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 usualtête-à-tête, 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 brokentête-à-têtewas 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 chére," 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.
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.
"Do not speak of her to me," she said.
"But we will not speak of her. I do not wish to speak of her," said Mr. Drew, also rising, a stress of excitement and anxiety making itself felt in his soft, sibilant, hurried tones; "I understand every exquisite loyalty that hedges your path. And I'm hedged, too; you see that. Wait, wait—please listen. We won't speak of her. What I want to speak of is you. I want to ask you to make use of me. I want to ask you to trust me. You love her, but how can you depend on her? She is a child, an undisciplined, capricious child, and she is displeased with you, seriously displeased. Who is there in the world you can depend on? You are unutterably alone. And I ask you to turn to me."
Her frosty scrutiny disconcerted him. He had not touched her in the least.
"These are things you cannot say to me," she said. "There is nothing that you can do for me. I only know you as my guardian's friend; you forgot that, I think, when you brought me here." She turned from him.
"Oh, but you do not understand! I have made you angry! Oh, please, Mrs. Jardine;" his voice rose to sharp distress. He caught her hand with a supplicating yet determined grasp. "You can't understand. You are so inconceivably unaware. It is because of you; all because of you. Haven't you really seen or understood? She can't forgive you because I love you. I love you, you adorable child. I have only stayed on and borne with her because of you!"
His passion flamed before her frozen face. And as, for a transfixed moment of stupor, she stood still, held by him, he read into her stillness the pause of the woman to whom the apple of the tree of life is proffered, amazed, afraid, yet thrilled through all her being, tempted by the very suddenness, incapable of swift repudiation. He threw his arms around her, taking, in a draught of delight, the impression of silvery, glacial loveliness that sent dancing stars of metaphor streaming in his head, and pressed his lips to her cheek.
It was but one moment of attainment. The thrust that drove him from her was that, indeed, of the strong young goddess, implacable and outraged. Yet even as he read his deep miscalculation in her aspect he felt that the moment had been worth it. Not many men, not even many poets, could say that they had held, in such a scene, on such a night, an unwilling goddess to their breast.
She did not speak. Her eyes did not pause to wither. They passed over him. He had an image of the goddess wheeling to mount some chariot of the sky as, with no indignity of haste, she turned from him. She turned. And in the path, in the entrance to the flagged garden, Tante stood confronting them.
She stood before them in the moonlight with a majesty at once magnificent and ludicrous. She had come swiftly, borne on the wings of a devouring suspicion, and she maintained for a long moment her Medusa stare of horror. Then, it was the ugliest thing that Karen had ever seen, the mask broke. Hatred, fury, malice, blind, atavistic passions distorted her face. It was to fall from one nightmare to another and a worse; for Tante seized her by the shoulders and shook and shook and shook her, till the blood sprang and rang in her ears and eyeballs, and her teeth chattered together, and her hair, loosened by the great jerks, fell down upon her shoulders and about her face. And while she shook her, Tante snarled—seeming to crush the words between her grinding teeth, "Ah!perfide! perfide! perfide!"
From behind, other hands grasped Karen's shoulders. Mr. Drew grappled with Tante for possession of her.
"Leave me—with my guardian," she gathered her broken breath to say. She repeated it and Mr. Drew, invisible to her, replied, "I can't. She'll tear you to pieces."
"Ah! You have still to hear from me—vile seducer!" Madame von Marwitz cried, addressing the young man over Karen's shoulder. "Do you dare dispute my right to save her from you—foul serpent! Leave us! Does she not tell you to leave us?"
"I'll see her safely out of your hands before I leave her," said Mr. Drew. "How dare you speak of perfidy when you saw her repulse me? You'd have found it easier to forgive, no doubt, if she hadn't."
These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!" She raised her head. "Did you believe me blind, infatuated? Did you think by your tricks and pretences to evade me? Did I not see, from the moment that she came, that your false heart had turned from me?" Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world. Oh, we understand those retreats. What more alluring to the man who pursues than the woman who flees? What more inflaming than the pose of white, idiotic innocence? You did not know. You did not understand—" fiercely, in a mincing voice, she mimicked a supposed exculpation. "You are so young, so ignorant of life—soimmer kindlich! Ah!" she laughed, half strangled, "until the man seizes you in his arms you are quite unaware—but quite, quite unaware—of what he seeks from you. Little fool! And more than fool. Have I not seen your wiles? From day to day have I not watched you? Now it is the piano. You must play him your favourite little piece; so small; you have so little talent; but you will do your best. Now the chance meeting in the garden; you are so fond of flowers; you so love the open air, the sea, the wandering on the cliffs; such a free, wild creature you are. And now we have the frustratedrendezvousof this evening; he should find you dreaming, among your flowers, in the dusk. The pretty picture. And no, you want no dinner; you will go to your own room. But you are not to be found in your own room. Oh, no; it is again the garden; the moon; the sea and solitude that you seek! Be silent!" this was almost shouted at Claude Drew, who broke in with savage denials. "Do you think still to impose on me—you traitor?—No," her eyes burned on Karen's face. "No; you are wiser. You do not speak. You know that the time for insolence has passed. What! You take refuge with me here. You fly from your husband and throw yourself on my hands and say to me,"—again she assumed the mincing tones—"Yes, here I am again. Continue, pray, to work for me; continue, pray, to clothe and feed and lodge me; continue to share your life with me and all of rich and wide and brilliant it can offer; continue, in a word, to hold me high—but very high—above the gutter from which I came—and I take you, I receive you in my arms, I shelter you from malicious tongues, I humble myself in seeking to mend your shattered life; and for my reward you steal from me the heart of the one creature in the world I loved—the one—the only one! Until you came he was mine. Until you came he yearned for me—only for me. Oh, my heart is broken! broken! broken!" She leaned forward, wildly sobbing, and raising herself she shook the girl with all her force, crying: "Out of my sight! Be off! Let me see no more of you!" Covering her face with her hands, she reeled back, and Karen fled down the path, hearing a clamour of sobs and outcries behind her.
