Tante Part 44

"No, that ain't what I mean. Mercedes has had a sight of trouble. I don't deny it, but that ain't what I mean. She makes trouble. She makes it for herself and she makes it for other people. There's always trouble going, of some sort or other, when Mercedes is about."

"I don't understand you, Mrs. Talcott," said Karen. An uncanny feeling had crept over her while the old woman spoke. It was as if, helplessly, she were listening to a sleep-walker who, in tranced unconsciousness, spoke forth mildly the hidden thought of his waking life.

"No, you don't understand, yet," said Mrs. Talcott. "Perhaps it's fair that you don't. Perhaps she can't help it. She was born so, I guess."

Mrs. Talcott turned and walked towards the house.

The panic of the cliff was rising in Karen again. Mrs. Talcott was worse than the cliff and the unanswering immensities. She walked beside her, trying to control her terror.

"You mean, I think," she said, "that Tante is a tragic person and people who love her must suffer because of all that she has had to suffer."

"Yes, she's tragic all right," said Mrs. Talcott. "She's had about as bad a time as they make 'em--off and on. But she spoils things. And it makes me tired to see it going on. I've had too much of it," said Mrs.

Talcott, "and if this can't come right--this between you and your nice young husband--I don't feel like I could get over it somehow." Leaning on Karen's arm with both hands she had paused and looked intently down at the path.

"But Mrs. Talcott," Karen's voice trembled; it was incredible, yet one was forced by Mrs. Talcott's whole demeanour to ask the question without indignation--"you speak as if you were blaming Tante for something. You do not blame her, do you?"

Mrs. Talcott still paused and still looked down, as if deeply pondering.

"I've done a lot of thinking about that very point, Karen," she said.

"And I don't know as I've made up my mind yet. It's a mighty intricate question. Perhaps we've all got only so much will-power and when most of it is ladled out into one thing there's nothing left to ladle out into the others. That's the way I try, sometimes, to figure it out to myself.

Mercedes has got a powerful sight of will-power; but look at all she's got to use up in her piano-playing. There she is, working up to the last notch all the time, taking it out of herself, getting all wrought up.

Well, to live so as you won't be spoiling things for other people needs about as much will-power as piano-playing, I guess, when you're as big a person as Mercedes and want as many things. And if you ain't got any will-power left you just do the easiest thing; you just take what you've a mind to; you just let yourself go in every other way to make up for the one way you held yourself in. That's how it is, perhaps."

"But Mrs. Talcott," said Karen in a low voice, "all this--about me and my husband--has come because Tante has thought too much of us and too little of herself. It would have been much easier for her to let us alone and not try and make Gregory like her. I do not recognise her in what you are saying. You are saying dreadful things."

"Well, dreadful things have happened, I guess," said Mrs. Talcott. "I want you to go back to your nice husband, Karen."

"No; no. Never. I can never go back to him," said Karen, walking on.

"Because he hates Mercedes?"

"Not only that. No. He is not what I thought. Do not ask me, Mrs.

Talcott. We do not love each other any longer. It is over."

"Well, I won't say anything about it, then," said Mrs. Talcott, who, walking beside her, kept her hand on her arm. "Only I liked Mr. Jardine.

I took to him right off, and I don't take to people so easy. And I take to you, Karen, more than you know, I guess. And I'll lay my bottom dollar there's some mistake between you and him, and that Mercedes is the reason of it."

They had reached the house.

"But wait," said Karen, turning to her. She laid both her hands on the old woman's arm while she steadied her voice to speak this last thought.

"Wait. You are so kind to me, Mrs. Talcott; but you have made everything strange--and dreadful. I must ask you--one question, Mrs. Talcott. You have been with Tante all her life. No one knows her as you do. Tell me, Mrs. Talcott. You love Tante?"

They faced each other at the top of the steps, on the verandah. And the young eyes plunged deep into the old eyes, pa.s.sionately searching.

For a moment Mrs. Talcott did not reply. When she did speak, it was decisively as if, while recognising Karen's right to ask, Karen must recognise that the answer must suffice. "I'd be pretty badly off if I didn't love Mercedes. She's all I've got in the world."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

The sound of the motor, whirring skilfully among the lanes, was heard at six, and shortly after Madame von Marwitz's return Mrs. Talcott knocked at her door.

Madame von Marwitz was lying on the sofa. Louise had removed her wraps and dress and was drawing off her shoes. Her eyes were closed. She seemed weary.

"I'll see to Madame," said Mrs. Talcott with her air of composed and una.s.suming authority. It was somewhat the air of an old nurse, sure of her prerogatives in the nursery.

Louise went and Mrs. Talcott took off the other shoe and fetched the white silk _mules_.

Madame von Marwitz had only opened her eye for a glimmer of recognition, but as Mrs. Talcott adjusted a _mule_, she tipped it off and muttered gloomily: "Stockings, please. I want fresh stockings."

There was oddity--as Mrs. Talcott found, and came back, with a pair of white silk stockings--in the sight of the opulent, middle-aged figure on the sofa, childishly stretching out first one large bare leg and then the other to be clothed; and it might have aroused in Mrs. Talcott a vista of memories ending with the picture of a child in the same att.i.tude, a child as idle and as autocratic.

