The sweet old odor, so well remembered, half musty, half fresh, of cobwebbed wood, lichened along the lintels and doorway beams, assailed him while he groped lightly around the walls, automatically reaching out his hand to the doll’s locker, the little row of shelves, the low, rustic bench and the table that, he remembered as it rocked slightly under his touch, had always been unsteady. All were in their old, accustomed places, and among them he saw himself a ghost, some sightless, soundless creature hovering in the darkness.
The darkness and the familiar forms he evoked from it grew oppressive, and he stepped out again into the night, where, by contrast with the uncanny blindness, he found a new distinctness of form, almost of color, and where a memory, old and deep, seemed to seize him with gentle, compelling hands, in the fragrance of the white roses growing near the summer-house. Wine-like and intoxicating, it filled the air with magic; and he had gone but a few steps farther when, like a picture called up by the enchantment, he saw the present, the future too, it seemed, and, with a shock that for all its quiet violence was not unexpected, stood still to gaze, to feel in the one moment of memory and forecast all his life gathered into his contemplation.
Eppie sat on a low garden bench in the garden’s most hidden corner. With the fresh keenness of sight he could see the clustering white roses on the wall behind her, see against them the darkness of her hair, the whiter whiteness of her dress, as she sat there with head a little bent, looking down, the long white shawl folded about her.
It was no longer the Eppie of the past, not even the Eppie of the present: the present was only that long pause. It was the future that waited there, silent, motionless, almost as if asleep; waited for the word and touch that would reveal it.
She had not heard his light step, and it seemed to be in the very stillness of his pause that the sense of his presence came to her. Raising her head she looked round at him.
He could only see the narrow oval of her face, but he felt her look; it seized him, compelling as the fragrance had been--compelling but not gentle. He felt it like firm hands upon him while he walked on slowly toward her, and not until he was near her, not until he had sat down beside her, did he see as well as feel her fixed and hostile gaze.