“What difference does that make now?... It is nothing ... less than nothing....” And she fell to weeping once more.
He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, “There is the necessary business. You must not be seen here ... like this.”
But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. “I will take him to my house,” she said, quietly. “You may come there.... You may stay there if you like. It is a big house ... in the Rue Raynouard.... No one will ever know.”
She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. “I will take care of things,” she said. “I will stay here if you will arrange for the rest. I would like to stay ... alone. It was good of you.... There is nothing I can say.”
So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber. Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns and summer chairs piled high in the corners.
When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanationuntil now. She had come so near to being late ... only a matter of a few hours, of a single night. For he had escaped them all now, forever. They would never possess him again....
She looked at him, lying here white and still in the gay blue trousers with the silver braid and the yellow sash, and she understood why it was that he had seemed so young. It was because he had never really belonged to any of them. He had not even had a country of his own. He had gone out into a war which was none of his concern. There was nothing which tied him down, not even the nonsense which people talked of “la gloire” and “la patrie.” For she, in her aloofness, had known it for the nonsense it was, just as he in his good-nature and love for all the world had known it. She remembered what he had once written her.... “A man of our generation who has missed the war will not have lived at all.... He will be a poor thing compared to the others. It is a game in which one must take a chance. It is better to die than to have missed it.”
He had believed that to the very end. Perhaps this was the secret of Old Gramp who had roamed the world and lived in this very Paris under the Second Empire. He had lived. He had done everything, and now in his old age he had a stock of memories that would last forever, a life which none of the others ever knew. He had been certain of only one life and he had made the most of it, so that he was ready when his time came to die with satisfaction, to take his chance on what lay beyond.
And as she sat there with the black dog by her side, in the slow, gray light, it occurred to her that perhaps the end of Fergus had not been after all so tragic. He had died in the very midst of life with the woman he loved at his side. If he had lived.... Who could tell? There was small place in the world for men like him. He never had the strength, the fierce aloofness of Old Gramp, the savage contempt of the old man for the drones and grubbers of life.
It was all a strange business, surely. Strange and confused and without sense. In the beginning, when she had first come into this frivolous room (so cold and dead now in the gray light) shehad been angry and jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having caused his death. She had thought, “If he had not been going to meet her, he would not have been killed.”
But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now. She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit ... all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?
What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time rushed on and on....
But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.
She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her—that phrase out of Lily’s letter—And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain he is dead.He had gone away and she did not know where. Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle ... a pitiful spectacle, so full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The old quotation came back to her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare with an intense passion. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That was it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who never mounted to theheights but kept her eyes always on the ground, frantically occupied with a thousand tiny things, never willing, as Fergus had said, to face the truth. And now that he was gone, her favorite of them all, what would she do? There remained nothing now except the one truth which none could in the end escape.
It was daylight and the ghastly smell of picric acid had died away before she stirred herself. The morning sun, pouring in at the window, seemed to say, “This is another day. We must all go on. This is not the end of everything.”
(The sun, she thought bitterly, which Fergus had always loved even as a baby.)
So she had stirred herself wearily and gone over to the little escritoire which stood in one corner of the room. There, with the pen of gold and mother-of-pearl that belonged to Madame Nozières, she seated herself and wrote, one letter to Callendar and one to her mother. To Callendar she wrote that she would marry him as soon as it was possible. To her mother she wrote a lie. She wrote that Fergus had died in the house in the Rue Raynouard, alone with herself and Doctor Chausson who was a great doctor and came only because he was a friend of hers. Everything had been done which could be done. He would be buried not in a grave at the front nor in a lonely Paris graveyard but at Trilport, in the friendly cemetery where Madame Gigon lay, a little way off from Germigny l’Evec where Lily went in the summer.
And in the end she added another lie, because she knew it was the one thing above all else that Hattie Tolliver would want to hear. She even framed the sentence shrewdly, sentimentally, though it was false to her very nature. She wrote, “He died thinking of you. Your name was the last word he said.”
For Hattie had at last to face the truth, and one must make it as easy as possible for her.
Almost the last word he had said was, “Callendar.... This man ... Callendar.” ... And she would never know now what it was that he had meant to say.
There was a knock at the door. She knew what it was ... the men sent by Doctor Chausson.
Ignoring it, she knelt beside the bed and pressed her cheek close to the cold face of her brother. She was alone now, more alone than she had ever been in all her life, where none could see her. Then as she stood, looking down at him, it occurred to her that this death had been in a strange way a perfect thing.... He had escaped in the midst of life, happier than he had ever been before.... There were worse things than death. It was only to those who remained that death was cruel.... It was cruel to understand, in that frivolous room with the bright spring sun streaming in at the window, that she had come to know him only when he was dead. There had never been time before.... There had been only the business of fame and glory and success.
When at last she opened the door, the men sent by Doctor Chausson saw a handsome woman hard and cold, without sympathy, who stood holding by his collar a great black dog who growled at them savagely.
In the days that followed Madame Nozières came twice to the Rue Raynouard, once on foot and once in a taxicab though it was quite clear that she was far more used to a motor of her own—a small, very expensive motor like that of Sabine. She it was who had candles placed in the room with Fergus and had masses said for him. And to all this, which old Jacob Barr would have called “popery” and denounced as rubbish, Ellen offered no resistance; for, not being sure any longer that she herself believed in anything, she saw no harm so long as it gave comfort to others. Fergus himself, she knew, would have smiled and allowed it.
