SIX weeks after the night the Governor drove furiously away from the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane gave her last dinner before sending Lily away. It was small, including only Mrs. Julis Harrison, her son William, and Miss Abercrombie, but it served her purpose clearly as a piece of strategy to deceive the Town. Irene was absent, having gone back to the convent in the east where she had been to school as a little girl. A great doctor advised the visit, a doctor who held revolutionary ideas gained in Vienna. It was, he said, the one means of bringing the girl round, since he could drag from her no sane reason for her melancholy and neurasthenic behavior. Her mother could discover nothing; indeed it appeared that the girl had a strange fear of her which struck her dumb. So Julia Shane overcame her distaste for the Roman Catholic church and permitted the girl to return, thanking Heaven that she had kept from her the truth. This, she believed, would have caused Irene to lose her mind.
In the drawing-room after dinner a discreet battle raged with Julia Shane on one side and Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie on the other. Lily and William Harrison withdrew to the library. In a curious fashion the drawing-room made an excellent battle-ground for so polite a struggle. It was so old, so mysterious and so delicate. There were no lights save the lamps, three of them, one majolica, one blue faience and one Ming, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the tall mirror and the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. The only flowers were a bowl of white peonies which Lily had been able to save from the wreck of a garden beaten for three days by a south wind.
“The Governor’s visit,” observed Mrs. Harrison, “turned out unfortunately. He succeeded in offending almost every one of importance.”
“And his sudden going-away,” added Miss Abercrombie, eagerly leaning forward.
Julia Shane stirred in her big chair. To-night she wore an old-fashioned gown of black lace, very tight at the waist and very low in the neck, which displayed boldly the boniness of her strong shoulders. “I don’t think he intended slighting any one,” she said. “He was called away by a telegram. A Governor, you know, has duties. When Colonel Shane was alive....” And she launched into an anecdote of twenty years earlier, told amusingly and skilfully, leading Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie for the time being far away from the behavior of the Governor. She spoke of her husband as she always did, in terms of the most profound devotion.
Mrs. Harrison was a handsome stout woman, a year or two older than Julia Shane but, unlike her, given to following the fashions closely. She preserved an illusion of youth by much lacing and secret recourse to rouge, a vain deception before Julia Shane, who knew rouge in all its degrees in Paris where rouge was used both skilfully and frankly. She moved, the older woman, with a slight pomposity, conscious always of the dignity of her position as the richest woman in the Town; for she was richer by a million or two than Julia Shane, to whom she acceded nothing save the prestige which was Cypress Hill and its tradition.
Miss Abercrombie, a spinster of uncertain age, wore her hair in a pompadour and spoke French, as she believed, perfectly. It was necessary that she believe in her own French, for she it was who instructed the young girls of the Town in French and in history, drawing upon a background derived from a dozen summers spent at one time or another on the continent. Throughout Julia Shane’s long anecdote, Miss Abercrombie interrupted from time to time with little fluttering sighs of appreciation, with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and sudden observations of how much pleasanter the Town had been in the old days. When the anecdote at last was finished, she it was who brought the conversation by a sudden heroic gesture back to the Governor.
“And tell me, dear Julia,” she said. “Is there no news of Lily?... Has nothing come of the Governor’s devotion?”
There was nothing, Julia replied with a sharp, compressed smile. “Nothing at all, save a flirtation. Lily, you know, is very pretty.”
“So beautiful!” remarked Mrs. Harrison. “I was telling my son William so, only to-night. He admires her ... deeply, you know, deeply.” She had taken to fanning herself vigorously for the night was hot. She did it boldly, endeavoring in vain to force some stray zephyr among the rolls of fat inside her tight bodice.
“What I can never understand,” continued Miss Abercrombie, “is why Lily hasn’t already married. A girl so pretty and so nice to every one ... especially older people.”
Mrs. Shane became falsely deprecating of Lily’s charms. “She is a good girl,” she said. “But hardly as charming as all that. The trouble is that she’s very fastidious. She isn’t easy to suit.” In her deprecation there was an assumption of superiority, as though she could well afford to deprecate because no one could possibly take her seriously.
“She’s had plenty of chances.... I don’t doubt that,” observed Miss Abercrombie. “I can remember that summer when we were all in Aix together.... Do you remember the young Englishman, Julia? The nice one with yellow hair?” She turned to Mrs. Julis Harrison with an air of arrogant pride and intimacy. “He was the second son of a peer, you know, and she could have had him by a turn of her finger.”
And the association with the peerage placed for the time being Miss Abercrombie definitely on the side of Julia Shane in the drawing-room skirmish.
“And Harvey Biggs was so devoted to her,” she babbled on. “Such a nice boy ... gone now to the war like so many other brave fellows.” Then as though remembering suddenly that William Harrison was not at the war but safe in the library across the hall, she veered quickly. “They say the Spanish atrocities in Cuba are beyond comprehension. I feel that we should spread them as much as possible to rouse the spirit of the people.”
“I’ve thought since,” remarked Mrs. Harrison, “that you should have had flags for decorations at the garden party, Julia. With a war on and especially with the Governor here.I only mention it because it has made people talk. It only adds to the resentment against his behavior.”
“I thought the flowers were enough,” replied Mrs. Shane, making a wry face. “They were so beautiful until cinders from your furnaces destroyed them. Those peonies,” she added, indicating the white flowers that showed dimly in the soft light, “are all that is left.” There was a moment’s pause and the distant throb of the Mills filled the room, proclaiming their eternal presence. It was a sound which never ceased. “The garden party seems to have been a complete failure. I’m growing too old to entertain properly.”
