Tante

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

"I stayed home for four or five years and then Mercedes sent for me. She used to write now and then to her 'Dearest Tallie' as she always called me, and I'd heard all about how she'd come out in Paris and Vienna as a great pianist, and how she'd quarrelled with her relations and how she'd run away with a young English painter and got married to him. It was an awful silly match, and they'd all opposed it; but it pleased me somehow. I thought it showed that Mercedes was soft-hearted like her mother, and unworldly. Well, she wrote that she was miserable and that her husband was a fiend and broke her heart and that she hated all her relations and they'd all behaved like serpents to her—Mercedes is always running across serpents—and how I was the only true friend she had and the only one who understood her, and how she longed for her dear Tallie. So I sold out again—I'd just started a sort of little farm near the old place in Maine, raising chickens and making jam—and came over again. I don't know what it is about Mercedes, but she gets a hold over you. And guess I always felt like she was my own baby. I had a baby, but it died when it was born. Well, she was living in Paris then and they had a fine flat and a big studio, and when Mercedes got into a passion with her husband she'd take a knife and slash up his canvases. She quarrelled with him day and night, and I wasn't long with them before I saw that it was all her fault and that he was a weak, harmless sort of young creature—he had yellow hair, longish, and used to wear a black velvet cap and paint sort of dismal pictures of girls with long necks and wild sort of eyes—but that the truth was she was sick of him and wanted to marry the Baron von Marwitz.

"You can commence to get hold of the story now, Karen. You remember the Baron. A sad, stately man he was, as cultured and intellectual as could be and going in the best society. Mercedes had found pretty quick that there wasn't much fun in being married to a yellow-haired boy who lived on the money she made and wasn't a mite in society. And the Baron was just crazy over her in his dignified, reverential way. Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Talcott pausing in a retrospect over this vanished figure, "Poor fellow! I guess he came to rue the day he ever set eyes on her. Well, Mercedes made out to him how terrible her life was and how she was tied to a dissipated, worthless man who lived on her and was unfaithful to her. And it's true that Baldwin Tanner behaved as he shouldn't; but he was a weak creature and she'd disillusionized him so and made him so miserable that he just got reckless. And he'd never asked any more than to live in a garret with her and adore her, and paint his lanky people and eat bread and cheese; he told me so, poor boy; he just used to lay his head down on my lap and cry like a baby sometimes. But Mercedes made it out that she was a victim and he was a serpent; and she believed it, too; that's the power of her; she's just determined to be in the right always. So at last she made it all out. She couldn't divorce Baldwin, being a Catholic; but she made it out that she wasn't really married to him. It appears he didn't get baptized by his folks; they hadn't believed in baptizing; they were free-thinkers. And the Baron got his powerful friends to help and they all set to work at the Pope, and they got him to fix it up, and Mercedes's marriage was annulled and she was free to marry again. That's what was in her mind in sending for me, you see; she'd quarrelled with her folks and she wanted a steady respectable person who knew all about her to stand by her and chaperon her while she was getting rid of Baldwin. Mercedes has always been pretty careful about her reputation; she's hardly ever taken any risks.

"Well, she was free and she married the Baron, and poor Baldwin got a nice young English girl to marry him, and she reformed him, and they're alive and happy to this day, and I guess he paints pretty poor pictures. And it makes Mercedes awful mad to hear about how happy they are; she has a sort of idea, I imagine, that Baldwin didn't have any right to get married again. I've always had a good deal of satisfaction over Baldwin," said Mrs. Talcott. "It's queer to realize that Mercedes was once just plain Mrs. Baldwin Tanner, ain't it? It was a silly match and no mistake. Well, it took two or three years to work it all out, and Mercedes was twenty-five when she married the Baron. I didn't see much of them for a while. They put me around in their houses to look after things and be there when Mercedes wanted me. She'd found out she couldn't get along without me in those two or three years. Mercedes was the most beautiful creature alive at that time, I do believe, and all Europe was wild about her. She and the Baron went about and she gave concerts, and it was just a triumphal tour. But after a spell I began to see that things weren't going smooth. Mercedes is the sort of person who's never satisfied with what she's got. And the Baron was beginning to find her out. My! I used to be sorry for that man. I'll never forget his white, sick face the first time she flew out at him and made one of her scenes. 'Emprisonné ma jeunesse,'" Mrs. Talcott quoted with a heavy accent. "That's what she said he'd done to her. He was twenty years older than Mercedes, the Baron. Mercedes always liked to have men who were in love with her hanging about, and that's what the trouble was over. The more they cared the worse she treated them, and the Baron was a very dignified man and didn't like having them around. And she was dreadful jealous of him, too, and used to fly out at him if he so much as looked at another woman; in her way I guess he was the person Mercedes cared for most in all her life; she respected him, too, and she knew he was as clever as she was and more so, and as for him, in spite of everything, he always stayed in love with her. They used to have reconciliations, and when he'd look at her sort of scornful and loving and sad all together, it would make her go all to pieces. She'd throw herself in his arms and cry and cry. No, she ain't all bad, Mercedes. And she thought she could make things all right with him after she'd let herself go; she depended on his caring for her so much and being sorry for her. But I saw well enough as the years went on that he got more and more depressed. He was a depressed man by nature, I reckon, and he read a sight of philosophy of the gloomy kind—that writer Schopenhauer was a favourite of his, I recollect, and Mercedes thought a sight of him, too—and after ten years or so of Mercedes I expect the Baron was pretty sick of life.

