Tante Part 18

"Not at all. It's you, now, who are the person to whom the appendage belongs. I'm your appendage. That quite alters the situation. You will have to stand in the foreground and do all the conventional things."

"Shall I?" smiled Karen, unperturbed. She was, as he knew, not to be disconcerted by any novel social situation. She had witnessed so many situations and such complicated ones that the merely conventional were, in her eyes, relatively insignificant and irrevelant. There would be for her none of the debutante's sense of awkwardness or insufficiency. Again she reminded him of the rustic little princess, unaware of alien customs, and ready to learn and to laugh at her own blunders.

It was arranged, Mrs. Talcott's appearance helping to decisions, that as soon as Karen heard from her guardian, who might have plans to suggest, she should come up to London and stay with Lady Jardine.

Mrs. Talcott, on entering, had grasped Gregory's hand and shaken it vigorously, remarking: "I'm very pleased to see you back again."

"I didn't tell Mrs. Talcott anything, Gregory," said Karen. "But I am sure she guessed."

"Mrs. Talcott and I had our understandings," said Gregory, "but I'm sure she guessed from the moment she saw me down here. She was much quicker than you, Karen."

"I've seen a good many young folks in my time," Mrs. Talcott conceded.

Gregory's sense of the deepened significance in all things lent a special pathos to his conjectures to-day about Mrs. Talcott. He did not know how far her affection for Karen went and whether it were more than the mere kindly solicitude of the aged for the young; but the girl's presence in her life must give at least interest and colour, and after Mrs. Talcott had spoken her congratulations and declared that she believed they'd be real happy together, he said, the idea striking him as an apt one, "And Mrs. Talcott, you must come up and stay with us in London sometimes, won't you?"

"Oh, Mrs. Talcott--yes, yes;" said Karen, delighted. He had never seen her kiss Mrs. Talcott, but she now clasped her arm, standing beside her.

Mrs. Talcott did not smile; but, after a moment, the aspect of her face changed; it always took some moments for Mrs. Talcott's expression to change. Now it was like seeing the briny old piece of shipwrecked oak mildly illuminated with sunlight on its lonely beach.

"That's real kind of you; real kind," said Mrs. Talcott reflectively. "I don't expect I'll get up there. I'm not much of a traveller these days.

But it's real kind of you to have thought of it."

"But it must be," Karen declared. "Only think; I should pour out your coffee for you in the morning, after all these years when you've poured out mine; and we would walk in the park--Gregory's flat overlooks the park you know--and we would drive in hansoms--don't you like hansoms--and go to the play in the evening. But yes, indeed, you shall come."

Mrs. Talcott listened to these projects, still with her mild illumination, remarking when Karen had done, "I guess not, Karen; I guess I'll stay here. I've been moving round considerable all my life long and now I expect I'll just stay put. There's no one to look after things here but me and they'd get pretty muddled if I was away, I expect. Mitch.e.l.l isn't a very bright man."

"The real difficulty is," said Karen, holding Mrs. Talcott's arm and looking at her with affectionate exasperation, "that she doesn't like to leave Les Solitudes lest she should miss a moment of Tante. Tante sometimes turns up almost at a moment's notice. We shall have to get Tante safely away to Russia, or America again, before we can ask you; isn't that the truth, Mrs. Talcott?"

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps there's something in it," Mrs. Talcott admitted. "Mercedes likes to know I'm here seeing to things. She mightn't feel easy in her mind if I was away."

"We'll lay it before her, then," said Karen. "I know she will say that you must come."

CHAPTER XIV

It was not until some three weeks after that Karen paid her visit to London. Tante had not written at once and Gregory had to control his discontent and impatience as best he might. He and Karen wrote to each other every day and he was aware of a fretful anxiety in his letters which contrasted strangely with the serenity of hers. Once more she made him feel that she was the more mature. In his brooding imaginativeness he was like the most youthful of lovers, seeing his treasure menaced on every hand by the hazards of life. He warned Karen against cliff-edges; he warned her, now that motors were every day becoming more common, against their sudden eruption in "cornery" lanes; he begged her repeatedly to keep safe and sound until he could himself take care of her. Karen replied with sober rea.s.surances and promises and showed no corresponding alarms on his behalf. She had, evidently, more confidence in the law of probability.

