For she stood there in front of him in the radiant, dancing, dewy morning, happy and unperturbed, in her gracious half-human beauty, not majestic, not passionate, not mysterious, but unreal from her very loveliness, a nymph, not of the woods or rivers, but of the sea—yet not of the tempestuous main—no tall sad siren of a treacherous rock, but a sweet, young pleasant nymph from a bay where the sun is always shining, a sea-sand nymph not unacquainted with flowers.
For when I would deal with her face and body, all those feeble, pretty comparisons whereby the pen of the writer strives to emulate the brush of the painter, must be of the sea or of flowers. Her dark hair, fringed against the gold lace of her scarf—but those same painters (whom all we word-workers envy bitterly but dare not say so) have shown how many confluent colours—hyacinth and blue and red and deep red gold, gleam in the shadowy hollows of the hair we fools call dark. ... Dark! As the sea-water in a sunlit bay lies dark between two little island rocks yet ripples in the wind, and the sea flowers turn it red along the marge and the depths glow violet in the midst, and the sunshine is all near but hidden—am I not now describing the dark hair of a lovely woman?
"But her eyes, poor poet, her eyes—are they not also pools of the salt sea?"
Not the eyes of this lass, my gentle friend. Her eyes were of finer and subtler essence than the heavy water of the sea. They were blue—which is ever most wonderful with dark lashes, dark brows and sea-dark hair—but not the dark blue of a rock pool nor yet quite the light broken blue of the blinking waves in the calm and brilliant bay. Her eyes were of a light dry fire—the blue not of sea nor of sky, but rather of the glowing air that swims about the idle fisher's boat hour after hour on summer days. So that you could not tell if they were deep eyes or light wayward eyes,—those little gay discs of laughing sunlit air.
And her countenance, that was a sweet rose and jasmine garden—but always, I would have you remember, a garden that blossoms by the sea, with vistas of the bay down every alley of the roses, and gleams of blue water glinting behind the trellis of the jasmine, and the sea air slightly touching the colour of all the flowers. Have you not seen the flowers in that Italian picture that are flung round Venus as she rises from the sea! Even so a little paler than the brave inland flowers were the jasmine and roses in the garden of the countenance of this lovely girl.
And her body? Can I tell you its secret? Ah, never: but as you leave the garden—pluck one tendril from the vine.
Her light, gracious, flowing beauty trans-ported the boy to the days he had read of, the days when the world was young. The chains of commerce and the shackles of class,—as it were, the last tatters of his black British clothes—fell from him. Looking at her, he smiled.
She evidently took that smile as a greeting intended for her, for she seemed to wait for him to come down and to be in no hurry with her pails.
"Good morning," she cried to him as he approached, in the honeyed and somewhat languorous speech of Alsander.