A look of distress that was painful to witness came into Mrs. Renshaw’s face. Her fingers tightened upon his hand and she leant forward towards him. “Tassar, Tassar, dear!” she said very gravely, “when you talk like that you make me feel as if I were absolutely alone in the world.”
“What do you mean, Aunt Helen?” murmured the young man in a low voice.
“You make me feel as if it were wrong of me to love you so much,” she went on, bending her head and looking down at his feet.
As he saw her now, with the fading afternoon light falling on her parted hair, still wavy and beautiful even in its grey shadows, and on her broad pale forehead, he realized once more what he alone perhaps, of all who ever had known her realized, the unusual and almost terrifying power of her personality. She forced him to think of some of the profound portraits of the sixteenth century, revealing with an insight and a passion, long since lost to art, the tragic possibilities of human souls.
He laughed gently. “Dear, dear Aunt Helen!” he cried, “forget my foolishness. I was only jesting. I don’t give a fig for any of my opinions on these things. To the deuce with them all, dear! To free you from one single moment of annoyance, I’d believe every word in the Church Catechism from ‘What is your name?’ down to ‘without doubt are lost eternally’!”
She looked up at this, and made a most heart-breaking effort not to smile. Her abnormally sensitive mouth—the mouth, as Baltazar always maintained, of a great tragic actress—quivered at the corners.
“If I had taught you your catechism,” she said, “you would remember it better than that!”
Baltazar’s eyes softened as he watched her, and a strange look, full of a pity that was as impersonal as the sea itself, rose to their surface. He lifted her hand to his lips.
“Don’t do that! You mustn’t do that!” she murmured, and then with another flicker of a smile, “you must keep those pretty manners, Tassar, for all your admiring young women!”
“Confound my young women!” cried the young man. “You’re far more beautiful, Aunt Helen, than all of them put together!”