The pair below her knew, no doubt, that Madame Gigon waslong since snoring among the gimcracks of her bedroom, and they believed that she herself was out, at the theater with Rebecca. In the French manner, the servants did not matter; it is probable that of all the people in the house they knew most of Lily and her life.
The Baron’s voice, deep and rich, drifted up to the open window.
“Jean, you say, will be back from school in June?”
He wore his uniform, and the perfection of its lines emphasized all the trim, masculine hardness of his slight figure. Beside him in her black gown, with the stole of sable thrown round her for warmth, Lily was soft and lovely. His voice it seemed, caressed her.
“He is growing big now ... fourteen. Think of it....” He laughed softly. “Youwith a big boy of fourteen! It is impossible ...incroyable!”
Lily said something which was not audible and then, “Yes. We must be more careful. He will begin to see things.”
“In England boys are not so sharp ... at least not about affairs between men and women.”
In silence they walked for a time, once up and once down the terrace. The leaves of the plane trees rustled and a boat far below in the Seine whistled faintly. Once more they passed beneath the window.
“June is more than a month away,” said the Baron. “We could go to Nice for three long weeks.”
Lily, it seemed, was unwilling, for he argued with her, saying in a voice that would have melted steel, “Think of it.... We have not been alone for months. Think of it ... the mornings ... waking together ... looking out over the bay.... Alone ... alone.” He paused suddenly and seizing her in his arms kissed her. For a long time they stood thus. Ellen could see them quite plainly, standing in the shadow of one of the white urns, Lily with her head against his shoulder while he kissed her again and again.
Then slowly, with the air of waking from a dream, Lily raisedher head and passing her hand against her eyes, murmured, “I should not like Ellen to know.”
At this he laughed and a new note, one of hard anger, entered his voice. “She knows already if she is not a fool.”
At the intonation Lily withdrew and leaned against one of the white urns. “She doesn’t. I’m sure of it. She has said nothing.”
Again he laughed, scornfully. “She’s no fool. She knows it would be more unpleasant for her than for you. She needs a home and money ... just now. She’ll not open her eyes so long as it might harm her plans.”
Sitting there in the darkness, Ellen succumbed to a slow anger that rose to her head like a fever. She had believed that he spoke against her; now she was sure of it. She hated him vaguely, because he dared even to say such a thing to her cousin. He was so sure of himself, the amorous beast.
She was hurt too, as if some one had struck her, because what César had said was so near to the truth.
But Lily turned away from him. “I won’t have you say such things,” she said. “It is ridiculous and unjust.”
He did not use words in defense of himself, perhaps because words were to him such weak and awkward weapons. Instead, he simply took Lily once more in his arms, and beneath his kisses, Ellen saw that all resistance, all anger melted from her. It was like a bit of wax touched suddenly by a flame.... An amazing sight which seemed to illumine sharply the whole of Lily’s strange life.
After a moment, he placed his arm about her waist and they moved away down the steps into the shadow of the plane trees. Once they halted for a time while he kissed her again and then, resuming their way in the same state of enchantment, they disappeared through the filigree of black shadows into the white pavilion, silvered by the moon.
And in the room above the terrace, Ellen slipped from the chaise longue to the floor where she lay flung out, weeping passionately. The loneliness returned now more terribly than ever before.
IN the morning, after coffee and brandy, Ellen rose at dawn to ride in the Bois. She went purposely without Schneidermann, leaving him to a vain pursuit, in order that she might be alone; and when she returned she found that Lily was already awake and had come down from her room to breakfast on the terrace. The May sunlight poured into the garden and beat against the stone of the façade, enveloping her with its reflected warmth, as she sat at the iron table before a bowl of hot chocolate, a dish of rolls and two piles of letters. One heap had been opened and the contents lay scattered over the table and on the flagging beneath. As Ellen, tall and slim in her riding habit and hard hat, stepped through the tall window Lily put down a letter and said, “I brought your mail out here. It isn’t interesting this morning ... mostly bills.”
Ellen throwing down her crop and hat, ran her fingers through her dark hair and seated herself on the opposite side of the table, while Lily sent for more chocolate and hot rolls.
“You look tired,” observed Lily. “Were you out late?”
“No. Rebecca couldn’t go with me, and I was tired so I didn’t go at all. But I slept badly.”
Lily turned the page of the note she was reading. “You work too hard,” she said. “Try taking a rest. Come down to the country with me in June.”
“No, I can’t do that.... I’m going to play in London. Rebecca and Schneidermann have arranged it. It will be my début.”
She announced the news abruptly, without any show of emotion.
Lily put down the letter and leaned toward her. “You didn’t tell me it would be so soon.”
“I only knew it for certain last night. I’m superstitious about speaking of things until they’re certain. I’m to play in Wigmore Street on the third.”
Her cousin was all interest now. She drew her chair a little nearer and carelessly pushed her letters off the edge of the table.
“Have you chosen a gown? We’ll send for the motor and choose one this morning. That’s important, you know ... especially in England where they recognize good clothes but never wear them.”
“I can’t go this morning.... I’m going to Philippe.”
“To-morrow then,” said Lily. “I shall go over to London for the concert and bring Jean back with me.... Perhaps César can go too.”
“Not him!” Ellen interrupted sullenly. “He’d spoil everything.”
For a moment the two cousins regarded each other in silence. In Ellen’s face there was a look of bitterness that appeared more and more frequently of late, a sort of devil-may-care expression that puzzled Lily and disturbed her. They had never recognized the breach before ... not, at least, openly.
“Why shan’t César come?” she put forward gently.
“He hates me! I know that!”
Lily endeavored to pour oil on the waters. “It’s not true. You’re rude to each other ... both of you. Why is it? There’s no reason. He doesn’t really dislike you?”
For a time, Ellen came very close to being unpleasant; she was tempted to reveal all she had seen and heard from the window above the moonlit garden. The memory of César’s words rang in her ears, a taunt in which there was too much of truth. But she could not say that she hated César because he never allowed her any peace of mind. She could not say that she never saw him without thinking of Callendar.
“It’s nothing ... nonsense, I daresay, on both sides.” The power of Lily’s eager friendliness overwhelmed her. “I’m sorry,” she added, “that I’m disagreeable sometimes.... I’ve been worried lately. I know the quarrel is my fault too.” She tore open one of her letters and then, looking very pale, she added, “Bring him, if he would like to come.... It won’t matter.”
And Lily never knew what it was that softened her so abruptly. She did not know, of course, that Ellen was thinking of Callendar,hoping desperately that he could be there to listen to her music as he had listened so many times, with all the passionate abandon which meant so much to her. She needed Fergus too, for she was frightened now that the chance, awaited so long, was at hand. With César present she would at least be reminded of Callendar. It would be the next best thing to having him or Fergus in a cold audience of strangers.
On the top of the little pile of letters was one from her mother from which she read portions aloud to her cousin.
