Castle Richmond | Page 7

It is by gradual, earnest efforts that this must be
done--if it be done. Ten, nay, twenty pages of the finest descriptive
writing that ever fell from the pen of a novelist will not do it.
Clara Desmond, when young Fitzgerald first saw her, had hardly
attained that incipient stage of womanhood which justifies a mother in
taking her out into the gaieties of the world. She was then only sixteen;
and had not in her manner and appearance so much of the woman as is
the case with many girls of that age. She was shy and diffident in
manner, thin and tall in person. If I were to say that she was angular
and bony, I should disgust my readers, who, disliking the term, would
not stop to consider how many sweetest girls are at that age truly
subject to those epithets. Their undeveloped but active limbs are long
and fleshless, the contour of their face is the same, their elbows and
shoulders are pointed, their feet and hands seem to possess length
without breadth. Birth and breeding have given them the frame of
beauty, to which coming years will add the soft roundness of form, and
the rich glory of colour. The plump, rosy girl of fourteen, though she
also is very sweet, never rises to such celestial power of feminine grace
as she who is angular and bony, whose limbs are long, and whose joints
are sharp.
Such was Clara Desmond at sixteen. But still, even then, to those who
were gifted with the power of seeing, she gave promise of great
loveliness. Her eyes were long and large, and wonderfully clear. There
was a liquid depth in them which enabled the gazer to look down into
them as he would into the green, pellucid transparency of still ocean
water. And then they said so much--those young eyes of hers: from her
mouth in those early years words came but scantily, but from her eyes
questions rained quicker than any other eyes could answer them.
Questions of wonder at what the world contained,--of wonder as to
what men thought and did; questions as to the inmost heart, and truth,
and purpose of the person questioned. And all this was asked by a
glance now and again; by a glance of those long, shy, liquid eyes,
which were ever falling on the face of him she questioned, and then
ever as quickly falling from it.

Her face, as I have said, was long and thin, but it was the longness and
thinness of growing youth. The natural lines of it were full of beauty, of
pale silent beauty, too proud in itself to boast itself much before the
world, to make itself common among many. Her hair was already long
and rich, but was light in colour, much lighter than it grew to be when
some four or five more years had passed over her head. At the time of
which I speak she wore it in simple braids brushed back from her
forehead, not having as yet learned that majestic mode of sweeping it
from her face which has in subsequent years so generally prevailed.
And what then of her virtues and her faults--of her merits and defects?
Will it not be better to leave them all to time and the coming pages?
That she was proud of her birth, proud of being an Irish Desmond,
proud even of her poverty, so much I may say of her, even at that early
age. In that she was careless of the world's esteem, fond to a fault of
romance, poetic in her temperament, and tender in her heart, she shared
the ordinary--shall I say foibles or virtues?--of so many of her sex. She
was passionately fond of her brother, but not nearly equally so of her
mother, of whom the brother was too evidently the favoured child.
She had lived much alone; alone, that is, with her governess and with
servants at Desmond Court. Not that she had been neglected by her
mother, but she had hardly found herself to be her mother's companion;
and other companions there she had had none. When she was sixteen
her governess was still with her; but a year later than that she was left
quite alone, except inasmuch as she was with her mother.
She was sixteen when she first began to ask questions of Owen
Fitzgerald's face with those large eyes of hers; and she saw much of
him and he of her, for the twelve months immediately after that. Much
of him, that is, as much goes in this country of ours, where four or five
interviews in as many months between friends is supposed to signify
that they are often together. But this much-seeing occurred chiefly
during the