“Look at that stream,” she remarked to Alick, as they stood, on the Sunday following Heather’s return, side by side, leaning over the parapet of a little bridge which spanned the Kemm; “do you know what it puts me in mind of?”
“No,” answered the boy, to whom sometimes the talk of his companion was as the talk of a creature from another world; “I cannot know what anything puts you in mind of, for you are like no other person I ever met in all my life before.”
“So much the better for you,” she replied. “Do I not often inform you I am one of the daughters of Cain, come on a short visit to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden? and that brings me back to the river: it runs by—like existence at Berrie Down—with scarcely a ripple on its surface. I should like to be the Kemm,” she added in a lower tone, “murmuring on over the pebbles, never singing a more passionate strain than that—never fretting or fuming—never forcing my way through rocks and stones—never brawling—never uncertain as to my future course—but stealing quietly and peacefully to the great sea;” and as she spoke, Bessie dropped her arms over the parapet of the little bridge, and looked into the stream sadly and dreamily.
Let me sketch her for you—Herbert Ormson’s only daughter, Gilbert Harcourt’s affianced wife—or rather let me make the attempt, for it is not easy to give in pen and ink an idea of the personal appearance of a girl like Bessie Ormson, whose mood was shifting as the sunbeams, whose beauty was changeful as the shadows flitting over the grass in the golden summer-time:
Scarcely of the middle height, figure slight and delicately rounded, she was not destitute of dignity, though lithe and lissom as a child: she had a small head, which she could rear, on occasions, almost defiantly; a mass of dark brown hair, smoothly braided on her cheeks, and then rolled up at the back of her neck in coil after coil; eyes of the darkest, deepest, divinest blue, shaded by long black lashes, that gave to her face, when in repose, an almost pathetic expression; a complexion which neither sun nor wind seemed able to spoil; she had lips like coral, and teeth like pearls; and a short, provoking, piquant, saucy upper lip. Was it any wonder, think you, that Alick Dudley should consider her the perfection of beauty?—that almost unconsciously the fancies and loves of his future life were shaped and moulded by this his earliest ideal of feminine loveliness?
And yet it was no mere beauty of feature that caused Bessie Ormson to seem so irresistibly charming: it was that ever-varying expression of which I have spoken—that shifting look, now sad, now gay, now earnest, now provoking, now coquettish, now soft and womanly, and again almost sarcastic in its keen perception of human folly and human weakness—which gave variety to her face.
Always changing—never for two minutes the same—always filling the beholder with a vague wonder as to what strangely-varied mental book such a face could be the index.
It was wistful, it was saucy, it was sorrowful, it was joyous. There was a shadow lying across her eyes one moment; they were sparkling with mirth the next. She would look at Heather as though she were gazing into the depths of a clear stream, with a strange dreamy glance, and before you could fix that expression on your mind it was gone.
See her with Lally, and her face was the face of a child; leave her to herself for an instant, and there came an anxious, troubled look on her countenance. She was all things—mischievous, tender, high-spirited, quiet, loving, cross, full of bitter repartee, of premature worldly knowledge.
She had eaten of the tree too soon; and, if that fruit set her mental teeth on edge, who may say the fault lay with Bessie?