“Forgive me, beloved, for what I am doing. It was all that remained. It is better ... everything is better now, and you will be free again as you once were.
“I must tell you what you will soon learn. No one can keep it from you. I am a thief. I have stolen money and now there is no way to escape. If I ran away, it would be the same as what I am doing.... It would be the end. I would never dare ask to see you again. I would never tell you where I had gone. What I am doing is the only way out.”
(Here he had, in his agitation, written the same sentence twice as if he begged her not to hate him because he had been the cause of so much trouble. He had almost said, “Forgive me for being a bother to you.”)
Then it continued, “It was wrong from the beginning. I should never have asked you to run away with me, because I was not good enough. I tried to be and failed. I was a poor thing. So now, after I am gone again, there will be nothing to hold you ... not even from the man you really loved ... if it is not too late. You see, I know the truth! I know the truth! I discovered it in time. Forgive me, dearest. I love you always.”
Slowly during the long hours of the interminable night, the whole tragedy assumed a clarity of form. While she lay on the green bed, in a silence penetrated only by the faint nocturnal sounds that rose from the distant street, the little pieces fitted together ... bits of the past and the present, sudden stabbing memories and poignant flashes of intuition, odd scraps of old emotions vanished now forever ... the little pieces fitted together until, like a picture puzzle, they assumed a swift and startling completeness. She saw the answer in a quick bright flash; it was that she had destroyed him; she it was who had driven him intothe abyss. The bitterness lay in the fact that all the while she had tried to save him, to make him happy.
If he had stolen money it could have been for one purpose alone—to give her more than he had been able to give her, to make her believe that he was far greater than he could ever have been. She understood that he had fought for her sake to create an illusion of grandeur, to raise before her eyes the figure of a man, successful and clever, who was not Clarence at all but a creature who existed only in the troubled flights of his ambition. And it was this very figure which, toppling from its pedestal, had destroyed him. She had known all along that there was no such creature. She could have told him....
His humbleness pained her. Even in the end he had chosen to destroy himself in a corner where it would make the least trouble.
There was, too, the vague confused affair of Callendar. The note said so little; it left the fear so incomplete.There will be nothing to hold you, not even from the man whom you really loved.He must have known that he had not freed her, even by his death, for he knew that in almost the same hour Callendar had himself ceased to be free. All that was gone now, lost forever, and a little time before it had been so near, quite within her grasp. In trying to have everything she had lost all save her soul and the fire which burned there....If it is not too late....
But the thing which hurt her most was the memory of two words which he had used. They were, strangely enough, words of endearment, of affection, even perhaps of something so strong as passion. He had dared in his note to say “dearest” and “beloved.” He was gone now; he would not have to face her, knowing that because his love had fallen upon barren ground he was ridiculous. In life these were two words which he had never dared to use. They burned now like scars that would never heal.
She could not talk to him now; she could no longer still his uneasiness with empty words and a kiss which cost her nothing. He lay near her, just beyond her door, upon the shabby divan, butshe could not reach him. To the dead there was nothing she could say, nothing which she could explain. In death he had come to possess her, for it was she who was humbled now.
She did not hide herself away. When morning came she appeared, calm and cold, to aid a strangely subdued Fergus in all the bitter tasks of caring for the dead. She arranged the telegrams and even chose the wording for the one that went to his sister in Ogdensburg. In all of them she said merely that Clarence had died suddenly. The truth she withheld. (There was always his weak heart to lend credence to such a tale.) In the newspapers there appeared only a brief line or two recording the fact of one more suicide in a great city and this, of course, was never read in the Town or by the people who had known Clarence as a boy. So in the end, his mother was the only one who knew the truth and even of the truth there was a portion which she never learned; it was that her son was a thief.
Out of all the tragic confusion only one thing remained to puzzle her; it was how Clarence had come to know of Richard Callendar. The answer, never entirely clear, came to her from a source she had never considered, from a man whom she treated, when she bothered to think of him at all, as beneath her contempt.
In the midst of that first gray morning the door opened and Mr. Wyck came in, shabby and downcast, to pay his condolences. He returned to the flat where he had known the only happiness which had ever come his way, but he returned, clearly, under circumstances he had never foreseen in the most gloomy and portentous of his bitter imaginings. At the sight of Ellen, cold and capable, in the midst of her grief (for she did grieve in a fashion she would not have done for a man whom she had loved), his green eyes turned toward the tips of his boots and he murmured, “Ah, this is terrible ... terrible,” in the professional manner of an undertaker.
In his heart, he may have thought, “It was you who ruined him, you, who came here into this very flat, a nobody, to use himfor what he was worth ... to turn me out into the streets.” But he kept silent, perhaps because she had always terrified him, filling him with a sense of one standing upon the rim of a volcano. He was afraid of scenes, Mr. Wyck, and so his hate found its way into the open through devious, hidden channels. He had not the courage, it seemed, even to look at her now.
They stood for a time in silence by the divan, symbols of that queer, distorted figure of which the dead Clarence formed the third angle—a figure all awry, perverted out of all drawing—Clarence, so white and still, gone now beyond the reach of either of them.
Mr. Wyck muttered oily and incoherent consolations.... “It is a bitter blow.... One must be brave.... He was a good man....” All the old banalities which somehow took on a bitter, ironical ring. And presently he snuffled and wiped his eyes, as much in pity for himself who had lost the one thing for which he had gambled, as for the man who lay quiet and still upon the divan.
Ellen, watching him, was filled with a slow, burning anger. She wanted suddenly to crush him as she had once wanted to crush poor May Seton, because he was sentimental, and silly and without strength. And suddenly it occurred to her to say abruptly, “It was not a case of suicide. It was not Clarence who killed himself.... It was others who killed him.”
She had spoken in a sudden moment of humility, acknowledging her own guilt, and the speech, so abrupt, so unexpected, produced upon Mr. Wyck the strangest effect. He looked at her sharply, for the first time, and then averted his eyes; but in the brief glance she discovered the answer to the mystery. It was Mr. Wyck who had betrayed her secret. It was Mr. Wyck who had told the story of Callendar, distended no doubt, and perverted by his malice. She knew it by the look of terror in the shifty eyes. He had used this secret as his last stake.... And he had lost, forever, beyond all hope.
Almost at once he turned away from the morbid fascination of the divan, bade her good-by and hurried out of the door;and Ellen, watching his narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature, with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she was lost to him forever.
So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free.
SHE went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this—“If he’d been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He’d have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg.”
And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval.She kept silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant and powerful figure.