Madame Nozières wept and thanked Ellen and made her ill at ease and miserable, but she did not say who she was or whence she came. Indeed, Ellen learned no more of her identity than she had discovered from Fergus himself, as he lay dying. She was alady, afemme du monde, a creature of charm and (despite her grief) of gaiety. She came out of mystery and returned to it. “Madame Nozières” was a label, perhaps as good as any other. Twice, long afterward, Ellen fancied that she saw her,—once walking in the Bois and talking earnestly with Doctor Chausson and once in the establishment of Reboux, but she could not be certain because each time she turned quickly away lest Madame Nozières should recognize her. She respected the mystery; she was afraid to intrude upon it. In some way it seemed better to leave the tragedy with its proper ending—in that frivolous room by candlelight in the Avenue Kléber. It had been in its way a complete, a perfect thing. To follow it further could lead only into triviality and disillusionment. She had no desire to know too much of Madame Nozières.
But the sense of mystery fascinated her and, in the lonely days in the Rue Raynouard, it appeared to change and soften all her beliefs. She saw now that mystery had its place in the scheme of things, that it possessed a beauty of its own which lent fascination to all life. There were others, she knew, besides Callendar who were never to be understood completely, never to be pinned down and taken apart as this or that. In all her haste, she had fancied that life was thus and so, that people were easy to fathom and understand. She doubted now whether she would ever know any one—even Lily or Rebecca. There was always something which escaped knowledge, something which lay hidden deep beneath layer upon layer of caution, of shyness, of deceit, or mockery, of a thousand things ... the something which in the end was one’s own self, the same self she had guarded with savagery through so many years.
For all that people might say or think, she understood that this Fergus, the one who stood in the candlelit room in the Avenue Kléber, had been more beautiful than any other ... as he lay there clasping with one hand his sister and with the other Madame Nozières!
IT is true that Ellen in life and even Fergus in death did not really know their own mother. They had said that she would not be able to face the truth; yet she had done it, bravely and with a dignity that none of them would have recognized; for they had not seen her on the day she forced Judge Weissman, her enemy, to aid her because her children were the ones at stake.
So the premonition which had troubled her for so long came now to be a reality. With Ellen in Paris, Robert joined up with his own army, and Fergus (her beloved Fergus) dead, there remained only Gramp, cold and aloof and ageless, in his chamber surrounded by books.
It was the grim old man who found her lying in the darkness of the tiny living room of the flat with Ellen’s letter crushed in her hand. In his unearthly fashion he had divined the tragedy. He saw that she did not weep; she did not even moan. She lay quite still, unconscious that he stood there in the shadows watching her. It is impossible to imagine what his thoughts could have been. For a time at least the hardness which had protected him for so long must have melted a little; for Fergus had been of all the family his favorite. It was Fergus to whom he lent his precious books. It was Fergus who had seemed at times the very incarnation of his own youth—so remote now, so buried beneath all his intolerant scorn of those who were afraid to live.
For a long time he stood there watching his daughter-in-law, silently and with an intense concentration as if he were obsessed by a desire to study her sorrow with the passion of an anatomist. And then he had gone up to her and quietly taken the damp, crumpled letter with a strange gentleness out of the strong, worn hand. She did not resist; she did not even stir. She lay quite still while he held the letter close to the light and peering at it read it through, though he knew all the time what was in it.
When he had finished he laid it again by her side and said in alow voice, “The boy loved life, Hattie. And for those who die, death is not hard. There are worse things.”
In thirty years it was the first time there had passed between the two any speech purified of anger or resentment.
To one of Hattie’s nature there is consolation in the possession of the dead. The grim small tasks, the polite and empty phrases of condolence, the coming and going of those who care for the dead ... all this empty hubbub and commerce serves in a fashion to conceal and break the anguish of loss. But for Hattie there were not even these things. She was left alone with Gramp in a flat which, though it had seemed empty before, now achieved a desolation beyond all belief. She (who had lived only in her children) had no friends about her; the very flat was not in the proper sense a home, such as the house in Sycamore Street had been. It was a barren, inhuman cave occupied before her by a procession of strangers which, when she left, would again close over the brief years of her tenancy. She found herself alone save for that ancient man her father-in-law, in a strange city, without even the body of her son for a bitter consolation.
So this woman, who had lived her life so richly ... a life florid and overflowing with sentiment, a life that churned and raced along in an overwhelming current of vitality, achieved in the face of tragedy a calm and a dignity which she had never shown before. She understood, in the primitive depths of her nature, that this truth which she must face was the final one, from which there was no appeal. Always before there had been some hope ahead, some chance of turning events by a vast energy and a crude wilfulness to her own ends. There was nothing now ... nothing save a few old clothes, some books and the Bible she had given him on his tenth birthday. To these she clung with the tenacity of a savage, and they were pitiful remnants to a woman whose love demanded the very bodies of her children.
For Hattie there were none of those shades of grief and joy which are the lot of those more completely civilized. She had nocapacity for seeing herself, or, like Ellen, for finding in the death of Fergus an illumination which served in a mysterious fashion to light up the long progression of her life. In her sorrow, Hattie no longer even pitied herself; and this, of course, may have been the secret of her dignity. Hattie, the martyr, who bore her cross and flung herself before her family like the Pope before the Visigoths, no longer existed. In her place there was a strong, almost grim woman, who was silent and did not complain.
Nor had she, like the more civilized, the pleasure of books and of philosophic reflection. Her life since the very beginning had been far too active for such things; and now, when at last there was time, when she had no one to care for save the independent old man, she could not read, she could not reflect. Books were poor pale things by comparison with the ferocious activity of life itself. There were no stockings to darn, no one for whom she might make meringues, no dog to place upon his mat before locking up the house. (To the apartment there was but one door and it locked of itself. It was, properly speaking, no real home at all.) So she came to invent things for herself to do. She lingered over her work and took (though she was rich now) to such pale tasks as embroidery and knitting, only to find that the objects of her labor, having been created for no real purpose, accumulated dismally in the drawers and cupboards.