“Nonsense!” declared Mrs. Julis Harrison with great emphasis. “But I don’t see why you persist in living here with the furnaces under your nose.”
“I shan’t live anywhere else. Cypress Hill was here before the Mills ... long before.”
Almost unconsciously each woman discovered in the eye of the other a faint gleam of anger, the merest flash of spirit, a sign of the eternal struggle between that which is established and that which is forever in a state of flux, which Mrs. Julis Harrison in her heart called “progress” and Julia Shane in hers called “desecration.”
THE struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue eyes that protruded a little from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.
“It is late, mother,” he said. “And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday.”
His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.
“Sailing!” repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and suspending her fan in mid-air. “Sailing! Why didn’t you tell me, Julia? I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily.”
“Sailing,” echoed Miss Abercrombie, “to France, my dear! I have some commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?”
Lily smiled slowly. “Of course not. Can you send them down in the morning? I’m afraid I won’t get up to the Town to-morrow.”
She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery’s wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison’s first speech.
“Tell Hennery,” she said, “to send round Mrs. Harrison’s carriage.” The old woman was taking no chances now.
There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement over the thought of a voyage to “the continent.” The carriage arrived and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the squalid street.
When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which, sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.
“She refused me,” he said.
For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, “She may come round.... You’re not clever with women, William.”
The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that his mother’s opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope had been killed—put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last, despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.
“It couldn’t be,” she thought. “Julia would never have dared to invite us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and pleasant. No, it’s impossible!”
All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend who lived in Paris.
AT Cypress Hill, Julia Shane and her elder daughter returned, when the door had closed on their guests, to the drawing-room to discuss after a custom of long standing the entertainment of the evening. They agreed that Mrs. Harrison had grown much too stout, that she was indeed on the verge of apoplexy; that Miss Abercrombie became steadily more fidgety and affected.
“A woman should marry,” said Julia Shane, “even if she can do no better than a day laborer.”
Two candles by the side of the tall mirror and one by the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner guttered feebly and expired. Now that she was alone, the old woman lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke quietly into the still air. It was Lily who interrupted the silence.
“Willie proposed to me again,” she said presently.
The mother made no answer but regarded the girl quietly with a curious questioning look in her tired eyes. Lily, seated in the glow of light from the majolica lamp, must have understood what was passing in her mind.
“No,” she said, “if I had wanted to marry, I could have had a man ... a real man.” For a second her eyes grew dark with emotion and her red lips curved as if she remembered suddenly and with a shameless pleasure the embraces of her lover. “No,” she continued, “I wouldn’t play such a trick, even on a poor thing like Willie.”
The old woman knocked the ashes from her cigarette. The rings flashed and glittered in the candle light. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think you are hopeless ... altogether abandoned.”
There was a note of melancholy in her voice, so poignant that the girl suddenly sprang from her chair, crossed the little space between them and embraced her mother impulsively.“I’m sorry for your sake, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry....” She kissed the hard, handsome face and the mother returned the embrace with a sudden fierce burst of unaccustomed passion.
“It’s all right, Lily dear. I’m only thinking of you. I don’t think anything can really hurt me any longer. I’m an old warrior, tough and well-armored.” For a second she regarded the girl tenderly and then asked, “but aren’t you afraid?”
“No!” The answer was quiet and confident.
“You’re a strange, strange girl,” said the mother.
MADAME GIGON with Fifi lived in a tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption. In the summer she went to live at Germigny l’Evec in a curve of the Marne after it has passed Meaux and Trilport, wandering its soft and amiable way between sedges and wild flags under rows of tall plane trees with bark as green and spotted as the backs of salamanders. Here she occupied the lodge of the château belonging to her cousin, a gentleman who inherited his title from a banker of the First Empire and lent the lodge rent free to Madame Gigon, whose father, also a banker, was ruined by the collapse of the Second Empire. M. Gigon, a scholar and antiquarian, one of the curators of the Cluny Museum, was long since dead—an ineffectual little man with a stoop and a squint, who lived his life gently and faded out of it with so little disturbance that even Madame Gigon sometimes examined her conscience and her respectability because there were long periods when she forgot that he had ever existed at all. Fifi was to her far more of a personality—Fifi with her fat waddle, her black and tan coat, and her habit of yapping for gateaux at tea time.
Although Madame Gigon was not English at all, tea was a fixed rite in her life. She came by the custom at the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the edge of Paris where tea was a regular meal because there was always a score of English girls among Mademoiselle’spensionnaires. On the passing of Monsieur Gigon she had taken, under the stress of bitter necessity, a place as instructress in art and history at the establishment of the aging Mademoiselle de Vaux, who, like herself was a Bonapartist, abourgeoiseand deeply respectable. She saved from her small salary a comfortable little fortune, and at length retired with Fifi to the little flat in the Rue de la Assomption to live upon herinterest and the bounty of her cousin the Baron. But above even her respectability and her small fortune, she honored her position, an element which she had preserved through a lifetime of adversity. She was respected still as the daughter of a man who had ruined himself to support Napoleon the Little. She still attended the salons of the Bonapartist families in the houses and apartments of Passy, of the Boulevard Flandrin, and the new Paris of the Place de l’Etoile. She was respected still in the circles which moved about the aging figure of the Prince Bonaparte and, greatest of all, she received a card of admission signed by his own hand whenever the Prince addressed the Geographical Society.
Madame Gigon was in the act of closing her tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption for the summer when the letter of Julia Shane arrived. At the news it contained, she suspended the operations necessary to her departure for the lodge of Germigny l’Evec and settled herself to await the arrival of pretty Lily Shane, contenting herself meanwhile with taking Fifi for airings in the Bois de Boulogne, a suitable distance away for one of Madame’s age and infirmities. And when the day came, she managed to meet Lily in a fiacre at the Gare du Nord.
