"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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.ddess, 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 G.o.ddess to their breast.

She did not speak. Her eyes did not pause to wither. They pa.s.sed over him. He had an image of the G.o.ddess 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 pa.s.sions 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s, 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 pa.s.sed. What! You take refuge with me here. You fly from your husband and throw yourself on my hands and say to me,"--again she a.s.sumed 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 gra.s.sy 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.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

Mrs. Talcott sat down on the bed and Karen knelt before her with her head in her lap. The old woman's pa.s.sed quietly over her hair while she wept, and the homely gentleness, like the simplicity of milk to famished lips, flowed into her horror-haunted mind.

She tried to tell Mrs. Talcott what had happened. "She does not love me, Mrs. Talcott. She has turned me out. Tante has told me to go."

"I've seen her," said Mrs. Talcott, stroking on. "I was just going out to look for you if you didn't come in. Did she tear your hair down like this? It's all undone."

"It was when she shook me, Mrs. Talcott. She found me with Mr. Drew. He had kissed me. I could not help it. She knew that I could not help it.

She knows that I am not a bad woman."

"You mustn't take Mercedes at her word when she's in a state like that, Karen. She's in an awful state. She's parted from that young man."

"And I am going, Mrs. Talcott."

"Well, I've wanted you to go, from the first. Now you've found her out, this ain't any place for you. You can't go hanging on for all your life, like I've done."

"But Mrs. Talcott--what does it mean? What have I found out? What is Tante?" Karen sobbed. "For all these years so beautiful--so beautiful--to me, and suddenly to become my enemy--someone I do not know."

"You never got in her way before. She's got no mercy, Mercedes hasn't, if you get in her way. Where'd you thought of going, Karen?"

"To Frau Lippheim. She is still in London, I think. I could join her there. You could lend me a little money, Mrs. Talcott. Enough to take me to London."

Mrs. Talcott was silent for a moment. "Come up here, on the bed, Karen,"

she then said. "Here, wrap this cloak around you; you're awful cold.

That's right. Now I want you to sit quiet while I explain things to you the best I can. I've made up my mind to do it. Mercedes will be in her right mind to-morrow and frantic to get hold of you again and get you to forgive her. Oh, I know her. And I don't want her to get hold of you again. I want you to be quit of her. I want you to see, as clear as day, how your husband was right about Mercedes, all along."

"Oh, do not speak of him--" Karen moaned, covering her face as she sat on the bed beside Mrs. Talcott.