“Let’s go into the back room,” cried Mrs. Berle; and she led the way.
In the back room wine and cakes were distributed by a German Madchen in a French cap. The gentlemen—there were two or three present besides Arthur and Hetzel—lit their cigars. The ladies, of whom there were an equal number, with the exception of Mrs. Lehmyl, gathered in a knot around the center-table. Mrs. Lehmyl went to the bay-window and admired the view. It was, indeed, admirable. A crystalline atmosphere permitted one to see as far down the river as the Brooklyn Navy Yard; and leagues to the eastward, on Long Island, the marble of I know not what burying-ground glittered in the sun. An occasional schooner slipped past almost within stone’s throw. On the wharf under the terrace, fifty odd yards away, an aged man placidly supported a fishing pole, and watched a cork that floated immobile upon the surface of the water. Over all bent the sky, intensely blue, and softened by a few white, fleecy clouds. But Arthur’s faculties for admiration were engrossed by Mrs. Lehmyl’s face.
I think the first impression created by her face was one of power, rather than one of beauty. Not that it was in the slightest degree masculine, not that it was too strong to be intensely womanly. But at first sight, especially if it chanced then to be in repose, it seemed to embody the pride and the solemnity of womanhood, rather than its gentleness and flexibility. It was the face of a woman who could purpose and perform, who could suffer and be silent, who could command and be inexorable. The brow, crowned by black, waving hair, was low and broad, and as white as marble. The nose and chin were modeled on the pattern of the Ludovici Juno’s. Your first notion was: “This woman is calm, reserved, thoughtful, persistent. Her emotions are subordinated to her intellect. She has a tremendous will. She was cut out to be an empress.” But the next instant you noticed her eyes and her mouth: and your conception had accordingly to be reframed. Her eyes, in color dark, translucent brown, were of the sort that your gaze can delve deep into, and discern a light shimmering at the bottom: eyes that send an electric spark into the heart of the man who looks upon them; eyes that are eloquent of pathos and passion and mystery. Her lips were full and ruddy, and indicated equal capacities for womanly tenderness and for girlish mirth. It was easy to fancy them curling in derisive laughter: it was quite as easy to fancy them quivering with intense emotion, or becoming compressed in pain. Insensibly, you added: “No—not an empress: a heroine, a martyr to some noble human cause. It was like this that the Mother of Sorrows must have looked.”
She was beautiful: on that score there could be no difference of opinion. Her appearance justified the expectations that her voice aroused. She was beautiful not in a pronounced, aggressive way, but in a quiet, subtle, and all the more potent way. Her beauty was of the sort that grows upon one, the longer one studies it; rather than of the sort that, bullet-like, produces its greatest effect at once. Join to this that she was manifestly young, at the utmost five-and-twenty, and the reader will not wonder that Arthur’s antecedent interest in her had mounted several degrees. I must not forget to mention her hands. These were a trifle larger than it is the fashion for a lady’s hands to be; but they were shaped and colored to perfection, and they had an unconscious habit of toying with each other, as their owner talked or listened, that made it a charm to watch them. They were suggestive hands. Arthur felt that, had he understood the language of hands, he could, by observing these, have divined a number of Mrs. Lehmyl’s secrets; and he bethought him of an old treatise on palmistry that lay gathering dust in his book-case up-stairs. Around her wrist she wore a bracelet of amber beads. She was dressed entirely in black, and had a sprig of mignonette pinned in her button-hole.
As has been said, she admired the view. “I am so glad we have come to live in Beekman Place,” she added; “it is such a contrast to the rest of dusty, noisy, hot New York.”
“To hear this woman utter small talk,” says Arthur, “was like seeing a giant lift straws. I half wished that she would not speak at all, unless to proclaim mighty truths in hexameters. Still, had she kept silence, I am sure I should have been disappointed.”
She was much amused by the old fisherman down on the wharf; wondered whether he had met with any luck; and thought that such patient devotion as he displayed, merited recognition on the part of the fishes. She was curious to know what the granite buildings were on Blackwell’s Island. Arthur undertook the office of cicerone.
“Prison and hospital and graveyard constantly in sight,” was her comment; “I should think they would make one gloomy.”
“A memento mori, as one’s eyes feast on sky and water. On moonlight nights in summer, it is superb here—quite Venetian. Every now and then some dark, mysterious craft, slowly drifting by, reminds one of Elaine’s barge.”
“It must be very beautiful,” she said, simply.