[CHAPTER I,] [II,] [III,] [IV,] [V,] [VI,] [VII,] [VIII,] [IX,] [X,] [XI,] [XII,] [XIII,] [XIV,] [XV,] [XVI,] [XVII,] [XVIII,] [XIX,] [XX,] [XXI,] [XXII,] [XXIII,] [XXIV,] [XXV,] [XXVI,] [XXVII,] [XXVIII,] [XXIX,] [XXX,] [XXXI,] [XXXII,] [XXXIII,] [XXXIV,] [XXXV,] [XXXVI,] [XXXVII,] [XXXVIII,] [XXXIX,] [XL,] [XLI,] [XLII,] [XLIII,] [XLIV,] [XLV,] [XLVI,] [XLVII,] [XLVIII,] [XLIX,] [L,] [LI,] [LII,] [LIII,] [LIV,] [LV,] [LVI,] [LVII,] [LVIII,] [LIX,] [LX,] [LXI,] [LXII,] [LXIII,] [LXIV,] [LXV,] [LXVI,] [LXVII,] [LXVIII,] [LXIX,] [LXX,] [LXXI,] [LXXII,] [LXXIII,] [LXXIV,] [LXXV,] [LXXVI,] [LXXVII,] [LXXVIII,] [LXXIX,] [LXXX,] [LXXXI,] [LXXXII,] [LXXXIII,] [LXXXIV,] [LXXXV,] [LXXXVI,] [LXXXVII,] [LXXXVIII,] [LXXXIX,] [XC,] [XCI. ]
THE GREEN BAY TREE
The
GREEN BAY
TREE
A Novel
by
LOUIS BROMFIELD
GROSSET & DUNLAP · PUBLISHERS · NEW YORK
By arrangement with FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
Copyright, 1924, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MY MOTHER,
WHO MUST HAVE KNOWN
AT SOME TIME IN HER LIFE
HATTIE TOLLIVER
“Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”
“Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the least alike and no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows his wife and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable, because we ourselves do not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal it.”
“The Green Bay Tree” is part of what is in a sense a single work known as “Escape,” which includes three other parts: “Possession,” “Early Autumn,” and “A Good Woman.”
THE GREEN BAY TREE
I
IF you can picture a little park, bright for the moment with the flush of early summer flowers and peopled with men and women in the costumes of the late nineties—If you can picture such a park set down in the midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to describe Cypress Hill on the afternoon of the garden party for the Governor. It was a large garden, indeed quite worthy of the name “park,” withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitæ clipped at intervals into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, some genuine, some of them copies. The Venus of Cydnos was there (in copy to be sure), and of course the Apollo Belvedere, a favorite ornament of formal gardens, as well as the Samothrace Victory dashing forward, it seemed, to soar high above the cloud of smoke from the neighboring blast furnaces.
Here and there the hedge displayed signs of death. There were patches where the green had become withered, and other patches where there was no green at all but simply a tangled wall of hard, dead twigs. Where death had touched the barrier it was possible to see beyond the borders of the garden into regions filled with roaring furnaces, steel sheds, and a tangle of glittering railway tracks cluttered by a confusion of semaphores and signal lights which the magic of night transformed into festoons of glowing jewels—emeralds, rubies, cabuchons, opals, glowing in the thick darkness. But it was not yet dark and no one at the garden party peered through the dying gaps in the hedge because by daylight there lay beyond the borders of the garden only ugliness of the most appalling nature.
The little park sloped away on all sides from a great brick house, conceived in the most bizarre union of Georgian and Gothic styles. It was large and square and faced with white stone, but beyond this the Georgian style played no part. The roof carried a half-dozen high pitched gables; the windows were tall and pointed in the manner of a church rectory, and the chimneys, built of white stone, were carved in the most ornate Gothic fashion. Over all clambered a mass of vines,—woodbine, virginia creeper and wistaria—which somehow bound the grotesque combination of styles into one harmonious whole, characterized by a surprising look of age, considering the fact that the house stood in the midst of a community which less than a century before had been a complete and trackless wilderness.
The vines, like the hedge, had been more green and exotic at some earlier day. In places there were now no leaves at all, and elsewhere, though the season was early summer, the leaves appeared sickly and wretched, surrounded by dead bare tendrils pressing desperately against the faded bricks.
On the whole, however, the garden was at its best. Along the gravel walks leading to the arbor, irises raised crowns of mauve, royal purple and yellow. Peonies in the process of bursting from tight green buds into great pom-poms of pink and white tumbled across the flagged walk. At the feet of the flying Eros (made of cast iron and painted white), who carried a ring in one hand and thus served for a hitching post, ground pinks and white violets, brought from England by Julia Shane’s grandmother, peeped from among the blades of new grass. But the greatest splendor had its being in the wistaria. High up among the branches of the dead oak that towered gauntly above the horse block, its cascades of mauve and white and purple poured like water escaping from a broken dam. From the black iron portico tumbled more torrents of blossoms. They appeared even high up among the tips of the pointed cypresses which gave the house its name. To be sure these were not true cypresses at all, for true cypresses could not have survived the harsh northern winter. In reality they were cedars; but their tall, green-black spires, swaying in melancholy fashion at the least breath of air, resembled cypresses as one brother resembles another. John Shane, perhaps because the name roused memories of some secret world of his own, always called them cypresses and such, to all purposes, they had become. None knew why he called the house Cypress Hill or why he loved cypresses so much that he called cedars by that name when nature cheated him out of his heart’s desire. The Town set it down simply as another of his eccentricities. One more craziness no longer disturbed the Town. And John Shane had been dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was one of no importance whatever.
Under the wistarias on the wrought iron piazza his widow, Julia Shane, leaning on her stick of ebony filigreed in silver, surveyed the bright garden and the guests who moved about among the old trees, the men clad in sober black, the ladies in sprigged muslins or bright colored linens. She was a tall thin woman with a nose slightly hooked, which gave her the fleeting look of an eagle, courageous, bold, even a little pitiless and unrelenting. An air of dignity and distinction compensated the deficiencies of beauty; she was certainly not a beautiful woman and her fine skin was already crisscrossed by a million tiny lines no more substantial than cobweb. Like the women of the generation preceding hers, she made no attempt at preserving the illusion of youth. Although she could not have been long past middle age, she dressed as an old woman. She wore a gown of black and mauve of the most expensive materials,—a sign of mourning which she kept up for a husband dead ten years, a husband whose passing could have given her no cause for regret, whose memory could not possibly bring to her ivory cheeks the faintest flush of pleasure. But the black and mauve gave her great dignity and a certain melancholy beauty. On her thin fingers she wore rings set with amethysts and diamonds and about her neck hung a chain of amethysts caught in a setting of old Spanish silver. The chain reached twice about her thin throat and hung to the knees.
She had been standing on the piazza, a little withdrawn from her guests, all the afternoon because she knew that the mauve of her gown and the dull lavender sparkle of the amethysts blended superbly with the tumbling blossoms of the wistaria. She had not been, after all, the wife of John Shane for nothing. People said that he had taught his wife to make the best of herself because he could bear to have about him only those things which were in excellent taste. People also said that his wife was lame, not because she had fallen by accident down the long polished stairway, but because she had been thrown from the top to the bottom by her husband in an insane fit of rage.
From her point of vantage, her bright blue eyes swept the garden, identifying the guests—those whom she desired to have there, those to whose presence she was completely indifferent, and those whom political necessity had forced upon her. About most of them centered scornful, bitter, little thoughts that chased themselves round and round her tired brain.
Over against the hedge on the far side of the little pavilion stood a group which, it appeared, interested her more than any other, for she watched it with a faint smile that carried the merest trace of mockery. She discerned the black of the bombazine worn by Hattie Tolliver, her blood niece, and the sprigged muslin of Hattie’s daughter, Ellen, who stood by resentfully with an air of the most profound scorn while her mother talked to Judge Weissman. The mother talked voluably, exerting all her power to charm the Judge, a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant Viennese Jew. And the efforts of Hattie Tolliver, so solid, so respectable, so downright, were completely transparent, for the woman possessed no trace of subtlety, not the faintest power of dissimulation. She sought to win favor with the Jew because he was the one power in the county politics. He ruled his party with an undisputed sway, and Hattie Tolliver’s husband was a candidate for office. Perhaps from the pinnacle of her worldliness Julia Shane detected a quality naive and almost comic in the vulgar intrigue progressing so blatantly on the opposite side of the pavilion.