In the Babylon Arms there was little to be done. Ellen paid a visit for the first time to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company and there learned that Clarence had stolen money which he collected and failed to deliver. The amount was something over fifteen hundred dollars. When she heard it she murmured, “It was so little too! Why, I could have paid it if he had told me. To have killed himself for so little!”
But she knew, of course, that if he had confessed he would have destroyed that splendid creature which he fancied he had created in her eyes. He had preferred himself to be destroyed. In death it would not matter that she discovered the fraud: he would not have to face her.
She paid the money, out of her savings and out of the amount brought by the sale of the furniture. She sold even the piano he had bought her as a wedding gift. And when she had finished there remained but little more than a hundred dollars.
On the very day the furniture was being taken from the flat she told Fergus the whole truth concerning her plans. They sat together amid the wreckage, brother and sister, both understanding for perhaps the first time that they were faced by the new problem of Hattie Tolliver. Both knew that she had set her mind upon coming to them, and having tasted freedom, neither was willing now to turn back.
“There is Ma,” said Ellen. “I don’t know what’s to be done about her. She’ll be coming here to live before long and I won’t be here. She’s worked all these years to come where she can be near us and now I’ve got to go away. I’m going to Paris.... It’s the only thing left.”
Fergus looked at her. “But you don’t know French,” he said, “and you haven’t any money.”
“I can’t turn back now. If I went back to Ma, it would be the end of me. I know that. I couldn’t.... I couldn’t everbegin again. I’ve enough money to take me there.... I’ll manage after that.... Besides, there is Lily.... She promised to help me when the time came.... The time has come.... I can’t turn back.”
Fergus listened in silence, moved perhaps by the new dignity that had come to her, a dignity touched with bitterness. She was beautiful too in a new fashion, more placid, more serene.
“You must be good to Ma,” she continued. “She’ll hate my running away, but I’ve got to go. She’s a wonderful woman. She’s the one who has sacrificed everything. She’s always done it ... for all of us. I couldn’t go if I didn’t know that you’re the one she loves best of all. You’re the one she worships. She loved you enough to let you go. I had to run away. You know it, Fergus, as well as I. You must be good to her. If anything happened to you, it would kill her. You mustn’t disappoint her. One day we must all make her proud of us. I mean to do it, and then when I’m rich, when I’m successful, I can reward her.” She paused for a moment and then added. “You see, she loves you best because you’re so like Pa. You’re the way he used to be when she fell in love with him.”
The boy’s face took on an unaccustomed gravity. He rose and looked out of the window over the beloved and magical city. “I’ll do my best,” he said presently. “I’ll do my best.... She’s a wonderful woman.” (Yet neither of them would turn back now.)
In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and said, “But you’re going to Lily.... Ma will hate that.”
“I know she will.... She’s always been afraid of Lily. She needn’t worry though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can ever happen to me again.”
It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of Ellen’s destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played for she never knew, of course, that ifchance had not thrown her glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been blinded.
So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right.Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them.
THE world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois. Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and unmorality.
The house stood in the Rue Raynouard a short distance from the place where it rushes down a slope to join a half dozen other streets in a whirlpool known as the Place Passy surrounded by magasins, cafés, and tobacconists’ shops. It was, in all truth, an eighteenth century house, built in the beginning as a château in the open country on the outskirts of Paris between the city and the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Here in the open fields the Marquise de Sevillac, an ugly, clever and eccentric woman, held a court of her own, a court indeed which in some respects outshone the splendor of Versailles. In her house were to be found the poets, the wits and the philosophers of the day. Shecorresponded with Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists came frequently to work in the rooms which overlooked the little park and the sheep pastures beyond. Indeed the Sage of Ferney on his triumphant return to Paris had planned a visit to the Marquise and was only prevented by the fatal illness which overtook so swiftly his skinny old body.
The Marquise had been the last of her family. There is a Marquis de Sevillac living to-day but the title is Bonapartist and has nothing to do with the ancient splendor of the true family. As an old woman, the Marquise clung to her house even with the approach of the revolution. During that cataclysm, which she faced in a bold and cynical fashion, she was allowed to survive because the people remembered her as the friend of the radicals and the philosophers who plagued their stupid King. She allied herself with the Girondists and took Madame Roland perilously to her bosom, and when the débâcle came at length her bony old body would have been dragged off to the guillotine along with the others save that she was so old and that Danton and Terezia Tallien intervened. So she died at last in her bed and the château became the property of the Directory.
Since her death it has known many occupants. For a time it served as a museum; it housed the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who gave his name to a street nearby; it passed through a period of neglect and emptiness and at last fell into the possession of a wealthy manufacturer of soap and chocolate. It was during his day and the day of his son that the château came to be pressed upon by other houses and by apartments in the florid German style, until there was left at length only the house itself and the little park designed by Le Nôtre which still remained the largest private garden in all the city of Paris.
The house turns to the world a deceptive face, for on the side facing the Rue Raynouard it is but one story high with a commonplace door and a single row of shuttered windows. It is this side which in the days of the Marquise faced the stablesand dovecote; so the house now turns its back upon the world and preserves for its friends the glory of its three story façade of Caen stone. The façade, broken by rows of tall windows, looks upon a high terrace lined with crumbling urns carved in the classic Greek manner and a garden with a reticulation of paths laid out by Le Nôtre to center upon the pastry-cake pavilion erected to the God of Love. Inside the high wall which shuts out the noise and dust of the Rue de Passy there are great plane trees with trunks mottled like the backs of salamanders, and laburnums that cluster close about the Temple of Eros.
One could live forever within the boundaries of the ancient house and garden, surrounded by luxury and beauty, receiving one’s friends, seldom going into the world. It was an admirable house in which to live discreetly, almost secretly, and it was an admirable house for one of so indolent a nature as Lily’s. For Lily had succeeded the chocolate manufacturer, and the château of the Marquise de Sevillac with its ghosts of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the wanton Terezia Tallien and the clever Madame Roland, was tenanted now by a rich American out of a country which in the days of the Marquise had been no more than a howling wilderness—a woman the world knew as a widow, beautiful, charming, discreet and indolent, living under the guardianship of the most respectable and stuffy of Bonapartists, the ancient Madame Gigon.
On a dripping morning of December, of the sort which makes Paris a wretched city in midwinter, a carriage drew up before the door of this house and out of it stepped Ellen Tolliver, pale from traveling but unusually handsome in the black of her widowhood. There was with her a small thin young woman, trimly dressed rather in the practical style of a professional traveler, with red hair and pretty bright eyes which had a way of observing the slightest things which occurred in her vicinity. The stranger (after haggling with the driver over the fare) paid himand then, changing her mind, bade him wait for her. She pulled the bell with a swift, energetic jerk.
