The green bay tree

By Louis Bromfield

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Title: The green bay tree

Author: Louis Bromfield

Release date: June 29, 2024 [eBook #73944]

Language: English

Original publication: NYC: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1924

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


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                          THE GREEN BAY TREE




                                  The
                               GREEN BAY
                                 TREE

                               _A Novel
                                  by_

                            LOUIS BROMFIELD

                       [Illustration: colophon]

               GROSSET & DUNLAP · PUBLISHERS · NEW YORK

           _By arrangement with_ FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY


                         _Copyright, 1924, by_
                      FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

                         _All Rights Reserved_


               _Printed in the United States of America_




                                  TO

                              MY MOTHER,

                          WHO MUST HAVE KNOWN
                       AT SOME TIME IN HER LIFE
                            HATTIE TOLLIVER




“_Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us.
Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins,
only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children
of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and
their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither.
They are lost somewhere between._”

“_Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the
least alike and no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a
part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of
the soul. No husband ever knows his wife and no wife ever really knows
her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof
and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable, because we ourselves do
not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too
fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even
if we chose to reveal it._”



     “THE GREEN BAY TREE” is part of what is in a sense a single work
     known as “ESCAPE,” which includes three other parts: “POSSESSION,”
     “EARLY AUTUMN,” and “A GOOD WOMAN.”




                          THE GREEN BAY TREE




I


If you can picture a little park, bright for the moment with the flush
of early summer flowers and peopled with men and women in the costumes
of the late nineties--If you can picture such a park set down in the
midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to
describe Cypress Hill on the afternoon of the garden party for the
Governor. It was a large garden, indeed quite worthy of the name “park,”
withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitæ clipped at intervals
into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, some genuine,
some of them copies. The Venus of Cydnos was there (in copy to be sure),
and of course the Apollo Belvedere, a favorite ornament of formal
gardens, as well as the Samothrace Victory dashing forward, it seemed,
to soar high above the cloud of smoke from the neighboring blast
furnaces.

Here and there the hedge displayed signs of death. There were patches
where the green had become withered, and other patches where there was
no green at all but simply a tangled wall of hard, dead twigs. Where
death had touched the barrier it was possible to see beyond the borders
of the garden into regions filled with roaring furnaces, steel sheds,
and a tangle of glittering railway tracks cluttered by a confusion of
semaphores and signal lights which the magic of night transformed into
festoons of glowing jewels--emeralds, rubies, cabuchons, opals, glowing
in the thick darkness. But it was not yet dark and no one at the garden
party peered through the dying gaps in the hedge because by daylight
there lay beyond the borders of the garden only ugliness of the most
appalling nature.

The little park sloped away on all sides from a great brick house,
conceived in the most bizarre union of Georgian and Gothic styles. It
was large and square and faced with white stone, but beyond this the
Georgian style played no part. The roof carried a half-dozen high
pitched gables; the windows were tall and pointed in the manner of a
church rectory, and the chimneys, built of white stone, were carved in
the most ornate Gothic fashion. Over all clambered a mass of
vines,--woodbine, virginia creeper and wistaria--which somehow bound the
grotesque combination of styles into one harmonious whole, characterized
by a surprising look of age, considering the fact that the house stood
in the midst of a community which less than a century before had been a
complete and trackless wilderness.

The vines, like the hedge, had been more green and exotic at some
earlier day. In places there were now no leaves at all, and elsewhere,
though the season was early summer, the leaves appeared sickly and
wretched, surrounded by dead bare tendrils pressing desperately against
the faded bricks.

On the whole, however, the garden was at its best. Along the gravel
walks leading to the arbor, irises raised crowns of mauve, royal purple
and yellow. Peonies in the process of bursting from tight green buds
into great pom-poms of pink and white tumbled across the flagged walk.
At the feet of the flying Eros (made of cast iron and painted white),
who carried a ring in one hand and thus served for a hitching post,
ground pinks and white violets, brought from England by Julia Shane’s
grandmother, peeped from among the blades of new grass. But the greatest
splendor had its being in the wistaria. High up among the branches of
the dead oak that towered gauntly above the horse block, its cascades of
mauve and white and purple poured like water escaping from a broken dam.
From the black iron portico tumbled more torrents of blossoms. They
appeared even high up among the tips of the pointed cypresses which gave
the house its name. To be sure these were not true cypresses at all, for
true cypresses could not have survived the harsh northern winter. In
reality they were cedars; but their tall, green-black spires, swaying in
melancholy fashion at the least breath of air, resembled cypresses as
one brother resembles another. John Shane, perhaps because the name
roused memories of some secret world of his own, always called them
cypresses and such, to all purposes, they had become. None knew why he
called the house Cypress Hill or why he loved cypresses so much that he
called cedars by that name when nature cheated him out of his heart’s
desire. The Town set it down simply as another of his eccentricities.
One more craziness no longer disturbed the Town. And John Shane had been
dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was one of no
importance whatever.

Under the wistarias on the wrought iron piazza his widow, Julia Shane,
leaning on her stick of ebony filigreed in silver, surveyed the bright
garden and the guests who moved about among the old trees, the men clad
in sober black, the ladies in sprigged muslins or bright colored linens.
She was a tall thin woman with a nose slightly hooked, which gave her
the fleeting look of an eagle, courageous, bold, even a little pitiless
and unrelenting. An air of dignity and distinction compensated the
deficiencies of beauty; she was certainly not a beautiful woman and her
fine skin was already crisscrossed by a million tiny lines no more
substantial than cobweb. Like the women of the generation preceding
hers, she made no attempt at preserving the illusion of youth. Although
she could not have been long past middle age, she dressed as an old
woman. She wore a gown of black and mauve of the most expensive
materials,--a sign of mourning which she kept up for a husband dead ten
years, a husband whose passing could have given her no cause for regret,
whose memory could not possibly bring to her ivory cheeks the faintest
flush of pleasure. But the black and mauve gave her great dignity and a
certain melancholy beauty. On her thin fingers she wore rings set with
amethysts and diamonds and about her neck hung a chain of amethysts
caught in a setting of old Spanish silver. The chain reached twice about
her thin throat and hung to the knees.

She had been standing on the piazza, a little withdrawn from her guests,
all the afternoon because she knew that the mauve of her gown and the
dull lavender sparkle of the amethysts blended superbly with the
tumbling blossoms of the wistaria. She had not been, after all, the
wife of John Shane for nothing. People said that he had taught his wife
to make the best of herself because he could bear to have about him only
those things which were in excellent taste. People also said that his
wife was lame, not because she had fallen by accident down the long
polished stairway, but because she had been thrown from the top to the
bottom by her husband in an insane fit of rage.

From her point of vantage, her bright blue eyes swept the garden,
identifying the guests--those whom she desired to have there, those to
whose presence she was completely indifferent, and those whom political
necessity had forced upon her. About most of them centered scornful,
bitter, little thoughts that chased themselves round and round her tired
brain.

Over against the hedge on the far side of the little pavilion stood a
group which, it appeared, interested her more than any other, for she
watched it with a faint smile that carried the merest trace of mockery.
She discerned the black of the bombazine worn by Hattie Tolliver, her
blood niece, and the sprigged muslin of Hattie’s daughter, Ellen, who
stood by resentfully with an air of the most profound scorn while her
mother talked to Judge Weissman. The mother talked voluably, exerting
all her power to charm the Judge, a fat perspiring Oriental and the son
of an immigrant Viennese Jew. And the efforts of Hattie Tolliver, so
solid, so respectable, so downright, were completely transparent, for
the woman possessed no trace of subtlety, not the faintest power of
dissimulation. She sought to win favor with the Jew because he was the
one power in the county politics. He ruled his party with an undisputed
sway, and Hattie Tolliver’s husband was a candidate for office. Perhaps
from the pinnacle of her worldliness Julia Shane detected a quality
naive and almost comic in the vulgar intrigue progressing so blatantly
on the opposite side of the pavilion.

There was also a quality indescribably comic in the fierce attitude of
the daughter, in her aloofness from the politician and the intensity of
her glowering expression. She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful,
spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the
piano superbly, in a truly extraordinary fashion.

Presently Julia Shane, behind the shelter of the wistaria, sniffed
suddenly as though the wind had carried to her among the delicate odors
of the flowers the offensive smell of the fat perspiring Jew. He was
there by political necessity, because the Governor desired his presence.
Clearly she looked upon him as an intruder who defiled the little park.

Farther off at the side of the empty kennels, all buried beneath a
tangle of vines, another group had gathered about a table where pink
ices and pink and white cakes were being served. About the great silver
punch bowl hung a dozen men, drinking, drinking, drinking, as though the
little park were a corner saloon and the little table the accustomed
free lunch. For a moment Julia Shane’s gaze fastened upon the men and
her thin nostrils quivered. Her lips formed themselves to utter a word
which she spoke quite loudly so that three women, perfect strangers to
her who stood just beneath the piazza, overheard it and spread the story
that Julia Shane had taken to talking to herself. “Pigs!” she said.




II


In other parts of the garden the bright parasols of the gossiping women
raised themselves in little clumps like mushrooms appearing unexpectedly
through the green of a wide lawn. The Governor was nowhere to be seen,
nor Lily nor Irene, Julia Shane’s two daughters.

The guests began to depart. A victoria with a driver on the box came
round the corner of the old house. A fat dowager, dressed in purple and
wearing a gold chain, bowed, and the diminutive young man beside her, in
a very tight coat and a derby hat, smiled politely--very politely--Mrs.
Julis Harrison and her son Willie, of the great family which owned the
Mills.

Julia Shane bowed slightly and leaned more heavily upon her ebony stick.
A second vehicle appeared, this time a high buggy which bore the county
auditor and his wife ... common people who never before had entered the
wrought iron gates of Cypress Hill. The fat and blowsy wife bowed in an
exaggerated fashion, never stopping the while to fan her red face
vigorously until she discovered that her elaborate bows were expended
upon the back of Julia Shane, who had become suddenly absorbed in the
rings that glittered on her bony fingers. The smile froze on the fat
lady’s face and her heavy lips pursed themselves to utter with a savage
intensity of feeling the word “Snob!” Indeed, her indignation so mounted
under the protests of her tipsy husband, that a moment later she altered
the epithet to another more vulgar and more powerful phrase. “Old Slut!”
she said aloud. The two carriages made their way down the long avenue
between the rows of dying Norway spruce to the gate where Hennery, the
black servant, stood on guard.

Outside, with faces pressed against the bars, stood a score of aliens
from the hovels of the mill workers in the neighboring Flats. The little
group included a dozen women wearing shawls and a multitude of
petticoats, three or four children and as many half-grown boys still a
year or two too young to be of any use to the Harrison Mills. They
pushed and pressed against the handsome gates, striving for a glimpse at
the spectacle of the bright garden animated by the figures of the men
and women who ruled the Town, the Flats, the very lives and destinies of
the little throng of aliens. A baby squalled in the heat and one of the
boys, a tall powerful fellow with a shock of yellow hair, spat through
the bars.

At the approach of the carriage the black Hennery sprang up and with the
gesture of one opening the gates of Buckingham Palace, shouted to the
crowd outside, “Look out, you all! There’s carriages a-coming!”

Then with a great clanging and shooting of bolts he swung open the gates
and Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son William swept through. The hoofs of
the dancing horses beat a tattoo on the cobblestones. The mother saw
nothing, but the narrow eyes of her son appraised the group of boys and
even the babies as potential workers in the Mills. These Dago children
grew rapidly, but not fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the
growing furnaces; and so many of them died before they reached manhood.

As the carriage swung into narrow Halsted Street, Mrs. Harrison, leaning
forward so that the gold chain swayed like a pendulum from her
mountainous bosom, surveyed the wretched houses, the yards bereft of all
green, and the shabby railway station that stood a hundred yards from
the very gates of Shane’s Castle.

“You’d think Julia Shane would move out of this filthy district,” she
said. “Sentiment is all right, but there’s such a thing as running it
into the ground. The smoke and soot is even killing the flowers. They’re
not half so fine as last year.”

Her son William shrugged his narrow, sloping shoulders.

“The ground is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “Three railroads--the
only site left. She could get her own price.”

In the corner saloon a mechanical piano set up a tinny uproar and
shattered fragments of The Blue Danube drifted out upon the hot air
through the swinging doors into the street, throttling for the moment
any further conversation.

The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for
the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that
horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any
preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them
from him and swore.

“She needn’t think she’s so damned swell,” she said. “What’s she got to
make her so proud? I should think she’d blush at what has happened in
that rotten old house. Why, she’s got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for
neighbors!”

She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the
victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.

With a loud, officious bang, Hennery closed the wrought iron gates and
the wise, old faces of the alien women pressed once more against the
bars. One of the throng--the big boy with the shock of yellow hair, a
Ukrainian named Stepan Krylenko--shouted something in Russian as the
gates banged together. It was a tongue foreign to Hennery but from the
look in the fierce blue eye of the young fellow, the negro understood
that what he said was not friendly. The women admonished the boy and
fell to whispering in awe among themselves, but the offender in no way
modified his manner. When Judge Weissman, fat and perspiring and covered
with jewelry, whirled past him in a phaeton a moment later, the boy
shouted in Russian, “Jew! Dirty Jew!” Judge Weissman regarded the boy
with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his
companion, Lawyer Briggs, “These foreigners are getting too free in
their manners.... The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of
these days.... There ought to be a law against letting them into the
country.”

The Judge was angry, although his anger was stirred not by the shout of
Stepan Krylenko but by the fact that Julia Shane had become suddenly
blind as his phaeton swept round the corner of the old house. The shout
was something upon which to fasten his anger.




III


From her point of vantage on the wistaria clad piazza, the old woman
watched the little drama at the entrance to the Park, and when the gates
had been flung closed once more, she moved back into the cool shadows,
still wondering where Lily and Irene and the Governor could have hidden
themselves. She settled herself on an iron bench, praying that no one
would pass to disturb her, and at the same moment the sound of sobbing
reached her ears. It came from the inside of the house, from the library
just beyond the tall window. There, in a corner beyond the great silver
mounted globe, Irene had flung herself down and was weeping. The
half-suppressed sobs shook the girl’s frail body. Her muslin dress with
the blue sash was crushed and damp. The mother bent over her and drew
the girl into a sitting posture against the brocade of the rosewood
sofa.

“Come, Irene,” said the old woman. “It is no time for tears. There is
time enough when this infernal crowd is gone. What is it? What has come
over you since yesterday?”

The girl’s sobs grew more faint but she did not answer nor raise her
head. She was frail and blond with wide blue eyes set far apart. Her
thick hair was done low at the back of her neck. She had a small pretty
mouth and a rather prominent nose. Her mother must have resembled her
before she hardened into a cynical old woman, before the prominent nose
became an eagle’s beak and the small pretty mouth a thin-lipped sardonic
one. The mother, puzzled and silent, sat stiffly beside the sobbing
girl, fingering all the while the chain of amethysts set in Spanish
silver.

“Are you tired?” she asked presently.

“No.”

“Then what is it, Irene? There must be some reason. Girls don’t behave
like this for nothing. What have you done that has made you miserable?”

“Nothing,” sobbed the girl. “Nothing!”

The mother sat up a little straighter and began to trace with her ebony
stick the outlines of the roses on the Aubusson carpet. At length she
spoke again in a clear, hard voice.

“Then you must pull yourself together and come out. I want you to find
Lily and the Governor.--Every one is leaving and they should be here.
There’s no use in giving a party for him if he is going to snub the
politicians.... Here--sit up!... Turn round while I fasten your hair.”

With perfect deliberation the mother arranged the girl’s hair, smoothed
the crumpled muslin of her dress, patted straight the blue ribbon sash,
dried her eyes, and bade her stand away to be surveyed.

“Now,” she said in the same crisp voice, “You look all right.... I can’t
have you behaving like this.... You should be out in the garden. Before
I die, Irene, I want to see you married. You never will be if you hide
yourself where no one can see you.... I don’t worry over Lily--she can
take care of herself. Go and find them and bring them back.... Tell them
I said to return at once.”

The girl, without a word, went out of the room into the big dark hallway
and thence into the garden. Her mother’s voice was one made to command.
It was seldom that any one refused to carry out her orders. When Irene
reached the terrace the guests were making their way back toward the
house in little groups of two or three, ladies in summer dresses very
tight at the waists, shielding their complexions from the June sun with
small, bright-colored parasols ... Mrs. Mills, the rector’s wife, Miss
Bird, the Town librarian, Mrs. Smyth, wife of the Methodist clergyman,
Mrs. Miliken, wife of the sheriff, Miss Abercrombie, Mrs.... And behind
them, the husbands, and the stray politicians who treated the little
arbor over the punch bowl as though it were a corner saloon. The punch
was gone now and the last of the pink ices melted. From other parts of
the garden more guests made their way toward the house. Irene passed
them, bowing and forcing herself to smile though the effort brought her
a kind of physical pain. Among the rhododendrons she came upon a little
terra cotta Virgin and Child brought by father from Sienna and,
remembering her convent training, she paused for a moment and breathed a
prayer.

Lily and the Governor were not among the rhododendrons. She ran on to
the little pavilion beyond the iris walk. It was empty. The arbor, green
with the new leaves of the Concord grapes, was likewise untenanted save
by the shadows of the somber, tall cypresses. The girl ran on and on
from one spot of shelter to another, distracted and terrified, her
muslin dress soiled and torn by the twigs. The little park grew empty
and the shadows cast by the setting sun sprawled across the patches of
open grass. Two hiding places remained, but these Irene avoided. One was
the clump of bushes far down by the iron gates. She dared not go there
because the little crowd of aliens peering through the bars terrified
her. Earlier in the afternoon she had wandered there to be alone and a
big tow headed boy shouted at her in broken English, “There are bones
... people’s bones hidden in your cellar!”

No, she dared not again risk the torment of his shouting.

The other hiding place was the old well behind the stables, a well
abandoned now and almost lost under a tangle of clematis. There was a
sheltered seat by its side. The girl ran as far as the stables and then,
summoning her strength to lie to her mother if the necessity arose,
turned back without looking and hastened across the garden toward the
piazza. She had not the courage to approach the well because she knew
that it was there she would find her sister Lily and the Governor.

When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room
seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old
woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of
the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It
was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town
was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain
elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity.
She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which
stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of
iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a
second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The
diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading
light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were
present--the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the
veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she
did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.

“And where are they?--Have you found them?”

The girl’s lips grew pale, and when she replied, she trembled with the
awful consciousness of lying to her mother.

“I cannot find them. I have looked everywhere.”

The mother frowned. “Bring me an ash tray, Irene, and do not lie to me.
They are in the garden.” She crushed out the ember of her cigarette.
“That man is a fool. He has offended a dozen important men after I took
the trouble to invite them here. God knows, I didn’t want them!”

While she was speaking, the sound of footsteps arose in the open gallery
that ran along the far side of the drawing-room, and two figures,
silhouetted against the smoky, setting sun, appeared at the windows
moving toward the doorway. They were the missing Lily and the Governor.
He followed her at a little distance as though they had been quarreling
and she had forbidden him to address her. At the sight of them, Irene
moved toward the door, but her mother checked her escape.

“Irene! Where are you going now? What are you afraid of? If this
behavior does not stop, I shall forbid you to go to mass. You are
already too pious for any good on this earth.”

The frightened girl returned silently and sat down with her usual air of
submission on the sofa that stood in the shadows by a mantelpiece which
supported a painting of Venice, flamboyant and glowing, executed by the
hand of Turner. At the sound of Lily’s voice, she shrank back among the
cushions as if to hide herself. There was in the voice nothing to
terrify her. On the contrary it was a voice, low and warm, indolent and
ingratiating--a voice full of charm, one which inspired affection.

Lily was taller than her sister and two years older; yet there was an
enormous difference between them which had to do less with age than with
manner. There was about Irene something childish and undeveloped. Lily
was a woman, a young woman, to be sure, tall and lovely. Her hair was
the color of honey. It held bright copper lights; and she wore it, in
the fashion of Irene, low on a lovely neck that carried a warning of
wilfulness. Her skin was the transparent sort which artists love for its
green lights, and her eyes were of a shade of violet which in some
lights appeared a clear blue. Her arms were laden with irises, azure and
pale yellow, which she had plucked on her way from the old well. She too
wore a frock of muslin with a girdle of radiant blue. As she entered,
she laid the flowers gently among the crystal and silver bibelots of a
rosewood table and rang for Sarah, the mulatto wife of Hennery, guardian
of the wrought iron gates.

The Governor followed her, a tall man of perhaps forty, strongly built
with a fine chest and broad shoulders. His hair was black and vigorous
and he wore it cropped close to a well-shaped head. He had the drooping
mustaches of the period. His was a figure which commands the attention
of mobs. His manner, when he was not too pompous or condescending, was
charming. People said there was no reason why he should not one day be
president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps
ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.

He was angry now with a primitive, boiling anger which threatened to
burst the bonds of his restraint. His breath came huskily. It was the
anger of a man accustomed to dominate, who has encountered suddenly some
one who cares not a fig for his powers.

“Madame,” he said, “your daughter has refused to marry me.”

The mother took up her ebony stick and placed it squarely before her, at
the same time leaning forward upon it. For a moment, she smiled, almost
secretly, with a sort of veiled amusement at his pompous speech. She did
not speak until the mulatto woman, slipping in noiselessly, had taken
the flowers and disappeared again into the vast hall. Then she addressed
Lily who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her lovely body slightly
balanced, her manner as calm and as placid as if nothing had gone wrong.

“Is this true, Lily?”

The girl nodded and smiled, so slightly that the play of expression
could scarcely have been called a smile. It was as though she kept the
smile among her other secrets, not to be shared by people who knew
nothing of its meaning.

“It is serious, Madame, I promise you,” the Governor interrupted. “I
love your daughter. She has told me that she loves me.” He had grown a
little pompous now, as though he were addressing an assembly of
constituents. “What else is there?” He turned to Lily suddenly, “It is
true, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I have told you that.... But I will not marry
you.... I am not refusing because I want to be unkind.... I can’t help
it. Believe me, I cannot.”

The mother began tracing the design on the carpet, round and round the
petals of the faded roses. When she spoke she did not raise her head.
She kept on tracing ... tracing....

“There must be some reason, Lily.... It is a match not to be cast aside
lightly.... It would make me very happy.”

She was interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Irene had vanished
into the gallery on the far side of the drawing-room. The three of them
saw her running past the window back into the garden as though she were
pursued. The mother fell once more to tracing the outlines on the
carpet. In the growing darkness the scent of the lilac grew more and
more strong.

The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I
would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane ... alone, if possible. There are
some things which I must tell ... things which are unpleasant but of
tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood
mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must
confess them.”

At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed
her head suddenly and looked away.

“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.

The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if
you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After
all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”

He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done
enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”

The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind
her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she
knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the
furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky,
glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of
the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights
began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot
and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the
flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the
blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.

Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons.
There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister
praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her
arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against
Irene’s pale one.




IV


That night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled
dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by
tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined
alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly,
and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she
was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the
old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches
furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia
Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do
most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject
some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.

At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the
room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon
the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the
light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and
addressed him.

“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began.
“It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”

For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the
table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.

“I have told you that I love Lily.”

The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a
second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the
faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of
his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity
of an iceberg.

“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for
anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The
diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it
forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love
can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”

Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the
ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to
say.... It is, after all, her affair.”

The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books
and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of
Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture
had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a
decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood
against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall
man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat
reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the
small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was
bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its
color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested
on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an
aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It
was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both
handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the
other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character
before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much
drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes,
which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a
strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It
was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a
creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a
horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was
baffling.

It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence
for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message
from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs
reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until
she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which
she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop
her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She
carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the
dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a
moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath
the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind
him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the
cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing
the door softly behind her.

“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know
everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it
to-night one way or another, for good and all.”

The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before
her.

“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue.
“Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe
you understand.”

The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you
know ... certainly not _now_.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down
thoughtfully.

The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end
in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law.
You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”

The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve
thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one.
No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us
alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to
speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re
afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a
child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”

“But why ... why?” began her mother.

“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want
to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of
passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have
money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”




V


For a little while the room grew silent save for the distant pounding of
the Mills, regular and reverberant, monotonous and unceasing. The wind
from the South bore a smell of soot which smothered the scent of
wistaria and iris. All at once a cry rang out and the Governor, very red
and handsome in his tight coat, fell on his knees before her, his arms
about her waist. The girl remained sitting quietly, her face quite white
now against the black of her cloak.

“Please ... please, Lily,” the man cried. “I will give up everything ...
I will do as you like. I will be your slave.” He became incoherent and
muddled, repeating over and over again the arguments he had used in the
afternoon by the old well. For a long time he talked, while the girl sat
as still as an image carved from marble, regarding him curiously as
though the whole scene were a nightmare and not reality at all. At last
he stopped talking, kissed her hand and stood up once more. The old
woman seated under the portrait said nothing. She regarded the pair
silently with wise, narrowed eyes.

It was Lily who spoke. “It is no use.... How can I explain to you? I
would not be a good wife. I know ... you see, I know because I know
myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my
affair.” A note almost of stubbornness entered her voice. “Two days ago
I might have married you. I cannot now, because I know. I wanted to
know, you see.” She looked up suddenly with a strange smile. “Would you
have preferred me to take a lover from the streets?”

For the first time the mother stirred in her chair. “Lily ... Lily....
How can you say such a thing?”

The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is
nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do
you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”

For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man
and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her
passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a
terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say
farewell.

“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her
father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of
hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray
portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then,
checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been
Irene.”

Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing
behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying
slowly away as she ascended the stairs.

At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the
Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane,
leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long
drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the
miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the
corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the
swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the
night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.

Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress
Hill came abruptly to an end.

He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the
great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring
into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from
Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have
upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one
of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn
before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.

As for the third--Irene--she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin
for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she
buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy
the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.




VI


There had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene
who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad
stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town,
when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great
sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line
of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded
a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the
Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane
constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of
glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he
came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more
than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a
single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he
purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single
street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase
included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under
his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.

Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the
kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters
returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house.
Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was
planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the
rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and
stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across
the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane’s Castle
and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town
preferred their own name and it was known as Shane’s Castle to the very
end.

Who John Shane was or whence he came remained a mystery. Some said he
was Irish, which might well have been. Others were certain that he was
English because he spoke with the clipped accent of an Englishman. There
were even some who held that so swarthy a man could only have come from
Spain or Italy; and some were convinced that his love of travel was due
to an obscure strain of gipsy blood. As to the light which Shane himself
cast upon the subject, no one ever penetrated beyond a vague admission
that he had lived in London and found the life there too tame.

He set himself up in the house at Cypress Hill to lead the life of a
gentleman, a worldly cynical gentleman, perhaps the only gentleman in
the archaic sense of the word in all the Western Reserve. In a frontier
community where every one toiled, he alone made, beyond the control of
his farms, no pretense at working. He had his horses and his dogs, and
because there were no hounds to follow and no hunters to ride with him,
he set aside on the land bordering the main street of the Town a great
field where he rode every day including the Sabbath, and took the most
perilous jumps to the amazement of the farmers and townspeople who
gathered about the paddock to watch his eccentric behavior.

Among these were a Scotch settler and his son-in-law, Jacob Barr, who
owned jointly a great stretch of land to the west of Shane’s farm. They
kept horses to ride though they were in no sense sporting men. They were
honest stock, dignified and hard-working, prosperous and respected
throughout the country as men who had wrested from the wilderness a
prosperous living. MacDougal was the first abolitionist in the county.
He it was who established the first station of the underground railway
and organized the plans for helping slaves to escape across the border
into Canada. These two sometimes brought their horses into the paddock
at Shane’s farm and there, under his guidance, taught them to jump.

The abolitionist activities culminated in the Civil War, and the three
men joined the colors, Shane as a lieutenant because somewhere in his
mysterious background there was a thorough experience in military
affairs. His two friends joined the ranks, rising at length to commands.
MacDougal lost his life in the campaign of the Wilderness. Jacob Barr
returned stricken by fever, and Shane himself received a bullet in the
thigh.

Returning as a colonel from the war he found that in place of the dead
MacDougal he had as a riding companion the farmer’s youngest daughter, a
girl of nineteen. She had taken to the saddle with enthusiasm and was a
horsewoman after his own heart. She knew no such thing as fear; she
joined him recklessly in the most perilous feats and sat his most unruly
horses with the ease and grace of an Amazon. She was not a pretty girl.
The word “handsome” would have described her more accurately. She was
strong, lithe and vigorous, and her features, though large like the
honest MacDougal’s, were clearly chiseled and beautiful in a large way.

The strange pair rode together in the paddock more and more frequently
until, at last, the astonished county learned that John Shane, the
greatest gentleman in the state, had taken MacDougal’s youngest daughter
east over the mountains and quietly made her mistress of Shane’s Castle.
It also learned that he had taken his bride to Europe, and that his
housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged Irish woman who never mingled with the
townspeople, had been sent away, thus ending rumors of sin which had
long scandalized the county. It appeared, some citizens hinted, that
Julia MacDougal had been substituted for the Irish woman.

For two years the couple remained abroad, but during that time they were
separated, for Shane, conscious of his bride’s rustic simplicity, sent
her to a boarding school for English girls kept by a Bonapartist
spinster named Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.
During those two years he did not visit her, choosing instead to absent
himself upon some secret business in the south of Europe; and when he
returned, his bride found it difficult to recognize in the man with a
thick, blue black beard, the husband she had married two years earlier.
The adornment gave him an appearance even more alien and sinister.

The two years were for the girl wretched ones, but in some
incomprehensible fashion they hardened her and fitted her to begin the
career her mysterious husband had planned. When they returned to Cypress
Hill, Shane shaved off his beard once more and entered politics. From
then on, great people came to stay at Cypress Hill--judges, politicians,
lawyers, once even a president. As for Shane he sought no office for
himself. It seemed that he preferred in politics to be the power behind
the throne, the kingmaker, the man who advised and planned campaigns; he
preferred the intrigues without the responsibilities. And so he became a
figure in the state, a strange, bizarre, dashing figure which caught
somehow the popular imagination. His face became known everywhere, as
well as the stories about his private life, of strange brawls in the
growing cities of the middle-west, of affairs with women, of scandals of
every sort save those which concerned his personal honesty. Here he was
immune. No one doubted his honesty. And the scandals did him little harm
save in a small group of his own townspeople who regarded him as the
apotheosis of sin, as a sort of Lucifer dwelling in a great brick house
in the center of the Black Fork marshes.

In the great house, his wife, whose life it was whispered was far from
happy, bore him two daughters, a circumstance which might have
disappointed most men. It pleased the perverse John Shane who remarked
that he was glad there was no son to carry on “his accursed name.”

As he grew older the unpopularity increased until among the poorer
residents of the Town strange stories found their way into circulation,
tales of orgies and wickedness in the great brick house. The stories at
length grew by repetition until they included the unfortunate wife. But
Shane went his proud way driving his handsome horses through the Town,
riding like mad in the paddock. The Town grew and spread along the
outskirts of his farm, threatening to surround it, but Shane would not
sell. He scorned the arguments for progress and prosperity and held on
to his land. At last there came a second railroad and then a third which
crossed the continent, passing on their way along the banks of the
sluggish Black Fork through the waving green swamp. Shane found himself
powerless because the state condemned the land and it was his own party
which promoted the railroad. He gave way and his land doubled and
tripled in value. Factories began to appear and the marsh land became
precious because in its midst three railroads crossed in a triangle
which surrounded the house at Cypress Hill. Shane became older and more
perverse. The tales increased, tales of screams heard in the night and
of brutalities committed upon his wife; more scandals about a young
servant girl leaked out somehow and were seized by the population of the
Town. But throughout the state Shane’s name still commanded respect.
When the great came to the Town they stopped at Shane’s Castle where the
drawing-room was thrown open and receptions were held with the rag, tag
and bobtail permitted to satisfy their curiosity. They found nothing but
a handsome house, strange and beautifully furnished in a style unknown
in the Town. John Shane and his wife, her face grown hard now as the
jewels on her fingers, stood by this judge or that governor to receive,
calm and dignified, distinguished by a worldliness foreign to the
rugged, growing community.

And at last the master of Shane’s Castle was stricken dead by apoplexy
one winter night at the top of the long polished stairway; and the wiry,
thin old body rolled all the way to the bottom. Irene, who was a
neurotic, timid girl, saw him fall and ran screaming from the house.
Lily was in Europe at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, a
_pensionnaire_ in the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux.
The wife quietly raised the body, laid it on a sofa under the portrait
in the library and summoned a doctor who made certain that the terrible
old man at last was dead.

When the news of his death spread through the Town, Italian workmen
passing along the railroad at the foot of Cypress Hill crossed
themselves and looked away as though the devil himself lay in state
inside the wrought iron gates. Governors, judges and politicians
attended the funeral and the widow appeared in deep mourning which she
wore for three years. She played the role of a wife bereft of a devoted
husband. The world whispered tales of her unhappiness, but the world
_knew_ nothing. When great people came to the Town, they were still
entertained at Cypress Hill. The legend of John Shane attained the most
fantastic proportions; it became a part of the Town’s tradition. The
words which Stepan Krylenko, the tow-headed Ukrainian, shouted through
the wrought iron gates at the terrified Irene were simply an echo of
certain grotesque stories.

After the death of her husband, Julia Shane sold off piecemeal at
prodigious prices the land in the marshes traversed by the railroads.
Factory after factory was erected. Some built farming implements, some
manufactured wooden ware, but it was steel which occupied most of the
district. Rolling mills came in and blast furnaces raised their bleak
towers until Shane’s Castle was no longer an island surrounded by
marshes but by great furnaces, steel sheds and a glistening maze of
railway tracks. New families grew wealthy and came into prominence, the
Harrisons among them. Some of the Shane farm land was sold, but out of
it the widow kept a wide strip bordering Main Street where she erected
buildings which brought her fat rents. The money that remained she
invested shrewdly so that it increased at a startling rate. She became a
rich woman and the legend of Shane’s Castle grew, spurred on by envy.

To the foreigners who lived in the hovels at the gate of Cypress Hill,
the house and the park became the symbols of an oppressing wealth, of a
crude relentless power no less savage than the old world which they had
deserted for this new one. It was true that Julia Shane had nothing to
do with the mills and furnaces; her money came from the land she owned.
The mills were owned by the Harrisons and Judge Weissman; but Shane’s
Castle became an easy symbol upon which to fix a hatred. Its fading
grandeur arose in the very midst of the hot and overcrowded kennels of
the workers.




VII


Six weeks after the night the Governor drove furiously away from the
house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane gave her last dinner before sending
Lily away. It was small, including only Mrs. Julis Harrison, her son
William, and Miss Abercrombie, but it served her purpose clearly as a
piece of strategy to deceive the Town. Irene was absent, having gone
back to the convent in the east where she had been to school as a little
girl. A great doctor advised the visit, a doctor who held revolutionary
ideas gained in Vienna. It was, he said, the one means of bringing the
girl round, since he could drag from her no sane reason for her
melancholy and neurasthenic behavior. Her mother could discover nothing;
indeed it appeared that the girl had a strange fear of her which struck
her dumb. So Julia Shane overcame her distaste for the Roman Catholic
church and permitted the girl to return, thanking Heaven that she had
kept from her the truth. This, she believed, would have caused Irene to
lose her mind.

In the drawing-room after dinner a discreet battle raged with Julia
Shane on one side and Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie on the
other. Lily and William Harrison withdrew to the library. In a curious
fashion the drawing-room made an excellent battle-ground for so polite a
struggle. It was so old, so mysterious and so delicate. There were no
lights save the lamps, three of them, one majolica, one blue faience and
one Ming, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the tall mirror
and the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. The only flowers were a bowl of
white peonies which Lily had been able to save from the wreck of a
garden beaten for three days by a south wind.

“The Governor’s visit,” observed Mrs. Harrison, “turned out
unfortunately. He succeeded in offending almost every one of
importance.”

“And his sudden going-away,” added Miss Abercrombie, eagerly leaning
forward.

Julia Shane stirred in her big chair. To-night she wore an old-fashioned
gown of black lace, very tight at the waist and very low in the neck,
which displayed boldly the boniness of her strong shoulders. “I don’t
think he intended slighting any one,” she said. “He was called away by a
telegram. A Governor, you know, has duties. When Colonel Shane was
alive....” And she launched into an anecdote of twenty years earlier,
told amusingly and skilfully, leading Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss
Abercrombie for the time being far away from the behavior of the
Governor. She spoke of her husband as she always did, in terms of the
most profound devotion.

Mrs. Harrison was a handsome stout woman, a year or two older than Julia
Shane but, unlike her, given to following the fashions closely. She
preserved an illusion of youth by much lacing and secret recourse to
rouge, a vain deception before Julia Shane, who knew rouge in all its
degrees in Paris where rouge was used both skilfully and frankly. She
moved, the older woman, with a slight pomposity, conscious always of the
dignity of her position as the richest woman in the Town; for she was
richer by a million or two than Julia Shane, to whom she acceded nothing
save the prestige which was Cypress Hill and its tradition.

Miss Abercrombie, a spinster of uncertain age, wore her hair in a
pompadour and spoke French, as she believed, perfectly. It was necessary
that she believe in her own French, for she it was who instructed the
young girls of the Town in French and in history, drawing upon a
background derived from a dozen summers spent at one time or another on
the continent. Throughout Julia Shane’s long anecdote, Miss Abercrombie
interrupted from time to time with little fluttering sighs of
appreciation, with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and sudden observations of how much
pleasanter the Town had been in the old days. When the anecdote at last
was finished, she it was who brought the conversation by a sudden heroic
gesture back to the Governor.

“And tell me, dear Julia,” she said. “Is there no news of Lily?... Has
nothing come of the Governor’s devotion?”

There was nothing, Julia replied with a sharp, compressed smile.
“Nothing at all, save a flirtation. Lily, you know, is very pretty.”

“So beautiful!” remarked Mrs. Harrison. “I was telling my son William
so, only to-night. He admires her ... deeply, you know, deeply.” She had
taken to fanning herself vigorously for the night was hot. She did it
boldly, endeavoring in vain to force some stray zephyr among the rolls
of fat inside her tight bodice.

“What I can never understand,” continued Miss Abercrombie, “is why Lily
hasn’t already married. A girl so pretty and so nice to every one ...
especially older people.”

Mrs. Shane became falsely deprecating of Lily’s charms. “She is a good
girl,” she said. “But hardly as charming as all that. The trouble is
that she’s very fastidious. She isn’t easy to suit.” In her deprecation
there was an assumption of superiority, as though she could well afford
to deprecate because no one could possibly take her seriously.

“She’s had plenty of chances.... I don’t doubt that,” observed Miss
Abercrombie. “I can remember that summer when we were all in Aix
together.... Do you remember the young Englishman, Julia? The nice one
with yellow hair?” She turned to Mrs. Julis Harrison with an air of
arrogant pride and intimacy. “He was the second son of a peer, you know,
and she could have had him by a turn of her finger.”

And the association with the peerage placed for the time being Miss
Abercrombie definitely on the side of Julia Shane in the drawing-room
skirmish.

“And Harvey Biggs was so devoted to her,” she babbled on. “Such a nice
boy ... gone now to the war like so many other brave fellows.” Then as
though remembering suddenly that William Harrison was not at the war but
safe in the library across the hall, she veered quickly. “They say the
Spanish atrocities in Cuba are beyond comprehension. I feel that we
should spread them as much as possible to rouse the spirit of the
people.”

“I’ve thought since,” remarked Mrs. Harrison, “that you should have had
flags for decorations at the garden party, Julia. With a war on and
especially with the Governor here. I only mention it because it has
made people talk. It only adds to the resentment against his behavior.”

“I thought the flowers were enough,” replied Mrs. Shane, making a wry
face. “They were so beautiful until cinders from your furnaces destroyed
them. Those peonies,” she added, indicating the white flowers that
showed dimly in the soft light, “are all that is left.” There was a
moment’s pause and the distant throb of the Mills filled the room,
proclaiming their eternal presence. It was a sound which never ceased.
“The garden party seems to have been a complete failure. I’m growing too
old to entertain properly.”

“Nonsense!” declared Mrs. Julis Harrison with great emphasis. “But I
don’t see why you persist in living here with the furnaces under your
nose.”

“I shan’t live anywhere else. Cypress Hill was here before the Mills ...
long before.”

Almost unconsciously each woman discovered in the eye of the other a
faint gleam of anger, the merest flash of spirit, a sign of the eternal
struggle between that which is established and that which is forever in
a state of flux, which Mrs. Julis Harrison in her heart called
“progress” and Julia Shane in hers called “desecration.”




VIII


The struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William
Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from
the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin
draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which
descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter
than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue eyes that protruded a little
from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth
narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was
conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity
necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.

“It is late, mother,” he said. “And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New
York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday.”

His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his
watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.

“Sailing!” repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and
suspending her fan in mid-air. “Sailing! Why didn’t you tell me, Julia?
I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily.”

“Sailing,” echoed Miss Abercrombie, “to France, my dear! I have some
commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?”

Lily smiled slowly. “Of course not. Can you send them down in the
morning? I’m afraid I won’t get up to the Town to-morrow.”

She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery’s
wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison’s
first speech.

“Tell Hennery,” she said, “to send round Mrs. Harrison’s carriage.” The
old woman was taking no chances now.

There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female
wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement
over the thought of a voyage to “the continent.” The carriage arrived
and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the
squalid street.

When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which,
sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the
Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered
his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear
him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.

“She refused me,” he said.

For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress
sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, “She may
come round.... You’re not clever with women, William.”

The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that
his mother’s opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There
was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope
had been killed--put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she
was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped
that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been
tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing
puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of
her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange
incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for
a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last,
despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.

“It couldn’t be,” she thought. “Julia would never have dared to invite
us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and
pleasant. No, it’s impossible!”

All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red
sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend
who lived in Paris.




IX


At Cypress Hill, Julia Shane and her elder daughter returned, when the
door had closed on their guests, to the drawing-room to discuss after a
custom of long standing the entertainment of the evening. They agreed
that Mrs. Harrison had grown much too stout, that she was indeed on the
verge of apoplexy; that Miss Abercrombie became steadily more fidgety
and affected.

“A woman should marry,” said Julia Shane, “even if she can do no better
than a day laborer.”

Two candles by the side of the tall mirror and one by the flaming Venice
of Mr. Turner guttered feebly and expired. Now that she was alone, the
old woman lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke quietly into the still
air. It was Lily who interrupted the silence.

“Willie proposed to me again,” she said presently.

The mother made no answer but regarded the girl quietly with a curious
questioning look in her tired eyes. Lily, seated in the glow of light
from the majolica lamp, must have understood what was passing in her
mind.

“No,” she said, “if I had wanted to marry, I could have had a man ... a
real man.” For a second her eyes grew dark with emotion and her red lips
curved as if she remembered suddenly and with a shameless pleasure the
embraces of her lover. “No,” she continued, “I wouldn’t play such a
trick, even on a poor thing like Willie.”

The old woman knocked the ashes from her cigarette. The rings flashed
and glittered in the candle light. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I
think you are hopeless ... altogether abandoned.”

There was a note of melancholy in her voice, so poignant that the girl
suddenly sprang from her chair, crossed the little space between them
and embraced her mother impulsively. “I’m sorry for your sake, Mama,”
she said. “I’m sorry....” She kissed the hard, handsome face and the
mother returned the embrace with a sudden fierce burst of unaccustomed
passion.

“It’s all right, Lily dear. I’m only thinking of you. I don’t think
anything can really hurt me any longer. I’m an old warrior, tough and
well-armored.” For a second she regarded the girl tenderly and then
asked, “but aren’t you afraid?”

“No!” The answer was quiet and confident.

“You’re a strange, strange girl,” said the mother.




X


Madame Gigon with Fifi lived in a tiny apartment in the Rue de la
Assomption. In the summer she went to live at Germigny l’Evec in a curve
of the Marne after it has passed Meaux and Trilport, wandering its soft
and amiable way between sedges and wild flags under rows of tall plane
trees with bark as green and spotted as the backs of salamanders. Here
she occupied the lodge of the château belonging to her cousin, a
gentleman who inherited his title from a banker of the First Empire and
lent the lodge rent free to Madame Gigon, whose father, also a banker,
was ruined by the collapse of the Second Empire. M. Gigon, a scholar and
antiquarian, one of the curators of the Cluny Museum, was long since
dead--an ineffectual little man with a stoop and a squint, who lived his
life gently and faded out of it with so little disturbance that even
Madame Gigon sometimes examined her conscience and her respectability
because there were long periods when she forgot that he had ever existed
at all. Fifi was to her far more of a personality--Fifi with her fat
waddle, her black and tan coat, and her habit of yapping for gateaux at
tea time.

Although Madame Gigon was not English at all, tea was a fixed rite in
her life. She came by the custom at the boarding school of Mademoiselle
Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the edge of Paris where tea was a
regular meal because there was always a score of English girls among
Mademoiselle’s _pensionnaires_. On the passing of Monsieur Gigon she had
taken, under the stress of bitter necessity, a place as instructress in
art and history at the establishment of the aging Mademoiselle de Vaux,
who, like herself was a Bonapartist, a _bourgeoise_ and deeply
respectable. She saved from her small salary a comfortable little
fortune, and at length retired with Fifi to the little flat in the Rue
de la Assomption to live upon her interest and the bounty of her cousin
the Baron. But above even her respectability and her small fortune, she
honored her position, an element which she had preserved through a
lifetime of adversity. She was respected still as the daughter of a man
who had ruined himself to support Napoleon the Little. She still
attended the salons of the Bonapartist families in the houses and
apartments of Passy, of the Boulevard Flandrin, and the new Paris of the
Place de l’Etoile. She was respected still in the circles which moved
about the aging figure of the Prince Bonaparte and, greatest of all, she
received a card of admission signed by his own hand whenever the Prince
addressed the Geographical Society.

Madame Gigon was in the act of closing her tiny apartment in the Rue de
la Assomption for the summer when the letter of Julia Shane arrived. At
the news it contained, she suspended the operations necessary to her
departure for the lodge of Germigny l’Evec and settled herself to await
the arrival of pretty Lily Shane, contenting herself meanwhile with
taking Fifi for airings in the Bois de Boulogne, a suitable distance
away for one of Madame’s age and infirmities. And when the day came, she
managed to meet Lily in a fiacre at the Gare du Nord.

There was something touching in Madame Gigon’s reception of the girl,
something even more touching in Lily’s reception by the fat and wheezing
Fifi. The shrewd old dog remembered her as the girl who had been
generous with gateaux, and when Lily, dressed smartly in a purple suit
with a large hat covered with plumes, climbed into the fiacre, the plump
Fifi shouted and leapt about with all the animation of a puppy.

Throughout the journey to Meaux and on the succeeding trip by carriage
along the Marne to Germigny, the pair made no mention of Julia Shane’s
letter. They talked of the heat, of the beauty of the countryside, of
Mademoiselle de Vaux, who was past ninety and very feeble, of the new
girls at the school ... until the peasant coachman drew up his fat horse
before the gate of the lodge and carried their luggage into the vine
covered cottage.




XI


After Lily had rested in the room just beneath the dove cote, the pair,
assisted by a red-cheeked farm girl, set themselves to putting the place
in order. With the approach of evening, Madame Gigon took off her wig,
donned a lace cap, and they were settled until the month of October.

When they had finished a supper of omelette, potatoes and wine, they
seated themselves on the terrace and Madame Gigon at length approached
the matter, delicately and with circumspection. It was a blue, misty
evening of the sort frequent in the Isle de France, when the stillness
becomes acute and tangible, when the faintest sound is sharply audible
for an amazing distance across the waving fields of wheat. From the
opposite side of the river arose the faint tinkling of a bell as a pair
of white oxen made their way slowly from the farm to the sedge-bordered
river. Overhead among the vines on the roof of the lodge, the pigeons
stirred sleepily, cooing and preening themselves. The evening was
beautiful, unbelievably calm, with the placidity of a marvelous dream.

After a long silence, Madame Gigon began to gossip once more and
presently, she said, “To be sure, it has happened before in this world.
It will happen again. The trouble is that you are too pretty, dear Lily,
and you lose your head. You are too generous. I always told Mademoiselle
you were more like our girls than the English or Americans.”

Lily said nothing. It appeared that she heard nothing old Madame Gigon
said. Wrapped in her black cloak against the chill of the faint mist
which swam above the Marne, she seemed lost in the breathless beauty of
the evening.

“Why, in my family, it has happened. There was my cousin ... a sister of
the Baron who lives here in the Chateau....” And Madame Gigon moved from
one case to another, justifying Lily’s strange behavior. When she had
finished with a long series, she shook her head gently and said, “I
know, I know ...,” smiling all the while as though she had known many
lovers and been as seductive as Cleopatra. She drank the last of her
coffee, drying her mustache when she had finished.

“I brought down some fine lawn and some lace from Paris,” she said, “I
remember that you always sewed beautifully. We shall be busy this winter
in the little flat.”

And then Lily stirred for the first time, moving her body indolently
with her eyes half-closed, her head resting on the back of the chair.
“We shan’t live in the little flat, Madame Gigon.... We shall have a
house.... I know just the one, in the Rue Raynouard. You see, I am going
to live in Paris always. I am never going back to America to live.”

The old Frenchwoman said nothing, either in approval or disagreement,
but she grew warm suddenly with pleasure. The house in the Rue Raynouard
captured her imagination. It meant that she would have the dignity of
surroundings suitable to one who received signed cards from the Prince
Bonaparte to his lectures. She could have a salon. She knew that Lily
Shane, like all Americans, was very rich.

A little while later they went inside and Lily in her room just under
the dove-cote lighted a candle and settled herself to writing letters.
One she addressed to the convent where Irene was stopping, one to
Cypress Hill, and the last, very short and formal, she addressed the
Governor. It was the first line she had written him. Also it was the
last.




XII


In the Town the tidings of Lily’s sudden departure followed the course
of all bits of news from Shane’s Castle. It created for a time a
veritable cloud of gossip. Again when it became gradually known that she
intended living in Paris, heads wagged for a time and stories of her
father were revived. Her name became the center of a myriad tales such
as accumulate about beautiful women who are also indifferent.

But of one fact the Town learned nothing. It had no knowledge of a
cablegram which arrived at Shane’s Castle containing simply the words,
“John has arrived safely and well.” Only the telegraph operator saw it
and to him the words could have meant nothing.

It was Mrs. Julis Harrison who kept alive the cloud of rumors that
closed over the memory of Lily. When she was not occupied with directing
the activities of the Mills through the mouthpiece of her son Willie,
she fostered her suspicions. The letter addressed to a friend in Paris
bore no fruit. Lily, it seemed, had buried herself. She was unknown to
the American colony. But Mrs. Harrison, nothing daunted, managed herself
to create a story which in time she came to believe, prefacing it to her
choicest friends with the remark that “Shane’s Castle has not changed.
More things go on there than this world dreams of.”

As for the Governor, he visited the Town two years later on the eve of
election; but this time he did not stay at Shane’s Castle. It was known
that he paid old Julia Shane a mysterious visit lasting more than an
hour, but what passed between them remained at best a subject for the
wildest speculation.

With the departure of Lily, her mother settled slowly into a life of
retirement. There were no more receptions and garden-parties. With Lily
gone, there appeared to be no reasons for gaiety. Irene, as every one
knew, hated festivities of every sort.

“I am growing too old,” said Julia Shane. “It tires me to entertain. Why
should I?”

