"I ain't going to speak about him. I'm going to tell you about me and Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott. "I'm going to explain Mercedes. And I'm going way back to the very beginning to do it."

"Explain it to me. What is she? Has it all been false--all her loveliness?"

"I don't know about false," said Mrs. Talcott. "Mercedes ain't all bad; not by a long shot. She feels good sometimes, like most folks, when it ain't too much trouble. You know how it began, Karen. You know how I'm a sort of connection of Mercedes's mother and I've told you about Dolores.

The prettiest creature you ever set eyes on. Mercedes looks like her; only it was a softer face than Mercedes's with great, big black eyes. I can see her now, walking round the galleries of that lovely house in New Orleans with a big white camellia in her black hair and a white muslin dress, standing out round her--like they wore then; singing--singing--so young and happy--it almost breaks my heart to think about her. I've told you about Mercedes's father, too, Pavelek Okraski, and how he came out to New Orleans and gave lessons to Dolores Bastida and made love to her on the sly and got her to run away with him--poor silly thing. When I think it all over I seem to piece things out and see how Mercedes came to be what she is. Her mother was just as sweet and loving as she could be, but scatter-brained and hot-tempered. And Pavelek was a mighty mean man and a mighty bad man, too, a queer, tricky, sly sort of man; but geniusy, with very attractive manners. Mercedes has got his eyes and his way of laughing; she shows her teeth just like he used to do when he laughed. Well, he took Dolores off to Poland and spent all her money as fast as he could get it, and then Senor Bastida and the two boys--nice, hot-tempered boys they were and perfect pictures--all got killed in a vendetta they had with another family in Louisiana, and poor Senora Bastida got sick and died and all the family fortunes went to pieces and there was no more home and no more money either, for Dolores. She just lost everything straight off.

"She sent for me then. Her baby was coming and Pavelek had gone off and she didn't know where he was and she was about distracted. I'd been married before she ran away with Pavelek, but Homer only lived four years and I was a widow then. I had folks left still in Maine; but no one very near and there wasn't anybody I seemed to take to so much as I always had to Dolores. You may say she had a sort of fascination for me.

So I sold out what I had and came. My, what a queer journey that was. I don't know how I got to Cracow. I only spoke English and travelling wasn't what it is nowadays. But I got there somehow and found that poor child. She was the wretchedest creature you ever set eyes on; thin as thin; and all haggard and wild. Pavelek neglected her and ran after other women and drank, and when he got drunk and she used to fly out at him--for she was as hot-tempered as she could be--he used to beat her.

Yes; that man used to beat Dolores." A note of profound and enduring anger was in Mrs. Talcott's voice.

"He came back after I got there. I guess he thought I'd brought some money, and he came in drunk one day and tried to hit her before me. He didn't ever try it again after that. I just got up and struck him with all my might and main right in the face and he fell down and hurt his head pretty bad and Dolores began to shriek and said I'd killed her husband; but he didn't try it again. He was sort of scared of me, I guess. No: I ain't forgiven Pavelek Okraski yet and I reckon I never shall. I don't seem to want to forgive him, neither in this world nor the next--if there is a next," Mrs. Talcott commented.

"Well, the time for the baby came and on the day Mercedes was born the Austrians bombarded Cracow; it was in '48. I took Dolores down to the cellar and all day long we heard the sh.e.l.ls bursting, and the people screeching. And that was the time Mercedes came into the world. Dolores most died, but she got through. But afterwards I couldn't get proper care for her, or food either. She just pined off and died five months after the baby came. Pavelek most went off his head. He was always fond of her in his own mean way, and I guess he suffered considerable when she died. He went off, saying he'd send some money for me and the baby, but precious little of it did I ever see. I made some by sewing and giving lessons in English--I reckon some of those young Poles got queer ways of speaking from me, I was never what you'd call a polished speaker--and I sc.r.a.ped on. Time and time again we were near starving.

My! that little garret room, and that big church--Panna Marya they called it--where I'd go and sit with the baby when the services were on to see if I could keep warm in the crowd! And the big fire in '50, when I carried the baby out in a field with lots of other people and slept out. It lasted for ten days that fire.

"It seems like a dream sometimes, all that time," Mrs. Talcott mused, and the distant sorrow of her voice was like the blowing of a winter wind. "It seems like a dream to think I got through with the child alive, and that my sweet, pretty little Dolores went under. There's some things that don't bear thinking about. Well, I kept that baby warm and I kept it fat, and it got to be the prettiest, proudest thing you ever set eyes on. She might have been a queen from the very beginning. And as for Pavelek, she just ruled him from the time she began to have any sense.