There was also a quality indescribably comic in the fierce attitude of the daughter, in her aloofness from the politician and the intensity of her glowering expression. She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful, spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the piano superbly, in a truly extraordinary fashion.
Presently Julia Shane, behind the shelter of the wistaria, sniffed suddenly as though the wind had carried to her among the delicate odors of the flowers the offensive smell of the fat perspiring Jew. He was there by political necessity, because the Governor desired his presence. Clearly she looked upon him as an intruder who defiled the little park.
Farther off at the side of the empty kennels, all buried beneath a tangle of vines, another group had gathered about a table where pink ices and pink and white cakes were being served. About the great silver punch bowl hung a dozen men, drinking, drinking, drinking, as though the little park were a corner saloon and the little table the accustomed free lunch. For a moment Julia Shane’s gaze fastened upon the men and her thin nostrils quivered. Her lips formed themselves to utter a word which she spoke quite loudly so that three women, perfect strangers to her who stood just beneath the piazza, overheard it and spread the story that Julia Shane had taken to talking to herself. “Pigs!” she said.
II
IN other parts of the garden the bright parasols of the gossiping women raised themselves in little clumps like mushrooms appearing unexpectedly through the green of a wide lawn. The Governor was nowhere to be seen, nor Lily nor Irene, Julia Shane’s two daughters.
The guests began to depart. A victoria with a driver on the box came round the corner of the old house. A fat dowager, dressed in purple and wearing a gold chain, bowed, and the diminutive young man beside her, in a very tight coat and a derby hat, smiled politely—very politely—Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son Willie, of the great family which owned the Mills.
Julia Shane bowed slightly and leaned more heavily upon her ebony stick. A second vehicle appeared, this time a high buggy which bore the county auditor and his wife ... common people who never before had entered the wrought iron gates of Cypress Hill. The fat and blowsy wife bowed in an exaggerated fashion, never stopping the while to fan her red face vigorously until she discovered that her elaborate bows were expended upon the back of Julia Shane, who had become suddenly absorbed in the rings that glittered on her bony fingers. The smile froze on the fat lady’s face and her heavy lips pursed themselves to utter with a savage intensity of feeling the word “Snob!” Indeed, her indignation so mounted under the protests of her tipsy husband, that a moment later she altered the epithet to another more vulgar and more powerful phrase. “Old Slut!” she said aloud. The two carriages made their way down the long avenue between the rows of dying Norway spruce to the gate where Hennery, the black servant, stood on guard.
Outside, with faces pressed against the bars, stood a score of aliens from the hovels of the mill workers in the neighboring Flats. The little group included a dozen women wearing shawls and a multitude of petticoats, three or four children and as many half-grown boys still a year or two too young to be of any use to the Harrison Mills. They pushed and pressed against the handsome gates, striving for a glimpse at the spectacle of the bright garden animated by the figures of the men and women who ruled the Town, the Flats, the very lives and destinies of the little throng of aliens. A baby squalled in the heat and one of the boys, a tall powerful fellow with a shock of yellow hair, spat through the bars.
At the approach of the carriage the black Hennery sprang up and with the gesture of one opening the gates of Buckingham Palace, shouted to the crowd outside, “Look out, you all! There’s carriages a-coming!”
Then with a great clanging and shooting of bolts he swung open the gates and Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son William swept through. The hoofs of the dancing horses beat a tattoo on the cobblestones. The mother saw nothing, but the narrow eyes of her son appraised the group of boys and even the babies as potential workers in the Mills. These Dago children grew rapidly, but not fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the growing furnaces; and so many of them died before they reached manhood.
As the carriage swung into narrow Halsted Street, Mrs. Harrison, leaning forward so that the gold chain swayed like a pendulum from her mountainous bosom, surveyed the wretched houses, the yards bereft of all green, and the shabby railway station that stood a hundred yards from the very gates of Shane’s Castle.
“You’d think Julia Shane would move out of this filthy district,” she said. “Sentiment is all right, but there’s such a thing as running it into the ground. The smoke and soot is even killing the flowers. They’re not half so fine as last year.”
Her son William shrugged his narrow, sloping shoulders.
“The ground is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “Three railroads—the only site left. She could get her own price.”
In the corner saloon a mechanical piano set up a tinny uproar and shattered fragments of The Blue Danube drifted out upon the hot air through the swinging doors into the street, throttling for the moment any further conversation.
The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them from him and swore.
“She needn’t think she’s so damned swell,” she said. “What’s she got to make her so proud? I should think she’d blush at what has happened in that rotten old house. Why, she’s got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for neighbors!”
She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.
With a loud, officious bang, Hennery closed the wrought iron gates and the wise, old faces of the alien women pressed once more against the bars. One of the throng—the big boy with the shock of yellow hair, a Ukrainian named Stepan Krylenko—shouted something in Russian as the gates banged together. It was a tongue foreign to Hennery but from the look in the fierce blue eye of the young fellow, the negro understood that what he said was not friendly. The women admonished the boy and fell to whispering in awe among themselves, but the offender in no way modified his manner. When Judge Weissman, fat and perspiring and covered with jewelry, whirled past him in a phaeton a moment later, the boy shouted in Russian, “Jew! Dirty Jew!” Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, “These foreigners are getting too free in their manners.... The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of these days.... There ought to be a law against letting them into the country.”
The Judge was angry, although his anger was stirred not by the shout of Stepan Krylenko but by the fact that Julia Shane had become suddenly blind as his phaeton swept round the corner of the old house. The shout was something upon which to fasten his anger.
III
FROM her point of vantage on the wistaria clad piazza, the old woman watched the little drama at the entrance to the Park, and when the gates had been flung closed once more, she moved back into the cool shadows, still wondering where Lily and Irene and the Governor could have hidden themselves. She settled herself on an iron bench, praying that no one would pass to disturb her, and at the same moment the sound of sobbing reached her ears. It came from the inside of the house, from the library just beyond the tall window. There, in a corner beyond the great silver mounted globe, Irene had flung herself down and was weeping. The half-suppressed sobs shook the girl’s frail body. Her muslin dress with the blue sash was crushed and damp. The mother bent over her and drew the girl into a sitting posture against the brocade of the rosewood sofa.
“Come, Irene,” said the old woman. “It is no time for tears. There is time enough when this infernal crowd is gone. What is it? What has come over you since yesterday?”
The girl’s sobs grew more faint but she did not answer nor raise her head. She was frail and blond with wide blue eyes set far apart. Her thick hair was done low at the back of her neck. She had a small pretty mouth and a rather prominent nose. Her mother must have resembled her before she hardened into a cynical old woman, before the prominent nose became an eagle’s beak and the small pretty mouth a thin-lipped sardonic one. The mother, puzzled and silent, sat stiffly beside the sobbing girl, fingering all the while the chain of amethysts set in Spanish silver.
“Are you tired?” she asked presently.
“No.”
“Then what is it, Irene? There must be some reason. Girls don’t behave like this for nothing. What have you done that has made you miserable?”
“Nothing,” sobbed the girl. “Nothing!”
The mother sat up a little straighter and began to trace with her ebony stick the outlines of the roses on the Aubusson carpet. At length she spoke again in a clear, hard voice.
“Then you must pull yourself together and come out. I want you to find Lily and the Governor.—Every one is leaving and they should be here. There’s no use in giving a party for him if he is going to snub the politicians.... Here—sit up!... Turn round while I fasten your hair.”
With perfect deliberation the mother arranged the girl’s hair, smoothed the crumpled muslin of her dress, patted straight the blue ribbon sash, dried her eyes, and bade her stand away to be surveyed.
“Now,” she said in the same crisp voice, “You look all right.... I can’t have you behaving like this.... You should be out in the garden. Before I die, Irene, I want to see you married. You never will be if you hide yourself where no one can see you.... I don’t worry over Lily—she can take care of herself. Go and find them and bring them back.... Tell them I said to return at once.”
The girl, without a word, went out of the room into the big dark hallway and thence into the garden. Her mother’s voice was one made to command. It was seldom that any one refused to carry out her orders. When Irene reached the terrace the guests were making their way back toward the house in little groups of two or three, ladies in summer dresses very tight at the waists, shielding their complexions from the June sun with small, bright-colored parasols ... Mrs. Mills, the rector’s wife, Miss Bird, the Town librarian, Mrs. Smyth, wife of the Methodist clergyman, Mrs. Miliken, wife of the sheriff, Miss Abercrombie, Mrs.... And behind them, the husbands, and the stray politicians who treated the little arbor over the punch bowl as though it were a corner saloon. The punch was gone now and the last of the pink ices melted. From other parts of the garden more guests made their way toward the house. Irene passed them, bowing and forcing herself to smile though the effort brought her a kind of physical pain. Among the rhododendrons she came upon a little terra cotta Virgin and Child brought by father from Sienna and, remembering her convent training, she paused for a moment and breathed a prayer.
