"Will you shut the door, Gregory?" Karen said. "I want to speak to you."
The feeling with which he looked at her was that with which he had faced
her sleeping, as he thought, after their former dispute. The sense of
failure and disillusion was upon him. As before, it was only of her
guardian that she was thinking. He knew that he had given Madame von
Marwitz a handle against him.
He obeyed her and when he came and stood before her she went on. "Before
we all meet at dinner again, I must ask you something. Do not make your
contempt of Tante's guests--and of mine--more plain to her than you have
already done this afternoon."
"Did I make it plain?" Gregory asked, after a moment.
"I think that if I felt it so strongly, Tante must have felt it," said
Karen, and to this, after another pause, Gregory found nothing further
to say than "I'm sorry."
"I hardly think," said Karen, holding the back of her chair tightly and
looking down again while she spoke, "that you can have realized that
Herr Lippheim is not only Tante's friend, but mine. I don't think you
can have realized how you treated him. I know that he is very simple and
unworldly; but he is good and kind and faithful; he is a true
artist--almost a great one, and he has the heart of a child. And beside
him, while you were hurting and bewildering him so to-day, you looked to
me--how shall I say it--petty, yes, and foolish, yes, and full of
self-conceit."
The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words,
deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself,
as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to
examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was
the overpowering fact.
"I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said.
"Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a
painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree."
"Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to
smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt.
"I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you
think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen,
"to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in
behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it."
"And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in
the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will
permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you
surrounded by--this rabble."
"Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen.
"I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm
concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom
it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,--I wouldn't
have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian
knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask
her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable
person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it
is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a
possible husband for you." Gregory imagined that he was speaking
carefully and choosing his words, but he was aware that his anger
coloured his voice. He had also been aware, some little time before, in
a lower layer of consciousness, of the stir and rustle of steps and
dresses in the passage outside--Madame von Marwitz conducting Eleanor
Scrotton to the door. And now--had she actually been listening, or did
his words coincide with the sudden opening of the door?--Madame von
Marwitz herself appeared upon the threshold.
Her face made the catastrophe all too evident. She had heard him. She
had, he felt convinced, crept quietly back and stood to listen before
entering. His memory reconstructed the long pause between the departing
rustle and this apparition.
Madame von Marwitz's face had its curious look of smothered heat. The
whites of her eyes were suffused though her cheeks were pale.
"I must apologise," she said. "I overheard you as I entered, Mr.
Jardine, and what I heard I cannot ignore. What is it that you say to
Karen? What is it that you say of the man I thought of as a possible
husband for her?"
She advanced into the room and laying her arm round Karen's shoulders
she stood confronting him.
"I don't think I can discuss this with you," said Gregory. "I am very
sorry that you overheard me." The slight smile of his pain had gone. He
looked at Madame von Marwitz with a flinty eye.
"Ah, but you must discuss it; you shall," said Madame von Marwitz. "You
say things to my child that I am not to overhear. You seek to poison her
mind against me. You take her from me and then blacken me in her eyes. A
possible husband! Would to God," said Madame von Marwitz, with sombre
fury, "that the possibility had been fulfilled! Would to God that it
were my brave, deep-hearted Franz who were her husband--not you, most
ungrateful, most ungenerous of men."
"Tante," said Karen, who still stood looking down, grasping her
chair-back and encircled by her guardian's arm, "he did not mean you to
hear him. Forgive him."
"I beg your pardon, Karen," said Gregory, "I am very sorry that Madame
von Marwitz overheard me; but I have said nothing for which I wish to
apologize."
"Ah! You hear him!" cried Madame von Marwitz, and the inner
conflagration now glittered in her eyes like flames behind the windows
of a burning house. "You hear him, Karen? Forgive him! How can I forgive
him when he has made you wretched! How can I ever forgive him when he
tears your life by thrusting me forth from it--me--and everything I am
and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen--you have seen my efforts to win
your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his
half-hidden insolence. Never--ah, never in my life have I faced such
humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof--humiliations,
endured for your sake, Karen--for yours only! Ah"--releasing Karen
suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry,
stretching out her arm--"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find
yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my
friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting
your room! Did I not see it! You! _justes cieux!_ with your bourgeois
little world; your little--little world--so small--so small! your people
like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in
between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side
lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of
surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this
cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a
creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in
from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never!
there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her
love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not
share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart--ah,
I know it--will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod
upon and broken!"
With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz
sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate
tears.
Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of
embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile
of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's
bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.
"My dear," said Gregory--their voices seemed to pass above the clash and
uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an
elemental grief--"I have nothing to say to your guardian."
"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to
me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not
repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back,
permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would
marry?"
Gregory paused, and in the pause, as he observed, Madame von Marwitz was
able to withhold for a moment her strange groans and gaspings while she
listened. "I don't think there has been any such effort," he said. "We
were both keeping up appearances, your guardian and I; and I think that
I kept them up best. As for Herr Lippheim, it was only when you accused
me of rudeness to him that I confessed how much it astonished me to find
that he was the man your guardian had wished you to marry. It does
astonish me. Herr Lippheim isn't even a gentleman."
"Enough!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sprang to her feet. "Enough!"
she said, half suffocated. "It is the voice of the cage! We will not
stay to hear its standards applied. Come with me, Karen, that I may say
farewell to you."