It was mighty queer to see that man, who had behaved so bad to her mother, cringing before that child. He doted on her, and she didn't care a b.u.t.ton for him. It used to make me feel almost sorry for Pavelek, sometimes. She'd look at him, when he tried to please her and amuse her, like he was a performing dog. It kept Pavelek in order, I can tell you, and made things easier for me. She'd just say she wanted things and if she didn't get them straight off she'd go into a black rage, and he'd be scared out of his life and go and work and get 'em for her. And then she began to show she was a prodigy. Pavelek taught her the violin first and then the piano and when he realized she was a genius he most went off his head with pride. Why that man--the selfishest, laziest creature by nature--worked himself to skin and bone so that she should have the best lessons and everything she needed. We both held our noses to the grindstone just as tight as ever we could, and Mercedes was brought up pretty well, I think, considering.

"She gave that first concert in Warsaw--we'd moved to Warsaw--and then Pavelek seemed to go to pieces. He just drank himself to death. Well, after that, rich relations of Mercedes's turned up--cousins of the Bastidas', who lived in Paris. They hadn't lifted a finger to help Dolores, or me with the baby after Dolores died; but they remembered about us now Mercedes was famous and made us come to live with them in Paris and said they had first claim on Mercedes. I didn't take to the Bastidas. But I stayed on because of Mercedes. I got to be a sort of nurse for her, you may say. Well, as she got older, and prettier and prettier, and everyone just crazy about her, I saw she didn't have much use for me. I didn't judge her too hard; but I began to see through her then. She'd behaved mighty bad to me again and again, she used to fly at me and bite me and tear my hair, when she was a child, if I thwarted her; but I always believed she really loved me; perhaps she did, as much as she can. But after these rich folks turned up and her life got so bright and easy she just seemed to forget all about me. So I went home.

"I stayed home for four or five years and then Mercedes sent for me. She used to write now and then to her 'Dearest Tallie' as she always called me, and I'd heard all about how she'd come out in Paris and Vienna as a great pianist, and how she'd quarrelled with her relations and how she'd run away with a young English painter and got married to him. It was an awful silly match, and they'd all opposed it; but it pleased me somehow.

I thought it showed that Mercedes was soft-hearted like her mother, and unworldly. Well, she wrote that she was miserable and that her husband was a fiend and broke her heart and that she hated all her relations and they'd all behaved like serpents to her--Mercedes is always running across serpents--and how I was the only true friend she had and the only one who understood her, and how she longed for her dear Tallie. So I sold out again--I'd just started a sort of little farm near the old place in Maine, raising chickens and making jam--and came over again. I don't know what it is about Mercedes, but she gets a hold over you. And guess I always felt like she was my own baby. I had a baby, but it died when it was born. Well, she was living in Paris then and they had a fine flat and a big studio, and when Mercedes got into a pa.s.sion with her husband she'd take a knife and slash up his canvases. She quarrelled with him day and night, and I wasn't long with them before I saw that it was all her fault and that he was a weak, harmless sort of young creature--he had yellow hair, longish, and used to wear a black velvet cap and paint sort of dismal pictures of girls with long necks and wild sort of eyes--but that the truth was she was sick of him and wanted to marry the Baron von Marwitz.

"You can commence to get hold of the story now, Karen. You remember the Baron. A sad, stately man he was, as cultured and intellectual as could be and going in the best society. Mercedes had found pretty quick that there wasn't much fun in being married to a yellow-haired boy who lived on the money she made and wasn't a mite in society. And the Baron was just crazy over her in his dignified, reverential way. Poor fellow!"

said Mrs. Talcott pausing in a retrospect over this vanished figure, "Poor fellow! I guess he came to rue the day he ever set eyes on her.

Well, Mercedes made out to him how terrible her life was and how she was tied to a dissipated, worthless man who lived on her and was unfaithful to her. And it's true that Baldwin Tanner behaved as he shouldn't; but he was a weak creature and she'd disillusionized him so and made him so miserable that he just got reckless. And he'd never asked any more than to live in a garret with her and adore her, and paint his lanky people and eat bread and cheese; he told me so, poor boy; he just used to lay his head down on my lap and cry like a baby sometimes. But Mercedes made it out that she was a victim and he was a serpent; and she believed it, too; that's the power of her; she's just determined to be in the right always. So at last she made it all out. She couldn't divorce Baldwin, being a Catholic; but she made it out that she wasn't really married to him. It appears he didn't get baptized by his folks; they hadn't believed in baptizing; they were free-thinkers. And the Baron got his powerful friends to help and they all set to work at the Pope, and they got him to fix it up, and Mercedes's marriage was annulled and she was free to marry again. That's what was in her mind in sending for me, you see; she'd quarrelled with her folks and she wanted a steady respectable person who knew all about her to stand by her and chaperon her while she was getting rid of Baldwin. Mercedes has always been pretty careful about her reputation; she's hardly ever taken any risks.

