Эмиль Золя
Abbe Mouret's Transgression
VI
One morning she at last succeeded in helping him to the foot of the steps, trampling down the grass before him with her feet, and clearing a way for him through the briars, whose supple arms barred the last few yards. Then they slowly entered the wood of roses. It was indeed a very wood, with thickets of tall standard roses throwing out leafy clumps as big as trees, and enormous rose bushes impenetrable as copses of young oaks. Here, formerly, there had been a most marvellous collection of plants. But since the flower garden had been left in abandonment, everything had run wild, and a virgin forest had arisen, a forest of roses over-running the paths, crowded with wild offshoots, so mingled, so blended, that roses of every scent and hue seemed to blossom on the same stem. Creeping roses formed mossy carpets on the ground, while climbing roses clung to others like greedy ivy plants, and ascended in spindles of verdure, letting a shower of their loosened petals fall at the lightest breeze. Natural paths coursed through the wood – narrow footways, broad avenues, enchanting covered walks in which one strolled in the shade and scent. These led to glades and clearings, under bowers of small red roses, and between walls hung with tiny yellow ones. Some sunny nooks gleamed like green silken stuff embroidered with bright patterns; other shadier corners offered the seclusion of alcoves and an aroma of love, the balmy warmth, as it were, of a posy languishing on a woman’s bosom. The rose bushes had whispering voices too. And the rose bushes were full of songbirds’ nests.
‘We must take care not to lose ourselves,’ said Albine, as she entered the wood. ‘I did lose myself once, and the sun had set before I was able to free myself from the rose bushes which caught me by the skirt at every step.’
They had barely walked a few minutes, however, before Serge, worn out with fatigue, wished to sit down. He stretched himself upon the ground, and fell into deep slumber. Albine sat musing by his side. They were on the edge of a glade, near a narrow path which stretched away through the wood, streaked with flashes of sunlight, and, through a small round blue gap at its far end, revealed the sky. Other little paths led from the clearing into leafy recesses. The glade was formed of tall rose bushes rising one above the other with such a wealth of branches, such a tangle of thorny shoots, that big patches of foliage were caught aloft, and hung there tent-like, stretching out from bush to bush. Through the tiny apertures in the patches of leaves, which were suggestive of fine lace, the light filtered like impalpable sunny dust. And from the vaulted roof hung stray branches, chandeliers, as it were, thick clusters suspended from green thread-like stems, armfuls of flowers that reached to the ground, athwart some rent in the leafy ceiling, which trailed around like a tattered curtain.
Albine meanwhile was gazing at Serge asleep. She had never seen him so utterly prostrated in body as now, his hands lying open on the turf, his face deathly. So dead indeed he was to her that she thought she could kiss his face without his even feeling it. And sadly, absently, she busied her hands with shredding all the roses within her reach. Above her head drooped an enormous cluster which brushed against her hair, set roses on her twisted locks, her ears, her neck, and even threw a mantle of the fragrant flowers across her shoulders. Higher up, under her fingers, other roses rained down with large and tender petals exquisitely formed, which in hue suggested the faintly flushing purity of a maiden’s bosom. Like a living snowfall these roses already hid her feet in the grass. And they climbed her knees, covered her skirt, and smothered her to her waist; while three stray petals, which had fluttered on to her bodice, just above her bosom, there looked like three glimpses of her bewitching skin.
‘Oh! the lazy fellow!’ she murmured, feeling bored and picking up two handfuls of roses, which she flung in Serge’s face to wake him.
He did not stir, however, but still lay there with the roses on his eyes and mouth. This made Albine laugh. She stooped down, and with her whole heart kissed both his eyes and his mouth, blowing as she kissed to drive the rose petals away; but they remained upon his lips, and she broke into still louder laughter, intensely amused at this flowery caressing.
Serge slowly raised himself. He gazed at her with amazement, as if startled at finding her there.
‘Who are you? where do you come from? what are you doing here beside me?’ he asked her. And still she smiled, transported with delight at marking this awakening of his senses. Then he seemed to remember something, and continued with a gesture of happy confidence:
‘I know, you are my love, flesh of my flesh, you are waiting for me that we may be one for ever. I was dreaming of you. You were in my breast, and I gave you my blood, my muscles, my bones. I felt no pain. You took half my heart so tenderly that I experienced keen inward delight at thus dividing myself. I sought all that was best and most beautiful within me to give it to you. You might have carried off everything, and still I should have thanked you. And I woke when you went out of me. You left through my eyes and mouth; ay, I felt it. You were all warm, all fragrant, so sweet that it was the thrill from you that has made me awake.’