“It is a modest house,” she observed to Ellen in short, ironic syllables colored by an accent that was indefinable. “A modest house for a rich American. Usually they are more flamboyant.”
Impatiently she pulled the bell a second time and presently the commonplace door was opened by a Breton maid in a white cap who bade them enter. Inside, away from the dripping cobblestones of the Rue Raynouard, it was clear that the stranger succumbed to the magic of the house. For an instant, she remained silent, staring in astonishment at the long sweep of stairs and the array of glittering crystal. Then she made a grunting noise and addressed the maid in French.
“Madame Shane.... Is she in?”
“No,” replied the girl. “She is at Nice.... She has been gone since two weeks.”
The stranger translated the speech and for a moment there was a silence in which the face of Ellen, pale and handsome in her mourning, was shadowed by a sudden look of terror. It vanished quickly and she said to her companion, “Ask for Madame Gigon.”
Madame Gigon was in. She never went out any more. At the moment she was in the drawing room. Should she ask if Madame Gigon would see them?
“This,” observed the bright ferret, to the maid, “is Madame Shane’s cousin. She has come to pay her a visit.”
The stairway before them led downwards in the most unexpected fashion. Between panels of satinwood adorned with plaques of gilt and rock crystal and filled with candles, it swept down for the depth of two stories, past a gallery which led away on both sides, into a dim vista of polished floor at the end of which there was a high window with small panes of glass that gave out upon a garden. At the sight, a faint touch of color appeared on the cheeks of Ellen and her eyes grew bright withinterest. It was all far grander than she had ever imagined, more magnificent than she had hoped. In such a house she might stay quietly, interfering with no one. It was possible to remain hidden in its depths for weeks at a time.
“Shall I stay?” asked her companion.
“I can manage.... It’s my affair. There’s no use troubling you any further. It was good of you to have bothered.”
“But what about speaking French?”
“Madame Gigon speaks English. She once had a school for English and American girls.... My great-aunt went to it.”
Up the long stairs, remotely, the maid was returning now.
“Bien,” she said. “Madame Gigon will see you.”
“Au revoir,” murmured the stranger. “If you want me, I shall be at the Ritz until the end of the month.... Miss Rebecca Schönberg.... You have my card....”
And with that she vanished through the rain into the waiting cab.
At the foot of the long stairs Ellen found herself suddenly in the great drawing-room. Beyond, through the tall window draped in blue brocade, she had a vista of dripping trees and a wet garden dominated by a white pavilion that resembled a pastry. The room was long and rectangular, for all the world like the drawing room at Shane’s Castle, save that it was not, even on this wet winter day, a gloomy room. There was in it far too much color. Even the satinwood paneling appeared warm and soft. At the far end before a neat fire of cannel coal she discerned among the shadows the figures of a tiny old woman and a small boy, sturdy, handsome and red haired. He sat at the feet of the crone, reading aloud to her in English and nearby lay two fat and elderly dogs, an Aberdeen and a West Highland. It was not until she had come quite close to them that they realized she had entered the room. The boy stood up and the old woman turned toward her with a curious dazed look in her eyes.
It was the old woman who spoke first. She peered, apparentlywithout seeing her, in the general direction of Ellen and asked, “Are you Mees Tolliver?”
The boy regarded her, frankly, with a pleasant friendliness.
“Yes,” replied Ellen, “I am Madame Shane’s cousin.”
In an instant, as she watched the child and faced the sharp old woman, she grasped the identity of the boy. It came to her quickly, as a revelation out of all the mystery of the past. Of course she knew all about Madame Gigon; it was the boy for whom she was not prepared. About him there could no longer be any doubt. He was Lily’s child and the old story was true. It gave her a quick, inexplicable feeling of relief, as if after so many years she stood in the open, knowing at last the truth. It did not produce any shock, perhaps because she had been for so long prepared for the knowledge. So she had said without hesitationMadameShane, just as a little while before in order to take no chance in protecting Lily, she had saidMadameShane to Miss Rebecca Schönberg.
The old woman coughed and said slowly, “I don’t speak English very well any more. I’m so old.... I almost forget.... Est-ce que vous parlez français?” And then, “Asseyez vous.”
Ellen simply stared at her, and in the emergency the boy, polite and eager, said in a piping voice, “She wants to know if you speak French.... She wants you to sit down.” His English was colored by an accent which struck Ellen with a remote sense of unreality. Lily’s child! Her own cousin! Speaking English as if it were a foreign tongue!
“I don’t,” said Ellen. “Will you tell her that I know no French?”
It was the old woman who answered in labored English. “Oh, I understand.... I know what you say.... I can no longerspeakEnglish.... Asseyez vous.... Sit down.”
It was only then that Ellen understood the peering look in the eyes of the old woman. She had been sitting down, all the while. The old woman, who peered at her so earnestly, was blind.
“Did Madame Shane know you were coming?” asked Madame Gigon.
“No, I had no time.... I left America in haste.” She held back the truth. She did not say that she had come, deliberately and without warning, because she could take no chances on being refused. Sitting there, with only a few francs in the world, she felt secure. She was in Paris now in a house that was big and beautiful. The rest could be managed.
“She did not tell me.... She would have been here,” continued Madame Gigon. Then, as if her brain were fatigued by the strain of speaking English, the old woman addressed a torrent of French to the little boy. When she had finished he advanced to Ellen, shyly, and held out his hand.
“She says,” he repeated in the same piping voice, “that I must welcome you as master of the house. She says you are my cousin.” He smiled gravely. “I never had a cousin before. And,” he continued, “she says that if Maman had known she would have been here.”
He stood regarding her with a look of fascination as though so strange and exotic a thing as a cousin was too thrilling to be passed over lightly. Touched by the simplicity of the child, Ellen drew him near to her and, addressing both him and Madame Gigon, said, “You are good to believe that I am Madame Shane’s cousin. How could you know?”
Madame Gigon smiled shrewdly. She was withered and had a little black mustache. Again the boy translated her speech. “She says,” he repeated, “that you have ... une voix honnête.” He hesitated.... “An honest voice ... and that she knows the voice because she taught my mother in school and before her my grandmère. She says it is like my grandmère’s voice.”
As he spoke the old woman smiled again and wagged her head with extraordinary vigor. “Je connais la voix.... Je la connais bien.”
Then she addressed the boy again and he translated her speech. “She says she is blind and will you come near so that she may touch your face?”
Ellen drew her chair closer so that it disturbed the fatter of the two dogs and allowed Madam Gigon to pass her thin hands in a fluttering gesture over her handsome throat and the fine arch of her nose.
“Ah,” said the old woman triumphantly. “Le nez ... the nose.... C’est le nez de vôtre tante ... le même nez ... précisement. C’est un nez fier ... distingué.”
