Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“ Hermia sat by the window waiting for Quintard. It was the saddest hour of the day—that hour of dusk when the lamplighter trudges on his rounds. How many women have sat in their darkening rooms at that hour with their brows against the glass and watched their memories rise and sing a dirge! Even a child—if it be a woman-child—is oppressed in that shadow-haunted land between day and night, for the sadness of the future is on her. It is the hour when souls in their strain feel that the tension must snap; when tortured hearts send their cries through forbidding brains. ”

“ Alexina had no intention of being afflicted with rounded shoulders when the present mode had passed.
But her face expressed no guile as she stood there in her simple white frock with a bunch of periwinkles in her belt, her delicate profile turned to Gathbroke as she gazed at the irregular majesty of the Coast Range, dark blue under a pale blue haze. He had retained the impression of starry eyes and vivid coloring and eager happy youth, a body of perfect slenderness and grace, whose magnetism was not that of youth alone but personal and individual. ”

“ THE CRACK IN THE JAR There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever; but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. ”

“ The snow in the open was already as high as the horses' knees. There was no wind, only that silent sweeping of the heavens. In the depths the high branches of the redwoods groaned ominously under the stiffening weight, like giants in pain.
The forest thinned. The snow had its will of the earth. There was no refuge under the larger trees that still stood, like outposts, here and there; the branches were too high above. Once Adan suggested through his stiff lips and unruly teeth that they turn back and take refuge in some dense grove above; but Roldan shook his head peremptorily. ”

“ Helena, with the world at her feet, would have little time for brooding, little time for anything but the lighter pleasures of life under his watchful eye, until she loved and passed to the keeping of a man who, he hoped, would be far stronger and finer than himself. But Magdaléna? Repressed, unloved, intellectual, disappointed at every turn, passionate undoubtedly,—there was no knowing to what sudden extremes desperation might drive her. And the woman, no matter how plain, had yet to be born who could not be utterly bad if she put her mind to it. ”

“ Concha's cheeks were as pink as the Castilian roses that grew even before the kitchen door and were quivering at the moment under the impassioned carolling of a choir of larks. Her black eyes were full of dancing lights, like the imprisoned sun-flecks under the rose bush, and never had indolent Spanish hands moved so quickly.
"Mira! Mira!" she cried to the luckless Rosa. "That is the third time thou hast spilt the chocolate. Thy hands are of wood when they should be of air. A soft bit of linen to clean them, not that coarse rag. Dios de mi alma! I shall send for Malia." ”

“ I have killed once and for all that fatal talent for self-delusion that I had thought was as dead—well, as dead as my love for Moritz Hohenhauer; and nothing could be more dead than that. My brain feels like a crystal house illuminated by searchlights, strong enough to penetrate every corner but not strong enough to blind. I could never, if I would, deceive myself again, nor make another mistake, so far as human prescience will serve me. ”

“ I should hate a woman who even had it in her to love a man out of gratitude. You have your world at your feet, and I want mine at my feet. You have won yours without effort, for you were born with the crown and sceptre of fascination, I have to fight for mine. But the same instinct is in us both, the same possibilities on different lines. I am not making you the broken passionate appeal of the usual lover, because so long as I know you do not love me I could not place myself at the mercy of emotion—I have no thought of making a fool of myself. ”

“ The great red towers of the Alhambra were before them, and Catalina forgot the Unknown. There happened to be no one else in the Plaza de los Aljibes as they entered it, and the afternoon was very warm and still. They lingered between the hedges of myrtle, the flower best beloved of the Moor, and disdaining the upstart palace of Charles V. looked wonderingly at the featureless wall that hid so much beauty, and in its time had secluded from the vulgar the daily life and gorgeous state of the most picturesque court in Europe, and such harems of varied loveliness as never will be seen again. ”

“ He strode over to her, and flinging his serape from his shoulder opened the mouth of a sack and poured its contents into her lap. Pearls of all sizes and shapes—pearls black and pearls white, pearls pink and pearls faintly blue, pearls like globes and pearls like pears, pearls as big as the lobe of Pio Pico's ear, pearls as dainty as bubbles of frost—a lapful of gleaming luminous pearls, the like of which caballero had never brought to doña before.
For a moment Ysabel forgot her love and her lover. The dream of a lifetime was reality. ”

“ A caballero serenaded his lady at midnight in Monterey.
The tinkle of a guitar, the jingling of spurs, fell among the strong tones of a man's voice.
Chonita had been serenaded until she had fled to the mountains for sleep, but she crept to the foot of the bed and knelt there, her hand at her throat. A door opened, and, one by one, out of the black beyond, five white-robed forms flitted into the room. They looked like puffs of smoke from a burning moon. The heavy wooden shutters were open, and the room was filled with cold light. ”

“ I fancied myself sated with fame, tired of life, a remote and tragic figure among men—the trail of Byron is over us all. That was the moment for the great and fatal passion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise; not only to inspire the passion, but to transform a frame of mind arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. ”

