The Worshipper of the Image

Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted face.

The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bedtime nests. When all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a bough on which already hung a little star.

Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the shadows and the toadstools and the silence.

"Silencieux," he said over to himself-"I love you, Silencieux."

Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white gable of a little chalet to which he was dreaming his way.

Suddenly a small bronze object caught his eye moving across the mossy path. It was a beautiful beetle, very slim and graceful in shape, with singularly long and fine antennae. Antony had loved these things since he was a child,-dragonflies with their lamp-like eyes of luminous horn, moths with pall-like wings that filled the world with silence as you looked at them, sleepy as death-loved them with the passion of a Japanese artist who delights to carve them on quaint nuggets of metal. Perhaps it was that they were so like words-words to which he had given all the love and worship of his life. Surely he had loved Silencieux[1] more since he had found for her that beautiful name.

He held the beetle in his hand a long while, loving it. Then he said to himself, with a smile in which was the delight of a success: "A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns."

The phrase delighted him. He set the insect down on the path, tenderly. He had done with it. He had carved it in seven words. The little model might now touch its delicate way among the ferns at peace.

"A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns," he repeated as he walked on, and then the gathering gloom of the wood suggested an addition: "And some day I shall find in the wood that moth of which I have dreamed since childhood-the dark moth with the face of death between his wings."

The chalet stood on a little clearing, in a little circle of pines. From it the ground sloped down towards the valley, and at some distance beneath smoke curled from a house lost amid clouds of foliage, the abounding green life of this damp and brooding hollow. A great window looking down the woodside filled one side of the chalet, and the others were dark with books, an occasional picture or figured jar lighting up the shadow. A small fire flickered beneath a quaintly devised mantel, though it was summer-for the mists crept up the hill at night and chilled the souls of the books. A great old bureau, with a wonderful belly of mahogany, filled a corner of the room, breathing antique mystery and refinement. At one end of it, on a small vacant space of wall, hung a cast, apparently the death-mask of a woman, by which the eye was immediately attracted with something of a shock and held by a curious fascination. The face was smiling, a smile of great peace, and also of a strange cunning. One other characteristic it had: the woman looked as though at any moment she would suddenly open her eyes, and if you turned away from her and looked again, she seemed to be smiling to herself because she had opened them that moment behind your back, and just closed them again in time.

It was a face that never changed and yet was always changing.

She looked doubly strange in the evening light, and her smile softened and deepened as the shadows gathered in the room.

Antony came and stood in front of her.

"Silencieux," he whispered, "I love you, Silencieux. Smiling Silence, I love you. All day long on the moors your smile has stolen like a moonbeam by my side-"

As he spoke, from far down the wood came the gentle sound of a woman's voice calling "Antony," and coming nearer as it called.

With a shade of impatience, Antony bent nearer to the image and kissed it.

"Good-bye, Silencieux," he whispered, "Good-bye, until the rising of the moon."

Then he passed out on to the little staircase that led down into the wood, and called back to the approaching voice: "I am coming, Beatrice,"-'Beatrice' being the name of his wife.

As he called, a shaft of late sunlight suddenly irradiated the tall slim form of a woman coming up the wood. She wore no hat, and the sun made a misty glory of her pale gold hair. She seemed a fairy romantic thing thus gliding in her yellow silk gown through the darkening pines. And her face was the face of the image, feature for feature. There was on it too the same light, the same smile.

"Antony," she called, as they drew nearer to each other, "where in the wide world have you been? Dinner has been waiting for half-an-hour."

"Dinner!" he said, laughing, and kissing her kindly. "Fancy! the High Muses have made me half-an-hour late for dinner. Beauty has made me forget my dinner. Disgraceful!"

"I don't mind your forgetting dinner, Antony-but you might have remembered me."

"Do you think I could remember Beauty and forget you? Yes! you are beautiful to-night, Silen-Beatrice. You look like a lady one meets walking by a haunted well in some old Arthurian tale."

"Hush!" said Beatrice, "listen to the night-jar. He is worth a hundred nightingales."

"Yes; what a passion is that!" said Antony, "so sincere, and yet so fascinating too."

"'Yet,' do you say, Antony? Why, sincerity is the most fascinating thing in the world."

And as they listened, Antony's heart had stolen back to Silencieux, and once more in fancy he pressed his lips to hers in the dusk: "It is with such an eternal passion that I love you, Silencieux."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Of course, the writer is aware that while "Silencieux" is feminine, her name is masculine. In such fanciful names, however, such license has always been considered allowable.]

