Gregory when he came in that evening thought at first, with a pang of
fear, that Karen had gone out. It was time for dressing and she was not
in their room. In the drawing-room it was dark; he stood in the doorway
for a moment and looked about it, sad and tired and troubled, wondering
if Karen had gone to Mrs. Forrester's, wondering whether, in her grave
displeasure with him, she had even followed her guardian. And then, from
beside him, came her voice. "I am here, Gregory. I have been waiting for
you."
His relief was so intense that, turning up the lights, seeing her
sitting there on a little sofa near the door, he bent involuntarily over
her to kiss her.
But her hand put him away.
"No; I must speak to you," she said.
Gregory straightened himself, compressing his lips.
Karen had evidently not thought of changing. She wore her dark-blue silk
dress. She had, indeed, been sitting there since Mrs. Forrester went. He
looked about the room, noting, with dull wonder, the grouped chairs, and
open piano. "You have had people here?"
"Yes. The Lippheims came and played to me. I would have written to them
and told them not to come; but I forgot. And Mrs. Forrester has been
here."
"Quite a reception," said Gregory. He walked to the window and looked
out. "Well," he said, not turning to his wife, "what have you to say to
me, Karen?" His tone was dry and even ironic.
"Mrs. Forrester came to tell me," said Karen, "that you had seen her
this morning."
"Yes. Well?"
"And she told me," Karen went on, "that you had a great deal to say to
her about my guardian--things that you have never dared to say to me."
He turned to her now and her eyes from across the room fixed themselves
upon him.
"I will say them to you if you like," said Gregory, after a moment. He
leaned against the side of the window and folded his arms. And he
examined his wife with, apparently, the cold attention that he would
have given to a strange witness in the box. And indeed she was strange
to him. Over his aching and dispossessed heart he steeled himself in an
impartial scrutiny.
"It is true, then," said Karen, "that you believe her tyrannous and
dangerous and unscrupulous, and that you think her devoured by egotism,
and hypocritical in her feeling for me, and that you hope that I may
never see her again?"
She catalogued the morning's declarations accurately, like the witness
giving unimpeachable testimony. But it was rather absurd to see her as
the witness, when, so unmistakably, she considered herself the judge and
him the criminal in the dock. There was relief in pleading guilty to
everything. "Yes: it's perfectly true," he said.
She looked at him and he could discover no emotion on her face.
"Why did you not tell me this when you asked me to marry you?" she
questioned.
"Oh--I wasn't so sure of it then," said Gregory. "And I loved you and
hoped it would never come out. I didn't want to give you pain. That's
why I never dared tell you, as you put it."
"You wanted to marry me and you knew that if you told me the truth I
would not marry you; that is the reason you did not dare," said Karen.
"Well, there's probably truth in that," Gregory assented, smiling; "I'm
afraid I was an infatuated creature, perhaps a dishonest one. I can't
expect you to make allowances for my condition, I know."
She lowered her eyes and sat for so long in silence that presently,
rather ashamed of the bitterness of his last words, he went on in a
kinder tone: "I know that I can never make you understand. You have your
infatuation and it blinds you. You've been blind to the way in which,
from the very beginning, she has tracked me down. You've been blind to
the fact that the thing that has moved her hasn't been love for you but
spite, malicious spite, against me for not giving her the sort of
admiration she's accustomed to. If I've come to hate her--I didn't in
the least at first, of course--it's only fair to say that she hates me
ten times worse. I only asked that she should let me alone."
"And let me alone," said Karen, who had listened without a movement.
"Oh no," Gregory said, "that's not at all true. You surely will be fair
enough to own that it's not; that I did everything I could to give you
both complete liberty."
"As when you applauded and upheld Betty for her insolent interference;
as when you complained to me of my guardian because she asked that I
should have a wider life; as when you hoped to have Mrs. Talcott here so
that my guardian might be kept out."
"Did she suggest that?"
"She showed it to me. I had not seen it even then. Do you deny it?"
"No; I don't suppose I can, though it was nothing so definite. But I
certainly hoped that Madame von Marwitz would not come here."
"And yet you can tell me that you have not tried to come between us."
"Yes; I can. I never tried to come between you. I tried to keep away.
It's been she, as I say, who has tracked me down. That was what I was
afraid of if she came here; that she'd force me to show my dislike. Can
you deny, Karen, I ask you this, that from the beginning she has made
capital to you out of my dislike, and pointed it out to you?"
"I will not discuss that with you," said Karen; "I know that you can
twist all her words and actions."
"I don't want to do that. I can see a certain justice in her malice. It
was hard for her, of course, to find that you'd married a man she didn't
take to and who didn't take to her; but why couldn't she have left it at
that?"
"It couldn't be left at that. It wasn't only that," said Karen. "If she
had liked you, you would never have liked her; and if you had liked her
she would have liked you."
The steadiness of her voice as she thus placed the heart of the matter
before him brought him a certain relief. Perhaps, in spite of his cold
realizations and the death of all illusion as to Karen's love for him,
they could really, now, come to an understanding, an accepted
compromise. His heart ached and would go on aching until time had
blunted its hurts, and a compromise was all he had to hope for. He had
nothing to expect from Karen but acceptance of fact and faithful
domesticity. But, after all the uncertainties and turmoils, this bitter
peace had its balms. He took up her last words.
"Ah, well, she'd have liked my liking," he analysed it. "I don't know
that she'd have liked me;--unless I could have managed to give her
actual worship, as you and her friends do. But I'm not going to say
anything more against her. She has forced the truth from me, and now we
may bury it. You shall see her, of course, whenever you want to. But I
hope that I shall never have to speak of her to you again."
The talk seemed to have been brought to an end. Karen, had risen and
Barker, entering at the moment, announced dinner.
"By Jove, is it as late as that," Gregory muttered, nodding to him. He
turned to Karen when Barker was gone and, the pink electric lights
falling upon her face, he saw as he had not seen before how grey and
sunken it was. She had made no movement towards the door.
"Gregory," she said, fixing her eyes upon him, and he then saw that he
had misinterpreted her quiet, "I tell you that these things are not
true. They are not true. Will you believe me?"
"What things?" he asked. But he was temporizing. He saw that the end had
not come.
"The things you believe of Tante. That she is a heartless woman, using
those who love her--feeding on their love. I say it is not true. Will
you believe me?"
She stood on the other side of the room, her arms hanging at her sides,
her hands hanging open, all her being concentrated in the ultimate
demand of her compelling gaze.
"Karen," he said, "I know that she must be lovable; I know, of course,
that she has power, and charm, and tenderness. I think I can understand
why you feel for her as you do. But I don't think that there is any
chance that I shall change my opinion of her; not for anything you say.
I believe that she takes you in completely."
Karen gazed at him. "You will still believe that she is tyrannous, and
dangerous, and false, whatever I may say?"
"Yes, Karen. I know it sounds horrible to you. You must try to forgive
me for it. We won't speak of it again; I promise you."
She turned from him, looking before her at the Bouddha, but not as if
she saw it. "We shall never speak of it again," she said. "I am going to
leave you, Gregory."
For a moment he stared at her. Then he smiled. "You mustn't punish me
for telling you the truth, Karen, by silly threats."
"I do not punish you. You have done rightly to tell me the truth. But I
cannot live with a man who believes these things."
She still gazed at the Bouddha and again Gregory stared at her. His face
hardened. "Don't be absurd, Karen. You cannot mean what you say."
"I am going to-night. Now," said Karen.
"Going? Where?"
"To Cornwall, back to my guardian. She will take care of me again. I
will not live with you."
"If you really mean what you say," said Gregory, after a moment, "you
are telling me that you don't love me. I've suspected it for some time."
"I feel as if that were true," said Karen, looking now down upon the
ground. "I think I have no more love for you. I find you a petty man."
It was impossible to hope that she was speaking recklessly or
passionately. She had come to the conclusion with deliberation; she had
been thinking of it since last night. She was willing to cast him off
because he could not love where she loved. How deeply the roots of hope
still knotted themselves in him he was now to realize. He felt his heart
and mind rock with the reverberation of the shattering, the pulverizing
explosion, and he saw his life lying in a wilderness of dust about him.
Yet the words he found were not the words of his despair. "Even if you
feel like this, Karen," he said, "there is no necessity for behaving
like a lunatic. Go and stay with your guardian, by all means, and
whenever you like. Start to-morrow morning. Spend most of your time with
her. I shall not put the smallest difficulty in your way. But--if only
for your own sake--have some common-sense and keep up appearances. You
must remain my wife in name and the mistress of my house."
"Thank you, you mean to be kind, I know," said Karen, who had not looked
at him since her declaration; "But I am not a conventional woman and I
do not wish to live with a man who is no longer my husband. I do not
wish to keep up appearances. I do not wish it to be said--by those who
know my guardian and what she has done for me and been to me--that I
keep up the appearance of regard for a man who hates her. I made a
mistake in marrying you; you allowed me to make it. Now, as far as I
can, I undo it by leaving you. Perhaps," she added, "you could divorce
me. That would set you free."
The remark in its childishness, callousness, and considerateness struck
him as one of the most revealing she had made. He laughed icily. "Our
laws only allow of divorce for one cause and I advise you not to seek
freedom for yourself--or for me--by disgracing yourself. It's not worth
it. The conventions you scorn have their solid value."
She had now turned her head and was looking at him. "I think you are
insulting me," she said.
For the first time he observed a trembling in her voice and interpreted
it as anger. It gave him a hurting satisfaction to have made her angry.
She had appalled and shattered him.
"I am not insulting you, I am warning you, Karen," he said. "A woman who
can behave as you are behaving is capable of acts of criminal folly. You
don't believe in convention, and in your guardian's world you will meet
many men who don't."
"What do you mean by criminal folly?"
"I mean living with a man you're not married to."
He had simply and sincerely forgotten something. Karen's face grew
ashen.
"You mean that my mother was a criminal?"
Even at this moment of his despair Gregory was horribly sorry. Yet the
memory that she recalled brought a deeper fear for her future. He had
spoken with irony of her suggestion about divorce and freedom. But did
not her very blood, as well as her environment, give him reason to
emphasise his warning?
"I didn't mean that. I wasn't thinking of that," he said, "as you must
know. And to be criminally foolish is a very different thing from being
a criminal. But I'm convinced that to break social laws--and these laws
about men and women have deeper than merely social sanctions--to break
them, I'm convinced, can bring no happiness. I feel about your mother,
and what she did--I say it with all reverence--that she was as mistaken
as she was unfortunate. And I beg of you, Karen, never to follow her
example."
"It is not for you to speak of her!" Karen said, not moving from her
place but uttering the words with a still and sudden passion that he had
never heard from her. "It is not for you to preach sermons to me on the
text of my mother's misfortunes. I do not call them misfortunes--nor did
she. I do not accept your laws, and she was not afraid of them. How dare
you call her unfortunate? She lost nothing that she valued and she
gained great happiness, and gave it, for she was happy with my father.