“It is a proud nose,” echoed the interpreter gravely.... “A high distinguished nose.... A nose like your aunt’s.”
And the old woman, wagging her head, fell suddenly into a silent train of old memories.
“My name is Jean,” said the boy shyly. “I am ten years old. Would you like to see my book? It is in English. I can read English just as well as French.” And he brought her Tom Brown’s School Days and showed her the picture of the boys climbing the tree to rob the rook’s nest. Ellen, leaning over his shoulder, was softened and showed a warm enthusiasm over the other illustrations. She even listened while he told the long story of Tom Brown.
Presently Madame Gigon joined their talk and for a long time they held a conversation, translated always by the boy, that was animated and illumined by a warm friendliness. It was this which presently filled Ellen with a passionate desire to weep. She took off her hat and sat on the floor with Jean and the dogs, while Madame Gigon and the boy asked questions about America and old Julia Shane whom Jean called “grandmère” and whom he had never seen. And presently the Breton maid appeared with tea (for Madame Gigon, though she was French, had learned the custom of tea among the English) and over Ellen there swept slowly a strange feeling that, at last, after having been away a long time, she had come home. It was here that she belonged,here that she would be happy, in this great, beautiful house that was so friendly.
Jean was allowed one gâteau and the fat dogs devoured two apiece.
“She says,” translated Jean, “that Maman told her you would come some day ... just as you have come. She says she is not surprised ... your great-aunt, my grandmère, would have done the same.”
After tea, she was led away by the Breton maid up the stairs and along a gallery into which opened an endless procession of doors, until she came, at length, to the end, where a door was opened which revealed a square room dominated by a great bed hung with a canopy of brocade. The tall windows gave out upon the park which, lying now in the fog that succeeded the rain of an hour or two before, appeared blue and mysterious. In the heart of the mist the white pavilion showed vaguely, and beyond it, above the top of the garden wall, yellow globules of light from the lamps in the Rue de Passy cast the trunks of the old plane trees into sharp black shadows.
When the maid had left, she sat down before the bright small fire and without moving regarded the room closely, point by point, detail by detail. It was large and warm and beautiful, but the quality which moved her most profoundly was its elegance ... the same quality that was so evident in the great drawing-room belowstairs. She had never dreamed that there could be such warm, old beauty. There was nothing here of the barren, gas-lit pomp of Mrs. Callendar’s dining room out of the Second Empire, and nothing of the vast Callendar drawing-room lined with grim Dutch ancestors and gilt cabinets of tear bottles and Buddhas. This room ... this lovely house ... had been there always. It had been like this in the days of the ugly Marquise de Sevillac. The chaise longue on which she sat, the gilt chair that stood before the writing desk, the very mirror, with its dim rectangular panes of glass, had the effect of softening her. Indeed,for a time, these things made her dimly uneasy; far back in her consciousness there rose a grotesque fear that if she once succumbed to the splendor of that great bed, she might never rise from it again, that it might weaken her by its very luxury. She regarded it almost with suspicion, touched by an actual fear of all that was too beautiful and too splendid. She might become, like Lily, indolent and idle and charming. And slowly the realization swept over her that she was changed. She became aware that she was a woman now; she no longer wanted to be like Lily. She was strong, as she had never been before, strong as Lily would never be. Luxury, idleness, charm were not the things she desired. It must be something stronger than that, more heady, more challenging.
Dimly she understood the appeal of the room and of the dark misty garden with its white pavilion. It was insidious and peaceful, like an enchanted palace that swam mirage-like in the blue fog. And again she was overcome by a sense of returning home after having been away for a long time. The white squares of Paris, seen through the rain-spattered cab-windows on the way from the Gare du Nord, had moved her deeply; they had given her a wild sense of freedom, of escape. But this was different, more languorous, more intimate. It was the thing for which she had been born, the thing which, all her life, she had struggled to attain. It lay on the opposite side of the earth from the black Mills and the plain houses of the Town.
And then, pathetically and slowly, there came over her the wish that, as once she had planned, Clarence might have known this old splendor ... the splendor he had talked of seeing, “some day when they were rich enough.” There was that white villa at Nice....
She had understood, well enough, while she sat on the deck of theCity of Paris, damp and chilled by the fog, that Clarence was not gone forever, simply because he was dead. She understood (indeed she thought of it constantly, even in the hours when shehad listened in fascination to the talk of Rebecca Schönberg) that since his death he was more real to her than he had ever been in life. While he had lived there had never been time to consider him. There was only time, now, when he was gone. The very affection she had for him in life was nothing to the affection she now experienced, and in this new emotion there was no pity, because pity had been effaced by self-reproach. The one desire which obsessed her was a desire to see him, to explain, to justify herself.... Ellen, who had never bothered to justify her faintest whim. The power of the weak over the strong was still stirring. It had not altogether died.
Mingled with these very thoughts was the knowledge that somewhere in this strange city that was so familiar, Callendar and Sabine were living. They must be there quite near her; she was sure of it. They were moving about, dining, going to the theater and the opera, all the while in ignorance of what had happened to her, knowing nothing of her presence. For them, her reason told her, she was forgotten; yet something stronger than reason, a belief which beyond all doubt had its roots in the memory of Callendar’s face upon his wedding day, told her that she was not forgotten. She had been there, with them, all the while, ... perhaps, she thought triumphantly, even upon their wedding night. It was a thought utterly free from any desire to hurt Sabine; indeed, toward Sabine she had no feeling at all. Callendar was the one who roused her malice; she wanted to torment him, to be herself the one who dominated. The thought would have appeased her vanity save for the fact that she could never capture the whole truth; it was impossible because, in the months that had separated them, she had returned again to the old feeling that she did not know Callendar at all, that there was a part of him beyond her understanding, which escaped her always. She was afraid of him.
She dressed to the accompaniment of water dripping from the high roof on to the white terrace of the garden and, under thestimulus of physical activity, she came presently to forget both Clarence and Richard Callendar. Her thoughts turned to Miss Schönberg, that small, good-natured, ferrety creature who was so kind to her. The encounter had occurred, by chance, on theCity of Pariswhen the stranger, watching Ellen as she paced in her tireless way round and round the deck through the fog and the blowing rain, finally offered her a book to read. Ellen did not, as a rule, read anything, but she accepted the book, gratefully enough, more as a symbol of the stranger’s friendliness than for its own qualities. She could not, now, even remember what it was, nor anything about it save that it was bound in green and was written by a man called de Morgan. She was, at that time, engaged in thinking of her own story, which was indeed quite as good as anything concocted by a novelist. For the sense of rôle, the awareness of herself as a dramatic figure “living by her wits,” had grown upon her steadily, until in her mind there had been born a suspicion that such a rôle possessed a value. She was not, after all, commonplace. Already, though she was but twenty-four, tremendous things had happened to her ... things which were romantic and even tragic, but things in which she found satisfaction. She had wished, as far back as she could remember, to have a life that was eventful. She wanted not to die until she had known her share of life, and in life she did not seek, like Lily, simple happiness and contentment. She desired experience, and so she resembled greatly old man Tolliver.
