Tante Part 37

She had appalled and shattered him.

"I am not insulting you, I am warning you, Karen," he said. "A woman who can behave as you are behaving is capable of acts of criminal folly. You don't believe in convention, and in your guardian's world you will meet many men who don't."

"What do you mean by criminal folly?"

"I mean living with a man you're not married to."

He had simply and sincerely forgotten something. Karen's face grew ashen.

"You mean that my mother was a criminal?"

Even at this moment of his despair Gregory was horribly sorry. Yet the memory that she recalled brought a deeper fear for her future. He had spoken with irony of her suggestion about divorce and freedom. But did not her very blood, as well as her environment, give him reason to emphasise his warning?

"I didn't mean that. I wasn't thinking of that," he said, "as you must know. And to be criminally foolish is a very different thing from being a criminal. But I'm convinced that to break social laws--and these laws about men and women have deeper than merely social sanctions--to break them, I'm convinced, can bring no happiness. I feel about your mother, and what she did--I say it with all reverence--that she was as mistaken as she was unfortunate. And I beg of you, Karen, never to follow her example."

"It is not for you to speak of her!" Karen said, not moving from her place but uttering the words with a still and sudden pa.s.sion that he had never heard from her. "It is not for you to preach sermons to me on the text of my mother's misfortunes. I do not call them misfortunes--nor did she. I do not accept your laws, and she was not afraid of them. How dare you call her unfortunate? She lost nothing that she valued and she gained great happiness, and gave it, for she was happy with my father.

It was a truer marriage than any I have known. She was more married than you or I have ever been or could ever have been; for there was deep love between them, and trust and understanding. Do not speak to me of her. I forbid it."

She turned to the door. Gregory sprang to her side and seized her wrist.

"Karen! Where are you going? Wait till to-morrow!" he exclaimed, fear for her actual safety surmounting every other feeling.

She stood still under his hand and looked at him with her still pa.s.sion of repudiation. "I will not wait. I shall go to-night to Frau Lippheim.

And to-morrow I shall go to Cornwall. I shall tell Mrs. Barker to pack my clothes and send them to me there."

"You have no money."

"Frau Lippheim will lend me money. My guardian will take care of me. It is not for you to have any thought for me."

He dropped her arm. "Very well. Go then," he said.

He turned from her. He heard that she paused, the k.n.o.b of the door in her hand. "Good-bye," she then said.

Again it was, inconceivably, the mingled childishness, callousness and considerateness. That, at the moment, she could think of the formality, suffocated him. "Good-bye," he replied, not looking round.

The door opened and closed. He heard her swift feet pa.s.sing down the pa.s.sage to their room.

She was not reckless. She needed her hat and coat at least. Quiet, rational determination was in all her actions.

Yet, as he waited to hear her come out again, a hope that he knew to be chimerical rose in him. She would, perhaps, return, throw herself in his arms and, weeping, say that she loved him and could not leave him.

Gregory's heart beat quickly.

But when he heard her footsteps again they were not returning. They pa.s.sed along to the kitchen; she was speaking to Mrs. Barker--Gregory had a shoot of surface thought for Mrs. Barker's astonishment; they entered the hall again, the hall door closed behind them.

Gregory stood looking at the Bouddha. The tears kept mounting to his throat and eyes and, furiously, he choked them back. He did not see the Bouddha.

But, suddenly becoming aware of the bland contemplative gaze of the great bronze image, his eyes fixed themselves on it.

He had known it from the first to be an enemy. Its presage was fulfilled. The tidal wave had broken over his life.

PART II

CHAPTER XXIX

Karen sat in her corner of the railway carriage looking out at familiar scenery.

Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in the morning. Then, after the attendant had pa.s.sed along the corridor announcing lunch, and those who were lunching had followed him in single file, had come the lonely majesty of the Somerset downs, lying like great headlands along the plain, a vast sky of rippled blue and silver above them. They had pa.s.sed Plymouth where she had always used to look down from the high bridges and wonder over the lives of the midshipmen on the training-ships, and now they were winding through wooded Cornish valleys.

Karen had looked out of her window all day. She had not read, though kind Frau Lippheim had put the latest _tendenz-roman_, paper-bound, into the little basket, which was also stocked with stout beef-sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and the packet of chocolate and bun in paper bag that Franz had added to it at the station.