“ Patience followed, and entered a large drawing-room furnished with amber satin and ebony: a magnificent room, heavy with the perfume of great baskets of flowers, and filled with costly articles of decoration. The carpet was of amber velvet. Not a sound of street penetrated the heavy satin curtains.
An indefinable sensation stole over Patience’s mind, a ghost whose lineaments were blurred, yet familiar. She felt an impulse to turn and run, then twitched her shoulders impatiently, and approaching other portières, parted them and glanced into the room beyond. ”

“ If there was a mutter of protest from the race in Fessenden’s depths he let it pass unheeded. His suddenly conceived and violent passion needed but the lash of pity to transform him from the individual into the type, tumultuous with sentimental desire; the instinct of the strong to protect the beloved weak, keen and quick; pouring into a flimsy shell such an ideal as man knows only in his dreams—the determination to possess this inestimable treasure though the world stood still and the angels warned through brazen trumpets. ”

“ The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when wandering alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old memories of Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what man had lavished upon her for centuries. ”

“ The most original artist the State had produced had painted a deep frieze which was a series of the strange moonlight scenes that had made his fame: the deep sulphurous blue of the California night sky, the long black shadows, the wind-driven trees, the low desolate adobe houses abandoned in the towns settled by Spain. Now and again a cluster of lights indicated a window-pane and a belated tenant, but the garden walls were in ruins, the tiled roofs sagging, the ancient whitewash was peeling; all blended and lifted into a harmony of color and pathos by the genius of the artist. ”

“ He knelt down and dug up the float, his heart hammering. And then he deliberately let the prospector’s fever take possession of him. The soles of his feet prickled as if responding to the magnets below; he had a fancy that gold, molten, was running through his veins. But his brain worked clearly. He was aware that his exultation and excitement were not due to the lure of gold alone, but to the still more subtle pleasure that a strong and obstinate nature feels in breaking a vow and deliberately succumbing to temptation. ”

“ Within his brain?—or battling with the storm to reach him? What were those wraith-like things—those tiny forms dancing weirdly on the roaring waters? Ah, he knew. They were the elfins of his brain that had tormented him with their music and fled at his approach. They had flown from their little cells, and were holding court on the storm-waves like fairies on the green. It was like them to love the danger and the tumult and the night. It was like them to shout and bound with the intoxication of the hour, to scream with the gale, and to kiss with frantic rapture the waves that threatened them. ”

“ While he amused himself with the many rare volumes on the library shelves, Hermia read the introduction and the four tales with equal interest and astonishment. They had a vital power which seemed to grip her mind as with a palpable hand and hold it until she had read the last of the sheets. Quintard had reproduced the style and spirit of the age with remarkable fidelity—the unbridled passions, the coarse wit, the stirring deeds of valor. He made no attempt at delicate pathos or ideality. When a man suffered, he raged like a wounded boar; every phase of his nature was portrayed in the rough. ”

“ Do you think I have thought of anything else since my return to Munich? I have been tempted to scald my flesh to relieve the torments of my mind. And I tell you there is no way out, there is nothing for us in this life but what we have had already, nothing! We must part, and part to-night, before it is too late, and as there is no other way to bring you to your senses, I shall tell you that hideous history, not only to blast your love out of existence, but to inspire you with a vision of the enthusiasm with which London would receive me as a peeress, should you ever be free. ”

“ At first the sparkle and splendor, the glamour and mystery of the world of fashion dazzled and delighted him. It was to him what fairy tales of prince and princess are to children. For even he, prosaic, phlegmatic, with nerves of iron and brain of shallows, had in him that germ of the picturesque which in some natures shoots to high and full-flowered ideals, in others to lofty or restless ambitions, coupled with a true love of art; and yet again develops a weed of tenacious root and coarse enduring fibre which a clever maker of words has named snobbery. ”

“ But the sadness did not leave her eyes nor the delicate curves of her mouth. She had the face of the Madonna, stamped with the heritage of suffering; a nature so keenly capable of joy and pain that she drew both like a magnet, and would so long as life stayed in her.
She curled herself in the window-seat, looking down the road for the gray cloud of dust that would herald her brother. But only black flocks of crows mounted screaming from the willows, to dive and rise again. Suddenly she became conscious that she was watched, and her gaze swept downward to the corral. ”

“ When she had left Mary Zattiany stood for a few moments striking her hands together, her face distorted. A wave of nausea overwhelmed her. She felt as if there had been an earthquake in her own soul and its muck were riding the surface. She loathed herself and all women and all men. She knew that the violence of the revulsion must be temporary, but for the moment it was beyond her control. She went to the telephone and called up Clavering and told him that she had a severe headache and was going to bed. ”

“ When it does not rain at Sitka it pours, and when once in a way she draws a deep breath of respite and lifts her grand and glorious face to the sun, in pathetic gratitude for dear infrequent favor, comes a wild flurry of snow or a close white fog from the inland waters; and, like a great beauty condemned to wear a veil through life, she can but stare in dumb resentment through the folds, consoling herself with the knowledge that could the world but see it must surely worship. ”

“ Patience crossed the valley through beds of golden poppies and pale blue baby-eyes struggling with infantile pertinacity to raise themselves above the waving grass. She plucked a poppy and held her nose in the great cup that covered half her face. She liked the slight languor its heavy perfume induced.
She climbed the hill, and the woods shut out the world. Patience forgot her destination and wandered happily and aimlessly in the dim fragrance. ”