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Tante

<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2> Madame von Marwitz sat in the deep chintz sofa with Karen beside her, and while she talked to the young couple, Karen's hand in hers, her eyes continually went about the room with an expression that did not seem to match her alert, if rather mechanical, conversation. Karen had already seen her, the day before, when she had gone to the station to meet her and had driven with her to Mrs. Forrester's. But Miss Scrotton had been there, too, almost tearful in her welcoming back of her great friend, and there had been little opportunity for talk in the carriage. Tante had smiled upon her, deeply, had held her hand, closely, and had asked, with the playful air which forestalls gratitude, how she liked her present. "You will see it, my Scrotton; a Bouddha in his shrine—of the best period; a thing really rare and beautiful. Mr. Asprey told me of it, at a sale in New York; and I was able to secure it. Hein, ma petite; you were pleased?" "Oh, Tante, my letter told you that," said Karen. "And your husband? He was pleased?" "He thought that it was gorgeous," said Karen, but after a momentary hesitation not lost upon her guardian. "I was sorely tempted to keep it myself," said Madame von Marwitz. "I could see it in the music-room at Les Solitudes. But at once I felt—it is Karen's. My only anxiety was for its background. I have never seen Mr. Jardine's flat. But I knew that I could trust the man my child had chosen to have beauty about him." "It isn't exactly a beautiful room," Karen confessed, smiling. "It isn't like the music-room; you won't expect that from a London flat—or from us. But it is very bright and comfortable and, yes, pretty. I hope that you will like my home." Miss Scrotton, Karen felt, while she made these preparatory statements, had eyed her in a somewhat gaunt manner; but she was accustomed to a gaunt manner from Miss Scrotton, and Miss Scrotton's drawing-room, certainly, was not as nice as Gregory's. Karen had not cared at all for its quality of earnest effort. Miss Scrotton, not many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the æsthetics of South Kensington. Karen did not feel that Gregory's drawing-room required apologies and Tante had been so mild and sweet, if also a little absent, that she trusted her to show leniency. She had, as yet, to-day, said nothing about the Bouddha or the background on which she found him. She talked to Gregory, while they waited for tea, asking him a great many questions, not seeming, always, to listen to his answers. "Ah, yes. Well done. Bravo," she said at intervals, as he told her about their wedding-trip and how he and Karen had enjoyed this or that. When Barker brought in the tea-tray and set it on a little table before Karen, she took up one of the cups—they were of an old English ware with a wreath of roses inside and lines of half obliterated gilt—and said—it was her first comment on the background—"Tiens, c'est joli. Is this one of your presents, Karen?" Karen told her that the tea-set was not a present; it had belonged to a great-grandmother of Gregory's. Madame von Marwitz continued to examine the cup and, as she set it down among the others, with the deliberate nicety of gesture that gave at once power and grace to her slightest movement, she said: "You were fortunate in your great-grandmother, Mr. Jardine." Her voice, her glance, her gestures, were already affecting Gregory unpleasantly. There was in them a quality of considered control, as though she recognised difficulty and were gently and warily evading it. Seated on his chintz sofa in the bright, burnished room, all in white, with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, newly aware of æsthetic discriminations, Karen seemed to interpret and justify her surroundings, to show their commonplace as part of their charm and to make the Bouddha and Madame von Marwitz herself, in all their portentous distinction, look like incidental ornaments. Madame von Marwitz's silence in regard to the Bouddha had already become a blight, but it was, perhaps, the growing crisp decision in Gregory's manner that made Karen first aware of constraint. Her eyes then turned from Tante to the shrine at the end of the room, and she said: "You don't care for the way it looks here, Tante, do you—your present?" Madame von Marwitz had finished her tea and she turned in the sofa so that she could consider the Bouddha no longer incidentally but decisively. "I am glad that it is yours, ma chérie," she said, after the pause of her contemplation. "Some day you must place it more happily. You don't intend, do you, Mr. Jardine, to live for any length of time in these rooms?" "Oh, but I like it here so much, Tante," Karen took upon herself the reply. "I want to go on living where