"I don't think I can discuss this with you," said Gregory. "I am very sorry that you overheard me." The slight smile of his pain had gone. He looked at Madame von Marwitz with a flinty eye.
"Ah, but you must discuss it; you shall," said Madame von Marwitz. "You say things to my child that I am not to overhear. You seek to poison her mind against me. You take her from me and then blacken me in her eyes. A possible husband! Would to God," said Madame von Marwitz, with sombre fury, "that the possibility had been fulfilled! Would to God that it were my brave, deep-hearted Franz who were her husband—not you, most ungrateful, most ungenerous of men."
"Tante," said Karen, who still stood looking down, grasping her chair-back and encircled by her guardian's arm, "he did not mean you to hear him. Forgive him."
"I beg your pardon, Karen," said Gregory, "I am very sorry that Madame von Marwitz overheard me; but I have said nothing for which I wish to apologize."
"Ah! You hear him!" cried Madame von Marwitz, and the inner conflagration now glittered in her eyes like flames behind the windows of a burning house. "You hear him, Karen? Forgive him! How can I forgive him when he has made you wretched! How can I ever forgive him when he tears your life by thrusting me forth from it—me—and everything I am and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen—you have seen my efforts to win your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his half-hidden insolence. Never—ah, never in my life have I faced such humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof—humiliations, endured for your sake, Karen—for yours only! Ah"—releasing Karen suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry, stretching out her arm—"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting your room! Did I not see it! You! justes cieux! with your bourgeois little world; your little—little world—so small—so small! your people like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never! there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart—ah, I know it—will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod upon and broken!"
With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate tears.
Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.
"My dear," said Gregory—their voices seemed to pass above the clash and uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an elemental grief—"I have nothing to say to your guardian."
"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back, permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would marry?"
Gregory paused, and in the pause, as he observed, Madame von Marwitz was able to withhold for a moment her strange groans and gaspings while she listened. "I don't think there has been any such effort," he said. "We were both keeping up appearances, your guardian and I; and I think that I kept them up best. As for Herr Lippheim, it was only when you accused me of rudeness to him that I confessed how much it astonished me to find that he was the man your guardian had wished you to marry. It does astonish me. Herr Lippheim isn't even a gentleman."