"Well, she was free and she married the Baron, and poor Baldwin got a nice young English girl to marry him, and she reformed him, and they're alive and happy to this day, and I guess he paints pretty poor pictures.

And it makes Mercedes awful mad to hear about how happy they are; she has a sort of idea, I imagine, that Baldwin didn't have any right to get married again. I've always had a good deal of satisfaction over Baldwin," said Mrs. Talcott. "It's queer to realize that Mercedes was once just plain Mrs. Baldwin Tanner, ain't it? It was a silly match and no mistake. Well, it took two or three years to work it all out, and Mercedes was twenty-five when she married the Baron. I didn't see much of them for a while. They put me around in their houses to look after things and be there when Mercedes wanted me. She'd found out she couldn't get along without me in those two or three years. Mercedes was the most beautiful creature alive at that time, I do believe, and all Europe was wild about her. She and the Baron went about and she gave concerts, and it was just a triumphal tour. But after a spell I began to see that things weren't going smooth. Mercedes is the sort of person who's never satisfied with what she's got. And the Baron was beginning to find her out. My! I used to be sorry for that man. I'll never forget his white, sick face the first time she flew out at him and made one of her scenes. '_Emprisonne ma jeunesse_,'" Mrs. Talcott quoted with a heavy accent. "That's what she said he'd done to her. He was twenty years older than Mercedes, the Baron. Mercedes always liked to have men who were in love with her hanging about, and that's what the trouble was over. The more they cared the worse she treated them, and the Baron was a very dignified man and didn't like having them around. And she was dreadful jealous of him, too, and used to fly out at him if he so much as looked at another woman; in her way I guess he was the person Mercedes cared for most in all her life; she respected him, too, and she knew he was as clever as she was and more so, and as for him, in spite of everything, he always stayed in love with her. They used to have reconciliations, and when he'd look at her sort of scornful and loving and sad all together, it would make her go all to pieces. She'd throw herself in his arms and cry and cry. No, she ain't all bad, Mercedes.

And she thought she could make things all right with him after she'd let herself go; she depended on his caring for her so much and being sorry for her. But I saw well enough as the years went on that he got more and more depressed. He was a depressed man by nature, I reckon, and he read a sight of philosophy of the gloomy kind--that writer Schopenhauer was a favourite of his, I recollect, and Mercedes thought a sight of him, too--and after ten years or so of Mercedes I expect the Baron was pretty sick of life.

"Well, you came. You thought it was Mercedes who was so good to you, and it was in a way. But it was poor Ernst who really cared. He took to you the moment he set eyes on you, and he'd liked your father. And he wanted to have you to live with them and be their adopted daughter and inherit their money when they died. It had always been a grief to him that Mercedes wouldn't have any children. She just had a horror of having children, and he had to give up any hope of it. Well, the moment Mercedes realized how he cared for you she got jealous and they had a scene over you right off, in that hotel at Fontainebleau. She took on like her heart would break and put it that she couldn't bear to have any one with them for good, she loved him so. It was true in a way. I didn't count of course. He looked at her, sick and scornful and loving, and he gave way. That was why you were put to school. She tried to make up by being awful nice to you when you came for your holidays now and then; but she never liked having you round much and Ernst saw it and never showed how much he cared for you. But he did care. You had a real friend in him, Karen. Well, after that came the worst thing Mercedes ever did."

Mrs. Talcott paused, gazing before her in the dimly lighted room. "Poor things! Poor Mercedes! It nearly killed her. She's never been the same since. And it was all her fault and she knows it and that's why she's afraid. That's why," she added in a lower voice, "you're sorry for her and put up with everything, because you know she's a miserable woman and it wouldn't do for her to be alone.

