Tante Part 34

"It would have been far kinder to have dropped Karen than deliberately to set to work, as she has done, to ruin her happiness. She hasn't been able to keep her hands off it. She couldn't stand it--a happiness she hadn't given; a happiness for which grat.i.tude wasn't due to her."

"Gregory, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester raised her eyes to him now; "you are frank with me, very frank; and I must be frank with you. There is more than dislike here, and distrust, and morbid prejudice. There is jealousy. Hints of it have come to me; I've tried to put them aside; I've tried to believe, as my poor Mercedes did, that, by degrees, you would adjust yourself to the claims on Karen's life, and be generous and understanding, even when you had no spontaneous sympathy to give. But it is all quite clear to me now. You can't accept the fact of your wife's relation to Mercedes. You can't accept the fact of a devotion not wholly directed towards yourself. I've known you since boyhood, Gregory, and I've always had regard and fondness for you; but this is a serious breach between us. You seem to me more wrong and arrogant than I could trust myself to say. And you have behaved cruelly to a woman for whom my feeling is more than mere friends.h.i.+p. In many ways my feeling for Mercedes Okraska is one of reverence. She is one of the great people of the world. To know her has been a possession, a privilege. Anyone might be proud to know such a woman. And when I think of what you have now said of her to me--when I think of how I saw her--here--last night,--broken--crushed,--after so many sorrows--"

Tears had risen to Mrs. Forrester's eyes. She turned her head aside.

"Do you mean," said Gregory after a moment, in which it seemed to him that his grey world preceptibly, if slightly, darkened, "do you mean that I've lost your friends.h.i.+p because of Madame von Marwitz?"

"I don't know, Gregory; I can't tell you," said Mrs. Forrester, not looking at him. "I don't recognize you. As to Karen, I cannot imagine what your position with her can be. How is she to bear it when she knows that it is said that you insulted her guardian's friends and then turned her out of your house?"

"I didn't turn her out," said Gregory; he walked to the window and stared into the street. "She went because that was the most venomous thing she could do. And I didn't insult her friends."

"You said to her that the man she had thought of as a husband for Karen was not a gentleman. You said that you did not understand how Mercedes could have chosen such a man for her. You said this with the child standing between you. Oh, you cannot deny it, Gregory. I have heard in detail what took place. Mercedes saw that unless she left you Karen's position was an impossible one. It was to save Karen--and your relation to Karen--that she went."

Gregory, still standing at the window, was silent, and then asked: "Have you seen Herr Lippheim?"

"No, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester returned, and now with trenchancy, the concrete case being easier to deal with openly. "No; I have not seen him; but Mercedes spoke to me about him last winter, when she hoped for the match, and told me, moreover, that she was surprised by Karen's refusal, as the child was much attached to him. I have not seen him; but I know the type--and intimately. He is a warm-hearted and intelligent musician."

"Your bootmaker may be warm-hearted and intelligent."

"That is petulant--almost an insolent simile, Gregory. It only reveals, pitifully, your narrowness and prejudice--and, I will add, your ignorance. Herr Lippheim is an artist; a man of character and significance. Many of my dearest friends have been such; hearts of gold; the salt of the world."

"Would you have allowed a daughter of yours, may I ask, to marry one of these hearts of gold?"

"Certainly; most certainly," said Mrs. Forrester, but with a haste and heat somewhat suspicious. "If she loved him."

"If he were personally fit, you mean. Herr Lippheim is undoubtedly warm-hearted and, in his own way, intelligent, but he is as unfit to be Karen's husband as your bootmaker to be yours."

They had come now, on this lower, easier level, to one of the points where temper betrays itself as it cannot do on the heights of contest.

Gregory's reiteration of the bootmaker greatly incensed Mrs. Forrester.

