On a chill, sunny morning in April, Gregory Jardine went out on to his
balcony before breakfast and stood leaning there as was his wont,
looking down over his view. The purpling tree-tops in the park emerged
from a light morning mist. The sky, of the palest blue, seemed very high
and was streaked with white. Spring was in the air and he could see
daffodils shining here and there on the slopes of green.
He had just read Karen Woodruff's last letter, and he was in the mood,
charmed, amused and touched, that her letters always brought. Never, he
thought, had there been such sweet and such funny letters; so frank and
so impersonal; so simple and so mature. During these months of their
correspondence the thought of her had been constantly in his mind,
mingling now not only with his own deep and distant memories, but, it
seemed, with hers, so that while she still walked with him over the
hills of his boyhood and stooped to look with him at the spring gushing
from under the bracken, they also brushed together the dry, soft snow
from the trailing arbutus, or stood above the sea on the Cornish
headlands. Never in his life had he so possessed the past and been so
aware of it. His youth was with him, even though he still thought of his
relation to Karen Woodruff as a paternal and unequal one; imagining a
crisis in which his wisdom and knowledge of the world might serve her; a
foolish love-affair, perhaps, that he would disentangle; or a disaster
connected with the great woman under whose protection she lived; he
could so easily imagine disasters befalling Madame von Marwitz and
involving everyone around her. And now in a week's time he would be in
Cornwall and seeing again the little Hans Andersen heroine. This was the
thought that emerged from the sweet vagrancy of his mood; and, as it
came, he was pierced suddenly with a strange rapture and fear that had
in it the very essence of the spring-time.
Gregory had continued to think of the girl he was to marry in the guise
of a Constance Armytage, and although Constance Armytage's engagement to
another man found him unmoved, except with relief for the solution of
what had really ceased to be a perplexity--since, apparently, he could
not manage to fall in love with her--this fact had not been revealing,
since he still continued to think of Constance as the type, if she had
ceased to be the person. Karen Woodruff was almost the last type he
could have fixed upon. She fitted nowhere into his actual life. She only
fitted into the life of dreams and memories.
So now, still looking down at the trees and daffodils, he drew a long
breath and tried to smile over what had been a trick of the imagination
and to relegate Karen to the place of half-humorous dreams. He tried to
think calmly of her. He visualized her in her oddity and child-likeness;
seeing the flat blue bows of the concert; the old-fashioned gold locket
of the tea; the sealskin cap of the station. But still, it was apparent,
the infection of the season was working in him; for these trivial bits
of her personality had become overwhelmingly sweet and wonderful. The
essential Karen infused them. Her limpid grey eyes looked into his. She
said, so ridiculously, so adorably: "My guardian likes best to be called
von Marwitz by those who know her personally." She laughed, the tip of
her tongue caught between her teeth. From the place of dream and memory,
the living longing for her actual self emerged indomitably.
Gregory turned from the balcony and went inside. He was dazed. Her
primroses stood about the room in the white and blue bowls. He wanted to
kiss them. Controlling the impulse, which seemed to him almost insane,
he looked at them instead and argued with himself. In love? But one
didn't fall in love like that between shaving and breakfast. What
possessed him was a transient form of _idée fixe_, and he had behaved
very foolishly in playing fairy-godfather to a dear little girl. But at
this relegating phrase his sense of humour rose to mock him. He could
not relegate Karen Woodruff as a dear little girl. It was he who had
behaved like a boy, while she had maintained the calm simplicities of
the mature. He hadn't the faintest right to hope that she saw anything
in his correspondence but what she had herself brought to it. Fear fell
more strongly upon him. He sat down to his breakfast, his thoughts in
inextricable confusion. And while he drank his coffee and glanced
nervously down the columns of his newspaper, a hundred little filaments
of memory ran back and linked the beginning to the present. It had not
been so sudden. It had been there beside him, in him; and he had not
seen it. The meeting of their eyes in the long, grave interchange at the
concert had been full of presage. And why had he gone to tea at Mrs.
Forrester's? And why, above all why, had he dreamed that dream? It was
his real self who had felt no surprise when, at the edge of the forest,
she had said: "And I love you." The words had been spoken in answer to
his love.
