So fixed and unalterable was that belief that it amounted
to positive knowledge, so far as it constituted a motive of action. In
her strange youth wild dreams had possessed her, and some of them, often
dreamed again, had become realities to her now. Her powers were natural,
those gifts which from time to time are seen in men and women, which are
alternately scoffed at as impostures, or accepted as facts, but which
are never understood either by their possessor or by those who witness
the results. She had from childhood the power to charm with eye and hand
all living things, the fascination which takes hold of the consciousness
through sight and touch and word, and lulls it to sleep. It was
witchery, and she was called a witch. In earlier centuries her hideous
fate would have been sealed from the first day when, under her childish
gaze, a wolf that had been taken alive in the Bohemian forest crawled
fawning to her feet, at the full length of its chain, and laid its
savage head under her hand, and closed its bloodshot eyes and slept
before her. Those who had seen had taken her and taught her how to
use what she possessed according to their own shadowy beliefs and dim
traditions of the half-forgotten magic in a distant land. They had
filled her heart with longings and her brain with dreams, and she had
grown up to believe that one day love would come suddenly upon her and
bear her away through the enchanted gates of the earthly paradise; once
only that love would come, and the supreme danger of her life would be
that she should not know it when it was at hand.
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