Maid Marian and Other Stories
9781465637734
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Yes, it was surely the embodiment of feminine beauty—the dark, narrow-lidded eyes, wide apart—did you ever notice the terrible intelligence in the eyes of a portrait?—the slim patrician nose, the hair so quaintly coifed with pearl, the uplifted hand: no wonder that Macfarren gazed at it with something like reverence. You will be apt to imagine that Macfarren was an enthusiast, possibly with darkly curling hair and of a Byronic-Dantesque cast of countenance. Quite the contrary. He was a keen-witted, hard-headed New York lawyer fast galloping out of his forties—a well-made, well-dressed man, with a clear-cut, sensible face. His hair had been trifled with by the hand of Time, and what remained is not worth describing. Nor was the place sanctified by the lady Marian's portrait a Norman abbey, nor yet a battlemented castle. It was a room sliced off from the place where the housemaids kept their brooms and dust-pans on the third floor of a New York hotel. Macfarren had kept those rooms for twenty years. Meanwhile, bachelors' flats had sprung up all over town, but he was conservative and kept his modest suite of two rooms until the advent of the Lady Marian made another room a necessity. For the portrait was so large—a full-length—and so conspicuous that it would have monopolized the whole of the cosey sitting-room. Besides, Macfarren had a—superstition, perhaps—something about the portrait which made him shrink from exposing it to the vulgar gaze of the waiters and bell-boys who saw the inside of his room, and the jokes—how he would have chafed under them!—of the good fellows who came in occasionally for a quiet smoke and chat. It seemed as if Destiny had had a share in giving to him the Lady Marian. Some years before, loitering in England, he had wandered into King's Lyndon, an old show-place in one of the midland counties and had seen this picture. It made a strange impression on him; and he was singularly unsusceptible to anything but ideas: they always impressed him tremendously. He was surprised and almost ashamed of the hold this face took upon him. He carried it in his mind through fifteen years, and once or twice when he had been arguing a case before a learned judge the sedate, black figure on the bench had become Lady Marian, resplendent in white and pearls, and he had experienced a queer sensation as if he were pleading his cause to her instead of to the honorable court. And the other day on a flying trip to London he had suddenly come across her in an auction-room where a sale of antiques and curios was going on, and, with a recklessness entirely foreign to his natural conservatism, he had bought her at a high figure—bought his divinity of fifteen years for hard cash. He had also hired a room for her, and, coming home to dinner on this particular evening, when, for the first time she hung in beauty on his walls, he entered the place made glorious by her presence, and, carefully closing the door after him, stood in homage before her. He had been smoking, but an instinctive reverence made him remove his cigar from his lips. He looked long and steadily. This picture had helped him to understand himself. Would he have otherwise known that under this cool exterior, this nature so distinctly intellectual, existed a sentiment so deep, so strong, so romantic? It came home to him that he was very like those old pagans who first took statues as their symbols and then came to worship the symbols. Then he looked into the eyes, and presently the eyes looked at him, loftily, yet not unkindly. And then—ah! sweet, strange, delicious moment—the lips parted into a dazzling smile!
