The light grew brighter, still wavering, slanting across the wall where it rocked and shifted, casting long, distorted shadows that danced up and down. Some one was evidently coming up-stairs with a light. The door was hidden by a projecting angle of the wall, however, and so for a few moments I saw nobody.
In those seconds the room was illuminated gradually more and more, showing a white-painted wainscot with a dull green wall above, where a few Japanese prints hung. Opposite my bed was a window with small, old-fashioned panes; there was another beside me. The rays glinted on the polished sides of several pieces of old mahogany furniture and flared yellow on brass candle-sticks and on the gilded frame of an eagle mirror. Finally the glare stopped its undulating, the shadows grew steadier on the wall, and, as I gazed eagerly for a first glimpse of my visitor, a young woman, bearing a silver candlestick, came into the room. She looked immediately over to where I lay, and then, catching my surprised stare, her expression changed wonderfully from a rather pathetic abstraction to an animated interest. With something not quite a smile on her face she walked nearer my bed, and stood for a moment without speaking, still looking at me. Her attitude hinted that she saw in me something—as if, for instance, it were a sort of picturesqueness which was unexpected enough to appeal to her imagination. She rested for a moment, poised and calm, but intensely attentive, fascinated.
And I, at the same time, was instantly conscious of so curious a sentiment that I must stop to attempt to describe it.
I conceived myself to be a connoisseur in women, and I estimated her at first sight as one unique, even extraordinary. But though to my mind she was indubitably beautiful, it was not her beauty that for the moment thrilled me. It was chiefly her "newness," the very novelty of her visitation. I felt a sudden, compelling desire to prolong the mystery of her presence rather than to have it explained. I tried, mentally, to delay her first word, to hold her back from any definite explanation till my eyes had had their fill of her—till they had, so to speak, solved her equation—till my wonder had spent itself in the vision, exhausting all its possibilities of delight. Her charm was, in its unexpectedness, so alluring, that she was like a pleasant dream which one lingers with and detains.
She was small, but her head was so exquisitely proportioned to her body that one did not notice her size. I have called her young, though she was twenty-seven, for her graceful figure and pose were still girlishly maintained. The shape of her small head was defined by a quaint coiffure, the dark, fine hair being banded in an encircling plait up past her tiny ears and over, like a coronal, showing a sweeping high-bred curve over her low brow. All this gave her a tender, virginal aspect; but her soft, deep brown eyes were so saddened by warm shadows below the lids, her mouth was so tremulously sensitive, with its slightly parted lips, and the little lines that women fear had begun to write her history so suggestively upon her face, that, as I gazed at her, I saw a woman who had lived and suffered, a woman as intense as she was delicate in all her moods.
She was clad in a bewilderingly feminine peignoir of lace and embroidery, open at the neck, and covered with another long, straightly hanging garment of shimmering pale-green silk, richly decorated with odd patterns. This gave her to my wondering eyes quite the appearance of a medieval princess, or the heroine of some old fairy tale. The impression was intensified by the long chain she wore, set with fire opals which flashed in the candle-light. From it, below her waist, there hung a golden star.
And, strangest of all, most provocative to my fancy, she also appeared, with extraordinary sympathy, almost with prescience, to feel something of my wonder as she paused and stood silent, retarding her greeting, in answer to my unspoken thought. While our eyes held each other in that marvelous communion, she did not smile; it was rather from her quivering mouth that I got the idea that she, too, was touched by the spell, and was keenly alive to the potentiality of the situation. She seemed to hold her breath lest the wonder should pass too soon.
That moment was as sublimely unreal as anything I have ever known, and, within its unmeasurable limits, as potent. It was tense, instinct with fine, secret emotions too faint for analysis. Messages came and went, electric. It was, in short, the psychological moment that comes but once to any friendship, and, coming, is usually hurried past without appreciation of its mysterious charm. It was that most suggestive of preludes, an instinctive, conscious pause upon the magic threshold of Romance. That she felt its quality also overpowered me. The minute passed like a falling star, and in its glory we seemed to travel miles together.
Then, with a visible effort, she spoke.
Her voice was light and clear, so expressively modulated that I have, despite myself, to compare it only to fairy footsteps passing over flower-tops. Its tones poised and hovered as if on the wing, though they were as sure as the melody of an old song. It was, above all else, graceful, and usually it held a trace of mental eagerness, but its characteristic quality came more from delicate nuances of feeling than from any vibrant intensity. It had the fluidity of running water.