It was not true that she was old, yet it was true that she was tired. It
was clear that she was letting slip all threads of interest, even more
apparent that she actually cherished her solitude.

She still condescended to go to an occasional dinner in the Town,
driving in her victoria with Hennery on the box through sweating smelly
Halsted street, across the writhing oily Black Fork and up the Hill to
the respectable portion of the Town where lived the people of property.
It was impossible to have guessed her thoughts on that infrequent
journey. They must have been strange ... the thoughts of a woman not
long past middle-age who had seen within her lifetime the most
extraordinary metamorphosis in the Town of her birth. She could remember
the days when she rode with John Shane in his paddock, now completely
buried beneath massive warehouses. She could remember the days when
Halsted street was only a private drive across the marshes to Cypress
Hill. Indeed it appeared, as the years passed, that Julia Shane was
slipping slowly back across all those years into the simplicity that
marked her childhood as a farmer’s daughter. She talked less and avoided
people. She no longer cared for the elegance of her clothes. As though
her gaunt and worldly air had been only a mockery she began to slough it
off bit by bit with the passing months. The few women who crossed the
threshold of Shane’s Castle returned with stories that Julia Shane,
having closed the rest of the house, had taken to living in two or three
rooms.

People said other things too, of Julia and her two daughters, but mostly
of Lily, for Lily somehow captured their imagination. In the midst of
the Town, born and bred upon the furnace girt hill, she was an exotic,
an orchid appearing suddenly in a prosperous vegetable garden.

People said such things as, “Julia Shane gets no satisfaction out of
her daughter Irene.... I believe myself that the girl is a little
queer.”

Or it might be that Mrs. Julis Harrison, with a knowing shake of the
head would remark, “It’s strange that Lily has never married. They say
she is enjoying herself in Paris, although she doesn’t see anything of
the Americans there. It’s like John Shane’s daughter to prefer the
French.”




XIII


Meanwhile the Town grew. The farm where Julia Shane spent her youth
disappeared entirely, broken up into checker board allotments, crossed
by a fretwork of crude concrete sidewalks. Houses, uniform and
unvaryingly ugly in architecture and cheap in construction, sprang up in
clusters like fungi to house the clerks and the petty officials of the
Mills. In the Flats, which included all that district taken over by the
factories, hundreds of alien workmen drifted in to fill the already
overcrowded houses beyond endurance. Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles,
Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the
shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the
very hedges of Shane’s Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the
corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of
conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the
sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who
were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.

All this, Julia Shane, living in another world, ignored. She saw nothing
of what happened beneath her very windows.

It was true that she found no satisfaction in her daughter Irene. On the
return of the girl from a long rest at the convent, there took place
between mother and daughter a terrible battle which did not end in a
sudden, decisive victory but dragged its length across many weeks. Irene
returned with her thin pretty face pale and transparent, her ash blond
hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in severe nunlike fashion. She
wore a suit of black stuff, plainly made and ornamented only by a plain
collar of white lawn.

On the first evening at home, the mother and daughter sat until midnight
in the library, a room which they used after dinner on evenings when
they were alone. The little French clock struck twelve before the girl
was able to summon courage to address her mother, and when at last she
succeeded, she was forced to interrupt the old woman in the midst of a
new book by Collette Willy, sent her by Lily, which she was reading with
the aid of a silver mounted glass.

“Mother,” began Irene gently. “Mother....”

Julia Shane put down the glass and looked up. “What is it?”

“Mother, I’ve decided to enter the church.”

It was an announcement far from novel, a hope expressed year after year
only to be trodden under foot by the will of the old woman. But this
time there was a new quality in Irene’s voice, a shade of firmness and
determination that was not at all in keeping with the girl’s usual
humility. The mother’s face grew stern, almost hard. Cheri slipped
gently to the floor where it lay forgotten.

“Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?” The voice
was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a
trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing--the Roman
Catholic church--which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked
all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the
Scarlet Woman of Rome.

The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the
while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown
desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.

“Has this anything to do with Lily?” asked the mother with a sudden air
of suspicion, and Irene answered “No! No!” with such intensity that
Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.

“You know how I feel,” she said. “I am old and I am tired. I have had
enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last.”

Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread
until her whole body was shaking. “It is all I have,” she cried.

“Don’t be morbid!”

The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane’s face--the look with which she
faced down all the world save her own family.

“I won’t hear of it,” she added. “I’ve told you often enough, Irene....
I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can
prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin
to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am
dead, if I can help it.”

The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a
certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared
even to argue her case. “If it were Lily ...” she began weakly.

“It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is
out of the question. Lily is no fool....”

The accusation of Irene was an old one, secret, cherished always in the
depths of a lonely submissive heart. It was born now from the depths of
her soul, a cry almost of passion, a protest against a sister whom every
one pardoned, whom every one admired, whom all the world loved. It was
an accusation directed against the mother who was so sympathetic toward
Lily, so uncomprehending toward Irene.

“I suppose they have been talking to you ... the sisters,” continued
Julia Shane. And when the girl only buried her face miserably in her
arms, she added more gently, “Come here, Irene.... Come over here to
me.”

Quietly the daughter came to her side where she knelt down clasping the
fingers covered with rings that were so cold against her delicate,
transparent skin. For an instant the mother frowned as if stricken by
some physical pain. “My God!” she said, “Why is it so hard to live?” But
her weakness passed quickly. She stiffened her tired body, sighed, and
began again. “Now,” she said gruffly. “We must work this out.... We must
understand each other better, my dear. If you could manage to confide in
me ... to let me help you. I am your mother. Whatever comes to you comes
to me as well ... everything. There are three of us, you and Lily and
me.” Her manner grew slowly more tender, more affectionate. “We must
keep together. You might say that we stood alone ... three women with
the world against us. When I die, I want to leave you and Lily closer to
each other than you and I have been. If there is anything that you want
to confess ... if you have any secret, tell it to me and not to the
sisters.”

By now Irene was sobbing hysterically, clinging all the while to the
hand of her mother. “There is nothing ... nothing!” she cried, “I don’t
know why I am so miserable.”

“Then promise me one thing ... that you will do nothing until we have
talked the matter out thoroughly.” She fell to stroking the girl’s blond
hair with her thin veined hand, slowly, with a hypnotic gesture.

“Yes.... Yes.... I promise!” And gradually the sobbing ebbed and the
girl became still and calm.

For a time they sat thus listening to the mocking frivolous tick-tick of
the little French clock over the fireplace. A greater sound, rumbling
and regular like the pounding of giant hammers they did not hear because
it had become so much a part of their lives that it was no longer
audible. The throb of the Mills, working day and night, had become a
part of the very stillness.

At last Julia Shane stirred and said with a sudden passion, “Come,
Irene!... Come up to my room. There is no peace here.” And the pair rose
and hurried away, the mother hobbling along with the aid of her ebony
stick, never once glancing behind her at the portrait whose handsome
malignant eyes appeared to follow them with a wicked delight.




XIV


For days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which
neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping
or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a
second promise ... that she would never enter the church so long as her
mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the
families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill.
Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into
their homes, facing all the deep-rooted hostility and the suspicions of
Shane’s Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of
laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored
thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few
among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and
simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly
in the lady from Shane’s Castle.

It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home
after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending
word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of
the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express,
unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for
twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed
with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a
pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily
recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily
Shane might never return from Paris.

She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at
the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen’s houses which had sprung
up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as
if they were not solid and real at all, but queer structures born out
of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of
mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted
street to Shane’s Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab
window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the
glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it
touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a
dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel
workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed
at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the
Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her
destination was the great black house on the hill.

As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the
street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were
clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until
in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house
the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light
glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead,
abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.

Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright
labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and
Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and
deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria
vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of
the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull
glow of the furnaces.

The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times,
listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman
opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of
welcome.

“Mama!” Lily called up the long polished stairway. “Irene! Mama! Where
are you?”

She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her
veil, the sound of her mother’s limping step and the tapping of her
stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later,
Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene
clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.




XV


On the occasion of Lily’s first dinner at home, the mulatto woman
brought out the heaviest of the silver candelabra and despatched Hennery
into the Town for a dozen tall candles and a great bunch of pink roses
which filled the silver épergne when the mother and the two daughters
came down to dinner; Julia Shane, as usual, wore black with a lace shawl
thrown over her gray hair, a custom which she had come to adopt in the
evenings and one which gave the Town one more point of evidence in the
growing chain of her eccentricities. Irene, still clad in the gray dress
with the high collar and looking somehow like a governess or a nurse
employed in the house, took her place at the side of the table. As for
Lily, her appearance so fascinated the mulatto woman and the black girl
who aided her that the dinner was badly served and brought a sharp
remonstrance from Mrs. Shane. No longer had Lily any claims to girlhood.
Indisputably she was become a woman. A fine figure of a woman, she might
have been called, had she been less languid and indolent. Her slimness
had given way to a delicate voluptuousness, a certain opulence like the
ripeness of a beautiful fruit. Where there had been slimness before
there now were curves. She moved slowly and with the same curious
dignity of her mother, and she wore no rouge, for her lips were full and
red and her cheeks flushed with delicate color. Her beauty was the
beauty of a peasant girl from which all coarseness had been eliminated,
leaving only a radiant glow of health. She was, after all, the
granddaughter of a Scotch farmer; there was nothing thin-blooded about
her, nothing of the anemia of Irene. To-night she wore a tea-gown from
Venice, the color of water in a limestone pool, liquid, cool, pale
green. Her reddish hair, in defiance of the prevailing fashions, she
wore bound tightly about her head and fastened by a pin set with
brilliants. About her neck on a thin silver cord hung suspended a single
pear-shaped emerald which rested between her breasts, so that sometimes
it hung outside the gown and sometimes lay concealed against the
delicate white skin.

Irene throughout the dinner spoke infrequently and kept her eyes cast
down as though the beauty of her sister in some way fascinated and
repelled her. When it was finished, she stood up and addressed her
mother.

“I must go now. It is my night to teach at Welcome House.”

Lily regarded her with a puzzled expression until her mother, turning to
explain, said, “She teaches English to a class of foreigners in Halsted
street.” And then to Irene, “You might have given it up on the first
night Lily was home!”

A look of stubbornness came into the pale face of the younger sister. “I
can’t. They are depending on me. I shall see Lily every day for weeks.
This is a duty. To stay would be to yield to pleasure.”

“But you’re not going alone into Halsted street?” protested Lily. “At
night! You must be crazy!”

“I’m perfectly safe.... They know me and what I do,” the sister answered
proudly. “Besides there is one of the men who always sees me home.”

She came round to Lily’s chair and gave her a kiss, the merest brushing
of cool lips against the older sister’s warm cheek. “Good-night,” she
said, “in case you have gone to bed before I return.”

When Irene had gone, an instant change took place in the demeanor of the
two women. It was as though some invisible barrier, separating the souls
of mother and daughter, had been let down suddenly. Lily leaned back and
stretched her long limbs. The mulatto woman brought cigarettes and the
mother and daughter settled themselves to talking. They were at last
alone and free to say what they would.

“How long has Irene been behaving in this fashion?” asked Lily.

“It is more than three years now. I don’t interfere because it gives
her so much pleasure. It saved her, you know, from entering the church.
Anything is better than that.”

Then all at once as though they had suddenly entered another world, they
began to talk French, shutting out the mulatto woman from their
conversation.

“Mais elle est déja religieuse,” said Lily, “tout simplement. You might
as well let her enter the church. She already behaves like a nun ... in
that ridiculous gray dress. She looks ghastly. You should forbid it. A
woman has no right to make herself look hideous. There’s something
sinful in it.”

The mother smiled wearily. “Forbid it? You don’t know Irene. I’m
thankful to keep her out of the church. She is becoming fanatic.” There
was a pause and Mrs. Shane added, “She never goes out now ... not since
a year and more.”

“She is like a spinster of forty.... It is shameful for a girl of
twenty-five to let herself go in that fashion. No man would look at
her.”

“Irene will never marry.... It is no use speaking to her. I have seen
the type before, Lily ... the religieuse. It takes the place of love. It
is just as ecstatic.”

The mulatto woman, who had been clearing away the dishes, came and stood
by her mistress’ chair to await, after her custom, the orders for the
following day. “There will only be three of us ... as usual. That is
all, Sarah!”

The woman turned to go but Lily called after her. “Mama,” she said,
“can’t we open the rest of the house while I’m here? It’s horrible, shut
up in this fashion. I hate sitting in the library when there is all the
drawing-room.”

Mrs. Shane did not argue. “Get some one to help you open the
drawing-room to-morrow, Sarah. We will use it while Miss Lily is here.”

The mulatto woman went out and Lily lighted another cigarette. “You will
want it open for the Christmas party,” she said. “You can’t entertain
all the family in the library.”

“I had thought of giving up the Christmas party this year,” replied the
Mother.

“No ... not this year,” cried Lily. “It is such fun, and I haven’t seen
Cousin Hattie and Uncle Jacob and Ellen for years.”

Again the mother yielded. “You want gaiety, I see.”

“Well, I’m not pious like Irene, and this house is gloomy enough.” At
the sight of her mother rising from her chair, she said ... “Let’s not
go to the library. Let’s sit here. I hate it in there.”

So there they remained while the tall candles burned lower and lower.
Suddenly after a brief pause in the talk, the mother turned to Lily and
said, “Et toi.”

Lily shrugged her shoulders. “Moi? Moi? Je suis contente.”

“Et Madame Gigon, et le petit Jean.”

“They are well ... both of them. I have brought a picture which I’ve
been waiting to show you.”

“He is married, you know.”

“When?”

“Only three weeks ago. He came here after your letter to offer to do
anything he could. He wants the boy to go to school in America.”

Here Lily smiled triumphantly. “But Jean is mine. I shall accept nothing
from him. He is afraid to recognize Jean because it would ruin him. I
shall send the boy where I like.” She leaned forward, glowing with a
sudden enthusiasm. “You don’t know how handsome he is and how clever.”
She pushed back her chair. “Wait, I’ll get his picture.”

The mother interrupted her. “Bring me the enameled box from my dressing
table. There is something in it that will interest you.”




XVI


In a moment the daughter returned bearing the photograph and the
enameled box. It was the picture which interested Julia Shane. Putting
aside the box she took it up and gazed at it for a long time in silence
while Lily watched her narrowly across the polished table.

“He is a handsome child,” she said presently. “He resembles you. There
is nothing of his father.” Her blue eyes were moist and the tired hard
face softened. “Come here,” she added almost under her breath, and when
the daughter came to her side she kissed her softly, holding her close
to her thin breast. When she released Lily from her embrace, she said,
“And you? When are you going to marry?”

Lily laughed. “Oh, there is plenty of time. I am only twenty-seven,
after all. I am very happy as I am.” She picked up the enameled box,
smiling. “Show me the secret,” she said.

Mrs. Shane opened the box and from a number of yellow clippings drew
forth one which was quite new. “There,” she said, giving it to the
daughter. “It is a picture of him and his new wife, taken at the
wedding.”

There was a portrait of the Governor, grown a little more stout, but
still tall, straight and broad shouldered. His flowing mustache had been
clipped; otherwise he was unchanged. In the picture he grinned amiably
toward the camera as if he saw political capital even in his own
honeymoon. By his side stood a woman of medium height and strong build.
Her features were heavy and she too smiled, although there was something
superior in her smile as though she felt a disdain for the public. It
was a plain face, intelligent, yet somehow lacking in charm. The
clipping identified her as the daughter of a wealthy middle-western
manufacturer and a graduate of a woman’s college. It continued with a
short biographical account of the Governor, predicting for him a
brilliant future and congratulating him upon a marriage the public had
long awaited with interest.

Lily replaced the clipping in the enameled box and closed the lid with a
snap. “He had done well,” she remarked. “She sounds like a perfect wife
for an American politician. I should have been a hopeless failure. As it
is we are both happy.”

The look of bewilderment returned to her mother’s eyes. “The boy,” she
said, “should have a father. You should marry for his sake, Lily.”

“He shall have ... in time. There is no hurry. Besides, his position is
all right. I am Madame Shane, a rich American widow. Madame Gigon has
taken care of that. My position is excellent. No woman could be more
respected.”

Gradually she drifted into an account of her life in Paris. It followed
closely the line of pleasant anticipations which Madame Gigon had
permitted herself during the stillness of that first evening on the
terrace above the Marne. The house in the Rue Raynouard was big and old.
It had been built before the Revolution at a time when Passy was a
suburb surrounded by open meadows. It had a garden at the back which ran
down to the Rue de Passy, once the open highroad to Auteuil. Apartments,
shops and houses now covered the open meadows but the old house and the
garden remained unchanged, unaltered since the day Lenôtre planned them
for the Marquise de Sevillac. The garden had a fine terrace and a
pavilion which some day Jean should have for his own quarters. The house
itself was well planned for entertaining. It had plenty of space and a
large drawing-room which extended along the garden side with tall
windows opening outward upon the terrace. At a little distance off was
the Seine. One could hear the excursion steamers bound for Sèvres and
St. Cloud whistling throughout the day and night.

As for friends, there were plenty of them ... more than she desired.
There were the respectable baronnes and comtesses of Madame Gigon’s set,
a group which worshiped the Prince Bonaparte and talked a deal of silly
nonsense about the Restoration of the Empire. To be sure, they were
fuddy-duddy, but their sons and daughters were not so bad. Some of them
Lily had known at the school of Mademoiselle de Vaux. Some of them were
charming, especially the men. She had been to Compiègne to hunt, though
she disliked exercise of so violent a nature. Indeed they had all been
very kind to her.

“After all,” she concluded, “I am not clever or brilliant. I am content
with them. I am really happy. As for Madame Gigon, she is radiant. She
has become a great figure in her set. She holds a salon twice a month
with such an array of gateaux as would turn you ill simply to look at. I
give her a fat allowance but she gets herself up like the devil. I think
she is sorry that crinolines are no longer the fashion. She looks like a
Christmas tree, but she is the height of respectability.” For an instant
a thin shade of mockery, almost of bitterness colored her voice.

Julia Shane reached over suddenly and touched her daughter’s arm.
Something in Lily’s voice or manner had alarmed her. “Be careful, Lily.
Don’t let yourself grow hard. That’s the one thing.”




XVII


They sat talking thus until the candles burnt low, guttered and began to
go out, one by one, and at last the distant tinkle of a bell echoed
through the house. For a moment they listened, waiting for one of the
servants to answer and when the bell rang again and again, Lily at last
got up languidly saying, “It must be Irene. I’ll open if the servants
are in bed.”

“She always has a key,” said her mother. “She has never forgotten it
before.”

Lily made her way through the hall and boldly opened the door to
discover that she was right. Irene stood outside covered with snow. As
she stepped in, her sister caught a glimpse through the mist of falling
flakes of a tall man, powerfully built, walking down the long drive
toward Halsted street. He walked rapidly, for he wore no overcoat and
the night was cold.

In the warm lamplighted hall, Irene shook the snow from her coat and
took off her plain ugly black hat. Her pale cheeks were flushed, perhaps
from the effort of walking so rapidly up the drive.

“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.




XVIII


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 movements of 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, and
last 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 as though 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.”




XIX


For thirty years Christmas dinner had been an event at Shane’s Castle.
John Shane, who had no family of his own, who was cut off from friends
and relatives, adopted in the seventies the family of his wife, and
established the custom of inviting every relative and connection to a
great feast with wine, a turkey, a goose and a pair of roast pigs. In
the old days before the MacDougal Farm was swallowed up by the growing
town, New Year’s dinner at the farmhouse had also been an event. The
family came in sleds and sleighs from all parts of the county to gather
round the groaning table of Jacob Barr, Julia Shane’s brother-in-law and
the companion of John Shane in the paddock now covered by warehouses.
But all that was a part of the past. Even the farmhouse no longer
existed. Christmas at Cypress Hill was all that remained.

Once there had been as many as thirty gathered about the table, but one
by one these had vanished, passing out of this life or migrating to the
West when the Mills came and the county grew crowded; for the
MacDougals, the Barrs and all their connection were adventurers, true
pioneers who became wretched when they were no longer surrounded by a
sense of space, by enough air, unclogged by soot and coal gas, for their
children to breathe.

On Christmas day there came to Cypress Hill a little remnant of seven.
These with Julia Shane and her two daughters were all that remained of a
family whose founder had crossed the Appalachians from Maryland to
convert the wilderness into fertile farming land. They arrived at the
portico with the wrought iron columns in two groups, the first of which
was known as The Tolliver Family. It included Cousin Hattie, her husband
Charles Tolliver, their daughter Ellen, two sons Fergus and Robert, and
Jacob Barr, who made his home with them and shared with Julia Shane the
position of Head of the Family.

They drove up in a sleigh drawn by two horses--good horses, for Jacob
Barr and Charles Tolliver were judges of horseflesh--and Mrs. Tolliver
got down first, a massive woman, large without being fat, with a rosy
complexion and a manner of authority. She wore a black feather boa, a
hat trimmed with stubby ostrich plumes perched high on her fine black
hair, and a short jacket of astrakhan, slightly _démodé_ owing to its
leg-of-mutton sleeves. After her descended her father, the patriarch
Jacob Barr. The carriage rocked beneath his bulk. He stood six feet
three in his stocking feet and for all his eighty-two years was bright
as a dollar and straight as a poker. A long white beard covered his
neckerchief and fell to the third button of his embroidered waistcoat,
entangling itself in the heavy watch chain from which hung suspended a
nugget of gold, souvenir of his adventure to the Gold Coast in the
Forties. He carried a heavy stick of cherry wood and limped, having
broken his hip and recovered from it at the age of eighty.

Next Ellen got down, her dark curls transformed into a pompadour as her
mother’s concession to a recent eighteenth birthday. She was tall, slim,
and handsome despite the awkwardness of the girl not yet turned woman.
Her eyes were large and blue and her hands long and beautiful. She had
the family nose, prominent and proudly curved, which in Julia Shane had
become an eagle’s beak. After her, Fergus, a tall, shy boy of fourteen,
and Robert, two years younger, sullen, wilful, red-haired like his
venerable grandfather, who in youth was known in the county as The Red
Scot. The boys were squabbling and had to be put in order by their
mother before entering Cousin Julia’s handsome house. Under her watchful
eye there was a prolonged scraping of shoes on the doormat. She managed
her family with the air of a field-marshal.

As for Charles Tolliver, he turned over the steaming horses to Hennery,
bade the black man blanket them well, talked with him for a moment, and
then followed the others into the house. Him Hennery adored, with the
adoration of a servant for one who understands servants. In the
stables, Hennery put extra zeal into the rubbing down of the animals,
his mind carrying all the while the picture of a tall gentleman with
graying hair, kindly eyes and a pleasant soft voice.

“Mr. Tolliver,” he told the mulatto woman later in the day, “is one of
God’s gentlemen.”

The other group was known as The Barr Family. The passing of years had
thinned its ranks until there remained only Eva Barr, the daughter of
Samuel Barr and therefore a niece of the vigorous and patriarchal Jacob.
Characteristically she made her entrance in a town hack, stopping to
haggle with the driver over the fare. Her thin, spinsterish voice rose
above the roaring of the Mills until at length she lost the argument, as
she always did, and paid reluctantly the prodigious twenty-five cents.
She might easily have come by way of the Halsted street trolley for five
cents, but this she considered neither safe nor dignified. As she grew
older and more eccentric, she had come to exercise extraordinary
precautions to safeguard her virginity. She was tall, thin, and dry,
with a long nose slightly red at the end, and hair that hung in
melancholy little wisps about an equine face; yet she had a double lock
put on the door of her room at Haines’ boarding house, and nothing would
have induced her to venture alone into the squalid Flats. She was poor
and very pious. Into her care fell the destitute of her parish. She
administered scrupulously with the hard efficiency of a penurious
housekeeper.

Dinner began at two and assumed the ceremonial dignity of a tribal rite.
It lasted until the winter twilight, descending prematurely because of
the smoke from the Mills, made it necessary for the mulatto woman and
her black helpers to bring in the silver candlesticks, place them amid
the wreckage of the great feast, and light them to illumine the paneled
walls of the somber dining-room. When the raisins and nuts and the
coffee in little gilt cups had gone the rounds, the room resounded with
the scraping of chairs, and the little party wandered out to distribute
itself at will through the big house. Every year the distribution
followed the same plan. In one corner of the big drawing-room Irene, in
her plain gray dress, and Eva Barr, angular and piercing in durable and
shiny black serge, foregathered, drawn by their mutual though very
different interest in the poor. Each year the two spinsters fell upon
the same arguments; for they disagreed about most fundamental things.
The attitude of Irene toward the poor was the Roman attitude, full of
paternalism, beneficent, pitying. Eva Barr in her Puritan heart had no
room for such sentimental slop. “The poor,” she said, “must be taught to
pull themselves out of the rut. It’s sinful to do too much for them.”

Two members of the family, the oldest, Jacob Barr, and the youngest, his
grandson, disappeared completely, the one to make his round of the
stables and park, the other to vanish into the library where, unawed by
the sinister portrait of old John Shane, he poked about, stuffing
himself with the candy sent by Willie Harrison as a token of a thrice
renewed courtship. The grandfather, smoking what he quaintly called a
cheroot, surveyed scrupulously the stable and the house, noting those
portions which were falling into disrepair. These he later brought to
the attention of Julia Shane; and the old woman, leaning on her stick,
listened with an air of profound attention to her brother-in-law only to
forget everything he had advised the moment the door closed upon him.
Each year it was the same. Nothing changed.

In the far end of the drawing-room by the grand piano, Lily drew Ellen
Tolliver and the tall shy brother Fergus to her side. Here Mrs. Tolliver
joined them, her eyes bright with flooding admiration for her children.
The girl was plainly fascinated by her glamorous cousin. She examined
boldly Lily’s black gown from Worth, her pearls, and her shoes from the
Rue de la Paix. She begged for accounts of the Opéra in Paris and of
Paderewski’s playing with the Colonne Orchestra. There was something
pitiful in her eagerness for some contact with the glamorous world
beyond the Town.

“I’m going to New York to study, next year,” she told Lily. “I would go
this year but Momma says I’m too young. Of course, I’m not. If I had
money, I’d go anyway.” And she cast a sudden defiant glance at her
powerful mother.

Lily, her face suddenly grave with the knowledge of Judge Weissman’s
visit, tried to reassure her. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity, Ellen.
You’re still a young girl ... only eighteen.”

“But there’s never any money,” the girl replied, with an angry gleam in
her wide blue eyes. “Papa’s always in debt. I’ll never get a chance
unless I make it myself.”

In the little alcove by the gallery, Julia Shane leaning on her stick,
talked business with Charles Tolliver. This too was a yearly custom; her
nephew, the county treasurer, gave her bits of advice on investments
which she wrote down with a silver pencil and destroyed when he had
gone. She listened and begged his advice because the giving of it
encouraged him and gave him confidence. He was a gentle, honest fellow,
and in her cold way she loved him, better even than she loved his wife
who was her niece by blood. The advice he gave was mediocre and
uninspired; besides Julia Shane was a shrewd woman and more than a match
in business matters for most men.

When they had finished this little ceremony, the old woman turned the
conversation to the Cyclops Mill scandal.

“And what’s to come of it?” she asked. “Are you going to win?”

Charles Tolliver smiled. “We’ve won already. The case was settled
yesterday. The Mill owes the state some five hundred thousand with
fines.”

Julia Shane again pounded the floor in delight. “A fine Christmas
present!” she chuckled. “A fine Christmas present!” And then she did an
unaccountable thing. With her thin ringed hand she slapped her nephew on
the back.

“You know they came to me,” she said, “to get my influence. I told them
to go to the Devil!... I suppose they tried to bribe you.”

The nephew frowned and the gentleness went out of his face. The fine
mouth grew stern. “They tried ... carefully though, so carefully they
couldn’t be caught at it.”

“It will make you trouble. Judge Weissman is a bad enemy. He’s
powerful.”

“I know that. I’ve got to fight him. The farmers are with me.”

“But the Town is not, and it’s the Town which counts nowadays. The day
of the farmer is past.”

“No, the Town is not.”

The face of Charles Tolliver grew serious and the blue eyes grave and
worried. Julia Shane saw that he was watching his tall daughter who sat
now at the piano, preparing to play.

“If you need money at the next election,” she said, “Come to me. I can
help you.”




XX


At the sound of Ellen’s music, the conversation in the long drawing-room
ceased save for the two women who sat the far corner--Irene and Eva
Barr. They went on talking in an undertone of their work among the poor.
The others listened, captivated by the sound, for Ellen played well, far
better than any of the little group save Lily and Julia Shane knew. To
the others it was simply music; to the old woman and her daughter it was
something more. They found in it the fire of genius, the smoldering
warmth of a true artist, a quality unreal and transcendental which
raised the beautiful old room for a moment out of the monotonous slough
of commonplace existence. Ellen, in high-collared shirtwaist and skirt
with her dark hair piled high in a ridiculous pompadour, sat very
straight bending over the keys from time to time in a caressing fashion.
She played first of all a Brahms waltz, a delicate thread of peasant
melody raised to the lofty realm of immortality by genius; and from this
she swept into a Chopin valse, melancholy but somehow brilliant, and
then into a polonaise, so dashing and so thunderous that even Irene and
Eva Barr, ignorant of all the beauty of sound that tumbled flood-like
into the old room, suspended their peevish talk for a time and sat quite
still, caught somehow in the contagious awe of the others.

The thin girl at the piano was not in a drawing-room at all. She sat in
some enormous concert hall on a high stage before thousands of people.
The faces stretched out before her, row after row, until those who sat
far back were misty and blurred, not to be distinguished. When she had
finished the polonaise she sat quietly for a moment as though waiting
for a storm of applause to arise after a little hush from the great
audience. There was a moment of silence and then the voice of Lily was
heard, warm and soft, almost caressing.

“It was beautiful, Ellen ... really beautiful. I had no idea you played
so well.”

The girl, blushing, turned and smiled at the cousin who lay back so
indolently among the cushions of the sofa, so beautiful, so charming in
the black gown from Worth. The smile conveyed a world of shy and
inarticulate gratitude. The girl was happy because she understood that
Lily knew. To the others it was just music.

“Your daughter is an artist, Hattie,” remarked Julia Shane. “You should
be proud of her.”

The mother, her stout figure tightly laced, sat very straight in her
stiff chair, her work-stained hands resting awkwardly in her lap. Her
face beamed with the pride of a woman who was completely primitive, for
whom nothing in this world existed save her children.

“And now, Ellen,” she said, “play the McKinley Funeral March. You play
it so well.”

The girl’s young face clouded suddenly. “But it’s not McKinley’s Funeral
March, Mama,” she protested. “It’s Chopin’s. It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, you know what I mean ... the one you played at the Memorial
Service for McKinley.” She turned to Lily, her pride written in every
line of her strong face. “You know, Ellen was chosen to play at the
services for McKinley. Mark Hanna himself made a speech from the same
platform.”




XXI


An irrepressible smile swept Lily’s face. “They couldn’t have chosen
better, I’m sure. Do play it, Ellen.”

The girl turned to the piano and a respectful silence fell once more.
Slowly she swept into the somber rhythms of the _March Funèbre_,
beginning so softly that the music was scarcely audible, climbing
steadily toward a climax. From the depths of the old Pleyel she brought
such music as is seldom heard. The faces in the drawing-room became
grave and thoughtful. Lying among the pillows of the divan, Lily closed
her eyes and listened through a wall of darkness. Nearby, her mother,
leaning on the ebony stick, bowed her head because her eyes had grown
dim with tears, a spectacle which she never permitted this world to
witness. Presently the music swung again into a somber retarding rhythm;
and then slowly, surely, with a weird, unearthly certainty, it became
synchronized with the throbbing of the Mills. The steady beat was
identical. Old Julia Shane opened her eyes and stared out of the window
into the gathering darkness. The music, all at once, made the pounding
of the Mills hideously audible.

When the last note echoing through the old house died away, Eva Barr,
fidgeting with her embroidered reticule in search of a handkerchief to
wipe her lean red nose, rose and said, “Well, I must go. It’s late and
the hack is already here. He charges extra for waiting, you know.”

That was the inevitable sign. The dinner was ended. Grandpa Barr, very
rosy from his promenade about the grounds, and the red-haired Robert,
much stuffed with Willie Harrison’s courting chocolates, reappeared and
the round of farewells was begun.

Before Hennery brought round from the stable the Tolliver’s sleigh, Lily
placing her arm about Ellen’s waist, drew her aside and praised her
playing. “You must not throw it away,” she said. “It is too great a
gift.” She whispered. Her manner became that of a conspirator. “Don’t
let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll
try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen, don’t waste
your life. The others ... the ones who aren’t remarkable in any way will
try to pull you down from your pedestal to their level. But don’t let
them. Fitting the pattern is the end of their existence. ‘Be like every
one else,’ is their motto. Don’t give in. And when the time comes, if
you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can
live with me.”

The girl blushed and regarded the floor silently for a moment. “I won’t
let them,” she managed to say presently. “Thank you, Cousin Lily.” At
the door, she turned sharply, all her shyness suddenly vanished, an air
of defiance in its place. “I won’t let them.... You needn’t worry,” she
added with a sudden fierceness.

“And next week,” said Lily, “come here and spend the night. I want to
hear more music. There’s no music in this Town but the Mills.”

By the fireplace under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, Julia Shane
talked earnestly with her niece, Mrs. Tolliver, who stood warming her
short astrakhan jacket by the gentle blaze.

“And one more thing, Hattie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been planning to
give you these for some time but the opportunity never arose. I shan’t
live many more years and I want you to have them.”

With an air of secrecy she took from her thin fingers two rings and
slipped them into the red, worn hands of her niece. “Don’t tell any
one,” she added. “It’s a matter between us.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s hand closed on the rings. She could say nothing, but she
kissed Aunt Julia affectionately and the tears came into her eyes
because the old woman understood so well the intricate conventions of
pride in matters of money. The rings were worth thousands. Hattie
Tolliver could not have accepted their value in money.

At the door the little party made its departure with a great deal of
healthy hubbub, colliding at the same time with a visitor who had driven
up unseen. It was Willie Harrison, come to call upon Lily and to propose
a visit to the Mills to look over the new furnaces that were building.
In the stream of light from the doorway the caller and Charles Tolliver
recognized each other and an awkward moment followed. It was Willie
Harrison, overcome with confusion, who bowed politely. Charles Tolliver
climbed into his sleigh without making any sign of recognition. The feud
between the old and the new, concealed for so many years, was emerging
slowly into the open.




XXII


The day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, as clear as any day
dawned in the Flats where at sunrise the smoke turned the sun into a
great copper disk rising indolently toward the zenith of the heavens.
The false warmth of the January thaw, precocious that year, brought
gentle zephyrs that turned the icicles on the sweeping eaves of the
house into streams of water which added their force to the rivulets
already coursing down the long drive to leave the gravel bare and
eroded, swelling with the upheaval of the escaping frost. But the false
warmth brought no beauty; no trees burgeoned forth in clouds of bright
green and no crocuses thrust forth their thin green swords and errant
blossoms. The January thaw was but a false hope of the northern winter.
When the sun of the early afternoon had destroyed all traces of the snow
save drifts which hid beneath the rhododendrons or close against the
north wall of the stable, it left behind an expanse of black and
dessicated lawn, in spots quite bare even of dying grass. The garden
stripped of its winter blanket at last stood revealed, a ravaged
fragment of what had once been a glory.

Lily, drawn from the house by the warmth of the sun, wandered along the
barren paths like a lovely hamadyrad enticed by deceitful Gods from her
winter refuge. She ran from clump to clump of shrubbery, breaking off
the tender little twigs in search of the green underbark that was a sign
of life. Sometimes she found the green; more often she found only dead,
dry wood, bereft of all vitality. In the flower garden she followed the
brick path to its beginning in the little arbor covered with wistaria
vine. Here too the Mills had taken their toll; the vine was dead save a
few thin twining stalks that clung to the arbor. In the border along the
walk, she found traces of irises--hardy plants difficult to kill--an
occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among
the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were
great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her
childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue
delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove,
goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks.... All were gone now,
blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas
and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches
clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitæ, the bits of white
statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and
defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer
recognizable.

In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became
loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When
she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers,
high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and
bade her throw them away.

On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little
cry of horror. “The garden, Mama, is ruined.... Nothing remains!”

The expression on the old woman’s face remained unchanged and stony.

“Nothing will grow there any longer,” she said. “Besides, it does not
matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene
hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town.”

Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on
her way up the long stairs to her room. If Willie Harrison had ever had
a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the
stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all.




XXIII


At three that afternoon Willie’s victoria called to bear Lily and Irene
to the Cyclops Mills for the tour which he proposed. Workmen, passing
the carriage, regarded the two sisters with curiosity, frowning at the
sight of Irene in a carriage they recognized as Harrison’s. A stranger
might have believed the pair were a great lady and her housekeeper on
the way to market, so different and incongruous were the appearances of
the two women. Lily, leaning back against the thick mulberry cushions,
sat wrapped in a sable stole. She wore a gray tailored suit and the
smallest and smartest of black slippers. Around her white throat, which
she wore exposed in defiance of fashions which demanded high, boned
collars, she had placed a single string of pearls the size of peas. By
the side of her opulent beauty Irene possessed the austerity and
plainness of a Gothic saint. As usual she wore a badly cut suit, a plain
black hat and flat shoes with large, efficient heels. Her thin hands,
clad in knitted woolen gloves, lay listlessly in her lap.

Willie Harrison was waiting for them at the window of the
superintendent’s office just inside the gate. They saw him standing
there as the victoria turned across the cinders in through the
red-painted entrance. He stood peering out of the window in a
near-sighted way, his shoulders slightly stooped, his small hands
fumbling as usual the ruby clasp of his watch chain. At the sight of him
Lily frowned and bit her fine red lip as though she felt that a man so
rich, a man so powerful, a man who owned all these furnaces and steel
sheds should have an air more conquering and impressive.

Irene said, “Oh, there’s William waiting for us now.” And a second later
the victoria halted by the concrete steps and Willie himself came out to
greet them, hatless, his thin blond hair waving in a breeze which with
the sinking of the sun grew rapidly more chilly. The sun itself,
hanging over the roseate tops of the furnaces, had become a shield of
deep copper red.

“You’re just in time,” said Willie. “The shifts will be changing in a
little while. Shall we start here? I’ll show you the offices.”

They went inside and Willie, whose manner had become a little more
confident at the prospect of such a display, led them into a long room
where men sat in uniform rows on high stools at long tables. Over each
table hung suspended a half-dozen electric lights hooded by green
shades. The lights, so Willie told them, were placed exactly to the
sixteenth of an inch eight feet and three inches apart. It was part of
his theory of precision and regularity.

“This,” said Willie, with a contracted sweep of his arm, “is the
bookkeeping department. The files are kept here, the orders and all the
paper work.”

At the approach of the visitors, the younger men looked up for an
instant fascinated by the presence of so lovely a creature as Lily
wandering in to shatter so carelessly the sacred routine of their day.
There were men of every age and description, old and young, vigorous and
exhausted, men in every stage of service to the ponderous mill gods. The
younger ones had a restless air and constantly stole glances in the
direction of the visitors. The middle-aged ones looked once or twice at
Lily and then returned drearily to their columns of figures. The older
ones did not notice her at all. They had gone down for the last time in
a sea of grinding routine.

Irene, who knew the Town better than Lily, pointed out among the
near-sighted, narrow-chested workers men who were grandsons or
great-grandsons of original settlers in the county, descendants of the
very men who had cleared away the wilderness to make room for banks and
lawyers and mills.

“Let’s go on,” said Lily, “to the Mills. They’re more interesting than
this, I’m sure. You know I’ve never been inside a mill-yard.” She spoke
almost scornfully, as if she thought the counting room were a poor show
indeed. A shadow of disappointment crossed Willie’s sallow face.

After donning a broadcloth coat with an astrakhan collar and a derby
hat, he led the way. For a long time they walked among freight cars
labeled with names from every part of North America ... Santa Fé,
Southern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul....
They passed between great warehouses and vast piles of rusty pig iron
still covered with frost, the dirty snow lying unmelted in the
crevasses; and at last they came to an open space where rose a vast,
shapeless object in the process of being raised toward the sky.

“Here,” said Willie, “are the new furnaces. There are to be six of them.
This is the first.”

“I like this better,” said Lily. “There is spirit here ... even among
the laborers.”

The structure bore a strange resemblance to the Tower of Babel. Swarthy
workmen, swarming over the mass of concrete and steel, shouted to each
other above the din of the Mills in barbaric tongues which carried no
meaning to the visitors. Workmen, like ants, pushed wheelbarrows filled
with concrete, with fire clay or fire bricks. Overhead a giant crane
lifted steel girders with an effortless stride and swung them into
place. The figures of the workmen swept toward the tower in a constant
stream of movement so that the whole took on a fantastic composition, as
if the tower, rushing on its way heavenward, were growing taller and
taller before their very eyes, as if before they moved away it might
pierce the very clouds.

At the sight of Willie Harrison, the foremen grew more officious in
manner and shouted their orders with redoubled vigor, as if the strength
of their lungs contributed something toward the speed with which the
great tower grew. But the workmen moved no more rapidly. On returning to
the mounds of sand and fire brick, they even stopped altogether at times
to stare calmly like curious animals at the visitors. One or two nodded
in recognition of Irene’s “Good-day, Joe,” or “How are you,
Boris?”--words which appeared to cloud somewhat Willie’s proud enjoyment
of the spectacle. And every man who passed stared long and hard at Lily,
standing wrapped in her furs, a little aloof, her eyes bright
nevertheless with the wonder of the sight. Neither Lily nor Irene nor
Willie spoke more than was necessary, for in order to be heard above the
din they were forced to scream.

From the growing tower the little party turned west toward the sunset,
walking slowly over a rough roadway made of cinders and slag. Once a
cinder penetrated Lily’s frail shoe and she was forced to lean against
Willie while she took it off and removed the offending particle. He
supported her politely and turned away his face so that he should not
offend her by seeing her shapely stockinged foot.

A hundred yards further on they came upon a dozen great vats covered by
a single roof of sheet iron. From the vats rose a faint mist, veiling
the black bodies of negroes who, shouting as they worked, dipped great
plates of steel in and out. An acrid smell filled the air and penetrated
the throats of the visitors as they passed rapidly by, causing Lily to
take from her hand bag a handkerchief of the thinnest linen which she
held against her nose until they were once more beyond the zone of the
fumes.

“Those are the tempering vats,” said Willie. “Only negroes work here.”

“But why?” asked Irene.

“Because the other workers won’t,” he said. “The acid eats into their
lungs. The negroes come from South Carolina and Georgia to do it. They
are willing!”

As they walked the sound of pounding, which appeared to come from the
great iron shed lying before them black against the sunset, grew louder
and louder, steadily more distinct. In the fading twilight that now
surrounded them the Mill yard became a fantastic world inhabited by
monsters of iron and steel. Great cranes swung to and fro against the
glow of the sky, lifting and tossing into piles huge plates of steel
that fell with an unearthly slithering din when an invisible hand,
concealed somewhere high among the black vertebræ of the monsters,
released a lever. High in the air lights, red and green, or cold
piercing blue-white, like eyes appeared one by one peering down at them
wickedly. Beyond the cranes in the adjoining yard the black furnaces
raised gigantic towers crowned by halos of red flame that rose and fell,
palpitating as the molten iron deep in the bowels of the towers churned
and boiled with a white infernal heat. Dancing malignant shadows
assailed them on every side.

The three visitors, dwarfed by the monsters of steel, made their way
across the slag and cinders, deafened by the unearthly noise.

“Yesterday,” shouted William Harrison in his thin voice, “there was a
terrible accident yonder in the other yard. A workman fell into a vat of
molten iron.”

Irene turned to her companion with horror stricken eyes. “I know,” she
said. “It was an Italian named Rizzo. I heard of it this morning. I have
been to see his wife and family. There are nine of them.”

William shouted again. “They found nothing of him. He became a part of
the iron. He is part of a steel girder by now.”

Out of the evil, dancing shadows a man blackened by smoke leapt suddenly
at them. “Look out!” he cried, and thrust them against the wall of a
neighboring shed so roughly that Irene fell forward upon her knees. A
great bundle of steel plates--tons of them--swung viciously out of the
darkness, so close to the little party that the warmth of the metal
touched their faces. It vanished instantly, drawn high into the air by
some invisible hand. It was as if the monster had rebelled suddenly
against its master, as if it sought to destroy Willie Harrison as it had
destroyed the Italian named Rizzo.

Willie lost all power of speech, all thought of action. Irene, her face
deathly white, leaned against the wall calling upon Lily to support her.
It was Lily, strangely enough, who alone managed to control herself. She
displayed no fear. On the contrary she was quiet, fiercely quiet as if a
deadly anger had taken complete possession of her soul.

“Great God!” she exclaimed passionately. “This is a nightmare!” Willie
fumbled helplessly by her side, rubbing the wrists of the younger sister
until she raised her head and reassured them.

“I’m all right,” said Irene. “We can go on now.”

But Lily was for taking her home. “You’ve seen enough. I’m not going to
have you faint on my hands.”

“I’m all right ... really,” repeated Irene, weakly. “I want to see the
rest. I must see it. It’s necessary. It is part of my duty.”

“Don’t be a fool! Don’t try to make a martyr of yourself!”

But Irene insisted and Lily, who was neither frightened nor exhausted,
yielded at last, weakened by her own curiosity. At the same moment her
anger vanished; she became completely amiable once more.

Willie led them across another open space shut in on the far side by the
great shed which had loomed before them throughout the tour. They passed
through a low, narrow door and stood all at once in an enormous cavern
glowing with red flames that poured from the mouths of a score of
enormous ovens. From overhead, among the tangle of cranes and steelwork,
showers of brilliant cold light descended from hooded globes. The cavern
echoed and reechoed with the sound of a vast hammering, irregular and
confused--the very hammering which heard in the House at Cypress Hill
took on a throbbing, strongly-marked rhythm. On the floor of the cavern,
dwarfed by its very immensity, men stripped to the waist, smooth, hard,
glistening and streaked with sweat and smoke, toiled in the red glow
from the ovens.




XXIV


Before one of these the little party halted while Lily, and Irene, who
seemed recovered though still deathly pale, listened while Willie
described the operation. Into a great box of steel and fire clay were
placed block after block of black iron until the box, filled at length,
was pushed forward, rolling easily on balls of iron, into the fiery
mouth of the oven. After a little time, the box was drawn out again and
the blocks of whitehot iron were carried aloft and deposited far off,
beside the great machines which rolled and hammered them into smooth
steel plates.

While they stood there, workmen of every size and build, of a dozen
nationalities, toiled on ignoring them. Lily, it appeared, was not
deeply interested in the explanation, for she stood a little apart, her
gaze wandering over the interior of the cavern. The adventure--even the
breathless escape of a moment before--left her calm and indifferent. In
her gaze there was a characteristic indolence, an air of
absent-mindedness, which frequently seized her in moments of this sort.
Nothing of her apparel was disarranged. Her hat, her furs, her pearls,
her suit, were in perfect order. The flying dust and soot had gathered
in her long eyelashes, but this only gave her a slightly theatrical
appearance; it darkened the lashes and made her violet eyes sparkle the
more. Her gaze appraised the bodies of the workmen who stood idle for
the moment waiting to withdraw the hot iron from the ovens. They leaned
upon the tools of their toil, some on shovels, some on long bars of
iron, great chests heaving with the effort of their exertions.

Among them there was one who stood taller than the others, a giant with
yellow hair and a massive face with features which were like the
features of a heroic bust not yet completed by the sculptor. There was
in them something of the unformed quality of youth. The man was young;
he could not have been much over twenty, and the muscles of his arm and
back stood out beneath his fair skin like the muscles on one of Rodin’s
bronze men in the Paris salons. Once he raised a great hand to wipe the
sweat from his face and, discovering that she was interested in him, he
looked at her sharply for an instant and then sullenly turned away
leaning on a bar of iron with his powerful back turned to her.

She was still watching the man when Willie approached her and touched
her arm gently. It seemed that she was unable to look away from the
workman.

“Come over here and sit down,” said Willie, leading her to a bench that
stood a little distance away in the shadow of the foreman’s shack.
“Irene wants to speak to one of the men.”

Lily followed him and sat down. Her sister, looking pale and tired,
began a conversation with a swarthy little Pole who stood near the oven.
The man greeted her with a sullen frown and his remarks, inaudible to
Lily above the din, appeared to be ill-tempered and sulky as if he were
ashamed before his fellows to be seen talking with this lady who came to
the cavern accompanied by the master.

“Do you find it a wonderful sight?” began Willie.

Lily smiled. “I’ve seen nothing like it in all my life. I never knew
what lay just beyond the garden hedge.”

“It will be bigger than this next year and even bigger the year after.”
His eyes brightened and for a moment the droop of his shoulders
vanished. “We want some day to see the Mills covering all the Flats. The
new furnaces are the beginning of the expansion. We hope to grow bigger
and bigger.” He raised his arms in a sudden gesture. “There’s no limit,
you know.”

But Lily’s gaze was wandering again back and forth, up and down, round
and round the vast cavern as if she were not the least interested in
Willie’s excitement over bigness. Irene had left the swarthy little man
and was talking now to the tow-headed young giant who leaned upon the
iron bar. His face was sulky, though it was plain that he was curiously
polite to Irene, who seemed by his side less a woman of flesh and blood
than one of paper, so frail and wan was her face. He smiled sometimes in
a shy, withdrawn fashion.

Politely Lily turned to her companion. “But you are growing richer and
richer, Willie. Before long you will own the Town.”

He regarded her shyly, his thin lips twisted into a hopeful smile. Once
more he began to fumble with the ruby clasp of his watch chain.

“I could give you everything in the world,” he said suddenly, as though
the words caused him a great effort. “I could give you everything if you
would marry me.” He paused and bent over Lily who sat silently turning
the rings on her fingers round and round. “Would you, Lily?”

“No.” The answer came gently as if she were loath to hurt him by her
refusal, yet it was firm and certain.

Willie bent lower. “I would see that Mother had nothing to do with us.”
Lily, staring before her, continued to turn the rings round and round.
The young workman with Irene had folded his muscular arms and placed his
iron bar against the wall of the oven. He stood rocking back and forth
with the easy, balanced grace of great strength. When he smiled, he
showed a fine expanse of firm white teeth. Irene laughed in her vague
half-hearted way. Lily kept watching ... watching....

“You could even spend half the time in Europe if you liked,” continued
Willie. “You could do as you pleased. I would not interfere.” He placed
one hand gently on her shoulder to claim her attention, so plainly
wandering toward the blond and powerful workman. She seemed not even to
be conscious of his hand.

The workmen had begun to move toward the oven now, the young fellow with
the others. He carried his iron bar as if it were a straw. He moved with
a sort of angry defiance, his head thrown back upon his powerful
shoulders. He it was who shouted the orders when the great coffin full
of hot iron was drawn forth. He it was who thrust his bar beneath the
mass of steel and lifting upward shoved it slowly and easily forward on
the balls of iron. His great back bent and the muscles rippled beneath
the skin as if they too were made of some marvelous flexible steel.

Willie Harrison took Lily’s hand and put an end to the turning of the
rings. “Tell me, Lily,” he said softly, “is it no use? Maybe next year
or the year after?”

All at once as though she had heard him for the first time, she turned
and placed the other hand gently on top of his, looking up at the same
time from beneath the wide brim of her hat. “It’s no use, Willie. I’m
sorry. I’m really sorry.” She laughed softly. “But you were wrong in
your method. You shouldn’t have given me the promise about Europe. When
I marry, it will be a man who will not let me leave his side.”

