Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow: A Novel

by C. Despard

Thither many were hastening, mostly ladies of the fashionable class, gayly dressed in all the freshness of early summer coloring. But those who thronged to the Royal Academy on this May afternoon were not all of the fashionable class; there were besides some who went from a true love of art, a patient thirst for the beautiful—pale students, whose eyes had long grown used to dusky streets, and to whom the yearly vision of the something that always lies beyond was a revelation and a power; governesses and female artisans who had taken a holiday for the express purpose of enjoying the image of that which hard reality had denied to them. Many of these were shabbily dressed, and pallid from the wasting effects of hard work and care; they enjoyed, however, more perhaps than their brilliant sisters, who could glibly criticise this style and that, with the true art-jargon and an appearance of intimate knowledge, but to whom this, that charmed those others, was only a matter of course, a somewhat tiresome routine, that must of necessity be performed as a part of the season's work.

On a corner of a seat in a central hall one seemingly of this latter class had found a place. She could not certainly have belonged to the fashionable world, for her scanty black dress was made with no pretension to style, and she wore a close bonnet, from under which a plain white border, that resembled a widow's cap, was peeping. There was one detail, however, in her dress that drew the attention of some who passed her. She wore, fastened gracefully round her shoulders in rather a foreign style, a silk Indian scarf of the richest coloring and workmanship. It harmonized strangely with the rest of her dress and her general appearance, but it was not unbecoming. Those who, attracted by this incongruity, looked at her attentively, saw a face that was almost startling in its pure beauty of outline, and a form whose refined grace did not require the assistance of the toilet to add to its charms.

"That woman could wear anything," was the reflection of one or two who glanced at her in passing.

She knew nothing of their criticism. Hour after hour passed away, and still she remained in the same place—a solitude to her, peopled by the multitude of thoughts to which the sight of one small picture had given rise. And that picture was, to many of those who had admired her in their rapid transit from one flower of art to another, a very commonplace affair. We see with such different eyes, for is not the perception of beauty a birthright of spirit? Where soul illumines there beauty lies, but only for the soul that sees.

Her eyes saw the picture, and her spirit saw beyond it. Hence the beauty that drew and enchained her. Besides, the picture had a history. From her own consciousness she translated its meaning.

Probably few will remember the picture, for it did not write its name on the art-history of the period, and its author is unknown to fame; but it certainly possessed power. Perhaps it was one of those flashes thrown off in the fire of youth by what might have been a grand genius if it had not been swamped in the great ocean of modern realism, thus losing for ever the divine breath of imaginative power. The picture was small. In its quiet corner it lived its life unnoticed by the crowd.

This is what it represented. In the background a sea just tinged with the gold of sunset, and skirting it a barren, rocky shore; on the shore a woman in an attitude of eager, waiting expectation; in the far distance a sail that has gathered on its whiteness some of the bright evening coloring; overhead a deepening sky, in which faint stars seem to be struggling into sight. The woman's face is traced sharply against the sky. It is beautiful, the blessed dawning of a new-born hope seeming to glimmer faintly from the deep horrors of a past despair. She leans over a projecting ledge of rock, not heeding in her rapt eagerness the sharp point that seems to pierce her tender hand, only gazing, as if her soul were in her eye, at the white point in the distance, which holds, as she imagines, the object of her hope.

There were pictures in the close neighborhood of this one that, to the art-critic, possessed far greater claims to admiration, but the woman with the shabby dress saw none of them. She sat on her crimson-covered seat, her hands folded and her eyes fixed, looking at the one picture that had touched her; she looked at it until she saw it no longer; a film gathered over her eyes; the picture, the room, the crowds, all her surrounding, had vanished. She was living in the region of thought alone, busying herself with the problem which the picture had evoked.

And as she sat rooted to the one spot, herself a fairer picture than any which that roof covered, the afternoon waned away and the galleries thinned. The fashionable crowd were beginning to think of their dinner-toilet. The woman was left alone on her seat in the centre of one of the halls, a somewhat conspicuous object, for her singular style of dress and her strange beauty would have gained her observation anywhere.

It was at about this time that a young gentleman dressed in the height of fashion, with an eye-glass carefully adjusted in his right eye, strolled leisurely through the hall. He was evidently a very young man, one who had not yet been aroused from the delusion so pleasing while it lasts of his own vast superiority to—almost everything; it is scarcely necessary to particularize—his own sex, with perhaps a few exceptions, certainly all women and lesser creatures. His walk revealed this small weakness to any one who chose to take the trouble of observing him closely and the carriage of his head, which was held very erect, the chin being slightly elevated.