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Ebook has 1930 lines and 118876 words, and 39 pages

Gregory had observed this fact and had hoped that it might have escaped Karen's notice. To the Lavingtons Mrs. Talcott's platter had been unrecognizable and they had tended to let its contents alone.

"It's as I said, you know," he put forward a mitigation; "they've not been trained to see differences; she is very different, isn't she?"

"Well, but so am I," said Karen, "and they talked to me. I don't mean to complain of your friends; that would be very rude when they were so nice and kind; and, besides, are your friends. But people's thoughtlessness displeases me, not that I am not often very thoughtless myself."

Gregory was anxious to exonerate himself. "I hope she didn't feel left out;" he said. "I did notice that she wasn't talking. I found her in the garden, alone--she seemed to be enjoying that, too--and she and I went about for quite a long time together."

"I know you did," said Karen. "You are not thoughtless. As for her, one never knows what she feels. I don't think that she does feel things of that sort at all; she has been used to it all her life, one may say; but there's very little she doesn't notice and understand. She understands--oh, perfectly well--that she is a queer old piece of furniture standing in the background, and one has to remember not to treat her like a piece of furniture. It's a part of grace and tact, isn't it, not to take such obvious things for granted. You didn't take them for granted with her, or with me," said Karen, smiling her recognition at him. "For, of course, to most people I am furniture, too; and if Tante is about, there is, of course, nothing to blame in that; everybody becomes furniture when Tante is there."

"Oh no; I can't agree to that," said Gregory. "Not everybody."

"You know what I mean," Karen rejoined. "If you will not agree to it for me, it is because from the first you felt me to be your friend; that is different." They were walking in the flagged garden where the blue campanulas were now safely established in their places and the low afternoon sun slanted in among the trees. Karen still wore her hat and motoring veil and the smoky grey substance flowed softly back about her shoulders. Her face seemed to emerge from a cloud. It had always to Gregory's eyes the air of steadfast advance; the way in which her hair swept back and up from her brows gave it a wind-blown, lifted look. He glanced at her now from time to time, while, in a meditative and communicative mood, she continued to share her reflections with him. Gregory was very happy.

This was indeed hard on the Lavingtons; but Gregory was not thinking of the Lavingtons, who could take care of themselves. He was wondering, as he more and more wondered, about Madame von Marwitz, and what she saw and what she permitted herself not to see.

"You aren't invisible to her sometimes?" he inquired.

Her innocence before his ironies made him ashamed always of having spoken them. "It is just that that makes me feel sometimes so badly about Mrs. Talcott," she answered now; "just because she is, in a sense, sometimes invisible, and I'm not. Mrs. Talcott, of course, counts for a great deal more in the way of comfort and confidence than I do; I don't believe that Tante really is as intimate with anybody in the world as with Mrs. Talcott; but she doesn't count as much as I do, I am nearly sure, in the way of tenderness. I really think that in the way of tenderness I am nearer than anybody."

They left the flagged garden now, and came down to a lower terrace. Here the sun shone fully; they walked to and fro in the radiance. "Of course," Karen continued to define and confide, "as far as interest goes any one of her real friends counts for more than I do, and you mustn't think that I mean to say that I believe myself the most loved; not at all. But I am the tender, home thing in her life; the thing to pet and care for and find waiting. It is that that is so beautiful for me and so tragic for her."

"Why tragic?"

"Oh, but you do not feel it? A woman like that, such a heart, and such a spirit--and no one nearer than I am? That she should have no husband and no child? I am a makeshift for all that she has lost, or never had."

"And Mrs. Talcott?" said Gregory after a moment. "Is it Mrs. Talcott's tragedy to have missed even a makeshift?"

Karen now turned her eyes on him, and her face, as she scrutinized him, showed a slight severity. "Hardly that. She has Tante."