It may have been a sense of all this which attracted the stranger, for Miss Schönberg despite all her fine clothes and her habit of wandering from one spot to another, lived vicariously. She searched breathlessly for excitement. At thirty she was a confirmed and passionless virgin who lived on the fringes of life, perpetually stimulated by her sense of the spectacle. She had no real home nor any real nationality, unless one might identify as a nation that army of restless wanderers which moved from hotel to hotel across the face of Europe. Her best friends, or at least those who knew her most intimately, were the proprietors of suchestablishments as the Hotel Negresco and the Beau Rivage, the Royal Splendide, Claridge’s, the Cavendish, the Adlon, the Ritz and sometimes, for the sake of atmosphere, such a place as the France et Choiseul. She was an orphan and rich. In Vienna she had an aunt; in Trieste a handful of cousins; in New York an uncle who traded in diamonds. She was a Jewess and an emancipated woman, regarded with suspicion by the orthodox members of her tribe. And her emancipation had the fierce quality which envelops Jewish virgins who have determined at all costs to be free. It was a sort of aggressive freedom. She had never succumbed to or even understood love and it was extremely unlikely that her bright, shiny mind would ever be weakened by an emotion so sentimental.
All this Ellen had learned from her, either by intuition or by her own confession, for Miss Schönberg was much given to conversation, especially of the self-revelatory variety. From Ellen, in turn, she had learned what the girl chose to tell her, fragments of the truth strung together in such a fashion that the whole seemed an honest but rather dull and erratic tale. Yet she knew more of Ellen than the young widow ever guessed, for if Ellen had been as dull and uninteresting as the story she told, Miss Schönberg would never have bothered to address her a second time.
And now Ellen, as she dressed to dine alone with the blind old woman belowstairs, wondered why Rebecca Schönberg had been at all interested in her. She had, it was true, faith in her own star; she knew that she would one day be famous. That any one beside herself could have any intimation of this appeared on the surface preposterous.
When she descended, she found that Jean had gone to bed and before the fire there was only Madame Gigon with Criquette and Michou, the dogs, who had not stirred from their places but lay fat and lazy, basking in the warmth of the blaze. With theeager interpreter gone, Madame Gigon, under the stress of necessity, cudgeled her old brain into speaking a very passable sort of English. At dinner, she told Ellen that Lily was stopping in the white villa at Nice. (It was not in Nice proper but Cimiez, high up on the hill beside the ruined Roman arena with a magnificent view overlooking Villefranche and the Bay of Angels. It lay just above the statue of Queen Victoria carven with a very realistic reticule and an umbrella.) She had telegraphed Lily to come home and greet her cousin properly.
After dinner they went, followed by the dogs, back again into the drawing-room to the luxurious chairs by the fire, and after a time Ellen rose and played at the request of the old woman some Brahms, an air from La Belle Hélène and finally a waltz or two of Chopin. It was a beautiful piano, for Lily respected music, and the sound of its low, mellow beauty led Ellen into playing more and more passionately. When at last her hands dropped into her lap and she sat listening to the distant sound of the boat whistles along the Seine, Madame Gigon began to talk.
She had seen George Sand once a long time ago when, as a bride, her husband, M. Gigon (who had been a curator at the Musée Cluny and had been dead now for more than half a century) had taken her one night to dine at Magny’s where he might show her the celebrities of the town. She had seen George Sand, she repeated, come in with no less persons than Flaubert, yellow and bent, and the exquisite Théophile Gautier, to dine in a private room before the répétition generale of her play Le Batard, at the Odéon. The writer was an old woman then, come up from her farm, and bedizened with cheap jewelry, but every one noticed her. She had vitality. She was a sensation....
And she could remember too the funeral of Jules de Goncourt and how they stood in the rain quite near to this same Flaubert....
But Ellen had never heard of George Sand and knew, beyond his music, very little of Chopin, so it merely confused her to hear Madame Gigon call a man “she.” Lest she betray her ignorance she kept silent, and sometimes she did not listen at all, because this ancient talk did not interest her, though it seemed to be the very core of all the life that remained in the blind old woman.
Madame Gigon talked far into the night, with the air of one who had long been shut in solitude, and as she talked her English became more and more clear. She spoke almost as easily as she had spoken in the days, half a century earlier, when she had taken Lily’s mother and the other girls of the school onpique-niquesin the woods along the Seine at Sèvres. And after a time as the dull glow of her memories took fire, she fell to talking of old Julia Shane herself. But she talked of a Julia Shane who was still a young girl and not the sick old woman who, lying ill in her house among the black mills, was the last link in the chain that held Hattie Tolliver from her children.
And as Madame Gigon talked on and on to the accompaniment of the distant sounds from the misty river, there swept over Ellen a consciousness, new but unmistakable, of a delicate unity running through all of life. It was bound together, somehow, in an intricate web composed of such things as love and memories, hopes and sorrows and sentiment, but it was a web without pattern, without design, a senseless, crazy and beautiful thing. She saw then that she could never exist apart, in isolation, from all these others; there were filaments which bound her even to so remote and insubstantial a creature as this blind old woman. It was the web which made her uneasy. She must be free of it, somewhere, sometime....
Criquette began to wheeze and Madame Gigon prodding him with her toe said, “Heigh-ho!... We must go to bed.... Even the dogs have begun to snore.”
AT the end of the week Lily returned from the south, wrapped in furs and shivering in the damp of Paris. She was a warm, sensuous creature who loved the sun and traveled north or south according to the variations in temperature. Even on the Riviera she was not content and, on the occasion of a mistral, she had been known to pack her bag and embark into Italy for Capri or Taormina where the sun was brighter and the flowers more fragrant.
She arrived early in the morning in company with the Baron, Madame Gigon’s nephew, and together they came upon Ellen, not yet fallen into the luxurious habits of the French, having breakfast alone in the dining room with Jean, who sat across the table from her plying her all the while with questions about his grandmère and about America and the Town where his mother was born. She was describing it to him....
“It is not a nice Town.... It is full of big Mills and furnaces and the soot blackens everything.... There’s nothing pretty in the Town ... nothing in the whole place half as pretty as your garden.... Your grandmother had a garden once that was as pretty as this one but it’s all dead now. The smoke killed it....”
