Tante

Then Mr. Schultz came and she had to see him, and that was tiring."

Mr. Schultz was Madame Okraska"s secretary.

"Dear, dear, what a pity that he had to bother her. Did she drink the egg-flip I had sent up to her? Mrs. Jenkins makes them excellently as a rule."

"I did my best to persuade her," said Miss Woodruff, "but she did not seem to care for it."

"Didn"t care for it? Was it too sweet? I warned Mrs. Jenkins that her tendency was to put in too much sugar."

"That was it," Miss Woodruff smiled at the other"s penetration. "She tasted it and said: "_Trop sucre_," and put it down. But it was really very nice. I drank it!" said Miss Woodruff.

"But I am so grieved. I shall speak severely to Mrs. Jenkins," Mrs.

Forrester murmured, preoccupied. "I am afraid our chances aren"t good to-day, Lady Campion," she turned from Miss Woodruff to say. "You must come and dine one night while she is with me. I am always sure of her for dinner."

"She really isn"t coming down?" Miss Scrotton leaned over the back of Miss Woodruff"s chair to ask with some asperity of manner. "Shall I wait for a little before I go up to her?"

"I can"t tell," the young girl replied. "She said she did not know whether she would come or not. She is lying down and reading."

"She does not forget that she comes to me for tea to-morrow?"

"I do not think so, Miss Scrotton."

"Lady Campion wants to talk to you, Karen," Mrs. Forrester now said; "come to this side of the table." And as Sir Alliston was engaged with Miss and Mrs. Harding, Gregory was left to Eleanor Scrotton.

Miss Scrotton felt irritation rather than affection for Gregory Jardine.

Yet he was not unimportant to her. Deeper than her pride in old Sir Jonas was her pride in her connection with the Fanshawes, and Gregory"s mother had been a Fanshawe. Gregory"s very indifference to her and to the standards of the Scrottons had always given to intercourse with him a savour at once acid yet interesting. Though she knew many men of more significance, she remained far more aware of him and his opinions than of theirs. She would have liked Gregory to show more consciousness of her and his relationship, of the fact that she, too, had Fanshawe blood in her veins. She would have liked to impress, or please or, at worst, to displease him. She would very much have liked to secure him more frequently for her dinners and her teas. He vexed and he allured her.

"Do you really mean that last night was the first time you ever heard Mercedes Okraska?" she said, moving to a sofa, to which, somewhat unwillingly, Gregory followed her. "It makes me sorry for you. It"s as if a person were to tell you that they"d never before seen the mountains or the sea. If I"d realised that you"d never met her I could have arranged that you should. She often comes to me quite quietly and meets a few friends. She was so devoted to dear father; she called him The Hammer of the G.o.ds. I have the most wonderful letter that she wrote me when he died," Miss Scrotton said, lowering her voice to a reverent pause. "Between ourselves," she went on, "I do sometimes think that our dear Mrs. Forrester cherishes her a little too closely. I confess that I love nothing more than to share my good things. I don"t mean that dear Mrs. Forrester doesn"t; but I should ask more people, frequently and definitely, to meet Mercedes, if I were in her place."

"But if Madame Okraska won"t come down and see them?" Gregory inquired.

"Ah, but she will; she will," Miss Scrotton said earnestly; "if it is thought out; arranged for carefully. She doesn"t, naturally, care to come down on chance, like to-day. She does want to know whom she"s to meet if she makes the effort. She knows of course that Sir Alliston and I are here, and that may bring her; I do hope so for your sake; but of course if she does not come I go up to her. With Mrs. Forrester I am, I think, her nearest friend in England. She has stayed with me in the country;--my tiny flat here would hardly accommodate her. I am going, did you know it, to America with her next week."

"No; really; for a tour?"

"Yes; through the States. We shall be gone till next summer. I know several very charming people in New York and Boston and can help to make it pleasant for Mercedes. Of course for me it is the opportunity of a life-time. Quite apart from her music, she is the most remarkable woman I have ever known."

"She"s clever?"

"Clever is too trivial a word. Her genius goes through everything. We read a great deal together--Dante, Goethe, French essayists, our English poets. To hear her read poetry is almost as wonderful an experience as to hear her play. Isn"t it an extraordinary face? One sees it all in her face, I think."

"She is very unusual looking."

"Her face," Miss Scrotton pursued, ignoring her companion"s trite comments, "embodies the thoughts and dreams of many races. It makes me always think of Pater"s Mona Lisa--you remember: "Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come and the eyelids are a little weary." She is, of course, a profoundly tragic person."

"Has she been very unfortunate?"

"Unfortunate indeed. Her youth was pa.s.sed in bitter poverty; her first marriage was disastrous, and when joy came at last in an ideal second marriage it was shattered by her husband"s mysterious death. Yes; he was drowned; found drowned in the lake on their estate in Germany. Mercedes has never been there since. She has never recovered. She is a broken-hearted woman. She sees life as a dark riddle. She counts herself as one of the entombed."

"Dear me," Gregory murmured.

Miss Scrotton glanced at him with some sharpness; but finding his blue eyes fixed abstractedly on Karen Woodruff exonerated him from intending to be disagreeable. "Her childlessness has been a final grief," she added; "a child, as she has often told me, would be a resurrection from the dead."

"And the little girl?" Gregory inquired. "Is she any solace? What is the exact relationship? I hear that she calls her Tante."