There was something touching in Madame Gigon’s reception of the girl, something even more touching in Lily’s reception by the fat and wheezing Fifi. The shrewd old dog remembered her as the girl who had been generous with gateaux, and when Lily, dressed smartly in a purple suit with a large hat covered with plumes, climbed into the fiacre, the plump Fifi shouted and leapt about with all the animation of a puppy.
Throughout the journey to Meaux and on the succeeding trip by carriage along the Marne to Germigny, the pair made no mention of Julia Shane’s letter. They talked of the heat, of the beauty of the countryside, of Mademoiselle de Vaux, who was past ninety and very feeble, of the new girls at the school ... until the peasant coachman drew up his fat horse before the gate of the lodge and carried their luggage into the vine covered cottage.
AFTER Lily had rested in the room just beneath the dove cote, the pair, assisted by a red-cheeked farm girl, set themselves to putting the place in order. With the approach of evening, Madame Gigon took off her wig, donned a lace cap, and they were settled until the month of October.
When they had finished a supper of omelette, potatoes and wine, they seated themselves on the terrace and Madame Gigon at length approached the matter, delicately and with circumspection. It was a blue, misty evening of the sort frequent in the Isle de France, when the stillness becomes acute and tangible, when the faintest sound is sharply audible for an amazing distance across the waving fields of wheat. From the opposite side of the river arose the faint tinkling of a bell as a pair of white oxen made their way slowly from the farm to the sedge-bordered river. Overhead among the vines on the roof of the lodge, the pigeons stirred sleepily, cooing and preening themselves. The evening was beautiful, unbelievably calm, with the placidity of a marvelous dream.
After a long silence, Madame Gigon began to gossip once more and presently, she said, “To be sure, it has happened before in this world. It will happen again. The trouble is that you are too pretty, dear Lily, and you lose your head. You are too generous. I always told Mademoiselle you were more like our girls than the English or Americans.”
Lily said nothing. It appeared that she heard nothing old Madame Gigon said. Wrapped in her black cloak against the chill of the faint mist which swam above the Marne, she seemed lost in the breathless beauty of the evening.
“Why, in my family, it has happened. There was my cousin ... a sister of the Baron who lives here in the Chateau....” And Madame Gigon moved from one case toanother, justifying Lily’s strange behavior. When she had finished with a long series, she shook her head gently and said, “I know, I know ...,” smiling all the while as though she had known many lovers and been as seductive as Cleopatra. She drank the last of her coffee, drying her mustache when she had finished.
“I brought down some fine lawn and some lace from Paris,” she said, “I remember that you always sewed beautifully. We shall be busy this winter in the little flat.”
And then Lily stirred for the first time, moving her body indolently with her eyes half-closed, her head resting on the back of the chair. “We shan’t live in the little flat, Madame Gigon.... We shall have a house.... I know just the one, in the Rue Raynouard. You see, I am going to live in Paris always. I am never going back to America to live.”
The old Frenchwoman said nothing, either in approval or disagreement, but she grew warm suddenly with pleasure. The house in the Rue Raynouard captured her imagination. It meant that she would have the dignity of surroundings suitable to one who received signed cards from the Prince Bonaparte to his lectures. She could have a salon. She knew that Lily Shane, like all Americans, was very rich.
A little while later they went inside and Lily in her room just under the dove-cote lighted a candle and settled herself to writing letters. One she addressed to the convent where Irene was stopping, one to Cypress Hill, and the last, very short and formal, she addressed the Governor. It was the first line she had written him. Also it was the last.
IN the Town the tidings of Lily’s sudden departure followed the course of all bits of news from Shane’s Castle. It created for a time a veritable cloud of gossip. Again when it became gradually known that she intended living in Paris, heads wagged for a time and stories of her father were revived. Her name became the center of a myriad tales such as accumulate about beautiful women who are also indifferent.
But of one fact the Town learned nothing. It had no knowledge of a cablegram which arrived at Shane’s Castle containing simply the words, “John has arrived safely and well.” Only the telegraph operator saw it and to him the words could have meant nothing.
It was Mrs. Julis Harrison who kept alive the cloud of rumors that closed over the memory of Lily. When she was not occupied with directing the activities of the Mills through the mouthpiece of her son Willie, she fostered her suspicions. The letter addressed to a friend in Paris bore no fruit. Lily, it seemed, had buried herself. She was unknown to the American colony. But Mrs. Harrison, nothing daunted, managed herself to create a story which in time she came to believe, prefacing it to her choicest friends with the remark that “Shane’s Castle has not changed. More things go on there than this world dreams of.”
As for the Governor, he visited the Town two years later on the eve of election; but this time he did not stay at Shane’s Castle. It was known that he paid old Julia Shane a mysterious visit lasting more than an hour, but what passed between them remained at best a subject for the wildest speculation.
With the departure of Lily, her mother settled slowly into alife of retirement. There were no more receptions and garden-parties. With Lily gone, there appeared to be no reasons for gaiety. Irene, as every one knew, hated festivities of every sort.
“I am growing too old,” said Julia Shane. “It tires me to entertain. Why should I?”
It was not true that she was old, yet it was true that she was tired. It was clear that she was letting slip all threads of interest, even more apparent that she actually cherished her solitude.
