Tante

He felt abashed before her. The most dependent and child-like of creatures where her trust and love were engaged, she was, as well, the most serenely independent. Even Tante, he felt, could not touch her faiths.

"You mustn"t say that you are a pagan, you see," he said.

"But Plato believed in immortality," Karen returned, smiling. "And you will not tell me that Plato was _pratiquant_ or _croyant_."

He could not claim Plato as a member of the Church of England, though he felt quite ready to demonstrate, before a competent body of listeners, that, as a nineteenth century Englishman, Plato would have been. Karen was not likely to follow such an argument. She would smile at his seeming sophistries.

No; he must accept it, and as a very part of her lovableness, that she could not be made to fit into the plan of his life as he had imagined it. She would not carry on its traditions, for she would not understand them. To win her would be, in a sense, to relinquish something of that orderly progression as a professional and social creature that he had mapped out for himself, though he knew himself to be, through his experience of her, already a creature more human, a creature enriched.

Karen, if she came to love him, would be, through love, infinitely malleable, but in the many adjustments that would lie before them it would be his part to foresee complications and to do the adjusting.

Change in her would be a gradual growth, and never towards mere conformity.

He felt it to be the first step towards adjustments when he motored Karen and Mrs. Talcott to Guillian House to lunch with his friends the Lavingtons. The occasion must mark for him the subtle altering of an old tie. Karen and the Lavingtons could never be to each other what he and the Lavingtons had been. It was part of her breadth that congeniality could never for her be based on the half automatic affinities of caste and occupation; and it was part of her narrowness, or, rather, of her inexperience, that she could see people only as individuals and would not recognize the real charm of the Lavingtons, which consisted in their being, like their house and park, part of the landscape and of an established order of things. Yet, once he had her there, he watched the metamorphosis that her presence worked in his old a.s.sociations with pleasure rather than pain. It pleased him, intimately, that the Lavingtons should see in him a lover as yet uncertain of his chances. It pleased him that they should not find in Karen the type that they must have expected the future Mrs. Jardine to be, the type of Constance Armytage and the type of Evelyn Lavington, Colonel and Mrs. Lavington"s unmarried daughter, who, but for Karen, might well have become Mrs.

Jardine one day. He observed, with a lover"s fond pride, that Karen, in her shrunken white serge and white straw hat, Karen, with her pleasant imperturbability, her mingled simplicity and sophistication, did, most decisively, make the Lavingtons seem flavourless. Among them, while Mrs.

Lavington walked her round the garden and Evelyn elicited with kindly concern that she played neither golf, hockey nor tennis, and had never ridden to hounds, her demeanour was that of a little rustic princess benignly doing her social duty. The only reason why she did not appear like this to the Lavingtons was that, immutably unimaginative as they were, they knew that she wasn"t a princess, was, indeed, only the odd appendage of an odd celebrity with whom their friend had chosen, oddly, to fall in love. They weren"t perplexed, because, since he had fallen in love with her, she was placed. But they, in the complete contrast they offered, had little recognition of individual values and judged a dish by the platter it was served on. A princess was a princess, and an appendage an appendage, and a future Mrs. Jardine a very recognizable person; just as, had a subtle _charlotte russe_ been brought up to lunch in company with the stewed rhubarb they would have eaten it without comment and hardly been aware that it wasn"t an everyday milk-pudding.

"Did you and Mrs. Lavington and Evelyn and Mrs. Haverfield find much to talk of after lunch?" Gregory asked, as he motored Mrs. Talcott and Karen back to Les Solitudes.

"Yes; we talked of a good many things," said Karen. "But I know about so few of their things and they about so few of mine. Miss Lavington was very much surprised to think that I had never been to a fox-hunt; and I," Karen smiled, "was very much surprised to think that they had never heard Tante play."

"They hardly ever get up to town, you see," said Gregory. "But surely they knew about her?"

"Not much," said Karen. "Mrs. Lavington asked me about her--for something pleasant to say--and they were such strange questions; as though one should be asked whether Mr. Arthur Balfour were a Russian nihilist or Metchnikoff an Italian poet." Karen spoke quite without grievance or irony.

"And after your Sargent," said Gregory, "you must have been pained by that portrait of Mrs. Haverfield in the drawing-room."

"Mrs. Lavington pointed it out to me specially," said Karen, laughing, "and told me that it had been in the Academy. What a sad thing; with all those eyelashes! And yet opposite to it hung the beautiful Gainsborough of a great-grandmother. Mrs. Lavington saw no difference, I think."

"They haven"t been trained to see differences," said Gregory, and he summed up the Lavingtons in the aphorism to himself as well as to Karen; "only to accept samenesses." He hoped indeed, by sacrificing the aesthetic quality of the Lavingtons, to win some approbation of their virtues; but Karen, though not inclined to proffer unasked criticism, found, evidently, no occasion for commendation. Later on, when they were back at Les Solitudes and walking in the garden, she returned to the subject of his friends and said: "I was a little disturbed about Mrs.

Talcott; did you notice? no one talked to her at all, hardly. It was as if they thought her my _dame de compagnie_. She isn"t my _dame de compagnie_; and if she were, I think that she should have been talked to."