She had letters both from Ellen and Robert which she kept in the family Bible to read over and over again; and sometimes a shameful, bitter thought crept into the recesses of her active mind. It was a terrible thought, which she thrust hastily aside as impious and touched with blasphemy; but it returned nevertheless again and again to torment her. She thought, “If only it had been Robert instead of Fergus!” (Robert who was so steadfast and reliable, who already was the youngest captain of his division). She was proud of him too, but in a different way. She could not say how....
The awful thought would not die. She would have given Robert to keep Fergus, though in the solitude of the empty flatshe sometimes cried out, “It is not true. I could not think such a horrible thing!”
The squabbling with Gramp came quietly to an end, though neither of them ever made any allusion to the change. They lived together for the most part in silence but the old man ceased to torment and worry her. And on her side without ever knowing why, she came to treat him in a new way, almost to cherish and protect him like some brittle piece of glass, as all that remained of the old life. She even made for him little delicacies and had him to eat at the table with her. At such times they sat, awkwardly, and without conversation, each perhaps abashed by the weakness that lay in this strange truce.
In the long empty days there came to Hattie a mysterious sense of having turned a corner, of having stepped from one room into another. The door between had, she knew, closed forever, though she did not understand why. She had come now into the borders of Gramp’s country. She was growing old and so she came to understand a little the old man’s vast indifference.
Before he sailed, Robert, dressed in his captain’s uniform, neat and spotless, every button properly arranged, came to bid farewell. She could feel certain of him. There would be no mad exploits, no wild surges of temperament ending in disaster, no idle heroics undertaken for their own selfish thrill. These things Robert would never understand.
As he sat talking to her (trying bravely in his solid, unspectacular way to take the place of Fergus) he seemed square and massive and eternal as her father, old Jacob Barr, had been. There was reassurance in the snub nose, the solid jaw and the unruly red hair. Where Fergus had not even been able to look out for himself, she knew that this other son would care for his men with a detached and efficient thoroughness. There was nothing in the death of Fergus which could be counted as a material loss, even to herself. It was Robert who had earned money when it was most needed; it was Robert who looked out forher and stood between her and the world. It was upon men like Robert that the whole world rested; he was a foundation, the beginning and end of all order and worth. And yet.... And yet.... Even while he sat there doing his clumsy best to make up for the loss of his brother, the old wicked thought kept tormenting her.... She wanted to tear it out by its roots, to destroy it forever; but there it was, always with her....If only it had been Robert.
“You need not worry over me,” he assured her. “I will take no chances. There’s nothing romantic about war ... at least not about this one. It’s simply business. The side which is most efficient is bound to win. There won’t be any nonsense. I’ll look out for myself.”
She said to him almost with indifference, “You’re all I have left, because I don’t see much of Ellen any more. She’s too busy.”
But she was not thinking of what she said: she was thinking that warwasromantic. It must be so else it would not excite men as it excited Fergus. It was the romance that was the bait in the trap ... romance and the excitement. So long as these things existed, there would be wars, for there would be men like Fergus who did not take their places efficiently but went because (she remembered one of the phrases he had used again and again in the face of her reproaches) “it was too big a show to be missed.” It was not men like Robert who made war possible; it was men like Fergus. She saw it all with a vision uncluttered by talk of economics and politics; and so in her own fashion she came far nearer to the truth than this solid, logical son of hers.
But he was sure of himself, Robert. You could fancy him ordering his men about, ably and dispassionately, leading them admirably when it was necessary, as his grandfather Barr, the Citizen, had done before him in the Civil War. He would make a good job of it. You could see that he would quietly and thoroughly win distinction, not as Fergus had done, without once thinking of it, but because he had arranged it so. You could seehim being decorated with medals, as his brother had been decorated, again and again; but not for the same reason. He would not wear them as Fergus had done, with a swagger. He would cherish them, in neat leather cases, and bring them out to show his children and his grandchildren, because he could not tell them what the war was like, give them the feel of it, as Fergus could have done ... Fergus who (if he had lived) would have lost the medals or thrown them away long ago in disgust like his Grandfather Tolliver, who found the Siege of Paris more romantic than Bull Run or Gettysburg. He had, one fancied, already counted his medals. One could see that he was cut out for a good officer.
“I will see Ellen as soon as I have leave,” he murmured and thought, “And I will not be walking about the streets during an air raid as if I were at a church sociable.”
Yet he was not bitter because Fergus was the better loved; that fact he had come long since to accept. He was scornful only because it seemed to him an idiotic thing to be wandering carelessly into the midst of danger. There could be no reason for it ... none on earth.
Before he left, Hattie burdened him with a great bundle of sweaters and socks, all admirably made in the hours when she had been distracted by her terror of idleness.
“You must wear them all yourself,” she said. “You’ll need them in time. They’ll wear out and you’ll lose them. I’ll send you others from time to time. It’s all I have to do nowadays.”
And on the way past the cell occupied by The Everlasting he must have heard the squeaking of his grandfather’s chair as the old man rocked and rocked, lost again in a torrent of memories; but he did not stop.
“Say good-by for me to The Everlasting,” he said and then, after kissing her abruptly, he turned and disappeared quickly down the stairs, so that she could not see his tears. For Robertwas, unlike the others, sentimental, though he had never once allowed his mother the joy of discovering it. It was a thing which he thought shameful.
Even he had caught a sense of her terrible desolation.
There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those who possess the gift of awareness. Old Gramp in his solitude knew well its workings, and Ellen, in Paris, had become, as the tempo of her own life began to lose its intensity, to understand it dimly. For Hattie, in the fretful ebb and flow of her existence there could never be such knowledge. This rhythm, this beauty, existed outside her, a thing apart, beyond the wall of her consciousness.
