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<h2>CHAPTER XXXIII</h2> The sound of the motor, whirring skilfully among the lanes, was heard at six, and shortly after Madame von Marwitz's return Mrs. Talcott knocked at her door. Madame von Marwitz was lying on the sofa. Louise had removed her wraps and dress and was drawing off her shoes. Her eyes were closed. She seemed weary. "I'll see to Madame," said Mrs. Talcott with her air of composed and unassuming authority. It was somewhat the air of an old nurse, sure of her prerogatives in the nursery. Louise went and Mrs. Talcott took off the other shoe and fetched the white silk mules. Madame von Marwitz had only opened her eye for a glimmer of recognition, but as Mrs. Talcott adjusted a mule, she tipped it off and muttered gloomily: "Stockings, please. I want fresh stockings." There was oddity—as Mrs. Talcott found, and came back, with a pair of white silk stockings—in the sight of the opulent, middle-aged figure on the sofa, childishly stretching out first one large bare leg and then the other to be clothed; and it might have aroused in Mrs. Talcott a vista of memories ending with the picture of a child in the same attitude, a child as idle and as autocratic. "Thank you, Tallie," Madame von Marwitz said, wearily but kindly, when the stockings were changed. Mrs. Talcott drew a chair in front of the sofa, seated herself and clasped her hands at her waist. "I've come for a talk, Mercedes," she said. Madame von Marwitz now was sleepily observing her. "A talk! Bon Dieu! But I have been talking all day long!" She yawned, putting a folded arm under her head so that, slightly raising it, she could look at Mrs. Talcott more comfortably. "What do you want to talk about?" she inquired. Mrs. Talcott's eyes, with their melancholy, immovable gaze, rested upon her. "About Karen and her husband," she said. "I gathered from some talk I had with Karen to-day that you let her think you came away from London simply and solely because you'd had a quarrel with Mr. Jardine." Madame von Marwitz lay as if arrested by these words for some moments of an almost lethargic interchange, and then in an impatient voice she returned: "What business is it of Karen's, pray, if I didn't leave London simply and solely on account of my quarrel with her husband? I had found it intolerable to be under his roof and I took the first opportunity for leaving it. The opportunity happened to coincide with my arrangements for coming here. What has that to do with Karen?" "It has to do with her, Mercedes, because the child believes you were thinking about her when, as a matter of fact, you weren't thinking about her or about anyone but this young man you've gotten so taken up with. Karen believes you care for her something in the same way she does for you, and it's a sin and a shame, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott spoke with no vehemence at all of tone or look, but with decision, "a sin and a shame to let that child ruin her life because of you." Again Madame von Marwitz, now turning her eyes on the ceiling, seemed to reflect dispassionately. "I never conceived it possible that she would leave him," she then said. "I found him insufferable and I saw that unless I went Karen also would come to see him as insufferable. To spare the poor child this I came away. And I was amazed when she appeared here. Amazed and distressed," said Madame von Marwitz. And after another moment she took up: "As for him, he has what he deserves." Mrs. Talcott eyed her. "And what do you deserve, I'd like to know, for going meddling with those poor happy young things? Why couldn't you let them alone? Karen's been a bother to you for years. Why couldn't you be satisfied at having her nicely fixed up and let her tend to her own potato-patch while you tended to yours? You can't make me believe that it wasn't your fault—the whole thing—right from the beginning. I know you too well, Mercedes." Again Madame von Marwitz lay, surprisingly still and surprisingly unresentful. It was as if, placidly, she were willing to be undressed, body or soul, by her old nurse and guardian. But after a moment, and with sudden indignation, she took up one of Mrs. Talcott's sentences. "A bother to me? I am very fond of Karen. I am devoted to Karen. I should much like to know what right you have to intimate that my feeling for her isn't sincere. My life proves the contrary. As for saying that it is my fault, that is merely your habit. Everything is always my fault with you." "It always has been, as far as I've been able to keep an eye on your tracks," Mrs. Talcott remarked. "Well, this is not. I deny it. I absolutely," said Madame von Marwitz, and now with some excitement, "deny it. Did I not give her to him? Did I not go to them with tenderest solicitude and strive to make possible between him and me some relation of bare good fellowship? Did I not curb my spirit, and it is a proud and impatient one, as you know, to endure, lest she should see it, his veiled insolence and hostility? Oh! when I think of what I have borne with from that young man, I marvel at my own forbearance. I have nothing to reproach myself with, Tallie; nothing; and if his life is ruined I can say, with my hand on my heart,"—Madame von Marwitz laid it there—"that he alone is to blame for it. A more odious, arrogant, ignorant being," she added, "I have never encountered. Karen is well rid of him." Mrs. Talcott remained unmoved. "You don't like him because he don't like you and that's about all you've got against him, I reckon, if the truth were known," she said. "You can make yourself see it all like that if you've a mind to, but you can't make me; I know you too well, Mercedes. You were mad at him because he didn't admire you like you're used to being admired, and you went to work pinching and picking here and there, pretending it was all on Karen's account, but really so as you could get even with him. You couldn't stand their being happy all off by themselves without you. Why I can see it all as plain and clear as if I'd been there right along. Just think of your telling that poor deluded child that you wanted her to make her husband like you. That was a nice way, wasn't it, for setting her heart at rest about you and him. If you didn't like him and saw he didn't like you, why didn't you keep your mouth shut? That's all you had to do, and keep out of their way all you could. If you'd been a stupid woman there might have been some excuse for you, but you ain't a stupid woman, and you know precious well what you're about all the time. I don't say you intended to blow up the whole concern like you've done; but you wanted to get even with Mr. Jardine and show him that Karen cared as much for you as she did for him, and you didn't mind two straws what happened to Karen while you were doing it." Madame von Marwitz had listened, turning on her back and with her eyes still on the ceiling, and the calm of her face might have