i love to look at this “rainbow,” as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours. handsome creature that she is in forms and colors, fit for a sea-king’s bride, it is not her beauty alone that holds my eyes upon her. let me tell you one of my fancies, and then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for me.
it is in the hearts of many men and women——let me add children——that there is a great secret waiting for them,——a secret of which they get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later years. these hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden startling flashes,——second wakings, as it were,——a waking out of the waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep. i have many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes. of course i cannot tell what kind of a secret this is; but i think of it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events, and to their first great cause. this secret seems to be broken up, as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life. i do not think it could be; for i am disposed to consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life. persons,[35] however, have fallen into trances,——as did the reverend william tennent, among many others,——and learned some things which they could not tell in our human words.
now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great mystery. there are women’s faces, some real, some ideal, which contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite purity and love. i remember two faces of women with wings, such as they call angels, of fra angelico,——and i just now came across a print of raphael’s santa apollina, with something of the same quality,——which i was sure had their prototypes in the world above ours. no wonder the catholics pay their vows to the queen of heaven! the unpoetical side of protestantism is that it has no women to be worshipped.
but mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the great secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it. sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents. but this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken mystery of expression. can she tell me anything? is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it which i have been groping after through so many[36] friendships that i have tired of, and through——hush! is the door fast? talking loud is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
you must have sometimes noted this fact that i am going to remind you of and to use for a special illustration. riding along over a rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble. there is a great hollow under your feet,——a huge unsunned cavern. deep, deep beneath you, in the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered out, obsolete and useless.
so it is in life. we jog quietly along, meeting the same faces, grinding over the same thoughts,——the gravel of the soul’s highway,——now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle. suddenly we hear the deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
i wish the girl would go. i don’t like to look at her so much, and yet i cannot help it. always that same expression of something that i ought to know,——something that she was made to tell and i to hear,——lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap out of[37] her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
it suddenly occurs to me that i may have put you on the wrong track. the great secret that i refer to has nothing to do with the three words. set your mind at ease about that,——there are reasons i could give you which settle all that matter. i don’t wonder, however, that you confounded the great secret with the three words.
i love you is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to tell. when that is said, they are like china-crackers on the morning of the fifth of july. and just as that little patriotic implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train leading from a young girl’s eye or lip to the “i love you” in her heart. but the three words are not the great secret i mean. no, women’s faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. it lies deeper than love, though very probably love is a part of it. some, i think,——wordsworth might be one of them,——spell out a portion of it from certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. i can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which seem to me to come near the region where i think it lies. i have known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old alchemists,——all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving[38] up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about their floor and ceilings, and so they died. the vulgar called them drunkards.
i told you that i would let you know the mystery of the effect this young girl’s face produces on me. it is akin to those influences a friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from certain voices. i cannot translate it into words,——only into feelings; and these i have attempted to shadow by showing that her face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing, which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world or on the very threshold of the next.
this young girl, about whom i have talked so unintelligibly, is the unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our breakfast-table. the little gentleman leans towards her, and she again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards him. that slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side, is a physical fact i have often noticed. then there is a tendency in all the men’s eyes to converge on her; and i do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to look.
that bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom i have spoken as sitting opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. she brought down some mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. she gave a sprig[39] to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another by the hand of bridget to this old gentleman.
——sarvant, ma’am! much obleeged,——he said, and put it gallantly in his buttonhole. after breakfast he must see some of her drawings. very fine performances,——very fine!——truly elegant productions,——truly elegant!——had seen miss linley’s needlework in london, in the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, i think he said),——patronized by the nobility and gentry, and her majesty,——elegant, truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of them;——wonderful resemblance to nature; an extraordinary art, painting; mr. copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when he was a boy. used to remember some lines about a portrait written by mr. cowper, beginning,——
“o that those lips had language! life has pass’d
with me but roughly since i heard thee last.”
and with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. the dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look at him so many, many years ago. he stood still as if in a waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
how many drawing-books have you filled,——i said,——since you began to take lessons?——this was the first,——she[40] answered,——since she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had covered with drawings.
i turned over the leaves of the book before us. academic studies, principally of the human figure. heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth. limbs from statues. hands and feet from nature. what a superb drawing of an arm! i don’t remember it among the figures from michel angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. from nature, i think, or after a cast from nature.——oh!——
——your smaller studies are in this, i suppose,——i said, taking up the drawing-book with a lock on it.——yes,——she said.——i should like to see her style of working on a small scale.——there was nothing in it worth showing,——she said; and presently i saw her try the lock, which proved to be fast. we are all caricatured in it, i haven’t the least doubt. i think, though, i could tell by her way of dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders. some of them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else. the young fellow john appears to stand second in her good graces. i think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady’s daughter calls bó-kays of flowers,——somebody has, at any rate.——i saw a book she had, which must have come from the divinity-student. it had a dreary title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,——a face from memory, apparently,——one of those faces that small children loathe without knowing why,[41] and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are “good men,” and that heaven is full of such.——the gentleman with the diamond——the koh-i-noor, so called by us——was not encouraged, i think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. he pulls his purple mustache and looks appreciatingly at iris, who never sees him as it should seem. the young marylander, who i thought would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, i wish you were up here by me, or i were down there by you,——which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. but nothing comes of all this,——and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding out the girl’s fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.
not to give up all the questions i was determined to solve, i made an attempt also to work into the little gentleman’s chamber. for this purpose, i kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was just ready to go up stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk, followed him as he toiled back to his room. he rested on the landing and faced round toward me. there was something in his eye which said, stop there! so we finished our conversation on the landing. the next day, i mustered assurance enough to knock at his door, having a pretext ready.——no answer.——knock again. a door, as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently i heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots. the bolts and the lock of the inner[42] door were unfastened,——with unnecessary noise, i thought,——and he came into the passage. he pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which i stood. he had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as “mr. copley” used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in; and a quaint-looking key in his hand. our conversation was short, but long enough to convince me that the little gentleman did not want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
i have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,——a school-girl’s secrets and a whimsical man’s habits. i mean to give up such nonsense and mind my own business.——hark! what the deuse is that odd noise in his chamber?