She fled along the cliff-path and an incomparable horror was in her soul. Her life had been struck from her. It seemed a ghost that ran, watched by the moon, among the trees.
On the open cliff-path it was very light. The sky was without a cloud. The sea lay like a vast cloth of silk, diapered in silver.
Karen ran to where the path led to a rocky verge.
From here, in daylight, one looked down into a vast hollow in the coast and saw at the bottom, far beneath, a stony beach, always sad, and set with rocks. To-night the enormous cup was brimmed with blackness.
Karen, pausing and leaning forward, resting on her hands, stared across the appalling gulf of inky dark, and down into the nothingness.
Horror had driven her to the spot, and horror, like a presence, rose from the void, and beckoned her down to oblivion. Why not? Why not? The question of despair seemed, like a vast pendulum, to swing her to and fro between the sky and the blackness, so that, blind and deaf and dumb, she felt only the horror, and her own pulse of life suspended over annihilation. And while her fingers clutched tightly at the rock, the thought of Gregory's face, as it had loved her, dimly, like a far beacon, flashed before her. Their love was dead. He did not love her. But they had loved. She moved back, trembling. She did not want to die. She lay down with her face to the ground on the grassy cliff.
When she raised herself it was as if after a long slumber. She was immensely weary, with leaden limbs. Horror was spent; but a dull oppression urged her up and on. There was something that she must never see again; something that would open before her again the black abyss of nothingness; something like the moon, that once had lived, but was now a ghost, white, ghastly, glittering. She must go. At once. And, as if far away, a tiny picture rose before her of some little German town, where she might earn a living and be hidden and forgotten.
But first she must see Mrs. Talcott. She must say good-bye to Mrs. Talcott. There was nothing now that Mrs. Talcott could show her.
She went back softly and carefully, pausing to listen, pushing through unused, overgrown paths and among thickets of gorse and stunted Cornish elms. In the garden all was still; the dreadful clamour had ceased. By the back way she stole up to her room.
A form rose to meet her as she opened the door. Mrs. Talcott had been waiting for her. Taking her hand, Mrs. Talcott drew her in and closed the door.
Mrs. Talcott sat down on the bed and Karen knelt before her with her head in her lap. The old woman's passed quietly over her hair while she wept, and the homely gentleness, like the simplicity of milk to famished lips, flowed into her horror-haunted mind.
She tried to tell Mrs. Talcott what had happened. "She does not love me, Mrs. Talcott. She has turned me out. Tante has told me to go."
"I've seen her," said Mrs. Talcott, stroking on. "I was just going out to look for you if you didn't come in. Did she tear your hair down like this? It's all undone."
"It was when she shook me, Mrs. Talcott. She found me with Mr. Drew. He had kissed me. I could not help it. She knew that I could not help it. She knows that I am not a bad woman."
"You mustn't take Mercedes at her word when she's in a state like that, Karen. She's in an awful state. She's parted from that young man."
"And I am going, Mrs. Talcott."
"Well, I've wanted you to go, from the first. Now you've found her out, this ain't any place for you. You can't go hanging on for all your life, like I've done."
"But Mrs. Talcott—what does it mean? What have I found out? What is Tante?" Karen sobbed. "For all these years so beautiful—so beautiful—to me, and suddenly to become my enemy—someone I do not know."
"You never got in her way before. She's got no mercy, Mercedes hasn't, if you get in her way. Where'd you thought of going, Karen?"
"To Frau Lippheim. She is still in London, I think. I could join her there. You could lend me a little money, Mrs. Talcott. Enough to take me to London."
Mrs. Talcott was silent for a moment. "Come up here, on the bed, Karen," she then said. "Here, wrap this cloak around you; you're awful cold. That's right. Now I want you to sit quiet while I explain things to you the best I can. I've made up my mind to do it. Mercedes will be in her right mind to-morrow and frantic to get hold of you again and get you to forgive her. Oh, I know her. And I don't want her to get hold of you again. I want you to be quit of her. I want you to see, as clear as day, how your husband was right about Mercedes, all along."
"Oh, do not speak of him—" Karen moaned, covering her face as she sat on the bed beside Mrs. Talcott.
"I ain't going to speak about him. I'm going to tell you about me and Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott. "I'm going to explain Mercedes. And I'm going way back to the very beginning to do it."
"Explain it to me. What is she? Has it all been false—all her loveliness?"
