Tante Part 15

"Has it not been a beautiful afternoon?" Karen continued. "What have you been doing in the garden, Mrs. Talcott?"

"I sowed a big bed of mignonette down by the arbour, and Mitch.e.l.l and I set out a good lot of plants."

Mrs. Talcott made her replies to the questions that Karen continued to ask, in an even voice in which Gregory, who kept his dismal eyes upon her, detected a melancholy patience. Mrs. Talcott must perceive his state to be already one of "hanging on." Of her sympathy he was, at all events, a.s.sured. She showed it by rising as soon as he and Karen had drunk their tea. "I've got some more things to do," she said. "Good-bye, Mr. Jardine. Are you coming over to-morrow?"

"No," said Gregory taking Mrs. Talcott's hand. "My holiday is over. I shall be going back to town to-morrow."

Mrs. Talcott looked into his eyes. "Well, that's too bad," she observed.

"Isn't it? I'd far rather stay here, I can a.s.sure you," said Gregory.

"We'll miss you, I guess," said Mrs. Talcott. "I'm very glad to have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance."

"And I of making yours."

Mrs. Talcott departed and Gregory turned to Karen. She was standing near the window, looking at him.

"We must say good-bye, too, I suppose," said Gregory, mastering his grief. "You will give me your guardian's address so that I can write to her at once?"

Her face had worn the aspect of a grey, pa.s.sive sheet of water; a radiant pallor now seemed struck from its dulled surface.

"You are going to write to Tante?" she said.

"Isn't that the next step?" Gregory asked. "You will write, too, won't you? Or is it part of my ordeal that I'm to plead my cause alone?"

Karen had clasped her hands together on her breast and, in the eyes fixed on his, tears gathered. "Do not speak harshly," she said. "I am so sorry there must be the ordeal. But so happy, too--so suddenly. Because I believed that you were going to leave me since you thought me so wrong and so unloving."

"Going to leave you, Karen?" Gregory repeated in amazement. Desperate amus.e.m.e.nt struggled in his face with self-reproach. "My darling child, what must you think of me? And, actually, you'd have let me go?" He had come to her and taken her hands in his.

"What else could I do?"

"Such an idiot would have deserved it? Could you believe me such an idiot? Darling, you so astonish me. What a strange, indomitable creature you are."

"What else could I do, Gregory?" she repeated, looking into his face and not smiling in answer to his smiling, frowning gaze.

"Love me more; that's what you could have done--a great deal more," said Gregory. "That's what you must do, Karen. I can't bear to think that you wouldn't marry me without her consent. I can't bear to think that you don't love me enough. But leave you because you don't love me as much as I want you to love me! My darling, how little you understand."

"You seemed very angry," said Karen. "I was so unhappy. I don't know how I should have borne it if you had gone away and left me like this. But love should not make one weak, Gregory. There you are wrong, to think it is because I do not love you."

"Ah, you'll find out if I'm wrong!" Gregory exclaimed with tender conviction. "You'll find out how much more you are to love me. Oh, yes, I will kiss you good-bye, Karen. I don't care if all the Tantes in the world forbid it!"

In thinking afterwards of these last moments that they had had together, the discomfitures and dismays of the afternoon tended to resolve themselves for Gregory into the memory of the final yielding. She had let him take her into his arms, and with the joy was the added sweetness of knowing that in permitting and reciprocating his unauthorized kiss she sacrificed some principles, at all events, for his sake.

CHAPTER XII

Madame von Marwitz was sitting on the great terrace of a country-house in Ma.s.sachusetts, opening and reading her post, as we have already seen her do. Impatient and weary as the occupation often made her, she yet depended upon the morning waves of adulation that lapped in upon her from every quarter of the earth. To miss the fullness of the tide gave her, when by chance there was deficiency, the feeling that badly made _cafe au lait_ gave her at the beginning of the day; something was wrong; the expected stimulant lacked in force or in flavour, and coffee that was not strong and sweet and aromatic was a mishap so unusual that, when it occurred, it became an offence almost gross and unnatural, as did a post that brought few letters of homage and appreciation. To-day the mental coffee was as strong and as perfumed as that of which she had shortly before partaken in her lovely little _Louis Quinze_ boudoir, after she had come in from her bath. The bath-room was like that of a Roman Empress, all white marble, with a square of emerald water into which one descended down shallow marble steps. Madame von Marwitz was amused by the complexities of luxury among which she found herself, some of which, even to her, were novel. "_Eh, eh, ma chere_," she had said to Miss Scrotton, "beautiful if you will, and very beautiful; but its nails are too much polished, its hair too much _ondule_. I prefer a porcelain to a marble bath-tub." But the ingenuities of hospitality which the Aspreys--earnest and accomplished millionaires--lavished upon their guests made one, she owned, balmily comfortable. And as she sat now in her soft white draperies under a great silken sunshade, raised on a stand above her and looking in the sunlight like a silver bell, the beauty of her surroundings--the splendid Italian gardens, a miracle of achievement even if lacking, as the miraculous may, an obvious relation with its surroundings; the landscape with its inlaid lake and wood and hill and great arch of bluest sky; the tall, transparent, Turneresque trees in the middle distance;--all this stately serenity seemed to have wrought in her an answering suavity and gladness. There was almost a latent gaiety in her glance, as, with her large, white, securely moving hands, which seemed to express their potential genius in every deft and delicate gesture, she took up and cut open and unfolded her letters, pausing between them now and then to tweak off and eat a grape as large as a plum from the bunch lying on its leaves in a Veronese-like silver platter beside her.

