Other visions there were without count. Also they would mix and fall
into new patterns, like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. There was
no end to them, and each was lovelier, or grander, or fraught with a
more sweet entrancement, than the last. And still she who brought them,
she who opened his eyes, who caused his ears to hear and his soul to
see; she whom he worshipped; his heart’s twin, she who had sworn
herself to him on earth, and was there waiting to fulfil the oath to
all eternity; the woman who had become a spirit, that spirit that had
taken the shape of a woman—there she stood and smiled and changed, and
yet was changeless. And oh! what did it matter if his life was draining
from him, and oh! to die at those glittering feet, with that perfumed
breath stirring in his hair! What did he seek more when Death would be
the great immortal waking, when from twilight he passed out to light?
What more when in that dawn, awful yet smiling, she should be his and
he hers, and they twain would be one, with thought that answered
thought, since it was the same thought?
There is much that might be told—enough to fill many pages. It would be
easy, for instance, to set out long lists of the entrancing dreams
which were the soul speech of the spirit of Stella, and to some extent,
to picture them. Also the progress of the possession of Morris might be
described and the student of his history shown, step by step, how the
consummation that in her life days Stella had feared, overtook him; how
“the thing got the mastery of him,” and he became “unfitted for his
work on earth!” How, too, his body wasted and his spiritual part
developed, till every physical sight and deed became a cause of
irritation to his new nature, and at times even a source of active
suffering.
Thus an evil odour, the spectacle of pain, the cry of grief, the sight
of the carcases of dead animals, to take a few examples out of very
many, were agonies to his abnormal, exasperated nerves. Nor did it stop
there, since the misfortune which threatened Stella when at length she
had succeeded in becoming bodily conscious of the presence of the
eidolon of her sister, and “heard discords among the harmonies” of the
rich music of her violin, overtook him also.
Thus, for instance, in the scent of the sweetest rose at times Morris
would discover something frightful; even the guise of tender childhood
ceased to be lovely in his eyes, for now he could see and feel the
budding human brute beneath. Worse still, his beautiful companion,
Mary, fair and gracious as she was, became almost repulsive to him, so
that he shrank from her as in common life some delicate-nurtured man
might shrink from a full-bodied, coarse-tongued young fishwife. Even
her daily need of food, which was healthy though not excessive,
disgusted him to witness,—he who was out of touch with all wholesome
appetites of earth, whose distorted nature sought an alien rest and
solace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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