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

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

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

Gregory was anxious to exonerate himself. "I hope she didn"t feel left out;" he said. "I did notice that she wasn"t talking. I found her in the garden, alone--she seemed to be enjoying that, too--and she and I went about for quite a long time together."

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

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

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

Gregory was very happy.

"Even Tante doesn"t always remember enough about Mrs. Talcott," she went on. "That is of course because Mrs. Talcott is so much a part of her life that she sometimes hardly sees her. She _is_, for her, the dear old restful chair that she sinks back into and forgets about. Besides, some people have a right not to see things. One doesn"t ask from giants the same sort of perception that one does from pygmies."

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

"You aren"t invisible to her sometimes?" he inquired.

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

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

"Why tragic?"

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

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

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

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

Gregory, though he felt a pang of disquietude, felt no disposition to retreat. He intended that she should be made to understand what he meant. "I think that what it comes to is that it is you I am thinking of, rather than of Mrs. Talcott," he said. "I don"t know your guardian, and I do know you, and it is what she gets rather than what she gives that is most apparent to me."

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

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

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

"Does it? I want to understand everything."

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

"Please tell me."

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

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

"Everything."

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

"I want to tell you about my life," said Karen, looking out at the sea from between her hands. "You have heard my story, of course; people are always told it; but you have never heard it from my side. You have heard no doubt about my father and mother, and how she left the man she did not love for him. My mother died when I was quite little; so, though I remember her well she does not come into the part of my story that I want to tell you. But I was thirteen years old when my father died, and that begins the part that leads to Tante. It was in Rome, in winter when he died; and I was alone with him; and there was no money, and I had more to bear than a child"s mind and heart should have. He died. And then there were dreadful days. Cold, coa.r.s.e people came and took me and put me in a convent in Paris. That convent was like h.e.l.l to me. I was so miserable. And I had never known restraint or unkindness, and the French girls, so sly and so small in their thoughts, were hateful to me. And I did not like the nuns. I was punished and punished--rightly no doubt. I was fierce and sullen, I remember, and would not obey. Then I heard, by chance, from a girl whose family had been to her concert in Paris, that Madame Okraska was with her husband at Fontainebleau. Of her I knew nothing but the lovely face in the shop-windows. But her husband"s name brought back distant days to me. He had known my father; I remembered him--the fair, large, kindly smiling, very sad man--in my father"s studio among the clay and marble. He bought once a little head my father had done of me when I was a child. So I ran away from the convent--oh, it was very bad; I knocked down a nun and escaped the portress, and hid for a long time in the streets. And I made my way through Paris and walked for a day and night to Fontainebleau; and there in the forest, in the evening, I was lost, and almost dead with hunger and fatigue. And as I stood by the road I saw the carriage approaching from very far away and saw sitting in it, as it came nearer, the beautiful woman. Shall I ever forget it? The dark forest and the evening sky above and her face looking at me--looking, looking, full of pity and wonder. She has told me that I was the most unhappy thing that she had ever seen. My father"s friend was with her; but though I saw him and knew that I was safe, I had eyes only for her. Her face was like heaven opening. When the carriage stopped and she leaned to me, I sprang to her and she put her arms around me. They have been round me ever since," said Karen, joining her fingers over her eyes and leaning her forehead upon them so that her face was hidden; and for a moment she did not speak. "Ever since," she went on presently, "she has been joy and splendour and beauty. What she has given me is nothing. It is what she is herself that lifts the lives of other people. Those who do not know her seem to me to have lives so sad and colourless compared to mine. You cannot imagine it, anyone so great, yet at the same time so little and so sweet. She is merry like no one else, and witty, and full of cajoleries, like a child. One cannot be dull with her, not for one moment. And there is through it all her genius, the great flood of wonderful music; can you think what it is like to live with that? And under-lying everything is the great irremediable sorrow. I was with her when it came; the terrible thing. I did not live with them while he was alive, you know, my Onkel Ernst; he was so good and kind--always the kindest of friends to me; but he loved her too deeply to be able to share their life, and how well one understands that in her husband. He had me put at a school in Dresden. I did not like that much, either. But, even if I were lonely, I knew that my wonderful friends--my Tante and my Onkel--were there, like the sun behind the grey day, and I tried to study and be dutiful to please them.

And in my holidays I was always with them, twice it was, at their beautiful estate in Germany. And it was there that the horror came that wrecked her life; her husband"s death, his death that cannot be explained or understood. He drowned himself. We never say it, but we know it. That is the fear, the mystery. All his joy with her, his love and happiness--to leave them;--it was madness; he had always been a sad man; one saw that in his face; the doctors said it was madness. He disappeared without a word one day. For three weeks--nothing. Tante was like a creature crying out on the rack. And it was I who found him by the lake-edge one morning. She was walking in the park, I knew; she used to walk and walk fast, fast, quite silent; and with horrible fear I thought: If I can keep her from seeing. I turned--and she was beside me.

I could not save her. Ah--poor woman!" Karen closed her hands over her face.

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

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

"Yes," said Gregory.

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