“Is that your idea of me?” he asked, laughing.
She nodded, thoughtfully: “You take what you want, sooner or later. There is no hope in opposing you. You are that kind of man. I have learned that.”
She touched the orchid to her chin meditatively. “It surprised me,” she added. “I have not been accustomed to authority like yours. I am my own mistress, and I supposed I was accountable to myself alone. But—” she lifted her eyes, “it appears that I am accountable to you. And the realization does not seem to anger me very deeply.”
He looked away: “I do not try to control you, Karen,” he said in a low voice.
“You have done so whether or not you have tried. I don’t know what has happened to me. Do you?”
“Nothing,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Except you are learning that the greatest pleasure of friendship is a confidence in it which nothing can disturb.”
“Confidence in friendship — yes. But confidence in you! — that ended in our stateroom. Without confidence I thought friendship impossible.... And here I am asking you not to go away — because I — shall miss you. Will you tell me what is the matter with a girl who has no confidence in a man and who desires his companionship as I do yours?” Her cheeks flushed, but her eyes were steady, bright, and intelligent: “Am I going to fall in love with you, Kervyn?”
He laughed mirthlessly: “No, not if you can reason with yourself about it,” he said. “It merely means that you are the finest, most honest, most fearless woman I ever knew, capable of the most splendid friendship, not afraid to show it. That is all it means, Karen. And I am deeply, humbly grateful.... And very miserable.... Because — —”
The entrance of Frau Bergner with the breakfast tray checked him. They both turned toward the long oak table.
Fortunately the culinary school where the housekeeper had acquired her proficiency was not German. She had learned her art in Alsace.
So the coffee was fragrant and the omelette a dream; and there were grapes from the kitchen arbour and ham from a larder never lacking the succulent by-products of the sanglier of the Ardennes.
Frau Bergner took his letters and telegram, promising that Fritzl should find somebody with a bicycle at Trois Fontaines to carry the other note to Lesse Forest.
She hovered over them while they ate. The breakfast was a silent one.
Afterward Karen wrote a number of notes addressed to her modiste in Berlin and to various people who might, in her present emergency, supply her with something resembling a wardrobe.
Guild had taken his pipe out to the fountain, where she could see him through the window, seated on the coping of the pool, smoking and tracing circles in the gravel with a broken twig.
She hurried her notes, called the housekeeper to take them, then, without taking hat or gloves, she went out into the sunshine. The habit, so easily acquired, of being with Guild was becoming a necessity, and neither to herself nor to him had it yet occurred to her to pretend anything different.
There was, in her, an inherent candour, which unqualified, perhaps unsoftened by coquetry, surprises more than it attracts a man.
But its very honesty is its undoing; it fails to hold the complex masculine mind; its attractiveness is not permanent. For the average man requires the subtlety of charm to stir him to sentiment; and charm means uncertainty; and uncertainty, effort.
No effortless conquest means more to a man than friendship. And friendship is nothing new to a man.
But it was new to Karen; she had opened her mind to it; she was opening her heart to it, curious concerning it, interested as she had never before been, sincere about it — sincere with herself.
Never before had the girl cared for a man more than she had cared about any woman. The women she had known had not been inferior in intelligence to the men she knew. And a normal and wholesome mind and heart harbour little sentiment when the mind is busy and the body sound.
But since she had known this man she knew also that he had appealed to something more than her intelligence.
Vaguely realizing this in the crisis threatened by his violence, she had warned him that he was violating something more than friendship.
Then the episode had passed and become only an unquiet memory; but the desire for his companionship had not passed; it increased, strengthening itself with every hour in his company, withstanding self-analysis, self-reproach, defying resentment, mocking her efforts to stimulate every tradition of pride — even pride itself.
Deeply conscious of the power his personality exercised over her, perplexed, even bewildered at herself, she had not only endured the intimacy of contact with him, but in her heart she accepted it, cared for it, was conscious of relaxation and contentment except for the constant array of traditional indictments which her conscience was busily and automatically finding against her.
She could not comprehend why what he had done had not annihilated her interest in him; why she, even with effort, could find in her mind no abiding anger, no scorn, no contempt for him or for what he had done.
And because she was intelligent and healthy, in her perplexity she had tried to reason — had found nothing to account for her state of mind unless love could account for it — and knowing nothing of love, had admitted the possibility to herself and even to him. Intelligence, candour, ignorance of deeper emotion — coupled with the normal mental and physical innocence of a young girl — this was the character she had been born with and which had naturally and logically developed through nineteen years of mental and bodily cultivation. The girl was most fatally equipped for an awakening.
He stood up when she appeared, knocked out his pipe and advanced to meet her. He had been doing a lot of thinking. And he had concluded to talk very frankly to her about her friendship with him — frankly, kindly, discouraging gaily any mistaken notion she might harbour that there could be any room, any reason, any fitness for a deeper sentiment in this friendship — anything more significant than the delightful and frank affection now existing between them.