That was all she said to him. The rest, whatever it was, remained
hidden, deep within her, behind the dark eyes which found so little
interest in Willie Harrison, which saw nothing but the blond giant who
moved with such uncanny strength, with such incredibly easy grace about
his heroic task. Perhaps if Willie had guessed, even for a moment, what
was passing in her mind, he would have blushed, for Willie was, so
people said, a nice young man who had led a respectable life. Such
things were no doubt incomprehensible to him. Perhaps if she had spoken
the truth, if she had bothered herself to explain, she would have said,
“I could not marry you. I could give myself to no man but one who caught
my fancy, in whom there was strength and the grace of a fine animal.
Beauty, Willie, counts for much ... far more than you guess, living
always as you do in the midst of all this savage uproar. I am rich. Your
money means nothing. And your power! It is not worth the snap of a
finger to me.... Ah, if you had a face like that workman ... a face ...
a real face, and a body ... a real body like his, then you might ask
with hope. It is hopeless, Willie. You do not interest me, though I am
not eager to hurt you just the same.”

But she said none of these things, for people seldom say them. On the
contrary, she was content to put him off with a bare denial. It is
doubtful whether such thoughts even occurred to her, however deep they
may have been rooted in her soul; for she was certainly not a woman
given to reflection. To any one, it was apparent that she did not
examine her motives. She was content, no doubt, to be beautiful, to live
where there was beauty, to surround herself with beautiful, luxurious
things.

She was prevented from saying anything further by the arrival of Irene
who had abandoned her workmen to rejoin Willie and her sister. Willie,
crimson and still trembling a little with the effort of his proposal,
suggested that they leave. It was already a quarter to six. The workmen
vanished suddenly into a little shed. Their shift was finished. They
were free now to return to their squalid homes, to visit the corner
saloon or the dismal, shuttered brothels of Franklin street, free to go
where they would in the desolate area of the Flats for twelve brief
hours of life.




XXV


The three visitors made their way back to the office of the
superintendent across a mill yard now bright with the cold glare of a
hundred arc lights. On the way, Lily turned suddenly to her sister and
asked, “Who was the man you were talking to ... the tall one with the
yellow hair?”

Irene, moving beside her, cast a sudden glance at her sister and the old
terrified look entered her pale eyes. “His name is Krylenko,” she
replied in a voice grown subdued and cold. “He is the one who brought me
home from Welcome House the other night. He is a bright boy. I’ve taught
him English.”

Willie, who had been walking behind them, quickened his pace and came
abreast. “Krylenko?” he said. “Krylenko? Why, that’s the fellow who’s
been making trouble. They’ve been trying to introduce the union.” He
addressed Irene. “Your Welcome House is making trouble I’m afraid,
Irene. There’s no good comes of educating these men. They don’t want
it.”

Lily laughed. “Come now,” she said, “that’s what your mother says, isn’t
it? I can hear her saying it.”

Willie failed to answer her, but a sheepish, embarrassed look took
possession of his sallow face, as if the powerful figure of his mother
had joined them unawares. And Irene, walking close to Lily, whispered to
her sister, “You shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel of you.”

At the office of the superintendent they found Willie’s victoria
waiting, the horses covered with blankets against the swift, piercing
chill of the winter night. The coachman shivered on the box. The three
of them climbed in and Willie bade the man drive to Halsted street where
he would get down, leaving the carriage to the ladies. When Lily
protested, he answered, “But I want to walk up the hill to the Town. I
need the exercise.”

They drove along between two streams of mill workers, one entering, one
leaving the Mill yards with the change of shifts. The laborers moved in
two columns, automatons without identity save that one column was clean
and the men held their heads high and the other was black with oil and
soot and the heads were bent with a terrible exhaustion. It was a dark
narrow street bordered on one side by the tall blank walls of warehouses
and on the other by the Mill yard. The smells of the Black Fork, coated
with oil and refuse, corrupted the damp air. On the Mill side a high
fence made of barbed wire strung from steel posts was in the process of
construction. To this Willie called their attention with pride. “You
see,” he said, “we are making the Mills impregnable. If the unions come
in there will be trouble. It was my idea ... the fence. A stitch in time
saves nine.” And he chuckled softly in the darkness.

At Halsted street Willie got down and, removing his hat, bade the
sisters a dry and polite good-night. But before the carriage drove on,
Lily called out to him, “You’re coming to the ball to-night, aren’t you?
Remember, there’s a quadrille and you can’t leave us flat at the last
minute.”

“I’m coming,” said William. “Certainly I’m coming.” And he turned away,
setting off in the opposite direction toward the Hill and Mrs. Julis
Harrison who sat in the ugly house of red sandstone awaiting news of the
proposal. He walked neatly, placing his small feet firmly, his hands
clasped behind his back, his head bowed thoughtfully. The umbrella, held
in the crook of his arm, swung mournfully as he walked. His shoulders
drooped wearily. He had shown Lily all his wealth, all his power; and
she treated it as if it were nothing at all. In the brownstone house,
Mrs. Harrison sat waiting.

The carriage drove up Halsted street past the corner saloon now thronged
with mill workers, toward the house at Cypress Hill. In a tenement
opposite the wrought iron gates a nostalgic Russian sat on the front
stoop squeezing mournfully at a concertina which filled the winter
evening with the somber music of the steppes.

Irene, leaning back pale and exhausted on the mulberry cushions, said,
“Why did you ask Willie whether he was coming? You know he never misses
anything if he can help it.”

“I only wanted to make him feel welcome,” her sister replied absently.
“Since this affair over the taxes, Mama and Mrs. Harrison haven’t been
very thick.... I feel sorry for Willie. He doesn’t know what it’s all
about.”




XXVI


Inside the old house, Irene went to her room, and Lily, instead of
seeking out her mother for their usual chat, went quietly upstairs. She
ignored even the preparations for the ball. After she had taken off her
clothes, she lay for a long time in a hot bath scented with verbena
salts, drowsing languidly until the hot water had eliminated every
soiling trace of the Mills. Returning to her room, she sat clad in a
thin satin wrapper for a long time before the mirror of her dressing
table, polishing her pink nails, examining the tiny lines at the corners
of her lips,--lines which came from smiling too much. Then she powdered
herself all over with scented powder and did up her red hair, fastening
it with the pin set in brilliants. And presently, the depression having
passed away, she began to sing in her low warm voice, _Je sais que vous
êtes gentil_. It was a full-throated joyous song. At times her voice
rose in a crescendo that penetrated the walls of the room where Irene
lay in the darkness on her narrow white bed.

As she dressed for dinner, she continued to sing one song after another,
most of them piquant and racy, songs of the French cuirassiers. She sang
_Sur la route á Montauban_, _Toute la longe de la Tamise_ and _Auprés de
ma Blonde_. The dressing was the languid performance which required an
hour or more, for she took the most minute care with every detail. The
chemise must not have a wrinkle; the peacock blue stockings must fit as
if they were the skin itself; the corsets were drawn until the result,
examined for many minutes before the glass, was absolutely perfect. At
the last she put on a gown of peacock blue satin with a long train that
swept about her ankles, and rang for one of the black servants to hook
it. Before the slavey arrived, Lily had discovered a wrinkle beneath the
satin and began all over again the process of dressing, until at the
end of the second attempt she stood before the mirror _soignée_ and
perfect in the soft glow from the open fire by her bed. The
tight-fitting gown of peacock blue followed the curves of her figure
flawlessly. Then she hung about her fine throat a chain of diamonds set
in a necklace of laurel leaves wrought delicately in silver, lighted a
cigarette and stood regarding her tall figure by the light of the lamps.
Among the old furniture of the dark room she stood superbly dressed,
elegant, _mondaine_. A touch to the hair that covered her small head
like a burnished helmet, and she smiled with satisfaction, the face in
the mirror smiling back with a curious look of elation, of abundant
health, of joy; yet there was in it something too of secrecy and
triumph.




XXVII


Irene’s room was less vast and shadowy. In place of brocade the windows
were curtained with white stuff. In one corner stood a _prie dieu_
before a little paint and plaster image of the Virgin and child--all
blue and pink and gilt,--which Lily had sent her sister from Florence.
The bed was small and narrow and the white table standing near by was
covered with books and papers neatly arranged--the paraphernalia of
Irene’s work among the people of the Flats. Here Lily discovered her
when she came in, flushed and radiant, to sit on the edge of the white
bed and talk with her sister until the guests arrived.

She found Irene at the white table, the neat piles of books and papers
pushed aside to make room for a white tray laden with food, for Irene
was having dinner alone in her room. There had been no question of her
coming to the ball. “I couldn’t bear it,” she told her mother. “I would
be miserable. I don’t want to come. Why do you want to torture me?” She
had fallen, of late, into using the most exaggerating words, out of all
proportion with truth or dignity. But Julia Shane, accustomed more and
more to yielding to the whims of her younger daughter, permitted her to
remain away.

“Have you anything to read?” began Lily. “Because if you haven’t, my
small trunk is full of books.”

“I’ve plenty, and besides, I’m going out.”

“Where?” asked Lily, suddenly curious.

“To Welcome House. It’s my night to teach. I should think you would have
remembered that.” Her voice sounded weary and strained. She turned to
her sister with a look of disapproval, so intense that it seemed to
accuse Lily of some unspeakable sin.

“I didn’t remember,” Lily replied. “How should I?” And then rising she
went to her sister’s side and put one arm about her shoulders, a
gesture of affection which appeared to inspire a sudden abhorrence in
the woman, for she shivered suddenly at the touch of the warm bare arm.
“You shouldn’t go out to-night. You are too tired!”

“I must go,” Irene replied. “They’re counting on me.”

“What are you eating?...” remarked Lily, picking up a bit of cake from
the tray, “Peas, potatoes, rice, dessert, milk.... Why you’ve no meat,
Irene. You should eat meat. It is what you need more than anything.
You’re too pale.”

Irene’s pale brow knitted into a frown. “I’ve given it up,” she said.
“I’m not eating meat any longer.”

“And why not?” Lily moved away from her and stood looking down with the
faintest of mocking smiles. The transparent cheek of her sister flushed
slightly.

“Because I don’t believe in it. I believe it’s wrong.”

“Well, I’m going to speak to Mama about it. It’s nonsense. You’ll kill
yourself with such a diet. Really, Irene....” Her voice carried a note
of irritation, but she got no further for Irene turned on her suddenly,
like a beaten dog which after long abuse snaps suddenly at the offending
hand.

“Why can’t you leave me in peace? You and Mama treat me like a child. I
am a grown woman. I want to do as I please. I am harming no one but
myself ... no one.... I’m sick of it, I tell you. I’m sick of it!”

And suddenly she began to weep, softly and hysterically, her thin
shoulders shaking as the sobs tore her body. “I want to go away,” she
moaned. “I want to be alone, where I can think and pray. I want to be
alone!” Her sobbing was at once pitiful and terrible, the dry, parched
sobbing of a misery long pent up. For a moment Lily stood helplessly by
her side and then, all at once, she went down on her knees in the
peacock blue gown and put her lovely bare arms about her sister,
striving to comfort her. The effort failed strangely. Irene only drew
away and sobbed the more. “If you would only let me have peace ... I
could find it alone!”

Lily said nothing but knelt by her sister’s side kissing and caressing
the thin white hands until Irene’s sobbing subsided a little and she
fell forward among the books and papers, burying her head in her arms.
The misery of the soul and spirit in some way appalled Lily. She watched
her sister with a look of bewilderment in her eyes as if she had
discovered all at once a world of which she had been ignorant up to now.
The spectacle stifled quickly the high spirits of a moment before. The
bawdy French ballads were forgotten. She had become suddenly grave and
serious, the lines in her beautiful face grown hard. She was sitting on
the floor, her head in Irene’s lap, when a knock and the sound of her
name roused her.

“Miss Lily,” came the mulatto woman’s voice, “Mis’ Shane says the guests
are a-coming and you must come down.”

“All right Sarah.... I’ll be down at once.”

Lily, struggling with the tight satin dress, rose slowly, kissed her
sister and said, “Please, dear, stay home to-night and rest.”

But Irene, still sobbing softly as if entranced by the sensual
satisfaction of weeping, did not answer her. She remained leaning over
the table, her face buried in her arms. But she was more quiet now, with
the voluptuous stillness of one who has passed through a great emotional
outburst.

Lily, once more before the mirror in her own room, rearranged her
ruffled hair listening to the murmur of talk that arose from the well of
the stairs. It was not until she had fastened the pin set with
brilliants for a second time that she discovered with sudden horror that
the peacock blue gown was split and ripped at one side from the arm to
the waist. In the sudden outburst of affection for her sister, she had
flung herself to her knees abandoning all thought of vanity. The gown
was ruined.

From below stairs the murmur grew in volume as carriage after carriage
arrived. Lily swore beneath her breath in French, tore off the gown and
brought from her closet another of a pale yellow-green, the color of
chartreuse. The process of dressing began all over again and in half an
hour, after the mulatto woman had called twice and been sent away and
the guests had gone in to dinner, Lily stood once more before the
mirror, radiant and beautiful. The gown was cut lower than the one she
had tossed aside, and the yellow-green blended with the tawny red of her
hair so that there was something nude and voluptuous in her appearance.
The smile returned to her face, a smile which seemed to say, “The Town
will see something the like of which it has never seen before.”

Before going down she went to Irene’s room once more, only to find it
dark and empty. Clad in the gray suit and the plain black hat Irene had
made her way silently to the stairs at the back of the house and thence
through the gallery that led past the drawing-room windows into the dead
park. The austere and empty chamber appeared to rouse a sudden shame in
Lily, for she returned to her room before descending the long stairs and
took from the trunk a great fan of black ostrich feathers to shield her
bare breasts alike from the stares of the impudent and the disapproving.

The ball was a great success. The orchestra, placed in the little alcove
by the gallery, played a quadrille followed by waltzes, two-steps and
polkas. Until ten o’clock the carriages made their way along Halsted
street past the Mills and the squalid houses through the wrought iron
gates into the park; and at midnight they began to roll away again
carrying the guests to their homes. Lily, all graciousness and charm,
moved among the dancers distributing her favors equitably save in the
single instance of Willie Harrison, who looked so downcast and
prematurely old in his black evening clothes that she danced with him
three times and sat out a waltz, and a polka. And all the Town, ignorant
of the truth, whispered that Willie’s chances once more appeared good.

Ellen Tolliver was there, in a dress made at home by her mother, and she
spent much of the evening by the side of her aunt Julia who sat in black
jet and amethysts at one end of the drawing-room leaning on her stick
and looking for all the world like a wicked duchess. At the sound of the
music and the sight of the dancers, the old gleam returned for a little
time to her tired eyes.

Ellen was younger than the other guests and knew most of them only by
sight but she had partners none the less, for she was handsome despite
her badly made gown and her absurd pompadour, and she danced with a
barbaric and energetic grace. When she was not dancing her demeanor
carried no trace of the drooping wall-flower. She regarded the dancers
with a expression of defiance and scorn. None could have taken her for a
poor relation.




XXVIII


A little while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned
from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past
the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill
worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in
the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the
dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse
of Irene’s sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill
shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she
whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took
their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly
abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green
ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of
beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko
stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had
passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of
action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard
him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something
in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to
keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to
leave.

The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins,
passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o’clock,
leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of
her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the
wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the
departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam
died out of Julia Shane’s eyes. She became again an old woman with a
tired bent figure, her sharp eyes half closed by dark swellings which
seemed to have appeared all at once with the death of the last chord.

“I’m going to bed,” she said, bidding the others good-night. “We can
discuss the party in the morning.”

She tottered up the stairs leaving her daughter and grand-niece together
in the long drawing-room. When she had gone, Lily rose and put out the
lamps and candles one by one until only three candles in a sconce above
the piano remained lighted.

“Now,” she said, lying back among the cushions of the divan and
stretching her long handsome legs, “play for me ... some Brahms, some
Chopin.”

The girl must have been weary but the request aroused all her
extraordinary young strength. She sat at the piano silhouetted against
the candle light ... the curve of her absurd pompadour, the more
ridiculous curve of her corseted figure. From the divan Lily watched her
through half-closed eyes. She played first of all two études of Chopin
and then a waltz or two of Brahms, superbly and with a fine freedom and
spectacular fire, as if she realized that at last she had the audience
she desired, a better audience than she would ever have again no matter
how celebrated she might become. Above the throbbing of the Mills the
thread of music rose triumphant in a sort of eternal beauty, now
delicate, restrained, now rising in a tremendous, passionate crescendo.
The girl invested it with all the yearnings that are beyond expression,
the youth, the passionate resentment and scorn, the blind gropings which
swept her baffled young soul. Through the magic of the sound she managed
to convey to the woman lying half-buried among the cushions those things
which it would have been impossible for her to utter, so high and
impregnable was the wall of her shyness and pride. And Lily, watching
her, wept silently at the eloquence of the music.

Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl
swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse
Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre,
yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy
room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning,
unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the
old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet
familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be
captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy,
swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for
but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond
the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and
came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on the
_prie dieu_ before the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation,
which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was
a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the
sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and
softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away
into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the
silence of the old room.

After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her
head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she
slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and
soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and
gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had
fainted.




XXIX


The visit of Ellen was extended from one night to three. The piano was a
beautiful one, far better than the harsh-toned upright in the Tolliver
parlor in the Town, and Ellen gladly played for hours with only Lily,
lying among the cushions, and old Julia Shane, lost in her own fantastic
memories, for an audience.

On the third night, long after twelve o’clock, as Lily and her cousin
climbed the long stairway, the older woman said, “I have some clothes,
Ellen, that you may have if you like. They have been worn only a few
times and they are more beautiful than anything you can find in
America.”

The girl did not answer until they had reached Lily’s room and closed
the door behind them. Her face was flushed with the silent struggle
between a hunger for beautiful things and a fantastic pride, born of
respectable poverty. In some way, her cousin sensed the struggle.

“They are yours if you want them,” she said. “You can try them on if you
like at any rate.”

Ellen smiled gratefully. “I’d like to,” she said timidly. “Thank you.”

While the girl took off her shirtwaist and skirt, Lily busied herself
among the shadows of her closet. When she returned she bore across her
arms three gowns, one dull red, one black and one yellow. The girl stood
waiting shyly, clad only in her cheap underclothing coarsened and
yellowed by many launderings.

“You must take those things off,” said Lily. “I’ll give you others.” And
she brought out undergarments of white silk which Ellen put on,
shivering a little in the chill of the big room.

Then Lily took the pale yellow gown and slipped it over her cousin’s
head. It belonged to no period of fashion. It hung from the shoulders
in loose folds of shining silk, clinging close to the girl’s slim body.
There was a silver girdle which fastened over the hips. Ellen turned to
regard herself in the mirror.

“But wait,” said Lily, laughing, “you’ve only begun. We’ve got to change
your hair and do away with that ridiculous rat. Why do you spoil such
beautiful hair with a wad of old wire?”

She took out the pins and let the hair fall in a clear, black shower. It
was beautiful hair of the thick, sooty-black color that goes with fair
skin and blue eyes. It fell in great coils over the pale yellow gown.
Lily, twisting it into loose strands, held it against the light of the
lamp.

“Beautiful hair,” she said, “like the hair of Rapunzel.”

Then she twisted it low about Ellen’s head, loosely so that the light,
striking the free ends created a kind of halo. With a supreme gesture of
scorn, she tossed the “rat” into the scrap basket.

“There,” she said, turning her cousin to face the long mirror.
“There.... Behold the great pianist ... the great artist.”

In the magical mirror stood a tall lovely woman. The ridiculous awkward
girl had vanished; it was another creature who stood there transfigured
and beautiful. And in her frank blue eyes, there was a new look,
something of astonishment mingled with determination. The magical mirror
had done its work. From that moment the girl became a stranger to the
Town. She had come of age and slipped all unconsciously into a new
world.

With shining eyes she turned and faced her cousin.

“May I really have the clothes, Lily?”

“Of course, you silly child!”

And Lily smiled because the clothes had never been worn at all. They
were completely new.




XXX


At breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before
Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”

Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown
into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about
with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came
to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not
until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped
once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned
of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to
calculate the whims of her existence.

Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring
afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old
Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging
Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.

Tearing it open, Lily began to read,

“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped
with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a
traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged
to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the
Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose,
Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am
certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is
distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing
I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing
to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool.
None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gave
Ellen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young
drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles.
Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so
unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”

For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last
sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had
marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis
Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another
mark in the long score of the old against the new.

For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the
river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint
clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of
the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along
the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted
suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who
dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He
climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had
thrown over her shoulders.

“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”

Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers.
“Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”

She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the
passion of a savage, miserly possession.

“Je t’aime, Mama ... tellement,” whispered the little fellow, and
climbed down to run into the big house in search of kind Madame Gigon
and her cakes. The gaze of Lily wandered after his sturdy little body
and her dark eyes grew bright with a triumphant love.

When he had disappeared through one of the tall windows, she took up the
letter once more and continued her reading.

“Irene,” wrote her mother, “seems more content now that you are gone. I
confess that I understand her less and less every day. Sometimes I think
she must be not quite well ... a little touched perhaps by a religious
mania. She is giving her life, her strength, her soul, to these
foreigners in the Flats. What for? Because it brings her peace, I
suppose. But still I cannot understand her. There is one man ...
Krylenko, by name, I believe, whom she has made into a sort of disciple.
I only hope that news of him won’t reach the Town. God knows what sort
of a tale they would make out of it. I’m afraid too of her becoming
involved in the troubles at the Mills. Some day there will be open
warfare in the Flats.”

When Lily had finished reading, she tore the letter slowly into bits
after a custom of long standing and tossed the torn fragments into one
of the stone urns that bordered the terrace.... Then she rose and
pulling her fur cloak closer about her began to walk up and down
restlessly as if some profound and stirring memory had taken possession
of her. The rain began to fall gently and darkness to descend upon the
garden. In the house behind her the servants lighted the lamps. Still
she paced up and down tirelessly.

After a time she went down from the terrace to the gravel path of the
garden and there continued her walking until the gate in the garden wall
opened suddenly and a man stepped in, his erect soldierly figure black
against the lamps of the Rue de Passy. It was the Baron, Madame Gigon’s
cousin. He came toward her quickly and took her into his arms, embracing
her passionately for a long time in silence.

When at last he freed her, a frown crossed his dark face, and he said,
“What is it? What is distracting you? Are you troubled about something?”

Lily thrust her arm through his and leaned against him, but she avoided
his gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

And thus they walked through the rain until they reached the pavilion
designed by Lenôtre which stood at a distance from the house. Here they
halted and the Baron, taking from his pocket a key, unlocked the door
and they went in silently.

Once inside, he kissed her again and presently he said, “What is it?
There is something between us. There is a difference.”

“Nothing,” she murmured stubbornly. “It is nothing. You must be
imagining things.”




XXXI


All that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The
escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however,
for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of
the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a
clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion
its hunger after life.

When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for
consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied
above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason
to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing
that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She
kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived
me.”

At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie.
She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that
you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose
the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after
all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She
took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one
and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only
natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the
wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different.
We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does
with us as She pleases.”

But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in
her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.

“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t
suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to
me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily _did_ help Ellen it was
only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children
are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are
likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were
young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles
after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way
off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They
envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”

For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece
silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve
been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life
is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us.
Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins,
only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children
of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and
their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither.
They are lost somewhere between.”

But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades
of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother
and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg
St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised
heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been
called upon to endure so much.

As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next
election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his
campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too
strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about
helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as
clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a
cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children,
goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So
he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was
honest, he was sacrificed to the Mills. He settled himself, a man of
forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s
Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because
it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.

In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There
was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of
violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town
enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once
affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the
top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were
removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the
way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western
Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron
over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in
passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while
they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town
among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the
Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with
fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element
in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the
square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at
last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians
who had to do with the contract.

In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the
Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the
shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For
all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one
proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom
to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a
rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of
trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into
tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening
penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the
prosperity to which he had contributed so much. He went his way, petty,
dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because
he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the
piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in
the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side,
because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new
furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds
of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in
the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and
obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming
prosperity.




XXXII


In the Flats, as the years passed, new tides of immigrants swept in,
filling the abominable dirty houses to suffocation, adding to the
garbage and refuse which already clogged the sluggish waters of the
Black Fork. The men worked twelve hours and sometimes longer in the
Mills. The women wore shawls over their heads and bore many children,
most of whom died amid the smoke and filth. Here the Town overlooked one
opportunity. With a little effort it might have saved the lives of these
babies to feed to the Mills later on; but it was simpler to import more
cheap labor from Europe. Let those die who could not live.

And none of these new residents learned to speak English. They clung to
their native tongues. They were simply colonists transplanted, unchanged
and unchanging, from Poland, Ukrainia, South Italy and the
Balkans--nothing more, nothing less. The Town had nothing to do with
them. They were pariahs, outcasts, “Hunkies,” “Dagos,” and the Town held
it against them that they did not learn English and join in the vast
chorus of praise to prosperity.

But trouble became more frequent nowadays. Willie Harrison no longer
dared take his exercise by walking alone up the hill to the Town. The
barricade of barbed wire was complete now. It surrounded the Mills on
all sides, impregnable, menacing. It crowded the dead hedges of arbor
vitæ that enclosed the park at Shane’s Castle. There had been no need
for it yet. It was merely waiting.

Welcome House, the tentative gesture of a troubled civic conscience,
went down beneath the waves of prosperity. Volunteer citizens no longer
ventured into the troubled area of the Flats. Money ceased to flow in
for its support. It dropped at length from the rank of an institution
supported by a community to the rank of a school supported by one woman
and one man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko.
The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a
day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.

The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than
they had been to the Town. She aged ... dryly, after the fashion of
spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course
into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and
more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the
transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy’s map. Her pale blond
hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not
time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn
with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She
dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which
she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them,
she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather
outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her
work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure
of fun.

Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a
queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of
one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these.
She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she
molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at
her through the wrought iron gates of Shane’s Castle.

For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English
perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He
taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl
Marx, and even Voltaire ... books which Irene bought him in ignorance of
their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in
the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard
vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a
criminal.

Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother
never left the confines of Shane’s Castle, their affairs still held an
interest for those who had known Cypress Hill in the days of its
vanished splendor. For women who had long since ceased to take any part
in the life of a community, the names of old Julia Shane and her two
daughters came up with startling frequency at the dinners and lunches
and tea parties in the Town. It may have been that in a community where
life was so noisy, so banal, so strenuous, so redolent of prosperity,
the Shanes and the old house satisfied some profound and universal
hunger for the mysterious, the beautiful, the bizarre, even the mystic.
Certainly in the midst of so materialistic a community the Shanes were
exotic and worthy of attention. And always in the background there was
the tradition of John Shane and the memories of things which it was
whispered had happened in Shane’s Castle. It was Lily who aroused the
most talk, perhaps because she was even more withdrawn and mysterious
than her mother and sister, because it was so easy to imagine things
about her.... Lily who could come back and bring all the Town once more
to Shane’s Castle; Lily, the generous, the good-natured, the beautiful
Lily.

Mrs. Julis Harrison discussed them; and her son, the rejected Willie;
and Miss Abercrombie, who with the passing of years had developed an
affection of the nerves which made her face twitch constantly so that
always, even in the midst of the most solemn conversations, she had the
appearance of winking in a lascivious fashion. It was a trial which she
bore, with a truly noble fortitude.




XXXIII


On the evening of the day that Mrs. Harrison called for the last time at
Cypress Hill, Miss Abercrombie was invited to dine with her in the ugly
sandstone house on the Hill. The call was Mrs. Harrison’s final gesture
in an effort to patch up the feud which had grown so furiously since the
affair over the taxes. Of its significance Miss Abercrombie had been
told in advance, so it must have been with a beating, expectant heart
that she arrived at the Harrison mansion.

The two women dined alone in a vast dining-room finished in golden oak,
beneath a gigantic brass chandelier fitted with a score of pendant brass
globes. They sat at either end of a table so long that shouting was
almost a necessity.

“William is absent,” explained Mrs. Harrison in a loud, deep voice.
“There is a big corporation from the east that wants to buy the Mills.
It wants to absorb them at a good price with a large block of stock for
William and me. Of course, I oppose it ... with all my strength. As I
told William, the Mills _are_ the Harrisons ... I will never see them
out of the family ... Judge Weissman has gone east with William to see
that he does nothing rash. Neither of them ought to be away, I told
Willie, with all this trouble brewing in the Flats.” Here she paused for
a long breath. “Why, only this afternoon, some of those Polish brats
threw stones at my victoria, right at the foot of Julia’s drive....
Imagine that in the old days!”

This long and complicated speech, she made with but a single pause for
breath. She had grown even more stout, and her stupendous masculine
spirit had suffered a certain weakening. A light stroke of paralysis she
had passed over heroically, dismissing it by sheer force of her
tremendous will. The misfortune left no trace save a slight limp as she
dragged her body across the floor and settled it heavily in the plush
covered arm chair at one end of the table.

The butler--Mrs. Harrison used a butler as the symbol of her domination
in the Town, wearing him as a sort of crest--noiselessly brought the
thick mushroom soup, his eye gleaming at the sight of the two women. He
was an old man with white hair and the appearance of a gentleman.

“How dreadful!” exclaimed Miss Abercrombie, and then unable longer to
restrain herself, she said, “Tell me! Do tell me about Julia!”

Mrs. Harrison drank from her water glass, set it down slowly and then
said impressively, “She did not receive me!”

“I feared so,” rejoined Miss Abercrombie, winking with nervous
impatience.

“It is the end! No one can say that I have not done my part toward a
reconciliation.” This statement she uttered with all the majesty of an
empress declaring war. “And to think,” she added mournfully, “that such
an old friendship should come to such an end.”

“It’s just the way I feel,” replied Miss Abercrombie. “And you know, my
friendship was even older. I knew her before you. Why, I can remember
when she was only a farmer girl.” Here her illness forced her to wink as
if there were something obscene in her simple statement.

“Well,” said Mrs. Harrison, “I don’t suppose any one in the Town was
ever closer to Julia than I was. D’you know? That mulatto woman actually
turned me away to-day, and I must say her manner was insolent. She said
Julia was not feeling well enough to see me. Imagine, not well enough to
see _me_, her oldest friend!” This statement the sycophantic Miss
Abercrombie allowed to pass unchallenged. “Heaven knows,” continued Mrs.
Harrison. “It was only friendship that prompted me. I certainly would
not go prying about for the sake of curiosity. You know that, Pearl.
Why, I wasn’t allowed to set my foot inside the door. You’d have thought
I was diseased.”

After this a silence descended during which the room vibrated with
unsaid things. At the memory of her reception, Mrs. Harrison’s face
grew more and more flushed. The gentlemanly butler removed the soup and
brought on whitefish nicely browned and swimming in butter.

“It’s a queer household,” remarked Miss Abercrombie, with an air of
hinting at unspeakable things and feeling her way cautiously toward a
letting down of all bars. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate that they had
disputed the position of “oldest friend.” In a way it tied both their
hands.

“It has always been queer,” replied the hostess. “Even since the house
was built.”

Again a pregnant silence, and then Miss Abercrombie with another
unwilled and obscene wink added, “I must say I can’t understand Irene’s
behavior.” About this effort, there was something oblique and yet
effective. It marked another step.

“Or Lily’s,” rejoined Mrs. Harrison, taking a third step.

“They say,” said Miss Abercrombie, pulling fishbones from her mouth,
“that there is a common mill worker who is very attentive to Irene.
Surely she can’t be considering marriage with _him_.”

“No, from what I hear, she _isn’t_,” observed Mrs. Harrison. After this
dark hint she paused for a moment tottering upon the edge of new
revelations with the air of a swimmer about to dive into cold water. At
last she plunged.

“They say,” she murmured in a lowered voice, “that there is more between
them than most people guess ... more than is proper.”

Miss Abercrombie leaned forward. “You know,” she said, “that’s funny.
I’ve heard the same thing.”

“Well, I heard it from Thomas, the coachman. Of course, I reproved him
for even hinting at such things. I must say he only hinted ... very
delicately. He was discreet. If I hadn’t guessed there was something of
the sort going on, I should never have known what he was driving at.”

Miss Abercrombie bridled and leaned back for the butler to remove her
fish plate. “Imagine!” she said, “Imagine a child of yours being the
subject of gossip among servants!”

Her hostess gave a wicked chuckle. “You’ve forgotten John Shane. When he
was alive, his behavior was the talk of every one. But how could you
have forgotten the talk that went the rounds? It was common property ...
common property.”

Miss Abercrombie sighed deeply. “I know ... I know. Julia’s life has not
been happy.” And into the sigh she put a thousand implications of the
superior happiness of virgins.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Harrison, “he was insane. There’s no doubt about
it. People may talk, but facts are facts. John Shane was insane ...
certainly toward the end he was insane.”

The butler brought the roast fowl, and until his back was turned once
more both women kept silence. When he had gone out of the room, they
found themselves striving for first place in the race. Both spoke at
once but Mrs. Harrison overwhelmed the sycophantic Abercrombie.

“Of course,” she said, “I think Julia herself is a little queer at
times. I’ve noticed it for years ... ever since ... well ... ever since
Lily went to Paris to live.”

“Yes,” observed Miss Abercrombie, moving toward something more definite.
“Ever since the Governor’s garden party. All that was very queer ...
very queer.”

Here again they found themselves halted by the immensity of the
unspoken. Mrs. Harrison veered aside.

“The house has gone to ruin. Even the gate is hanging by one hinge.
Nothing is kept up any longer.”

“Have you seen this lover of Irene’s?” asked Miss Abercrombie, calling a
spade a spade and endeavoring to keep to one thing at a time.

“I’ve seen him once ... William pointed him out to me at the Mills. He’s
one of the men who have been making trouble there.”

“Is he good looking?” asked Miss Abercrombie.

“Yes and no,” replied her companion.

“Well, what does that mean?”

“Well, he’s tall and has a handsome face ... a little evil perhaps. The
real trouble is that I should call him common. Yes, common is the word I
should use, decidedly common.”

Miss Abercrombie raised her eyebrows and smiled. “But, my dear, after
all he is nothing but a workman.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Harrison, “he _is_.” In a manner which put an end to
all doubt in the matter.

“Do you really think,” asked Miss Abercrombie, “that there is anything
in it?”

Mrs. Harrison poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look. “Well,
of course I can’t see what he sees in her ... pale and haggard as she
is. Now with him it’s different. He’s ... well.” She halted suddenly,
adding, “This fowl is tough, Pearl ... I’m sorry it happened when you
were dining with me.” And then, “I suppose it’s money he’s after. She
must be very rich.”

The butler, after bringing more rich food, disappeared again and this
time, Miss Abercrombie, casting to the winds all restraint, rose and
said, “I’m going to bring my chair nearer, Belle. I can’t talk all the
way from this end of the table.”

And she moved her chair and plate to a more strategic position so that
when the butler returned, he found the two women sitting quite close to
each other, their heads together, their voices lowered to the most
confidential of pitches. Fragments of their talk reached an ear long
trained to eavesdropping upon old women.

“But Lily is the one,” drifted to the ear. “I’d really like to know the
truth about her. Of course blood is thicker than water. They say
she....” Mrs. Harrison rattled the ice in her glass, thus destroying the
remainder of the sentence.

So they sat until near midnight--two old women, one of them at the end
of a life barren of love, the other abandoned by love forever and cast
aside, a slowly decaying mass of fat--pawing over the affairs of two
women for whom the force of love in some manifestation or other was
still a radiant reality. They knew nothing; they possessed only
suspicions and fragments of gossip, but out of these they succeeded in
patching together a mosaic which glowed with all the colors of the most
glamorous sin and the most romantic passion.




XXXIV


And at the same moment in the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane lay
propped up in her bed reading a French novel. It was an enormous bed
with a vast dusty canopy supported by two ironical wood-gilt cupids who
hung suspended from the ceiling; and Julia Shane, reading by the light
of her night lamp, appeared lost in it like a woman tossing on the waves
of the sea. To-night, feeling more ill than usual, she had her dinner in
bed, wrapped in a peignoir of mauve ribbon and valenciennes, her bony
neck exposed above the linen of her night dress.

She read, as usual, with the aid of a silver mounted reading glass which
tossed the sentences in enormous capitals well into the range of her
fading vision. On the table beside her stood one of the gilt coffee
cups, a mute witness to the old woman’s disobedience of the doctor’s
orders. Beside it lay two paper backed French novels and on the floor in
the shadow of the table a half dozen more tossed aside carelessly, some
lying properly, others open and sprawled, exposing the ragged edges of
the hastily cut pages.

In the fashion of the ill and aging, she lived nowadays in memories ...
memories of her girlhood when she had ridden John Shane’s wildest mare
Doña Rita recklessly about the paddock of the farm, memories of
Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux and the picnics with French and English
girls in a neatly kept wood at Sèvres, memories of Cypress Hill in the
days immediately after her return when John Shane was still more the
passionate lover than the husband. As she grew older, the memories
became clearer and more vivid, but they were neither vivid nor diverse
enough to occupy all her time. What remained she divided between the
game of patience and the French novels which Lily supplied faithfully,
shipping them from Paris in lots of a dozen at a time.

The old woman had evolved her own scheme of reading, a plan which Irene
condemned by the word “skimming,” but which satisfied Julia Shane
because it revealed the plot without an unnecessary waste of time over
long, involved descriptions of scenery and minute analyses of
incomprehensible Gallic passions. Under the skimming system she read a
few pages at the beginning and then turned to the end to learn the
outcome of the tale. After this, she plunged into the middle of the book
and read a page or two here and there until her curiosity was satisfied
and her interest flagged. And at last the book was tossed aside to be
carried off by the mulatto woman, who never failed to go through each
volume carefully as though by looking at the words frequently enough she
would be able at length to unlock the secrets of foreign tongues. The
books which lay on the floor beside the bed had been “skimmed.” They lay
prostrate and sprawled like the dead soldiers of an army. The titles
served as an index of the old woman’s favorite authors. They appeared
some in black ink, some in red, some even in blue ... Paul Marguerite,
Marcel Prévost, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Collette Willy and, strange
to relate, Anatole France represented by _L’Ile des Penguins_ which, it
seemed, had baffled the “skimming” system, for of all the lot it was the
only volume in which every page had been cut.

After she grew weary, she tossed aside _Les Anges Gardiens_ which she
had been reading and sat leaning back with her eyes closed. Perhaps she
pondered the doings of the four evil governesses in the Prévost tale;
perhaps she turned her thoughts to the Town and Mrs. Julis Harrison whom
she had sent away because she “was not in a mood to be bored.” It is
even possible that she knew at this very moment that in the sandstone
house of the Harrisons, they were discussing her affairs. She was too
wise and too worldly not to have known what Belle Harrison would say of
her. Yet she appeared calm and content enough, completely indifferent to
the opinions of her acquaintances, of the Town--indeed of all the world.
She had reached the time when such things are no longer of any
importance.

So great was her indifference that in more than three months she had
left the house only once and then to follow the coffin of Jacob Barr to
the cemetery on the hill. The old man was dead at last, after an illness
which had drained with a bitter, heart-breaking slowness all the vigor
of his strong and energetic body. On the day of the funeral the foreign
women in Halsted street caught a swift glimpse of the mistress of
Cypress Hill as she drove through on her way to the cemetery. They must
have guessed that it was an event of great importance which drew her
from her seclusion; and indeed it was such an event, for it was the
funeral of the oldest member of the family, the last of all his
generation save Julia Shane.

And after the funeral Julia Shane returned and shut herself in, resolved
to see no one but Irene and her niece, Hattie Tolliver.




XXXV


Whatever her thoughts and memories may have been, they were interrupted
presently by the knock of the mulatto woman who came to bear away the
gilt coffee cup and pile of ravaged novels. The sound of the woman’s
shuffling approach aroused Julia Shane who opened her eyes and said,
“Here, Sarah. Give me a hand. I’ve slipped down.”

Sarah helped lift her once more into a sitting posture. The old woman
raised herself scornfully as if there was between her indomitable spirit
and her wrecked body no bond of any sort, as if she had only contempt
for the body as a thing unworthy of her, a thing which had failed her,
over which she had neither control nor responsibility.

The mulatto woman bent to pick up the scattered novels, and as she stood
up, her mistress, chuckling, said, “My God. They’re tiresome, Sarah.
They never write about anything but _l’amour_. You’d think there was
nothing else in the world. Even _l’amour_ gets to be a bore after a
time.”

The mulatto woman waited obediently. “Yes, Mis’ Shane. I guess you’re
right,” she said presently. At which the old woman smiled.

“And Sarah,” the mistress continued. “When Miss Irene comes in, tell her
I should like to see her. It’s important.”

The servant hesitated for an instant. “But Miss Irene don’t come in till
after midnight, Mis’ Shane.” She spoke with the manner of concealing
something. In her soft voice there was a thin trace of insinuating
suspicion, almost of servile accusation. “That foreign fella brings her
home,” she added.

“It’s all right,” replied the old woman. “I shall be awake.” And then in
a cold voice she added, “I’m sure it’s good of him to bring her home. I
shouldn’t want her wandering about alone at that hour of the night. It’s
very thoughtful of him.”

At midnight, true to her word, she was still awake. She had even managed
to gain her feet painfully and to make her way with unsteady step across
the room to the drawer which held her cigarettes. These too the doctor
had forbidden her.

On the way back to her vast bed, she passed by the window and, drawing
aside the curtain for a moment, she looked out over the hot panorama of
glowing furnaces and tall black chimneys. As she stood there, she saw
entering the wrought iron gates two figures sharply outlined against the
glare of the white arc light in Halsted Street. The woman was Irene. She
was accompanied by Krylenko.

Quietly the old woman extinguished the candle on the table beside her.
The room became a vault of darkness. Beneath her window at the turn in
the drive, the pair halted and stood talking in voices so low that what
they said was inaudible even through the open window. After a time Irene
seated herself wearily on the horseblock. Her frail body sagged with
fatigue. She leaned against the cast iron Cupid who held in one
outstretched hand an iron ring. Krylenko bent over her and his hands,
with the curious, eloquent gestures of an alien, pantomimed their tale
against the distant arc light. Above them in the recessed window the
mother, clinging all the while to the heavy curtains for support,
watched silently. She could hear nothing. She could only keep watch. At
length Irene arose and lifting the ugly black hat from her head, ran her
finger through her loose hair all damp with the terrible heat. Now was
the moment. The old woman, awaiting proof, leaned against the table by
her side.

But there was no proof. There was no embrace, not even the faintest
exchange of intimacies. Krylenko chastely took Irene’s hand, bade her
good-night and turned with his swinging powerful stride down the long
drive. Irene, passing along the gallery by the drawing room, slipped her
key into the lock and entered the house.

Above stairs she found her mother sitting up in bed, lost again in the
midst of _Les Anges Gardiens_. Still carrying the worn hat in her hand,
the daughter came over to the bed. With the increasing illness of the
old woman, Irene’s manner had become more gentle. She even smiled a
tired smile.

“What?” she said playfully. “Are you still awake? Skimming again, I
see.”

Yet her manner was not the manner of a daughter with a mother. Rather it
was that of a casual friend. It was too playful, too forced. The chasm
of thirty years and more was not to be bridged by any amount of strained
cordiality.

Julia Shane put down her reading glass. “I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to
read,” she said.

Irene drew up a chair and sat by the bed. She appeared worn and
exhausted, as though the August heat had drained to the dregs all her
intense, self-inspired vitality.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better ... much better except for the ache in my back.”

Irene’s face grew serious. “You’ve been smoking again,” she said, “after
the doctor forbade you.” The old woman, quite prepared to lie, started
to protest, shaking her head in negation. “It’s no use, Mama ... I saw
you ... I saw the glow of your cigarette at the window.”

(So Irene knew that she had been watched, and there was no need to
protest.) The old woman sat still for a moment twisting the silver
reading glass round and round, her brow contracted in an angry frown as
though she resented bitterly the decay of body which gave any one
authority over her. (That Julia Shane should ever take orders from a
doctor or stand reproved by her own daughter!) It was this angry emotion
that stood revealed and transparent in every line of her face, in the
very defiance of her thin body. At length the frown melted slowly away.

“What sort of a man is he, Irene?” she asked looking straight into her
daughter’s tired eyes. Irene moved uneasily.

“What man?” she asked, “I don’t know who you mean.”

“That foreigner ... I don’t remember his name. You’ve never told me....
You might have told your mother.” There was a note of peevishness in her
voice which sounded queer and alien, almost a portent.

“Oh, Krylenko,” said Irene, twisting her black hat with her thin hands.
“Krylenko.” Then she waited for a moment. “He’s a fine man ... a
wonderful man. He has given up everything for his people.”

“But they are not _your_ people,” observed her mother looking at her
sharply.

“They are my people,” replied Irene softly. “All of them down to the
last baby. If they are not my people, who are?”

The old woman, opposed once more by the inevitable wall of Irene’s
obsessions, frowned. “You are wealthy,” she said. “You were born to a
position.”

In Irene’s smile there was a shade of bitterness. “In this Town?” she
inquired scornfully. “Oh! No! Position in this Town! That’s almost
funny.” She leaned forward a little, pressing her hand against her
forehead. “My people?” she said in a hushed voice. “My people.... Why, I
don’t even know where my father came from.”

The mother, half-buried among the heavy pillows raised herself slowly as
if a wave of new vigor had taken possession of her worn-out body. “Get
me a cigarette, Irene.”

The girl opened her lips to protest, but her mother silenced her.
“Please, Irene, do as I say. It can’t possibly matter what I do now.”

“Please, Mama,” began Irene once more. “The doctor has forbidden it.”
Then Julia Shane gave her daughter a terrible look pregnant with all the
old arrogance and power.

“Will you do as I say, Irene, or must I send for Sarah? She at least
still obeys me.”

For a second, authority hung in the balance. It was the authority of a
lifetime grounded upon a terrific force of will and sustained by the
eternal and certain precedent of obedience. It was the old woman who won
the struggle. It was her last victory. The daughter rose and obediently
brought the cigarettes, even holding the candle to light it. She held
the flame at arm’s length with a gesture of supreme distaste as if she
had been ordered to participate in some unspeakable sin. After she had
replaced the candle, her mother puffed thoughtfully for a time.

“Your father,” she said presently, “was born in Marseilles. His mother
was Spanish and his father Irish. He came to this country because he had
to run away. That’s all I know. He might have told me more if he had not
died suddenly. It’s not likely that any of us will ever know his story,
no matter how hard we try. Life isn’t a story book, you know. In life
there are some things that we never know, even about our own friends,
our own children. Each man’s soul is a secret, which even himself is not
able to reveal.”

For an instant the light of triumph swept Irene’s pale countenance. “You
see!” she said. “I am just like the rest ... like Stepan Krylenko and
all the others. My father was a foreigner.”

The mother’s lips curved in a sudden, scornful smile. “But he was a
gentleman, Irene.... That is something. And your mother was an American.
Her grandfather was the first settler in the wilderness.... The Town was
named for him. Have you no pride?”

“No,” replied Irene, “to be proud is a vice.... I have killed it. I am
not proud. I am like all the others.” And yet there was a fierce pride
in her voice, a smug, fierce, pride in not being proud.

“You are perverse,” said her mother. “You are beyond me. You talk like a
fool....” Irene raised her head to speak but the will of the old woman
swept her back. “I know,” she continued. “You think it is saintly. Does
it ever occur to you that it might only be smugness?”

The old eyes flashed with anger and resentment, emotions which merely
shattered themselves against the barrier of Irene’s smiling and fanatic
sense of righteousness. A look of obstinacy entered her face. (She
regarded herself as superior to Julia Shane! Incredible!)

“You amaze me, Irene. Your hardness is beyond belief. If you could be
soft for a moment, gentle and generous ... like Lily.”

The daughter’s hands tightened about the battered old hat.

“It’s always Lily,” she said bitterly. “It’s always Lily.... Lily this
and Lily that. She’s everywhere. Every one praises her ... even Cousin
Hattie.” The stubborn look of smugness again descended upon her face.
“Well, let them praise her ... I know that it is I who am right, I who
am good in the sight of God.” And then for the first time in all the
memory of Julia Shane, a look of anger, cold and unrelenting came into
the eyes of her daughter. “Lily! Lily!” she cried scornfully, “I hate
Lily.... May God forgive me!”




XXXVI


Then for a long time a silence descended upon the room. Julia Shane
crushed out the embers of her cigarette and fell once more to turning
the silver mounted reading glass round and round, regarding it fixedly
with the look of one hypnotized. At last she turned again to her
daughter.

“Are you going to marry him?” she asked.

“No, of course not.”

“I should be satisfied, if he is as fine as you say he is. I would
rather see you married before I die, Irene.”

The daughter shook her head stubbornly. “I shall never marry any one.”

The old woman smiled shrewdly. “You are wrong, my girl. You are wrong. I
haven’t had a very happy time, but I wouldn’t have given it up. It is a
part of life, knowing love and having children.... Love can be so many
things, but at least it is part of life ... the greatest part of all.
Without it life is nothing.”

For a long time Irene remained silent. She kept her eyes cast down and
when she spoke again it was without raising them. “But Lily ...” she
began shrewdly. “She has never married.” It was the old retort, always
Lily. Her mother saw fit to ignore it, perhaps because, knowing what she
knew, it was impossible to answer it.

“You’ve been seeing a great deal of this Krylenko,” she said. “It’s been
going on for years ... since before Lily was here the last time. That’s
years ago.”

Irene looked up suddenly and a glint of anger lighted her pale eyes.
“Who’s been talking to you about me?... I know. It’s Cousin Hattie. She
was here to-day. Oh, why can’t people let me alone? I harm no one. I
want to be left in peace.”

Then Julia Shane, perhaps because she already knew too well the
antipathy between her coldly virginal daughter and her niece whose whole
life was her children, deliberately lied.

“Cousin Hattie did not even mention it.” She turned her eyes away from
the light. “I would like to see you married, Irene,” she repeated. It
was clear that for some reason the old hope, forgotten since that
tumultuous visit of the Governor, was revived again. It occupied the old
woman’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

“There is nothing between us, Mama,” said Irene. “Nothing at all. Can’t
you see. We’ve been friends all along. I taught him to read English. I
got him books.” Her voice wavered a little and her hands trembled. It
was as if she had become a little girl again, the same girl who, in a
white muslin dress with a blue sash, sobbed alone on the sofa in the
library beneath John Shane’s portrait. “I’ve made him what he is,” she
continued. “Don’t you see. I’m proud of him. When I found him, he was
nothing ... only a stupid Ukrainian boy who was rebellious and rude to
me. And now he works with me. He’s willing to sacrifice himself for
those people. We understand each other. All we want is to be left alone,
Don’t you understand? I’m just proud of him because I’ve made him what
he is. I’m nothing,” she stammered. “I’m nothing to him in that way at
all. That would spoil everything ... like something evil, intruding upon
us.”

The pale tired face glowed with a kind of religious fervor. For an
instant there was something maternal and exalted in her look. All the
plainness vanished, replaced suddenly by a feverish beauty. The plain,
exhausted old maid had disappeared.

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” asked the old woman.

“You never asked me.... You never wanted to know what I was doing. You
were always interested in Lily. How could you ever have thought I’d
marry him? I’m years older.” Suddenly she extended her arms with a
curious exhibitive gesture like a gesture Lily sometimes made when she
was looking her loveliest. “Look at me. I’m old and battered and ugly.
How could he ever love me in that way? He is young.”

The thin hands dropped listlessly into her lap and lay against the worn
black serge. She fell silent, all exhausted by the emotion. Her mother
stared at her with the look of one who has just penetrated the soul of a
stranger. Irene, it appeared, was suddenly revealed to her.

