And beautiful as snow-mountains. Swift she is
As leaping flame and calm as winter stars.”
Its chaste beauty had long ago stamped the passage upon her memory; to-day the lines hymned themselves to a subtle, splendid music.
Tossing the volume suddenly to one side, her hands loosed her belt. She held the limp band movelessly a moment, and then bent her face eagerly over it. Under her fingers the filigree of the clasp slid back, disclosing a portrait. It was that of a man, young, resolute-faced, with brown, wavy hair parted in the middle, and candid forehead. It was rugged and masterful, but with a sweetness of lips and a tender, gray softness of proud eyes that bespoke him not more a doer than a dreamer.
As she looked, her lips parted and a faint color crept up her neck, showing brightly against the auburn hollows of her hair. She fondled and petted the ivory with her hands, and then raised it to her lips, kissing it, murmuring to it, and folding it over and over in the warm moistness of her breath.
Holding it against her face, she walked up and down the open space with quick, pushing steps, her free hand stripping the leaves from the sweeping bush fronds, her hat fallen back, swaying from the knotted streamers caught under the slipping coil between her shoulders. Stopping at length in front of the bench, she hung the belt upon a corner of the carven board, its violet weave tinging the weathered grain and the painted circlet glowing like a jewelled period for the massive lettering.
With one knee on the warped seat, she read again the fading sentences.
“An unknown woman.” Gone down into the cold green depths! Perhaps with a dear, glowing secret in her heart, a one name bubbling from her lips, a new quivering something in her soul, which the waters could not still! That body buffeted and tossed by rearing breakers, to lie nameless in a neglected grave; that soul, its earthly longing forgotten, to go forever unregretful of what it had cried for with all the might of its human passion!
Ah! but did it? If death touched her own soul to-day! “For love is strong as death. * * * Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it!” In imagination she felt the numbing clasp of the dragging under-deeps; she saw her soul wandering, wraith-like, through shadowless, silent spaces and across infinite distances. Would it bear with it a placid joy? Would it know no quicker heart-beat, no tears that reddened the eyelid, no tender thrill in all its lucent veins? Would nothing, nothing of that strange, sweet wildness that ran imprisoned in all her blood cling to it still?
The thought bit her. She reached up and snatched down the belt, pressing the clasp tightly with her cheek in the curve of her shoulder, repeating dumbly to herself the pious “Ora pro anima sua” that stood before her eyes.