The telephone sounded while Gregory next morning ate his solitary
breakfast, and the voice of Mrs. Forrester, disembodied of all but its
gravity, asked him, if he would, to come and see her immediately.
Gregory asked if Madame von Marwitz were with her. He was not willing,
after the final affront that she had put upon him, to encounter Madame
von Marwitz again in circumstances where he might seem to be justifying
himself. But, with a deeper drop, the disembodied voice informed him
that Madame von Marwitz, ten minutes before, had driven to the station
on her way to Cornwall. "You will understand, I think, Gregory," said
Mrs. Forrester, "that it is hardly possible for her to face in London,
as yet, the situation that you have made for her."
Gregory, to this, replied, shortly, that he would come to her at once,
reserving his comments on the imputed blame.
He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little
dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly
recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at
last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His
wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her
compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had
said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with
bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called,
sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of
breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces,
his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of
tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had
slowly ebbed away.
He found Mrs. Forrester in her morning-room among loudly singing
canaries and pots of jonquils; and as he shook hands with her he saw
that this old friend, so old and so accustomed that she was like a part
of his life, was embarrassed. The wrinkles on her withered, but oddly
juvenile, face seemed to have shifted to a pattern of perplexity and
pained resolution. He was not embarrassed, though he was beaten and done
in a way Mrs. Forrester could not guess at; yet he felt an awkwardness.
They had known each other for a life-time, he and Mrs. Forrester, but
they were not intimate; and how intimate they would have to become if
they were to discuss with anything like frankness the causes and
consequences of Madame von Marwitz's conduct! A gloomy indifference
settled on Gregory as he realized that her dear friend's conduct was the
one factor in the causes and consequences that Mrs. Forrester would not
be able to appraise at its true significance.
She shook his hand, and seating herself at a little table and slightly
tapping it with her fingers, "Now, my dear Gregory," she said, "will
you, please, tell me why you have acted like this?"
"Isn't my case prejudged?" Gregory asked, reconstructing the scene that
must have taken place last night when Madame von Marwitz had appeared
before her friend.
"No, Gregory; it is not," Mrs. Forrester returned with some terseness,
for she felt his remark to be unbecoming. "I hope to have some sort of
explanation from you."
"I'm quite ready to explain; but it's hardly possible that my
explanation will satisfy you," said Gregory. "You spoke, just now, when
you called me up, of a situation and said I'd made it. My explanation
can only consist in saying that I didn't make it; that Madame von
Marwitz made it; that she came to us in order to make it and then to fix
the odium of it on me."
Already Mrs. Forrester had flushed. She looked hard at the pot of
jonquils near her. "You really believe that?"
"I do. She can't forgive me for not liking her," said Gregory.
"And you don't like her. You own to it."
"I don't like her. I own to it," Gregory replied with a certain frosty
relief. It was like taking off damp, threadbare garments that had
chilled one for a long time and facing the winter wind, naked, but
invigorated. "I dislike her very much."
"May I ask why?" Mrs. Forrester inquired, with careful courtesy.
"I distrust her," said Gregory. "I think she's dangerous, and tyrannous,
and unscrupulous. I think that she's devoured by egotism. I'm sorry. But
if you ask me why, I can only tell you."
Mrs. Forrester sat silent for a moment, and then, the flush on her
delicate old cheek deepening, she murmured: "It is worse, far worse,
than Mercedes told me. Even Mercedes didn't suspect this. Gregory,--I
must ask you another question: Do you really imagine that you and your
cruel thoughts of her would be of the slightest consequence to Mercedes
Okraska, if you had not married the child for whose happiness she holds
herself responsible?"
"Of course not. She wouldn't give me another thought, if I weren't
there, in her path; I am in her path, and she feels that I don't like
her, and she hasn't been able to let me alone."
"She has not let you alone because she hoped to make your marriage
secure in the only way in which security was possible for you and Karen.
What happiness could she see for Karen's future if she were to have cut
herself apart from her life; dropped you, and Karen with you? That,
doubtless, would have been the easy thing to do. There is indeed no
reason why women like Mercedes Okraska, women with the world at their
feet, should trouble to think of the young men they may chance to meet,
whose exacting moral sense they don't satisfy. I am glad you see that,"
said Mrs. Forrester, tapping her table.
"It would have been far kinder to have dropped Karen than deliberately
to set to work, as she has done, to ruin her happiness. She hasn't been
able to keep her hands off it. She couldn't stand it--a happiness she
hadn't given; a happiness for which gratitude wasn't due to her."
"Gregory, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester raised her eyes to him now; "you are
frank with me, very frank; and I must be frank with you. There is more
than dislike here, and distrust, and morbid prejudice. There is
jealousy. Hints of it have come to me; I've tried to put them aside;
I've tried to believe, as my poor Mercedes did, that, by degrees, you
would adjust yourself to the claims on Karen's life, and be generous and
understanding, even when you had no spontaneous sympathy to give. But it
is all quite clear to me now. You can't accept the fact of your wife's
relation to Mercedes. You can't accept the fact of a devotion not wholly
directed towards yourself. I've known you since boyhood, Gregory, and
I've always had regard and fondness for you; but this is a serious
breach between us. You seem to me more wrong and arrogant than I could
trust myself to say. And you have behaved cruelly to a woman for whom my
feeling is more than mere friendship. In many ways my feeling for
Mercedes Okraska is one of reverence. She is one of the great people of
the world. To know her has been a possession, a privilege. Anyone might
be proud to know such a woman. And when I think of what you have now
said of her to me--when I think of how I saw her--here--last
night,--broken--crushed,--after so many sorrows--"
Tears had risen to Mrs. Forrester's eyes. She turned her head aside.
