Bella Donna | Page 6

the more apparent by her small waist, and by the small size of her beautifully shaped head, which was poised on a long but exquisite neck. Her whole outline announced her gentle breeding. The most lovely woman of the people could never be shaped quite like that. As Doctor Isaacson realised this, he felt a sudden difficulty in connecting with the woman before him her notorious career. Surely pride must be a dweller in a body so expressive of race!
He thought of the very young men, almost boys, with whom Mrs. Chepstow was seen about. Was it possible?
Her eyes met his, and in her face he saw a subtle contradiction of the meaning her form seemed eloquently to indicate.
It was possible.
Almost before he had time to say this to himself, Mrs. Chepstow's face had changed, suddenly accorded more definitely with her body.
"What a clever woman!" the Doctor thought.
With an almost sharp movement he sat forward in his chair, braced up, alert, vital. His irritation was gone with the fatigue engendered by the day's work. Interest in life tingled through his veins. His day was not to be wholly dull. His thought of the morning, when he had looked at the patients' book, was not an error of the mind.
"You came to consult me because--?"
"I don't know that I am ill," Mrs. Chepstow said, very composedly.
"Let us hope not."
"Do you think I look ill?"
"Would you mind turning a little more towards the light?"
She sat still for a minute, then she laughed.
"I have always said that so long as one is with a doctor, qua doctor, one must never think of him as a man," she said; "but--"
"Don't think of me as a man."
"Unfortunately, there is something about you which absolutely prevents me from regarding you as a machine. But--never mind!"
She turned to the light, lifted her thin veil, and leaned towards him.
"Do you think I look ill?"
He gazed at her steadily, with a scrutiny that was almost cruel. The face presented to him in the bold light that flowed in through the large window near which their chairs were placed still preserved elements of the beauty of which the world had heard too much. Its shape, like the shape of Mrs. Chepstow's head, was exquisite. The line of the features was not purely Greek, but it recalled things Greek, profiles in marble seen in calm museums. The outline of a thing can set a sensitive heart beating with the strange, the almost painful longing for an ideal life, with ideal surroundings, ideal loves, ideal realizations. It can call to the imagination that lies drowsing, yet full of life, far down in the secret recesses of the soul. The curve of Mrs. Chepstow's face, the modelling of her low brow, and the undulations of the hair that flowed away from it--although, alas! that hair was obviously, though very perfectly, dyed--had this peculiar power of summons, sent forth silently this subtle call. The curve of a Dryad's face, seen dimly in the green wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks, and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses in the springtime of creation, but an existence to distress a moralist, and a lack of pleasure in it to dishearten an honest pagan. The ideality in Mrs. Chepstow's face was contradicted, was set almost at defiance, by something--it was difficult to say exactly what; perhaps by the faint wrinkles about the corners of her large and still luminous blue eyes, by a certain not yet harsh prominence of the cheek-bones, by a slight droop of the lips that hinted at passion linked with cynicism. There was a suggestion of hardness somewhere. Freshness had left this face, but not because of age. There are elderly, even old women who look almost girlish, fragrant with a charm that has its root in innocence of life. Mrs. Chepstow did not certainly look old. Yet there was no youth in her, no sweetness of the girl she once had been. She was not young, nor old, nor definitely middle-aged.
She was definitely a woman who had strung many experiences upon the chain of her life, yet who, in certain aspects, called up the thought of, even the desire for, things ideal, things very far away from all that is sordid, ugly, brutal, and defaced.
The look of pride, or perhaps of self-respect, which Doctor Isaacson had seen born as if in answer to his detrimental thought of her, stayed in