LIKE another foreigner, I had my ideal of the Irishwoman—bewitching, naturally, but built upon somewhat hackneyed and high-coloured lines: vivacious play of feature, blue-black hair, violet eyes, and complexion made up of lilies and roses. So when Trueberry, the gallantest friend man ever found on English shores, asked me to join him in a trip to Erin, imagination hastily evoked this resplendent creature of my desire, and I straightway proposed to myself the pleasing excitement of a flirtatious romance. I told Trueberry I thought nothing more delightful than the prospect I had formed, to fall in love, and ride away. Trueberry, in his fatal Saxon way, made some grim rejoinder about the riding away being the pleasantest part of it.
We shot and rode and fished, and stared at the girls, without any fervour of glance or flutter of pulse, it must be confessed, I alertly on the look-out for this creature of dazzling contrasts and laughing provocation. With fancy still uncomforted, Trueberry was dangerously hurt, and we were several miles distant from the nearest village. A peasant offered to help me carry my comrade down the glen, and assured me that the lady of the grey manor would be glad to receive him. Our claim at the hall was courteously responded to by an old man-servant, who drew a couch out on which we stretched my moaning friend, and then I was directed to the doctor’s house, some way along the uplands. My guide offered me the shelter of his roof hard by, when I spoke of looking for a lodging.
It was late in the afternoon when the doctor and I reached the manor. The sun was level on the western horizon, an arch of misty gold upon a broad sheet of silver lying behind the nearer low-hanging clouds, so that the silver heaven, beyond this chain of grey and opal hills, looked mystically remote and clear, while lower down lake and purple mountains were softened by a fine white veil of mist, and the sea was visible curling its delicate foam upon the crest of the tide among the rocks. The valley below was dusk, shut in by the grand sweep of girdling mountains, and so still was the air that every far-off sound carried, from the echo of ocean’s murmuring to the nearer crash of a waterfall hissing down the rocks, and the pleasant lilt at my feet of a little rivulet lipping its daisied marge. The birds were in full chorus, and each of the dense trees nested song. We left the breezy, wandering moors, which swept the horizon in a measurelessness of space as triumphant and vast seemingly as the illimitable Atlantic rolling from their base, and took the narrow road that sloped down to the glen of firs and oak, where the light could scarce make a path among the deepening shadows. Outside all was great, in air, on land, on water. Here intolerable compression of space and such a diminution of light as to harass nerves and imagination. My preoccupation about Trueberry rather stimulated than blunted my visual faculties, and I noted with abhorrence each detail of the sharp, precise landscape; the thin vein of water glimmering through the darkening grass like a broken mirror, the abrupt curve of the road from the shoulder of the bluff, and the stiff, dim plumes of the heather washed of purple pretension in the twilight, while through a clump of black firs the rough front of the manor made a fainter shade in the grey air. The solitude was scented with the fragrance of wild thyme, and as we approached, old-fashioned odours blew against us from the garden.
Trueberry was restored to a vague consciousness, and lay with shut eyes in a darkened room. I walked outside with the doctor, who was a cheery, hopeful fellow, and in diagnosing my friend’s case, furnished me with no occasion for alarm. I found it strange that no member of the family had come forward to explain the gracious hospitality by a personal interest in the wounded man. As I stood in the chill air musing on this odd unconcern, I heard a light step behind, coming from the house. I turned, and faced the woman who was to dominate my heart by one swift sweep of all that had ever claimed it.
She looked at me, and in one grave, steadfast glance the miracle was accomplished. Is this love? I have been so often, so continuously in love, and yet have never known anything that approached it. It was like the mystery of life and death—not to be explained, not to be conquered, not to be eluded. It needs no will to be born, to die; so it needs no will to surrender to such an influence. Upon a single throb of pulse, it has established itself permanently upon the altar of life, and sentimental fancies and shabby yearnings drop out of memory with the sacramental transfusion of soul.
