Audrey

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.