Gregory has lived for so long. We have such a view, you see; and such air." Madame von Marwitz mused upon her for a moment and then giving her chin a little pinch, half meditative, half caressing, she inquired, with Continental frankness: "A very pretty sentiment, ma petite, but what will you do when the babies come?" Karen was not disconcerted. "I rather hope we may not have babies for a year or two, Tante; and when they do come there will be room, quite happily, for several. You don't know how big the flat is; you will see. Gregory has always been able to put up his married sister and her husband; that gives us one quite big room over and a small one." "But then you can have no friends if your rooms are full of babies," Madame von Marwitz objected, still with mild playfulness. "No," Karen had to admit it; "but while they were very small I do not think I should have much time for friends in the house, should I. And we think, Gregory and I, of soon taking a tiny cottage in the country, too." "Then, while you remain here, and unless my Bouddha is to look very foolish," said Madame von Marwitz, "you must, I think, change your drawing-room. It can be changed," she gazed about her with a touch of wildness. "Something could be done. It could be darkened; quieted; it talks too much and too loudly now, does it not? But you could move these so large chairs and couches away and have sober furniture, of a good period; one can still pick up good things if one is clever; a Chinese screen here and there; a fine old mirror; a touch of splendour; a flavour of dignity. The shape of the room is not impossible; the outlook, as you say, gives space and breathing; something could be done." Karen's gaze followed hers, cogitating but not acquiescent. "But you see, Tante," she remarked, "these are things that Gregory has lived with. And I like them so, too. I should not like them changed." "But they are not things that you have lived with, parbleu!" said Madame von Marwitz laughing gently. "It is a pretty sentiment, ma petite, it does you honour; you are—but oh! so deeply—the wife, already, are you not, my Karen? but I am sure that your husband will not wish you to sacrifice your taste to your devotion. Young men, many of them do not care for these domestic matters; do not see them. My Karen must not pretend to me that she does not care and see. I am right, am I not, Mr. Jardine? you would not wish to deprive Karen of the bride's distinctive pleasure—the furnishing of her own nest." Gregory's eyes met hers;—it seemed to be their second long encounter;—eyes like jewels, these of Madame von Marwitz; full of intense life, intense colour, still, bright and cold, tragically cold. He seemed to see suddenly that all the face—the long eyebrows, with the plaintive ripple of irregularity bending their line, the languid lips, the mournful eyelids, the soft contours of cheek and throat,—were a veil for the coldness of her eyes. To look into them was like coming suddenly through dusky woods to a lonely mountain tarn, lying fathomless and icy beneath a moonlit sky. Gregory was aware, as if newly and more strongly than before, of how ambiguous was her beauty, how sinister her coldness. Above the depths where these impressions were received was his consciousness that he must be careful if Karen were not to guess how much he was disliking her guardian. It was not difficult for him to smile at a person he disliked, but it was difficult not to smile sardonically. This was an apparently trivial occasion on which to feel that it was a contest that she had inaugurated between them; but he did feel it. "Karen knows that she can burn everything in the room as far as I'm concerned," he said. "Even your Bouddha," he added, smiling a little more nonchalantly, "I'd gladly sacrifice if it gave her pleasure." Nothing was lost upon Madame von Marwitz, of that he was convinced. She saw, perhaps, further than he did; for he did not see, nor wish to, beyond the moment of guarded hostility. And it was with the utmost gentleness and precaution, with, indeed, the air of one who draws softly aside from a sleeping viper found upon the path, that she answered: "I trust, indeed, that it may never be my Karen's pleasure, or yours, Mr. Jardine, to destroy what is precious; that would hurt me very much. And now, child, may I not see the rest of this beloved domain?" She turned from him to Karen. Gregory rose; he had told Karen that he would leave them alone after tea; he had letters to write and he would see Madame von Marwitz before she went. He had the sense, as he closed the door, of flying before temptation. What might he not say to Madame von Marwitz if he saw too much of her? When she and Karen were left alone, Madame von Marwitz's expression changed. The veils of lightness fell away; her face became profoundly melancholy; she gazed in