It was a truer marriage than any I have known. She was more married than
you or I have ever been or could ever have been; for there was deep love
between them, and trust and understanding. Do not speak to me of her. I
forbid it."
She turned to the door. Gregory sprang to her side and seized her wrist.
"Karen! Where are you going? Wait till to-morrow!" he exclaimed, fear
for her actual safety surmounting every other feeling.
She stood still under his hand and looked at him with her still passion
of repudiation. "I will not wait. I shall go to-night to Frau Lippheim.
And to-morrow I shall go to Cornwall. I shall tell Mrs. Barker to pack
my clothes and send them to me there."
"You have no money."
"Frau Lippheim will lend me money. My guardian will take care of me. It
is not for you to have any thought for me."
He dropped her arm. "Very well. Go then," he said.
He turned from her. He heard that she paused, the knob of the door in
her hand. "Good-bye," she then said.
Again it was, inconceivably, the mingled childishness, callousness and
considerateness. That, at the moment, she could think of the formality,
suffocated him. "Good-bye," he replied, not looking round.
The door opened and closed. He heard her swift feet passing down the
passage to their room.
She was not reckless. She needed her hat and coat at least. Quiet,
rational determination was in all her actions.
Yet, as he waited to hear her come out again, a hope that he knew to be
chimerical rose in him. She would, perhaps, return, throw herself in his
arms and, weeping, say that she loved him and could not leave him.
Gregory's heart beat quickly.
But when he heard her footsteps again they were not returning. They
passed along to the kitchen; she was speaking to Mrs. Barker--Gregory
had a shoot of surface thought for Mrs. Barker's astonishment; they
entered the hall again, the hall door closed behind them.
Gregory stood looking at the Bouddha. The tears kept mounting to his
throat and eyes and, furiously, he choked them back. He did not see the
Bouddha.
But, suddenly becoming aware of the bland contemplative gaze of the
great bronze image, his eyes fixed themselves on it.
He had known it from the first to be an enemy. Its presage was
fulfilled. The tidal wave had broken over his life.
PART II
CHAPTER XXIX
Karen sat in her corner of the railway carriage looking out at familiar
scenery.
Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in
the morning. Then, after the attendant had passed along the corridor
announcing lunch, and those who were lunching had followed him in single
file, had come the lonely majesty of the Somerset downs, lying like
great headlands along the plain, a vast sky of rippled blue and silver
above them. They had passed Plymouth where she had always used to look
down from the high bridges and wonder over the lives of the midshipmen
on the training-ships, and now they were winding through wooded Cornish
valleys.
Karen had looked out of her window all day. She had not read, though
kind Frau Lippheim had put the latest _tendenz-roman_, paper-bound, into
the little basket, which was also stocked with stout beef-sandwiches, a
bottle of milk, and the packet of chocolate and bun in paper bag that
Franz had added to it at the station.
Poor Franz. He and his mother had come to see her off and they had both
wept as the train moved away, and strange indeed it must have been for
them to see the Karen Jardine who, only yesterday, had been, apparently,
so happy, and so secure in her new life, carried back to the old; a wife
who had left her husband.
Karen had slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept
less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the
narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the
Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very
cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder
that Franz's eyes had been so heavy, his face so puffed and pale that
morning; and his tears had given the last touch of desolation to his
countenance.
Karen herself had not wept, either at the parting or at the meeting of
the night before. She had told them, with no explanations at all, that
she had left her husband and was going back to her guardian, and the
Lippheims had asked no questions.
It might have been possible that Franz, as he sat at the table, his
fingers run through his hair, clutching his head while he and his mother
listened to her, was not so dazed and lost as was Frau Lippheim, who had
not seen Gregory. Franz might have his vague perceptions. "_Ach! Ach!_"
he had ejaculated once or twice while she spoke.
And Frau Lippheim had only said: "_Liebes Kind! Liebes, armes Kind!_"
She was, after all, going back to the great Tante and they felt, no
doubt, that no grief could be ultimate which had that compensatory
refuge.
She was going back to Tante. As the valleys, in their deepened shadows,
streamed past her, Karen remembered that it had hardly been at all of
Tante that she had thought while the long hours passed and her eyes
observed the flying hills and fields. Perhaps she had thought of
nothing. The heavy feeling, as of a stone resting on her heart, of doom,
defeat and bitterness, could hardly have been defined as thought. She
had thought and thought and thought during these last dreadful days;
every mental cog had been adjusted, every wheel had turned; she had held
herself together as never before in all her life, in order to give
thought every chance. For wasn't that to give him every chance? and
wasn't that, above all, to give herself any chance that might still be
left her?
And now the machinery seemed to lie wrecked. There was not an ember of
hope left with which to kindle its activity. How much hope there must
have been to have made it work so firmly and so furiously during these
last days! how much, she hadn't known until her husband had come in last
night, and, at last, spoken openly.
Even Mrs. Forrester's revelations, though they had paralyzed her, had
not put out the fires. She had still hoped that he could deny, explain,
recant, own that he had been hasty, perhaps; perhaps mistaken; give her
some loophole. She could have understood--oh, to a degree almost
abject--his point of view. Mrs. Forrester had accused her of that. And
Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze
to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the
folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look
and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in
her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood
bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit,
unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had
never loved each other; or, worse, far worse, they had loved and love
was this puny thing that a blow could kill. His love for her was dead.
She still trembled when the ultimate realization surged over her,
looking fixedly out of the window lest she should weep aloud.
She had only one travelling companion, an old woman who got out at
Plymouth. Karen had found her curiously repulsive and that was one
reason why she had kept her eyes fixed on the landscape. She had been
afraid that the old woman would talk to her, perhaps offer her
refreshments, or sympathy; for she was a kind old woman, with bland eyes
and a moist warm face and two oily curls hanging forward from her
old-fashioned bonnet upon her shoulders. She was stout, dressed in tight
black cashmere, and she sat with her knees apart and her hands, gloved
in grey thread gloves, lying on them. She held a handkerchief rolled
into a ball, and from time to time, as if furtively, she would raise
this handkerchief to her brow and wipe it. And all the time, Karen felt,
she looked mildly and humbly at her and seemed to divine her distress.
Karen was thankful when she got out. She had been ashamed of her
antipathy.
Bodmin Road was now passed and the early spring sunset shone over the
tree-tops in the valleys below. Karen leaned her head back and closed
her eyes. She was suddenly aware of her great fatigue, and when they
reached Gwinear Road she found that she had been dozing.
The fresh, chill air, as she walked along the platform, waiting for the
change of trains, revived her. She had not been able to eat her beef
sandwiches and the thought that so much of Frau Lippheim's good food
should be wasted troubled her; she was glad to find a little wandering
fox-terrier who ate the meat eagerly. She herself, sitting beside the
dog, nibbled at Franz's chocolate. She had had nothing on her journey
but the milk and part of the bun which Franz had given her.
Now she was in the little local train and the bleak Cornish country,
nearing the coast, spread before her eyes like a map of her future life.
She began to think of the future, and of Tante.
She had not sent word to Tante that she was coming. She felt that it
would be easiest to appear before her in silence and Tante would
understand. There need be no explanations.
She imagined that Tante would find it best that she should live,
permanently now, in Cornwall with Mrs. Talcott. It could hardly be
convenient for her to take about with her a wife who had left her
husband. Karen quite realized that her status must be a very different
one from that of the unshadowed young girl.
And it would be strange to take up the old life again and to look back
from it at the months of life with Gregory--that mirage of happiness
receding as if to a blur of light seen over a stretch of desert. Still
with her quiet and unrevealing young face turned towards the evening
landscape, Karen felt as if she had grown very old and were looking
back, after a life-time without Gregory, at the mirage. How faint and
far it would seem to be when she was really old--like a nebulous star
trembling on the horizon. But it would never grow invisible; she would
never forget it; oh never; nor the dreadful pain of loss. To the very
end of life, she was sure of it, she would keep the pang of the shining
memory.
When they reached Helston, dusk had fallen. She found a carriage that
would drive her the twelve miles to the coast. It was a quiet, grey
evening and as they jolted slowly along the dusty roads and climbed the
steep hills at a snail's pace, she leaned back too tired to feel
anything any longer. And now they were out upon the moors where the
gorse was breaking into flowers; and now, over the sea, she saw at last
the great beacon of the Lizard lighthouse sweeping the country with its
vast, desolate, yet benignant beam.
They reached the long road and the stile where, a year before, she had
met Gregory. Here was the hedge of fuchsia; here the tamarisks on their
high bank; here the entrance to Les Solitudes. The steeply pitched grey
roofs rose before her, and the white walls with their squares of orange
light glimmered among the trees.
She alighted, paid the man, and rang.
A maid, unknown to her, came to the door and showed surprise at seeing
her there with her bag.
Yes; Madame von Marwitz was within. Karen had entered with the asking.
"Whom shall I announce, Madam?" the maid inquired.
Karen looked at her vaguely. "She is in the music-room? I do not need to
be announced. That will go to my room." She put down the bag and crossed
the hall.
She was not aware of feeling any emotion; yet a sob had taken her by the
throat and tears had risen to her eyes; she opened them widely as she
entered the dusky room, presenting a strange face.
Madame von Marwitz rose from a distant sofa.
In her astonishment, she stood still for a moment; then, like a great,
white, widely-winged moth, she came forward, rapidly, yet with hesitant,
reconnoitring pauses, her eyes on the girl who stood in the doorway
looking blindly towards her.
"Karen!" she exclaimed sharply. "What brings you here?"
"I have come back to you, Tante," said Karen.
Tante stood before her, not taking her into her arms, not taking her
hands.
"Come back to me? What do you mean?"
"I have left Gregory," said Karen. She was bewildered now. What had
happened? She did not know; but it was something that made it impossible
to throw herself in Tante's arms and weep.
Then she saw that another person was with them. A man was seated on the
distant sofa. He rose, wandering slowly down the room, and revealed
himself in the dim light that came from the evening sky and sea as Mr.
Claude Drew. Pausing at some little distance he fixed his eyes on Karen,
and in the midst of all the impressions, striking like chill, moulding
blows on the melted iron of her mood, she was aware of these large, dark
eyes of Mr. Drew's and of their intent curiosity.
The predominant impression, however, was of a changed aspect in
everything, and as Tante, now holding her hands, still stood silent,
also looking at her with intent curiosity, the impression vaguely and
terribly shaped itself for her as a piercing question: Was Tante not
glad to have her back?
There came from Tante in another moment a more accustomed note.
"You have left your husband--because of me--my poor child?"
Karen nodded. Mr. Drew's presence made speech impossible.
"He made it too difficult for you?"
Karen nodded again.
"And you have come back to me." Madame von Marwitz summed it up rather
than inquired. And then, after another pause, she folded Karen in her
arms.
