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And beautiful indeed were the rounded shoulders, the neck, the calm and bloodless face, the little nose, and the drawing of the nostrils, the extraordinary waxen pallor, the eyelids laid like rose-leaves upon the eyes that death has closed for ever. An Ascension lily lay within the arm, in the pale hand. Candles were burning, and the soft smell of wax mixed with the perfume of the roses.
They put the Bible away in a rough box where they kept it among rose-leaves ignorant priests of the lovely mystery of Him who was with them always and without a word went each his own way, not happy, for were they not leaving Him under the elder-tree, lonely and shadowy, where it was their custom to meet!
Gretchen and Anna had learned in crises, such as the present to restrain the superabundant vitality they had inherited. If their cheekbones were a little too high, their Delft blue eyes a little too small, their colour was of the proverbial rose-leaves and cream. Gene Hollister's difficulty was to know which to marry.
So, repelled by the horror of twentieth-century "style," she had hidden her manuscripts deeper than ever in the old bureau, under little silk sachets of dried rose-leaves and lavender, as though they were love-letters or old lace. And when sometimes she shut herself up and read them over she felt like one of Hamlet's "guilty creatures sitting at a play."
I noticed how that my lady seemed restless, and would start at the clap o' a door, or when Herne did come suddenly upon her. And one day she leaned from a window, as I swept up the rose-leaves from the grass on the east terrace, and called to me to come thither. She was as white as her kirtle, and her gray eyes were dark like water before a storm. She did not look at me, but beyond into the air.
Not even doing that much, so that the old lady were busy and pleased, he would quietly swallow what was given him, merely taking a corrective dip of hands and face into the great bowl of dried rose-leaves, and into the other great bowl of dried lavender, and then would go out, as confident in the sweetening powers of Cloisterham Weir and a wholesome mind, as Lady Macbeth was hopeless of those of all the seas that roll.
I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.
I can no more remove it than I could the thunder-cloud from Jehovah's arch." I trembled at the strength of his language, and it seemed as if the shadow were stealing over my own soul. His employment was prophetic. He was pulling the rose-leaves from my basket, and scattering them unconsciously on the floor. "See what I have done," said he, looking down on the wreck.
The handkerchiefs, grouped in dozens, were strewn with dried violets and rose-leaves to make them sweet. Lavender-bags and sachets of orris lay among the linen; and perfumes as of Araby were discernible whenever a drawer in the bureau was pulled out. So the winter passed, and now spring was come; and the two girls on the doorsteps were talking about the wedding, which seemed very near now.
Lucy with her apron full of rose-leaves, letting them float away while she cons the children's lesson for the morrow with Merrycourt? They be no great loss, when the place is full of roses. Or why could you not call to the wench to take better heed of them, instead of making all this pother? 'A pretty sort of lesson it is like to be!
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