The hall door had swung partially open, and, dreading that she might be refused admittance if she rang the bell, she availed herself of the lucky accident (which in Elsie’s lifetime never happened), and entered unchallenged and unobserved.
From the parlor issued a rather monotonous and suppressed sound, as of some one reading aloud, and, advancing a few steps, the governess stood inside the threshold.
The curtains of the south window were looped back, the blinds thrown open, and the sickly sunshine poured in, lighting the easel, before which the mistress of the house had drawn an ottoman and seated herself.
To-day, an air of unwonted negligence marked her appearance, usually distinguished by extraordinary care and taste.
Her white merino robe de chambre was partially ungirded, and the blue tassels trailed on the carpet; her luxuriant hair instead of being braided and classically coiled, was gathered in three or four large heavy loops, and fastened rather loosely by the massive silver comb that allowed one long tress to straggle across her shoulder, while the folds in front slipped low on her temples and forehead.
Intently contemplating her work, she leaned her cheek on her hand, and only the profile was visible from the door, as she repeated, in a subdued tone,—
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“I stanch with ice my burning breast, With silence balm my whirling brain, O Brandan! to this hour of rest, That Joppan leper’s ease was pain.” |
The easel held the largest of many pictures, upon which she had lavished time and study, and her present work was a wide stretch of mid-ocean, lighted by innumerable stars, and a round glittering polar moon that swung mid-heaven like a globe of silver, and shed a ghostly lustre on the raging, ragged waves, above which an Aurora Borealis lifted its gleaming arch of mysterious white fires.
On the flowery shore of a tropic isle, under clustering boughs of lime and citron, knelt the venerable figure of Saint Brandan,—and upon a towering, jagged iceberg, whose crystal cliffs and diamond peaks glittered with the ghastly radiance reflected from arctic moon and boreal flames, lay Judas, pressing his hot palms and burning breast to the frigid bosom of his sailing sapphire berg.