The Worshipper of the Image | Page 6

Silencieux,--and the idea of his going out with serious
eagerness to meet one who, if she was as he knew a living being, was
an image too, delighted his sense of fantastic make-believe.
There is in all love that element of make-believe. Every woman who is
loved is partly the creation of her lover's fancy. He consciously
siderealises her, and with open eyes magnifies her importance to his
life. Antony but made believe and magnified uncommonly--and his
dream of vivifying white plaster was perhaps less desperate than the
dreams of some, that would breathe the breath of life into the colder
clay of some beloved woman, who seems spontaneously to live but is
dead all the while.
Silencieux appeared to be dead, but beneath that eternal smile, as
Beatrice had divined, as Antony was learning, she was only too terribly
alive. Yes! Antony's was the easier dream.
The moon and Antony came up the wood together from opposite ends,
and when Antony entered his châlet Silencieux was already waiting for
him, her head crowned with a moonbeam. He kissed her softly and took
her with him out into the ferns.

CHAPTER V
SILENCIEUX SPEAKS
So long as the moon held, Antony stole up the wood each night to meet
Silencieux--"at the rising of the moon." Sometimes he would lie in a
hollow with her head upon his knee, and gaze for an hour at a time,
entranced, into her face. He would feign to himself that she slept, and
he would hold his breath lest he should awaken her. Sometimes he
would say in a tender whisper, not loud enough for her to hear:--
"It is cold to-night, Silencieux. See, my cloak will keep you warm."
Once as he did this she heaved a gentle sigh, as though thanking him.
At other times he would place her against the gable of the châlet, so
that the moonlight fell upon her, and then he would plunge into the
wood and walk its whole length, so that, as he wound his way back
through the intervening brakes, her face would come and go,
glimmering away off through the leafage, beckoning to him to return.
And once he thought he heard her call his name very softly through the
wood.
That may have been an illusion, but it was during these days that he did
actually hear her speak for the first time. He had been writing till past
midnight, with her smile just above him, and when he had turned out
the lamp and was moving to the door through the vague flickering light
of the fire, he distinctly heard a voice very luxurious and tender say
"Antony," just behind him. It was hardly more than a whisper, but its
sweetness thrilled his blood, and half in joy and fear he turned to her
again. But she was only smiling inscrutably as before, and she spoke no
more for that night.
CHAPTER VI
THE THREE BLACK PONDS
At the bottom of the valley, approached by sunken honeysuckle lanes

that seemed winding into the centre of the earth, lay three black ponds,
almost hidden in a cul-de-sac of woodland. Though long since
appropriated by nature, made her own by moss and rooted oaks, they
were so set one below the other, with green causeways between each,
that an ancient art, long since become nature, had evidently designed
and dug them, years, perhaps centuries, ago. So long dead were the old
pond-makers that great trees grew now upon the causeways, and vast
jungles of rush and water grasses choked the trickling overflows from
one pond to the other. Once, it was said, when the earth of those parts
had been rich in iron, these ponds had driven great hammers,--but long
before the memory of the oldest cottager they had rested from their
labours, and lived only the life of beauty and silence. Where iron had
once been was now the wild rose, and the grim wounds of the earth had
been healed by the kisses of five hundred springs.
About these ponds stole many a secret path, veined with clumsy roots,
shadowed with the thick bush of many a clustering parasite, and
echoing sometimes beneath from the hollowed shelter of coot or
water-rat. Lilies floated in circles about the ponds, like the crowns of
sunken queens, and sometimes a bird broke the silence with a
frightened cry.
It was here that Beatrice and Wonder would often take their morning
walk,--Wonder, though but a little girl of four, having grown more and
more of a companion to her mother, since Antony's love for Silencieux.
A morning in August the two were walking hand in hand. Wonder was
one of those little girls that seem to know all the meanings of life, while
yet struggling with the alphabet