silence at Karen and then held out her arms to her; Karen came closer and was enfolded in their embrace. "My child, my child," said Madame von Marwitz, leaning, as was her wont at these moments, her forehead against Karen's cheek. "Dear Tante," said Karen. "You are not sad?" she murmured. "Sad?" her guardian repeated after a moment. "Am I ever anything but sad? But it is not of my sadness that I wish to speak. It is of you. Are you happy, my dear one?" "Oh, Tante—so happy, so very happy; more than I can say." "Is it so?" Madame von Marwitz lifted her head and stroked back the girl's hair. "Is it so indeed? He loves you very much, Karen?" "Oh, yes, Tante." "It is a great love? selfless? passionate? It is a love worthy of my child?" "Yes, indeed." A slight austerity was now apparent in Karen's tone. Silence fell between them for a moment, and then, stroking again the golden head, Madame von Marwitz continued, with great tenderness; "It is well. It is what I have prayed for—for my child. And let me not cast one shadow, even of memory, upon your happiness. Yet ah—ah Karen—if you could have let me share in the sunshine a little. If you could have remembered how dark was my way, how lonely. That my child should have married without me. It hurts. It hurts—" She did not wish to cast a shadow, yet she was weeping, the silent, undisfigured weeping that Karen knew so well, showing only in the slow welling of tears from darkened eyes. "Oh, Tante," Karen now leaned her head to her guardian's shoulder, "I did not dream you would mind so much. It was so difficult to know what to do." "Have I shown myself so indifferent to you in the past, my Karen, that you should have thought I would not mind?" "I do not mean that, Tante. I thought that you would feel that it was what it was best for me to do. I had given my word. All the plans were made." "You had given your word? Would he not have let you put me before your word? For once? For that one time in all our lives?" "It was not that, Tante. Gregory would have done what I wished. You must not think that I was forced in any way." Karen now had raised her head. "But we had waited for you. We thought that you were coming. It was only at the last moment that you let us know, Tante, and you did not even say when you were coming back." Madame von Marwitz kept silence for some moments after this, savouring perhaps in the words—though Karen's eyes, in speaking them, had also filled with tears—some hint of resistance. She looked away from the girl, keeping her hand in hers, as she said: "I could not come. I could not tell you when I was to come. There were reasons that bound me; ties; claims; a tangle of troubled human lives—the threads passing through my fingers. No; I was not free; and there I would have had you trust me. No, no, my Karen, we will speak of it no farther. I understand young hearts—they are forgetful; they cannot dwell on the shadowed places. Let us put it aside, the great grief. What surprises me is to find that the littlest, littlest ones cling so closely. I am foolish, Karen. I have had much to bear lately, and I cannot shake off the little griefs. That others than myself should have chosen my child's trousseau; oh, it is small—so very small a thing; yet it hurts; it hurts. That the joy of seeking all the pretty clothes together—that, that, too, should have been taken from me. Do not weep, child." "Tante, you could not come, and the things had to be made ready. They all—Mrs. Forrester—Betty—seemed to feel there was no time to lose. And I have always chosen my own clothes; I did not know that you would feel this so." "Betty? Who is Betty?" Madame von Marwitz mournfully yet alertly inquired. "Lady Jardine, Gregory's sister-in-law. You remember, Tante, I have written of her. She has been so kind." "Betty," Madame von Marwitz repeated, sadly. "Yes, I remember; she was at your wedding, I think. There, dry your eyes, child. I understand. It is a loving heart, but it forgot. The sad old Tante was crowded out by new friends—new joys." "No, you must not say that, Tante. It is not true." The hardness that Madame von Marwitz knew how to interpret was showing itself on Karen's face, despite the tears. Her guardian rose, passing her arm around her shoulders. "It is not true, then, chérie. When one is very sad one is foolish. Ah, I know it; one imagines too quickly things that are not true. They float and then they cling, like the tiny barbed down of the thistle, and then, behold, one's brain is choked with thorny weeds. That is how it comes, my Karen. Forgive me. There; kiss me." "Darling Tante," Karen murmured, clasping her closely. "Nothing, nothing crowded you out. Nothing could ever crowd you out. Say that you believe me. Say that all the thistles are rooted up and thrown away." "Rooted up and burned—burned root and branch, my child. I promise it. I