This suavity, this gladness and even gaiety of demeanour were apparent to Miss Eleanor Scrotton when she presently emerged from the house and advanced slowly along the terrace, pausing at intervals beside its bal.u.s.trade to gaze with a somewhat melancholy eye over the prospect.

Miss Scrotton was struggling with a half formulated sense of grievance.

It was she who had brought Madame von Marwitz and the Aspreys together.

Madame von Marwitz already knew, of course, most of the people in America who were worth knowing; if she hadn't met them there she had met them in Europe; but the Aspreys she had, till then, never met, and they had been, indisputably, Miss Scrotton's possession. Miss Scrotton had known them slightly for several years; her father and Mr. Asprey had corresponded on some sociological theme and the Aspreys had called on him in London in a mood of proper deference and awe. She had written to the Aspreys before sailing with Mercedes, had found that they were wintering in Egypt, but would be back in America in Spring, ready to receive Madame von Marwitz and herself with open arms; and within those arms she had, a week ago, placed her treasure. No doubt someone else would have done it if she hadn't; and perhaps she had been too eager in her determination that no one else should do it. Perhaps she was altogether a little too eager. Madame von Marwitz liked people to care for her and showed a pretty grat.i.tude for pains endured on her behalf; at least she usually did so; but it may well have been that the great woman, at once vaguely aloof and ironically observant, had become a little irked, or bored, or merely amused at hearing so continually, as it were, her good Scrotton panting beside her, tense, determined and watchful of opportunity. However that may have been, Miss Scrotton, as Madame von Marwitz's glance now lifted and rested upon herself, detected the sharper gaiety defined by the French as "_malice_," lighting, though ever so mildly, her friend's eyes and lips. Like most devotees Miss Scrotton had something of the valet in her composition, and with the valet's capacity for obsequiousness went a valet-like shrewdness of perception. She hadn't spent four months travelling about America with Madame von Marwitz without seeing her in undress. She had long since become uncomfortably aware that when Madame von Marwitz found one a little ridiculous she could be unkind, and that when one added plaintiveness to folly she often amused herself by giving one, to speak metaphorically, soft yet sharp little pinches that left one nervously uncertain of whether a caress or an aggression had been intended.

Miss Scrotton was plaintive, and she could not conceal it. Glory as she might in the _role_ of second fiddle, she was very tenaciously aware of what was due to that subservient but by no means insignificant performer; and the Aspreys had not shown themselves enough aware, Mercedes had not shown herself aware at all, of what they all owed to her sustaining, discreet and harmonious accompaniment. In the carefully selected party a.s.sembled at Belle Vue for Madame von Marwitz's delectation, she had been made a little to feel that she was but one of the indistinguishable orchestra that plucked out from accommodating strings a mellow ba.s.s to the one thrilling solo. Not for one moment did she grudge any of the recognitions that were her great friend's due; but she did expect to bask beside her; she did expect to find transmitted to her an important satellite's share of beams; and, it wasn't to be denied, Mercedes had been too much occupied with other people--and with one other in particular--to shine upon her in any distinguishing degree.

Mercedes had the faculty, chafe against it as one might--and her very fondness, her very familiarity were a part of the effect--of making one show as an unimportant satellite, as something that would revolve when wanted and be contentedly invisible when that was fitting. "I might almost as well be a paid _dame de compagnie_," Miss Scrotton had more than once murmured to herself with a lip that trembled; and, obscurely, she realised that close a.s.sociation with the great might reveal one as insignificant rather than as glorified. It was therefore with her air of melancholy that she paused in her advance along the terrace to gaze out at the prospect, and with an air of emphasized calm and dignity that she finally came towards her friend; and, as she came, thus armed, the blitheness deepened in the great woman's eyes.

"Well, _ma cherie_," she remarked, "How goes it?" She spoke in French.

"Very well, _ma bien aimee_," Miss Scrotton replied in the same language. Her French was correct, but Mercedes often made playful sallies at the expense of her accent. She preferred not to talk in French. And when Madame von Marwitz went on to ask her where her fellow _convives_ were, it was in English that she answered, "I don't know where they all are--I have been busy writing letters; Mrs. Asprey and Lady Rose are driving, I know, and Mr. Asprey and Mr. Drew I saw in the smoking-room as I pa.s.sed. The Marquis I don't think is down yet, nor Mrs. Furnivall; the young people are playing tennis, I suppose."