Lily and the Governor were not among the rhododendrons. She ran on to the little pavilion beyond the iris walk. It was empty. The arbor, green with the new leaves of the Concord grapes, was likewise untenanted save by the shadows of the somber, tall cypresses. The girl ran on and on from one spot of shelter to another, distracted and terrified, her muslin dress soiled and torn by the twigs. The little park grew empty and the shadows cast by the setting sun sprawled across the patches of open grass. Two hiding places remained, but these Irene avoided. One was the clump of bushes far down by the iron gates. She dared not go there because the little crowd of aliens peering through the bars terrified her. Earlier in the afternoon she had wandered there to be alone and a big tow headed boy shouted at her in broken English, “There are bones ... people’s bones hidden in your cellar!”
No, she dared not again risk the torment of his shouting.
The other hiding place was the old well behind the stables, a well abandoned now and almost lost under a tangle of clematis. There was a sheltered seat by its side. The girl ran as far as the stables and then, summoning her strength to lie to her mother if the necessity arose, turned back without looking and hastened across the garden toward the piazza. She had not the courage to approach the well because she knew that it was there she would find her sister Lily and the Governor.
When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity. She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were present—the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.
“And where are they?—Have you found them?”
The girl’s lips grew pale, and when she replied, she trembled with the awful consciousness of lying to her mother.
“I cannot find them. I have looked everywhere.”
The mother frowned. “Bring me an ash tray, Irene, and do not lie to me. They are in the garden.” She crushed out the ember of her cigarette. “That man is a fool. He has offended a dozen important men after I took the trouble to invite them here. God knows, I didn’t want them!”
While she was speaking, the sound of footsteps arose in the open gallery that ran along the far side of the drawing-room, and two figures, silhouetted against the smoky, setting sun, appeared at the windows moving toward the doorway. They were the missing Lily and the Governor. He followed her at a little distance as though they had been quarreling and she had forbidden him to address her. At the sight of them, Irene moved toward the door, but her mother checked her escape.
“Irene! Where are you going now? What are you afraid of? If this behavior does not stop, I shall forbid you to go to mass. You are already too pious for any good on this earth.”
The frightened girl returned silently and sat down with her usual air of submission on the sofa that stood in the shadows by a mantelpiece which supported a painting of Venice, flamboyant and glowing, executed by the hand of Turner. At the sound of Lily’s voice, she shrank back among the cushions as if to hide herself. There was in the voice nothing to terrify her. On the contrary it was a voice, low and warm, indolent and ingratiating—a voice full of charm, one which inspired affection.
Lily was taller than her sister and two years older; yet there was an enormous difference between them which had to do less with age than with manner. There was about Irene something childish and undeveloped. Lily was a woman, a young woman, to be sure, tall and lovely. Her hair was the color of honey. It held bright copper lights; and she wore it, in the fashion of Irene, low on a lovely neck that carried a warning of wilfulness. Her skin was the transparent sort which artists love for its green lights, and her eyes were of a shade of violet which in some lights appeared a clear blue. Her arms were laden with irises, azure and pale yellow, which she had plucked on her way from the old well. She too wore a frock of muslin with a girdle of radiant blue. As she entered, she laid the flowers gently among the crystal and silver bibelots of a rosewood table and rang for Sarah, the mulatto wife of Hennery, guardian of the wrought iron gates.
The Governor followed her, a tall man of perhaps forty, strongly built with a fine chest and broad shoulders. His hair was black and vigorous and he wore it cropped close to a well-shaped head. He had the drooping mustaches of the period. His was a figure which commands the attention of mobs. His manner, when he was not too pompous or condescending, was charming. People said there was no reason why he should not one day be president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.
He was angry now with a primitive, boiling anger which threatened to burst the bonds of his restraint. His breath came huskily. It was the anger of a man accustomed to dominate, who has encountered suddenly some one who cares not a fig for his powers.
“Madame,” he said, “your daughter has refused to marry me.”
The mother took up her ebony stick and placed it squarely before her, at the same time leaning forward upon it. For a moment, she smiled, almost secretly, with a sort of veiled amusement at his pompous speech. She did not speak until the mulatto woman, slipping in noiselessly, had taken the flowers and disappeared again into the vast hall. Then she addressed Lily who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her lovely body slightly balanced, her manner as calm and as placid as if nothing had gone wrong.
The girl nodded and smiled, so slightly that the play of expression could scarcely have been called a smile. It was as though she kept the smile among her other secrets, not to be shared by people who knew nothing of its meaning.
“It is serious, Madame, I promise you,” the Governor interrupted. “I love your daughter. She has told me that she loves me.” He had grown a little pompous now, as though he were addressing an assembly of constituents. “What else is there?” He turned to Lily suddenly, “It is true, isn’t it?”
The girl nodded. “Yes, I have told you that.... But I will not marry you.... I am not refusing because I want to be unkind.... I can’t help it. Believe me, I cannot.”
The mother began tracing the design on the carpet, round and round the petals of the faded roses. When she spoke she did not raise her head. She kept on tracing ... tracing....
“There must be some reason, Lily.... It is a match not to be cast aside lightly.... It would make me very happy.”
She was interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Irene had vanished into the gallery on the far side of the drawing-room. The three of them saw her running past the window back into the garden as though she were pursued. The mother fell once more to tracing the outlines on the carpet. In the growing darkness the scent of the lilac grew more and more strong.
The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane ... alone, if possible. There are some things which I must tell ... things which are unpleasant but of tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must confess them.”
At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed her head suddenly and looked away.
“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.
The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”
He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”
The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky, glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.
Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons. There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against Irene’s pale one.
IV
THAT night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly, and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.
At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and addressed him.
“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began. “It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”
For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.
“I have told you that I love Lily.”
The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity of an iceberg.
“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”
Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say.... It is, after all, her affair.”
The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.
It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing the door softly behind her.
“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it to-night one way or another, for good and all.”
The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before her.
“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue. “Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe you understand.”
The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you know ... certainly not now.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down thoughtfully.
The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law. You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”
The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one. No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”
“But why ... why?” began her mother.
“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”
V
FOR a little while the room grew silent save for the distant pounding of the Mills, regular and reverberant, monotonous and unceasing. The wind from the South bore a smell of soot which smothered the scent of wistaria and iris. All at once a cry rang out and the Governor, very red and handsome in his tight coat, fell on his knees before her, his arms about her waist. The girl remained sitting quietly, her face quite white now against the black of her cloak.
“Please ... please, Lily,” the man cried. “I will give up everything ... I will do as you like. I will be your slave.” He became incoherent and muddled, repeating over and over again the arguments he had used in the afternoon by the old well. For a long time he talked, while the girl sat as still as an image carved from marble, regarding him curiously as though the whole scene were a nightmare and not reality at all. At last he stopped talking, kissed her hand and stood up once more. The old woman seated under the portrait said nothing. She regarded the pair silently with wise, narrowed eyes.
It was Lily who spoke. “It is no use.... How can I explain to you? I would not be a good wife. I know ... you see, I know because I know myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my affair.” A note almost of stubbornness entered her voice. “Two days ago I might have married you. I cannot now, because I know. I wanted to know, you see.” She looked up suddenly with a strange smile. “Would you have preferred me to take a lover from the streets?”
For the first time the mother stirred in her chair. “Lily ... Lily.... How can you say such a thing?”
The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”
For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say farewell.
“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then, checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been Irene.”
Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying slowly away as she ascended the stairs.
At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane, leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.
Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress Hill came abruptly to an end.
He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.
As for the third—Irene—she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.
VI
THERE had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town, when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.
Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house. Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane’s Castle and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town preferred their own name and it was known as Shane’s Castle to the very end.
Who John Shane was or whence he came remained a mystery. Some said he was Irish, which might well have been. Others were certain that he was English because he spoke with the clipped accent of an Englishman. There were even some who held that so swarthy a man could only have come from Spain or Italy; and some were convinced that his love of travel was due to an obscure strain of gipsy blood. As to the light which Shane himself cast upon the subject, no one ever penetrated beyond a vague admission that he had lived in London and found the life there too tame.
