Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/201



He winced and writhed. "There, there, let us sit down, my dear Mrs. Crane."

"And once I was called Bella."

"Ages ago! Basta! All things have their end. Do take those eyes of yours off my face; they were always so bright! and—really—now they are perfect burning-glasses! How close it is! Peuh! I am dead tired. May I ask for a glass of water; a drop of wine in it—or—brandy will do as well."

"Ho! you have come to brandy and morning drams, eh, Jasper?" said Mrs. Crane, with a strange, dreary accent. "I, too, once tried if fire could burn up thought, but it did not succeed with me; that is years ago; and—there—see the bottles are full still!"

While thus speaking, she had unlocked a chiffonniere of the shape usually found in "genteel lodgings," and taken out a leathern spirit-case containing four bottles, with a couple of wine-glasses. This case she placed on the table before Mr., Losely, and contemplated him at leisure while he helped himself to the raw spirits.

As she thus stood, an acute student of Lavater might have recognized, in her harsh and wasted countenance, signs of an original nature superior to that of her visitor; on her knitted brow, a sense higher in quality than on his smooth low forehead; on her straight stern lip, less cause for distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome mouth into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not to affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the woman to be rather by natural temperament passionate and impulsive than systematically cruel or deliberately-false,—false or cruel only as some predominating passion became the soul's absolute tyrant, and adopted the tyrant's vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall, which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek human animal before her.

In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,—the stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by boarding-schools from