"I'm afraid you think that I've made a dreadful mess of things, Gregory.
I simply couldn't help myself," said Betty, half an hour later. "If only
she hadn't gone on gazing at Karen in that aggressive way I might have
curbed my tongue, and if only, afterwards, Mrs. Forrester hadn't shown
herself such an infatuated partisan. But I'm afraid she was right in
saying that I was an unwise woman. Certainly I haven't made things
easier for you, unless you want a _situation nette_. It's there to your
hand if you do want it, and in your place I should. It was a challenge
she gave, you know, to you through me. After the other night there was
no mistaking it. I should forbid Karen to go on Saturday."
Gregory stood before her still wearing his overcoat, for they had driven
up simultaneously to the door below, his hands in his pockets and eyes
of deep cogitation fixed on his sister-in-law. He was inclined to think
that she had made a dreadful mess of things; yet, at the same time, he
was feeling a certain elation in the chaos thus created.
"You advise me to declare war on Madame von Marwitz?" he inquired.
"Come; the situation is hardly _nette_ enough to warrant that; what?"
"Ah; you do see it then!" Betty from the sofa where she sat erect, her
hands in her muff, almost joyfully declared. "You do see, then, what she
is after!"
He didn't intend to let Betty see what he saw, if that were now
possible. "She's after Karen, of course; but why not? It's a jealous and
exacting affection, that is evident; but as long as Karen cares to
satisfy it I'm quite pleased that she should. I can't declare war on
Madame von Marwitz, Betty, even if I wanted to. Because, if she is fond
of Karen, Karen is ten times fonder of her."
"Expose her to Karen!" Betty magnificently urged. "You can I'm sure.
You're been seeing things more and more clearly, just as I have; you've
been seeing that Madame von Marwitz, as far as her character goes, is a
fraud. Trip her up. Have things out. Gregory, I warn you, she's a
dangerous woman, and Karen is a very simple one."
"But that's just it, my dear Betty. If Karen is too simple to see, now,
that she's dangerous, how shall I make her look so? It's I who'll look
the jealous idiot Mrs. Forrester thinks me," Gregory half mused to
himself. "And, besides, I really don't know that I should want to trip
her up. I don't know that I should like to have Karen disillusioned.
She's a fraud if you like, and Karen, as I say, is ten times fonder of
her than she is of Karen; but she is fond of Karen; I do believe that.
And she has been a fairy-godmother to her. And they have been through
all sorts of things together. No; their relationship is one that has its
rights. I see it, and I intend to make Madame von Marwitz feel that I
see it. So that my only plan is to go on being suave and acquiescent."
"Well; you may have to sacrifice me, then. Karen is indignant with me, I
warn you."
"I'm a resourceful person, Betty. I shan't sacrifice you. And you must
be patient with Karen."
Betty, who had risen, stood for a moment looking at the Bouddha.
"Patient? I should think so. She is the one I'm sorriest for. Are you
going to keep that ridiculous thing in here permanently, Gregory?"
"It's symbolic, isn't it?" said Gregory. "It will stay here, I suppose,
as long as Madame von Marwitz and Karen go on caring for each other.
With all my griefs and suspicions I hope that the Bouddha is a fixture."
He felt, after Betty had gone, that he had burned a good many of his
boats in thus making her, to some extent, his confidant. He had
confessed that he had griefs and suspicions, and that, in itself, was to
involve still further his relation to his wife. But he had kept from
Betty how grave were his grounds for suspicion. The bearing away of
Karen to the ducal week-end wasn't really, in itself, so alarming an
incident; but, as a sequel to Madame von Marwitz's parting declaration
of the other evening, her supremely insolent, "I must see what I can
do," it became sinister and affected him like the sound of a second,
more prolonged, more reverberating clash upon the gong. To submit was to
show himself in Madame von Marwitz's eyes as contemptibly supine; to
protest was to appear in Karen's as meanly petty.
His reflections were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone and
when he went to it Karen's voice told him that she was spending the
evening with Tante, who was ill, and that she would not be back till
ten. Something chill and authoritative in the tones affected him
unpleasantly. Karen considered that she had a grievance and perhaps
suspected him of being its cause. After all, he thought, hanging up the
receiver with some abruptness, there was such a thing as being too
simple. One had, indeed, to be very patient with her. And one thing he
promised himself whatever came of it; he wasn't going to sacrifice Betty
by one jot or tittle to his duel with Madame von Marwitz.
