"Does it really seem so strange, dear? I sometimes think you have never loved anything else."
Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was appealing to him with a perverse fascination.
To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,—surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.
As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious, knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love—a love of beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death, inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of humanity.
To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve that—and never come out of the dream.
These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image. He felt that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a strange expectancy.
CHAPTER IV
AT THE RISING OF THE MOON
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 had found for the Image, as we saw in the first chapter; and his love for Silencieux, begun more or less as a determined self-illusion, grew more and more of a reality. Every day new life welled into Silencieux's face, as every day life ebbed from the face of Beatrice, surely foreseeing the coming on of what she had feared. For the love he gave to Silencieux Antony must take away from Beatrice, from whom as the days went by he grew more and more withdrawn.