In this rich refuge Aurelius awoke as from an unsavoury and penurious dream. He regained some of his plump, sage swagger, his rotund phraseology, his autocratic dogmatism in matters Æsculapian. The atmosphere of Avalon agreed with his gullet. Above all things, he was held to be a man of tact.
In dead Duessa's bower there still hung her mirror of steel, whose sheeny surface had often answered to her languorous eyes and moon-white face. Duessa's hair had glimmered before this good friend's flattery. Gems, necklet, broideries, and tiars had sunk deep into its magic memory. The mirror could have told truths and expounded philosophies, had there been some Merlin to conjure with the past.
Aurelius of Gilderoy played the necromancer under more rational auspices. He was a benignant soul, subtle, sympathetic to the brink of dotage. His professional hint was that dead Duessa's mirror should be exiled from the bower of Avalon. The oracle spoke with much beneficence as to the delusions of the sick, and the demoniac influence of melancholy upon the brain. Yet his wisdom was withstood in the very quarter where he had trusted to find obedience and understanding. Dead Duessa's mirror still hung in the Lady Yeoland's bower.
One calm evening, when the west stood a great arch of ruddy gold, a slim girl knelt in the oriel with her face buried in her hands. She was clad in a gown of peacock blue, fitting close to her slight figure, and girded about the hips with a girdle of green leather. Her black hair poured upon her shoulders, clouding her face, yet leaving bare the base of her white neck where it curved from her pearly shoulders. She drooped her head as she knelt before the casement, where the light entered to her, azure and green, vermilion and purple, silver and rose.
Anon she rose softly, turned towards the mirror hanging on the wall, gazed into its depths with a species of bewitched fear. One glance given, she turned away with a shudder, hid her face in her hands, walked the room in a mute frenzy of self-horror. Presently she knelt again before the window-seat, struggled in prayer, turning her face piteously to an open casement where the golden woods stood under the red wand of the west. The light waned a little. She rose up again from her knees, shook her hair forward so that it bathed her face, trod slowly towards the mirror, stared at herself therein.
The crystal bowl was broken, the ivory throne dishonoured! The blush of the rose had faded, the gleam of the opal fallen to dust. Youth and its sapphire shield had passed into the gloom of dreams. The stars and the moon were magical no more.
She wavered away from the window to a dark corner, hid her face in the arras. The same wild cry rang like a piteous requiem through her brain. The man lived and loved her, and she had come to this! Burning Gilderoy had stolen her beauty, made her a mockery of her very self. God, that Fate should compel her to lift her scars to the eyes of love!
In the gathering dusk, she went again to the mirror, peered therein, with strained eyes and a tremor of the lip. The twilight softened somewhat the bitterness of truth. She shook her hair forward, saw her eyes gleam, fingered her white throat, and smiled a little. Presently she lit a taper, held it with wavering hand, peered at the steel panel once again. She cried out, jerked away, and crushed the frail light under her foot.
Darkness increased, seeming to clothe her misery. She wandered through the room, twisting her black hair about her wrist, moaning and darting piteous glances into the gloom. Once she took a poniard from a table, fingered the point, pressed her hand over her heart, threw the knife away with a gesture of despair. On the morrow the man would come to her. What would she see in those grey eyes of his? Horror and loathing, ah God, not that!
Anon she grew calmer and less distressed, prayed awhile, lit a lamp, delved in an ambry built in the wall. That night her hands worked zealously, while the moon shimmered on the mere, setting silver wrinkles on its agate face. The woods were still and solemn as death, deep with the voiceless sympathy of the hour. Black lace hung upon Yeoland's hands; the sable thread ran through and through; her white fingers quivered in the light of the lamp.