It was past ten when Karen returned and his mood of latent hostility
melted when he saw how tired she looked and how unhappy. She, too, had
steeled herself in advance against something that she expected to find
in him and he was thankful to feel that she wouldn't find it. She was to
find him suave and acquiescent; he would consent without a murmur to
Madame von Marwitz's plan for the week-end.
"Darling, I'm so sorry that she's ill, your guardian," he said, taking
her hat and coat from her as she sank wearily on the sofa. "How is she
now?"
She looked up at him in the rosy light of the electric lamps and her
face showed no temporizing recognitions or gratitudes. "Gregory," she
said abruptly, "do you mind--does it displease you--if I go with Tante
next Saturday to stay with some friends of hers?"
"Mind? Why should I?" said Gregory, standing before her with his hands
in his pockets. "I'd rather have you here, of course. I've been feeling
a little deserted lately. But I want you to do anything that gives you
pleasure."
She studied him. "Betty thought it a wrong thing for me to do. She hurt
Tante's feelings deeply this afternoon. She spoke as if she had some
authority to come between you and me and between me and Tante. I am very
much displeased with her," said Karen, with her strangely mature
decision.
The moment had come, decisively, not to sacrifice Betty. "Betty sees
things more conventionally and perhaps more wisely," he said, "than you
or I--or Madame von Marwitz, even, perhaps. She feels a sense of
responsibility towards you--and towards me. Anything she said she meant
kindly, I'm sure."
Karen listened carefully as though mastering herself. "Responsibility
towards me? Why should she? I feel none towards her."
"But, my dear child, that wouldn't be in your place," he could not
control the ironic note. "You are a younger woman and a much more
inexperienced one. It's merely as if you'd married into a family where
there was an elder sister to look after you."
Karen's eyes dwelt on him and her face was cold, rocky. "Do you forget,
as she does, that I have still with me a person who, for years, has
looked after me, a person older still and more experienced still than
the little Betty? I don't need any guidance from your sister; for I have
my guardian to tell me, as she always has, what is best for me to do. It
is impertinent of Betty to imagine that she has any right to interfere.
And she was more than impertinent. I had not wished to tell you; but you
must understand that Betty has been insolent."
"Come, Karen; don't use such unsuitable words. Hasty perhaps; not
insolent. Betty herself has told me all about it."
A steely penetration came to Karen's eyes. "She has told you? She has
been here?"
"Yes."
"She complained of Tante to you?"
"She thinks her wrong."
"And you; you think her wrong?"
Gregory paused and looked at the young girl on the sofa, his wife. There
was that in her attitude, exhausted yet unappealing, in her face, weary
yet implacable, which, while it made her seem pitiful to him, made her
also almost a stranger; this armed hostility towards himself, who loved
her, this quickness of resentment, this cold assurance of right. He
could understand and pity; but he, too, was tired and overwrought. What
had he done to deserve such a look and such a tone from her except
endure, with unexampled patience, the pressure upon his life, soft,
unremitting, sinister, of something hateful to him and menacing to their
happiness? What, above all, was his place in this deep but narrow young
heart? It seemed filled with but one absorbing preoccupation, one
passion of devotion.
He turned from her and went to the mantelpiece, and shifting the vases
upon it as he spoke, remembering with a bitter upper layer of
consciousness how Madame von Marwitz's blighting gaze had rested upon
these ornaments in her first visit;--"I'm not going to discuss your
guardian with you, Karen," he said; "I haven't said that I thought her
wrong. I've consented that you should do as she wishes. You have no
right to ask anything more of me. I certainly am not going to be forced
by you into saying that I think Betty wrong. If you are not unfair to
Betty you are certainly most unfair to me and it seems to me that it is
your tendency to be fair to one person only. I'm in no danger of
forgetting her control and guidance of your life, I assure you. If you
were to let me forget it, she wouldn't. She is showing me now--after
telling me the other night what she thought of my _monde_--how she
controls you. It's very natural of her, no doubt, and very natural of
you to feel her right; and I submit. So that you have no ground of
grievance against me." He turned to her again. "And now I think you had
better go to bed. You look very tired. I've some work to get through, so
I'll say good-night to you, Karen dear."