"Well, you came. You thought it was Mercedes who was so good to you, and it was in a way. But it was poor Ernst who really cared. He took to you the moment he set eyes on you, and he'd liked your father. And he wanted to have you to live with them and be their adopted daughter and inherit their money when they died. It had always been a grief to him that Mercedes wouldn't have any children. She just had a horror of having children, and he had to give up any hope of it. Well, the moment Mercedes realized how he cared for you she got jealous and they had a scene over you right off, in that hotel at Fontainebleau. She took on like her heart would break and put it that she couldn't bear to have any one with them for good, she loved him so. It was true in a way. I didn't count of course. He looked at her, sick and scornful and loving, and he gave way. That was why you were put to school. She tried to make up by being awful nice to you when you came for your holidays now and then; but she never liked having you round much and Ernst saw it and never showed how much he cared for you. But he did care. You had a real friend in him, Karen. Well, after that came the worst thing Mercedes ever did." Mrs. Talcott paused, gazing before her in the dimly lighted room. "Poor things! Poor Mercedes! It nearly killed her. She's never been the same since. And it was all her fault and she knows it and that's why she's afraid. That's why," she added in a lower voice, "you're sorry for her and put up with everything, because you know she's a miserable woman and it wouldn't do for her to be alone.

"A young man turned up. His name don't matter now, poor fellow. He was just a clever all-over-the-place young man like so many of them, thinking they know more about everything than God Almighty;—like this young man in a way, only not a bad young man like him;—and downright sick with love of Mercedes. He followed her about all over Europe and went to every concert she gave and laid himself out to please her in all the ways he could. And he had a great charm of manner—he was a Russian and very high-bred—and he sort of fascinated her, and she liked it all, I can tell you. Her youth was beginning to go, and the Baron was mighty gloomy, and she just basked in this young man's love, and pretty soon she began to think she was in love with him—perhaps she was—and had never loved before, and she certainly worked herself up to suffer considerably. Well, the Baron saw it. He saw she didn't treat him the way she'd treated the others; she was kind of humble and tender and distracted all the time. The Baron saw it all, but she never noticed that he was getting gloomier and gloomier. I sometimes wonder if things might have been different if he'd been willing to confide in me some. It does folks a sight of good if there's someone they can tell things to. But the Baron was very reserved and never said a word. And at last she burst out with a dreadful scene. You were with them; yes, it was that summer at Felsenschloss; but you didn't know anything about it of course. I was pretty much in the thick of it all, as far as Mercedes went, and I tried to make her see reason and told her she was a sinful woman to treat her husband so; but I couldn't hold her back. She broke out at him one day and told him he was like a jailor to her, and that he suffocated her talent and that he hung on her like a vampire and sucked her youth, and that she loved the other man. I can see her now, rushing up and down that long saloon on that afternoon, with the white blinds drawn down and the sun filtering through them, snatching with her hands at her dress and waving her arms up and down in the air. And the Baron sat on a sofa leaning on his elbow with his hand up over his eyes and watched her under it. And he didn't say one word. When she fell down on another sofa and cried and cried, he got up and looked at her for a moment; but it wasn't the scornful, loving look; it was a queer, dark, dead way. And he just went out. And we never saw him alive again.

"You know the rest, Karen. You found him. But no one knows why he did it, no one but you and me. He put an end to himself, because he couldn't stand it any longer, and to set her free. They called it suicidal mania and the doctors said he must have had melancholia for years. But I shan't ever forget his face when he went out, and no more will Mercedes. After he was gone she thought she'd never cared for anything in the world but him. She never saw that young man again. She wrote him a letter and laid the blame on him, and said he'd tried to take her from her adored husband and that she'd never forgive him and loathed the thought of him, and that he had made her the most wretched of women, and he went and blew his brains out and that was the end of him. I had considerable difficulty in getting hold of that letter. It was on him when he killed himself. But I managed to talk over the police and hush it up. Mercedes gave me plenty of money to manage with. I don't know what she thinks about that poor fellow; she's never named his name since that day. And she went on like a mad thing for two years or more. You remember about that, Karen. She said she'd never play the piano again or see anybody and wanted to go and be a nun. But she had a friend who was a prioress of a convent, and she advised her not to. I guess poor Mercedes wouldn't have stayed long in a convent. And the reason she was nice to you was because the Baron had been fond of you and she wanted to make up all she could for that dreadful thing in her life. She had you to come and live with her. You didn't interfere with anything any longer and it sort of soothed her to think it was what he'd have liked. She's fond of you, too. She wouldn't have put up with you for so long if she hadn't been. She'd have found some excuse for being quit of you. But as for loving you, Karen child, like you thought she did, or like you love her, why it's pitiful. I used to wonder how long it would be before you found her out."

Karen's face was hidden; she had rested it upon her hands, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, and she had not moved while Mrs. Talcott told her story. Now, as Mrs. Talcott sat silent, she stirred slightly.

"Tante! Tante!" she muttered. "My beautiful!"

Mrs. Talcott did not reply to this for some moments; then she laid her hand on Karen's shoulder. "That's it," she said. "She's beautiful and it most kills us to find out how cruel and bad she can be. But I guess we can't judge people like Mercedes, Karen. When you go through life like a mowing-machine and see everyone flatten out before you, you must get kind of exalted ideas about yourself. If anything happens that makes a hitch, or if anybody don't flatten out, why it must seem to you as if they were wrong in some way, doing you an injury. That's the way it is with Mercedes. She don't mean to be cruel, she don't mean to be bad; but she's a mowing-machine and if you get in her way she'll cut you up fine and leave you behind. And the thing for you to do, Karen, is to get out of her way as quick as you can."

"Yes, I am going," said Karen.