“Why, you know he’s never looked at a woman,” Irene continued in a
lowered voice. “He’s lived in the Flats all these years and he’s never
looked at a woman. Do you know what that means in the Flats?” Her voice
dropped still lower. “Of course, you don’t know, because you know
nothing about the Flats,” she added with a shade of bitterness.

At this her mother smiled. “The rest of the world is not so different,
Irene.”

But Irene ignored her. “He’s worked hard all these years to make himself
worth while and to help his people. He’s never had time to be bad.” Her
mother smiled faintly again. Perhaps she smiled at the spinsterish word
by which Irene chose to designate fornication.

“He’s pure,” continued Irene. “He’s fine and noble and pure. I want to
keep him so.”

“You are making of him a saint,” observed the old woman drily.

“He is a saint! That’s just what he is,” cried Irene. “And you mock him,
you and Lily.... Oh, I know ... I know you both. He’s been driven from
the Mills for what he’s done for the people in the Flats. He’s been put
on a black list so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me
so to-night. That’s what he was telling me when you stood watching us.”
A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. “But it’s too
late!” she cried. “It’s too late.... They’ve voted to strike. It begins
to-morrow. Stepan is the one behind it.”

It was as if a terrible war, long hanging in the balance, had suddenly
become a reality. Julia Shane, propped among the pillows, turned
restlessly and sighed.

“What fools men are!” she said, almost to herself. “What fools!” And
then to Irene. “It won’t be easy, Irene. It’ll be cruel. You’d best go
to bed now, dear. You look desperately tired. You’ll have plenty of work
before you.”

Irene pressed a cold, distant kiss on the ivory cheek of her mother and
turned to leave.

“Shall I put out the light?”

“Yes, please.”

The room subsided into darkness and Irene, opening the door, suddenly
heard her mother’s voice.

“Oh, Irene.” The voice was weary, listless. “I’ve written for Lily to
come home. The doctor told me to-day that I could not possibly live
longer than Christmas. I forced it out of him. There was no use in
having nonsense. I wanted to know.”

And Irene, instead of going to her own room, returned and knelt by the
side of her mother’s bed. The hardness melted and she sobbed, perhaps
because the old woman who faced death with such proud indifference was
so far beyond the need of prayer and comfort.

Yet when the smoky dawn appeared at last, it found Irene in her own
chaste room still kneeling in prayer before the pink and blue Sienna
Virgin.

“Oh, Blessed Virgin,” she prayed, from the summit of her complacency.
“Forgive my mother her sins of pride and her lack of charity. Forgive my
sister her weakness of the flesh. Enter into their hearts and make them
good women. Make them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Enter into
the heart of my sister and cleanse her. Make her a good woman ... a pure
woman, loving only those things which are holy. Cleanse her of the lusts
of the flesh!”

Her pale eyes were wet with tears. Although she prayed to a plaster
Virgin in pink gilt, she used the sonorous rolling words drawn all
unconsciously from the memories of a Presbyterian childhood. And the
Lily for whom she prayed ... the Lily who had been sent for ... was
there in the old house just as she was always in the Town and in the
memories of those who knew her beauty, her tolerance and her charm.
There were, indeed, times when Krylenko, caught perhaps in the memory of
a night when he stood in the melting snow peering into the windows of
Shane’s Castle, spoke of her; and these were times when Irene turned
away from him, frightened by the shadow of something in his eyes.




XXXVII


It became known as the Great Strike and it served to mark an epoch. Long
afterward people in the Town said, “It was the year of the Great Strike”
as they said, “It was the year of the Spanish-American War” or “the year
that Bryan was a candidate for the first time.” Willie Harrison found a
use for his enclosures of barbed wire and his heavily barricaded gates.
As the strike progressed and the violence increased, other machines of
warfare were set up ... such things as machine guns and searchlights
which at night fingered the Flats and the sky above with shafts of white
light, rigid and unbending as steel.

In one sense the strike was a Godsend. When the Mills shut down there
were no more fires in the ovens and the furnaces; no more soot fell in
clouds like infernal snow over the low eminence of Cypress Hill and the
squalid expanse of the Flats. For the first time in a score of years the
sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of
hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear
and white, a sun such as God intended it to be. But even more remarkable
was the blanket of silence which descended upon all the district. With
the banking of the fires, there was no more hammering, and in place of
the titanic clamor there was a stillness so profound and so unusual that
people noticed it as people notice a sudden clap of loud thunder and
remark upon it to each other. The silence became noisy.

In the house at Cypress Hill the world of Julia Shane narrowed from the
castle itself to a single room and at last to the vast Italian bed. It
was seldom that she gathered sufficient strength to struggle to her feet
and make her way, leaning on the ebony and silver stick, to the window
where the Mill yards and the Flats lay spread out beneath her gaze.
During those last months she knew again the stillness which enveloped
the Cypress Hill of her youth. But there was a difference; the green
marshes were gone forever, buried beneath the masses of cinders, clay
and refuse upon which the Mills raised their sheds and towers and the
Flats its flimsy, dirty, matchwood houses, all smoke stained and rotting
at the eaves. The lush smell of damp growing things was replaced by the
faint odor of crowded, sweating humanity. Not one slim cat-tail, not one
feathery willow remained in all the desert of industry. There was,
however, a sound which had echoed over the swamps almost a hundred years
earlier, a sound which had not been heard since the days when Julia
Shane’s grandfather built about what was now the public square of the
Town a stockade to protect the first settlers from the redskins. It was
the sound of guns. Sometimes as she sat at the window, there arose a
distant rat-tat-tat like the noise of a typewriter but more staccato and
savage, followed by a single crack or two. She discovered at length the
origin of the sound. In the Mill yard beneath her window a target had
been raised, and at a little distance off men lay on their stomachs
pointing rifles mounted upon tripods. Sometimes they fired at rusty
buckets and old tin cans because these things did not remain stupid and
inanimate like the target, but jumped and whirled about in the most
tortured fashion when the bullets struck them, as though they had lives
which might be destroyed. It made the game infinitely more fascinating
and spirited. The men who indulged in this practise were, she learned
from Hennery, the hired guards whom the Harrisons and Judge Weissman had
brought in to protect the Mills, riff-raff and off-scourings from the
slums of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

There came a day, after the sights and sounds of the Mill yard had
become a matter of indifference to the old woman, when the doctor
forbade her to leave her bed if she wished to survive the day set for
Lily’s arrival. It was October, and the park remained unchanged save
that the atmosphere was less hot and the sun shone more clearly; for the
trees and shrubs on the low hill were long since dead and far beyond the
stage of sending out new leaves to fall at the approach of winter. It
was bald now and very old. The brick house, dominating all the horizon,
stood out day after day gaunt and blackened by soot against the
brilliant October sky.

Lily had been delayed. Before leaving Paris she wrote to her mother and
Irene that it was necessary for her to take a small boy, the son of a
friend, to England. After placing him in school there, she wrote, she
would sail at once for America and come straight to Cypress Hill. There
were also matters of business which might delay her; but she would not
arrive later than the middle of November. So Julia Shane set herself to
battling with Death, bent upon beating Him off until she had seen Lily
once more.




XXXVIII


In those days, because it was difficult and dangerous for any one to
visit Cypress Hill and because, after all, no one had any particular
reason to visit it, there was at the old house, only one caller beside
the doctor. This was Hattie Tolliver, whose strength had given way a
little to an increasing stoutness but whose pride and spirit flagged not
at all. To the police and the hired guards at the Mills, she became as
familiar a figure as the doctor himself. She came on foot, since all
service on the clanging trolley cars of Halsted street was long since
suspended, her large powerful body clad in black clothes of good
quality, a basket suspended over one arm and the inevitable umbrella
swinging from the other. She walked with a sort of fierce disdain
directed with calculated ostentation alike at the Mill guards, the
police, and the dwellers of the Flats who viewed her bourgeois approach
with a sullen hostility. The basket contained delicacies concocted by
her own skilled and housewifely hand ... the most golden of custards,
the most delicate of rennets, fragile biscuits baked without sugar--in
short, every sort of thing which might please the palate of an invalid
accustomed to excellent food.

In effect, Cypress Hill fell slowly into a state of siege. Surrounded on
three sides by the barrier of barbed wire, the sole means of egress was
the long drive turning into Halsted street. Here there was danger, for
disorders occurred frequently at the very wrought iron gates, now rusted
and broken. Stones were hurled by the strikers and shots fired by the
police. The wagons of the Town no longer delivered goods at a spot so
isolated and dangerous, and the duties of supplying the place with food
came gradually to be divided between Irene and Hattie Tolliver, whose
lack of friendliness and understanding toward each other approached an
open hatred. They alone of the little garrison went in and out of the
wrought iron gates; for Hennery and the mulatto woman were far too
terrified by the disorders outside ever to venture into the Town.

On the day of Lily’s letter Hattie Tolliver, bearing a well-laden
basket, arrived and went at once to Aunt Julia’s room. She brooked no
interference from the mulatto woman.

After bidding Sarah place the contents of the basket in a cool place she
swept by the servant with a regal swish of black skirts.

Upstairs in the twilight Julia Shane lay in the enormous bed, flat on
her back staring at the ceiling. At the approach of her niece she raised
herself a little and asked in a feeble voice to be propped up. It was as
though the approach of her vigorous rosy-faced niece endowed her with a
sudden energy.

“And how are you?” asked Hattie Tolliver when she had smoothed the
pillows with an expert hand and made the old woman more comfortable than
she had been in many days.

“The same ... just the same,” was the monotonous answer. “Lily is a long
time in coming.”

Cousin Hattie went to the windows and flung back the curtains. “Light
and air will do you good,” she said. “There’s nothing like light and
air.” And then turning, “Why don’t you make Sarah keep the windows
open?”

Julia Shane sat up more straightly, breathing in the crisp air. “I tell
her to ... but she doesn’t like air,” she said weakly.

“You let her bully you! She needs some one to manage her. I’m surprised
Irene doesn’t put her in her place.”

The old woman smiled. “Irene,” she said. “Irene.... Why she’s too meek
ever to get on with servants. It’s no use ... her trying anything.”

“I’ve brought you a custard and some cakes,” continued her niece, at the
same time flicking bits of dust from the dressing table with her
handkerchief and setting the pillows of the chaise longue in order with
a series of efficient pats. “There’s going to be trouble ... real
trouble before long. The strikers are getting bolder.”

“They’re getting more hungry too, Irene says,” replied the old woman.
“Perhaps that’s why.”

Cousin Hattie came over to the bed now and sat herself down, at the
same time taking out a pillow-case which she set herself to hemming.
“You know what they’re saying in the Town,” she remarked. “They’re
saying that Irene is helping the strike by giving the strikers money.”

To this the old woman made no reply and Cousin Hattie continued. “I
don’t see the sense in that. The sooner every one gets to work, the
better. It isn’t safe in Halsted street any longer. I’m surprised at
Irene helping those foreigners against the Harrisons. I didn’t think she
had the spirit to take sides in a case like this.”

Julia Shane moved her weary body into a more comfortable position. “She
doesn’t take sides. She only wants to help the women and children.... I
suppose she’s right after all.... They are like the rest of us.”

At this Cousin Hattie gave a grunt of indignation. “They didn’t have to
come to this country. I’m sure nobody wants ’em.”

“The Mills want them,” said her aunt. “The Mills want them and the Mills
want more and more all the time.”

“But I don’t see why we have to suffer because the Mills want
foreigners. There ought to be some law against it.”

As though there seemed to be no answer to this, Julia Shane turned on
her side and remarked. “I had a letter from Lily to-day.”

Her niece put down the pillow case and regarded her with shining eyes.
Her heavy body became alive and vibrant. “What did she say? Was there
any news of Ellen? Shall I read it?”

“No, go on with your work. If you prop me a little higher and give me my
glass, I’ll read it.”

This operation completed, she read the letter through. It was not until
Ellen’s name occurred that Cousin Hattie displayed any real interest. At
the sound of her daughter’s name, the woman put down her sewing and
assumed an attitude of passionate listening.

“Ellen,” ran the letter, “is doing splendidly. She is contented here and
is working hard under Philippe. She plays better than ever ... if that
is possible, and plans to make her début in London next year. She has
every reason to make a great success. I am leaving her in my house when
I come to America. She gets on beautifully with Madame Gigon. That was
my greatest worry, for Madame Gigon has grown worse as she has grown
older. But she has taken a fancy to Ellen ... fortunately, so everything
is perfect. Tell Cousin Hattie that one day she will be proud of her
daughter.”

Julia Shane, when she had finished, put down the letter, and regarded
her niece. “You see, Hattie,” she said, “there is no need to worry.
Everything is going splendidly. Ellen couldn’t be in better hands. Lily
knows her way about the world a great deal better than most. Some day
your daughter will be famous.”

There came no response from her niece. Mrs. Tolliver sat upright and
thoughtful. Presently she took up the pillow case and set to work again.

“These débuts,” she said. “They cost money, don’t they?”

“Yes,” replied her aunt.

“Well where is Ellen to get it? Clarence’s life insurance must all be
gone by this time.”

“I suppose Lily has found a way. Lily is clever. Besides Ellen isn’t
altogether helpless.”

Again there was a thoughtful pause and the old woman said, “I don’t
think you’d be pleased if Ellen _was_ a great success.”

“I don’t know. I’d be more pleased if I had her nearer to me. I don’t
like the idea of her being in Paris. It’s not a healthy place. It’s the
wickedest city in the world.”

“Come, Hattie. You mustn’t forget Ellen was made to live in the world.
You brought her up to be successful and famous. It’s your fault if you
have reason to be proud of her.”

Into this single sentence or two Julia Shane managed to condense a whole
epic. It was an epic of maternal sacrifices, of a household kept without
servants so that the children might profit by the money saved, of plans
which had their beginning even before the children were born, of hopes
and ambitions aroused skilfully by a woman who now sat deserted, hemming
a pillow-case to help dispel her loneliness. She had, in effect, brought
about her own sorrow. They were gone now, Ellen to Paris, Fergus and
Robert to New York. It was in their very blood. All this was written,
after all, in the strong proud face bent low over the pillow-case ... an
epic of passionate maternity.

“We have to expect these things of our children,” continued Aunt Julia.
“I’m old enough to know that it’s no new story, and I’ve lived long
enough to know that we have no right to demand of them the things which
seem to us the only ones worth while. Every one of us is different from
the others. There are no two in the least alike. And no one ever really
knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and
hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows
his wife, Hattie, and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is
always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched,
mysterious and undiscoverable because we ourselves do not know just what
it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious,
ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal
it....”




XXXIX


At the close of this long speech, the old woman fell into a fit of
coughing and her niece rose quickly to bring more medicine and water. If
Hattie Tolliver had understood even for a moment these metaphysical
theories, they were forgotten in the confusion of the coughing fit. It
is more than probable that she understood nothing of the speech and
probable that she was too far lost in thoughts of Ellen to have heard
it. In any case, she was, like most good mothers and housewives, a pure
realist who dealt in terms of the material. At least she gave no sign,
and when the coughing fit was over, she returned at once to the main
thread of the conversation.

“These careers,” she said, “may be all right but I think that Ellen
might be happier if she had something more sound ... like a husband and
children and a home.”

It was useless to argue with her. Like all women whose domestic life has
been happy and successful, she could not be convinced that there was
anything in the world more desirable than the love of a good husband and
children. With her it was indeed something even stronger--a tribal
instinct upon which life itself is founded. She was a fundamental person
beside whom Irene and Lily, even her own daughter Ellen, were sports in
the biological sense. They were removed by at least two generations from
the soil. In them the struggle for life had become transvalued into a
pursuit of the arts, of religion, of pleasure itself.

In the gathering twilight, Hattie Tolliver brought a lamp and lighted it
to work by. Julia Shane watched her silently for a time, observing the
strong neck, the immaculate full curve of her niece’s figure, the
certainty with which the strong worn fingers moved about their delicate
work.

“You remember,” she said, “that Lily mentioned a boy ... a young boy, in
her letter?”

“Yes,” replied Hattie Tolliver, without glancing from her work. “The
child of a friend. I thought she might have passed him by to come home
to her mother.... Funny how children can forget you.”

Julia Shane stirred softly in the deep bed. “I thought you might be
thinking that,” she said. “I thought it would be better to tell you the
truth. I wanted you to know anyway. The truth is, Hattie, that the child
is her own. She is more interested in him than in me, and that’s natural
enough and quite proper.”

The strong fingers paused abruptly in their work and lay motionless
against the white linen. Hattie Tolliver’s face betrayed her amazement;
yet clearly she was a little amused.

“Charles always said there was something mysterious about Lily,” she
said. “But I never guessed she’d been secretly married.”

The old woman, hesitating, coughed before she replied, as though the
supremely respectable innocence of her niece somehow made her
inarticulate. At last she summoned strength.

“But she’s never been married, Hattie. There never was any ceremony.”

“Then how ...” In Mrs. Tolliver’s face the amazement spread until her
countenance was one great interrogation.

“Children,” interrupted her aunt in a voice filled with tremulous calm,
“can be born without marriage certificates. They have nothing to do with
legal processes.”

For a long time the niece kept silent, fingering the while the half
finished pillow case. It appeared that she found some new and marvelous
quality in it. She fingered the stuff as though she were in the act of
purchasing it across a counter. At last she raised her head.

“Then it was true ... that old story?” she asked.

“What story?”

“The one they told in the Town ... about Lily’s _having_ to go away to
Paris.”

“Yes.... But no one ever really knew. They only guessed. They knew
nothing at all. And they know nothing more to-day.” The old woman paused
for a second as though to give her words emphasis. “I’m trusting you
never to tell, Hattie. I wanted you to know because if ever it was
necessary, I wanted Lily to come to you for help. It never will be. It
isn’t likely.”

Hattie Tolliver sat up very stiff and red. “Tell!” she said, “Tell! Who
should I ever tell in the Town? Why should I tell any of them?” The
tribal instinct rose in triumph. It was a matter of her family against
the Mills, the Town, all the world if necessary. Torture could not have
dragged from her the truth.

Yet Hattie Tolliver was not unmoved by the confession. It may even have
been that she herself long ago had suspicions of the truth which had
withered and died since from too much doubt. To a woman of her nature
the news of a thousand strikes, of murder and of warfare was as nothing
beside the thing Julia Shane revealed. For a long time she said nothing
at all, but her strong fingers spoke for her. They worked faster and
more skilfully than ever, as if all her agitation was pouring itself out
through their tips. The fingers and the flying needle said, “That this
should have happened in our family! I can’t believe it. Perhaps Aunt
Julia is so sick that her mind is weakened. Surely she must imagine this
tale. Such things happen only to servant girls. All this is unreal. It
cannot be true. Lily could not be so happy, so buoyant if this were
true. Sinners can only suffer and be miserable.”

All this time she remained silent, breathing heavily, and when at last
she spoke, it was to ask, “Who was the man?” in so terrible a voice that
the old woman on the bed started for a moment and then averted her face
lest her niece see the ghost of a smile which slipped out unwilled.

“It was the Governor,” the aunt replied at last.

And then, “Why would he not marry her?” in a voice filled with
accumulations of hatred and scorn for the ravishers of women.

This time Julia Shane did not smile. Her pride,--the old fierce and
arrogant pride--was touched.

“Oh,” she replied, “it was not that. It was Lily who refused to marry
him. He begged her ... on his knees he begged her. I saw him. He would
have been glad enough to have her.”

And this led only to a “Why?” to which the old woman answered that she
did not know except that Lily had said she wished to be herself and go
her own way, that she was content and would not marry him even if he
became president. “Beyond that, I do not know,” she said. “That is where
a mother does not know even her own daughter. I don’t believe Lily knows
herself. Can you tell why it is that Ellen must go on studying and
studying, why she cannot help it? Can I know why Irene wants only to be
left in peace to go her own way? No, we never really know any one.”

All this swept over the head of Hattie Tolliver. She returned to one
thing. “It would not have been a bad match. He is a senator now.”

It had grown quite dark during their talk and from inside the barrier of
the Mills the searchlights began to operate, at first furtively and in
jerky fashion and then slowly with greater and greater deliberation,
sweeping in gigantic arcs the sky and the squalid area of the Flats. A
dozen times in their course the hard white beams swept the walls of the
barren old house, penetrating even the room where Julia Shane lay slowly
dying. The flashes of light came suddenly, bathing in an unearthly glow
and with a dazzling clarity the walls and the furniture. At last, as the
beams swept the face of the ormulu clock, Hattie Tolliver, rising,
folded her pillow case and thrust it into the black bag she carried.

“I must go now,” she said. “Charlie will be wanting his supper.”

The old woman asked her to bend down while she kissed her. It was the
first time she had ever made such a request and she passed over the
extraordinary event by hastily begging her niece to draw the curtains.

“The lights make me nervous,” she said. “I don’t know why, but they are
worse than the noise the Mills used to make.”

And when this operation was completed she summoned her niece again to
her side. “Would you like to see a picture of Lily’s boy?”

Hattie Tolliver nodded.

“It is in the top drawer of the chiffonier. Will you fetch it to me?”

Her niece brought the picture and for a time the two women regarded it
silently. It was the photograph of a handsome child, singularly like
Lily although there was something of the Governor’s rather florid good
looks, particularly about the high sweeping forehead.

“He is a fine child, isn’t he?” the old woman remarked. “I never
expected to have a grandchild named Shane.”

Still regarding the picture with a sort of fascination, Mrs. Tolliver
replied, “He is a darling, isn’t he? Does she call him that?”

“Of course. What would she call him?”

“Yes, he is a fine lad. He looks like our family.” And then after a long
pause she added, “I’m glad you told me all the story. I’m glad Lily did
what she did deliberately. I should hate to think that any of us would
be weak enough to let a man take advantage of her. That makes a great
difference.”

After she had put on her small black hat trimmed with worn and stubby
ostrich plumes, she turned for the last time. “If you have another of
those pictures, Aunt Julia, I would like to have one. I’d like to show
it to Charles. He’s always admired Lily. It’s funny what a way she has
with men.”

There was no sting in the remark. It was a simple declaration, spoken as
though the truth of it had occurred to her for the first time. She was
too direct and vigorous to be feline.

As she closed the door the voice of her aunt trailed weakly after. “You
needn’t worry about Ellen. All her strength and character is your
strength and character, Hattie. She can take care of herself.”

The niece turned in the doorway, her thick strong figure blocking the
shower of dim light from the hall. “No,” she said. “It’s not as though
Lily were bad. She isn’t bad. I’ve always had an idea that she knew what
she was about. I suppose she has her own ideas on life. Perhaps she
lives up to them. I can’t say they’re my ideas.” For a second she leaned
against the frame of the door, searching with an air of physical effort
for words to express her thoughts. “No, she isn’t bad,” she continued.
“No one who ever knew her can say she is a bad woman. I can’t explain
what I mean, but I suppose she believes in what she does.”

And with this wise and mysterious observation Mrs. Tolliver returned to
the world of the concrete--her own world--swept down the long stairway
and into the kitchen where she reclaimed her basket, and left the house
without waiting for the hostile mulatto woman to open the door.




XL


Perhaps because she was so dazed and fascinated by the story which Julia
Shane had poured into her astonished ears, she walked in a sort of dream
to the foot of the long drive where she found herself suddenly embroiled
in a waking nightmare. On all sides of her there rose a great tumult and
shouting. Stones were thrown. Cries rang out in barbaric tongues. Men
struggled and fought, and above the men on foot rose the figures of the
constabulary mounted on wild and terrified horses who charged and
curvetted as their masters struck about them with heavy clubs.

Through all this, Hattie Tolliver passed with an air of the most
profound detachment and scorn, somewhat in the manner of a great
sea-going freighter riding the waves of an insignificant squall. She
carried her head high, despising the Irish constabulary as profoundly as
she despised the noisy alien rabble. Clearly it was none of her affair.
This embroiled rabble had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her
family, nothing to do with her world. The riot was as nothing beside the
tale that kept running through her mind, blinding her senses to all the
struggle that took place at her very side.

And then, suddenly and without warning, the crack of a pistol tore the
air; then another and another, and there fell at the feet of Hattie
Tolliver, completely blocking her overwhelming progress, the body of a
swarthy man with heavy black mustaches. Before she was able to move, one
of the constabulary, rushing up, kicked the prostrate body of the
groaning man.

But he did not kick twice, for he was repulsed a second later by the
savage thrust in the stomach from the umbrella of Mrs. Tolliver who,
rushing to the attack, cried out, “Get away, you filthy brute!... You
dirty coward!”

And the trooper, seeing no doubt that she was not one of the
foreigners, retired sheepishly before the menace of the angry mob to
join his fellows.

The basket and umbrella were cast aside and Mrs. Tolliver, bending over
the writhing man, searched for the wound. When she looked up again she
found, standing over her, the gigantic steel worker who she knew was
Irene’s friend. She did not know his name.

“Here,” she said, with the manner of a field marshal. “Help me get this
fellow into the house over there.”

Without a word, Krylenko bent down, picked up the stricken workman and
bore him, laid across his brawny shoulders, into the corner saloon
whither Hattie Tolliver with her recovered basket and umbrella followed
him, surrounded by a protecting phalanx of excited and gibbering
strikers.

The saloon was empty, for all the hangers-on had drifted long before
into the streets to watch the riot from a safe distance. But the
electrical piano kept up its uncanny uproar playing over and over again,
Bon-Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop and I’m Afraid to go Home in the Dark.

There on the bar, among the empty glasses, Krylenko laid the unconscious
striker and Hattie Tolliver, with the scissors she had used but a moment
before in hemstitching a pillow-case, cut away the soiled shirt and
dressed the wound. When her work was done she ordered Krylenko to take
down one of the swinging doors and on this the strikers bore the wounded
man to his own house.

When the little procession had vanished around a corner, Mrs. Tolliver
brushed her black clothes, gathered up her basket and umbrella and set
out up the hill to the Town. It was the first time she had ever set foot
inside an establishment which sold intoxicating liquors.

Behind her in the darkened room at Cypress Hill, the sound of shots and
cries came distantly to Julia Shane as through a high impenetrable wall,
out of another world. At the moment she was alive in a world of
memories, a world as real and as tangible as the world of the Mills and
the Flats, for the past may be quite as real as the present. It is a
vast country full of trees and houses, animals and friends, where people
may go on having adventures as long as they live. And the sounds she
heard in her world bore no relation to the sounds in sordid Halsted
street. They were the sounds of pounding hoofs on hard green turf, and
the cries of admiration from a little group of farmers and townspeople
who leaned on the rail of John Shane’s paddock while his wife, with a
skilful hand sent his sleek hunter Doña Rita over the bars--first five,
then six and last of all and marvelous to relate, a clean seven!

A stained and dusty photograph slipped from her thin fingers and lost
itself among the mountainous bedclothing which she found impossible to
keep in order. It was the portrait of a youngish man with a full black
beard and eyes that were wild, passionate, adventurous ... the portrait
of John Shane, the lover, as he returned to his wife at the school of
Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.




XLI


As Julia Shane grew weaker, it was Cousin Hattie Tolliver who “took
hold” of the establishment at Shane’s Castle. It was always Mrs.
Tolliver, capable and housewifely, who “took hold” in a family crisis.
She managed funerals, weddings and christenings. Cousins came to die at
her shabby house in the Town. She gathered into her large strong hands
the threads of life and death that stretched themselves through a family
scattered from Paris to Australia. Her relatives embroiled themselves in
scrapes, they grew ill, they lost or made fortunes, they succumbed to
all the weaknesses to which the human flesh is prone; and always, at the
definitive moment, they turned to Hattie Tolliver as to a house built
upon a rock.

Irene, so capable in succoring the miserable inhabitants of the Flats,
grew helpless when death peered in at the tall windows of Shane’s
Castle. Besides, she had her own work to do. As the strike progressed
she came to spend days and nights in the squalid houses of Halsted
street, returning at midnight to inquire after her mother. She knew
nothing of managing a house and Hattie Tolliver knew these things
intimately. More than that, Mrs. Tolliver enjoyed “taking hold”; and she
extracted, beyond all doubt, a certain faintly malicious satisfaction in
taking over the duties which should have fallen upon Irene, while Irene
spent her strength, her very life, in helping people unrelated to her,
people who were not even Americans.

So it was Hattie Tolliver, wearing a spotless apron and bearing a
dustcloth, who opened the door when Hennery, returning from his solitary
and heroic venture outside the gates, drove Lily up from the dirty red
brick station, bringing this time no great trunks covered with gay
labels of Firenze and Sorrento but a pair of black handbags and a small
trunk neatly strapped. It may have been that Hennery, as Irene hinted
bitterly, made that perilous journey through the riots of Halsted street
only because it was Mis’ Lily who was returning. Certainly no other
cause had induced him to venture outside the barren park.

The encounter, for Hattie Tolliver, was no ordinary one. From her manner
it was clear that she was opening the door to a woman ... her own cousin
... who had lived in sin, who had borne a child out of wedlock. Indeed
the woman might still be living in sin. Paris was a Babylon where it was
impossible to know any one’s manner of living. Like all the others, Mrs.
Tolliver had lived all her life secure in the belief that she knew Lily.
She remembered the day of her cousin’s birth ... a snowy blustering day.
She knew Lily throughout her childhood. She knew her as a woman. “Lily,”
she undoubtedly told herself, “was thus and so. If any one knows Lily, I
know her.” And then all this knowledge had been upset suddenly by a
single word from Lily’s mother. It was necessary to create a whole new
pattern. The woman who stood on the other side of the door was not Lily
at all--at least not the old Lily--but a new woman, a stranger, whom she
did not know. There might be, after all, something in what Aunt Julia
said about never really knowing any one.

All this her manner declared unmistakably during the few strained
seconds that she stood in the doorway facing her cousin. For an instant,
while the two women, the worldly and the provincial, faced each other,
the making of family history hung in the balance. It was Mrs. Tolliver
who decided the issue. Suddenly she took her beautiful cousin into her
arms, encircling her in an embrace so warm and so filled with defiance
of all the world that Lily’s black hat, trimmed with camelias, was
knocked awry.

“Your poor mother!” were Cousin Hattie’s first words. “She is very low
indeed. She has been asking for you.”

And so Lily won another victory in her long line of conquests, a victory
which she must have known was a real triumph in which to take a profound
pride.

Then while Lily took off her hat and set her fine hair in order, her
cousin poured out the news of the last few days. It was news of a sort
that warmed the heart of Mrs. Tolliver ... news of Julia Shane’s illness
delivered gravely with a vast embroidery of detail, a long account of
the mulatto woman’s insolence and derelictions which increased as the
old woman grew weaker; and, last of all, an eloquent and denunciatory
account of Irene’s behavior.

“She behaves,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “as though a daughter had no
obligations toward her own mother.” Her face grew scarlet with
indignation at this flouting of family ties. “She spends all her time in
the Flats among those foreigners and never sees her own mother more than
a minute or two a day. There she lies, a sick and dying woman, grieving
because her daughter neglects her. You’d think Irene loved the strikers
more ... especially one young fellow who is the leader,” she added
darkly.

Lily, knowing her mother, must have guessed that Cousin Hattie’s account
suffered from a certain emotional exaggeration. The picture of old Julia
Shane, grieving because her daughter neglected her, was not a convincing
one. The old woman was too self reliant for that sort of behavior. She
expected too little from the world.

But Lily said nothing. She unstrapped her bag and brought out a fresh
handkerchief and a bottle of scent. Then she raised her lovely head and
looked sharply at her cousin. “I suppose it’s this same Krylenko,” she
said. “D’you think she’s in love with him?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Tolliver shrewdly, “I don’t think she loves anybody
or anything but her own soul. She’s like a machine. She has an idea she
loves the strikers but that’s only because she thinks she’s saving her
soul by good works. I suppose it makes her happy. Only yesterday I told
her, thinking it would be a hint, that charity begins at home.” For a
moment Mrs. Tolliver waited thoughtfully, and then she added, “You know,
sometimes Irene looks at her mother as if she wanted her to make haste
with her dying. I’ve noticed the look--more than once.”

And so they talked for a time, as people always talked of Irene, as if
she were a stranger, a curiosity, something which stood outside the
realm of human understanding. And out of the ruin of Irene’s character,
Hattie Tolliver rose phoenix-like, triumphant, as the heroine who had
seen Irene’s duty and taken it upon herself.

“You know, I’m nursing your mother,” she continued. “She wouldn’t have a
nurse because she couldn’t bear to have a stranger in the house. She has
that one idea now ... seeing no one but the doctor and her own family.
Now that you’ve come, I suppose she won’t even see the doctor any more.
She’s asleep now, so I came down-stairs to put the house into some sort
of order. Heaven knows what it would have been like if the drawing-room
had been open too. That mulatto woman,” she added bitterly, “hasn’t
touched a thing in weeks.”

Silently, thoughtfully, Lily pushed open the double doors into the
drawing-room.

“It’s not been opened since you left,” continued Mrs. Tolliver. “Not
even for the Christmas party. But that wasn’t necessary because there
aren’t many of us left. You could put all of us into the library.
There’s only Eva Barr and Charles and me. The old ones are all dead and
the young ones have gone away.” For a moment she paused, for Lily
appeared not to be listening. Then she added softly, “But I guess you
know all that. I’d forgotten Ellen was living with you.”

For the time being, the conversation ended while the two women, Lily in
her smart suit from the Rue de la Paix and Hattie Tolliver in shiny
black alpaca with apron and dustcloth, stood in the doorway reverently
surveying the vast old room, so dead now and so full of memories. The
rosewood chairs, shrouded like ghosts, appeared dimly in the light that
filtered through the curtained windows. In the far end, before the long
mirror, the piano with its shapeless covering resembled some crouching,
prehistoric animal. Above the mantelpiece, the flaming Venice of Mr.
Turner glowed vaguely beneath layers of dust. Cobwebs hung from the
crystal chandeliers and festooned the wall sconces; and beneath the
piano the Aubusson carpet, rolled into a long coil, waited like a
python. The room was the mute symbol of something departed from the
Town.

Silently the two women regarded the spectacle and when Lily at length
turned away, her dark eyes were shining with tears. She was
inexpressibly lovely, all softened now by the melancholy sight.

“I suppose it will never be opened again,” observed Mrs Tolliver in a
solemn voice. “But I mean to clean it thoroughly the first time I have
an opportunity. Just look at the dust.” And with her competent finger
she traced her initials on the top of a lacquer table.

For a moment Lily made no reply. At last she said, “No. I suppose it is
closed for good.”

“You wouldn’t come back here to live?” probed her cousin with an air of
hopefulness.

“No. Why should I?” And a second later Lily added, “But how quiet it is.
You can almost hear the stillness.”

Mrs. Tolliver closed the door, seizing at the same time the opportunity
to polish the knobs on the hallway side. “Yes, it’s a relief not to hear
the Mills. But there are other noises now ... riots and machine guns,
and at night there are searchlights. Only last night the police clubbed
an old woman to death at the foot of the drive. She was a Polish woman
... hadn’t been harming any one. I wonder you didn’t see the blood. It’s
smeared on the gates. Irene can tell you all about it.” For a moment she
polished thoughtfully; then she straightened her vigorous body and said,
“But I got back at them. I gave one of the hired policeman a poke he
won’t soon forget. It’s a crime the way they behave.... It’s murder. No
decent community would allow it.” And she told Lily the story of the
rescue at the corner saloon.

As Lily made her way up the long stairway, Mrs. Tolliver paused in her
work to watch the ascending figure until it reached the top. Her large
honest face was alive with interest, her eyes shining as if she now
really saw Lily for the first time, as if the old Lily had been simply
an illusion. The beautiful stranger climbed the stairs languidly, the
long, lovely lines of her body showing through the trim black suit. Her
red hair glowed in the dim light of the hallway. She was incredibly
young and happy, so unbelievably fresh and lovely that Mrs. Tolliver,
after Lily had disappeared at the turn of the stair, moved away shaking
her head and making the clucking sound which primitive women use to
indicate a disturbance of their suspicions.

And when she returned to dusting the library under the handsome,
malignant face of John Shane she worked in silence, abandoning her usual
habit of humming snatches of old ballads. After the Ball was Over and
The Baggage Coach Ahead were forgotten. Presently, when she had finished
polishing the little ornaments of jade and crystal, she fell to
regarding the portrait with a profound interest. She stood thus, with
her arms akimbo, for many minutes regarding the man in the picture as if
he too had become a stranger to her. She discovered, it appeared,
something more than a temperamental and clever old reprobate who had
been indulgent toward her. Her manner was that of a person who stands
before a suddenly opened door in the presence of magnificent and
incomprehensible wonders.

Lily found her there when she came down-stairs.

“You know,” observed Mrs. Tolliver, “I must be getting old. I have such
funny thoughts lately ... the kind of thoughts a normal healthy woman
doesn’t have.”




XLII


Room by room, closet by closet, Mrs. Tolliver and Lily put the big house
in order. They even set Hennery to cleaning the cellar, and themselves
went into the attic where they poked about among old boxes and trunks
filled with clothing and photographs, bits of yellow lace and brocade
for which no use had ever been found. There were photographs of Lily and
Irene as little girls in tarlatan dresses much ornamented with
artificial pansies and daisies; pictures of John Shane on the wrought
iron piazza, surrounded by men who were leaders in state politics; dim
photographs of Julia Shane in an extremely tight riding habit with a
bustle, and a hat set well forward over the eyes; pictures of the annual
family gatherings at Christmas time with all its robust members standing
in the snow outside the house at Cypress Hill. There were even pictures
of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, Jacob Barr, on the heavy hack he sometimes
rode, and one of him surrounded by his eight vigorous children.

From the sentimental Mrs. Tolliver, this collection wrenched a tempest
of sighs. To Lily she said. “It’s like raising the dead. I just can’t
believe the changes that have occurred.”

The arrival of Lily brought a certain repose to the household. The
mulatto woman who behaved so sulkily under the shifting dominations of
the powerful Mrs. Tolliver and the anemic Irene, began slowly to regain
her old respectful attitude. It appeared that she honored Miss Lily with
the respect which servants have for those who understand them. Where the
complaints of Irene and the stormy commands of Mrs. Tolliver had wrought
nothing, the amiable smiles and the interested queries of Lily
accomplished miracles. For a time the household regained the air of
order and dignity which it had known in the days of Julia Shane’s
domination. Lily was unable to explain her success. After all, there
was nothing new in the process. Servants had always obeyed her in the
same fashion. She charmed them whether they were her own or not.

Although her arrival worked many a pleasant change in the house and
appeared to check for a time the inward sweeping waves of melancholy,
there was one thing which she was unable, either consciously or
unconsciously, to alter in any way. This was the position of Irene. The
sister remained an outsider. It was as if the old dwelling were a
rooming house and she were simply a roomer, detached, aloof ... a roomer
in whom no one was especially interested. She was, in fact, altogether
incomprehensible. Lily, to be sure, made every effort to change the
condition of affairs; but her efforts, it appeared, only drove her
sister more deeply into the shell of taciturnity and indifference. The
first encounter of the two sisters, for all the kisses and warmth of
Lily, was an awkward and soulless affair to which Irene submitted
listlessly. So apparent was the strain of the encounter that Mrs.
Tolliver, during the course of the morning’s work, found occasion to
refer to it.

“You mustn’t mind Irene’s behavior,” she said. “She has been growing
queerer and queerer.” And raising her eyebrows significantly she
continued, “You know, sometimes I think she’s a little cracked. Religion
sometimes affects people in that way, especially the sort of popery
Irene practises.”

And then she told of finding Irene, quite by accident, prostrate before
the pink-gilt image of the Virgin, her hair all disheveled, her eyes
streaming with tears.

Once Mrs. Tolliver had reconciled herself to Lily’s secret, her entire
manner toward her cousin suffered a change. The awe which had once
colored her behavior disappeared completely. She was no longer the
provincial, ignorant of life outside the Town, face to face with an
experienced woman of the world. She was one mother with an understanding
for another. Before many days had passed the pair worked and gossiped
side by side, not only as old friends might have gossiped but as old
friends who are quite the same age, whose interests are identical. In
her manner there was no evidence of any strangeness save in the
occasional moments when she would cease working abruptly to regard her
lovely cousin with an expression of complete bewilderment, which did not
vanish until Lily, attracted by her cousin’s steady gaze, looked up and
caused Mrs. Tolliver to blush as if it were herself who had sinned.




XLIII


It was Lily who in the end mentioned the affair. She spoke of it as they
sat at lunch in the paneled dining room.

“Mama,” she said suddenly, “tells me that you know all about Jean.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Tolliver, in a queer unearthly voice. “She told me.”

“I’m glad, because I wanted to tell you before, only she wouldn’t let
me. She said you wouldn’t understand.”

There was an awesome little pause and Mrs. Tolliver, her fork poised,
said, “I don’t quite understand, Lily. I must say it’s puzzling. But I
guessed you knew what you were doing. It wasn’t as if you were a common
woman who took lovers.” She must have seen the faint tinge of color that
swept over Lily’s face, but she continued in the manner of a virtuous
woman doing her duty, seeing a thing in the proper light, being fair and
honest. “I guessed there was some reason. Of course, I wouldn’t want a
daughter of mine to do such a thing. I would rather see her in her
grave.”

Her manner was emphatic and profound. It was clear that however she
might forgive Lily in the eyes of the world, she had her own opinions
which none should ever know but herself and Lily.

Lily blushed, the color spreading over her lovely face to the soft
fringe of her hair. “You needn’t worry, Cousin Hattie,” she said. “Ellen
would never do such a thing. You see, Ellen is complete. She doesn’t
need anything but herself. She’s not like me at all. She isn’t weak. She
would never do anything because she lost her head.”

Ellen’s mother, who had stopped eating, regarded her with a look of
astonishment. “But your mother said you hadn’t lost your head. She said
it was you who wouldn’t marry the Governor.”

Lily’s smile persisted. She leaned over to touch her cousin’s hand,
gently as though pleading with her to be tolerant.

“It’s true,” she said. “Some of what mother told you. It’s true about my
refusing to marry him. You see the trouble is that I’m not afraid when I
should be. I’m not afraid of the things I should be afraid of. When
there is danger, I can’t run away. If I could run away I’d be saved, but
I can’t. Something makes me see it through. It’s something that betrays
me ... something that is stronger than myself. That’s what happened with
the Governor. It was I who was more guilty than he. It is I who played
with fire. If I was not unwilling, what could you expect of him ... a
man. Men love the strength of women as a refuge from their own
weakness.” She paused and her face grew serious. “When it was done, I
was afraid ... not afraid, you understand of bearing a child or even
afraid of what people would say of me. I was afraid of losing myself,
because I knew I couldn’t always love him.... I knew it. I knew it. I
knew that something had betrayed me. I couldn’t give up all my life to a
man because I’d given an hour of it to him. I was afraid of what he
would become. Can you understand that? That was the only thing I was
afraid of ... nothing else but that. It was I who was wrong in the very
beginning.”

But Mrs. Tolliver’s expression of bewilderment failed to dissolve before
this disjointed explanation. “No,” she said, “I don’t understand.... I
should think you would have wanted a home and children and a successful
husband. He’s been elected senator, you know, and they talk of making
him president.”

Lily’s red lip curved in a furtive, secret, smile. “And what’s that to
me?” she asked. “They can make him what they like. A successful husband
isn’t always the best. I could see what they would make him. That’s why
I couldn’t face being his wife. I wasn’t a girl when it happened. I was
twenty-four and I knew a great many things. I wasn’t a poor innocent
seduced creature. But it wasn’t so much that I thought it out. I
couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t marry him. Something inside me wouldn’t
let me. A part of me was wise. You see, only half of me loved him ...
my body, shall we say, desired him. That is not enough for a lifetime.
The body changes.” For a second she cast down her eyes as if in shame
and Mrs. Tolliver, who never before had heard such talk, looked away,
out of the tall window across the snow covered park.

“Besides,” Lily continued, after a little silence, “I have a home and I
have a child. Both of them are perfect. I am a very happy woman, Cousin
Hattie ... much happier than if I had married him. I know that from what
he taught me ... in that one hour.”

Mrs. Tolliver regarded her now with a curious, prying, look. Plainly it
was a miracle she had found in a woman who had sinned and still was
happy. “But you have no husband,” she said presently, with the air of
presenting a final argument.

“No,” replied Lily, “I have no husband.”

“But that must mean something.”

“Yes, I suppose it does mean something.”

And then the approach of the mulatto woman put an end to the talk for
the time being. When she had disappeared once more, it was Mrs. Tolliver
who spoke. “You know,” she said, “I sometimes think Irene would be
better off if such a thing had happened to her. It isn’t natural, the
way she carries on. It’s morbid. I’ve told her so often enough.”

“But it couldn’t have happened to Irene. She will never marry. You see
Irene’s afraid of men ... in that way. Such a thing I’m sure would drive
her mad.” And Lily bowed her lovely head for a moment. “We must be good
to Irene. She can’t help being as she is. You see she believes all love
is a kind of sin. Love, I mean, of the sort you and I have known.”

At this speech Mrs. Tolliver grew suddenly tense. Her large, honest face
became scarlet with indignation. “But it isn’t the same,” she protested.
“What I knew and what you knew. They’re very different things. My love
was consecrated.”

Lily’s dark eyes grew thoughtful. “It would have been the same if I had
married the Governor. People would have said that we loved each other as
you and Cousin Charles love each other. They wouldn’t have known the
truth. One doesn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public.”

Her cousin interrupted her abruptly. “It is not the same. I could not
have had children by Charlie until I was married to him. I mean there
could have been nothing like that between us beforehand.”

“That’s only because you were stronger than me,” said Lily. “You see I
was born as I am. That much I could not help. There are times when I
cannot save myself. You are more fortunate. Irene is like me. That is
the reason she behaves as she does. After all, it is the same thing in
us both.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, it was plain to be seen, understood none of this. It
was quite beyond her simple code of conduct. Her life bore witness to
her faith in the creed that breaking the rules meant disaster.

“I know,” continued Lily, “that I was lucky to have been rich. If I had
been poor it would have been another matter. I should have married him.
But because I was rich, I was free. I was independent to do as I wished,
independent ... like a man, you understand. Free to do as I pleased.”
All at once she leaned forward impulsively. “Tell me, Cousin Hattie ...
it has not made me hard, has it? It has not made me old and evil? It has
not made people dislike me?”

Mrs. Tolliver regarded her for a moment as if weighing arguments,
seeking reasons, why Lily seemed content and happy despite everything.
At length, finding no better retort, she said weakly, “How could they
dislike you? No one ever knew anything about it.”

A look of triumph shone in Lily’s dark eyes. “Ah, that’s it!” she cried.
“That’s it! They didn’t know anything, so they don’t dislike me. If they
had known they would have found all sorts of disagreeable things in me.
They would have said, ‘We cannot speak to Lily Shane. She is an immoral
woman.’ They would have made me into a hard and unhappy creature. They
would have created the traits which they believed I should possess. It
is the knowing that counts and not the act itself. It is the old story.
It is worse to be found out in a little sin than to commit secretly a
big one. There is only one thing that puzzles them.” She raised her
slim, soft hands in a little gesture of badinage. “Do you know what it
is? They can’t understand why I have never married and why I am not old
and rattly as a spinster should be. It puzzles them that I am young and
fresh.”

For a time Mrs. Tolliver considered the dark implications of this
speech. But she was not to be downed. “Just the same, I don’t approve,
Lily,” she said. “I don’t want you to think for a minute that I approve.
If my daughter had done it, it would have killed me. It’s not right. One
day you will pay for it, in this world or the next.”

At this threat Lily grew serious once more and the smoldering light of
rebellion came into her eyes. She was leaning back in her old indolent
manner. It was true that there was about her something inexpressibly
voluptuous and beautiful which alarmed her cousin. It was a dangerous,
flaunting beauty, undoubtedly wicked to the Presbyterian eyes of Mrs.
Tolliver. And she was young too. At that moment she might have been
taken for a woman in her early twenties.

After a time she raised her head. “But I am happy,” she said, defiantly,
“completely happy.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Tolliver with a frown, “that you wouldn’t say such
things. I can’t bear to hear you.”

And presently the talk turned once more to Irene. “She is interested in
this young fellow called Krylenko,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “And your mother
is willing to have her marry him, though I can’t see why. I would rather
see her die an old maid than be married to a foreigner.”

“He is clever, isn’t he?” asked Lily.

“I don’t know about that. He made all this trouble about the strike.
Everything would be peaceful still if he hadn’t stirred up trouble.
Maybe that’s being clever. I don’t know.”

“But he must be clever if he could do all that. He must be able to lead
the workers. I’m glad he did it, myself. The Harrison crowd has ruled
the roost long enough. It’ll do them good to have a jolt ... especially
when it touches their pocketbooks. I saw him once, myself. He looks like
a powerful fellow. I should say that some day you will hear great
things of him.”

Mrs. Tolliver sniffed scornfully. “Perhaps ... perhaps. If he is, it
will be because Irene made him great. All the same I can’t see her
marrying him ... a common immigrant ... a Russian!”

“You needn’t worry. She won’t. She could never marry him. To her he
isn’t a man at all. He’s a sort of idea ... a plaster saint!” And for
the first time in all her discussion of Irene a shade of hard scorn
colored her voice.




XLIV


For an hour longer they sat talking over the coffee while Lily smoked
indolently cigarette after cigarette beneath the disapproving eye of her
cousin. They discussed the affairs of the household, the news in the
papers of Mrs. Julis Harrison’s second stroke, of Ellen, and Jean from
whom Lily had a letter only that morning.

“Has the Governor ever asked for him?” inquired Mrs. Tolliver, with the
passionate look of a woman interested in details.

“No,” said Lily, “I have not heard from him in years. He has never seen
the boy. You see Jean is mine alone because even if the Governor wanted
him he dares not risk a scandal. He is as much my own as if I had
created him alone out of my own body. He belongs to me and to me alone,
do you see? I can make him into what I will. I shall make him into a man
who will know everything and be everything. He shall be stronger than I
and cleverer. He is handsome enough. He is everything to me. A queen
would be proud to have him for her son.”

As she spoke a light kindled in her eyes and a look of exultation spread
over her face. It was an expression of passionate triumph.

“You see,” she added, “it is a wonderful thing to have some one who
belongs to you alone, who loves you alone and no one else. He owns me
and I own him. There is no one else who counts. If we were left alone on
a desert island, we would be content.” The look faded slowly and gave
place to a mocking smile that arched the corners of her red lips. “If I
had married the Governor, the boy might have become anything.... I
should have seen him becoming crude and common under my very eyes. I
should have hated his father and I could have done nothing. As it is,
his father is only a memory ... pleasant enough, a handsome man who
loved me, but never owned me ... even for an instant ... not even the
instant of my child’s conception!”

During this speech the manner of Mrs. Tolliver became more and more
agitated. With each bold word a new wave of color swept her large face,
until at the climax of Lily’s confession she was struck mute, rendered
incapable of either thought or action. It was a long time before she
recovered even a faint degree of her usual composure. At last she
managed to articulate, “I don’t see, Lily, how you can say such things.
I really don’t. The words would burn my throat!”

Her cousin’s smile was defiant, almost brazen. “You see, Cousin Hattie,
I have lived among the French. With them such things are no more than
food and drink ... except perhaps that they prefer love to everything
else,” she added, with a mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes.

“And besides,” continued Mrs. Tolliver, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m
sure Charles has never _owned_ me.”

“No, my dear,” said Lily, “He never has. On the contrary it is you who
have always owned him. It is always one thing or the other. The trouble
is that at first women like to be owned.” She raised her hand. “Oh, I
know. The Governor would have owned me sooner or later. There are some
men who are like that. You know them at once. I know how my father owned
my mother and you know as well as I that she was never a weak, clinging
woman. If she had been as rich as I, she would have left him ... long
ago. She could not because he owned her.”

