The Worshipper of the Image - Richard Le Gallienne
All day long, in unrest,
To and fro, do I move.
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart in my bosom faints
To think of you, my queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,
My dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
To hear your sweet and sad complaints,
My life, my love, my saint of saints,
My dark Rosaleen!....
Over dews, over sands,
Will I fly for your weal:
Your holy delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel.
At home in your emerald bowers,
From morning's dawn till e'en,
You'll pray for me, my flower of flowers,
My dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
You'll think of me thro' daylight hours,
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
My dark Rosaleen!
I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
A second life, a soul anew,
My dark Rosaleen!
Wonder, child-like, wearied with the length of the verses, and suddenly
the white face of Silencieux caught her eye.
"Who is that lady, Daddy?"
"That is Silencieux."
"What a pretty name! Is she a kind lady, Daddy?"
"Sometimes."
"She is very beautiful. She is like little mother. But her face is so
white. She makes me frightened. Hold me, Daddy--" and she crouched in
his arms.
"You mustn't be frightened of her, Wonder. She loves little girls. See
how she is smiling at you. She wants to be friends with you. She wants
you to kiss her, little Wonder."
"Oh, no! no!" almost screamed the little girl.
But suddenly a cruel whim to insist came over the father, and,
half-coaxingly and half-forcibly, he held her up to the image, stroking
its white cheek to reassure her.
"See, how kind she is, little Wonder! See how she smiles--how she loves
you. She loves little girls, and she never sees any up here in the
lonely wood. It will make her so happy. Kiss her, little Wonder!"
Reluctantly the child obeyed, and with a shudder she said:--
"Oh, how cold her lips are, Daddy!"
"But were they not sweet, little Wonder?"
"No, Daddy, they tasted of dust."
And as Antony had lifted her up, he had said in his heart: "Silencieux,
I bring you my little child."
CHAPTER XII
AUTUMN IN THE VALLEY
Autumn in the valley was autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find
her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and
oozy sinks of dank water. For the moors autumn is the spring come back
in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year
dies happily, she smiles like a widow so young and fair that one thinks
rather of life than death in her presence.
But in the valley Autumn was a fearsome hag, a little crazy, two-double,
gathering sticks in a scarlet cloak. When she turned her wicked old eyes
upon you, the life died within you, and wherever you walked she was
always somewhere in the bushes muttering evil spells. All the year
round under the green cloud of summer, you might meet Autumn creeping
somewhere in the valley, like foul mists that creep from pool to pool;
for here all the year was decay to feed upon and dead leaves for her to
sleep on. Always the year round in the valley, if you listened close,
you would hear something sighing, something dying. To the happiest
walking there would come strange sinkings of the heart, unaccountable
premonitions of overhanging doom. There the least superstitious would
start at the sight of a toad, and come upon three magpies at once not
without fear. Over all was a breath of imminent disaster, a look of
sorrow from which there was no escape. It was not many yards away from a
merry high-road, but once in the shade of its lanes, it seemed as though
you had been shut away from the world of living men. Black slopes of
pine and melancholy bars of sunset walled you in, as in some funeral
hall of judgment.
Alas! Beatrice's was not the happiest of hearts, and all day long this
autumn, as the mornings came later and darker and the evenings earlier,
always voices in the valley, voices of low-hanging mist and dripping
rain, kept saying: "Death is coming! Death is coming!"
Tapped at the windows, ticking and crying in the rooms, was the same
message; till, in a terror of the walls, she would flee into the wider
prison of the woods, and oppressed by them in turn, would escape with a
beating heart into the honest daylight of the high-road. So one flies
from a haunted house, or comes out of an evil dream.
Sometimes it seemed as if the white face of Silencieux looked out from
the woodside, and mocked her with the same cry: "Death is coming! Death
is coming!"
Silencieux! Ah, how happy they had been before the coming of
Silencieux! How frail is our happiness, how suddenly it can die! One
moment it seems built for eternity, marble-based and glittering with
towers,--the next, where it stood is lonely grass and dew, not a stone
left. Ah, yes, how happy they had been; and then Antony by a heartless
chance had seen Silencieux, and in an instant their happiness had been
at an end for ever. Only a glance of the eyes and love is born, only a
glance of the eyes, and alas! love must die.