Gregory laid down his paper and stared before him. He was in love.
Should he get over it? Did he want to get over it? Was it possible to
get over it if he did want to? And, this was the culmination, would she
have him? These questions drove him forth.
When Barker, his man, came to clear away the breakfast things he found
that the bacon and eggs had not been eaten. Barker was a stone-grey
personage who looked like a mid-Victorian Liberal statesman. His gravity
often passed into an air of despondent responsibility. "Mr. Jardine
hasn't eaten his breakfast," he said to his wife, who was Gregory's
cook. "It's this engagement of Miss Armytage's. He was more taken with
her than we'd thought."
Gregory had intended to motor down to Cornwall, still a rare opportunity
in those days; a friend who was going abroad had placed his car at his
disposal. But he sent the car ahead of him and, on the first day of his
freedom, started by train. Next day he motored over to the little
village near the Lizard.
It was a pale, crystalline Spring day. From heights, where the car
seemed to poise like a bird in mid-air, one saw the tranquil blue of the
sea. The woods were veiled in young green and the hedges thickly starred
with blackthorn. Over the great Goonhilly Downs a silvery sheen trembled
with impalpable colour and the gorse everywhere was breaking into gold.
It was a day of azure, illimitable distances; of exultation and delight.
Even if one were not in love one would feel oneself a lover on such a
day.
Gregory had told himself that he would be wise; that he would go
discreetly and make sure not only that he was really in love, but that
there was in his love a basis for life. Marriage must assure and secure
his life, not disturb and disintegrate it; and a love resisted and put
aside unspoken may soon be relegated to the place of fond and transient
dream. Perhaps the little Hans Andersen heroine would settle happily
into such a dream. How little he had seen of her. But while he thus
schooled himself, while the white roads curved and beckoned and unrolled
their long ribbons, the certainties he needed of himself merged more and
more into the certainties he needed of her. And he felt his heart, in
the singing speed, lift and fly towards the beloved.
He had written to her and told her the hour of his arrival, and at a
turning he suddenly saw her standing above the road on one of the stone
stiles of the country. Dressed in white and poised against the blue,
while she kept watch for his coming, she was like a calm, far-gazing
figure-head on a ship, and the ship that bore her seemed to have soared
into sight.
She was new, yet unchanged. Her attitude, her smile, as she held up an
arresting hand to the chauffeur, filled him with delight and anxiety. It
disconcerted him to find how new she was. He felt that he spoke
confusedly to her when she came to shake his hand.
"People often lose their way in coming to see Tante," she said, and it
struck him, even in the midst of his preoccupation with her, as too
sweetly absurd that the first sentence she spoke to him should sound the
familiar chime. "They have gone mistakenly down the lane that leads to
the cliff path, that one there, or the road that leads out to the moors.
And one poor man was quite lost and never found his way to us at all. It
meant, for he had only a day or two to spend in England, that he did not
see her for another year. Tante has had signs put up since then; but
even now people can go wrong."
She mounted beside the chauffeur so that she could guide him down the
last bit of road, sitting sideways, her arm laid along the back of the
seat. From time to time she smiled at Gregory.
She was a person who accepted the unusual easily and with no personal
conjecture. She was so accustomed, no doubt, to the sudden appearance of
all sorts of people, that she had no discriminations to apply to his
case. There was no shyness and no surmise in her manner. She smiled at
him as composedly as she had smiled over the Great Wall of China in Mrs.
Forrester's drawing-room, and her pleasure in seeing him was neither
less frank nor more intimate.
She wore a broad hat of sun-burnt straw and a white serge coat and skirt
that looked as if they had shrunk in frequent washings. Her white blouse
had the little frills at neck and wrists and around her throat was the
gold locket on its black ribbon. Her eyes, when she turned them on him
and smiled, seemed to open distances like the limitlessness of the
moorland. Her tawny skin and shining golden hair were like the gorse and
primroses and she in her serenity and gladness like the day personified.
They did not attempt to talk through the loudly purring monotones of the
car, which picked its way swiftly and delicately down the turning road
and then skimmed lightly on the level ground between hedges of fuchsia
and veronica. As the prospect opened Karen pointed to the golden
shoulder of a headland bathed in sunlight and the horizon line of the
sea beyond. They turned among wind-bitten Cornish elms, leaning inland,
and Gregory saw among them the glimmer of Les Solitudes.
