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Tante

<h2>CHAPTER XLIII</h2> Karen lay sleeping in the little room above. She had slept so much since they had carried her, Franz, and the two women with kind faces, into this little room; deep draughts of sleep, as though her exhausted nature could never rest enough. Fever still drowsed in her blood and a haze of half delirious visions often accompanied her waking. They seemed to gather round her now, as, in confused and painful dreams, she rose from the depths towards consciousness again. Dimly she heard the sound of voices and her dream wove them into images of fear and sorrow. She was running along the cliff-top. She had run for miles and it was night and beside her yawned the black gulfs of the cliff-edge. And from far below, in the darkness, she heard a voice wailing as if from some creature lost upon the rocky beach. It was Gregory in some great peril. Pity and fear beat upon her like black wings as she ran, and whether it was to escape him or to succour him she did not know. Then from the waking world came distinctly the sound of rolling wheels, and opening her eyes she looked out upon her room, its low uneven ceiling, its coloured print of Queen Victoria over the mantelpiece, its text above the washhand-stand and chest of drawers. On the little table beside her bed Onkel Ernst's watch ticked softly. The window was open and a tree rustled outside. And through these small, familiar sounds she still heard the rolling of retreating wheels. The terror of her dream fastened upon this sound until another seemed to strike, like a soft, stealthy blow, upon her consciousness. Footsteps were mounting the stairs to her room. Not Franz's footsteps, nor the doctor's, nor the landlady's, nor Annie the housemaid's. She knew all these. Who was it then who mounted, softly rustling, towards her? The terror of the dream vanished in a tense, frozen panic of actuality. She wished to scream, and could not; she wished to leap up and fly, but there was no way of escape. It was Tante who came, slowly, softly, rustling in silken fabrics; the very scent of her garments seemed wafted before her, and Karen's heart stopped in its heavy beating as the door handle gently turned and Tante stood within the room. Karen looked at her and Madame von Marwitz looked back, and Madame von Marwitz's face was almost as white as the death-like face on the pillow. She said no word, nor did Karen, and in the long stillness delirium again flickered through Karen's brain, and Tante, standing there, became a nightmare presence, dead, gazing, immutable. Then she moved again, and the slow, soft moving was more dreadful than the stillness, and coming forward Tante fell on her knees beside the bed and hid her face in the bed-clothes. Karen gave a strange hoarse cry. She heard herself crying, and the sound of her own voice seemed to waken her again to reality: "Franz! Franz! Franz!" Madame von Marwitz was weeping; her large white shoulders shook with sobs. "Karen," she said, "forgive me! Karen, it is I. Forgive me!" "Franz!" Karen repeated, turning her head away on the pillow. "Karen, you know me?" said Madame von Marwitz. She had lifted her head and she gazed through her tears at the strange, changed, yet so intimately known, profile. It was as if Karen were the more herself, reduced to the bare elements of personality; rocky, wasted, alienated. "Do not kill me, my child," she sobbed, "Listen to me, Karen! I have come to explain all, and to implore for your forgiveness." She possessed herself of one of the hot, emaciated hands. Karen drew it away, but she turned her head towards her. Tante's tears, her words and attitude of abjection, dispersed the nightmare horror. She understood that Tante had come not as a ghastly wraith; not as a pursuing fury; but as a suppliant. Her eyes rested on her guardian and their gaze, now, was like cold, calm daylight. "Why are you here?" she asked. Madame von Marwitz's sobs, at this, broke forth more violently. "You remember our parting, my child! You remember my mad and shameful words! How could I not come!" she articulated brokenly. "Oh, I have sought you in terror, in unspeakable longing! My child—it was a madness. Did you not see it? I went to you at dawn that day to kneel before you, as I kneel now, and to implore your pardon. And you were gone! Oh, Karen—you will listen to me now!" "You need not tell me," said Karen. "I understand." "Ah, no: ah, no:" said Madame von Marwitz, laying her supplicating hand on the sleeve of Karen's nightdress. "You do not understand. How could you—young and cold and flawless—understand my heart, my wild, stained heart, Karen, my fierce and desolate and broken heart. You are air and water; I am earth and fire; how could you understand my darkness and my rage?" She spoke, sobbing, with a sincerity dreadful and irrefragable, as if she stripped herself and showed a body scarred and burning. With all the forces of her nature she threw herself on Karen's pity, tearing from herself, with a humility far above pride and shame, the glamour that had held Karen's heart to hers. Deep instinct guided her spontaneity. Her glamour, now, must consist in having none; her nobility must consist in abasement, her greatness in being piteous. "Listen to me, Karen," she sobbed, "The world knows but one side of me—you have known but one side;—even Tallie, who knows so much, who understands so much—does not know the other—the dark and tortured soul. I am not a good woman, Karen, the blood that flows in my veins is tainted, ambiguous. I have sinned. I have been savage and dastardly; but it has always been in a madness when I could not seize my better self: flames seem to sweep me on. Listen, Karen, you are so strong, so calm, how could you dream of what a woman's last wild passion can be, a woman whose whole soul is