“We are settled now in seven rooms in East Seventieth Street. There is room for Fergus and Robert and Papa and I, and a room for Gramp and his books, which he would not leave behind. And an extra room which I have let to a young man who works with an electrical company. He has nice manners and seems to be of a very good family. He talks a great deal about them. It seems that his family was rich once, a long time ago. He was very unhappy in a boarding house, but he likes it here....”
Lily, who had been listening closely to the news, looked up as Ellen suddenly stopped reading and allowed the letter to slip to the ground. She saw that her cousin reached down hastily and recovered it, as if she wished to conceal her agitation.
“Not bad news?” asked Lily.
“No. I was just surprised for a moment by something in the letter. I think ... I think I know the young man she writes of. Still I can’t understand what chance brought him and Ma together.... It’s an idiotic world.... There’s no sense in it.” She lighted a cigarette, and after a thoughtful silence added, “Ma is a remarkable woman. Think of her, tearing a whole family up by its roots and transplanting it without a thought.”
Then she continued reading. The family, she learned, were all very comfortable in their new home. Fergus might be going abroad in a year or two ... some sort of writing work, with a newspaper. Hattie had recaptured him only to lose him againat once. Robert was the same, the plodder of the family, silent, unbrilliant, a sort of rock and foundation as old Jacob Barr had been before him. They were hoping to see Ellen soon now. She must come home, now that they were settled in New York. And in the end there was the usual refrain.I am looking forward to the day when I can make a home for all my children.
When she had finished reading, they both sat for a time in silence and at last Lily said simply, “She’ll never give up, will she?”
In the same pile there was a note from Rebecca sent by hand from the Regina where she was stopping. It read:
“I’m sorry about last night but it couldn’t be helped. How was I to know that Aunt Lina was arriving from Vienna and hadn’t been in Paris for twenty-five years? She had to be looked after and will take a great deal of my time, I suppose, as she plans to stay a month if I cannot get her off before that. She is important because she is very rich and has no children. Uncle Otto owns a sapphire mine in Cambodia. And I am her god-daughter. (Her real name is Rebecca, but in the family they call her Lina because there are so many Rebeccas.) Besides, some day she may be of use to us in Vienna, especially when the time comes for you to play there. She is rich and has myriads of rich friends who all spend money on the arts.
“I won’t let her interfere with the plans for London. I’ve talked to Schneidermann and in case I can’t get away at once, he will go over and arrange things in plenty of time. He knows the ropes. Don’t let Lily help to choose your gown without my being there. She has beautiful taste but it’s too quiet for an artist. The public, especially in England and America, expects something spectacular from a musician. I’ll try to run out for a moment to-day if I can get rid of Aunt Lina. Perhaps I can make her believe she is tired from the journey and stay in bed all day. Here’s to the triumph in London!
Rebecca.”
The note troubled her, so that when Lily rose, and murmuring something, went into the house to dress, Ellen took no notice of her but got up and walked, in her slim black riding habit with the skirt pinned high (she did not ride astride, because she thought it ugly) down the steps into the garden.
If Rebecca failed her now, either through Aunt Lina or otherwise, she felt that she would not have courage to go on. She would kill herself because there would be nothing left. She fancied the humiliation of playing before row upon row of empty seats. If fate played her such a dirty trick, she would put herself out of fate’s way. She was sick to death of being buffeted about, this way and that, achieving neither success nor happiness.
Angrily she beat her skirt with her riding crop. If Schneidermann went to London, it would only put her hopelessly in his debt. She might have to marry him out of gratitude, and she wanted no more weak husbands to clutter up her life.
And then this business of Wyck turning up suddenly as a lodger in her mother’s house! It could be no one else; her mother’s description fitted him too perfectly ...a man whose family had been rich once, who worked with an electrical company, who talked a great deal of past splendors. He had reappeared, armed with her secret. She could fancy her mother caring for him, making him comfortable, giving him all the attentions he yearned for and never received in a world which kicked him about. She could trust Fergus, but Mr. Wyck was nasty, feminine. Still he had not betrayed his acquaintance either with her or poor Clarence. If he had done that, her mother would have spoken of it in her letter.... A friend of one of Hattie’s children would be like a child of her own. It may have been that he felt as guilty as she herself felt; if that were true, he would not be likely to betray her. She thought of his shifting green eyes, his mincing manner and his habit of talking perpetually of the past. He was a worm ... something one might find on lifting a stone!
Twice she had made the round of the garden, indifferent nowin the midst of her own worries to the nearness of the guilty pavilion, when she saw Augustine, the maid, coming toward her with a card. For some reason, she was overcome by a sudden feeling that this bit of paper which the red-faced Breton girl held in her hand was of immense importance. She found herself hurrying forward to meet her. She found herself reading the name and then, looking up, she saw in one of the tall windows that opened on the terrace, the figure of Sabine Cane ... Sabine Callendar ... standing in the brilliant sunlight, dressed all in gray, superbly, with a gray veil that fell over her shoulders ... the same Sabine, poised, indifferent, striking. Nothing had changed save that she looked old, surprisingly so considering the perfection of her make-up.
The call must indeed be important, since Sabine had followed Augustine straight into the garden.
They sat in the long drawing-room where they might look out over the sun-drenched garden with its blue flame of irises lighting up the expanses of gray stone.
“What a lovely house!” remarked Sabine as she drew off her gloves. “I suppose it is your cousin’s.”
The speech was stiff, constrained by the vague shadow of hostility that had enveloped them, almost at once—an intangible thing, which it is probable both women felt but failed to understand, because each fancied herself too intelligent to be the victim of jealousy.
“Yes. It belongs to Madame Shane.”
Sabine laughed. “It’s the sort of house I would like. You see we live, when we’re in Paris, in a sort of World’s Fair exhibit in the Avenue du Bois.”
It surprised Ellen to find that a single, small word such as “we” could cause her any feeling. She found too that the presence of Sabine had turned back the years; she was watching her now, as she might watch an enemy, as she had watched her in the dayswhen she had gone, a young and awkward girl, to the big house on Murray Hill. She had not “watched” people in quite this fashion for a long time now.
She felt herself quite a match for the worldly woman who sat, carefully, with the brilliant light at her back; she could no longer be taken at a disadvantage.
“It is strange,” said Ellen, “that we have not met before.”
Sabine’s scarlet lips curved in a bright hard smile. “I saw you once, in the distance, at the Ritz. It was nearly four years ago. You went out before I was able to speak to you.” She coughed, nervously. “So I lost trace of you. I was sorry, because I was interested to know how you had come to Paris so soon.”
“I just came. There was nothing strange about it.”
“But I thought there were so many difficulties.”
“They happened to disappear very quickly ... through a series of chances.”
The old Sabine, the one Ellen had known so well, the Sabine who was always prying into the affairs of other people, showed itself now, yet there was a difference, impossible to define save that now her interest seemed to be more personal, more intense, not so cold and abstract.
