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 cherie. 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 cherie. 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, cherie?" 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.

Other things were different. Tante seemed now to wish very constantly to have her there when Mr. Drew was with her. She made much of her to Mr. Drew. She called his attention to her skill in gardening, to her directness of speech, to her individuality of taste in dress. These expositions made Karen uncomfortable, yet they seemed an expression of Tante's desire to make amends. And Mr. Drew, with his vague, impenetrable regard, helped her to bear them. It was as if, a clumsy child, she were continually pushed forward by a fond, tactless mother, and as if, mildly shaking her hand, the guest before whom she was displayed showed her, by kind, inattentive eyes, that he was paying very little attention to her. Mr. Drew put her at her ease and Tante embarrassed her. She became, even, a little grateful to Mr. Drew. But now, aware of this strange bond, it was more difficult to talk to him when they were alone and when, once or twice, he met her in the garden or house, she made always an excuse to leave him. She and Mr. Drew could have nothing to say to each other when Tante was not there.

One evening, returning to Les Solitudes after a walk along the cliffs, Karen found that tea was over, as she had intended that it should be, Tante and Mr. Drew not yet come in from their motoring, and Mrs. Talcott safely busied in the garden. There was not one of them with whom she could be happily alone, and she was glad to find the morning-room empty. Mrs. Talcott had left the kettle boiling for her on the tea-table and the small tea-pot, which they used in their usual tete-a-tete, ready, and Karen made herself a cup.

She was tired. She sat down, when she had had her tea, near the window and looked out over the ranged white flowers growing in their low white pots on the window-seat, at the pale sea and sky. She sat quietly, her cheek on one hand, the other in her lap, and from time to time a great involuntary sigh lifted her breast. It seemed nearer peace than fear, this mood of immeasurable, pale sorrow. It folded her round like the twilight falling outside.

The room was dim when she heard the sound of the returning motor and she sat on, believing that here she would be undisturbed. Tante rarely came to the morning-room. But it was Tante who presently appeared, wearing still her motoring cloak and veil, the nun-like veil bound round her head. Karen thought, as she rose, and looked at her, that she was like one of the ghost-like white flowers. And there was no joy for her in seeing her. She seemed to be part of the sadness.

She turned and closed the door with some elaboration, and as she came nearer Karen recognized in her eyes the piteous look of quelled watchfulness.

"You are sitting here, alone, my child?" she said, laying her hand, but for a moment only, on Karen's shoulder. Karen had resumed her seat, and Tante moved away at once to take up a vase of flowers from the mantelpiece, smell the flowers, and set it back. "Where is Tallie?"

"Still in the garden, I think. I worked with her this morning and before tea. Since tea I have had a walk."

"Where did you walk?" Madame von Marwitz inquired, moving now over to the upright piano and bending to examine in the dusk the music that stood on it. Karen described her route.

"But it is lonely, very lonely, for you, is it not?" Tante murmured after a moment's silence. Karen said nothing and she went on, "And it will be still more lonely if, as I think probable, I must leave you here before long. I shall be going; perhaps to Italy."

A sensation of oppression that she could not have analyzed passed over Karen. Why was Tante going to Italy? Why must she leave Les Solitudes? Her mind could not rest on the supposition that her own presence drove Tante forth, that the broken tete-a-tete was to be resumed under less disturbing circumstances. She could not ask Tante if Mr. Drew was to be in Italy; yet this was the question that pressed on her heart.

"Oh, but I am very used to Les Solitudes," she said.

"Used to it. Yes. Too used to it," said Madame von Marwitz, seating herself now near Karen, her eyes still moving about the room. "But it is not right, it is not fitting, that you should spend your youth here. That was not the destiny I had hoped for you. I came here to find you, Karen, so that I might talk to you." Her fingers slightly tapped her chair-arm. "We must talk. We must see what is to be done."

"Do you mean about me, Tante?" Karen asked after a moment. The look of the ghostly room and of the white, enfolded figure seated before her with its restless eyes seemed part of the chill that Tante's words brought.

"About you. Yes. About who else, parbleu!" said Madame von Marwitz with a slight laugh, her eyes shifting about the room; and with a change of tone she added: "I have it on my heart—your situation—day and night. Something must be done and I am prepared to do it."

"To do what?" asked Karen. Her voice, too, had changed, but not, as Madame von Marwitz's, to a greater sweetness.

"Well, to save it—the situation; to help you." Madame von Marwitz's ear was quick to catch the change. "And I have come, my Karen, to consult with you. It is a matter, many would say, for my pride to consider; but I will not count my pride. Your happiness, your dignity, your future are the things that weigh with me. I am prostrated, made ill, by the miserable affair; you see it, you see that I am not myself. I cannot sleep. It haunts me—you and your broken life. And what I have to propose," Tante looked down at her tapping fingers while she spoke, "is that I offer myself as intermediary. Your husband will not take the first step forward. So be it. I will take it. I will write to Mrs. Forrester. I will tell her that if your husband will but offer me the formal word of apology I will myself induce you to return to him. What do you say, my Karen? Oh, to me, as you know, the forms are indifferent; it is of you and your dignity that I think. I know you; without that apology from him to me you could not contemplate a reconciliation. But he has now had his lesson, your young man, and when he knows that, through me, you would hold out the olive-branch, he will, I predict, spring to grasp it. After all, he is in love with you and has had time to find it out; and even if he were not, his mere man's pride must writhe to see himself abandoned. And you, too, have had your lesson, my poor Karen, and have seen that romance is a treacherous sand to build one's life upon. Dignity, fitness, one's rightful place in life have their claims. You are one, as I told you, to work out your destiny in the world, not in the wilderness. What do you say, Karen? I would not write without consulting you. Hein! What is it?"

