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<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2> The telephone sounded while Gregory next morning ate his solitary breakfast, and the voice of Mrs. Forrester, disembodied of all but its gravity, asked him, if he would, to come and see her immediately. Gregory asked if Madame von Marwitz were with her. He was not willing, after the final affront that she had put upon him, to encounter Madame von Marwitz again in circumstances where he might seem to be justifying himself. But, with a deeper drop, the disembodied voice informed him that Madame von Marwitz, ten minutes before, had driven to the station on her way to Cornwall. "You will understand, I think, Gregory," said Mrs. Forrester, "that it is hardly possible for her to face in London, as yet, the situation that you have made for her." Gregory, to this, replied, shortly, that he would come to her at once, reserving his comments on the imputed blame. He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called, sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces, his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had slowly ebbed away. He found Mrs. Forrester in her morning-room among loudly singing canaries and pots of jonquils; and as he shook hands with her he saw that this old friend, so old and so accustomed that she was like a part of his life, was embarrassed. The wrinkles on her withered, but oddly juvenile, face seemed to have shifted to a pattern of perplexity and pained resolution. He was not embarrassed, though he was beaten and done in a way Mrs. Forrester could not guess at; yet he felt an awkwardness. They had known each other for a life-time, he and Mrs. Forrester, but they were not intimate; and how intimate they would have to become if they were to discuss with anything like frankness the causes and consequences of Madame von Marwitz's conduct! A gloomy indifference settled on Gregory as he realized that her dear friend's conduct was the one factor in the causes and consequences that Mrs. Forrester would not be able to appraise at its true significance. She shook his hand, and seating herself at a little table and slightly tapping it with her fingers, "Now, my dear Gregory," she said, "will you, please, tell me why you have acted like this?" "Isn't my case prejudged?" Gregory asked, reconstructing the scene that must have taken place last night when Madame von Marwitz had appeared before her friend. "No, Gregory; it is not," Mrs. Forrester returned with some terseness, for she felt his remark to be unbecoming. "I hope to have some sort of explanation from you." "I'm quite ready to explain; but it's hardly possible that my explanation will satisfy you," said Gregory. "You spoke, just now, when you called me up, of a situation and said I'd made it. My explanation can only consist in saying that I didn't make it; that Madame von Marwitz made it; that she came to us in order to make it and then to fix the odium of it on me." Already Mrs. Forrester had flushed. She looked hard at the pot of jonquils near her. "You really believe that?" "I do. She can't forgive me for not liking her," said Gregory. "And you don't like her. You own to it." "I don't like her. I own to it," Gregory replied with a certain frosty relief. It was like taking off damp, threadbare garments that had chilled one for a long time and facing the winter wind, naked, but invigorated. "I dislike her very much." "May I ask why?" Mrs. Forrester inquired, with careful courtesy. "I distrust her," said Gregory. "I think she's dangerous, and tyrannous, and unscrupulous. I think that she's devoured by egotism. I'm sorry. But if you ask me why, I can only tell you." Mrs. Forrester sat silent for a moment, and then, the flush on her delicate old cheek deepening, she murmured: "It is worse, far worse, than Mercedes told me. Even Mercedes didn't suspect this. Gregory,—I must ask you another question: Do you really imagine that you and your cruel thoughts of her would be of the slightest consequence to Mercedes Okraska, if you had not married the child for whose happiness she holds herself responsible?" "Of course not. She wouldn't give me another thought, if I weren't there, in her path; I am in her path, and she feels that I don't like her, and she hasn't been able to let me alone." "She has not let you alone because she hoped to make your marriage secure in the only way in which security was possible for you and Karen. What happiness could she see for Karen's future if she were to have cut herself apart from her life; dropped you, and Karen with you? That, doubtless, would have been the easy thing to do. There is indeed no reason why women like Mercedes Okraska, women with the world at their feet, should trouble to think of the young men they may chance to meet, whose exacting moral sense they don't satisfy. I am glad you see that," said Mrs. Forrester, tapping her table. "It would have been far kinder to have dropped Karen than deliberately to set to work, as she has done, to ruin her happiness. She hasn't been able to keep her hands off it. She couldn't stand it—a happiness she hadn't given; a happiness for which gratitude wasn't due to her." "Gregory, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester raised her eyes to him now; "you are frank with me, very frank; and I must be frank with you. There is more than dislike here, and distrust, and morbid prejudice. There is jealousy. Hints of it have come to me; I've tried to put them aside; I've tried to believe, as my poor Mercedes did, that, by degrees, you would adjust yourself to the claims on Karen's life, and be generous and understanding, even when you had no spontaneous sympathy to give. But it is all quite clear to me now. You can't accept the fact of your wife's relation to Mercedes. You can't accept the fact of a devotion not wholly directed towards yourself. I've known you since boyhood, Gregory, and I've always had regard and fondness for you; but this is a serious breach between us. You seem to me more wrong and arrogant than I could trust myself to say. And you have behaved cruelly to a woman for whom my feeling is more than