The girl dreamed as she breathed. Wakened from a long, long fantasy,
desolate and cold to the heart in an alien air, she sought for poppy and
mandragora, and in some sort finding them dreamed again, though not for
herself, not as before. It can hardly be said that she was unhappy. She
walked in a pageant of strange miseries, and the pomp of woe was hers to
portray. Those changelings from some fateful land, those passionate, pale
women, the milestones of whose pilgrimage spelled love, ruin, despair, and
death, they were her kindred, her sisters. Day and night they kept her
company: and her own pain lessened, grew at last to a still and dreamy
sorrow, never absent, never poignant.
Of necessity, importunate grief was drugged to sleep. In the daylight
hours she must study, must rehearse with her fellow players; when night
came she put on a beautiful dress, and to lights and music and loud
applause there entered Monimia, or Belvidera, or Athenais. When the play
was done and the curtain fallen, the crowd of those who would have stayed
her ever gave way, daunted by her eyes, her closed lips, the atmosphere
that yet wrapped her of passion, woe, and exaltation, the very tragedy of
the soul that she had so richly painted. Like the ghost of that woman who
had so direfully loved and died, she was wont to slip from the playhouse,
through the dark garden, to the small white house and her quiet room.
There she laid off her gorgeous dress, and drew the ornaments from her
dark hair that was long as Molly's had been that day beneath the
sugar-tree in the far-away valley.
She rarely thought of Molly now, or of the mountains. With her hair
shadowing her face and streaming over bared neck and bosom she sat before
her mirror. The candle burned low; the face in the glass seemed not her
own. Dim, pale, dark-eyed, patient-lipped at last, out of a mist and from
a great distance the other woman looked at her. Far countries, the burning
noonday and utter love, night and woe and life, the broken toy, flung with
haste away!
The mist thickened; the face withdrew, farther, farther off;
the candle burned low. Audrey put out the weak flame, and laid herself
upon the bed. Sleep came soon, and it was still and dreamless. Sometimes
Mary Stagg, light in hand, stole into the room and stood above the quiet
form. The girl hardly seemed to breathe: she had a fashion of lying with
crossed hands and head drawn slightly back, much as she might be laid at
last in her final bed. Mistress Stagg put out a timid hand and felt the
flesh if it were warm; then bent and lightly kissed hand or arm or the
soft curve of the throat. Audrey stirred not, and the other went
noiselessly away; or Audrey opened dark eyes, faintly smiled and raised
herself to meet the half-awed caress, then sank to rest again.