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Updated: June 12, 2025
It was Antony, deep in some dream of Silencieux. "Daddy! Daddy!" cried the little girl. He took her tenderly by the hand. "Daddy, where have you been all this long time? You have brought me no flowers for ever so long." "Flowers, little Wonder they are nearly all gone away, gone to sleep till next year But see, I will gather you something prettier than flowers."
Then, having relit the lantern, he set the spade into the ground, and speedily removed the soil from the white face below. As he uncovered it, the wind again extinguished the lantern, and there, to his amazement and terror, was the face of Silencieux shining radiantly in the darkness. The hole in which she lay brimmed over with light, as a spring wells out of the hillside.
"Once on a time there was a beautiful girl who died, and from her grave grew a wonderful flower, which all the world came to see. 'Yet it seems a pity, said one, 'that so beautiful a girl should have died. 'Ah, said a poet standing by, 'there was no other way of making the flower!" And again, as Antony still kept silence in his agony, Silencieux said, "Listen." "Listen, Antony.
The moonlight fell through it mysteriously, as on that night when he had stolen up there to meet Silencieux "at the rising of the moon." He could hesitate no longer. Leaving Beatrice asleep, he was soon making his way once more through the moonlit trees.
Promise me never to gather them, won't you, Wonder?" "Yes, mother. I don't like them. They frighten me." Antony turned into a by-path with a strange laugh, and was lost to them in the wood. Silencieux often spoke to Antony now. Sometimes a sudden, startling word when he was writing late at night; sometimes long tender talks; once a terrible whisper. But all this time she never opened her eyes.
But when he looked at Wonder, he took a more serious view of bacilli. "You must have your well looked to at once," he said. "Your little girl is very ill. She must be kept very quiet, and on no account excited." Beatrice and Antony took it in turns to watch by Wonder's bed that night, and once while Beatrice was watching, Antony found time to steal up the wood with his prayer to Silencieux.
Several nights they had the whim that Silencieux should masquerade in the wardrobe of her past. "To-night, you shall go clothed as when you loved that woman in Mitylene," Antony would say. Or: "To-night you shall be a little shepherd-boy, with a leopard-skin across your shoulder and mountain berries in your hair." Or again: "To-night you shall be Pierrot mourning for his Columbine."
Only an early yellow butterfly stood fanning itself on the freshly turned earth. Was it the soul of Silencieux? Cursing himself for a madman, he turned away, but had not gone many yards, when once more there was that sudden strain of music and the word "Resurgam" somewhere on the wind. This time he knew he was not mistaken, but to believe it true O God, he must not believe it true.
Silencieux appeared to be dead, but beneath that eternal smile, as Beatrice had divined, as Antony was learning, she was only too terribly alive. Yes! Antony's was the easier dream. The moon and Antony came up the wood together from opposite ends, and when Antony entered his châlet Silencieux was already waiting for him, her head crowned with a moonbeam.
"But I could not break her, she looked so like you; so I buried her in the wood." Beatrice kissed him gratefully. But her heart would have been more satisfied had Silencieux been broken. "Resurgam!" Had his senses deceived him? They must have deceived him. And yet that music at least had seemed startlingly near, sudden, and sweet, as though one should tread upon a harp in the grass.
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