trust my child; she is mine; my loving one. Ainsi soit-il. And now," Madame von Marwitz spoke with sudden gaiety, "and now show me your home, my Karen, show me all over this home of yours to which already you are so attached. Ah—it is a child in love!" They went from room to room, their arms around each other's waists. Madame von Marwitz cast her spell over Mrs. Barker in the kitchen, and smiled a long smile upon Rose, the housemaid. "Yes, yes, very nice, very pretty," she said, in the spare-room, the little dressing-room, the dining-room and kitchen. In Karen's room, with its rose-budded chintz and many photographs of herself, of Gregory, she paused and looked about. "Very, very pretty," she repeated. "You like bedsteads of brass, my Karen?" "Yes, Tante. They look so clean and bright." "So clean and bright. I do not think that I could sleep in brass," Madame von Marwitz mused. "But it is a simple child." "Yes, that is just it, Tante," said Karen, smiling. "And I wanted to explain to you about the drawing-room. You see it is that; I am simple; not a sea-anemone of taste, like you. I quite well see things. I see that Les Solitudes is beautiful, and that this is not like Les Solitudes. Yet I like it here just as it is." "Because it is his, is it not so, my child-in-love? Ah, she must not be teased. You can be happy, then, among so much brass?—so many things that glitter and are highly coloured?" "Yes, indeed. And it is a pretty bedroom, Tante. You must say that it is a pretty bedroom?" "Is it? Must I? Pretty? Yes, no doubt it is pretty. Yet I could have wished that my Karen's nest had more distinction, expressed a finer sense of personality. I imagine that every young woman in this vast beehive of homes has just such a bedroom." "You think so, Tante? I am afraid that if you think this like everybody's room you will find Gregory's library even worse. You must see that now; it is all that you have not seen." Karen took her last bull by the horns, leading her out. "Has it red wall-paper, sealing-wax red; with racing prints on the walls and a very large photograph over the mantelpiece of a rowing-crew at Oxford?" Madame von Marwitz questioned with a mixture of roguishness and resignation. "Yes, yes, you wicked Tante. How did you know?" "I know; I see it," said Madame von Marwitz. "But a man's room expresses a man's past. One cannot complain of that." They went to the library. Madame von Marwitz had described it with singular accuracy. Gregory rose from his letters and his eyes went from her face to Karen's, both showing their traces of tears. "It is au revoir, then," said Madame von Marwitz, standing before him, her arm round Karen's shoulders. "I am happy in my child's happiness, Mr. Jardine. You have made her happy, and I thank you. You will lend her to me, sometimes? You will be generous with me and let me see her?" "Of course; whenever you want to; whenever she wants to," said Gregory, leaning his hands on the back of his chair and tilting it a little while he smiled the fullest acquiescence. Madame von Marwitz's eyes brooded on him. "That is kind," she said gently. "Oh no, it isn't," Gregory returned. "I think," said Madame von Marwitz, becoming even more gentle, "that you misunderstand my meaning. When people love, it is hard sometimes not to be selfish in the joy of love, and the lesser claims tend to be forgotten. I only ask that you should make it easy for Karen to come to me." To this Gregory did not reply. He continued to tilt his chair and to smile at Madame von Marwitz. "This husband of yours, Karen," said Madame von Marwitz, "does not understand me yet. You must interpret me to him. Adieu, Mr. Jardine. Will you come with me alone to the door, Karen. It is our first farewell in a home I do not give you." She gave Gregory her hand. They left him and went down the passage together. Madame von Marwitz kept her arm round the girl's shoulders, but its grasp had tightened. "My child! my own child!" she murmured, as, at the door, she turned and clasped her. Her voice strove with deep emotion. "Dear, dear Tante," said Karen, also with a faltering voice. Madame von Marwitz achieved an uncertain smile. "Farewell, my dear one. I bless you. My blessing be upon you." Then, on the threshold she paused. "Try to make your husband like me a little, my Karen," she said. Karen did not come back to him in the smoking-room and Gregory presently got up and went to look for her. He found her in the drawing-room, sitting in the twilight, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. He did not know what she could be feeling; the fact that dominated in his own mind was that her guardian had made her weep. "Well, darling," he said. He stooped over her and put his hand on her shoulder. The face she lifted to him was ambiguous. She had not wept again; on the contrary, he felt sure that she