Twin Tales/The Lost Titian/Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Conkling, on returning to the Keswick house for the second time, nursed an elusive sense of frustration. He nursed, as well, a sense of playing little more than a secondary role in a drama of deferment. For the accessories of the drama were not arranging themselves as he might have wished. On his way back to the manor-house he had come face to face with Lavinia Keswick, and that austere old figure, seated in a decrepid canopied phaëton drawn by a rawboned mare, had either failed or refused to recognize him. He was further depressed by the ominous silence which reigned when he pounded on the faded manor-door with the heavy brass knocker in the form of an ape with laughter on its embittered metal face. But in a minute or two the door was opened, and Julia Keswick herself stood confronting him.
She was dressed in Quaker gray, and seemed more repressed and more mature than when he had first caught sight of her. But she had the power, for all her quietness, of once more making his pulse skip a beat or two.
"I was to look over the pictures," he explained, noticing her hesitancy.
"I'm afraid that won't be possible to-day," she told him in a tone of constraint.
"But your aunt asked me to," he reminded her.
"I know, but there has been an accident."
"A serious one?" he asked.
"I hope not. But my Aunt Georgina slipped on the attic steps and sprained her ankle. It's paining her a great deal, and she has gone to bed."
"Could I possibly see her?"
A ghost of a smile appeared on the girl's face. It would not be easy to explain to him that no living man had ever beheld her Aunt Georgina in bed. So she merely shook her head.
"Then how about your Aunt Lavinia?"
Again the girl shook her head.
"She has had to go to Weston to see a lawyer about a mortgage foreclosure—and she has always hated the pictures."
"Then why couldn't you show them to me?" he suggested.
"I don't think my aunt would approve of that."
"But in an emergency like this?" he contended.
"I wouldn't be allowed to," she said with an odd flattening of the voice. "Some of them are not" she broke off. Her shoulder movement was a half-ironic one. "Even my aunt objected to some of them. She was carrying one of the bigger canvases down to her bedroom when she slipped and fell."
"That was unfortunate," he perfunctorily exclaimed. His mind, for the moment, seemed to be on other things. It was his glance into the girl's face, where he sensed pennons of valor behind the bastions of silence, that brought his thoughts back to the present.
"But why to her bedroom?" he asked.
"To hide it away," was the level-noted reply. And again their glances came together.
"What was the nature of that canvas," he finally asked, "the canvas that caused the accident!"
There was a silence of several seconds before she answered.
"It was a Bouguereau!"
He was able to smile as he studied her in the shadow of the weather-bleached doorway. He understood, at last, the grim valor of her gaze. And she saw that he understood, and seemed glad of it.
"It's all ridiculous, of course," he said with his renewing smile of comprehension. "But it's at least given me the chance of seeing you again."
She in turn studied him for a moment or two with her intent eyes. Then she slowly changed color.
"I'm sorry," she finally said.
"About what?"
Her slow look back over her shoulder had not escaped him. But he was quite satisfied to stand and stare at her. She seemed the only point of life in that house of dead and silent mustiness.
"I can't talk to you any longer," she said in lowered tones. "I really can't!"
"Why not?" he demanded.
"I'd be punished for it," she told him, without meeting his eye, "cruelly punished."
She had spoken quietly enough, but there was an undertone of passion in her words.
"That doesn't sound reasonable," he expostulated. For she seemed, in her present mood and posture, far removed from the child.
"It isn't," he heard her answering. "But there's nothing I can do about it."
"How old are you?" he asked with a frankness sired by impatience.
"I'm nineteen—almost twenty," she told him, with her habitual impersonal candor.
"Then that makes it more unreasonable than ever," he proclaimed with a touch of triumph.
"All my life has been unreasonable."
"But" he began, and broke off. Still again their glances had met and locked, and he seemed to drink courage from the quietness of her eyes. "Why couldn't I see you?"
"See me?" she echoed.
"Without them knowing it," he explained, paling under his tan.
She stood silent a moment.
"Where?" she finally asked, in little more than a whisper.
"What's the matter with that old arbor of yours at the foot of the garden?" he suggested.
He still misunderstood her hesitation, for it was resolution and not timidity which was so completely whitening her face.
"Why couldn't you meet me there, about nine o'clock to-night?"
"That would be too early," she said, bewilderingly composed.
"Then say ten," he persisted, marveling at his own unpremeditated deadly earnestness; and still again she stood silent. But she found the courage to lift her intent eyes and let them rest on his face. It seemed significant of tremendous capitulations. But when she spoke she spoke very quietly.
"I'll be there."
Conkling watched her retreat into the shadow and watched the faded door swing slowly shut between them. Then he turned and went down the steps. He went away this time without thinking of the pictures, and he went with no slightest sense of disappointment.