Tante

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

She was, after all, going back to the great Tante and they felt, no doubt, that no grief could be ultimate which had that compensatory refuge.

She was going back to Tante. As the valleys, in their deepened shadows, streamed past her, Karen remembered that it had hardly been at all of Tante that she had thought while the long hours passed and her eyes observed the flying hills and fields. Perhaps she had thought of nothing. The heavy feeling, as of a stone resting on her heart, of doom, defeat and bitterness, could hardly have been defined as thought. She had thought and thought and thought during these last dreadful days; every mental cog had been adjusted, every wheel had turned; she had held herself together as never before in all her life, in order to give thought every chance. For wasn't that to give him every chance? and wasn't that, above all, to give herself any chance that might still be left her?

And now the machinery seemed to lie wrecked. There was not an ember of hope left with which to kindle its activity. How much hope there must have been to have made it work so firmly and so furiously during these last days! how much, she hadn't known until her husband had come in last night, and, at last, spoken openly.

Even Mrs. Forrester's revelations, though they had paralyzed her, had not put out the fires. She had still hoped that he could deny, explain, recant, own that he had been hasty, perhaps; perhaps mistaken; give her some loophole. She could have understood—oh, to a degree almost abject—his point of view. Mrs. Forrester had accused her of that. And Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had never loved each other; or, worse, far worse, they had loved and love was this puny thing that a blow could kill. His love for her was dead.

She still trembled when the ultimate realization surged over her, looking fixedly out of the window lest she should weep aloud.

She had only one travelling companion, an old woman who got out at Plymouth. Karen had found her curiously repulsive and that was one reason why she had kept her eyes fixed on the landscape. She had been afraid that the old woman would talk to her, perhaps offer her refreshments, or sympathy; for she was a kind old woman, with bland eyes and a moist warm face and two oily curls hanging forward from her old-fashioned bonnet upon her shoulders. She was stout, dressed in tight black cashmere, and she sat with her knees apart and her hands, gloved in grey thread gloves, lying on them. She held a handkerchief rolled into a ball, and from time to time, as if furtively, she would raise this handkerchief to her brow and wipe it. And all the time, Karen felt, she looked mildly and humbly at her and seemed to divine her distress.

Karen was thankful when she got out. She had been ashamed of her antipathy.

Bodmin Road was now passed and the early spring sunset shone over the tree-tops in the valleys below. Karen leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was suddenly aware of her great fatigue, and when they reached Gwinear Road she found that she had been dozing.

The fresh, chill air, as she walked along the platform, waiting for the change of trains, revived her. She had not been able to eat her beef sandwiches and the thought that so much of Frau Lippheim's good food should be wasted troubled her; she was glad to find a little wandering fox-terrier who ate the meat eagerly. She herself, sitting beside the dog, nibbled at Franz's chocolate. She had had nothing on her journey but the milk and part of the bun which Franz had given her.

Now she was in the little local train and the bleak Cornish country, nearing the coast, spread before her eyes like a map of her future life. She began to think of the future, and of Tante.