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Tante

<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2> If only, Gregory often felt, in thinking it over and over in the days of outer unity and inner estrangement that followed, she had not been able to go to sleep so placidly. All resentment had faded from his heart when he went in to her. He had longed for reconciliation and for reassurance. But as he had looked at the seeming calm of Karen's face his tenderness and compunction passed into a bitter consciousness of frustrated love. Her calm was like a repulse. Their personal estrangement and misunderstanding left her unmoved. She had said what she had to say to him; she had vindicated her guardian; and now she slept, unmindful of him. He asked himself, and for the first time clearly and steadily, as he lay awake for hours afterwards in the little dressing-room bed, whether Karen's feelings for him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted, unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment grasped him; but the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness, the romance that she so supremely personified for him, surged too strongly against the barrier of her mute, unanswering face, for him to feel temperately and weigh fairly. There was a lack in her, and because of it she hurt him thus cruelly. They met next morning over a mutual misinterpretation, and, with a sense of mingled discord and relief, found themselves kissing and smiling as if nothing had happened. Pride sustained them; the hope that, since the other seemed so unconscious, a hurt dealt so unconsciously need not, for pride's sake, be resented; the fear that explanation or protest might emphasise estrangement. The easiest thing to do was to go on acting as if nothing had happened. Karen poured out his coffee and questioned him about the latest political news. He helped her to eggs and bacon and took an interest in her letters. And since it was easiest to begin so, it was easiest so to go on. The routine of their shared life blurred for them the sharp realisations of the night. But while the fact that such suffering had come to them was one that could, perhaps, be lived down, the fact that they did not speak of it spread through all their life with a strange, new savour. Karen went to her ducal week-end; but she did not, when she came back from it, regale her husband with her usual wealth of detailed description. She could no longer assume the air of happy confidence where Tante and her doings with Tante were concerned. That air of determined cheerfulness, that pretence that nothing was really the matter and that Tante and Gregory were bound to get on together if she took it for granted that they would, had broken down. There was relief for Gregory, though relief of a chill, grey order, in seeing that Karen had accepted the fact that he and Tante were not to get on. Yet he smarted from the new sense of being shut out from her life. It was he who assumed the air; he who pretended that nothing was the matter. He questioned her genially about the visit, and Karen answered all his questions as genially. Yes; it had been very nice; the great house sometimes very beautiful and sometimes very ugly; the beauty seemed, in a funny way, almost as accidental as the ugliness. The people had been very interesting to look at; so many slender pretty women; there were no fat women and no ugly women at all, or, if they were, they contrived not to look it. It all seemed perfectly arranged. Had she talked to many of them? Gregory asked. Had she come across anybody she liked? Karen shook her head. She had liked them all—to look at—but it had gone no further than that; she had talked very little with any of them; and, soberly, unemphatically, she had added: "They were all too much occupied with Tante—or with each other—to think much of me. I was the only one not slender and not beautiful!" Gregory asked who had taken her in to dinner on the two nights, and masked ironic inner comments when he heard that on Saturday it had been a young actor who, she thought, had been a little cross at having her as his portion. "He didn't try to talk to me; nor I to him, when I found that he was cross," she said. "I didn't like him at all. He had fat cheeks and very shrewd black eyes." On Sunday it had been a young son of the house, a boy at Eton. "Very, very dear and nice. We had a great talk about climbing Swiss mountains, which I have done a good deal, you know." Tante, it appeared, had had the ambassador on Saturday and the Duke himself on Sunday. And she and Tante, as usual, had had great fun in their own rooms every night, talking everybody over when the day was done. Karen said nothing to emphasise the contrast between the duke's friends and Gregory's, but she couldn't have failed to draw her comparison. Here was a monde where Tante was fully appreciated. That she herself had not been was not a matter to engage her thoughts. But it engaged Gregory's. The position in which she had been placed was a further proof to him of Tante's lack of consideration. Where Karen was placed depended, precisely, he felt sure of it, on where Madame von Marwitz wished her to be placed. It was as the little camp-follower that she had taken her. After this event came a pause in the fortunes of our young couple. Madame von Marwitz, with Mrs. Forrester, went to Paris to give her two concerts there and was gone for a fortnight. In this fortnight he and Karen resumed, though warily, as it were, some old customs. They read their political economy again in the evenings when they did not go out, and he found her at tea-time waiting for him as she had used to do. She shared his life; she was gentle and thoughtful; yet she had never been less near. He felt that she guarded herself against admissions. To come near now would be to grant that it had been Tante's presence that had parted them. She wrote to Madame von Marwitz, and heard from her, constantly. Madame von Marwitz sent her presents from Paris; a wonderful white silk dressing-gown; a box of chocolate; a charming bit of old enamel picked up in a rive gauche curiosity shop. Then one day she wrote to say that Tallie had been quite ill—povera vecchia—and would Karen be a kind, kind child and run down and see her at Les Solitudes. Gregory had not forgotten the plan for having Mrs. Talcott with them that winter and had reminded Karen of it, but it appeared then that she had not forgotten, either; had indeed, spoken to Tante of it; but that Tante had not seemed to think it a good plan. Tante said that Mrs. Talcott did not like leaving Les Solitudes; and, moreover, that she herself, might be going down there for the inside of a week at any moment and Karen knew how Tallie would hate the idea of not being on the spot to prepare for her. Let them postpone the idea of a visit; at all events until she was no longer in England. Gregory now suggested that Karen might bring Mrs. Talcott back with her. There was some guile in the suggestion. Encircling this little oasis of peace where he and Karen could, at all events, draw