He set himself up in the house at Cypress Hill to lead the life of a gentleman, a worldly cynical gentleman, perhaps the only gentleman in the archaic sense of the word in all the Western Reserve. In a frontier community where every one toiled, he alone made, beyond the control of his farms, no pretense at working. He had his horses and his dogs, and because there were no hounds to follow and no hunters to ride with him, he set aside on the land bordering the main street of the Town a great field where he rode every day including the Sabbath, and took the most perilous jumps to the amazement of the farmers and townspeople who gathered about the paddock to watch his eccentric behavior.
Among these were a Scotch settler and his son-in-law, Jacob Barr, who owned jointly a great stretch of land to the west of Shane’s farm. They kept horses to ride though they were in no sense sporting men. They were honest stock, dignified and hard-working, prosperous and respected throughout the country as men who had wrested from the wilderness a prosperous living. MacDougal was the first abolitionist in the county. He it was who established the first station of the underground railway and organized the plans for helping slaves to escape across the border into Canada. These two sometimes brought their horses into the paddock at Shane’s farm and there, under his guidance, taught them to jump.
The abolitionist activities culminated in the Civil War, and the three men joined the colors, Shane as a lieutenant because somewhere in his mysterious background there was a thorough experience in military affairs. His two friends joined the ranks, rising at length to commands. MacDougal lost his life in the campaign of the Wilderness. Jacob Barr returned stricken by fever, and Shane himself received a bullet in the thigh.
Returning as a colonel from the war he found that in place of the dead MacDougal he had as a riding companion the farmer’s youngest daughter, a girl of nineteen. She had taken to the saddle with enthusiasm and was a horsewoman after his own heart. She knew no such thing as fear; she joined him recklessly in the most perilous feats and sat his most unruly horses with the ease and grace of an Amazon. She was not a pretty girl. The word “handsome” would have described her more accurately. She was strong, lithe and vigorous, and her features, though large like the honest MacDougal’s, were clearly chiseled and beautiful in a large way.
The strange pair rode together in the paddock more and more frequently until, at last, the astonished county learned that John Shane, the greatest gentleman in the state, had taken MacDougal’s youngest daughter east over the mountains and quietly made her mistress of Shane’s Castle. It also learned that he had taken his bride to Europe, and that his housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged Irish woman who never mingled with the townspeople, had been sent away, thus ending rumors of sin which had long scandalized the county. It appeared, some citizens hinted, that Julia MacDougal had been substituted for the Irish woman.
For two years the couple remained abroad, but during that time they were separated, for Shane, conscious of his bride’s rustic simplicity, sent her to a boarding school for English girls kept by a Bonapartist spinster named Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. During those two years he did not visit her, choosing instead to absent himself upon some secret business in the south of Europe; and when he returned, his bride found it difficult to recognize in the man with a thick, blue black beard, the husband she had married two years earlier. The adornment gave him an appearance even more alien and sinister.
The two years were for the girl wretched ones, but in some incomprehensible fashion they hardened her and fitted her to begin the career her mysterious husband had planned. When they returned to Cypress Hill, Shane shaved off his beard once more and entered politics. From then on, great people came to stay at Cypress Hill—judges, politicians, lawyers, once even a president. As for Shane he sought no office for himself. It seemed that he preferred in politics to be the power behind the throne, the kingmaker, the man who advised and planned campaigns; he preferred the intrigues without the responsibilities. And so he became a figure in the state, a strange, bizarre, dashing figure which caught somehow the popular imagination. His face became known everywhere, as well as the stories about his private life, of strange brawls in the growing cities of the middle-west, of affairs with women, of scandals of every sort save those which concerned his personal honesty. Here he was immune. No one doubted his honesty. And the scandals did him little harm save in a small group of his own townspeople who regarded him as the apotheosis of sin, as a sort of Lucifer dwelling in a great brick house in the center of the Black Fork marshes.
In the great house, his wife, whose life it was whispered was far from happy, bore him two daughters, a circumstance which might have disappointed most men. It pleased the perverse John Shane who remarked that he was glad there was no son to carry on “his accursed name.”
As he grew older the unpopularity increased until among the poorer residents of the Town strange stories found their way into circulation, tales of orgies and wickedness in the great brick house. The stories at length grew by repetition until they included the unfortunate wife. But Shane went his proud way driving his handsome horses through the Town, riding like mad in the paddock. The Town grew and spread along the outskirts of his farm, threatening to surround it, but Shane would not sell. He scorned the arguments for progress and prosperity and held on to his land. At last there came a second railroad and then a third which crossed the continent, passing on their way along the banks of the sluggish Black Fork through the waving green swamp. Shane found himself powerless because the state condemned the land and it was his own party which promoted the railroad. He gave way and his land doubled and tripled in value. Factories began to appear and the marsh land became precious because in its midst three railroads crossed in a triangle which surrounded the house at Cypress Hill. Shane became older and more perverse. The tales increased, tales of screams heard in the night and of brutalities committed upon his wife; more scandals about a young servant girl leaked out somehow and were seized by the population of the Town. But throughout the state Shane’s name still commanded respect. When the great came to the Town they stopped at Shane’s Castle where the drawing-room was thrown open and receptions were held with the rag, tag and bobtail permitted to satisfy their curiosity. They found nothing but a handsome house, strange and beautifully furnished in a style unknown in the Town. John Shane and his wife, her face grown hard now as the jewels on her fingers, stood by this judge or that governor to receive, calm and dignified, distinguished by a worldliness foreign to the rugged, growing community.
And at last the master of Shane’s Castle was stricken dead by apoplexy one winter night at the top of the long polished stairway; and the wiry, thin old body rolled all the way to the bottom. Irene, who was a neurotic, timid girl, saw him fall and ran screaming from the house. Lily was in Europe at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, a pensionnaire in the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux. The wife quietly raised the body, laid it on a sofa under the portrait in the library and summoned a doctor who made certain that the terrible old man at last was dead.
When the news of his death spread through the Town, Italian workmen passing along the railroad at the foot of Cypress Hill crossed themselves and looked away as though the devil himself lay in state inside the wrought iron gates. Governors, judges and politicians attended the funeral and the widow appeared in deep mourning which she wore for three years. She played the role of a wife bereft of a devoted husband. The world whispered tales of her unhappiness, but the world knew nothing. When great people came to the Town, they were still entertained at Cypress Hill. The legend of John Shane attained the most fantastic proportions; it became a part of the Town’s tradition. The words which Stepan Krylenko, the tow-headed Ukrainian, shouted through the wrought iron gates at the terrified Irene were simply an echo of certain grotesque stories.
After the death of her husband, Julia Shane sold off piecemeal at prodigious prices the land in the marshes traversed by the railroads. Factory after factory was erected. Some built farming implements, some manufactured wooden ware, but it was steel which occupied most of the district. Rolling mills came in and blast furnaces raised their bleak towers until Shane’s Castle was no longer an island surrounded by marshes but by great furnaces, steel sheds and a glistening maze of railway tracks. New families grew wealthy and came into prominence, the Harrisons among them. Some of the Shane farm land was sold, but out of it the widow kept a wide strip bordering Main Street where she erected buildings which brought her fat rents. The money that remained she invested shrewdly so that it increased at a startling rate. She became a rich woman and the legend of Shane’s Castle grew, spurred on by envy.
To the foreigners who lived in the hovels at the gate of Cypress Hill, the house and the park became the symbols of an oppressing wealth, of a crude relentless power no less savage than the old world which they had deserted for this new one. It was true that Julia Shane had nothing to do with the mills and furnaces; her money came from the land she owned. The mills were owned by the Harrisons and Judge Weissman; but Shane’s Castle became an easy symbol upon which to fix a hatred. Its fading grandeur arose in the very midst of the hot and overcrowded kennels of the workers.
VII
SIX weeks after the night the Governor drove furiously away from the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane gave her last dinner before sending Lily away. It was small, including only Mrs. Julis Harrison, her son William, and Miss Abercrombie, but it served her purpose clearly as a piece of strategy to deceive the Town. Irene was absent, having gone back to the convent in the east where she had been to school as a little girl. A great doctor advised the visit, a doctor who held revolutionary ideas gained in Vienna. It was, he said, the one means of bringing the girl round, since he could drag from her no sane reason for her melancholy and neurasthenic behavior. Her mother could discover nothing; indeed it appeared that the girl had a strange fear of her which struck her dumb. So Julia Shane overcame her distaste for the Roman Catholic church and permitted the girl to return, thanking Heaven that she had kept from her the truth. This, she believed, would have caused Irene to lose her mind.