“You see,” she continued, “Mrs. Callendar found your address through Madame de Cyon.”
(So Mrs. Callendar had known all along that she was in Paris.)
“I have not seen her,” said Ellen, “since I left New York.”
For a moment, the shadow of a mocking, bitter smile crossed Sabine’s face.
“She is just the same.... Just as vigorous, just as determined.”
“I should like to see her again.... Perhaps she will be interested to know that I make my début in London in June.”
At this, even the indifferent mask of Sabine betrayed a flicker of surprise. “So you’re still working at your music.”
Ellen laughed. “Of course. What did you think?”
“But it has taken a long time.”
“Naturally. It meant work. I was taking no chances.”
So they talked, rather stupidly, fencing with each other, making no progress. It was clear that Sabine had not called at such an hour simply through politeness, nor was it likely that she called because she sought to renew an old acquaintance. Both women were too intelligent to have misunderstood each other. As for Ellen, she found herself excited by the consciousness of a shadowy struggle; there was a devilish satisfaction in finding herself with an advantage over so experienced a woman as Sabine. The visitor wanted something; beneath all her indifference, she was clearly excited and nervous. Once Ellen caught her pulling a button from her gray gloves.
It occurred to her suddenly to be bold and strike at what might be the root of the matter.
“How is Mr. Callendar?” she asked, amused at the thought of speaking thus of him.
“He is well,” Sabine replied with a terrible quietness, and then, after a little pause. “Do you see him frequently?”
For an instant Ellen was very near to losing her temper, a thing she might easily have done now that she found herself a match for Sabine. But she did not; instead she waited and said, “What do you mean? How could I have seen him? I have not seen him since I came to Paris.”
The answer was so honest, so obviously true, that even Sabine was discountenanced. She looked at the floor and murmured, “I didn’t know. I thought perhaps you had.”
“Why didn’t you ask him?” suggested Ellen.
“It would have done no good. Besides he would have thought me jealous.” There was something pitiful in the terrible control exercised by the woman. Even Ellen forgot suddenly the strange sense of enmity. She kept silent and it was Sabine who spoke.
“Besides,” she said. “You never spoke of him or of Mrs.Callendar to Madame de Cyon. That made me think you might have seen him.”
“It would only have made complications,” replied Ellen. “If you knew Madame de Cyon, you would understand.” Her voice suddenly grew cold. “Did you think,” she asked, “that he had brought me to Paris? Did you think I was carrying on an affair ... secretly?”
The more they talked, the clearer grew the likeness of the one to the other. They were in both the same restraint, the same watchfulness, the same determination that the world should not hurt her.
When Ellen looked at her visitor again she saw that she had been weeping, silently; she was putting a handkerchief, stealthily, to her eyes, ashamed clearly that she should have so revealed her unhappiness.
“I have been wretched all day,” she said. “You see little Thérèse and I ... that’s my little daughter, she’s three years old ... found a starving kitten yesterday. It had fleas and we washed it with carbolic soap. It’s sick. I’m afraid we’ve hurt it and it may die. Little Thérèse is very fond of it.”
Then, quite silently, the tears began to stream down her face. It was the only sign she gave. She did not sob. Her hands did not tremble. She simply wept.
It was a terrible sight, because Ellen understood plainly that the kitten had nothing to do with the tears.
Presently, after she had had a glass of port, Sabine took Ellen’s hand and murmured, “You must forgive me. I was spiteful and rude ... and unjust too. But you see there were so many things. You knew my husband a little, so you can guess perhaps something of the story.”
Then pressing her hand to her head, she was silent for a time. “You seeI have had a child ... a daughter ... and I can never have another. Mrs. Callendar and Richard want a son ... I know that.... The old woman wants some one to care for all her money. You see, he’s no good at it. They’ve never said anything, but I know she wants me to divorce him so that he can marry again. I can feel all their will working against me.... It’s horrible. It’s sinister. It’s always concealed by smiles and smooth words. I can’t do that.... I can’t.... Not yet ... perhaps some day.” The tears began to flow again, for even Sabine could not keep from pitying herself. “And I know there are other women.... I think I am a little mad to behave in this fashion ... to come to you, like this.” She coughed nervously. “You were always so strong and so independent. So was I ... once.”
She rose and dried her eyes and powdered her nose. “Now,” she said, “I look presentable again.” Then she took Ellen’s hand and murmured: “You’ll forgive me, won’t you? I’ve been a fool.... And you’ll say nothing?”
Ellen moved with her toward the long stairs that led up to the door opening upon the street. Together they climbed them, quite close to each other in the friendliest fashion, and from the doorway Ellen watched her, composed once more, chic and worldly, step into her tiny motor and drive away.
As she turned from the door and descended the stairs, it occurred to her suddenly that save for chance she might have been the unhappy woman entering the motor. It was amazing what Callendar had done to Sabine. Last night she had been envying her, and to-day Sabine had come to her almost, one might say, seeking help.... Sabine who had been so cold and impregnable and aloof.
And in a strange way, in spite even of Sabine’s insults, she had given her sympathy. It was as if they had, tacitly, become allies in the battle against him.
AUNT LINA did not interrupt the plans, for she spent only two weeks in Paris and left declaring that it had changed for the worse during the twenty-five years that had passed since her last visit. The new houses looked just like the houses in Vienna; her friends had died or gone away; in fact she could see no reason at all for ever having left Vienna. So Rebecca went over to London to make the arrangements and Schneidermann did what he could in Paris.
Between them, they set in motion a caravan of gossip and small talk which found its way through devious channels into Berlin, Munich, London, Rome and New York. Sometimes news of this new pianist (who was so remarkable) was carried by word of mouth; sometimes it was relayed by letter to the members of Rebecca’s tribe scattered across the face of Europe. After a conference in the Rue Raynouard, attended by Lily, Schneidermann, Rebecca, Ellen and César (who took part resentfully until it occurred to him that if Ellen could be made famous he might be free of her forever), a name was chosen. “Ellen Tolliver” was commonplace and carried no implications that were not solid, respectable and bourgeois. The name which emerged after three hours of frantic argument was “Lilli Barr,” a name compounded out of Lily’s name and the name of old Jacob Barr ... a name that might be anything, a name that had a slight turn toward the Hungarian, a name that was abundant of implications. A musician called Lilli Barr could have no past that was not glamorous and romantic; and between them, Rebecca and Schneidermann proceeded to invent just such a past by creating out of nothing the most amazing tales.
In all the hubbub and preparations Sabine was forgotten, but the memory of Callendar remained. Ellen, now Lilli Barr, prayed that he might reappear for just one night.
The success of the concert in Wigmore Street is now a part ofmusical history. In London Rebecca drafted the services of an immense family connection; fully one half the seats were taken by Bettelheims, Rakonitzes, Czelovars, Schönbergs and Abramsons; there were even one or two Rothschilds present in a box. Schneidermann recruited another group, less numerous but more cynical and hostile, from the musical world. Pictures of Lilli Barr (who photographed splendidly) appeared in the illustrated papers, and the critics, instead of sending their second or third assistants to the concert, appeared in person.
