"What a woman!" he said to himself, strangely troubled a moment later when she was gone.He had not looked at the book again.It lay forgotten by his pillow.
"What a woman!" he repeated, with a sigh that was like a groan.
Her bringing of the book--her unusual conversation--her excitement--her seriousness--the impression she made upon him that a new problem was beginning to work itself out in her life--most of all that one startling revelation of herself at the instant of turning away: all these occupied his thoughts that day.
She did not return the next or the next or the next.And, it was during these long vacant hours that he began to weave curiously together all that he had ever heard of her and of her past; until, in the end, he accomplished something like a true restoration of her life--in the colour of his own emotions.Then he fell to wandering up and down this long vista of scenes as he might have sought unwearied secret gallery of pictures through which he alone had the privilege of walking.
At the far end of the vista he could behold her in her childhood as the daughter of a cavalier land-holder in the valley of the James: an heiress of a vast estate with its winding creeks and sunny bays, its tobacco plantations worked by troops of slaves, its deer parks and open country for the riding to hounds.There was the manor-house in the style of the grand places of the English gentry from whom her father was descended; sloping from the veranda to the river landing a wide lawn covered with the silvery grass of the English parks, its walks bordered with hedges of box, its summer-house festooned with vines, its terraces gay with the old familiar shrubs and flowers loyally brought over from the mother land.He could see her as, some bright summer morning, followed by a tame fawn, she bounded down the lawn to the private landing where a slow frigate had stopped to break bulk on its way to Williamsburg-perhaps to put out with other furniture a little mahogany chair brought especially for herself over the rocking sea from London or where some round-sterned packet from New England or New Amsterdam was unloading its cargo of grain or hides or rum in exchange for her father's tobacco.Perhaps to greet her father himself returning from a long absence amid old scenes that still could draw him back to England; or standing lonely on the pier, to watch in tears him and her brothers--a vanishing group--as they waved her a last good-bye and drifted slowly out to the blue ocean on their way "home" to school at Eton.
He liked to dwell on the picture of her as a little school-girl herself:
sent fastidiously on her way, with long gloves covering her arms, a white linen mask tied over her face to screen her complexion from tan, a sunbonnet sewed tightly on her head to keep it secure from the capricious winds of heaven and the more variable gusts of her own wilfulness; or on another picture of her--as a lonely little lass--begging to be taken to court, where she could marvel at her father, an awful judge in his wig and his robe of scarlet and black velvet; or on a third picture of her--as when she was marshalled into church behind a liveried servant bearing the family prayer-book, sat in the raised pew upholstered in purple velvet, with its canopy overhead and the gilt letters of the family name in front; and a little farther away on the wall of the church the Lord's Prayer and the Commandments put there by her father at the cost of two thousand pounds of his best tobacco; finally to be preached to by a minister with whom her father sometimes spilt wine on the table-cloth, and who had once fought a successful duel behind his own sanctuary of peace and good will to all men.
Here succeeded other scenes; for as his interest deepened, he never grew tired of this restorative image-building by which she could be brought always more vividly before his imagination.
Her childhood gone, then, he followed her as she glided along the shining creeks from plantation to plantation in a canoe manned by singing black oarsmen: or rode abroad followed by her greyhound, her face concealed by a black velvet riding mask kept in place by a silver mouth-piece held between her teeth; or when autumn waned, went rolling slowly along towards Williamsburg or Annapolis in the great family coach of mahogany, with its yellow facings, Venetian windows, projection lamps, and high seat for footmen and coachman --there to take a house for the winter season--there to give and to be given balls, where she trod the minuet, stiff in blue brocade, her white shoulders rising out of a bodice hung with gems, her beautiful head bearing aloft its tower of long white feathers.
Yet with most of her life passed at the great lonely country-house by the bright river: qazing wistfully out of the deep-mullioned windows of diamond panes; flitting up and down the wide staircase of carven oak; buried in its library, with its wainscoted walls crossed with swords and hung with portraits of soldierly faces: all of which pleased him best, he being a home-lover.So that when facts were lacking, sometimes he would kindle true fancies of her young life in this place: as when she reclined on mats and cushions in the breeze-swept balls, fanned by a slave and reading the Tatler or the Spectator; or if it were the chill twilights of October, perhaps came in from a walk in the cool woods with a red leaf at her white throat, and seated herself at the spinet, while a low blaze from the deep chimney seat flickered over her face, and the low music flickered with the shadows; or when the white tempests of winter raved outside, gave her nights to the reading of "Tom Jones," by the light of myrtleberry candles on a slender-legged mahogany table.