In the drawing-room after dinner a discreet battle raged with Julia Shane on one side and Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie on the other. Lily and William Harrison withdrew to the library. In a curious fashion the drawing-room made an excellent battle-ground for so polite a struggle. It was so old, so mysterious and so delicate. There were no lights save the lamps, three of them, one majolica, one blue faience and one Ming, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the tall mirror and the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. The only flowers were a bowl of white peonies which Lily had been able to save from the wreck of a garden beaten for three days by a south wind.
“The Governor’s visit,” observed Mrs. Harrison, “turned out unfortunately. He succeeded in offending almost every one of importance.”
“And his sudden going-away,” added Miss Abercrombie, eagerly leaning forward.
Julia Shane stirred in her big chair. To-night she wore an old-fashioned gown of black lace, very tight at the waist and very low in the neck, which displayed boldly the boniness of her strong shoulders. “I don’t think he intended slighting any one,” she said. “He was called away by a telegram. A Governor, you know, has duties. When Colonel Shane was alive....” And she launched into an anecdote of twenty years earlier, told amusingly and skilfully, leading Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie for the time being far away from the behavior of the Governor. She spoke of her husband as she always did, in terms of the most profound devotion.
Mrs. Harrison was a handsome stout woman, a year or two older than Julia Shane but, unlike her, given to following the fashions closely. She preserved an illusion of youth by much lacing and secret recourse to rouge, a vain deception before Julia Shane, who knew rouge in all its degrees in Paris where rouge was used both skilfully and frankly. She moved, the older woman, with a slight pomposity, conscious always of the dignity of her position as the richest woman in the Town; for she was richer by a million or two than Julia Shane, to whom she acceded nothing save the prestige which was Cypress Hill and its tradition.
Miss Abercrombie, a spinster of uncertain age, wore her hair in a pompadour and spoke French, as she believed, perfectly. It was necessary that she believe in her own French, for she it was who instructed the young girls of the Town in French and in history, drawing upon a background derived from a dozen summers spent at one time or another on the continent. Throughout Julia Shane’s long anecdote, Miss Abercrombie interrupted from time to time with little fluttering sighs of appreciation, with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and sudden observations of how much pleasanter the Town had been in the old days. When the anecdote at last was finished, she it was who brought the conversation by a sudden heroic gesture back to the Governor.
“And tell me, dear Julia,” she said. “Is there no news of Lily?... Has nothing come of the Governor’s devotion?”
There was nothing, Julia replied with a sharp, compressed smile. “Nothing at all, save a flirtation. Lily, you know, is very pretty.”
“So beautiful!” remarked Mrs. Harrison. “I was telling my son William so, only to-night. He admires her ... deeply, you know, deeply.” She had taken to fanning herself vigorously for the night was hot. She did it boldly, endeavoring in vain to force some stray zephyr among the rolls of fat inside her tight bodice.
“What I can never understand,” continued Miss Abercrombie, “is why Lily hasn’t already married. A girl so pretty and so nice to every one ... especially older people.”
Mrs. Shane became falsely deprecating of Lily’s charms. “She is a good girl,” she said. “But hardly as charming as all that. The trouble is that she’s very fastidious. She isn’t easy to suit.” In her deprecation there was an assumption of superiority, as though she could well afford to deprecate because no one could possibly take her seriously.
“She’s had plenty of chances.... I don’t doubt that,” observed Miss Abercrombie. “I can remember that summer when we were all in Aix together.... Do you remember the young Englishman, Julia? The nice one with yellow hair?” She turned to Mrs. Julis Harrison with an air of arrogant pride and intimacy. “He was the second son of a peer, you know, and she could have had him by a turn of her finger.”
And the association with the peerage placed for the time being Miss Abercrombie definitely on the side of Julia Shane in the drawing-room skirmish.
“And Harvey Biggs was so devoted to her,” she babbled on. “Such a nice boy ... gone now to the war like so many other brave fellows.” Then as though remembering suddenly that William Harrison was not at the war but safe in the library across the hall, she veered quickly. “They say the Spanish atrocities in Cuba are beyond comprehension. I feel that we should spread them as much as possible to rouse the spirit of the people.”
“I’ve thought since,” remarked Mrs. Harrison, “that you should have had flags for decorations at the garden party, Julia. With a war on and especially with the Governor here. I only mention it because it has made people talk. It only adds to the resentment against his behavior.”
“I thought the flowers were enough,” replied Mrs. Shane, making a wry face. “They were so beautiful until cinders from your furnaces destroyed them. Those peonies,” she added, indicating the white flowers that showed dimly in the soft light, “are all that is left.” There was a moment’s pause and the distant throb of the Mills filled the room, proclaiming their eternal presence. It was a sound which never ceased. “The garden party seems to have been a complete failure. I’m growing too old to entertain properly.”
“Nonsense!” declared Mrs. Julis Harrison with great emphasis. “But I don’t see why you persist in living here with the furnaces under your nose.”
“I shan’t live anywhere else. Cypress Hill was here before the Mills ... long before.”
Almost unconsciously each woman discovered in the eye of the other a faint gleam of anger, the merest flash of spirit, a sign of the eternal struggle between that which is established and that which is forever in a state of flux, which Mrs. Julis Harrison in her heart called “progress” and Julia Shane in hers called “desecration.”
VIII
THE struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue eyes that protruded a little from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.
“It is late, mother,” he said. “And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday.”
His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.
“Sailing!” repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and suspending her fan in mid-air. “Sailing! Why didn’t you tell me, Julia? I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily.”
“Sailing,” echoed Miss Abercrombie, “to France, my dear! I have some commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?”
Lily smiled slowly. “Of course not. Can you send them down in the morning? I’m afraid I won’t get up to the Town to-morrow.”
She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery’s wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison’s first speech.
“Tell Hennery,” she said, “to send round Mrs. Harrison’s carriage.” The old woman was taking no chances now.
There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement over the thought of a voyage to “the continent.” The carriage arrived and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the squalid street.
When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which, sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.
“She refused me,” he said.
For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, “She may come round.... You’re not clever with women, William.”
The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that his mother’s opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope had been killed—put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last, despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.
“It couldn’t be,” she thought. “Julia would never have dared to invite us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and pleasant. No, it’s impossible!”
All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend who lived in Paris.
IX
AT Cypress Hill, Julia Shane and her elder daughter returned, when the door had closed on their guests, to the drawing-room to discuss after a custom of long standing the entertainment of the evening. They agreed that Mrs. Harrison had grown much too stout, that she was indeed on the verge of apoplexy; that Miss Abercrombie became steadily more fidgety and affected.
“A woman should marry,” said Julia Shane, “even if she can do no better than a day laborer.”
Two candles by the side of the tall mirror and one by the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner guttered feebly and expired. Now that she was alone, the old woman lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke quietly into the still air. It was Lily who interrupted the silence.
“Willie proposed to me again,” she said presently.
The mother made no answer but regarded the girl quietly with a curious questioning look in her tired eyes. Lily, seated in the glow of light from the majolica lamp, must have understood what was passing in her mind.
“No,” she said, “if I had wanted to marry, I could have had a man ... a real man.” For a second her eyes grew dark with emotion and her red lips curved as if she remembered suddenly and with a shameless pleasure the embraces of her lover. “No,” she continued, “I wouldn’t play such a trick, even on a poor thing like Willie.”
The old woman knocked the ashes from her cigarette. The rings flashed and glittered in the candle light. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think you are hopeless ... altogether abandoned.”
There was a note of melancholy in her voice, so poignant that the girl suddenly sprang from her chair, crossed the little space between them and embraced her mother impulsively. “I’m sorry for your sake, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry....” She kissed the hard, handsome face and the mother returned the embrace with a sudden fierce burst of unaccustomed passion.
“It’s all right, Lily dear. I’m only thinking of you. I don’t think anything can really hurt me any longer. I’m an old warrior, tough and well-armored.” For a second she regarded the girl tenderly and then asked, “but aren’t you afraid?”
“No!” The answer was quiet and confident.
“You’re a strange, strange girl,” said the mother.