had been intently thinking. The result of her thought, now, was a look of resolute serenity. But he was sure that she did not feel serene. For the first time, Karen was hiding her feeling from him. "Well, darling," she replied. She got up and put her arms around his neck; she looked at him, smiling calmly; then, as if struck by a sudden memory, she said: "It is the night of the dance, Gregory." They were to dine at Edith Morton's and go on to Karen's first dance. Under Betty's supervision she had already made progress through half-a-dozen lessons, though she had not, she confessed to Gregory, greatly distinguished herself at them. "I'll get you round all right," he had promised her. They looked forward to the dance. "So it is," said Gregory. "It's not time to dress yet, is it?" "It's only half-past six. Shall I wear my white silk, Gregory, with the little white rose wreath?" "Yes, and the nice little square-toed white silk shoes—like a Reynolds lady's—and like nobody else's. I do so like your square toes." "I cannot bear pinched toes," said Karen. "My father gave me a horror of that; and Tante. Her feet are as perfect as her hands. She has all her shoes made for her by a wonderful old man in Vienna who is an artist in shoes. She was looking well, wasn't she, Tante?" Karen added, in even tones. Gregory and she were sitting now on the sofa together, their arms linked and hand-in-hand. "Beautiful," said Gregory with sincerity. "How well that odd head-dress became her." "Didn't it? It was nice that she liked those pretty teacups, wasn't it. And appreciated our view; even though," Karen smiled, taking now another bull by the horns, "she was so hard on our flat. I'm afraid she feels her Bouddha en travestie here." "Well, he is, of course. I do hope," said Gregory, also seizing his bull, "that she didn't think me rude in my joke about being willing to burn him. And you will change everything—burn anything—barring the Bouddha and the teacups—that you want to, won't you, dear?" "No; I wouldn't, even if I wanted to; and I don't want to. Perhaps Tante did not quite understand. I think it may take a little time for her to understand your jokes or you her outspokenness. She is like a child in her candour about the things she likes or dislikes." A fuller ease had come to her voice. By her brave pretence that all was well she was persuading herself that all could be made well. Perhaps it might be, thought Gregory, if only he could go on keeping his temper with Madame von Marwitz and if Karen, wise and courageous darling, could accept the unspoken between them, and spare him definitions and declarations. A situation undefined is so often a situation saved. Life grows over and around it. It becomes a mere mummied fly, preserved in amber; unsightly perhaps; but unpernicious. After all, he told himself—and he went on thinking over the incidents of the afternoon while he dressed—after all, Madame von Marwitz might not be much in London; she was a comet and her course would lead her streaming all over the world for the greater part of her time. And above all and mercifully, Madame von Marwitz was not a person upon whose affections one would have to count. He seemed to have found out all sorts of things about her this afternoon: he could have given Sargent points. The main strength of her feeling for anyone, deep instinct told him, was an insatiable demand that they should feel sufficiently for her. And the chief difficulty—he refused to dignify it by the name of danger—was that Madame von Marwitz had her deep instincts, too, and had, no doubt, found out all sorts of things about him. He did not like her; he had not liked her from the first; and she could hardly fail to feel that he liked her less and less. He was able to do Madame von Marwitz justice. Even a selflessly devoted mother could hardly rejoice wholeheartedly in the marriage of a daughter to a man who disliked herself; and how much less could Madame von Marwitz, who was not a mother and not selflessly devoted to anybody, rejoice in Karen's marriage. She was right in feeling that it menaced her own position. He did her justice; he made every allowance for her; he intended to be straight with her; but the fact that stood out for Gregory was that, already, she was not straight with him. Already she was picking surreptitiously, craftily, at his life; and this was to pick at Karen's. He would give her a long string and make every allowance for the vexations of her situation; but if she began seriously to tarnish Karen's happiness he would have to pull the string smartly. The difficulty—he refused to see this as danger either—was that he could not pull the string upon Madame von Marwitz without, by the same gesture, upsetting himself as well. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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