"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."