“But that was different,” parried Mrs. Tolliver. “He was a foreigner.”

They were treading now upon that which in the family had been forbidden
ground. No one discussed John Shane with his wife or children because
they had kept alive for more than thirty years a lie, a pretense. John
Shane had been accepted silently and unquestioningly as all that a
husband should be. Now the manner of Mrs. Tolliver brightened visibly at
the approach of an opening for which she had waited more years than she
was able to count.

“But he was a man and she was a woman,” persisted Lily. “I know that
most American women own their husbands, but the strange thing is that I
could never have married a man whom I could own. You see that is the
trouble with marriage. It is difficult to be rid of a husband.”

Mrs. Tolliver shifted nervously and put down her coffee cup. “Really,
Lily,” she said, “I don’t understand you. You talk as though being
married was wrong.” Her manner, for the first time, had become
completely cold and disapproving. She behaved as though at any moment
she might rise and turn her back forever upon Lily.

“Oh, don’t think, Cousin Hattie, that people get married because they
like being tied together by law. Most people get married because it is
the only way they can live together and still be respected by the
community. Most people would like to change now and then. It’s true.
They’re like that in their deepest hearts ... far down where no one ever
sees.”

She said this so passionately that Mrs. Tolliver was swept into silence.
Books the good woman never read because there was no time; and even now
with her children gone, she did not read because it was too late in life
to develop a love for books. Immersed always in respectability, such
thoughts as these had never occurred to her; and certainly no one had
ever talked thus in her presence.

“I don’t understand,” she was able to articulate weakly after a long
pause. “I don’t understand.” And then as if she saw opportunity escaping
from her into spaces from which it might never be recovered, she said,
“Tell me, Lily. Have you ever had any idea from where your father came?”

The faint glint of amusement vanished from her cousin’s eyes and her
face grew thoughtful. “No. Nothing save that his mother was Spanish and
his father Irish. He was born in Marseilles.”

“And where’s that?” asked Mrs. Tolliver, aglow with interest.

“It’s in the south of France. It’s a great city and an evil one ... one
of the worst in the world. Mamma says we’ll never know the truth. I
think perhaps she is right.”

After this the conversation returned to the minutiae of the household
for a time and, at length, as the bronze clock struck three the two
women rose and left the room to make their way upstairs to the chamber
of the dying old woman. In the hall, Lily turned, “I’ve never talked
like this to any one,” she said. “I’d never really thought it all out
before. I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told any one, Cousin Hattie
... even my mother.”

Upstairs Mrs. Tolliver opened the door of the darkened room, Lily
followed her on tiptoe. In the gray winter light, old Julia Shane lay
back among the pillows sleeping peacefully.

“Will you wake her for her medicine?” whispered Lily.

“Of course,” replied her cousin, moving to the bedside, where she shook
the old woman gently and softly called her name.

“Aunt Julia! Aunt Julia!” she called again and again. But there was no
answer as Mrs. Tolliver’s powerful figure bent over the bed. She felt
for the weakened pulse and then passed her vigorous hand over the face,
so white now and so transparent. Then she stood back and regarded the
bony, relentless old countenance and Lily drew nearer until her warm
full breasts brushed her cousin’s shoulder. The hands of the two women
clasped silently in a sort of fearful awe.

“She has gone away,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “in her sleep. It could not
have been better.”

And together the two women set about preparing Julia Shane for the
grave, forgetful of all the passionate talk of an hour before. In the
face of death, it counted for nothing.




XLV


A little while later, Lily herself went down the snow covered drive and
summoned a passing boy whom she sent into the Flats in search of Irene,
since she herself dared not venture among the sullen strikers. After two
hours, he returned to say he could find no trace of the sister. So it
was not until Irene returned at midnight that she learned her mother was
dead. She received the news coldly enough, perhaps because in those days
death and suffering meant so little to her; but even Lily must have seen
the faint glimmer of triumph that entered her sister’s pale, red-rimmed
eyes at the news that she was free at last.

Just before dawn when the searchlights, swinging their gigantic arcs
over the Flats, pierced the quiet solitude of Lily’s room and wakened
her, she heard through the mist of sleep the voice of Irene praying in
her room for mercy upon the soul of their mother. For a second, she
raised her head in an attitude of listening and then sank back and
quickly fell asleep, her rosy face pillowed on her white bare arm, her
bright hair all loose and shining in the sudden flashes of reflected
light.

The Town newspapers published long obituaries of Julia Shane, whole
columns which gave the history of her family, the history of John Shane,
so far as it was known, and the history of Cypress Hill. In death it
seemed that Julia Shane reflected credit in some way upon the Town. She
gave it a kind of distinction just as the Cyclops Mills or any other
remarkable institution gave it distinction. The newspapers treated her
as if she were good advertising copy. The obituaries included lists of
celebrated people who had been guests at Cypress Hill. Presidents were
mentioned, an ambassador, and the Governor who was now a senator. They
remarked that Julia Shane was the granddaughter of the man who gave the
Town its name. For a single day Cypress Hill regained its lost and
splendid prestige. Newcomers in the Town, superintendents and clerks
from the idle Mills, learned for the first time the history of Shane’s
Castle, all but the scandalous stories about John Shane which were
omitted as unsuitable material for an obituary. Besides no one really
knew whether they were true or not.

And despite all this vulgar fanfare, it was clear that a great lady had
passed, one who in her day had been a sovereign, but one whose day had
passed with the coming of the Mills and the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of
progress and prosperity.

The obituaries ended with the sentence, “Mrs. Shane is survived by two
unmarried daughters, Irene, who resides at Cypress Hill, and Lily who
for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their
mother at the time of her passing.”

It was this last sentence which interested the older residents. _Lily,
who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their
mother at the time of her passing._ How much lay hidden and mysterious
in those two lines. Until the publishing of the obituary, the Town had
known nothing of Lily’s return.

At five o’clock on the afternoon of the funeral Willie Harrison sat in
his mother’s bedroom in the sandstone house giving her a detailed
account of the funeral. Outside the snow fell in drifting clouds, driven
before a wind which howled wildly among the ornamental cupolas and
projections of the ugly house. Inside the air hung warm and stifling,
touched by the pallid odor of the sickroom. It was a large square room
constructed with a great effect of solidity, and furnished with heavy,
expensive furniture upholstered in dark red plush. The walls were tan
and the woodwork of birch stained a deep mahogany color. Above the
ornate mantelpiece hung an engraved portrait of the founder of the Mills
and of the Harrison fortune ... Julis Harrison, coarse, powerful,
beetle-browed, his heavy countenance half-buried beneath a thick chin
beard. The engraving was surrounded by a wide frame of bright German
gilt; it looked down upon the room with the gaze of one who has wrought
a great success out of nothing by the sweat of his brow and labor of
bulging muscles, as once he had hammered crude metal into links and
links into chains in the blacksmith shop which stood upon the spot now
occupied by the oldest of the furnaces. It was a massive awkward room,
as much like a warehouse as like a boudoir or a bedroom. It suited
admirably the face in the portrait and the heavy body of the old woman
who lay in the mahogany bed, helpless and ill-tempered beneath a second
stroke of paralysis.

The son sat awkwardly on the edge of the red plush sofa near the mother.
As he grew older, his manner became more and more uneasy in the presence
of the old woman. His hair had grown thinner and on the temples there
were new streaks of gray. There was something withered about him,
something incomplete and unfinished like an apple that has begun to
shrink before it has reached maturity. In the massive room, beneath the
gaze of the overwhelming portrait, beside the elephantine bed in which
he was conceived and born of the heavy old woman, Willie Harrison was a
curiosity, a mouse born of a mountain in labor. He was the son of
parents who were both quite masculine.

In a strange fit of forgetfulness he had worn his heavy overshoes into
the sacred precincts of his mother’s bedroom and they now lay beside him
on the floor where he had placed them timidly when his mother commanded
him to remove them lest his feet become overheated and tender, thus
rendering him liable to sudden colds. Indeed, since the very beginning
of the strike Willie had not been well. The struggle appeared to weigh
him down. Day by day he grew paler and more nervous. He rarely smiled,
and a host of new fine lines appeared upon his already withered
countenance. Yet he had gone through the blowing snow and the bitter
cold to the cemetery, partly at the command of his mother who was unable
to go and partly because he had hoped to see Lily once more, if only for
a moment by the side of an open grave.

And now Mrs. Julis Harrison, lying helpless upon her broad back, waited
to hear the account of the funeral. She lay with her head oddly cocked
on one side in order to see her son. Her speech came forth mumbled and
broken by the paralysis.

“Were there many there?” she asked.

“Only a handful,” replied her son in his thin voice. “Old William Baines
... you know, the old man, the Shane’s family lawyer....”

“Yes,” interrupted his mother. “An old fogy ... who ought to have died
ten years ago.”

William Harrison must have been used to interruptions of this sort from
his mother. He continued, “One or two church people and the two girls.
It was frightfully cold on top of that bald hill. The coffin was covered
with snow the moment it was lowered into the grave.”

“Poor Julia,” muttered the woman on the bed. “She lived too long. She
lost interest in life.” This remark she uttered with the most mournful
of intonations. On the verge of the grave herself, she still maintained
a lively interest in deaths and funerals.

“I’m glad you went,” she added presently. “It shows there was no
feeling, no matter how bad Julia treated me. It shows that I forgave
her. People knew I couldn’t go.”

There was a long pause punctuated by the loud monotonous ticking of the
brass clock. Outside the wind whistled among the cornices.

“She must have left a great deal of money,” observed Mrs. Harrison.
“More than a couple of millions, I shouldn’t wonder. They haven’t spent
anything in the last ten years.”

Willie Harrison lighted a cigarette. “Except Irene,” he said. “She has
been giving money to the strikers. Everybody knows that.”

“But that’s her own,” said his mother. “It has nothing to do with what
Julia left.” She stirred restlessly. “Please, Willie, will you not smoke
in here. I can’t bear the smell of tobacco.”

Willie extinguished the cigarette and finding no place in the whole room
where he might dispose of the remains, he thrust them silently into his
pocket.

“I asked her at the funeral if it was true,” he said. “And she told me
it was none of my business ... that she would give everything she
possessed if she saw fit.”

Mrs. Harrison grunted. “It’s that Krylenko,” she observed. “That’s who
it is. Don’t tell me she’d give away her money for love of the strikers.
No Shane ever gave his fortune to the poor.”

The clock again ticked violently and without interruption for a long
time.

“And Lily,” said Mrs. Harrison presently.

Willie began fumbling with the ruby clasp on his watch chain, slipping
it backward and forward nervously.

“She’s just the same,” he said. “Just the same.... Younger if anything.
It’s surprising how she keeps so young. I asked her to come and see you
and she wanted to know if you had asked her to. I said you had and then
she smiled a little and asked, ‘Is it for curiosity? You can tell her
how I look. You can tell her I’m happy.’ That was all. I don’t suppose
she’ll ever come back to the Town again after this time.”

This Mrs. Harrison pondered for a time. At last she said, “I guess it’s
just as well she wouldn’t have you. There’s something bad about her. She
couldn’t be so young and happy if she was just an old maid. I guess
after all you’re better off. They have bad blood in ’em. It comes from
old John Shane.”

Willie winced at the bluntness of his mother’s speech and attempted to
lead her into other paths. “There was no trouble in the Flats to-day.
None of the strikers came into Halsted street. Everything was quiet all
day. The superintendent says it was on account of the old woman’s
funeral.”

“You see,” said Mrs. Harrison. “It’s that Krylenko. I can’t understand
it ... how a frumpish old maid like Irene can twist him around her
finger.”

Willie stopped fumbling with his chain. “She’s made a weapon of him to
fight us.”

Mrs. Harrison shook her massive head with a negative gesture.

“Oh, no,” she said, speaking slowly and painfully. “It may look like
that, but she never thought it out. She isn’t smart enough. Neither of
them is, Irene or Lily. I’ve known them since they were little girls.
They both do what they can’t help doing. Julia might have done such a
thing but I’m certain it never occurred to her. Besides,” she added
after a little pause, “she’s dead and buried now.”

“She came to hate us before she died,” persisted Willie.

“Yes ... that’s true enough. I guess she did hate us ... ever since that
affair over the taxes.”

Willie clung to his idea. “But don’t you see. It’s all worked out just
the same, just as if they had planned it on purpose. It’s the second
time they have cost the Mills thousands of dollars.”

This, somehow, Mrs. Harrison found herself unable to deny.

“Tell me,” she said presently. “How did they appear to take it?... Lily
and Irene?”

Willie was once more fumbling with the ruby clasp. “I don’t know. Irene
wasn’t even dressed in mourning. She had on the same old gray suit and
black hat. She looked like a crow. As for Lily, she was able to smile
when she spoke to me. But you can’t tell how she feels about anything.
She always smiles.”

After this little speech Willie rose and began to move about the room,
fingering nervously the sparsely placed ornaments--a picture of himself
as an anemic child with long, yellow curls, a heavy brass inkwell, a
small copy in marble of the tomb of Scipio Africanus, the single memento
of a voyage to Rome. He drifted over toward the window and drew aside
the curtain to look out into the storm.




XLVI


All this time his mother, her vast bulk immovable beneath the
mountainous sheets, followed him with her eyes. She must have recognized
the symptoms, for presently she broke the way.

“Have you anything you want to say?” she asked.

Willie moved back to the bed and for a time stood in silence fingering
the carving of the footboard. He cleared his throat as if to speak but
only fell silent again. When at last he was able to say what was in his
mind, he did so without looking up. He behaved as though the carving
held for him the most profound interest.

“Yes,” he said gently, “I want to say that I’m going to get out of the
Mills. I hate them. I’ve always hated them. I’m no good at it!” To
forestall her interruptions he rushed on with his speech. The sight of
his mother lying helpless appeared to endow him with a sudden desperate
courage. She was unable to stop him. He even raised his head and faced
her squarely. “I don’t like this strike. I don’t like the fighting. I
want to be an ordinary, simple man who could walk through Halsted street
in safety. I want to be left alone.”

Mrs. Harrison did not raise her head, but all the violent emotion, pent
up and stifled by her helplessness, rose and flashed in her eyes. The
scorn was thunderous but somehow it failed to overwhelm the faded,
middle-aged man at the foot of the gigantic bed.

“I thank God your father cannot hear those words! He would strike you
down!”

Still Willie did not flinch. “My father is dead,” he observed quietly.
But his smile carried implications and a malice of its own. “My father
is dead,” said the smile. “And my mother is helpless. Before long I
shall be free ... for the first time in my life ... free ... to do as I
please ... the slave of no one.”

The smile wavered and clung to his face. Of course he said none of this.
What he said was, “It is a dirty business. And I want nothing to do with
it ... not even any stock. If it hadn’t been for the Mills, Lily might
have married me.”

From the bed arose the scornful sound of a hoarse chuckle, “Oh no, she
wouldn’t. You don’t know her! She wouldn’t marry you because you were
such a poor thing.”

At this Willie began to tremble. His face became as white as the
spotless coverlet, and he grasped the bed rail with such intensity that
his thin knuckles showed blue against his skin. It was the old taunt of
a mother toward a child whose gentleness and indecision were to her both
incomprehensible and worthy only of contempt, a child who had never
suited her gigantic ideas of power and wealth.

“And pray tell me what you _do_ intend to do,” she asked with rich
sarcasm.

A tremulous quality entered Willie’s voice as he replied. “I want to
have a farm where I can raise chickens and ducks and rabbits.”

“Great God!” replied his mother in her deep voice. It was all she said.
Moving her head with a terrible effort, she turned her face to the wall
away from her son. But Willie, though he still trembled a little in the
presence of the old woman and the glowering portrait above his head, had
a look of triumph in his pale eyes. It said, “I have won! I have won! I
have achieved a victory. I am free at last from the monster which I have
always hated.... I am through with the Mills. I am through with Judge
Weissman.... I can be bullied no more!”

Outside the wind howled and tore at the eaves and presently there came a
suave knock at the door ... the knock of the worldly, white haired
butler. “Miss Abercrombie is here to see Mrs. Harrison,” came a suave
voice, and before Willie could answer, his mother’s crony, her nose very
red from the cold, had pushed her way like a wriggling ferret into the
room.

At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a
purely involuntary fashion.

“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you
delighted?”

Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.

“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling
manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down
like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic
child still wearing curls.

Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I
have told her everything.”

And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the
mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia
Shane.




XLVII


In the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the
settlement of the will proceedings.

The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as
if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no
January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that
Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother,
encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted
street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families
from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children,
were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid
houses already far too crowded.

Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a
hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the
streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they
sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners
ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by
the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always
the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town
found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen
of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing
prosperity and injuring the “boom spirit.” The Rotary Club and the
Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal
church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused
the cause of prosperity.

The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as
slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.

Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing.
During the day while Irene was absent Lily, clad in a peignoir of black
silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert
herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her
ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with
the yellow backed French novels “skimmed” and cast away by her mother.
These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she
sought to pass the time by writing letters--addressed always to one of
three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon’s cousin, the Baron.
Wrapped in her mother’s old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her
way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for
her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.

She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening
the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in
playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy.
Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the
bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of
Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the
strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in
despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she
purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over
to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their
families.

She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of
plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a
dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These
perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming
to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the
barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the
antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down
modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite
openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their
demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they
interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls
hooting among the branches of the dead trees.

The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the “old
fogy” lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bearing a little black
bag filled with papers. With Mrs. Tolliver, he shared an attitude of
supreme indifference alike toward the strikers and the guards. It
appeared that he still lived in a day when there were no mills and no
strikers. He was a tall withered old man with drooping white mustaches
and a thick mass of vigorous white hair. He went about his business
gruffly, wasting no time over details, and no emotion over sentiment. He
treated both sisters in the same cold, legal manner.

The will was brief and concocted shrewdly by Julia Shane and old Mr.
Baines. Nor was it complicated. The house and all the old woman’s jewels
were left to her daughter Lily. There was also a sizable gift for Hattie
Tolliver and a strange bequest which came as a surprise to all but old
Mr. Baines. It was added in a codicil, so he said, a short time before
her death. It provided for a trust fund to support Welcome House and
provide a visiting nurse until Mr. Baines and the two daughters deemed
these things no longer necessary.

“That,” observed the cynical Mr. Baines drily, as he read the will,
“will be as long as the human race exists. I tried to persuade her
against it but she would not listen. She always knew what she was doing
and just what she wanted, right to the very end.”

Thus Julia Shane placed herself for all time among the enemies of the
Mills.

Otherwise the property was divided evenly with an allowance made to
Irene for the value of the Cypress Hill holdings.

Then Mr. Baines delivered with considerable ceremony and advice two
letters, one addressed to Lily and one to Irene, which had been left in
his keeping.

The letter addressed to Lily read, “I am leaving the house to you
because Irene hates it. I know that she would only dispose of it at once
and give the money to the church. Likewise I am leaving my jewels to
you, with the exception of two rings which I gave Hattie Tolliver years
ago--the emerald set with diamonds and the single big emerald. No doubt
you remember them. There is no use in leaving such things to Irene. She
would only sell them and spend the money to buy candles for a saint. And
that is not the purpose for which God made jewels. He meant them to
adorn beautiful women. Therefore I give them to you.”

And thus the amethysts set in Spanish silver, two emerald rings, seven
rings set with diamonds, a ruby necklace, a festoon of pearls, a
quantity of earrings of onyx, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and a long
diamond chain passed into the possession of the elder daughter.

“In worldly possessions,” the letter continued, “I have left you both
wealthy. There are other possessions over which I had no control. They
were left to you by your father and by me--the possessions which one
cannot sell nor throw away, the possessions which are a part of you,
possessions good and evil, bad and indifferent, the possessions which in
the end are you yourself.

“There are some things which it is difficult to discuss, even between a
mother and her daughter. I am gone now. I shall not be forced to look at
you and feel shame at what you know. Yet I have always wanted to tell
you, to explain to you that, after all, I was never so hard, so
invincible, so hopelessly brittle as I must have seemed. You see, my
dear, there are some things which one cannot control and one of these is
the unconscious control over self-control--the thing which does not
permit you to speak. Another is pride.

“You see there was never anything in common between your father and me,
unless it was love of horses and that, after all, is not much. Before he
ever saw me, he must have known more of life than I ever knew. But those
things were secret and because of them, perhaps, I fell in love with
him--after a fashion. I say ‘after a fashion’ because that is what it
was. I was a country girl, the daughter of a farmer ... nothing else,
you understand. And you cannot know what that meant in the days when the
Town was a village and no one in it ever went outside the state and
seldom outside the county. He was fascinating ... more fascinating than
you can ever know. I married him on account of that. It was a great
match. He was a wonderful lover ... not a lover like the men of the
county who make such good husbands, but a lover out of another world.
But that, my dear, did not make him a good husband, and in a little
while it became clear that I was little more to him than a convenience.
Even sending me to France didn’t help matters.

“It was a bad affair, but in my day when one married there was no
thought of anything but staying married. So what was done was done.
There was no unmaking a mistake, even less chance after you and Irene
were born. He came of one race and I of another. And never once in our
life together did we touch in our sympathies. It was, in short, a
marriage founded upon passion alone--a despicable state of affairs which
is frequently worse than a _marriage de convenance_, for in that there
is no desire to burn itself out.... You see, I understood the affair of
the Governor far better than you ever imagined.

“And so there are things descended to both of you over which I have no
control. I can only ask God to be merciful. Be gentle with Irene and
thank God that you are made so that life cannot hurt you. She cannot
help that which she is. You see I have known and understood more than
any one guessed.”

That was all. The ending was as abrupt as the manner of Julia Shane
while she lived. Indeed to Lily, reading the letter, it must have seemed
that her mother was still alive. She sat thoughtfully for a long time
and at last tearing the letter slowly into bits, she tossed it into the
drawing-room fire. Of its contents she said nothing to Irene.

The letter to Irene was brief. It read, “I leave you your money outright
with no string to it, because the dead have no rights which the living
are bound to respect. You may do with it as you like.... You may give it
all to your beloved church, though it will be without my approval. You
may do anything with it which will bring you happiness. I have prayed to
God to make you happy. If you can find happiness by burying yourself, do
it before you are an hour older, for life is too short to waste even an
hour of happiness. But do not believe that it is such an easy thing to
find.

“I have loved you, Irene, always, though I have never been able to
understand you. I have suffered for you, silently and alone. I, who am
dead, may tell you these things which in life I could not tell you. Only
know that I cherished you always even if I did not know how to reach
you. There are some things that one cannot say. At least I--even I,
your own mother--could not make you understand because I never really
knew you at all. But remember always that I loved you in spite of all
the wretched walls which separated even a mother from her daughter. God
be with you and guide you.”

Irene, in the stillness of her bare, austere room, wept silently, the
tears streaming down her battered, aging face. When she had finished
reading she thrust the letter inside her dress against her thin breasts,
and a little later when she descended and found the drawing-room empty
she tore it into tiny bits to be consumed by the same fire which had
secretly destroyed Lily’s letter a little while before.




XLVIII


She made no mention of this letter to Lily, but before she left the
house late the same afternoon she went to Lily’s room, a thing which she
had never done before. She found her sister lying on the bed in her
darkened room.

“What is it, Irene?”

Irene standing in the doorway, hesitated for an instant.

“Nothing,” she said presently. “I just stopped to see if you were all
right.” Again there was a little pause. “You aren’t afraid ... alone
here in the evenings, are you?”

Out of the darkness came the sound of Lily’s laughter.

“Afraid? Lord, no! What is there to be afraid of? I’m all right.” And
Irene went away, down the long drive into Halsted street which lay in
thick blackness because the strikers had cut the wires of the street
lights.

On the same evening Lily had dinner on a lacquer table before the fire
in the drawing-room. She ate languidly, leaning back in her rosewood
armchair, dividing her attention between the food and the pages of Henri
Bordeaux. Save for a chair or two and the great piano, the room was
still in camphor, the furniture swathed in linen coverings, the Aubusson
carpet rolled up in its corner. Dawdling between the food and the book,
she managed to consume an hour and a half before she finished her coffee
and cigarette. Despite the aspect of the room there was something
pleasant about it, a certain indefinable warmth and sense of space which
the library lacked utterly.

The business of the will was virtually settled. She had announced her
intention of leaving within a day or two. Two of her bags were already
packed. One of them she had not troubled herself to unpack because she
had not the faintest need of clothes unless she wished to dress each
night for her lonely dinner as if she expected a dozen guests. And being
indolent she preferred to lounge about comfortably in the black kimono
embroidered in silver with a design of wistaria. Yet in her lounging
there was nothing of sloppiness. She was too much a woman of taste. She
was comfortable; but she was trim and smart, from her bronze hair so
well done, to the end of her neat silver-slippered toe.

When she had finished her cigarette she rose and went to the piano where
she played for a long time, rather sentimentally and without her usual
ecstatic dash. She played as if a yearning sadness had descended upon
her. It may have been the thought of quitting the old house which had
come to the end of the road. In another week its only occupants would be
Sarah and Hennery. The others would have vanished.... Irene, Lily, even
the black servants. There was no such thing as age or tradition. The
Town had no time for such things. There was no longer room for Cypress
Hill. It stood in the way of progress. The Town council was eager to buy
and destroy it in order to raise on its site a new railway station, more
vast and pretentious than any in the state.

It may have been this which made her sad.

Certainly her mood drove her to the depths, for she played such music as
the Liebesträume and a pair of sentimental German waltzes. And gradually
she played more and more softly until at length her hands slipped from
the keyboard to her lap and she sat with bowed head regarding the pink
tips of her polished finger-nails.

The curtains were drawn across the windows so that no sound penetrated
from the outside. In the grate the fire of cannel coal crackled softly
and new flames leapt up.

Presently she returned to her chair and novel, but she did not read. She
remained staring into the fire in the same distracted fashion.




XLIX


She was sitting thus when she turned at the sound of shuffling footsteps
and saw Sarah coming softly toward her. The countenance of the mulatto
carried a vague, indefinable expression of fear. It was gray with
terror.

“What is it, Sarah?” asked Lily. “In the name of Heaven what is the
matter?”

The woman trembled. “There’s trouble a-brewin’, Miss Lily,” she said.
“The park is full of men. They’ve been comin’ in at the gate and they’re
all over the place.” The woman hesitated again. “Hennery’s watching now.
He sent me to ask if he was to send for the police?”

Lily stood up and fastened the black and silver kimono higher about her
throat.

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know, Miss Lily. Hennery thinks mebbe they’re strikers. He’s
put out the light at the back, so he can watch ’em without bein’ seen.”

For a moment Lily remained silent and thoughtful. Presently she said,
“Put out the lights in here, Sarah. I’ll go and look myself.”

And she went out, leaving the frightened servant to extinguish the
lamps.

A moment later, groping her way through the dark hallway to the
servants’ quarters, she stumbled suddenly upon the terrified figure of
Hennery kneeling down by a window, keeping watch.

“It’s Miss Lily, Hennery,” she said. “Don’t be frightened.”

The window was a blue rectangle against the wall of the hallway. It was
a clear night but moonless, although the bright, cold sky was all
powdered with glistening stars. Outside in the park, among the dead
trunks of the trees, moved scores of figures black against the blue
gray snow. Some of them carried lanterns of one sort or another. There
were even women among them, women with shawls over their heads, wearing
short heavy skirts which cleared the top of the deep snow. Behind them,
the searchlights from the mill yard fingered the blue dome of the sky
nervously, sweeping now up and down, now across striking the black
chimneys and furnace towers, cutting them cleanly in two as if the cold
rays of light were knives.

In the hallway the nervous breathing of Hennery became noisy. It was
clear that something about the scene ... something which had to do with
the silent, cold furnaces, the dead trees and the blackness of the
moving figures aroused all the superstitious terror of the negro.

Outside the number of men increased. They appeared to be congregating
now, in a spot near the deserted kennels. The lanterns moved among the
trees like dancing lights above a swamp.

“It’s all right, Hennery,” said Lily presently. “It’s all right The
police would only make matters worse. I suppose Miss Irene told them to
meet here in the park. The police won’t let them meet anywhere else.
It’s the last place they have.”

“Mebbe,” Hennery muttered, doubtfully. “Mebbe.”

The figure of the mulatto woman appeared shuffling her way along the
wall of the corridor.

“The best thing to do,” said Lily softly, “is for you to go to bed and
forget about it. Nothing will happen. Just don’t interfere. Forget about
it. I’ll go up to my own room.... You might see that all the doors are
locked.”

And with that she left the two negroes crouching on the floor of the
corridor gazing with a sort of fascination at the spectacle in the
barren park.

Upstairs in her own room, she drew up the chaise longue and pulled aside
the curtains from the window. The glass ran to the floor so that she was
able, lying down, to watch everything that took place in the park. The
room was in darkness and the French traveling clock, as if to comfort
her, chimed out ten as she flung herself down, covering her long limbs
with a silk comforter against the chill that crept in everywhere.

Outside the strange pageant continued to grow in size and animation.
Sometimes the searchlight, swinging low in its course, flashed swiftly
across the park, revealing for an instant a hundred swarthy faces and as
many figures wrapped in heavy coats, bits of old blanket, rags ...
anything to shut out the bitter cold. Above each figure hung a little
cloud of steaming breath, a soul hovering above a body. There were
negroes among them,--the negroes doubtless, whom she had seen working in
the choking fumes of the acid vats.

Yet none of the figures held any individuality. They might have been
automatons. Figures in a single mob, none of them possessed a distinct
personality. All this was welded into one vague mass, which carried a
threat of anger and violence. The terror of Hennery was not altogether
beyond conception. They kept moving about too in a restless uncertain
fashion among the dead trees and deserted borders. In the niches of the
dead hedge the figures of the Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo Belvedere
gleamed darkly.

And as Lily watched, the light in her dark eyes brightened slowly and
steadily. She became like one hypnotized. She began to breathe more
quickly as if the old excitement, against which she was so powerless,
had entered her blood. The soft white hand holding the back of the
chaise longue trembled a little.

Slowly the moving figures gathered into a black throng at the side of
the kennels. Somewhere in their midst a light began to glow, increasing
slowly in volume until the tongues of red flame showed above the black
heads of the mob. They had built a great fire for warmth, and near it
some one had set up a barrel for the speakers to stand on. By the light
of the flames she was able to see that the first speaker was a little
man, rather thin and wiry like a bearded gnome, who danced about a great
deal, waving his arms and legs. His manner was explosive. It was
impossible to hear above the flames through the heavy glass of the
window what he was saying, but clearly it produced an effect. The mob
began to churn about and wave its lanterns. Sometimes the sound of
shouts and cries vaguely penetrated the darkened room.

At last the little man finished and was lifted down by a score of
hands. More wood was thrown on the fire and the red flames hungrily
chased a shower of sparks high up among the dead branches of the trees.
A moment later a second man climbed to the top of the barrel. He was an
enormous fellow, a veritable giant who towered far above the mob. At the
sight of him the strikers cheered wildly. Lily, from her point of
vantage, must have recognized in him something vaguely familiar ... the
merest suggestion of memory in the sudden, eloquent gestures, the easy
powerful grace with which he balanced himself as he spoke, the same
grace she had seen one afternoon in the great shed beneath the hill.
More wood was thrown upon the fire. The flames leaped higher and in the
wild light, doubt was no longer possible. It was Krylenko who harangued,
feverishly and desperately, the threatening sullen mob.




L


Inside the warm room, Lily raised herself slowly and felt her way to the
closet where she took down the old sealskin coat with the leg of mutton
sleeves. With this thrown about her shoulders, she went back to the
window, cautiously unfastened the clasp and stepped out upon the snow
covered roof of the wrought iron piazza. The snow was deep and the
silver slippered feet sank to the ankles. But of this she seemed to take
no notice. As if fascinated, she leaned close against the bricks,
sheltering herself from the wind, and stood listening.

Krylenko addressed the strikers in some foreign tongue which might have
been Russian or Polish. He spoke in a clear strong voice that rose and
fell with the sincerity of an overpowering emotion. It was impossible to
know what he was saying, yet the effect was tremendous. The man was a
born leader. In that moment he could have led the mob where he would.

And presently he began to speak Italian ... rather haltingly and with an
air of desperate frustration. This Lily was able to understand in part.
He urged them not to yield. He plead with them to fight to the end. The
victory, he said, was within....

Above the crackling of the fire and the voice of the speaker the air was
ripped suddenly by a solitary rifle shot. Then another and another in
quick succession, until the air became alive and vibrant with the sound
of guns. From the throng rose a solitary scream, followed by a groan or
two and the confused, animal cries of a mob suddenly stricken by a
panic. The figure on the barrel disappeared, engulfed by a swarming mass
of terrified humanity. Lanterns were flung to the ground and trampled.
One or two exploded in bursts of red flame. The little park was alive
with running figures, women in shawls, men in rags. On the gray blue
snow by the deserted kennels lay a solitary black figure. By the arbor
where the wistaria had once flourished was another which stirred
faintly.

Lily, leaning against the dead vines on the house, understood what had
happened. The Mill guards, from the security of the barrier, had fired
upon the helpless mob. The innocent plan of Irene had been, after all,
nothing but a trap.

Something struck the bricks above her head with a sharp spatter and bits
of mortar fell into her hair. Quickly she slipped through the tall
window back into the room and waited.

The little park was empty now, so empty that if it had not been for the
embers in the snow and black still figure lying near by, one might have
believed that there had been no mob at all, no fire and no savage cries
of terror. Lily remained standing inside the window as if she were
unable to move. The dying embers appeared to exert an overpowering
fascination ... the dying embers and the still black figure in the snow.

Presently there crept out from the shelter of the kennels a man, bending
low to the ground as he moved. Cautiously he made his way to the figure
in the snow, halting there for a moment to fumble with the ragged coat
for some sign of life, risking his life in full sight of the guards.
Another shot rang out and then another, and the man still crouching low
to the ground ran toward the shelter of the big house. He came nearer
and nearer until, as he crossed the drive, he was no longer a unit in
the mob. He became an individual. It was Krylenko.

A second later he disappeared beneath the edge of piazza roof and Lily
lay down once more on the chaise longue. She was still trembling. It may
have been the cold.

Outside the night once more settled back into a dreadful stillness. The
searchlights fingered the sky with a new agitation. The house itself
grew still as death. The only sound was the faint, irregular,
untraceable creaking which afflicts old houses in the midst of the
night. The French traveling clock struck eleven and at the same time a
new sound, not at all like the distant unearthly creaking, came faintly
through the open door of Lily’s room. It was an indistinct scraping
sound as if some one were trying a key in a lock.




LI


Lily sat up, listening. The sound was repeated and presently there
followed the noise of a door being opened slowly and cautiously. Lily
rose and made her way to the dressing table where she pulled the bell.
Once she pulled, and then again and again. There was no response. Either
the servants were asleep or too terrified to answer. She gave the bell a
final pull and when the only answer was silence, she took from the
dressing table an electric torch and from the drawer of her carved desk
a tiny pistol with a handle of mother of pearl which had been her
mother’s. Then she made her way quietly into the hall until she reached
the top of the stairway where she leaned over the rail and flashed the
light.

The glare illuminated all the lower hall, lighting up the familiar
carved chest, the straight-backed chair, the crystal chandelier, the
mirror. Everything was the same save that on the chest with his head
bowed and resting on his hands in an attitude of despair, sat Krylenko,
hatless, his coat all torn, the blood streaming down the side of his
face.

It appeared that he was weak and dazed, for he remained in this same
position for a long time, failing to notice even the bright shower of
light which, without warning, drenched the hall. When at last he
stirred, it was to lean back wearily against the wall and say in a low
voice, “I have used the key, Miss Irene.”

At the sound Lily ran down the long stairs, more rapidly than she had
descended them in all the years she had lived in the house. She soared
above the polished wood, until she stood suddenly by his side. She bent
over him and touched his shoulder.

“It is not Miss Irene ... I am Lily,” she said. “Lily ... Miss Irene’s
sister.”

With one arm Krylenko wiped the blood from his eyes.

“Then you don’t know me,” he said weakly. “I am not a thief ... breaking
in.”

The little revolver Lily placed beside him on the chest, “I know you,”
she said. “I have seen you ... you are Krylenko.” She placed one arm
beneath his. “Come,” she said, “this is no place for you. There is a
divan in the drawing room. Come and lie down there. I’ll fetch some
whiskey.”

With an air of great weariness the man managed to gain his feet and,
leaning upon her, he made his way preceded by the little circle of white
light from Lily’s torch across the polished floor into the drawing-room.
Lily was tall but Krylenko towered above her like a giant.

She made him comfortable, piling the brocade pillows carelessly beneath
his bloody head. Then she went out and as she left, there rose behind
her the sound of a heart breaking sigh, like the cry of a defeated,
sobbing child.

After a little while she returned bearing a white basin filled with
water, a pair of linen pillow cases and a small silver flask. Presently
he sat up.

It was the first time she had seen him since that afternoon in the Mill
shed when Willie Harrison, fumbling with the ruby clasp of his watch
chain, proposed to her for the last time. He had changed. He was older.
Experience had traced its record in the fine lines about his eyes and
mouth. The crudeness of the massive head had likewise undergone a
change, giving place to a more certain modeling and a new dignity. Where
there had once been a certain shapelessness of feature, there was now a
firmness of line, a determination in the fine mouth, the strong nose and
the high massive forehead.

Lily, tearing the linen pillow cases into long strips, watched him
narrowly.

The wavy blond hair, where it was not stained with blood, clung against
the damp forehead. Where the coat was torn and the dark flannel shirt
ripped from the throat, the powerful muscles of the arm and shoulder lay
exposed. The fair skin was as white as Lily’s own soft body. The man’s
whole figure carried an air of freedom, of a certain fierce desire to
burst through the shabby, stained clothing.

All at once he raised his head and looked about him. The color returned
a little way into his face.

“The blinds,” he said, “are they shut?”

“Yes,” said Lily. “You are safe here.”

She had thrown off the old sealskin coat and sat by him clad in the
black and silver kimono, seductive, beautiful, perfect, save for the
tips of her silver slippers all soaked by the melted snow. The kimono
had come open at the neck and left her white soft throat exposed.
Krylenko was watching her now in a puzzled fashion. He behaved almost as
if she terrified him in some new and indefinable way.

“I let myself in with a key,” he told her. “A key Miss Irene gave me.
She told me to use it if ever I had to hide.” He paused for a moment and
took a second drink from the flask. “You see, I am safe here because it
is the last place they would look for me. They would never look for me
in the house of a rich man. They wouldn’t expect to find me in the house
of an American, a wealthy lady.”

He looked up at her in a singularly straightforward fashion,

“I suppose,” he said, “you too are on our side.”

Lily dipping a bit of linen into the basin did not reply for a moment.
At last she said, “I’d never thought about it one way or another until
now. It doesn’t matter, I suppose. But you needn’t fear what I’ll do.
I’d rather have _you_ here than the police.”

“If they caught me now,” he continued weakly, “they’d hang me. I
wouldn’t have a chance with Judge Weissman and the rest. Any jury in the
Town would hang me. You see there were men killed out there in the park
... men on both sides. That fellow over by the fire ... he’s dead. I
stopped to make certain. I didn’t kill anybody myself, but that makes no
difference. It’s me they’re after. They’ve been waiting for a chance
like this.”

He spoke English with a curious lack of accent, for the chaste Irene as
a teacher was thorough. He spoke it deliberately and rather carefully to
be sure, but without serious faults. His manner was neither shy nor
awkward. It was the manner of a man unused to women’s company, of a man
who had never before addressed a great lady; for Irene could not
properly be called either a woman or a great lady. She was, rather, the
embodiment of an idea.

“You’re safe,” said Lily. “You may depend on it. I, myself, will see to
it. I don’t love the police or the Harrisons or Judge Weissman ... I
don’t love any of them.” She drew her chair nearer. “Now lie down and
I’ll bathe your head.”

He lay down and instantly sat up again. “My head!” he protested. “It’s
all bloody.... It’ll spoil everything.” He picked up one of the pillows.
“See, I’ve done it already. They’re covered with blood.”

Lily smiled at him in her charming fashion, an imperceptible, secret
smile. She behaved as if she were entertaining a great man, an
ambassador or a rich banker, as if she were intent only upon making him
comfortable, at ease.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “In a few days there will be no one
to use the pillows. There are times, you know, when such things don’t
matter. Lie down,” she commanded. “One must know when such things are of
no account. It is part of knowing how to live.”

Protesting, Krylenko laid his great body back gently and she bent over
him, first removing the rings from her finger and placing them in a
glittering heap upon the lacquer table. He closed his eyes with a sigh
and she washed away with great gentleness the blood from his hair, from
the side of his face. Her soft white fingers swept across the tanned
face, then lower to where the throat became white and across the smooth,
hard muscles of the shoulder until at last there was in her touch more
of the caress of a woman than the ministering of a nurse.

“It is not serious,” she said in a low voice. “The bullet only cut the
skin.”

She took the strips of linen and bound them with the same gentle,
caressing fingers round and round his head. And presently she discovered
that he was still watching her in a curious embarrassed fashion. When
she had finished the dressing, she bathed the deep cut on his shoulder
and bound it carefully.

At length he sat up once more. A sudden change came over him. His blue
eyes grew dark, almost clouded.

“You are a good nurse,” he said, and took another drink from the silver
flask.

Lily moved about, clearing away the blood stained cloths and the bowl of
reddish water. The soft glow of the lamp captured the silver of her
kimono and fixed it as she moved with a flashing light. And all the time
Krylenko regarded her with a strange look of awe, as if he had never
before seen a woman.

“Strange,” she said presently, “that we should meet like this. You, who
have never seen me before.”

Krylenko stirred and ran one strong hand awkwardly over the back of the
other. “I’ve seen you before ... twice ... No ... three times. Once on
that day you came to the Mills, once in the street in your carriage and
once”--he looked up--“once in this room, right here. You were with the
boss that time ... dancing with him.”

Lily laughed softly. She must have remembered the shameless gown of
chartreuse green. “I’ll never be dancing with him again. I doubt if I
ever see him.”

Krylenko regarded her quizzically. “But he is rich.... Don’t rich women
marry rich men?” And he finished with a puzzled grunt of inquiry.

“Yes,” replied Lily. “It’s because I’m rich that I wouldn’t marry him.”
It must have occurred to her then how wide was the chasm which separated
her world from Krylenko’s. Still he failed to understand.

“That’s no reason,” she continued, “for marrying him ... a poor thing
like that.”

She sat down and drew her chair quite close to the rosewood sofa,
laughing at the same time. Clearly the whole adventure struck her as
bizarre, ridiculous ... even unreal. Yet she trembled as if she were
shivering with cold, and her laugh carried a vague hint of hysteria. She
leaned forward and began to stroke his aching head gently.

After a long awkward pause, she said, “Miss Irene will be home any time
now.”

“Yes.” And Krylenko gave a sort of grunt. Unmistakably there was a
crudeness about him. He was gauche, awkward; yet there was in his manner
a quality of power, of domination which had its origin somewhere in the
dim ages, when there were no drawing-rooms and no books of etiquette.
He had a manifest self-possession. He did not become obsequious before
this great lady as Judge Weissman and other men in stations beneath her
had done. He treated her, after all, as his equal. He was even a little
arrogant; a trifle scornful of her wealth.

“Miss Irene,” he observed presently, “is a noble woman. You understand
she gives up her life to my people. Do you know where she is now?” His
voice was raised, his manner excited. “She’s looking after the fellows
that got hurt. There was a woman, too. I saw her ... shot through the
arm.... Ah, Miss Irene is a saint. You know she could go anywhere in the
Flats. No one would touch her.”

The whole speech was touched with a tone of simple adoration. The
essence of him was a great, a really profound simplicity.

“She works hard,” said Lily. “She works hard. She cares for nothing
else.” By the watch on her white wrist it was midnight. “So that is why
she is late,” she added.

“There will be much work for her to-night,” said Krylenko. He kept
watching Lily in the same furtive fashion, his gaze wandering to the
lovely line of her bare white throat.

Again there was an awkward pause. “You don’t know how much she does,” he
said presently. “You don’t know what life is in the Flats. You sit here
in a warm house ... with silk and pillows and good food. You don’t
know,” he said bitterly. “You don’t know!”

Until now their conversation had been broken, disjointed, awkward, as if
circumstance compelled them to talk about something. Now for the first
time, a certain fire entered the Russian’s voice. Lily kept silent,
watching him with her great burning eyes. She still trembled.

“Maybe you think I like working twelve hours a day in that hot shed like
you saw me. Maybe you think I don’t want time to read and think.” The
man was working himself into a kind of frenzy. “You don’t know.... You
don’t know.... And then they shoot us down like pigs.” He leaned forward
and raised at Lily a strong finger. “I come here from Russia. I come
here because I could not live in Russia.... My father ... My father ...
He was shot by the Cossacks. I come here because they tell me that in
America you are free and have a good life. And what do they give me?
They make me work twelve hours in a hot shed. They put me into a filthy
house. They say, you must not complain. You must do as we say. We will
not pay you more. We will not let you live like a man. You are
Hunkies!... You are dirt! You did not have to come here. But all the
same, they want us. They send men to Russia to tell us great things
about America so we will come here because they need men for the Mills
... men to feed to the furnaces like coal ... to make a few men rich.”
He sighed bitterly and buried his face in his hands. “And now they shoot
us like the Cossacks shot my father in Russia.... I came here full of
hope and peace ... only to be shot like my father in Russia!”

In his excitement he forgot the perfect English Irene had taught him.
His blue eyes flashed and his face grew pale once more.

“No.... They can take me.... They can hang me.... Let them! I will not
go away.... It is not America or Russia that counts.... It is all
humanity!... Christians.... Bah!” He spat suddenly upon the polished
floor. And all at once he pitched back again among the pillows, weak and
fainting. The bandage slipped from his wounded head over one eye.

Quickly Lily bent over him. She poured more whiskey between his lips and
refastened the bandage. Then she settled herself to chafing his strong
wrists and rubbing his forehead in the old caressing motion with a
delicate, white hand that trembled beyond control. A queer light came
into her dark eyes.

Presently he sighed and looked up at her. “I am sorry,” he said, “to
bother a fine lady like you. If it had been Miss Irene.” He closed his
eyes suddenly. “I have been hungry, you know. We haven’t even enough
food in the Flats.” Then he took her hand and pressed it in a naive,
grateful fashion. “I am sorry, you know ...” he murmured gently.

She did not move. She remained there stroking his head. “I know.... I
understand.... You must lie still. Be quiet,” she said softly. For a
long time they remained thus, and presently Krylenko, opening his eyes
looked up at her with a puzzled expression. “You are not the same as
Miss Irene,” he said in a low voice. “You are different ... very
different.”

To this she made no reply. Gently the motion of her hand ceased. A pool
of silence enveloped them. _You are not the same as Miss Irene._




LII


The minutes passed and then suddenly, sharply, there arose a loud
uproar, the sound of angry knocking and a hand rattling the big outer
door. Krylenko sat up white and still. Neither of them moved. The
knocking continued, punctuated now by shouts.

“It’s the police!” said Lily, and stood up. “Come with me. Bring the
bowl ... the bandages!”

Krylenko stood by helplessly. It was Lily who arranged everything with a
sudden clairvoyance which seemed to have overtaken her at the instant of
the knocking. She turned the brocade cushions so that the bloody side
was concealed and, gathering up the bandages, she led the way through
the hall into the corridor where an hour earlier Hennery and the mulatto
woman had crouched in fascinated terror. At last she turned into a store
room piled high with boxes. Here she led him to a great box in the
corner where she halted.

“I’ll hide you here,” she said. “They’ll never find you. It is full of
books.” And together, with flying hands, they emptied the box. Krylenko
climbed in and assumed a crouching position. He was buried beneath the
books which Lily hurled into the box in bunches of three or four, in
armfuls. At last he lay completely hidden beneath a great heap of yellow
backed novels ... the novels of Paul Marguerite, Marcel Prévost, Paul
Bourget, Collette Willy ... the novels that Julia Shane had “skimmed”
and cast aside, the novels which to her covenanting blood _l’amour_ made
so tiresome.

As Lily ran through the corridor the knocking increased in violence,
punctuated by shouts of “Hello, in there!” and “Open the door,” uttered
in a gruff bass voice. As she ran she wrapped the kimono high about her
throat, and as she passed the carved chest she picked up the tiny pearl
handled pistol. Then she turned the key quickly and opened the door
standing with the pistol in one hand and the yellow backed Les Anges
Gardiens in the other.

Outside on the snow covered piazza stood a half dozen men in the
uniforms of the constabulary. At the apparition of the beautiful woman
in the doorway they remained for an instant silent, startled.

“What is it you want?” she asked.

One of the men, a burly fellow with a brutal jaw stepped forward. “We
want to search the house. We’re looking for a man.”

“What man?” asked Lily.

“Never mind,” came the gruff answer. “You wouldn’t know him. He’s
nothing to you. His name is Krylenko.”

“There’s no one in the house but me and the servants.” Her voice
trembled a little before the menacing group on the piazza.

“That’s all right,” said the man. “We’re going to see for ourselves. We
saw him come in here.”

He began to edge his way slowly toward the open door and as he moved the
pearl handled pistol raised slowly, menacingly, in an even tempo with
his slow insolent advance.

“You cannot come in,” said Lily in a slow, firm voice. The pistol was
level now with the heart of the intruder. “I’ve told you there is no one
here. You might, it seems to me, take the word of a lady. I’ve been here
all the evening and I would know....” She raised the yellow backed novel
in a brief little gesture. “I’ve been reading. There is no one here but
myself.”

The man growled. “That’s all right but we want to look for ourselves.”
There was a painful pause. “We’re going to have a look,” he added with
determination.

When Lily spoke again there was a new note in her voice, a sudden timbre
of determination, a hint of unreasonable, angry, feminine stubborness
which appeared to awe the intruder.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” she said. “It is my house. You have no right to
enter it. You have no warrant. It is mine. You cannot enter it.” And
then, as if by an afterthought she added, “Even my sister is not here. I
don’t know this Krylenko. I never saw him.”

The man, it seemed, was baffled. If the woman in the doorway had been
the wife of a workman, a simple Italian or Slovak, he undoubtedly would
have brushed her aside, shot her if necessary, trampled her under foot
the way his comrades had trampled to death the old Polish woman in
Halsted street at the foot of the drive. But the woman in the doorway
was a lady. She was not a poor foreigner. She was more American than
himself. Behind her in the shadows gleamed dully a silver mounted
mirror, a chandelier of sparkling crystal. Her fine, beautiful body was
clad in a garment of black and silver. On her fingers glittered rings.
All these things meant wealth, and wealth meant power. The man, after
all, had only the soul of a policeman, a soul at once bullying and
servile. For him these symbols might spell ruin. Besides, the woman was
hysterically stubborn, strangely unafraid ... so unafraid that her
courage carried a hint of suspicious origin. He did not brush her aside
nor did he shoot her.

“It’s no use,” she said. “If you return with a warrant, all right. I can
do nothing. For the present, it is my house.”

The man turned away and began a low conversation with his companions. He
had a sheepish air, and as he talked the door was closed suddenly and
locked, shutting him out in the darkness, leaving him no choice in the
matter. For a time the little group of men conversed angrily, and
presently they went away in defeat down the long drive.

So Lily had placed herself on the side of the strikers ... against the
Town, against the Mills. She stood now with all her family, with Irene,
with the dead Julia Shane, with Hattie Tolliver and her savage
umbrella.




