Sleep, Pale Sister Read Free Page B

violent. I offered to lend her some good, improving books, and was delighted when she read them dutifully. There was no wilfulness in her: she seemed created to embody all the feminine virtues without any of the perversity of that sex.
    I had never wanted to be a bachelor, but my mistrust of women, born of my professional contact with them, had led me to doubt whether I would ever find St Paul’s ‘one in a thousand’, who is virtuous and obedient. However, as I saw more of Effie, as I was charmed by her beauty and her sweet ways, I realized that, after all, there was a way to achieve that ideal.
    There was no taint on Effie: she was absolutely pure. If I could nurture her qualities, if I could keep a fatherly eye on her development, I was certain that I could make of her something rare, something wonderful. I would protect her from the rest of the world, educate her to be my equal. I would mould her, then, the work done…as I formulated the idea my mind threw back at me the memory of a small boy in a room full of forbidden marvels, and that fleeting, nostalgic scent of jasmine seemed to fill the air. For the first time the image brought no accompanying twist of guilt: Effie’s purity would redeem me, I knew it. There was nothing worldly, nothing sensual about her; hers was the cool indifference of the true innocent. Through her I would find salvation.
    I engaged private tutors for her—I wanted her to have as little contact with other children as possible—I bought her clothes and books. I employed a respectable housekeeper for her mother and aunt so that Effie would not have to waste time helping around the house. I befriended her tedious mother so that I should have the excuse to frequent Cranbourn Alley and I kept the money flowing in.
    I was painting Effie almost incessantly now, abandoning all my other models unless they were needed as secondaries in a canvas. I concentrated upon Effie: Effie at twelve, taller, in the pretty white dresses and blue sashes I encouraged her mother to buy; Effie at thirteen, fourteen, her dancer’s figure as graceful as a colt’s; at fifteen, her eyes and lips darkening, her face taking a more adult shape; at sixteen, her pale hair bound up in a tidy coronet around her brow, her mouth the tenderest of arcs, her lovely rain-coloured eyes heavy-lidded, the skin around them so fine that it seemed almost bruised.
    I must have drawn or painted Effie a hundred times: she was Cinderella, she was Mary, she was the young novice in The Passion-Flower, she was Beatrice in Heaven, Juliet in the tomb, draped with lilies and trailing convolvulus for Ophelia , in rags for The Little Beggar Girl . My final portrait of her at that time was The Sleeping Beauty , so like My Sister’s Sleep in composition, showing Effie all in white again, like a bride or a novice, lying on the same little girl’s bed, her hair, much longer than it had been when she was ten—I had always urged her never to cut it—trailing on to the floor, where a century’s worth of dust lingers. Sunlight filters through the skylight on to the floor, and tendrils of ivy have begun to drop through the window into the room. A skeleton in armour, twined all over with the encroaching ivy, warns of the perils of disturbing the sleeping innocent. Effie’s face is turned towards the light; she smiles in her sleep, unaware of the desolation around her.
    I could wait no longer. I had woven the enchantment which had kept her waiting for me all these years: now was the time to break it. She was still very young, I knew, but to wait another year might be to risk losing her for ever.
    Her mother did not even seem surprised that I should want to marry her daughter. Indeed, the eagerness with which she welcomed the offer made me suspect that she had already envisaged the possibility. I was a rich man, after all: it was certain that if Effie married me I would be obliged to help her relatives, and I was almost forty while Effie was seventeen.