X
MADAME GIGON with Fifi lived in a tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption. In the summer she went to live at Germigny l’Evec in a curve of the Marne after it has passed Meaux and Trilport, wandering its soft and amiable way between sedges and wild flags under rows of tall plane trees with bark as green and spotted as the backs of salamanders. Here she occupied the lodge of the château belonging to her cousin, a gentleman who inherited his title from a banker of the First Empire and lent the lodge rent free to Madame Gigon, whose father, also a banker, was ruined by the collapse of the Second Empire. M. Gigon, a scholar and antiquarian, one of the curators of the Cluny Museum, was long since dead—an ineffectual little man with a stoop and a squint, who lived his life gently and faded out of it with so little disturbance that even Madame Gigon sometimes examined her conscience and her respectability because there were long periods when she forgot that he had ever existed at all. Fifi was to her far more of a personality—Fifi with her fat waddle, her black and tan coat, and her habit of yapping for gateaux at tea time.
Although Madame Gigon was not English at all, tea was a fixed rite in her life. She came by the custom at the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the edge of Paris where tea was a regular meal because there was always a score of English girls among Mademoiselle’s pensionnaires. On the passing of Monsieur Gigon she had taken, under the stress of bitter necessity, a place as instructress in art and history at the establishment of the aging Mademoiselle de Vaux, who, like herself was a Bonapartist, a bourgeoise and deeply respectable. She saved from her small salary a comfortable little fortune, and at length retired with Fifi to the little flat in the Rue de la Assomption to live upon her interest and the bounty of her cousin the Baron. But above even her respectability and her small fortune, she honored her position, an element which she had preserved through a lifetime of adversity. She was respected still as the daughter of a man who had ruined himself to support Napoleon the Little. She still attended the salons of the Bonapartist families in the houses and apartments of Passy, of the Boulevard Flandrin, and the new Paris of the Place de l’Etoile. She was respected still in the circles which moved about the aging figure of the Prince Bonaparte and, greatest of all, she received a card of admission signed by his own hand whenever the Prince addressed the Geographical Society.
Madame Gigon was in the act of closing her tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption for the summer when the letter of Julia Shane arrived. At the news it contained, she suspended the operations necessary to her departure for the lodge of Germigny l’Evec and settled herself to await the arrival of pretty Lily Shane, contenting herself meanwhile with taking Fifi for airings in the Bois de Boulogne, a suitable distance away for one of Madame’s age and infirmities. And when the day came, she managed to meet Lily in a fiacre at the Gare du Nord.
There was something touching in Madame Gigon’s reception of the girl, something even more touching in Lily’s reception by the fat and wheezing Fifi. The shrewd old dog remembered her as the girl who had been generous with gateaux, and when Lily, dressed smartly in a purple suit with a large hat covered with plumes, climbed into the fiacre, the plump Fifi shouted and leapt about with all the animation of a puppy.
Throughout the journey to Meaux and on the succeeding trip by carriage along the Marne to Germigny, the pair made no mention of Julia Shane’s letter. They talked of the heat, of the beauty of the countryside, of Mademoiselle de Vaux, who was past ninety and very feeble, of the new girls at the school ... until the peasant coachman drew up his fat horse before the gate of the lodge and carried their luggage into the vine covered cottage.
XI
AFTER Lily had rested in the room just beneath the dove cote, the pair, assisted by a red-cheeked farm girl, set themselves to putting the place in order. With the approach of evening, Madame Gigon took off her wig, donned a lace cap, and they were settled until the month of October.
When they had finished a supper of omelette, potatoes and wine, they seated themselves on the terrace and Madame Gigon at length approached the matter, delicately and with circumspection. It was a blue, misty evening of the sort frequent in the Isle de France, when the stillness becomes acute and tangible, when the faintest sound is sharply audible for an amazing distance across the waving fields of wheat. From the opposite side of the river arose the faint tinkling of a bell as a pair of white oxen made their way slowly from the farm to the sedge-bordered river. Overhead among the vines on the roof of the lodge, the pigeons stirred sleepily, cooing and preening themselves. The evening was beautiful, unbelievably calm, with the placidity of a marvelous dream.
After a long silence, Madame Gigon began to gossip once more and presently, she said, “To be sure, it has happened before in this world. It will happen again. The trouble is that you are too pretty, dear Lily, and you lose your head. You are too generous. I always told Mademoiselle you were more like our girls than the English or Americans.”
Lily said nothing. It appeared that she heard nothing old Madame Gigon said. Wrapped in her black cloak against the chill of the faint mist which swam above the Marne, she seemed lost in the breathless beauty of the evening.
“Why, in my family, it has happened. There was my cousin ... a sister of the Baron who lives here in the Chateau....” And Madame Gigon moved from one case to another, justifying Lily’s strange behavior. When she had finished with a long series, she shook her head gently and said, “I know, I know ...,” smiling all the while as though she had known many lovers and been as seductive as Cleopatra. She drank the last of her coffee, drying her mustache when she had finished.
“I brought down some fine lawn and some lace from Paris,” she said, “I remember that you always sewed beautifully. We shall be busy this winter in the little flat.”
And then Lily stirred for the first time, moving her body indolently with her eyes half-closed, her head resting on the back of the chair. “We shan’t live in the little flat, Madame Gigon.... We shall have a house.... I know just the one, in the Rue Raynouard. You see, I am going to live in Paris always. I am never going back to America to live.”
The old Frenchwoman said nothing, either in approval or disagreement, but she grew warm suddenly with pleasure. The house in the Rue Raynouard captured her imagination. It meant that she would have the dignity of surroundings suitable to one who received signed cards from the Prince Bonaparte to his lectures. She could have a salon. She knew that Lily Shane, like all Americans, was very rich.
A little while later they went inside and Lily in her room just under the dove-cote lighted a candle and settled herself to writing letters. One she addressed to the convent where Irene was stopping, one to Cypress Hill, and the last, very short and formal, she addressed the Governor. It was the first line she had written him. Also it was the last.
XII
IN the Town the tidings of Lily’s sudden departure followed the course of all bits of news from Shane’s Castle. It created for a time a veritable cloud of gossip. Again when it became gradually known that she intended living in Paris, heads wagged for a time and stories of her father were revived. Her name became the center of a myriad tales such as accumulate about beautiful women who are also indifferent.
But of one fact the Town learned nothing. It had no knowledge of a cablegram which arrived at Shane’s Castle containing simply the words, “John has arrived safely and well.” Only the telegraph operator saw it and to him the words could have meant nothing.
It was Mrs. Julis Harrison who kept alive the cloud of rumors that closed over the memory of Lily. When she was not occupied with directing the activities of the Mills through the mouthpiece of her son Willie, she fostered her suspicions. The letter addressed to a friend in Paris bore no fruit. Lily, it seemed, had buried herself. She was unknown to the American colony. But Mrs. Harrison, nothing daunted, managed herself to create a story which in time she came to believe, prefacing it to her choicest friends with the remark that “Shane’s Castle has not changed. More things go on there than this world dreams of.”
As for the Governor, he visited the Town two years later on the eve of election; but this time he did not stay at Shane’s Castle. It was known that he paid old Julia Shane a mysterious visit lasting more than an hour, but what passed between them remained at best a subject for the wildest speculation.
With the departure of Lily, her mother settled slowly into a life of retirement. There were no more receptions and garden-parties. With Lily gone, there appeared to be no reasons for gaiety. Irene, as every one knew, hated festivities of every sort.
“I am growing too old,” said Julia Shane. “It tires me to entertain. Why should I?”
It was not true that she was old, yet it was true that she was tired. It was clear that she was letting slip all threads of interest, even more apparent that she actually cherished her solitude.
She still condescended to go to an occasional dinner in the Town, driving in her victoria with Hennery on the box through sweating smelly Halsted street, across the writhing oily Black Fork and up the Hill to the respectable portion of the Town where lived the people of property. It was impossible to have guessed her thoughts on that infrequent journey. They must have been strange ... the thoughts of a woman not long past middle-age who had seen within her lifetime the most extraordinary metamorphosis in the Town of her birth. She could remember the days when she rode with John Shane in his paddock, now completely buried beneath massive warehouses. She could remember the days when Halsted street was only a private drive across the marshes to Cypress Hill. Indeed it appeared, as the years passed, that Julia Shane was slipping slowly back across all those years into the simplicity that marked her childhood as a farmer’s daughter. She talked less and avoided people. She no longer cared for the elegance of her clothes. As though her gaunt and worldly air had been only a mockery she began to slough it off bit by bit with the passing months. The few women who crossed the threshold of Shane’s Castle returned with stories that Julia Shane, having closed the rest of the house, had taken to living in two or three rooms.