A glance of the eyes and all the old kindness is gone, a glance of the
eyes, and from the face you love the look you seek has died out for
everlasting.
"O Antony! Antony!" moaned Beatrice, as she wandered alone in those dank
autumn lanes, "if you would only come back to me for one short day, come
back with the old look on your face, be to me for a little while as you
once were, I think I could gladly die--"
Die! A tattered flower caught her glance, shaking chilly in the damp
wind, and once more she heard the whisper, "Death is coming!"
Near where she walked, stood, in the midst of a small meadow overgrown
with nettles, the blackened ruin of a cottage long since destroyed by
fire. On the edge of the little sandy lane, perilously near the feet of
the passer-by, was its forgotten well, the mouth choked with weeds and
briers.
In her absorption Beatrice had almost walked into it. Now she parted the
bushes and looked down. A stone fell as she looked, making a sepulchral
echo. What a place to hide one's sorrow in! No one would think of
looking there. Antony might think she had gone away, or he might drag
the three black ponds, but here it was unlikely any one would come. And
in a little while--a very little while--Antony would forget, or
sometimes make himself happy with his unhappiness.
Ah! but Wonder! No, if Antony needed her no more, Wonder did. She must
stay for Wonder's sake. And perhaps, who could say, Antony might yet
need her, might come to her some day and say "Beatrice," with the old
voice. To be really necessary to Antony again, if only for one little
hour,--yes! she could wait and suffer for that.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HUMAN SACRIFICE
The valley was an ill place even for the body, a lair of rheums and
agues; and disembodied fevers waited in wells for the sunk pail. For the
valley was very beautiful, beautiful with that green beauty that only
comes of damp and decay.
Late one October night, Antony, alone with Silencieux, as was now again
his custom, was surprised to hear footsteps coming hastily up the wood,
and even more surprised at the sudden unusual appearance of Beatrice.
"I am sorry to disturb you, Antony," she said, noting with a pang how
the lamp had been arranged to throw a vivid light upon Silencieux, "but
I want you to come down and look at Wonder. I'm afraid she is ill."
"Wonder, ill!" exclaimed Antony, rising with a start, "I will come at
once;" and they went together.
Wonder was lying in her bed, with flushed cheeks and bright yet heavy
eyes.
"Wonder, my little Wonder," said Antony caressingly, as he bent over
her. "Does little Wonder feel ill?"
"Yes, Daddy. I feel so sick, Daddy."
"Never mind; she will be better to-morrow." But he had noticed how
burning hot were her hands, and how dry were her fresh little lips.
"I must go for the doctor at once," he said to his wife, when they were
outside the room. The father, so long asleep, had sprung awake at the
first hint of danger to the little child that in his neglectful way he
loved deeply all the time; and, in spite of the danger to Wonder, a
faint joy stirred in Beatrice's heart to see him thus humanly aroused
once more.
"Kiss me, Beatrice," he said, as he set out upon his errand. "Don't be
anxious, it will be all right." It was the first time he had kissed his
wife for many days.
The doctor's was some three miles away across the moor. It was a bright
starlit night, and Antony, who knew the moor well, had no difficulty in
making his way at a good pace along the mossy tracks. Presently he gave
a little cry of pain and stood still.
"O God," he cried, "it cannot be that. Oh, it cannot."
At that moment for the first time a dreadful thought had crossed his
mind. Suddenly a memory of that afternoon when he had bade Wonder kiss
Silencieux flashed upon him; and once more he heard himself saying:
"Silencieux, I bring you my little child."
But he had never meant it so. It had all been a mad fancy. What was
Silencieux herself but a wilful, selfish dream? He saw it all now. How
could a lifeless image have power over the life of his child?
And yet again, was Silencieux a lifeless image? And still again, if she
were an image, was it not always to an image that humanity from the
beginning had been sacrificed? Yes; perhaps if Silencieux were only an
image there was all the more reason to fear her.
When he returned he would go to Silencieux, go on his knees and beg for
the life of his child. Silencieux had been cruel, but she could hardly
be so cruel as that.
He drove back across the moor by the doctor's side.
"I have always thought you unwise to live in that valley," said the
doctor. "It's pretty, but like most pretty places, it's unhealthy.
Nature can seldom be good and beautiful at the same time." The doctor
was somewhat of a philosopher.