The piercing question seemed answered. Yet Karen could not now have
wept. A dry, hard desolation filled her. "May I go to my room, Tante?"
"Yes, my child. Go to your room. You will find Tallie. Tallie is in the
house, I think--or did I send her in to Helston?--no, that was for
to-morrow." She held Karen's hand at a stretch of her arm while she
seemed, with difficulty still, to collect her thoughts. "But I will come
with you myself. Yes; that is best. Wait here, Claude." This to the
silent, dusky figure behind them.
"Do not let me be a trouble." Karen controlled the trembling of her
voice. "I know my way."
"No trouble, my child; no trouble. Or none that I am not glad to take."
Tante had her now on the stair--her arm around her shoulders. "You will
find us at sixes and sevens; a household hastily organized, but Tallie,
directed by wires, has done wonders. So. My poor Karen. You have left
him. For good? Or is it only to punish him that you come to me?"
"I have left him for good."
"So," Madame von Marwitz repeated.
With all the veils and fluctuations, one thing was growing clear to
Karen. Tante might be glad to have her back; but she was confused,
trying to think swiftly, to adjust her thoughts. They were in Karen's
little room overlooking the trees at the corner of the house. It was
dismantled; a bare dressing-table, the ewer upturned in the basin, the
bed and its piled bedding covered with a sheet. Madame von Marwitz sat
down on the bed and drew Karen beside her.
"But is not that to punish him too much?"
"It is not to punish him. I cannot live with him any longer."
"I see; I see;" said Madame von Marwitz, with a certain briskness, as
though, still, to give herself time to think. "It might have been wiser
to wait--to wait for a little. I would have written to you. We could
have consulted. It is serious, you know, my Karen, very serious, to
leave one's husband. I went away so that this should not come to you."
"I could not wait. I could not stay with him any longer," said Karen
heavily.
"There is more, you mean. You had words? He hates me more than you
thought?"
Karen paused, and then assented: "Yes; more than I thought."
Above the girl's head, which she held pressed down on her shoulder,
Madame von Marwitz pondered for some moments. "Alas!" she then uttered
in a deep voice. And, Karen saying nothing, she repeated on a yet more
melancholy note: "Alas!"
Karen now raised herself from Tante's shoulder; but, at the gesture of
withdrawal, Madame von Marwitz caught her close again and embraced her.
"I feared it," she said. "I saw it. I hoped to hide it by my flight. My
poor child! My beloved Karen!"
They held each other for some silent moments. Then Madame von Marwitz
rose. "You are weary, my Karen; you must rest; is it not so? I will send
Tallie to you. You will see Tallie--she is a perfection of discretion;
you do not shrink from Tallie. And you need tell her nothing; she will
not question you. Between ourselves; is it not so? Yes; that is best.
For the present. I will come again, later--I have guests, a guest, you
see. Rest here, my Karen." She moved towards the door.
Karen looked after her. An intolerable fear pressed on her. She could
not bear, in her physical weakness, to be left alone with it. "Tante!"
she exclaimed.
Madame von Marwitz turned. "My child?"
"Tante--you are glad to have me back?"
Her pride broke in a sob. She hid her face in her hands.
Madame von Marwitz returned to the bed.
"Glad, my child?" she said. "For all the sorrow that it means? and to
know that I am the cause? How can I be glad for my child's unhappiness?"
She spoke with a touch of severity, as though in Karen's tears she felt
an unexpressed accusation.
"Not for that," Karen spoke with difficulty. "But to have me with you
again. It will not be a trouble?"
There was a little silence and then, her severity passing to melancholy
reproof, Madame von Marwitz said: "Did we not, long since, speak of
this, Karen? Have you forgotten? Can you so wound me once again? Only my
child's grief can excuse her. It is a sorrow to see your life in ruins;
I had hoped before I died to see it joyous and secure. It is a sorrow to
know that you have maimed yourself; that you are tied to an unworthy
man. But how could it be a trouble to me to have you with me? It is a
consolation--my only consolation in this calamity. With me you shall
find peace and happiness again."
She laid her hand on Karen's head. Karen put her hand to her lips.
"There. That is well," said Madame von Marwitz with a sigh, bending to
kiss her. "That is my child. Tante is sad at heart. It is a heavy blow.
But her child is welcome."
When she had gone Karen lay, her face in the billows of the bed, while
she fixed her thoughts on Tante's last words.
They became a sing-song monotone. "Tante is sad at heart. But her child
is welcome. It is a heavy blow. But her child is welcome."
After the anguish there was a certain ease. She rested in the given
reassurance. Yet the sing-song monotone oppressed her.
She felt presently that her hat, wrenched to one side, and still fixed
to her hair by its pins, was hurting her. She unfastened it and dropped
it to the floor. She felt too tired to do more just then.
Soon after this the door opened and Mrs. Talcott appeared carrying a
candle, a can of hot water, towels and sheets.
Karen drew herself up, murmuring some vague words of welcome, and Mrs.
Talcott, after setting the candle on the dressing-table and the hot
water in the basin, remarked: "Just you lie down again, Karen, and let
me wash your face for you. You must be pretty tired and dirty after that
long journey."
But Karen put her feet to the ground. They just sustained her. "Thank
you, Mrs. Talcott. I will do it," she said.
She bent over the water, and, while she washed, Mrs. Talcott, with
deliberate skill, made up the bed. Karen sank in a chair.
"You poor thing," said Mrs. Talcott, turning to her as she smoothed down
the sheet; "Why you're green. Sit right there and I'll undress you. Yes;
you're only fit to be put to bed."
She spoke with mild authority, and Karen, under her hands, relapsed to
childhood.
"This all the baggage you've brought?" Mrs. Talcott inquired, finding a
nightdress in Karen's dressing-case. She expressed no surprise when
Karen said that it was all, passed the nightdress over her head and,
when she had lain down, tucked the bed-clothes round her.
"Now what you want is a hot-water bottle and some dinner. I guess you're
hungry. Did you have any lunch on the train?"
"I've had some chocolate and a bun and some milk, oh yes, I had enough,"
said Karen faintly, raising her hand to her forehead; "but I must be
hungry; for my head aches so badly. How kind you are, Mrs. Talcott."
"You lie right there and I'll bring you some dinner." Mrs. Talcott was
swiftly tidying the room.
"But what of yours, Mrs. Talcott? Isn't it your dinner-time?"
"I've had my supper. I have supper early these days."
Karen dimly reflected, when she was gone, that this was an innovation.
Whoever Madame von Marwitz's guests, Mrs. Talcott had, until now, always
made an _acte de présence_ at every meal. She was tired and not feeling
well enough after her illness, she thought.
Mrs. Talcott soon returned with a tray on which were set out hot
_consommée_ and chicken and salad, a peach beside them. Hot-house fruit
was never wanting when Madame von Marwitz was at Les Solitudes.
"Lie back. I'll feed it to you," said Mrs. Talcott. "It's good and
strong. You know Adolphe can make as good a _consommée_ as anybody, if
he's a mind to."
"Is Adolphe here?" Karen asked as she swallowed the spoonfuls.
"Yes, I sent for Adolphe to Paris a week ago," said Mrs. Talcott.
"Mercedes wrote that she'd soon be coming with friends and wanted him.
He'd just taken a situation, but he dropped it. Her new motor's here,
too, down from London. The chauffeur seems a mighty nice man, a sight
nicer than Hammond." Hammond had been Madame von Marwitz's recent
coachman. Mrs. Talcott talked on mildly while she fed Karen who, in the
whirl of trivial thoughts, turning and turning like midges over a deep
pool, questioned herself, with a vague wonder that she was too tired to
follow: "Did Tante say anything to me about coming to Cornwall?"
Mrs. Talcott, meanwhile, as Madame von Marwitz had prophesied, asked no
questions.
"Now you have a good long sleep," she said, when she rose to go. "That's
what you need."
She needed it very much. The midges turned more and more slowly, then
sank into the pool; mist enveloped everything, and darkness.
CHAPTER XXX
Karen was waked next morning by the familiar sound of the
_Wohltemperirtes Clavier_.
Tante was at work in the music-room and was playing the prelude in D
flat, a special favourite of Karen's.
She lay and listened with a curious, cautious pleasure, like that with
which, half awake, one may guide a charming dream, knowing it to be a
dream. There was so much waiting to be remembered; so much waiting to be
thought. Tante's beautiful notes, rising to her like the bubbles of a
spring through clear water, seemed to encircle her, ringing her in from
the wider consciousness.
While she listened she looked out at the branches of young leaves,
softly stirring against the morning sky. There was her wall-paper, with
the little pink flower creeping up it. She was in her own little bed.
Tante was practising. How sweet, how safe, it was. A drowsy peace filled
her. It was slowly that memory, lapping in, like the sinister, dark
waters of a flood under doors and through crevices, made its way into
her mind, obliterating peace, at first, rather than revealing pain.
There was a fear formless and featureless; and there was loss, dreadful
loss. And as the sense of loss grew upon her, consciousness grew more
vivid, bringing its visions.
This hour of awakening. Gregory's eyes smiling at her, not cold, not
hard eyes then. His hand stretched out to hers; their morning kiss.
Tears suddenly streamed down her face.
It was impossible to hide them from Mrs. Talcott, who came in carrying a
breakfast tray; but Karen checked them, and dried her eyes.
Mrs. Talcott set the tray down on the little table near the bed.
"Is it late, Mrs. Talcott?" Karen asked.
"It's just nine; Mercedes is up early so as to get some work in before
she goes out motoring."
"She is going motoring?"
"Yes, she and Mr. Drew are going off for the day." Mrs. Talcott adjusted
Karen's pillow.
"But I shall see Tante before she goes?" It was the formless,
featureless fear that came closer.
"My, yes! You'll see her all right," said Mrs. Talcott. "She was asking
after you the first thing and hoped you'd stay in bed till lunch. Now
you eat your breakfast right away like a good girl."
Karen tried to eat her breakfast like a good girl and the sound of the
_Wohltemperirtes Clavier_ seemed again to encircle and sustain her.
"How'd you sleep, honey?" Mrs. Talcott inquired. The term hardly
expressed endearment, yet it was such an unusual one from Mrs. Talcott
that Karen could only surmise that her tears had touched the old woman.
"Very, very well," she said.
"How'd you like me to bring up some mending I've got to do and sit by
you till Mercedes comes?" Mrs. Talcott pursued.
"Oh, please do, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen. She felt that she would like
to have Mrs. Talcott there with her very much. She would probably cry
unless Mrs. Talcott stayed with her, and she did not want Tante to find
her crying.
So Mrs. Talcott brought her basket of mending and sat by the window,
sewing in silence for the most part, but exchanging with Karen now and
then a quiet remark about the state of the garden and how the plants
were doing.