It was all admirably managed. The shrewd brain of Rebecca forgot nothing. In those busy days the friendly little Jewess with the red hair and ferrety eyes stood forth for the first time in all the glory of her rôle as impresaria; and when the concert was over and the notices read, it was clear that she had been right in the instinct that had led her to speak to the pale, disagreeable girl in black who had paced the deck of theCity of Parisfive years before. Rebecca had loved music always; she had wished earnestly all her life to be an artist of one sort or another; she had spent years in rushing madly from one capital to another in search of diversion or occupation, and now she was settled. She had found her place as “the exploitress,” as Schneidermann expressed it, of Lilli Barr, the new star upon the horizon of music.
But there was one thing of which Rebecca knew nothing and which Ellen chose to keep a secret because it could have been of interest to none save herself. After she had played the first group on her program and returned to the platform in response to the applause, she caught a glimpse among the shadows in the back of the hall of a dark, familiar face. It astonished her that she should have noticed it at all, and once she had seen it, the rest of the audience failed to trouble her; it no longer had any existence. From that moment there had been a strange lift apparent in her music, a wild sort of ecstasy which carried every one with it. She played for one person. Among the shadows atthe back of the hall Callendar sat, listening, his dark sleek head bent forward a little. He was alone.
It was Rebecca who saw to it, in the months which followed, that Ellen was seen at the proper places, dressed with just a touch of fantasy so that she might attract notice and yet not be taken for a demi-mondaine; it was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen’s fierce dark beauty (so confident now in her triumph so arrogant) was set down for posterity by the most fashionable portrait painter in England, a man with a romantic reputation whom the gullible public would in time connect with Lilli Barr in some hazy intrigue which had never existed. It was Rebecca who saw to it that Ellen was photographed beside this composer and that one, and that the photographs, skilfully made with an eye to public attention, fell into proper hands and traveled to America where they looked forth from the pages of the Sunday supplements into the startled, proud faces of Charles and Hattie Tolliver and Fergus and Robert. They even found their way, after the rest of the family had exhausted the possibilities of the papers, into the cell of Gramp Tolliver who chuckled with wicked satisfaction over the spectacle of the ruthless granddaughter who had, after all, escaped.
And they found their way back to the Town where Mrs. Herman Biggs (née Seton and now the mother of three children) clipped them and showed them to the neighbors and to her brother Jimmy, a spindly, nervous youth of nineteen, who in his childhood had been honored more than once by cuffs from the hands of Lilli Barr which the newspapers said (via Miss Schönberg) were insured for one hundred thousand dollars.
In her boarding house, Cousin Eva Barr, last of the family, dominated the greasy meals for more than a week by the stories of the childhood of Lilli Barr. Under the spell of the reflected glamour, she forgot even the charities she administered so grimly, and spent most of her day at meetings and walking along streets where she would be likely to encounter people who would askabout her cousin. For in all the excitement, it seemed that in some way she herself had at last escaped the tradition that made a vigorous, unmarried woman into a grim, forbidding dreadnought.
Miss Ogilvie too shared the triumph though in a different fashion. It was she, after all, who had discovered Lilli Barr; but it was not this which warmed her fluttering heart so much as the old secret of the missing five hours, which even now she shared with no one. It was Miss Ogilvie—poor, timid, Miss Ogilvie—trapped like Cousin Eva Barr in the tradition of an earlier generation, who had helped this Lilli Barr to escape. And in her thoughts (she being a sentimental creature and knowing nothing of the truth) the little parlor took on a new glow of romance and glamour. At times, when her secret seemed almost too difficult to keep, she fancied that some day, after she herself was dead, they might place on the front of her house a little tablet with an inscription which read, “It was from this house on the Fifth of January, 1903, that Lilli Barr (then Ellen Tolliver) eloped ... etc. etc.”
So, in the first years of her fame, Ellen remained a little dazed by her success. She moved, terrified always on the eve of a concert, going between concerts her hard-working, secretive way, so that there grew up about her, in addition to all Rebecca’s marvelous lies, a legend of mystery. Few people knew her or anything at all of her real life. There were only the gaudy stories of Rebecca’s fabrication which people believed and yet did not believe because there were so many of them and they were all so conflicting. In place of the old coldness and restraint, which melted only when Ellen’s fingers touched the keyboard of a Bechstein or a Steinway, Rebecca managed to create such a sense of splendor and unmorality that presently the newspapers, as old Sanson had done long ago, came to speak of her as a second Teresa Carreño.
She caught too from Rebecca something of the latter’s contagious sense of showmanship and came to understand presently that if one wished to be sensationally successful it was necessary not only to be a fine musician but something of a charlatan as well. She learned not simply to walk out upon the platform; she made an entrance. In Paris, where Rebecca managed to buy up most of the press, she had a great following. Women came to the concerts for no other reason than to see her clothes and to study the youthful perfection of her figure.
Success and triumph flared up in her path in whatever direction she turned, yet there were times when the old doubts, the old self-reproach, assailed her bitterly.
One night, as she left the Salle Gaveau after a concert, and stood waiting with Rebecca for Schneidermann’s motor to come up, the sight of anaffichebearing the name LILLI BARR in great letters filled her with a kind of terror. Silently she gazed at it, fascinated by the name and the program in small letters beneath it ... Bach, Schumann, Moussorgsky, Chopin, Debussy ... all the great names dwarfed beneath the gigantic LILLI BARR. She knew that on the sidewalk, almost within arm’s length of her, there stood students, hungry and a little threadbare, who waited by the door to catch a glimpse of her as she left the hall. She knew that this Lilli Barr, whose name was set forth in letters so gigantic, had every reason to be content. Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She stared at the name with a curious sensation of strangeness, of detachment. Lilli Barr was herself now, and Ellen Tolliver was dead, swallowed up by a fantastic creature whom Rebecca and Schneidermann between them had created. To the world Ellen Tolliver had no existence; she had never lived at all, and she had now to play a rôle—to put on a false face—that the world might not discover it had been deceived. She was still playing the mountebank, the charlatan, as she had done in the drawing-room on Murray Hill behind a painted screen with a Russian tenor and a Javanese dancer. For a moment she hated Lilli Barr with a passionate hatred. She had lost possession forever of Ellen Tolliver. In the midst of her pride there had always been the grain of humility, fiercely hidden from the world, which made her in spite of everything an artist.
The voice of Rebecca, shrewd and sleek with her success as an “exploitress,” sounded in her ear.
“Here’s the motor.... We’ll be late and the others will have arrived without you.” (Always hustling ... Rebecca ... always pushing from one thing to another.)
