Chambers Robert William - The Maid-At-Arms стр 5.

Imperceptibly the outlines of the shape grew in the gloom from a deep, rich background, and I made out a figure of a youth all cased in armor save for the helmet, which was borne in one smooth, blue-veined hand.

The face, too, began to assume form; rounded, delicate, crowned with a mass of golden hair; and suddenly I perceived the eyes, and they seemed to open sweetly, like violets in a dim wood.

"What Ormond is this?" I muttered, bewitched, yet sullen to see such feminine roundness in any youth; and, with my sleeve of buckskin, I rubbed the dust from the gilded plate set in the lower frame.

"The Maid-at-Arms," I read aloud.

Then there came to me, at first like the far ring of a voice scarcely heard through southern winds, the faint echo of a legend told me ere my mother diedperhaps told me by her in those drifting hours of a childhood nigh forgotten. Yet I seemed to see white, sun-drenched sands and the long, blue swell of a summer sea, and I heard winds in the palms, and a songtruly it was my mother's; I knew it nowand, of a sudden, the words came borne on a whisper of ancient melody:

Staring at the picture, lips quivering with the soundless words, such wretched loneliness came over me that a dryness in my throat set me gulping, and I groped my way back to the settle by the fireplace and sat down heavily in homesick solitude.

Then hate came, a quick hatred for these Northern skies, and these strangers of the North who dared claim kin with me, to lure me northward with false offer of council and mockery of hospitality.

I was on my feet again in a flash, hot with anger, ready with insult to meet insult, for I meant to go ere I had greeted my hostan insult, indeed, and a deadly one among us. Furious, I bent to snatch my rifle from the settle where it lay, and, as I flung it to my shoulder, wheeling to go, my eyes fell upon a figure stealing down the stairway from above, a woman in flowered silk, bare of throat and elbow, fingers scarcely touching the banisters as she moved.

She hesitated, one foot poised for the step below; then it fell noiselessly, and she stood before me.

Anger died out under the level beauty of her gaze. I bowed, just as I caught a trace of mockery in the mouth's scarlet curve, and bowed the lower for it, too, straightening slowly to the dignity her mischievous eyes seemed to flout; and her lips, too, defied me, all silentlynay, in every limb and from every finger-tip she seemed to flout me, and the slow, deep courtesy she made me was too slow and far too low, and her recovery a marvel of plastic malice.

"My cousin Ormond?" she lisped;"I am Dorothy Varick."

We measured each other for a moment in silence.

There was a trace of powder on her bright hair, like a mist of snow on gold; her gown's yoke was torn, for all its richness, and a wisp of lace in rags fell, clouding the delicate half-sleeve of China silk.

Her face, colored like palest ivory with rose, was no doll's face, for all its symmetry and a forgotten patch to balance the dimple in her rounded chin; it was even noble in a sense, and, if too chaste for sensuous beauty, yet touched with a strange and pensive sweetness, like 'witched marble waking into flesh.

Suddenly a voice came from above: "Dorothy, come here!"

My cousin frowned, glanced at me, then laughed.

"Dorothy, I want my watch!" repeated the voice.

Still looking at me, my cousin slowly drew from her bosom a huge, jewelled watch, and displayed it for my inspection.

"We were matching mint-dates with shillings for father's watch; I won it," she observed.

"Dorothy!" insisted the voice.

"Oh, la!" she cried, impatiently, "will you hush?"

"No, I won't!"

"Then our cousin Ormond will come up-stairs and give you what Paddy gave the kettle-drumwon't you?" she added, raising her eyes to me.

"And what was that?" I asked, astonished.

Somebody on the landing above went off into fits of laughter; and, as I reddened, my cousin Dorothy, too, began to laugh, showing an edge of small, white teeth under the red lip's line.

"Are you vexed because we laugh?" she asked.

My tongue stung with a retort, but I stood silent. These Varicks might forget their manners, but I might not forget mine.

She honored me with a smile, sweeping me from head to foot with her bright eyes. My buckskins were dirty from travel, and the thrums in rags; and I knew that she noted all these matters.