The Worshipper of the Image

By RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
JOHN LANE: THE BODLEY HEAD LONDON AND NEW YORK 1900
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO SILENCIEUX
THIS TRAGIC FAIRY-TALE
CHAPTER
The Worshipper of the Image
SMILING SILENCE
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.