Mary Marston | Page 8

and Mary noted that the desires of the cousin
were farther reaching and more expensive than those of Miss Mortimer.
But, though in this way hard to please, they were not therefore
unpleasant to deal with; and from the moment she looked the latter in
the face, whom she had not seen since she was a girl, Mary could
hardly take her eyes off her. All at once it struck her how well the
unusual, fantastic name her mother had given her suited her; and, as she
gazed, the feeling grew.
Large, and grandly made, Hesper stood "straight, and steady, and tall,"
dusky-fair, and colorless, with the carriage of a young matron. Her
brown hair seemed ever scathed and crinkled afresh by the ethereal
flame that here and there peeped from amid the unwilling volute rolled
back from her creamy forehead in a rebellious coronet. Her eyes were
large and hazel; her nose cast gently upward, answering the carriage of
her head; her mouth decidedly large, but so exquisite in drawing and

finish that the loss of a centimetre of its length would to a lover have
been as the loss of a kingdom; her chin a trifle large, and grandly lined;
for a woman's, her throat was massive, and her arms and hands were
powerful. Her expression was frank, almost brave, her eyes looking full
at the person she addressed. As she gazed, a kind of love she had never
felt before kept swelling in Mary's heart.
Her companion impressed her very differently.
Some men, and most women, counted Miss Yolland strangely ugly.
But there were men who exceedingly admired her. Not very slight for
her stature, and above the middle height, she looked small beside
Hesper. Her skin was very dark, with a considerable touch of
sallowness; her eyes, which were large and beautifully shaped, were as
black as eyes could be, with light in the midst of their blackness, and
more than a touch of hardness in the midst of their liquidity; her
eyelashes were singularly long and black, and she seemed conscious of
them every time they rose. She did not use her eyes habitually, but,
when she did, the thrust was sudden and straight. I heard a man once
say that a look from her was like a volley of small-arms. Like Hesper's,
her mouth was large and good, with fine teeth; her chin projected a
little too much; her hands were finer than Hesper's, but bony. Her name
was Septimia; Lady Margaret called her Sepia, and the contraction
seemed to so many suitable that it was ere long generally adopted. She
was in mourning, with a little crape. To the first glance she seemed as
unlike Hesper as she could well be; but, as she stood gently regarding
the two, Mary, gradually, and to her astonishment, became indubitably
aware of a singular likeness between them. Sepia, being a few years
older, and in less flourishing condition, had her features sharper and
finer, and by nature her complexion was darker by shades innumerable;
but, if the one was the evening, the other was the night: Sepia was a
diminished and overshadowed Hesper. Their manner, too, was similar,
but Sepia's was the haughtier, and she had an occasional look of
defiance, of which there appeared nothing in Hesper. When first she
came to Durnmelling, Lady Malice had once alluded to the dependence
of her position--but only once: there came a flash into rather than out of
Sepia's eyes that made any repetition of the insult impossible and Lady
Malice wish that she had left her a wanderer on the face of Europe.
Sepia was the daughter of a clergyman, an uncle of Lady Malice,

whose sons had all gone to the bad, and whose daughters had all
vanished from society. Shortly before the time at which my narrative
begins, one of the latter, however, namely Sepia, the youngest, had
reappeared, a fragment of the family wreck, floating over the gulf of its
destruction. Nobody knew with any certainty where she had been in the
interim: nobody at Durnmelling knew anything but what she chose to
tell, and that was not much. She said she had been a governess in
Austrian Poland and Russia. Lady Margaret had become reconciled to
her presence, and Hesper attached to her.
Of the men who, as I have said, admired her, some felt a peculiar
enchantment in what they called her ugliness; others declared her
devilish handsome; and some shrank from her as if with an undefined
dread of perilous entanglement, if she should but catch them looking
her in the face. Among some of them she was known as Lucifer, in
antithesis to Hesper: they meant the Lucifer of darkness, not the
light-bringer of the morning.
The ladies, on their part, especially