Albine listened to his words with ecstasy. At last he saw her; at last his birth was accomplished, his cure begun. With outstretched hands she begged him to go on.
‘How have I managed to live without you?’ he murmured. ‘No, I did not live, I was like a slumbering animal. And now you are mine! and you are no one but myself! Listen, you must never leave me; for you are my very breath, and in leaving me you would rob me of my life. We will remain within ourselves. You will be mine even as I shall be yours. Should I ever forsake you, may I be accursed, may my body wither like a useless and noxious weed!’
He caught hold of her hands, and exclaimed in a voice quivering with admiration: ‘How beautiful you are!’
In the falling dust of sunshine Albine’s skin looked milky white, scarce gilded here and there by the sunny sheen. The shower of roses around and on her steeped her in pinkness.
Her fair hair, loosely held together by her comb, decked her head as with a setting planet whose last bright sparks shone upon the nape of her neck. She wore a white gown; her arms, her throat, her stainless skin bloomed unabashed as a flower, musky with a goodly fragrance. Her figure was slender, not too tall, but supple as a snake’s, with softly rounded, voluptuously expanding outlines, in which the freshness of childhood mingled with womanhood’s nascent charms. Her oval face, with its narrow brow and rather full mouth, beamed with the tender living light of her blue eyes. And yet she was grave, too, her cheeks unruffled, her chin plump – as naturally lovely as are the trees.
‘And how I love you!’ said Serge, drawing her to himself.
They were wholly one another’s now, clasped in each other’s arms! They did not kiss, but held each other round the waist, cheek to cheek, united, dumb, delighted with their oneness. Around them bloomed the roses with a mad, amorous blossoming, full of crimson and rosy and white laughter. The living, opening flowers seemed to bare their very bosoms. Yellow roses were there showing the golden skin of barbarian maidens: straw-coloured roses, lemon-coloured roses, sun-coloured roses – every shade of the necks which are ambered by glowing skies. Then there was skin of softer hue: among the tea roses, bewitchingly moist and cool, one caught glimpses of modest, bashful charms, with skin as fine as silk tinged faintly with a blue network of veins. Farther on all the smiling life of the rose expanded: there was the blush white rose, barely tinged with a dash of carmine, snowy as the foot of a maid dabbling in a spring; there was the silvery pink, more subdued than even the glow with which a youthful arm irradiates a wide sleeve; there was the clear, fresh rose, in which blood seemed to gleam under satin as in the bare shoulders of a woman bathed in light; and there was the bright pink rose with its buds like the nipples of virgin bosoms, and its opening flowers that suggested parted lips, exhaling warm and perfumed breath. And the climbing roses, the tall cluster roses with their showers of white flowers, clothed all these others with the lacework of their bunches, the innocence of their flimsy muslin; while, here and there, roses dark as the lees of wine, sanguineous, almost black, showed amidst the bridal purity like passion’s wounds. Verily, it was like a bridal – the bridal of the fragrant wood, the virginity of May led to the fertility of July and August; the first unknowing kiss culled like a nosegay on the wedding morn. Even in the grass, moss roses, clad in close-fitting garments of green wool, seemed to be awaiting the advent of love. Flowers rambled all along the sun-streaked path, faces peeped out everywhere to court the passing breezes. Bright were the smiles under the spreading tent of the glade. Not a flower that bloomed the same: the roses differed in the fashion of their wooing. Some, shy and blushing, would show but a glimpse of bud, while others, panting and wide open, seemed consumed with infatuation for their persons. There were pert, gay little things that filed off, cockade in cap; there were huge ones, bursting with sensuous charms, like portly, fattened-up sultanas; there were impudent hussies, too, in coquettish disarray, on whose petals the white traces of the powder-puff could be espied; there were virtuous maids who had donned low-necked garb like demure bourgeoises; and aristocratic ladies, graceful and original, who contrived attractive deshabilles. And the cup-like roses offered their perfume as in precious crystal; the drooping, urn-shaped roses let it drip drop by drop; the round, cabbage-like roses exhaled it with the even breath of slumbering flowers; while the budding roses tightly locked their petals and only sent forth as yet the faint sigh of maidenhood.
‘I love you, I love you,’ softly repeated Serge.
Albine, too, was a large rose, a pallid rose that had opened since the morning. Her feet were white, her arms were rosy pink, her neck was fair of skin, her throat bewitchingly veined, pale and exquisite. She was fragrant, she proffered lips which offered as in a coral cup a perfume that was yet faint and cool. Serge inhaled that perfume, and pressed her to his breast. Albine laughed.
The ring of that laugh, which sounded like a bird’s rhythmic notes, enraptured Serge.
‘What, that lovely song is yours?’ he said. ‘It is the sweetest I ever heard. You are indeed my joy.’
Then she laughed yet more sonorously, pouring forth rippling scales of high-pitched, flute-like notes that melted into deeper ones. It was an endless laugh, a long-drawn cooing, then a burst of triumphant music celebrating the delight of awakening love. And everything – the roses, the fragrant wood, the whole of the Paradou – laughed in that laugh of woman just born to beauty and to love. Till now the vast garden had lacked one charm – a winning voice which should prove the living mirth of the trees, the streams, and the sunlight. Now the vast garden was endowed with that charm of laughter.
‘How old are you?’ asked Albine, when her song had ended in a faint expiring note.
‘Nearly twenty-six,’ Serge answered.
She was amazed. What! he was twenty-six! He, too, was astonished at having made that answer so glibly, for it seemed to him that he had not yet lived a day – an hour.
‘And how old are you?’ he asked in his turn.
‘Oh, I am sixteen.’
Then she broke into laughter again, quivering from head to foot, repeating and singing her age. She laughed at her sixteen years with a fine-drawn laugh that flowed on with rhythmic trilling like a streamlet. Serge scanned her closely, amazed at the laughing life that transfigured her face. He scarcely knew her now with those dimples in her cheeks, those bow-shaped lips between which peeped the rosy moistness of her mouth, and those eyes blue like bits of sky kindling with the rising of the sun. As she threw back her head, she sent a glow of warmth through him.
He put out his hand, and fumbled mechanically behind her neck.
‘What do you want?’ she asked. And suddenly remembering, she exclaimed: ‘My comb! my comb! that’s it.’
She gave him her comb, and let fall her heavy tresses. A cloth of gold suddenly unrolled and clothed her to her hips. Some locks which flowed down upon her breast gave, as it were a finishing touch to her regal raiment. At the sight of that sudden blaze, Serge uttered an exclamation; he kissed each lock, and burned his lips amidst that sunset-like refulgence.
But Albine now relieved herself of her long silence, and chatted and questioned unceasingly.
‘Oh, how wretched you made me! You no longer took any notice of me, and day after day I found myself useless and powerless, worried out of my wits like a good-for-nothing… And yet the first few days I had done you good. You saw me and spoke to me… Do you remember when you were lying down, and went to sleep on my shoulder, and murmured that I did you good?’
‘No!’ said Serge, ‘no, I don’t remember it. I had never seen you before. I have only just seen you for the first time – lovely, radiant, never to be forgotten.’
She clapped her hands impatiently, exclaiming: ‘And my comb? You must remember how I used to give you my comb to keep you quiet when you were a little child? Why, you were looking for it just now.’
‘No, I don’t remember. Your hair is like fine silk. I have never kissed your hair before.’
At this, with some vexation, she recounted certain particulars of his convalescence in the room with the blue ceiling. But he only laughed at her, and at last closed her lips with his hand, saying with anxious weariness: ‘No, be quiet, I don’t know; I don’t want to know any more… I have only just woke up, and found you there, covered with roses. That is enough.’
And he drew her once more towards him and held her there, dreaming aloud, and murmuring: ‘Perhaps I have lived before. It must have been a long, long time ago… I loved you in a painful dream. You had the same blue eyes, the same rather long face, the same youthful mien. But your hair was carefully hidden under a linen cloth, and I never dared to remove that cloth, because your locks seemed to me fearsome and would have made me die. But to-day your hair is the very sweetness of yourself. It preserves your scent, and when I kiss it, when I bury my face in it like this, I drink in your very life.’
He kept on passing the long curls through his hands, and pressing them to his lips, as if to squeeze from them all Albine’s blood. And after an interval of silence, he continued: ‘It’s strange, before one’s birth, one dreams of being born… I was buried somewhere. I was very cold. I could hear all the life of the world outside buzzing above me. But I shut my ears despairingly, for I was used to my gloomy den, and enjoyed some fearful delights in it, so that I never sought to free myself from all the earth weighing upon my chest. Where could I have been then? Who was it gave me light?’
He struggled to remember, while Albine now waited in fear and trembling lest he should really do so. Smiling, she took a handful of her hair and wound it round the young man’s neck, thus fastening him to herself. This playful act roused him from his musings.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I am yours, what does the rest matter? It was you, was it not, who drew me out of the earth? I must have been under this garden. What I heard were your steps rattling the little pebbles in the path. You were looking for me, you brought down upon my head the songs of the birds, the scent of the pinks, the warmth of the sun. I fancied that you would find me at last. I waited a long time for you. But I never expected that you would give yourself to me without your veil, with your hair undone – the terrible hair which has become so soft.’
He sat her on his lap, placing his face beside hers.
‘Do not let us talk any more. We are alone for ever. We love each other.’
And thus in all innocence they lingered in each other’s arms; for a long, long time did they remain there forgetfully. The sun rose higher; and the dust of light fell hotter from the lofty boughs. The yellow and white and crimson roses were now only a ray of their delight, a sign of their smiles to one another. They had certainly caused buds to open around them. The roses crowned their heads and threw garlands about their waists. And the scent of the roses became so penetrating, so strong with amorous emotion, that it seemed to be the scent of their own breath.
At last Serge put up Albine’s hair. He raised it in handfuls with delightful awkwardness, and stuck her comb askew in the enormous knot that he had heaped upon her head. And as it happened she looked bewitching thus. Then, rising from the ground, he held out his hands to her, and supported her waist as she got up. They still smiled without speaking a word, and slowly they went down the path.
VII
Albine and Serge entered the flower garden. She was watching him with tender anxiety, fearing lest he should overtire himself; but he reassured her with a light laugh. He felt strong enough indeed to carry her whithersoever she listed. When he found himself once more in the full sunlight, he drew a sigh of content. At last he lived; he was no longer a plant subject to the terrible sufferings of winter. And how he was moved with loving gratitude! Had it been within his power, he would have spared Albine’s tiny feet even the roughness of the paths; he dreamed of carrying her, clinging round his neck, like a child lulled to sleep by her mother. He already watched over her with a guardian’s watchful care, thrusting aside the stones and brambles, jealous lest the breeze should waft a fleeting kiss upon those darling locks which were his alone. She on her side nestled against his shoulder and serenely yielded to his guidance.
Thus Albine and Serge strolled on together in the sunlight for the first time. A balmy fragrance floated in their wake, the very path on which the sun had unrolled a golden carpet thrilled with delight under their feet. Between the tall flowering shrubs they passed like a vision of such wondrous charm that the distant paths seemed to entreat their presence and hail them with a murmur of admiration, even as crowds hail long-expected sovereigns. They formed one sole, supremely lovely being. Albine’s snowy skin was but the whiteness of Serge’s browner skin. And slowly they passed along clothed with sunlight – nay, they were themselves the sun – worshipped by the low bending flowers.
A tide of emotion now stirred the Paradou to its depths. The old flower garden escorted them – that vast field bearing a century’s untrammelled growth, that nook of Paradise sown by the breeze with the choicest flowers. The blissful peace of the Paradou, slumbering in the broad sunlight, prevented the degeneration of species. It could boast of a temperature ever equable, and a soil which every plant had long enriched to thrive therein in the silence of its vigour. Its vegetation was mighty, magnificent, luxuriantly untended, full of erratic growths decked with monstrous blossoming, unknown to the spade and watering-pot of gardeners. Nature left to herself, free to grow as she listed, in the depths of that solitude protected by natural shelters, threw restraint aside more heartily at each return of spring, indulged in mighty gambols, delighted in offering herself at all seasons strange nosegays not meant for any hand to pluck. A rabid fury seemed to impel her to overthrow whatever the effort of man had created; she rebelliously cast a straggling multitude of flowers over the paths, attacked the rockeries with an ever-rising tide of moss, and knotted round the necks of marble statues the flexible cords of creepers with which she threw them down; she shattered the stonework of the fountains, steps, and terraces with shrubs which burst through them; she slowly, creepingly, spread over the smallest cultivated plots, moulding them to her fancy, and planting on them, as ensign of rebellion, some wayside spore, some lowly weed which she transformed into a gigantic growth of verdure. In days gone by the parterre, tended by a master passionately fond of flowers, had displayed in its trim beds and borders a wondrous wealth of choice blossoms. And the same plants could still be found; but perpetuated, grown into such numberless families, and scampering in such mad fashion throughout the whole garden, that the place was now all helter-skelter riot to its very walls, a very den of debauchery, where intoxicated nature had hiccups of verbena and pinks.
Though to outward seeming Albine had yielded her weaker self to the guidance of Serge, to whose shoulder she clung, it was she who really led him. She took him first to the grotto. Deep within a clump of poplars and willows gaped a cavern, formed by rugged bits of rocks which had fallen over a basin where tiny rills of water trickled between the stones. The grotto was completely lost to sight beneath the onslaught of vegetation. Below, row upon row of hollyhocks seemed to bar all entrance with a trellis-work of red, yellow, mauve, and white-hued flowers, whose stems were hidden among colossal bronze-green nettles, which calmly exuded blistering poison. Above them was a mighty swarm of creepers which leaped aloft in a few bounds; jasmines starred with balmy flowers; wistarias with delicate lacelike leaves; dense ivy, dentated and resembling varnished metal; lithe honeysuckle, laden with pale coral sprays; amorous clematideae, reaching out arms all tufted with white aigrettes. And among them twined yet slenderer plants, binding them more and more closely together, weaving them into a fragrant woof. Nasturtium, bare and green of skin, showed open mouths of ruddy gold; scarlet runners, tough as whipcord, kindled here and there a fire of gleaming sparks; convolvuli opened their heart-shaped leaves, and with thousands of little bells rang a silent peal of exquisite colours; sweetpeas, like swarms of settling butterflies, folded tawny or rosy wings, ready to be borne yet farther away by the first breeze. It was all a wealth of leafy locks, sprinkled with a shower of flowers, straying away in wild dishevelment, and suggesting the head of some giantess thrown back in a spasm of passion, with a streaming of magnificent hair, which spread into a pool of perfume.
‘I have never dared to venture into all that darkness,’ Albine whispered to Serge.
He urged her on, carried her over the nettles; and as a great boulder barred the way into the grotto, he held her up for a moment in his arms so that she might be able to peer through the opening that yawned at a few feet from the ground.
‘A marble woman,’ she whispered, ‘has fallen full length into the stream. The water has eaten her face away.’
Then he, too, in his turn wanted to look, and pulled himself up. A cold breeze played upon his cheeks. In the pale light that glided through the hole, he saw the marble woman lying amidst the reeds and the duckweed. She was naked to the waist. She must have been drowning there for the last hundred years. Some grief had probably flung her into that spring where she was slowly committing suicide. The clear water which flowed over her had worn her face into a smooth expanse of marble, a mere white surface without a feature; but her breasts, raised out of the water by what appeared an effort of her neck, were still perfect and lifelike, throbbing even yet with the joys of some old delight.
‘She isn’t dead yet,’ said Serge, getting down again. ‘One day we will come and get her out of there.’
But Albine shuddered and led him away. They passed out again into the sunlight and the rank luxuriance of beds and borders. They wandered through a field of flowers capriciously, at random. Their feet trod a carpet of lovely dwarf plants, which had once neatly fringed the walks, and now spread about in wild profusion. In succession they passed ankle-deep through the spotted silk of soft rose catchflies, through the tufted satin of feathered pinks, and the blue velvet of forget-me-nots, studded with melancholy little eyes. Further on they forced their way through giant mignonette, which rose to their knees like a bath of perfume; then they turned through a patch of lilies of the valley in order that they might spare an expanse of violets, so delicate-looking that they feared to hurt them. But soon they found themselves surrounded on all sides by violets, and so with wary, gentle steps they passed over their fresh fragrance inhaling the very breath of springtide. Beyond the violets, a mass of lobelias spread out like green wool gemmed with pale mauve. The softly shaded stars of globularia, the blue cups of nemophila, the yellow crosses of saponaria, the white and purple ones of sweet rocket, wove patches of rich tapestry, stretching onward and onward, a fabric of royal luxury, so that the young couple might enjoy the delights of that first walk together without fatigue. But the violets ever reappeared; real seas of violets that rolled all round them, shedding the sweetest perfumes beneath their feet and wafting in their wake the breath of their leaf-hidden flowerets.
Albine and Serge quite lost themselves. Thousands of loftier plants towered up in hedges around them, enclosing narrow paths which they found it delightful to thread. These paths twisted and turned, wandered maze-like through dense thickets. There were ageratums with sky-blue tufts of bloom; woodruffs with soft musky perfume; brazen-throated mimuluses, blotched with bright vermilion; lofty phloxes, crimson and violet, throwing up distaffs of flowers for the breezes to spin; red flax with sprays as fine as hair; chrysanthemums like full golden moons, casting short faint rays, white and violet and rose, around them. The young couple surmounted all the obstacles that lay in their path and continued their way betwixt the walls of verdure. To the right of them sprang up the slim fraxinella, the centranthus draped with snowy blossoms, and the greyish hounds-tongue, in each of whose tiny flowercups gleamed a dewdrop. To their left was a long row of columbines of every variety; white ones, pale rose ones, and some of deep violet hues, almost black, that seemed to be in mourning, the blossoms that drooped from their lofty, branching stems being plaited and goffered like crape. Then, as they advanced further on, the character of the hedges changed. Giant larkspurs thrust up their flower-rods, between the dentated foliage of which gaped the mouths of tawny snapdragons, while the schizanthus reared its scanty leaves and fluttering blooms, that looked like butterflies’ wings of sulphur hue splashed with soft lake. The blue bells of campanulae swayed aloft, some of them even over the tall asphodels, whose golden stems served as their steeples. In one corner was a giant fennel that reminded one of a lace-dressed lady spreading out a sunshade of sea-green satin. Then the pair suddenly found their way blocked. It was impossible to advance any further; a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress. Down below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia of some barbarous order. Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria, the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty green bloom contrasted with the glowing colours around it. Towering over all these growths scarlet foxgloves and blue lupins, rising in slender columns, formed a sort of oriental rotunda gleaming vividly with crimson and azure; while at the very summit, like a surmounting dome of dusky copper, were the ruddy leaves of a colossal castor-bean.
As Serge reached out his hands to try to force a passage, Albine stopped him and begged him not to injure the flowers. ‘You will break the stems and crush the leaves,’ she said. ‘Ever since I have been here, I have always taken care to hurt none of them. Come, and I will show you the pansies.’
She made him turn and led him from the narrow paths to the centre of the parterre, where, once upon a time, great basins had been hollowed out. But these had now fallen into ruin, and were nothing but gigantic jardinieres, fringed with stained and cracked marble. In one of the largest of them, the wind had sown a wonderful basketful of pansies. The velvety blooms seemed almost like living faces, with bands of violet hair, yellow eyes, paler tinted mouths, and chins of a delicate flesh colour.
When I was younger they used to make me quite afraid,’ murmured Albine. ‘Look at them. Wouldn’t you think that they were thousands of little faces looking up at you from the ground? And they turn, too, all in the same direction. They might be a lot of buried dolls thrusting their heads out of the ground.’
She led him still further on. They went the round of all the other basins. In the next one a number of amaranthuses had sprung up, raising monstrous crests which Albine had always shrunk from touching, such was their resemblance to big bleeding caterpillars. Balsams of all colours, now straw-coloured, now the hue of peach-blossom, now blush-white, now grey like flax, filled another basin where their seed pods split with little snaps. Then in the midst of a ruined fountain, there flourished a colony of splendid carnations. White ones hung over the moss-covered rims, and flaked ones thrust a bright medley of blossom between the chinks of the marble; while from the mouth of the lion, whence formerly the water-jets had spurted, a huge crimson clove now shot out so vigorously that the decrepit beast seemed to be spouting blood. Near by, the principal piece of ornamental water, a lake, on whose surface swans had glided, had now become a thicket of lilacs, beneath whose shade stocks and verbenas and day-lilies screened their delicate tints, and dozed away, all redolent of perfume.