"My dear Gregory," she said, "I yield to no one in my appreciation of Karen; owing to the education and opportunities that Mercedes has given her, she is a charming young woman. But, since we are dealing with, facts, the bare, bald, worldly aspects of things, we must not forget the facts of Karen's parentage and antecedents. Herr Lippheim is, in these respects, I imagine, altogether her equal. A rising young musician, the friend and _protege_ of one of the world's great geniuses, and a penniless, illegitimate girl. Do not let your rancour, your jealousy, blind you so completely."

Gregory turned from the window at this, smiling a pallid, frosty smile and Mrs. Forrester was now aware that she had made him very angry. "I may be narrow," he said, "and conventional and ignorant; but I'm unconventional and clear-sighted enough to judge people by their actual, not their market, value. Of Herr Lippheim I know nothing, except that his parentage and antecedents haven't made a gentleman, or anything resembling one, of him; while of Karen I know that hers, unfortunate as they certainly were, have made a lady and a very perfect one. I don't forgive Madame von Marwitz for a great many things in regard to her treatment of Karen," Gregory went on with growing bitterness, "chief among them that she has taken her at her market value and allowed her friends to do the same. I've been able, thank goodness, to rescue Karen, at all events, from that. Madame von Marwitz can't carry her about any longer like a badge from some charitable society on her shoulder. No woman who really loved Karen, or who really appreciated her," Gregory added, falling back on his concrete fact, "could have thought of Herr Lippheim as a husband for her."

Mrs. Forrester sat looking up at him, and she was genuinely aghast.

"You are incredible to me, Gregory," she said. "You set your one year of devotion to Karen against Mercedes's life-time, and you presume to discredit hers."

"Yes. I do. I don't believe in her devotion to Karen."

"Do you realize that your att.i.tude may mean a complete rupture between Karen and her guardian?"

"No such luck; I'm afraid!" said Gregory with a grim laugh. "My only hope is that it may mean a complete rupture between Madame von Marwitz and me. It goes without saying, feeling as I do, that, if it wouldn't break Karen's heart, I'd do my best to prevent Madame von Marwitz from ever seeing her again."

There was a little silence and then Mrs. Forrester got up sharply.

"Very well, Gregory," she said. "That will do."

"Are you going to shake hands with me?" he asked, still with the grim smile.

"Yes. I will shake hands with you, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester replied.

"Because, in spite of everything, I am fond of you. But you must not come here again. Not now."

"Never any more, do you really mean?"

"Not until you are less wickedly blind."

"I'm sorry," said Gregory. "It's never any more then, I'm afraid."

He was very sorry. He knew that as he walked away.

CHAPTER XXVII

Mrs. Forrester remained among her canaries and jonquils, thinking. She was seriously perturbed. She was, as she had said, fond of Gregory, but she was fonder, far, of Mercedes von Marwitz, whom Gregory had caused to suffer and whom he would, evidently, cause to suffer still more.

She controlled the impulse to telephone to Eleanor Scrotton and consult with her; a vague instinct of loyalty towards Gregory restrained her from that. Eleanor would, in a day or two, hear from Cornwall and what she would hear could not be so bad as what Mrs. Forrester herself could tell her. After thinking for the rest of the morning, Mrs. Forrester decided to go and see Karen. She was not very fond of Karen. She had always been inclined to think that Mercedes exaggerated the significance of the girl's devotion, and Gregory's exaggeration, now, of her general significance--explicable as it might be in an infatuated young husband--disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom, she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show them all--to talk to Karen.

She drove to St. James's at four o'clock that afternoon and Barker told her that Mrs. Jardine was in the drawing-room. Visitors, evidently, were with her, and it affected Mrs. Forrester very unpleasantly, as Barker led her along the pa.s.sage, to hear rich harmonies of music filling the flat. She had expected to be perhaps ushered into a darkened bedroom; to administer comfort and sympathy to a shattered creature before administering reproof and counsel. But Karen not only was up; she was not alone. The strains were those of chamber-music, and a half-perplexed delight mingled with Mrs. Forrester's displeasure as she recognized the heavenly melodies of Schumann's Pianoforte Quintet. The performers were in the third movement.

