it, far enough in
all conscience: yet I walked home troubled with a fancy that somewhere,
somewhere down on the black, wet soil where it had fallen, through all
that dense, thorny tangle and millions of screening leaves, the white,
lidless, living eyes were following me still, and would always be
following me in all my goings and comings and windings about in the
forest. And what wonder? For were we not alone together in this dreadful
solitude, I and the serpent, eaters of the dust, singled out and
cursed above all cattle? HE would not have bitten me, and I--faithless
cannibal!--had murdered him. That cursed fancy would live on, worming
itself into every crevice of my mind; the severed head would grow and
grow in the night-time to something monstrous at last, the hellish
white lidless eyes increasing to the size of two full moons. "Murderer!
murderer!" they would say; "first a murderer of your own fellow
creatures--that was a small crime; but God, our enemy, had made them
in His image, and He cursed you; and we two were together, alone and
apart--you and I, murderer! you and I, murderer!"

I tried to escape the tyrannous fancy by thinking of other things and by
making light of it. "The starved, bloodless brain," I said, "has strange
thoughts." I fell to studying the dark, thick, blunt body in my hands;
I noticed that the livid, rudely blotched, scaly surface showed in some
lights a lovely play of prismatic colours. And growing poetical, I said:
"When the wild west wind broke up the rainbow on the flying grey cloud
and scattered it over the earth, a fragment doubtless fell on this
reptile to give it that tender celestial tint. For thus it is Nature
loves all her children, and gives to each some beauty, little or much;
only to me, her hated stepchild, she gives no beauty, no grace. But
stay, am I not wronging her? Did not Rima, beautiful above all things,
love me well? said she not that I was beautiful?"

"Ah, yes, that was long ago," spoke the voice that mocked me by the pool
when I combed out my tangled hair. "Long ago, when the soul that looked
from your eyes was not the accursed thing it is now. Now Rima would
start at the sight of them; now she would fly in terror from their
insane expression."

"O spiteful voice, must you spoil even such appetite as I have for this
fork-tongued spotty food? You by day and Rima by night--what shall I
do--what shall I do?"

For it had now come to this, that the end of each day br