The Adventures of Harry Richmond — CompleteMeredith, George
General
The Adventures of Harry Richmond — Complete
Meredith, George
Adventure and adventurers -- Fiction
She had grown a superb savage, proof against weather and compliments.
Her face was like an Egyptian sky fronting night. The strong old
Eastern blood put ruddy flame for the red colour; tawny olive edged
from the red; rare vivid yellow, all but amber. The light that first
looks down upon the fallen sun was her complexion above the brows, and
round the cheeks, the neck's nape, the throat, and the firm bosom
prompt to lift and sink with her vigour of speech, as her eyes were to
flash and darken. Meeting her you swore she was the personification of
wandering Asia. There was no question of beauty and grace, for these
have laws. The curve of her brows broke like a beaten wave; the lips
and nostrils were wide, tragic in repose. But when she laughed she
illuminated you; where she stepped she made the earth hers. She was as
fresh of her East as the morning when her ancient people struck tents
in the track of their shadows. I write of her in the style consonant to
my ideas of her at the time. I would have carried her off on the
impulse and lived her life, merely to have had such a picture moving in
my sight, and call it mine.
'You're not married?' I said, ludicrously faintly.
'I've not seen the man I'd marry,' she answered, grinning scorn.
The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with the
conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts of
gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes.
In fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite
title of pride;—pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity,
ingenuity, and tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed
she had hoped to meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to
jump out on me: and next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange
yesterday for six hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead
relative, poor little soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession
to the grave. Her people had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers,
and she feared the scandal of being pelted on the way to the church. I
knew that nothing of the sort would happen if I was present. Kiomi
walked humbly with her head bent, leaving me the thick rippling coarse
black locks of her hair for a mark of observation. We were entertained
at her camp in the afternoon. I saw no sign of intelligence between her
and Heriot. On my asking her, the day before, if she remembered him,
she said, 'I do, I'm dangerous for that young man.' Heriot's comment on
her was impressed on me by his choosing to call her 'a fine doe
leopard,' and maintaining that it was a defensible phrase.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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