At eleven the sound of the piano ceased and soon after the stately tread
of Madame von Marwitz was heard outside. Mrs. Talcott, saying that she
would come back later on, gathered up her mending as she appeared. She
was dressed for motoring, with a long white cloak lined with white fur
and her head bound in nun-like fashion with a white coif and veil.
Beautiful she looked, and sad, and gentle; a succouring Madonna; and
Karen's heart rose up to her. It clung to her and prayed; and the
realisation of her own need, her own dependence, was a new thing. She
had never before felt dependence on Tante as anything but proud and
glad. To pray to her now that she should never belie her loveliness, to
cling to that faith in her without which all her life would be a thing
distorted and unrecognisable, was not pride or gladness and seemed to be
the other side of fear. Yet so gentle were the eyes, so tender the smile
and the firm clasp of the hands taking hers, while Tante murmured,
stooping to kiss her: "Good morning to my child," that the prayer seemed
answered, the faith approved.
If Madame von Marwitz had been taken by surprise the night before, if
she had had to give herself time to think, she had now, it was evident,
done her thinking. The result was this warmly cherishing tenderness.
"Ah," she said, still stooping over Karen, while she put back her hair,
"it is good to have my child back again, mine--quite mine--once more."
"I have slept so well, Tante," said Karen. She was able to smile up at
her.
Madame von Marwitz looked about the room. "And now it is to gather the
dear old life closely about her again. Gardening, and reading; and quiet
times with Tante and Tallie. Though, for the moment, I must be much with
my guest; I am helping him with his work. He has talent, yes; it is a
strange and complicated nature. You did not expect to find him here?"
Karen held Tante's hand and her gaze was innocent of surmise. Mr. Drew
had never entered her thoughts. "No. Yes. No, Tante. He came with you?"
"Yes, he came with me," said Madame von Marwitz. "I had promised him
that he should see Les Solitudes one day. I was glad to find an
occupation for my thoughts in helping him. I told him that if he were
free he might join me. It is good, in great sorrow, to think of others.
Now it is, for the young man and for me, our work. Work, work; we must
all work, _ma chérie_. It is our only clue in the darkness of life; our
only nourishment in the desert places." Again she looked about the room.
"You came without boxes?"
"Yes, Mrs. Barker is to send them to me."
"Ah, yes. When," said Madame von Marwitz, in a lower voice, "did you
leave? Yesterday morning?"
"No, Tante. The night before."
"The night before? So? And where did you spend the night? With Mrs.
Forrester? With Scrotton? I have not yet written to Scrotton."
"No. I went to the Lippheims."
"The Lippheims? So?"
"The others, Tante, would have talked to me; and questioned me. I could
not have borne that. The Lippheims were so kind."
"I can believe it. They have hearts of gold, those Lippheims. They would
cut themselves in four to help one. And the good Lise? How is she? I am
sorry to have missed Lise."
"And she was, oh, so sorry to have missed you, Tante. She is well, I
think, though tired; she is always tired, you remember. She has too much
to do."
"Indeed, yes; poor Lise. She might have been an artist of the first rank
if she had not given herself over to the making of children. Why did she
not stop at Franz and Lotta and Minna? That would have given her the
quartette,"--Madame von Marwitz smiled--she was in a mildly merry mood.
"But on they go--four, five, six, seven, eight--how many are there--_bon
Dieu!_ of how many am I the god-mother? One grows bewildered. It is
almost a rat's family. Lise is not unlike a white mother-rat, with the
small round eye and the fat body."
"Oh--not a rat, Tante," Karen protested, a little pained.
"A rabbit, you think? And a rabbit, too, is prolific. No; for the rabbit
has not the sharpness, not the pointed nose, the anxious, eager look--is
not so the mother, indeed. Rat it is, my Karen; and rat with a golden
heart. How do you find Tallie? She has been with you all the morning?
You have not talked with Tallie of our calamities?"
"Oh, no, Tante."
"She is a wise person, Tallie; wise, silent, discreet. And I find her
looking well; but very, very well; this air preserves her. And how old
is Tallie now?" she mused.
Though she talked so sweetly there was, Karen felt it now, a
perfunctoriness in Tante's remarks. She was, for all the play of her
nimble fancy, preoccupied, and the sound of the motor-horn below seemed
a signal for release. "Tallie is, _mon Dieu_," she computed,
rising--"she was twenty-three when I was born--and I am nearly
fifty"--Madame von Marwitz was as far above cowardly reticences about
her age as a timeless goddess--"Tallie is actually seventy-two. Well, I
must be off, _ma chérie_. We have a long trip to make to-day. We go to
Fowey. He wishes to see Fowey. I pray the weather may continue fine. You
will be with us this evening? You will get up? You will come to dinner?"
She paused at the mantelpiece to adjust her veil, and Karen, in the
glass, saw that her eyes were fixed on hers with a certain intentness.
"Yes, I will get up this morning, Tante," she said. "I will help Mrs.
Talcott with the garden. But dinner? Mrs. Talcott says that she has
supper now. Shall I not have my supper with her? Perhaps she would like
that?"
"That would perhaps be well," said Madame von Marwitz. "That is perhaps
well thought." Still she paused and still, in the glass, she fixed
cogitating eyes on Karen. She turned, then, abruptly. "But no; I do not
think so. On second thoughts I do not think so. You will dine with us.
Tallie is quite happy alone. She is pleased with the early supper. I
shall see you, then, this evening."
A slight irritation lay on her brows; but she leaned with all her
tenderness to kiss Karen, murmuring, "_Adieu, mon enfant_."
When the sound of the motor had died away Karen got up, dressed and went
downstairs.
The music-room, its windows open to the sea, was full of the signs of
occupancy.
The great piano stood open. Karen went to it and, standing over it,
played softly the dearly loved notes of the prelude in D flat.
She practised, always, on the upright piano in the morning-room; but
when Tante was at home and left the grand piano open she often played on
that. It was a privilege rarely to be resisted and to-day she sat down
and played the fugue through, still very softly. Then, covering the
keys, she shut the lid and looked more carefully about the room.
Flowers and books were everywhere. Mrs. Talcott arranged flowers
beautifully; Karen recognized her skilful hand in the tall branches of
budding green standing high in a corner, the glasses of violets, the
bowls of anemones and the flat dishes of Italian earthenware filled with
primroses.
On a table lay a pile of manuscript; she knew Mr. Drew's small, thick
handwriting. A square silver box for cigarettes stood near by; it was
marked with Mr. Drew's initials in Tante's hand. How kind she was to
that young man; but Tante had always been lavish with those of whom she
was fond.
Out on the verandah the vine-tendrils were already green against the
sky, and on a lower terrace she saw Mrs. Talcott at work, as usual,
among the borders. Mrs. Talcott then, had not yet gone to Helston and
she would not be alone and she was glad of that. In the little cupboard
near the pantry she found a pair of old gardening gloves and her own old
gardening hat. The day was peaceful and balmy; all was as it had always
been, except herself.
She worked all the morning in the garden and walked in the afternoon on
the cliffs with Victor. Victor had come down with Tante.
Mrs. Talcott had adjourned the trip to Helston; so they had tea
together. Her boxes had not yet come and when it was time to dress for
dinner she had nothing to change to but the little white silk with the
flat blue bows upon it, the dress in which Gregory had first seen her.
She had left it behind her when she married and found it now hanging in
a cupboard in her room.
The horn of the returning motor did not sound until she was dressed and
on going down she had the music-room to herself for nearly half an hour.
Then Mr. Drew appeared.
The tall white lamps with their white shades had been brought in, but
the light from the windows mingled a pale azure with the gold. Mr. Drew,
Karen reflected, looked in the dual illumination like a portrait by
Besnard. He had, certainly, an unusual and an interesting face, and it
pleased her to verify and emphasize this fact; for, accustomed as she
was to watching Tante's preoccupations with interesting people, she
could not quite accustom herself to her preoccupation with Mr. Drew. To
account for it he must be so very interesting.
She was not embarrassed by conjectures as to what, after her entry of
last night, Mr. Drew might be thinking about her. It occurred to her no
more than in the past to imagine that anybody attached to Tante could
spare thought to her. And as in the past, despite all the inner
desolation, it was easy to assume to this guest of Tante's the attitude
so habitual to her of the attendant in the temple, the attendant who,
rising from his seat at the door, comes forward tranquilly to greet the
worshipper and entertain him with quiet comment until the goddess shall
descend.
"Did you have a nice drive?" she inquired. "The weather has been
beautiful."
Mr. Drew, coming up to her as she stood in the open window, looked at
her with his impenetrable, melancholy eyes, smiling at her a little.
There was no tastelessness in his gaze, nothing that suggested a
recollection of what he had heard or seen last night; yet Karen was made
vaguely aware from his look that she had acquired some sort of
significance for him.
"Yes, it's been nice," he said. "I'm very fond of motoring. I'd like to
spend my days in a motor--always going faster and faster; and then drop
down in a blissful torpor at night. Madame von Marwitz was so kind and
made the chauffeur go very fast."
Karen was somewhat disturbed by this suggestion. "I am sure that she,
too, would like going very fast. I hope you will not tempt her."
"Oh, but I'm afraid I do," Mr. Drew confessed. "What is the good of a
motor unless you go too fast in it? A motor has no meaning unless it's a
method of intoxication."
Karen received the remark with inattention. She looked out over the sea,
preoccupied with the thought of Tante's recklessness. "I do not think
that going so fast can be good for her music," she said.
"Oh, but yes," Mr. Drew assured her, "nothing is so good for art as
intoxication. Art is rooted in intoxication. It's all a question of how
to get it."
"But with motoring you only get torpor, you say," Karen remarked. And,
going on with her own train of thoughts, "So much shaking will be bad,
perhaps, for the muscles. And there is always the danger to consider. I
hope she will not go too fast. She is too important a person to take
risks." There was no suggestion that Mr. Drew should not take them.
"Don't you like going fast? Don't you like taking risks? Don't you like
intoxication?" Mr. Drew inquired, and his eyes travelled from the blue
bows on her breast to the blue bows on her elbow-sleeves.
"I have never been intoxicated," said Karen calmly--she was quite
accustomed to all manner of fantastic visitors in the temple--"I do not
think that I should like it. And I prefer walking to any kind of
driving. No, I do not like risks."
"Ah yes, I can see that. Yes, that's altogether in character," said Mr.
Drew. He turned, then, as Madame von Marwitz came in, but remained
standing in the window while Karen went forward to greet her guardian.
Madame von Marwitz, as she took her hands and kissed her, looked over
Karen's shoulder at Mr. Drew.
"Why did you not come to my room, _chérie_?" she asked. "I had hoped to
see you alone before I came down."
"I thought you might be tired and perhaps resting, Tante," said Karen,
who had, indeed, paused before her guardian's door on her way down, and
then passed on with a certain sense of shyness; she did not want in any
way to force herself on Tante.
"But you know that I like to have you with me when I am tired," Madame
von Marwitz returned. "And I am not tired: no: it has been a day of
wings."