“Shall we walk in the forest, Karen?” he said.
“Yes, please.”
So they turned into a sentier which curved away through a fern-set rabbit warren, over a wooden footbridge, and then led them on through alternate flecks of sunshine and shadow through a noble forest of beech and oak.
The green and brown mast lay thick under-foot, premature harvest of windfalls — perhaps the prodigality of those reckless sylvan spendthrifts, the squirrels and jays.
Here and there a cock-pheasant ran through a spinny at their approach; rabbits scuttled into wastes of bracken as yet uncurled and unblemished by a frost; distant crashes and a dull galloping signalled the unseen flight of deer. Now and then the dark disturbance of the forest floor betrayed where the horny, furry snouts of boar had left furrows of fresh black earth amid the acorns.
They came upon the stream again — or perhaps a different little brook, splashing and curling amid its ferns and green, drenched mosses. Stepping stones crossed it; Karen passed lightly, surely, on little flying feet, and stood laughing on the other side as he paused to poke about in the pool in hopes of starting a trout into arrowy flight.
When he crossed she had seated herself under a fir, the branches of which swept the ground around her; and so utterly had she vanished that she was obliged to call him before he could discover her whereabouts.
“Under this green tent,” she said, “if I had a bed, and some books, and clothes, and food, and my maid and — a piano, I could live most happily all summer.” She laughed, looked at him— “if I had all these and — you,” she added.
“Why drag me into such a perfect paradise?”
“I shouldn’t drag you,” she said gravely. “I should merely tell you where I lived.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You might have, with reason. I have demanded a great deal of your time.”
“I have demanded all of yours!” he retorted, lightly.
“No
t more than I was content to give.... It seems all a dream to me — which began when you rang the bell at Hyacinth Villa and roused me from my sleep. And,” she added with a gay flash of malice, “you have kept me awake ever since.”
“And you, me!”
“Not a bit! You slept in the railway car.”
“So did you.”
“In your arms, practically....” She looked up at him curiously: “What did you think of me, Kervyn?”
“I thought you were an exceedingly tired girl.”
“I was. Is that all you thought about it?”
“You know,” he said, laughing, “when a man is asleep he doesn’t do much thinking.”
“What did you think afterward?”
“About what?”
“About my sleeping against your shoulder?”
“Nothing,” he said carelessly.
“Were you quite — indifferent?”
He didn’t know how to answer.
“I was not,” she said. “I was contented, and I thought continually about our friendship — except when what I was doing made me uneasy about — what I was doing.... Isn’t it curious that a girl could do a thing like that and feel comfortable except when she remembered that a girl doesn’t usually do a thing like that?”
He began to laugh, and she laughed, too.
She said: “Always my inclination has been, from a child, to explain things to myself. But I can’t explain you, yet. You are very different, you know.”
“Not a bit — —”
“Yes, please. I’ve found that out.... Tell me, do you really mean to go today?”
“Yes, Karen, I do.”
“Couldn’t you stay?”
“I really couldn’t.”
“Why, please?”
“I must be about my business.”
“Enlistment?”
“Yes.”
“In the Guides,” she said, as though to herself.
He nodded.
“The Guides,” she repeated, looking rather vacantly at a sun spot that waxed and waned on the dry carpet of fir-needles at her feet. “I have seen them. They are odd, with their furry headgear and their green jackets and boots and cherry-red breeches.... I have danced with officers of the Guides in Brussels.... I never thought that my first man friend would be an officer in the Guides.”
“I never thought my best friend among women would be the first woman I ever robbed,” he said rather grimly.
“Oh, but you haven’t done it yet! And I don’t see how you propose to do it.”
He looked up, forcing a smile:
“Don’t you?”
“Not if you are going away. How can you? The only way I can see is for you to stay at Quellenheim in hopes that I might forget to lock my door some night. You know,” she said, almost wistfully, “I might forget — if you remained long enough.”
He shook his head.
“Then you have given it up?”
“No.”
“But I don’t see!”
She was so pretty in her perplexity, so utterly without art in her frankness and curiosity that the impulse to mystify and torment her possessed him.
“Will you bet that I shall not have those papers in my possession within ten minutes?” he asked.
“How can you?”
“I can. And I shall.”
She gazed at him incredulously, then suddenly her cheeks lost their colour and she stood up under the fir-tree.
“Must I take them or will you give them up, Karen?” he asked, laughing, as he rose.
She took a step backward, away from him. The tree-trunk checked her.
“You know I can’t give them to you,” she said unsteadily. “It would be dishonourable.”
“Am I to take them?”
“Are you going to?”
“Do you mean to say that rather than surrender them you would endure such violence as that?”
“I promised.... Are you going to — to hurt me, Kervyn?” she stammered.
“I’ll try not to.”
She stood there, breathing fast, white, defiant.
“You’ll have to surrender,” he said. “You might as well. It’s an honourable capitulation in the presence of superior force.”
“No.”
“You refuse?”
“Yes, please.”
