Presently she rose, and went to a bureau, and unlocked a drawer with
a key that she carried in her pocket. Taking out an ebony box like a
casket, she unlocked that in turn, and then lifted from it a morocco
case, evidently a miniature. She returned to her chair and seated herself
again, swaying her body gently to and fro as if confirming some difficult
resolution, but with the same inscrutable expression upon her face. Still
holding the case in her hands unopened, she murmured:
"I want a sober mind,
A self-renouncing will,
That tramples down and casts behind
The baits of pleasing ill."
She repeated the whole hymn several times, as if it were a kind of spell
or incantation, and while she was yet saying it she opened the miniature.
The western light streamed over the likeness of a man of a gallant,
graceful air, in whom the fires of youth were not yet burned out, and
in whose presence there might be some peculiar fascination. The hair
was rather long and fair--the features were handsomely moulded, but
wore a slightly jaded expression, which often seems to a woman an air
of melancholy, but which a man would have recognized at once as the
result of dissipation. There was a singular cast in the eye, and a kind
of lofty, irresistible command in the whole aspect, which appeared to be
quite as much an assumption of manner as a real superiority. In fact it
was the likeness of what is technically called a man of the world, whose
frank insolence and symmetry of feature pass for manly beauty and
composure.
The miniature was in the face of a gold locket, on the back of which
there was a curl of the same fair hair. It was so fresh and glossy that
it might have been cut off the day before. But the quaintness of the
setting and the costume of the portrait showed that it had been taken
many years previous, and that in the order of nature the original was
probably dead.
As Mrs. Simcoe held the miniature in both hands and looked at it, her
body still rocked over it, and her lips still murmured.
Then rocking and murmuring stopped together, and she seemed like one
listening to music or the ringing of distant bells.
And as she sat perfectly still in the golden September sunshine, it was
as if it had shone into her soul; so that a softer light streamed into
her eyes, and the hard inscrutability of her face melted as by some
internal warmth, and a tender rejuvenescence somehow blossomed out upon
her cheeks until all the sweetness became sadness, and heavy tears
dropped from her eyes upon the picture.
Then, with the old harshness stealing into her face again, she rose
calmly, carrying the miniature in her hand, and went out of the room, and
down the stairs into the library, which was opposite the parlor in which
Abel Newt had seen the picture of old Grandpa Burt at the age of ten,
holding a hoop and book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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