“Light was her form, and darkly delicate, that brow, whereon her native sun had sat, but had not marr’d.”
She was tall, so far as I could judge, but oh, how attenuated! Her lower limbs absolutely made no impression on the mattrass, to which her frame appeared to cling, giving a ghastly conspicuousness to the oedematoust swelling of her feet, and to her person, for, alas! She was in a way to have become a mother.
The offspring of his wayward youth,
When he betrayed Bianca’s truth;
The maid whose folly could confide
In him, who made her not his bride.
Her hand, grasping her pocket-handkerchief, drenched, alas, with blood, hung over the side of the bed, thin and pale, with her long taper fingers as transparent as if they had been fresh cut alabaster, with the blue veins winding through her wrists, and her bosom wasted and shrunk, and her neck no thicker than her arm, with the pulsations of the large arteries as plain and evident as if the skin had been a film, and her beautiful features, although now sharpened by the near approaching death agony, her lovely mouth, her straight nose, her arched eyebrows, black, like pencilled jet lines, and her small ears,—and oh, who can describe her rich black raven hair, lying combed out, and spread all over the bed and pillow? She was dressed in a long loose gown of white crape; it looked like a winding-sheet; but the fire of her eyes—I have purposely not ventured to describe them—the unearthly brilliancy of her large, full, swimming eye!
When I entered, I bowed, and remained standing near the door. She said something, but in so low a voice that I could not catch the words; and when I stepped nearer, on purpose to hear more distinctly, all at once the blood mantled in her cheeks and forehead and throat, like the last gleam of the setting sun; but it faded as rapidly, and once more she lay pale as her smock.
“Yet not such blush, as mounts when health would show,
All the heart’s hue in that delightful glow;
But ‘twas a hectic tint of secret care,
That for a burning moment fever’d there;
And the wild sparkle of her eye seemd caught
From high, and lighten’d with electric thought;
Though its black orb these long low lashes fringe,
Had temper’d with a melancholy tinge.”
Her voice was becoming more and more weak, she said, so she must be prompt. “You have some trinkets for me, Mr Cringle?” I presented them. She kissed the crucifix fervently, and then looked mournfully on her own miniature. “This was thought like once, Mr Cringle.—Are the newspaper accounts of his trial correct?” she next asked. I answered, that in the main facts they were. “And do you believe in the commission of all these alleged atrocities by him?” I remained silent. “Yes, they are but too true. Hush, hush,” said she “look there.”
I did as she requested. There, glancing bright in the sunshine, a most beautiful butterfly fluttered in the air, in the very middle of the open window. When we first saw it, it was flitting gaily and happily amongst the plants and flowers that were blooming in the balcony, but it gradually became more and more slow on the wing, and at last poised itself so unusually steadily for an insect of its class, that even had Maria not spoken, it would have attracted my attention. Below it, on the window sill, near the wall, with head erect, and its little basilisk eyes upturned towards the lovely fly, crouched a camelion lizard; its beautiful body, when I first looked at it, was a bright sea-green. It moved into the sunshine, a little away from the shade of the laurel bush, which grew on the side it first appeared on, and suddenly the back became transparent amber, the legs and belly continuing green. From its breast under the chin, it every now and then shot out a semicircular film of a bright scarlet colour, like a leaf of a tulip stretched vertically, or the pectoral fin of a fish.
This was evidently a decoy, and the poor fly was by degrees drawn down towards it, either under the impression of its being in reality a flower, or impelled by some impulse which it could not resist. It gradually fluttered nearer and more near, the reptile remaining all the while steady as a stone, until it made a sudden spring, and in the next moment the small meally wings were quivering on each side of the camelion’s tiny jaws. While in the act of gorging its prey, a little fork, like a wire, was projected from the opposite corner of the window; presently a small round black snout, with a pair of little fiery blasting eyes, appeared, and a thin black neck glanced in the sun. The lizard saw it. I could fancy it trembled. Its body became of a dark blue, then ashy pale; the imitation of the flower, the gaudy fin was withdrawn, it appeared to shrink back as far as it could, but it was nailed or fascinated to the window sill, for its feet did not move. The head of the snake approached, with its long forked tongue shooting out and shortening, and with a low hissing noise. By this time about two feet of its body was visible, lying with its white belly on the wooden beam, moving forward with a small horizontal wavy motion, the head and six inches of the neck being a little raised. I shrunk back from the serpent, but no one else seemed to have any dread of it; indeed, I afterwards learned, that this kind being good mousers, and otherwise quite harmless, were, if any thing, encouraged about houses in the country. I looked again; its open mouth was now within an inch of the lizard, which by this time seemed utterly paralysed and motionless; the next instant its head was drawn into the snake’s mouth, and by degrees the whole body disappeared, as the reptile gorged it, and I could perceive from the lump which gradually moved down the snake’s neck, that it had been sucked into its stomach. Involuntarily I raised my hand, when the whole suddenly disappeared.
I turned, I could scarcely tell why, to look at the dying girl. A transient flush had again lit up her pale wasted face. She was evidently greatly excited. “Can you read me that riddle, Mr Cringle? Does no analogy present itself to you between what you have seen, between the mysterious power possessed by these subtle reptiles, and Look—look again.”