The manner in which Antony had found and come to love Silencieux was a strange illustration of that law by which one love grows out of another-that law by which men love living women because of the dead, and dead women because of the living.

One day as chance had sent him, picking his way among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered loveliness of antiquity.

Through white corridors of faces he passed, with the cold breath of classic art upon his cheek, and in the company of the dead who live for ever he was conscious of a contagion of immortality.

Soon in an alcove of faces he grew conscious of a presence. Some one was smiling near him. He turned, and, almost with a start, found that-as he then thought-it was no living thing, but just a plaster cast among the others, that was thus shining, like a star among the dead. A face not ancient, not modern; but a face of yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

Instantly he knew he had seen the face before. Where?

Why, of course, it was the face of Beatrice, feature for feature. How strange!-and, loving Beatrice, he bought it, because of his great love for her! Who was the artist, what the time and circumstance, that had anticipated in this strange fashion the only face he had ever really loved on earth?

He sought information of the shopkeeper, who told him a strange little story of an unknown model and an unknown artist, and two tragic fates.

When Antony had brought Silencieux home to Beatrice, she had at first taken that delight in her which every created thing takes in a perfect, or even an imperfect, reflection of itself. To have been anticipated in a manner so unusual gave back in romantic suggestiveness what at first sight it seemed to steal from one's personal originality. Only at first sight-for, if like Beatrice, you were the possessor of a face so uncommon in type that your lover might, with little fear of disproof, declare, at all events in England, that there was none other like it, you might grow superstitious as you looked at an anticipation so creepily identical, and conceive strange fancies of re-incarnation. What if this had been you in some former existence! Or at all events, if there is any truth in those who tell us that in the mould and lines of our faces and hands-yes! and in every secret marking of our bodies-our fates are written as in a parchment; would it not be reasonable to surmise, perhaps to fear, that the writing should mean the same on one face as on the other, and the fates as well as the faces prove identical?

Beatrice gave the mask back to Antony, with a little shiver.

"It is very wonderful, very strange, but she makes me frightened. What was the story the man told you, Antony?"

"No doubt it was all nonsense," Antony replied, "but he said that it was the death-mask of an unknown girl found drowned in the Seine."

"Drowned in the Seine!" exclaimed Beatrice, growing almost as white as the image.

"Yes! and he said too that the story went that the sculptor who moulded it had fallen so in love with the dead girl, that he had gone mad and drowned himself in the Seine also."

"Can it be true, Antony?"

"I hope so, for it is so beautiful,-and nothing is really beautiful till it has come true."

"But the pain, the pity of it-Antony."

"That is a part of the beauty, surely-the very essence of its beauty-"

"Beauty! beauty! O Antony, that is always your cry. I can only think of the terror, the human anguish. Poor girl-" and she turned again to the image as it lay upon the table,-"see how the hair lies moulded round her ears with the water, and how her eyelashes stick to her cheek-Poor girl."

"But see how happy she looks. Why should we pity one who can smile like that? See how peaceful she looks;" and with a sudden whim, Antony took the image and set it lying back on a soft cushion in a corner of the couch, at the same time throwing round its neck his black cloak, which he had cast off as he came in.

The image nestled into the cushion as though it had veritably been a living woman weary for sleep, and softly smiling that it was near at last. So comfortable she seemed, you could have sworn she breathed.

Antony lifted her head once or twice with his fingers, to delight himself with seeing her sink back luxuriously once more.

Beatrice grew more and more white.

"Antony, please stop. I cannot bear it. She looks so terribly alive."

At that moment Antony's touch had been a little too forcible, the image hung poised for a moment and then began to fall in the direction of Beatrice.

"Oh, she is falling," she almost screamed, as Antony saved the cast from the floor. "For God's sake, stop!"

"How childish of you, Beatrice. She is only plaster. I never knew you such a baby."

"I cannot help it, Antony. I know it is foolish, but I cannot help it. I think living in this place has made me morbid. She seems so alive-so evil, so cruel. I am sorry you bought her, Antony. I cannot bear to look at her. Won't you take her away? Take her up into the wood. Keep her there. Take her now. I shall not be able to sleep all night if I know she is in the house."

She was half hysterical, and Antony soothed her gently.

"Yes, yes, dear. I'm sorry. I'll take her up the wood now this minute. Wait till I light the lantern. Poor Beatrice, I never dreamed she would affect you so. I loved her, dear-because I love you; but I would rather break her in pieces than that she should make you unhappy. Though to break any image of you, dear," he added tenderly, "would seem a kind of sacrilege. You know how I love you, Beatrice, don't you?"

