Still my mother was not perfectly happy; a vague want haunted even her tranquil and luxurious existence. It was a feeling, not a thought, the shadowy longing of a heart loving to the centre, which finds half the soul that should have answered it clothed in mystery. She could not account for this hungry feeling. It was not suspicion—it was not a doubt, but something deeper and intangible. The love which fills a bosom like hers always flings its own shadow, for love is the sunshine of genius, and shadows ever follow the pathway of the sun.
Still, her life was very happy, not the less so, perhaps, for these wandering heart-mists. My birth had its effect also, for it seems to me that no woman thoroughly sounds the depths of her soul till she becomes a mother. I have read her journal at this period, and every sentence is a rich, wild gush of poetry; you can almost feel a torrent of blissful sighs warming the paper on which she wrote, such as a mother feels when the first-born sleeps upon her bosom for the first time.
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCEALMENTS AND SUSPICIONS.
And now I have an existence, I am a human soul growing like a flower in the warmth of that young bosom, flitting through the house and haunting my mother’s lap like a bird. The first memory that I have is like a starbeam, as quick and vivid. My mother sat in a little room somewhere in an angle of the building just at sunset. Her hair was down; the Spanish woman had unbraided the long tresses, and shaken them apart in dark wavy masses. They fell over the crimson cushions of her chair to the ground. The sash doors were open into a stone balcony choked up with clematis. The sunset came through in golden flashes, kindling up those black waves till they shone with a purple bloom. Her dress was crimson, of camel’s hair, I think, with a violet tinge, and flowing down her person in soft folds, that glowed in the light like pomegranates on the bough. Half over her shoulders and half upon the chair, was a cashmere shawl of that superb palmleaf pattern which looks so quiet, but is so richly gorgeous; a profusion of black lace fell around her arms and neck, contrasting the golden brown of her complexion. Her eyes—I never saw such eyes in my life—so large, so radiant, yet so soft; the lashes were black as jet, and curled upward.
It is useless. I can remember, but not describe her, that peach-like bloom, those soft lips so full, so richly red. I have no idea where I was at the time, only that I saw her sitting in that room so much like a picture, and felt that she was my mother.
She was looking into the garden with an expression of tranquil expectation on her face. I remember watching the shadows from her eyelashes as they lay so dreamily on her cheeks, for though she evidently expected some one, it was not with doubt; she was quiet as the sunbeams that fell around her, now and then turning her head a little as the Spanish woman gathered up a fresh handful of her hair, but still with her half-shut eyes fixed upon the footpath that led through the wilderness.
I sat down upon some cushions that had been left in the balcony, and watched her through the open sash till the heavy folds of hair were braided like a coronet over her head, and her look became a little anxious. Then I too began to gaze across the intervening flower-beds upon the footpath, as if a share in the watchfulness belonged to me.
At last, as the golden sunset was turning to violet, and one felt the unseen dew as it fell, I saw, through the purple mist, a man walking slowly along the footpath. My heart leaped, I uttered a little shout, and clasping my hands, looked up to my mother. Her lips were parted, and her eyes flashed like diamonds.
“It is the Busne—the Busne,” I said.
She took me in her arms, and smothering me with glad kisses, murmured, “My Busne, mine, mine!”