She still condescended to go to an occasional dinner in the Town, driving in her victoria with Hennery on the box through sweating smelly Halsted street, across the writhing oily Black Fork and up the Hill to the respectable portion of the Town where lived the people of property. It was impossible to have guessed her thoughts on that infrequent journey. They must have been strange ... the thoughts of a woman not long past middle-age who had seen within her lifetime the most extraordinary metamorphosis in the Town of her birth. She could remember the days when she rode with John Shane in his paddock, now completely buried beneath massive warehouses. She could remember the days when Halsted street was only a private drive across the marshes to Cypress Hill. Indeed it appeared, as the years passed, that Julia Shane was slipping slowly back across all those years into the simplicity that marked her childhood as a farmer’s daughter. She talked less and avoided people. She no longer cared for the elegance of her clothes. As though her gaunt and worldly air had been only a mockery she began to slough it off bit by bit with the passing months. The few women who crossed the threshold of Shane’s Castle returned with stories that Julia Shane, having closed the rest of the house, had taken to living in two or three rooms.
People said other things too, of Julia and her two daughters, but mostly of Lily, for Lily somehow captured their imagination. In the midst of the Town, born and bred upon the furnace girt hill, she was an exotic, an orchid appearing suddenly in a prosperous vegetable garden.
People said such things as, “Julia Shane gets no satisfaction out of her daughter Irene.... I believe myself that the girl is a little queer.”
Or it might be that Mrs. Julis Harrison, with a knowing shake of the head would remark, “It’s strange that Lily has never married. They say she is enjoying herself in Paris, although she doesn’t see anything of the Americans there. It’s like John Shane’s daughter to prefer the French.”
MEANWHILE the Town grew. The farm where Julia Shane spent her youth disappeared entirely, broken up into checker board allotments, crossed by a fretwork of crude concrete sidewalks. Houses, uniform and unvaryingly ugly in architecture and cheap in construction, sprang up in clusters like fungi to house the clerks and the petty officials of the Mills. In the Flats, which included all that district taken over by the factories, hundreds of alien workmen drifted in to fill the already overcrowded houses beyond endurance. Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles, Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the very hedges of Shane’s Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.
All this, Julia Shane, living in another world, ignored. She saw nothing of what happened beneath her very windows.
It was true that she found no satisfaction in her daughter Irene. On the return of the girl from a long rest at the convent, there took place between mother and daughter a terrible battle which did not end in a sudden, decisive victory but dragged its length across many weeks. Irene returned with her thin pretty face pale and transparent, her ash blond hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in severe nunlike fashion. She wore a suit of black stuff, plainly made and ornamented only by a plain collar of white lawn.
On the first evening at home, the mother and daughter sat until midnight in the library, a room which they used after dinner on evenings when they were alone. The little Frenchclock struck twelve before the girl was able to summon courage to address her mother, and when at last she succeeded, she was forced to interrupt the old woman in the midst of a new book by Collette Willy, sent her by Lily, which she was reading with the aid of a silver mounted glass.
“Mother,” began Irene gently. “Mother....”
Julia Shane put down the glass and looked up. “What is it?”
“Mother, I’ve decided to enter the church.”
It was an announcement far from novel, a hope expressed year after year only to be trodden under foot by the will of the old woman. But this time there was a new quality in Irene’s voice, a shade of firmness and determination that was not at all in keeping with the girl’s usual humility. The mother’s face grew stern, almost hard. Cheri slipped gently to the floor where it lay forgotten.
“Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?” The voice was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing—the Roman Catholic church—which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.
The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.
“Has this anything to do with Lily?” asked the mother with a sudden air of suspicion, and Irene answered “No! No!” with such intensity that Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.
“You know how I feel,” she said. “I am old and I am tired. I have had enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last.”
Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread until her whole body was shaking. “It is all I have,” she cried.
“Don’t be morbid!”
The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane’s face—the look with which she faced down all the world save her own family.
“I won’t hear of it,” she added. “I’ve told you often enough, Irene.... I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it.”
The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared even to argue her case. “If it were Lily ...” she began weakly.
“It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is out of the question. Lily is no fool....”
The accusation of Irene was an old one, secret, cherished always in the depths of a lonely submissive heart. It was born now from the depths of her soul, a cry almost of passion, a protest against a sister whom every one pardoned, whom every one admired, whom all the world loved. It was an accusation directed against the mother who was so sympathetic toward Lily, so uncomprehending toward Irene.
“I suppose they have been talking to you ... the sisters,” continued Julia Shane. And when the girl only buried her face miserably in her arms, she added more gently, “Come here, Irene.... Come over here to me.”
Quietly the daughter came to her side where she knelt down clasping the fingers covered with rings that were so cold against her delicate, transparent skin. For an instant the mother frowned as if stricken by some physical pain. “My God!” she said, “Why is it so hard to live?” But her weakness passed quickly. She stiffened her tired body, sighed, and began again. “Now,” she said gruffly. “We must work this out.... We must understand each other better, my dear. If you could manage to confide in me ... to let me help you. I am your mother. Whatever comes to you comes to me as well ... everything. There are three of us, you and Lily and me.” Her manner grew slowly more tender, more affectionate. “We must keep together. You might say that we stood alone ... three women with the world against us. When I die, I want to leave you and Lily closer to each other than you and I have been. If there is anything thatyou want to confess ... if you have any secret, tell it to me and not to the sisters.”
By now Irene was sobbing hysterically, clinging all the while to the hand of her mother. “There is nothing ... nothing!” she cried, “I don’t know why I am so miserable.”
“Then promise me one thing ... that you will do nothing until we have talked the matter out thoroughly.” She fell to stroking the girl’s blond hair with her thin veined hand, slowly, with a hypnotic gesture.
“Yes.... Yes.... I promise!” And gradually the sobbing ebbed and the girl became still and calm.
