The Worshipper of the Image

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...

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...

Had his senses deceived him? They must have deceived him. And yet that music at least had seemed startlingly near, sudden, and sweet, as though one should tread upon a harp in t...

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...

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 som...

Silencieux often spoke to Antony now. Sometimes a sudden, startling word when he was writing late at night; sometimes long tender talks; once a terrible whisper. But all this ti...

As Antony and Silencieux became more and more to each other, poor Beatrice, though she had been the first occasion of their love, and little as she now demanded, seldom as Anton...

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 moor...

From this moment Silencieux took possession of Antony as she had never taken it before. Never had he been so inaccessibly withdrawn into his fatal dream. Beatrice forgot her own...

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...

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 w...

So the weeks and months went by for those two upon the hills, and the soul of Antony grew stronger day by day, and his love with it--and the face of Beatrice was like a bird sin...

Beatrice's prayer had been answered. Antony had come back to her. She was necessary to him once more. The old look was in his eyes, the old sound in his voice. One day as they w...

But a week or two more, and Beatrice's prophecy had progressed so far towards fulfilment, that Antony was going about the woods and the moors saying over to himself the name he...

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...

"But to think," said Antony presently, in answer to Beatrice's soothing hand, "to think that I might have lived with a child--and I chose instead to live with words. In all the...

A few days after this, little Wonder, playing about the garden, had slipped away from her nurse, and, pleased in her little soul at her cleverness, had found her way up to her f...

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 depth...

The heart of Beatrice was broken, and there was now no use or place for her in the world. Wonder was gone, and Antony was even further away. She knew now that he would never com...

One hot August afternoon Antony took Silencieux with him to a bramble-covered corner of the dark moor which bounded his little wood. A ruined bank soaked with sunshine, a haunt...

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 g...

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, an...

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. W...