"I don't know about false," said Mrs. Talcott. "Mercedes ain't all bad; not by a long shot. She feels good sometimes, like most folks, when it ain't too much trouble. You know how it began, Karen. You know how I'm a sort of connection of Mercedes's mother and I've told you about Dolores. The prettiest creature you ever set eyes on. Mercedes looks like her; only it was a softer face than Mercedes's with great, big black eyes. I can see her now, walking round the galleries of that lovely house in New Orleans with a big white camellia in her black hair and a white muslin dress, standing out round her—like they wore then; singing—singing—so young and happy—it almost breaks my heart to think about her. I've told you about Mercedes's father, too, Pavelek Okraski, and how he came out to New Orleans and gave lessons to Dolores Bastida and made love to her on the sly and got her to run away with him—poor silly thing. When I think it all over I seem to piece things out and see how Mercedes came to be what she is. Her mother was just as sweet and loving as she could be, but scatter-brained and hot-tempered. And Pavelek was a mighty mean man and a mighty bad man, too, a queer, tricky, sly sort of man; but geniusy, with very attractive manners. Mercedes has got his eyes and his way of laughing; she shows her teeth just like he used to do when he laughed. Well, he took Dolores off to Poland and spent all her money as fast as he could get it, and then Señor Bastida and the two boys—nice, hot-tempered boys they were and perfect pictures—all got killed in a vendetta they had with another family in Louisiana, and poor Señora Bastida got sick and died and all the family fortunes went to pieces and there was no more home and no more money either, for Dolores. She just lost everything straight off.
"She sent for me then. Her baby was coming and Pavelek had gone off and she didn't know where he was and she was about distracted. I'd been married before she ran away with Pavelek, but Homer only lived four years and I was a widow then. I had folks left still in Maine; but no one very near and there wasn't anybody I seemed to take to so much as I always had to Dolores. You may say she had a sort of fascination for me. So I sold out what I had and came. My, what a queer journey that was. I don't know how I got to Cracow. I only spoke English and travelling wasn't what it is nowadays. But I got there somehow and found that poor child. She was the wretchedest creature you ever set eyes on; thin as thin; and all haggard and wild. Pavelek neglected her and ran after other women and drank, and when he got drunk and she used to fly out at him—for she was as hot-tempered as she could be—he used to beat her. Yes; that man used to beat Dolores." A note of profound and enduring anger was in Mrs. Talcott's voice.
"He came back after I got there. I guess he thought I'd brought some money, and he came in drunk one day and tried to hit her before me. He didn't ever try it again after that. I just got up and struck him with all my might and main right in the face and he fell down and hurt his head pretty bad and Dolores began to shriek and said I'd killed her husband; but he didn't try it again. He was sort of scared of me, I guess. No: I ain't forgiven Pavelek Okraski yet and I reckon I never shall. I don't seem to want to forgive him, neither in this world nor the next—if there is a next," Mrs. Talcott commented.
"Well, the time for the baby came and on the day Mercedes was born the Austrians bombarded Cracow; it was in '48. I took Dolores down to the cellar and all day long we heard the shells bursting, and the people screeching. And that was the time Mercedes came into the world. Dolores most died, but she got through. But afterwards I couldn't get proper care for her, or food either. She just pined off and died five months after the baby came. Pavelek most went off his head. He was always fond of her in his own mean way, and I guess he suffered considerable when she died. He went off, saying he'd send some money for me and the baby, but precious little of it did I ever see. I made some by sewing and giving lessons in English—I reckon some of those young Poles got queer ways of speaking from me, I was never what you'd call a polished speaker—and I scraped on. Time and time again we were near starving. My! that little garret room, and that big church—Panna Marya they called it—where I'd go and sit with the baby when the services were on to see if I could keep warm in the crowd! And the big fire in '50, when I carried the baby out in a field with lots of other people and slept out. It lasted for ten days that fire.
"It seems like a dream sometimes, all that time," Mrs. Talcott mused, and the distant sorrow of her voice was like the blowing of a winter wind. "It seems like a dream to think I got through with the child alive, and that my sweet, pretty little Dolores went under. There's some things that don't bear thinking about. Well, I kept that baby warm and I kept it fat, and it got to be the prettiest, proudest thing you ever set eyes on. She might have been a queen from the very beginning. And as for Pavelek, she just ruled him from the time she began to have any sense. It was mighty queer to see that man, who had behaved so bad to her mother, cringing before that child. He doted on her, and she didn't care a button for him. It used to make me feel almost sorry for Pavelek, sometimes. She'd look at him, when he tried to please her and amuse her, like he was a performing dog. It kept Pavelek in order, I can tell you, and made things easier for me. She'd just say she wanted things and if she didn't get them straight off she'd go into a black rage, and he'd be scared out of his life and go and work and get 'em for her. And then she began to show she was a prodigy. Pavelek taught her the violin first and then the piano and when he realized she was a genius he most went off his head with pride. Why that man—the selfishest, laziest creature by nature—worked himself to skin and bone so that she should have the best lessons and everything she needed. We both held our noses to the grindstone just as tight as ever we could, and Mercedes was brought up pretty well, I think, considering.
"She gave that first concert in Warsaw—we'd moved to Warsaw—and then Pavelek seemed to go to pieces. He just drank himself to death. Well, after that, rich relations of Mercedes's turned up—cousins of the Bastidas', who lived in Paris. They hadn't lifted a finger to help Dolores, or me with the baby after Dolores died; but they remembered about us now Mercedes was famous and made us come to live with them in Paris and said they had first claim on Mercedes. I didn't take to the Bastidas. But I stayed on because of Mercedes. I got to be a sort of nurse for her, you may say. Well, as she got older, and prettier and prettier, and everyone just crazy about her, I saw she didn't have much use for me. I didn't judge her too hard; but I began to see through her then. She'd behaved mighty bad to me again and again, she used to fly at me and bite me and tear my hair, when she was a child, if I thwarted her; but I always believed she really loved me; perhaps she did, as much as she can. But after these rich folks turned up and her life got so bright and easy she just seemed to forget all about me. So I went home.
