Tante Part 41

There was no tastelessness in his gaze, nothing that suggested a recollection of what he had heard or seen last night; yet Karen was made vaguely aware from his look that she had acquired some sort of significance for him.

"Yes, it's been nice," he said. "I'm very fond of motoring. I'd like to spend my days in a motor--always going faster and faster; and then drop down in a blissful torpor at night. Madame von Marwitz was so kind and made the chauffeur go very fast."

Karen was somewhat disturbed by this suggestion. "I am sure that she, too, would like going very fast. I hope you will not tempt her."

"Oh, but I'm afraid I do," Mr. Drew confessed. "What is the good of a motor unless you go too fast in it? A motor has no meaning unless it's a method of intoxication."

Karen received the remark with inattention. She looked out over the sea, preoccupied with the thought of Tante's recklessness. "I do not think that going so fast can be good for her music," she said.

"Oh, but yes," Mr. Drew a.s.sured her, "nothing is so good for art as intoxication. Art is rooted in intoxication. It's all a question of how to get it."

"But with motoring you only get torpor, you say," Karen remarked. And, going on with her own train of thoughts, "So much shaking will be bad, perhaps, for the muscles. And there is always the danger to consider. I hope she will not go too fast. She is too important a person to take risks." There was no suggestion that Mr. Drew should not take them.

"Don't you like going fast? Don't you like taking risks? Don't you like intoxication?" Mr. Drew inquired, and his eyes travelled from the blue bows on her breast to the blue bows on her elbow-sleeves.

"I have never been intoxicated," said Karen calmly--she was quite accustomed to all manner of fantastic visitors in the temple--"I do not think that I should like it. And I prefer walking to any kind of driving. No, I do not like risks."

"Ah yes, I can see that. Yes, that's altogether in character," said Mr.

Drew. He turned, then, as Madame von Marwitz came in, but remained standing in the window while Karen went forward to greet her guardian.

Madame von Marwitz, as she took her hands and kissed her, looked over Karen's shoulder at Mr. Drew.

"Why did you not come to my room, _cherie_?" she asked. "I had hoped to see you alone before I came down."

"I thought you might be tired and perhaps resting, Tante," said Karen, who had, indeed, paused before her guardian's door on her way down, and then pa.s.sed on with a certain sense of shyness; she did not want in any way to force herself on Tante.

"But you know that I like to have you with me when I am tired," Madame von Marwitz returned. "And I am not tired: no: it has been a day of wings."

She walked down the long room, her arm around Karen, with a buoyancy of tread and demeanour in which, however, Karen, so deep an adept in her moods discovered excitement rather than gaiety. "Has it been a good day for my child?" she questioned; "a happy, peaceful day? Yes? You have been much with Tallie? I told Tallie that she must postpone the trip to Helston so that she might stay with you." Tante on the sofa encircled her and looked brightly at her; yet her eye swerved to the window where Mr. Drew remained looking at a paper.

Karen said that she had been gardening and walking.

"Good; bravo!" said Tante, and then, in a lower voice: "No news, I suppose?"

"No; oh no. That could not be, Tante," said Karen, with a startled look, and Tante went on quickly: "But no; I see. It could not be. And it has, then, been a happy day for my Karen. What is it you read, Claude?"

Karen's sense of slight perplexity in regard to Tante's interest in Mr.

Drew was deepened when she called him Claude, and her tone now, half vexed, half light, was perplexing.

"Some silly things that are being said in the House," Mr. Drew returned, going on reading.

"What things?" said Tante sharply.

"Oh, you wouldn't expect me to read a stupid debate to you," said Mr.

Drew, lifting his eyes with a smile.

Dinner was announced and they went in, Tante keeping her arm around Karen's shoulders and sweeping ahead with an effect of unawareness as to her other guest. She had, perhaps, a little lost her temper with him; and his manner was, Karen reflected, by no means a.s.siduous. At the table, however, Tante showed herself suave and sweet.

One reason why things seemed a little strange, Karen further reflected, was that Mrs. Talcott came no longer to dinner; and she was vaguely sorry for this.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Karen's boxes arrived next day, neatly packed by Mrs. Barker. And not only her clothes were in them. She had left behind her the jewel-box with the pearl necklace that Gregory had given her, the pearl and sapphire ring, the old enamel brooch and clasp and chain, his presents all. The box was kept locked, and in a cupboard of which Gregory had the key; so that he must have given it to Mrs. Barker. The photographs, too, from their room, not those of him, but those of Tante; of her father; and a half a dozen little porcelain and silver trinkets from the drawing-room, presents and purchases particularly hers.

It was right, quite right, that he should send them. She knew it. It was right that he should accept their parting as final. Yet that he should so accurately select and send to her everything that could remind him of her seemed to roll the stone before the tomb.

She looked at the necklace, the ring, all the pretty things, and shut the box. Impossible that she should keep them yet impossible to send them back as if in a bandying of rebuffs. She would wait for some years to pa.s.s and then they should be returned without comment.

And the clothes, all these dear clothes of her married life; every dress and hat was a.s.sociated with Gregory. She could never wear them again.

