Read Online The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - Free Book Online Page A

and
approached a pretty summer-house, built of wood, in the form of a
miniature Swiss chalet. The one room of the summer-house, as we
ascended the steps of the door, was occupied by a young lady. She
was standing near a rustic table, looking out at the inland view
of moor and hill presented by a gap in the trees, and absently
turning over the leaves of a little sketch-book that lay at her
side. This was Miss Fairlie.
    How can I describe her? How can I separate her from my own
sensations, and from all that has happened in the later time? How
can I see her again as she looked when my eyes first rested on
her—as she should look, now, to the eyes that are about to see
her in these pages?
    The water-colour drawing that I made of Laura Fairlie, at an after
period, in the place and attitude in which I first saw her, lies
on my desk while I write. I look at it, and there dawns upon me
brightly, from the dark greenish-brown background of the summer-
house, a light, youthful figure, clothed in a simple muslin dress,
the pattern of it formed by broad alternate stripes of delicate
blue and white. A scarf of the same material sits crisply and
closely round her shoulders, and a little straw hat of the natural
colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed with ribbon to match the
gown, covers her head, and throws its soft pearly shadow over the
upper part of her face. Her hair is of so faint and pale a brown—
not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and yet almost
as glossy—that it nearly melts, here and there, into the shadow
of the hat. It is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears,
and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses her forehead.
The eyebrows are rather darker than the hair; and the eyes are of
that soft, limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so
seldom seen in real life. Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in
form—large and tender and quietly thoughtful—but beautiful above
all things in the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their
inmost depths, and shines through all their changes of expression
with the light of a purer and a better world. The charm—most
gently and yet most distinctly expressed—which they shed over the
whole face, so covers and transforms its little natural human
blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the relative
merits and defects of the other features. It is hard to see that
the lower part of the face is too delicately refined away towards
the chin to be in full and fair proportion with the upper part;
that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always hard and
cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may be),
has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal
straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are
subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which
draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It
might be possible to note these blemishes in another woman's face
but it is not easy to dwell on them in hers, so subtly are they
connected with all that is individual and characteristic in her
expression, and so closely does the expression depend for its full
play and life, in every other feature, on the moving impulse of
the eyes.
    Does my poor portrait of her, my fond, patient labour of long and
happy days, show me these things? Ah, how few of them are in the
dim mechanical drawing, and how many in the mind with which I
regard it! A fair, delicate girl, in a pretty light dress,
trifling with the leaves of a sketch-book, while she looks up from
it with truthful, innocent blue eyes—that is all the drawing can
say; all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen
can say in their language, either. The woman who first gives
life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills
a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us
till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too
deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times,