For a time they sat thus listening to the mocking frivolous tick-tick of the little French clock over the fireplace. A greater sound, rumbling and regular like the pounding of giant hammers they did not hear because it had become so much a part of their lives that it was no longer audible. The throb of the Mills, working day and night, had become a part of the very stillness.
At last Julia Shane stirred and said with a sudden passion, “Come, Irene!... Come up to my room. There is no peace here.” And the pair rose and hurried away, the mother hobbling along with the aid of her ebony stick, never once glancing behind her at the portrait whose handsome malignant eyes appeared to follow them with a wicked delight.
FOR days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a second promise ... that she would never enter the church so long as her mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill. Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into their homes, facing all the deep-rooted hostility and the suspicions of Shane’s Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly in the lady from Shane’s Castle.
It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express, unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily Shane might never return from Paris.
She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen’s houses which had sprung up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as if they were notsolid and real at all, but queer structures born out of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted street to Shane’s Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her destination was the great black house on the hill.
As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead, abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.
Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull glow of the furnaces.
The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times, listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of welcome.
“Mama!” Lily called up the long polished stairway. “Irene! Mama! Where are you?”
She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her veil, the sound of her mother’s limping step andthe tapping of her stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later, Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.
ON the occasion of Lily’s first dinner at home, the mulatto woman brought out the heaviest of the silver candelabra and despatched Hennery into the Town for a dozen tall candles and a great bunch of pink roses which filled the silver épergne when the mother and the two daughters came down to dinner; Julia Shane, as usual, wore black with a lace shawl thrown over her gray hair, a custom which she had come to adopt in the evenings and one which gave the Town one more point of evidence in the growing chain of her eccentricities. Irene, still clad in the gray dress with the high collar and looking somehow like a governess or a nurse employed in the house, took her place at the side of the table. As for Lily, her appearance so fascinated the mulatto woman and the black girl who aided her that the dinner was badly served and brought a sharp remonstrance from Mrs. Shane. No longer had Lily any claims to girlhood. Indisputably she was become a woman. A fine figure of a woman, she might have been called, had she been less languid and indolent. Her slimness had given way to a delicate voluptuousness, a certain opulence like the ripeness of a beautiful fruit. Where there had been slimness before there now were curves. She moved slowly and with the same curious dignity of her mother, and she wore no rouge, for her lips were full and red and her cheeks flushed with delicate color. Her beauty was the beauty of a peasant girl from which all coarseness had been eliminated, leaving only a radiant glow of health. She was, after all, the granddaughter of a Scotch farmer; there was nothing thin-blooded about her, nothing of the anemia of Irene. To-night she wore a tea-gown from Venice, the color of water in a limestone pool, liquid, cool, pale green. Her reddish hair, in defiance of the prevailing fashions, she wore bound tightly about her head andfastened by a pin set with brilliants. About her neck on a thin silver cord hung suspended a single pear-shaped emerald which rested between her breasts, so that sometimes it hung outside the gown and sometimes lay concealed against the delicate white skin.
Irene throughout the dinner spoke infrequently and kept her eyes cast down as though the beauty of her sister in some way fascinated and repelled her. When it was finished, she stood up and addressed her mother.
“I must go now. It is my night to teach at Welcome House.”
Lily regarded her with a puzzled expression until her mother, turning to explain, said, “She teaches English to a class of foreigners in Halsted street.” And then to Irene, “You might have given it up on the first night Lily was home!”
A look of stubbornness came into the pale face of the younger sister. “I can’t. They are depending on me. I shall see Lily every day for weeks. This is a duty. To stay would be to yield to pleasure.”
“But you’re not going alone into Halsted street?” protested Lily. “At night! You must be crazy!”
“I’m perfectly safe.... They know me and what I do,” the sister answered proudly. “Besides there is one of the men who always sees me home.”
She came round to Lily’s chair and gave her a kiss, the merest brushing of cool lips against the older sister’s warm cheek. “Good-night,” she said, “in case you have gone to bed before I return.”
When Irene had gone, an instant change took place in the demeanor of the two women. It was as though some invisible barrier, separating the souls of mother and daughter, had been let down suddenly. Lily leaned back and stretched her long limbs. The mulatto woman brought cigarettes and the mother and daughter settled themselves to talking. They were at last alone and free to say what they would.
“How long has Irene been behaving in this fashion?” asked Lily.
“It is more than three years now. I don’t interfere because it gives her so much pleasure. It saved her, you know, from entering the church. Anything is better than that.”
Then all at once as though they had suddenly entered another world, they began to talk French, shutting out the mulatto woman from their conversation.
“Mais elle est déja religieuse,” said Lily, “tout simplement. You might as well let her enter the church. She already behaves like a nun ... in that ridiculous gray dress. She looks ghastly. You should forbid it. A woman has no right to make herself look hideous. There’s something sinful in it.”
The mother smiled wearily. “Forbid it? You don’t know Irene. I’m thankful to keep her out of the church. She is becoming fanatic.” There was a pause and Mrs. Shane added, “She never goes out now ... not since a year and more.”
“She is like a spinster of forty.... It is shameful for a girl of twenty-five to let herself go in that fashion. No man would look at her.”
“Irene will never marry.... It is no use speaking to her. I have seen the type before, Lily ... the religieuse. It takes the place of love. It is just as ecstatic.”
The mulatto woman, who had been clearing away the dishes, came and stood by her mistress’ chair to await, after her custom, the orders for the following day. “There will only be three of us ... as usual. That is all, Sarah!”
The woman turned to go but Lily called after her. “Mama,” she said, “can’t we open the rest of the house while I’m here? It’s horrible, shut up in this fashion. I hate sitting in the library when there is all the drawing-room.”
