§ 2
I realize that I must make some effort to tell you how she looked. But when I think of words—how futile, stale and shopworn seem all the words that come to me. In my early days my one recreation was cheap paper-covered novels and historical romances, from which I got my idea of the grand monde. Now, when I try to think of words with which to describe Sylvia, it is their words that come to me. I know that a heroine must be slender and exquisite, must be sensitive and haughty and aristocratic. Sylvia was all this, in truth; but how shall I bring to you the thrill of wonder that came to me when I encountered her—that living joy she was to me forever after, so different from anything the books had ever brought me!
She was tall and very straight, free in her carriage; her look, her whole aspect was quick and eager. I sit and try to analyze her charm, and I think the first quality was the sense she gave you of cleanness. I lived with her much; I saw her, not merely made up for parties, but as she opened her eyes in the morning; and I cannot recall that I ever saw about her any of those things that offend us in the body. Her eyes were always clear, her skin always fair; I never saw her with a cold, or heard her speak of a headache. If she were tired, she would not tell you so—at least, not if she thought you needed her. If there was anything the matter with her, there was only one way you found it out—that she stopped eating.
She would do that at home, when someone was ill and she was under a strain. She would literally fade away before your eyes—but still just as cheerful and brave, laughing at the protests of the doctors, the outcries of her aunts and her colored “aunties.” At such times she had a quite new kind of beauty, that seemed to strike men dumb; she used to make merry over it, saying that she could go out when other women had to shut themselves behind curtains. For thinness brought out every line of her exquisitely chiseled features; every quiver of her soul seemed to show—her tense, swift being was as if cut there in living marble, and she was some unearthly creature, wraith-like, wonderful, thrilling. There were poets in Castleman County; they would meet her in this depleted state, and behave after the fashion of poets in semi-tropical climates—stand with their knees knocking and the perspiration oozing out upon their foreheads; they would wander off by moonlight-haunted streams and compose enraptured verses, and come back and fall upon their knees and implore her to accept the poor, feeble tribute of their adoration.
I have seen her, too, when she was strong and happy, and then she would be well-made and shapely, with a charm of a more earthly sort. Then her color would be like the roses she always carried; and in each of her cheeks would appear the most adorable of dimples, and under her chin another. She had a nose that was very straight and finely carved; and right in the center, under the tip, the sculptor had put a tiny little groove. She had also a chin that was very straight, and right in the center of this was a corresponding little groove. You will laugh perhaps; but those touches added marvelously to the expressiveness of her countenance. How they would shift and change when, for instance, her nostrils quivered with anger, or when the imp of mischievousness took possession of her, and the network of quaint wrinkles gathered round her eyes!
Dimples, I know, are an ultra-feminine property; but Sylvia’s face was not what is ordinarily called feminine—it was a kind of face that painters would give to a young boy singing in a church. I used to tell her that it was the kind they gave to angels of the higher orders; whereupon she would put her arms about me and whisper, “You old goose!” She had a pair of the strangest red-brown eyes, soft and tender; and then suddenly lighting up—shining, shining!
I don’t know if I make you see her. I can add only one detail more, the one that people talked of most—her hair. You may see her hair, very beautifully done, in the portrait of Lady Lysle. The artist was shrewd and put the great lady in a morning robe, standing by the open window, the sunlight falling upon a cascade of golden tresses. The color of Sylvia’s hair was toned down when I knew her, but they told me that in her prime it had been vivid to outrageousness. I sit before the painting, and the present slips away and I see her as she was in the glow of her youth—eager, impetuous, swept with gusts of merriment and tenderness, like a mountain lake in April.
So the old chroniclers report her, nine generations back, when she came over to marry the Governor of Massachusetts! They have her wedding gown preserved in a Boston Museum, and the Lysles have a copy of it, so that each generation can be married in one like it. But Sylvia was the first it became, being the first blonde since her great progenitor. How strange seems such a whim of heredity—not merely the color of the hair and eyes, the cut of the features, but a whole character, a personality hidden away somewhere in the germ-plasm, and suddenly breaking out, without warning, after a couple of hundred years!