It was a white-walled house with a high-pitched roof of grey shingles,
delicately rippling; a house almost rustic, yet more nearly noble, very
beautiful; simple, yet unobtrusively adapted to luxury. Simplicity
reigned within, though one felt luxury there in a chrysalis condition,
folded exquisitely and elaborately away and waiting the return of the
enchantress.
Karen led him across the shining spaces of the hall and into the
morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and,
with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting
background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it
was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically,
she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that
the famous altar-piece had been temporarily removed and that he could
not really judge the chapel without its culminating and consecrating
object. "If only Tante were here!" she said. "It seems so strange that
anyone should see Les Solitudes who has not seen her in it. I do not
remember that it has ever happened before. This is the dining-room--yes,
I like to show it all to you--she planned it all herself, you know--is
it not a beautiful room? You see, though we are Les Solitudes, we can
seat a large dinner-party and Tante has sometimes many guests; not often
though; this is her place of peace and rest. She collected all this
Jacobean furniture; connoisseurs say that it is very beautiful. The
music-room, alas, is closed; but I will show you the garden--and Mrs.
Talcott in it. I am eager for you and Mrs. Talcott to meet."
He would rather have stayed and talked to her in the morning-room; but
she compelled him, rather as a sacristan compels the slightly bewildered
sight-seer, to pass on to the next point of interest. She led him out to
the upper terrace of the garden, which dropped, ledge by ledge, with low
walls and winding hedges, down the cliff-side. She pointed out to him
the sea-front of the house, with its wide verandah and clustered trees
and the beautiful dip of the roof over the upper windows, far gazing
little dormer windows above these. Tante, she told him, had designed the
house. "That is her room, the corner one," she said. "She can see the
sunrise from her bed."
Gregory was interested neither in Madame von Marwitz's advantages nor in
her achievements. He asked Karen where her own room was. It was at the
back of the house, she said; a dear little room, far up. She, too, had a
glimpse of the Eastern headland and of the sunrise.
They were walking along the paths, their borders starred as yet frugally
with hints of later glories; but already the aubrietia and arabis made
bosses of white or purple on the walls, and in a little copse daffodils
grew thickly.
"There is Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, quickening her pace. Evidently she
considered Mrs. Talcott, in her relation to Tante, as an important
feature of Les Solitudes.
It was her relation to Karen that caused Gregory to look with interest
at the stout old lady, dressed in black alpaca, who was stooping over a
flower-border at a little distance from them. He had often wondered what
this sole companion of Karen's cloistered life was like. Mrs. Talcott's
skirts were short; her shoes thick-soled and square-toed, fastening with
a strap and button over white stockings at the ankle. She wore a round
straw hat, like a child's, and had a basket of gardening implements
beside her.
"Mrs. Talcott, here is Mr. Jardine," Karen announced, as they approached
her.
Mrs. Talcott raised herself slowly and turned to them, drawing off her
gardening gloves. She was a funny looking old woman, funnier than Karen
had prepared him for finding her, and uglier. Her large face,
wallet-shaped and sallow, was scattered over with white moles, or
rather, warts, one of which, on her eyelid, caused it to droop over her
eye and to blink sometimes, suddenly. She had a short, indefinite nose
and long, large lips firmly folded. With its updrawn hair and
impassivity her face recalled that of a Chinese image; but more than of
anything else she gave Gregory the impression, vaguely and incongruously
tragic, of an old shipwrecked piece of oaken timber, washed up, finally,
out of reach of the waves, on some high, lonely beach; battered, though
still so solid; salted through and through; crusted with brine, and with
odd, bleached excrescences, like barnacles, adhering to it. Her look of
almost inhuman cleanliness added force to the simile.
"Mr. Jardine heard Tante last winter, you know," said Karen, "and met
her at Mrs. Forrester's."
"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Sir," said Mrs. Talcott,
giving Gregory her hand.
"Mrs. Talcott is a great gardener," Karen went on. "Tante has the ideas
and Mrs. Talcott carries them out. And sometimes they aren't easy to
carry out, are they, Mrs. Talcott!"
