CHAPTER I.

_A PICTURE AND A FACE._

There was a woman, beautiful as morning, Sitting beneath the rocks upon the sand Of the waste sea--fair as one flower adorning An icy wilderness--each delicate hand Lay crossed upon her bosom, and the band Of her dark hair had fallen, and so she sat Looking upon the waves.

London and May. What visions of gayety and beauty, of life and brightness, the conjunction of those two words brings before the mind! London in May, when, as it might almost seem, the first gleam of sunshine had called forth, from the essential nothing of obscurity, gay flutterers of a million colored hues, to spread their wings and float joyously in an atmosphere of hope.

For, let who will speak of the balmy breezes and deep azure skies of the children of the South, there are some who would maintain that in the resurrection of the fashionable corners of England's great city from their winter sleep, in the sometimes keen wind that rouses the island spirit of opposition and braces the nerves of the idlers, even in the rapid changes that pass over the sky, there is more exhilaration, more strong incitement to courage and hope, than in the full flush of radiant summer which May often brings in climes held to be more highly favored by Nature.

London, in May, when the streets are filled with gay equipages, whose prancing steeds seem to rejoice in the dignity of their position, taking a part in the great saturnalia of rank and fashion--when the dresses of the ladies are only eclipsed by the brilliancy of the shop-windows which they daily haunt--when the artist and musician bring forth their choicest wares to delight the senses and gratify the perceptions of the great and the little who throng busy London in this fairest season of the year.

It was in London, then, and the month was May. So much being said, little more description is needful: like bold divers, we must leave the coast, and plunge at once into the great sea of humanity, drawing thence, it may be, a pearl which but for our efforts had remained there still. For all this humanity, which our vast London so fitly represents, is composed of individuals; each individual has a separate tale to tell, though all have not the voice to tell it; and in the tale of the hidden life there is sometimes a beauty and pathos, a dignity and wonder, that the dramatist and poet might do well to seize. But it is seldom that they are caught and transferred. Beside the hidden tragedies and heartrending emotions of the every-day life of humanity these transcripts are often pale and colorless--a body that waits for the breath of life to kindle it into beauty.

It was early in the afternoon of a bright May day. Even for that season London seemed unusually crowded. In Regent street the difficulty was to move forward at all, and in Pall Mall and the Strand matters were not much better. Woe to the unlucky foreigners or country cousins who found crossing the street an absolute necessity! They might have been seen generally at the most crowded spots, shivering on the brink of what for the moment was worse than the vague, shadowy Jordan of the pilgrims, and too often submitting ignominiously to the guidance of that being almost superhuman in his callous indifference to rattling wheels and horses' heads--the policeman.

But in and about a certain corner of Charing Cross the crowd seemed to culminate. To tell of the pedestrians of every shade and hue, the carriages, the omnibuses, which kept up a constant stream in this direction, would take volumes, for the Exhibition of the Royal Academy had only been open a week, and had not, therefore, lost the first charm of novelty.

Thither many were hastening, mostly ladies of the fashionable class, gayly dressed in all the freshness of early summer coloring. But those who thronged to the Royal Academy on this May afternoon were not all of the fashionable class; there were besides some who went from a true love of art, a patient thirst for the beautiful--pale students, whose eyes had long grown used to dusky streets, and to whom the yearly vision of the something that always lies beyond was a revelation and a power; governesses and female artisans who had taken a holiday for the express purpose of enjoying the image of that which hard reality had denied to them. Many of these were shabbily dressed, and pallid from the wasting effects of hard work and care; they enjoyed, however, more perhaps than their brilliant sisters, who could glibly criticise this style and that, with the true art-jargon and an appearance of intimate knowledge, but to whom this, that charmed those others, was only a matter of course, a somewhat tiresome routine, that must of necessity be performed as a part of the season's work.

On a corner of a seat in a central hall one seemingly of this latter class had found a place. She could not certainly have belonged to the fashionable world, for her scanty black dress was made with no pretension to style, and she wore a close bonnet, from under which a plain white border, that resembled a widow's cap, was peeping. There was one detail, however, in her dress that drew the attention of some who passed her. She wore, fastened gracefully round her shoulders in rather a foreign style, a silk Indian scarf of the richest coloring and workmanship. It harmonized strangely with the rest of her dress and her general appearance, but it was not unbecoming. Those who, attracted by this incongruity, looked at her attentively, saw a face that was almost startling in its pure beauty of outline, and a form whose refined grace did not require the assistance of the toilet to add to its charms.

"That woman could wear anything," was the reflection of one or two who glanced at her in passing.

