Prose Fancies Part 11

Her dreams are nearly all about dying, and, though she is obviously robust, there is that transparent ethereal look in her face which makes old women say 'she is not long for this world,' that fateful beauty which creates an atmosphere of doom about it. You cannot look at her without a queer involuntary feeling that she was born to die in some tragic way. She reminds one of those perilously fragile vases we feel must get broken, those rarely delicate flowers we feel cannot have strong healthy roots.

She is one of those who seem born to see terrible things, monstrous accidents, supernatural appearances. She has seen death and birth in strange uncanny forms; and she has met with unearthly creatures in the lonely corners of rooms. She is a 'seventh-month child,' and 'seventh-month children always see things,' she says, with a funny little sententious shake of her head.

Yet, with all this, she is the sunniest, healthiest, most domestic little soul that breathes; and no doubt the materialist would be right in saying that all this 'spirituelle' nonsense is but a trick of her transparent blonde complexion, a chance quality in the colour of her great luminous eyes.

Like all women, she was most wonderful just before the birth of her first child, a little changeling creature, wild-eyed as her fairy mother. How she made believe with the little fairy vestments, the elfin-s.h.i.+rts, the pixy-frocks--long before it was time for the tiny body to step inside them! how she talked to the unborn soul that none but she as yet could see! And all the time she 'knew' she was going to die, that she would never see the little immortal that was about to put on our mortality: 'people' had told her so in her dreams at night,--doubtless 'the good people,' the fairies. Those who loved her grew almost to believe her--she looks so like a little Sibyl when she says such things,--yet her little one came almost without a cry, and in a few days the fairy mother was once more glinting about the house like a sunbeam.

Well! well! I cannot make you see her as I know her: that I fear is certain. You might meet her, yet never know her from my description. If you wait for the coa.r.s.e articulation of words you might well 'miss' her; for her qualities are not histrionic, they have no notion of making the best of themselves. They remain, so to speak, in nuggets; they are minted into no current coin of fleeting fas.h.i.+on and shallow accomplishment. But if a face can mean more to you than the whole of Johnson's _Dictionary_, and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ to boot, if a strain of music can convey to you the thrill of human life, with its heights and depths and romantic issues and possibilities, as Gibbon and Grote can never do--come and wors.h.i.+p White Soul's face with me. Some women's faces are like diamonds--they look their best in artificial lights; White Soul's face is bright with the soft brightness of a flower--a flower tumbled with dew, and best seen in the innocent lights of dawn. Dear face without words!

And if there are those who can look on that face without being touched by its strange spiritual loveliness, without seeing in it one of those clear springs that bubble up from the eternal beauty, there must indeed be many who would miss the soul for which her face is but the ivory gate, who would never know how white is all within, never see or hear that holy dove.

But I have seen and heard, and I know that if G.o.d should covet White Soul and steal her from me, her memory would ever remain with me as one of those eternal realities of the spirit to which 'realities' of flesh and blood, of wood and stone, are but presumptuous shadows.

I am not worthy of White Soul. Indeed, just to grow more worthy of her was I put into the world.