Peace had descended upon the little room where Karen lay, cold, still peace. There were no longer any tears or clamour, no appeals and agonies. Tante was often with her; but she seldom spoke now and Karen had ceased to feel more than a dull discomfort when she came into the room.

Tante smiled at her with the soft, unmurmuring patience of her exile, she tended her carefully, she told her that in a day or two, at furthest, they would be out at sea in the most beautiful of yachts. "All has been chosen for my child," she said. "The nurse meets us at Southampton and we wing our way straight to Sicily."

Karen was willing that anything should be done with her except the one thing. It had surprised her to find how much it meant to Tante that she should consent to go back to her. It had not been difficult to consent, when she understood that that was all that Tante wanted and why she wanted it so much. It was the easier since in her heart she believed that she was dying.

All these days it had been like holding her way through a whirlpool. The foam and uproar of the water had beat upon her fragile bark of life, had twisted it and turned it again and again to the one goal where she would not be. Tante had been the torrent, at once stealthy and impetuous, and the goal where she had wished to drive her had been marriage to Franz.

Karen had known no fear of yielding, it would have been impossible to her to yield; yet she had thought sometimes that the bark would crack under the onslaught of the torrent and she be dragged down finally to unconsciousness.

All that torment was over. She seemed to be sliding rapidly and smoothly down a misty river. She could see no banks, no sky; all was white, soft, silent. There was no strength left in her with which to struggle against the thought of death, no strength with which to fear it.

But, as she lay in the little room, her hands folded on her breast, corpse-like already in her placidity, something wailed within her and lamented. And sometimes tears rose slowly and swelled her eyelids and she felt herself a creature coffined and underground, put away and forgotten, though not yet a creature dead. Her heart in the darkness still lived and throbbed. Thoughts of Gregory were with her always, memories of him and of their life together which, now that she had lost him forever, she might cherish. She felt, though she lay so still, that she put out her hands always, in supplication, to Gregory. He would forget her, or remember her only as his disgrace. It seemed to her that if she could feel Gregory lean to her and kiss her forehead in tenderness and reconciliation her breath could sweetly cease.

The day before the departure was come and it was a warm, quiet afternoon. Tante had been with her in the morning, engaged in preparations for the journey. She had brought to show to Karen the exquisite nightgowns and wrappers, of softest wool and silk, that she was to wear on the yacht. The long cloak, too, of silk all lined with swansdown, such a garment as the tenderest, most cherished of mortals should wear. This was for Karen when she lay on deck in the sun. And there was a heavier fur-lined cloak for chilly days and the loveliest of shoes and stockings and scarves. All these things Tante had sent for for Karen, and Karen thanked her, as she displayed them before her, gently and coldly. She felt that Tante was piteous at these moments, but nothing in her was moved towards her. Already she was dead to Tante.

She was alone now, again, and she would not see Tante till tea-time.

Tante had asked her if she could sleep and she had said yes. She lay with eyes closed, vaguely aware of the sounds that rose to her from the room beneath, where Tante was engaged with the landlady in arranging the new possessions in boxes, and of the fainter sounds from the road in front of the house. Wheels rolled up and stopped. They often came, during these last days; Tante's purchases were arriving by every post.

And the voices below seemed presently to alter in pitch and rhythm, mounting to her in a sonorous murmur, dully rising and falling. Karen listened in indifference.

But suddenly there came another sound and this was sharp and near.

There was only one window in the little room; it was open, and it looked out at the back of the house over a straggling garden set round with trees and shrubberies. The sound was outside the window, below it and approaching it, the strangest sound, scratching, cautious, deliberate.

Karen opened her eyes and fixed them on the window. The tree outside hardly stirred against the blue spring sky. Someone was climbing up to her window.

She felt no fear and little surprise. She wondered, placidly, fixing her eyes upon the patterned square of blue and green. And upon this background, like that of some old Italian picture, there rose the head and shoulders of Mrs. Talcott.

Karen raised herself on her elbow and stared. The river stopped in its gliding; the mists rolled away; the world rocked and swayed and settled firmly into a solid, visible reality; Mrs. Talcott's face and her round black straw hat and her black caped shoulders, hoisting themselves up to the window-sill. Never in her life was she to forget the silhouette on the sky and the branching tree, nor Mrs. Talcott's resolute, large, old, face, nor the gaze that Mrs. Talcott's eyes fixed on her as she came.

Mrs. Talcott put her knee on the window-sill and then struggled for a moment, her foot engaged in the last rung of the ladder; then she turned and stepped down backwards into the room.

Karen, raised on her elbow, was trembling.

"Lay down, honey," said Mrs. Talcott, gently and gravely, as they looked at each other; and, as she came towards the bed, Karen obeyed her and joined her hands together. "Oh, will you come with us?" she breathed.

"Will you stay with me? I can live if you stay with me, Mrs.

Talcott--dear Mrs. Talcott."

She stretched out her hands to her, and Mrs. Talcott, sitting down on the bed beside her, took her in her arms.

"You're all right, now, honey. I'm not going to leave you," she said, stroking back Karen's hair.

Karen leaned her head against her breast, and closed her eyes.

"Listen, honey," said Mrs. Talcott, who spoke in low, careful tones: "I want to ask you something. Do you love Franz Lippheim? Just answer me quiet and easy now. I'm right here, and you're as safe as safe can be."

