Page:Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams.djvu/117

THE HILL OF DREAMS bring the match about, would weep and look indignantly at the unhappy bridegroom. 'I hope you'll be kind to her, Robert.' Then in a rapid whisper to the bride: 'Mind you insist on Wyman's flushing the drains when you come back; servants are so careless and dirty too. Don't let him go about by himself in Paris. Men are so queer; one never knows. You have got the pills?' And aloud, after these secreta, 'God bless you, my dear; good-bye! cluck, cluck, good-bye!'

There were stranger things written in the manuscript pages that Lucian cherished, sentences that burnt and glowed like 'coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame.' There were phrases that stung and tingled as he wrote them, and sonorous words poured out in ecstasy and rapture, as in some of the old litanies. He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning. He dreamed night and day over these symbols, he copied and re-copied the manuscript nine times before he wrote it out fairly in a little book which he made himself of a skin of creamy vellum. In his mania for 107