"Has her as the chair has her, you mean?" He couldn't for the life of him control the question. It seemed indeed due to their friendship that he should not conceal from her the fact that he found disproportionate elements in her devotion. Yet it was not the right way in which to be frank, and Karen showed him so in her reply. "I mean that Tante is everything to her and that, in the nature of things, she cannot be so much to Tante. You mustn't take quite literally what I said of the chair, you know. It can hardly be a makeshift to have somebody like Tante to love and care for. I don't quite know what you mean by speaking like that," Karen said. Her gaze, in meeting his, had become almost stern. She seemed to scan him from a distance.

Gregory, though he felt a pang of disquietude, felt no disposition to retreat. He intended that she should be made to understand what he meant. "I think that what it comes to is that it is you I am thinking of, rather than of Mrs. Talcott," he said. "I don't know your guardian, and I do know you, and it is what she gets rather than what she gives that is most apparent to me."

"Gets? From me? What may that be?" Karen continued to return his gaze almost with haughtiness.

"The most precious thing I can imagine," said Gregory. "Your love. I hope that she is properly grateful for it."

She looked at him and the slow colour mounted to her cheeks; but it was as if in unconscious response to his feeling; it hardly, even yet, signified self-consciousness. She had stood still in asking her last question and she still did not move as she said: "I do not like to hear you speak so. It shows me that you understand nothing."

"Does it? I want to understand everything."

"You care for me," said Karen, standing still, her eyes on his, "and I care for you; but what I most wish in such a friend is that he should see and understand. May I tell you something? Will you wait while I tell you about my life?"

"Please tell me."

"I want you to see and understand Tante," said Karen. "And how much I love her; and why."

They walked on, from the terrace to the cliff-path. Karen stopped when they had gone a little way and leaned her elbows on the stone wall looking out at the sea. "She has been everything to me," she said. "Everything."

He was aware, as he leaned beside her in the mellow evening light, of a great uneasiness mingling with the beautiful gravity of the moment. She was near him as she had never yet been near. She had almost recognized his love. It was there between them, and it was as if, not turning from it, she yet pointed to something beyond and above it, something that it was his deep instinct to evade and hers to show him. He must not take a step towards her, she seemed to tell him, until he had proved to her that he had seen what she did. And nothing she could say would, he felt sure of it, alter his fundamental distrust of Madame von Marwitz.

"I want to tell you about my life," said Karen, looking out at the sea from between her hands. "You have heard my story, of course; people are always told it; but you have never heard it from my side. You have heard no doubt about my father and mother, and how she left the man she did not love for him. My mother died when I was quite little; so, though I remember her well she does not come into the part of my story that I want to tell you. But I was thirteen years old when my father died, and that begins the part that leads to Tante. It was in Rome, in winter when he died; and I was alone with him; and there was no money, and I had more to bear than a child's mind and heart should have. He died. And then there were dreadful days. Cold, coarse people came and took me and put me in a convent in Paris. That convent was like hell to me. I was so miserable. And I had never known restraint or unkindness, and the French girls, so sly and so small in their thoughts, were hateful to me. And I did not like the nuns. I was punished and punished--rightly no doubt. I was fierce and sullen, I remember, and would not obey. Then I heard, by chance, from a girl whose family had been to her concert in Paris, that Madame Okraska was with her husband at Fontainebleau. Of her I knew nothing but the lovely face in the shop-windows. But her husband's name brought back distant days to me. He had known my father; I remembered him--the fair, large, kindly smiling, very sad man--in my father's studio among the clay and marble. He bought once a little head my father had done of me when I was a child. So I ran away from the convent--oh, it was very bad; I knocked down a nun and escaped the portress, and hid for a long time in the streets. And I made my way through Paris and walked for a day and night to Fontainebleau; and there in the forest, in the evening, I was lost, and almost dead with hunger and fatigue. And as I stood by the road I saw the carriage approaching from very far away and saw sitting in it, as it came nearer, the beautiful woman. Shall I ever forget it? The dark forest and the evening sky above and her face looking at me--looking, looking, full of pity and wonder. She has told me that I was the most unhappy thing that she had ever seen. My father's friend was with her; but though I saw him and knew that I was safe, I had eyes only for her. Her face was like heaven opening. When the carriage stopped and she leaned to me, I sprang to her and she put her arms around me. They have been round me ever since," said Karen, joining her fingers over her eyes and leaning her forehead upon them so that her face was hidden; and for a moment she did not speak. "Ever since," she went on presently, "she has been joy and splendour and beauty. What she has given me is nothing. It is what she is herself that lifts the lives of other people. Those who do not know her seem to me to have lives so sad and colourless compared to mine. You cannot imagine it, anyone so great, yet at the same time so little and so sweet. She is merry like no one else, and witty, and full of cajoleries, like a child. One cannot be dull with her, not for one moment. And there is through it all her genius, the great flood of wonderful music; can you think what it is like to live with that? And under-lying everything is the great irremediable sorrow. I was with her when it came; the terrible thing. I did not live with them while he was alive, you know, my Onkel Ernst; he was so good and kind--always the kindest of friends to me; but he loved her too deeply to be able to share their life, and how well one understands that in her husband. He had me put at a school in Dresden. I did not like that much, either. But, even if I were lonely, I knew that my wonderful friends--my Tante and my Onkel--were there, like the sun behind the grey day, and I tried to study and be dutiful to please them. And in my holidays I was always with them, twice it was, at their beautiful estate in Germany. And it was there that the horror came that wrecked her life; her husband's death, his death that cannot be explained or understood. He drowned himself. We never say it, but we know it. That is the fear, the mystery. All his joy with her, his love and happiness--to leave them;--it was madness; he had always been a sad man; one saw that in his face; the doctors said it was madness. He disappeared without a word one day. For three weeks--nothing. Tante was like a creature crying out on the rack. And it was I who found him by the lake-edge one morning. She was walking in the park, I knew; she used to walk and walk fast, fast, quite silent; and with horrible fear I thought: If I can keep her from seeing. I turned--and she was beside me. I could not save her. Ah--poor woman!" Karen closed her hands over her face.