Gramp, in his solitude, knew too that there were in each life hills and valleys and, rising above them all, one peak which pierced the clouds. Out of the depths of his uncanny perception he came to understand that Hattie’s life had passed its solitary peak. It had begun now to slip down the other side; what remained could be but a gradual falling away, a gentle decline until the end. What he knew from the summit of a monstrous detachment came to Hattie vaguely through her senses; she knew it as she knew the approach of damp weather by its effect upon her rheumatism. It was that sense of having passed from one room into another, with the door behind her closed and bolted forever.
And Ellen.... She too stood now on the summit, for ambition had been the beginning and end of her existence. She had accomplished; she had won. There would never be another peak so lofty, so enveloped in heady invigorating air; nor one so lonely. But there remained the things which lie always on the opposite slope of the peak—the things which the wise, like Gramp, place above all the hurry, the scramble, the headlong turmoil of the long ascent. There were the gentle pastures of reflection, ofkindliness, of warmth and fine thoughts, all the rewards which succeed the terrible struggle. Ellen, he knew, had crossed the summit; and she was still a young woman.
ONE bright spring morning as Hattie sat looking out into the street while she sewed and thought, round and and round, over and over again, those same thoughts which stole in upon her so frequently in these days of idleness, the postman brought a letter from Ellen. It was a brief letter, written it seemed in haste, but it contained two bits of news that changed the whole face of the world.
Ellen was to be married, and she wanted Hattie to come to Paris and make her home there.
“I have talked it over with Lily,” she wrote, “and she is delighted with the plan. Her house here is enormous and comfortable, and Lily is rarely in it save in the spring and autumn. You could do as you chose with no one to annoy you. And you need never think or worry about housekeeping. I am sending a cheque, and Rebecca’s uncle Mr. Schönberg is arranging for tickets. It is difficult to travel nowadays, but I have talked to Mrs. Callendar and she has written to a friend of hers, Malcolm Travers, the banker, who will arrange passports for you. You will hear from him within a few days after this letter.”
And about her own plans she wrote, “I am marrying Richard Callendar, the son of the same Mrs. Callendar. You remember her? You met her on the night of my first concert in America, a small, fat dark woman covered with dirty diamonds. You may have read of the family in the papers, for they are well known. They are very rich. He is four years older than me. I have known him for nearly ten years. He wanted to marry me before, years ago. (And then a sudden flash of the old Ellen who hadwalked away in the sunlight to skate on Walker’s Pond.) Fancy me, marrying a millionaire!”
So, in an instant, everything was changed and Hattie’s world grew bright once more. It was all so preposterous—to have Ellen arranging everything in this grand manner, the tickets, the passports, as if her mother were a queen whose journey was to be made as simple and free of trouble as possible. And the cheque and the millionaire husband! Yet, when the sense of excitement had abated a little, she remembered that she had always known her children were not of ordinary flesh and blood. There had been something extraordinary about them. Look at Ellen! Famous and rich and now marrying a millionaire.
But her satisfaction was not free from the old doubts. Was he—this Callendar—good enough for her? Clarence had never been. It was a good thing, she reflected, that he had died. What could she have done with him during all these years ... Clarence, a poor thing at best, always complaining of his health.
But this Callendar. Who was he and why had she never spoken of him before? Surely she was a strange girl who kept such secrets so passionately hidden. Where had he come from? Was he of good healthy stock? What had his life been? For a time she paced up and down the room in a ferment of curiosity. She tried to imagine what sort of man Ellen would choose to marry. (This time she must be marrying only for love; there could be no other reason.) She tried again and again to picture him and she found herself baffled. It was impossible to imagine....
And when she had grown more calm and the sense of the dreary flat was borne in upon her once more, she remembered The Everlasting. He was ninety-five, and yet not really an old man; his mind had never faltered in its course. But he was feeble and needed care. She could not desert him now. She deceived herself into believing that it was her duty to care for him until he died; and only the Almighty knew when that would be. No, she must take him with her. She could not leave him, as Ellen suggested, in some home for the aged. That would be wrong; it would be, in asense, indecent. He was after all the father of her husband, the grandfather of her children. One could not do a thing like that. She debated the matter with herself for hours, thinking, strangely enough, only of reasons why sheshouldtake him; and it never once occurred to her that she really had no desirenotto take him. The arguments against it were simply the habit of an intermittent civil war that had endured for more than thirty years. She could not bear to leave him behind, any more than she could have borne it to leave behind the old clothes, the worn shoes, and the Bible she had given Fergus on his tenth birthday. Gramp was a fixture now, a part of the past. Without him she would feel lost and lonely.
When she told him the intoxicating news, the old man, with a wariness that placed no trust in their unreal truce, looked at her sharply and said, doubtfully, “I don’t know, Hattie. I’m too old and too feeble. I think perhaps I’d better stay behind.” He opposed the idea in the belief that if he opposed it she would insist upon its being carried through.
But she was firm. She would not even argue the matter. He must go with her to Paris. He would be quite as well off there as anywhere else and he would at least be where she could look after him.
“Much better off,” thought Gramp, whose only desire was to see Paris again before he died. But he still maintained a resentful air as if he opposed the idea with his last breath but was far too feeble to offer any real resistance.
IN Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival. It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow. All things pass in time and sothe grief and loneliness had begun to pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave, dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of “Tiens! Tiens!” de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from the crêpe-laden “Tiens! Tiens!” and satisfied to have found so agreeable a creature as Lily—a woman whom he described to his friends as dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in general and to France in particular.
And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other confidences with Ellen, she said, “He is a gentleman and distinguished. Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as for me....” She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her voice. “He will not bother me much. He is an old man.” But she was grave too when she spoke again. “And I ... I am no longer young. I am forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have never had before.”
And then she grew thoughtful and added, “It will be good for Jean too. It is time he had a father ... a thing he has never had. It is time that I stepped out of the picture and made way for him.”