Of course I saw that she was a beautiful woman, but this only afterwards. What I first saw was the deep impersonal gaze that drew the heart from my breast. It met mine with a full, free beam, and held it upon a wave of inexplicable emotion. Bondage to it was a glory, a consecration of my manhood. The subtle, the elusive nature of my captivation was the spiritual point upon an ordinary passion. It was the spurs, the belt of knighthood. For this I understood to be no mere command of senses, but the imperative claims of life-long allegiance, whether for suffering or for happiness.
Perhaps by nature I was attuned to such surrender. Since ever romantic hopes first broke their deeps in my boyish brain, and my heart was lifted on the first warm wave of desire, I have eagerly yearned for free passionate servitude to one sovereign lady. There was always the mediæval strain in me, though I have fluttered idly enough, like the moth round the flame, and hovered in a sort of protective sympathy and admiration, round pretty womanhood, not objecting to being trampled on as a holocaust to graceful and bewildering caprice. But now had come the enslavement of the soul, not of the senses; of the spirit, not of the eye. Homage did not bend in banter, but was exalted on the wings of reverence. It was only afterwards that I remembered the details of the face: its unchanging pallor and exceeding finish, the peculiar unrippling sheen of the blonde hair, like gold leaf in its unshaded polish, the inner curves of coil as deep an amber as the outer edges, without shadow of curl or ring round neck and temple. So smooth and shining a frame was admirably adjusted to the small, grave, glacial oval, with its look of wistful abstracted charm, with a delicate chiselling only an inspired pencil could copy, with an exquisite line from brow to chin. Such was the transparency of the colourless skin that like a shell, it seemed in the light to reflect the warm rose of life beneath. Under the arch of the unerring brows, long grey eyes, shadowed blackly, that in girlhood must have presaged storm, but now the black lay broodingly, a seal to the clear grey depths. You looked into, not through them; and found them too bewilderingly unstirred by the yearning trouble of the gazer.
There was, perhaps, a conscious but not an undignified expression in her dress. Sweeping folds of grey matched the austere stillness of her eyes, as did the full cambric of throat a wanness reminiscent of a mediæval saint. Long sleeves lined with silk fell backward, and the inner ones were of crimped cambric: hardly affectation, but the supreme touch to beauty so visibly haloed as hers. Her voice was in keeping with the clear eloquence of her glance; full, unperturbed, sustained without conscious modulation or trick, harmonious like all sounds of natural sweetness. It fell with the sentence, as the Irish voice habitually does, but softly, without abrupt cadences or huskiness.
‘All that lies in our power for your friend’s care and comfort will be done,’ she said, after her unhurried survey of me. ‘There is little to offer in such an out-of-the-way place but home medicines and home resources, and there will not be much in the way of distraction for him, since I live here alone with my children, and my solitude is unbroken. I regret that you have decided to lodge elsewhere, but pray do not spare us your visits. The house is your friend’s, and I am honoured in being of use to him.’
It was hardly a bow she made, but drooped her eyelids with a curious movement, and lowered her chin from its ineffable upward line. The words I scarcely heard, though every fibre trembled with emotion at her speech. I thought the voice, with the softening syllables dropping into silence, more exquisite than any music dreamed of. Its tones accompanied me as a murmur rather than the remembrance of actual words in my walk up to the free bluff, whence I could look down on the grey manor, and mixed with the resounding roar of ocean, as the wind blew the melody of the waves shoreward. What was the distinction of this woman who through all the days to come offered me rapture and agony by noontide and by midnight? Not her beauty so much as her essential difference from others. Not the gleaming gold of her hair, but the solemn simplicity of her bearing in such accord with the vast and unbroken solitude around her. Her voice I acknowledged without shrinking or terror, as we accept all essential elements, to be henceforth the dominant key of life for me, the note to sound my depths and touch me at will as an impassive instrument. Was this woman free? I asked myself, with a thrill of revolt, as I remembered her mention of children. But no word of husband! This fact let in a ray of hope upon my dread. I could never again belong to myself with the cheap security of an hour ago, and what was there for me if there was no room for me in the chambers of her heart?