Karen had risen, and Madame von Marwitz's eyelashes fluttered a little in looking up at her.

"I will never forgive you, I will never forgive you," said Karen in a harsh voice, "if you speak of this again."

"What is this that you say to me, Karen?" Madame von Marwitz, too, rose.

"Never speak to me of this again," said Karen.

In the darkening room they looked at each other as they had never in all their lives looked before. They were equals in maturity of demand.

For a strange moment sheer fury struggled with subtler emotions in Madame von Marwitz's face, and then self-pity, overpowering, engulfing all else. "And is this the return you make me for my love?" she cried. Her voice broke in desperate sobs and long-pent misery found relief. She sank into her chair.

"I asked for no reconciliation," said Karen. "I left him and we knew that we were parting forever. There is no love between us. Have you no understanding at all, and no thought of my pride?"

It was woman addressing woman. The child Karen was gone.

"Your pride?" Madame von Marwitz repeated in her sobs. "And what of mine? Was it not for you, stony-hearted girl? Is it not your happiness I seek? If I have been mistaken in my hopes for you, is that a reason for turning upon me like a serpent!"

Karen had walked to the long window that opened to the verandah and looked out, pressing her forehead to the pane. "You must forgive me if I was unkind. What you said burned me."

"Ah, it is well for you to speak of burnings!" Madame von Marwitz sobbed, aware that Karen's wrath was quelled. "I am scorched by all of you! by all of you!" she repeated incoherently. "All the burdens fall upon me and, in reward, I am spurned and spat upon by those I seek to serve!"

"I am sorry, Tante. It was what you said. That you should think it possible."

"Sorry! Sorry! It is easy to say that you are sorry when you have rolled me in the dust of your insults and your ingratitude!" Yet the sobs were quieter.

"Let us say, then, that it has been misunderstanding," said Karen. She still stood in the window, but as she spoke the words she drew back suddenly. She had found herself looking into Mr. Drew's eyes. His face, gazing in oddly upon her, was at the other side of the pane, and, in the apparition, its suddenness, its pallor, rising from the dusk, there was something almost horrible.

"Who is that?" came Tante's voice, as Karen drew away. She had turned in her chair.

It seemed to Karen, then, that the room was filled with the whirring wings of wild emotions, caught and crushed together. Tante had sprung up and came with long, swift strides to the window. She, too, pressed her face against the pane. "Ah! It is Claude," she said, in a hushed strange voice, "and he did not see that I was here. What does he mean by looking in like that?" she spoke now angrily, drying her eyes as she spoke. She threw open the window. "Claude. Come here."

Mr. Drew, whose face seemed to have sunk, like a drowned face, back into dark water, returned to the threshold and paused, arrested by his friend's wretched aspect. "Come in. Enter," said Madame von Marwitz, with a withering stateliness of utterance. "You have the manner of a spy. Did you think that Karen and I were quarrelling?"

"I couldn't think that," said Mr. Drew, stepping into the room, "for I didn't see that you were here."

"We have had a misunderstanding," said Madame von Marwitz. "No more. And now we understand again. Is it not so, my Karen? You are going?"

"I think I will go to my room," said Karen, who looked at neither Madame von Marwitz nor Mr. Drew. "You will not mind if I do not come to dinner to-night."

"Certainly not. No. Do as you please. You are tired. I see it. And I, too, am tired." She followed Karen to the door, murmuring: "Sans rancune, n'est-ce-pas?"

"Yes, Tante."

As the door closed upon Karen, Madame von Marwitz turned to Mr. Drew.

"If you wish to see her, why not seek her openly? Who makes it difficult for you to approach her?" Her voice had the sharpness of splintering ice.

"Why, no one, ma chere," said Mr. Drew. "I wasn't seeking her."

"No? And what did it mean, then, your face pressed close to hers, there at the window?"

"It meant that I couldn't see who it was who stood there. Just as I can hardly now see more than that you are unhappy. What is the matter, my dear and beautiful friend?" His voice was solicitous.

Madame von Marwitz dropped again into her chair and leaning forward, her hands hanging clasped between her knees, she again wept. "The matter is the old one," she sobbed. "Ingratitude! Ingratitude on every hand! My crime now has been that I have sought—at the sacrifice of my own pride—to bring a reconciliation between that stubborn child and her husband, and for my reward she overwhelms me with abuse!"

"Tell me about it," said Mr. Drew, seating himself beside her and, unreproved, taking her hand.