Here Jean interrupted her to say, “I know!... I know!... Maman has a friend ... a Monsieur Schneidermann who owns Mills like that. Once when we were up north, we stopped at a town called Saarbrücken and saw the furnaces.... It was a long time ago when I was only seven ... but I remember....” He became silent and thoughtful for a time and then, looking at her wistfully, he added, “I’d like to go to that Town ... I’d like to see my grandmère.... But Maman says I can’t go ... at least until I’m grown up.... I suppose grandmère will be dead by then.... She’s an old, old woman....”
“But she’s not so old as Madame Gigon.... Think of it,Madame Gigon taught your grandmother in school when she was a young girl....”
She wanted by some means to escape from the subject of the Town. She could not, of course, tell the boy why he could never visit the Town; she could not tell him there were scores of old women who had been waiting for years just to know for certain that he existed at all. She could tell him about the smoke and filth, but she could not explain to him the nasty character of those women.
“I’m going to England to school in the autumn,” the boy said. “Maman has arranged everything.... I’ll like that better than going to school here.... Perhaps grandmère might come to visit us some time.”
“She might ...” replied Ellen, “but she’s very ill.... My mother is taking care of her now. You see, my mother lives in the Town. She’s your mother’s cousin ... her real first cousin. That’s how it comes that I’m your cousin.”
“And your mother? What is she like?” asked the boy.
For an instant Ellen observed him thoughtfully. “She’s not a bit like your mother ... and yet she’s like her too in some ways.”
She did not finish the description, for at that moment, through the long vista of the rooms, she saw moving toward her Lily and a man who carried a handbag and across his arm a steamer rug. As they came in, Jean sprang from his chair and ran toward them, clasping his mother about the waist and kissing her as she leaned toward him.
“Maman has come back! Maman has come back!” he cried over and over again, and then, “I have a new cousin! I have a new cousin!”
The man laughed and Lily, smiling, bade the boy be quiet, turning at the same time to Ellen, whom she embraced, to say, “So you’ve come at last! I hope you’re going to stay a long time.”
It was the same Lily, a shade older, a shade less slender, butstill warm, lovable, disarming. As they embraced, the faint scent of mimosa drifted toward Ellen and the odor raised a swift, clear picture of the drawing-room at Shane’s Castle with all the family assembled on Christmas day ... the last Christmas day they ever came together there. Old Jacob Barr was dead now. Ellen and Lily were in Paris, Fergus in New York. The drawing room was shut up and abovestairs in her vast bedroom Julia Shane herself, cared for by the capable Hattie, lay dying. In a few more years there would be none of the family left in the Town. They would be scattered over the world. It remained only for grandmère to die.
All this passed through Ellen’s mind as she spoke, “Yes, I shall stay a long time ... if you will have me.” She turned away. “I had to come,” she said. “There was nothing left to do.... But I’m sorry I brought you back from the south.”
“And this,” said Lily, “is Monsieur Carrière ... César. He is the nephew of Madame Gigon and a great friend of Jean and me.”
The stranger bowed and murmured, “Enchanté,” adding in English, “You are the musician.... Madame Shane expects you one day to be great.”
He was a swarthy man, rather handsome with sharply cut features and fierce mustachios, a Colonel of the Cuirassiers who had most of his time free. He smiled pleasantly, yet underneath the smile there was a hint of hostility, a mere spark which, however, struck a response in the breast of Ellen. It was on her side, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance, of the very assurance with which he conducted himself. It was as if he welcomed her to his own house. And it may have been that for reasons of his own he resented her presence. She too, was arrogant and assured, even though she said pleasantly enough, “If you will have me.” Underneath all that false humility, there ran a vein of domination, a strength which one less good-natured and indolent than Lily could discern at once. Still Lily had told him, long ago, that he would not like her cousin....
They were a handsome pair, Lily and the Baron, the one so blonde and voluptuous, the other so dark, so brusque, so like a bit of fine steel. There was about him a sense of something familiar, which tormented the dim recesses of Ellen’s memory.
“Well! Well!” he said, throwing down the coats and bags. “Let’s have some breakfast.” And with the same proprietary air he moved across and rang for the maid and ordered chocolate and rolls for himself and Lily.
When they had gone at last into the drawing-room and Madame Gigon, groping her way down the long stairs, and followed by the two fat dogs, had come in, Ellen understood what it was she had recognized at once in the swarthy Monsieur Carrière. It was nothing that had to do with his appearance; it was far more subtle and complicated than that. It was his manner, the very intonation of his voice when he spoke either to Ellen or Lily herself. He approached them, for all his smooth politeness, as if they were, in the final analysis, creatures inferior to himself, creatures who should be delighted to grant his every whim. With Lily, so good-natured, so generous, he may have been right: with her cousin it was as Mrs. Callendar used to say, “autres choses.” The girl bristled with subdued anger. As they sat there, the three of them, smoking before the bright fire, she knew they were destined to hate each other.
Yet it was this very quality, so hauntingly familiar, that reminded her of Richard Callendar. He had not asked her if she loved him; he had taken it simply for granted that she should do as he wished. The memory, in spite of everything, made her miserable. She heard his voice again, more gentle and soft than the voice of the Baron, and saw his hands, fascinating and persuasive.
He was somewhere in this same damp white city on his wedding journey with Sabine.
Presently the Baron observed with a brusque, important air that he must be off: Madame Gigon summoned Jean to the school-room for his lesson, and the two cousins were left alone. Before the others they had carried on a sort of made-up conversation, suitable for the ears of strangers, and neither had spoken honestly nor fully. As Madame Gigon, guided by Jean and followed by the waddling dogs, disappeared round the corner of the stairs, Lily took off her hat and observed, “Well, now I suppose we can have a long ... long talk. Come up to my room where we’ll be alone.”
The family, again after so long a time, asserted itself.
It was a large room, closely resembling the one in which Madame Gigon had placed Ellen, save that it was even more luxurious and smelled faintly of scents and powders. There was a canopied bed and on the wall hung reproductions of four drawings by Watteau. It was not until Lily had removed her corsets and, clad in a peignoir of lace, had flung herself down on the bed that the sense of strain disappeared utterly.
“Sit there on the chaise longue,” she said to Ellen, “and let’s have a good talk. There’s so much to say.”
Ellen, stiff and severe in her mourning, sat down by the side of her glowing cousin and Lily, lying back among the pillows, appeared by contrast more lovely, more opulent than she had seemed an hour earlier. To her cousin, so changed since they had last met, so much more indifferent to such matters, there was an air of immorality and sensuousness in the room. Beside Lily she felt as lean, as spirited as a young greyhound.
