Read Ebook: Tante by Sedgwick Anne Douglas

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Ebook has 1930 lines and 118876 words, and 39 pages

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?"

"Yes; I heard from her," said Mrs. Talcott. Gregory at once inferred that Madame von Marwitz had been writing for information concerning himself.

She must by now have become aware of his correspondence with Karen and its significant continuity.

"Are there any messages?--any news?" asked Karen, and she could not keep dejection from her voice. She had had no letter.

"It's only a business note," said Mrs. Talcott. "Hasn't Miss Scrotton written?"

"Does my cousin keep you posted as a rule?" Gregory asked, as Karen shook her head.

"No; but Tante asks her to write sometimes, when she is too tired or rushed; and I had a letter from her, giving me their plans, only a few days ago; so that I know that all is well. It is only that I am always greedy for Tante's letters, and this is the day on which they often come."

They went in to lunch. Karen spoke little during the meal. Gregory and Mrs. Talcott carried on a desultory conversation about hotels and the different merits of different countries in this respect. Mrs. Talcott had a vast experience of hotels. From Germany to Australia, from New York to St. Petersburg, they were known to her.

After lunch he and Karen started on their walk. It had been a morning of white fog and the mist still lay thickly over the sea, so that from the high cliff-path, a clear, pale sky above them, they looked down into milky gulfs of space. Then, as the sun shone softly and a gentle breeze arose, a rift of dark, still blue appeared below, as the sky appears behind dissolving clouds, and fold upon fold, slumbrously, the mist rolled back upon itself. The sea lay like a floor of polished sapphire beneath the thick, soft webs. Far below, in a cavern, the sound of lapping water clucked, and a sea-gull, indolently intent, drifted by slowly on dazzling wings.

Karen and Gregory reached their headland and, seating themselves on the short, warm turf, looked out over the sea. During the walk they had hardly spoken, and he had wondered whether her thoughts were with him and with their last words yesterday, or dwelling still on her disappointment. But presently, as if her preoccupation had drifted from her as the fog had drifted from the sea, Karen turned tranquil eyes upon him and said: "I suddenly thought, and the stillness made me think it, and Mrs. Talcott's hotels, too, perhaps, of all that is going on in the world while we sit here so lonely and so peaceful. Frenchmen with fat cheeks and flat-brimmed silk hats sitting at little tin tables in boulevards; isn't it difficult to realize that they exist? and Arabs on camels crossing deserts; they are quite imaginable; and nuns praying in convent cells; and stokers, all stripped and sweating, under the engines of great steamers; and a little Japanese artist carving so carefully the soles of the feet of some tiny image; there they are, all going on; as real to themselves as we are, at the very moment that we sit here and feel that only we, in all the world, are real." She might almost have been confiding her fancies to a husband whose sympathy had been tested by years of fond companionship.

Gregory, wondering at her, loving her, pulled at the short turf as he lay, propped on an elbow, beside her, and said: "What nice thoughts you have."

"You have them, too, I think," said Karen, smiling down at him. "And nicer ones. Mine are usually only amusing, like those; but yours are often beautiful. I see that in your face, you know. It is a face that makes me think always of a cold, clear, steely pool;--that is what it looks like if one does not look down into it but only across it, as it were; but if one bends over and looks down, deep down, one sees the sky and passing white clouds and boughs of trees. I saw deep down at once. That is why," her eyes rested upon him, "we were friends from the first."

"It's what you bring that you see," said Gregory; "you make me think of all those things."

"Ah, but you think them for yourself, too; when you are alone you think them."

"But when I am alone and think them, without you in the thought of them, it's always with sadness, for something I've lost. You bring them back, with happiness. The thought of you is always happy. I have never known anyone who seemed to me so peacefully happy as you do. You are very happy, aren't you?" Gregory looked down at his little tufts of turf as he asked this question.

"I am glad I seem to you like that," said Karen. "I think I am usually quiet and gay and full of confidence; I sometimes wonder at my confidence. But it is not always so. No, I am not always happy. Sometimes, when I think and remember, it is like feeling a great hole being dug in my heart--as if the iron went down and turned up dark forgotten things. I have that feeling sometimes; and then I wonder that I can ever be happy."

"What things, dear Karen?"