passion? Love! it is all that I have craved. Love! love! all my inner life has been enmeshed in it—in craving, in seeking, in destroying. It is like a curse upon me, Karen. You will not understand; yet that love of love, is it not so with all us wretched women; do we not long, always, all of us, for the great flame to which we may surrender, the flame that will appease and exalt us, annihilate us, yet give us life in its supremacy? So I have always longed; and not grossly; mine has never been the sensual passion; it has been beauty and the heights of life that I have sought. And my curse has been that for me has come no appeasement, no exaltation, but only, always, a dark smouldering of joylessness. With my own hand I broke the great and sacred devotion that blessed my life, because I was thus cursed. Jealousy, the craving for a more complete possession, for the ecstasy I had not found, blind forces in my blood, drove me on to the destruction of that precious thing. I wrecked myself, I killed him. Oh, Karen, you know of whom I speak." Convulsively, the blackness of her memories assailing her in their old forms of horror, Madame von Marwitz sobbed, burying her face in the bed-clothes, her hand forgetting to clutch at Karen's sleeve. She lifted her face and the tears streamed from under her closed lids. "Let me not think of it or I shall go mad. How could I, having known that devotion, sink to the place where you have seen me? Be pitiful. He needed me so much—I believed. My youth was fading; I was growing old. Soon the time was to come when no man's heart would turn to me. Be pitiful. You do not know what it is to look without and see life slowly growing dark and look within and see only sinister memories. It came to me like late sunlight—like cool, sweet water—his love. I believed in it. I loved him. Oh—" she sobbed, "how I loved him, Karen! How my heart was torn with sick jealousy when I saw that his had turned from me to you. I loved you, Karen, yet I hated you. Open your generous heart to me, my child; do not spurn me from you. Understand how it may be that one can strike at the thing one loves. I knew myself in the grasp of an evil passion, but I could not tear it from me. I even feared, with a savage fear that seemed to eat into my brain, that you responded to his love. Oh, Karen, it was not I who spoke those shameful words, when I found you with him, but a creature maddened with pain and jealousy, who for days had fought against her madness and knew when she spoke that she was mad. When I had sent him from me, when he was gone from my life, and I knew that all was over, the evil fury passed from my brain like a mist. I knew myself again. I saw again the sweet and sacred places of my life. I saw you, Karen. Oh, my child," again the pleading hand trembled on Karen's sleeve, "it has not all been misplaced, your love for me; not all illusion. I am still the woman who has loved you through so many years. You will not let one hour of frenzy efface our happy years together?" The words, the sobbing questions that waited for no answer, the wailing supplications, had been poured forth in one great upwelling. Through the tears that streamed she had seen Karen's face in blurred glimpses, lying in profile to her on its pillow. Now, when all had been said and her mind was empty, waiting, she passed her hand over her eyes, clearing them of tears, and fixed them on Karen. And silence followed. So long a silence that wonder came. Had she understood? Was she half unconscious? Had all the long appeal been wasted? But Karen at last spoke and the words, in their calm, seemed to the listening woman to pass like a cold wind over buds and tendrils of reviving life, blighting them. "I am sorry for you," said Karen. "And I understand." Madame von Marwitz stared at her for another silent moment. "Yes," she then said, "you are sorry for me. You understand. It is my child's great heart. And you forgive me, Karen?" Again came silence; then, restlessly turning her head as if the effort to think pained her, Karen said, "What do you mean by forgiveness?" "I mean pity, Karen," said Madame von Marwitz. "And compassion, and tenderness. To be forgiven is to be taken back." "Taken back?" Karen repeated. "But I do not feel that I love you any longer." She spoke in a dull, calm voice. Madame von Marwitz remained kneeling for some moments longer. Then a dark flush mounted to her face. She became aware that her knees were stiff with kneeling and her cheeks salt with tears. Her head ached and a feeling of nausea made her giddy. She rose and looked about her with dim eyes. A small wooden chair stood against the wall at a little distance from the bed. She went to it and sank down upon it, and leaning her head upon her hand she wept softly to herself. Her desolation was extreme. Karen listened to her for a long time, and without any emotion. Now that the horror had passed, her only feeling was one of sorrow and oppression. She was very sorry for the weeping woman; but she wished that she would go away. And her mind at last wandered from the thought of Tante. "Where is Franz?" she asked. The fount of Madame von Marwitz's tears was exhausted. She dried her eyes and cheeks. She blew her nose. She gathered together her thoughts. "Karen," she said, "I will not speak of myself. You say that you do not love me. I can only pray that my love for you may in time win you to me again. Never again, I know it, can I stand before you, untarnished, as I stood before; but I will trust my child's deep heart as strength once more comes to her. Pity will grow to love. I will love you; that will be enough. But I have come to you not only as a mother to her child. I have come to you as a friend to whom your welfare is of the first importance. I have much to say to you, Karen." Madame von Marwitz rose. She went to the washhand-stand