She knew nothing of their criticism. Hour after hour passed away, and still she remained in the same place--a solitude to her, peopled by the multitude of thoughts to which the sight of one small picture had given rise. And that picture was, to many of those who had admired her in their rapid transit from one flower of art to another, a very commonplace affair. We see with such different eyes, for is not the perception of beauty a birthright of spirit? Where soul illumines there beauty lies, but only for the soul that sees.

Her eyes saw the picture, and her _spirit_ saw beyond it. Hence the beauty that drew and enchained her. Besides, the picture had a history. From her own consciousness she translated its meaning.

Probably few will remember the picture, for it did not write its name on the art-history of the period, and its author is unknown to fame; but it certainly possessed power. Perhaps it was one of those flashes thrown off in the fire of youth by what might have been a grand genius if it had not been swamped in the great ocean of modern realism, thus losing for ever the divine breath of imaginative power. The picture was small. In its quiet corner it lived its life unnoticed by the crowd.

This is what it represented. In the background a sea just tinged with the gold of sunset, and skirting it a barren, rocky shore; on the shore a woman in an attitude of eager, waiting expectation; in the far distance a sail that has gathered on its whiteness some of the bright evening coloring; overhead a deepening sky, in which faint stars seem to be struggling into sight. The woman's face is traced sharply against the sky. It is beautiful, the blessed dawning of a new-born hope seeming to glimmer faintly from the deep horrors of a past despair. She leans over a projecting ledge of rock, not heeding in her rapt eagerness the sharp point that seems to pierce her tender hand, only gazing, as if her soul were in her eye, at the white point in the distance, which holds, as she imagines, the object of her hope.

There were pictures in the close neighborhood of this one that, to the art-critic, possessed far greater claims to admiration, but the woman with the shabby dress saw none of them. She sat on her crimson-covered seat, her hands folded and her eyes fixed, looking at the one picture that had touched her; she looked at it until she saw it no longer; a film gathered over her eyes; the picture, the room, the crowds, all her surrounding, had vanished. She was living in the region of thought alone, busying herself with the problem which the picture had evoked.

And as she sat rooted to the one spot, herself a fairer picture than any which that roof covered, the afternoon waned away and the galleries thinned. The fashionable crowd were beginning to think of their dinner-toilet. The woman was left alone on her seat in the centre of one of the halls, a somewhat conspicuous object, for her singular style of dress and her strange beauty would have gained her observation anywhere.

It was at about this time that a young gentleman dressed in the height of fashion, with an eye-glass carefully adjusted in his right eye, strolled leisurely through the hall. He was evidently a very young man, one who had not yet been aroused from the delusion so pleasing while it lasts of his own vast superiority to--almost everything; it is scarcely necessary to particularize--his own sex, with perhaps a few exceptions, certainly all women and lesser creatures. His walk revealed this small weakness to any one who chose to take the trouble of observing him closely and the carriage of his head, which was held very erect, the chin being slightly elevated.

He held a catalogue in his hand, but he very seldom consulted it. To have compared the number of the picture with that of its description would have been, to use a pet phrase with young men, an awful bore. And an awful bore he seemed to find the whole affair as he walked through the picture-lined galleries, smothering a yawn from time to time. He was evidently looking out for some one who had appointed this place as a rendezvous, and as evidently he was rather more indignant than disappointed at not finding directly the object of his search.

At last, as it seemed, he had enough of it. Considering himself a sufficiently conspicuous object not to be lightly passed by by any who had once been favored with the honor of his acquaintance, he threw himself on one of the seats, fully determined to take no more trouble in the matter, but to leave the _denouement_ to fate.

There was one other on the seat he had chosen, but our young gentleman, in spite of his small vanities, was too truly a gentleman to honor the solitary woman who occupied it with that supercilious stare which, unconsciously to herself, had more than once been cast on her that day. In sheer idleness, and for want of something better to do, he looked rather attentively at the picture which faced him, and presently he too had fallen under its spell.

The beauty of the woman by the sea-shore, her sadness, her desolation, attracted him powerfully. Before many moments had passed he found himself tracing every line of her face and form, and dreaming out the tragedy which her face revealed.

He was awoke from his reverie by a faint sobbing sigh, and looking round he discovered that the woman who shared his seat was struggling with a faintness that seemed gradually to be overpowering her. Before he could rise to offer her assistance her head had fallen back upon the crimson cushion, the little close bonnet had dropped off, and the white face, in its chiselled beauty, lay stricken with a death-calm close to his shoulder.