"Tiens!" Madame von Marwitz opened her eyes in genuine surprise. "I could not have imagined such, decisive feeling. I could not have imagined that you despised the good Franz. I need not tell you that I do not agree with you there."
"I do not despise him."
"Ah, there is more than mere negation in your look, your voice, my child. It is pride, wounded pride, that speaks; and it is as if you told me that I had less care for your pride than you had, and thought less of your claims."
"I do not think of my claims."
"You feel them. You feel Franz your inferior."
"I did not think of such things. I thought of his face, near me, and it made me hate him."
Karen continued to look aside with a sombre gaze. And, after examining her for another moment, Madame von Marwitz held out her hand. "Come," she said, "come here, child. I have blundered. I see that I have blundered. Franz shall be sent about his business. Have I hurt you? Do not think of it again."
The girl got up slowly, as if her stress of feeling made her awkward. Stumbling, she knelt down beside her guardian and, taking the hand and holding it against her eyes, she said in a voice heavy with unshed tears: "Am I a burden? Am I an anxiety? Let me go away, then. I can teach. I can teach music and languages. I can do translations, so many things. You have educated me so well. You will always be my dear friend and I shall see you from time to time. But it is as you say, I am a woman now. I would rather go away than have you troubled by me."
Madame von Marwitz's face, as she listened to the heavy voice, that trembled a little over its careful words, darkened. "It is not well what you say, Karen," she replied. "No. You speak to me as you have no right to speak, as though you had a grievance against me. What have I ever done that you should ask me whether you are a burden to me?"
"Only—" said Karen, her voice more noticeably trembling—"only that it seemed to me that I must be in the way if you could think of Franz as a husband for me. I do not know why I feel that. But it hurt me so much that it seemed to me to be true."
"It has always been my joy to care for you," said Madame von Marwitz. "I have always loved you like my own child. I do not admit that to think of Franz as a husband for you was to do you a wrong. I would not listen to an unfitting suitor for my child. It is you who have hurt me—deeply hurt me—by so misunderstanding me." Sorrow and reproach grew in her voice.
"Forgive me," said Karen, who still held the hand before her eyes.
Madame von Marwitz drew her hand gently away and raising Karen's head so that she could look at her, "I forgive you, indeed, Karen," she said. "How could I not forgive you? But, child, do not hurt me so again. Never speak of leaving me again. You must never leave me except to go where a fuller happiness beckons. You do not know how they stabbed—those words of yours. That you could think them, believe them! No, Karen, it was not well. Not only are you dear to me for yourself; there is another bond. You were dear to him. You were beside me in the hour of my supreme agony. You desecrate our sacred memories when you allow small suspicions and fears to enter your thoughts of me. So much has failed me in my life. May I not trust that my child will never fail me?"
Tragic grief gazed from her eyes and Karen's eyes echoed it.
"Forgive me, Tante, I have hurt you. I have been stupid," she spoke almost dully; but Madame von Marwitz was looking into the eyes, deep wells of pain and self-reproach.
"Yes, you have hurt me, ma chérie," she replied, leaning now her cheek against Karen's head. "And it is not loving to forget that when a cup of suffering brims, a drop the more makes it overflow. You are harsh sometimes, Karen, strangely harsh."
"Forgive me," Karen repeated.
Madame von Marwitz put her arms around her, still leaning her head against hers. "With all my heart, my child, with all my heart," she said. "But do not hurt me so again. Do not forget that I live at the edge of a precipice; an inadvertent footstep, and I crash down to the bottom, to lie mangled. Ah, my child, may life never tear you, burn you, freeze you, as it has torn and burned and frozen me. Ah, the memories, the cruel memories!" Great sighs lifted her breast. She murmured, while Karen knelt enfolding her, "His dead face rises before me. The face that we saw, Karen. And I know to the full again my unutterable woe." It was rare with Madame von Marwitz to allude thus explicitly to the tragedy of her life, the ambiguous, the dreadful death of her husband. Karen knelt holding her, pale with the shared memory. They were so for a long time. Then, sighing softly, "Bon Dieu! bon Dieu!" Madame von Marwitz rose and, gently putting the girl aside, she went into her bedroom and closed the door.
CHAPTER VII
It was a hard, chill morning and Gregory, sauntering up and down the platform at Euston beside the open doors of the long steamer-train, felt that the taste and smell of London was, as nowhere else, concentrated, compressed, and presented to one in tabloid form, as it were, at a London station on a winter morning. It was a taste and smell that he, personally, rather liked, singularly compounded as it was, to his fancy, of cold metals and warm sooty surfaces; of the savour of kippers cooking over innumerable London grates and the aroma of mugs of beer served out over innumerable London bars; something at once acrid yet genial, suggesting sordidness and unlimited possibility. The vibration of adventure was in it and the sentiment, oddly intermingled, of human solidarity and personal detachment.
Gregory, as he strolled and waited for his old friend and whilom Oxford tutor, Professor Blackburn, whom he had promised to see off, had often to pause or to deviate in his course; for, though it was still early, and the season not a favourite one for crossing, the platform was quite sufficiently crowded, and crowded, evidently, with homeward-bound Americans, mostly women. Gregory tended to think of America and its people with the kindly lightness common to his type. Their samenesses didn't interest him, and their differences were sometimes vexatious. He had a vague feeling that they'd really better have been Colonials and be done with it. Professor Blackburn last night had reproved this insular levity. He was going over with an array of discriminations that Gregory had likened to an explorer's charts and instruments. He intended to investigate the most minute and measure the most immense, to lecture continually, to dine out every evening and to write a book of some real appropriateness when he came home. Gregory said that all that he asked of America was that it should keep its institutions to itself and share its pretty girls, and the professor told him that he knew more about the latter than the former. There were not many pretty girls on the platform this morning, though he remarked one rather pleasing young person who sat idly on a pile of luggage and fixed large, speculative, innocently assured eyes upon him when he went by, while near her her mother and a tawny sister disputed bitterly with a porter. Most of the ladies who hastened to and fro seemed, while very energetic, also very jaded. They were packed as tightly with experiences as their boxes with contraband clothing, and they had both, perhaps, rather heavily on their minds, wondering, it was probable, how they were to get them through. Some of them, strenuous, eye-glassed and scholastic, looked, however, as they marshalled their pathetically lean luggage, quite innocent of material trophies.
Among these alien and unfamiliar visages, Gregory caught sight suddenly of one that was alien yet recognizable. He had seen the melancholy, simian features before, and after a moment he placed the neat, black person, walking beside a truck piled high with enormous boxes, as Louise, Madame von Marwitz's maid. To recognise Louise was to think of Miss Woodruff. Gregory looked around the platform with a new interest.
Miss Woodruff was nowhere to be seen, but a new element pervaded the dingy place, and it hardly needed the presence of four or five richly dressed ladies bearing sheaves of flowers, or that of two silk-hatted impresario-looking gentlemen with Jewish noses, to lead Gregory to infer that the element was Madame von Marwitz's, and that he had, inadvertently, fallen upon the very morning of her