“You know about Jean,” Lily observed casually. “You understand then why I did not insist on your coming to live with me. I was foolish perhaps ... but when the moment came there was always something which wouldn’t let me betray the secret....” She lighted a cigarette and lay back once more among the pillows. “I suppose itwasa secret,” she added, complacently.
“People talked, but no one knew anything.”
“No one knows anything here.... No one save Madame Gigon. They know less here because they haven’t so much timeto think of other people’s affairs.” Slowly a smile crept over her face, from the rosy mouth up to the violet eyes. “Ah, wouldn’t they like to know in the Town?” But her voice was bitter.
Ellen smiled again. “It makes no difference. They say what they want to believe anyway.... They said that I ran away with Clarence because I was going to have a baby ... and I’ve never had it yet. It’s been a long while coming.”
“I wanted you to come ... always, but I was too lazy ever to come to the point. You can stay as long as you like and do as you please. This is a big house.... You need never see the rest of us if you don’t care to.” She spoke with the carelessness of one who was fabulously rich; there was a certain medieval splendor in her generosity. Ellen smiled again.
“Why do you smile?” her cousin asked.
“I was thinking that all this money comes out of the Town ... the same dirty old Town.”
“There’s satisfaction in that ... to think that people like Judge Weissmann are paying us rent.”
It was extraordinary how clearly the Town rose up before them. The thousands of miles which lay between made no difference. They belonged to the Town still, by a thousand ties. They were, each in her own way, American. All the years that Lily had lived in Paris could not alter the fact. She was extravagant as Americans are extravagant, content to live abroad forever as Americans are content to do. Yet all her wealth came out of America, out of the very factories in the dirty Town which they both despised. It was perhaps the Scotch blood in them that made them content wherever they saw fit to settle. In a strange country they would not, as the English do, strive to bring their native land with them; they would simply create a new world of their own. Their people have done it everywhere ... in St. Petersburg, in Constantinople, in Paris, in the Argentine and on the frontiers of Africa.
“And your husband,” began Lily. “Tell me about him....I met him once, you know, coming out on the train to the West. He was going then to see a girl called....” She frowned slightly. “I’ve forgotten her name....”
“Seton,” murmured Ellen. “May Seton.” Lily was rousing memories now, which seemed far away and yet were faintly painful.
“Seton! That was it!... I’d never heard of them and it seemed to hurt him. I wrote you when I heard of his death. The letter must have passed you.”
“I never got it ... perhaps it’ll be forwarded.”
“Had he been ill long?” She must have wondered at the look in Ellen’s eyes. It was not a look of sorrow or desolation; rather it was a look of numb pain.
“He hadn’t been ill at all.” The girl frowned suddenly and looked out of the window. “All the same,” she continued, “you might have said he had been ill for a long time.” Then she rose and stood before the small panes looking out into the wet garden. “I’ve got to tell some one,” she said with an air of desperation. “You see....” And her voice became barely audible. “You see.... He killed himself.”
The veil was torn away now. Between them there remained no barrier. Each had made her confession, Lily concerning the child, Ellen concerning her husband, and in the torrent of emotion which engulfed them Lily sat up and drew her cousin down to the bed beside her. They both wept and each (with as little real cause) pitied herself.
Ellen told her story, punctuated by sobs, from the beginning. She confessed that she had never had any love for Clarence. She spoke of many things which, at the time of the tragedy, were not clear to her and which she had come to understand later during the hours of solitude on windswept decks. In the emotion of the moment she understood the whole affair even more clearly. She told Lily that she had tried, valiantly, to make Clarence happy. She had done her best to preserve his happinessand her own at the same time. There had come a time when this was no longer possible.
“Perhaps,” she said, when her sobbing had quieted a little, “it is not possible for two people to be completely happy together.”
If she had spoken all that was in her mind, she would have added, “When one of them is ambitious and a genius.” But this would have been preposterous because there was then no proof of such a thing. Another chapter of the tale she chose not to reveal. In all her torrent of sobbing and talk she never mentioned the name of Callendar.
When they had become more quiet, Lily kissed her and said, “You have been too unhappy. You must stay now with me ... forever, if you like. You must study and become a great musician. I am rich. I can help you.... If you won’t take the money, you can borrow it from me and pay me back when you are successful and famous....”
Lily rose languidly and brought a bottle of cologne and they both bathed their eyes. All the strangeness was gone now. Their tears, in the way of women, had brought them close to each other. The sun had come out and the little park was filled by its slanting rays. Belowstairs one of the tall windows opened and they heard on the gravel of the terrace the slow steps of blind Madame Gigon who, wrapped in an antiquated coat of fur and followed by the dogs, was moving up and down in the unaccustomed warmth. There was something in the sound which, as they listened, filled the room with the atmosphere of a conspiracy. For an instant the current of kinship ran swift and high, as high indeed as it had run in the old days when all the clan assembled for the annual feast at Shane’s Castle.
“She is growing feeble,” observed Lily. “Think of it. She’s eighty-five.”
Life was short. Only a little time before Madame Gigon had been a young widow come to the school of Mademoiselle Violet de Faux to teach, among others, an awkward young American called Julia Shane.
When Ellen had gone to her own room, she sat for a time before the fire, thinking, and slowly the face which she saw reflected in the dim old mirror began, though it was quite alone in the room, to smile back at her. It had not been difficult. It was all done now. The future was certain. She had gotten what was necessary, without asking for it; in some inexplicable fashion, quite without any planning, it had happened. She had not even been forced to say that all she had in the world were the seven francs that lay in the sunlight on the Louis Quinze console.
IN this one fleeting instant life had been briefly a perfect and exquisite thing. In the great house, surrounded by beauty, by warmth and friendliness, the past and, even for a time, the future did not exist. It was a moment which could not have endured; with such a person as Ellen a moment of that sort might have been called a miracle to have happened at all. As the months passed the very comfort which surrounded her degenerated into a sort of dulness. After a time, Lily returned to her beloved south and there remained in the house only Ellen, Madame Gigon and Jean. The endless talk of Lily’s guardian, which in the beginning had seemed vaguely diverting, became in the end merely the garrulity of a childish old woman. But there were worse things to bear.
