IV
OAKGUARD
The night of her first meeting with Adrian Sorio, found the daughter of the house of Renshaw restless and wakeful. She listened to the hall clock striking the hour of twelve with an intentness that would have suggested to any one observing her that she had only been waiting for that precise moment to plunge into some nocturnal enterprise fraught with both sweetness and peril.
The night was chilly, the sky starless and overcast. The heavy curtains were drawn but the window, wide-open behind them, let in a breath of rain-scented air which stirred the flames of the two silver candles on the dressing table and fluttered the thin skirt of the girl’s night-dress as she sat, tense and expectant, over the red coals of a dying fire.
A tall gilt-framed mirror of antique design stood on the left of the fireplace.
As the last stroke of midnight sounded, the girl leapt to her feet and swiftly divesting herself of her only garment, stood straight and erect, her hands clasped behind her head, before this mirror. The firelight cast a red glow over her long bare limbs and the flickering candle flames threw wavering shadows across her lifted arms and slender neck. Her hair remained tightly braided round her head and this, added to the boyish outlines of her body, gave her the appearance of one of those androgynous forms of later Greek art whose ambiguous loveliness wins us still, even in the cold marble, with so touching an appeal. Her smooth forehead and small delicately moulded face showed phantom-like in the mirror. Her scarlet lips quivered as she gazed at herself, quivered into that enigmatic smile challenging and inscrutable which seems, more than any other human expression, to have haunted the imagination of certain great artists of the past.
Permitted for a brief moment to catch a glimpse of that white figure, an intruder, if possessed of the smallest degree of poetic fancy, would have been tempted to dream that the dust of the centuries had indeed been quickened and some delicate evocation of perverse pagan desire restored to breath and consciousness.
Such a dream would not, perhaps, have survived a glance at the girl’s face. With distended pupils and irises so large that they might have been under the influence of some exciting drug, her eyes had that particular look, sorrowful and heavy with mystery, which one feels could not have been in the world before the death of Christ.
With her epicene figure, she resembled some girl-priestess of Artemis invoking a mocking image of her own defiant sexlessness. With her sorrowful inhuman eyes she suggested some strange elf-creature, born of mediæval magic.