their breaths, were storms and arid wastes. Madame von Marwitz would soon be back. She might even be thinking of redeeming her promise of coming to stay with them. If old Mrs. Talcott, slightly invalided, could be installed before the great woman's return, she might keep her out for the rest of her stay in London, and must, certainly, keep Karen in to a greater extent than when she had no guest to entertain. Karen could not suspect his motive; he saw that from her frank look of pleasure. She promised to do her best. It was worth while, he reflected, to lose her for a few days if she were to bring back such a bulwark as Mrs. Talcott might prove herself to be. And, besides, he would be sincerely glad to see the old woman. The thought of her gave him a sense of comfort and security. He saw Karen off next morning. She was to be at Les Solitudes for three or four days, and on the second day of her stay he had his first letter from her. It was strange to hear from her again, from Cornwall. It was the first letter he had had from Karen since their marriage and, with all its odd recalling of the girlish formality of tone, it was a sweet one. She had found Mrs. Talcott much better, but still quite weak and jaded, and very glad indeed to see her. And Mrs. Talcott really seemed to think that she would like to get away. Karen believed that Mrs. Talcott had actually been feeling lonely, uncharacteristic as that seemed. She would probably bring her back on Saturday. The letter ended: "My dear husband, your loving Karen." Mrs. Talcott, therefore, was expected, and Mrs. Barker was told to make ready for her. But on Saturday morning, when Karen was starting, he had a wire from her telling him that plans were altered and that she was coming back alone. He went to meet her at Paddington, remembering the meeting when she had come up after their engagement. It was a different Karen, a Karen furred and finished and nearly elegant, who stepped from the train; but she had, as then, her little basket with the knitting and the book; and the girlish face was scarcely altered; there was even a preoccupation on it that recalled still more vividly the former meeting at Paddington. "Well, dearest, and why isn't Mrs. Talcott here, too?" were his first words. Karen took his arm as he steered her towards the luggage. "It is only put off, I hope, that visit," she said, "because I heard this morning, Gregory, and wired to you then, that Tante asks if she may come to us next week." Her voice was not artificial; it expressed determination as well as gentleness and seemed to warn him that he must not show her if he were not pleased. Yet duplicity, in his unpleasant surprise, was difficult to assume. "Really. At last. How nice," he said; and his voice rang oddly. "But poor old Mrs. Talcott. Madame von Marwitz didn't know, I suppose," he went on, "that we'd just been planning to have her?" Karen, her arm still in his, stood looking over the heaped up luggage and now pointed out her box to the porter. Then, as they turned away and went towards their cab, she said, more gently and more determinedly: "Yes; she did know we had planned it. I wrote and told her so, and that is why she wrote back so quickly to ask if we could not put off Mrs. Talcott for her; because she will be leaving London very soon and it will be, this next week, her only chance of being with us. Mrs. Talcott did not mind at all. I don't think she really wanted to come so much, Gregory. It is as Tante says, you know," Karen settled herself in a corner of the hansom, "she really does not like leaving Les Solitudes." Gregory had the feeling of being enmeshed. Why had Madame von Marwitz thrown this web? Had she really divined in a flash his hope and his intention? Was there any truth in her sudden statement that this was the only week she could give them? "Oh! Really," was all that he found to say to Karen's explanations, and then, "Where is Madame von Marwitz going when she leaves us then?" "To the Riviera, with the Duchess of Bannister, I think it is arranged. I may wire to her, then, Gregory, at once, and say that she is to come?" "Of course. How long are we to have the pleasure of entertaining her?" "She did not say; for a week at least, I hope. Perhaps, even, for a fortnight if that will be convenient for you. It will be a great joy to me," Karen went on, "if only"—she was speaking with that determined steadiness, looking before her as they drove; now, suddenly, she turned her eyes on him "if only you will try to enjoy it, too, Gregory." It was, in a sense, a challenge, yet it was, too, almost an appeal, and it brought them nearer than they had been for weeks. Gregory's hand caught hers and, holding it tightly, smiling at her rather tremulously, he said: "I enjoy anything, darling, that makes you happy." "Ah, but," said Karen, her voice keeping its earnest control, "I cannot be happy with you and Tante unless you can enjoy her for yourself. Try to know Tante, Gregory," she went on, now with a little breathlessness; "she wants that so much. One of the first things she asked me when she came back was that I should try to make you care for her. She felt at once—and oh! so did I, Gregory—that something was not happy between you." Her hand holding his tightly, her earnest eyes on his, Gregory felt his blood turn a little cold as he recognized once more the soft, unremitting pressure. It had begun, then, so early. She had asked Karen that when she first came back. "But you see, dearest," he said, trying to keep his head between realizations of Madame von Marwitz's craft and Karen's candour, "I've never been able to feel that Madame von Marwitz wanted me to care for her or to come in at all, as it were. I don't mean anything unkind; only that I imagined that what she did ask of me was to keep outside and leave your relation and hers alone. And that's what I've tried to do." "Oh, you mistake Tante, Gregory, you mistake her." Karen's hand grasped his more tightly in the urgency of her opportunity. "She cared for me too much—yes, it is there that you do not understand—to feel what you think. For she knows that I cannot be happy while you shut yourself away from her." "Then it's not she who shuts me out?" he tried to smile. "No; no; oh, no, Gregory." "I must push in, even when I seem to feel I'm not wanted?" She would not yield to his attempted lightness. "You mustn't push in; you must be in; with us, with Tante and me." "Do you mean literally? I'm to be a third at your tête-à-têtes?" "No, Gregory, I do not mean that; but in thought, in sympathy. You will try to know Tante. You will make her feel that you and I are not parted when she is there." She saw it all, all Tante's side, with a dreadful clearness. And it was impossible that she should see what he did. He must submit to seeming blurred and dull, to pretending not to see anything. At all events her hand was in his. He felt able to face the duel at close quarters with Madame von Marwitz as long as Karen let him keep her hand. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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