Gregory heard no word of the revealing talk; yet, when he and Karen were
alone, he was aware of a new chill, or a new discretion, in the
atmosphere. It was as if a veil of ice, invisible yet impassable, hung
between them, and he could only infer that she had something to hide, he
could only suspect, with a bitterer resentment, that Madame von Marwitz
had been more directly exerting her pressure.
The pressure, whatever it had been, had the effect of making Karen, when
they were all three confronted, more calm, more mildly cheerful than
before, more than ever the fond wife who did not even suspect that a
flaw might be imagined in her happiness.
Gregory had an idea--his only comfort in this sorry maze where he found
himself so involved--that this attitude of Karen's, combined with his
own undeviating consideration, had a disconcerting effect upon Madame
von Marwitz and at moments induced her to show her weapon too openly in
their wary duel. If he ever betrayed his dislike Karen must see that it
was Tante who wouldn't allow him to conceal it, who, sorrowfully and
gently, turned herself about in the light she elicited and displayed
herself to Karen as rejected and uncomplaining. He hoped that Karen saw
it. But he could be sure of nothing that Karen saw. The flawless loyalty
of her outward bearing might be but the shield for a deepening hurt. All
that he could do was what, in former days and in different conditions,
Mrs. Talcott had advised him to do; "hang on," and parry Madame von
Marwitz's thrusts. She had come, he more and more felt sure of it, urged
by her itching jealousy, for the purpose of making mischief; and if it
was not a motive of which she was conscious, that made her but the more
dangerous with her deep, instinctive craft.
Meanwhile if there were fundamental anxieties to fret one's heart, there
were superficial irritations that abraded one's nerves.
Karen was accustomed to the turmoil that surrounded the guarded shrine
where genius slept or worked, too much accustomed, without doubt, to
realise its effect upon her husband.
The electric bells were never silent. Seated figures, bearing band-boxes
or rolls of music, filled the hall at all hours of the day and night.
Alert interviewers button-holed him on his way in and out and asked for
a few details about Mrs. Jardine's youth, and her relationship to Madame
Okraska.
Madame von Marwitz rose capriciously and ate capriciously; trays with
strange meals upon them were carried at strange hours to her rooms, and
Barker, Mrs. Barker and Rose all quarrelled with Louise.
Madame von Marwitz also showed oddities of temper which, with all her
determination to appear at her best, it did not occur to her to control,
oddities that met, from Karen, with a fond tolerance.
It startled Gregory when they saw Madame von Marwitz, emerging from her
room, administer two smart boxes upon Louise's ears, remarking as she
did so, with gravity rather than anger: "_Voilà pour toi, ma fille._"
"Is Madame von Marwitz in the habit of slapping her servants?" he asked
Karen in their room, aware that his frigid mien required justification.
She looked at him through the veil of ice. "Tante's servants adore her."
"Well, it seems a pity to take such an advantage of their adoration."
"Louise is sometimes very clumsy and impertinent."
"I can't help thinking that that sort of treatment makes servants
impertinent."
"I do not care to hear your criticism of my guardian, Gregory."
"I beg your pardon," said Gregory.
Betty Jardine met him on a windy April evening in Queen Anne's Gate. "I
see that you had to sacrifice me, Gregory," she said. She smiled; she
bore no grudge; but her smile was tinged with a shrewd pity.
He felt that he flushed. "You mean that you've not been to see us since
the occasion."
"I've not been asked!" Betty laughed.
"Madame von Marwitz is with us, you know," Gregory proffered rather
lamely.
"Yes; I do know. How do you like having a genius domiciled? I hear that
she is introducing Karen into a very artistic set. After the Bannisters,
Mr. Claude Drew. He is back from America at last, it seems, and is an
assiduous adorer. You have seen a good deal of him?"
"I haven't seen him at all. Has he been back for long?"
"Four or five days only, I believe; but I don't know how often he and
Madame von Marwitz and Karen have been seen together. Don't think me a
cat, Gregory; but if she is engaged in a flirtation with that most
unpleasant young man I hope you will see to it that Karen isn't used as
a screen. There have been some really horrid stories about him, you
know."
Gregory parted from his sister-in-law, perturbed. Indiscreet and naughty
she might be, but Betty was not a cat. The veil of ice was so
impenetrable that no sound of Karen's daily life came to him through it.
He had not an idea of what she did with herself when he wasn't there,
or, rather, of what Madame von Marwitz did with her.
"You've been seeing something of Mr. Claude Drew, I hear," he said to
Karen that evening. "Do you like him better than you used to do?" They
were in the drawing-room before dinner and dinner had been, as usual,
waiting for half an hour for Madame von Marwitz.
Gregory's voice betrayed more than a kindly interest, and Karen answered
coldly, if without suspicion; "No; I do not like him better. But Tante
likes him. It is not I who see him, it is Tante. I am only with them
sometimes."
"And I? Am I to be with them sometimes?" Gregory inquired with an air of
gaiety.