She wired at last to say that she had heard from Tante and would come up next day if Lady Jardine could have her at such short notice. Gregory had made his arrangements with Betty, who showed a most charming sympathy for his situation, and when, at the station, he saw Karen's face smiling at him from a window, when he seized her arm and drew her forth, it was with a sense of relief and triumph as great as though she were restored to him after actual perils.

"Darling, it has seemed such ages," he said.

He was conscious, delightedly, absorbedly, of everything about her. She wore her little straw hat with the black bow and a long hooded cape of thin grey cloth. In her hand she held a small basket containing her knitting--she was knitting him a pair of golf stockings--and a book.

He piloted her to the cab he had in waiting. Her one small shabby box was put on the top and a very large dressing-case, curiously contrasting in its battered and discoloured magnificence with the box, placed inside; it was a discarded one of Madame von Marwitz's, as its tarnished initials told him. It was only as the cab rolled out of the station, after he had kissed Karen and was holding her hand, that he realized that she was far less aware of him than he of her. Not that she was not glad; she sighed deeply with content, smiling at him, holding his hand closely; but there was a shadow of preoccupation on her.

"Tell me, darling, is everything all right?" he asked. "You have had good news from your guardian?"

She said nothing for a moment, looking out of the window, and then back at him. Then she said: "She is beautiful to me. But I have made her sad."

"Made her sad? Why have you made her sad?" Gregory suppressed--only just suppressed--an indignant note.

"I did not think of it myself," said Karen. "I didn't think of her side at all, I'm afraid, because I did not realise how much I was to her. But you remember what I told you I was, the little home thing; I am that even more deeply than I had thought; and she feels--dear, dear one--that that is gone from her, that it can never be the same again." She turned her eyes from him and the tears gathered thickly in them.

"But, dearest," said Gregory, "she can't want to make you sad, can she?

She must really be glad to have you happy. She herself wanted you to get married, and had found Franz Lippheim for you, you know." Instinct warned him to go carefully.

Karen shook her head with a little impatience. "One may be glad to have someone happy, yet sad for oneself. She is sad. Very, very sad."

"May I see her letter?" Gregory asked after a moment, and Karen, hesitating, then drew it from the pocket of her cloak, saying, as she handed it to him, and as if to atone for the impatience, "It doesn't make me love you any less--you understand that, dear Gregory--because she is sad. It only makes me feel, in my own happiness, how much I love her."

Gregory read. The address was "Belle Vue."

"My Darling Child,--A week has pa.s.sed since I had your letter and now the second has come and I must write to you. My Karen knows that when in pain it is my instinct to shut myself away, to be quite still, quite silent, and so to let the waves go over me. That is why, she will understand, I have not written yet. I have waited for the strength and courage to come back to me so that I might look my sorrow in the face. For though it is joy for you, and I rejoice in it, it is sorrow, could it be otherwise, for me. So the years go on and so our cherished flowers drop from us; so we feel our roots of life chilling and growing old; and the marriage-veil that we wrap round a beloved child becomes the symbol of the shroud that is to fold us from her. I knew that I should one day have to give up my Karen; I wished it; she knows that; but now that it has come and that the torch is in her hand, I can only feel the darkness in which her going leaves me. Not to find my little Karen there, in my life, part of my life;--that is the thought that pierces me. In how many places have I found her, for years and years; do you remember them all, Karen? I know that in heart we are not to be severed; I know that, as I cabled to you, you are not less but more mine than ever; but the body cries out for the dear presence; for the warm little hand in my tired hand, the loving eyes in my sad eyes, the loving heart to lean my stricken heart upon. How shall I bear the loneliness and the silence of my life without you?

"Do not forget me, my Karen. Ah, I know you will not, yet the cry arises. Do not let this new love that has come to you in your youth and gladness shut me out more than it must. Do not forget the old, the lonely Tante. Ah, these poor tears, they fall and fall. I am sad, sad to death, my Karen. Great darknesses are behind me, and before me I see the darkness to which I go.

"Farewell, my darling.--_Lebewohl._--Tell Mr. Jardine that he must make my child happy indeed if I am to forgive him for my loss.

"Yes; it shall be in July, when I return. I send you a little gift that my Karen may make herself the fine lady, ready for all the gaieties of the new life. He will wish it to be a joyful one, I know; he will wish her to drink deep of all that the world has to offer of splendid, and rare, and n.o.ble. My child is worthy of a great life, I have equipped her for it. Go forward, my Karen, with your husband, into the light. My heart is with you always.