People said other things too, of Julia and her two daughters, but mostly of Lily, for Lily somehow captured their imagination. In the midst of the Town, born and bred upon the furnace girt hill, she was an exotic, an orchid appearing suddenly in a prosperous vegetable garden.
People said such things as, “Julia Shane gets no satisfaction out of her daughter Irene.... I believe myself that the girl is a little queer.”
Or it might be that Mrs. Julis Harrison, with a knowing shake of the head would remark, “It’s strange that Lily has never married. They say she is enjoying herself in Paris, although she doesn’t see anything of the Americans there. It’s like John Shane’s daughter to prefer the French.”
XIII
MEANWHILE the Town grew. The farm where Julia Shane spent her youth disappeared entirely, broken up into checker board allotments, crossed by a fretwork of crude concrete sidewalks. Houses, uniform and unvaryingly ugly in architecture and cheap in construction, sprang up in clusters like fungi to house the clerks and the petty officials of the Mills. In the Flats, which included all that district taken over by the factories, hundreds of alien workmen drifted in to fill the already overcrowded houses beyond endurance. Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles, Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the very hedges of Shane’s Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.
All this, Julia Shane, living in another world, ignored. She saw nothing of what happened beneath her very windows.
It was true that she found no satisfaction in her daughter Irene. On the return of the girl from a long rest at the convent, there took place between mother and daughter a terrible battle which did not end in a sudden, decisive victory but dragged its length across many weeks. Irene returned with her thin pretty face pale and transparent, her ash blond hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in severe nunlike fashion. She wore a suit of black stuff, plainly made and ornamented only by a plain collar of white lawn.
On the first evening at home, the mother and daughter sat until midnight in the library, a room which they used after dinner on evenings when they were alone. The little French clock struck twelve before the girl was able to summon courage to address her mother, and when at last she succeeded, she was forced to interrupt the old woman in the midst of a new book by Collette Willy, sent her by Lily, which she was reading with the aid of a silver mounted glass.
“Mother,” began Irene gently. “Mother....”
Julia Shane put down the glass and looked up. “What is it?”
“Mother, I’ve decided to enter the church.”
It was an announcement far from novel, a hope expressed year after year only to be trodden under foot by the will of the old woman. But this time there was a new quality in Irene’s voice, a shade of firmness and determination that was not at all in keeping with the girl’s usual humility. The mother’s face grew stern, almost hard. Cheri slipped gently to the floor where it lay forgotten.
“Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?” The voice was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing—the Roman Catholic church—which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.
The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.
“Has this anything to do with Lily?” asked the mother with a sudden air of suspicion, and Irene answered “No! No!” with such intensity that Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.
“You know how I feel,” she said. “I am old and I am tired. I have had enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last.”
Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread until her whole body was shaking. “It is all I have,” she cried.
“Don’t be morbid!”
The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane’s face—the look with which she faced down all the world save her own family.
“I won’t hear of it,” she added. “I’ve told you often enough, Irene.... I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it.”
The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared even to argue her case. “If it were Lily ...” she began weakly.
“It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is out of the question. Lily is no fool....”
The accusation of Irene was an old one, secret, cherished always in the depths of a lonely submissive heart. It was born now from the depths of her soul, a cry almost of passion, a protest against a sister whom every one pardoned, whom every one admired, whom all the world loved. It was an accusation directed against the mother who was so sympathetic toward Lily, so uncomprehending toward Irene.
“I suppose they have been talking to you ... the sisters,” continued Julia Shane. And when the girl only buried her face miserably in her arms, she added more gently, “Come here, Irene.... Come over here to me.”
Quietly the daughter came to her side where she knelt down clasping the fingers covered with rings that were so cold against her delicate, transparent skin. For an instant the mother frowned as if stricken by some physical pain. “My God!” she said, “Why is it so hard to live?” But her weakness passed quickly. She stiffened her tired body, sighed, and began again. “Now,” she said gruffly. “We must work this out.... We must understand each other better, my dear. If you could manage to confide in me ... to let me help you. I am your mother. Whatever comes to you comes to me as well ... everything. There are three of us, you and Lily and me.” Her manner grew slowly more tender, more affectionate. “We must keep together. You might say that we stood alone ... three women with the world against us. When I die, I want to leave you and Lily closer to each other than you and I have been. If there is anything that you want to confess ... if you have any secret, tell it to me and not to the sisters.”
By now Irene was sobbing hysterically, clinging all the while to the hand of her mother. “There is nothing ... nothing!” she cried, “I don’t know why I am so miserable.”
“Then promise me one thing ... that you will do nothing until we have talked the matter out thoroughly.” She fell to stroking the girl’s blond hair with her thin veined hand, slowly, with a hypnotic gesture.
“Yes.... Yes.... I promise!” And gradually the sobbing ebbed and the girl became still and calm.
For a time they sat thus listening to the mocking frivolous tick-tick of the little French clock over the fireplace. A greater sound, rumbling and regular like the pounding of giant hammers they did not hear because it had become so much a part of their lives that it was no longer audible. The throb of the Mills, working day and night, had become a part of the very stillness.
At last Julia Shane stirred and said with a sudden passion, “Come, Irene!... Come up to my room. There is no peace here.” And the pair rose and hurried away, the mother hobbling along with the aid of her ebony stick, never once glancing behind her at the portrait whose handsome malignant eyes appeared to follow them with a wicked delight.
XIV
FOR days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a second promise ... that she would never enter the church so long as her mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill. Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into their homes, facing all the deep-rooted hostility and the suspicions of Shane’s Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly in the lady from Shane’s Castle.
It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express, unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily Shane might never return from Paris.
She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen’s houses which had sprung up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as if they were not solid and real at all, but queer structures born out of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted street to Shane’s Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her destination was the great black house on the hill.
As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead, abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.
Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull glow of the furnaces.
The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times, listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of welcome.
“Mama!” Lily called up the long polished stairway. “Irene! Mama! Where are you?”
She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her veil, the sound of her mother’s limping step and the tapping of her stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later, Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.
XV
ON the occasion of Lily’s first dinner at home, the mulatto woman brought out the heaviest of the silver candelabra and despatched Hennery into the Town for a dozen tall candles and a great bunch of pink roses which filled the silver épergne when the mother and the two daughters came down to dinner; Julia Shane, as usual, wore black with a lace shawl thrown over her gray hair, a custom which she had come to adopt in the evenings and one which gave the Town one more point of evidence in the growing chain of her eccentricities. Irene, still clad in the gray dress with the high collar and looking somehow like a governess or a nurse employed in the house, took her place at the side of the table. As for Lily, her appearance so fascinated the mulatto woman and the black girl who aided her that the dinner was badly served and brought a sharp remonstrance from Mrs. Shane. No longer had Lily any claims to girlhood. Indisputably she was become a woman. A fine figure of a woman, she might have been called, had she been less languid and indolent. Her slimness had given way to a delicate voluptuousness, a certain opulence like the ripeness of a beautiful fruit. Where there had been slimness before there now were curves. She moved slowly and with the same curious dignity of her mother, and she wore no rouge, for her lips were full and red and her cheeks flushed with delicate color. Her beauty was the beauty of a peasant girl from which all coarseness had been eliminated, leaving only a radiant glow of health. She was, after all, the granddaughter of a Scotch farmer; there was nothing thin-blooded about her, nothing of the anemia of Irene. To-night she wore a tea-gown from Venice, the color of water in a limestone pool, liquid, cool, pale green. Her reddish hair, in defiance of the prevailing fashions, she wore bound tightly about her head and fastened by a pin set with brilliants. About her neck on a thin silver cord hung suspended a single pear-shaped emerald which rested between her breasts, so that sometimes it hung outside the gown and sometimes lay concealed against the delicate white skin.
Irene throughout the dinner spoke infrequently and kept her eyes cast down as though the beauty of her sister in some way fascinated and repelled her. When it was finished, she stood up and addressed her mother.
“I must go now. It is my night to teach at Welcome House.”
Lily regarded her with a puzzled expression until her mother, turning to explain, said, “She teaches English to a class of foreigners in Halsted street.” And then to Irene, “You might have given it up on the first night Lily was home!”
A look of stubbornness came into the pale face of the younger sister. “I can’t. They are depending on me. I shall see Lily every day for weeks. This is a duty. To stay would be to yield to pleasure.”
“But you’re not going alone into Halsted street?” protested Lily. “At night! You must be crazy!”
“I’m perfectly safe.... They know me and what I do,” the sister answered proudly. “Besides there is one of the men who always sees me home.”
