Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/114

quietude, like the shivering of the swimmer at his first contact with the water. She found him strange, fantastic, almost terrifying. At times, there seemed to hang about him a sadness like that of a melancholy landscape; he was dull and sombre like a canal traversing a district encumbered with gravel and ash. The gloom, which thus intermittently weighed upon his mind passed like a film over his fine blue eyes. At the very height of his accesses of kindness and tenderness occurred reactions, chilliness, sudden shrinkings. His character seemed drawn-and-quartered by continual set-backs. No matter, from the first appearance of Kehlmark she felt herself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom spoke an unknown voice, which would always thrill her; she had vowed herself to him without hope of salvation as to a god who would banish her eternally far from his paradise, and when she looked at him there was in her eyes the expression of a martyr vainly searching the skies for the flight of angels that should come and deliver him. And yet, she was still ignorant of the rites and the worst trials of the religion of love to which she had consecrated herself.