She had lived, if not a life beyond reproach, one that was at least discreet and marked by good taste, and so the other things,since the world is as it is, did not matter. Of those who had really known her secret only three remained ... Ellen and Hattie and Jean. César and Madame Gigon and Old Julia were dead. It did not, of course, occur to her to include The Everlasting, who had known all the while.
Jean too was happier now, for he had grown used to wandering about on crutches and had become accustomed to a new leg, made so admirably that he could still ride as much as he liked. It would have been impossible for him to have remained depressed; there was too much of Lily in him and, it must not be forgotten, he resembled Fergus greatly. The old friendship between him and Ellen waxed stronger than ever. It seemed to her at times that Fergus had returned or had never died at all. In the evenings while his mother sat talking quietly in the big soft drawing room with Monsieur de Cyon, Ellen joined him at the piano in playing with four hands the wildest songs out of the music halls. Rebecca in rare moments of good humor added to the gaiety with imitations of poor old Sarah Bernhardt or Mistinguette or Spinelly.
Rebecca had long since come to make herself at home in the big house. She was settled now in one of the rooms opening on the long gallery and she was perpetually with them, for it never occurred to Lily to offer objections to one more guest; but, having nothing to occupy her time, she grew irritable and restless. Her occupation had gone suddenly and there remained nothing to absorb her energy. Ellen remained stubborn and mysterious. She would not return to America where there was a fortune awaiting her.
“I have enough,” she said. “I need not work myself to death. I am rich now. I am through with struggling. Whenever I see fit I can return.”
But to Rebecca, it must have seemed that Ellen had slipped somehow out of her reach, beyond the control which she had once held over her. She would not even quarrel as they had once doneso often and with such vigor. She would simply repeat, “No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I am going to rest for a time.”
It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca. She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she had never been.
“You are deceiving me,” Rebecca reproached her. “There is something that I don’t know. You are keeping something from me.” And she would grow tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. “Me,” she would repeat, beating her thin breast, “who have given my life for you ... who have worked myself to the bone ... given all my time.... For no other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful.”
And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, “Because you have found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you fastened upon me.... Because you found happiness in taking possession of me and my life.”
But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, “And you told the most wonderful lies about me.... You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr is having a rest now. I am being myself ... Ellen Tolliver ... for a little time.”
Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up the rear.
July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end. The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because, simply, they werethere. He had kept on thequi vivefor her other brother—Robert—but he had not come across him. It was not strange since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might see him.... One could never tell.... They expected to be shifted soon eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since he was, after all, half-American.
And he would write again and again, “Do not worry about me. I have the most incredible luck—always. There are some men who go through the thingknowingthat nothing will ever happen to them. Iknowit. It’s a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling ... so strong that it is physical. ‘Nothing will happen to me ... nothing whatever,’ I find myself repeating over and over again.”
And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her—the part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless, miserable killing there was no power which lay in one’s self. It was simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.
But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there with him enduring the same hardships and dangers, and for the first time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts; now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change. There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been settled.
But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote, shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the beginning.
He wrote at length that Sabine’s divorce was completed. “I am free now and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much of happiness. But you are mine now ... mine forever. I shall never lose you again....”
But the letter troubled her strangely; it invoked with each line some disturbing memory of the past. The allusion to courage.... Who could say what had been courage and what cowardice? If the matter had rested with Callendar alone, it would have been solved because he had had what he believed was courage. He would have thrust poor Clarence aside and trampled upon him, to take ruthlessly what he himself desired. It had been a courage different from hers, whose foundations stood rooted in self-denial. Yet she had saved no one in the end, not even Clarence. Some power, in which Callendar placed such faith, had brought them together in the end, destroying Clarence despite anything she could do to save him. And it seemed to her that all the trouble, all the sorrow went back to that winter evening on the shore ofWalker’s Pond when she had said “Yes” to Clarence and felt for him at the same moment a queer, inarticulate pity—a pity which she was beginning at last to understand.
She experienced again a fierce satisfaction, almost a pleasure, which Callendar, in the strangeness of his blood, would never know. It was the satisfaction in having dominated even one’s own body.
But in the last lines there lay an echo of the old conflict.You will be mine ... mine forever. I will never lose you again.It was an arrogant speech, so like the way he had come to her years ago in the Babylon Arms, not asking what she desired but simply taking for granted that she would do as he wished. The memory of that afternoon disturbed her again with the sense that this love of which he wrote was an obscene, middle-aged emotion worn by a too great experience. The freshness was gone and with it all the glow of their meetings in the open windows of Sherry’s and the walks through the Spring in Central Park.... It was this knowledge perhaps more than any other, that made his passionate phrases seem shameful. All of that first youth was gone from them, yet he posed, he wrote her still in the same ardent phrases, grown threadbare and unconvincing, of a love that had once been clean and fresh and despite all that she knew, even then, virginal. There was a touch now that bordered upon the professional....
He told her that Sabine was in Paris and might pay her a call, as much out of a gossip’s curiosity as from her curious passion for knowing the truth, for knowing with a blazing clarity exactly how things stood.
Sabine did call, in her small, expensive motor, accompanied by little Thérèse, an awkward, sickly girl of ten, but Ellen sent word that she was out. She had no desire to see Sabine, perhaps because she feared what Sabine had to tell her. And she could not turn back now; for too many years she had followed a straight unswerving path.
IT was a fantastic journey for Hattie and The Everlasting. On passports arranged by Thérèse Callendar they were borne along a way made easy by all the power behind Thérèse Callendar’s fortune, through all the hubbub and turmoil of the war. Their companions on shipboard were correspondents and doctors and nurses and soldiers and congressmen (bound for the front to garner out of the very graves material for new campaigns). The others aboard the ship must have found them a strange pair concerning whom it was possible to speculate endlessly—this handsome, grim woman and the old, old man in her charge. It is probable that no one ever learned precisely who they were or whither they were bound, for Hattie was a suspicious traveler who placed no trust in fellow voyagers. She warned them away by her looks; and Gramp, of course, had not the faintest desire to enter upon conversation. He read his books and once a day made a circuit, under the escort of Hattie, of the entire deck, his coonskin coat (from which he refused to be separated) blowing in and out against his skinny old body. He never spoke, even to Hattie, even in reply to such remarks as, “Now, Grandpa, you must not eat that,” or “Now, Grandpa, you had best move your chair, there’s a draft in that corner.”