"If you will come back to tea to-morrow, Gregory," she answered gravely,
"you will meet him. He comes to tea then."
For the last few days Gregory had fallen into the habit of only getting
back in time for dinner. "You know it's only because I usually find that
you've gone out with your guardian that I haven't come back in time for
tea," he observed.
"I know," Karen returned, without aggressiveness. "And so, to-morrow,
you will find us if you come."
He got back at tea-time next day, expecting to make a fourth only of the
small group; but, on his way to the drawing-room, he paused, arrested,
in the hall, where a collection of the oddest looking hats and coats he
had ever seen were piled and hung.
One of the hats was a large, discoloured, cream-coloured felt, much
battered, with its brown band awry; one was of the type of flat-brimmed
silk, known in Paris as the _Latin Quartier_; another was an enormous
sombrero. Gregory stood frowning at these strange signs somewhat as if
they had been a drove of cockroaches. He had, as never yet before, the
sense of an alien and offensive invasion of his home, and an old, almost
forgotten disquiet smote upon him in the thought that what to him was
strange was to Karen normal. This was her life and she had never really
entered his.
In the drawing-room, he paused again at the door, and looked over the
company assembled under the Bouddha's smile. Madame von Marwitz was its
centre; pearl-wreathed, silken and silver, she leaned opulently on the
cushions of the sofa where she sat, and Karen at the tea-table seemed
curiously to have relapsed into the background place where he had first
found her. She was watching, with her old contented placidity, a scene
in which she had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not
of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them,
the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with
the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse
definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main,
Bohemians, they were not, in the main, shoddy.
Belot was there, with his massive head and sagacious eyes; and a famous
actress, ugly, thin, with a long, slightly crooked face, tinted hair,
and the melancholy, mysterious eyes of a llama. Claude Drew, at a little
table behind Madame von Marwitz, negligently turned the leaves of a
book. Lady Rose Harding, the only one of the company with whom Gregory
felt an affinity, though a dubious one, talked to the French actress and
to Madame von Marwitz. Lady Rose had ridden across deserts on camels,
and sketched strange Asiatic mountains, and paid a pilgrimage to
Tolstoi, and written books on all these exploits; and she had been to
the Adirondacks that summer with the Aspreys and Madame von Marwitz, and
was now writing a book on that. In a corner a vast, though youthful,
German Jew, with finely crisped red-gold hair, large lips and small,
kind eyes blinking near-sightedly behind gold-rimmed spectacles, sat
with another young man, his hands on his widely parted knees, in an
attitude suggesting a capacity to cope with the most unwieldy
instruments of an orchestra; his companion, black and emaciated, talked
in German, with violent gestures and a strange accent, jerking
constantly a lock of hair out of his eyes. A squat, fat little woman,
bundled up, clasping her knees with her joined hands, sat on a footstool
at Madame von Marwitz's feet, gazing at her and listening to her with a
smile of obsequious attention, and now and then, suddenly, and as if
irrelevantly, breaking into a jubilant laugh. Her dusty hair looked as
though, like the White Queen's, a comb and brush might be entangled in
its masses; the low cut neck of her bodice displayed a ruddy throat
wreathed in many strings of dirty seed-pearls, and her grey satin dress
was garnished with dirty lace.
Gregory had stood for an appreciable moment at the door surveying the
scene, before either Karen or her guardian saw him, and it was then the
latter who did the honours of the occasion, naming him to the bundled
lady, who was an English poetess, and to Mlle. Suzanne Mauret, the
French actress. The inky-locked youth turned out to be a famous Russian
violinist, and the vast young German Jew none other than Herr Franz
Lippheim, to whom--this was the fact that at once, violently, engaged
Gregory's attention--Madame von Marwitz had destined Karen.
Franz Lippheim, after Gregory had spoken to everybody and when he at
last was introduced, sprang to his feet and came forward, beaming so
intently from behind his spectacles that Gregory, fearing that he might,
conceivably, be about to kiss him, made an involuntary gesture of
withdrawal. But Herr Lippheim, all unaware, grasped his hand the more
vigorously. "Our little Karen's husband!" "Unserer kleinen Karen's
Mann!" he uttered in a deeply moved German.
In the driest of tones Gregory asked Karen for some tea, and while he
stood above her Herr Lippheim's beam continued to include them both.
"Sit down here, Franz, near me," said Karen. She, too, had smiled
joyously as Herr Lippheim greeted her husband. The expression of her
face now had changed.
Herr Lippheim obeyed, placing, as before, his hands on his knees, the
elbows turned outward, and contemplating Karen's husband with a gaze
that might have softened a heart less steeled than Gregory's.
