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<h2>CHAPTER XLI</h2> It seemed to Karen, after hours had passed, that she had ceased to be tired and that her body, wafted by an involuntary rhythm, was as light as thistle-down on the wind. She had crossed the Goonhilly Downs where the moonlight, spreading far and wide with vast unearthly brightness, filled all the vision with immensities of space and brought memories of strains from Schubert's symphonies, silver monotonies of never-ending sound. She had plunged down winding roads, blackly shadowed by their hedgerow trees, passing sometimes a cottage that slept between its clumps of fuchsia and veronica. She had climbed bare hill-sides where abandoned mines or quarries had left desolate mementoes that looked in the moonlight like ancient tombs and catacombs. Horror lay behind her at Les Solitudes, a long, low cloud on the horizon to which she had turned her back. The misery that had overpowered and made her one with its dread realities lay beneath her feet. She was lifted above it in a strange, disembodied enfranchisement all the night, and the steady blowing of the wind, the leagues of silver, the mighty sky with its far, high priestess, were part of an ecstasy of sadness, impersonal, serene, hallucinated, like that of the music that accompanied the rhythm of her feet. The night was almost over and dawn was coming, when, on a long uphill road, she felt her heart flag and her footsteps stagger. The moon still rode sharp and high, but its light seemed concentrated in its own glittering disk and the world was visible in an uncanny darkness that was not dark. The magic of the night had vanished and the beat of vast, winding melodies melted from Karen's mind leaving her dry and brittle and empty, like a shell from which the tides have drawn away. She knew what she had still to do. At the top of the road she was to turn and cut across fields to a headland above Falmouth—from which a path she knew led to the town. She had not gone to Helston, but had taken this cross-country way to Falmouth because she knew that at any hour of the night she might be missed and followed and captured. They would not think of Falmouth; they would not dream that she could walk so far. In the town she would pawn Onkel Ernst's watch and take the early train to London and by evening she would be with Frau Lippheim. So she had seen it all, in flashes, last night. But now, toiling up the interminable road, clots of darkness floating before her eyes, cold sweats standing on her forehead, the sense of her exhaustion crushed down upon her. She tried to fix her thoughts on the trivial memories and forecasts that danced in her mind. The odd blinking of Mrs. Talcott's eyelid as she had told her story; the pattern of the breakfast set that she and Gregory had used—ah, no!—not that! she must not fix that memory!—the roofs and chimneys of some little German town where she was to find a refuge; for though it was to join the Lippheims that she fled, she did not see her life as led with theirs. Leaning upon these pictures as if upon a staff she held, she reached the hill-top. Her head now seemed to dance like a balloon, buffeted by the great throbs of her blood. She trailed with leaden feet across the fields. In the last high meadow she paused and looked down at the bend of the great bay under the pallid sky and at the town lying like a scattering of shells along its edge. How distant it was. How like a mirage. A little tree was beside her and its leaves in the uncanny light looked like crisp black metal. The sea was grey. The sunrise was still far off. Karen sank beneath the tree and leaned her head against it. What should she do if she were unable to walk on? There was still time—hours and hours of time—till the train left Falmouth; but how was she to reach Falmouth? Fears rolled in upon her like dark breakers, heaping themselves one upon the other, stealthy, swift, not to be escaped. She saw the horrible kindness in Mrs. Talcott's eyes, relegated, not relinquished. She saw herself pursued, entrapped, confronted by Gregory, equally entrapped, forced by her need, her helplessness, to come to her and coldly determined—as she had seen him on that dreadful evening of their parting—to do his duty by her, to make her and to keep her safe, and his own dignity secure. To see him again, to strive against him again, weaponless, now, without refuge, and revealed to herself and to him as a creature whose whole life had been founded on illusion, to strive not only against his ironic authority but, worst of all, against a longing, unavowed, unlooked at, a longing that crippled and unstrung her, and that ran under everything like a hidden river under granite hills—she would die, she felt, rather than endure it. She had closed her eyes as she leaned her head against the tree and when she opened them she saw that the leaves of the tree had turned from black to green and that the grass was green and the sea and sky faintly blue. Above her head the long, carved ripples of the morning cirri flushed with a heavenly pink and there came from a thicket of a little wood the first soft whistle of a wakened bird. Another came and then another, and suddenly the air was full of an almost jangling sweetness. Karen felt herself trembling. Shudders ran over her. She was ravished to life, yet without the answering power of life. Her longing, her loneliness, her fear, were part of the intolerable loveliness and they pierced her through and through. She struggled to her feet, holding the tree in her clasp, and, after the galvanised effort, she closed her eyes again, and again leaned her head upon the bark. Then