and bathed her face. The triumph that she had held in her hand seemed melting through her fingers; but, thinking rapidly and deeply, she drew the scattered threads of the plan together once more, faced her peril and computed her resources. The still face on the pillow was unchanged, its eyes still calmly closed. She could not attempt to take the hand of this alien Karen, nor even to touch her sleeve. She went back to her chair. "Karen," she said, "if you cannot love me, you can still think of me as your friend and counsellor. I am glad to hear you speak of our Franz. That lights my way. I have had much talk with our good and faithful Franz. Together we have faced all that there is of difficult and sad to face. My child shall be spared all that could trouble her. Franz and I are beside you through it all. Your husband, Karen, is to divorce you because of Franz. You are to be set free, my child." A strange thing happened then. If Madame von Marwitz had plunged a dagger into Karen's heart, the change that transformed her deathly face could hardly have been more violent. It was as if all the amazed and desperate life fled to her eyes and lips and cheeks. Colour flooded her. Her eyes opened and shone. Her lips parted, trembled, uttered a loud cry. She turned her head and looked at her guardian. Her dream was with her. What was that loud cry for help, hers or his? Madame von Marwitz looked back and her face, too, was changed. Realizations, till then evaded, flashed over it as though from Karen's it caught the bright up-flaming of the truth. Fear followed, darkening it. Karen's truth threatened the whole fabric of the plan, threatened her life in all that it held of value. Resentment for a moment convulsed it. Then, with a steady mastery, yet the glance, sunken, sickened, of one who holds off disabling pity while he presses out a fluttering life beneath his hand, she said: "Yes, my child. Your wild adventure is known. You have been here for days and nights with this young man who loves you and he has given you his name. Your husband seizes the opportunity to free himself. Can you not rejoice, Karen, that it is to set you free also? It is of that only that I have thought. I have rejoiced for you. And I have told Franz that I will stand by you and by him so that no breath of shame or difficulty shall touch you. In me you have the staunchest friend." Madame von Marwitz, while she addressed these remarks to the strange, vivid face that stared at her with wide and shining eyes, was aware of a sense of nausea and giddiness so acute that she feared she might succumb to sickness. She put her hand before her eyes, reflecting that she must have some food if she were to think clearly. She sat thus for some moments, struggling against the invading weakness. When she looked up again, the flame whose up-leaping had so arrested her, which had, to be just, so horrified her, was fallen to ashes. Karen's eyes were closed. A bitter composure, like that sometimes seen on the face of the dead, folded her lips. Madame von Marwitz, suddenly afraid, rose and went to her and stooped over her. And, for a dreadful moment, she did not know whether it was with fear or hope that she scanned the deathly face. Abysses of horror seemed to fall within her as she thus bent over Karen and wondered whether she had died. It had been a foolish fear. The child had not even fainted. Madame von Marwitz's breath came back to her, almost in a sob, as, not opening her eyes, Karen repeated her former question: "Where is Franz?" "He will be back soon; Franz will soon be here," said Madame von Marwitz gently and soothingly. "I must see him," said Karen. "You shall. You shall see him, my Karen," said Madame von Marwitz. "You are with those who love you. Have no fear. Franz is of my mind in this matter, Karen. You will not wish to defend yourself against your husband's suit, is it not so? Defence, I fear, my Karen, would be useless. The chain of evidence against you is complete. But even if it were not, if there were defence to make, you would not wish to sue to your husband to take you back?" Karen still with closed eyes, turned her head away on the pillow. "Let him be free," she said. "He knows that I wished him to be free. When I left him I told him that I hoped to set him free. Let him believe that I have done so." Madame von Marwitz still leaned above her and, as when Franz had imparted the unlooked-for tidings of Karen's reticence, so now her eyes dilated with a deepened hope. "You told him so, Karen?" she repeated gently, after a moment. "Yes," said Karen, "I told him so. I shall make no defence. Will you go now? I am tired. And will you send Franz to me when he comes back?" "Yes, my child; yes," said Madame von Marwitz. "It is well. I will be below. I will watch over you." She raised herself at last. "There is nothing that I can do for you, my Karen?" "Nothing," said Karen. Her voice, too, seemed sinking into ashes. Madame von Marwitz opened the door to the dark little staircase and closed it. In the cloaking darkness she paused and leaned against the wall. "Bon Dieu!" she murmured to herself "Bon Dieu!" She felt sick. She wished to sleep. But she could not sleep yet. She must eat and restore her strength. And she had letters to write; a letter to Mrs. Forrester, a letter to Frau Lippheim, and a note to Tallie. It was as if she had thrown her shuttle across a vast loom that, drawing her after the thread she held, enmeshed her now with all the others in its moving web. She no longer wove; she was being woven into the pattern. Even if she would she could not extricate herself. The thought of this overmastering destiny sustained and fortified her. She went on down the stairs and into the little sitting-room. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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