Mrs. Shane did not argue. “Get some one to help you open the drawing-room to-morrow, Sarah. We will use it while Miss Lily is here.”
The mulatto woman went out and Lily lighted another cigarette. “You will want it open for the Christmas party,” she said. “You can’t entertain all the family in the library.”
“I had thought of giving up the Christmas party this year,” replied the Mother.
“No ... not this year,” cried Lily. “It is such fun, and I haven’t seen Cousin Hattie and Uncle Jacob and Ellen for years.”
Again the mother yielded. “You want gaiety, I see.”
“Well, I’m not pious like Irene, and this house is gloomy enough.” At the sight of her mother rising from her chair, she said ... “Let’s not go to the library. Let’s sit here. I hate it in there.”
So there they remained while the tall candles burned lower and lower. Suddenly after a brief pause in the talk, the mother turned to Lily and said, “Et toi.”
Lily shrugged her shoulders. “Moi? Moi? Je suis contente.”
“Et Madame Gigon, et le petit Jean.”
“They are well ... both of them. I have brought a picture which I’ve been waiting to show you.”
“He is married, you know.”
“When?”
“Only three weeks ago. He came here after your letter to offer to do anything he could. He wants the boy to go to school in America.”
Here Lily smiled triumphantly. “But Jean is mine. I shall accept nothing from him. He is afraid to recognize Jean because it would ruin him. I shall send the boy where I like.” She leaned forward, glowing with a sudden enthusiasm. “You don’t know how handsome he is and how clever.” She pushed back her chair. “Wait, I’ll get his picture.”
The mother interrupted her. “Bring me the enameled box from my dressing table. There is something in it that will interest you.”
IN a moment the daughter returned bearing the photograph and the enameled box. It was the picture which interested Julia Shane. Putting aside the box she took it up and gazed at it for a long time in silence while Lily watched her narrowly across the polished table.
“He is a handsome child,” she said presently. “He resembles you. There is nothing of his father.” Her blue eyes were moist and the tired hard face softened. “Come here,” she added almost under her breath, and when the daughter came to her side she kissed her softly, holding her close to her thin breast. When she released Lily from her embrace, she said, “And you? When are you going to marry?”
Lily laughed. “Oh, there is plenty of time. I am only twenty-seven, after all. I am very happy as I am.” She picked up the enameled box, smiling. “Show me the secret,” she said.
Mrs. Shane opened the box and from a number of yellow clippings drew forth one which was quite new. “There,” she said, giving it to the daughter. “It is a picture of him and his new wife, taken at the wedding.”
There was a portrait of the Governor, grown a little more stout, but still tall, straight and broad shouldered. His flowing mustache had been clipped; otherwise he was unchanged. In the picture he grinned amiably toward the camera as if he saw political capital even in his own honeymoon. By his side stood a woman of medium height and strong build. Her features were heavy and she too smiled, although there was something superior in her smile as though she felt a disdain for the public. It was a plain face, intelligent, yet somehow lacking in charm. The clipping identified her as the daughter of a wealthy middle-western manufacturer and a graduate ofa woman’s college. It continued with a short biographical account of the Governor, predicting for him a brilliant future and congratulating him upon a marriage the public had long awaited with interest.
Lily replaced the clipping in the enameled box and closed the lid with a snap. “He had done well,” she remarked. “She sounds like a perfect wife for an American politician. I should have been a hopeless failure. As it is we are both happy.”
The look of bewilderment returned to her mother’s eyes. “The boy,” she said, “should have a father. You should marry for his sake, Lily.”
“He shall have ... in time. There is no hurry. Besides, his position is all right. I am Madame Shane, a rich American widow. Madame Gigon has taken care of that. My position is excellent. No woman could be more respected.”
Gradually she drifted into an account of her life in Paris. It followed closely the line of pleasant anticipations which Madame Gigon had permitted herself during the stillness of that first evening on the terrace above the Marne. The house in the Rue Raynouard was big and old. It had been built before the Revolution at a time when Passy was a suburb surrounded by open meadows. It had a garden at the back which ran down to the Rue de Passy, once the open highroad to Auteuil. Apartments, shops and houses now covered the open meadows but the old house and the garden remained unchanged, unaltered since the day Lenôtre planned them for the Marquise de Sevillac. The garden had a fine terrace and a pavilion which some day Jean should have for his own quarters. The house itself was well planned for entertaining. It had plenty of space and a large drawing-room which extended along the garden side with tall windows opening outward upon the terrace. At a little distance off was the Seine. One could hear the excursion steamers bound for Sèvres and St. Cloud whistling throughout the day and night.
As for friends, there were plenty of them ... more than she desired. There were the respectable baronnes and comtesses of Madame Gigon’s set, a group which worshiped thePrince Bonaparte and talked a deal of silly nonsense about the Restoration of the Empire. To be sure, they were fuddy-duddy, but their sons and daughters were not so bad. Some of them Lily had known at the school of Mademoiselle de Vaux. Some of them were charming, especially the men. She had been to Compiègne to hunt, though she disliked exercise of so violent a nature. Indeed they had all been very kind to her.
“After all,” she concluded, “I am not clever or brilliant. I am content with them. I am really happy. As for Madame Gigon, she is radiant. She has become a great figure in her set. She holds a salon twice a month with such an array of gateaux as would turn you ill simply to look at. I give her a fat allowance but she gets herself up like the devil. I think she is sorry that crinolines are no longer the fashion. She looks like a Christmas tree, but she is the height of respectability.” For an instant a thin shade of mockery, almost of bitterness colored her voice.