"Your little girl needs the hills. In fact you all do. Your wife isn't
half the woman she was since you took her into the valley. You don't
look any better for it, either. No, sir, believe me, beauty's all very
well, but it's not good to live with--And, by the way, have you had your
well looked at lately? That valley is just a beautiful sewer for the
drainage of the hills; a very market-town for all the germs and bacilli
of the district."
And the doctor laughed, as, curiously enough, people always do at jests
about bacilli.
But when he looked at Wonder, he took a more serious view of bacilli.
"You must have your well looked to at once," he said. "Your little girl
is very ill. She must be kept very quiet, and on no account excited."
Beatrice and Antony took it in turns to watch by Wonder's bed that
night, and once while Beatrice was watching, Antony found time to steal
up the wood with his prayer to Silencieux.
Never had she looked more mask-like, more lifeless.
"Silencieux," he cried, "I wickedly brought you my little child. O give
her back to me again! I cannot bear it. I cannot give her to you,
Silencieux. Take me, if you will. I will gladly die for you. But spare
her. O give her back to me, Silencieux!"
But the image was impassive and made no sign.
"Silencieux," he implored, "speak, for I know you hear me. Are you a
devil, Silencieux; a devil I have worshipped all this time? God help me!
Have you no pity,--what is her little flower-life to you? Why should you
snatch it out of the sun--"
But Silencieux made no sign.
Then Antony grew angry in his remorse: "I hate you, Silencieux. Never
will I look on your face again. You are an evil dream that has stolen
from me the truth of life. I have broken a true heart that loved me,
that would have died for me--for your sake; just to watch your loveless
beauty, to hear the cold music of your voice. You are like the moon that
turns men mad, a hollow shell of silver drawing all your light from the
sun of life, a silver shadow of the golden sun."
But prayer and reproach were alike in vain. Silencieux remained
unheeding, and Antony returned to watch by Beatrice's side, with a heart
that had now no hope, and a soul weighed down with the sense of
irrevocable sin. There lay the little life he had murdered, delivered up
to the Moloch of Art. No sorrow, no agonies, were now of any avail for
ever. Little Wonder would surely die, and all the old lost opportunities
of loving her could never return. He had loved the shadow. This was a
part of the price.
Day after day the cruel fever consumed Wonder as fire consumes a flower.
Her tiny face seemed too small for the visitation of such suffering as
burned and hammered behind the high white brow, and yellowed and drew
tight the skin upon the cheeks. She had so recently known the strange
pain of being born. Already, for so little of life, she was to endure
the pain of death.
Day after day, hour after hour, Antony hung over her bed, with a
devotion and an unconsciousness of fatigue that made Beatrice look at
him with astonishment, and sometimes even for a moment forget Wonder in
the joy with which she saw him transfigured by simple human love. Now,
when it was too late, he had become a father indeed. And it brought some
ease to his fiercely tortured heart to notice that it was his
ministrations that the dying child seemed to welcome most. For the most
part she lay in a semi-conscious state, heeding nothing, and only
moaning now and again, a sad little moan, like an injured bird. She
seemed to say she was so little a thing to suffer so. Once, however,
when Antony had just placed some fresh ice around her head, she opened
her eyes and said, "Dear little Daddy," and the light on Antony's
face--poor victim of perverse instincts that too often drew his really
fine nature awry--was sanctifying to see.
As terrible was the look of torture that came over his face, one night
near the end, when Wonder in a sudden nightmare of delirium had seized
his hand and cried:--
"O Daddy, the white lady! See her there at the end of the bed. She is
smiling, Daddy--" Then lower, "You will not make me kiss her any more,
will you, Daddy?"--
Beatrice had gone to snatch an hour or two's sleep, so she never heard
this, and it was no mere cowardly consolation for Antony to think
afterwards that no one but he and his little child had known of that
fatal afternoon in the wood. The dead understand all,--yes, even the
dead we have murdered. But the living can never be told a secret such as
that which Antony and his little daughter, whose soul was really grown
up, though she spoke still in baby language, shared immortally between
them.
When Beatrice returned to the room Wonder was sleeping peacefully again,
but at the chill hour when watchers blow out the night-lights, and a
dreary greyness comes like a fog through the curtains, Antony and
Beatrice fell into each other's arms in anguish, for Wonder was dead.
