Richard Le Gallienne

“ 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. ”

“ And again, as Antony still kept silence in his agony, Silencieux said, "Listen."
"Listen, Antony. You have hidden yourself away from me, you have put seas and lands between us, you have denied me with bitter curses, you have vowed to thrust me from your life, you have given your allegiance to the warm and pretty humanity of a day, and reviled the august cold marble of immortality. But it is all in vain. In your heart of hearts you love no human thing, you love not even yourself, you love only the eternal spirit of beauty in all things, you love only me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Me you may sacrifice, your own heart you may deny, in the weakness of human pity for human love; but, should this be, your life will be in secret broken, purposeless, and haunted, and to me at last you will come, at the end—at the end and too late. This is your own heart's voice; you know if it be true."
"It is true," moaned Antony.
"Many men and many loves are there in this world," continued Silencieux, "and each knows the way of his own love, nor shall anything turn him from it in the end. ”

“ As he uncovered it, the wind again extinguished the lantern, and there, to his amazement and terror, was the face of Silencieux shining radiantly in the darkness. The hole in which she lay brimmed over with light, as a spring wells out of the hillside. Her face was almost transparent with brightness, and presently she spoke low, with a voice sweeter than Antony had ever heard before. It was the voice of that magic harp at the bottom of the sea, it was the voice that had told him of her lovers, the voice of hidden music that had cried "Resurgam" through the wood. ”

“ 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! ”

“ SILENCIEUX WHISPERS
So Antony first knew how cruel could be Silencieux to those who loved her. Her sudden silences he had grown to understand, even to love. Always they had been broken again by some wonderful word, which he had known would come sooner or later. All great natures are full of silence. Silence is the soil of all passion. But now it was not silence that was between them, but terrible speech. As with a knife she had stabbed their love right in its heart. Yet Antony knew that his love could never die, but only suffer.
During these days he half turned to Beatrice. ”

“ For a moment your thoughts had forsaken me and gone to pity Beatrice. I saw it in your eyes."
"Poor Beatrice!" said Antony. "It is little indeed I give her. Could you not spare her so little, Silencieux?"
"I can spare her nothing. You must be all mine, Antony—your every thought and hope and dream. So long as there is another woman in the world for you except me, I cannot be yours in the depths of my being, nor you mine. There must always be something withheld. ”

“ Best of them I love two: one a laughing giant who loved me three hundred years ago, and the other a little London boy with large eyes of velvet, who mid all the gloom of your great city saw and loved my face, as none had seen and loved it since she of Mitylene. I found the giant sitting by a country stream, holding a daffodil in his mighty hands and whistling to the birds. He took and wore me like a flower. I was to him as a nightingale that sang from his sleeve, for he loved so much besides. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 of its unimportant words.
The soul of such a child is, of all things, the most mysterious. ”

“ The immortality of art indeed is one of those curious illusions of man's self-love which a moment's thought dispels. Art, who need be told, is as dependent for its survival on the survival of its physical media as man's body itself—and though the epic and the great canvas escape combustion for a million years, they must burn at last, burn with all the other accumulated shadows of time. What we call immortality in art is but the shadow of the soul's immortality; but the immortality of love is that of the soul itself—"
"O Antony," interrupted Beatrice, "you really believe that now? ”

“ I have been cruel, yes, but to die for me has seemed better than to live for any other. And some of my lovers I have never forsaken. When they have lost all in the world, they have had me. Lonely garrets have seemed richly furnished because of my face, and men with foodless lips have died blest because I was near them at the last. Sometimes I have kissed their lips and died with them, and the world has missed my face for a hundred unlovely years—for the world is only beautiful when I and my lovers are in it. Antony, you are one of my lovers, one of my dearest lovers ”

“ There but remained for her to fulfil her destiny, the destiny she had vaguely known ever since Antony had brought home the Image, and shown her how the Seine water had moulded the hair and made wet the eyelashes.
For some weeks now Beatrice had been living on the border of another world. She had finally abandoned all her hopes of earthly joy—and to Antony she was no longer any help or happiness. He had needed her again for a few brief weeks, but now he needed her no more. His every look told her how he wished her out of his life. And she had no one else in the world. ”

“ The châlet 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 châlet, 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. ”

“ 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, having found a spade, he took her from the wall, and looked from his door into the wood, pondering where her grave should be. A whitebeam at a little distance made a vivid conflagration of green amid the sombre boles of the pines. Pinewoods rely on their undergrowth—bracken and whortleberry and occasional bushes—for their spring illuminations, and the whitebeam shone as bright in that wood as a lamp in the dark.
"I will bury her beneath the whitebeam," said Antony, and he carried her thither. ”

“ There is no one but I who can give you back your little Wonder—no one but I who can give you back anything you have lost. If you love me faithfully, Antony—there is nothing you can lose but in me you will find it again."
Antony bowed his head, his heart breaking for Beatrice—but who is not powerless against his own soul?
"Listen," said Silencieux again. "Once on a time there was a beautiful girl who died, and from her grave grew a wonderful flower, which all the world came to see. ”

“ What is that instinct in us which tells us that we risk our happiness in speaking of it? Happiness is such a frightened thing that it flies at the sound of its own name. And yet of what shall we speak if not our happiness? Of our sorrows we can keep silence, but our joys we long to utter.
So Beatrice spoke of her great happiness to Antony, and told him too of her old great unhappiness and her longing for death. ”

“ For him the world held nothing but my face, and it was of his great love for me that he died."
"But these were all poets," said Antony.
"Yes, poets are the greatest of all lovers. Though all who since the world began have been the makers of beautiful things have loved me, I love my poets best. Sweeter than marble or many colours to my eyes is the sound of a poet singing in my ears—"
"For whom, Silencieux, did you step down into the sad waters of the Seine?" ”

“ 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. ”