it was that she heard footsteps, sudden footsteps, near. For a moment a paralysis of fear held down her eyelids. "Ach Gott!" she heard. And opening her eyes, she saw Franz Lippheim before her. Franz Lippheim was dressed, very strangely dressed, in tweeds and knicker-bockers and wore a soft round hat with a quill in it—the oddest of hats—and had a knapsack on his back. The colours of the coming day were caricatured in his ruddy face and red-gold hair, his bright green stockings and bright red tie. He was Germanic, flagrant, incredible, and a Perseus, an undreamed of, God-sent Perseus. "Ach Gott! Can it be so!" he was saying, as he approached her, walking softly as though in fear of dispersing a vision. And as, not speaking, still clasping her tree, she held out her hand to him, he saw the extremity of her exhaustion and put his arm around her. She did not faint; she kept her consciousness of the blue sky and the cirri—golden now—and even of Franz's tie and eyeglasses, glistening golden in the rising sunlight; but he had lowered her gently to the ground, kneeling beside her, and was supporting her shoulders and putting brandy to her lips. After a little while he made her drink some milk and then she could speak to him. She must speak and she must tell him that she had left her guardian. She must speak of Tante. But what to say of her? The shame and pity that had gone with her for days laid their fingers on her lips as she thought of Tante and of why she had left her. Her mind groped for some availing substitute. "Franz," she said, "you must help me. I have left Tante. You will not question me. There is a breach between us; she has been unkind to me. I can never see her again." And now with clearer thought she found a sufficient truth. "She has not understood about me and my husband. She has tried to make me go back to him; and I have fled from her because I was afraid that she would send for him. She is not as fond of me as I thought she was, Franz, and I was a burden to her when I came. Franz, will you take me to London, to your mother? I am going with you all to Germany. I am going to earn my living there." "Du lieber Gott!" Herr Lippheim ejaculated. He stared at Karen in consternation. "Our great lady—our great Tante—has been unkind to you? Is it then possible, Karen?" "Yes, Franz; you must believe me. You must not question me." "Trust me, my Karen," said Herr Lippheim now; "do not fear. It shall be as you say. But I cannot take you to the Mütterchen in London, for she is not there. They have gone back to Germany, Karen, and it is to Germany that we must go." "Can you take me there, Franz, at once? I have no money; but I am going to pawn this watch that Onkel Ernst gave me." "That is all simple, my Karen. I have money. I took with me the money for my tour; I was on a walking-tour, do you see, and reached Falmouth last night and had but started now to pay my respects at Les Solitudes. I wished to see you, Karen, and to see if you were well. But it is very far to your village. How have you come so far, at night?" "I walked. I have walked all night. I am so tired, Franz. So tired. I do not know how I shall go any further." She closed her eyes; her head rested against his shoulder. Franz Lippheim looked down at her with an infinite compassion and gentleness. "It will all be well, my Karen; do not fear," he said. "The train does not go from Falmouth for three hours still. We will take it then and go to Southampton and sail for Germany to-night. And for now, you will drink this milk—so, yes; that is well;—and eat this chocolate;—you cannot; it will be for later then. And you will lie still with my cloak around you, so; and you will sleep. And I will sit beside you and you will have no troubled thoughts. You are with your friends, my Karen." While he spoke he had wrapped her round and laid her head softly on a folded garment that he drew from his knapsack; and in a few moments he saw that she slept, the profound sleep of complete exhaustion. Franz Lippheim sat above her, not daring to light his pipe for fear of waking her. He, watched the glory of the sunrise. It was perhaps the most wonderful hour in Franz's life. Phrases of splendid music passed through his mind, mingling with the sound of the sea. No personal pain and no personal hope was in his heart. He was uplifted, translated, with the beauty of the hour and its significance. Karen needed him. Karen was to come to them. He was to see her henceforward in his life. He was to guard and help her. He was her friend. The splendour and the peace of the golden sky and golden sea were the angels of a great initiation. Nothing could henceforth be as it had been. His brain stirred with exquisite intuitions, finding form for them in the loved music that, henceforth, he would play as he had never before played it. And when he looked from the sea and sky down at the sleeping face beside him, wasted and drawn and piteous in its repose, large tears rose in his eyes and flowed down his cheeks, and the sadness was more beautiful than any joy that he had known. What she had suffered!—the dear one. What they must help her to forget! To her, also, the hour would send it angels: she would wake to a new life. He turned his eyes again to the rising sun, and his heart silently chanted its love and pride and sadness in the phrases of Beethoven, of Schubert and of Brahms, and from time to time, softly, he muttered to himself, this stout young German Jew with the red neck-tie and the strange round hat: "Süsses Kind! Unglückliches Kind! Oh—der schöne Tag!" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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