CHAPTER XXXV

Karen did not go to her room. She was afraid that Mrs. Talcott would come to her there. She asked the cook for a few sandwiches and going to one of the lower terraces she found a seat there and sat down. She felt ill. Her mind was sore and vague. She sat leaning her head on her hand, as she had sat in the morning-room, her eyes closed, and did not try to think.

She had escaped something—mercifully. Yes, the supreme humiliation that Tante had prepared for her was frustrated. And she had been strangely hard and harsh to Tante and in return Tante had been piteous yet unmoving. Her heart was dulled towards Tante. She felt that she saw her from a great distance.

The moon had risen and was shining brightly when she at last got up and climbed the winding paths up to the house.

A definite thought, after the hours that she had sat there, had at last risen through the dull waters of her mind. Why should Tante go away? Why should not she herself go? There need be no affront to Tante, no alienation. But, for a time, at least, would it not be well to prove to Tante that she could be something more than a problem and a burden? Could she not go to the Lippheims in Germany and teach English and French and Italian there—she knew them all—and make a little money, and, when Tante wanted her again to come to Les Solitudes, come as an independent person?

It was a curious thought. It contradicted the assumptions upon which her life was founded; for was she not Tante's child and Tante's home her home? So curious it was that she contemplated it like an intricate weapon laid in her hand, its oddity concealing its significance.

She turned the weapon over. She might be Tante's child and Tante's home might be hers; yet a child could gain its own bread, could it not? What was there to pierce and shatter in the thought that it would be well for her to gain her bread? "Tante has worked for me too long," she said to herself. She was not pierced or shattered. Something very strange was in her hand, but she was only reasonable.

She had stood still, in the midst of her swift climbing towards the house, to think it all out clearly, and it was as she stood there that she saw the light of a cigarette approaching her. It was Mr. Drew and he had seen her. Karen was aware of a deep stirring of displeasure and weariness. "But, please," he said, as, slightly bowing her head, and murmuring, "Good-night," she passed him; "I want—I very particularly want—to see you." He turned to walk beside her, tossing away his cigarette. "There is something I particularly want to say."

His tone was grave and kind and urgent. It reproached her impatient impulse. He might have come with a message from Tante.

"Where is my guardian?" she asked.

"She has gone to bed. She has a horrible headache, poor thing," said Mr. Drew, who was leading her through the little copse of trees and along the upper paths. "Here, shall we sit down here? You are not cold?"

They were in the flagged garden. Karen, vaguely expectant, sat down on the rustic bench and Mr. Drew sat beside her. The moonlight shone through the trees and fell fantastically on the young man's face and figure and on Karen, sitting upright, her little shawl of white knitted wool drawn closely about her shoulders and enfolding her arms. "Not for long, please," she said. "It is growing late and although I am not cold I am tired. What have you to say, Mr. Drew?"

He had so much to say and it was, so obviously, his opportunity, his complete opportunity at last, that, before the exquisite and perilous task of awakening this creature of flowers and glaciers, Mr. Drew collected his resources with something of the skill and composure of an artist preparing canvas and palette. He must begin delicately and discreetly, and then he must be sudden and decisive.

"I want to make you feel, in the first place, if I can," he said, leaning forward to look into her face and observing with satisfaction that she made no movement of withdrawal as he came a little nearer in so doing, "that I'm your friend. Can I, do you think, succeed in making you feel that?" His experience had told him that it really didn't matter so much what one said. To come near was the point, and to look deeply. "I've had so few chances of showing you how much your friend I am."

"Thank you," said Karen. "You are kind." She did not say that he would succeed in making her feel him a friend.

"We have been talking about you, talking a great deal, since you left us, your guardian and I," Mr. Drew continued, and he looked at the one of Karen's hands that was visible, emerging from the shawl to clasp her elbow, the left hand with its wedding-ring, "and ludicrous as it may seem to you, I can't but feel that I understand you a great deal better than she does. She still thinks of you as a child—a child whose little problems can be solved by facile solutions. Forgive me, I know it may sound fatuous to you, but I see what she does not see, that you are a suffering woman, and that for some problems there are no solutions." His eyes now came back to hers and found them fixed on him with a wide astonished gaze.

"Has my guardian asked you to say anything to me?" she said.

"No, not exactly that," said Mr. Drew, a little disconcerted by her tone and look, while at the same time he was marvelling at the greater and greater beauty he found in the impassive moonlit face—how had he been so unconscionably stupid as not to see for so long how beautiful she was!—"No, she certainly hasn't asked me to say anything to you. She is going away, you know, to Italy; it's a sudden decision and she's been telling me about it. I can't go with her. I don't think it a good plan. I can stay on here, but I can't go to Italy. Perhaps she'll give it up. She didn't find me altogether sympathetic and I'm afraid we've had something of a disagreement. I am sure you've seen since you've been here that if your guardian doesn't understand you she doesn't understand me, either."

"But I cannot speak of my guardian to you," said Karen. She had kept her eyes steadily upon him waiting to hear what he might have to say, but now the thought of Tante in her rejected queenliness broke insufferably upon her making her sick with pity. This man did not love Tante. She rose as she spoke.