CHAPTER XIV
A SONG OF THE LITTLE DEAD
They carried little Wonder to a green churchyard, a place of kind old
trees and tender country bells. There were few birds to welcome her in
the grim November morning, but the grasses stole close and whispered
that very soon the thrush and the nightingale would be coming, that the
violets were already on their way, and that when May was there she
should lie all day in a bed of perfume.
For very dear to Nature's heart are the Little Dead. The great dead lie
imprisoned in escutcheoned vaults, but for the little dead Nature
spreads out soft small graves, all snowdrops and dewdrops, where
day-long they can feel the earth rocking them as in a cradle, and at
night hear the hushed singing of the stars.
Yes, Earth loves nothing so much as her little graves. There the tiny
bodies, like unexhausted censers, pour out all the stored sweetness they
had no time to use above the ground, turning the earth they lie in to
precious spices. There the roots of the old yew trees feel about
tenderly for the little unguided hands, and sometimes at nightfall the
rain bends over them weeping like an inconsolable mother.
It is on the little graves that the sun first rises at morn, and it is
there at evening that the moon lays softly her first silver flowers.
There the wren will sometimes bring her sky-blue eggs for a gift, and
the summer wind come sowing seeds of magic to take the fancy of the
little one beneath. Sometimes it shakes the hyacinths like a rattle of
silver, and spreads the turf above with a litter of coloured toys.
Here the butterflies are born with the first warm breath of the spring.
All the winter they lie hidden in the crevices of the stone, in the
carving of little names, and with the first spring day they stand
delicately and dry their yellow wings on the little graves. There are
the honeycombs of friendly bees, and the shelters of many a timid
earth-born speck of life no bigger than a dewdrop, mysteriously small.
Radiant pin-points of existence have their palaces on the broad blades
of the grasses, and in the cellars at their roots works many a humble
little slave of the mighty elements.
Yes, the emperors and the ants of Nature's vast economy alike love to be
kind to the little graves.
CHAPTER XV
SILENCIEUX ALONE IN THE WOOD.
Beatrice's grief for Wonder was such as only a mother can know. She had
but one consolation,--the kind sad eyes of Antony. She had lost Wonder,
but Antony had come back again. Wonder was not so dead as Antony had
seemed a month ago.
When they had left Wonder and were back in the house which was now twice
desolate, Antony took Beatrice's hands very tenderly and said:--
"I have been very wrong all these months. For a shadow I have missed the
lovely reality of a little child--and for a shadow, my own faithful
wife, I have all this time done you cruel wrong. But my eyes are open
now, I have come out of the evil dream that bound me--and never shall I
enter it again. Let us go from here. Let us leave this valley and never
come back to it any more."
So it was arranged that they should winter far away, returning only to
the valley for a few short days in the spring, and then leave it for
ever. They had no heart now for more than just to fly from that haunted
place, and before night fell in the valley they were already far away.
In vain Silencieux listened for the sound of her lover's step in the
wood, for he had vowed that he would never look upon her face again.
CHAPTER XVI
THE FIRST TALK ON THE HILLS
Antony took Beatrice to the high hills where all the year long the sun
and the snow shine together. He was afraid of the sea, for the sea was
Silencieux's for ever. In its depths lay a magic harp which filled all
its waves with music--music lovely and accursed, the voice of
Silencieux. That he must never hear again. He would pile the hills
against his ears. Inland and upland, he and Beatrice should go, ever
closer to the kind heart of the land, ever nearer to the forgetful
silences of the sky, till huge walls of space were between them and that
harp of the sea. Nor in the whisper of leaves nor in the gloom of
forests should the thought of Silencieux beset them. The earth that
held least of her--to that earth they would go; the earth that rose
nearest to heaven.
Beauty indeed should be theirs--the Beauty of Nature and Love; no more
the vampire's beauty of Art.
It was strange to each how their souls lightened as the valleys of the
world folded away behind them, and the simple slopes mounted in their
path. In that pure unladen air which so exhilarated their very bodies,
there seemed some mysterious property of exhilaration for the soul also.
One might have dreamed that just to breathe on those heights all one's
days would be to grow holy by the more cleansing power of the air. With
such bright currents ever running through the brain, surely one's
thoughts would circle there white as stones at the bottom of a spring.
"O Antony," said Beatrice, "why were we so long in finding the hills?"
"We found them once before, Beatrice--do you remember?"
