Pagina 349 van 490

"As you called it."

"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me

such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a

satyr."

"It is the face of my soul."

"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of

a devil."

"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with

a wild gesture of despair.

Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it. "My God!

If it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done

with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk

against you fancy you to be!" He held the light up again to the

canvas and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite

undisturbed and as he had left it. It was from within,

apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some

strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly

eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave

was not so fearful.