This, then, was Madame von Marwitz's next move; her next experiment in
seeing what she could "do." Was not Herr Lippheim a taunt? And with what
did he so unpleasantly associate the name of the French actress? The
link clicked suddenly. _La Gaine d'Or_, in its veiling French, was about
to be produced in London, and it was Mlle. Mauret who had created the
heroine's role in Paris. These were the people by means of whom Madame
von Marwitz displayed her power over Karen's life;--a depraved woman (he
knew and cared nothing about Mlle. Mauret's private morality; she was
the more repulsive to him if her morals weren't bad; only a woman of no
morals should be capable of acting in _La Gaine d'Or_;) that impudent
puppy Drew, and this preposterous young man who addressed Karen by her
Christian name and included himself in his inappropriate enthusiasm.
He drank his tea, standing in silence by Karen's side, and avoiding all
encounter with Herr Lippheim's genial eyes.
"It is like old times, isn't it, Franz?" said Karen, ignoring her
husband and addressing her former suitor. "It has been--oh, years--since
I have heard such talk. Tante needs all of you, really, to draw her out.
She has been wonderful this afternoon, hasn't she?"
"_Ah, kolossal!_" said Herr Lippheim, making no gesture, but expressing
the depths of his appreciation by an emphasized solemnity of gaze.
"You are right, I think, and so does Tante, evidently," Karen continued,
"about the _tempo rubato_ in the Mozart. It is strange that Monsieur
Ivanowski doesn't feel it."
"Ah! but that is it, he does feel it; it is only that he does not think
it," said Herr Lippheim, now running his fingers through his hair. "Hear
him play the Mozart. He then contradicts in his music all that his words
have said."
But though Karen talked so pointedly to him, Herr Lippheim could not
keep his eyes or his thoughts from Gregory. "You are a musician, too,
Mr. Jardine?" he smiled, bending forward, blinking up through his
glasses and laboriously carving out his excellent English. "You do not
express, but you have the soul of an artist? Or perhaps you, too, play,
like our Karen here."
"No," Gregory returned, with a chill utterance. "I know nothing about
music."
"Is it so, Karen?" Herr Lippheim questioned, his guileless warmth hardly
tempered.
"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.
It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim
seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could
interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will
still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who
had gained Karen's heart,--"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr.
Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the
greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to
this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With
you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"
"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not
there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding;
yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he
knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.
"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"--she again
excluded her husband;--"It is just finished."
Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in
preoccupied tones, "_Kolossal_!"
They talked, and Gregory stood above them, aloof from their conversation
frigidly gazing over the company, his elbow in his hand, his neat
fingers twisting his moustache. If he was giving Madame von Marwitz a
handle against him he couldn't help it. Over the heads of Karen and Herr
Lippheim his eyes for a moment encountered hers. They looked at each
other steadily and neither feigned a smile.
Eleanor Scrotton arrived at six, flushed and flustered.
"Thank heaven, I haven't missed her!" she said to Gregory, to whom,
to-day, Eleanor was an almost welcome sight. Her eyes had fixed
themselves on Mlle. Mauret. "Have you had a talk with her yet?"
"I haven't had a talk and I yield my claim to you," said Gregory. "Are
you very eager to meet the lady?"
"Who wouldn't be, my dear Gregory! What a wonderful face! What thought
and suffering! Oh, it has been the most extraordinary of stories. You
don't know? Well, I will tell you about her some time. She is,
doubtless, one of the greatest living actresses. And she is still quite
young. Barely forty."
He watched Eleanor make her way to the actress's side, reflecting
sardonically upon the modern growths of British tolerance. Half the
respectable matrons in London would, no doubt, take their girls to see
_La Gaine d'Or_; mercifully, they would in all probability not
understand it; but if they did, was there anything that inartistic
London would not swallow in its terror of being accused of philistinism?
The company was dispersing. Herr Lippheim stood holding Karen's hands
saying, as she shook them, that he would bring _das Mütterchen_ and _die
Schwesterchen_ to-morrow. Belot came for a last cup of tea and drank it
in sonorous draughts, exchanging a few words with Gregory. He had
nothing against Belot. Mr. Drew leaned on Madame von Marwitz's sofa and
spoke to her in a low voice while she looked at him inscrutably, her
eyes half closed.
"Lucky man," said Lady Rose to Gregory, on her way out, "to have her
under your roof. I hope you are a scrupulous Boswell and taking notes."
In the hall Barker was assorting the sombrero, the _Latin Quartier_ and
the cream-coloured felt; the last belonged to Herr Lippheim, who was
putting it on when Gregory escorted Lady Rose to the door.
Gregory gave the young man a listless hand. He couldn't forgive Herr
Lippheim. That he should ever, under whatever encouragements from
Karen's guardian, have dared to aspire to her, was a monstrous fact.
He watched the thick rims of Herr Lippheim's ears, under the
cream-coloured felt, descending in the lift and wondered if the sight
was to be often inflicted upon him.
When he went back to the drawing-room, Karen was alone. Madame von
Marwitz had taken Miss Scrotton to her own room. Karen was standing by
the tea-table, looking down at it, her hands on the back of the chair
from which she had risen to say good-bye to her guardian's guests. She
raised her eyes as her husband came in and they rested on him with a
strange expression.