Poor Franz. He and his mother had come to see her off and they had both wept as the train moved away, and strange indeed it must have been for them to see the Karen Jardine who, only yesterday, had been, apparently, so happy, and so secure in her new life, carried back to the old; a wife who had left her husband.

Karen had slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder that Franz's eyes had been so heavy, his face so puffed and pale that morning; and his tears had given the last touch of desolation to his countenance.

Karen herself had not wept, either at the parting or at the meeting of the night before. She had told them, with no explanations at all, that she had left her husband and was going back to her guardian, and the Lippheims had asked no questions.

It might have been possible that Franz, as he sat at the table, his fingers run through his hair, clutching his head while he and his mother listened to her, was not so dazed and lost as was Frau Lippheim, who had not seen Gregory. Franz might have his vague perceptions. "_Ach! Ach!_"

he had e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed once or twice while she spoke.

And Frau Lippheim had only said: "_Liebes Kind! Liebes, armes Kind!_"

She was, after all, going back to the great Tante and they felt, no doubt, that no grief could be ultimate which had that compensatory refuge.

She was going back to Tante. As the valleys, in their deepened shadows, streamed past her, Karen remembered that it had hardly been at all of Tante that she had thought while the long hours pa.s.sed and her eyes observed the flying hills and fields. Perhaps she had thought of nothing. The heavy feeling, as of a stone resting on her heart, of doom, defeat and bitterness, could hardly have been defined as thought. She had thought and thought and thought during these last dreadful days; every mental cog had been adjusted, every wheel had turned; she had held herself together as never before in all her life, in order to give thought every chance. For wasn't that to give him every chance? and wasn't that, above all, to give herself any chance that might still be left her?

And now the machinery seemed to lie wrecked. There was not an ember of hope left with which to kindle its activity. How much hope there must have been to have made it work so firmly and so furiously during these last days! how much, she hadn't known until her husband had come in last night, and, at last, spoken openly.

Even Mrs. Forrester's revelations, though they had paralyzed her, had not put out the fires. She had still hoped that he could deny, explain, recant, own that he had been hasty, perhaps; perhaps mistaken; give her some loophole. She could have understood--oh, to a degree almost abject--his point of view. Mrs. Forrester had accused her of that. And Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had never loved each other; or, worse, far worse, they had loved and love was this puny thing that a blow could kill. His love for her was dead.

She still trembled when the ultimate realization surged over her, looking fixedly out of the window lest she should weep aloud.

She had only one travelling companion, an old woman who got out at Plymouth. Karen had found her curiously repulsive and that was one reason why she had kept her eyes fixed on the landscape. She had been afraid that the old woman would talk to her, perhaps offer her refreshments, or sympathy; for she was a kind old woman, with bland eyes and a moist warm face and two oily curls hanging forward from her old-fashioned bonnet upon her shoulders. She was stout, dressed in tight black cashmere, and she sat with her knees apart and her hands, gloved in grey thread gloves, lying on them. She held a handkerchief rolled into a ball, and from time to time, as if furtively, she would raise this handkerchief to her brow and wipe it. And all the time, Karen felt, she looked mildly and humbly at her and seemed to divine her distress.

Karen was thankful when she got out. She had been ashamed of her antipathy.

Bodmin Road was now pa.s.sed and the early spring sunset shone over the tree-tops in the valleys below. Karen leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was suddenly aware of her great fatigue, and when they reached Gwinear Road she found that she had been dozing.

The fresh, chill air, as she walked along the platform, waiting for the change of trains, revived her. She had not been able to eat her beef sandwiches and the thought that so much of Frau Lippheim's good food should be wasted troubled her; she was glad to find a little wandering fox-terrier who ate the meat eagerly. She herself, sitting beside the dog, nibbled at Franz's chocolate. She had had nothing on her journey but the milk and part of the bun which Franz had given her.

Now she was in the little local train and the bleak Cornish country, nearing the coast, spread before her eyes like a map of her future life.

She began to think of the future, and of Tante.

She had not sent word to Tante that she was coming. She felt that it would be easiest to appear before her in silence and Tante would understand. There need be no explanations.