She walked down the long room, her arm around Karen, with a buoyancy of
tread and demeanour in which, however, Karen, so deep an adept in her
moods discovered excitement rather than gaiety. "Has it been a good day
for my child?" she questioned; "a happy, peaceful day? Yes? You have
been much with Tallie? I told Tallie that she must postpone the trip to
Helston so that she might stay with you." Tante on the sofa encircled
her and looked brightly at her; yet her eye swerved to the window where
Mr. Drew remained looking at a paper.
Karen said that she had been gardening and walking.
"Good; bravo!" said Tante, and then, in a lower voice: "No news, I
suppose?"
"No; oh no. That could not be, Tante," said Karen, with a startled look,
and Tante went on quickly: "But no; I see. It could not be. And it has,
then, been a happy day for my Karen. What is it you read, Claude?"
Karen's sense of slight perplexity in regard to Tante's interest in Mr.
Drew was deepened when she called him Claude, and her tone now, half
vexed, half light, was perplexing.
"Some silly things that are being said in the House," Mr. Drew returned,
going on reading.
"What things?" said Tante sharply.
"Oh, you wouldn't expect me to read a stupid debate to you," said Mr.
Drew, lifting his eyes with a smile.
Dinner was announced and they went in, Tante keeping her arm around
Karen's shoulders and sweeping ahead with an effect of unawareness as to
her other guest. She had, perhaps, a little lost her temper with him;
and his manner was, Karen reflected, by no means assiduous. At the
table, however, Tante showed herself suave and sweet.
One reason why things seemed a little strange, Karen further reflected,
was that Mrs. Talcott came no longer to dinner; and she was vaguely
sorry for this.
CHAPTER XXXI
Karen's boxes arrived next day, neatly packed by Mrs. Barker. And not
only her clothes were in them. She had left behind her the jewel-box
with the pearl necklace that Gregory had given her, the pearl and
sapphire ring, the old enamel brooch and clasp and chain, his presents
all. The box was kept locked, and in a cupboard of which Gregory had the
key; so that he must have given it to Mrs. Barker. The photographs, too,
from their room, not those of him, but those of Tante; of her father;
and a half a dozen little porcelain and silver trinkets from the
drawing-room, presents and purchases particularly hers.
It was right, quite right, that he should send them. She knew it. It was
right that he should accept their parting as final. Yet that he should
so accurately select and send to her everything that could remind him of
her seemed to roll the stone before the tomb.
She looked at the necklace, the ring, all the pretty things, and shut
the box. Impossible that she should keep them yet impossible to send
them back as if in a bandying of rebuffs. She would wait for some years
to pass and then they should be returned without comment.
And the clothes, all these dear clothes of her married life; every dress
and hat was associated with Gregory. She could never wear them again.
And it felt, not so much that she was locking them away, as that Gregory
had locked her out into darkness and loneliness. She took up the round
of the days. She practised; she gardened, she walked and read. Of Tante
she saw little.
She was accustomed to seeing little of Tante, even when Tante was there;
quite accustomed to Tante's preoccupations. Yet, through the fog of her
own unhappiness, it came to her, like an object dimly perceived, that in
this preoccupation of Tante's there was a difference. It showed, itself
in a high-pitched restlessness, verging now and again on irritation--not
with her, Karen, but with Mr. Drew. To Karen she was brightly,
punctually tender, yet it was a tenderness that held her away rather
than drew her near.
Karen did not need to be put aside. She had always known how to efface
herself; she needed no atonement for the so apparent fact that Tante
wanted to be left alone with Mr. Drew as much as possible. The
difficulty in leaving her came with perceiving that though Tante wanted
her to go she did not want to seem to want it.
She caressed Karen; she addressed her talk to her; she kept her; yet,
under the smile of the eyes, there was an intentness that Karen could
interpret. It devolved upon her to find the excuse, the necessity, for
withdrawal. Mrs. Talcott, in the morning-room, was a solution. Karen
could go to her almost directly after dinner, as soon as coffee had been
served; for on the first occasion when she rose, saying that she would
have her coffee with Mrs. Talcott, Tante said with some sharpness--after
a hesitation: "No; you will have your coffee here. Tallie does not have
coffee." Groping her way, Karen seemed to touch strange forms. Tante
cared so much about this young man; so much that it was almost as if she
would be willing to abandon her dignity for him. It was more than the
indulgent, indolent interest, wholly Olympian, that she had so often
seen her bestow. She really cared. And the strangeness for Karen was in
part made up of pain for Tante; for it almost seemed that Tante cared
more than Mr. Drew did. Karen had seen so many men care for Tante; so
many who were, obviously, in love with her; but she had seen Tante
always throned high above the prostrate adorers, idly kind; holding out
a hand, perhaps, for them to kiss; smiling, from time to time, if they,
fortunately, pleased her; but never, oh never, stepping down towards
them.
It seemed to her now that she had seen Tante stepping down. It was only
a step; she could never become the suppliant, the pursuing goddess; and,
as if with her hand still laid on the arm of her throne, she kept all
her air of high command.
But had she kept its power? Mr. Drew's demeanour reminded Karen
sometimes of a cat's. Before the glance and voice of authority he would,
metaphorically, pace away; pausing to blink up at some object that
attracted his attention or to interest himself in the furbishing of
flank or chest. At a hint of anger or coercion, he would tranquilly
disappear. Tante, controlling indignation, was left to stare after him
and to regain the throne as best she might, and at these moments Karen
felt that Tante's eye turned on her, gauging her power of
interpretation, ready, did she not feign the right degree of
unconsciousness, to wreak on her something of the controlled emotion.
The fear that had come on the night of her arrival pressed closely on
Karen then, but, more closely still, the pain for Tante. Tante's clear
dignity was blurred; her image, in its rebuffed and ineffectual
autocracy, became hovering, uncertain, piteous. And, in seeing and
feeling all these things, as if with a lacerated sensitiveness, Karen
was aware that, in this last week of her life, she had grown much older.
She felt herself in some ways older than her guardian.
It was on the morning of her seventh day at Les Solitudes that she met
Mr. Drew walking early in the garden.
The sea was glittering blue and gold; the air was melancholy in its
sweetness; birds whistled.
Karen examined Mr. Drew as he approached her along the sunny upper
terrace.
With his dense, dark eyes, delicate face and golden hair, his white
clothes and loose black tie, she was able to recognize in him an object
that might charm and even subjugate. To Karen he seemed but one among
the many strange young men she had seen surrounding Tante; yet this
morning, clearly, and for the first time, she saw why he subjugated
Tante and why she resented her subjugation. There was more in him than
mere pose and peculiarity; he had some power; the power of the cat: he
was sincerely indifferent to anything that did not attract him. And at
the same time he was unimportant; insignificant in all but his
sincerity. He was not a great writer; Tante could never make a great
writer out of him. And he was, when all was said and done, but one among
many strange young men.
"Good morning," he said. He doffed his hat. He turned and walked beside
her. They were in full view of the house. "I hoped that I might find
you. Let us go up to the flagged garden," he suggested; "the sea is
glittering like a million scimitars. One has a better view up there."
"But it is not so warm," said Karen. "I am walking here to be in the
sun."
Mr. Drew had also been walking there to be in the sun; but they were in
full view of the house and he was aware of a hand at Madame von
Marwitz's window-curtain. He continued, however, to walk beside Karen up
and down the terrace.
"I think of you," he said, "as a person always in the sun. You suggest
glaciers and fields of snow and meadows full of flowers--the sun pouring
down on all of them. I always imagine Apollo as a Norse God. Are you
really a Norwegian?"
Karen was, as we have said, accustomed to young men who talked in a
fantastic manner. She answered placidly: "Yes. I am half Norwegian."
"Your name, then, is really yours?--your untamed, yet intimate, name. It
is like a wild bird that feeds out of one's hand."
"Yes; it is really mine. It is quite a common name in Norway."
"Wild birds are common," Mr. Drew observed, smiling softly.
He found her literalness charming. He was finding her altogether
charming. From the moment that she had appeared at the door in the dusk,
with her white, blind, searching face, she had begun to interest him.
She was stupid and delightful; a limpid and indomitable young creature
who, in a clash of loyalties, had chosen, without a hesitation, to leave
the obvious one. Also she was married yet unawakened, and this, to Mr.
Drew, was a pre-eminently charming combination. The question of the
awakened and the unawakened, of the human attitude to passion,
preoccupied him, practically, more than any other. His art dealt mainly
in themes of emotion as an end in itself.
The possibilities of passion in Madame von Marwitz, as artist and
genius, had strongly attracted him. He had genuinely been in love with
Madame von Marwitz. But the mere woman, as she more and more helplessly
revealed herself, was beginning to oppress and bore him.
He had amused himself, of late, by imaging his relation to her in the
fable of the sun and the traveller. Her beams from their high, sublime
solitudes had filled him with delight and exhilaration. Then the
radiance had concentrated itself, had begun to follow him--rather in the
manner of stage sunlight--very unflaggingly. He had wished for intervals
of shade. He had been aware, even during his long absence in America, of
sultriness brooding over him, and now, at these close quarters, he had
begun to throw off his cloak of allegiance. She bored him. It wasn't
good enough. She pretended to be sublime and far; but she wasn't sublime
and far; she was near and watchful and exacting; as watchful and
exacting as a mistress and as haughty as a Diana. She was not, and had,
evidently, no intention of being, his mistress, and for the mere
pleasure of adoring her Mr. Drew found the price too high to pay. He did
not care to proffer, indefinitely, a reverent passion, and he did not
like people, when he showed his weariness, to lose their tempers with
him. Already Madame von Marwitz had lost hers. He did not forget what
she looked like nor what she said on these occasions. She had mentioned
the large-mouthed children at Wimbledon--facts that he preferred to
forget as much as possible--and he did not know that he forgave her.
There was a tranquil malice in realizing that as Madame von Marwitz
became more and more displeasing to him, Mrs. Jardine, more and more,
became pleasing. A new savour had come into his life since her
appearance and he had determined to postpone a final rupture with his
great friend and remain on for some time longer at Les Solitudes. He
wondered if it would be possible to awaken Mrs. Jardine.
"Haven't I heard you practising, once or twice lately?" he asked her
now, as they turned at the end of the terrace and walked back.
"Yes," said Karen; "I practise every morning."
"I'd no idea you played, too."
"It is hardly a case of 'too', is it," Karen said, mildly amused.
"I don't know. Perhaps it is. One may look at a Memling after a Michael
Angelo, you know. I wish you'd play to me."
"I am no Memling, I assure you."
"You can't, until I hear you. Do play to me. Brahms; a little Brahms."
"I have practised no Brahms for a long time. I find him too difficult."
"I heard you doing a Bach prelude yesterday; play that."
"Certainly, if you wish it, I will play it to you," said Karen, "though
I do not think that you will much enjoy it."