"Do you mean," said Gregory after a moment, in which it seemed to him
that his grey world preceptibly, if slightly, darkened, "do you mean
that I've lost your friendship because of Madame von Marwitz?"
"I don't know, Gregory; I can't tell you," said Mrs. Forrester, not
looking at him. "I don't recognize you. As to Karen, I cannot imagine
what your position with her can be. How is she to bear it when she knows
that it is said that you insulted her guardian's friends and then turned
her out of your house?"
"I didn't turn her out," said Gregory; he walked to the window and
stared into the street. "She went because that was the most venomous
thing she could do. And I didn't insult her friends."
"You said to her that the man she had thought of as a husband for Karen
was not a gentleman. You said that you did not understand how Mercedes
could have chosen such a man for her. You said this with the child
standing between you. Oh, you cannot deny it, Gregory. I have heard in
detail what took place. Mercedes saw that unless she left you Karen's
position was an impossible one. It was to save Karen--and your relation
to Karen--that she went."
Gregory, still standing at the window, was silent, and then asked: "Have
you seen Herr Lippheim?"
"No, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester returned, and now with trenchancy, the
concrete case being easier to deal with openly. "No; I have not seen
him; but Mercedes spoke to me about him last winter, when she hoped for
the match, and told me, moreover, that she was surprised by Karen's
refusal, as the child was much attached to him. I have not seen him; but
I know the type--and intimately. He is a warm-hearted and intelligent
musician."
"Your bootmaker may be warm-hearted and intelligent."
"That is petulant--almost an insolent simile, Gregory. It only reveals,
pitifully, your narrowness and prejudice--and, I will add, your
ignorance. Herr Lippheim is an artist; a man of character and
significance. Many of my dearest friends have been such; hearts of gold;
the salt of the world."
"Would you have allowed a daughter of yours, may I ask, to marry one of
these hearts of gold?"
"Certainly; most certainly," said Mrs. Forrester, but with a haste and
heat somewhat suspicious. "If she loved him."
"If he were personally fit, you mean. Herr Lippheim is undoubtedly
warm-hearted and, in his own way, intelligent, but he is as unfit to be
Karen's husband as your bootmaker to be yours."
They had come now, on this lower, easier level, to one of the points
where temper betrays itself as it cannot do on the heights of contest.
Gregory's reiteration of the bootmaker greatly incensed Mrs. Forrester.
"My dear Gregory," she said, "I yield to no one in my appreciation of
Karen; owing to the education and opportunities that Mercedes has given
her, she is a charming young woman. But, since we are dealing with,
facts, the bare, bald, worldly aspects of things, we must not forget the
facts of Karen's parentage and antecedents. Herr Lippheim is, in these
respects, I imagine, altogether her equal. A rising young musician, the
friend and _protégé_ of one of the world's great geniuses, and a
penniless, illegitimate girl. Do not let your rancour, your jealousy,
blind you so completely."
Gregory turned from the window at this, smiling a pallid, frosty smile
and Mrs. Forrester was now aware that she had made him very angry. "I
may be narrow," he said, "and conventional and ignorant; but I'm
unconventional and clear-sighted enough to judge people by their actual,
not their market, value. Of Herr Lippheim I know nothing, except that
his parentage and antecedents haven't made a gentleman, or anything
resembling one, of him; while of Karen I know that hers, unfortunate as
they certainly were, have made a lady and a very perfect one. I don't
forgive Madame von Marwitz for a great many things in regard to her
treatment of Karen," Gregory went on with growing bitterness, "chief
among them that she has taken her at her market value and allowed her
friends to do the same. I've been able, thank goodness, to rescue Karen,
at all events, from that. Madame von Marwitz can't carry her about any
longer like a badge from some charitable society on her shoulder. No
woman who really loved Karen, or who really appreciated her," Gregory
added, falling back on his concrete fact, "could have thought of Herr
Lippheim as a husband for her."
Mrs. Forrester sat looking up at him, and she was genuinely aghast.
"You are incredible to me, Gregory," she said. "You set your one year of
devotion to Karen against Mercedes's life-time, and you presume to
discredit hers."
"Yes. I do. I don't believe in her devotion to Karen."
"Do you realize that your attitude may mean a complete rupture between
Karen and her guardian?"
"No such luck; I'm afraid!" said Gregory with a grim laugh. "My only
hope is that it may mean a complete rupture between Madame von Marwitz
and me. It goes without saying, feeling as I do, that, if it wouldn't
break Karen's heart, I'd do my best to prevent Madame von Marwitz from
ever seeing her again."
There was a little silence and then Mrs. Forrester got up sharply.
"Very well, Gregory," she said. "That will do."
"Are you going to shake hands with me?" he asked, still with the grim
smile.
"Yes. I will shake hands with you, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester replied.
"Because, in spite of everything, I am fond of you. But you must not
come here again. Not now."
"Never any more, do you really mean?"
"Not until you are less wickedly blind."
"I'm sorry," said Gregory. "It's never any more then, I'm afraid."
He was very sorry. He knew that as he walked away.