"I stayed home for four or five years and then Mercedes sent for me. She used to write now and then to her 'Dearest Tallie' as she always called me, and I'd heard all about how she'd come out in Paris and Vienna as a great pianist, and how she'd quarrelled with her relations and how she'd run away with a young English painter and got married to him. It was an awful silly match, and they'd all opposed it; but it pleased me somehow. I thought it showed that Mercedes was soft-hearted like her mother, and unworldly. Well, she wrote that she was miserable and that her husband was a fiend and broke her heart and that she hated all her relations and they'd all behaved like serpents to her—Mercedes is always running across serpents—and how I was the only true friend she had and the only one who understood her, and how she longed for her dear Tallie. So I sold out again—I'd just started a sort of little farm near the old place in Maine, raising chickens and making jam—and came over again. I don't know what it is about Mercedes, but she gets a hold over you. And guess I always felt like she was my own baby. I had a baby, but it died when it was born. Well, she was living in Paris then and they had a fine flat and a big studio, and when Mercedes got into a passion with her husband she'd take a knife and slash up his canvases. She quarrelled with him day and night, and I wasn't long with them before I saw that it was all her fault and that he was a weak, harmless sort of young creature—he had yellow hair, longish, and used to wear a black velvet cap and paint sort of dismal pictures of girls with long necks and wild sort of eyes—but that the truth was she was sick of him and wanted to marry the Baron von Marwitz.
"You can commence to get hold of the story now, Karen. You remember the Baron. A sad, stately man he was, as cultured and intellectual as could be and going in the best society. Mercedes had found pretty quick that there wasn't much fun in being married to a yellow-haired boy who lived on the money she made and wasn't a mite in society. And the Baron was just crazy over her in his dignified, reverential way. Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Talcott pausing in a retrospect over this vanished figure, "Poor fellow! I guess he came to rue the day he ever set eyes on her. Well, Mercedes made out to him how terrible her life was and how she was tied to a dissipated, worthless man who lived on her and was unfaithful to her. And it's true that Baldwin Tanner behaved as he shouldn't; but he was a weak creature and she'd disillusionized him so and made him so miserable that he just got reckless. And he'd never asked any more than to live in a garret with her and adore her, and paint his lanky people and eat bread and cheese; he told me so, poor boy; he just used to lay his head down on my lap and cry like a baby sometimes. But Mercedes made it out that she was a victim and he was a serpent; and she believed it, too; that's the power of her; she's just determined to be in the right always. So at last she made it all out. She couldn't divorce Baldwin, being a Catholic; but she made it out that she wasn't really married to him. It appears he didn't get baptized by his folks; they hadn't believed in baptizing; they were free-thinkers. And the Baron got his powerful friends to help and they all set to work at the Pope, and they got him to fix it up, and Mercedes's marriage was annulled and she was free to marry again. That's what was in her mind in sending for me, you see; she'd quarrelled with her folks and she wanted a steady respectable person who knew all about her to stand by her and chaperon her while she was getting rid of Baldwin. Mercedes has always been pretty careful about her reputation; she's hardly ever taken any risks.
"Well, she was free and she married the Baron, and poor Baldwin got a nice young English girl to marry him, and she reformed him, and they're alive and happy to this day, and I guess he paints pretty poor pictures. And it makes Mercedes awful mad to hear about how happy they are; she has a sort of idea, I imagine, that Baldwin didn't have any right to get married again. I've always had a good deal of satisfaction over Baldwin," said Mrs. Talcott. "It's queer to realize that Mercedes was once just plain Mrs. Baldwin Tanner, ain't it? It was a silly match and no mistake. Well, it took two or three years to work it all out, and Mercedes was twenty-five when she married the Baron. I didn't see much of them for a while. They put me around in their houses to look after things and be there when Mercedes wanted me. She'd found out she couldn't get along without me in those two or three years. Mercedes was the most beautiful creature alive at that time, I do believe, and all Europe was wild about her. She and the Baron went about and she gave concerts, and it was just a triumphal tour. But after a spell I began to see that things weren't going smooth. Mercedes is the sort of person who's never satisfied with what she's got. And the Baron was beginning to find her out. My! I used to be sorry for that man. I'll never forget his white, sick face the first time she flew out at him and made one of her scenes. 'Emprisonné ma jeunesse,'" Mrs. Talcott quoted with a heavy accent. "That's what she said he'd done to her. He was twenty years older than Mercedes, the Baron. Mercedes always liked to have men who were in love with her hanging about, and that's what the trouble was over. The more they cared the worse she treated them, and the Baron was a very dignified man and didn't like having them around. And she was dreadful jealous of him, too, and used to fly out at him if he so much as looked at another woman; in her way I guess he was the person Mercedes cared for most in all her life; she respected him, too, and she knew he was as clever as she was and more so, and as for him, in spite of everything, he always stayed in love with her. They used to have reconciliations, and when he'd look at her sort of scornful and loving and sad all together, it would make her go all to pieces. She'd throw herself in his arms and cry and cry. No, she ain't all bad, Mercedes. And she thought she could make things all right with him after she'd let herself go; she depended on his caring for her so much and being sorry for her. But I saw well enough as the years went on that he got more and more depressed. He was a depressed man by nature, I reckon, and he read a sight of philosophy of the gloomy kind—that writer Schopenhauer was a favourite of his, I recollect, and Mercedes thought a sight of him, too—and after ten years or so of Mercedes I expect the Baron was pretty sick of life.