Mrs. Talcott was in the morning-room over accounts; so Karen went with
the young man into the music-room and opened the grand piano there.
She then played her prelude, delicately, carefully, composedly. She knew
Mr. Drew to be musicianly; she did not mind playing to him.
More and more, Mr. Drew reflected, looking down at her, she reminded him
of flower-brimmed, inaccessible mountain-slopes. He must discover some
method of ascent; for the music brought her no nearer; he was aware,
indeed, that it removed her. She quite forgot him as she played.
The last bars had been reached when the door opened suddenly and Madame
von Marwitz appeared.
She had come in haste--that was evident--and a mingled fatigue and
excitement was on her face. Her white cheeks had soft, sodden
depressions and under her eyes were little pinches in the skin, as
though hot fingers had nipped her there. She looked almost old, and she
smiled a determined, adjusted smile, with heavy eyes. "_Tiens, tiens_,"
she said, and, turning elaborately, she shut the door.
Karen finished her bars and rose.
"This is a new departure," said Madame von Marwitz. She came swiftly to
them, her loose lace sleeves flowing back from her bare arms. "I do not
like my piano touched, you know, Karen, unless permission is given. No
matter, no matter, my child. Let it not occur again, that is all. You
have not found the right balance of that phrase," she stooped and
reiterated with emphasis a fragment of the prelude. "And now I will
begin my work, if you please. Tallie waits for you, I think, in the
garden, and would be glad of your help. Tallie grows old. It does not do
to forget her."
"Am I to go into the garden, too?" Mr. Drew inquired, as Madame von
Marwitz seated herself and ran her fingers over the keys. "I thought we
were to motor this morning."
"We will motor when I have done my work. Go into the garden, by all
means, if you wish to."
"May I come into the garden with you? May I help you there?" Mr. Drew
serenely drawled, addressing Karen, who, with a curious, concentrated
look, stood gazing at her guardian.
She turned her eyes on him and her glance put him far, far away, like an
object scarcely perceived. "I am not going into the garden," she said.
"Mrs. Talcott is working in the morning-room and does not need me yet."
"Ah. She is in the morning-room," Madame von Marwitz murmured, still not
raising her eyes, and still running loud and soft scales up and down.
Karen left the room.
As the door closed upon her, Madame von Marwitz, with a singular effect
of control, began to weave a spider's-web of intricate, nearly
impalpable, sound. "Go, if you please," she said to Mr. Drew.
He stood beside her, placid. "Why are you angry?" he asked.
"I am not pleased that my rules should be broken. Karen has many
privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the
ell is so gladly granted."
He leaned on the piano. Her controlled face, bent with absorption above
the lacey pattern of sound that she evoked, interested him.
"When you are angry and harness your anger to your art like this, you
become singularly beautiful," he remarked. He felt it; and, after all,
if he were to remain at Les Solitudes and attempt to scale those Alpine
slopes he must keep on good terms with Madame von Marwitz.
"So," was her only reply. Yet her eyes softened.
He raised the lace wing of her sleeve and kissed it, keeping it in his
hand.
"No foolishness if you please," said Madame von Marwitz. "Of what have
you and Karen been talking?"
"I can't get her to talk," said Mr. Drew. "But I like to hear her play."
"She plays with right feeling," said Madame von Marwitz. "She is not a
child to express herself in speech. Her music reveals her more truly."
"_Nur wo du bist sei alles, immer kindlich_," Mr. Drew mused. "That is
what she makes me think of." With anybody of Madame von Marwitz's
intelligence, frankness was far more likely to allay suspicion than
guile. And for very pride now she was forced to seem reassured. "Yes.
That is so," she said. And she continued to play.
CHAPTER XXXII
Karen meanwhile made her way to the cliff-path and, seating herself on a
grassy slope, she clasped her knees with her hands and gazed out over
the sea. She was thinking hard of something, and trying to think only of
that. It was true, the permission had been that she was to play on the
grand-piano when it was left open. There had been no rule set; it had
not been said that she was not to play at other times and indeed, on
many occasions, she had played unrebuked, before Tante came down. But
the thing to remember now, with all her power, was that, technically,
Tante had been right. To hold fast to that thought was to beat away a
fear that hovered about her, like a horrible bird of prey. She sat there
for a long time, and she became aware at last that though she held so
tightly to her thought, it had, as it were, become something lifeless,
inefficacious, and that fear had invaded her. Tante had been unkind,
unjust, unloving.
It was as though, in taking refuge with Tante, she had leaped from a
great height, seeing security beneath, and as though, alighting, she
slipped and stumbled on a sloping surface with no foothold anywhere.
Since she came, there had been only this sliding, sliding, and now it
seemed to be down to unseen depths. For this was more and worse than the
first fear of her coming. Tante had been unkind, and she so loved Mr.
Drew that she forgot herself when he bestowed his least attention
elsewhere.
Karen rose to her feet suddenly, aware that she was trembling.
She looked over the sea and the bright day was dreadful to her. Where
was she and what was she, and what was Tante, if this fear were true?
Not even on that far day of childhood when she had lost herself in the
forest had such a horror of loneliness filled her. She was a lost, an
unwanted creature.
She turned from the unanswering immensities and ran down the cliff-path
towards Les Solitudes. She could not be alone. To think these things was
to feel herself drowning in fear.
Emerging from the higher trees she caught sight below her of Mrs.
Talcott's old straw hat moving among the borders; and, in the midst of
the emptiness, the sight was strength and hope. The whole world seemed
to narrow to Mrs. Talcott. She was secure and real. She was a spar to be
clung to. The nightmare would reveal itself as illusion if she kept near
Mrs. Talcott. She ran down to her.
Mrs. Talcott was slaying slugs. She had placed pieces of orange-peel
around cherished young plants to attract the depredators and she held a
jar of soot; into the soot the slugs were dropped as she discovered
them.
The sight of her was like a draught of water to parching lips. Reality
slowly grew round Karen once more. Tante had been hasty, even unkind;
but she was piteous, absorbed in this great devotion; and Tante loved
her.
She walked beside Mrs. Talcott and helped her with the slugs.
"Been out for a walk, Karen?" Mrs. Talcott inquired. They had reached
the end of the border and moved on to a higher one.
"Only to the cliff," said Karen.
"You look kind of tired," Mrs. Talcott remarked, and Karen owned that
she felt tired. "It's so warm to-day," she said.
"Yes; it's real hot. Let's walk under the trees." Mrs. Talcott took out
her handkerchief and wiped her large, saffron-coloured forehead.
They walked slowly in the thin shadow of the young foliage.
"You're staying on for a while, aren't you?" Mrs. Talcott inquired
presently. She had as yet asked Karen no question and Karen felt that
something in her own demeanour had caused this one.
"For more than a while," she said. "I am not going away again." In the
sound of the words she found a curious reassurance. Was it not her home,
Les Solitudes?
Mrs. Talcott said nothing for some moments, stooping to nip a drooping
leaf from a plant they passed. Then she questioned further: "Is Mr.
Jardine coming down here?"
"I have left my husband," said Karen.
For some moments, Mrs. Talcott, again, said nothing, but she no longer
had an eye for the plants. Neither did she look at Karen; her gaze was
fixed before her. "Is that so," was at last her comment.
The phrase might have expressed amazement, commiseration or protest; its
sound remained ambiguous. They had come to a rustic bench. "Let's sit
down for a while," she said; "I'm not as young as I was."
They sat down, the old woman heavily, and she drew a sigh of relief.
Looking at her Karen saw that she, too, was very tired. And she,
too--was it not strange that to-day she should see it for the first
time?--was very lonely. A sudden pity, profound and almost passionate,
filled her for Mrs. Talcott.
"You'll not mind having me here--for all the time now--again, will you?"
she asked, smiling a little, with determination, for she did not wish
Mrs. Talcott to guess what she had seen.
"No," said Mrs. Talcott, continuing to gaze before her, and shaking her
head. "No, I'll be glad of that. We get on real well together, I think."
And, after another moment of silence, she went on in the same
contemplative tone: "I used to quarrel pretty bad with my husband when I
was first married, Karen. He was the nicest, mildest kind of man, as
loving as could be. But I guess most young things find it hard to get
used to each other all at once. It ain't easy, married life; at least
not at the beginning. You expect such a high standard of each other and
everything seems to hurt. After a while you get so discouraged, perhaps,
finding it isn't like what you expected, that you commence to think you
don't care any more and it was all a mistake. I guess every young wife
thinks that in the first year, and it makes you feel mighty sick. Why,
if marriage didn't tie people up so tight, most of 'em would fly apart
in the first year and think they just hated each other, and that's why
it's such a good thing that they're tied so tight. Why I remember once
the only thing that seemed to keep me back was thinking how Homer--Homer
was my husband's name, Homer G. Talcott--sort of snorted when he
laughed. I was awful mad with him and it seemed as if he'd behaved so
mean and misunderstood me so that I'd got to go; but when I thought of
that sort of childish snort he'd give sometimes, I felt I couldn't leave
him. It's mighty queer, human nature, and the teeny things that seem to
decide your mind for you; I guess they're not as teeny as they seem. But
those hurt feelings are almost always a mistake--I'm pretty sure of it.
Any two people find it hard to live together and get used to each other;
it don't make any difference how much in love they are."
There was no urgency in Mrs. Talcott's voice and no pathos of
retrospect. Its contemplative placidity might have been inviting another
sad and wise old woman to recognize these facts of life with her.
Karen's mood, while she listened to her, was hardening to the iron of
her final realization, the realization that had divided her and Gregory.
"It isn't so with us, Mrs. Talcott," she said. "He has shown himself a
man I cannot live with. None of our feelings are the same. All my sacred
things he despises."
"Mercedes, you mean?" Mrs. Talcott suggested after a moment's silence.
"Yes. And more." Karen could not name her mother.
Mrs. Talcott sat silent.
"Has Tante not told you why I was here?" Karen presently asked.
"No," said Mrs. Talcott. "I haven't had a real talk with Mercedes since
she got back. Her mind is pretty well taken up with this young man."
To this Karen, glancing at Mrs. Talcott in a slight bewilderment, was
able to say nothing, and Mrs. Talcott pursued, resuming her former tone:
"There's another upsetting thing about marriage, Karen, and that is that
you can't expect your families to feel about each other like you feel.
It isn't in nature that they should, and that's one of the things that
young married people can't make up their minds to. Now Mr. Jardine isn't
the sort of young man to care about many people; few and far between
they are, I should infer, and Mercedes ain't one of them. Mercedes
wouldn't appeal to him one mite. I saw that as plain as could be from
the first."
"He should have told me so," said Karen, with her rocky face and voice.
"Well, he didn't tell you he found her attractive, did he?"
"No. But though I saw that there was blindness, I thought it was because
he did not know her. I thought that when he knew her he would care for
her. And I could forgive his not caring. I could forgive so much. But it
is worse, far worse than that. He accuses Tante of dreadful things. It
is hatred that he feels for her. He has confessed it." The colour had
risen to Karen's cheeks and burned there as she spoke.
