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Updated: September 12, 2025
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 of lizards, a catacomb of little lives that creep and run and whisper, made their seat.
As he spoke, from far down the wood came the gentle sound of a woman's voice calling "Antony," and coming nearer as it called. With a shade of impatience, Antony bent nearer to the image and kissed it. "Good-bye, Silencieux," he whispered, "Good-bye, until the rising of the moon."
Thus in like manner for Antony did Silencieux alternate between reality and dream that afternoon, though all the time he knew that, however now and again the daylight seemed to create an illusion of her remoteness, she was still his, and he of all men her chosen lover.
Perhaps it was that they were so like words words to which he had given all the love and worship of his life. Surely he had loved Silencieux more since he had found for her that beautiful name. He held the beetle in his hand a long while, loving it. Then he said to himself, with a smile in which was the delight of a success: "A vase-shaped beetle with deer's horns." The phrase delighted him.
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." Far down the wood came and went through the trees the black and white gable of a little châlet to which he was dreaming his way.
Antony exclaimed, and in an instant the adder was nothing more than a terrified rustle in the brushwood. He took Silencieux into his hands. There was poison on her lips. For another moment his fancy made him self-conscious, and turned Silencieux again into a symbol, though it was but for a moment. "There is always poison on the lips of Art," he said to himself.
In God's name speak." But Silencieux spoke nothing at all. Then Beatrice, watching in terror, seeing by his face that he would really kill himself, ran round to the door and broke in, crying, "O my poor Antony!" but already he had plunged the dagger amid the veins of his left wrist, and was watching the blood gush out with a strange delight.
To set mere personal feelings against Beauty human tears against an immortal creation! Did he spare his own feelings? Indeed he did not. On the night when we first met him bidding good-bye to Silencieux "until the rising of the moon," he had sat through dinner eating but little, feverishly and somewhat cruelly gay.
During his illness Antony spoke to Beatrice all the time as Silencieux, but one day, when he was nearly well again, he suddenly turned upon her in enraged disappointment, with a curious harshness he had never shown before, as though the gentleness of his soul had died during his illness, and exclaimed: "Why, you are not Silencieux, after all!"
The sobbing cadences of the greatest of Irish songs came to Antony's mind, and he crooned a verse or two at random: Wonder, child-like, wearied with the length of the verses, and suddenly the white face of Silencieux caught her eye. "Who is that lady, Daddy?" "That is Silencieux." "What a pretty name! Is she a kind lady, Daddy?" "Sometimes." "She is very beautiful. She is like little mother.
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