Miss Scrotton looked about the terrace with its rhythmic tubs of flowering trees, its groups of chairs, its white silk parasols, and then wandered to the parapet to turn and glance up at the splendid copy of an Italian villa that rose above it. "It is really very beautiful, Mercedes," she observed. "It becomes the more significant from being so isolated, so divorced from what we are accustomed to find in Europe as a setting for such a place, doesn't it? Just as, I always think, the people of the Asprey type, the best this country has to offer, are more significant, too, for being picked out from so much that is indistinguishable. I do flatter myself, darling, that in this visit, at least, I've been able to offer you something really worth your while, something that adds to your experience of people and places. You _are_ enjoying yourself," said Miss Scrotton with a manner of sad satisfaction.

"Yes; truly," Madame von Marwitz made genial reply. "The more so for finding myself surrounded by so many old acquaintances. It is a particular pleasure to see again Lady Rose and the vivacious and intelligent Mrs. Furnivall; it was in Venice that we last met; her Palazzo there you must one day see. Monsieur de Hautefeuille and Mr.

Drew I counted already as friends in Europe."

"And Mrs. Asprey you will soon count as one, I hope. She is really a somewhat remarkable woman. She comes, you know, of one of their best and oldest families."

"Oh, for that, no; not remarkable. Good, if you will--_bon comme du pain_; it strikes me much, that goodness, among these American rich whom we are accustomed to hear so crudely caricatured in Europe;--and it is quite a respectable little aristocracy. They ally themselves, as we see here in our excellent host and hostess, with what there is of old blood in the country and win tradition to guide their power. They are not the flaunting, vulgar rich, of whom we hear so much from those who do not know them, but the anxious, thoughtful, virtuous rich, oppressed by their responsibilities and all studying so hard, poor dears, at stiff, deep books, in order to fulfil them worthily. They all go to _conferences_, these ladies, it seems, and study sociology. They take life with a seriousness that I have never seen equalled. Mrs. Asprey is like them all; good, oh, but yes. And I am pleased to know her, too.

Mrs. Furnivall had promised her long since, she tells me, that it should be. She and Mrs. Furnivall are old school-mates."

Miss Scrotton, all her merit thus mildly withdrawn from her, stood silent for some moments looking away at the lake and the Turneresque trees.

"It was so very kind of you, Mercedes, to have had Mr. Drew asked here,"

she observed at last, very casually. "It is a real opportunity for a young bohemian of that type; you are a true fairy-G.o.dmother to him; first Mrs. Forrester and now the Aspreys. Curious, wasn't it, his appearing over here so suddenly?"

"Curious? It did not strike me so," said Madame von Marwitz, showing no consciousness of the thrust her friend had ventured to essay. "People come to America a great deal, do they not; and often suddenly. It is the country of suddenness. His books are much read here, it seems, and he had business with his publishers. He knew, too, that I was here; and that to him was also an attraction. Why curious, my Scrotton?"

Miss Scrotton disliked intensely being called "my Scrotton;" but she had never yet found the necessary courage to protest against the appellation. "Oh, only because I had had no hint of it until he appeared," she returned. "And I wondered if you had had. Yes; I suppose he would be a good deal read over here. It is a very derivative and artificial talent, don't you think, darling?"

"Rather derivative; rather artificial," Madame von Marwitz replied serenely.

"He doesn't look well, does he?" Miss Scrotton pursued, after a little pause. "I don't like that puffiness about the eyelids and chin. It will be fatal for him to become fat."

"No," said Madame von Marwitz, as serenely as before, her eyes now on a letter that she held. "Ah, no; he could rise above fat, that young man.

I can see him fat with impunity. Would it become, then, somewhat the Talleyrand type? How many distinguished men have been fat. Napoleon, Renan, Gibbon, Dr. Johnson--" she turned her sheet as she mildly brought out the desultory list. "And all seem to end in n, do they not? I am glad that I asked Mr. Drew. He flavours the dish like an aromatic herb; and what a success he has been; _hein_? But he is the type of personal success. He is independent, indifferent, individual."

"Ah, my dear, you are too generous to that young man," Miss Scrotton mused. "It's beautiful, it's wonderful to watch; but you are, indeed, too kind to him." She mused, she was absent, yet she knew, and knew that Mercedes knew, that never before in all their intercourse had she ventured on such a speech. It implied watchfulness; it implied criticism; it implied, even, anxiety; it implied all manner of things that it was not permitted for a satellite to say.

The Baroness's eyes were on her letter, and though she did not raise them her dark brows lifted. "_Tiens_," she continued, "you find that I am too kind to him?"

Miss Scrotton, to keep up the appearance of ingenuousness, was forced to further definition. "I don't think, darling, that in your sympathy, your solicitude, where young talent is concerned, you quite realize how much you give, how much you can be made use of. The man admires you, of course, and has, of course, talent of a sort. Yet, when I see you together, I confess that I receive sometimes the impression of a scattering of pearls."

Madame von Marwitz laid down her letter. "Ah! ah!--oh! oh!--_ma bonne_,"

she said. She laughed out. Her eyes were lit with dancing sparks. "Do you know you speak as if you were very, very jealous of this young man who is found so charming?"