"The right to call her Tante is one of Mercedes"s gifts to her. She is no relation at all. Mercedes picked her up, literally from the roadside.

She is twenty-four, you know; not a child."

"So the story is true, about the Norwegian peasants and the forest?"

"I have to contradict that story at least twice a day," said Miss Scrotton with a smile half indulgent and half weary. "It is true that Karen was found in a forest, but it was the forest of Fontainebleau, _tout simplement_; and it is true that she has Norwegian blood; her mother was a Norwegian; she was the wife of a Norwegian artist in Rome, and there Karen"s father, an American, a sculptor of some talent, I believe, met her and ran away with her. They were never married. They lived on chestnuts up among the mountains in Tuscany, I believe, and the mother died when Karen was a little child and the father when she was twelve. Some relatives of the father"s put her in a convent school in Paris and she ran away from it and Mercedes found her on the verge of starvation in the forest of Fontainebleau. The Baron von Marwitz had known Mr. Woodruff in Rome and Mercedes persuaded him to take the child into their lives. She hadn"t a friend or a penny in the world. The father"s relatives were delighted to be rid of her and Mercedes has had her on her hands ever since. That is the true story."

"Isn"t she fond of her?" Gregory asked.

"Yes, she is fond of her," Miss Scrotton with some impatience replied; "but she is none the less a burden. For a woman like Mercedes, with a life over-full and a strength continually overtaxed, the care and responsibility is an additional weight and weariness."

"Well, but if she misses children so much; this takes the place,"

Gregory objected.

"Takes the place," Miss Scrotton repeated, "of a child of her own? This little n.o.body, and an uninteresting n.o.body, too? Oh, she is a good girl, a very good girl; and she makes herself fairly useful in elementary ways; but how can you imagine that such a tie can satisfy maternal craving?"

"How does she make herself useful?" Gregory asked, waiving the question of maternal cravings. He had vexed Miss Scrotton a good deal, but the theme was one upon which she could not resist enlarging; anything connected with Madame von Marwitz was for her of absorbing interest.

"Well, she is a great deal in Cornwall, at Mercedes"s place there," she informed him. "It"s a wonderfully lovely place; Les Solitudes; Mercedes built the house. Karen and old Mrs. Talcott look after the little farm and keep things in order."

"Old Mrs. Talcott? Where does she come in?"

"Ah, that is another of Mercedes"s romantic benevolences. Mrs. Talcott is a sort of old pensioner; a distant family connection; the funniest old American woman you can conceive of. She has been with Mercedes since her childhood, and, like everybody else, she is so devotedly attached to her that she regards it as a matter of course that she should be taken care of by her for ever. The way Karen takes her advantages as a matter of course has always vexed me just a little."

"Is Mrs. Talcott interesting?" Gregory pursued his questions with a placid persistence that seemed to indicate real curiosity.

"Good heavens, no!" Miss Scrotton said. "The epitome of the commonplace.

She looks like some of the queer old American women one sees in the National Gallery with Baedekers in their hands and bags at their belts; fat, sallow, provincial, with defective grammar and horrible tw.a.n.gs; the kind of American, you know," said Miss Scrotton, warming to her description as she felt that she was amusing Gregory Jardine, "that the other kind always tell you they never by any chance would meet at home."

"And what kind of American is Miss Woodruff? The other kind or Mrs.

Talcott"s kind?"

"By the other kind I mean Lady Jardine"s," said Miss Scrotton; "or--no; she const.i.tutes a further variety; the rarest of all; the kind who would never think about Mrs. Talcott one way or the other. But surely Karen is no kind at all. Could you call her an American? She has never been there. She is a sort of racial waif. The only root, the only nationality she seems to have is Mercedes; her very character is const.i.tuted by her relation to Mercedes; her only charm is her devotion--for she is indeed sincerely and wholeheartedly devoted. Mercedes is a sort of fairy-G.o.dmother to her, a sun-G.o.ddess, who lifted her out of the dust and whirled her away in her chariot. But she isn"t interesting," Miss Scrotton again a.s.sured him. "She is literal and unemotional, and, in some ways, distinctly dull. I have seen the poor fairy-G.o.dmother sigh and shrug sometimes over her inordinately long letters. She writes to her with relentless regularity and I really believe that she imagines that Mercedes quite depends on hearing from her. No; I don"t mean that she is conceited; it"s not that exactly; she is only dull; very, very dull; and I don"t know how Mercedes endures having her so much with her.

She feels that the girl depends on her, of course, and she is helplessly generous."

Gregory Jardine listened to these elucidations, leaning back in the sofa, a hand clasping his ankle, his eyes turning now on Miss Scrotton and now on the subject of their conversation. Miss Scrotton had amused him. She was entertainingly simple if at moments entertainingly intelligent, and he had divined that she was jealous of the crumbs that fell to Miss Woodruff"s share from the table of Madame von Marwitz"s bounty. A slight malice that had gathered in him during his talk with Eleanor Scrotton found expression in his next remark. "She is certainly charming looking; anyone so charming looking has a right to be dull."

But Miss Scrotton did not heed him. She had risen to her feet. "Here she is!" she exclaimed, looking towards the door in radiant satisfaction.

"You will meet her after all. I"ll do my very best so that you shall have a little talk with her."

The door had been thrown open and Madame Okraska had appeared upon the threshold.