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. How kind was her simple earth-warm affection, after the star-cold transcendentalism in which he had been living! How full of comfort was her unselfish humanity, after the pitiless egoism of the divine! And yet, while it momentarily soothed him, he realised, with a heart sad for Beatrice as for himself, that it could never satisfy him again. For days he left Silencieux alone in the wood, and Beatrice's face brightened with their renewed companionship; but all the time he seemed to hear Silencieux calling him, and he knew that he would have to go back. One night, almost happy again, as he lay by the side of Beatrice, who was sleeping deeply, he rose stealthily, and looked out into the wood. The moonlight fell through it mysteriously, as on that night when he had stolen up there to meet Silencieux—"at the rising of the moon." He could hesitate no longer. Leaving Beatrice asleep, he was soon making his way once more through the moonlit trees. The little chÂlet looked very still and solemn, like a temple of Chaldean mysteries, and an unwonted chill of fear passed through Antony as he stood in the circle of moonlight outside. His spirit seemed aware of some dread menace to the future in that moment, and a voice was crying within him to go back. But the longing that had brought him so far was too strong for such undefined warnings. Once more he turned the key in the lock, and looked on Silencieux once more. The moonlight fell over her face like a veil of silver, and on her eyelashes was a glitter of tears. Her face was alive again, alive too with a softness of womanhood he had never seen before. "Forgive me, Antony," she said. "I loved you all the time." What else need Silencieux say! "But it was so strange," said Antony after a while, "so strange. I could have borne the pain, if only I could have understood." "Shall I tell you the reason, Antony?" "Yes." "It was because I saw in your eyes a thought of 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. It will never be perfect, until—" "Until when?" "Until, Antony,"—and Silencieux lowered her voice to an awful whisper,—"until you have made for me the human sacrifice." "The human sacrifice!" "Yes, Antony,—all my lovers have done that for me. They were not really mine till then. Some have brought me many such offerings. Antony, when will you bring me the human sacrifice?" "O Silencieux!" Antony's heart chilled with terror at Silencieux's words. It was against this that the voices had warned him as he came up the wood. O that he had never seen Silencieux more, never heard her poisonous voice again! As one fleeing before the shadow of uncommitted sin that gains upon him at each stride, Antony fled from the place, and sought the moors. The moon was near its setting, and soon the dawn would throw open the eastern doors of the sky. He walked on and on, waiting, praying for, stifling for the light; and, at last, with a freshening of the air, and faint sounds of returning consciousness from distant farms, it came. High over a lake of ethereal silver welling up out of space, hung the morning star, shining as though its heart would break, bright as a tear that must slip down the face of heaven and fall amid the grass. As Antony looked up at it, his soul escaped from its prison of dark thought, and such an exaltation had come with the quickening light, that it seemed as though the body, with little more than pure aspiration to wing it, might follow the soul's flight to that crystal sphere. In that moment, Antony knew that the love in the soul of man is mated only with the infinite universe. In no marriage less than that shall it find lasting fulfilment of itself. No single face, however beautiful, no single human soul, however vast, can absorb it. Silencieux, Beatrice, Wonder, himself, all faded away, in a trance-like sense of a stupendous passion, an august possession. He felt that within him which rose up gigantic from the earth, and towered into eyries of space, from whence that morning star seemed like a dewdrop glittering low down upon the earth. It was the god in him that knew itself for one brief space, a moment's awakening in the sleep of fact. Could a god so great, so awakened, be again the slave of one earthly face? Yes, the greater the god, the greater the slave; and so it was that, falling plumb down from that skyey exaltation, human again with the weakness that follows divine moments, Antony returned from the morning star to Silencieux. Her face was bathed in the delicate early sunlight and looked very pure and gentle, and he kissed her. Surely those terrible words had been an illusion of the dark hours. Silencieux had never said them. He kissed her again. "I love you, Silencieux," he said. And then she spoke. "If you love me, Antony," she said, "if you love me—" "O what, Silencieux?" he cried, his heart growing cold once more. "Come nearer, Antony. Put your ear to my lips—Antony, if you love me—the human sacrifice." "O God," he cried, "here in the sunlight—It is true—" And, a man with the doom of his nature heavy upon him, he once more went out into the wood. |