• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 511 0

so real, as this vision of the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes. Great black velvet eyes… hollow eyes… haunted eyes… filled with remorse for the heart she had broken. Wicked eyes… anyone who broke hearts and never went to church must be wicked. Wicked people were so interesting. The Lady was burying herself from the world as a penance for her crimes. Could she be a princess? No, princesses were too scarce in P.E. Island. But she was tall, slim, remote, icily beautiful like a princess, with long jet-black hair in two thick braids over her shoulders, right to her feet. She would have a clear-cut ivory face, a beautiful Grecian nose, like the nose of Mother’s Artemis of the Silver Bow, and white lovely hands which she would wring as she walked in the garden at night, waiting for the one true lover she had disdained and learned too late to love… you perceive how the legend was growing?… while her long black velvet skirts trailed over the grass. She would wear a golden girdle and great pearl earrings in her ears and she must live her life of shadow and mystery until the lover came to set her free. Then she would repent of her old wickedness and heartlessness and hold out her beautiful hands to him and bend her proud head in submission at last. They would sit by the fountain… there was a fountain by this time… and pledge their vows anew and she would follow him, ‘over the hills and far away, beyond their utmost purple rim’, just as the Sleeping Princess did in the poem Mother read to her one night from the old volume of Tennyson Father had given her long, long ago. But the lover of the Mysterious Eyed gave her jewels beyond all compare.

The GLOOMY HOUSE would be beautifully furnished, of course, and there would be secret rooms and staircases, and the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes would sleep on a bed made of mother-of-pearl under a canopy of purple velvet. She would be attended by a greyhound… a brace of them… a whole retinue of them… and she would always be listening… listening… listening… for the music of a very far-off harp. But she could not hear it as long as she was wicked… not until she repented and her lover came and forgave her… and there you were.

Of course it sounds very foolish. Dreams do sound so foolish when they are put into cold, brutal words. Ten-year-old Nan never put hers into words, she only lived them. This dream of the wicked lady with the Mysterious Eyes became as real to her as the life that went on around her. It took possession of her. For two years now it had been part of her… she had somehow come, in some strange way, to believe it. Not for worlds would she have told anyone, not even Mother, about it. It was her own peculiar treasure, her inalienable secret, without which she could no longer imagine life going on. She would rather steal off by herself to dream of the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes than play in Rainbow Valley. Anne noticed this tendency and worried a little over it. Nan was getting too much that way. Gilbert wanted to send her up to Avonlea for a visit, but Nan, for the first time, pleaded passionately not to be sent. She didn’t want to leave home, she said piteously. To herself she said she would just die if she had to go so far away from the strange, sad, lovely woman of the mysterious eyes. True, the Mysterious Eyed never went out anywhere. But she might go out some day, and if she, Nan, were away she would miss seeing her. How wonderful it would be to get just a glimpse of her. Why, the very road along which she passed would be for ever romantic. The day on which it happened would be different from all other days. She would make a ring around it in the calendar. Nan had got to the point when she greatly desired to see her just once. She knew quite well that much she had imagined about her was nothing but imagination. But she hadn’t the slightest doubt that Thomasine Fair was young and lovely and wicked and alluring… Nan was by this time absolutely certain she had heard Susan say so, and as long as she was that Nan could go on imagining things about her for ever.

Nan could hardly believe