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Tante

<h2>CHAPTER XXXV</h2> Karen did not go to her room. She was afraid that Mrs. Talcott would come to her there. She asked the cook for a few sandwiches and going to one of the lower terraces she found a seat there and sat down. She felt ill. Her mind was sore and vague. She sat leaning her head on her hand, as she had sat in the morning-room, her eyes closed, and did not try to think. She had escaped something—mercifully. Yes, the supreme humiliation that Tante had prepared for her was frustrated. And she had been strangely hard and harsh to Tante and in return Tante had been piteous yet unmoving. Her heart was dulled towards Tante. She felt that she saw her from a great distance. The moon had risen and was shining brightly when she at last got up and climbed the winding paths up to the house. A definite thought, after the hours that she had sat there, had at last risen through the dull waters of her mind. Why should Tante go away? Why should not she herself go? There need be no affront to Tante, no alienation. But, for a time, at least, would it not be well to prove to Tante that she could be something more than a problem and a burden? Could she not go to the Lippheims in Germany and teach English and French and Italian there—she knew them all—and make a little money, and, when Tante wanted her again to come to Les Solitudes, come as an independent person? It was a curious thought. It contradicted the assumptions upon which her life was founded; for was she not Tante's child and Tante's home her home? So curious it was that she contemplated it like an intricate weapon laid in her hand, its oddity concealing its significance. She turned the weapon over. She might be Tante's child and Tante's home might be hers; yet a child could gain its own bread, could it not? What was there to pierce and shatter in the thought that it would be well for her to gain her bread? "Tante has worked for me too long," she said to herself. She was not pierced or shattered. Something very strange was in her hand, but she was only reasonable. She had stood still, in the midst of her swift climbing towards the house, to think it all out clearly, and it was as she stood there that she saw the light of a cigarette approaching her. It was Mr. Drew and he had seen her. Karen was aware of a deep stirring of displeasure and weariness. "But, please," he said, as, slightly bowing her head, and murmuring, "Good-night," she passed him; "I want—I very particularly want—to see you." He turned to walk beside her, tossing away his cigarette. "There is something I particularly want to say." His tone was grave and kind and urgent. It reproached her impatient impulse. He might have come with a message from Tante. "Where is my guardian?" she asked. "She has gone to bed. She has a horrible headache, poor thing," said Mr. Drew, who was leading her through the little copse of trees and along the upper paths. "Here, shall we sit down here? You are not cold?" They were in the flagged garden. Karen, vaguely expectant, sat down on the rustic bench and Mr. Drew sat beside her. The moonlight shone through the trees and fell fantastically on the young man's face and figure and on Karen, sitting upright, her little shawl of white knitted wool drawn closely about her shoulders and enfolding her arms. "Not for long, please," she said. "It is growing late and although I am not cold I am tired. What have you to say, Mr. Drew?" He had so much to say and it was, so obviously, his opportunity, his complete opportunity at last, that, before the exquisite and perilous task of awakening this creature of flowers and glaciers, Mr. Drew collected his resources with something of the skill and composure of an artist preparing canvas and palette. He must begin delicately and discreetly, and then he must be sudden and decisive. "I want to make you feel, in the first place, if I can," he said, leaning forward to look into her face and observing with satisfaction that she made no movement of withdrawal as he came a little nearer in so doing, "that I'm your friend. Can I, do you think, succeed in making you feel that?" His experience had told him that it really didn't matter so much what one said. To come near was the point, and to look deeply. "I've had so few chances of showing you how much your friend I am." "Thank you," said Karen. "You are kind." She did not say that he would succeed in making her feel him a friend. "We have been talking about you, talking a great deal, since you left us, your guardian and I," Mr. Drew continued, and he looked at the one of Karen's hands that was visible, emerging from the shawl to clasp her elbow, the left hand with its wedding-ring, "and ludicrous as it may seem to you, I can't but feel that I understand you a great deal better than she does. She still thinks of you as a child—a child whose little problems can be solved by facile solutions. Forgive me, I know it may sound fatuous to you, but I see what she does not see, that you are a suffering woman, and that for some problems there are no solutions." His eyes now came back to hers and found them fixed on him with a wide astonished gaze. "Has my guardian asked you to say anything to me?" she said. "No, not exactly that," said Mr. Drew, a little disconcerted by her tone and look, while at the same time he was marvelling at the greater and greater beauty he found in the impassive moonlit face—how had he been so unconscionably stupid as not to see for so long how beautiful she was!