In her heart Nance longed to cry, “No! No! No more of these tiresome memories! Make love to me! Make love to me!” but she only pressed his fingers gently and remained silent.
“I took up a book,” he went on, “from the heap on the floor and drawing one of those miserable chairs to the window, I opened it at random. It happened to be that mad lovely thing of Remy de Gourmont. I forgot whether you said you had got as far as French poetry in that collection of yours that Miss Doorm is so suspicious of. It was, in fact, ‘Le livre des Litanies,’ and shall I tell you the passage I read? I was too excited to gather its meaning all at once, and then such a curious thing happened to me! But I will say the lines to you, child, and you will understand better.”
Nance could only press his hand again, but her heart sank with an unaccountable foreboding.
“It was the Litany of the Rose,” he said, and his voice floated out into the embalmed stillness with the same ominous treachery in its tone, so the poor girl fancied, as the ambiguous words he chanted.
“Rose au regard saphique, plus pâle que les lys, rose au regard saphique, offre-nous le parfum de ton illusoire virginité, fleur hypocrite, fleur de silence.”
The strange invocation died away on the air, and a singular oppression, heavy as if with some undesired spiritual presence, weighed upon them both. Sorio did not speak for some minutes, and when he did so there was an uneasy vibration in his voice.
“As soon as I had read those lines, there came over me one of the most curious experiences I have ever had. I seemed to see, yes, you may smile,”—Nance was far from smiling—“but it is actually true—I seemed to see a living human figure outline itself against the wall of my room. To the end of my days I shall never forget it! It was a human form, Nance, but it was unlike all human forms I’ve ever beheld—unless it be one of those weird drawings, you know? of Aubrey Beardsley. It was neither the form of a boy nor of a girl, and yet it had the nature of both. It gazed at me with a fixed sorrowful stare, and I felt—was not that a strange experience—that I had known it before, somewhere, far off, and long ago. It was the very embodiment of tragic supplication, and yet, in the look it fixed on me, there was a cold, merciless mockery.
“It was the kind of form, Nance, that one can imagine wandering in vain helplessness down all the years of human history, seeking amid the dreams of all the great, perverse artists of the world for the incarnation it has been denied by the will of God.” He paused again, and an imperceptible breath of hot balmy air stirred the young leaves of the beech branch above them.
“Ah!” he whispered, “I know what I thought of then. I thought of that ‘Secret Rose Garden’ where the timid boy-girl thing—you know the picture I mean, Nance?—is led forth by some wanton lamp bearer between rose branches that are less soft than her defenceless sides.”
Once more he was silent and the hot wind, rising a little, uttered a perceptible murmur in the leaves above their heads.