Mrs. Talcott, her hands folded at her waist, contemplated her work.
"Mitchell made a mistake about the campanulas, Karen," she remarked.
"He's put the clump of blue over yonder, instead of the white."
"Oh, Mrs. Talcott!" Karen turned to look. "And Tante specially wanted
the white there so that they should be against the sea. How very stupid
of Mitchell."
"They'll have to come out, I presume," said Mrs. Talcott, but without
emotion.
"And where is the _pyramidalis alba_?"
"Well, he's got that up in the flagged garden where she wanted the
blue," said Mrs. Talcott.
"And it will be so bad for them to move them again! What a pity! They
have been sent for specially," Karen explained to Gregory. "My guardian
heard of a particularly beautiful kind, and the white were to be for
this corner of the wall, you see that they would look very lovely
against the sea, and the blue were to be among the white veronica and
white lupins in the flagged garden. And now they are all planted wrong,
and so accurately and solidly wrong," she walked ahead of Mrs. Talcott
examining the offending plants. "Are you quite sure they're wrong, Mrs.
Talcott?"
"Dead sure," Mrs. Talcott made reply. "He did it this morning when I was
in the dairy. He didn't understand, or got muddled, or something. I'll
commence changing them round as soon as I've done this weeding. It'll be
a good two hours' work."
"No, you must not do it till I can help you," said Karen. "To-morrow
morning." She had a manner at once deferential and masterful of
addressing the old lady. They were friendly without being intimate. "Now
promise me that you will wait till I can help you."
"Well, I guess I won't promise. I like to get things off my mind right
away," said Mrs. Talcott. If Karen was masterful, she was not yielding.
"I'll see how the time goes after tea. Don't you bother about it."
They left her bending again over her beds. "She is very strong, but I
think sometimes she works too hard," said Karen.
By a winding way she led him to the high flagged garden with its
encompassing trees and far blue prospect, and here they sat for a little
while in the sunlight and talked. "How different all this must be from
your home in Northumberland," said Karen. "I have never been to
Northumberland. Is your brother much there? Is he like you? Have you
brothers and sisters?"
She questioned him with the frank interest with which he wished to
question her. He told her about Oliver and said that he wasn't like
himself. A faint flavour of irony came into his voice in speaking of his
elder brother and finding Karen's calm eyes dwelling on him he wondered
if she thought him unfair. "We always get on well enough," he said, "but
we haven't much in common. He is a good, dull fellow, half alive."
"And you are very much alive."
"Yes, on the whole, I think so," he answered, smiling, but sensitively
aware of a possible hint of irony in her. But she had intended none. She
continued to look at him calmly. "You are making use of all of yourself;
that is to be alive, Tante always says; and I feel that it is true of
you. And his wife? the wife of the dull hunting brother? Does she hunt
too and think of foxes most?"
He could assure her that Betty quite made up in the variety of her
activities for Oliver's deficiencies. Karen was interested in the
American Betty and especially in hearing that she had been at the
concert from which their own acquaintance dated. She asked him, walking
back to the house, if he had seen Mrs. Forrester. "She is an old friend
of yours, isn't she?" she said.
"That must be nice. She was so kind to me that last day in London. Tante
is very fond of her; very, very fond. I hardly think there is anyone of
all her friends she has more feeling for. Here is Victor, come to greet
you. You remember Victor, and how he nearly missed the train."
The great, benignant dog came down the path to them and as they walked
Karen laid her hand upon his head, telling Gregory that Sir Alliston had
given him to Tante when he was quite a tiny puppy. "You saw Sir
Alliston, that sad, gentle poet? There is another person that Tante
loves." It was with a slight stir of discomfort that Gregory realised
more fully from these assessments how final for Karen was the question
of Tante's likes and dislikes.
They were on the verandah when she paused. "But I think, though the
music-room is closed, that you must see the portrait."
"The portrait? Of you?" Actually, and sincerely, he was off the track.
"Of me? Oh no," said Karen, laughing a little. "Why should it be of me?
Of my guardian, of course. Perhaps you know it. It is by Sargent and was
in the Royal Academy some years ago."