(All this to Gramp who had never denied himself anything and had a perfect digestion; who had never thought of drafts since he was born.)
Indeed, there was something touching in the spectacle of the middle-aged woman, tending so carefully the old, old man. It was as if she feared that he might by some ill chance be blown from the deck into the open sea or fall down a companionway and shatter forever the brittle old bones that had defied time itself. No one could have guessed that they were enemies, that despite the temporary truce they could never be anything but enemies by the very nature of things. Hattie treated him still as if hewere some fragile piece of old glass which she must deliver safely to Lily’s house in the Rue Raynouard.
It was only after she had seen him safely to bed in his cabin that she was able to give range to all her passionate energy and walk round and round the deck, her ostrich plumes blowing in the gale, her strong, buxom figure outlined against the luminous blue of the Atlantic night. At such times she was almost happy again for it seemed to her that in the winds and fogs Fergus was somewhere close at hand, just beyond reach, waiting for her.
And she was going now to take up once more the threads of life. Ellen was to be married.... Ellen was to be married.... She must have a child.... She must have a child.... These things she thought over and over again until she came at length to repeat them aloud to herself as she walked, bracing her body against the gale, through the darkness. She had joined Thérèse Callendar in this passionate desire for a grandchild, but it was not for the same reason. To Hattie a grandchild would alter everything. It would be for her like being young again, almost like bearing a child of her own.
She had never traveled before; she knew not a word of French and The Everlasting saw fit not to reveal his knowledge of the tongue; but she was undaunted. In some way, by an heroic effort touched with a profound scorn for a nation which chattered such an abominable tongue, she managed everything ... the customs at Havre, the accommodations in hotels already crowded to the doors and, last of all, the journey from the port into the Gare du Nord. (Lily had sent a courier to meet her but the meeting never occurred.) She was indomitable and she was almost happy again in all the business of managing tickets and meals and luggage, shepherding The Everlasting and his precious books. For Hattie believed that nothing was impossible....
From the corridor of the crowded train, where she stood protecting Gramp and jostling her fellow passengers, Hattie sawthem standing on the platform of the smoking cave called the Gare du Nord.... Ellen and Lily and a dark man in a blue uniform; and as the train jolted to a halt, her own car (for she thought of it thus) stopped almost abreast of them so that she was able to see that they talked earnestly with grave faces and an air of preoccupation. Wedged between a poilu slung round with a dozen musettes and wine bottles, and a trim English colonel with white mustaches and a red face, she was held immovable, unable to signal to them though she pounded upon the glass and shouted to them through windows open by some miracle against the stifling September heat. To Hattie, nothing existed in all that echoing cavern save those three figures, standing together amid mountains of luggage.
In the resounding shed steam hissed and engines squealed in ridiculous Gallic fashion; soldiers shouted to one another and a cocotte just beneath her window cried ribald jests to a lover somewhere in the same car who joined in the shouts of laughter. They looked up and down the platform—those three. It seemed that years passed before Lily, turning languidly in the heat, caught a glimpse of Hattie’s red and agitated face and Gramp’s sharp nose and inscrutable eyes.
They moved toward her; the English colonel whose toes had been trampled gave way in indignation and Hattie, bearing an immense amount of luggage and followed indifferently by Gramp, descended to the platform.
Ellen kissed her and then Lily, and at last she heard Ellen saying, “This is Richard, Ma. He is on leave.”
Above all the flurry and the conversation, she and Callendar regarded each other searchingly, the one with a piercing gaze of appraisal, the other with an air almost of astonishment. He had not, perhaps, pictured her as such a handsome woman, nor one, despite the grimness on which one could not put one’s finger, of such immense gusto. She accounted for Ellen’s strength and vitality, but there was clearly nothing subtle in her and nothing cold: the answer to all that lay elsewhere—perhaps in the ancientman who peered at them all like a spiteful mouse through his dim spectacles.
As for Hattie, her eyes asked only one thing, “Was he—this man—good enough for Ellen?” His foreign blood showed itself more plainly than she had expected. It troubled her that her daughter should be marrying a man of foreign blood; for, vaguely, all foreigners were associated in her mind with those dark, sullen, violent men who worked in the black Mills surrounding Shane’s Castle.
There flashed between the two—Callendar and Hattie—no spark either of understanding or enmity. Rather it seemed that the opinions of both were colored by surprise and a touch of suspicion. In Hattie’s eyes there was a fire of pride and possession, the look of one who would fight for her children, passionately; and in the gray eyes of Callendar there was only the opaque, inscrutable expression which only Ellen, of them all, had ever seen dissolve or change.
But they were grave, all of them, in a fashion that presently entered Hattie’s spirit and made her feel that their welcome was lacking in enthusiasm. Perhaps (she thought) it was the war; they were so close to it and Ellen, like herself, must be thinking always of Fergus. Perhaps they did not really want her there ... any of them. Yet they had written her with so much eagerness. It was a doubt that filled her with a sharp terror of growing old and useless and dependent.
Lily (whom she had not seen in years, Lily who was now Madame de Cyon) seemed scarcely changed at all. She could not be (Hattie, watching her, hastily calculated the years) she could not be a day less than forty-five; yet there she was, a woman who had sinned, looking young, almost fresh, scarcely a day older than Ellen who was twelve years younger ... more plump than Ellen and, strangely enough, more soft. Still, Hattie reflected, with a grim satisfaction, she had painted her face, and her hair, it was certain, had been “touched up.”