"Well, you came. You thought it was Mercedes who was so good to you, and it was in a way. But it was poor Ernst who really cared. He took to you the moment he set eyes on you, and he'd liked your father. And he wanted to have you to live with them and be their adopted daughter and inherit their money when they died. It had always been a grief to him that Mercedes wouldn't have any children. She just had a horror of having children, and he had to give up any hope of it. Well, the moment Mercedes realized how he cared for you she got jealous and they had a scene over you right off, in that hotel at Fontainebleau. She took on like her heart would break and put it that she couldn't bear to have any one with them for good, she loved him so. It was true in a way. I didn't count of course. He looked at her, sick and scornful and loving, and he gave way. That was why you were put to school. She tried to make up by being awful nice to you when you came for your holidays now and then; but she never liked having you round much and Ernst saw it and never showed how much he cared for you. But he did care. You had a real friend in him, Karen. Well, after that came the worst thing Mercedes ever did." Mrs. Talcott paused, gazing before her in the dimly lighted room. "Poor things! Poor Mercedes! It nearly killed her. She's never been the same since. And it was all her fault and she knows it and that's why she's afraid. That's why," she added in a lower voice, "you're sorry for her and put up with everything, because you know she's a miserable woman and it wouldn't do for her to be alone.
"A young man turned up. His name don't matter now, poor fellow. He was just a clever all-over-the-place young man like so many of them, thinking they know more about everything than God Almighty;—like this young man in a way, only not a bad young man like him;—and downright sick with love of Mercedes. He followed her about all over Europe and went to every concert she gave and laid himself out to please her in all the ways he could. And he had a great charm of manner—he was a Russian and very high-bred—and he sort of fascinated her, and she liked it all, I can tell you. Her youth was beginning to go, and the Baron was mighty gloomy, and she just basked in this young man's love, and pretty soon she began to think she was in love with him—perhaps she was—and had never loved before, and she certainly worked herself up to suffer considerably. Well, the Baron saw it. He saw she didn't treat him the way she'd treated the others; she was kind of humble and tender and distracted all the time. The Baron saw it all, but she never noticed that he was getting gloomier and gloomier. I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if he'd been willing to confide in me some. It does folks a sight of good if there's someone they can tell things to. But the Baron was very reserved and never said a word. And at last she burst out with a dreadful scene. You were with them; yes, it was that summer at Felsenschloss; but you didn't know anything about it of course. I was pretty much in the thick of it all, as far as Mercedes went, and I tried to make her see reason and told her she was a sinful woman to treat her husband so; but I couldn't hold her back. She broke out at him one day and told him he was like a jailor to her, and that he suffocated her talent and that he hung on her like a vampire and sucked her youth, and that she loved the other man. I can see her now, rushing up and down that long saloon on that afternoon, with the white blinds drawn down and the sun filtering through them, snatching with her hands at her dress and waving her arms up and down in the air. And the Baron sat on a sofa leaning on his elbow with his hand up over his eyes and watched her under it. And he didn't say one word. When she fell down on another sofa and cried and cried, he got up and looked at her for a moment; but it wasn't the scornful, loving look; it was a queer, dark, dead way. And he just went out. And we never saw him alive again.
"You know the rest, Karen. You found him. But no one knows why he did it, no one but you and me. He put an end to himself, because he couldn't stand it any longer, and to set her free. They called it suicidal mania and the doctors said he must have had melancholia for years. But I shan't ever forget his face when he went out, and no more will Mercedes. After he was gone she thought she'd never cared for anything in the world but him. She never saw that young man again. She wrote him a letter and laid the blame on him, and said he'd tried to take her from her adored husband and that she'd never forgive him and loathed the thought of him, and that he had made her the most wretched of women, and he went and blew his brains out and that was the end of him. I had considerable difficulty in getting hold of that letter. It was on him when he killed himself. But I managed to talk over the police and hush it up. Mercedes gave me plenty of money to manage with. I don't know what she thinks about that poor fellow; she's never named his name since that day. And she went on like a mad thing for two years or more. You remember about that, Karen. She said she'd never play the piano again or see anybody and wanted to go and be a nun. But she had a friend who was a prioress of a convent, and she advised her not to. I guess poor Mercedes wouldn't have stayed long in a convent. And the reason she was nice to you was because the Baron had been fond of you and she wanted to make up all she could for that dreadful thing in her life. She had you to come and live with her. You didn't interfere with anything any longer and it sort of soothed her to think it was what he'd have liked. She's fond of you, too. She wouldn't have put up with you for so long if she hadn't been. She'd have found some excuse for being quit of you. But as for loving you, Karen child, like you thought she did, or like you love her, why it's pitiful. I used to wonder how long it would be before you found her out."
Karen's face was hidden; she had rested it upon her hands, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, and she had not moved while Mrs. Talcott told her story. Now, as Mrs. Talcott sat silent, she stirred slightly.
"Tante! Tante!" she muttered. "My beautiful!"
Mrs. Talcott did not reply to this for some moments; then she laid her hand on Karen's shoulder. "That's it," she said. "She's beautiful and it most kills us to find out how cruel and bad she can be. But I guess we can't judge people like Mercedes, Karen. When you go through life like a mowing-machine and see everyone flatten out before you, you must get kind of exalted ideas about yourself. If anything happens that makes a hitch, or if anybody don't flatten out, why it must seem to you as if they were wrong in some way, doing you an injury. That's the way it is with Mercedes. She don't mean to be cruel, she don't mean to be bad; but she's a mowing-machine and if you get in her way she'll cut you up fine and leave you behind. And the thing for you to do, Karen, is to get out of her way as quick as you can."
