“How can I tell what she will or will not do? You know very well that she goes to sleep with one set of whims and wakes up with new ones. She catches odd freaks as some people catch diseases. She said yesterday that she had had enough of travel and change, and intended to settle and live and die right here; but that does not prove that I may not receive an order next week to pack her trunks and start to Jericho or Halifax, and I should not think the world was upside down and coming to an end if such an order came before breakfast to-morrow. Poor lamb! My poor lamb! Yonder she comes again. Do you notice how fast she walks, as if the foul fiend were clutching at her skirts or she were trying to get away from herself,—trying to run her restless soul entirely out of her wretched body? Come away, Robert, and let her have all the grounds to herself. She likes best to be alone.”
Mother and son walked off in the direction of the stables, and the advancing figure emerged from the dense shade where interlacing limbs roofed one of the winding walks, and paused before the circular stand on which lemon, rose, white, crimson, and variegated carnations, nodded their fringed heads and poured spicy aromas from their velvety chalices.
The face and form of Mrs. Gerome presented a puzzling 73 paradox, in which old age and youth seemed struggling for mastery; and “death in life” found melancholy verification. Tall, slender, and faultlessly made, the perfection of her figure was marred by the unfortunate carriage of her head, which drooped forward so heavily that the chin almost touched her throat and nearly destroyed the harmony of the profile outline. The head itself was nobly rounded, and sternly classic as any well authenticated antique, but it was no marvel that it habitually bowed under the heavy glittering mass of silver hair, which wound in coil after coil and was secured at the back by a comb of carved jet, thickly studded with small silver stars. The extraordinary lustrousness of these waves of gray hair that rippled on her forehead and temples like molten metal, lent a weird and wondrous effect to the straight, regular, rigid features,—daintily cut as those of Pallas, and quite as pallid. The delicate and high arch of the eyebrows was black as ebony, and in conjunction with the long jetty lashes formed a very singular contrast to the shining white tresses, which lay piled like freshly fallen snow-drift above them. The brow was full, round, smooth, and fair as a child’s; and more than one azure thread showed the subtle tracery of veins, whose crimson currents left no rosy reflex on the firm, gleaming white flesh, through which they branched.
Beneath that faultless forehead burned unusually large eyes, deep as mountain tarns, and of that pure bluish gray that tolerates no hint of green or yellow rays. The dilated pupils intensified the steel color, and faint violet lines ran out from the iris to meet the central shadows, while above and below the heavy black fringes enhanced their sombre depths, where mournful mysteries seemed to float like corpses just beneath the crystal shroud of ocean waves. The pale, passionless lips,—perfect in their pure curves, but defrauded of the blood which resolutely refused to come to the surface and tint the fine satin skin,—were lined in ciphers that the curious questioned and wondered over, but which few could read and none fully comprehend. The beautiful, frigid mouth, where all sweetness was frozen out to make room for hopelessness 74 and defiance, would have admirably suited some statue of discrowned and smitten Hecuba; and no amount of sighs and sobs, no stormy bursts of grief or fierce invective, could rival the melancholy eloquence of its mute, calm pallor.
The wan face, with its gray globe-like eyes, and the metallic glitter of the prematurely silvered hair, matched in hue the pearl-colored muslin dress which fluttered in the wind; and, standing there, this gray woman of twenty-three looked indeed like Pygmalion’s stone darling,—
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“Fair-statured, noble, like an awful thing Frozen upon the very verge of life, And looking back along eternity With rayless eyes that keep the shadow Time.” |
Her frail, white hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent, were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like pulses of sullen sang azure.
Bending over the carnations, she examined the gorgeous hues,—toyed with their fragile stems,—and then, glancing shyly over her shoulder like a startled fawn half expectant of hounds and hunter, she glided rapidly to an artificial mound crowned with a mouldering mossy plaster image of Ariadne and her pard, and stood surveying her new domain.
“Solitude” filled a semicircular hollow between low wooded hills, which ran down to lave their grassy flanks in the blue brine of the Atlantic, and constituted the horns of a crescent bay, on whose sloping sandy beach the billows broke without barrier.
The old-fashioned brick house—with sharp, peaked roof, turreted chimneys, and gable window looking down in front upon the clumsily clustered columns that supported the arched portico—was built upon a rocky knoll, of which nature laid the foundation and art increased the height; and, around and above it, towered a dense grove of ancient trees that shut out the glare of the sea and effectually screened the mansion from observation. The damp walls were heavily 75 draped with the sombre verdure of ivy, whose ambitious tendrils clambered to the cleft chimney-tops, and peered impertinently over the broad stone window-sills, whence the indignant housemaid remorselessly sheared them away as often as their encroachments grew perceptible.