She rose with a curious automatic obedience, and, coming to him, lifted
her forehead, like a child, for his kiss. Her face showed, perhaps, a
bleak wonder, but it showed no softness. She might be bewildered by this
sudden change in their relation, but she was not weakened. She went
away, softly closing the door behind her.
In their room, Karen stood for a moment before undressing and looked
about her. Something had happened, and though she could not clearly see
what it was it seemed to have altered the aspect of everything, so that
this pretty room, full of light and comfort, was strange to her. She
felt an alien in it; and as she looked round it she thought of how her
little room at Les Solitudes where, with such an untroubled heart, she
had slept and waked for so many years.
Three large photographs of Tante hung on the walls, and their eyes met
hers as if with an unfaltering love and comprehension. And on the
dressing-table was a photograph of Gregory; the new thing in her life;
the thing that menaced the old. She went and took it up, and Gregory's
face, too, was suddenly strange to her; cold, hard, sardonic. She
wondered, gazing at it, that she had never seen before how cold and hard
it was. Quickly undressing she lay down and closed her eyes. A
succession of images passed with processional steadiness before her
mind; the carriage in the Forest of Fontainebleau and Tante in it
looking at her; Tante in the hotel at Fontainebleau, her arm around the
little waif, saying: "But it is a Norse child; her name and her hair and
her eyes;" Tante's dreadful face as she tottered back to Karen's arms
from the sight at the lake-edge; Tante that evening lying white and
sombre on her pillows with eyelids pressed down as if on tears, saying:
"Do they wish to take my child, too, from me?"
Then came the other face, the new face; like a sword; thrusting among
the sacred visions. Consciously she saw her husband's face now, as she
had often, with a half wilful unconsciousness, seen it, looking at
Tante--ah, a fierce resentment flamed up in her at last with the
unavoidable clearness of her vision--looking at Tante with a courteous
blankness that cloaked hostility; with cold curiosity; with mastered
irony, suspicion, dislike. He was, then, a man not generous, not large
and wise of heart, a man without the loving humour that would have
enabled him to see past the defects and flaws of greatness, nor with the
heart and mind to recognize and love it when he saw it. He was petty,
too, and narrow, and arrogantly sure of his own small measures. Her
memories heaped themselves into the overwhelming realisation. She was
married to a man who was hostile to what--until he had come--had been
the dearest thing in her life. She had taken to her heart something that
killed its very pulse. How could she love a man who looked such things
at Tante--who thought such things of Tante? How love him without
disloyalty to the older tie? Already her forbearance, her hiding from
him of her fear, had been disloyalty, a cowardly acquiescence in
something that, from the first hint of it, she should openly have
rebelled against. Slow flames of shame and anger burned her. How could
she not hate him? But how could she not love him? He was part of her
life, as unquestionably, as indissolubly, as Tante.
Then, the visions crumbling, the flames falling, a chaos of mere feeling
overwhelmed her. It was as though her blood were running backward,
knotting itself in clots of darkness and agony. He had sent her away
unlovingly--punishing her for her fidelity. Her love for Tante destroyed
his love for her. He must have known her pain; yet he could speak like
that to her; look like that. The tears rose to her eyes and rolled down
her cheeks as she lay straightly in the bed, on her back, the clothes
drawn to her throat, her hands clasped tightly on her breast. Hours had
passed and here she lay alone.
Hours had passed and she heard at last his careful step along the
passage, and the shock of it tingled through her with a renewal of fear
and irrepressible joy. He opened, carefully, the dressing-room door. She
listened, stilling her breaths.
He would come to her. They would speak together. He would not leave her
when she was so unhappy. Even the thought of Tante's wrongs was effaced
by the fear and yearning, and, as the bedroom door opened and Gregory
came in, her heart seemed to lift and dissolve in a throb of relief and
blissfulness.
But, with her joy, the thought of Tante hovered like a heavy darkness
above her eyes, keeping them closed. She lay still, ashamed of so much
gladness, yet knowing that if he took her in his arms her arms could but
close about him.
The stillness deceived Gregory. In the dim light from the dressing-room
he saw her, as he thought, sleeping placidly, her broad braids lying
along the sheet.
He looked at her for a moment. Then, not stooping to her, he turned
away.