But written words are not the artist's colors; they can never paint the portrait which all the world can see. A woman may be described, and by a truthful pen, as possessing large eyes, regular features, and so on through the list, and yet that woman may move through life quite without charm, while another who is chronicled, and with equal truthfulness, as having a profile which is far from showing accordance with artists' rules, may receive through all her days the homage paid to loveliness alone. The bare catalogue of features, tints, and height does not include the subtle spell whose fulness crowns the one, while its lack mars the other, and a narrator, therefore, while allowing himself as detailed a delineation as it pleases him to give, should set down plainly at the end the result, the often mysterious and unexpected whole, which the elements he has described have, in some occult manner, combined to produce. "There was an enchantment in her expression," "There was an irresistible sweetness about her;" these phrases tell more than the most minute record of hue and outline; they place the reader where he would be were the living, breathing presence before him, instead of the mere printed page.
But in the case of Garda Thorne it could have been said that she had not only brilliant beauty, but the loveliness which does not always accompany it. There was sufficient regularity in her face to keep from it the term irregular; but it had also all the changing expressions, all the spirit, all the sweetness, which faces whose features are not by rule often possess. She had undoubtedly a great charm, a charm which no one had as yet analyzed; she was not a girl who turned one's thoughts towards analysis, one was too much occupied in simply admiring her. She was as open as the day, her frankness was wonderful; it would have been said of her by every one that she had an extraordinary simplicity, were it not that the richness of her beauty threw over her a sort of sumptuousness which did not accord with the usual image of pure, rather meagre limpidity called up by the use of that word.
Evert Winthrop, beholding her for the first time in the little Episcopal church of Gracias, had said to himself that she was the most beautiful girl (viewing the matter impersonally) whom he had ever seen. Impersonally, because he would have set down his personal preference as decidedly for something less striking, for eyes of blue rather than black, eyes which should be not so much lustrous as gentle, for smooth hair of pale gold, a forehead and eyebrows like those of a Raphael Madonna. He was sure, also, that he much preferred slenderness; even a certain virginal thinness and awkwardness he could accept, it might be part of the charm. A friend of his, a lady older than himself, upon hearing him express these sentiments not long before, had remarked that they shed a good deal of light backward over his past. When he asked her what she meant, she added that a liking for little wild flowers in a man of the world of his age, and an indifference to tea-roses, did not so much indicate a natural simplicity of taste as something quite apart from that—too long an acquaintance, perhaps, with the heavily perfumed atmosphere of conservatories.
"I don't know what you are trying to make me out," Winthrop had answered, laughing.
"I make you out a very good fellow," replied the lady. "But you are like my husband (who is also a very good fellow); he wonders how I can go to the theatre, plays are so artificial. I suppose they are artificial; but I notice that it required his closest—I may almost say his nightly—attention for something like fifteen years to find it out."
Winthrop happened to think of this little conversation—he knew not why—as he followed his guide through her green-walled path, which had now become so narrow that he could no longer walk by her side. As it came up in his mind he said to himself that here was a tea-rose, growing if not quite in the seclusion of untrodden forests where the wild flowers have their home, then at least in natural freedom, in the pure air and sunshine, under the open sky. There was—there could be—nothing of the conservatory, nothing artificial, in the only life Edgarda Thorne had known, the life of this remote southern village where she had been born and brought up. Her knowledge of the world outside was—must be—confined to the Spanish-tinted legends of the slumberous little community, to the limited traditions of her mother's small experience, and to the perceptions and fancies of her own imagination; these last, however numerous they might be in themselves, however vivid, must leave her much in the condition of a would-be writer of dramas who has never read a play nor seen one acted, but has merely evolved something vaguely resembling one from the dreaming depths of his own consciousness; Garda's idea of the world beyond the barrens must be equally vague and unreal. And then, as he looked at her, sweet-natured and indifferent, walking onward with her indolent step over her own land, under the low blue sky, it came over him suddenly that probably she had not troubled herself to evolve anything, to think much of any world, good or bad, outside of her own personality. And he said to himself that wherever she was would be world enough for most men. In which class, however, he again did not include Evert Winthrop.
The path made a sudden turn, and stopped. It had brought them to the borders of a waste.
"This was one of the sugar fields," said Garda, with her little air of uninterested proprietorship.
Two old roads, raised on embankments, crossed the level, one from north to south, the other from east to west. The verge upon which they stood had once been a road also, though now narrowed and in some places blocked by the bushes which had grown across it. "A little farther on, beyond that point, you will find our ruin," said Garda. "There will not be time to sketch it, I will wait for you here."
"You are deserting me very soon."
"I am not deserting you at all, I intend to take you remorselessly over the entire place. But there are thorns in those bushes, and thorns are dangerous."
"I know it, I am already wounded."
"I mean that the briers might tear my dress," explained Miss Thorne, with dignity.
This stately rejection of so small and, as it were, self-made a pun entertained her companion highly; it showed how unfamiliar she was with the usual commonplaces. Talking with her would be not unlike talking with a princess in a fairy tale—one of those who have always lived mysteriously imprisoned in a tower; such a damsel, regarding her own rank, would be apt to have a standard which might strike the first comer as fantastically high. His entertainment, however, was not visible as, with a demeanor modelled upon the requirements of her dignity, he bent back the thorny bushes of the green cape, and made a passageway for her round its point. When his little roadway was finished, she came over it with her leisurely step, as though (he said to himself) it and the whole world, including his own poor individuality, belonged to her by inherited right, whenever she should choose to claim them. He was well aware that he was saying to himself a good many things about this girl; but was it not natural—coming unexpectedly upon so much beauty, set in so unfamiliar a frame? It was a new portrait, and he was fond of portraits; in picture-galleries he always looked more at the portraits than at anything else.
On the opposite side of the thorny cape the ruin came into view, standing back in a little arena of its own. Two of its high stone walls remained upright, irregularly