"Tante."

Gregory read, and instinctively, while he read, he glanced at Karen, steadying his face lest she should guess from its tremor of contempt how latent antagonisms hardened to a more ironic dislike. But Karen gazed from the window--grave, preoccupied. Such suspicions were far indeed from her. Gregory could give himself to the letter and its intimations undiscovered. Suffering? Perhaps Madame von Marwitz was suffering; but she had no business to say it. Forgive him indeed; well, if those were the terms of forgiveness, he promised himself that he should deserve it.

Meanwhile he must conceal his resentment.

"I'm so sorry, darling," he said, giving the letter back to Karen. "We shall have to cheer her up, shan't we? When she sees how very happy you are with me I am sure she'll feel happier." He wasn't at all sure.

"I don't know, Gregory. I am afraid that my happiness cannot make her less lonely."

Karen's griefs were not to be lightly dispersed. But she was not a person to enlarge upon them. After another moment she pointed out something from the window and laughed; but the unshadowed gladness that he had imagined for their meeting was overcast.

Betty awaited them with tea in her Pont Street drawing-room, a room of polished, glittering, softly l.u.s.trous surfaces. Precious objects stood grouped on little Empire tables or ranged in Empire cabinets. Flat, firm cushions of rose-coloured satin stood against the backs of Empire chairs and sofas. On the walls were French engravings and a delicate portrait of Betty done at the time of her marriage by Boutet de Monvel. The room, like Betty herself, combined elegance and cordiality.

"I was there, you know, at the very beginning," she said, taking Karen's hands and scanning her with her jewel-like eyes. "It was love at first sight. He asked who you were at once and I'm pleased to think that it was I who gave him his first information. Now that I look back upon it,"

said Betty, taking her place at the tea-table and holding Karen still with her bright and friendly gaze, "I remember that he was far more interested in you than in anything else that evening. I don't believe that Madame Okraska existed for him." Betty was drawing on her imagination in a manner that she took for granted to be pleasing.

"I should be sorry to think that," Karen observed and Gregory was relieved to see that she did not take Betty's supposition seriously. She watched her pretty hands move among the teacups with an air of pleased interest.

"Would you really? You would want him to retain all his aesthetic faculties even while he was falling in love? Do you think one could?"

Betty asked her questions smiling. "Or perhaps you think that one would fall in love the more securely from listening to Madame Okraska at the same time. I think perhaps I should. I do admire her so much. I hope now that some day I shall know her. She must be, I am sure, as lovely as she looks."

"Yes, indeed," said Karen. "And you will meet her very soon, you see, for she comes back in July."

Gregory sat and listened to their talk, satisfied that they were to get on, yet with a slight discomfort. Betty questioned and Karen replied, unaware that she revealed aspects of her past that Betty might not interpret as she would feel it natural that they should be interpreted, supremely unaware that any criticism could attach itself to her guardian as a result of these revelations. Yes; she had met so-and-so and this and that, in Rome, in Paris, in London or St. Petersburg; but no, evidently, she could hardly say that she knew any of these people, friends of Tante's though they were. The ambiguity of her status as little camp-follower became defined for Betty's penetrating and appraising eyes and the inappropriateness of the letter, with its broken-hearted maternal tone, returned to Gregory with renewed irony. He didn't want to share with Betty his hidden animosities and once or twice, when her eye glanced past Karen and rested reflectively upon himself, he knew that Betty was wondering how much he saw and how he liked it. The Lippheims again made their socially unill.u.s.trious appearance; Karen had so often stayed with them before Les Solitudes had been built and while Tante travelled with Mrs. Talcott; she had never stayed--Gregory was thankful for small mercies--with the Belots; Tante, after all, had her own definite discriminations; she would not have placed Karen in the charge of Chantefoy's lady of the Luxembourg, however reputable her present position; but Gregory was uneasy lest Karen should disclose how simply she took Madame Belot's past. The fact that Karen's opportunities in regard to dress were so obviously haphazard, coming up with the question of the trousseau, was somewhat atoned for by the sum that Madame von Marwitz now sent--Gregory had forgotten to ask the amount. "A hundred pounds," said Betty cheerfully; "Oh, yes; we can get you very nicely started on that."

"Tante seems to think," said Karen, "that I shall have to be very gay and have a great many dresses; but I hope it will not have to be so very much. I am fond of quiet things."