"Yes! You have not forgotten?" said Beatrice, with the ray of a lost
happiness in her eyes--lost, and yet could it be dawning again? There
was a morning star in Antony's face.
"And then," said Antony, "we went into the valley--the Valley of Beauty
and Death."
Beatrice pressed his hand and looked all her love at him for comfort. He
knew how precious was such a forgiveness, the forgiveness of a mother
heart broken for the child, which he, directly or indirectly, had
sacrificed,--directly as he and Wonder alone knew, indirectly by taking
them with him into the Valley of Beauty.
"Ah, Beatrice, your love is almost greater than I can bear. I am not
worthy of it. I never shall be worthy. There is something in the love of
a woman like you to which the best man is unequal. We can love--and
greatly--but it is not the same."
"We went into the valley," he cried, "and I lost you your little
Wonder--"
"_Our_ little Wonder," gently corrected Beatrice. "We found her
together, and we lost her together. Perhaps some day we shall find her
together again--"
"And do you know, Antony," Beatrice continued, "I sometimes wonder if
her little soul was not sent and so taken away all as part of a mission
to us, which in its turn is a part of the working out of her own
destiny. For life is very mysterious, Antony--"
"Alas! I had forgotten life," answered Antony with a sigh.
"Yes, dear," Beatrice went on, pursuing her thought. "I have dared to
hope that perhaps Wonder, as she was the symbol of our coming together,
was taken away just at this time because we were being drawn apart.
Perhaps it was to save our love that little Wonder died--"
Antony looked at Beatrice; half as one looks at a child, and half as one
might look at an angel.
"Beatrice," he said tenderly, "you believe in God."
"All women believe in God," answered Beatrice.
"Yes," said Antony musingly, and with no thought of irony, "it is that
which makes you women."
CHAPTER XVII
ANTONY ALONE ON THE HILLS
But although Beatrice might forgive Antony, from himself came no
forgiveness. He hid his remorse from her, sparing the mother-wound in
her heart--but always when he was walking alone he kept saying to
himself: "I have lost our little Wonder. I killed our little Wonder."
One day he climbed up the highest hill within reach, and there leaned
into the enormous silence, that he might cry it aloud for God to hear--
God!--poor little Beatrice, what God was there to hear! To look at
Beatrice one might indeed believe in God--and yet was it not Beatrice
who had made God in her own image? Was not God created of all pure
overflows of the human soul, the kind light of human eyes that not all
the suffering of the world can exhaust, the idealism of the human spirit
that not all the infamies of natural law can dismay?
Nevertheless, Antony confessed himself to God upon the hills, not indeed
as one seeking pardon, but punishment.
Yet Heaven's benign untroubled blue carried no cloud upon its face,
because one breaking human heart had thus breathed into it its unholy
secret. Around that whole enormous circle such cries and such
confessions were being poured like noxious vapours, from a thousand
cities; but that incorruptible ether remained unsullied as on the first
morning, the black smoke of it all lost in the optimism of God.
On some days he would live over again the scene with Wonder in the wood
with unbearable vividness.
"Why, those are only words, silly Daddy!"--How many times a day did he
not hear that quaint little voice making, with a child's profundity,
that tremendous criticism upon literature.
He had silenced her with the music of words, as he had silenced his own
heart and soul with the same music, but they were still only words none
the less. Ah! if she were only here to-day, he would bring her something
more beautiful than words--or toadstools.
He shuddered as he thought of the loathsome form his decaying fancy had
taken, that morning by the Three Black Ponds. He had filled the small
outstretched hands with Nature's filth and poison. She had asked for
flowers, he had brought her toadstools. Oh, the shame, the crime, the
anguish!
But worst of all was to hear himself saying in the silence of his soul,
over and over again without any power to still it, as one is forced
sometimes to hear the beating of one's heart: "Silencieux, I bring you
my little child."
There were times he heard this so plainly when he was with Beatrice that
he had to leave her and walk for hours alone. Only unseen among the
hills dare he give vent to the mad despair with which that memory tore
him.
Yes, for words--"only words"--he had sacrificed that wonderful living
thing, a child. For words he had missed that magical intercourse, the
intercourse with the mind of a child. How often had she come to him for
a story, and he had been dull and preoccupied--with words; how often
asked him to take her a walk up the lane, but he had been too busy--with
words!