"I must have missed it. Am I to see it now?"
"Yes. I will ask Mrs. Talcott for the key and we will draw all the
blinds and you shall see it." They walked back to the garden in search
of Mrs. Talcott.
"Do you like it?" Gregory asked.
Karen reflected for a moment and then said; "He understands her better
than Mr. Drew does, or, at all events, does not try to make up for what
he does not understand by elaborations. But there are blanks!--oh
blanks!--However, it is a very magnificent picture and you shall see.
Mrs. Talcott, may I have the key of the music-room? I want to show the
Sargent to Mr. Jardine."
They had come to the old woman again, and again she slowly righted
herself from her stooping posture. "It's in my room, I'll come and get
it," said Mrs. Talcott, and on Karen's protesting against this, she
observed that it was about tea-time, anyway. She preceded them to the
house.
"But I do beg," Karen stopped her in the hall. "Let me get it. You shall
tell me where it is."
Mrs. Talcott yielded. "In my left top drawer on the right hand side
under the pile of handkerchiefs," she recited. "Thanks, Karen."
While Karen was gone, Mrs. Talcott in the hall stood in front of Gregory
and looked past him in silence into the morning-room. She did not seem
to feel it in any sense incumbent upon her to entertain him, though
there was nothing forbidding in her manner. But happening presently,
while they waited, to glance at the droll old woman, he found her eyes
fixed on him in a singularly piercing, if singularly impassive, gaze.
She looked away again with no change of expression, shifting her weight
from one hip to the other, and something in the attitude suggested to
Gregory that she had spent a great part of her life in waiting. She had
a capacity, he inferred, for indefinite waiting. Karen came happily
running down the stairs, holding the key.
They went into the dim, white room where swathed presences stood as if
austerely welcoming them. Karen drew up the blind and Mrs. Talcott,
going to the end of the room, mounted a chair and dexterously twitched
from its place the sheet that covered the great portrait. Then, standing
beside it, and still holding its covering, she looked, not at it, but,
meditatively, out at the sea that crossed with its horizon line the four
long windows. Karen, also in silence, came and stood beside Gregory.
It was indeed a remarkable picture; white and black; silver and green.
To a painter's eye the arresting balance of these colours would have
first appealed and the defiant charm with which the angular surfaces
of the grand piano and the soft curves of the woman seated at it
were combined. The almost impalpable white of an azalea with its
flame-green foliage, and a silver statuette, poised high on a
slender column of white chalcedony, were the only accessories. But
after the first delighted draught of wonder it was the face of Madame
Okraska--pre-eminently Madame Okraska in this portrait--that compelled
one to concentration. She sat, turning from the piano, her knees
crossed, one arm cast over them, the other resting along the edge of the
key-board. The head drooped slightly and the eyes looked out just below
the spectator's eyes, so that in poise and glance it recalled somewhat
Michael Angelo's Lorenzo da Medici. And something that Gregory had felt
in her from the first, and that had roused in him dim hostilities and
ironies, was now more fully revealed. The artist seemed to have looked
through the soft mask of the woman's flesh, through the disturbing and
compelling forces of her own consciousness, to the very structure and
anatomy of her character. Atavistic, sub-conscious revelations were in
the face. It was to see, in terms of art, a scientific demonstration of
race, temperament, and the results of their interplay with environment.
The languors, the feverish indolences, the caprice of generations of
Spanish exiles were there, and the ambiguity, the fierceness of Slav
ancestry. And, subtly interwoven, were the marks of her public life upon
her. The face, so moulded to indifference, was yet so aware of
observation, so adjusted to it, so insatiable of it, that, sitting
there, absorbed and brooding, lovely with her looped pearls and
diamonds, her silver broideries and silken fringes, she was a product of
the public, a creature reared on adulation, breathing it in softly,
peacefully, as the white flowers beside her breathed in light and air.
Her craftsmanship, her genius, though indicated, were submerged in this
pervasive quality of an indifference based securely on the ever present
consciousness that none could be indifferent to her. And more than the
passive acceptance and security was indicated. Strange, sleeping
potentialities lurked in the face; as at the turn of a kaleidoscope,
Gregory could fancy it suddenly transformed, by some hostile touch, some
menace, to a savage violence and rapacity. He was aware, standing
between the girl who worshipped her and the devoted old woman, of the
pang of a curious anxiety.