César, for all his hopes, had not yet lost her. At that very moment the house in the Rue Raynouard was filled with people whom Schneidermann and Rebecca had called in ... actresses, writers, rich bankers with a fancy for art, musicians, perhaps even a demi-mondaine or two ... all the rag, tag and bobtail gathered from a dozen cities of Europe. What was she doing among them? She? Ellen Tolliver? Had she lost possession of herself?—that precious self she had guarded always with such secrecy?
It was not Ellen Tolliver who was going to this noisy party. It was Lilli Barr, a creature who had been made out of nothing. Ellen Tolliver would have gone to her room and wept a little over her loneliness.
The voice of Rebecca again....
“Ravel is coming to-night. He wants to speak with you about the new suite he has done.... It is important. Be nice to him.”
It was all a long way from Walker’s Pond.
For two years she lived, thus, almost in public, sustained always by the glorious vitality descended to her from Hattie Tolliver and guided by Rebecca who allowed her to miss no opportunity. She was tireless. She appeared everywhere. Yet there was a remoteness about her which none penetrated, save perhaps Callendar whose dark face appeared now and then in the back of some concert hall, now in Paris, now in London, now in Rome, wherever his path chanced to cross that of Lilli Barr. Sometimes as she came upon the stage she caught a fleeting glimpse of him, watching her as he had watched on that first awful evening inWigmore Street, when so much had hung in the balance. He was always alone.
During the second summer she set out with Rebecca to visit Vienna and exploit Aunt Lina and her friends, and to play in Salzburg; but they never arrived, for on the day they left Paris the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Serajevo.
On the same day Fergus sailed for London.
IT was Fergus who first called Gramp The Everlasting. The name was not original; he found it in one of the seed catalogues which his father brought into the apartment; for Charles Tolliver, shut up all day in a government office and all night in a city flat, led vicariously a life which in happier times had been a reality. The living room was cluttered with the catalogues of gardening houses and journals which dealt with agriculture, stock breeding and horses. The outward life of the gentle man was scarcely more than an illusion; a man with Charles Tolliver’s face and dressed in Charles Tolliver’s clothes lived at an address in the east Seventies of New York City; the same man worked at the Customs House, eating his lunch modestly in one of the little restaurants where Clarence and Mr. Wyck had once taken their gloomy meals. But the real Charles Tolliver was not to be found in any of these places. He lived perpetually among the farms of a county in the Midlands, or in the hotel bars and parlors of the Town, talking endlessly of the Grand Circuit races. And sometimes he was to be found seated with a fishing rod on the banks of a clear stream a thousand miles from the greasy current of the North River. When he was not in such places, he could be found among the catalogues which displayed gay colored pictures of gigantic beets and ears of sweet corn, or in the pages of journals which had splendid pictures of prize cows and greatherds of cattle grazing knee deep in alfalfa. Sometimes he found pictures of his old friend Judge Wilkins’ prize shorthorns and on such occasions he grew sentimental and talked of the county as an old man talks of the love affairs of his youth. One would have thought that the triumph of each new blue ribbon won by Judge Wilkins’ prize bull, Herkimer Sextant, was a personal triumph of Charles Tolliver. The city had for him no reality; it was a dreary episode, a nightmare from which he would in time awake as he awaked reluctantly from the pleasant dreams he had when, carefully tucked in on the divan by Hattie’s capable hand, he escaped for a little while from the ugliness of the hard, unreal city. Since he had come from the Town, the habit of sleep had grown upon him: it was a drug ... hashish or opium.
It was in one of his garden catalogues that Fergus found the name. Seizing the booklet in hilarious triumph, he bore it to his mother and, holding it open, he showed her a large picture in color of a gigantic raspberry advertised as bearing throughout the season. Underneath in bold letters there stood forth in an amazing coincidence the name—TOLLIVER’S EVERLASTING. The name stuck and from then on the family referred to Gramp with humorous disrespect by that name. At length the old man himself overheard it and was delighted. He resolved then to see his hundredth birthday. In the solitude of his room, he felt amazingly brittle and young. Time rushed past him; tremendous things happened to the family, but he remained passive, unchanged because he had no emotions left to exhaust him.
The war that trapped Ellen and Rebecca Schönberg somewhere in the neighborhood of Trieste dawned upon the Tollivers in the most conventional fashion. At first they talked of it as impossible and absurd, and for the first time in years Gramp emerged from his seclusion to discuss with Robert (for whom he had an intense dislike) the Siege of Paris, which he had lived through in his youth. Indeed his interest attained such a magnitude that he very nearly revealed a secret hope that one day he might be taken, amillstone about his daughter-in-law’s neck, back to the city where he had spent what she would have called “a profligate youth.” But he took care not to mention the wish for fear that Hattie, in revenge for so many defeats over so many years, would do all in her power to thwart it. At ninety he wanted to see Paris again. He developed a passion for the military maps which appeared in the newspapers and used up all the pins in the house tracing the advance of the Germans toward the Marne.
As for Hattie, she gave small heed to his eccentricities, for she was occupied with other things. Her son, her best-beloved, was in England; she could not trust him. He might join in the war. She knew him well enough to know that he would not stop to weigh the chances of death; such a spectacle would fascinate him. And she knew that her daughter, in the company of an unearthly creature called Rebecca Schönberg (whom she had come to regard darkly as a sort of procuress), was lost somewhere in Austria. Until now, these foreign nations had meant little to her save that they were in the part of the world from which came the hordes of aliens who jostled her in the street. But now all was changed; a great war was no longer a distant affair to be treated with indifference. Her children were involved. She fancied Fergus already ill and wounded. She saw Ellen taken for a spy and immured in the sort of a dungeon one saw in the lurid pictures of the Sunday papers.
The news that came at last into the midst of her frantic anxiety brought her no peace. The two letters arrived by the same mail. The one from Fergus contained the information that he had gone to France, that vaguely he was trying to find a place where he might see the war. He was all right, he wrote. She must remember his excellent luck. It was all terrible, tragic, incredible ... the sights he had already seen, the things he had already heard. Yet it was magnificent too; somehow between the lines of a letter which he had meant to be reassuring and a little cold, she caught a sense of his reckless enthusiasm. She understood that he saw the war as a great spectacle. She remembered him as a little boy,wild with excitement at the glitter and pomp of a circus parade, intoxicated by the splendor, captured by the romance.
And she knew that she could not stop him. She knew that all the ink in the world and all the words she might write with it would not hold him back. It was all so clear in his letter. The image returned to her again and again ... a little boy, running recklessly, wildly toward the gaudy parade.... Only this time the parade was tragic and wound its length half way across the face of Europe. And because it was so gigantic, it was all the more powerful, all the more glamorous. What could she do against it?
Sometimes she cursed Gramp, The Everlasting, for the wandering spirit he had passed on to her children, and sometimes she reproached her own people for their strength and energy. If her children had been poor weak things she would never have lost them; she could have guarded them always. Sometimes when her worry and despair became overwhelming, she had a terrible premonition that in the end she would be left, alone, with that terrible sardonic old man, her father-in-law.
