Public-domain ebook
by John Bennett
Language: en418 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Historical Novels·Novels·Mythology, Legends & Folklore
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #69430.
The opening · free to read
In an age so glorious, so rich and fine, and so be-starred with splendor that one almost forgets the bottomless abyss into which it plunged at last, there lived a woman in Charleston of whom a very odd story is told.
The languid, lovely, tired old town was then a city brave and gay, with Mediterranean manners and Caribbean ways.
The perfume of ten thousand flowers drifted upon the winds, which came and went over a thousand gardens, ebbing and flowing like the tide.
Clouds of snowy gold and roses rolled across the sky, like the vast rotundas of a city builded of colored ivory. Slowly rising overhead, in windy and ethereal masses, they stood, carvings of pale porphyry upon a turquoise wall. The earth was transfigured with beauty.
It was a golden age, when all things were fair; nothing had grown old; even the tragic and the terrible were comely then. Wonder lay on everything. Merely to exist was to be happy. It was a world of unextinguished youth; life was brimful to the lips with delight.
In the gardens rare flowers bloomed, and rare fruits ripened,--pomegranates, oranges, medlars, figs, jujubes, and the purple Indian peach; and among the flowers, like winged flames, small and bright, sped the harlequins, the painted nonpareils, delicately beating the soft wind with their pied wings; while in the pomegranate-tree, among the dull bronze fruit, the mocking-bird sang his love and rapture. Through the green-hedged close, women, beautiful and stately, paced the shade, with men beside them, slender and straight, passionate and haughty, with fierce, bright eyes as ardent as the goshawk’s and as bold; and lovely girls, with dark hair and skins of alabaster, as graceful and as timid as fawns, and with fawn’s eyes, slipped among the green leaves like flowers alive.
Those were charmed days indeed. The town has changed since then. The world seems to have grown weary and gray, and the hearts of men bitter. The young were younger then; the old not so sorry for everything as they have been since. Then, somehow, it seemed to be always summer morning, morning before the sun had burned the world to a dun crisp with his meridian heat, scorching bitter and blinding bright; before the advent of gasping afternoon with its languid leafage and evaporated sap. The calendar seemed to have paused among the daffodils, between the jessamine and the June, in that paradise of the year. The delicate and virginal camellia bloomed then, untarnished by rough wind or rain; its petals were sweet, which since then have grown so bitter. The elm-trees did not then bloom thrice for one green coat. And no one ever paused to think that no good and lovely thing exists on earth without its corresponding shadow.
The world was full of the sound of sweet, flute-like voices of young women calling after their lovers; and the singing of small birds made slender, pleasant melodies among the cool myrtles. Life was simpler; perhaps more child-like though more passionate. Two who loved each other might walk together, hand in hand, along the path, singing their happiness, without reproach, save, perchance, from some lugubrious, gray-bearded presbyter mourning, among mossy tombstones, life’s evanescence.
And happy youth was without a fault, unless it were a trivial one, some péché mignon, a guileless, guiltless, girlish sin, like kissing oneself in the looking-glass for lack of another lover.
In all the town there were none so pretty, none so graceful or so sweet, as the golden girls of San Domingo. They flowed along the windy streets, their turbans nodding, like a stream of tulips. They fluttered down the byways in their white muslin dresses like bevies of butterflies. The loveliness of their slender bodies and the beauty of their youthful faces were far beyond all dull description; they were a bed of tiger-lilies in the sun. The earth loved the tread of their flying feet, which seemed to be forever dancing pastourelles; and the narrow lanes of the city laughed with the lilt of their Creole tongue.
Among the golden San Domingans the loveliest of all admittedly was Marguerite Lagoux, the milliner, by her patronage called Rita, by her familiars Margoton, by envious rivalry Madame Margot; and, after all was over and done, known merely as Old Mother Go-go.
Hers was glorious physical loveliness in its fullest maturity. It was in an hour of inspiration the indolent god of beauty drew the lines on which her body was built.
Her passionate, rich-colored, handsome face was like a line from an old enchantment which took men’s souls captive, then cast them away without the least regret, or with a Circean spell turned them into beasts. Her neck was a deep-colored, ivory tower poised perfectly over her breast. The dazzling, orange-tawny skin of her broad bust turned to golden-russet before it reached her cheeks, and was there flushed to dusky rose, like the skin of a ruddy-gold peach. In the burnt splendor of her cheek the darkly eloquent blood in her veins made its golden proclamation. Her mouth was long and strangely curved like a retroverted bow; the lips of a queer fruit-color, not crimson, carmine, nor magenta, but a little of all three. The upper lip was brief to a fault, and curled back on itself like a rich-pulped fruit which has parted in ripening. The full under-lip cast a heavier shade than the lips the old masters chose, when they painted a picture of the Madonna. Her hair, like a dark, uncertain cloud, fell down in heavy coils, gathered and knotted at the nape of the neck, bound there in a golden net; or lay in an unfilleted band across the broad, low brow, drawn back into braids over her ears, or collected into a turban tied with peculiar dexterity. Her body was cast in a glorious mould: she was tall; in figure perfect, and full of a stately, tiger-like grace, the envy of other women. She moved, when she walked, as an empress might if heaven but gave her grace, with an exquisite, perfect motion, devoid of every appearance of effort,--not striding, but seeming to glide like a swan swimming on untroubled water. In the sluggish grace of her heavy lips and deep-lidded, brooding eyes, she was as full of an indolent, sleepy beauty as midsummer afternoon. Dressed in bright merino, crimson, orange, and blue, with a kerchief of blood-colored silk around her head bound in oriental fashion, beads of amber around her neck, and in each ear a hoop of gold, she looked like a great golden lily dusted with sang-dieu.
