Her face, when you came to look at it, was not, perhaps, quite so terrible as might have been expected. In fact, Kingston found it rather disappointing in its possibilities. He consoled himself by noticing that the mouth was ridiculously wide, revealing, too, a glimpse of gold; but, still, it was an eager, mobile mouth, full of energetic vitality. Gundred’s pretty, definite lips invariably preserved their proper lines; but Isabel’s had smiles and flashes of feeling that kept no limits and obeyed no conventions. Agile, too, and expressive beyond due bounds, they had a gleaming redness that was put to shame by the decent pallor of her cousin’s. Her face was irregular, uneven, unconventional, yet not without a certain heady and unlawful charm. Like her mouth, it was so very much alive. It did not seem, as did Gundred’s, to be a moulded mask, but to be the woman’s very own naked soul. The claim of her birth was clear in the strangely delicate beauty of her ears—the only part of her that could ever, by any possibility, be called neat or dainty—and in the firm, fine curves of her nose and upper lip. The nose especially, swift and decided in its line, carried high and defiant, had the long thin nostrils, sensitive, fierce, cruel in their lifted curve, that one sees in the conspicuous women of old ferocious days. Kingston and Gundred had seen them in the face of Isabel the Queen.
As for the rest of her character, a student might have found traces of uncontrolled personality in her broad forehead, heavy along the supraciliary ridge, and in the deep set of her eyes. The eyes themselves were big and ardent, of that grey-green whose precise tone can never be actually discerned. Golden at one time, emerald at another, they are always vivid, blazing, inscrutable. And over all hung in a dense cloud the heavy obscurity of her hair. Black as darkness it was, long, straight, and utterly impatient of restraint. Its arrangement was of a piece with Miss Darrell’s whole accoutrement. Evidently she was content with twirling it into a rough lump, poking it here, pinning it inadequately there. At every point it burst its bonds: loose coils and ropes were dropping and trailing unreproved; each movement, each jump of the hat, set free a fresh strand. Miss Darrell clearly counted on the hat’s pressure to preserve at least some semblance of order; but that unhappy adornment was powerless to exert any influence; it jigged and jolted as the hair dictated, and the mass on the top of her head hopped happily in a unanimous heap as she went, carrying the hat unresisting to its sway.
Meanwhile Gundred was pouring forth a stream of pleasantness. Her gentle voice ran on in an orderly melody, expounding the joy that she and Kingston felt in welcoming a kinswoman to Brakelond. And, as she spoke, not a detail of her cousin’s untidiness escaped her eye. But the pitying disapproval that she felt found no hint of expression in her voice. Tone and manner remained calm, dispassionate, colourless as ever. Isabel, for her part, had no such nice polish, and made no attempt to conceal her excitement. Her eye roved, her head went eagerly from side to side, scanning her surroundings. When Gundred paused, she interposed some quick question, some keen remark on what she saw. But to her cousin’s formal little speeches she was evidently not attending. Her manners were careless as her dress.
Kingston, taking no part in the dialogue, devoted himself to watchful criticism of the enemy. He noticed how the smile flickered and flashed across her eager face, and how the fine nostrils thrilled and contracted now and again with enthusiasm. Those nostrils, he felt, were well known. Where had he seen them? He did not remember the face of the She-Wolf Queen, but, as he looked at that of Isabel, stronger and stronger grew his impression that it was no stranger. His hostile feelings grew and deepened. The face, the manner, the charm of Isabel made some vehement, inexplicable claim upon him; and in his resistance to so unreasonable a call, his attitude stiffened itself into a determined enmity. There could be nothing appealing or desirable about this sloppy, disorderly creature, yet he felt the beginning—was it the beginning or the renewal?—of a paradoxical fascination that contradicted his own most cherished sense of what was admirable. He looked again at Gundred, and strenuously admired her neat, cool beauty, the perfection of her appointments, her gestures, her inflections, her expressions. Nothing was wrong there; no criticism could be made: it was all just right; there was the admirable, incarnate.
Thence, his judgment reinforced, his gaze swept back to Isabel. There it was all just wrong: criticism could run riot; there, incarnate, was the second-rate. Second-rate? Blind instinct protested, and pointed the way to a discovery. Isabel was not second-rate. By every rule she should have been, but second-rate she was not. Strangely, unaccountably not. The rules in this case seemed to have collapsed. There, at all events, was everything that normally makes up the second-rate—cheapness, tawdriness, untidiness. But these items could not be added up to make the expected total. He hated his consciousness that in her was something—something that he recognised almost as an old friend—character, enthusiasm, whatever it was, that exempted her from ordinary rules. And, as he chafed against himself for not being able to pass the whole-hearted condemnation that his fastidiousness clamoured for, so he doubly chafed against the mystery in her that imposed so illogical, so unreasonable a limitation on his judgment, and forced him to feel, in what all the laws of taste denounced, a monstrous, fantastic fascination that defied analysis and resistance.
‘So nice,’ he heard Gundred saying; ‘and then you will go with us to Ivescar, I hope—our place in Yorkshire. I have never been there yet, of course, so you and I will have great fun exploring it—yes?’
‘Too glorious for words!’ cried Isabel irrelevantly, her eyes roaming eagerly from wall to wall of the little low room. ‘I have never dreamt of a fairy-palace like this. That panelling! Oh, it’s too precious. And the beautiful dim dustiness of it all! One feels as if one were trespassing on the domain of ghosts. These tiny, crazy, oaken parlours—they must be simply soaked with memories.’
‘Nice little rooms—yes?’ said Gundred complacently, contriving to reprove such undisciplined enthusiasm by the very gentleness with which she accepted it. ‘Dusty’ did not seem to her at all a fitting compliment to pay the oldest wing of Brakelond. She was certain that the housemaids discharged their duty perfectly.
‘Nice!’ cried Isabel ardently; ‘what a ridiculous word! They are the haunt of dead centuries. Don’t you feel either primeval or irreverent every time you drink a cup of tea here?’
‘Oh no,’ replied Gundred mildly. ‘I hope I should never have such dreadful feelings anywhere, and the rooms are really quite convenient. The only thing is that they are so cut off from the rest of the Castle. You’ll see to-morrow. This wing stands right away from the rest of the building, on a spur of rock that drops straight into the sea. They are all wood, these rooms—the oldest part of Brakelond.’