Tante Part 32

"No," Gregory returned, with a chill utterance. "I know nothing about music."

"Is it so, Karen?" Herr Lippheim questioned, his guileless warmth hardly tempered.

"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.

It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who had gained Karen's heart,--"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr.

Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"

"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding; yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.

"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"--she again excluded her husband;--"It is just finished."

Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in preoccupied tones, "_Kolossal_!"

They talked, and Gregory stood above them, aloof from their conversation frigidly gazing over the company, his elbow in his hand, his neat fingers twisting his moustache. If he was giving Madame von Marwitz a handle against him he couldn't help it. Over the heads of Karen and Herr Lippheim his eyes for a moment encountered hers. They looked at each other steadily and neither feigned a smile.

Eleanor Scrotton arrived at six, flushed and fl.u.s.tered.

"Thank heaven, I haven't missed her!" she said to Gregory, to whom, to-day, Eleanor was an almost welcome sight. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Mlle. Mauret. "Have you had a talk with her yet?"

"I haven't had a talk and I yield my claim to you," said Gregory. "Are you very eager to meet the lady?"

"Who wouldn't be, my dear Gregory! What a wonderful face! What thought and suffering! Oh, it has been the most extraordinary of stories. You don't know? Well, I will tell you about her some time. She is, doubtless, one of the greatest living actresses. And she is still quite young. Barely forty."

He watched Eleanor make her way to the actress's side, reflecting sardonically upon the modern growths of British tolerance. Half the respectable matrons in London would, no doubt, take their girls to see _La Gaine d'Or_; mercifully, they would in all probability not understand it; but if they did, was there anything that inartistic London would not swallow in its terror of being accused of philistinism?

The company was dispersing. Herr Lippheim stood holding Karen's hands saying, as she shook them, that he would bring _das Mutterchen_ and _die Schwesterchen_ to-morrow. Belot came for a last cup of tea and drank it in sonorous draughts, exchanging a few words with Gregory. He had nothing against Belot. Mr. Drew leaned on Madame von Marwitz's sofa and spoke to her in a low voice while she looked at him inscrutably, her eyes half closed.

"Lucky man," said Lady Rose to Gregory, on her way out, "to have her under your roof. I hope you are a scrupulous Boswell and taking notes."

In the hall Barker was a.s.sorting the sombrero, the _Latin Quartier_ and the cream-coloured felt; the last belonged to Herr Lippheim, who was putting it on when Gregory escorted Lady Rose to the door.

Gregory gave the young man a listless hand. He couldn't forgive Herr Lippheim. That he should ever, under whatever encouragements from Karen's guardian, have dared to aspire to her, was a monstrous fact.

He watched the thick rims of Herr Lippheim's ears, under the cream-coloured felt, descending in the lift and wondered if the sight was to be often inflicted upon him.

When he went back to the drawing-room, Karen was alone. Madame von Marwitz had taken Miss Scrotton to her own room. Karen was standing by the tea-table, looking down at it, her hands on the back of the chair from which she had risen to say good-bye to her guardian's guests. She raised her eyes as her husband came in and they rested on him with a strange expression.

CHAPTER XXV

"Will you shut the door, Gregory?" Karen said. "I want to speak to you."

The feeling with which he looked at her was that with which he had faced her sleeping, as he thought, after their former dispute. The sense of failure and disillusion was upon him. As before, it was only of her guardian that she was thinking. He knew that he had given Madame von Marwitz a handle against him.

He obeyed her and when he came and stood before her she went on. "Before we all meet at dinner again, I must ask you something. Do not make your contempt of Tante's guests--and of mine--more plain to her than you have already done this afternoon."

"Did I make it plain?" Gregory asked, after a moment.

"I think that if I felt it so strongly, Tante must have felt it," said Karen, and to this, after another pause, Gregory found nothing further to say than "I'm sorry."

"I hardly think," said Karen, holding the back of her chair tightly and looking down again while she spoke, "that you can have realized that Herr Lippheim is not only Tante's friend, but mine. I don't think you can have realized how you treated him. I know that he is very simple and unworldly; but he is good and kind and faithful; he is a true artist--almost a great one, and he has the heart of a child. And beside him, while you were hurting and bewildering him so to-day, you looked to me--how shall I say it--petty, yes, and foolish, yes, and full of self-conceit."

The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words, deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself, as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was the overpowering fact.

"I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said.

"Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree."

"Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt.

"I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen, "to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it."

"And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you surrounded by--this rabble."

"Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen.

"I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,--I wouldn't have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a possible husband for you." Gregory imagined that he was speaking carefully and choosing his words, but he was aware that his anger coloured his voice. He had also been aware, some little time before, in a lower layer of consciousness, of the stir and rustle of steps and dresses in the pa.s.sage outside--Madame von Marwitz conducting Eleanor Scrotton to the door. And now--had she actually been listening, or did his words coincide with the sudden opening of the door?--Madame von Marwitz herself appeared upon the threshold.

Her face made the catastrophe all too evident. She had heard him. She had, he felt convinced, crept quietly back and stood to listen before entering. His memory reconstructed the long pause between the departing rustle and this apparition.

Madame von Marwitz's face had its curious look of smothered heat. The whites of her eyes were suffused though her cheeks were pale.

"I must apologise," she said. "I overheard you as I entered, Mr.

Jardine, and what I heard I cannot ignore. What is it that you say to Karen? What is it that you say of the man I thought of as a possible husband for her?"

She advanced into the room and laying her arm round Karen's shoulders she stood confronting him.

"I don't think I can discuss this with you," said Gregory. "I am very sorry that you overheard me." The slight smile of his pain had gone. He looked at Madame von Marwitz with a flinty eye.

"Ah, but you must discuss it; you shall," said Madame von Marwitz. "You say things to my child that I am not to overhear. You seek to poison her mind against me. You take her from me and then blacken me in her eyes. A possible husband! Would to G.o.d," said Madame von Marwitz, with sombre fury, "that the possibility had been fulfilled! Would to G.o.d that it were my brave, deep-hearted Franz who were her husband--not you, most ungrateful, most ungenerous of men."

"Tante," said Karen, who still stood looking down, grasping her chair-back and encircled by her guardian's arm, "he did not mean you to hear him. Forgive him."

"I beg your pardon, Karen," said Gregory, "I am very sorry that Madame von Marwitz overheard me; but I have said nothing for which I wish to apologize."

"Ah! You hear him!" cried Madame von Marwitz, and the inner conflagration now glittered in her eyes like flames behind the windows of a burning house. "You hear him, Karen? Forgive him! How can I forgive him when he has made you wretched! How can I ever forgive him when he tears your life by thrusting me forth from it--me--and everything I am and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen--you have seen my efforts to win your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his half-hidden insolence. Never--ah, never in my life have I faced such humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof--humiliations, endured for your sake, Karen--for yours only! Ah"--releasing Karen suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry, stretching out her arm--"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting your room! Did I not see it! You! _justes cieux!_ with your bourgeois little world; your little--little world--so small--so small! your people like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never!

there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart--ah, I know it--will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod upon and broken!"

With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into pa.s.sionate tears.

Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of embarra.s.sment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.

"My dear," said Gregory--their voices seemed to pa.s.s above the clash and uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an elemental grief--"I have nothing to say to your guardian."

"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back, permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would marry?"