Queer Classics – 10 Novels Collection. Radclyffe Hall

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      Emma Denman passed in front of the mirror, erasing her own reflection there. She came forward, and offered her hand to me with shy cordiality. The shyness remembered the old familiar playmate of the days of “little husband and little wife”; the cordiality was for the unforgotten friend.

      I found no change, only development, in Emma Denman. Still the same fitful fascination that had been her charm as a child. It seized me at once. I lost my power of quiet discrimination. I can hardly analyze her power even now. These subtle influences refuse to be subject to my chemical methods and my formulas.

      It was not the power of beauty, alone. Physical beauty she had, but something higher also. Nor spiritual beauty alone, but something other. The mere flesh-and-blood charms, lilies and roses, the commonplace traits of commonplace women, whose inventory describes the woman, she could afford to disdain. It was a face that forbade all formal criticism. No passport face. Other women one names beautiful for a feature, a smile, or a dimple, — that link between a feature and a smile. Hers was a face suffused with the fine essence of beauty. It seemed to wrong the whole, if one let eyes or mind make any part distinct.

      Grace she had, — exquisite grace. Grace is perhaps a more subtle charm than beauty. Beauty is passive; grace is active. Beauty reveals the nature; grace interprets it. Beauty wins; grace woos.

      Emma Denman’s coloring did not classify her. Her hair was in the indefinite shades between light and dark. One would not expect from her the steadiness of the fair temperaments, nor the ardor of their warmer counterparts in hue. No dismissing her with the label of a well-known type. I must have a new and composite thought in my mind while I curiously studied her.

      Her eyes wanted color. They were not blue and constant, not black and passionate. Indeed, but for their sparkle and vivacity, they would have seemed expressionless. Restless eyes! they might almost have taken a lesson from Densdeth’s, so rapid were they to come and go, so evanescent and elusive was their glance. But Densdeth’s were chasing eyes; hers were flying. Her swift eyes, her transitory smile, her motions, soft as the bend of a branch, light as the spring of a bird, lithe as the turn of a serpent, all were elements in her singular fascination, — it was almost elfin.

      She was in deep mourning; and, partly because mourning quickens sympathy, partly because to a person of her doubtful coloring positive contrasts are valuable, it seemed the very dress to heighten her beauty. And yet, as I saw her afterwards, I found that all costume and scenery became thus tributary to her, and all objects and people so disposed themselves, and all lights and shades so fell, as to define and intensify her charm.

      Densdeth witnessed our recognition, and then excused himself. “He had business with Mr. Denman in the library, and would join us by and by.” We both breathed freer upon his exit. It was impossible not to feel that he was always reading every act and thought; and that consciousness of a ruthless stare turned in upon one’s little innocencies of heart is abashing to young people.

      Miss Denman had seemed uneasy while Densdeth stayed. She changed her seat, and with it her manner, as he departed. The chair she now took brought her again within range of the distant mirror. Her shadow became a third party in our interview. When I observed it, its presence disturbed me. Sometimes, as before, I fancied it the sprite of the sister dead, sometimes the double of the person before me, — her true self, or her false self, which she had dismissed for this occasion, while she made her impression upon me.

      Strange fancies! faintly drifting across my mind. But I did not often observe that dim watcher in the mirror. My companion engaged me too closely. Now that Densdeth was gone, we sat in quiet mood, and let our old acquaintance renew itself.

      Our talk was hardly worth chronicling. Words cannot convey the gleam of pleasure with which our minds alighted together on the same memory of days gone by, as we used to spring upon a flower in the field, or a golden butterfly by the wayside.

      “Ah! those sorrowless days of childhood!” I said. “Not painless, — not quite painless!”

      “There are never any painless days,” said she.

      “No. Pain is the elder brother of Pleasure. But the days when the sense of injury passed away with the tears it compelled; when the sense of wrong-doing vanished with the light penance of a pang, with the brief penitence of an hour, and left the heart untainted. Those days were sorrowless.”

      As I spoke thus, Emma Denman suddenly burst into tears.

      I had not suspected her of any such uncontrollable emotion. She had seemed to me one to smile and flash, hardly earnest enough for an agony.

      “Pardon me,” she said, quelling her tears, “but since those bright days I have suffered bitter sorrow. As you, my old playmate, speak, all that has passed since we met comes up newly.”

      This was all she said, at the moment, of her sister’s death. I respected the recent wound. I had no right to renew her distress even by sympathy. I changed the subject.

      “I find myself,” said I, “between two opposites, as guardians for my second childhood at home. Mr. Churm is to launch me upon my work. Mr. Densdeth introduces me at the club. Which shall my boyship obey?”

      “Such opposites will neutralize each other. You will be left free for a guardian in my sex. Have you sought one yet?”

      “Destiny selects for me. I am thrust into your hands. Will you take me in charge?”

      The look she gave as I said this touched me strangely. It seemed as if her double had suddenly glided forward and peered at me through her evasive eyes. A mysterious expression. I could no more comprehend it from my present shallow knowledge of the lady, than a novice perceives why Titian’s surface glows, until he has scraped the surface and knows the undertones.

      “Will I take you in charge?” she rejoined, with this strange look, henceforth my controlling memory of her face. “Will you trust me with such grave office? What say the other guardians? Do they recommend me? Does Mr. Churm? Have you consulted him?”

      “Churm has rather evaded forming a prejudice in your favor in my mind. He gave me no ideal to alter. I had no counter-charm of the fancy to oppose to your actual charm.”

      “Your other choice among mentors, Mr. Densdeth, — has he offered you any light upon my qualifications?”

      “Not a word! But he is not my choice. He has chosen me, if our companionship is choice, not chance.”

      “You accept him?”

      “I have not thought of rejecting a man of such peculiar power.”

      “Has he mastered you, too?”

      “Mastered? I am my own master. He attracts my curiosity greatly. I cannot resist the desire to know him by heart.”

      “To know him by heart!” she repeated, with almost a shudder. “To know Densdeth by heart! Study him, then, for yourself! I will give you no help! No help from me! God forbid!”

      I must have looked, as I felt, greatly surprised at this outburst, for she recovered her usual manner, with an effort, and said: “Pardon me, again! Do not let me prejudice you against Mr. Densdeth. He is our friend, our best friend; but sometimes I suddenly have superstitious panics when I think of him and my sister’s death.”

      She seemed to struggle now against a flood of sorrowful recollections. The force of the struggle carried her over to the side of СКАЧАТЬ