mere friendship. In many ways my feeling for Mercedes Okraska is one of reverence. She is one of the great people of the world. To know her has been a possession, a privilege. Anyone might be proud to know such a woman. And when I think of what you have now said of her to me—when I think of how I saw her—here—last night,—broken—crushed,—after so many sorrows—" Tears had risen to Mrs. Forrester's eyes. She turned her head aside. "Do you mean," said Gregory after a moment, in which it seemed to him that his grey world preceptibly, if slightly, darkened, "do you mean that I've lost your friendship because of Madame von Marwitz?" "I don't know, Gregory; I can't tell you," said Mrs. Forrester, not looking at him. "I don't recognize you. As to Karen, I cannot imagine what your position with her can be. How is she to bear it when she knows that it is said that you insulted her guardian's friends and then turned her out of your house?" "I didn't turn her out," said Gregory; he walked to the window and stared into the street. "She went because that was the most venomous thing she could do. And I didn't insult her friends." "You said to her that the man she had thought of as a husband for Karen was not a gentleman. You said that you did not understand how Mercedes could have chosen such a man for her. You said this with the child standing between you. Oh, you cannot deny it, Gregory. I have heard in detail what took place. Mercedes saw that unless she left you Karen's position was an impossible one. It was to save Karen—and your relation to Karen—that she went." Gregory, still standing at the window, was silent, and then asked: "Have you seen Herr Lippheim?" "No, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester returned, and now with trenchancy, the concrete case being easier to deal with openly. "No; I have not seen him; but Mercedes spoke to me about him last winter, when she hoped for the match, and told me, moreover, that she was surprised by Karen's refusal, as the child was much attached to him. I have not seen him; but I know the type—and intimately. He is a warm-hearted and intelligent musician." "Your bootmaker may be warm-hearted and intelligent." "That is petulant—almost an insolent simile, Gregory. It only reveals, pitifully, your narrowness and prejudice—and, I will add, your ignorance. Herr Lippheim is an artist; a man of character and significance. Many of my dearest friends have been such; hearts of gold; the salt of the world." "Would you have allowed a daughter of yours, may I ask, to marry one of these hearts of gold?" "Certainly; most certainly," said Mrs. Forrester, but with a haste and heat somewhat suspicious. "If she loved him." "If he were personally fit, you mean. Herr Lippheim is undoubtedly warm-hearted and, in his own way, intelligent, but he is as unfit to be Karen's husband as your bootmaker to be yours." They had come now, on this lower, easier level, to one of the points where temper betrays itself as it cannot do on the heights of contest. Gregory's reiteration of the bootmaker greatly incensed Mrs. Forrester. "My dear Gregory," she said, "I yield to no one in my appreciation of Karen; owing to the education and opportunities that Mercedes has given her, she is a charming young woman. But, since we are dealing with, facts, the bare, bald, worldly aspects of things, we must not forget the facts of Karen's parentage and antecedents. Herr Lippheim is, in these respects, I imagine, altogether her equal. A rising young musician, the friend and protégé of one of the world's great geniuses, and a penniless, illegitimate girl. Do not let your rancour, your jealousy, blind you so completely." Gregory turned from the window at this, smiling a pallid, frosty smile and Mrs. Forrester was now aware that she had made him very angry. "I may be narrow," he said, "and conventional and ignorant; but I'm unconventional and clear-sighted enough to judge people by their actual, not their market, value. Of Herr Lippheim I know nothing, except that his parentage and antecedents haven't made a gentleman, or anything resembling one, of him; while of Karen I know that hers, unfortunate as they certainly were, have made a lady and a very perfect one. I don't forgive Madame von Marwitz for a great many things in regard to her treatment of Karen," Gregory went on with growing bitterness, "chief among them that she has taken her at her market value and allowed her friends to do the same. I've been able, thank goodness, to rescue Karen, at all events, from that. Madame von Marwitz can't carry her about any longer like a badge from some charitable society on her shoulder. No woman who really loved Karen, or who really appreciated her," Gregory added, falling back on his concrete fact, "could have thought of Herr Lippheim as a husband for her." Mrs. Forrester sat looking up at him, and she was genuinely aghast. "You are incredible to me, Gregory," she said. "You set your one year of devotion to Karen against Mercedes's life-time, and you presume to discredit hers." "Yes. I do. I don't believe in her devotion to Karen." "Do you realize that your attitude may mean a complete rupture between Karen and her guardian?" "No such luck; I'm afraid!" said Gregory with a grim laugh. "My only hope is that it may mean a complete rupture between Madame von Marwitz and me. It goes without saying, feeling as I do, that, if it wouldn't break Karen's heart, I'd do my best to prevent Madame von Marwitz from ever seeing her again." There was a little silence and then Mrs. Forrester got up sharply. "Very well, Gregory," she said. "That will do." "Are you going to shake hands with me?" he asked, still with the grim smile. "Yes. I will shake hands with you, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester replied. "Because, in spite of everything, I am fond of you. But you must not come here again. Not now." "Never any more, do you really mean?" "Not until you are less wickedly blind." "I'm sorry," said Gregory. "It's never any more then, I'm afraid." He was very sorry. He knew that as he walked away. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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