Читать книгу Ardath - Marie Corelli - Страница 21

Later on in the afternoon of the same day, when the sun, poised above the western mountain-range, appeared to be lazily looking about him with a drowsy, golden smile of farewell before descending to his rest, Alwyn was once more alone in the library. Twilight shadows were already gathering in the corners of the long, low room, but he had moved the writing-table to the window, in order to enjoy the magnificence of the surrounding scenery, and sat where the light fell full upon his face as he leaned back in his chair, with his hands clasped behind his head, in an attitude of pleased, half-meditative indolence. He had just finished reading from beginning to end the poem he had composed in his trance … there was not a line in it he could have wished altered,—not a word that would have been better omitted,—the only thing it lacked was a title, and this was the question on which he now pondered. The subject of the poem itself was not new to him—it was a story he had known from boyhood, … an old Eastern love-legend, fantastically beautiful as many such legends are, full of grace and passionate fervor—a theme fitted for the nightingale-utterance of a singer like the Persian Hafiz—though even Hafiz would have found it difficult to match the exquisitely choice language and delicately ringing rhythm in which this quaint idyll of long past ages was now most perfectly set like a jewel in fine gold. Alwyn himself entirely realized the splendid literary value of the composition—he knew that nothing more artistic in conception or more finished in treatment had appeared since the St. Agnes Eve of Keats—and as he thought of this, he yielded to a growing sense of self-complacent satisfaction which gradually destroyed all the deeply devout humility he had at first felt concerning the high and mysterious origin of his inspiration. The old inherent pride of his nature reasserted itself—he reviewed all the circumstances of his "trance" in the most practical manner—and calling to mind how the poet Coleridge had improvised the delicious fragment of Kubla Khan in a dream, he began to see nothing so very remarkable in his own unconscious production of a complete poem while under mesmeric or magnetic influences.

"After all," he mused, "the matter is simple enough when one reasons it out. I have been unable to write anything worth writing for a long time, and I told Heliobas as much. He, knowing my apathetic condition of brain, employed his force accordingly, though he denies having done so, … and this poem is evidently the result of my long pent-up thoughts that struggled for utterance yet could not before find vent in words. The only mysterious part of the affair is this 'Field of Ardath,' … how its name haunts me! … and how HER face shines before the eyes of my memory! That SHE should be a phantom of my own creation seems impossible—for when have I, even in my wildest freaks of fancy, ever imagined a creature half so fair!"

His gaze rested dreamily on the opposite snow-clad peaks, above which large fleecy clouds, themselves like moving mountains, were slowly passing, their edges glowing with purple and gold as they neared the sinking sun. Presently rousing himself, he took up a pen and first of all addressing an envelope to

"THE HONBLE. FRANCIS VILLIERS,

"Constitutional Club,

"LONDON"

he rapidly wrote off the following letter: