[Fragment from Strange Shadows.]
SCENE: The house of a village priest, at midnight. The priest himself is revealed in prayer before the crucifix, besides a table piled with Commentaries and the Lives of the Saints. His features are buried in a shadow such as Rembrandt loved to paint; but the ochre-coloured light of a dying candle gleams on his heavy hair, and on a back and shoulders to whose shapely outlines the black gown has moulded itself in supple curves. He bows head with a voiceless prayer, whose nature, perhaps, it were not well to examine over-curiously, or surmise with too much confidence. Suddenly, the austere room, and the young, attractive frame of the priest, are suffused with a glare of rosy light that emanates from the mid-air. The crucifix is seen to tremble and totter and recede, the room seems to expand, the walls to melt away; and the heavy cross, with burden, soars and diminishes to a flying mote, lost in immensities of splendor. In its place, a woman stands-a woman fair and voluptuous as the first dreams of puberty, and naked as an antique statue. Her breasts and arms are moulded in the solemn, superb, inevitable lines of a divine lasciviousness; and her hair is like morning on a waterfall; her eyes are the sapphires bathed in wine. She smiles, and in the curve of her crescent lips ineffable lore is manifest, as if an entire kalpa of summers were epitomizes in a single rose.
With open arms, she advances toward the priest, who turns in terror, and puts the table with its black-bound commentaries between himself and the apparition. She pauses, but continues to smile.
The Priest: Saint Anthony preserve us! ...Who are you?
Venus:
The End