But Ellen was coming home! Ellen was coming home! She wrote from a place called Genoa to say that she was sailing in two days with Rebecca Schönberg, whom Hattie pictured as sallow, dark and sinister. Ellen had escaped from Austria, out of the midst of the war! She had been arrested with the dangerously international Miss Schönberg, but in the end, due to Miss Schönberg’s Aunt Lina and Uncle Otto, everything had been set right and they were allowed to go by boat from Pola into Italy. It was a wretched experience. The police, the soldiers ... every one was stupid and a little insane. Ellen would, she wrote, be thankful to get away from such a madhouse as Europe had become.Damn them!she wrote,for starting a war just when I had planned a tour of Austria and Germany!
There was hardness in that one line, of a new and amazing kind.
The entry into New York was made, due to Rebecca’s shrewdness, the proper sort of event. Two women straight (as the newspaper men managed to make it seem) from the front line! Two women who had been detained as spies! Two women who were good for at least two columns of space, paid for at so much a line, not to speak of the large photograph showing them on the deck of theGiuseppe Verdiwith a great black Swiss shepherd dog that belonged to Lilli Barr! Two women with (almost) the dust of the trenches on their shoulders! The papers were full of Lilli Barr, and Miss Rebecca Schönberg, her manager. Every one got something out of it. Lilli Barr got a vast amount of attention. Rebecca Schönberg found herself in the newspapers and rose correspondingly in the eyes of all the relatives and acquaintances, (there were Bettelheims and Czelovars and Schönbergs in New York as well as in London and Paris and Vienna) to whom she had been known until now as Raoul Schönberg’s eccentric niece. The newspaper men earned extra money on space and the public had a first hand account of the war. It was all arranged magnificently. Lilli Barr got in under the line before the hundreds of other musicians who likewise damned the war and turned their faces toward a new world that had suddenly acquired an enormous importance.
Hattie Tolliver, dressed in shabby black, and weeping with joy, was on the pier, and with her, Robert, stolid and a little cynical of the grand manner with which his arrogant sister descended the gangplank. Seven trunks were gone through by customs men. Hattie Tolliver discovered that Miss Schönberg, instead of being a dark, sinister species of procuress, was red-haired, good-natured and immensely excited and triumphant. Robert, to his disgust, was told that he was quite a man, and Hattie was told that she was not a day older, that she must have a new hat ... a half-dozen new hats ... at once. And, at length, under the eyes of bedazzled fellow-passengers, the entire party, with immense gusto, got under way.
It was all different from the damp December day when a lonely young widow, secretly terrified, waved farewell to Fergus as the doddering oldCity of Parisslipped away from the pier. It was not Ellen Tolliver who was returning. She had been left behind somewhere in Europe. It was Lilli Barr.
The seven trunks did not go to the apartment in the Seventies; they were sent instead to the Ritz, to the rooms arranged by Raoul Schönberg, the diamond merchant, in accordance with instructions from his niece. Miss Schönberg went with the trunks and the wolf-like dog, but Ellen, with her hand clasped in both her mother’s, smiling in triumph beneath the gaze of her mother’s tear-stained eyes, went straight to the apartment. All the way Robert sat opposite them, stolidly. He was the bourgeois member of the family. For him there were no transports of joy and sorrow, no wild soarings of delight, no gay irresponsibility, no intense passions, no violent depressions, no fierce desire to set off wandering about the earth. And so it happened that he, the most dependable, the most unselfish, was the one whom all the others took for granted. For him there would never be any celebration to mark the prodigal’s return. Darkly he knew all this, and was in his quiet way, content. Somehow he had escaped the heritage of The Everlasting. Secretly he thought there was a great deal of bunk about Miss Schönberg and his sister Ellen; he suspected that their adventures had not been, in fact, so exciting as Miss Schönberg, with a magnificent embroidery of detail, made them seem.
Still, he knew nothing about their profession. Such nonsense might be necessary. Thank God, it was not necessary in the bond business to behave like a three ring circus!
It was long after midnight when Ellen at last joined her manager at the Ritz. Dressed in the smart clothes in which she left the ship, she remained at the apartment surrounded by her family, talking, laughing, even weeping a bit when the rich, violent emotion of her mother engulfed them all save Robert and The Everlasting in a sort of sentimental orgy. Gramp joined them too, forin a city apartment it was no longer possible to keep him shut away as they had done in the days when he occupied a room above the kitchen.
There was but one thing to sadden the reunion; it was the absence of Fergus. Ellen learned for the first time, when she asked for him, that he had gone to Europe. It was rotten luck, because in the depths of her heart he was the one she had wanted to see above all the others. He would have appreciated the grandiose triumph of her return; he would have laughed at it but he would have understood the importance of the spectacle. He would have known how well it was done. She needed his little touch of mocking humor, his complete sympathy.... And now he was gone. There was even a chance that she might never see him again.
The others had no interest in the spectacle. Her mother, it was clear, was proud that she was famous; but she really cared nothing at all for Lilli Barr. It was Ellen Tolliver who absorbed them all. They wanted to recapture Ellen Tolliver, pin her down and keep her with them forever. And that, of course, could not be done, because there was so little of Ellen and so much of Lilli.
Once, as they talked frantically, she caught a sudden twinkle in the eye of The Everlasting as he sat, silent and mocking, a little beyond the border of the family group. It was a brief twinkle, which vanished as quickly as it had come, but it told her that he, like Fergus, understood. He knew that she had carried the war into the enemy’s country and had won. They hadn’t, after all, pulled her down and clipped her wings.
And then, during a brief silence, in the flood of talk there sounded through the room the familiar echo of his demoniacal chuckle. He was thinking, perhaps, of the winter night when he threw a fit and so allowed Ellen to escape.
The occasion was so great that Gramp was allowed to have his dinner with the rest of the family, a privilege which had not been granted in more than fifteen years; for on that first night Hattie would have welcomed the devil himself and placed him onher right hand. Sitting there with his dim spectacles tilted on the end of his high thin nose, he watched them all without taking any part in the celebration. He listened while Ellen described Lily’s house in the Rue Raynouard, and he understood, what the others failed to understand, that of course the Baron was Lily’s lover. He saw quickly enough that Ellen had closed her eyes to all that took place in the lovely old house. And he knew what the others did not ... that Ellen had not really returned to them at all, that she had learned the wisdom of going her own way and allowing others to do the same. She had, in short, discovered freedom; she had found her way about in a strange world and had learned the tricks which gave her the upper hand. He was proud of her to have been so smart, to have learned so quickly.
This was no longer the stormy, unhappy Ellen who had run away with a drummer. This was Lilli Barr, a woman of the world, hard, successful, with smooth edges. She glittered a bit. She was too slippery ever to recapture. She sat there, in her chic, expensive clothes, self-possessed, remote, smiling, and a little restless, as if she were impatient to be gone already back into the nervous, superficial clatter of the life which had swallowed her.