Karen rose, as Barker announced her, from the side of a stout lady at the piano, and Mrs. Forrester, nodding, her finger at her lips, dropped into a chair and listened.

The stout lady at the piano had a pale, fat, pear-shaped face, her grizzled hair parted above it and twisted to a large outstanding k.n.o.b behind. She wore eyegla.s.ses and peered through them at her music with intelligent intensity and profound humility. The violin was played by an enormous young man with red hair, and the viola, second violin and 'cello by three young women, all of the black-and-tan Semitic type.

Mrs. Forrester was too much preoccupied with her wonder to listen as she would have wished to, but by the time the end of the movement was come she had realized that they played extremely well.

Karen came forward in the interval. She was undoubtedly pale and heavy-eyed; but in her little dress of dark blue silk, with her narrow lawn ruffles and locket and s.h.i.+ning hair, she showed none of the desperate signs appropriate to her circ.u.mstances nor any embarra.s.sment at the incongruous situation in which Mrs. Forrester found her.

"This is Frau Lippheim, Mrs. Forrester," she said. "And these are Fraulein Lotta and Minna and Elizabeth, and this is Herr Franz. I think you have often heard Tante speak of our friends."

Her ears buzzing with the name of Lippheim since the night before, Mrs.

Forrester was aware that she showed confusion, also that for a brief, sharp instant, while her eyes rested on Herr Franz, a pang of perverse sympathy for Gregory, in a certain aspect of his wickedness, disintegrated her state of mind. He was singular looking indeed, this untidy young man, whose ill-kept clothes had a look of insecurity, like arrested avalanches on a mountain. "No, I can feel for Gregory somewhat in this," Mrs. Forrester said to herself.

"We are having some music, you see," said Karen. "Herr Lippheim promised me yesterday that they would all come and play to me. Can you stay and listen for a little while? They must go before tea, for they have a rehearsal for their concert," she added, as though to let Mrs. Forrester know that she was not unconscious of the matter that must have brought her.

There was really no reason why she shouldn't stay. She could not very well ask to have the Lippheims and their instruments turned out.

Moreover she was very fond of the Quintet. Mrs. Forrester said that she would be glad to stay.

When they went on to the fourth movement, and while she listened, giving her mind to the music, Mrs. Forrester's disintegration slowly recomposed itself. It was not only that the music was heavenly and that they played so well. She liked these people; they were the sort of people she had always liked. She forgot Herr Franz's uncouth and mountainous aspect.

His great head leaning sideways, his eyes half closed, with the musician's look of mingled voluptuous rapture and cold, grave, listening intellect, he had a certain majesty. The mother, too, all devout concentration, was an artist of the right sort; the girls had the gentle benignity that comes of sincere self-dedication. They pleased Mrs.

Forrester greatly and, as she listened, her severity towards Gregory shaped itself anew and more forcibly. Narrow, blind, bigoted young man.

And it was amusing to think, as a comment on his fierce consciousness of Herr Lippheim's unfitness, that here Herr Lippheim was, admitted to the very heart of Karen's sorrow. It was inconceivable that anyone but very near and dear friends should have been tolerated by her to-day. Karen, too, after her fas.h.i.+on, was an artist. The music, no doubt, was helpful to her. Soft thoughts of her great, lacerated friend, speeding now towards her solitudes, filled Mrs. Forrester's eyes more than once with tears.

They finished and Frau Lippheim, rubbing her hands with her handkerchief, stood smiling near-sightedly, while Mrs. Forrester expressed her great pleasure and asked all the Lippheims to come and see her. She planned already a musical. Karen's face showed a pale beam of gladness.

"And now, my dear child," said Mrs. Forrester, when the Lippheims had departed and she and Karen were alone and seated side by side on the sofa, "we must talk. I have come, of course you know, to talk about this miserable affair." She put her hand on Karen's; but already something in the girl's demeanour renewed her first displeasure. She looked heavy, she looked phlegmatic; there was no response, no softness in her glance.