"You know, I think." Karen looked out at the sea. "Tante's face when I found her husband's body. And my father's face when he was dying; he did not know what was to become of me; he was quite weak, like a little child, and he cried on my breast. And my mother's face when she died. I have not told you anything of my mother."

"Will you? I want to hear everything about you; everything," said Gregory.

"This is her locket," Karen said, putting her hand over it. "Her face is in it; would you like to see it?"

He held out his hand, and slipping the ribbon over her head she pressed the little spring and laid the open locket in it.

He saw the tinted photograph of a young girl's head, a girl younger than Karen and with her fair hair and straight brows and square chin; but it was a gentler face and a clumsier, and strange with its alien nationality.

"I always feel as if she were my child and I her mother when I look at that," said Karen. "It was taken before I was born. She had a happy life, and yet my memory of her breaks my heart. She was so very young and it frightened her so much to die; she could not bear to leave us."

Gregory, holding the little locket, looked at it silently. Then he put it to his lips. "You care for me, don't you, Karen?" he said.

"You know, I think," said Karen, repeating her former words.

He laid the locket in her hand, and the moment had for him a sacramental holiness so that the locket was like a wedding-ring; holding it and her hand together he said, lifting his eyes to hers, "I love you. Do you love me?"

Her eyes had filled with tears when he had kissed her mother's face, and there was young awe in her gaze; but no shadow, no surprise.

"Yes," she said, unhesitatingly. "Yes, I love you, dear Gregory."

The simplicity, the inevitableness of his bliss overwhelmed him. He held her hand and looked down at it. All about them was the blue. All her past, its beauty, its dark, forgotten things, she had given to him. She was his for ever. "Oh, my darling Karen," he murmured.

She bent down to look at him now, smiling and unclosing her hand from his gently, so that she could look at her mother's face. "How glad she would be if she could know," she said. "Perhaps she does know. Do you not think so?"

"Dear--I don't know what I think about those hopes. I hope."

"Oh, it is more than hope, my belief that she is there; that she is not lost. Only one cannot tell how or when or where it all may be. For that, yes, it can be only hope. She, too, would love you, I am sure," Karen continued.

"Would she? I'm glad you think so, darling."

"We are so much alike, you see, that it is natural to feel sure that we should think alike. Do you not think that her face is much like mine? What happiness! I am glad it is not a day of rain for our happiness." And she then added, "I hope we may be married."

"Why, we are to be married, dear child," Gregory said, smiling at her. "There is no 'may' about it, since you love me."

"Only one," said Karen, who still looked at her mother's face. "And perhaps it will be well not to speak much of our love till we can know. But I feel sure that she will say this happiness is for me."

"She?" Gregory repeated. For a moment he imagined that she meant some superstition connected with her mother.

Karen, slipping the ribbon over her head, had returned the locket to its place. "Yes; Tante," she said, still with the locket in her hand.

"Tante?" Gregory repeated.

At his tone, its change, she lifted startled eyes to his.

"What has she to do with it?" Gregory asked after a moment in which she continued to gaze at him.

"What has Tante to do with it?" said Karen in a wondering voice. "Do you think I could marry without Tante's consent?"

"But you love me?"

"I do not understand you. Was it wrong of me to have said so before I had her consent? Was that not right? Not fair to you?"

"Since you love me you ought to be willing to marry me whether you have your guardian's consent or not." His voice strove to control its bitterness; but the day had darkened; all his happiness was blurred. He felt as if a great injury had been done him.

Karen continued to gaze at him in astonishment. "Would you have expected me to marry you without my mother's consent? She is in my mother's place."

"If you loved me I should certainly expect you to say that you would marry me whether your mother consented or not. You are of age. There is nothing against me. Those aren't English ideas at all, Karen."

"But I am not English," said Karen, "my guardian is not English. They are our ideas."

"You mean, you seriously mean, that, loving me, you would give me up if she told you to?"

"Yes," said Karen, now with the heaviness of their recognized division. "She would not refuse her consent unless it were right that I should give you up."

For some moments after this Gregory, in silence, looked down at the grass between them, clasping his knees; for he now sat upright. Then, controlling his anger to argumentative rationality, he said, while again wrenching away at the strongly rooted tufts: "If she did refuse, what reason could she give for refusing? As I say, there's absolutely nothing against me."

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