And it felt, not so much that she was locking them away, as that Gregory had locked her out into darkness and loneliness. She took up the round of the days. She practised; she gardened, she walked and read. Of Tante she saw little.

She was accustomed to seeing little of Tante, even when Tante was there; quite accustomed to Tante's preoccupations. Yet, through the fog of her own unhappiness, it came to her, like an object dimly perceived, that in this preoccupation of Tante's there was a difference. It showed, itself in a high-pitched restlessness, verging now and again on irritation--not with her, Karen, but with Mr. Drew. To Karen she was brightly, punctually tender, yet it was a tenderness that held her away rather than drew her near.

Karen did not need to be put aside. She had always known how to efface herself; she needed no atonement for the so apparent fact that Tante wanted to be left alone with Mr. Drew as much as possible. The difficulty in leaving her came with perceiving that though Tante wanted her to go she did not want to seem to want it.

She caressed Karen; she addressed her talk to her; she kept her; yet, under the smile of the eyes, there was an intentness that Karen could interpret. It devolved upon her to find the excuse, the necessity, for withdrawal. Mrs. Talcott, in the morning-room, was a solution. Karen could go to her almost directly after dinner, as soon as coffee had been served; for on the first occasion when she rose, saying that she would have her coffee with Mrs. Talcott, Tante said with some sharpness--after a hesitation: "No; you will have your coffee here. Tallie does not have coffee." Groping her way, Karen seemed to touch strange forms. Tante cared so much about this young man; so much that it was almost as if she would be willing to abandon her dignity for him. It was more than the indulgent, indolent interest, wholly Olympian, that she had so often seen her bestow. She really cared. And the strangeness for Karen was in part made up of pain for Tante; for it almost seemed that Tante cared more than Mr. Drew did. Karen had seen so many men care for Tante; so many who were, obviously, in love with her; but she had seen Tante always throned high above the prostrate adorers, idly kind; holding out a hand, perhaps, for them to kiss; smiling, from time to time, if they, fortunately, pleased her; but never, oh never, stepping down towards them.

It seemed to her now that she had seen Tante stepping down. It was only a step; she could never become the suppliant, the pursuing G.o.ddess; and, as if with her hand still laid on the arm of her throne, she kept all her air of high command.

But had she kept its power? Mr. Drew's demeanour reminded Karen sometimes of a cat's. Before the glance and voice of authority he would, metaphorically, pace away; pausing to blink up at some object that attracted his attention or to interest himself in the furbis.h.i.+ng of flank or chest. At a hint of anger or coercion, he would tranquilly disappear. Tante, controlling indignation, was left to stare after him and to regain the throne as best she might, and at these moments Karen felt that Tante's eye turned on her, gauging her power of interpretation, ready, did she not feign the right degree of unconsciousness, to wreak on her something of the controlled emotion.

The fear that had come on the night of her arrival pressed closely on Karen then, but, more closely still, the pain for Tante. Tante's clear dignity was blurred; her image, in its rebuffed and ineffectual autocracy, became hovering, uncertain, piteous. And, in seeing and feeling all these things, as if with a lacerated sensitiveness, Karen was aware that, in this last week of her life, she had grown much older.

She felt herself in some ways older than her guardian.

It was on the morning of her seventh day at Les Solitudes that she met Mr. Drew walking early in the garden.

The sea was glittering blue and gold; the air was melancholy in its sweetness; birds whistled.

Karen examined Mr. Drew as he approached her along the sunny upper terrace.

With his dense, dark eyes, delicate face and golden hair, his white clothes and loose black tie, she was able to recognize in him an object that might charm and even subjugate. To Karen he seemed but one among the many strange young men she had seen surrounding Tante; yet this morning, clearly, and for the first time, she saw why he subjugated Tante and why she resented her subjugation. There was more in him than mere pose and peculiarity; he had some power; the power of the cat: he was sincerely indifferent to anything that did not attract him. And at the same time he was unimportant; insignificant in all but his sincerity. He was not a great writer; Tante could never make a great writer out of him. And he was, when all was said and done, but one among many strange young men.

"Good morning," he said. He doffed his hat. He turned and walked beside her. They were in full view of the house. "I hoped that I might find you. Let us go up to the flagged garden," he suggested; "the sea is glittering like a million scimitars. One has a better view up there."

"But it is not so warm," said Karen. "I am walking here to be in the sun."

Mr. Drew had also been walking there to be in the sun; but they were in full view of the house and he was aware of a hand at Madame von Marwitz's window-curtain. He continued, however, to walk beside Karen up and down the terrace.

"I think of you," he said, "as a person always in the sun. You suggest glaciers and fields of snow and meadows full of flowers--the sun pouring down on all of them. I always imagine Apollo as a Norse G.o.d. Are you really a Norwegian?"

Karen was, as we have said, accustomed to young men who talked in a fantastic manner. She answered placidly: "Yes. I am half Norwegian."

"Your name, then, is really yours?--your untamed, yet intimate, name. It is like a wild bird that feeds out of one's hand."

"Yes; it is really mine. It is quite a common name in Norway."