"Well," said Karen at last, and she looked from the picture to him.
"What do you think of it?"
"It's splendid," said Gregory. "It's very fine. And beautiful."
"But does it altogether satisfy you?" Her eyes were again on the
portrait. "What is lacking, I cannot say; but it seems to me that it is
painted with intelligence only, not with love. It is Madame Okraska, the
great genius; but it is not Tante; it is not even Madame von Marwitz."
The portrait seemed to Gregory to go so much further and so much deeper
than what he had himself seen that it was difficult to believe that hers
might be the deepest vision, but he was glad to take refuge in the
possibility. "It does seem to me wonderfully like," he said. "But then I
don't know 'Tante.'"
Karen now glanced at Mrs. Talcott. "It is a great bone of contention
between us," she said, smiling at the old lady, yet smiling, Gregory
observed, with a touch of challenge. "She feels it quite complete. That,
in someone who does know Tante, I cannot understand."
Mrs. Talcott, making no reply, glanced up at the portrait and then,
again, out at the sea.
Gregory looked at her with awakened curiosity. This agreement was an
unexpected prop for him. "You, too, think it a perfect likeness?" he
asked her. Her old blue eyes, old in the antique tranquillity of their
regard, yet still of such a vivid, unfaded turquoise, turned on him and
again he had that impression of an impassive piercing.
"It seems to me about as good a picture as anyone's likely to get," said
Mrs. Talcott.
"Yes, but, oh Mrs. Talcott"--with controlled impatience Karen took her
up--"surely you see,--it isn't Tante. It is a genius, a great woman, a
beautiful woman, a beautiful and poetic creature, of course;--he has
seen all that--who wouldn't? but it is almost a woman without a heart.
There is something heartless there. I always feel it. And when one
thinks of Tante!" And Mrs. Talcott remaining silent, she insisted: "Can
you really say you don't see what I mean?"
"Well, I never cared much about pictures anyway," Mrs. Talcott now
remarked.
"Well, but you care for this one more than I do!" Karen returned, with a
laugh of vexation. "It isn't a question of pictures; it's a question of
a likeness. You really think that this does Tante justice? It's that I
can't understand."
Mrs. Talcott, thus pursued, again looked up at the portrait, and
continued, now, to look at it for several moments. And as she stood
there, looking up, she suddenly and comically reminded Gregory of the
Frog gardener before the door in "Alice," with his stubborn and
deliberate misunderstanding. He could almost have expected to see Mrs.
Talcott advance her thumb and rub the portrait, as if to probe the cause
of her questioner's persistence. When she finally spoke it was only to
vary her former judgment: "It seems to me about as good a picture as
Mercedes is likely to get taken," she said. She pronounced the Spanish
name: "Mursadees."
Karen, after this, abandoned her attempt to convince Mrs. Talcott. Tea
was ready, and they went into the morning-room. Here Mrs. Talcott
presided at the tea-table, and for all his dominating preoccupation she
continued to engage a large part of Gregory's attention. She sat,
leaning back in her chair, slowly eating, her eyes, like tiny, blue
stones, immeasurably remote, immeasurably sad, fixed on the sea.
"Is it long since you were in America?" he asked her. He felt drawn to
Mrs. Talcott.
"Why, I guess it's getting on for twenty-five years now," she replied,
after considering for a moment; "since I've lived there. I've been over
three or four times with Mercedes; on tours."
"Twenty-five years since you came over here? That is a long time."
"Oh, it's more than that since I came," said Mrs. Talcott. "Twenty-five
years since I lived at home. I came over first nearly fifty years ago.
Yes; it's a long time."
"Dear me; you have lived most of your life here, then."
"Yes; you may say I have."
"And don't you ever want to go back to America to stay?"
"I don't know as I do," said Mrs. Talcott.
"You're fonder of it over here, like so many of your compatriots?"
"Well, I don't know as I am," Mrs. Talcott, who had a genius it seemed
for non-committal statements, varied; and then, as though aware that her
answers might seem ungracious, she added: "All my folks are dead.