"Yes, I am going," said Karen.
Again Mrs. Talcott sat silent. "I'd like to talk to you about that, Karen," she then said. "I want to ask you to give up going to Frau Lippheim. There ain't any sense in that. It's a poor plan. What you ought to do, Karen, is to go right back to your nice young husband."
Karen, who sat on as if crushed beyond the point where anything could crush her further, shook her head. "Do not ask me that, Mrs. Talcott," she said. "I can never go back to him."
"But, Karen, I guess you've got to own now that he was right and you were wrong in that quarrel of yours. I guess you'll have to own that it must have made him pretty sick to see her putting him in the wrong with you all the time and spoiling everything; and there's no one on earth can do that better than Mercedes."
"I see it all," said Karen. "But that does not change what happened between Gregory and me. He does not love me. I saw it plainly. If he had me back it would only be because he cares for conventions. He said cruel things to me."
"I guess you said cruel things to him, Karen."
Karen shook her head slightly, with weariness rather than impatience.
"No, for he saw that it was my loyalty to her—my love of her—that he was wounding. And he never understood. He never helped me. I can never go back to him, for he does not love me."
"Now, see here, Karen," said Mrs. Talcott, after a pause, "you just let me work it out. You'll have a good sleep and to-morrow morning I'll see you off, before Mercedes is up, to a nice little farm near here that I know about—just a little way by train—and there you'll stay, nice and quiet, and I'll not let Mercedes know where you are. And I'll write to Mr. Jardine and tell him just what's happened and what you meant to do, and that you want to go to Frau Lippheim; and you mark my words, Karen, that nice young husband of yours'll be here quicker than you can say Jack Robinson."
Karen had dropped her hands and was looking at her old friend intently. "Mrs. Talcott, you do not understand," she said. "You cannot write to him. Have I not told you that he does not love me?"
"Shucks!" said Mrs. Talcott. "He'll love you fast enough now that Mercedes is out of the way."
"But, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, rising and looking down at the old woman, whose face, in the dim light, had assumed to her reeling mind an aspect of dangerous infatuation—"I do not think you know what you are saying. What do I want of a man who only loves me when I cease to love my guardian?"
"Well, say you give up love, then," Mrs. Talcott persisted, and a panic seized Karen as she heard the unmoved tones. "Say you don't love him and he don't love you. You can have conventions, then—he wants that you say, and so can you—and a good home and a nice husband who won't treat you bad in any way. That's better than batting about the world all by yourself, Karen; you take my word for it. And you can take my word for it, too, that if you behave sensible and do as I say, you'll find out that all this is just a miserable mistake and that he loves you just as much as ever. Now, see here," Mrs. Talcott, also, had risen, and stood in her habitual attitude, resting heavily on one hip, "you're not fit to talk and I'm not going to worry you any more. You go to sleep and we'll see about what to do to-morrow. You go right to sleep, Karen," she patted the girl's shoulder.
The panic was deepening in Karen. She saw guile on Mrs. Talcott's storm-beaten and immutable face; and she heard specious reassurance in her voice. Mrs. Talcott was dangerous. She had set her heart on this last desire of her passionless, impersonal life and had determined that she and Gregory should come together again. It was this desire that had unsealed her lips: she would never relinquish, it. She might write to Gregory; she might appeal to him and put before him the desperate plight in which his wife was placed. And he might come. What were a wife's powers if she was homeless and penniless, and a husband claimed her? Karen did not know; but panic breathed upon her, and she felt that she must fly. She, too, could use guile. "Yes," she said. "I will go to sleep. And to-morrow we will talk. But what you hope cannot be. Good-night, Mrs. Talcott."
"Good-night, child," said Mrs. Talcott.
They had joined hands and the strangeness of this farewell, the knowledge that she might never see Mrs. Talcott again, and that she was leaving her to a life empty of all that she had believed it to contain, rose up in Karen so strongly that it blotted out for a moment her own terror.
"You have been so good to me," she said, in a trembling voice. "Never shall I forget what you have done for me, Mrs. Talcott. May I kiss you good-night?"
They had never kissed.
Mrs. Talcott's eyes blinked rapidly, and a curious contortion puckered her mouth and chin. Karen thought that she was going to cry and her own eyes filled with tears.
But Mrs. Talcott in another moment had mastered her emotion, or, more probably, it could find no outlet. The silent, stoic years had sealed the fount of weeping. Only that dry contortion of her face spoke of her deep feeling. Karen put her arms around her and they kissed each other.
"Good-night, child," Mrs. Talcott then said in a muffled voice, and disengaging herself she went out quickly.
Karen stood listening to the sound of her footsteps passing down the corridor. They went down the little flight of stairs that led to another side of the house and faded away. All was still.
She did not pause or hesitate. She did not seem to think. Swiftly and accurately she found her walking-shoes and put them on, her hat and cloak; her purse with its half-crown, its sixpence and its few coppers. Swiftly she laid together a change of underwear and took from her dressing-table its few toilet appurtenances. She paused then, looking at the ornaments of her girlhood. She must have money. She must sell something; yet all these her guardian had given her.
No; not all. Her little gold watch ticked peacefully, lying on the table beside her bed as it had lain beside her for so many years; her beautiful little watch, treasured by her since the distant birthday when Onkel Ernst had given it.
She clutched it tightly in her hand and it seemed to her, as she had once said to Gregory, that the iron drove deep into her heart and turned up not only dark forgotten things but dark and dreadful things never seen before.