He said: “Very well, then,” with an alarming frown.
“Kervyn — —”
“What?”
“If you tear my gown I — I shall have to go to bed.”
“I’m not going to touch your gown,” he said. “I’m going to charm those papers so they’ll leave their hiding place and fly into my pocket. Watch me very attentively, Karen!” And he tucked up his cuffs and made a few short passes in the air. Then he smiled at her.
“Kervyn! I thought you meant to take them. Do you know you really did frighten me?”
“I have got them,” he said.
The colour came back into her cheeks; she smiled at him in a breathless way.
“You did frighten me,” she said. She came slowly back and seated herself on the carpet of fir-needles. He sat down beside her.
“Karen, dear,” he said, “you are a brick and I’m a brute. I took your papers this morning. I had to, dear.”
And he drew them from his breast pocket and showed them to her.
The girl sat in wide-eyed amazement for a moment. Suddenly her face flushed and the tears flashed in her eyes.
“You have ridiculed me!” she said. “You have treated me like a child!”
“Karen — —”
“I will not listen! I shall never listen to you again! You have played with me, hurt me, humiliated me. You have ruled and overruled me! You gained my friendship and treated it — and me — without ceremony. And I let you! I must have been mad — —”
Her mouth quivered; she clenched her hands, gazing at him through eyes that glimmered wet:
“How could you do it? I was honest with you; I had had no experience with a man I cared for. You knew it. You let me care for you until I didn’t understand — until the sincerity and force of what I felt for you bewildered me!
“And now — and now I am — unhappy — unhappy — miserable, ashamed—” She caught her breath, scarcely able to see him through her tears — no longer able to control the quivering lip.
She rose swiftly, encountered something — his arm — felt herself drawn resistlessly into his embrace.
“Forgive me, Karen,” he said. “I did not realize — what was happening to — us both.”
She rested her forehead on his shoulder for a moment.
“Can you forgive me, Karen?”
“Yes.”
“You know I truly care for you?”
“Yes.”
Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he bent to touch her forehead with his lips, and she lifted her face at the same moment. His kiss fell on her mouth, and she responded. At the same instant her girlhood ended forever — vanished on her lips in a little sigh.
Dazed, silenced, a trifle faint, she turned from him blindly.
“Please,” she whispered, in the ghost of a voice; and he released her.
For a few moments she stood resting against the fir-tree, her left arm across her eyes, frightened, motionless.
The forest was very still around her, as though every leaf were listening.
CHAPTER XVII
HER FIRST CAMPAIGN
“Karen,” she heard him say, in a constrained and unfamiliar voice, “I love you.”
If he thought he was still speaking to the same girl whose soft and fragrant lips he had touched a moment before, he was mistaken. He spoke too late. The girl had vanished with her girlhood.
And now it was with a very different sort of being he had to do — with a woman whose mind had quickened under shock; whose latent emotions had been made conscious; whose spirit, awakened by a crisis, was already armoured and in arms. Aroused, alert, every instinct awake, proud of a new and radian
t knowledge, new motives germinated, new impulses possessed her; a new and delicious wisdom thrilled her. She was ready, and she realized it.
“Karen?”
She heard him perfectly. Deep within her something was laughing. There was no hurry. She knew it.
“Karen?” he said, very humbly.
Conscious of the change within herself, still a little surprised and excited by it, and by a vaguely exquisite sensation of impending adventure, of perils charmingly indefinite, of the newness of it all, deep, deep within her she felt the certainty, the tranquillity, the sweet intoxication of power. Power! She knew she was using it now. She knew she was exercising it on this man. And, for a second, the grasp of the new weapon almost frightened her. For it was her first campaign. And she had not yet reconnoitered the adversary or fully developed his strength and position. Man, as an adversary, was still unknown to her.
“Karen?” he ventured, rather anxiously.
Instantly she lost a large portion of her fear of him. Oh! but she had a long, long reckoning to settle yet with him. She cast a swift glance backward, but already her girlhood was gone — gone with its simplicity, its quaint perplexities, its dear ignorance, its pathos, its helplessness before experience, its naïveté, its faith.
It had gone, slipped away, exhaled in a deep, unconscious sigh. And suddenly she flushed hotly, remembering his lips. Truly, truly there was a long reckoning still to come.... But there seemed to be no hurry.
Still leaning against the tree, she fumbled for her handkerchief, touched her eyes with it leisurely, then, still turning her back to him, she lifted her hands to her hair.
For a first campaign she was doing very well.
Her thick, burnished hair was not in any desperate disorder, but she touched it here and there, patted, tucked, caressed it with light, swift fingers, delicately precise as the exploring antennæ of a butterfly.
“Give me my answer, Karen,” he urged, in a low voice, stepping nearer. Instantly she moved lightly aside to avoid him — just a short step — her back still turned, her hands framing her bright hair. Presently she looked around with a slight laugh, which seemed to say: “Have you noticed my new wings? If I choose to use them, I become unattainable. Take care, my friend!”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 764