There's no reason for my wanting to go home that I can think of."
"Besides, Mrs. Talcott," Karen now helped her on, "home to you is where
Tante is, isn't it. Mrs. Talcott has lived with Tante ever since Tante
was born. No one in the world knows her as well as she does. It is
rather wonderful to think about." She had the air, finding Mrs. Talcott
appreciated, of putting forward for her her great claim to distinction.
"Yes; I know Mercedes pretty well," Mrs. Talcott conceded.
"How I love to hear about it," said Karen; "about her first concert, you
know, Mrs. Talcott, when you curled her hair--such long, bright brown
hair, she had, and so thick, falling below her waist, didn't it?" Mrs.
Talcott nodded with a certain complacency. "And she wore a little white
muslin frock and white shoes and a blue sash; she was only nine years
old; it was a great concert in Warsaw. And she didn't want her hair
curled, and combed it all out with her fingers just before going on to
the platform--didn't she?"
Mrs. Talcott was slightly smiling over these reminiscences. "Smart
little thing," she commented. "She did it the last minute so as it was
too late for me to fix it again. It made me feel dreadful her going on
to the platform with her head all mussed up like that. She looked mighty
pretty all the same."
"And she was right, too, wasn't she?" said Karen, elated, evidently, at
having so successfully drawn Mrs. Talcott out. "Her hair was never
curly, was it. It looked better straight, I'm sure."
"Well, I don't know about that," said Mrs. Talcott. "I always like it
curled best, when she was little. But I had to own to myself she looked
mighty pretty, though I was so mad at her."
"Tante has always had her own way, I imagine," said Karen, "about
anything she set her mind on. She had her way about being an infant
prodigy; though you were so right about that--she has often said so,
hasn't she, and how thankful she is that you were able to stop it before
it did her harm. I must show you our photographs of Tante, Mr. Jardine.
We have volumes and volumes, and boxes and boxes of them. They are far
more like her, I think, many of them, than the portrait. Some of them
too dear and quaint--when she was quite tiny."
Tea was over and Karen, rising, looked towards the shelves where,
evidently, the volumes and boxes were kept.
"I really think I'd rather see some more of this lovely place, first,"
said Gregory. "Do take me further along the cliff. I could see the
photographs, you know, the next time I come."
He, too, had risen and was smiling at her with a little constraint.
Karen, arrested on her way to the photographs, looked at him in
surprise. "Will you come again? You are to be in Cornwall so long?"
"I'm to be here about a fortnight and I should like to come often, if I
may." She was unaware, disconcertingly unaware; yet her surprise showed
the frankest pleasure.
"How very nice," she said. "I did not think that you could come all that
way more than once."
While they spoke, Mrs. Talcott's ancient, turquoise eyes were upon them,
and in her presence Gregory found it easier to say things than it would
have been to say them to Karen alone. Already, he felt sure, Mrs.
Talcott understood, and if it was easy to say things in her presence
might that not be because he guessed that she sympathised? "But I came
down to Cornwall to see you," he said, leaning on his chair back and
tilting it a little while he smiled at Karen.
Her pleasure rose in a flush to her cheek. "To see me?"
"Yes; I felt from our letters that we ought to become great friends."
She looked at him, pondering the unlooked-for possibility he put before
her. "Great friends?" she repeated. "I have never had a great friend of
my own. Friends, of course; the Lippheims and the Belots; and Strepoff;
and you, of course, Mrs. Talcott; but never, really, a great friend
quite of my own, for they are Tante's friends first and come through
Tante. Of course you have come through Tante, too," said Karen, with
evident satisfaction; "only not quite in the same way."
"Not at all in the same way," said Gregory. "Don't forget. We met at the
concert, and without any introduction! It has nothing to do with Madame
von Marwitz this time. It's quite on our own."
"Oh, but I would so much rather have it come through her, if we are to
be great friends," Karen returned, smiling, though reflectively. "I
think we are to be, for I felt you to be my friend from that first
moment. But it was at the concert that we met and it was Tante's
concert. So that it was not quite on our own. I want it to be through
Tante," she went on, "because it pleases me very much to think that we
may be great friends, and my happy things have come to me through Tante,
always."