"A young man turned up. His name don't matter now, poor fellow. He was just a clever all-over-the-place young man like so many of them, thinking they know more about everything than G.o.d Almighty;--like this young man in a way, only not a bad young man like him;--and downright sick with love of Mercedes. He followed her about all over Europe and went to every concert she gave and laid himself out to please her in all the ways he could. And he had a great charm of manner--he was a Russian and very high-bred--and he sort of fascinated her, and she liked it all, I can tell you. Her youth was beginning to go, and the Baron was mighty gloomy, and she just basked in this young man's love, and pretty soon she began to think she was in love with him--perhaps she was--and had never loved before, and she certainly worked herself up to suffer considerably. Well, the Baron saw it. He saw she didn't treat him the way she'd treated the others; she was kind of humble and tender and distracted all the time. The Baron saw it all, but she never noticed that he was getting gloomier and gloomier. I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if he'd been willing to confide in me some. It does folks a sight of good if there's someone they can tell things to.

But the Baron was very reserved and never said a word. And at last she burst out with a dreadful scene. You were with them; yes, it was that summer at Felsenschloss; but you didn't know anything about it of course. I was pretty much in the thick of it all, as far as Mercedes went, and I tried to make her see reason and told her she was a sinful woman to treat her husband so; but I couldn't hold her back. She broke out at him one day and told him he was like a jailor to her, and that he suffocated her talent and that he hung on her like a vampire and sucked her youth, and that she loved the other man. I can see her now, rushing up and down that long saloon on that afternoon, with the white blinds drawn down and the sun filtering through them, s.n.a.t.c.hing with her hands at her dress and waving her arms up and down in the air. And the Baron sat on a sofa leaning on his elbow with his hand up over his eyes and watched her under it. And he didn't say one word. When she fell down on another sofa and cried and cried, he got up and looked at her for a moment; but it wasn't the scornful, loving look; it was a queer, dark, dead way. And he just went out. And we never saw him alive again.

"You know the rest, Karen. You found him. But no one knows why he did it, no one but you and me. He put an end to himself, because he couldn't stand it any longer, and to set her free. They called it suicidal mania and the doctors said he must have had melancholia for years. But I shan't ever forget his face when he went out, and no more will Mercedes.

After he was gone she thought she'd never cared for anything in the world but him. She never saw that young man again. She wrote him a letter and laid the blame on him, and said he'd tried to take her from her adored husband and that she'd never forgive him and loathed the thought of him, and that he had made her the most wretched of women, and he went and blew his brains out and that was the end of him. I had considerable difficulty in getting hold of that letter. It was on him when he killed himself. But I managed to talk over the police and hush it up. Mercedes gave me plenty of money to manage with. I don't know what she thinks about that poor fellow; she's never named his name since that day. And she went on like a mad thing for two years or more. You remember about that, Karen. She said she'd never play the piano again or see anybody and wanted to go and be a nun. But she had a friend who was a prioress of a convent, and she advised her not to. I guess poor Mercedes wouldn't have stayed long in a convent. And the reason she was nice to you was because the Baron had been fond of you and she wanted to make up all she could for that dreadful thing in her life. She had you to come and live with her. You didn't interfere with anything any longer and it sort of soothed her to think it was what he'd have liked. She's fond of you, too. She wouldn't have put up with you for so long if she hadn't been. She'd have found some excuse for being quit of you. But as for loving you, Karen child, like you thought she did, or like you love her, why it's pitiful. I used to wonder how long it would be before you found her out."

Karen's face was hidden; she had rested it upon her hands, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, and she had not moved while Mrs.

Talcott told her story. Now, as Mrs. Talcott sat silent, she stirred slightly.

"Tante! Tante!" she muttered. "My beautiful!"

Mrs. Talcott did not reply to this for some moments; then she laid her hand on Karen's shoulder. "That's it," she said. "She's beautiful and it most kills us to find out how cruel and bad she can be. But I guess we can't judge people like Mercedes, Karen. When you go through life like a mowing-machine and see everyone flatten out before you, you must get kind of exalted ideas about yourself. If anything happens that makes a hitch, or if anybody don't flatten out, why it must seem to you as if they were wrong in some way, doing you an injury. That's the way it is with Mercedes. She don't mean to be cruel, she don't mean to be bad; but she's a mowing-machine and if you get in her way she'll cut you up fine and leave you behind. And the thing for you to do, Karen, is to get out of her way as quick as you can."

"Yes, I am going," said Karen.

Again Mrs. Talcott sat silent. "I'd like to talk to you about that, Karen," she then said. "I want to ask you to give up going to Frau Lippheim. There ain't any sense in that. It's a poor plan. What you ought to do, Karen, is to go right back to your nice young husband."

Karen, who sat on as if crushed beyond the point where anything could crush her further, shook her head. "Do not ask me that, Mrs. Talcott,"

she said. "I can never go back to him."

"But, Karen, I guess you've got to own now that he was right and you were wrong in that quarrel of yours. I guess you'll have to own that it must have made him pretty sick to see her putting him in the wrong with you all the time and spoiling everything; and there's no one on earth can do that better than Mercedes."

