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This sumptuous creature, this Eve just within the gate of an untried Paradise, untutored in the ways of the world, but on tiptoe to reach the fruit of the tree of knowledge, alive to the moist vitality of that warm atmosphere palpitating with voices and music, as the flower of some dioecious plant which has grown in a lone corner and suddenly unfolding its corolla on some hot-breathing June evening, feels that the air is perfumed with strange odors and loaded with golden dust wafted from those other blossoms with which its double life is shared, this almost over-womanized woman might well have bewitched him, but that he had a vague sense of a counter-charm.
As they approached the house, the trembling light like fireflies through the leaves, the warm silence broken only by a military band playing a drowsy waltz on the veranda, and the heavy odors of jessamine in the air, thrilled Brant with a sense of shame as he thought of his old comrades in the field.
The place was vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human horses. The cadaverous, half nude varlets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental splendor. They shed no entrancing odors just the contrary.
It was the vibrant, active hour when odors are freshest and spirits rise. The forest was noisy with the cry of birds, and flocks of shrill-voiced paroquets raised an uproar in the tallest trees. The dense canopy of green overhead was alive with fluttering wings; the groves echoed to the cries of all the loud-voiced thicket denizens.
From every side floated odors of naked, sweaty flesh, and of strange stews boiling in the pots; the hammers of the carpenters echoed loudly as they worked upon the siege-engines which would soon be hurling stones and darts against the walls.
The odors, sounds, movements were quite the same. The same deaf old men, led by determined, sturdy old women, were going up the aisle to the front pews. The choir assembling above the pulpit made him shiver with emotion. "Perhaps one of them will be Mary and I won't know her," he said to himself. "I will know her voice," he added.
As he approached this island, he fancied that the winds bore to his senses the spicy odors said to be wafted from the islands of the East Indian seas. "As I arrived at this cape," he said, "there came off a fragrance so good and soft of the flowers or trees of the land that it was the sweetest thing in the world."
It seemed to me also that the woods had not those pure, clean, innocent odors which so abound in the New England forest in early spring; but there was something luscious, voluptuous, almost oppressively fragrant about the magnolias, as if they belonged not to Hebe, but to Magdalen.
And above it all there were odors of wines and flowers, clouds of smoke, shouts of laughter, music of shrill gay voices. She stood like a frozen creature and saw the rosebuds' in her hand. Then with a great piercing cry she let the little roses fall, and turned and fled. At the sound he looked up and saw her, and shook his beautiful brown harlot off him with an oath.
In what original this practice of the Egyptians had root, divers authors dispute; while some place the origin hereof in the desire to prevent the separation of the soul by keeping the body untabified, and alluring the spiritual part to remain by sweet and precious odors. But all this was but fond inconsideration.
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