Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/604

598 stepped aside from the precipitous road, and seated herself upon a moss-cushioned stone hanging over the bed of the torrent.

I have given a very false idea of my heroine if I have represented her as in any way lackadaisical. Few young ladies were less given to melancholy moods; though, as with all finely strung and somewhat romantic natures, many of her most enjoyable moments were tinctured with sadness. But now the dimpled chin went down into the slender hand, memory and imagination were away together upon a roving commission; and to any artist surveying the meditative maiden from above and behind, she might have sat for a Niobe or an image of La Penserosa.

I do not profess to follow her thoughts – and indeed they were so fantastically absurd as to be hardly worth the following. All that can be said in extenuation is, that she had been growing less and less like her sensible self for a fortnight past. She had lunched indifferently, she had starved herself at tea; and so, like some of the solitary hermits of the Thebaid after their severe and prolonged fasts, she saw strange visions and she dreamed wild dreams. Considering that Mr Moray was "hard as nails," that the manifold experiences of many adventurous years had proved him to bear something like a charmed life, the tremendous situations in which she figured him did infinite credit to the vivacity of her imagination. Could she have counted upon such fancies coming to her call, she might have composed a new series of the 'Arabian Nights.' But her father's own stories and letters from the East had supplied the materials and the colouring. He was being caught in the coils of a gigantic anaconda, and being drawn out in ribbons like the metal that is meant for an Armstrong gun. He was being held to ransom by a truculent Malay chief, who had confined him in a cage of split bamboo, with a view to ordering him off to execution after a course of preparatory torture. His vessel was becalmed, and he was beset by pirates, with the tints of a native crew turning unnaturally yellow behind the boarding-nettings, while the fleet of sweep-impelled proas was approaching hand over hand. Struck down by the jungle-fever or the cholera – she did not pretend to give the precise diagnosis of the disease – he was tossing in a grass hammock, clutching vainly at a water-jar, while his negligent attendant had gone sound asleep. That is scarcely a fair outline of the commonplaces which her fancy richly embroidered; but something like the last of these pictures had struck her so pathetically, that her agitation relieved itself in stifled sobs.

And then – the mania for devising surprises must have run in the family – and then she was startled from her melting dream by a hand being gently laid upon her shoulder. While her spirit had gone fluttering from the Pyrenees to the Tropics, it had missed the very individual it went in search of. A hale elderly gentleman, apparently in perfect health and excellent spirits, having rounded the sharp corner of the road, had paused to take breath and admire the landscape. What struck him most and at once, was the graceful figure in the foreground. The pose was sad, no doubt; but when he had wiped his forehead and rubbed his eyes, he showed anything rather than the appropriate sympathy. On the contrary, his pleasant though rugged features were lighted up by a sudden illumination, as if they had caught the last glowing reflec-