LIII


Inside the house, she listened until the creak of boots on the snow died
away. Then she moved off along the hall toward the corridor. She walked
uncertainly and from time to time leaned against the wall for support.
The spot of light from the electric torch preceded her slippered feet, a
bright moving circle which seemed to devour and destroy the streak of
flooring which it crossed on its way to the storeroom. Weakly she opened
the door and stepped inside.

“It’s all right, now. I’ve sent them away.”

The books in the great box stirred with a heaving motion and out of them
presently emerged Krylenko, pale and shaken. He climbed out and as his
foot struck the floor, Lily gave a little cry and pitched forward so
that he caught her suddenly. The electric torch dropped to the floor.
The glass shattered with a faint pop and the room swam in a thick, soft
darkness.

She did not faint. In a moment she recovered herself and managed to
stand upright, but she did not move away from Krylenko. She stood there,
waiting. Slowly his powerful arms closed about her with the vague
gesture of a man wakening slowly from a profound sleep.

“It’s all right,” she whispered faintly. “I’ve saved you.”

He made no other answer than a faint crooning sound. He stroked her hair
gently with his strong, calloused hand, and tried to quiet the violent
trembling which once more had taken possession of her. Again the house
was silent save for the distant, ghostly creaking.

Perhaps he was seized by an overwhelming sense of awe which until that
moment he had never experienced ... an awe for some unknown and terrific
force against which he was helpless, like a little child. It may have
been that, as Irene believed, he had never known any woman, that he had
been pure as a saint. If these things had not been, it is impossible to
say what might have happened. He stood holding Lily close to him,
kissing with a strange, awed gentleness the white line of her bare
throat.

He discovered presently that she was sobbing.... Lily, who never wept.
It was a terrible heartbreaking sound as if, all at once, she had sensed
the tragedy of a whole lifetime, as if she stood in a vast and barren
plain surrounded only by loneliness.

Krylenko’s hands and arms became unaccountably gentle. His cheek brushed
against her white forehead with a comforting, caressing motion. And
presently he lifted her as easily and as gently as he had lifted the
wounded striker at Mrs. Tolliver’s command, and bore her from the room
and down the dark corridor. She lay quietly, still sobbing in the same
heartbroken fashion.

Thus he carried her into the long drawing-room and placed her among the
brocade cushions of the divan, her amber hair all disheveled, her eyes
bright with tears. For a moment he stood by her side awkwardly, silent
and incoherent, overwhelmed by some new and profound emotion. The fire
of cannel coal had died down. In the grate there was nothing now but
ashes. Silently he knelt beside the sofa and rested his blond head on
her breasts. Neither of them spoke a word, but Lily’s hand returned once
more to the old gentle caressing motion across his tired eyes.

The minutes slipped away, one by one in a quick stream as if they were
no more than the trickle of a clear spring water which is beyond all
peril of drought, as if time itself were nothing and eternity even less.

So engulfed were they by the mood that even the sound of a key turning
distantly in a clumsy lock and the echo of a light footfall in the
hallway failed to disturb them. They were, it seemed oblivious to
everything until suddenly there stepped through the doorway the thin
figure of Irene in the worn gray suit and battered black hat. At the
sight of them she halted, an apparition with a tired white face, drawn
and quivering. It was not until she gave a low convulsive cry that Lily
and Krylenko discovered she was watching them. Krylenko remained on his
knees, only straightening his body to look at her. Lily turned her head
a little, gently, listlessly, almost with indifference.

Irene had become hideous. In her eyes was the light of fury. When she
spoke her voice was cold with an insane, unearthly hatred.

“So,” she said bitterly, “it has happened!” The worn hat fell from her
grasp. Her fingers intertwined with a strangling gesture. “I might have
known it.... I should have guessed....” And then her voice rose to a
suppressed scream. “You are no better than a street walker! You are
damned forever! I have prayed.... I have prayed but God himself could
not save you.... He would not want you ... a vile creature ... a
strumpet!... to destroy all that I have spent my life to create.” She
began to sob wildly. “To destroy in a night what cost me years.”

Slowly, silently, Krylenko rose to his feet. He watched Irene with a
look of bewilderment, as if he found himself in a wild nightmare. Lily
turned away silently and buried her face in the pillows. A Fury had
descended upon them unawares.

Irene continued to cry. “I have known always.... I have known from the
beginning.... I knew about the Governor.... I saw him go into your
room.... Only God knows how many men you have had.... You are lost,
damned, forever!” The terrible sound of her weeping echoed and reechoed
through the silent old house.

Lily raised her body from the cushions and sat with her silver slippers
touching the floor. “What are you saying, Irene?” she asked. “You are
mad. There has been nothing ... nothing ... nothing. You are mad!”

It was true that for the moment Irene was quite insane, yet her madness
endowed her with the clairvoyance that is beyond sanity. She rushed
toward Lily. She would have strangled her but Krylenko stepped between
them and held her as if she had been an angry bad-tempered little child.

“Ah, don’t lie to me,” she cried. “I’m no fool. I can see. It is written
in your eyes. Both of you.... I know. I know!... It is there! I see it!”

She struggled fiercely in the powerful grasp of Krylenko. “Let me
go.... You ... You are no better than the others ... a common beast, a
swine like the others ... a swine like all men, lying to me all these
years. And on a night like this. May God damn you both in Hell forever
and ever!”

She freed herself and sank to the floor at Krylenko’s feet. The tirade
gave way to a torrent of wild hysterical sobbing. Her pale, battered
face was all distorted, her thin hair disarrayed. She collapsed suddenly
into a barren shattered old woman, abandoned by life. She had lost in
her battle against something which was far stronger than herself,
stronger even than Lily and Krylenko. She was broken, pitiful.

Lily sat by helplessly, her own tears dried now. She turned the rings
round and round on her fingers and in the gesture there was a
concentrated agony.

“You must not mind her,” she said presently. “She is not well.” Then she
rose slowly and moved toward her sister. “Irene,” she said softly.
“Irene.”

But Irene shuddered and drew away from her. “Don’t touch me ... evil
one! Don’t touch me!” she cried monotonously.

“Perhaps if she had rest,” said Krylenko. “Perhaps if she slept.”

Irene kept up moaning and rocking. “In the Flats they’re dying.... In
the Flats they’re dying ... and you two up here, like beasts all that
time ... like beasts!”

Lily began to walk up and down the long shadowy room in a wild
distracted manner, as if the contagion of her sister’s hysteria had
touched her too. “There is nothing I can do,” she kept saying. “There is
nothing.... Perhaps if we left her....”

It was Krylenko who solved the difficulty. He bent over Irene and picked
her up despite her protests. She screamed. She wept. She would have
scratched and bitten him if his arms had been less powerful and his grip
less certain. He turned to Lily. “Where is her bed?”

He spoke with a curious, intimate understanding. In an hour he had come
nearer to Lily than ten years had brought him to the chaste fanatic
sister.

Silently Lily led the way up the long stairs while he followed bearing
Irene who moaned like a wounded animal. At the door of the room with the
white bed and the pink-gilt image of the Virgin, he halted as if fearful
of desecrating its purity. But Lily led the way boldly and together they
laid the sister upon the narrow white bed. When they had gone out,
closing the door behind them, the sound of her faint moaning haunted the
dark hallway.

At the door of her own room Lily halted. “Wait,” she said, and left him,
returning in a moment, her arms burdened with blankets.

“Take these,” she said. “It will be cold in the drawing-room.” In all
the confusion, she had not forgotten his wounds, his comfort.

Krylenko smiled vaguely. “It will be hard to sleep anywhere to-night,”
he said softly.

“But it is spoiled now ...” replied Lily. “Everything.”

And Krylenko turned away and went silently down the stairs.

It is true that no one slept until the dawn. Irene and Lily did not
sleep at all. The one lay awake sobbing and praying, the other lay with
her head buried in the pillows keeping her body rigid to still its wild
trembling. Krylenko was the only one who slept. With the coming of dawn
he sank into a deadening thick slumber among the stained brocade pillows
of the rosewood sofa.

There he slept undisturbed until midday, for with the curtains tightly
drawn there was no light to waken him. When at last he did waken, he
found on the lacquer table beside him a note, which read:

“There are some things in this world which are impossible, things fate
herself will not permit. This you will understand, I am sure. I have
gone away. Irene has gone too. Where she has gone I do not know. Perhaps
it does not matter. There is small chance of our ever meeting again. Our
paths lie too far apart.... I have arranged for you to remain in the
house ... as long as it is necessary. As long even as you desire it.
There is no one but yourself and the two black servants. They have been
told. It is my house. It would please me to think of you there. It
would please me ... and my mother too ... to know that you were safe
inside it still leading the strike. It is a good place, for you can keep
in hiding and still lead the fight. My blessings are with you and your
cause.”

The note was signed with Lily’s name, and underneath it in the same
sprawling hand was written, “O God! I love you. Good-by.”

She had come in some time between the dawn and the broad daylight to
leave the note by his side. She had passed him and gone away without a
word, whither he could not possibly know. Nothing remained save a
confused memory of her and this short, enigmatic, note which avowed
nothing and yet everything.

For a long time Krylenko held the bit of paper between his strong heavy
fingers, staring dully all the while at the generous impetuous writing.
At last he took out a battered cigarette, put a match to it, and at the
same moment set fire to the wisp of paper which he tossed among the cold
ashes of the dead fire.... _There are some things in this world which
are impossible._

He got up and began pacing the floor angrily, up and down, up and down,
scarring the polished floor at each step. It made no difference now.
There was no one there any longer to use the floor. Presently he began
muttering to himself. “They are no different than the others. They are
all alike. When they are tired they run away because they are rich. Damn
them and their money!”

And then all at once he went down upon his knees before the sofa and
seizing one of the stained cushions in his arms, he kissed it again and
again as if it were Lily instead of a feather-stuffed bit of brocade
which he held in his arms.




LIV


He did not quit the old house. He remained there in hiding to direct the
strike. He was still there when Hennery packed the glowing Venice of Mr.
Turner and the handsome malignant portrait of John Shane to be shipped
to Lily in Paris. From the old house he sent out to the strikers message
after message of encouragement and exhortation, until, at last, the
strike was lost and there was no longer either need or place for him in
the Mills or in the Town. No one knew when he went away or whither it
was he went.

And the greatest of all the stories of Shane’s Castle remained a secret.
The Town knew nothing of the greatest sacrifice ever made within its
walls.




LV


The drawing-room of the house in the Rue Raynouard was a long,
high-ceilinged room with tall windows opening upon a terrace and a
sloping lawn which ran down to the high wall that shut out the dust and
the noise of the Rue de Passy. It was curiously like the muffled,
shuttered drawing-room in the old house in Cypress Hill, not because the
furnishings were the same; they were not. From Shane’s Castle Lily
brought only two things ... the glowing Venice and the portrait of her
father. Mr. Turner’s flamboyant painting hung above the black marble
mantelpiece in the Rue Raynouard. The portrait of John Shane hung
against the satinwood paneling opposite the row of tall windows. The
similarity was not an easy thing to define, for its roots lay in nothing
more tangible than the bond between old Julia Shane and her daughter
Lily, in a subtle sense of values which the one had passed on to the
other.

The cold, impersonal hand of a decorator had nothing to do with either
room. There was no striving toward a museum accuracy of period. The
effect was much warmer, much more personal than that. The distinction
was achieved by the collection, bit by bit, of beautiful things each
chosen for some quality which warmed the heart of the purchaser ...
carpets, bits of crystal and carved jade on ebony stands, books,
cushions, chairs, pictures, sconces, candelabra, brocades and old
Italian damasks, footstools, and mirrors which coldly reflected the warm
bodies of beautiful women. Even in a city where taste and beauty were
the rule, the drawing-room in the Rue Raynouard was a marvel of these
qualities. It was more beautiful than the rooms of Madame Gigon’s
respectable friends; for these women were French _bourgeoises_ and
neither wealth nor decorators could endow them with a quality that
descends from Heaven only upon the few and the blessed. These women
admired Madame Shane’s drawing room and envied it ... all of them,
Madame de Cyon, the Comptesse de Turba, Madame Marchand, the mysterious
old Madame Blaise, who people said had been a famous beauty in her
youth; Geneviève Malbour, who wrote novels as dowdy as herself and
struck the literary note; even the rich Duchesse de Gand, who frequented
the royalist soirées and the parties given by the _chic_ Jews, and only
came occasionally to Madame Gigon to placate her husband whose title was
created by the first Napoleon. They attempted to imitate the seductive,
quiet beauty of Numero Dix but they failed somehow, perhaps because they
could not resist introducing a pillow of just the wrong, violent shade
or a pair of rubber plants, or some monstrous piece of furniture from
the period of the Second Empire.

“This American” had outdone them, quite without striving or effort.
Indeed if the success of Lily’s drawing-room had depended upon either of
these things it would have remained forever as ugly as on the day she
moved into it, to succeed a chocolate manufacturer whose growing
prosperity led him to a small palace in the new German style on the
Avenue de Jena. She was incapable of effort. If she had been poor, if
she had been forced to work, she would have become sloven; even her
beauty would have deteriorated and grown sloppy through neglect. It was
money which stood between her and these disasters ... money which
permitted her to enter a shop and say, “I will have this and this and
this for my drawing-room,” money which permitted her to enter any
_salon_ of the Rue de la Paix and say, “I will have this gown, or this
one, or this,” money which permitted her to go to the hairdresser,
Augustine, and say, “I will have my hair waved and my complexion
treated.” And having been born with taste, she made no errors.

Although the friends of Madame Gigon spoke of her as “the American,” it
is seldom that they thought of her as a foreigner. Only her indolence
and her extravagance could have betrayed to a stranger the fact that she
was not a true Frenchwoman. In the seven years that followed the death
of her mother, Lily abandoned forever all thought of returning to
America. She spoke French to perfection, indolently and gracefully, with
a fine smooth accent. Her son, for all his American parentage and
British schooling, was French; or at least, not American. He had a taste
for music, for pictures, even for poetry.

“Fancy that,” she remarked to Ellen. “Fancy that, and think what his
father has become.”

And she held up a newspaper photograph of the Governor ... now the
Senator ... clipped from one of the American newspapers which Ellen
brought to Numero Dix. It portrayed him in the act of addressing the
Benevolent Order of Camels in Detroit. The pose was in itself
flamboyant. Everything about him flowed. His loose black cravat flowed
in the breeze. His hair, worn rather long, waved behind him. His alpaca
suit ballooned about his heavy figure. His stomach rested upon a
flag-draped railing, and his face wore a smile that was old and
familiar, the smile of one who patronized his audience. In the
background there was a vague suggestion of a square, solid figure in a
richly flowered costume, wearing a pince nez and a cloud of flowing
veils ... obviously the figure of the Senatoress.

Though Lily sometimes mocked the Governor, she never mentioned him as
the source of Jean’s restless vitality and intelligence. But it did not
matter, since no one in her world and, least of all Ellen, was
interested in the Governor or eager to defend him.

The women who came to her drawing-room were, first of all, “Madame
Gigon’s friends.” Toward Lily, for all her good-nature and her
submission to their world, their attitude was never more than that of
acquaintances. She saw them many times a month but there remained always
an insurmountable barrier. It existed perhaps because she was too
indolent to make those overtures necessary to friendship, perhaps
because deep down in the heart of their bourgeois respectability they
detected in the American traces of the wanton. They came to the “salons”
of Madame Gigon and Lily went in turn to theirs. But she never
entertained in the evening save at small dinners of four and six, and
she never went to balls. Her hunger for gaiety she satisfied in the
midst of crowds, at the Opéra, in the music halls, at the races. And
always she was accompanied by Jean or Ellen or Madame Gigon so that no
one was able to say that she was indiscreet. If she went out frequently
with the Baron, he was after all the cousin and protector of the old
woman who accompanied them. If the Baron came frequently to her house it
was to see Madame Gigon who was flattered by his attentions and his
gifts of money.

Yet it could not be said that she was more friendly with men than with
women. The men admired her. Indeed men from the world of fashion, from
the world of the Duchesse de Guermantes’ _soirées_, sometimes mingled
with the dowdy Bonapartists of Madame Gigon’s salon, brought there by
friends who moved in the circle closest to “the American.” They were
pleasantly received and sent on their way, having accomplished nothing.
If they became a trifle ardent she called Madame Gigon or the Baron to
her side and the incident ended without difficulty. The visits came to
nothing, for Lily appeared to have no ambitions. She was bafflingly
content. She might have had great success in a score of ways, for her
flamboyant beauty was a sort rarely seen among French women and it
attracted notice wherever she appeared. But she had no ambitions; she
was both wealthy and content. People remarked her at the Opéra but it
was seldom that any one was able to identify her, for none knew her. Her
circle was small, dowdy and infinitely respectable. She lived quietly
with old Madame Gigon, now almost blind, and a charming son. It seemed
that she was even content to forego a second marriage. And among those
who admired her, because she was so good-natured and lovely to look
upon, was the wife of the Baron, a pretty blond woman, rich and stupid,
the daughter of a manufacturer from Lyons.

Madame Gigon adored her in two quite distinct fashions. The first
because Lily was pleasant, kindly and generous. The second adoration,
less commendable perhaps but none the less thorough, was the adoration
of a woman pinched all her life by poverty for a fellow creature who
secured her declining years with every possible luxury. Madame Gigon
could not possibly forget that it was Lily who had set her up in a
situation worthy of a woman whose father had been ruined by his loyalty
to Napoleon the Little. The widow of the curator of the Cluny Museum had
grown very small and dry. Her face resembled a withered pomegranate both
in texture and color. Her dog Fifi had long since been laid to rest in
the dog’s cemetery on a little island in the Seine where Madame Shane
had kindly raised a tombstone with Fifi in marble sitting on a bronze
cushion, “tout á fait comme dans la vie.” Fifi had not one successor but
two, both provided by Madame Shane to console “her poor old Louise.” One
was a black and tan, for all the world like the departed Fifi, and bore
the name of Criquette. The other, a perky black Scotty brought back from
England as a surprise, bore the name of Michou. They slept in Madame
Gigon’s room overlooking the garden and had their own corner in the
Louis Seize dining room, where they ate when the rest of the household
sat down at an enormous table lighted by tall candles. Like Fifi they
had gone the way of gateaux and were stout and short of breath.




LVI


These four ... Lily, Madame Gigon, Criquette and Michou ... were the
permanent tenants of Numero Dix. There were two others who came and
went, spending now a week’s holiday, now a whole month or more. They
even paid visits frequently to the lodge at Germigny l’Evec in the park
of the Baron, where Lily spent the spring and the autumn of every year,
taking a house during the summer at Houlgate where she lived as a
Frenchwoman in the very heart of the small American colony. The
transients in the establishment of Madame Shane were her son Jean and
her cousin Ellen Tolliver. They flitted in and out like birds of
passage, less regular in their arrival and departure, though no less
spirited and noisy.

The Ellen Tolliver of the pompadour and starched shirt waists had become
the Lilli Barr whom crowds packed concert halls to see and hear, whom
music critics found themselves bound to commend--the same Lilli Barr
whose photograph seated beside a great composer appeared in the Sunday
supplements of American newspapers. This of course, the public never
knew. It knew only that she was a fine pianist with a sensational
presence and a vitality which reached out and engulfed them through the
medium of surging music. It knew nothing of her past. Indeed there were
few who knew she was an American. Her name might have been Russian or
Austrian, Hungarian or German. It carried with it the glamor sought by
the public which will receive the most sublime artist with indifference
if her name happened to be Mary Smith and her origin Evanston, Indiana.
This she realized. She shrewdly explained to Lily the evolution of her
name.

“Barr,” she said, “is the name of my grandfather. I have a perfect right
to it. Alone and unadorned it is not thrilling. Therefore I have chosen
Lilli. That, my dear, is a tribute to you, because if it had not been
for you I should probably be an old maid giving music lessons at fifty
cents an hour to the daughters of mill clerks.” She laughed noisily.
“Lilli Barr.... A great name, don’t you think? It will suit everybody.
It will suit those who believe American musicians should be encouraged
and it will suit those who must have a little exotic European sauce with
their fowl. Lilli Barr.... It might be anything at all.”

“Lilli Barr” was a name which betrayed nothing of a rather materialistic
elopement with a traveling salesman called Clarence Murdock. It betrayed
nothing of Clarence’s quiet passing out of this life from a weakened
heart too greatly tried by life with a robust and ambitious wife. It had
nothing to do with a father, ruined by honesty, who wore away his middle
age as clerk in an industrial bank. It gave no hint of a mother who, in
an effort to follow her ambitious, migratory offspring, had kept a
Manhattan rooming house for five years past. Decidedly, emphatically, it
was an exotic name. There were even people who believed that she was the
protegee of a German Baron named Unschaff (they had his name and the
history of his amours) whom she repaid in the usual way. And this story
Ellen would have been the last to deny, for she knew its value. She
understood that the people who paid money for concerts must have
something beside music. And she understood the value of money in a
fashion never imagined by Lily. The critics might call her playing
sensational, bordering even upon charlatanism, she would not deny it.
The public liked an artist who understood the value of a gesture, who
came upon the concert stage with air of a queen, who played with gusto
and the sweep of a hurricane. She understood all that. It was not that
she was insincere. There were those for whom she played exquisitely and
with all the distilled beauty of a sensitive artist, with the same
curious passion which had engulfed her music on that last night in the
drawing-room at Cypress Hill. She was a clever woman, far more
intelligent than Lily, and having been nourished in the midst of poverty
and failure, her one God was success, a sort of embittered success which
played upon the silliness and affectation of the world.

Certainly she had kept the promise made to Lily. She fitted no pattern,
least of all the pattern of the Town. She had her own ruthless law,
founded upon consideration for friends alone. She had her own thoughts
and beliefs. Indeed she hated the pattern bitterly, so bitterly that she
made a vow never to play in the Town no matter what the fee offered her.
In appearance she resembled curiously her grandaunt, Lily’s mother.
About her features there was the same bold carving. Her face was too
long and her eyes a shade too green. Her figure held none of the
voluptuous curves that softened her cousin’s beauty; on the contrary it
was slim and strong. She walked with a fine free swing that carried in
it a hint of masculinity. Beside Lily she was not beautiful at all; yet
on the concert stage under the glow of the lights her beauty was
infinitely more effective than Lily’s would have been.... Her energy was
the energy descended directly from Hattie Tolliver. It crackled through
her whole being. She was not like Lily, a woman of the world; there was
a quality of directness and naivete, a breeziness springing from her
background and her ancestry, which all the courts of Europe might never
overcome. She was, above all else, herself, incapable of affectation or
pretense. And this, she also understood, was a thing of great value
because one expected it of the artistic temperament. An artist made no
compromises.




LVII


One late afternoon in April, nineteen thirteen, when the trees in the
garden were all feathery and soft with the first green of the Gallic
springtime, Madame Gigon sat in her chair by the door of the long
drawing-room bidding her guests good-by, one by one, as they left her
usual Thursday _salon_. The drawing-room, owing to the sharp slope of
the ground upon which the house was built, lay below the surface of the
Rue Raynouard on the garden side of the house so that the guests leaving
were forced to climb a long flight of stairs that led up to the street
door. The stairway, opening directly into the drawing-room, provided a
long, high vista leading up to a door, itself noticeable by its very
insignificance. It was one of the charming features of the house that on
the street side it was but one story high with a single door and a row
of high windows which betrayed no hint of the beauty and space within
its walls. On the garden side, however, the house presented a beautiful
façade some three stories high, constructed of Caen stone and designed
in the best manner of the eighteenth century. Lenôtre himself was said
to have had a hand in the planning of the terraces and the pavilion that
stood at a little distance completely embowered by shrubs and covered by
a canopy made of the broad green leaves of plane trees. The house, after
a fashion, turned its back upon the world, concealing its beauties from
the eye of the random passerby, preserving them for the few who were
admitted by the humble and unpretentious door that swung open upon the
cobble stones of the Rue Raynouard. To the world it showed the face of a
_petite bourgeoise_. To its friends it revealed the countenance of an
eighteenth century marquise. And this fact had influenced for more than
a century and a half the character of its tenants. The prosperous
chocolate manufacturer abandoned it for the German palace in the Avenue
de Jena for the very reason that Lily Shane seized it the moment it
fell vacant. It was no sort of a house for one who desired the world to
recognize his success and the character of his life, but it was an
excellent house in which to live quietly, even secretly. It stood
isolated in the very midst of Paris.

Madame Gigon sat in a high-backed chair, her small, withered body
propped among cushions, her feet resting on a footstool. Since her eyes
had grown dim she used her ears as a means of watching her guests; and
these, after the fashion of such organs, had become sharper and sharper
with the failure of her sight.

A fat and dowdy woman dressed all in white and wearing an extravagant
white veil moved up to her.

“Good-by, Madame Gigon,” she said. “You come to me on Friday. Don’t
forget. The Prince himself will be there.”

Madame Gigon, instead of peering at the white lady, leaned back. “Ah,
it’s you, Héloise.... Yes, I will be there on Friday. But you are
leaving early.”

“No,” replied the white lady, who was a countess and possessed a fine
collection of armor. “No. Others have gone before me. I am dining out in
the Boulevard St. Germain.”

Madame Gigon smiled. “With your Jewish friends?”

“Yes. It is a long way.”

“They say her eldest daughter is to marry a rich American ... millions.
He is called Blumenthal.”

“Oui ... a very nice gentleman and the Good God alone knows how rich.”

“Well, money is a great thing ... the foundation of everything,
Héloise.”

“Yes ... Good-by ... On Friday then. And fetch Madame Shane if she cares
to come.”

And the plump white lady made her way with effort up the long polished
stairway to the unpretentious doorway.

Madame Gigon, holding Michou on her lap, began fondling the dog’s ears.
She leaned back and listened. Most of the guests had gone. Her sharp
ears constructed the scene for her. A shrill and peevish voice in the
far corner betrayed Madame de Cyon. The old woman saw her, fat, with
dyed black hair and a round face well made up to conceal the ravages of
time. A Russian woman, married to a French diplomat ... Bonapartist of
course. She translated American novels into French to amuse herself and
to help keep up the household in Neuilly. Yet she was rich, for her fat
pig’s hands were covered with rings and the sable of her cloak was the
best.

A man’s voice, ill-tempered and gruff, rose through the shadowy room.
Captain Marchand, who did not get on with his wife. Tactless of Madame
de Cyon to have led them to the bridge table to play with each other.
Bridge-mad ... was Madame de Cyon ... bridge-mad, and she hated like the
Devil to lose. To lose five francs was like losing one of her fat legs.
Strange game ... this bridge. It put every one into a bad temper. Not at
all like piquet.

“Deux pique!” announced Madame de Cyon.

“Passe!” ... “Passe!” ... “Passe!”

From the dining-room issued the sound of two voices in dispute, the one
high-pitched, old and somewhat shrill, and the other rather deep and
gentle, almost conciliatory. They drifted to Madame Gigon across the
murmurous spaces of the drawing-room. Madame Blaise and “Mees Ellen’s”
friend, Schneiderman. Madame Blaise was a Gasconne, old, shrill and
vituperatory, yet somehow amusing and stimulating ... a little cracked
perhaps but still full of spirit, and mysterious in the fashion of those
whose existence has its foundations in a world of fanciful, half-mad
unreality. She was tall and thin, with a mass of dyed red hair (it must
have gone gray ten years earlier) under an old-fashioned purple bonnet
trimmed with purple plumes and perched high on her head in the fashion
of the eighties. Madame Gigon knew she was by the gateaux ... eating ...
eating ... eating ... as if she starved herself at home. Yet she too was
rich.

“Ah, you don’t know the Germans as I do!” came the high-pitched voice.
“My fine young fellow! I tell you I have lived with them. I have been on
business for the government. They are capable of anything. You will
see....”

And then the voice of Schneidermann, mild and a little amused by the old
lady. “Ah ...,” gently. “Perhaps ... perhaps. But I do not think that
war is any longer possible.”

“Nevertheless,” persisted the voice. “One fine day you will go marching
away like the rest.”




LVIII


Schneidermann was Alsatian, and Jew on his father’s side, rich, for his
family owned steel mills at Toul and Nancy and in the very environs of
Paris, as well as coal mines in the neighborhood of St. Quentin and La
Bassée. Schneidermann, tall, handsome, swarthy ... was beautiful in an
austere, sensual fashion as only Jews can be beautiful. He came
sometimes to play the ’cello with “Mees Ellen,” choosing queer music
they called “modern” that had none of the beauty and melody of Offenbach
and Gounod.

The voice of “Mees Ellen” joining the pair in the dining-room....
“War!... War!... Nonsense! There can’t be any war. I must play in Berlin
and Munich next season.” Her voice rang with genuine conviction, as if
she really believed that war itself dared not interfere with still more
amazing successes. Madame Blaise’ cynical laugh answered her.

“Ah, you young people ... you young people. What do you know of war and
politics? I have been through wars, through revolutions, you understand.
I know about these things. I am as old as time.”

The old woman was talking in her most fantastic vein. It was her habit
to talk thus as if she were wise beyond all people. She was, as Madame
Gigon said, a little cracked on this side of her.

“I know ... I know,” she continued to mutter in the most sinister
fashion until an unusually large madeleine put an end to her talk.

“How much did you say ... eight francs?” It was the peevish voice of
Madame de Cyon settling her bridge debts.

“Eight francs,” came the gruff reply of Captain Marchand. “Eight francs,
I tell you.” And then the tinkling of the Russian’s woman’s innumerable
gold bangles as she thrust her fat bejeweled hand into a small purse to
wrench loose from it the precious eight francs. “I had no luck to-day
... no luck at all,” she observed in the same irritable voice. “No cards
at all. What can one do without cards? Now last week I won ...” And she
fell to recounting past victories while Captain Marchand’s chair scraped
the floor savagely.

And then the voice of Madame Blaise quite close at hand, bidding Madame
Gigon good-by.

“On Tuesday, then, Louise. I shall expect you.”

“On Tuesday,” repeated Madame Gigon.

“And bring Madame Shane if she wishes to come. But not ‘Mees Tolliver.’
I can’t bear her and her American ways.” The old harridan bent lower,
her reticule shaking with the aged trembling of her thin body. “That
Schneidermann!” she observed scornfully. “He is a fool! The men I knew
when I was young were interested in revolutions and politics ... not
music. Music! Bah!” And to show her disgust she spat on the bare
floor.... Then she made a hissing noise and swept up the long dim
stairway, her boots squeaking as she walked.

Then the confusion of farewells as the last guests departed, Madame de
Cyon passing by, still in bad humor over her losses.

“On Friday, Madame Gigon,” she said. “My husband will be there. He is
home from the Balkans and full of news.”

“Of the wars I suppose.... On Friday, Madame.”

“And tell Madame Shane she is expected also.”

Then Captain Marchand and Madame Marchand, also in a bad humor because
they got on badly. Madame Marchand’s day fell on Monday and she too
asked the old woman to bring Madame Shane. Her invitation was made in
the same oblique fashion as the other. “Bring Madame Shane if she cares
to come.”

At last there remained no one save those whom Lily, in her vague, lazy
fashion called “the family.” These were old Madame Gigon, Ellen
Tolliver, Jean, herself and the Baron.

As the blond little Captain Marchand, pompously clanking his spurs as he
walked, disappeared up the darkening reaches of the long stairway, Jean,
who had been reading in a corner reserved for himself, sprang up with
the bound of a young animal and ran across to Ellen and Schneidermann.

“Alors! Viens donc ... la musique!” he cried, seizing her by the hand
while she struggled against his youthful strength, and Schneiderman
laughed at his exuberance. She resisted, bracing her strong slim body
and indulging in a mock struggle.

“Not a sound from me,” she replied. “Unless we talk English. I can make
no more effort with this waiter’s chatter.”

It was a price which she exacted frequently, for she spoke French badly,
though with great vigor, and with an accent so atrocious that it seemed
quite beyond hope of improvement. Her English carried the drawling tang
of the middle west. She called “dog” _dawg_ and “water” _watter_.

Jean resembled his mother. His hair, like hers, was red though less soft
and more carroty. His nose was short, straight, and conveyed an
impression of good humor and high spirits. He was tall for his age and
strongly built with a slim figure which gave every promise of one day
growing into the bulky strength of the Governor. He possessed a
restless, noisy, energy quite incomprehensible to Lily. To-day he wore
the uniform of a cadet at the cavalry school at St. Cyr. It was the idea
of the Baron, himself a cuirassier, that Jean should be trained for the
cavalry. “If he does not like it, he may quit,” he told Lily. As for
Jean, he appeared to like it well enough. He was as eager for a war as
Madame Blaise had been certain of one.

“Come along, Nell,” he cried. “Be a good cousin, and play that
four-handed stuff with me.”

Madame Gigon, with Michou and Criquette waddling amiably after her,
stole quietly away to her room to lock her door against the hideous
sounds which Ellen, Schneidermann and Jean made when they played what
they called modern “music.”

From the shelter of a divan placed between two of the tall windows, Lily
and the Baron watched the three noisy musicians. On the verge of
middle-age, her beauty appeared to have reached its height. There are
those who would have preferred her as a young girl, fresher, more gentle
and more naive. But likewise there are those who find the greatest
beauty in the opulent women of Titian, and it was this beauty which Lily
now possessed. She wore a black tea-gown, loosely and curiously made
with a collar which came high about her throat and emphasized the ivory
green tint of her skin and the copper red of her hair. She lay back
among the cushions watching Jean with the triumphant, possessive look
which strayed into her dark eyes whenever her son was with her. It was
an expression so intense as to be almost tragic.

The Baron smiled too, but his smile was concealed somewhat by the fierce
black military mustaches that adorned his face. They were the mustaches
of the French army, very long, very luxurious, and purposely rather
ill-kempt. There was nothing silky about them. On the contrary they were
the mustaches of an _homme de guerre_--stiff, bristling and full of
vitality. He was a dark, wiry Frenchman, with strong, nervous hands and
very bright black eyes which clouded easily with anger. He was perhaps
four or five years older than Lily and did not look his age. Indeed his
figure was youthful and muscular with the hard, fierce masculinity which
belongs to some men of the Latin race.

Whenever he regarded Ellen, it was with a stern glance that was almost
hostile. They did not get on well. Even Lily, indifferent and
unobservant, must have seen the hidden clash of their two strong
natures. It appeared that he resented Ellen’s wilfulness and even the
masculine simplicity of her clothes. On this evening she was at her
best. Her dark hair she no longer wore in the manner of Lily. It was
drawn straight back from her high forehead with an uncompromising
severity and done in a knot low on the back of her strong, well-shaped
neck. Jean dragged her by sheer force of strength to the piano where the
two sat down noisily, the boy searching through the music while Ellen
played the most amazing, delicate and agile roulades and cascades of
notes on the polished ivory keyboard. Schneidermann, thrown a little
into the background by the wild exuberance of the pair, drew up a chair
and waited quietly until it was time for him to turn the pages.

And during these preliminaries Lily and the Baron rose and made their
way silently through one of the tall windows on to the terrace and
thence into the garden. Lily herself confessed that she could not abide
the new music.

“I do not understand it,” she told her cousin. “And I do not find it
beautiful. It is beyond me, I confess. I cannot see what you and Jean
find in it. I suppose it is because I am growing old. You and Jean
belong to the same generation. I am too old for new ideas.” And for the
first time her laugh was not all geniality and warmth. It carried a fine
edge of bitterness, scarcely to be discerned but none the less
unmistakable.

And now in the soft spring twilight of the garden she and the Baron
walked along the neat gravel paths until they reached the wall shutting
out the Rue de Passy. Here they sat for a time on a stone bench saying
nothing, remaining quite still and silent. And at last as the darkness
grew more heavy they rose and wandered off again, aimlessly and slowly,
until in the shadow of a laburnum tree, the man seized her suddenly and
kissed her, long and passionately. And after a little while when it was
quite dark they entered the pavilion hidden by shrubbery where Jean
lived when he was home on a holiday.

The garden lay breathless and silent. Even the rumbling noises from the
street beyond the wall had died away with the coming of darkness. From
the distant Seine arose the faint whistle of the St. Cloud steamer, and
through the tall window drifted in wild fragments the savage, barbaric
chords of Stravinsky’s music.




LIX


Day in and day out Lily’s life followed its easy, happy course. Always
there were diversions, always gaiety, always people. Yet there were
times now--indeed they seemed to have begun upon her return from America
following her mother’s death--when a cloud of sadness descended upon
her, times when she would withdraw suddenly to her own room as if some
tiny thing, a word, a gesture, an intonation, had set fire to a train of
secret memories. Frequently she kept her room for the rest of the day,
seeing no one, lunching and dining alone on a gilt table placed before
her chaise longue by the window.

These sudden fits of melancholy disturbed Ellen who remarked on them
gravely to old Madame Gigon.

“She was never like that before. I can’t see what it is that disturbs
her.”

Madame Gigon saw no cause for alarm. “It’s true,” she said. “She was
never like that before. But it may be that she grows tired. You see she
is growing older, my dear Mees Ellen. All of us, as we grow older, like
moments of solitude and quiet. It gives one time to reflect on life. You
don’t understand that yet. You’re too young. But some day you will
understand. As you get older you begin to wonder what it’s all about ...
(_pourquoi le combat_).”

“Perhaps,” replied Ellen with a vigorous shrug. “I’m sure it can’t be
her mother. It might, of course, be Irene.”

And they fell to discussing for the hundredth time the case of Irene,
whom Madame Gigon had not seen since she was a little girl. They talked
of her strange behavior, Madame Gigon wagging her old head, staring
before her with sightless eyes.

“It is tragic ... a life like that,” she would say. “A life wasted. You
know she was a pretty little girl.... She could have married.”

They spoke of her as if she were dead. It was true that to them ... to
Ellen, to Madame Gigon, she was forever lost. Perhaps they were right,
with that instinctive knowledge which underlies the consciousness of
women chattering together over the strangeness of human behavior.
Perhaps Irene _was_ dead.... Perhaps she had been dead since a certain
night when the last traces of her faith in humanity were throttled. It
was true that she had left the world and turned her faith toward God
alone, as if she were already dead and in purgatory.

“She was always queer,” Ellen would say.

And then Madame Gigon, as if she were conscious of toying with thoughts
of blasphemy, would say piously:

“But she is a good woman, who has given her life to good work and
prayer.”

But she spoke as if trying to convince herself, as if she did not quite
believe what she said.

And Lily, all the while, kept her secret. Undoubtedly she was no longer
in her first youth. This may have depressed her, for she was a woman to
whom beauty and youth were the beginning and the end. Yet the fits of
melancholy had something to do with a more definite and tangible thing.
They were associated in some way with a little enameled box in which she
kept a growing bundle of clippings from the American newspapers which
Ellen brought into the house at Numero Dix.

In the solitude of her room, she opened the box and reread them many
times, over and over again until the edges became frayed and the print
blurred from much fingering. They had to do with the career of a certain
labor leader, a man named Krylenko who seemed a strange person to excite
the interest of a woman like Madame Shane. The clippings marked the
progress of the man. Whenever there was a strike, Krylenko appeared to
take a hand in it. Slowly, clipping by clipping, the battle he fought
was being won. The unions penetrated now this steel town, now that one.
There were battles, brutalities, deaths, fires in his trail, but the
trail led steadily upward toward a goal. He was winning slowly. That he
was strong there could be no doubt. He was so strong that great
newspapers printed editorials against him and his cause. They called
him an “anarchist,” “an alien disturber,” “a peril to the great American
nation” and, most frequently of all, “a menace to prosperity and the
inalienable rights of property.”

Lily kept the enameled box locked in a drawer of her writing desk. No
one had ever seen it. No one would see it until she died. It had been
there for seven years.

It was on the morning after one of these attacks of melancholy, a few
days after Jean’s visit, that the Town suddenly intruded once more upon
the house in the Rue Raynouard.

Lily sat on the sunlit terrace of the garden before a late breakfast of
chocolate and buttered rolls, opposite Ellen whose habit it was to arise
early and pursue some form of violent exercise while her cousin still
slept. This morning she had been riding in the Bois de Bologne. As a
little girl she learned to ride under the instruction of her
grandfather, old Jacob Barr, and she rode well and easily with the air
and the skill of one who has grown up with horses. The languid
Schneidermann accompanied her on these early morning jaunts. She owned
her horse because in the long run it was more economical and, as she
said, “No pennies slip through my fingers.”

She wore a tight black riding habit with a white stock and a low derby
hat. The riding crop lay across her strong, slim knees as she smoked and
watched Lily devour too many rolls and a too large bowl of rich
chocolate.

Between them on the table lay the morning’s letters. In Ellen’s little
heap there were three or four notes from struggling music students,
begging help or advice from her, one from a manager proposing an
interview with regard to an American tour, a bill from Durand the
publisher. Lily’s pile was altogether different. It consisted almost
entirely of bills, from Coty, from Worth, from Henri the florist, from
Augustin the hairdresser, from Lanvin ... from ... on and on endlessly
and at the bottom a letter from the lawyers who succeeded on the death
of William Baines, “the old fogy,” to the management of Lily’s holdings
in the Town.

The last letter she read through twice with so deep an interest that the
chocolate grew cold and she was forced to send for a hot cup and more
hot rolls. When she had finished she leaned back in the wicker chair,
buried beneath the silk, the lace ruffles and the pale tiny bows of her
peignoir.

“D’you know, Ellen,” she remarked, “I am growing too rich. I’ve no idea
what to do with all my money.”

Ellen put down her letter abruptly and knocked the ash from her
cigarette.

“There are plenty of places for it.” She slapped the envelope against
her slim thigh. “I’ve had two letters this morning asking me for money
... from two music students. Heaven knows I’ve got nothing to spare. All
that’s left over I send to Ma. What is it now? A gold mine or an oil
well?”

“Neither,” said Lily. “It’s just the Town making me richer and richer.
It’s from Folsom and Jones ... I guess they’re since your time. They’re
lawyers and they handle Irene’s and my estate. They want me to sell the
rest of the property we own.”

Ellen pursed her lips reflectively. “How much are they offered?”

“Something over five hundred thousand. They say they can get six in a
pinch.”

She whistled softly. “Take it ... take it. Those old shacks can’t be
worth that.”

“It isn’t the shacks,” said Lily. “It’s the land itself they want. The
shacks aren’t even worth repair. Why, they were built, most of them,
while father was still living. The lawyers hint that the Town is ashamed
of them, that they are a disgrace to the Town.”

“I suppose it has changed,” remarked Ellen.

“The population has doubled,” said her cousin. “There aren’t enough
houses for the people. Why, last summer people who came to work at the
Mills had to live in tents for a time. Even the people on Park avenue
let out rooms. The Chamber of Commerce asked them to. They appealed to
their pride not to stop the tremendous growth. There’s been a
tremendous....”

Ellen interrupted her. “I know ... I know.... Watch us grow. The biggest
city in the state in ten years. Well, it’s money in your pocket. You’ve
no kick coming.”

The chocolate and rolls arrived and Lily began once more to eat.

“I don’t see how you can eat all that and keep your figure,” observed
Ellen.

“Massage,” said Lily. “Massage ... and luckily the time is coming when I
can eat all I want and be as fat as I like. In another fifteen years
I’ll be an old woman and it won’t matter what I do.” The faint
bitterness again drifted through the speech, evasive and imperceptible.

“What does Irene say to your selling?” inquired Ellen.

“The lawyers say she wants to sell. You know I haven’t had a line from
her in years. She’s in France now, you know.”

“In France!” said Ellen, her eyebrows rising in surprise.

“Yes, at Lisieux.”

“I should think you’d go and see her.”

“She wouldn’t see me if I went. What good would it do?”




LX


There was a sudden silence while Ellen beat her riding crop against her
leg. “I must say she’s very queer. I never understood her. You know when
I was a girl, she gave me the creeps ... the way she had of looking at
you with those pale eyes.”

“I know,” replied Lily. And then after a pause. “You know they want to
buy Cypress Hill too. The Lord alone knows how many times they tried.
They began before Mama died. Irene hasn’t any share in it. It belongs
outright to me.”

“I suppose it’s the Mills.”

“No, not this time. The Town wants it now.” She paused while she
buttered another roll. “They want it for a new railway station ... a
union station, you know, for all three roads. It’s perfect for that. And
each time they increase the offer. Now they write me that they’ve made a
last offer. If I won’t sell, they’ll undertake proceedings to condemn
it.”

During this speech the countenance of Ellen Tolliver underwent a
complete metamorphosis. The devil-may-care look vanished slowly,
replaced by a certain hardness, a squaring of the handsome jaw, a slight
hardening of the firm lips. It may have been that while Lily talked her
cousin was swept by a torrent of memories--memories of hurt pride, of
poverty and indignities endured because she was helpless, memories of
patronizing women and young girls who spoke of “poor Ellen Tolliver,”
memories of her father’s defeats and disappointments, of Judge
Weissman’s dishonesty and corruption, of her mother’s agonizing and
endless struggle to keep up appearances. As sometimes occurs with
individuals of strong personality, a whole life, a complete philosophy
stood revealed for an instant in her intelligent face. She had run off
with Clarence Murdoch “to show the Town.” She had become famous and
successful because, deep down in her heart, she was resolved always to
show the Town how little it counted in her life, how great was the
contempt she felt for it. It was always this thought--this more than
everything else--which had driven her forward. And now came this new
opportunity, perhaps the best of all, to block the Town, to thwart its
most cherished desire. It was a chance to prevent a new and flamboyant
effort to advertise its wealth, its prosperity, its bigness.

“As if,” she said aloud, “‘bigness’ was something to be proud of. Let
them try and condemn it, Lily. I doubt if they can. Anyway I’d keep it
just to spite them. It’s a chance to show your power.” She leaned
earnestly across the table, striking it with her riding crop to
emphasize her words. “You hate the place as much as I do. Why, it isn’t
even the same Town we grew up in. It’s another place built upon filth
and soot. It’s not that we’re fouling our own nest. Why, Lily, the Town
your mother and my grandfather loved wasn’t that sort of place at all.
It was a pleasant place where people lived quietly and peacefully, where
they had horses and dogs and were decent to each other. And now that’s
all buried under those damned filthy Mills, under a pile of muck and
corruption with Judge Weissman and his crowd enthroned on the very top.”
She stood up, her blue eyes flashing. “It’s changed the very people in
it. It’s made them noisy, common, cheap. Damn it! I hate them all!” She
struck the table a violent blow with her riding crop. “Don’t sell it.
You don’t need the money. It’s nothing to you ... not even if they
offered you a million!” And then she laughed savagely. “That’s the best
part of it. The longer you hold it, the more they’ll have to pay you.
The more prosperous they are, the more it will cost them to have a new
railway station. You’re the one who has the power now. Don’t you see
what power there is in money?... the power that grows out of just owning
a thing?”

Lily, it appeared, was amazed by the passion of the sudden, outburst.
For a time she lay back in the wicker chair, regarding her cousin with a
thoughtful look. At last, she said, “I had no idea that you felt that
way about it. It’s the way Mama used to feel. I suppose I never had
enough of the place to really hate it.”

Ellen again interrupted her passionately. “If you’d had as much as I
had, you’d have hated it all right.”

“I just ran away from it as soon as I could,” continued Lily. “Besides,”
she added after a pause, “Mama left a letter asking me to keep Cypress
Hill. She always felt that way about the Town.”

Ellen, persistent, bent over the table toward her cousin. The riding
crop fell to the gravel terrace. “Promise me you won’t sell it, Lily....
Promise me you’ll keep it. It’s a chance to hit back.... Promise!”

And Lily, who after all was indifferent in matters of business,
promised, perhaps because the violent revelations made by her cousin
astounded her so completely that she was unable to think of any
argument. Doubtless she had reasons of her own ... secret reasons which
had to do with the worn clippings in the enameled box.

“I’ll keep it,” she replied. “They can wait until Hell freezes over. And
besides you put the idea so that it amuses me. I’ll sell the other stuff
and invest the money.”

Ellen interrupted her with a bitter laugh. “It’s funny, you know, that
all this time they’ve been pouring money into your pocket. That’s the
joke of it. In a way, it was all this booming and prosperity that helped
me too. If you hadn’t been so rich, I suppose I’d never have made a
success of it.”

Lily languidly finished the last of her chocolate. “I’d never thought of
it in that way. It’s an amusing idea.”

Ellen was satisfied. Gathering up her letters she went into the house,
changed her clothes, and in a little while, seated under the flaming
Venice of Mr. Turner, she was working stormily at her music, filling the
house with glorious sound until it overflowed and spilled its rhapsodies
over the terrace into the garden where the first bright irises were
abloom.




LXI


Upstairs Lily made her way, after a toilette which occupied two hours,
to the room of Madame Gigon. It was, amid the elegance of the house, a
black-sheep of a room, its walls covered with books, its corners
cluttered with broken fragments of Gothic saints and virgins, the sole
legacy of the distant and obscure M. Gigon, curator at the Cluny Museum.
In the center stood a table covered with dark red rep, heavily
embroidered and cluttered with inkpots, pens and all the paraphernalia
of writing. Bits of faded brocade ornamented the wall save for a space
opposite the door where hung an immense engraving of the First Napoleon,
dominating a smaller portrait of Napoleon the Little in all the glory of
his mustaches and imperial. An engraving of the Eugènie by Winterhalter
stood over the washstand, a convenience to which Madame Gigon clung even
after Lily’s installation of the most elaborate American plumbing.

Madame Gigon huddled like a benevolent old witch among the bedclothes of
her diminutive bed. At the foot, in a bright patch of sunlight, lay
Criquette and Michou amiably close to each other and both quite stuffed
with toasted rolls and hot chocolate.

Lily came in looking fresh and radiant in a severe suit and smart hat.
They exchanged greetings.

“How are you this morning, Tante Louise?” she inquired of the old woman.

“Not so well ... not so well. I slept badly. The pain in my hip.”

Lily went and sat on the bed, taking the old woman’s hand which she
caressed as she felt her pulse.

“You have everything you want?” she inquired.

“Oui ... everything.” There was a little pause and Madame Gigon peered
at her with dim eyes. “I’ve been thinking how lucky I am.”

Lily smiled.

“I mean that I’m not left poor and alone. You’ve been good to me.”

Lily’s smile expanded into a laugh. “Nonsense.... Nonsense. It’s given
me enough pleasure....”

“It seems like the hand of God,” said the old woman very piously.

“It may be,” said Lily. “Mees Ellen has been telling me it’s the hand of
man.”

And Madame Gigon, not having heard the talk on the terrace, was puzzled.
Secretly she disapproved Mees Ellen’s lack of piety.

“Mees Ellen plays well this morning ... beautifully,” said Madame Gigon.
“She is an artist ... a true artist. Will you ask her a favor?”

Lily nodded.

“Will you ask her to play something of Offenbach? I’ve been hungry for
it.” She looked feeble and appealing somewhat confused by violence of
the life with which she found herself surrounded since the advent of
Mees Ellen and the grown-up Jean.

“Of course,” said Lily.

“And one more thing,” said Madame Gigon. “This I must ask of you.... I’m
too ill to go to Madame Blaise this afternoon. I want you to go and
explain why I have not come. Tell her I am too ill.” A slight frown
crossed Lily’s brow. Madame Gigon, with her dim eyes could not possibly
have seen it, yet she said, “Madame Blaise admires you.... She thinks
you are all that a woman should be ... a perfect woman.”

If Lily had felt any genuine hesitation, the faint flattery destroyed
it, for she replied, “I’ll go, certainly. I’m lunching out and I’ll go
there late and tell her.”

“Not too late.... She is easily offended,” said Madame Gigon. “You know
she is a little ...” She made a comic gesture indicating that Madame
Blaise was a little cracked.

