"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 compa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 succ.u.mb 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.

CHAPTER XLIV

The days that pa.s.sed after her arrival at the inn were to live in Madame von Marwitz's memory as a glare of intolerable anxiety, obliterating all details in its heat and urgency. She might, during the hours when she knelt supplicating beside Karen's bed, have been imaged as a furnace and Karen as a corpse lying in it, strangely unconsumed, pa.s.sive and unresponsive. There was no cruelty in Karen's coldness, no unkindness even. Pity and comprehension were there; but they were rocks against which Madame von Marwitz dashed herself in vain.

When she would slip from her kneeling position and lie grovelling and groaning on the ground, Karen sometimes would say: "Please get up.

Please don't cry," in a tone of distress. But when the question, repeated in every key, came: "Karen, will you not love me again?"

Karen's answer was a helpless silence.

Schooling the fury of her eagerness, and in another mood, Madame von Marwitz, after long cogitations in the little sitting-room, would mount to point out to Karen that to persist in her refusal to marry Franz, when she was freed, would be to disgrace herself and him, and to this Karen monotonously and immovably would reply that she would not marry Franz.

Madame von Marwitz had not been able to keep from her beyond the evening of the first day that Franz had gone. "To Germany, my Karen, where he will wait for you." Karen's eyes had dwelt widely, but dully, on her when she made this announcement and she had spoken no word; nor had she made any comment on Madame von Marwitz's further explanations.

"He felt it right to go at once, now that I had come, and bring no further scandal on your head. He would not have you waked to say good-bye."

Karen lay silent, but the impa.s.sive bitterness deepened on her lips.

When Franz's first letter to Karen arrived Madame von Marwitz opened, read and destroyed it. It revealed too plainly, in its ingenuous solicitude and sorrow, the coercion under which Franz had departed. Yes; the plan was there and they were all enmeshed in it; but what was to happen if Karen would not marry Franz? How could that be made to match the story she had now written to Mrs. Forrester? And what was to happen if Karen refused to come with her? It would not do, Madame von Marwitz saw that clearly, for an alienated Karen to be taken to the Lippheims'.

Comparisons and disclosures would ensue that would send the loom, with a mighty whirr, weaving rapidly in an opposite direction to that of the plan. Franz, in Germany, must be pacified, and Karen be carried off to some lovely, lonely spot until the husband's suit was safely won. It was not fatal to the plan that Karen should be supposed, finally, to refuse to marry Franz; that might be mitigated, explained away when the time came; but a loveless Karen at large in the world was a figure only less terrifying than a Karen reunited to her husband. She felt as if she had drawn herself up from the bottom of the well where Karen's flight had precipitated her and as if, breathing the air, seeing the light of the happy world, she swung in a circle, clutching her wet rope, horrible depths below her and no helping hand put out to draw her to the brink.

Gregory's letter in answer to the letter she had sent to Mrs. Forrester, with the request that he should be informed of its contents, came on the second morning. It fortified her. There was no questioning; no doubt. He formally a.s.sured her that he would at once take steps to set Karen free.

"Ah, he does not love her, that is evident," said Madame von Marwitz to herself, and with a sense of quieted pulses. The letter was shown to Karen.

Mrs. Forrester's note was not quite rea.s.suring. It, also, accepted her story; but its dismay const.i.tuted a lack of sympathy, even, Madame von Marwitz felt, a reproach.

She wrote of Gregory's broken heart. She lamented the breach that had come between him and Karen and made this disaster possible.

Miss Scrotton's paean was what it inevitably would be. From Tallie came no word, and this implied that Tallie, too, was convinced, though Tallie, no doubt, was furious, and would, as usual, lay the blame on her.

Danger, however, lurked in Tallie's direction, and until she was safely out of England with Karen she should not feel herself secure.

Pertinaciously and blandly she insisted to the doctor that Frau Lippheim was now quite well enough to make a short sea voyage. She would secure the best of yachts and the best of trained nurses, and a little voyage would be the very thing for her. The doctor was recalcitrant, and Madame von Marwitz was in terror lest, during the moments they spent by her bedside, Karen should burst forth in a sudden appeal to him.