Perhaps in Paris all life was different; perhaps such a lifeas Lily’s made not too great a difference. Looking at her cousin, so beautiful, so charming and so unnaturally young, all the deep rooted respectability of Hattie’s nature rose and bristled. And as she stood on the steps of the Gare du Nord waiting for Callendar to fetch the gray blue Government motor to drive them to the Rue Raynouard, it swept over her that it was a strange and ridiculous turn of affairs which had brought her of all people “into the wickedest city in the world,” to live in the house of Lily whom she had always distrusted. She had not thought of it until this moment when she stood looking out across the Place Roubaix.
The motor came abreast of them with Callendar—a stranger, a foreigner—at the wheel, driving with a cool recklessness. It was all weird and unreal, so preposterous that Hattie grew suddenly frightened. She was aware briefly of a terror at the spectacle of this new, strange city where every one spoke an ungodly language. A little while before she would not even have thought of such things. It occurred to her that she must be growing old.
“I never felt younger in my life,” she repeated aloud to Lily who stood waiting for her to enter the motor.
All this time The Everlasting had said nothing. Watching the others he had kept his own silence, but he had not overlooked the Paris that lay all about him, so changed now, so different, from the Paris of his youth. He heard none of their talk, made almost laboriously against the inexplicable depression, as they drove through the Rue Lafayette. How could it have interested him who was concerned with another world ...? A world of gaslight and crinoline, imperials and the waltzes of Strauss and Waldteufel? To him, who had no future, this new Paris must have been less than nothing ... this new Paris in which Lily with all her money out of the black mills in the Middle West had a house and lived as if she had been born a Parisian; this new Paris in which his own granddaughter played a brilliant part. It was a Paris.... How could one describe it?
Yet, as he rode over the sweltering asphalt, his eyes, his ears, his nose drank in the sights and sounds and smells ... the sudden cry of “L’Intran!... L’Intran!” and “Le Petit Parisien!” the withered dying chestnut trees of the Boulevard Haussmann (he could remember when it was new), the little tables.... Because youth was after an insidious fashion returning to him, Gramp, the bitter, the aloof, grew sentimental. It had been here, in this Paris, that he had climbed to the pinnacle of all his life, the summit from which all else had been a gentle decline. He had not died like Fergus. He had gone on and on until at last life itself had lost all its savor....
They had turned now round Arc de Triomphe, and Ellen, sitting quietly by the side of Callendar, frowned. She had been silent throughout the drive, thinking, thinking, thinking bitterly with a savage secrecy because she dared not betray herself even by the flicker of an eyelid. She sat there silently, pondering how she might break the news which she herself and no other must in the end relate. It seemed to her that the whole affair was too cruel, too horrible. It was not possible that she should be forced twice to do the same terrible thing.
The sound of her mother’s voice, cheerful and rich, as she talked to Lily came to her over her shoulder.... “And the man wouldn’t open the window so in the end I opened it myself and then he began to chatter and yell at me in some ridiculous language ... French perhaps.”
“How was he dressed?” asked Lily, and Hattie described his uniform.
“Oh,” replied Lily in mirth. “He was Portuguese.... You must never mind the Portuguese.”
“Well, I don’t know whether Portuguese smell worse than other nationalities but the air in that train was enough to suffocate a strong man.”
... And now they were coming nearer and nearer to the Trocadéro. They were quite near now. Ellen turned away her eyes. They had passed the house in the Avenue Kléber. Shecaught a swift glimpse of the doorway which she had not seen since the bright morning she closed the door on the frivolous little room of Madame Nozières. Ah, she knew how it looked! She knew each tiny thing about it, and the gray courtyard with the summer furniture heaped into one corner. It was cruel, incredible ... what she had to do.
Before they drew up to the door of the house in the Rue Raynouard, Hattie too had grown silent under the gray depression which claimed all the little party.
They had tea on the white terrace where they found the black dog and poor tottering old Criquette and were joined by Jean and Monsieur de Cyon, and Rebecca, whose sulkiness did nothing to raise the spirits of the party. It was, Lily remarked, as she sat behind a table laden with silver and flowers sent up from Germigny and the most delicate sandwiches of pâté and cheese and jam, like a great family reunion. The big house was full now; Lily was married, even with distinction. There were no more secrets. In some ways life had grown simple, yet in others its complexity had been increased, again and again.
Ellen, sitting there in her own pool of tragic silence, watched them all with the old knowledge that their lives were all in some way entangled and bound up together ... all that absurd and ill assorted group, Monsieur de Cyon, gentle and white haired, Hattie, Rebecca, Jean, Lily, Callendar and herself; and even Gramp who had disappeared already into the solitude of the room which Lily had given him. Here they all were, most of them—even de Cyon, himself, a foreigner—living on the wealth poured out by the black mills of a town in the Midlands of America. And she it was who had brought them together.
Watching her mother, it occurred to her that the indomitable Hattie was no longer young. She would ask presently to be shown the room where Fergus had died, and Ellen, still lying, would show it to her, and her mother would weep and be satisfied in a pitiful fashion with the deception. It was better sometimes to lie, better to deceive.
But the other thing.... She rose presently and walked away down into the garden where she was joined after a little time by Jean on his crutches and Hansi, panting and restless at being kept in the summer heat of the city. And when she had gone Rebecca drifted away with an air of resentful martyrdom. She would have been nasty to Hattie, if she had dared, just as she had been nasty to Callendar who was only amused by her and took pains to show her in a thousand small ways that Ellen belonged to him now, and that she, Rebecca, no longer counted. But Rebecca could wait; there was the same blood in both and Rebecca understood how his game was played. She could wait, she thought bitterly, as she went up to her own room. The game was not yet over and she had not yielded the victory. She knew, perhaps better than any of the others, even Ellen, what to expect of Callendar. There was no part of him which remained a mystery to her, for she knew the men of her own family ... the Uncle Ottos and Maximilians and Gustaves, all with a touch of the Levant. But Ellen would never believe her; she would believe only that Rebecca was jealous of him (which was true) and that what she said was uttered only out of spite. She would not believe that he was really cruel and domineering and thought of women as creatures who belonged in a harem.... Sabine could have helped her, but Sabine whom she had never met had been turned away from the door.