"I see it all," said Karen. "But that does not change what happened between Gregory and me. He does not love me. I saw it plainly. If he had me back it would only be because he cares for conventions. He said cruel things to me."

"I guess you said cruel things to him, Karen."

Karen shook her head slightly, with weariness rather than impatience.

"No, for he saw that it was my loyalty to her--my love of her--that he was wounding. And he never understood. He never helped me. I can never go back to him, for he does not love me."

"Now, see here, Karen," said Mrs. Talcott, after a pause, "you just let me work it out. You'll have a good sleep and to-morrow morning I'll see you off, before Mercedes is up, to a nice little farm near here that I know about--just a little way by train--and there you'll stay, nice and quiet, and I'll not let Mercedes know where you are. And I'll write to Mr. Jardine and tell him just what's happened and what you meant to do, and that you want to go to Frau Lippheim; and you mark my words, Karen, that nice young husband of yours'll be here quicker than you can say Jack Robinson."

Karen had dropped her hands and was looking at her old friend intently.

"Mrs. Talcott, you do not understand," she said. "You cannot write to him. Have I not told you that he does not love me?"

"Shucks!" said Mrs. Talcott. "He'll love you fast enough now that Mercedes is out of the way."

"But, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, rising and looking down at the old woman, whose face, in the dim light, had a.s.sumed to her reeling mind an aspect of dangerous infatuation--"I do not think you know what you are saying. What do I want of a man who only loves me when I cease to love my guardian?"

"Well, say you give up love, then," Mrs. Talcott persisted, and a panic seized Karen as she heard the unmoved tones. "Say you don't love him and he don't love you. You can have conventions, then--he wants that you say, and so can you--and a good home and a nice husband who won't treat you bad in any way. That's better than batting about the world all by yourself, Karen; you take my word for it. And you can take my word for it, too, that if you behave sensible and do as I say, you'll find out that all this is just a miserable mistake and that he loves you just as much as ever. Now, see here," Mrs. Talcott, also, had risen, and stood in her habitual att.i.tude, resting heavily on one hip, "you're not fit to talk and I'm not going to worry you any more. You go to sleep and we'll see about what to do to-morrow. You go right to sleep, Karen," she patted the girl's shoulder.

The panic was deepening in Karen. She saw guile on Mrs. Talcott's storm-beaten and immutable face; and she heard specious rea.s.surance in her voice. Mrs. Talcott was dangerous. She had set her heart on this last desire of her pa.s.sionless, impersonal life and had determined that she and Gregory should come together again. It was this desire that had unsealed her lips: she would never relinquish, it. She might write to Gregory; she might appeal to him and put before him the desperate plight in which his wife was placed. And he might come. What were a wife's powers if she was homeless and penniless, and a husband claimed her?

Karen did not know; but panic breathed upon her, and she felt that she must fly. She, too, could use guile. "Yes," she said. "I will go to sleep. And to-morrow we will talk. But what you hope cannot be.

Good-night, Mrs. Talcott."

"Good-night, child," said Mrs. Talcott.

They had joined hands and the strangeness of this farewell, the knowledge that she might never see Mrs. Talcott again, and that she was leaving her to a life empty of all that she had believed it to contain, rose up in Karen so strongly that it blotted out for a moment her own terror.

"You have been so good to me," she said, in a trembling voice. "Never shall I forget what you have done for me, Mrs. Talcott. May I kiss you good-night?"

They had never kissed.

Mrs. Talcott's eyes blinked rapidly, and a curious contortion puckered her mouth and chin. Karen thought that she was going to cry and her own eyes filled with tears.

But Mrs. Talcott in another moment had mastered her emotion, or, more probably, it could find no outlet. The silent, stoic years had sealed the fount of weeping. Only that dry contortion of her face spoke of her deep feeling. Karen put her arms around her and they kissed each other.

"Good-night, child," Mrs. Talcott then said in a m.u.f.fled voice, and disengaging herself she went out quickly.

Karen stood listening to the sound of her footsteps pa.s.sing down the corridor. They went down the little flight of stairs that led to another side of the house and faded away. All was still.

She did not pause or hesitate. She did not seem to think. Swiftly and accurately she found her walking-shoes and put them on, her hat and cloak; her purse with its half-crown, its sixpence and its few coppers.

Swiftly she laid together a change of underwear and took from her dressing-table its few toilet appurtenances. She paused then, looking at the ornaments of her girlhood. She must have money. She must sell something; yet all these her guardian had given her.