"Thank you, Tallie," Madame von Marwitz said, wearily but kindly, when the stockings were changed.

Mrs. Talcott drew a chair in front of the sofa, seated herself and clasped her hands at her waist. "I've come for a talk, Mercedes," she said.

Madame von Marwitz now was sleepily observing her.

"A talk! _Bon Dieu!_ But I have been talking all day long!"

She yawned, putting a folded arm under her head so that, slightly raising it, she could look at Mrs. Talcott more comfortably. "What do you want to talk about?" she inquired.

Mrs. Talcott's eyes, with their melancholy, immovable gaze, rested upon her. "About Karen and her husband," she said. "I gathered from some talk I had with Karen to-day that you let her think you came away from London simply and solely because you'd had a quarrel with Mr. Jardine."

Madame von Marwitz lay as if arrested by these words for some moments of an almost lethargic interchange, and then in an impatient voice she returned: "What business is it of Karen's, pray, if I didn't leave London simply and solely on account of my quarrel with her husband? I had found it intolerable to be under his roof and I took the first opportunity for leaving it. The opportunity happened to coincide with my arrangements for coming here. What has that to do with Karen?"

"It has to do with her, Mercedes, because the child believes you were thinking about her when, as a matter of fact, you weren't thinking about her or about anyone but this young man you've gotten so taken up with.

Karen believes you care for her something in the same way she does for you, and it's a sin and a shame, Mercedes," Mrs. Talcott spoke with no vehemence at all of tone or look, but with decision, "a sin and a shame to let that child ruin her life because of you."

Again Madame von Marwitz, now turning her eyes on the ceiling, seemed to reflect dispa.s.sionately. "I never conceived it possible that she would leave him," she then said. "I found him insufferable and I saw that unless I went Karen also would come to see him as insufferable. To spare the poor child this I came away. And I was amazed when she appeared here. Amazed and distressed," said Madame von Marwitz. And after another moment she took up: "As for him, he has what he deserves."

Mrs. Talcott eyed her. "And what do you deserve, I'd like to know, for going meddling with those poor happy young things? Why couldn't you let them alone? Karen's been a bother to you for years. Why couldn't you be satisfied at having her nicely fixed up and let her tend to her own potato-patch while you tended to yours? You can't make me believe that it wasn't your fault--the whole thing--right from the beginning. I know you too well, Mercedes."

Again Madame von Marwitz lay, surprisingly still and surprisingly unresentful. It was as if, placidly, she were willing to be undressed, body or soul, by her old nurse and guardian. But after a moment, and with sudden indignation, she took up one of Mrs. Talcott's sentences.

"A bother to me? I am very fond of Karen. I am devoted to Karen. I should much like to know what right you have to intimate that my feeling for her isn't sincere. My life proves the contrary. As for saying that it is my fault, that is merely your habit. Everything is always my fault with you."

"It always has been, as far as I've been able to keep an eye on your tracks," Mrs. Talcott remarked.

"Well, this is not. I deny it. I absolutely," said Madame von Marwitz, and now with some excitement, "deny it. Did I not give her to him? Did I not go to them with tenderest solicitude and strive to make possible between him and me some relation of bare good fellows.h.i.+p? Did I not curb my spirit, and it is a proud and impatient one, as you know, to endure, lest she should see it, his veiled insolence and hostility? Oh! when I think of what I have borne with from that young man, I marvel at my own forbearance. I have nothing to reproach myself with, Tallie; nothing; and if his life is ruined I can say, with my hand on my heart,"--Madame von Marwitz laid it there--"that he alone is to blame for it. A more odious, arrogant, ignorant being," she added, "I have never encountered.

Karen is well rid of him."

Mrs. Talcott remained unmoved. "You don't like him because he don't like you and that's about all you've got against him, I reckon, if the truth were known," she said. "You can make yourself see it all like that if you've a mind to, but you can't make me; I know you too well, Mercedes.

You were mad at him because he didn't admire you like you're used to being admired, and you went to work pinching and picking here and there, pretending it was all on Karen's account, but really so as you could get even with him. You couldn't stand their being happy all off by themselves without you. Why I can see it all as plain and clear as if I'd been there right along. Just think of your telling that poor deluded child that you wanted her to make her husband like you. That was a nice way, wasn't it, for setting her heart at rest about you and him. If you didn't like him and saw he didn't like you, why didn't you keep your mouth shut? That's all you had to do, and keep out of their way all you could. If you'd been a stupid woman there might have been some excuse for you, but you ain't a stupid woman, and you know precious well what you're about all the time. I don't say you intended to blow up the whole concern like you've done; but you wanted to get even with Mr. Jardine and show him that Karen cared as much for you as she did for him, and you didn't mind two straws what happened to Karen while you were doing it."

Madame von Marwitz had listened, turning on her back and with her eyes still on the ceiling, and the calm of her face might have been that of indifference or meditation. But now, after a moment of receptive silence, indignation again seemed to seize her. "It's false!" she exclaimed.

"No it ain't false, Mercedes, and you know it ain't," said Mrs. Talcott gloomily.