CHAPTER X
He came next day and every day. They were favoured with the rarely given gift of a perfect spring. They walked along the cliffs and headlands. They sat and talked in the garden. He took her with Mrs. Talcott for long drives to distant parts of the coast which he and Karen would explore, while Mrs. Talcott in the car sat, with apparently interminable patience, waiting for them.
Karen played to him in the morning-room; and this was a new revelation of her. She was not a finished performer and her music was limited by her incapacity; but she had the gift for imparting, with transparent sincerity and unfailing sensitiveness, the very heart of what she played. There were Arias from Schubert Sonatas, and Bach Preludes, and loving little pieces of Schumann, that Gregory thought he had never heard so beautifully played before. Everything they had to say was said, though, it might be, said very softly. He told her that he cared more for her music than for any he had listened to, and Karen laughed, not at all taking him seriously. "But you do care for music, though you are no musician," she said. "I like to play to you; and to someone who does not care it is impossible."
Her acceptances of their bond might give ground for all hope or for none. As for himself there had been, from the moment of seeing her again, of knowing in her presence that fear and that delight, no further doubt as to his own state and its finality. Yet his first perplexities lingered and could at moments become painful.
He felt the beloved creature to be at once inappropriate and inevitable. With all that was deepest and most instinctive in him her nature chimed; the surfaces, the prejudices, the principles of his life she contradicted and confused. She talked to him a great deal, in answer to his questions, about her past life, and what she told him was often disconcerting. The protective tenderness he had felt for her from the first was troubled by his realisation of the books she had placidly read—under Tante's guidance—the people whose queer relationships she placidly took for granted as in no need of condonation. When he intimated to her that he disapproved of such contacts and customs, she looked at him, puzzled, and then said, with an air of kindly maturity at once touching and vexatious: "But that is the morality of the Philistines."
It was, of course, and Gregory considered it the very best of moralities; but remembering her mother he could not emphasize to her how decisively he held by it.
It was in no vulgar or vicious world that her life, as the child of the unconventional sculptor, as the protégée of the great pianist, had been passed. But it was a world without religion, without institutions, without order. Gregory, though his was not the religious temperament, had his reasoned beliefs in the spiritual realities expressed in institutions and he had his inherited instincts of reverence for the rituals that embodied the spiritual life of his race. He was impatient with dissent and with facile scepticisms. He did not expect a woman to have reasoned beliefs, nor did he ask a credulous, uncritical orthodoxy; but he did want the Christian colouring of mind, the Christian outlook; he did want his wife to be a woman who would teach her children to say their prayers at her knees. It was with something like dismay that he gathered from Karen that her conception of life was as untouched by any consciousness of creed as that of a noble young pagan. He was angry at himself for feeling it and when he found himself applying his rules and measures to her; for what had it been from the first but her spiritual strength and loveliness that had drawn him to her? Yet he longed to make her accept the implications of the formulated faiths that she lived by. "Oh, no, you're not," he said to her when, turning unperturbed eyes upon him, she assured him: "Oh yes, I am quite, quite a pagan." "I don't think you know what you mean when you say you're a pagan," Gregory continued.
"But, yes," she returned. "I have no creed. I was brought up to think of beauty as the only religion. That is my guardian's religion. It is the religion, she says, of all free souls. And my father thought so, too." It was again the assurance of a wisdom, not her own, yet possessed by her, a wisdom that she did not dream of anybody challenging. Was it not Tante's?
"Well," he remarked, "beauty is a large term. Perhaps it includes more than you think."