One day she was the lily; the next a yellow rose; and the next she was a tulip,--gold, crimson, purple and black. She was a Caribbean summer incarnate, of flower-blooms, thunder and gold. The passing traveler, seeing her, stopped while he caught his breath. There was something about her commanded attention besides her remarkable beauty. One spoke of Ducie Poincignon casually; but one spoke of Rita Lagoux with an accent.
Of all the milliners of her day Margot was first beyond compare. Her taste was perfect; her instinct for color was never at fault; her choice of fabrics exquisite. None equaled her in dexterity; she was like a marvelous spider weaving webs of gossamer. Those who sought beauty found it; her patrons were patrician; all of the very best employed her art; she had no successful competitor; beside her Eloise Couesnon was esteemed but maladroit.
Margot’s shop was in King street, near Mignot’s Garden, a little above the Bend. She lived in a little alley known as Lilac lane, a narrow, crooked, private path between two large estates, which rambled into the interspace like a brown brook into a wood. Beneath high green hedges it wandered into the solitude, growing narrower as it went, until the hedge boughs, meeting, knit themselves together, interlacing their elastic, leafy twigs. There the baffled foot-path seemed to lose its way and to abandon every purpose for which foot-paths are designed, ran on a little, hesitated, crept on again uncertainly, then gave up hope and disappeared in a green perplexity. The unfamiliar traveler paused here, bewildered, and turned back to find a bolder thoroughfare; familiar feet alone pressed on through Lilac lane.
Where the strait way vanished into the wilderness stood Margot’s cottage, tucked snug as a plum stone in a plum. Around it was a garden hedged by box and bay. Of all the hedges in Lilac lane the highest were Margot’s. They rose around her garden in an impenetrable thicket, tall, dark-tangled, dense and old, their green tops tossing against the blue beyond the reach of the hedger’s bill. Within lay a little tranquil space, withdrawn alike from curious gaze and the town’s brawl, and overshadowed by the wide boughs of two great magnolias, whose drowsy shade fell heavily on the sleepy oleanders and over the rows of tulips below, that lifted up their golden cups and filled the air with odor. Here day and night flowed by in undisturbed serenity; all noise was hushed and tumult quelled; the shyest wild birds nested here in perfect confidence, fear cast away and foes forgot. No place in all the town seemed more secure from rude intrusion. No apparition came by night, no terror by day; so quiet it was, so full of peace, it seemed a sanctuary withdrawn from the interrupting clash and rude alarms of the troubled world,--its tranquillity that of a convent close, with little, distant, ringing bells, recurrent chimes and subdued voices, muffled by distance, as of nuns chanting an office in the peaceful choir of a green-nooked nunnery.
Though Margot was lovely, Gabrielle was lovelier. They differed in beauty as pompadour-pink differs from brier-rose. Margot’s was a golden beauty; Gabrielle’s an ivory loveliness. Margot was a pottery figurine moulded with marvelous skill; Gabrielle a statuette of exquisite porcelain. Margot was like the summer sun, dazzling, opulent, sumptuous; Gabrielle like the young spring moon in her slender loveliness; the lines of her flowed one into the other like the lines of a song. Her hands were delicate and fine, their touch as light as flowers blown by the wind, which drift like a whisper across the face of the passer-by. Her feet were arched like a Spanish girl’s; her ankles were the loveliest things that ever sandal-ribbon bound; she walked like the wind of an April morning through meadows after rain.
Her face, with its delicate high cheek-bones, was like the fair flower of Normandy; but her beauty was not Western, ’twas Eastern; it was like the pale Persian roses which blow by the gray-marbled waterways among the fallen pillars of the forgotten gardens of Istakhr,--roses of yesterday, full of yesterday’s unbearable loveliness, yesterday’s happiness, yesterday’s tragedy,--fragrant with passionate, heart-breaking perfume, piercingly sweet, with the pathos of swift-passing beauty, far keener than that of ruins and age. She was of a loveliness such as sometimes comes out of India unburned by the Indian sun, of which dreamers make dreams of unforgettable beauty.
Her slender young body was like a piece of perfect ivory laid away to be carved. Her long, dark, tangled eye-lashes fell upon her cheeks like sudden gusts of darkening rain; her cheeks were japonica-color; her lips pale pomegranate-red; her hair ebony; her temples were traced with crocus-blue.
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