"Smith, Clark Ashton - Tales of Averoigne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

trees and flowers?'
Adele smiled, but made no other answer. In the circle of bright
sunlight where they were now standing, she and Olivier looked at each
other with a new and pervasive intimacy. There was a strange perfume
on the windless air, coming in slow wafts from an undiscernible source
- a perfume that seemed to speak insidiously of love and langour and
amorous yielding. Neither knew the flower from which it issued, for all
at once there were many unfamiliar blossoms around their feet, with
heavy bells of carnal white or pink, or curled and twining petals, or
hearts like a rosy wound. Looking, they saw each other as in a sudden
dazzle of flame; and each felt a violent quickening of the blood, as if
they had drunk a sovereign philtre. The same thought was manifest in
the bold fervour of Olivier's eyes, and the modest flush upon the cheeks
of Mme. la Comtesse. The long-cherished love, which neither had
openly declared up to this hour, was clamouring importunately in the._
veins of both. They resumed their onward walk; and both were now
silent through the self-same feeling of embarrassment and constraint.
They dared not look at each other; and neither of them had eyes for
the changing character of the wood through which they wandered; and
neither saw the foul, obscene deformity of the grey boles that gathered
on each hand, or the shameful and monstrous fungi that reared their
spotted pallor in the shade, or the red, venerous flowers that flaunted
themselves in the sun. The spell of their desire was upon the lovers;
they were drugged with the mandragora of passion; and everything
beyond their own bodies, their own hearts, the throbbing of their own
delirious blood, was vaguer than a dream.
The wood grew thicker and the arching boughs above were a weft
of manifold gloom. The eyes of ferine animals peered from their
hidden burrows, with gleams of crafty crimson or chill, ferocious beryl;
and the dank smell of stagnant waters, choked with the leaves of
bygone autumn, arose to greet Adele and Olivier, and to break a' little
the perilous charm that possessed them.
They paused on the edge of a rock-encircled pool, above which the
ancient alders twined their decaying tops, as if to maintain forever the
mad posture of a superannuate frenzy. And there, between the nether
boughs of the alders in a frame of new leaves, they saw the face that
leered upon them.
The apparition was incredible; and, for the space of a long breath,
they could not believe they had really seen it. There were two horns in
a matted mass of coarse, animal-like hair above the semi-human face
with its obliquely slitted eyes and fang-revealing mouth and beard of
wild-boar bristles. The face was old - incomputably old; and its lines
and wrinkles were those of unreckoned years of lust; and its look was
filled with the slow, unceasing increment of all the malignity and
corruption and cruelty of elder ages. It was the face of Pan, as he glared
from his, secret wood upon travellers taken unaware.
Adele and Olivier were seized by a nightmare terror, as they:
recalled the old legends. The charm of their passionate obsession was
broken, and the drug of desire relinquished its hold on their senses.
Like people awakened from a heavy sleep, they saw thc face, and heard