Nothing before had ever seemed so entrancing, so REAL, as this vision of the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes. Great black velvet eyes ... HOLLOW eyes ... HAUNTED eyes ... filled with remorse for the hearts she had broken. WICKED eyes ... anyone who broke hearts and never went to church must be wicked. Wicked people were so interesting. The Lady was burying herself from the world as a penance for her crimes.
Could she be a princess? No, princesses were too scarce in P. E.
Island. But she was tall, slim, remote, icily beautiful like a princess, with long jet-black hair in two thick braids over her shoulders, right to her feet. She would have a clear-cut ivory face, a beautiful Grecian nose, like the nose of Mother's Artemis of the Silver Bow, and white lovely hands which she would wring as she walked in the garden at night, waiting for the one true lover she had disdained and learned too late to love ... you perceive how the legend was growing? ... while her long black velvet skirts trailed over the grass. She would wear a golden girdle and great pearl earrings in her ears and she must live her life of shadow and mystery until the lover came to set her free. Then she would repent of her old wickedness and heartlessness and hold out her beautiful hands to him and bend her proud head in submission at last. They would sit by the fountain ... there was a fountain by this time ... and pledge their vows anew and she would follow him, "over the hills and faraway, beyond their utmost purple rim,” just as the Sleeping Princess did in the poem Mother read to her one night from the old volume of Tennyson Father had given her long, long ago. But the lover of the Mysterious Eyed gave her jewels beyond all compare.
The GLOOMY HOUSE would be beautifully furnished, of course, and there would be secret rooms and staircases, and the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes would sleep on a bed made of mother-of-pearl under a canopy of purple velvet. She would be attended by a greyhound ... a brace of them ... a whole retinue of them ... and she would always be listening ... listening ... listening ... for the music of a very far-off harp. But she could not hear it as long as she was wicked until her lover came and forgave her ... and there you were.
Of course is sounds very foolish. Dreams do sound so foolish when they are put into cold brutal words. Ten-year-old Nan never put hers into words ... she only lived them. This dream of the wicked Lady with the Mysterious Eyes became as real to her as the life that went on around her. It took possession of her. For two years now it had been part of her ... she had somehow come, in some strange way, to believe it. Not for worlds would she have told anyone, not even Mother, about it. It was her own peculiar treasure, her inalienable secret, without which she could no longer imagine life going on. She would rather steal off by herself to dream of the Lady with the Mysterious Eyes than play in Rainbow Valley.
Anne noticed this tendency and worried a little over it. Nan was getting too much that way. Gilbert wanted to send her up to Avonlea for a visit, but Nan, for the first time, pleaded passionately not to be sent. She didn't want to leave home, she said piteously. To herself she said she would just die if she had to go so far away from the strange sad lovely Lady with the Mysterious Eyes. True, the Mysterious Eyed never went out anywhere. But she MIGHT go out some day and if she, Nan, were away she would miss seeing her. How wonderful it would be to get just a glimpse of her! Why, the very road along which she passed would be forever romantic. The day on which it happened would be different from all other days. She would make a ring around it in the calendar. Nan had got to the point when she greatly desired to see her just once. She knew quite well that much she had imagined about her was nothing but imagination. But she hadn't the slightest doubt that Thomasine Fair was young and lovely and wicked and alluring ... Nan was by this time absolutely certain she had heard Susan say so ... and as long as she was that, Nan could go on imagining things about her forever.
Nan could hardly believe her ears when Susan said to her one morning:
"There is a parcel I want to send up to Thomasine Fair at the old MacAllister place. Your father brought it out from town last night. Will you run up with it this afternoon, pet?”
Just like that! Nan caught her breath. WOULD she? Did dreams really come true in such fashion? She would see the GLOOMY HOUSE ... she would see her beautiful wicked Lady with the Mysterious Eyes. Actually see her ... perhaps hear her speak ... perhaps ... oh, bliss! ... touch her slender white hand. As for the greyhounds and the fountain and so forth, Nan knew she had only imagined them but surely the reality would be equally wonderful.
Nan watched the clock all the forenoon, seeing the time draw slowly ... oh, so slowly ... nearer and nearer. When a thundercloud rolled up ominously and rain began to fall she could hardly keep the tears back.
"I don't see HOW God could let it rain today," she whispered rebelliously.
But the shower was soon over and the sun shone again. Nan could eat hardly any dinner for excitement.
"Mummy, may I wear my yellow dress?”
"Why do you want to dress up like that to call on a neighbour, child?”
A neighbour! But of course Mother didn't understand ... couldn't understand.
"PLEASE, Mummy.”
"Very well," said Anne. The yellow dress would be outgrown very soon. May as well let Nan get the good of it.
Nan's legs were fairly trembling as she set off, the precious small parcel in her hand. She took a short-cut through Rainbow Valley, up the hill, to the side-road. The raindrops were still lying on the nasturtium leaves like great pearls; there was a delicious freshness in the air; the bees were buzzing in the white clover that edged the brook; slim blue dragonflies were glittering over the water ... devil's-darning-needles, Susan called them; in the hill pasture the daisies nodded to her ... swayed to her ... waved to her ... laughed to her, with cool gold-and-silver laughter. Everything was so lovely and she was going to see the Wicked Lady with the Mysterious Eyes. What would the Lady say to her? And was it QUITE safe to go to see her? Suppose you stayed a few minutes with her and found that a hundred years had gone by, as in the story she and Walter had read last week?
Chapter 36
Nan felt a queer tickly sensation in her spine as she turned into the lane. Did the dead maple bough move? No, she had escaped it ... she was past. Aha, old witch, you didn't catch ME! She was walking up the lane of which the mud and the ruts had no power to blight her anticipation. Just a few steps more ... the GLOOMY HOUSE was before her, amid and behind those dark dripping trees.
She was going to see it at last! She shivered a little ... and did not know that it was because of a secret unadmitted fear of losing her dream. Which is always, for youth or maturity or age, a catastrophe.
She pushed her way through a gap in a wild growth of young spruces that was choking up the end of the lane. Her eyes were shut; could she dare to open them? For a moment sheer terror possessed her and for two pins she would have turned and run. After all ... the Lady WAS wicked. Who knew what she might do to you? She might even be a Witch. How was it that it had never occurred to her before that the Wicked Lady might be a Witch?
Then she resolutely opened her eyes and stared piteously.
Was THIS the GLOOMY HOUSE ... the dark, stately, towered and turreted mansion of her dreams? This!
It was a big house, once white, now a muddy gray. Here and there, broken shutters, once green, were swinging loose. The front steps were broken. A forlorn glassed-in porch had most of its panes shattered. The scrolled trimming around the verandah was broken.
Why, it was only a tired old house worn out with living!