acted by
all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that
represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality.
He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera's ghoulish dwarfs,
with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their
malice: he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their malformations,
the humped backs, the club feet, the hydrocephalic heads. He described
the picture by Valdes Leal, in a certain place at Seville, which
represents a priest at the altar; and the altar is sumptuous with gilt
and florid carving. He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of
exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight was more than he
could bear; and in the meagre trembling hands, and in the white, ashen
face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes, there is a bodily corruption
that is terrifying. He seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds
of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison,
only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him and the
high heavens were empty of their solace. All the beauty of life appears
forgotten, and there is nothing in the world but decay. A ghastly
putrefaction has attacked already the living man; the worms of the grave,
the piteous horror of mortality, and the darkness before him offer naught
but fear. Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark night
of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of life
whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart.

Then, as if in pursuance of a definite plan, he analysed with a
searching, vehement intensity the curious talent of the modern Frenchman,
Gustave Moreau. Margaret had lately visited the Luxembourg, and his
pictures were fresh in her memory. She had found in them little save a
decorative arrangement marred by faulty drawing; but Oliver Haddo gave
them at once a new, esoteric import. Those effects as of a Florentine
jewel, the clustered colours, emerald and ruby, the deep blue of
sapphires, the atmosphere of scented chambers, the mystic persons who
seem ever about secret, religious rites, combined in his cunning phrases
to create, as it were, a pattern on her soul of morbid and mysterious
intricacy. Those pictures were filled with a strange sense of sin, and
the mind that contemplated them was burdened with the decadence of Rome
and with the passionate vice of the Renaissance; and it was