Complete Works of E. R. Eddison by E. R. Eddison

Author:E. R. Eddison [Eddison, E. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Delphi Main Series
Publisher: Delphi Classics
Published: 2022-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

VIII. Lady Mary Lessingham

IT WAS NOW the twenty-fourth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at Wolkenstein in the Grödner Dolomites, nine o’clock, and a morning without cloud. Up in the sky, beyond church-spire and river and meadow and chalet and rolling pasture and pine-forest and grass-smooth steep-going alp, hung the walls of the Sella. Seen through that haze of air and the down-shedding radiance of the sun, the millions upon millions of tons of living rock seemed as if refined away to an immateriality of aery outsides, luminous, turquoise-shadowed, paler and thinner than thin clouds, yet immovable and sharp-outlined like crystal. It was as if slab, gully, scree-slope, buttress, and mile-long train of precipice wall, cut off from all supports of earth and washed of all earthy superfluities which belong to appearances subject to secular change, stood revealed in their vast substantiality; the termless imperishable eidolon, laid up in Heaven, of all these things.

On the terrace before the inn, people were breakfasting at a dozen little tables. Here a lime-tree, there a wide umbrella striped white and scarlet, made its pool of shade upon green-and-white chequered table-cloth, gravel, and paved walk. Outside these shades, all was drenched with sunlight. Here and there, a glass ball, blue, yellow, or plain silver, the size of a man’s fist and having a short bottle-neck to take the top of the bamboo stick that supported it, gleamed among the rose-trees to rebate the glance of witches. All the time, amid the clink of breakfast things, was the coming and going, strong and graceful upon their feet, of the inn-keeper’s two daughters: capable, self-possessed, with a native ease of manner and an infectious laughter, charming to look at in their red petticoats, many-coloured aprons, Tyrolean blouses of white linen, and embroidered belts with clasps of silver. Underneath all the sounds and movements was an undersound of waters falling, and, closer at hand, a hum overhead of bees in the lime-trees which put out at this season their delicate sweet-smelling pendant flowers. And, an intoxication of lilies to make eddies of these simplicities, sat Mary: by herself at an outer table, part in sun part in shadow.

There seemed a morning coolness, dew upon an ungathered lily, to rest upon her sitting there, unconscious, to all appearance, of the many pairs of eyes that having once looked could not but look again, as bees drawn (fly where they can) still to the honey-dropping of Aganippe’s fount. Unregarding these looks, she now ate a piece of bread and honey; now (as if the little girl awoke anew in her to usurp the woman) dipped sugar in her coffee, and sucked and dipped and sucked again; now shaded her eyes to look up to the pale tremendous outlines afar of those dolomite walls under the sun.

Upon the sound from indoors of a voice among the many voices, she looked up. To a careless eye’s beholding, scarcely she seemed to move the least lineament of her face. Yet to Lessingham,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.