Ah! Henriette, what shall I say of you? How with this halting pen make
you live and be for others as you exist and are for me?
There are men and women born upon this earth, who, walking lightly, yet
print deep, ineffaceable footprints upon the age in which they live.
The world is better for them; their breath has purified the atmosphere
they existed in.... Ignorant of their predestination as they are, every
word and act of theirs bears the seal of the Divine Intelligence. They
were sent to do the work of the Most High.
And there are men and women who appear and vanish like shooting stars
or falling meteors. Their path is traced in ruin and devastation, as
the path of the tornado, as the path of the locust is. And having
accomplished their appointed work, they pass on like the destroying
wind, like the winged devourer: leaving prone trees and ruined homes,
wrecked ships, stripped fields--Death where there was Life.
* * * * *
Think of Henriette as one of the fatal forces, a velvet-voiced,
black-haired woman with a goddess’s shape and a skin of cream, such
little hands and feet as might have graced an Andalusian lady,--with
mobile features--the mouth especially being capable of every variety
of expression--and with great eyes of changing color, sometimes
agate-brown, sometimes peridot-green, sometimes dusky gray. Shaping her
image thus in words, I have conveyed to you nothing. No sorceress is
unveiled, no wonder shown.
In the old, old days when the Sons of Light walked upon earth with the
children of men, some seraph fell for the sake of a woman like this.
From the seed of that union sprang all the Henriettes.... You may know
them by the tattered rags of glory that trail behind them; by the pale
flickering aureole, no brighter than a will-o’-the wisp or glow-worm’s
light, that hovers over the white brow....
About that brow of Henriette the willful hair rose in a wave-crest
of delicate spraying blackness; curled over, shadowing the pearly
forehead and blue-veined temples and the little shell-like ears, as
though the waves were about to break; then rolled back and twined into
a labyrinthine knot of silken coilings from which two massive curls
escaped, to wander at their will. It was a face of lights and shadows;
in their continual play you forgot to criticise its features. But they
were eloquent, from the wide jetty arches of the eyebrows, to the
silken-lashed languid eyelids, purplish-tawny as the petals of fading
violets over the liquid, lustrous, changeful eyes. Eyes that mocked and
laughed at you even as they wooed you; and mourned and wept for you
even as they tempted and lured.
“Ah! do you indeed love me?” they seemed to say. “Is it so? Then most
unhappy--poor, poor friend!--are you! Because I am of those women
who are born to cause much misery. For we sting to desire without
intention, and provoke to pursuit without the will. And ‘No’ is a word
we have never learned to say.”