"Well, naturally. It's been a wonderful relationship. You remember you felt that so much in telling me about Karen at the very first."
"Of course; and it's all true, isn't it; the forest and all the rest of it. Only, not having met Karen, one didn't realize how much Madame von Marwitz was in luck." Betty, it was evident, had already begun to wonder whether Tante was as lovely as she looked.
CHAPTER XV
"Dear Mrs. Forrester, you know that I worship the ground she treads on," said Miss Scrotton; "but it can't be denied—can you deny it?—that Mercedes is capricious."
It was one day only after Miss Scrotton's return from America and she had returned alone, and it was to this fact that she alluded rather than to the more general results of Madame von Marwitz's sudden postponement. Owing to the postponement, Karen to-day was being married in Cornwall without her guardian's presence. Miss Scrotton had touched on that. She had said that she didn't think Mercedes would like it, she had added that she couldn't herself, however inconvenient delay might have been, understand how Karen and Gregory could have done it. But she had not at first much conjecture to give to the bridal pair. It was upon the fact that Mercedes, at the last moment, had thrown all plans overboard, that she dwelt, with a nipped and tightened utterance and a gaze, fixed on the wall above the tea-table, almost tragic. Mrs. Forrester was the one person in whom she could confide. It was through Mrs. Forrester that she had met Mercedes; her devotion to Mercedes constituted to Mrs. Forrester, as she was aware, her chief merit. Not that Mrs. Forrester wasn't fond of her; she had been fond of her ever since, as a relative of the Jardines' and a precociously intelligent little girl who had published a book on Port-Royal at the age of eighteen, she had first attracted her attention at a literary tea-party. But Mrs. Forrester would not have sat so long or listened so patiently to any other theme than the one that so absorbed them both and that so united them in their absorption. Miss Scrotton even suspected that a tinge of bland and kindly pity coloured Mrs. Forrester's readiness to sympathize. She must know Mercedes well enough to know that she could give her devotees bad half hours, though the galling thing was to suspect that Mrs. Forrester was one of the few people to whom she wouldn't give them. Mrs. Forrester might worship as devoutly as anybody, yet her devotion never let her in for so much forbearance and sacrifice. Perhaps, poor Miss Scrotton worked it out, the reason was that to Mrs. Forrester Mercedes was but one among many, whereas to herself Mercedes was the central prize and treasure. Mrs. Forrester was incapable of a pang of jealousy or emulation; she was always delighted yet never eager. When, in the first flow of intimacy with Mercedes, Miss Scrotton had actually imagined, for an ecstatic and solemn fortnight, that she stood first with her, Mrs. Forrester had met her air of irrepressible triumph with a geniality in which was no trace of grievance or humiliation. The downfall had been swift; Mercedes had snubbed her one day, delicately and accurately, in Mrs. Forrester's presence, and Miss Scrotton's cheek still burned when she remembered it. There were thus all sorts of unspoken things between her and Mrs. Forrester, and not the least of them was that her folly should have endeared her. Miss Scrotton at once chafed against and relied upon her old friend's magnanimity. Her intercourse with her was largely made up of a gloomy demand for sympathy and a stately evasion of it.
Mrs. Forrester now poured her out a second cup of tea, answering, soothingly, "Yes, she is capricious. But what do you expect, my dear Eleanor? She is a force of nature, above our little solidarities and laws. What do you expect? When one worships a force of nature, il faut subir son sort." It was kind of Mrs. Forrester to include herself in these submissions.
"I had really built all my summer about the plans that we had made," Miss Scrotton said. "Mercedes was to have come back with me, I was to have stopped in Cornwall for Karen's marriage and after my month here in London I was to have joined her at Les Solitudes for August. Now August is empty and I had refused more than one very pleasant invitation in order to go to Mercedes. She isn't coming back for another three months."
"You didn't care to go with the Aspreys to the Adirondacks?"
"How could I go, dear Mrs. Forrester, when I was full of engagements here in London for July? And, moreover, they didn't ask me. It is rather curious when one comes to think of it. I brought the Aspreys and Mercedes together, I gave her to them, one may say, but, I am afraid I must own it, they seized her and looked upon me as a useful rung in the ladder that reached her. It has been a disillusionizing experience, I can't deny it; but passons for the Aspreys and their kind. The fact is," said Miss Scrotton, dropping her voice a little, "the real fact is, dear Mrs. Forrester, that the Aspreys aren't responsible. It wasn't for them she'd have stayed, and I think they must realize it. No, it is all Claude Drew. He is at the bottom of everything that I feel as strange and altered in Mercedes. He has an unholy influence over her, oh, yes, I mean it, Mrs. Forrester. I have never seen Mercedes so swayed before."