Julia Shane reached over suddenly and touched her daughter’s arm. Something in Lily’s voice or manner had alarmed her. “Be careful, Lily. Don’t let yourself grow hard. That’s the one thing.”
THEY sat talking thus until the candles burnt low, guttered and began to go out, one by one, and at last the distant tinkle of a bell echoed through the house. For a moment they listened, waiting for one of the servants to answer and when the bell rang again and again, Lily at last got up languidly saying, “It must be Irene. I’ll open if the servants are in bed.”
“She always has a key,” said her mother. “She has never forgotten it before.”
Lily made her way through the hall and boldly opened the door to discover that she was right. Irene stood outside covered with snow. As she stepped in, her sister caught a glimpse through the mist of falling flakes of a tall man, powerfully built, walking down the long drive toward Halsted street. He walked rapidly, for he wore no overcoat and the night was cold.
In the warm lamplighted hall, Irene shook the snow from her coat and took off her plain ugly black hat. Her pale cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the effort of walking so rapidly up the drive.
“Who is the man?” asked Lily with an inquisitive smile. Her sister, pulling off her heavy overshoes, answered without looking up. “His name is Krylenko. He is a Ukrainian ... a mill worker.”
An hour later the two sisters sat in Lily’s room while she took out gown after gown from the brightly labeled trunks. Something had happened during the course of the evening to soften the younger sister. She showed for the first time traces of an interest in the life of Lily. She even bent over the trunks and felt admiringly of the satins, the brocades, the silks and the furs that Lily lifted out and tossed carelessly upon the big Italian bed. She poked about among the delicate chiffons and laces until at last she came upon a small photograph of a handsome gentleman in the ornate uniform of the cuirassiers. He was swarthy and dark-eyed with a crisp vigorous mustache, waxed and turned up smartly at the ends. For a second she held it under the light of the bed lamp.
“Who is this?” she asked, and Lily, busy with her unpacking, looked up for an instant and then continued her task. “It is the Baron,” she replied. “Madame Gigon’s cousin ... the one who supports her.”
“He is handsome,” observed Irene in a strange shrewd voice.
“He is a friend.... We ride together in the country. Naturally I see a great deal of him. We live at his château in the summer.”
The younger sister dropped the conversation. She became silent and withdrawn, and the queer frightened look showed itself in her pale blue eyes. Presently she excused herself on the pretense that she was tired and withdrew to the chaste darkness of her own room where she knelt down before a plaster virgin, all pink and gilt and sometimes tawdry, to pray.
ON the following night the house, as it appeared from the squalid level of Halsted street, took on in its setting of snow-covered pines and false cypresses the appearance to which the Town had been accustomed in the old days. The drawing-room windows glowed with warm light; wreaths were hung against the small diamond shaped panes, and those who passed the wrought iron gates heard during the occasional pauses in the uproar of the Mills the distant tinkling of a piano played with a wild exuberance by some one who chose the gayest of tunes, waltzes and polkas, which at the same hour were to be heard in a dozen Paris music halls.
Above the Flats in the Town, invitations were received during the course of the week to a dinner party, followed by a ball in the long drawing-room.
“Cypress Hill is becoming gay again,” observed Miss Abercrombie.
“It must be the return of Lily,” said Mrs. Julis Harrison. “Julia will never entertain again. She is too broken,” she added with a kind of triumph.
A night or two after Lily’s return Mrs. Harrison again spoke to her son William of Lily’s beauty and wealth, subtly to be sure and with carefully concealed purpose, for Willie, who was thirty-five now and still unmarried, grew daily more shy and more deprecatory of his own charms.
It was clear enough that the tradition of Cypress Hill was by no means dead, that it required but a little effort, the merest scribbling of a note, to restore all its slumbering prestige. The dinner and the ball became the event of the year. There was great curiosity concerning Lily. Those who had seen her reported that she looked well and handsome, that her clothes were far in advance of the local fashions. They talked once more of her beauty, her charm, her kindliness.They spoke nothing but good of her, just as they mocked Irene and jeered at her work among the foreigners in the Flats. It was Lily who succeeded to her mother’s place as chatelaine of the beautiful gloomy old house at Cypress Hill.
It was also Lily who, some two weeks before Christmas, received Mrs. Julis Harrison and Judge Weissman on the mission which brought them together in a social way for the only time in their lives. The strange pair arrived at Shane’s Castle in Mrs. Harrison’s victoria, the Jew wrapped in a great fur coat, his face a deep red from too much whiskey; and the dowager, in an imperial purple dress with a dangling gold chain, sitting well away to her side of the carriage as if contact with her companion might in some horrid way contaminate her. Lily, receiving them in the big hall, was unable to control her amazement at their sudden appearance. As the Judge bowed, rather too obsequiously, and Mrs. Harrison fastened her face into a semblance of cordiality, a look of intense mirth spread over Lily’s face like water released suddenly from a broken dam. There was something inexpressibly comic in Mrs. Harrison’s obvious determination to admit nothing unusual in a call made with Judge Weissman at ten in the morning.
“We have come to see your mother,” announced the purple clad Amazon. “Is she able to see us?”
Lily led the pair into the library. “Wait,” she replied, “I’ll see. She always stays in bed until noon. You know she grows tired easily nowadays.”
“I know ... I know,” said Mrs. Harrison. “Will you tell her it is important? A matter of life and death?”