She caught Karen by the arm. Her face was strange, savage, suffused.
Gregory went to open the door for them. "Base one!" she said to him.
"Ignominious one!"
She drew Karen swiftly along the passage and, still keeping her sharp
clasp of her wrist while she opened and closed the door of her room, she
sank, encircling her with her arms, upon the sofa, and wept loudly over
her.
Karen, too, was now weeping; heavy, shaking sobs.
"My child! My poor child!" Madame von Marwitz murmured brokenly after a
little time had gone. "I would have spared you this. It has come. We
have both seen it. And now, so that your life may not be ruined, I must
leave it."
"But Tante--my Tante--" sobbed Karen--Madame von Marwitz did not remember
that Karen had ever so sobbed before--"you cannot mean those words. What
shall I do if you say this? What is left for me?"
"My child, your life is left you," said Madame von Marwitz, holding her
close and speaking with her lips in the girl's hair. "Your husband's
love is left; the happiness that you chose and that I shall shatter if I
stay; ah, yes, my Karen, how deny it now? I see my path. It is plain
before me. To-night I go to Mrs. Forrester and to-morrow I breathe the
air of Cornwall."
"But Tante--wait--wait. You will see Gregory again? You will let him
explain? Oh, let me first talk with him! He says bitter things, but so
do you, Tante; and he does not mean to offend as much as you think."
At this, after a little pause, Madame von Marwitz drew herself slightly
away and put her handkerchief to her eyes and cheeks. The violence of
her grief was over. "Does he still so blind you, Karen?" she then asked.
"Do you still not see that your husband hates me--and has hated me from
the beginning?"
"Not hate!--Not hate!" Karen sobbed. "He does not understand you--that
is all. Only wait--till to-morrow. Only let me talk to him!"
"No. He does not understand. That is evident," said Madame von Marwitz
with a bitter smile. "Nor will he ever understand. Will you talk to him,
Karen, so that he shall explain why he smirches my love and my
sincerity? You know as well as I what was the meaning of those words of
his. Can you, loving me, ask me to sue further for the favour of a man
who has so insulted me? No. It cannot be. I cannot see him again. You
and I are still to meet, I trust; but it cannot again be under this
roof."
Karen now sobbed helplessly, leaning forward, her face in her hands, and
Madame von Marwitz, again laying an arm around her shoulders, gazed with
majestic sorrow into the fire. "Even so," she said at last, when Karen's
sobs had sunken to long, broken breaths; "even so. It is the law of
life. Sacrifice: sacrifice: to the very end. Life, to the artist, must
be this altar where he lays his joys. We are destined to be alone,
Karen. We are driven forth into the wilderness for the sins of the
people. So I have often seen it, and cried out against it in my tortured
youth, and struggled against it in my strength and in my folly. But now,
with another strength, I am enabled to stand upright and to face the
vision of my destiny. I am to be alone. So be it."
No answer came, from Karen and Madame von Marwitz, after a pause,
continued, in gentler, if no less solemn tones: "And my child, too, is
brave. She, too, will stand upright. She, too, has her destiny to
fulfil--in the world--not in the wilderness. And if the burden should
ever grow too heavy, and the road cut her feet too sharply, and the joy
turn to dust, she will remember--always--that Tante's arms and heart are
open to her--at all times, in all places, and to the end of life. And
now," this, with a sigh of fatigue, came on a more matter-of-fact
note--"let a cab be called for me. Louise will follow with my boxes."
Karen's tears had ceased. She made no further protest or appeal.
Rising, she dried her eyes, rang and ordered the cab to be called and
found her guardian's white cloak and veiled hat.
And while she shrouded her in these, Madame von Marwitz, still gazing,
as if at visions, in the fire, lifted her arms and bent her head with
almost the passivity of a dead thing. Once or twice she murmured broken
phrases: "My ewe-lamb;--taken;--I am very weary. _Mon Dieu, mon
Dieu_,--and is this, then, the end...."
She rested heavily on Karen's shoulder in rising. "Forgive me," she
said, leaning her head against hers, "forgive me, beloved one. I have
done harm where I meant to make a safer happiness. Forgive me, too, for
my bitter words. I should not have spoken as I did. My child knows that
it is a hot and passionate heart."
Karen, in silence, turned her face to her guardian's breast.
"And do not," said Madame von Marwitz, speaking with infinite
tenderness, while she stroked the bent head, "judge your husband too
hardly because of this. He gives what love he can; as he knows love. It
is as my child said; he does not understand. It is not given to some to
understand. He has lived in a narrow world. Do not judge him hardly,
Karen; it is for the wiser, stronger, more loving soul to lift the
smaller towards the light. He can still give my child happiness. In that
trust I find my strength."
They went down the passage together. Gregory came to the drawing-room
door. He would have spoken, have questioned, but, shrinking from him and
against Karen, as if from an intolerable searing, Madame von Marwitz
hastened past him. He heard the front door open and the last silent
pause of farewell on the threshold.
Louise scuttled by past him to her mistress's vacated rooms. She did not
see him and he heard that she muttered under her breath: "_Ah! par
exemple! C'est trop fort, ma parole d'honneur!_"
As Karen came back from the door he went to meet her.
"Karen," he said, "will you come and talk with me, now?"
She put aside his hand. "I cannot talk. Do not come to me," she said. "I
must think." And going into their room she shut the door.