been that of indifference or meditation. But now, after a moment of receptive silence, indignation again seemed to seize her. "It's false!" she exclaimed. "No it ain't false, Mercedes, and you know it ain't," said Mrs. Talcott gloomily. "False, and absolutely false!" Madame von Marwitz repeated. "How could I keep my mouth shut—as you delicately put it—when I saw that Karen saw? How keep my mouth shut without warping her relation to me? I spoke to her with lightest, most tender understanding, so that she should know that my heart was with her while never dreaming of the chasms that I saw in her happiness. It was he who forced me to an open declaration and he who forced me to leave; for how was happiness possible for Karen if I remained with them? No. He hated me, and was devoured by jealousy of Karen's love for me." "I guess if it comes to jealousy you've got enough for two in any situation. It don't do for you to talk to me about jealousy, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott returned, "I've seen too much of you. You can't persuade me it wasn't your fault, not if you were to talk till the cows come home. I don't deny but what it was pretty hard for you to see that Mr. Jardine didn't admire you. I make allowances for that; but my gracious me," said Mrs. Talcott with melancholy emphasis, "was that any reason for a big middle-aged woman like you behaving like a spiteful child? Was it any reason for your setting to work to spoil Karen's life? No, Mercedes, you've done about as mean a thing as any I've seen you up to and what I want to know now is what you're going to do about it." "Do about it?" Madame von Marwitz wrathfully repeated. "What more can I do? I open my house and my heart to the child. I take her back. I mend the life that he has broken. What more do you expect of me?" "Don't talk that sort of stage talk to me, Mercedes. What I want you to do is to make it possible so as he can get her back." "He is welcome to get her back if he can. I shall not stand in his way. It would be a profound relief to me were he to get her back." "I can see that well enough. But how'll you help standing in his way? The only thing you could do to get out of his way would be to help Karen to be quit of you. Make her see that you're just as bad as he thinks you. I guess if you told her some things about yourself she'd begin to see that her husband wasn't so far wrong about you." "Par exemple!" said Madame von Marwitz with a short laugh. She raised herself to give her pillow a blow and turning on her side and contemplating more directly her ancient monitress she said, "I sometimes wonder what I keep you here for." "I do, too, sometimes," said Mrs. Talcott, "and I make it out that you need me." "I make it out," Madame von Marwitz repeated the phrase with a noble dignity of manner, "that I am too kind of heart, too aware of what I owe you in gratitude, to resent, as I have every right to do, the license you allow yourself in speaking to me." "Yes; you'll always get plain speaking from me, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott remarked, "just as long as you have anything to do with me." "Indeed I shall. I am but too well aware of the fact," said Madame von Marwitz, "and I only tolerate it because of our life-long tie." "You'll go on tolerating it, I guess, Mercedes. You'd feel mighty queer, I expect, if the one person in the world who knew you through and through and had stood by you through everything wasn't there to fall back on." "I deny that you know me through and through," Madame von Marwitz declared, but with a drop from her high manner; sulkily rather than with conviction. "You have always seen me with the eye of a lizard." Her simile amused her and she suddenly laughed. "You have somewhat the vision of a lizard, Tallie. You scrutinize the cracks and the fissures, but of the mountain itself you are unaware. I have cracks and fissures, no doubt, like all the rest of our sad humanity; but, bon Dieu!—I am a mountain, and you, Tallie," she went on, laughing softly, "are a lizard on the mountain. As for Mr. Jardine, he is a mole. But if you think that Karen will be happier burrowing underground with him than here with me, I will do my best. Yes;" she reflected; "I will write to Mrs. Forrester. She shall see the mole and tell him that when he sends me an apology I send him Karen. It is a wild thing to leave one's husband like this. I will make her see it." "Now you see here, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, rising and fixing an acute gaze upon her, "don't you go and make things worse than they are. Don't you go interfering between Karen and her husband. The first move's got to come from them. I don't trust you round the corner where your vanity comes in, and I guess what you've got in your mind now is that you'd like to make it out to your friends how you've tried to reconcile Karen and her husband after he's treated you so bad. If you want to tell Karen that he was right in all the things he believed about you and that this isn't the first time by a long shot that you've wrecked people with your jealousy, and that he loves her ten times more than you do, that's a different thing, and I'll stand by you through it. But I won't have you meddling any more with those two poor young things, so you may as well take it in right here." Madame von Marwitz's good humour fell away. "And for you, may I ask you kindly to mind your own business?" she demanded. "I'll make this affair of Karen's my business if you ain't real careful, Mercedes," said Mrs. Talcott, standing solid and thick and black, in the centre of the room. "Yes, you'd better go slow and sure or you'll find there are some things I can't put up with. This affair of Karen has made me feel pretty sick, I can tell you. I've seen you do a sight of mean things in your life, but I don't know as I've seen you do a meaner. I guess," Mrs. Talcott continued, turning her eyes on the evening sea outside, "it would make your friends sit up—all these folks who admire you so much—if they could know a thing or two you've done." "Leave the room," said Madame von Marwitz, now raising herself on her elbow and pointing to the door. "Leave the room at once. I refuse to lie here and be threatened and insulted and brow-beaten by you. Out of my sight." Mrs. Talcott looked at the sea for a moment longer, in no provocative manner, but rather as if she had hardly heard the words addressed to her; and then she looked at Mercedes, who, still raised on her elbow, still held her arm very effectively outstretched. This, too, was no doubt a scene to which she was fully accustomed. "All right," she said, "I'm going." She moved towards the door. At the door she halted, turned and faced Madame von Marwitz again. "But don't you forget, Mercedes Okraska," she said, "that I'll make it my affair if you ain't careful." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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