"Yes, my child; yes," said Madame von Marwitz. "It is well. I will be below. I will watch over you." She raised herself at last. "There is nothing that I can do for you, my Karen?"
"Nothing," said Karen. Her voice, too, seemed sinking into ashes.
Madame von Marwitz opened the door to the dark little staircase and closed it. In the cloaking darkness she paused and leaned against the wall. "Bon Dieu!" she murmured to herself "Bon Dieu!"
She felt sick. She wished to sleep. But she could not sleep yet. She must eat and restore her strength. And she had letters to write; a letter to Mrs. Forrester, a letter to Frau Lippheim, and a note to Tallie. It was as if she had thrown her shuttle across a vast loom that, drawing her after the thread she held, enmeshed her now with all the others in its moving web. She no longer wove; she was being woven into the pattern. Even if she would she could not extricate herself.
The thought of this overmastering destiny sustained and fortified her. She went on down the stairs and into the little sitting-room.
CHAPTER XLIV
The days that passed after her arrival at the inn were to live in Madame von Marwitz's memory as a glare of intolerable anxiety, obliterating all details in its heat and urgency. She might, during the hours when she knelt supplicating beside Karen's bed, have been imaged as a furnace and Karen as a corpse lying in it, strangely unconsumed, passive and unresponsive. There was no cruelty in Karen's coldness, no unkindness even. Pity and comprehension were there; but they were rocks against which Madame von Marwitz dashed herself in vain.
When she would slip from her kneeling position and lie grovelling and groaning on the ground, Karen sometimes would say: "Please get up. Please don't cry," in a tone of distress. But when the question, repeated in every key, came: "Karen, will you not love me again?" Karen's answer was a helpless silence.
Schooling the fury of her eagerness, and in another mood, Madame von Marwitz, after long cogitations in the little sitting-room, would mount to point out to Karen that to persist in her refusal to marry Franz, when she was freed, would be to disgrace herself and him, and to this Karen monotonously and immovably would reply that she would not marry Franz.