She leaned against the table, putting the hand that held Onkel Ernst's watch to her eyes, and his agony became part of her own. How he had suffered. And the other man, the young, forgotten Russian. Mrs. Talcott's story became real to her as it had not yet been. It entered her; it filled her past; it linked itself with everything that she had been and done and believed. And the iron drove down deeper, until of her heart there seemed only to be left a deep black hole.
Mrs. Talcott had a broken night and it was like a continuation of some difficult and troubled dream when she heard the voice of Mercedes saying to her: "Tallie, Tallie, wake up. Tallie, will you wake!Bon Dieu!how she sleeps!"
The voice of Mercedes when she had heard it last had been the voice of passion and desperation, but its tone was changed this morning; it was fretful, feverishly irritable, rather than frantic.
Mrs. Talcott opened her eyes and sat up in bed. She wore a Jaeger nightgown and her head, with its white hair coiled at the top, was curiously unaltered by its informal setting.
"What do you mean by coming waking me up like this after the night you've given me," she demanded, fully awakened now. "Go right straight away or I'll put you out."
"Don't be a fool, Tallie," said Madame von Marwitz, who, in a silken dressing-gown and with her hair unbound, had an appearance at once childish and damaged. "Where is Karen? I've been to her room and she is not there. The door downstairs is unbolted. Is she gone out to walk so early?"
Mrs. Talcott sat still and upright in her bed. "What time is it?" she asked.
"It is seven. I have been awake since dawn. Do you imagine that I have had a pleasant night?"
Mrs. Talcott did not answer this query. She sprang out of bed.
"Perhaps she's gone to meet the bus at the cross-roads. But I told her I was going to take her. Tell Burton to come round with the car as quick as he can. I'll go after her and see that she's all right. Why, the child hasn't got any money," Mrs. Talcott muttered, deftly drawing on her clothes beneath her nightgown which she held by the edge of the neck between her teeth.
Madame von Marwitz listened to her impeded utterance frowning.
"The bus? What do you mean? Why is she meeting the bus?"
"To take her to London where she's going to the Lippheims," said Mrs. Talcott, casting aside the nightgown and revealing herself in chemise and petticoat. "You go and order that car, Mercedes," she added, as she buckled together her sturdy, widely-waisted stays. "This ain't no time for talk."
Madame von Marwitz looked at her for another moment and then rang the bell. She put her head outside the door to await the housemaid and, as this person made some delay, shouted in a loud voice: "Handcock! Jane! Louise! Where are you?Fainéantes!" she stamped her foot, and, as the housemaid appeared, running; "Burton," she commanded. "The car. At once. And tell Louise to bring me my tea-gown, my shoes and stockings, my fur cloak, at once; but at once; make haste!"
"What are you up to, Mercedes?" Mrs. Talcott inquired, as Madame von Marwitz thrust her aside from the dressing-table and began to wind up her hair before the mirror.
"I am getting ready to go with you,parbleu!" Madame von Marwitz replied. "Is that you, Louise? Come in. You have the things? Put on my shoes and stockings; quickly;mais dépêchez-vous donc! The tea-gown—yes, over this—over it I say! So. Now bring me a motor-veil and gloves. I shall do thus."
Mrs. Talcott, while Louise with an air of profoundest gloom arrayed her mistress, kept silence, but when Louise had gone in search of the motor-veil she remarked in a low but imperative voice: "You'll get out at the roadside and wait for me, that's what you'll do. I won't have you along when I meet Karen. She couldn't bear the sight of you."
"Peace!" Madame von Marwitz commanded, adjusting the sash of her tea-gown. "I shall see Karen. The deplorable misunderstanding of last night shall be set right. Her behaviour has been undignified and underhanded; but I misunderstood her, and, pierced to the heart by the treachery of a man I trusted, I spoke wildly, without thought. Karen will understand. I know my Karen."
It was not the moment for dispute. Louise had re-entered with the veil and Madame von Marwitz bound it about her head, standing before the mirror, and gazing at herself, fixedly and unseeingly, with dark eyes set in purpled orbits. She turned then and swept from the room, and Mrs. Talcott, pinning on her hat as she went, followed her.
Not until they were speeding through the fresh, chill air, did Mrs. Talcott speak. Madame von Marwitz, leaning to one side of the open car, scanned the stretch of road before them, melancholy and monotonous under the pale morning sky, and Mrs. Talcott, moving round determinedly in her corner, faced her.
"I want to tell you, right now, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, "that Karen's done with you. There's no use in your coming, for you'll never get her back. I've told her all about you, Mercedes;—yes, I ain't afraid of you and you know it;—I told her. I made up my mind to it last night after I'd seen you and heard all your shameful story and how you'd treated her. I made up my mind that you shouldn't get hold of her again, not if I could help it. The time had come to tell that child that her husband was right all along and that you ain't a woman to be trusted. She'd seen for herself what you could do, and I made a sure thing of it. I've held my tongue for all my life, but I spoke out last night. I want her to be quit of you for good. I want her to go back to her husband. Yes, Mercedes; I've burst up the whole concern."
Madame von Marwitz, her hand holding tightly the side of the car and her eyes like large, dark stones in her white face, was sitting upright and was staring at her. She could not speak and Mrs. Talcott went on.
"She knows all about you now; about you and Baldwin Tanner and you and Ernst, and about that pitiful young Russian. She knows how you treated them. She knows how it wasn't you but Ernst who was her real friend, and how you didn't want her to live with you. She knows that you're a mighty unfortunate creature and a mighty dangerous one; and what I advise you to do, Mercedes, is to get out here and go right home. Karen won't ever come back to you again, I'm as sure of it as I'm sure my name's Hannah Talcott."