"Of course I do, dear; and it was sweet of you to buy her for my sake, and I'm quite silly to-night. To-morrow I shall think nothing about her. Still, dear, she does frighten me, I can't tell why. There seems something malignant about her, something that threatens our happiness. Oh, how silly I am-"

Meanwhile, Antony had lit an old brass lantern, and presently he was flashing his way up among the dark sounds of the black old wood, with that ghostly face tenderly pressed against his side.

He stopped once to turn his lantern upon her. How mysterious she looked, here in the night, under the dark pines!

He too felt a little haunted as he climbed his chalet staircase and unlocked the door, every sound he made echoing fatefully in the silent wood; and when he had found a place for the image and hung her there, she certainly looked a ghostly companion for the midnight lamp, in the middle of a wood.

How strangely she smiled, the smile almost of one taking possession.

No wonder Beatrice had been frightened. Was there some mysterious life in the thing, after all? Why should these indefinite forebodings come over him as he looked at her!-But he was growing as childish as Beatrice. Surely midnight, a dark wood, a lantern, and a death-mask, with two owls whistling to each other across the valley, were enough to account for any number of forebodings! But Antony shivered, for all that, as he locked the door and hastened back again down the wood.

Antony had not written a poem to his wife since their little girl Wonder had been born, now some four years ago. Surely it was from no lack of love, this silence, but merely due to the working of what would seem to be a law of the artistic temperament: that to turn a muse into a wife, however long and faithfully loved, is to bid good-bye to the muse. But a day or two after the coming of Silencieux, Antony found himself suddenly inspired once more to sing of his wife.

It was the best poem he had written for a long time, and when it was finished, he came down the wood impatient to read it to Beatrice. This was the poem, which he called "The Northern Sphinx":-

Sphinx of the North, with subtler smile

Than hers who in the yellow South,

With make-believe mysterious mouth,

Deepens the ennui of the Nile;

And, with no secret left to tell,

A worn and withered old coquette,

Dreams sadly that she draws us yet,

With antiquated charm and spell:

Tell me your secret, Sphinx,-for mine!-

What means the colour of your eyes,

Half innocent and all so wise,

Blue as the smoke whose wavering line

Curls upward from the sacred pyre

Of sacrifice or holy death,

Pale twisting wreaths of opal breath,

From fire mounting into fire.

What is the meaning of your hair?

That little fairy palace wrought

With many a grave fantastic thought;

I send a kiss to wander there,

To climb from golden stair to stair,

Wind in and out its cunning bowers,-

O garden gold with golden flowers,

O little palace built of hair!

The meaning of your mouth, who knows?

O mouth, where many meanings meet-

Death kissed it stern, Love kissed it sweet,

And each has shaped its mystic rose.

Mouth of all sweets, whose sweetness sips

Its tribute honey from all hives,

The sweetest of the sweetest lives,

Soft flowers and little children's lips;

Yet rather learnt its heavenly smile

From sorrow, God's divinest art,

Sorrow that breaks and breaks the heart,

Yet makes a music all the while.

Ah! what is that within your eyes,

Upon your lips, within your hair,

The sacred art that makes you fair,

The wisdom that hath made you wise?

Tell me your secret, Sphinx,-for mine!-

The mystic word that from afar

God spake and made you rose and star,

The fiat lux that bade you shine.

While Antony read, Beatrice's face grew sadder and sadder. When he had finished she said:-

"It is very beautiful, Antony-but it is not written for me."

"What can you mean, Beatrice? Who else can it be written for?"

"To the Image of me that you have set up in my place."

"Beatrice, are you going mad?"

"It is quite true, all the same. Time will show. Perhaps you don't know it yourself as yet, but you will before long."

"But, Beatrice, the poem shows its own origin. Has your image blue eyes, or curiously coiled hair-"

"Oh, yes, of course, you thought of me. You filled in from me. But the inspiration, the wish to write it, came from the image-"

"It is certainly true that I love to look at it, as I love to look at a picture of you-because it is you-"

"As yet, no doubt, but you will soon love it for its own sake. You are already beginning."

"I love an image! You are too ridiculous, Beatrice."

"Does it really seem so strange, dear? I sometimes think you have never loved anything else."

Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was appealing to him with a perverse fascination.

To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,-surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.

As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious, knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love-a love of beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death, inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of humanity.

To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve that-and never come out of the dream.

These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image. He felt that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a strange expectancy.