The others would discover all this in time, later on. The Everlasting knew it at once.
At one o’clock, Robert summoned a taxi and drove with her to the Ritz. It was a strange, silent ride in which the brother and sister scarcely addressed each other. They were tired, and they were separated in age by nearly ten years. (Robert had been but ten when Ellen eloped.) The one was an artist, caught up for the moment in the delirium of success. The other sold bonds and was working at it with a desperate, plodding persistence. They might, indeed, have been strangers.
Ellen, watching in silence the silhouette of her brother’s snub nose and unruly red hair against the window of the taxicab, began to understand, with a perception almost as sharp as the old man’s, what it was that had happened. It made her sad and a little fearful lest she should discover that Rebecca had already gone to bed and she would find herself alone in the gaudy hotel. She was afraid, more and more of late, to be left alone.
Still, she reflected, there would be Hansi ... for company ... Hansi, a big, black, wolfish dog who devoted himself to her with a fanatic affection.
And the thought of Hansi turned her memories in the direction of Paris, which lay safe for the time being from the Germans; for Hansi reminded her always of Callendar and the day, just before they left for Vienna, when a fat little old man brought the dog with a note to the house in the Rue Raynouard.... A note which read ... “I send you Hansi because he is like you. He will look well by your side and be devoted to you. He may remind you sometimes of me, even in the midst of wild applause. It would be easy now to forget one who has known since the beginning that you were a great artist.
C”
That was all ... just a line or two, but enough to remind her of what she had forgotten—the awful sense of his patience, which seemed always to say with a shrug that all life was merely a matter of waiting.
The solid voice of Robert roused her.
“Here we are,” he said, and stepping from the cab, she was washed for an instant by the brilliant white glare of electricity and then vanished through the whirling doors into the Ritz.
In all the hubbub of those busy, noisy days there were intervals when, for a moment, she found time for reflection ... odd moments between tea and dinner, or in the hours after midnight when the roar of the city and the small revealing sounds of the great hotel had abated a little; or moments when Rebecca, buoyant, triumphant and full of business interviewed in the sitting room the men who came from musical papers suggesting a sort of polite blackmail. Rebecca handled them all beautifully because she had in her the blood of a hundred generations who had lived by barter.So Ellen escaped them, save when it was necessary for her to be interviewed. Rebecca arranged the concerts that were to be given. She was busy, she was happy, she was content in her possession of Lilli Barr.
It occurred to Ellen after a time that she had not seen Mr. Wyck. In all the confusion there had been no mention of her mother’s lodger. He had not been about. So when her mother came to lunch the next day in her sitting room at the Ritz, she asked, after the usual warm kisses had been exchanged, concerning the mysterious lodger.
“He went away the week before you arrived,” said Hattie. “I could never understand why. He had seemed to be so satisfied.”
Ellen endeavored to conceal her sense of pleasure at his disappearance. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “he was leaving town.”
Hattie frowned. “No. It wasn’t that,” she replied. “He said that he must have a room nearer his work.... It seemed a silly reason.”
Ellen called Hansi to her side and the big black dog threw himself down with his head against her knee, his green eyes fastened on her face with a look of adoration. She stroked the fine black head and murmured, “You never told me his name.”
“His name was Wyck,” said Hattie. “We grew to be very fond of him. He was no trouble at all, though he did sometimes talk too much concerning his family. Still, I can see that he had nothing else to talk about. He didn’t seem to have any friends but us. Fergus was the only one who didn’t like him.”
Ellen looked up suddenly. She had forgotten Fergus. She had forgotten that Wyck had seen him on the morning when Clarence lay dead on the divan in the Babylon Arms. Perhaps they did not remember each other. Certainly it was clear that Hattie knew nothing. Fergus must have known and, distrusting the nasty little man, have kept his secret. It was a strange world.
There was champagne that day for lunch because Rebecca had asked her uncle Raoul and his daughter, a handsome dark Jewess. Together they sat about a table laden with food which was richand bizarre to Hattie Tolliver. The sunlight streamed in at the windows and the waiters bobbed in and out of the room serving her daughter. The champagne she refused to drink and when the diamond merchant filled Ellen’s glass, she frowned and said, “I wish you wouldn’t drink, Ellen. You never know what it leads to.”
And when Mr. Schönberg, after telling one or two risqué stories, held a match to Ellen’s cigarette, Hattie frowned again and the old look of suspicion came into her eyes. It was Lily Shane who had taught her daughter to behave like a fast woman. She knew that.
It was only when the first excitement of Ellen’s return had worn away that Hattie began to feel the dull ache of an unhappiness which she could neither understand nor define. With all the vast optimism of her nature she had fancied the return of Ellen as something quite different from the reality. A hundred times during the long years while her daughter was away, she lived through the experience in her imagination; she saw Ellen taking her place once more in the midst of the family, quarreling cheerfully with Robert, helping her mother about the house, going and coming as the mood struck her. She fancied that Ellen would be, as in the old days, sullen and sometimes unhappy but always dependent just the same, always a rather sulky little girl who would play the piano by the hour while her mother saw to it that there was no work, no annoyance to disturb her.
And now it was quite different. She scarcely saw Ellen save when she went to the Ritz to eat a hurried lunch of fancy, rich foods under the bright eyes of the cheerful Miss Schönberg. The old piano stood in the apartment, silent save when Hattie herself picked out her old tunes in a desperate attack of nostalgia. Ellen had played for her a half dozen times but always on the great piano in her sitting room at the Ritz; it was not the same as in the sentimental, happy days when Hattie, as ruler of her household, sat darning with her family all about her. There wasno time for anything. And Ellen herself ... she had become slippery somehow, happier than in the old days, but also more remote, more independent, more “complete” as Lily had said. She had no need of any one.
There were days too when Hattie felt the absence of Mr. Wyck. Of all those who had at one time or another depended upon her ... old Julia, Fergus, Ellen, Wyck and all the others ... none remained save her husband. And somehow she had come to lose him too. Here in the city, living in his farm papers and in his memories, he had escaped her in a way she failed to understand. He slept more and more so that there were times when she was worried lest he might really be ill. Robert and The Everlasting were aloof and independent; they were no help whatever. But Mr. Wyck had come to her, wanting desperately all the little attentions which she gave so lavishly. And now he was gone, almost secretly and without gratitude. It hurt her because she could not understand why he had run away.
At times it seemed that with no one to lean upon her, the very foundations of her existence had melted away; there were moments when, for the first time in all her troubled and vigorous life, she feared that the world into which she had come might at last defeat her.