Karen, on Mrs. Talcott's breast, shook her head. "Oh, no, Mrs. Talcott; you could not believe that. Why should I love dear Franz?"

"Then it's only so as to set your husband free that you're marrying Franz?" Mrs. Talcott went on in the same even voice.

"But no, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, "I am not going to marry Franz." And now she lifted her head and looked at Mrs. Talcott. "Why do you ask me that? Who has told you that I am to marry Franz?"

Mrs. Talcott, keeping an arm around her, laid her back on the pillow.

"But, Karen, if you run off like that with Franz and come here and stay as his wife," she said, "and get your husband to divorce you by acting so, it's natural that people should think that you're going to marry the young man, ain't it?"

A burning red had mounted to Karen's wasted cheeks. Her sunken eyes dwelt on Mrs. Talcott with a sort of horror. "It is true," she said. "He may think that; he must think that; because unless he does he cannot divorce me and set himself free, and he must be free, Mrs. Talcott; he has said that he wishes to be free. But I did not run away with Franz. I met him, on the headland, that morning, and he was to take me to his mother, and I was so ill that he brought me here. That was all."

Mrs. Talcott smoothed back her hair. "Take it easy, honey," she said.

"There's nothing to worry over one mite. And now I've asked my questions and had my answers, and I've got something to tell. Karen, child, it's all been a pack of lies that Mercedes has told so as to get hold of you, and so as he shouldn't--so as your husband shouldn't, Karen. Listen, honey: your husband loves you just for all he's worth. I've seen him. I went up to him. And he told me how you were all the world to him, and how, if only you didn't love this young man and didn't want to be free, he'd do anything to get you back, and how if you'd done the wicked thing he'd been told and then gotten sorry, he'd want you back just the same because you were his dear wife, and the one woman he loved. But he couldn't force himself on you if you loved someone else and hated him.

So I just told him that I didn't believe you loved Franz; and I got him to hope it, too, and we came down together, Karen, and Mercedes is like a lion at bay downstairs, and she's in front of that door that leads up here and swears it'll kill you to see us; and I'd seen the ladder leaning on the wall and I just nipped out while she was talking, and brought it round to what I calculated would be your window and climbed up, and that's what I've come to tell you, Karen, that he loves you, and that he's downstairs, and that he's waiting to know whether you'll see him."

Mrs. Talcott rose and stood by the bed looking down into Karen's eyes.

"Honey, I can bring him up, can't I?" she asked.

Karen's eyes looked up at her with an intensity that had pa.s.sed beyond joy or appeal. Her life was concentrated in her gaze.

"You would not lie to me?" she said. "It is not pity? He loves me?"

"No, I wouldn't lie to you, dearie," said Mrs. Talcott, with infinite tenderness; "lies ain't my line. It's not pity. He loves you, Karen."

"Bring him," Karen whispered. "I have always loved him. Don't let me die before he comes."

CHAPTER XLVII

Mrs. Talcott, as she descended the staircase, heard in the little sitting-room a voice, the voice of Mercedes, speaking on and on, in a deep-toned, continuous roll of vehement demonstration, pa.s.sionate protest, subtle threat and pleading. Gregory's voice she did not hear.

No doubt he stood where she had left him, at the other side of the table, confronting his antagonist.

Mrs. Talcott turned the k.n.o.b of the door and slightly pushed it. A heavy weight at once was flung against it.

"You shall not come in! You shall not! I forbid it! I will not be disturbed!" cried the voice of Mercedes, who must, in the moment, have guessed that she had been foiled.

"Quit that foolishness," said Mrs. Talcott sternly. She leaned against the door and forced it open, and Mercedes, dishevelled, with eyes that seemed to pant on her like eyes from some dangerous jungle, flung herself once more upon the door and stood with her back against it.

"Mr. Jardine," said Mrs. Talcott, not looking at her recovered captive, "Karen is upstairs and wants to see you. She doesn't love Franz Lippheim and she isn't going to marry him. She didn't run away with him; she met him when she'd run away from her guardian and he was going to take her to his mother, only she got sick and he had to bring her here. She was told that you wanted to divorce her and wanted to be free. She loves you, Mr. Jardine, and she's waiting up there; only be mighty gentle with her, because she's been brought to death's door by all that she's been through."

"I forbid it! I forbid it!" shrieked Madame von Marwitz from her place before the door, spreading her arms across it. "She is mad! She is delirious! The doctor has said so! I have promised Franz that you shall not come to her unless across my dead body. I have sworn it! I keep my promise to Franz!"

Gregory advanced to the door, eyeing her. "Let me pa.s.s," he said. "Let me go to my wife."

"No! no! and no!" screamed the desperate woman. "You shall not! It will kill her! You shall be arrested! You wish to kill a woman who has fled from you! Help! Help!" He had her by the wrists and her teeth seized his hands. She fought him with incredible fury.

"Hold on tight, Mr. Jardine," Mrs. Talcott's voice came to him from below. "There; I've got hold of her ankles. Put her down."

With a loud, clashing wail through clenched and grinding teeth, Madame von Marwitz, like a pine-tree uprooted, was laid upon the floor. Mrs.

Talcott knelt at her feet, pinioning them. She looked along the large white form to Gregory at the other end, who was holding down Madame von Marwitz's shoulders. "Go on, Mr. Jardine," she said. "Right up those stairs. She'll calm down now. I've had her like this before."