United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And above the pulse of the march he seemed to hear another cadence, a thin laughter. He laughed too, giving himself up to that spectral contagion. He saw the fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong, gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship.
I know now now that it's safe for me to know. I was down at that village by the beach a year or so ago. I'm a Kain, of course, one of the crazy Kains, after all. John Sanderson was born in the village and lived there till his death. Only once that folks could remember had he been away, and that was when he took some papers to the city for Mrs. Kain to sign.
Their bath completed, the maidens emerged from the water on to the farther bank, paused for a moment to arrange their hair, like wood nymphs of the Golden Age, then wound their gorgeous kains about them and vanished amid the trees. From somewhere on the distant hillside came the sweet, shrill quaver of a reed instrument. The driver said it was a native flute, but I knew better.
But something was broken, something was lost: out of the surf of sound he could no longer fashion the measure of marching feet. The mad Kains had found him out, and cast him out. No longer could he dream them in dreams or run naked-hearted with them in the flood of the moon, for he was no blood of theirs, and they were gone. And huddling down on the edge of the bed, he wept.
Their costumes, faithful reproductions of those depicted in the carvings on the walls of the temples, were of a gorgeousness which made the creations of Bakst seem colorless and tame: tightly-wound kains of cloth-of-gold over which were draped silks in all the colors of the chromatic scale. Their necks and arms, which were stained a saffron yellow, were hung with jewels or near-jewels.
For it was the same man he had seen in the doorway that morning months ago, with a brown hat in one hand and a thorn stick in the other. Even a thing like that may be half put aside, though for a while. And by the time Christopher went to his room for the night the thought of the interloper had retired into the back of his mind, and they were all Kains there on the Hill, inheritors of romance.
Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept in to another world, the wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father, and Maynard, his father, another Maynard before him, and all the Kains and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the Cloud, the Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the Lilac hedge standing against the stars.
From waist to ankle they were tightly wrapped in kains of brilliant batik, which defined, without revealing, every line and contour of their hips and lower limbs, but from the waist up they were entirely nude, barring the flame-colored flowers in their dusky hair. Unlike most Malays, the eyes of the Balinese, instead of being oblique, are set straight in the head.
If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the sand with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones cornered where he caught them between cliff and water Guy's own baby amongst them and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody else did why, I'm free and willing to say 'twas his bounden duty to hold a true aim and pull a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though I was, and man of his poor father before him
For 'twas from that day he began to take it on. "I saw it myself. There was Daniel come home from other parts where his mother had kept him, out of gossip's way, bright as you please and knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains. And so I say the sin lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it out to Daniel, Daniel changed.
Word Of The Day