No, she had not yet lost the battle. She must save Ellen as much because she herself needed her as on Ellen’s own account. She climbed the long stairs and left Lily and de Cyon, Hattie and Callendar together on the terrace, talking under the guidance of Callendar, who led them gracefully here and there, finding, it seemed, a strange satisfaction in ignoring the terrible knowledge which he shared only with Lily and Ellen. Lily, watching him, must have thought him inhumanly cold. Perhaps it occurred toher again, in the depths of her wisdom and experience, that this marriage of Ellen could end in only one way.
Meanwhile under the old plane trees Ellen, who had been walking up and down in silence with Jean and the dogs, took the departure of Monsieur de Cyon for the white pavilion (which Lily had had fitted up for him as a sort of study) as a signal to return. On the terrace she said to Callendar, “I shan’t come down until dinner. If you want to see your mother before she sails, you had best go now. I’ll be free later,” and so dismissed him.
Then, turning to her mother, she said, “Come Ma, we’ll go up and get you settled in your room,” and led her away leaving the garden to Lily and Jean and fat old Criquette.
Hattie, who had noticed nothing either in the streets or in the house itself (for, as Ellen knew, she did not see its beauty but saw it only as the house which it might be said belonged to Ellen), noticed as she walked through the big drawing-room that it resembled Shane’s Castle in its warm, soft beauty. The portrait of old John Shane with a white setter at his feet, and the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner which had once hung in the house among the Mills now found places against the satinwood paneling. She fancied too that she recognized the Aubusson carpet, connected dimly in her memory with the picture of old Julia, hawk-like and bitter, tracing the outlines of the extravagant flowers with her stick of ebony and silver.
“It’s like the castle,” she murmured to Ellen, who hurried on up the stairs without heeding her.
They turned off along the gallery and, as they passed one of the doors, the squeaking of Gramp’s rocking chair (unpacked and long since placed in readiness by Lily) came to them through the paneling. Time went on. People were born and people died, but The Everlasting and his rocking chair remained the same.
“He’s better now than he used to be,” observed Hattie. Shedid not mention him by name, for Ellen knew well enough whom she meant; together they had passed his door, together they had heard the same rhythmical squeaking a thousand times. In a sense the sound of the decrepit rocker bound them to each other in a way that nothing else could have done. It was the one thing that remained constant, unchanged, out of all the past.
Hattie’s room—the room to which she had come to spend the rest of her life—was large and airy with two tall windows which opened on the garden where Lily had taken Ellen’s place and was now walking up and down, up and down, with her tall red-haired son. He was a man now and it made Hattie tremble to think how little difference his improper existence had made. There in the garden, under the old trees, it seemed of no importance that he had never had, in the proper sense, a father. He belonged there, with Lily. There was a rightness about the whole thing which Hattie sensed from afar off but was unable to explain ... a vague feeling that Lily’s life had been, despite everything, a life complete and in the proper key, like a beautiful painting superbly drawn and executed with all the boldness of a sure hand. Lily perhaps had led the life for which she was born. Hattie saw that she was telling the boy something which had led her to weep, for she lifted her handkerchief to her eyes and the boy halted to face her with his brow crinkled into little furrows. He was so like Fergus....
And in the next instant she knew what it was that Lily had said. Ellen put her arms about her mother and murmured in a low voice, “I have some bad news, Ma.”
And Hattie, looking at her in a queer stony fashion, replied, “I know what it is. Robert too is dead.”
It was true. Little by little, while her mother sat listening in the same stony silence, Ellen told the whole story. It was Callendar who had brought the news. He had come from the front on leave this very morning. There—somewhere in the Argonne—he had come across Robert’s regiment and there theyhad become acquainted. And then on the night before Callendar left, he had been sent for by one of the Americans. He had gone to a dressing station, but Robert was dead when he arrived. He had been wounded while saving one of his own men caught among the barbed wire between the German lines and his own. The man had been saved; he would live. It was he who had told Callendar the whole story, he who in a sort of delirium had described the whole affair with a fantastic poetry ... the fog that had settled over the lines, the swift, brilliant flare of the Veery lights, the faint, malicious, pop! pop! of the gas shells as they buried their noses so neatly in the earth. It was in this wild, unearthly setting that Robert had given up his life. Robert (thought Hattie) who had said, “There’s nothing romantic about war.... The side which is the most efficient.... There won’t be any nonsense.... I’ll look out for myself.”
When Ellen had finished they were both silent for a time and at last, Hattie, still dry eyed, said in a firm voice, “It is a judgment ... I love my children too well ... better than my own God and now they have been taken from me.”
(If only it had been Robert.... And now it was Robert too.)
She lay down on the great bed, a strange, incongruous figure—this grim, primitive, black-clad woman—in the midst of all the luxury that Lily had provided. And presently she said, “I’d like to be alone for a time, Ellen. I’ll call you ... later on.”
So Ellen left her mother in solitude, but as the door closed behind her she knew that it was herself upon whom the remnants of her family—Hattie and The Everlasting—now depended. It was she who, after all these years in which she had neglected and forgotten them, had become the rock, the foundation. And she knew too that there could no longer be any doubt about marrying Callendar. She would have to marry now.... Now that Robert, too, was gone there were new reasons. There remained only one thing that she could do for her mother. It might as well be Callendar as any other man.