Then Lily read to her for a time out of Faure’s History of Art which
undoubtedly bored her but gave Madame Gigon the greatest pleasure; and
at last she left for her mysterious lunch. A little while later there
arose from below stairs the tinkling melodies of the overture to Orpheus
in the Underworld. Somewhere among the piles of old music in the
drawing-room closet, Ellen had discovered the whole score and she played
it now in a wild good humor. Sometimes the music became actually noisy
in its triumphant violence. It was the playing of a woman who had
achieved a victory.




LXII


It is possible that Madame Blaise felt for Lily the admiration which
Madame Gigon attributed to her, but she was such a queer old thing that
it was impossible ever to know for a certainty. It could not be said
that she revealed these sentiments by any open demonstration, or even by
an occasional word of approval. There are women whose manner of showing
their devotion assumes an inverted character; it takes to displaying
itself in sharp criticisms of the object they love or admire. There are
women who nag their lovers, who deprecate the charms of their own
children, who sharply denounce the behavior of their dearest friends.
And if there be any truth in this theory of inverted demonstration, it
could be said that Madame Blaise admired Lily. Indeed judging from her
behavior it could be said that she experienced a profound affection for
the younger woman.

The old woman seldom addressed Lily, yet when Lily politely assumed the
initiative and inquired after the health of Madame Blaise or her plans
for the summer, Madame Blaise was flattered and smiled with all the
warmth of an August sun. To Madame Gigon she criticized Lily
unmercifully. She called her indolent, without ambition. She accused her
of having wasted her life and permitted her beauty to fade without using
its power. It was not true that Lily had faded, yet Madame Blaise was
convinced of it. To have heard her talk, one would have thought Lily was
a withered old harridan.

“I understand these things,” she told Madame Gigon confidentially,
“because I was a beauty myself ... a famous beauty.” And the memory of
her triumphs led her to bridle and cast a glance at the nearest mirror.
Yet she never spoke of these things to Lily, whose greater youth,
already turning into middle-age, seemed to inspire the old woman with an
awe tinged by actual worship.

“Why does she bury herself among these old women?” she would say. “Has
she no energy ... no zest for life? If only she could capture some of
Mees Tolliver’s _élan_. Mees Tolliver could spare her a great deal and
be the more charming for it.”

And to all this, Madame Gigon had one answer which it was her habit to
repeat over and over again. “Madame Shane is content. Is not that
enough? What more can any of us wish upon this earth?”

So it ran, this perpetual and carping interest of Madame Blaise.
Although she avoided Lily, she could not resist discussing her. And
Madame Gigon, believing firmly that Madame Blaise was a little cracked,
never mentioned these things to Lily.

There hung about Madame Blaise something of the mystery which envelopes
people suffering from delusions. Not only was it impossible to know when
she was lying and when she was speaking the truth ... it was impossible
even to say, “Madame Blaise is thus and so. She is mean or she is
benevolent. She is hostile or she is friendly.” It was impossible to
reach any sensible opinion concerning her. She was subject to the most
absurd whims which rendered impossible any anticipation of her actions.
Besides, she lived in a world of her own which resembled in no way the
world of her friends, so bound up in shopkeepers, food, laundry,
housekeeping, etc. Her world was inhabited by all sorts of fantastic and
imaginary creatures. She believed passionately that she was still a fine
figure of a woman. Not even a mirror could persuade her otherwise. She
asserted with a challenging pugnacity that she had once played a
prominent part in European politics, and hinted that she was the last of
the women who would go down in history as creatures who ruled kings; but
what it was she had done or when she had done it, no one could discover.
The tragedy was that no one took her seriously. When one spoke of her,
there was always a suspicion in the speech of that comic gesture which
Madame Gigon used to indicate that her friend was a little cracked. Yet
they were kind to her. No one allowed her to suspect that she was
accepted generally as a mere pack of highly animated hallucinations.
Indeed her _faiblesse_ gave her the whip hand over her friends. People
humored her. They submitted to her insults with a calm good-nature.

When she began one of her long tales, people smiled and feigned interest
and remarked, “How wonderful! Who would have thought it?” Or with mock
protests, they would say, “But my dear Madame Blaise, you are still a
fine figure of a woman.” And she would go off home delighted that she
had managed to preserve her figure and her youthful complexion, even if
a bit of rouge was at times necessary. Her delight was always apparent.
It was visible in every line of her seamed old face.

There were all sorts of stories concerning Madame Blaise, stories of the
most fantastic and incredible nature, stories that she was well known in
the generation which she had outlived, stories even that she had been
the mistress of this or that politician. Indeed some of the most
fantastic tales were contributed slyly by Madame Blaise herself. But no
one really knew anything of her youth; and although every one repeated
the stories with a certain relish, there was no one who really believed
them.

The old women who came to Madame Gigon’s salon knew that she had come to
Paris some twenty years earlier as the widow of a merchant from
Marseilles. She was rich, respected, and at that time seemed wholly in
her right mind, save for an overfondness to surround herself with
mystery. A respectable Bonapartist, the uncle of Captain Marchand, acted
as her sponsor. She settled herself presently into the respectable
circle. She had her _salon_ and all went well. By now she had been
accepted for so long a time that she seemed always to have been a part
of that neat little society, so neat, so compact and so circumspect. She
was a figure. Madame Blaise? Why, of course, every one knew Madame
Blaise ... always. What had gone before became quickly veiled in the
mists of the past, and Madame Blaise, whose life may have been after all
one of the most romantic and exciting, found herself a part of a
singularly dull and prosaic society.

Lily could have known no more than this concerning the old woman. Indeed
it is probable that she knew even less, for her good nature and her
tolerant indifference had long since stifled all her curiosity
concerning people. She went to Madame Blaise on that Tuesday afternoon
to please Madame Gigon, because she had no other engagement, and because
she was accustomed to obliging her friends. She may even have suspected
that the visit would give pleasure to Madame Blaise herself. She arrived
very late as usual (it was impossible for Lily to be punctual) having
lingered a long time over lunch and made an expensive tour of the shops
in the Rue de la Paix.

In a little enclosure shaded by old trees and high, neglected shrubbery
in Passy five minutes walk from the Trocadero, Madame Blaise had her
house. The enclosure was shared by two other houses, less pretentious,
which stood respectfully apart at a little distance. The dwelling was
built of wood in imitation of a Swiss chalet, and ornamented with little
carved balconies and fantastic ornaments in bizarre exaggeration of some
cowherd’s house on the mountains above Lucerne. A wall ran about the
enclosure with an opening which was barred at night by a massive iron
gate. Here Lily stepped down from the fiacre, passing, on her way
through the gate, Madame de Cyon and the Marchands, who were leaving.

“You are late,” observed Madame de Cyon, taking in Lily’s costume with
her small green eyes.

“I have been hurrying all the way,” replied Lily. “I was kept by
business.”

Captain Marchand and his wife bowed gravely.

“Every one has gone,” observed Madame de Cyon, waiting as though curious
to see what Lily would do.

“Well, I must go in.... Madame Gigon was too ill to come. She asked me
to convey her compliments.”

Madame de Cyon brightened. “Nothing serious, I hope.”

“No,” said Lily. “Madame is an old woman ...” And then politely, “She
tells me Monsieur de Cyon is back from the Balkans.”

“Yes. He is full of wars and intrigues. You must come to me on Thursday.
He has asked for you.”

Lily smiled. “Please remember me to him. I find him very interesting.”
She turned suddenly. “But I must hurry on. It is disgusting to be so
late. Good-by until Thursday.”

Madame de Cyon laid a hand on her arm. “Madame Blaise was eager that
you should come. She has been asking for you.”

“It is good of her,” said Lily politely, at the same time moving away.

“Good-by until Thursday,” said Madame de Cyon, and as Lily hurried into
the shadows of the enclosure the Russian woman turned and looked after
her, her small green eyes alight with an interest in which there was a
shade of malice and envy. It was well known that de Cyon admired Madame
Shane.

When Lily had disappeared in the thick shrubbery surrounding the house,
Madame de Cyon made a clucking noise and passed through the gate into
the street on her way to the Metro. She had lost money again to the
Marchands. She was planning to economize.




LXIII


At the door Lily was admitted by a fat Bretonne maidservant who ushered
her through a dark hall and up a dark stairway where the light was so
bad that she was unable to distinguish any of the furnishings. It might
have been a tunnel for all the impression it made upon a visitor. At a
turn of the stairs she was forced to press her body against the wall in
order to allow pass two strangers whom she had never seen at Madame
Gigon’s salon. At the top she was led through another hall lighted by a
sort of chalice, with a gas flame burning inside a red globe suspended
by Moorish chains from the low ceiling. Here it was possible to discern
the most enormous quantity of furniture and decorations, bronze
ornaments, bits of chinoiserie, pictures of all sizes in enormous gilt
frames, umbrellas, cloaks, chairs, pillows and what not. At the end of
the hall the maidservant opened the door of a large square room and
silently indicated Madame Blaise who was seated before a gentle charcoal
fire. Lily entered and the servant closed the door behind her.

Madame Blaise, dressed in old-fashioned gown of some thick black stuff,
sat on the edge of her chair like a crow upon a wall. Her cheeks and
lips were rouged and this, together with the red glow from the fire and
the thick mass of dyed red hair, gave her an appearance completely
bizarre and inhuman. She could not have heard Lily enter, for she did
not look up until the younger woman came quite close to her and said,
“Madame Blaise!”

“Ah!” said the old woman suddenly, as if waking from a dream. “It’s
you.”

Lily was smiling and apologetic. She lied about being detained on
business. She explained Madame Gigon’s indisposition. Altogether she
made herself charming, agreeable and insincere.

“Yes,” said Madame Blaise. “Madame Gigon is old,” in a tone which
implied “much older than I shall ever be.”

“I shan’t stay but a moment,” said Lily, sitting in a chair on the
opposite side of the fire.

“No, I suppose not.”

And then a silence fell during which it seemed that Madame Blaise
returned again to her dream. Lily took off her gloves, straightened her
hat and fell to regarding the room. It was an amazing room, full of
shadows and indefinable and shapeless objects which danced in the dim
gaslight. Gradually these things began to take shape. There were all
sorts of chairs and tables and cushions of every fashion and period. The
room fairly crawled with furniture. Near the fire stood a red lacquer
table, exquisitely made, laden with the remnants of tea--a chocolate
pot, a tea urn with the lamp extinguished and the tea growing cold,
plates with sandwiches and gateaux. The windows were covered by thick
curtains of some brocaded stuff which were drawn now to shut out the
twilight. But the most remarkable feature of the room was the number of
pictures. They hung in every conceivable nook and corner, standing
upright in little frames of gilt bronze, tortoiseshell or ebony, leaning
against the walls and against the mirror over the fireplace. Some,
judging from the flamboyance and heroic note of the poses, were pictures
of actresses and opera singers. Others from the pomposity of the subject
were undoubtedly politicians. There were pictures of ladies in
crinolines and gentlemen with beards or flowing mustaches. Some were
photographs, faded and worn; others were sketches or prints clipped out
of journals. There were at least a half dozen portraits in oil of
varying degrees of excellence.

Lily occupied herself for a time in studying the room. At last Madame
Blaise. “I am glad the others have gone. They weary me--inexpressibly.”
She leaned forward a little in her chair. “You understand I have had an
interesting life. These others ...” She made a stiff gesture of
contempt. “What have they known of life? They go round and round like
squirrels in a cage ... always the same little circle. Always the same
dull people.”

Lily smiled agreeably. She was remarkably beautiful in the soft light.
“I understand,” she said, with the air of humoring the old woman.

Madame Blaise rose suddenly. “But I forgot.... You must forgive me for
not asking you sooner. Will you have some tea or some chocolate?”

“Nothing,” said Lily. “I must think of my figure.”

Madame Blaise sat down again. “I am glad you have come ...” And after a
little pause, she added, “Alone.” A frown contracted her brow beneath a
neatly clipped bang. “You understand.... I think we have some things in
common ... you and I.”

Lily still sat complacently. “I’m sure we have!” she said, purely to
oblige her companion.

“But not what you suppose,” said Madame Blaise looking at her sharply.
“Not at all what you suppose. I am not speaking of the youth which we
share ... you and I. I am speaking rather of the qualities which have
nothing to do with youth. I mean the capacity to love.” This sentiment
she uttered with a look of profound mystery. In spite of her
eccentricity, there gleamed now and then through the cloud of mystery
traces of a grand manner, a certain elusive distinction. It showed in a
turn of the head, a gesture, an intonation ... nothing very tangible,
indeed, little more than a fleeting illusion.

Lily’s eye began to wander once more, round and round the room to this
picture and that, hesitating for a moment on one or another of the
amazing collection which caught her fancy. When Madame Blaise fell
silent once more for a long interval, she remarked,

“But have you no picture of yourself among all these?”

“No,” replied the old woman. “I am coming to that later.” And without
pausing, she added, “You have had lovers of course.” And when Lily,
astounded by this sudden observation, stirred nervously in her chair,
Madame Blaise raised her hand. “Oh, I know. I am not going to reproach
you. I approve, you understand. It is what beautiful women are made
for.” Her eyes took on an uncanny look of shrewdness.

“Don’t fancy that I am ignorant. Some people of course say that I am
crazy. I am not. It’s the others who are crazy, so they think that I am.
But I understand. You have a lover now.... He is Madame Gigon’s
cousin.” She looked fiercely into Lily’s face which had grown deathly
pale at the crazy outburst of the old woman. She appeared frightened
now. She did not even protest.

“I have watched,” continued Madame Blaise, in the most intimate manner
possible. “I understand these things. I know what a glance can mean ...
a gesture, a sudden unguarded word. You, my dear, have not always been
as cautious, as discreet, as you might have been. You needn’t fear. I
shall say nothing. I shall not betray you.” She reached over and touched
Lily’s hand with an air of great confidence. “You see, we are alike. We
are as one. It is necessary for us to fight these other women ... like
de Cyon. She is a cat, you understand.”

Lily, all her complacency vanished now, glanced at the watch on her
wrist. She stood up and walked to the fireplace in an effort to break
the way toward escape. She was, it appeared, unable to collect her wits
so that she might deal with Madame Blaise.

“You must not go yet,” continued the harridan. “I have so much to tell
you.” She pursed her withered lips reflectively and put her head a
little on one side. “When I was a young girl, I was very like you. You
can see that my hair is still the same. People notice and remark how
beautifully it has kept its color. Oh yes, many have spoken to me of it.
There is nothing like preserving your beauty.” And at this she chuckled
a little wildly with an air of savage triumph.




LXIV


So she talked for what must have seemed to Lily hour upon hour. When the
younger woman betrayed any sign of leaving, Madame Blaise thrust her
tall thin body between her and the door. Even if Lily had desired to
speak she would have found small opportunity, for Madame Blaise never
once stopped talking. It was as if all the talk of years, repressed and
hidden, was suddenly rushing forth in a torrent. The room became
intolerably stuffy from the burning gas. Lily’s head began to ache and
her face to grow more and more pale. If she had been less pleasant by
nature she would have made her way by force past the old woman and out
into the open air. As it was, she kept hoping, no doubt, that Madame
Blaise would come to an end of her talk, that some one would come in and
interrupt her ... the maid perhaps ... any one. She no longer heard what
Madame Blaise was saying. The talk came to her in fragments, the
inexpressibly boring chatter of a cracked old woman. To break the
monotony she took up the pictures on the mantelpiece and began to
examine them. During a brief pause, she observed. “Your pictures are
interesting, Madame Blaise. I should like to call again when I have more
time, in order to see them all.”

“Ah, yes,” said the old woman. “So they are ... so they are. The men ...
they were not all lovers you understand. But I might have had them for
lovers by the raising of my finger.”

“This one,” said Lily, holding up the portrait of a heavily built man
wearing the mustachios of a dragoon. “He is interesting.”

“Yes ... yes. He was a Spaniard ... a nobleman, very aristocratic. Dead
now.... Extraordinary how many of them are dead!”

Then all at once the attention of Madame Blaise was arrested by the
most extraordinary change in her companion. So remarkable was the change
that the old woman actually stopped talking and fell to observing the
face of Madame Shane.

Lily held in her hand a small photograph, very faded and soiled, of a
man in a black coat with sharp eyes, a high brow and a full black beard.
It bore in one corner the stamp of a well-known photographer of the
seventies, a gentleman with an establishment in the Galerie des
Panoramas. It was a handsome face, fascinating, fanatic, which at once
arrested the attention. Beyond all doubt it was the mate of a photograph
which Julia Shane, dying, had left to her daughter. Across the face of
the one Lily held in her hand was written, “_A la Reine de la Nuit de
son Cavalier Irlandais_.” The ink was faded, almost illegible.

“You find that gentleman especially interesting?” asked Madame Blaise in
a tone of unbearable curiosity.

For a moment Lily did not reply. She regarded the photograph closely,
turning it this way and that under the gaslight.

“Yes,” she said at last in a low, hushed voice. “Who is he?”

Madame Blaise bridled. “He was a gentleman ... very interesting,” she
said. “He admired me ... greatly. The inscription? It was a joke between
us. He was full of deviltry and fun (_un vrai diable ... tout gamin_). I
have forgotten what the joke was.... He was forced to leave the country
by some unpleasantness.... I too went away for time.” And again her eyes
narrowed in a mysterious look, invoking romantic, glamorous things.
Lily, the picture still clasped in her hand, sat down weakly.

Above all else, old photographs have the power of calling up dead
memories. It is so perhaps because they are so terribly, so cruelly,
realistic. Those things which the memory, desiring to forget, succeeds
in losing among the shadows of time, remain in a photograph so long as
it exists ... the posture of a head, the betraying affected gesture of a
hand, the manner of carrying oneself, the arrogance of countenance, the
habit of dress ... all these things survive on a bit of paper no larger
perhaps than the palm of one’s hand.

The photograph with “_A la Reine de la Nuit_” written across it must
have invoked forgotten things ... memories of John Shane’s savage temper
and whimsical kindnesses, of terrible scenes between him and his proud
wife, of his contempt for the anemic Irene and his admiration for the
glowing Lily, of a thousand things distant yet appallingly vivid.

While Lily sat thoughtful and silent, Madame Blaise kept up a stream of
hysterical chatter, turning crazily from one subject to another, from
personalities to anecdotes, from advice to warning. Lily heard none of
it. When she had recovered a little, she said, “This gentleman interests
me. I wish you could tell me more of him.”

But Madame Blaise shook her head ruefully. “I have forgotten so much,”
she said. “It is terrible how one forgets. Do you know?” And again the
look of mad confidence came into her face. “I have forgotten his name.
What is it he calls himself in the inscription?”

She took the photograph from Lily’s hand and thrust it under the circle
of light, holding it at arm’s length and squinting in order to discern
it properly. “Ah, yes,” she said. “_Cavalier Irlandais_.... That was his
name. I don’t remember his other name, though I believe he had one.” She
paused, thoughtful, as if trying by a tremendous force of will to
recapture the thing which had escaped her. “His father was Irish, you
understand.... Strange I can’t remember his name.” So she talked on
crazily, answering Lily’s questions madly, tangling the answers
hopelessly in a flood of insane philosophy and distorted observation.
The look of mystery and the remnants of a grand manner persisted. Lily
watched her with a look of intense curiosity as if she believed that,
after all, the queer old creature might once have been young,--young,
mysterious and lovely. But she learned little of the gentleman in the
portrait. It was impossible for Madame Blaise to concentrate upon her
subject. Lily learned only that the gentleman had been forced to leave
the country following some unpleasantness arising out of a duel in which
he had killed a relative ... a cousin perhaps. She did not remember. He
had been in politics too. That played a part in his flight. He returned
once, Madame Blaise believed, but she did not remember why he had come
back.

Altogether it was hopeless. Lily replaced the photograph on the high
mantel, powdered her nose and drew on her gloves. Presently there came
an opening in the flood of Madame Blaise’ talk and Lily seized it
sharply.

“I must really go, Madame Blaise. I have stayed much too long. It has
been so interesting.”

She rose and began to move slowly backward in the direction of the door,
as if she feared to rouse the old woman to fresh outbursts. She made her
departure gently, vanishing noiselessly; but she got no further than the
inlaid music box when Madame Blaise, detecting her plan, sprang up and
seized her arm fiercely with her thin old hands.

“Wait!” she cried. “There is one more thing I must show you ... only
one. It will take but a second.”

The patient Lily acquiesced, though she kept up a mild protest. Madame
Blaise scurried away, rather sidewise as a crab moves, into a dark
corner of the room where she disappeared for an instant through a door.
When she returned, she bore two dusty paintings in oil. Each was
surrounded by a heavy gilt frame and together the pair burdened the
strength of the old woman. Her whole manner reeked of secrecy. With an
air of triumph she smiled to herself as she took from the chair where
she had been sitting a red silk handkerchief with which she dusted the
faces of the two paintings. All this time she kept them turned from
Lily. At last she stiffened her thin body suddenly and said sharply,
“Now, look!”

Lily, bending low, discerned in the light from the fire the character of
the two pictures. Each was the portrait of a woman, painted in the
smooth, skilful, slightly hard manner of Ingres. Yet there was a
difference, which the connoisseur’s eye of Lily must have detected. They
were cleverly done with a too great facility. But for that one might
almost have said they were the work of a genius. Clearly the same woman
had posed for both. In one she wore an enormous drooping hat, tilted a
little over one eye. In the other she wore a barbaric crown and robes of
Byzantine splendor.

Madame Blaise stood by with the air of a great art collector displaying
his treasures. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. “Superb! You
know I understand these things. I have never shown them to any one in
years. I am showing them to you because I know you understand these
things. I have seen your house. I have seen your beautiful things. You
see it is the same woman who posed for both.... The one is called ‘The
Girl in the Hat’ ... the other is ‘The Byzantine Empress.’ Theodora, you
know, who was born a slave girl.”




LXV


Lily, it seemed, had scarcely heard her. She had taken one of the
pictures on her lap and was examining it minutely. She held it close to
her and then at a little distance. Madame Blaise stood surveying her
treasures proudly, her face lighted by a look of satisfaction at Lily’s
profound interest.

“I wonder,” said the old woman presently, “if you see what I see.”

For a moment Lily did not answer. She was still fascinated by the
pictures. At last she looked up. “Do you mean the woman is like me? Did
you see it too?”

Madame Blaise assumed a secretive expression. “Yes,” she said. “I have
known it all along ... ever since I saw you. But I never told any one. I
kept it as a secret for you.” And she spread her skinny hands in an
exhibitive gesture, full of satisfaction, of pride, even of triumph.

The likeness was unmistakable. Indeed, upon closer examination it was
nothing short of extraordinary. It might have been the Lily of ten years
earlier, when she was less heavy and opulent. The Byzantine Empress had
the same soft bronze hair, the same green-white skin, the same sensuous
red lips.

“It is like me when I was younger.”

“Very much,” observed Madame Blaise, and then with the air of an empress
bestowing a dazzling favor, she added, “I am going to give them to you.”

“But they are valuable,” protested Lily. “I can see that. They are no
ordinary paintings.” She spoke without raising her eyes, continuing all
the while to examine the pictures, first one and then the other as she
frequently examined with infinite care the reflection in her mirror in
the Rue Raynouard.

“I realize that you could not carry them home alone,” continued Madame
Blaise, ignoring her protests. “You might appear ridiculous. You might
even be arrested on suspicion. But I shall have them sent round. I must
give them to you. What would you have me do? When I die they will be
sold. I have no relatives ... no one. My sister is dead these ten years.
I have no child ... nothing. I am alone, you understand, absolutely
alone. Would you have my pictures knocking about some art dealer’s
place?”

She shook her head savagely. “No, you must have them. You cannot refuse.
It is the hand of God in the matter. I understand these things because
there is in me something of the woman of all time. The pictures are for
you. Nothing can dissuade me.”

Again the good-natured Lily was forced to yield, simply by the force of
the old woman’s crazy will. She must have sensed the fantastic, uncanny
quality of the entire affair, for she stirred uneasily and put the
Byzantine Empress on the floor, face down. The Girl in the Hat lay
across her knees, forgotten for the moment.

Madame Blaise had begun to walk up and down the room in a crazy fashion,
muttering to herself. All at once she halted again before Lily.

“It was a famous woman who sat for those pictures,” she said. “You could
never imagine who she really was.”

Vaguely, as if she had been absent from the room for a long time, Lily
replied. “No. I’m sure I have no idea. How could I? She was evidently a
great beauty.”

A look of delight swept the countenance of the old woman. “Wait!” she
cried. “Wait! I will make it easy for you. In one moment you will
understand!” And she scurried away once more into the dusty closet from
which she had brought the pictures. While she was absent Lily leaned
back in her chair closing her eyes and pressing a hand against her
forehead. For some time she remained thus and when, at last, she opened
her eyes at the sharp command of Madame Blaise she found the old woman
standing before her with the big hat of the girl in the picture drooped
over one eye.

The effect was grotesque, even horrible. Madame Blaise had arranged the
dress of black stuff so that her breasts and shoulders were exposed in
the fashion of the Girl in the Hat; but the ripe full breasts of the
girl in the picture were in the old woman sunken and withered, the color
of dusty paper; the gentle soft curve of the throat was shrunken and
flabby, and the soft glow of the face and the fresh carmine of the
caressing, sensuous lips were grotesquely simulated with hard rouge, and
powder which had caked in little channels on the wrinkled face of the
old woman. Even the bit of hair which showed beneath the big hat was
travestied horribly by dye. Madame Blaise simpered weakly in imitation
of the mysterious, youthful smile which curved the lips of the girl in
the picture.

There could be no mistake. The features were there, the same modeling,
the same indefinable spirit. Madame Blaise was the Byzantine Empress and
the Girl in the Hat. The caricature was cruel, relentless, bitter beyond
the power of imagination. Lily’s eyes widened with the horror of one who
has seen an unspeakable ghost. She trembled and the Girl in the Hat
slipped from her knee and fell with a clatter face downward upon the
Byzantine Empress.

Madame Blaise had begun to walk up and down the room with the languid
air of a mannequin. The big hat flopped as she moved. Turning her head
coyly, she said, “I have not changed. You see, I am almost the same.”

And then she fell to talking rapidly to herself, holding unearthly
conversations with men and women who stood in the dark corners of the
room among the innumerable pictures and bits of decaying bric-a-brac.
Crossing the room she passed near Lily’s chair where, halting for a
second, she bent down until her painted cheek touched Lily’s soft hair.
“You see,” she cried, pointing toward the dusty closet, “that one over
there.... He would give his life to have me.” She laughed a crazy laugh.
“But no ... not I. Never yield too easily and yield only for love. Live
only for love.” And she moved off again on her mad promenade, gibbering,
bowing and smiling into the dusty corners.

In the midst of a tête-á-tête which the old woman held with an invisible
beau whom she addressed as “Your Highness,” Lily sprang up and ran
toward the door. Opening it, she rushed through the upper hall down the
stairway into the dark tunnel below. As the outer door slammed behind
her, it shut in the sound of Madame Blaise’ cracked singing, punctuated
by peals of crazy laughter.

Lily did not stop running until she passed the gate of the little
enclosure and stood, breathless and fainting with terror, beneath the
lights of the Rue de l’Assomption.




LXVI


They passed the summer at Germigny-l’Evec in the lodge on the terrace
above the winding Marne. The little house at Houlgate kept its shutters
up all through the hot months. It is true that the health of Madame
Gigon was none too good. It is true too that she might have benefited by
the sea air. Although Lily mentioned the migration once or twice as the
summer advanced she did not insist upon it. Madame Gigon, it appeared,
preferred the house where she had always passed her summers, and Lily
was content to remain there as the weeks passed through June and into a
hot and breathless July. It seemed that, for the first time, she was
tired. Indolent by nature, she had reserves of energy which could be
roused when the occasion arose. But it appeared that this occasion was
not one of sufficient importance; so she remained quietly, reading,
walking by the Marne; sometimes in the early morning when the weather
was not too hot, she even rode one of the Baron’s horses along the paths
of the wood on the opposite side of the river near Trilport.

For diversion the pair were visited by Jean who came romping down from
St. Cyr for a brief holiday now and then, always looking handsome and
behaving with the ferocity appropriate to a budding cavalryman. Ellen
came too, but her visits tired her cousin, especially during the hot
months. While she was there Lily pretended that she did not ride because
Ellen made riding impossible for her. Ellen insisted upon riding at top
speed. She searched for stone walls to jump. She even swam her horse
through the Marne on one hot morning in July. Unlike Lily she made no
effort to preserve her complexion. She became as tanned as an Indian and
as hard as an athlete. Jean admired her enormously, and together they
careered wildly across country; for Ellen sat her saddle lightly and as
well as any man. Indeed she was as good as a boy for a companion. She
even enjoyed the risqué barracks jokes which Jean told her. She listened
to the ballads he sang, the bawdy ballads of the cavalry, old songs
filled with the traditions of Napoleon’s army ... the same ballads which
Lily sang to herself as she dressed for the last ball ever given at
Cypress Hill.

Ellen could swear too, in English or in bad French. They became great
friends. Lily saw them off in the mornings from her window, looking
after them with an expression of mingled envy and regret in her dusky
blue eyes. She must have envied the pair their youth. She was jealous of
Ellen as she was always jealous of any one for whom Jean showed
affection.

But an end came to the early morning excursions when Ellen in August
sailed for New York to spend a month with her mother and father. They
lived in a little house on Long Island; for Hattie Tolliver, since her
children had become successful, no longer kept a rooming house in
Manhattan.

“Pa is content now,” Ellen said. “He’s got a horse and a garden and
chickens. That’s what he always wanted. Ma is too. But it’s different
with her. She ought to have another complete family of children. She’s
never gotten over being a mother. She wants us to stay with her always.
She can’t bear having us grown up.”

It was true. The more successful her children became, the less Hattie
Tolliver saw of them.

“It is a warning,” said Ellen, “never to be too fond of your children.”
She laughed ironically. “And yet, if it hadn’t been for Ma, I don’t
suppose I’d be where I am ... or Fergus or Robert either. She brought us
up well. She made us ambitious.” And she concluded the speech with the
remark that “it was a damned funny world anyway.” She had never seen any
one who was content.

There had been a time, even a little while before, when she might have
said that Lily was the supreme example of contentment, but that time
seemed to have passed. Lily was clearly unhappy during that summer. She
became more grave and quiet. She was content only when the Baron came
down to stay for a week or two and rode with her through the mists of
the early summer mornings. When he had gone again, the vague
restlessness returned.

Madame Gigon grew to be more and more of a care; and added to the
calamities, Criquette on short notice gave birth to a family of puppies
of which it appeared the black and tan at the farm was the father.
Somehow Madame Gigon took this as a betrayal on the part of the hitherto
virginal Criquette. She complained of it as if Criquette had been her
own daughter, as indeed she might well have been for the affection and
care lavished upon her by the blind old woman. She succumbed completely
to her arthritis and lay most of the day in a chair under the clipped
linden trees, wearing an injured, fretful air when Lily was not by her
side to talk or read to her. Indeed it appeared that between the riotous
visits of Jean and Nellie a grayness had descended upon the lodge.




LXVII


It may have been that Madame Blaise played her part in the depression.
After the night that Lily ran out of her house, she never saw the crazy
old woman again, for a day or two later Madame Blaise, in a purple hat
and a bright Venetian shawl, was led away on the promise of a wonderful
adventure to a house in Versailles where well-to-do lunatics were cared
for and allowed to indulge to the utmost their idiosyncrasies. Her
guardian was none other than the handsome and distinguished M. de Cyon,
who with his brother, a lawyer, looked after the old woman’s property.
She seemed completely happy in the new establishment, so M. de Cyon
reported, because she found there an elderly wine merchant who believed
himself descended from Henri Quatre and Diane de Poitiers, and therefore
the rightful heir to the French throne. Together they spent their days
plotting intrigues and revolutions by which he was to be set upon the
throne with Madame Blaise as his consort. So there was no opportunity
for Lily to wring from the old woman any further information regarding
the photograph of the handsome gentleman in the black beard. The
photograph together with the hundreds of other pictures, was packed away
in a cavernous storehouse in Montparnasse when the furniture was cleared
out of the chalet in the enclosure near the Trocadero and it was let to
an Englishwoman interested in art. Life, as old Julia Shane said, was
after all no story book in which everything was revealed. Every man had
secrets which he carried into the grave.

But before Madame Blaise was led away, she kept her threat and sent
round to the house in the Rue Raynouard The Byzantine Empress and The
Girl in the Hat. The pictures were left there by the driver of a
battered fiacre who went off immediately. To Lily, the pictures had
become objects of horror. She would not see them. She bade the
housekeeper put them away in the top room of the house where she could
not possibly find them. When they arrived she was still in bed,
suffering from a wild headache that did not leave her for days after the
experience with Madame Blaise.

“It was horrible,” she told Ellen. “More horrible than you can imagine,
to see that old devil dancing before me like an omen ... a warning of
old age. If you had seen her ... so like me in the pictures ... so like
me even in the reality, like me as I might easily be some day. It was
horrible ... horrible!” And she buried her face in her hands.

Ellen, as usual, consulted Madame Gigon.

“She is really ill, this time,” she said. “It isn’t that she’s just
tired. She’s frightened by something. She’s much worse than she’s ever
been before.”

And they sent for a physician, a great bearded man, recommended by
Madame de Cyon, who diagnosed the case as a _crise de nerfs_ and bade
her go at once to the lodge in the country. The servants remarked that
Madame seemed ill and tired for the first time in her life.

After a time she appeared to forget the mysterious photograph. It was
clear that her father was destined to remain, as he had always been, a
solitary, fascinating, malevolent figure translated by some turn of
circumstance from the intrigues of the old world into the frontier life
of the new. What lay in the past--murder, disgrace, conspiracy--must
remain hidden, the secret of the dead and of a mad old woman who in her
youth and beauty had been his mistress at the very moment that his bride
struggled in the school at St. Cloud to learn the tricks of a great
lady. Out of all the mystery only one thing seemed clear--that Lily was
his favorite child; and now the reason seemed clear enough. By some whim
of Fate she was like The Girl in the Hat, the lovely creature who was
now Madame Blaise.

So the _crise de nerfs_ persisted throughout the summer. Indeed there
were times when it appeared that Lily was on the verge of a settled
melancholia, times when she would walk in solitude for hours along the
towpaths beneath the mottled limbs of the plane trees. Yet her beauty
persisted. She might have been a goddess ... Ceres ... as she walked
along the green path, bordered on one side by the Marne and on the other
by waving fields of yellow grain.

As the weeks passed she suffered increasing annoyance through the
persistent efforts of the Town to acquire the property at Cypress Hill.
A dozen times a month letters arrived from Folsom and Jones, pressing
letters that carried threats which Folsom and Jones passed along
smoothly with all the suavity of true lawyers playing both ends against
the middle. Indeed, from the tone of certain of the communications it
appeared that they too, although they were Lily’s agents and paid by
her, believed that the interests of the Town surmounted those of their
client. Its growth, they wrote, was stupendous. It was rapidly becoming
one of the greatest steel centers in the world. If she could only be
induced to return for a visit, she would understand the anxiety of the
Town council to acquire the holdings at Cypress Hill. Surely she could
understand that while sentiment was a commendable thing, it had its
place. One could be too sentimental about a situation. The price offered
was excellent. (“But not so excellent as it will be in another five
years,” thought Lily with a certain malice.) The house brought her no
return. She only paid taxes on it. And so on, for page after page,
letter after letter.

All this, no doubt, sounded reasonable enough, but Lily reading those
letters aloud to Madame Gigon, who desired to be read aloud to no matter
what the material, would murmur irritably, “Why the devil can’t they
leave me in peace? Go back and visit that place? My God! What for?” And
then sarcastically, “To see Eva Barr, I suppose. I’m sure I’m not
interested in their prosperity.”

And she would write again that she had no intention of selling and that
the more they annoyed her the less she was likely to alter her decision.

It may have been that she enjoyed the sense of power with which the
possession of Cypress Hill endowed her ... a feature she had not
realized until it was shown her by Ellen. It may have been that she was
simply tired and a little perverse and ill-natured. And it was true that
she had not the slightest interest in the money involved. Indeed she had
no idea how rich she was. Each year she spent what she desired to
spend, and never did she come to the end of her income. What more could
she desire? What could she do with more money?

But it is also more than probable that somewhere far back in the dark
recesses of her consciousness, there were memories which kindled as she
grew older, new fires of resentment against the Mills and the Town and
all the things they stood for ... memories of her mother’s open hatred
for the Harrisons and Judge Weissman, memories of a terrible night when
men and women were shot down under the dead trees of the park, memories
of an heroic, unattainable figure, wounded and bloody, but undefeated
... a figure which doubtless grew in fascination as it receded into the
past. It is true, too, that there is sometimes greater peace, even
greater happiness, in renunciation than in fulfilment. What has never
been a reality, may remain a fine dream. Krylenko had never been more
than this.

And so the affair ran on until one evening in September Eustache, the
farmer’s boy, brought back from Meaux a small envelope bearing the post
mark of the Town and addressed in the scrawled, illiterate handwriting
of old Hennery. It recounted briefly the end of the house of Cypress
Hill. It had caught fire mysteriously in the night and before dawn
nothing remained save a hole in the ground filled with the scorched and
blackened fragments of fine old carpets, mirrors, jade, crystals, carved
chests and old chairs, all the beautiful things which encumbered the
site of the proposed railroad station.

The mulatto woman, Hennery wrote with difficulty and the most atrocious
spelling, swore that she saw two men running away from the house after
the fire began. The police, he added, had been able to find no trace of
them.

And the following day Lily received a polite letter from Folsom and
Jones giving her a brief account of the catastrophe. They also mentioned
the story told by the mulatto woman. They believed, however, that it was
simply the crazy imagining of a demented old woman.

“Perhaps now,” the letter concluded, “Miss Shane would desire to rid
herself of a property that could no longer hold her even by ties of
sentiment.”




LXVIII


Lily did not sell and for a time the letters of Folsom and Jones ceased
to arrive regularly. Since all her property in the Town was sold save
the site of the house at Cypress Hill, there remained no cause for
correspondence. Her money she invested through the American banks in
Paris. She heard nothing more of the Town until November when she
returned to the city. The prospect of a winter in Paris appeared to
revive her spirits, and she went, as usual, to hear Ellen play her first
concert of the season. That year Lilli Barr played a new Poem with the
Colonne Orchestra under the bâton of the elegant Gabriel Pierné. The
performance was not a great success. There was too little sympathy
between the scholarly soul of the conductor and the vigorous, barbaric
temperament of the pianist. Yet it was Ellen who came off best, bearing
all the laurels, with all the simpering critics trotting attendance.
“Mlle. Barr,” they said, “has the perfect temperament for it ... the
superb adjustment of soul and intellect indispensable to the
interpretation of such febrile music. It is music which requires a
certain coldness of brain, a perception delicate and piercing ... a
thing of the nerves.” And so they ran on, wallowing in their delight for
the _mot juste_, praising more extravagantly than was either honest or
in good taste. One or two saw an opportunity in the praise of hitting a
back handed slap at the conductor and his orchestra.

It was M. Galivant, critic of the Journal des Arts Modernes, who hit
upon the phrases “febrile music” and “delicate perception.” He showed
Lilli Barr the article in the salon after the concert, with the keys of
the great piano barely cool from her hot fingers.

“Pish! Tosh!” she remarked to Lily who waited for her in the dressing
room. “Did you see what Galivant has written? It’s too exquisite for
me. To hear them talk, you’d think I took the veil for months at a time
just to meditate what my music is all about. I know what it’s about and
I don’t want praise that’s written before they hear me play, just
because I help their modern music along. Nerves! Nerves! I haven’t got
such things!”

Yet she was, as always after a concert, tense and nervous, filled with a
terrible energy which would not let her sleep until dawn. To-night she
wore a long tight gown of cloth of silver, without sleeves and girdled
by a single chain of rhinestones. With her dark hair drawn tightly back,
she resembled a fine greyhound--lean, muscular, quivering.

“At least they liked it,” said Lily, “judging from the applause.” She
sat waiting in a long cloak of black velvet, held together with silver
clasps.

There was a sudden knock at the door and Lily murmured “Come in.” It was
the porter, a lean, sallow, man with a stoop and enormous black
mustaches.

“There is a gentleman to see Madame l’artiste,” he said.

Ellen turned. “Who is it?”

The man grimaced. “How should I know? He says he knows you.”

A shadow of irritation crossed Ellen’s smooth brow. “If he wants to see
me, tell him to send in his name.” And then to Lily as the porter
withdrew, “You see what fame is. The porter doesn’t even know my name.
He calls me Madame l’artiste ... Madame indeed! He hasn’t even bothered
to read the bills.”

The fellow returned again, this time opening the door without the
courtesy of a knock.

“His name, Madame, is ’arrisong.”

Ellen pursed her lips thoughtfully and struck a match on the sole of her
slipper, holding the flame to the cigarette in her strong slim fingers.

“Harrison?... Harrison?” she repeated, holding the cigarette between her
lips and the lighted match poised. “I don’t know any Harrison.... Tell
him to come in.”

The stranger must have been waiting just outside the door, for at the
word he stepped timidly inside. He was dressed in black and wore a
derby hat set well on the back of his head. Over one arm hung an
umbrella. He was rather sallow and macabre despite his plumpness. There
was the faint air of an undertaker about him. He might have been any
age.

As he advanced he smiled and, observing Lily, his countenance assumed an
expression of surprise. Ellen gave no sign of recognition. It was Lily
who stirred suddenly and stood up, her face glowing with a genuine
spontaneous pleasure.

“Willie Harrison!” she cried. “Where have _you_ come from?”

At the sound of his name Ellen’s smooth brow wrinkled in a slight frown.
“Willie Harrison,” she murmured, and then joined Lily in welcoming him.

For a moment he stood awkwardly regarding the two women. Then he said,
“I came to your concert, Ellen.... I saw it advertised in the Herald. I
knew you were Lilli Barr.” He chortled nervously. “Funny how famous you
are now! Nobody ever would have thought it!”

The sight of Willie appeared suddenly to loosen all Ellen’s taut nerves.
She sat down, leaned back in the chair, and laughed. “Yes. I fooled
them, didn’t I?” she said. “I fooled them.” And a sort of grim
satisfaction entered her voice.

Lily was smiling now, out of sheer pleasure at the sight of Willie. It
amused her probably more than anything that could have happened to her
at that moment.

“But what on earth are you doing in Paris?”

From the tone of her voice, it was clear that she regarded his presence
as a sort of miracle.... That Willie Harrison should have had the energy
to cross the Atlantic and wander about alone in Paris.

Willie sat down, rather stiffly, and told his story. He was with a
Cook’s party. His tour included London, Paris, the château country and
Switzerland. He was leaving shortly.

“It’s been a wonderful trip,” he remarked, his plump face all aglow.
“I’d no idea how much country there was over here.”

“Yes,” said Ellen, “there’s a good deal, taking it all in all.” She said
this with an undisguised air of patronizing him. It was she who was
great now, she who held the whip hand. She was no longer an awkward girl
in a home-made ball gown so unpretentious that men like Willie Harrison
failed to notice her.

But Willie failed to understand. He was childishly excited over Paris.
“It’s a great city!” he observed, fingering nervously the ruby clasp of
his watch chain. “A great city!”

Lily stood up suddenly.

“Willie,” she said, “come home and have supper with us.” And turning to
Ellen she added, “Paul will be waiting for us. He must be there
already.” And to Willie, “Paul is Monsieur Schneidermann, a friend of
Ellen’s and mine.”

Willie rose. “I don’t know,” he said timidly. “Maybe you aren’t prepared
for me. Maybe I’d be in the way. I didn’t mean to force my way in on
anything when I called. It was just for the sake of old times.”

Lily, moved toward the door trailing the magnificent cloak of black and
silver. She thrust her arm through his. “Come along, Willie,” she said.
“No nonsense. Why, we grew up together.”

And they went out, Ellen following them in her plum-colored wrap, to the
motor which bore on its polished door the crest of the Baron.

Throughout the journey Willie kept poking his head in and out of the
closed motor, drinking in the sights along the way ... the hushed,
shadowy mass of the Madeleine, the warm glow before Maxims’, the ghostly
spaces of the Place de la Concorde, the white palaces of the Champs
Elysées. Ellen in her corner remained sulky and taciturn, smoking
savagely. Lily talked merrily, pointing out from time to time sights
which she deemed worthy of Willie’s appreciation. He seemed not to be
listening.

“It’s a wonderful place,” he kept saying over and over again. “It’s a
wonderful place.” And a kind of pathetic and beautiful awe crept into
his thin voice. It seemed that he had no other words than “wonderful.”
He kept repeating it again and again like a drunken man holding a
conversation with himself.

At Numero Dix, Rue Raynouard, Willie underwent the experience of every
stranger. He entered by the unpretentious door and found himself
suddenly at the top of a long, amazing stairway which led down to a
drawing-room all rosy with the glow of warm light. Half-way down the
stairs candles burned in sconces against the dull paneling. From below
drifted the faint sound of music ... a Debussy nocturne being played
with caressing fingers in the shadowy, dim-lit spaces of the
drawing-room.

“Paul is here,” observed Ellen and led the way down the long stairs.

Lily followed and close at her silver heels Willie Harrison, divested
now of his derby and umbrella. Half-way down, he paused for a moment and
Lily, conscious that he had ceased to follow her, waited too. As she
turned she saw that he was listening. There was a strange blurred look
in his pale eyes ... the look of one awaking from a long sleep.

“It’s beautiful,” he said reverently. “My God! It’s beautiful!” A kind
of dignity seized him. He was no longer gauche and timid. He stared at
Lily who stood with her back to a mirror, the black and silver cloak
thrown carelessly back from her voluptuous white shoulders, her handsome
head crowned with gold bronze hair. And then all at once the tears shone
in his eyes. He leaned against the paneling.

“I understand now,” he said softly. “I understand ... everything. I know
now how little I must have counted.... me and all the Mills together.”

And in Lily’s eyes there was mirrored another picture ... that of a vast
resounding shed bright with flames and thick with the odor of soot and
half-naked bodies ... Willie, eternally fingering the ruby clasp of his
watch chain, herself turning the rings round and round on her slim
fingers, and in the distance the white, stalwart body of a young
Ukrainian steel worker ... a mere boy ... but beautiful. Krylenko was
his name ... Krylenko ... Krylenko ... It was a long time ago, more than
fourteen years. How time flew!

Lily’s dusky blue eyes darkened suddenly and the tears brimmed over.
Perhaps it came to her then for the first time ... a sense of life, of a
beautiful yet tragic unity, of a force which swept both of them along
helplessly.

All at once she held her handkerchief, quite shamelessly, to her eyes.
“We are beginning to be old, Willie,” she said softly. “Do you feel it
too?”

And she turned and led the way downwards. The music had ceased and the
voices of Ellen and Paul Schneidermann rose in dispute. They were
arguing with a youthful fire over the merits of the new concerto.

“Here,” came Ellen’s voice. “This part. It is superb!” And then the
sound of a wild, ecstatic sweep of music, terrifying and beautiful. “You
understand the strings help a great deal. Part of it lies in the
accompaniment.” And she began singing the accompaniment as she played.

But Lily with her companion trooping along behind her, did not interrupt
the discussion. They made their way, enveloped in a peaceful silence,
into the dining-room where supper waited them--some sort of hot stuff in
a silver dish with an alcohol flame burning beneath it, an urn
steaming with hot chocolate, a bowl of whipped cream, a few
sandwiches--superlatively French sandwiches, very thin and crustless
with the faintest edge of buff colored paté showing between the
transparent slices of white bread. It was all exquisite, perfect,
flawless.

“Sit down,” said Lily, as she flung off the black and silver cloak. “Sit
down and tell me all about yourself.”

Willie drew up a chair. “I shan’t be able to stay very late,” he said.
“You see, I’m leaving early in the morning.” He watched Lily fumbling
with the lamp beneath the urn. She was plumper than he had expected.
Indeed she was almost fat. There was a faint air of middle-age about
her, indiscernable but unmistakably present.

“What about yourself?” he asked politely. “What has your life been?”

Lily kept on turning and pushing at the silver burner. “My life?” she
said. “Well, you see it all about you, Willie.” She made a little
gesture to include the long, softly glittering rooms, Ellen, the piano,
Paul Schneidermann. “It’s just been this,” she said. “Nothing more ...
nothing less. Not much has happened.” For a moment she stopped her
fumbling and sat thoughtful. “Not much has happened,” and then after
another pause, “No, scarcely anything.”

There was a sudden, sharp silence, filled by the sound of Ellen’s
music. She had become absorbed in it, utterly. It was impossible to say
when she would come in to supper.

Then Willie, in an attempt at courtliness, strained the truth somewhat.
“You don’t look a day older, Lily ... not a day.... Just the same. It’s
remarkable.”

His companion lifted the lid of the chafing dish. “Some hot chicken,
Willie?” she asked, and when he nodded, “I must say you look younger ...
ten years younger than the last time I saw you. Why, you look as though
you’d forgotten the Mills ... completely.”

Willie laughed. It was a curious elated laugh, a little wild for all its
softness.

“I have,” he said. “You see I’m out of the Mills for good. I’ve been out
of them for almost seven years.”

Lily looked at him. “Seven years,” she said, “seven years! Why that’s
since the strike. You must have gotten out at the same time.”

“I did,” he replied, “I own some stock. That’s all. Judge Weissman is
dead, you know. When mother died, the old crowd went out of it for good.
All the Mills are now a part of the Amalgamated.”




LXIX


Thus in a few words, he sketched the passing of one epoch and its
succession by another. The day of the small private enterprise in the
Town had passed, succeeded by the day of the great corporation.
Everything was owned now by capitalists, by stockholders who never saw
the Mills, to whom the workers of the Flats were little more than
mythical creatures, animated engines without minds or souls, whose only
symbol of existence was the dividend twice a year. Machines they were
... machines ... dim machines ... not in the least real or human.

Most of the tale Willie omitted. He did not tell of the monkey-faced
little man who came to the Town representing the Amalgamated. Nor did he
tell of the monkey-faced man’s address to the Chamber of Commerce in
which he talked a great deal of Jesus and declared that religion was
what the world most needed, religion and a sense of fellowship between
men. He did not tell of how the Amalgamated broke the strike by buying
all the wretched houses and turning out the strikers, men, women and
children. He omitted the blacklisting, the means by which the strikers
were prevented from obtaining work elsewhere. He did not observe that
the power which money gave Judge Weissman, himself and his mother, was
as nothing compared to the power of the Amalgamated--a vast incalculable
power founded upon gold and the possession of property. Nor did he say
that the passing of the Mills had killed Mrs. Julis Harrison ... a thing
which was as true as truth. These things were to him of no importance.
He was now simply “an average citizen” minding his own business.

All Willie said was, “When mother died, the old crowd went out of it for
good.”

In the drawing-room Ellen had been completely captured by the concerto.
She was playing it all over again, from beginning to end, rapturously,
savagely. Schneidermann lay among the cushions of the divan, his lean
figure sprawled languidly, his dark eyes closed.

“And what do you do now?” asked Lily. “You must do something to occupy
yourself.”

Willie’s plump face brightened. “I have a farm,” he said. “I raise ducks
and chickens.” A slow smile crept over Lily’s face. “It’s a success
too,” he continued. “You needn’t laugh at it. I make it pay. Why, I made
this trip on last year’s profits. And I have a great deal of fun out of
it.” He smiled again with an air of supreme contentment. “It’s the first
time I’ve ever done what I wanted to do.”

Lily regarded him with a faint air of surprise. It may have been that
she guessed then for the first time, that he was not after all a
complete fool. He, too, like Ellen, like herself, even like Irene, had
escaped in spite of everything.

They had been talking thus for half an hour when Ellen, followed by Paul
Schneidermann, joined them. Willie stood up nervously.