She came round to Lily’s chair and gave her a kiss, the merest brushing of cool lips against the older sister’s warm cheek. “Good-night,” she said, “in case you have gone to bed before I return.”
When Irene had gone, an instant change took place in the demeanor of the two women. It was as though some invisible barrier, separating the souls of mother and daughter, had been let down suddenly. Lily leaned back and stretched her long limbs. The mulatto woman brought cigarettes and the mother and daughter settled themselves to talking. They were at last alone and free to say what they would.
“How long has Irene been behaving in this fashion?” asked Lily.
“It is more than three years now. I don’t interfere because it gives her so much pleasure. It saved her, you know, from entering the church. Anything is better than that.”
Then all at once as though they had suddenly entered another world, they began to talk French, shutting out the mulatto woman from their conversation.
“Mais elle est déja religieuse,” said Lily, “tout simplement. You might as well let her enter the church. She already behaves like a nun ... in that ridiculous gray dress. She looks ghastly. You should forbid it. A woman has no right to make herself look hideous. There’s something sinful in it.”
The mother smiled wearily. “Forbid it? You don’t know Irene. I’m thankful to keep her out of the church. She is becoming fanatic.” There was a pause and Mrs. Shane added, “She never goes out now ... not since a year and more.”
“She is like a spinster of forty.... It is shameful for a girl of twenty-five to let herself go in that fashion. No man would look at her.”
“Irene will never marry.... It is no use speaking to her. I have seen the type before, Lily ... the religieuse. It takes the place of love. It is just as ecstatic.”
The mulatto woman, who had been clearing away the dishes, came and stood by her mistress’ chair to await, after her custom, the orders for the following day. “There will only be three of us ... as usual. That is all, Sarah!”
The woman turned to go but Lily called after her. “Mama,” she said, “can’t we open the rest of the house while I’m here? It’s horrible, shut up in this fashion. I hate sitting in the library when there is all the drawing-room.”
Mrs. Shane did not argue. “Get some one to help you open the drawing-room to-morrow, Sarah. We will use it while Miss Lily is here.”
The mulatto woman went out and Lily lighted another cigarette. “You will want it open for the Christmas party,” she said. “You can’t entertain all the family in the library.”
“I had thought of giving up the Christmas party this year,” replied the Mother.
“No ... not this year,” cried Lily. “It is such fun, and I haven’t seen Cousin Hattie and Uncle Jacob and Ellen for years.”
Again the mother yielded. “You want gaiety, I see.”
“Well, I’m not pious like Irene, and this house is gloomy enough.” At the sight of her mother rising from her chair, she said ... “Let’s not go to the library. Let’s sit here. I hate it in there.”
So there they remained while the tall candles burned lower and lower. Suddenly after a brief pause in the talk, the mother turned to Lily and said, “Et toi.”
Lily shrugged her shoulders. “Moi? Moi? Je suis contente.”
“Et Madame Gigon, et le petit Jean.”
“They are well ... both of them. I have brought a picture which I’ve been waiting to show you.”
“He is married, you know.”
“When?”
“Only three weeks ago. He came here after your letter to offer to do anything he could. He wants the boy to go to school in America.”
Here Lily smiled triumphantly. “But Jean is mine. I shall accept nothing from him. He is afraid to recognize Jean because it would ruin him. I shall send the boy where I like.” She leaned forward, glowing with a sudden enthusiasm. “You don’t know how handsome he is and how clever.” She pushed back her chair. “Wait, I’ll get his picture.”
The mother interrupted her. “Bring me the enameled box from my dressing table. There is something in it that will interest you.”
XVI
IN a moment the daughter returned bearing the photograph and the enameled box. It was the picture which interested Julia Shane. Putting aside the box she took it up and gazed at it for a long time in silence while Lily watched her narrowly across the polished table.
“He is a handsome child,” she said presently. “He resembles you. There is nothing of his father.” Her blue eyes were moist and the tired hard face softened. “Come here,” she added almost under her breath, and when the daughter came to her side she kissed her softly, holding her close to her thin breast. When she released Lily from her embrace, she said, “And you? When are you going to marry?”
Lily laughed. “Oh, there is plenty of time. I am only twenty-seven, after all. I am very happy as I am.” She picked up the enameled box, smiling. “Show me the secret,” she said.
Mrs. Shane opened the box and from a number of yellow clippings drew forth one which was quite new. “There,” she said, giving it to the daughter. “It is a picture of him and his new wife, taken at the wedding.”
There was a portrait of the Governor, grown a little more stout, but still tall, straight and broad shouldered. His flowing mustache had been clipped; otherwise he was unchanged. In the picture he grinned amiably toward the camera as if he saw political capital even in his own honeymoon. By his side stood a woman of medium height and strong build. Her features were heavy and she too smiled, although there was something superior in her smile as though she felt a disdain for the public. It was a plain face, intelligent, yet somehow lacking in charm. The clipping identified her as the daughter of a wealthy middle-western manufacturer and a graduate of a woman’s college. It continued with a short biographical account of the Governor, predicting for him a brilliant future and congratulating him upon a marriage the public had long awaited with interest.
Lily replaced the clipping in the enameled box and closed the lid with a snap. “He had done well,” she remarked. “She sounds like a perfect wife for an American politician. I should have been a hopeless failure. As it is we are both happy.”
The look of bewilderment returned to her mother’s eyes. “The boy,” she said, “should have a father. You should marry for his sake, Lily.”
“He shall have ... in time. There is no hurry. Besides, his position is all right. I am Madame Shane, a rich American widow. Madame Gigon has taken care of that. My position is excellent. No woman could be more respected.”
Gradually she drifted into an account of her life in Paris. It followed closely the line of pleasant anticipations which Madame Gigon had permitted herself during the stillness of that first evening on the terrace above the Marne. The house in the Rue Raynouard was big and old. It had been built before the Revolution at a time when Passy was a suburb surrounded by open meadows. It had a garden at the back which ran down to the Rue de Passy, once the open highroad to Auteuil. Apartments, shops and houses now covered the open meadows but the old house and the garden remained unchanged, unaltered since the day Lenôtre planned them for the Marquise de Sevillac. The garden had a fine terrace and a pavilion which some day Jean should have for his own quarters. The house itself was well planned for entertaining. It had plenty of space and a large drawing-room which extended along the garden side with tall windows opening outward upon the terrace. At a little distance off was the Seine. One could hear the excursion steamers bound for Sèvres and St. Cloud whistling throughout the day and night.
As for friends, there were plenty of them ... more than she desired. There were the respectable baronnes and comtesses of Madame Gigon’s set, a group which worshiped the Prince Bonaparte and talked a deal of silly nonsense about the Restoration of the Empire. To be sure, they were fuddy-duddy, but their sons and daughters were not so bad. Some of them Lily had known at the school of Mademoiselle de Vaux. Some of them were charming, especially the men. She had been to Compiègne to hunt, though she disliked exercise of so violent a nature. Indeed they had all been very kind to her.
“After all,” she concluded, “I am not clever or brilliant. I am content with them. I am really happy. As for Madame Gigon, she is radiant. She has become a great figure in her set. She holds a salon twice a month with such an array of gateaux as would turn you ill simply to look at. I give her a fat allowance but she gets herself up like the devil. I think she is sorry that crinolines are no longer the fashion. She looks like a Christmas tree, but she is the height of respectability.” For an instant a thin shade of mockery, almost of bitterness colored her voice.
Julia Shane reached over suddenly and touched her daughter’s arm. Something in Lily’s voice or manner had alarmed her. “Be careful, Lily. Don’t let yourself grow hard. That’s the one thing.”
XVII
THEY sat talking thus until the candles burnt low, guttered and began to go out, one by one, and at last the distant tinkle of a bell echoed through the house. For a moment they listened, waiting for one of the servants to answer and when the bell rang again and again, Lily at last got up languidly saying, “It must be Irene. I’ll open if the servants are in bed.”
“She always has a key,” said her mother. “She has never forgotten it before.”
Lily made her way through the hall and boldly opened the door to discover that she was right. Irene stood outside covered with snow. As she stepped in, her sister caught a glimpse through the mist of falling flakes of a tall man, powerfully built, walking down the long drive toward Halsted street. He walked rapidly, for he wore no overcoat and the night was cold.
In the warm lamplighted hall, Irene shook the snow from her coat and took off her plain ugly black hat. Her pale cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the effort of walking so rapidly up the drive.