—"No, she certainly hasn't asked me to say anything to you. She is going away, you know, to Italy; it's a sudden decision and she's been telling me about it. I can't go with her. I don't think it a good plan. I can stay on here, but I can't go to Italy. Perhaps she'll give it up. She didn't find me altogether sympathetic and I'm afraid we've had something of a disagreement. I am sure you've seen since you've been here that if your guardian doesn't understand you she doesn't understand me, either." "But I cannot speak of my guardian to you," said Karen. She had kept her eyes steadily upon him waiting to hear what he might have to say, but now the thought of Tante in her rejected queenliness broke insufferably upon her making her sick with pity. This man did not love Tante. She rose as she spoke. "Do not speak of her to me," she said. "But we will not speak of her. I do not wish to speak of her," said Mr. Drew, also rising, a stress of excitement and anxiety making itself felt in his soft, sibilant, hurried tones; "I understand every exquisite loyalty that hedges your path. And I'm hedged, too; you see that. Wait, wait—please listen. We won't speak of her. What I want to speak of is you. I want to ask you to make use of me. I want to ask you to trust me. You love her, but how can you depend on her? She is a child, an undisciplined, capricious child, and she is displeased with you, seriously displeased. Who is there in the world you can depend on? You are unutterably alone. And I ask you to turn to me." Her frosty scrutiny disconcerted him. He had not touched her in the least. "These are things you cannot say to me," she said. "There is nothing that you can do for me. I only know you as my guardian's friend; you forgot that, I think, when you brought me here." She turned from him. "Oh, but you do not understand! I have made you angry! Oh, please, Mrs. Jardine;" his voice rose to sharp distress. He caught her hand with a supplicating yet determined grasp. "You can't understand. You are so inconceivably unaware. It is because of you; all because of you. Haven't you really seen or understood? She can't forgive you because I love you. I love you, you adorable child. I have only stayed on and borne with her because of you!" His passion flamed before her frozen face. And as, for a transfixed moment of stupor, she stood still, held by him, he read into her stillness the pause of the woman to whom the apple of the tree of life is proffered, amazed, afraid, yet thrilled through all her being, tempted by the very suddenness, incapable of swift repudiation. He threw his arms around her, taking, in a draught of delight, the impression of silvery, glacial loveliness that sent dancing stars of metaphor streaming in his head, and pressed his lips to her cheek. It was but one moment of attainment. The thrust that drove him from her was that, indeed, of the strong young goddess, implacable and outraged. Yet even as he read his deep miscalculation in her aspect he felt that the moment had been worth it. Not many men, not even many poets, could say that they had held, in such a scene, on such a night, an unwilling goddess to their breast. She did not speak. Her eyes did not pause to wither. They passed over him. He had an image of the goddess wheeling to mount some chariot of the sky as, with no indignity of haste, she turned from him. She turned. And in the path, in the entrance to the flagged garden, Tante stood confronting them. She stood before them in the moonlight with a majesty at once magnificent and ludicrous. She had come swiftly, borne on the wings of a devouring suspicion, and she maintained for a long moment her Medusa stare of horror. Then, it was the ugliest thing that Karen had ever seen, the mask broke. Hatred, fury, malice, blind, atavistic passions distorted her face. It was to fall from one nightmare to another and a worse; for Tante seized her by the shoulders and shook and shook and shook her, till the blood sprang and rang in her ears and eyeballs, and her teeth chattered together, and her hair, loosened by the great jerks, fell down upon her shoulders and about her face. And while she shook her, Tante snarled—seeming to crush the words between her grinding teeth, "Ah! perfide! perfide! perfide!" From behind, other hands grasped Karen's shoulders. Mr. Drew grappled with Tante for possession of her. "Leave me—with my guardian," she gathered her broken breath to say. She repeated it and Mr. Drew, invisible to her, replied, "I can't. She'll tear you to pieces." "Ah! You have still to hear from me—vile seducer!" Madame von Marwitz cried, addressing the young man over Karen's shoulder. "Do you dare dispute my right to save her from you—foul serpent! Leave us! Does she not tell you to leave us?" "I'll see her safely out of your hands before I leave her," said Mr. Drew. "How dare you speak of perfidy when you saw her repulse me? You'd have found it easier to forgive, no doubt, if she hadn't." These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!" She raised her head. "Did you believe me blind, infatuated? Did you think by your tricks and pretences to evade me? Did I not see, from the moment that she came, that your false heart had turned from me?" Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world. Oh, we understand those retreats. What more alluring to the man who pursues than the woman who flees? What more inflaming than the pose of white, idiotic innocence? You did not know. You did not understand—" fiercely, in a mincing voice, she mimicked a supposed exculpation. "You are so young, so ignorant of life—so immer kindlich! Ah!" she laughed, half strangled, "until the man seizes you in his arms you are quite unaware—but quite, quite unaware—of what he seeks from you. Little fool! And more than fool. Have I not seen your wiles? From day to day have I not watched you? Now it is the piano. You must play him your favourite little piece; so small; you have so little talent; but you will do your best. Now the chance meeting in the garden; you are so fond of flowers; you so love the open air, the sea, the wandering on the cliffs; such a free, wild creature you are. And now we have the frustrated rendezvous of this evening; he should find you dreaming, among your flowers, in the dusk. The pretty picture. And no, you want no dinner; you will go to your own room. But you are not to be found in your own room. Oh, no; it is again the garden; the moon; the sea and solitude that you seek! Be silent!" this was almost shouted at Claude Drew, who broke in with savage denials. "Do you think still to impose on me—you traitor?—No," her eyes burned on Karen's face. "No; you are wiser. You do not speak. You know that the time for insolence has passed. What! You take refuge with me here. You fly from your husband and throw yourself on my hands and say to me,"—again she assumed the mincing tones—"Yes, here I am again. Continue, pray, to work for me; continue, pray, to clothe and feed and lodge me; continue to share your life with me and all of rich and wide and brilliant it can offer; continue, in a word, to hold me high—but very high—above the gutter from which I came—and I take you, I receive you in my arms, I shelter you from malicious tongues, I humble myself in seeking to mend your shattered life; and for my reward you steal from me the heart of the one creature in the world I loved—the one—the only one! Until you came he was mine. Until you came he yearned for me—only for me. Oh, my heart is broken! broken! broken!" She leaned forward, wildly sobbing, and raising herself she shook the girl with all her force, crying: "Out of my sight! Be off! Let me see no more of you!" Covering her face with her hands, she reeled back, and Karen fled down the path, hearing a clamour of sobs and outcries behind her. She fled along the cliff-path and an incomparable horror was in her soul. Her life had been struck from her. It seemed a ghost that ran, watched by the moon, among the trees. On the open cliff-path it was very light. The sky was without a cloud. The sea lay like a vast cloth of silk, diapered in silver. Karen ran to where the path led to a rocky verge. From here, in daylight, one looked down into a vast hollow in the coast and saw at the bottom, far beneath, a stony beach, always sad, and set with rocks. To-night the enormous cup was brimmed with blackness. Karen, pausing and leaning forward, resting on her hands, stared across the appalling gulf of inky dark, and down into the nothingness. Horror had driven her to the spot, and horror, like a presence, rose from the void, and beckoned her down to oblivion. Why not? Why not? The question of despair seemed, like a vast pendulum, to swing her to and fro between the sky and the blackness, so that, blind and deaf and dumb, she felt only the horror, and her own pulse of life suspended over annihilation. And while her fingers clutched tightly at the rock, the thought of Gregory's face, as it had loved her, dimly, like a far beacon, flashed before her. Their love was dead. He did not love her. But they had loved. She moved back, trembling. She did not want to die. She lay down with her face to the ground on the grassy cliff. When she raised herself it was as if after a long slumber. She was immensely weary, with leaden limbs. Horror was spent; but a dull oppression urged her up and on. There was something that she must never see again; something that would open before her again the black abyss of nothingness; something like the moon, that once had lived, but was now a ghost, white, ghastly, glittering. She must go. At once. And, as if far away, a tiny picture rose before her of some little German town, where she might earn a living and be hidden and forgotten. But first she must see Mrs. Talcott. She must say good-bye to Mrs. Talcott. There was nothing now that Mrs. Talcott could show her. She went back softly and carefully, pausing to listen, pushing through unused, overgrown paths and among thickets of gorse and stunted Cornish elms. In the garden all was still; the dreadful clamour had ceased. By the back way she stole up to her room. A form rose to meet her as she opened the door. Mrs. Talcott had been waiting for her. Taking her hand, Mrs. Talcott drew her in and closed the door. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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