SCARCELY a week after the landing of Ellen and Rebecca, Thérèse Callendar landed in New York, almost willingly and with a sense of relief. In the solid house on Murray Hill, the usual army of charwomen arrived and put the place in order against her coming, but on her arrival she closed most of the rooms and chose to live between her bed-room and the library. She was, oddly enough, confused and a little weary. She had been, all her life, a match and more for the shrewdest ofmen; she had outwitted bankers and brokers and even swindlers, and now she stood confronted by a catastrophe which she was unable to dominate. A third or more of a vast fortune stood in danger ... that part of it which she had been unable to save when the maelstrom broke over Europe. Much of it, fortunately, was transferred into safety. Through bits of information and advice picked up here and there in the course of her wanderings, she had divined that one day there was certain to be a war, and accordingly she had taken money out of Germany and placed it in England, disposed of Russian bonds and reinvested the money in America, shifted credits from Vienna to Paris. Yet there still remained a great sum which, for the time being, was lost in the confusion ... part of the fortune she had tended with the care of a gardener for his most prized orchid.
In the midst of the turmoil she had stayed for days in the office of her lawyer in Paris, wiring now to London, now to Trieste, now in New York—sitting with him, a shrewd, bearded man, in conference with bankers, brokers and men who simply juggled money into more money. And in the end even she, Thérèse Callendar, had been no match for the war. She wakened one morning to find the Germans at the gates of Paris and the Government fled to Bordeaux. She was alone; Richard and Sabine and little Thérèse were in England. So alone she had paced the tesselated floors of the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois, until all had been done which could be done. And at last, glad to leave the Europe which Ellen had called a madhouse, she turned back for the first time in her life with pleasure and relief to the quiet of the brownstone house on Murray Hill.
She had come to New York, as may be said of great people, incognita. Only her banker and her lawyer knew she was in town—a strange state of affairs for a woman who had lived always in public, going from one capital to another, seeing scores of people day by day.
It was not the money alone which troubled her. There wasthe matter of Sabine for which there seemed to be no solution. As she sat alone in the dark library three days after her arrival, she turned the matter over in her mind.
She thought of the interview which took place with Richard a day or two before the Archduke was shot in Serajevo ... an interview which occurred after lunch in the house in the Avenue du Bois before he took the Boulogne express to join Sabine in Hertfordshire. Over her coffee, she saw him again ... a dark handsome son of whom a mother might have been proud if he had cared more for the things which were the foundation of her life. There was bitter disappointment in all that ... his neglect of business and his indifference to money. Here he was, a man of thirty-five, who did nothing but amuse himself. He gambled a bit, he bought a picture now and then, he had a passion for music, he fenced and swam and rode beautifully. Yet there seemed to be no core to his existence, no foundation, unless the satisfaction of his own desire for pleasure might be called the dominant thread of his character. It was satisfaction—no more than that: it was never satiation. If he had been weak or dissipated or a waster, there would have been more to be said against him; but he was none of these things. In this, fortunately, he took after her own people. He had not, like young Americans who had money, gone to pieces. He took good care of himself. He had no habit which had become a vice. He had all the curious strength that comes of an old race.
Sitting over her coffee, she saw him again as he stood with the old mocking smile on his too red lips while she argued across the spaces of Wolff’s house in the Avenue du Bois. He stood, rocking a bit on his toes, with the easy grace which came of a supple strength, looking down at her out of the mocking gray eyes.
“But there is no one whom I want to marry,” he had said, “even if Sabine would divorce me.”
At which she had grown angry and retorted, “Women interest you. It would be easy enough....”
“It would be a nasty, unpleasant business. She is not a badwife. I might do much worse. I am sorry that she can’t have more children, but that is none of my doing. I do not want to hurt her. I might not have another wife as satisfactory.”
To which Thérèse had replied, “She is unhappy. I know she is. She can’t stand indifference forever, even if she is a cold woman. Besides she’s in love with you. She can’t go on always living with you and yet not living with you. She’d be happier free ... to marry some one else.”
Then he had mocked her out of the depths of his own security. “Do you think love is such a simple thing that it can be turned on and off like water from a tap?” (She knew that love with him was just that ... something which could be turned on and off, like water from a tap.)
“Besides, it wasyouwho wanted me to marry her. I had other ideas.”
“You mean Ellen Tolliver?” she asked. And then, “You would not have married her if you could have escaped it ... if you could have got her in any other way.”
But she saw that the look of mockery had faded a little at the sound of the girl’s name. (She was of course no longer a girl but a successful woman of thirty or more.)
“I don’t know ...” he had said, “I don’t know what I should have done. Only I fancy that if I had married her there would have been a great many little heirs running about.”
She had delivered herself into his hands. As a woman of affairs she knew that one could not argue sensibly about what might have happened; and for what had happened she herself was responsible. In that he had been right.
“Would you marry her to-day?”
“How can I answer that? Probably she wouldn’t have me. Why should she? We’re both different now.... It’s been years.... She’s rich now ... successful ... famous. It isn’t the same.”
“People don’t change as much as that ... especially if they not seen each other. They are likely to keep a memoryof that sort always fresh. It’s likely to grow strong instead of weak.”
“I’ve seen her since ... several times ... at her concerts.”
She saw, with her small piercing eyes, that she had uncovered a weak place in his armor ... a single chance on which to pin all her hopes.
“Have you talked to her?”
“No.”
She knew too that he was, in a sense, invincible. Sabine, so far as the world was concerned, made an excellent wife. She was worldly, distinguished, clever. So far as he was himself concerned, she gave him no trouble. She did not make scenes and she did not indulge in passionate outbreaks of jealousy. She did not even speak of the love which he sought outside his marriage ... the intrigues that were always taking place and now made him invincible in the face of her argument. She effaced herself, and as she had done once before, waited. But on that occasion she had waited for marriage, and had won. Now she was waiting for love, which was quite a different matter.
“If it’s an heir you want, I have one already.” He smiled. “He must be nearly twelve by now. Of course, he is the grandson of a janitor and the son of a music hall singer.... Still, he is an heir. We might legitimatize him.”
By this stroke he had won, for he had made her angry ... the thing he had been seeking to do all the while.
“I hear from him twice a year ... when my lawyer sends his mother money.”
“You’d do well to forget his existence.”
And then they had talked for a time without arriving anywhere.
As usual it was Richard who had won. He had gone back to Sabine as if nothing at all had occurred.
Thérèse drank the last of her coffee and then laid her dumpy figure down on the divan in the dark library. She was tired for the first time in her life, as if she had not the strength to go onfighting. She might have but a few years longer to live and she must hurry and settle this matter. There must be an heir to whom she might pass on the fortune ... not a sickly girl like little Thérèse but a man who could manage a responsibility so enormous.
Though her body was weary, her mind was alert. There still remained a chance. In the gathering darkness, she knew that the chance depended upon two things ... the hope that Ellen Tolliver still loved Richard as she had so clearly loved him on the night years earlier when the girl had talked to her in this very room; and the hope that Lilli Barr was as honest, as respectable, as bourgeois as Ellen Tolliver had been.