They sped, with softly singing speed, through the chill morning air. The hard, tight, dark eyeballs still fixed themselves on the old woman almost lifelessly, and still she sat grasping the side of the car. She had the look of a creature shot through the heart and maintaining the poise and pride of its startled and arrested life. Mechanical forces rather than volition seemed to sustain her.
"Say, Mercedes, will you get out?" Mrs. Talcott repeated. And the rigid figure then moved its head slightly in negation.
They reached the cross-roads where a few carts and an ancient fly stood waiting for the arrival of the omnibus that plied between the Lizard and Helston. Karen was nowhere to be seen.
"Perhaps she went across the fields and got into the bus at the Lizard," said Mrs. Talcott. "We'll wait and see, and if she isn't in the bus we'll go on to Helston. Perhaps she's walking."
Madame von Marwitz continued to say nothing, and in a moment they heard behind them the clashing and creaking of the omnibus. It drew up at the halt and Karen was not in it.
"To Helston," said Mrs. Talcott, standing up to speak to the chauffeur.
They sped on before the omnibus had resumed its journey.
Tints of azure and purple crept over the moors; the whitening sky showed rifts of blue; it was a beautiful morning. Mrs. Talcott, keeping a keen eye on the surrounding country, became aware presently that Mercedes had turned her gaze upon her and was examining her.
She looked round.
There was no anger, no resentment, even, on the pallid face. It seemed engaged, rather, in a deep perplexity—that of a child struck down by the hand that, till then, had cherished it. It brooded in sick wonder on Mrs. Talcott, and Mrs. Talcott looked back with her ancient, weary eyes. Madame von Marwitz broke the silence. She spoke in a toneless voice. "Tallie—how could you?" she said. "Oh, Tallie—how could you have told her?"
"Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, gently but implacably, "I had to. It was right to make sure you shouldn't get hold of her again. She had to go, and she had to go for good. If you want me to go, too, I will, but it's only fair to tell you that I never felt much sorrier for you than I do at this minute."
"There have been tragedies in my life," Madame von Marwitz went on in the low, dulled voice. "I have been a passion-tossed woman. Yes, I have not been guiltless. But how could you cut out my heart with all its scars and show it to my child?"
"It was right to do it, Mercedes, so as you shouldn't ruin her life. She's not your child, and you've shown her she's not. A mother don't behave so to her child, however off her head she goes."
"I was mad last night." The tears ran slowly down Madame von Marwitz's cheeks. "I can tell that to Karen. I can explain. I can throw myself on her mercy. I loved him and my heart was broken. One is not responsible. It is the animal, wounded to death, that shrieks and tears at the spear it feels entering its flesh."
"I'm awful sorry for you, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott.
And now, hiding her face in her hands and leaning back in her cushions, Madame von Marwitz began to weep with the soft reiterated sobbing of a miserable child. "I have no one left. I am alone," she sobbed. "Even you have turned against me."
"No, I haven't turned against you," said Mrs. Talcott. "I'm here." And presently, while Mercedes wept, Mrs. Talcott took her hand and held it.
They reached Helston and climbed the steep, stony road to the station. There was no sign of Karen. Mrs. Talcott got out and made inquiries. She might have gone to London by the train that left at dawn; but no one had noticed such a young lady. Mrs. Talcott came back to the car with her fruitless story.
Mercedes, by this time, had dried her eyes and was regaining, apparently, her more normal energies. "Not here? Not seen? Not heard of?" she repeated. "But where is she then?"
Mrs. Talcott stood at the door of the car and looked at her charge. "Well, I'm afraid she made off in the night, straight away, after I'd talked to her."
"Made off in the night?" A dark colour suddenly suffused Madame von Marwitz's face.
"Yes, that's it, I reckon. I must have said something to scare her about her going back to her husband. Perhaps she thought I'd bring him down without her knowing, and perhaps she wasn't far wrong. I'm afraid I've played the fool. She thought I'd round on her in some way and so she just lit out."
Madame von Marwitz stared at her. The expression of her face had entirely altered; there was no trace of the dazed and wretched child. Dark forces lit her eyes and the relaxed lines of her lips tightened.
"Get in," she commanded. "Tell him to drive back, and get in." And when Mrs. Talcott had taken her place beside her she went on in a low, concentrated voice: "Is it not possible that she has joined that vile seducer?"
Mrs. Talcott eyed her with the fixity of a lion-tamer. Their moment of instinctive closeness had passed. "Now see here, Mercedes," she said; "I advise you to be careful what you say."
"Careful! I am half mad! Between you all you will drive me mad!" said Madame von Marwitz with intensity of fury. "You fill Karen's mind with lies about my past—oh, there are two sides to every story! she shall hear my side!—you drive her forth with your threats to hand her over to the man she loathes, and she takes refuge—where else?—with that miscreant. Why not? Where else had she to go? You say that she had no money. We call now at the hotel. If he is gone, and if within the day we do not hear that she is with Lise, we will send at once for detectives."
"You'd better control yourself, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott. "If Karen ain't found it'll be a mighty ugly story for you to face up to, and if she's found it won't be all plain sailing for you either; you've got to pay the price for what you've done. But if it gets round that you drove her out and then spread scandal about her, you'll do for yourself—just keep your mind on that if you can."
"Scandal! What scandal shall I spread? If he disappears and she with him, will the facts not shriek aloud? If she is found she will be found by me. I will wire at once to Lise."