They stood for a long time in silence, Gregory leaning beside her and looking down at the sea. His thought was not with the stricken figure she put before him; it dwelt on the girl facing horror, on the child bearing more than a child should bear. Yet he was glad to feel, as a background to his thoughts, that Madame von Marwitz was indeed very pitiful.

"You understand," said Karen, straightening herself at last and laying her hands on the wall. "You see how it is."

"Yes," said Gregory.

"It is kind of you, and beautiful, to feel me, as your friend, a person of value," said Karen. "But it does not please me to have the great fact of my life belittled."

"I haven't meant to do that, really. I see why it means so much, to you. But I see you before I see the facts of your life; they interest me because of you," said Gregory. "You come first to me. It's that I want you to understand."

Karen had at last turned her eyes upon his and they met them in a long encounter that recalled to Gregory their first. It was not the moment for explicit recognitions or avowals; the shadow of the past lay too darkly upon her. But that their relation had changed her deepened gaze accepted. She took his hand, she had a fashion almost boyish of taking his rather than giving her hand, and said: "We shall both understand more and more; that is so, is it not? And some day you will know her. Until you know her you cannot really understand."

Karen and he had walked back to the house in silence, and at the door, where she stood to see him off, it had been arranged that he was to lunch at Les Solitudes next day and that she was to show him a favourite headland, one not far away, but that he had never yet been shown. From the sweetness, yet gravity, of her look and voice he could infer nothing but that she recognized change and a new significance. Her manner had neither the confusion nor the pretended unconsciousness of ordinary girlhood. She was calm, but with a new thoughtfulness. He arrived a little early next day and found Mrs. Talcott alone in the morning-room writing letters. He noticed, as she rose from the bureau, her large, immature, considered writing. "Karen'll be down in a minute or two, I guess," she said. "Take a chair."

"Don't let me interrupt you," said Gregory, as Mrs. Talcott seated herself before him, her hands folded at her waist. But Mrs. Talcott, remarking briefly, "Don't mention it," did not move back to her former place. She examined him and he examined her and he felt that she probed through his composure to his unrest. "I wanted a little talk," she observed presently. "You've gotten pretty fond of Karen, haven't you, Mr. Jardine?"