While Lily was gone the pair in the library waited beneath the mocking gaze of John Shane’s portrait. They maintained a tomb-like silence, broken only by the faint rustling of Mrs. Harrison’s taffeta petticoats and the cat-like step of the Judge on the Aubusson carpet as he prowled from table to table examining the bits of jade or crystal or silver which caught his Oriental fancy. Mrs. Harrison sat bolt upright, a little like a pouter pigeon, with her coat thrown back to permit her to breathe. She drummed the arm of her chair with her fat fingers and followed with her small blue eyes the movementsof the elk’s tooth charm that hung suspended from the Judge’s watch chain and swayed with every movement of his obese body. At the entrance of Julia Shane, so tall, so gaunt, so cold, she rose nervously and permitted a nervous smile to flit across her face. It was the deprecating smile of one prepared to swallow her pride.
Mrs. Shane, leaning on her stick, moved forward, at the same time fastening upon the Judge a glance which conveyed both curiosity and an undisguised avowal of distaste.
“Dear Julia,” began Mrs. Harrison, “I hope you’re not too weary. We came to see you on business.” The Judge bobbed his assent.
“Oh, no, I’m quite all right. But if you’ve come about buying Cypress Hill, it’s no use. I have no intention of selling it as long as I live.”
Mrs. Harrison sat down once more. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s other business.” And then turning. “You know Judge Weissman, of course.”
The Judge gave a obsequious bow. From the manner of his hostess, it was clear that she did not know him, that indeed thousands of introductions could never induce her to know him.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said with a cold politeness, and the Judge settled himself into an easy chair, collapsing vaguely into rolls of fat.
“We should like to talk with you alone,” said Mrs. Harrison. “If Lily could leave....” And she finished the speech with a nod of the head and a turn of the eye meant to convey a sense of grave mystery.
“Certainly,” replied Lily, and went out closing the door on her mother and the two visitors.
For two hours they remained closeted in the library while Lily wandered about the house, writing notes, playing on the piano; and once, unable to restrain her curiosity, listening on tip-toe outside the library door. At the end of that time, the door opened and there emerged Mrs. Julis Harrison, looking cold and massively dignified, her gold chain swinging more than usual, Judge Weissman, very red and very angry, andlast of all, Julia Shane, her old eyes lighted by a strange new spark and her thin lips framed in an ironic smile of triumph.
The carriage appeared and the two visitors climbed in and were driven away on sagging springs across the soot-covered snow. When they had gone, the mother summoned Lily into the library, closed the door and then sat down, her thin smile growing at the same time into a wicked chuckle.
“They’ve been caught ... the pair of them,” she said. “And Cousin Charlie did it.... They’ve been trying to get me to call him off.”
Lily regarded her mother with eyebrows drawn together in a little frown. Plainly she was puzzled. “But how Cousin Charlie?” she asked. “How has he caught them?”
The mother set herself to explaining the whole story. She went back to the very beginning. “Cousin Charlie, you know, is county treasurer. It was Judge Weissman who elected him. The Jew is powerful. Cousin Charlie wouldn’t have had a chance but for him. Judge Weissman only backed him because he thought he’d take orders. But he hasn’t. That’s where the trouble is. That’s why they’re worried now. He won’t do what Judge Weissman tells him to do!”
Here she paused, permitting herself to laugh again at the discomfiture of her early morning callers. So genuine was her mirthful satisfaction that for an instant, the guise of the worldly woman vanished and through the mask showed the farm girl John Shane had married thirty years before.
“You see,” she continued, “in going through the books, Cousin Charlie discovered that the Cyclops Mills owe the county about five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. He’s sued to recover the money together with the fines, and he cannot lose. Judge Weissman and Mrs. Harrison have just discovered that and they’ve come to me to call him off because he is set on recovering the money. He’s refused to take orders. You see, it hits their pocket-books. The man who was treasurer before Cousin Charlie has disappeared neatly. There’s a pretty scandal somewhere. Even if it doesn’t come out, the Harrisons and Judge Weissman will lose a few hundred thousands. The Jew owns a lot of stock, you know.”
The old woman pounded the floor with her ebony stick asthough the delight was too great to escape expression by any other means. Her blue eyes shone with a wicked gleam, “It’s happened at last!” she said. “It’s happened at last! I’ve been waiting for it ... all these years.”
“And what did you tell them?” asked Lily.
“Tell them! Tell them!” cried Julia Shane. “What could I tell them? Only that I could do nothing. I told them they were dealing with an honest man. It is impossible to corrupt Hattie’s husband. I could do nothing if I would, and certainly I would do nothing if I could. They’ll have to pay ... just when they’re in the midst of building new furnaces.” Suddenly her face grew serious and the triumph died out of her voice. “But I’m sorry for Charlie and Hattie, just the same. He’ll suffer for it. He has killed himself politically. The Jew is too powerful for him. It’ll be hard on Hattie and the children, just when Ellen was planning to go away to study. Judge Weissman will fight him from now on. You’ve no idea how angry he was. He tried to bellow at me, but I soon stopped him.”
And the old woman laughed again at the memory of her triumph.
As for Lily her handsome face grew rosy with indignation. “It can’t be as bad as that! That can’t happen to a man because he did his duty! The Town can’t be as rotten as that!”
“It is though,” said her mother. “It is. You’ve no idea how rotten it is. Why, Cousin Charlie is a lamb among the wolves. Believe me I know. It’s worse than when your father was alive. The mills have made it worse.”
Then both of them fell silent and the terrible roar of the Cyclops Mills, triumphant and monstrous, invaded the room once more. Irene came in from a tour of the Flats and looking in at the door noticed that they were occupied with their own thoughts, and so hurried on to her room. At last Mrs. Shane rose.
“We must help the Tollivers somehow,” she said. “If only they weren’t so damned proud it would be easier.”
Lily, her eyes dark and serious, stood at the window now looking across the garden buried beneath blackened snow. “I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”