"Well now!" Mrs. Talcott imperturbably ejaculated.
"You can see that I could not live with a man who hated Tante," said
Karen.
"What sort of things for instance?" Mrs. Talcott took up her former
statement.
"How can I tell you, Mrs. Talcott. It burns me to think of them.
Hypocrisy in her feeling for me; selfishness and tyranny and deceit. It
is terrible. In his eyes she is a malignant woman."
"Tch! Tch!" Mrs. Talcott made an indeterminate cluck with her tongue.
"I struggled not to see," said Karen, and her voice took on a sombre
energy, "and Tante struggled, too, for me. She, too, saw from the very
first what it might mean. She asked me, on the very first day that they
met, Mrs. Talcott, when she came back, she asked me to try and make him
like her. She was so sweet, so magnanimous," her voice trembled. Oh the
deep relief, so deep that it seemed to cut like a knife--of remembering,
pressing to her, what Tante had done for her, endured for her! "So
sweet, so magnanimous, Mrs. Talcott. She did all that she could--and so
did I--to give him time. For it was not that I lacked love for my
husband. No. I loved him. More, even more, than I loved Tante. There was
perhaps the wrong. I was perhaps cowardly, for his sake. I would not
see. And it was all useless. It grew worse and worse. He was not rude to
her. It was not that. It was worse. He was so careful--oh I see it
now--not to put himself in the wrong. He tried, instead, to put her in
the wrong. He misread every word and look. He sneered--oh, I saw it, and
shut my eyes--at her little foibles and weaknesses; why should she not
have them as well as other people, Mrs. Talcott? And he was
blind--blind--blind," Karen's voice trembled more violently, "to all the
rest. So that it had to end," she went on in broken sentences. "Tante
went because she could bear it no longer. And because she saw that I
could bear it no longer. She hoped, by leaving me, to save my happiness.
But that could not be. Mrs. Talcott, even then I might have tried to go
on living with that chasm--between Tante and my husband--in my life; but
I learned the whole truth as even I hadn't seen it; as even she hadn't
seen it. Mrs. Forrester came to me, Mrs. Talcott, and told me what
Gregory had said to her of Tante. He believes her a malignant woman,"
said Karen, repeating her former words and rising as she spoke. "And to
me he did not deny it. Everything, then, was finished for us. We saw
that we did not love each other any longer."
She stood before Mrs. Talcott in the path, her hands hanging at her
sides, her eyes fixed on the wall above Mrs. Talcott's head.
Mrs. Talcott did not rise. She sat silent, looking up at Karen, and so
for some moments they said nothing, while in the spring sunshine about
them the birds whistled and an early white butterfly dipped and
fluttered by.
"I feel mighty tired, Karen," Mrs. Talcott then said. Her eyelid with
the white mole twitched over her eye, the lines of her large, firm old
mouth were relaxed. Karen's eyes went to her and pity filled her.
"It is my miserable story," she said. "I am so sorry."
"Yes, I feel mighty tired," Mrs. Talcott repeated, looking away and out
at the sea. "It's discouraging. I thought you were fixed up all safe and
happy for life."
"Dear Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, earnestly.
"I don't like to see things that ought to turn out right turning out
wrong," Mrs. Talcott continued, "and I've seen a sight too many of them
in my life. Things turning out wrong that were meant to go right. Things
spoiled. People, nice, good people, like you and Mr. Jardine, all upset
and miserable. I've seen worse things, too," Mrs. Talcott slowly rose as
she spoke. "Yes, I've seen about as bad things happen as can happen, and
it's always been when Mercedes is about."
She stood still beside Karen, her bleak, intense old gaze fixed on the
sea.
Karen thought that she had misheard her last words. "When Tante is
about?" she repeated. "You mean that dreadful things happen to her? That
is one of the worst parts of it now, Mrs. Talcott--only that I am so
selfish that I do not think of it enough--to know that I have added to
Tante's troubles."
"No." Mrs. Talcott now said, and with a curious mildness and firmness.
"No, that ain't what I mean. Mercedes has had a sight of trouble. I
don't deny it, but that ain't what I mean. She makes trouble. She makes
it for herself and she makes it for other people. There's always trouble
going, of some sort or other, when Mercedes is about."
"I don't understand you, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen. An uncanny feeling
had crept over her while the old woman spoke. It was as if, helplessly,
she were listening to a sleep-walker who, in tranced unconsciousness,
spoke forth mildly the hidden thought of his waking life.
"No, you don't understand, yet," said Mrs. Talcott. "Perhaps it's fair
that you don't. Perhaps she can't help it. She was born so, I guess."
Mrs. Talcott turned and walked towards the house.
The panic of the cliff was rising in Karen again. Mrs. Talcott was worse
than the cliff and the unanswering immensities. She walked beside her,
trying to control her terror.
"You mean, I think," she said, "that Tante is a tragic person and people
who love her must suffer because of all that she has had to suffer."
"Yes, she's tragic all right," said Mrs. Talcott. "She's had about as
bad a time as they make 'em--off and on. But she spoils things. And it
makes me tired to see it going on. I've had too much of it," said Mrs.
Talcott, "and if this can't come right--this between you and your nice
young husband--I don't feel like I could get over it somehow." Leaning
on Karen's arm with both hands she had paused and looked intently down
at the path.
"But Mrs. Talcott," Karen's voice trembled; it was incredible, yet one
was forced by Mrs. Talcott's whole demeanour to ask the question without
indignation--"you speak as if you were blaming Tante for something. You
do not blame her, do you?"
Mrs. Talcott still paused and still looked down, as if deeply pondering.
"I've done a lot of thinking about that very point, Karen," she said.
"And I don't know as I've made up my mind yet. It's a mighty intricate
question. Perhaps we've all got only so much will-power and when most of
it is ladled out into one thing there's nothing left to ladle out into
the others. That's the way I try, sometimes, to figure it out to myself.
Mercedes has got a powerful sight of will-power; but look at all she's
got to use up in her piano-playing. There she is, working up to the last
notch all the time, taking it out of herself, getting all wrought up.
Well, to live so as you won't be spoiling things for other people needs
about as much will-power as piano-playing, I guess, when you're as big a
person as Mercedes and want as many things. And if you ain't got any
will-power left you just do the easiest thing; you just take what you've
a mind to; you just let yourself go in every other way to make up for
the one way you held yourself in. That's how it is, perhaps."
"But Mrs. Talcott," said Karen in a low voice, "all this--about me and
my husband--has come because Tante has thought too much of us and too
little of herself. It would have been much easier for her to let us
alone and not try and make Gregory like her. I do not recognise her in
what you are saying. You are saying dreadful things."
"Well, dreadful things have happened, I guess," said Mrs. Talcott. "I
want you to go back to your nice husband, Karen."
"No; no. Never. I can never go back to him," said Karen, walking on.
"Because he hates Mercedes?"
"Not only that. No. He is not what I thought. Do not ask me, Mrs.
Talcott. We do not love each other any longer. It is over."
"Well, I won't say anything about it, then," said Mrs. Talcott, who,
walking beside her, kept her hand on her arm. "Only I liked Mr. Jardine.
I took to him right off, and I don't take to people so easy. And I take
to you, Karen, more than you know, I guess. And I'll lay my bottom
dollar there's some mistake between you and him, and that Mercedes is
the reason of it."
They had reached the house.
"But wait," said Karen, turning to her. She laid both her hands on the
old woman's arm while she steadied her voice to speak this last thought.
"Wait. You are so kind to me, Mrs. Talcott; but you have made everything
strange--and dreadful. I must ask you--one question, Mrs. Talcott. You
have been with Tante all her life. No one knows her as you do. Tell me,
Mrs. Talcott. You love Tante?"
They faced each other at the top of the steps, on the verandah. And the
young eyes plunged deep into the old eyes, passionately searching.
For a moment Mrs. Talcott did not reply. When she did speak, it was
decisively as if, while recognising Karen's right to ask, Karen must
recognise that the answer must suffice. "I'd be pretty badly off if I
didn't love Mercedes. She's all I've got in the world."
CHAPTER XXXIII
The sound of the motor, whirring skilfully among the lanes, was heard at
six, and shortly after Madame von Marwitz's return Mrs. Talcott knocked
at her door.
Madame von Marwitz was lying on the sofa. Louise had removed her wraps
and dress and was drawing off her shoes. Her eyes were closed. She
seemed weary.
"I'll see to Madame," said Mrs. Talcott with her air of composed and
unassuming authority. It was somewhat the air of an old nurse, sure of
her prerogatives in the nursery.
Louise went and Mrs. Talcott took off the other shoe and fetched the
white silk _mules_.
Madame von Marwitz had only opened her eye for a glimmer of recognition,
but as Mrs. Talcott adjusted a _mule_, she tipped it off and muttered
gloomily: "Stockings, please. I want fresh stockings."
There was oddity--as Mrs. Talcott found, and came back, with a pair of
white silk stockings--in the sight of the opulent, middle-aged figure on
the sofa, childishly stretching out first one large bare leg and then
the other to be clothed; and it might have aroused in Mrs. Talcott a
vista of memories ending with the picture of a child in the same
attitude, a child as idle and as autocratic.
"Thank you, Tallie," Madame von Marwitz said, wearily but kindly, when
the stockings were changed.
Mrs. Talcott drew a chair in front of the sofa, seated herself and
clasped her hands at her waist. "I've come for a talk, Mercedes," she
said.
Madame von Marwitz now was sleepily observing her.
"A talk! _Bon Dieu!_ But I have been talking all day long!"
She yawned, putting a folded arm under her head so that, slightly
raising it, she could look at Mrs. Talcott more comfortably. "What do
you want to talk about?" she inquired.
Mrs. Talcott's eyes, with their melancholy, immovable gaze, rested upon
her. "About Karen and her husband," she said. "I gathered from some talk
I had with Karen to-day that you let her think you came away from London
simply and solely because you'd had a quarrel with Mr. Jardine."
Madame von Marwitz lay as if arrested by these words for some moments of
an almost lethargic interchange, and then in an impatient voice she
returned: "What business is it of Karen's, pray, if I didn't leave
London simply and solely on account of my quarrel with her husband? I
had found it intolerable to be under his roof and I took the first
opportunity for leaving it. The opportunity happened to coincide with my
arrangements for coming here. What has that to do with Karen?"
"It has to do with her, Mercedes, because the child believes you were
thinking about her when, as a matter of fact, you weren't thinking about
her or about anyone but this young man you've gotten so taken up with.
Karen believes you care for her something in the same way she does for
you, and it's a sin and a shame, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott spoke with no
vehemence at all of tone or look, but with decision, "a sin and a shame
to let that child ruin her life because of you."