She soon discovered that Lily, in her indifference, had virtually given over the house to Madame Gigon, and the old woman, poverty-stricken until Lily appeared on her horizon in need of a companion and watchdog, now used it to make up for all the years she had spent alone in a single room in a Versailles pension. Her friends were coming and going constantly, at the most inconvenient times, an endless procession of dowdy widows and spinsters. It was their habit to fortify themselves in the great drawing-room at just the moment chosen by Ellen for her practising. This theydid with an air of the utmost assurance, as if their great age in some fashion gave them precedence over all else in this world. Thus they would sit for hours talking volubly in a tongue which so far as Ellen was concerned might have been Greek or Roumanian. But gradually as she came to understand a word here and there, the mystery surrounding their impassioned conversation was dissipated, and out of the fog there emerged the prosaic fact that their excitement had no foundation. They became as wild over the price of cheese or the health of Criquette as if they had been engaged in a battle to preservela glorie de la patrie. Yet they were all rich; the very fingers which they shook so violently in the excess of their excitement glittered with diamonds and emeralds. And presently, as her knowledge of French increased, Ellen came to the dismal realization that the bulk of their talk was concerned with gossip. Gathered in a cluster about the blind old woman, they tore reputations as they might have torn cheese cloth. The words “maîtresse” and “intrigue” leapt from the conference a score of times within a single afternoon. Heads wagged and crêpe flowed, (for all of them were so old that they were perpetually in mourning for a husband or a brother or sister; indeed, they went beyond this and mourned darkly the demise of the most remote cousins). Madame de Cyon, the youngest of the lot and the one whom Mrs. Callendar had mentioned so long ago, had a way of narrowing her green eyes and saying, “Tiens! Tiens!” over some choice morsel, with an air of sniffing a bad smell. There were times when Ellen felt that if she said “Tiens! Tiens!” another time she would strangle her. Madame de Cyon was Russian but no better than the rest. They were all, Ellen came to understand, like the women of the Town; they visited Madame Gigon because she was blind and did not go out, and the remainder of their time, it seemed, was spent in collecting morsels for the delectation of the old woman.
There was but one thing which diverted the stream of their gossip and this was the mention of the sacred name of Bonaparte.She gathered, after a time, that there was a Prince Bonaparte in whom the existence of all of them had found its core. She learned to her astonishment that they ignored the very existence of the Republic. A tottering old man, the son of a plumber’s daughter and a dubious prince who was a homicide (all this she gathered from their talk) was, to them, a shining figure invested with all the glory of the Corsican’s golden bees.
At length, when she could bear it no longer, Ellen had a piano brought in and placed in one of the great empty chambers in the gallery above the drawing-room, and there she played for hours in defiance of “le Prince” and his court of old women belowstairs. There were times when the music (especially the compositions of some of the hateful new composers) became so violent that it threatened to drown the gossip of Madame Gigon’s cronies. At such moments the blind old woman would raise her sightless eyes toward the ceiling and observe to the others, “That is Madame Shane’s cousin. She is a violent woman (une femme sauvage).... She suffers from an excess of élan.”
At which Madame de Cyon would wag her head and observe, “Tiens! Tiens! Perhaps if she had a lover it would help! A young widow like that....”
During the long months two things sustained her. One was, of course, the old passion for her music. The other was Jean. As they came to know each other, a warm and touching affection developed between them, for the boy, despite the good manners and the quiet grave charm born of his long association with older people, had in him a spark which the presence of his cousin fanned into a flame. The life he led was, to be sure, of a queer sort ... a life spent almost entirely within the walls of the beautiful old house with little company save old Madame Gigon, her fat dogs and the fussy music master who came twice a week to give him lessons. It was a somber, quiet life which changed only during the delirious summer months when, in company withhis mother and old Madame Gigon, he went to stay in the country at Germigny l’Evec in the lodge of the park owned by Madame’s nephew, the Baron. There he could ride a pony, sometimes alone and sometimes following his mother and the Baron on their long rides at early morning through the damp forest on the opposite bank of the Marne. And there were the farmer’s boys for playmates.
But in winter everything was changed. Until his cousin came from America he played alone day after day in the little park dominated by the white pavilion. The fascination of having a cousin ... a real new cousin ... seemed likely to endure forever. Indeed the power of the novelty was so great that at times he slyly deserted old Madame Gigon and made his way secretly up the long stairs and along the gallery to sit on the floor outside Ellen’s door and listen, breathless, to the flood of music that welled up to fill all the house.
When Ellen took him walking in the Bois she did not, like his mother, walk in an indolent regal fashion; she moved rapidly, quite the way a person ought to walk, and she talked of the people they passed and sometimes even halted beside the pond and threw stones far out into the water.
The boy was, at that time, her only companion for, shut in by her ignorance of French and an incurable dislike for the stringy American students who sometimes sought her acquaintance, she had no opportunity for making friends. Yet she was content to be lonely, for she had always been so, save in two brief moments ... once when she had been overcome by the presence of Callendar and again when Lily had wept and embraced her. Jean worshiped her without claiming any part of her. He was, in this, like his mother, for Lily, in the wisdom and indolence of her nature, allowed Ellen to go her own way. It may have been that in this grain of wisdom lay the secret of her charm and her power even over the old women who came to gather about Madame Gigon’s chair and gossip. They succumbed to her like all the others, like the Baron....
There were times when the presence of César troubled Ellen. During all those months the first hatred she had for him failed to abate; she came to tolerate him, perhaps because she saw that it was necessary just as once it had been necessary to tolerate Mr. Wyck and the Bunces. She must have known that he worked against her. Yet in a strange, abstract fashion, she was able to understand the fascination of his hard and wiry masculinity. It was, of course, a thing which she herself could not have suffered for an instant, but she understood that to Lily it was a necessity. Beyond this point, however, her shrewd mind was unable to penetrate; it was impossible to fix the relationship of the pair. Lily never spoke of him, save in the most casual fashion. Indeed, Ellen, who could not bring herself to pry into such matters, never knew whether the Baron had been at Nice with her cousin or whether he had met her at the railway station. Madame Gigon spoke of him as her devoted nephew. She praised his virtues, and his constant presence at the house she interpreted as an interest in herself. At times Ellen could have cried out, “Rot! It’s not your nephew who’s supporting you and making you comfortable. It’s Lily. And it’s not you that he comes to see. It’s Lily.”
But she said nothing. The strangest thing of all was that she did not much care what their relationship might be. Once it might have disturbed her; now she looked upon it as a matter of no concern, a thing which had nothing to do with her. Yet there were moments in the evenings when, sitting with them in the long drawing-room, she felt vague, faint envy of her cousin. They came in the long silences when she would suddenly discover that Lily, so happy, so radiant, so lovely, in the long gowns of black velvet which she wore in the evening, was watching the Baron as he sat smoking his pipe, his feet stretched out before him toward the fire. The dogs adored him. He was the one person for whom they would desert Madame Gigon.
It was then that Ellen became conscious of her loneliness as a distant, almost physical pain. She learned to kill the pain.Usually she rose, lighted a cigarette, and sitting at the piano, fell to playing wild and boisterous music out of the music halls.