No one smiled at the request. Her husband uttered some soothing phrase of compliance. We all looked on while the flame caught and began to creep up among the apple-logs. Bagheera rose and changed his position to one before the hearth. When Vere stood erect, Desire leaned toward him.
"Will you read, aloud, sir?" she asked of him, and made a gesture toward the morocco book.
She surprised us all by that choice. I was unreasoning enough to feel slighted, although the task was one for which I felt a strong dislike. I fancied Vere liked the idea no better, from his expression. However, he offered no demur, but sat down at the table and began to flatten the warped pages that perversely sprang back and clung about his fingers. Desire slowly turned her lovely eyes to me, eyes that looked by gift of nature as if their long corners had been brushed with kohl. She said nothing, yet somehow conveyed her meaning and intent. I understood that she did not wish to hear me read those pages; that it was painful to her that they should be read at all.
Vere was ready. He glanced around our circle, then began with the simple directness that gave him a dignity peculiarly his own.
"'Mistress Desire Michell, her booke, Beginning at the nineteenth year of her Age,'" he read, in his leisurely voice.
The living Desire Michell and I were regarding one another. I smiled at the quaint wording, but she shuddered, and put her hands across her eyes.
Yet there was nothing in those first pages except a girl's chronicle of village life. This book evidently carried on a diary kept from early childhood; a diary written out of loneliness. Apparently the bare colonial life pressed heavily upon the writer; who, having no companions of the intellect, turned to this record of her own mind as a prisoner might talk to his reflection in a mirror rather than go mad from sheer silence. Discontent and restlessness beat through the lines like fluttering wings. She wrote of her own beauty with a cool appraisal oddly removed from vanity, almost with resentment of a possession she could not use.
"Like a man who finds treasure in a desert isle, I am rich in coin that I may not spend," she wrote. "I stand before my mirror and take a tress of my hair in either hand; I spread wide my arms full reach, yet I cannot touch the end of those tresses. Nor can my two hands clasp the bulk of them. There have been other women who had such hair, who were of body straight and white, and had the eyes—but I cannot read that they stayed poor and obscure."
There followed some quotations from the classics of which I was able to give but vague translations when Vere passed the book to me, both because my knowledge was scanty and because of their daring unconventionality. There were allusions, too, to ladies of later history who had found fairness a broad staircase for ambition to mount. Of the writer's learning, there could be no question; a learning amazing in one so young and so situated. The source of this became apparent. Her father was consumed with the passion of scholarship, and the girl's hungry mind fed in the pastures where he led the way.
Here crept into view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field, cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he denounced. He believed in the hidden lore while he condemned it. Deeper and deeper into forbidden knowledge his eagerness for research led him. Unsanctioned by any church were the books Dr. Michell starved his body to buy from Jews or other furtive dealers in unusual wares. The titles in his library comprehended the names of more charlatans than bishops. He could define the distinctions between necromancy, sorcery, and magic. The marvelous calculations of the Pythagoreans engaged him, and the lost mysteries of the Cabiri.