This was to come at once to the point. "Very fond," said Gregory, wondering if she had been diagnosing his fondness in a letter to Madame von Marwitz.

"She hasn't got many friends," Mrs. Talcott, after another moment of contemplation, went on. "She's always been a lonesome sort of child."

"That's what has struck me, too," said Gregory.

"Sometimes Mercedes takes her along; but sometimes she don't," Mrs. Talcott pursued. "It ain't a particularly lively sort of life for a young girl, going on in an out-of-the-way place like this with an old woman like me. She's spent most of her time with me, when you come to reckon it up." There was no air of criticism or confidence in Mrs. Talcott. She put forward these remarks with unbiassed placidity.

"I suppose Madame von Marwitz couldn't arrange always to take her?" Gregory asked after a pause.

"It ain't always convenient toting a young girl round with you," said Mrs. Talcott. "Sometimes Mercedes feels like it and sometimes she don't. Karen and I stay at home, now that I'm too old to go about with her, and we see her when she's home. That's the idea. But she ain't much at home. She's mostly travelling and staying around with folks."

"It isn't a particularly lively time, it seems to me, for either of you," said Gregory. It was his instinct to blame Madame von Marwitz for the featureless lives led by her dependents, though he could but own that it might, perhaps, be difficult to fit them into the vagabondage of a great pianist's existence.

"Well, it's good enough for me," said Mrs. Talcott. "I'm very contented if it comes to that; and so is Karen. She's known so much that's worse, the same as I have. But she's known what's better, too; she was a pretty big girl when her Poppa died and she was a companion to him and I reckon that without figuring it up much to herself she's lonesome a good deal."

Gregory for a moment was silent. Then he found it quite natural to say to Mrs. Talcott: "What I hope is that she will marry me."

"I hope so, too," said Mrs. Talcott with no alteration of tone. "I hoped so the moment I set eyes on you. I saw that you were a good young man and that you'd make her a good kind husband."

"Thanks, very much," said Gregory, smiling yet deeply touched. "I hope I may be. I intend to be if she will have me."

"The child is mighty fond of you," said Mrs. Talcott. "And it's not as if she took easy to people. She don't. She's never seemed to need folks. But I can see that she's mighty fond of you, and what I want to say is, even if it don't seem to work out like you want it to right away, you hang on, Mr. Jardine; that's my advice; an old woman like me understands young girls better than they understand themselves. Karen is so wrapped up in Mercedes and thinks such a sight of her that perhaps she'll feel she don't want to leave her and that sort of thing; but just you hang on."

"I intend to," said Gregory. "I can't say how much I thank you for being on my side."

"Yes; I'm on your side, and I'm on Karen's side; and I want to see this thing put through," said Mrs. Talcott.

Something seemed to hover between them now, a fourth figure that must be added to the trio they made. He wondered, if he did hang on successfully and if it did work out as he intended that it should, how that fourth figure would work in. He couldn't see a shared life with Karen from which it could be eliminated, nor did he, of course, wish to see it eliminated; but he did not see himself, either, as forming one of a band of satellites, and the main fact about the fourth figure seemed to be that any relation to it involved one, apparently, in discipleship. There seemed even some disloyalty to Mrs. Talcott in accepting her sympathy while anxieties and repudiations such as these were passing through his mind; for she, no doubt, saw in Karen's relation to Madame von Marwitz the chief asset with which she could present a husband; and he expected Mrs. Talcott, now, to make some reference to this asset; but none came; and if she expected from him some recognition of it, no expectancy was visible in the old blue eyes fixed on his face. A silence fell between them, and as it grew longer it grew the more consoling. Into their compact of understanding she let him see, he could almost fancy, that the question of Madame von Marwitz was not to enter.

Karen, when she appeared, was looking preoccupied, and after shaking his hand and giving him, for a moment, the sweet, grave smile with which they had parted, she glanced at the writing-table. "You are writing to Tante, Mrs. Talcott?" she said. "You heard from her this morning?"

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