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, 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
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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?