Again Madame von Marwitz, now turning her eyes on the ceiling, seemed to
reflect dispassionately. "I never conceived it possible that she would
leave him," she then said. "I found him insufferable and I saw that
unless I went Karen also would come to see him as insufferable. To spare
the poor child this I came away. And I was amazed when she appeared
here. Amazed and distressed," said Madame von Marwitz. And after another
moment she took up: "As for him, he has what he deserves."
Mrs. Talcott eyed her. "And what do you deserve, I'd like to know, for
going meddling with those poor happy young things? Why couldn't you let
them alone? Karen's been a bother to you for years. Why couldn't you be
satisfied at having her nicely fixed up and let her tend to her own
potato-patch while you tended to yours? You can't make me believe that
it wasn't your fault--the whole thing--right from the beginning. I know
you too well, Mercedes."
Again Madame von Marwitz lay, surprisingly still and surprisingly
unresentful. It was as if, placidly, she were willing to be undressed,
body or soul, by her old nurse and guardian. But after a moment, and
with sudden indignation, she took up one of Mrs. Talcott's sentences.
"A bother to me? I am very fond of Karen. I am devoted to Karen. I
should much like to know what right you have to intimate that my feeling
for her isn't sincere. My life proves the contrary. As for saying that
it is my fault, that is merely your habit. Everything is always my fault
with you."
"It always has been, as far as I've been able to keep an eye on your
tracks," Mrs. Talcott remarked.
"Well, this is not. I deny it. I absolutely," said Madame von Marwitz,
and now with some excitement, "deny it. Did I not give her to him? Did I
not go to them with tenderest solicitude and strive to make possible
between him and me some relation of bare good fellowship? Did I not curb
my spirit, and it is a proud and impatient one, as you know, to endure,
lest she should see it, his veiled insolence and hostility? Oh! when I
think of what I have borne with from that young man, I marvel at my own
forbearance. I have nothing to reproach myself with, Tallie; nothing;
and if his life is ruined I can say, with my hand on my heart,"--Madame
von Marwitz laid it there--"that he alone is to blame for it. A more
odious, arrogant, ignorant being," she added, "I have never encountered.
Karen is well rid of him."
Mrs. Talcott remained unmoved. "You don't like him because he don't like
you and that's about all you've got against him, I reckon, if the truth
were known," she said. "You can make yourself see it all like that if
you've a mind to, but you can't make me; I know you too well, Mercedes.
You were mad at him because he didn't admire you like you're used to
being admired, and you went to work pinching and picking here and there,
pretending it was all on Karen's account, but really so as you could get
even with him. You couldn't stand their being happy all off by
themselves without you. Why I can see it all as plain and clear as if
I'd been there right along. Just think of your telling that poor deluded
child that you wanted her to make her husband like you. That was a nice
way, wasn't it, for setting her heart at rest about you and him. If you
didn't like him and saw he didn't like you, why didn't you keep your
mouth shut? That's all you had to do, and keep out of their way all you
could. If you'd been a stupid woman there might have been some excuse
for you, but you ain't a stupid woman, and you know precious well what
you're about all the time. I don't say you intended to blow up the whole
concern like you've done; but you wanted to get even with Mr. Jardine
and show him that Karen cared as much for you as she did for him, and
you didn't mind two straws what happened to Karen while you were doing
it."
Madame von Marwitz had listened, turning on her back and with her eyes
still on the ceiling, and the calm of her face might have been that of
indifference or meditation. But now, after a moment of receptive
silence, indignation again seemed to seize her. "It's false!" she
exclaimed.
"No it ain't false, Mercedes, and you know it ain't," said Mrs. Talcott
gloomily.
"False, and absolutely false!" Madame von Marwitz repeated. "How could I
keep my mouth shut--as you delicately put it--when I saw that Karen saw?
How keep my mouth shut without warping her relation to me? I spoke to
her with lightest, most tender understanding, so that she should know
that my heart was with her while never dreaming of the chasms that I saw
in her happiness. It was he who forced me to an open declaration and he
who forced me to leave; for how was happiness possible for Karen if I
remained with them? No. He hated me, and was devoured by jealousy of
Karen's love for me."
"I guess if it comes to jealousy you've got enough for two in any
situation. It don't do for you to talk to me about jealousy, Mercedes,"
Mrs. Talcott returned, "I've seen too much of you. You can't persuade me
it wasn't your fault, not if you were to talk till the cows come home. I
don't deny but what it was pretty hard for you to see that Mr. Jardine
didn't admire you. I make allowances for that; but my gracious me," said
Mrs. Talcott with melancholy emphasis, "was that any reason for a big
middle-aged woman like you behaving like a spiteful child? Was it any
reason for your setting to work to spoil Karen's life? No, Mercedes,
you've done about as mean a thing as any I've seen you up to and what I
want to know now is what you're going to do about it."
"Do about it?" Madame von Marwitz wrathfully repeated. "What more can I
do? I open my house and my heart to the child. I take her back. I mend
the life that he has broken. What more do you expect of me?"
"Don't talk that sort of stage talk to me, Mercedes. What I want you to
do is to make it possible so as he can get her back."
"He is welcome to get her back if he can. I shall not stand in his way.
It would be a profound relief to me were he to get her back."
"I can see that well enough. But how'll you help standing in his way?
The only thing you could do to get out of his way would be to help Karen
to be quit of you. Make her see that you're just as bad as he thinks
you. I guess if you told her some things about yourself she'd begin to
see that her husband wasn't so far wrong about you."
"_Par exemple!_" said Madame von Marwitz with a short laugh. She raised
herself to give her pillow a blow and turning on her side and
contemplating more directly her ancient monitress she said, "I sometimes
wonder what I keep you here for."
"I do, too, sometimes," said Mrs. Talcott, "and I make it out that you
need me."
"I make it out," Madame von Marwitz repeated the phrase with a noble
dignity of manner, "that I am too kind of heart, too aware of what I owe
you in gratitude, to resent, as I have every right to do, the license
you allow yourself in speaking to me."
"Yes; you'll always get plain speaking from me, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott
remarked, "just as long as you have anything to do with me."
"Indeed I shall. I am but too well aware of the fact," said Madame von
Marwitz, "and I only tolerate it because of our life-long tie."
"You'll go on tolerating it, I guess, Mercedes. You'd feel mighty queer,
I expect, if the one person in the world who knew you through and
through and had stood by you through everything wasn't there to fall
back on."
"I deny that you know me through and through," Madame von Marwitz
declared, but with a drop from her high manner; sulkily rather than with
conviction. "You have always seen me with the eye of a lizard." Her
simile amused her and she suddenly laughed. "You have somewhat the
vision of a lizard, Tallie. You scrutinize the cracks and the fissures,
but of the mountain itself you are unaware. I have cracks and fissures,
no doubt, like all the rest of our sad humanity; but, _bon Dieu!_--I am
a mountain, and you, Tallie," she went on, laughing softly, "are a
lizard on the mountain. As for Mr. Jardine, he is a mole. But if you
think that Karen will be happier burrowing underground with him than
here with me, I will do my best. Yes;" she reflected; "I will write to
Mrs. Forrester. She shall see the mole and tell him that when he sends
me an apology I send him Karen. It is a wild thing to leave one's
husband like this. I will make her see it."
"Now you see here, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, rising and fixing an
acute gaze upon her, "don't you go and make things worse than they are.
Don't you go interfering between Karen and her husband. The first move's
got to come from them. I don't trust you round the corner where your
vanity comes in, and I guess what you've got in your mind now is that
you'd like to make it out to your friends how you've tried to reconcile
Karen and her husband after he's treated you so bad. If you want to tell
Karen that he was right in all the things he believed about you and that
this isn't the first time by a long shot that you've wrecked people with
your jealousy, and that he loves her ten times more than you do, that's
a different thing, and I'll stand by you through it. But I won't have
you meddling any more with those two poor young things, so you may as
well take it in right here."
Madame von Marwitz's good humour fell away. "And for you, may I ask you
kindly to mind your own business?" she demanded.
"I'll make this affair of Karen's my business if you ain't real careful,
Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, standing solid and thick and black, in the
centre of the room. "Yes, you'd better go slow and sure or you'll find
there are some things I can't put up with. This affair of Karen has made
me feel pretty sick, I can tell you. I've seen you do a sight of mean
things in your life, but I don't know as I've seen you do a meaner. I
guess," Mrs. Talcott continued, turning her eyes on the evening sea
outside, "it would make your friends sit up--all these folks who admire
you so much--if they could know a thing or two you've done."
"Leave the room," said Madame von Marwitz, now raising herself on her
elbow and pointing to the door. "Leave the room at once. I refuse to lie
here and be threatened and insulted and brow-beaten by you. Out of my
sight."
Mrs. Talcott looked at the sea for a moment longer, in no provocative
manner, but rather as if she had hardly heard the words addressed to
her; and then she looked at Mercedes, who, still raised on her elbow,
still held her arm very effectively outstretched. This, too, was no
doubt a scene to which she was fully accustomed.
"All right," she said, "I'm going." She moved towards the door. At the
door she halted, turned and faced Madame von Marwitz again. "But don't
you forget, Mercedes Okraska," she said, "that I'll make it my affair if
you ain't careful."
CHAPTER XXXIV
Karen, during the two or three days that followed her strange
conversation with Mrs. Talcott, felt that while she pitied and cared for
Mrs. Talcott as she had never yet pitied and cared for her, she was also
afraid of her. Mrs. Talcott had spoken no further word and her eyes
rested on her with no more than their customary steadiness; but Karen
knew that there were many words she could speak. What were they? What
was it that Mrs. Talcott knew? What secrets were they that she carried
about in her lonely, ancient heart?
Mrs. Talcott loomed before her like a veiled figure of destiny bearing
an urn within which lay the ashes of dead hopes. Mrs. Talcott's eyes
looked at her above the urn. It was always with them. When they gardened
together it was as if Mrs. Talcott set it down on the ground between
them and as if she took it up again with a sigh of fatigue--it was
heavy--when they turned to go. Karen felt herself tremble as she
scrutinized the funereal shape. There was no refuge with Mrs. Talcott.
Mrs. Talcott holding her urn was worse than the lonely fears.
And, for those two or three days of balmy, melancholy spring, the lonely
fears did not press so closely. They wheeled far away against the blue.
Tante was kinder to her and was more aware of her. She almost seemed a
little ashamed of the scene with the piano. She spoke to Karen of it,
flushing a little, explaining that she had slept badly and that Karen's
rendering of the Bach had made her nervous, emphasizing, too, the rule,
new in its explicitness, that the grand piano was only to be played on
by Karen when it was left open. "You did not understand. But it is well
to understand rules, is it not, my child?" said Madame von Marwitz. "And
this one, I know, you will not transgress again."
Karen said that she understood. She had something of her rocky manner in
receiving these implicit apologies and commands, yet her guardian could
see an almost sick relief rising in her jaded young eyes.