WHICH MAY BE PASSED OVER LIGHTLY

When I came back to some clearer sensing of things, I found myself abed in a room which was strange and yet strangely familiar.  Barring a great oaken clothes-press in one corner, a raree-show of curious china on the shelves where the books should have been, and the face of an armored soldier staring down at me from its frame over the chimney piece, where I should have looked to see my mother’s portrait, the room was a counterpart of my old bedchamber at Appleby Hundred.  There was even a faint odor of lavender in the bed-linen; and the sense of smell, which hath ever a better memory than any other, carried me swiftly back to my boyhood, and to the remembrance that my mother had always kept a spray or two of that sweet herb in her linen closet.

At the bedside there was a claw-footed table, which also had the look of an old friend; and on it a dainty porringer, filled with cuttings of fragrant sweetbriar.  This was some womanly conceit, I said to myself; and then I laughed, though the laugh set a pair of wolf’s jaws at work on my shoulder.  For you must know that I had lived the full half of King David’s span of three-score and ten years, and more, and what womanly softness had fallen to my lot had been well got and paid for.

I closed my eyes the better to remember what had befallen, and when I opened them again was fain to wonder if the moment of back-reaching stood not for some longer time.  In the deep bay of the window was a great chair of Indian wickerwork, and I could have sworn it had but now been empty.  Yet when I looked again a woman sat in it.

Now of a truth I had seen this woman’s face but twice; and once it wore a smile of teasing mockery and once was full of terror; but I thought I should live long and suffer much before the winsome challenging beauty of it would let me be as I had been before I had looked upon it.

She knew not that I was awake and slaking the thirst of my eyes upon the sweetness of her, and so I saw her then as few ever saw her, I think, with the womanly barriers of defense all down.  ’Tis a hard test, and one that makes a blank at rest of many a face beautiful enough in action; but though this lady’s face was to the full as changeful as any April sky, it was never less than triumphantly beautiful.

I had said her eyes were blue, but now they were deep wells reflecting the soft gray of the clouded sky beyond the window-panes.  I had made sure that her lips lent themselves most readily to mocking smiles scornful of any wit less trenchant than her own; but now these mocking lips were pensive, and with the rounded cheek and chin gave her the look of a sweet child wanting to be kissed.  I had said her hair was bright in the sunlight, and so, indeed, it was; but lacking the sun it still held the dull luster of burnished copper in its masses, and her simple, care-free dressing of it at a time when les grandes dames were frizzing and powdering and adding art to art to mar the woman’s crown of glory, gave her yet more the look of a child.