I laughed. If she applies that little piece of wisdom to me who say nothing, can there be any doubt but that she guesses at the truth?
"But what makes your friend Tierney suppose anything so extravagant as a black from the West Indies?" I asked.
She raised her eye-brows, which, in its way, is just as expressive as shrugging one's shoulders.
"I think the Miss Fennells have given it out that she comes from America, and if you think of the veil she wears always and the fact that no one in Ballysheen has ever seen her face, you've got enough to make people in a small Irish village say far more extravagant things than that. Mind you, I don't believe what Tierney says. I shouldn't be a bit surprised to find that she is beautiful."
That very nearly drew me; but not quite. I know she is beautiful. Not because I have that young man's word for it. I see her beautiful, as that type nearly always is. Every time the name Clarissa finds its way into my thoughts, there creeps in with it a picture which eludes all description of outline. I see a dim vision of deep dark eyes set in that faint blue-white—the white of old china he called it. God knows I thank him for nothing, unless it be for that. She has an olive skin, so tenderly touched with those southern suns that ivory might match it. Her mouth is sad, for when the God of a Thousand Circumstances takes a woman in His grasp, He lets fall two drops of sorrow in her eyes and moulds her lips to His own making. Then her hair I know is black; but in the blackness of it I can see a light of brown as though it once had caught a sun ray in its net and caged it there for ever.
More clear a vision than this, the picture of Clarissa denies me. I shall know her no better when I see her face than I know her already now; yet something dreads me to think of that first moment when she removes her veil. The dread is not that I shall see her. The look in that little nursery maid's eyes, in many another woman's face as well, comes quickly into my mind and I know it is the dread that she will see me.
Is it from such men as I that women take advice? Sometimes I am afraid she will not listen to me, that she will never go back to her sunny islands; that she will let herself be taken into the heart of that underworld where her lover has the substance of his being, and there will be a still deeper sorrow, a greater trouble than before, which she will never bring to me.
It was a sore temptation then to tell Bellwattle how beautiful I know Clarissa to be. But I resisted it, and we returned that third evening without reward. It was the very next night, however, that our patience bore fruit.
"Are you two always going to go out in the evening?" asked Cruikshank, when we looked into the room to give him a friendly nod of the head.
"Come with us," said Bellwattle.