“Paul,” said Lily, “Mr. Harrison--Mr. Harrison, Monsieur Schneidermann.”
They bowed. “You are both steel manufacturers,” she added with a touch
of irony, “You will find much in common.”

Willie protested. “No longer,” he said. “Now I am a farmer.”

“And I,” said Schneidermann, “have never been. I am a musician....”
Ellen laughed scornfully and he turned to her with a curious blushing
look of self-effacement, “Perhaps,” he said, “dilettante is a better
word.”

For a time they talked--the stupid, polite conversation that occurs
between strangers; and then, the proprieties satisfied, Ellen and Paul
drifted quickly back into the realm of music. Lily devoted herself to
Willie Harrison.

“It was too bad,” he remarked, “about the house at Cypress Hill.”

Lily leaned forward on the table holding up one white wrist to shield
her eyes from the light of the candles. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry ...
sentimentally, I suppose. I should never have gone back to it. It was
perfectly useless to me. But I’m sorry it’s gone. I suppose it, too, was
changed.”

“You would never have known it,” said Willie. “It was completely black
... even the white trimmings.” He leaned forward confidentially. “Do you
know what they say? They say in the Town that some one was hired to burn
it, so that you would be willing to sell.”

For a moment Lily remained silent. Her hand trembled a little. She
looked across at Ellen to see whether she had been listening. Her cousin
was plainly absorbed in her argument.

“They can have it now,” said Lily, with an intense bitterness. “I
begrudge them even the taxes I have to pay on it. But they’ll have to
pay a good price,” she added quietly. “I’ll squeeze the last cent out of
them.”

It was the end of their conversation, for Willie glancing at his watch,
announced that he must leave. Lily accompanied him up the long stairs to
the unpretentious door. There he hesitated for a moment on bidding her
good night.

“You have changed,” he said. “I can see it now.”

Lily smiled vaguely, “How?”

He fell to fumbling with the ruby clasp. “I don’t know. More calm, I
think.... You’re not so impatient. And you’re like a Frenchwoman....
Why, you even speak English with an accent.”

“Oh, no, Willie ... I’m not like a Frenchwoman. I’m still American.
There’s a good deal of my mother in me. I’ve realized it lately. It’s
that desire to run things. You understand what I mean.... Perhaps it’s
because I’m getting to the age where one can’t live upon the food of
youth.” She laughed suddenly. “We Americans don’t change. What I mean is
that I’m growing old.”

Willie shook hands politely and went out, leaving Lily in the doorway to
watch his neat figure, silhouetted against the glow of light from the
Café des Tourelles, until he reached the corner and disappeared.

It was the last time she ever saw him so it was impossible for her to
have known the vagaries of his progress after he left the door of Numero
Dix. Yet this progress held a certain interest. At the corner of the Rue
Franklin, Willie hailed with his umbrella a passing taxicab and bade the
driver take him to an address in the Rue du Bac. It was not the address
of the American Hotel; on the contrary it designated a three story house
with a café on the first floor and lodgings above. In one of these lived
a discreet lady who frequented the Louvre by day and employed Art as a
means of making the acquaintance of quiet gentlemen hanging about the
fringes of tourist parties. Indeed, she could have written an
interesting compendium on the effect of art and Paris upon the behavior
of soberly dressed, mousy gentlemen.

For Willie, with the death of his mother and the passing of the Mills,
had begun to live ... in his own awkward timid fashion, to be sure ...
but none the less he had begun to live.

As he sped on his way in the crazy taxicab, it became more and more
evident that his mood was changed by the encounter with Lily. He sat
well back in the cab, quietly, immersed in the thought. The dim white
squares, empty and deserted now; the flamboyant houses of the section
near the Étoile, the light-bordered Seine, the tall black skeleton of
the Eiffel Tower ... all these things now left him, for some strange
reason, unmoved. They swept by the windows of the cab unnoticed. Willie
was thinking of something else.

As the taxi turned into the ghostly spaces of the Place de la Concord,
Willie stirred himself suddenly and thrust his head out of the window.

“Cocher! Cocher! Chauffeur!” he cried suddenly in atrocious French.
“Allez a l’hotel Americain.”

The mustachioed driver grunted, turned his cab, and sped away once more
as if pursued by the devil; and presently he pulled up before the
American Hotel, a respectable hostelry frequented by school teachers and
temperance workers.

An hour later he lay chastely in his own bed, awake and restless in the
dark, but still innocent. And in the Rue du Bac the sophisticated lady
waited until long after midnight. At length, after cursing all
Americans, she took her lamp from the window and went angrily to bed.




LXX


At two o’clock in the house in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen came in to sit
on the edge of her cousin’s bed and discuss the happenings of the day.

“I guess,” she observed, “Willie will be able to tell them a good story
when he gets back to the Town. His mouth fairly hung open all the time
when he was here.”

Lily smiled. “I don’t know,” she replied, braiding her heavy bronze
hair. “From what he tells me, he’s in the backwater now. There are a lot
of people there who have never heard of us. I suppose Willie and you and
I are just back numbers so far as the Town is concerned.”

After Ellen had gone to her own room, Lily settled herself on the chaise
longue and, wrapped in a peignoir of pale blue chiffon all frothy with
old lace the color of ivory, she took from her desk the enameled box,
opened it and read the worn clippings. The pile had grown mightily.
There were a score of new clippings. The headlines had increased in size
and the editorials were an inch or two longer. The man was progressing.
He was denounced with a steadily increasing hatred and bitterness. It
was clear that he had become a national figure, that he was a leader in
the battle against the roaring furnaces.

For a long time she lay with her eyes closed ... thinking. And at last,
hours after the rest of the house had grown still and dark, she sighed,
replaced the clippings in the box and locked them once more into her
desk. Then she settled herself to writing a letter over which she spent
a long time, biting the end of the silver penholder from time to time
with her firm white teeth. When at last the effort satisfied her, she
placed it in an envelope and addressed it to Sister Monica in the
Carmelite Convent at Lisieux. It was the hundredth letter she had
written, letters in which she abased herself and begged forgiveness,
letters to which there was never any reply save an unforgiving and
relentless silence. It was like dropping the pale gray envelopes into a
bottomless crevasse.

In the following May, Ellen went to Munich. It was the first step in a
grand tour of the German cities. She would visit Salzburg, Cologne,
Vienna, Leipsic. She would call upon Schönberg, Busoni, Richard Strauss,
Pfitzner, von Schilling.... If the spirit moved her, she might even
penetrate Russia. And certainly she would go to the festival at Weimar.
All this was included in the plan she set forth to Lily. There was no
schedule. She would simply progress from one place to another as her
fancy dictated. She knew no German but she would learn it, as she had
learned French, by living among the people. She went alone. Therefore
she would have to learn the language.

The expedition was singularly characteristic of all her life. When she
found that the Town was unendurable she had reversed the plan of her
pioneer ancestors and turned east instead of west, to seek a new world
which to her was far more strange than the rolling prairies of the west
had been to her great-grandfather. When the traveling salesman, whom she
used as a stepping stone, fell by the wayside and departed this life she
was free to go unhindered on her own roving way, fortified by the
experience of a few years of married life. She owned no fixed home. On
the contrary, she moved about restlessly ... exploring, conquering,
exhausting now this city, now that one. She was, it seemed, possessed of
a veritable demon of restlessness, of energy, of a sharp inquiring
intelligence. It was this quality, stimulated constantly by an
overpowering curiosity, which sent her pioneering into the world of new
music which Lily disliked so intensely. She explored those regions which
musicians of a more contemplative and less restless nature dared not
enter. It was as if she were possessed by a Gargantuan desire to devour
all the world within a single lifetime.

Once in Paris she said to Lily, “You know, I am obsessed by a terrible
sense of the shortness of life. It is impossible to know and experience
all that I wish to know.”

But this was as near as she came to a contemplative philosophy. She had
no time for reflection. The hours she spent with the indolent Lily
inevitably fired her with a fierce and resentful unrest. It was then
that she grew impatient, bad-tempered, unendurable. It was the descent
of one of these black moods which drove her from the peaceful solitude
of the house at Germigny upon a new voyage of exploration.

And so it happened that Lily and Madame Gigon were alone on the peaceful
summer evening when Eustache, the red-cheeked farmer’s boy, returning on
his bicycle through the rain from Meaux, brought the final edition of
the Figaro containing a short paragraph of the most enormous importance
to all the world.

Madame Gigon had been installed days before on the first floor of the
lodge, because she was no longer able to leave her bed and insisted upon
being placed where her ears would serve her to the greatest advantage.
The door of her room opened outward upon the terrace above the Marne and
here, just inside the door, sat Lily when Eustache arrived.

She opened the Figaro and spread it across her knees.

Madame Gigon, hearing the rustle of the paper, stirred and said
peevishly, “What is new to-day?”

“Not much of importance,” said Lily, and after a pause. “The archduke of
Austria has been assassinated. Shall I read you that?”

“Certainly,” replied the old woman with a fierce impatience.
“Certainly!”

It was only part of a daily game ... this asking Madame Gigon what she
would have read to her; because in the end the entire journal was read
aloud by Lily--the daily progress of the celebrated case of Madame
Caillaux, the signed articles by this or that politician, the news of
the watering places ... Deauville, Vichy, Aix, Biarritz, the accounts of
the summer charity fêtes, the annual ball at the Opéra, the military
news ... everything was read to the old woman. For Madame Gigon found a
keen delight in the recognition of a name among those who had been
present at this fête or were stopping at that watering-place. After her
own fashion, the blind old woman reduced all France to the proportions
of a village. To her, the Caillaux trial became simply an old wives’
tale, a village scandal.

So Lily read of the Archduke’s assassination and Madame Gigon listened,
thoughtfully, interrupting her occasionally with a clucking sound to
indicate how terrible the affair really was. She understood these
things, being a Bonapartist. It was as if the Prince himself had been
shot down. It was the natural result of the Republican movement, of
Socialism, which was, after all, the same thing. Just another example of
what these wild ideas might lead to.

“These are sad times,” remarked Madame Gigon when Lily had finished
reading. “There is no such thing as law and order ... no such thing as
respect and regard for rank. A wild confusion (_une melée sauvage_) to
see who can gain the most wealth and make the greatest display. Money!”
the old woman muttered. “That’s it. Money! If you make a fortune out of
chocolate or soap, that is enough to put you into the government. Good
God! What times are ahead!”

To this harangue, Lily listened absently. It was all monotonously
familiar to her. Madame Gigon had said it a thousand times. Every evil
she attributed to “these dirty times.” She concluded by saying, “Crazy
Madame Blaise is right after all. There will be a war.... She was
right.... There will be.”

While she was speaking, Lily tore open the only interesting letter among
the dozen. Quietly she read it to herself. When she had finished she
interrupted Madame Gigon.

“I have a letter from M. de Cyon,” she said, “about some furniture I was
selling. He writes that Madame is ill again with indigestion ... quite
seriously this time.”

Madame Gigon made a little grunting noise. “Nadine eats too much.... I
have told her so a dozen times but she will not listen. A woman as fat
as that....”

And from the superior pinnacle of her great age, Madame allowed the
sentence to trail off into unspeakable vistas of Madame de Cyon’s folly.
At the end of a long time during which they both sat silently in the
dripping quiet of the summer evening Madame Gigon said explosively, “She
will go off suddenly one of these days ... like that,” and she snapped
her finger weakly.

At the sound Criquette and Michou got up lazily, stretched themselves,
and waddled close to her chair. For a moment she scratched their heads
with groping fingers and then turning to Lily said, “It is time for
their milk.... And see to it, my child, that they have a little cream in
it.”

Lily rose and called the dogs inside the lodge. Across the river in the
tiny church, the old curé, M. Dupont, rang the vesper bell. Behind the
cropped willows along the Marne the last glow faded above the rolling
fields of wheat. Inside the house Lily was singing softly, “O, le coeur
de ma mie est petit, tous p’tit, p’tit.” There was no other sound.

Presently, Madame Gigon leaned back in her bed and called to Lily.
“To-morrow,” she said, “you might ask M. Dupont to call on me. It has
been two days since he was here.”




LXXI


Upon Germigny l’Evec, removed from the highroad and the railway, the war
descended at first slowly, with the unreality of a vague dream, and then
with a gathering, ponderous ferocity of an appalling nightmare. In the
beginning even the farmer and his men, familiar with the army and with
military service, could not believe it. Still there was the memory of
1870, said the pessimists. It was not impossible.

“Ah, but war is unthinkable,” said Lily to Madame Gigon. “The days of
war are over. It could not happen. They would not dare to permit it.”

But Madame Gigon, again from the pinnacle of her superior age, replied,
“My child. You have never seen a war. You know nothing of it. It is not
at all impossible. You see, I can remember well 1870.”

All the talk, it seemed, turned back at once to 1870. Sooner or later
every one returned to it--M. Dupont, the curé, who had served at Metz
with MacMahon, the farmer and his wife, even Eustache. 1870 was no
longer a half-century away. It became only yesterday, an event which was
just finished the evening before at sunset. And slowly it became clear
that war was not at all an impossibility. The order for mobilization
made it a reality so hideous, so monstrous, as to be utterly lacking in
reality. In the château and at the farm, there were no longer any
barriers. The cook and the farmer’s wife, came and sat on the terrace,
red-faced and weeping. In the quiet of the evening there drifted across
the wheatfields the ominous whistling of trains which followed no
schedule, and from the distant high-road the faint sound of an unceasing
procession of taxicabs and omnibuses rushing east and north through
Pantin, through Meaux, on to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre.

From Paris came three letters, two by messenger, an orderly of the
Baron, the other by post. One was from the Baron himself and one was
from M. de Cyon.

“It is all more grave than any of us suspect,” wrote the Baron.
“Unhappily, Dear Lily, it is impossible for me to see you. I cannot
leave my regiment. You cannot come to Vincennes. We must try to endure
all this in the fashion of philosophers. It is not, you understand, as
if it had been unexpected. It has been slow--more slow than any one
hoped--in arriving.

“As for what may come of it, to me or to Jean. What is there to do? We
are all helpless as if caught in a web. May God be with us all! Jean
will be with me. Your heart can be assured that I shall do all it is
possible to do for him. The rest remains with the good God. I would give
... What would I give? Ten years or more of my life to have seen you
before going away. But that, it seems, is impossible. So we must wait
until it is possible.

“We are leaving to-night. I have sent old Pierre to see to it that you
and Madame Gigon are brought safely back to Paris. Germigny is safe from
the Germans, but there is always a chance. Who can say what will happen?
Good God! The suddenness of it!

“Au revoir, dear Lily, in haste. A thousand kisses from thy Césaire.”

It was the first time that there had been in all their correspondence
even the faintest note of anything more compromising than a proper
friendship between the Baron and the woman who had made his old cousin,
Madame Gigon, comfortable for life. It was this which somehow gave the
letter a gravity more terrible than any hint of foreboding contained in
its crisp white pages. It was as if the barriers of convention had
suddenly been destroyed, as if they had gone down in ruin to reveal life
in all the primitive directness of unfettered nature. It seemed to say,
“Nothing matters any longer save those things which have to do with
life, death and love.”

The letter from M. de Cyon was more calm and dignified, the proper
letter of a diplomat. It was the letter of a distinguished, white-haired
gentleman.

“You must leave Germigny as soon as it is possible. I write you this in
confidence and beg you not to arouse a panic among the peasants and the
citizens of Meaux. It is war, Madame, and no one can say what will
happen. Your security is of the deepest concern to me. I beg you to
waste no time. Go on foot, by ox-cart, by train--however it is possible,
but go. A battle is no place for so beautiful a woman.”

That was all, yet it contained hints and innuendoes of things too
terrible for the imagination. M. de Cyon undoubtedly knew more than he
chose to reveal in his circumspect note. He was, to be sure, near to the
Ministry of War.

There was a letter too from Jean, breathless and full of spirit, the
letter of a young warrior eager for battle, forgetful of all else, of
God, of his mother, of everything save the prospect of fighting.

     “Dear Mama,” he wrote, “we are leaving to-night for the front. I
     shall return perhaps a captain. Think of it! Thy Jean a captain! Do
     not worry. Our troops are in excellent condition. I fancy the war
     will be over in a fortnight. I am in Césaire’s company. I think of
     you, of course.

                                                            “THY JEAN.”

With the three letters in her hand Lily left Madame Gigon and set out to
walk the white tow-path at the edge of the river. On the far side the
farm appeared deserted as if suddenly its occupants had been overcome by
a sleep of enchantment. The oxen were nowhere to be seen. The fowls were
gone. The house lay shuttered and empty as a house of the dead. Above
the tow-path, the château likewise stood silent and empty. In all the
landscape there was no sign of life, no dogs, no chickens, no crying
children. And as she walked she turned her head presently and saw,
leaving the far side of the farm, a lumbering two-wheeled cart piled
high with furniture,--mattresses, a sewing machine, a few chairs, and
swinging underneath, little cages of osier in which were crowded the
barnyard fowls. Tied to the wheels, three goats followed the gentle
motion of the cart. Fat Madame Borgue, the farmer’s wife, trudged by the
side guiding the slow-gaited oxen with a long wand, and high up, perched
on a truss of straw, sat her mother, an immensely old and wrinkled
woman, with Madame Borgue’s baby in her arms. They were deserting,
driven before the straggling columns of refugees which had appeared like
magic during the early morning along the high-roads from La Ferté to
Meaux. There could be no doubt. The farm and the château were empty. At
Germigny only Lily and Madame Gigon remained behind.




LXXII


It appeared that the discovery made no impression upon Lily, for she
continued on her way along the deserted river path without stopping,
without even checking the mad speed at which she walked. Her manner was
that of one fleeing before a terror from which there is no escape. When
she had reached a spot opposite the little island that divided the
waters of the river, she halted suddenly by a clump of hazel bushes and
flung herself down upon the thick grass in the shadow of the plane
trees. She began to weep, soundlessly with long, racking, silent sobs
which shook her whole body as if she had been stricken by some frightful
pain.

Far off a train whistled distantly. The bright red kepis of the soldiers
showed in rows like poppies at the windows of the coaches. On the white
solid bridge at Trilport there appeared a double procession; one column
hot, dusty, bedraggled, full of crying, exhausted, women and children,
moved toward Paris. The other was gay and bright. The men wore bright
red trousers and bright red caps. It moved briskly forward. The guns
were like a field of wheat come suddenly to life, moving gallantly to
throw itself upon the reaper.

After a time, Lily sat up, her hair all blown and disheveled, her dark
eyes bright from weeping. She read the letters over and over absorbing
the same phrases.... May God be with us all!... It is all more grave
than any of us suspect.... A thousand kisses from thy Césaire.... It is
war, Madame, and no one can say what will happen.... A battle is no
place for a beautiful woman.... Perhaps I shall return.... Perhaps I
shall return a captain.... Think of it! Thy Jean a captain!... Thy
Jean!... Thy Jean.... Thy Césaire!... Thy Jean! Thy precious Jean!

Slowly she refolded the letters and thrust them into the bosom of her
dress and then, as if her emotion were too strong for silence, she said
aloud.... “Me ... myself.... Why do they worry about me?... Do they
think that I am afraid?” She laughed suddenly. “Afraid of what?”

Besides it was impossible to flee with a sick old woman and no means of
conveyance. She laughed again and said bitterly, “What do they think ...
that I am a magician?”

Lying there in the deep grass, it must have occurred to her all at once
that her whole life had been pillaged and destroyed because an Austrian
archduke was shot in a little hole called Serajevo. Madame Gigon dying.
Césaire and Jean on their way to destruction. Who remained? What
remained? De Cyon, perhaps. No one else. No one in all the world. The
years of her life come to an end like this ... that everything she
loved, everything she cherished, might be swept away over-night like so
much rubbish into a dustbin. As if she were no more than a poor forsaken
flower vender or charwoman! What was money now? What were beautiful
things? What was all her life?

And she flung herself down once more, sobbing wildly as she had sobbed
another time in the old house at Cypress Hill, when all at once, she had
sensed the tragedy of a whole lifetime, as if she stood in a vast plain
surrounded only by loneliness.

At dusk she arose slowly and, from long habit put her hair in order,
smoothed her dress, and set out upon her homeward journey, walking
slowly, with feet from which all youth had gone. When she arrived at the
lodge, the traces of her weeping had disappeared and she entered proudly
and in silence. For a moment there came into her pale lovely face a
fleeting likeness to her mother, a certain determination that was
inseparable from the rugged countenance of the stoic Julia Shane.

The house was still because old Madame Gigon had slipped out of her bed
and was lying asleep on the floor. When Lily attempted to rouse the old
woman, she discovered that she was not sleeping at all but unconscious,
and suddenly Lily too slipped to the floor, buried her face in her hands
and wept noisily and without restraint. The sound of her sobbing
penetrated the breathless garden and the distant empty rooms of the
château, but there was no one to answer it. The only sound was the
triumphant, ironic whistle of a steel locomotive, its belly hot with
red flames, its nostrils breathing fire and smoke.

At last she lifted Madame Gigon into the bed by the window and, lying by
the side of the unconscious old woman, she fell into a profound sleep.




LXXIII


It was dark when she awoke and rose wearily to light a lamp. The first
flame of the match illuminated the room. It revealed all the familiar
furniture ... the chintz covered chairs, the bright curtains of _toile
de Juouy_, the bowl of ghostly white phloxes by the window. Everything
was the same save that Madame Gigon ... old Tante Louise ... lay
unconscious upon the bed, and the house was so still that the silence
was suffocating.

She went into the kitchen and prepared a mixture of egg, milk and brandy
which she fed the old woman through a tube. She understood the care of
Madame Gigon. The old woman had been like this before. Lily, herself,
ate nothing, but took from the cupboard by the window a bottle of port
and drank a brimming glass. And after a time she went outside to listen
to the silence.

With her black cloak wrapped about her she sat there for a long time.
The farm, the tiny inn, the houses of the village were black and silent.
There hung in the atmosphere the ghostly feeling of a house suddenly
deserted by its inhabitants, standing empty and alone. The mournfulness
was overwhelming. After a time she lighted a cigarette and smoked it,
holding the ember away from her and regarding it at a little distance as
if the faint light in some way dissipated the loneliness.

For a time she regarded the distant horizon and the queer flashes of
color like heat lightning which appeared at intervals. Sometimes the
rising night wind bore toward her a faint sound like that of distant
thunder. And then all at once, there appeared in the house by the
village church a bright light. It was a lamp placed close to the open
window so that the rays piercing the darkness traversed the river,
penetrated the low branches of the plane trees and enveloped Lily
herself in a faint glow.

She watched it for a time with a breathless curiosity. The cigarette,
untouched, burned low and dropped from her fingers, and then behind the
light appeared the figure of the curé in his rusty black clothes. He had
stayed behind to guard his church. He was there, moving about his little
house, as if nothing had happened. Presently he took down from a shelf
above the table a heavy book, laid it before him, took out his steel
rimmed spectacles, and began to read.

After an hour of silence during which she lay motionless in her chair,
Lily rose and went inside to look at Madame Gigon. The old woman lay on
her back, snoring peacefully. She felt her pulse. It was weak and
irregular. Then she brought more brandy and milk, fed it to Madame
Gigon, and wrapping the black cloak about herself, set off down the
terrace to the iron bridge that led across the Marne to the house of the
curé.

Away to the north the flashes in the sky became more frequent and the
distant thunder less broken and more distinct. On the way to the bridge
the alder branches stirring softly in the breeze, whispered together in
a vague, ghostly fashion. She walked slowly in the same tired fashion
until she reached the little white house by the church.




LXXIV


Inside, the old priest at the sound of her knock looked up from his
reading and took off his spectacles.

“Come in,” he said, and Lily stepped uncertainly through the door, her
eyes blinded by the bright flame of the petrol light. M. Dupont,
regarding her with an expression of amazement, rose from his chair.

“It is I, Madame Shane,” said Lily. “The friend of Madame Gigon.”

“Ah, yes, I remember you well.”

Before this night there had passed between them occasional greetings
when he came to the lodge to play piquet with Madame Gigon, when he
passed Lily riding through the wood in the early morning.

“Won’t you sit down?” and then, “Why are you here? You know the Germans
may come any time now. Surely before morning.”

“As soon as that?” asked Lily indifferently. She had not thought of the
Germans. Perhaps they would come. It did not matter greatly.

The old man bent his head over the table and began to turn the pages of
the book. “Our soldiers are brave, Madame,” he said. “But there is too
much against them. They were not ready. In the end we will win.... For
the present....” He finished with a gesture implying that the matter lay
in the hands of the good God. He was a simple man, a peasant trained for
the priesthood by devout and adoring parents.

“It would be better if you would go away,” he said after a sudden pause.
“I imagine it will not be pleasant.”

Lily laughed softly. For a moment something of her old gay indifference
appeared to return, even a shade of the spirit with which she had met
another adventure years before in the park at Cypress Hill.

“There is Madame Gigon,” she said. M. Dupont again bent over the table
silently. It was a gesture of assent, of resignation, of agreement.

“Besides,” continued Lily, “I am not afraid. I think I may even enjoy
the experience.... I should like to know what war is like.” And then, as
if she feared that he did not understand her, she added, “Not, of
course, because I like war. Oh! not at all! But you understand what it
means for the men.... I have men in it.” She shivered a little and drew
the black cape more closely about her. “I think it might be easier for
the women if they could go into battle as well. It would be easier than
waiting ... at home ... alone.”

The man closed his book. “Madame is a beautiful woman,” he said, softly.

Again Lily smiled faintly. “Oh, I understand what you mean ...
perfectly.” A thoughtful expression entered her dark eyes. She seemed
suddenly to be listening to the faint and distant thunder. “Yes,” she
said with a sigh, “I understand. Fortunately I have no temptation to run
away. I could not go if I chose. Madame Gigon, you understand, has given
up her life to me.... It would be impossible to desert her now.”

She sat now with her back to the whitewashed wall of the little room;
her black cape and her red hair carried the quality of a beautiful
painting. All the color was gone from her face and beneath her eyes hung
dark circles which somehow increased the brilliance of her eyes and the
whiteness of her skin. She looked old but it was the oldness of beauty,
possessing a clear refinement and delicacy.

“She is a good woman ... Madame Gigon,” said the priest.

M. Dupont spoke in a low voice, respectful, scarcely audible, but the
words exerted upon his visitor an extraordinary effect. All at once she
leaned forward resting her elbows on the table. The cloak slipped to the
floor. She began to talk passionately with a kind of fierce melancholy
in her voice.

“Ah, she _is_ a good woman,” she said. “She has given her life to me.
She has lived with me for twenty years. She has been everything to me.
You understand ... a friend ... a companion ... even a mother.”

And then, without warning, she poured out the whole story of her life,
incident by incident, chapter by chapter, reserving nothing, disguising
nothing. Before the eyes of the astonished old priest she recreated the
house at Cypress Hill, the Mills, the Town, the figures of her bizarre
father, her cynical mother, the hysterical Irene, all the kaleidoscopic
picture of a wandering, aimless life. She told him of Jean. She even
related bit by bit the long tale of her love for the Baron. She told him
that in her heart she had even sinned for the sake of a common laborer
... Krylenko.

“And yet,” she said, “he was not exactly that. He was a great deal more.
He was, you understand, something of a martyr. He gave up everything for
his people. He would have given his life had it been necessary.... It
hurts me, even now, to think of him. He was a powerful man ... a good
man ... a noble man.”

It was of him that she talked for a long time, wildly, passionately
invoking him in her enthusiasm before the stricken eyes of the old
priest. He stood there for a long time in the bare, whitewashed room,
powerful, austere, suffering, as he had been on the night of the
slaughter in the park at Cypress Hill.

“He was a good man.... He still is,” she said. She talked breathlessly
with a bright exalted light in her eyes. “I have never told this to any
one.... There was no sin between us ... nothing unless to love deeply is
a sin.”

As if turned to stone, M. Dupont sat listening quietly. Only once did he
speak and that was when she mentioned the Baron. Then he stirred
uneasily and peered at her closely as if he suspected her of lying.

“Incredible!” he murmured to himself. “Incredible!” And after a little
pause. “Only God can know what lies in the darkness of men’s hearts.
Only God.... It is impossible to know.... It is impossible to know!”

But Lily swept past the interruption. The torrent of her revelations
flowed on. She talked eagerly, with a kind of wild delight; yet what she
said lacked the quality of a confession. She seemed to have no profound
consciousness of sin. She was even unrepentant. She told the story
breathlessly with a kind of wonder at herself, at the tragedy of her own
soul, that she loved so easily. Instead of confessing, she appeared to
be pouring out to the trembling old man secrets, too long confined,
which she found herself driven to reveal.

At last she drew to a conclusion. “You understand now,” she said, “why
to me the war is inexpressibly tragic. You understand what Madame Gigon
has been to me.”

She picked up the fallen cloak and, shivering, wrapped it about her and
sank back in the stiff little chair with a weary air of finality and
resignation. “You see, it is not only the war.... Madame Gigon is dying.
The war has taken everything. You understand I shall be alone ...
completely alone.”

M. Dupont made no reply. He kept his head bowed. He was repeating a
prayer as Irene had done in the old days. They prayed for Lily, who had
not been inside a church in more than seven years.

“I came to fetch you to her,” continued Lily, “She is dying now.... I am
certain she cannot live much longer.”

When the priest at last raised his head, it was to say, “Come. If she is
dying we must waste no time,” in so gentle a voice that the tears welled
in Lily’s eyes. She took out her handkerchief, already wet.

“I thought,” she said, “that I was through with weeping. I must have a
great many tears.” (Lily who never wept.)




LXXV


M. Dupont, after collecting those things which are necessary in the
administration of the last rites, put on his shovel hat and took up a
lantern.

“Come,” he said, “we must hurry.” And together they set out along the
white road, between the whispering alders and over the iron bridge. The
lantern swung feebly in his grasp. They walked in complete silence until
they reached the terrace when Lily, looking up suddenly, saw that the
sky behind the lodge was filled with a cloudy whiteness as if gray smoke
were drifting across the sky.

“There is a fire somewhere,” she said placing a hand on the arm of her
companion.

M. Dupont halted and regarded the sky for a moment, holding his lantern
high so that the rays might penetrate the darkness beyond the vine
covered lodge.

“It is not smoke,” he said suddenly. “It is dust. The cavalry is passing
along the road.”

And then for the first time the small revealing noises reached Lily’s
ear ... the clanking of spurs, the creaking of girths, the muffled sound
of hoofs striking the white road, and then the solitary whicker of a
horse.




LXXVI


Inside the lodge, Lily left Madame Gigon to the curé. He assured her
that she was right. It was impossible for the old woman to live much
longer. It would have been useless to have secured a physician even if
one had been available.

“She has been dying a long while,” said the old man. “I fancy she would
prefer not to be hindered in her going.”

As Lily closed the door upon the two old friends, she saw M. Dupont
kneel down in the lamplight and begin to pray.

Wearily she climbed the narrow winding stairway which led to the upper
floor and, finding herself unable to sleep, she went to the window above
the gateway and sat down to watch the column of cavalry on its way into
battle. The men had been riding for hours and now they rode silently,
white with dust, the black plumes of horsehair swaying as the horses
moved. It was impossible to distinguish one from another. They were
simply black figures, units of a body, mysterious and without
personality. There was not even the sound of a voice, nothing but the
faint rattle of sabers and the ghostly breathing of the horses. Jean
might have been among them ... even Césaire himself. It was impossible
to say. They were each like the other, no longer individuals, now only
units, cogs in a vast machine. No one of them counted any longer for
anything.

Presently the column came to an end and a battery of artillery, caissons
rattling, men upright upon the cartridge boxes, followed in its place.
And at last it too passed, swallowed up by the questioning darkness. The
silence became unreal, terrifying. From below stairs arose the droning
sound of M. Dupont’s voice conducting the service that would lead Madame
Gigon safely into the world beyond ... the world beyond. To-night in all
the lonely breathless quiet, the world beyond was very near. One might
almost enter it simply by closing one’s eyes, by stepping through a
doorway into the night.

Lily sat motionless and upright, watching. A second column passed and
then a third; and at last, a man riding a black horse whose chest was
white with froth turned in at the gateway. He was a man like the others
... a unit, a being without individuality save that he rode alone a
little in the rear of the other horsemen. Under the archway he
dismounted from his horse, and in the next moment he performed an act
which at once restored to him his identity. He walked directly to the
iron ring which hung concealed among the ivy leaves and there fastened
the black horse. Thus he betrayed himself. Only one person could have
known the exact place where the ring lay hidden among the leaves. There
could be no longer any doubt.

When he had fastened the black horse, he stepped out a little way from
the house and called softly, “Lily ... Lily.”




LXXVII


There was no answer, but before he called again a tall figure in a black
cloak ran from the doorway and hurried toward him.

“Césaire!... Césaire!” were the only words she spoke. She clung against
him, the metal of his bright cuirass pressing her lovely, soft body. For
a time Césaire kissed her passionately and at length, without a word,
she led him away from the house to the pleached walk that led from the
château garden down to the river. They walked sadly with arms encircling
each other’s waists.

“I have but a moment,” said the Baron. “At most, ten minutes. I have no
right even to that.”

She told him that Madame Gigon was dying. She explained that old Pierre
had not appeared to help them to escape and that he would have been of
no use since it was impossible to move her companion. And when she had
wasted three precious minutes in these explanations, she said, “You need
not worry for me.... I shall be quite safe.... If only I could be as
certain of you.”

At this he laughed softly, reassuring her and pulling his fierce
mustachios in warlike fashion.

“You need not fear for me,” he said. “I have had such great luck ...
always.” And he looked at her closely with shining eyes.

Then they sat for a time in silence, clinging closely to each other.
Presently he took off his helmet and rested it in her lap allowing her
to twist her fingers in and out among the long black hair of the plume.

“And Jean,” she said, after a time. “He is with you?”

“He is with me. He passed with the others beneath your window. He sent
you his love. He would have come too, but he knew it was unsoldierly to
break the ranks.... He is a good soldier,” he added softly. “A valiant
fellow. With me it is different. I am an old fellow. I have learned that
there are times when one must break the ranks. There are times when even
breaking ranks does not matter.”

In the darkness Lily’s eyes closed as if she felt a sharp, sudden pain.
“Ellen advised me,” she said, “never to be too fond of my child.”

Her lover kissed her and answered, “Come, you must not think of it like
that. You must understand he is a boy ... an ardent boy.”

And then he fell again to talking of her danger. He urged her not to
remain.

“I have the curé here ... M. Dupont,” she said.

“Leave him with Madame Gigon.”

“No. That I will not do.... Besides the Germans may never arrive here
after all.”

“No,” he said, gravely. “Perhaps not. We shall try to prevent them.”

Then they walked back again to the gateway. The house was silent now and
the voice of M. Dupont no longer to be heard. The Baron replaced his
helmet, untied his horse and swung himself on the back of the animal.
Leaning down, he kissed her again and then turned through the gateway
into the road. She listened to the sound of the black horse’s hoofs as
he galloped past the moving columns, and at last when the echo was no
longer audible she reentered the house and flung herself down upon the
bed. Throughout the brief visit, she had restrained herself. Now she
wept quietly, almost in peace, as if she were enveloped already by a
great resignation.




LXXVIII


Madame Gigon lived through the night, sleeping peacefully in her high
bed near the door that opened upon the terrace. But Lily did not sleep
at all. She kept watch, sometimes sitting at the bedside, sometimes
lying wrapped in her cloak in the long chair beneath the plane trees.
She watched the flashes on the horizon beyond the wood, until the dawn
rising slowly absorbed them and rendered them invisible in a faint glow
which grew and grew until it enveloped all the dome of the sky and
transformed, suddenly and without warning, the dark wood from a low
black wall extending across the sky into a grove of slender trunks
silhouetted against the rising light.

At dawn the troops no longer passed the house. The dusty white road lay
deserted between the rows of chestnut trees. But in the dust were the
prints of a thousand hoofs and the tracks of the wide wheeled caissons.
The little procession on the distant bridge at Trilport had vanished.
There were no soldiers going forward; and coming back, there was now
only an occasional, straggling cart or the figure of a shopkeeper
pushing before him in a wooden wheelbarrow all that he had salvaged of
his little shop.

At noon there appeared out of the wood a rolling kitchen drawn by tired
horses and driven by weary soldiers all white with dust. It came nearer
and nearer until it arrived at the farm where, in the shadow of the big
gray barns, it halted and the men ate. A little while later soldiers
began to appear among the trees, tiny figures in red trousers and red
caps, no longer bright like the poppies, but all stained and dust
covered. The red marked them against the wall of greenery as if it had
been planned that they should serve as targets.

Singly and in little groups of two or three the soldiers straggled
across the fields toward the kitchen set up against the gray wall of
the barn. The sun shone brilliantly, and in the clear white light the
red tiles, the white walls, and the green of the trees appeared gay and
bright. Some of the men carried arms suspended in slings. One or two
wore about their close-cropped heads bandages that were stained with
spots of red as if the color had come loose from their tragic little
caps and stained their skins. There was one dandified young officer,
with fine waxed mustaches, who dragged a shattered leg and still wore
the bedraggled remnants of the spotless white gloves he had carried into
the battle.

When they had eaten and drunk, the soldiers made their way across the
iron bridge and turning along the tow path at the foot of the garden
kept on their way, moving in a thin, trickling stream in the direction
of Paris.

At length Lily, rousing herself, went to the foot of the garden, opened
the gate and stood on the path. She carried wine which she gave them to
drink as they passed.

“And how does it go?” she asked now and then.

The respectful answer was always the same. “Badly, Madame.... Badly. It
would be better if you did not remain.”

Or a shrug and “What can we do, Madame? They have better guns ... better
shells. One cannot see them. They are dressed so that they look like the
trees themselves. And we ... we.” A gesture indicating the fatal red
trousers and kepi.

Early in the afternoon the sound of the guns became audible again, not
distant this time and indistinct like thunder, but sharp and clear ...
the barking “ping” of the seventy-fives.

When the wine was all gone, Lily returned again to the terrace to wait.
She had not been sitting there long when there arose all at once the
sound of a terrific explosion. Turning her head she saw above the river
at Trilport a great cloud of white dust and black smoke. They had
destroyed the solid white bridge. It was the French themselves who had
destroyed it. The Germans must be very near.

Madame Gigon slept peacefully just inside the doorway, all undisturbed
by the explosion.

As for Lily, lying in the low chair, the explosion appeared to have
worked a miracle. The color had begun to return to her white face. It
showed itself in bright spots as if she had been seized by a fever. And
presently she arose and began to walk about, up and down the garden,
going at last into the château itself from which she returned in a
little while carrying a pair of the Baron’s binoculars. With these she
climbed to the little turret which rose above the vine covered
dove-cote. There she settled herself to watching.

In a little while the men about the kitchen gathered themselves into a
group, put the horses once more into the harness and drove away,
carrying with them a boy of the last class whose strength had given out.
M. Dupont followed them until he reached the edge of the iron bridge
where he halted and stood looking after them, his hands shading his old
eyes against the long rays of the setting sun, until they disappeared
around a turn of the river. Then he went quietly indoors.

A little while later a battery of guns appeared among the trees, halted
on the edge of the wood, and began firing in the direction of La Ferté
where a cloud of smoke from the burning houses hung low upon the
horizon. It was a pretty picture. The men worked the guns rapidly. The
cannon spat forth little curls of white smoke followed by sudden angry
barks, not in the least deafening. In the clear evening light it was all
like one of Meissonier’s battle pictures, rather clear and pretty and
bright-colored.

But in a little while the battery stopped firing, the horses leaned
forward once more into the harness and the guns drew away down the lane,
past the white farm and across the iron bridge. The planks reverberated
with a thunderous sound under the hoofs of the galloping horses. The
little cavalcade turned along the tow-path and vanished. Out of the wood
there appeared suddenly three gray-green figures on horseback who halted
and surveyed the landscape. They were the first of the Uhlans.




LXXIX


With the falling of night, the Germans were in possession of the château
and the gardens. In bands of twenty or thirty they pushed beyond across
the field and through the copses in the direction of Meaux. A few
remained behind, and these occupied the château, using the best linen of
the Baroness, taking down from the wall of the kitchen the cook’s great
battery of spotless copper kettles in which to cook their beans and
soup.

Lily, sitting quietly inside the darkened lodge by the side of Madame
Gigon, heard their shouts and the stamping of their horses in the
stables. Dark figures moved above among the trees of the garden, the
figures of her enemies, the men who would kill if it were possible
Césaire and Jean. In the excitement, no one ventured as far from the
château as the lodge, and for a time she remained safe and in peace.

The cannon were no longer to be heard. For a little while there arose
the distant crackling of rifles like the sound of brush fires made by
the foresters in August; but this too died away after a time.

She bathed her head, fed Madame Gigon once more and sat down again to
wait, and at last, overcome by exhaustion she sank quietly into sleep.

In the château the weary Germans slept and in the stables the horses
ceased their stamping. A deep unbroken stillness settled again over the
garden and the wheatfields beyond, so peaceful that the firing and the
shouting of a little while before might have been wholly an illusion, a
nightmare which had nothing to do with reality.

Thus passed three hours.

It was the sound of knocking which aroused Lily, a violent imperious
sort of knocking which wakened her sharply and brought her quickly to
her feet. As if by force of habit, she opened the door and said in
French, “Gently ... please.... Gently. It is not necessary to break down
the door. There is a sick woman here.”

As it swung open she was enveloped by the sudden bright glare of an
electric torch. At the same moment a voice speaking the most excellent
French said, “I am sorry, Madame. I ask your pardon. I did not know the
lodge was occupied.”

The voice was not gruff. It was rather cold and smooth and carried a
hint of weariness. “I found the door locked. I always knock upon locked
doors,” continued the voice. “May I come in?”

All this time Lily, blinded by the sudden light, stood leaning against
the door, emerging slowly from the effects of her deep slumber. For a
moment she was silent.

“I prefer to come outside,” she replied. “There is a sick woman here....
If you will turn your light inside, you will see that I am not lying.
She is there.”

The light flashed across the high bed of Madame Gigon. “I believe you,
Madame.”

Lily closed the door and stood leaning against it. From the one of the
lower windows of the château streamed a path of light which illuminated
faintly the terrace, the front of the lodge and the Uhlan officer. He
was not tall and was not in the least savage in appearance. On the
contrary his face was smooth shaven and narrow, rather the face of a
scholar than a soldier. Yet he carried himself very erect. There was
something about him that was cold, stiff, almost brittle.

“What do you want of me?” asked Lily in a voice expressionless and free
of all emotion.

For a moment her companion hesitated. He switched off the electric torch
which until now he had kept turned full upon her. “Were you sleeping?”
he asked.

“Yes.” Again in the same dead tone.

“Extraordinary. You must be a woman of great nerve.”

“No ... not at all. I had not slept in thirty-six hours.”

Again he hesitated. “I ... I have been riding for that length of time
... and still I cannot sleep. I have tried.... My nerves are too much on
edge.”

She waited silently.

“Tell me ... why did you remain behind?” he began presently.

She made a gesture indicating the window behind which lay Madame Gigon.
“You have seen the reason,” she said. “It was impossible to go away.”

The man whistled softly. “Aren’t you in the least afraid?”

For a time there was no sound except a deep sigh. “There was nothing to
be done,” she answered presently in the same dead voice. “When there is
nothing to be done, it is foolish to fret. It is best to make the most
of it. What would you have me do?” For a moment a trace of life, almost
of humor entered her voice. “Would you have me lie down and scream?”
Again she sighed. “What good would it do? What would come of it? I do
not believe in scenes.”

The Uhlan laughed. “Unlike most women,” he said. “But you are right.
Afterwards, scenes are ridiculous. Nothing really matters much.... I’ve
learned that in two days,” he added with a sort of pride.

To this she made no reply but her very silence carried its own gesture
of assent. She did not deny his statement.

“I suppose you hate me,” he began, “like a good Frenchwoman.”

For the first time she raised her head and looked squarely at the
stranger. “What do you want?” she asked. “Why are you talking in this
fashion? You understand I am helpless. I must talk with you if you
choose.” In the darkness she frowned. “I suppose that is war.” And then,
“Besides, I am not a Frenchwoman at all. I am an American.”

At this the stranger gave a sudden start, in the darkness more audible
than visible by the sudden click of metal on some part of his uniform.

“Then you must hate me even more.... I have lived in Paris. The
Americans there are more French than the French.”

This remark, it appeared, angered her for she answered quickly. “I know
no Americans in Paris. I know nothing about them.”

The Uhlan laughed. “Madame, I have no intention of injuring you ... in
any way.”

To this she replied, “I suppose you do not mind if I sit down. I am a
little weary.”

The stranger’s manner changed abruptly. He became courteous, almost
courtly.

“I am sorry. I did not know there were chairs. You see I am a stranger
here. Sit down if you prefer it, by all means.... I am not one to work
hardships for a woman.” She moved toward the long chair under the
lindens and lay down, wrapping the cloak about her and closing her eyes.

“Perhaps,” said the stranger, “you would prefer to sleep.”

“No,” she replied quietly, “I could not sleep now.” And as if the idea
amused her she added, “I might as well talk with you ... since you too
suffer from insomnia.”

“As you will ... if you do not hate me too much.”

He sat in the chair by her side and slipped from his waist the belt in
which hung his black lugar pistol. Thus they remained for some time,
silently and peacefully, as if they were old friends between whom there
was no necessity for speech. The German sat with his elbows resting on
his knees, his head buried in his hands. There was a smoothness and
angularity about his thin figure so trimly clad in a uniform that now
carried the stains of battle.

At last he took out a cigarette and said, “I suppose you smoke, Madame?”

To which Lily replied without opening her eyes, “No.”

He was so polite, so scrupulously polite. And presently he sighed, “Ah,
this civilization ... this world of monkeys. (_Monde de singes._)” And
once more the night stillness descended, for Lily made no effort at
speech now. She lay motionless, so still that she might have been dead.
Her silence appeared to reproach him for he turned suddenly and said,
“Do you fancy I like this ... this living like a burglar in a château
... your château?”

“It is not mine,” Lily murmured.

“Do you fancy I like this war.... I am not pleased with killing men. Why
should I? I do not hate them. How is it possible? How can you even hate
me?”

She stirred impatiently. “No. It is impossible to hate genuinely ...
without a reason one can put one’s finger on. All the same you are my
enemy,” she added stubbornly.

The Uhlan laughed. “Who has made me so, Madame? Not myself, surely.” And
then after a little pause, he added with a kind of desperation, “No, I
am like all the others. I have nothing to do with it. We are all caught,
Madame, ... hopelessly caught in one great web spun by a monster. Ah,
what a monster!”

In the distant stable arose suddenly the sound of two horses quarreling.
There was a violent kicking ... a squealing that was savage and
implacable.

“We are not even like that,” he said. “It is not even that we bite and
kick.... We shoot each other at a distance. You, Madame, perhaps have
friends among the men I am fighting. I kill them and they me only
because the first who shoots is the safest. You know the artillerymen
kill men they never even see.” He spat suddenly. “Bah! It is mechanics
... all mechanics ... machinery, you understand, which they make in
great roaring factories. They kill men in factories in order to kill
more men on the battlefield. What is there in that?”

Again she made no answer to his question. The quarreling horses had been
separated and their squealing silenced. There was only the overpowering
stillness once more, a stillness unearthly in quality which lifted all
that it enveloped upon a new plane, determined by new values. Life,
death, reality, dreams--all these things were confused and yet amazingly
clear, as if the whole had been pierced by a single beam of cold white
light.




LXXX


It must have occurred to Lily that the man was talking in an hysterical
fashion with all the frenzy of a neurasthenic. “Madame, you should see
one of our towns where there are great furnaces ... Essen, Madame, or
Saarbrucken.. black, incredibly vile, a wallow of roaring fire and white
hot steel ... I know them, Madame, I have lived in them.”

Then for the first time Lily stirred. She even laughed, faintly yet with
unmistakable bitterness. “Know them? I know them. We have them in
America.”

The stranger paid no heed to her interruption. “Look, Madame,” he
commanded, pointing to the north where the horizon was lighted by the
glow of a burning town. “Look, Madame. You see that fire in the sky. The
ladles have overflowed. The white hot steel has spread across Europe.
There is gold in it too ... red hot gold.... Melted Gods ... idols which
we worship to-day.”

His voice rose until he was shouting. When he finished, he leaned back
in his chair, the fine uniform suddenly crumpled and limp. And after a
time he began to speak again, softly as if the torrent of emotion had
exhausted him.

“And where have we to go? If we sought to escape where have we to go?
There is no place. Because the monkeys ... the fools have civilized all
the world, so that they might sell their cheap cotton and tin trays.
They have created a monster which is destroying them. There is no longer
any peace ... any solitude. They have even wrenched the peasant from his
plow ... the shepherd from his hillside.” Again he pointed toward the
burning horizon. “They have driven them out upon the plains where the
cauldrons have overflowed across all Europe. It is the monsters, Madame,
who are at the bottom of all this. Ah, commerce, industry, wealth,
power.” He tossed away his cigarette and lighted another. “When this is
over, who do you think will have gained? Not the peasant, Madame. Not
the shepherd, not the poet. Ah, no! They will be shoveled under the
earth ... whole bodies and pieces of bodies because they are no longer
of any use. Not the worker, Madame, whom the monster devours. Ah, no.”
His voice rose suddenly. “It is the monster who will have gained ... the
monster and the men whose pockets he fills with gold ... the monster of
material, of industry. He will destroy us. He will devour us. What can
we do? You see, I know. I have lived in France. I have lived in
England.... My grandmother, you understand, was English. I would prefer
to live in England. But No! I was in England three weeks ago. And
suddenly I must go home to join my regiment, to set out upon the
expedition that has brought me here into this trampled garden. What for?
Who can say? Why? Who knows? Not surely because it gives me pleasure.
Not surely because I care a fig whether the German empire lives or dies.
That is merely an excuse to drag us into battle.” His head dropped
wearily again. “You see, this is why I have not been able to sleep. I
have been thinking of these things. They are not the sort that lull a
man to sleep. There is blood on my hands. I killed to-day ... by
shooting and stabbing. I assure you it gave me no pleasure. I should
doubtless have loved the men I killed. I am helpless. I cannot fight
against it. No, there is only one thing to be done. I must kill as many
men as possible. I must destroy all that it is possible to destroy
because if we destroy enough the monster will have nothing to feed upon.
He, too, will die ... and with him this civilization ... banal, ugly,
materialistic, unchristian ... this greed-ridden world.”

The Uhlan fell forward upon the table, burying his face in his arms. At
the sight Lily raised herself gently and watched her strange companion
in a wondering silence. At last she said softly, “Why do you tell me
this? Is it because you are afraid?”

The man made a chuckling, confused, sound and sat up once more. “Ah, no!
Madame. You fancy I am hysterical. Well, so I am. I don’t deny it. You
see it is not easy for me to be a warrior. I am a little mad. No, I talk
like this because....” For a moment he hesitated as if groping for some
explanation of an emotional crisis which in a soldier was not logical at
all. His manner seemed to imply that he should have accepted the affair
without question. “Because.... Well, there is a time when fear does not
matter, when terror does not exist, when one is enveloped by a despair
so great that what happens to one’s body is of no concern. You
understand that. You have answered it yourself a little time before,
when you said there came a time when it was useless to be afraid.” He
leaned back and made a little gesture of negation. “It does not matter,”
he concluded. In the faint light from the lower windows of the château
it was plain that he was smiling in a bitter, despairing fashion. “No, I
shall go on killing until I am killed. It will not be a long affair. It
is absurd to hope that I shall live many more days.” He whistled softly.
“I might even be killed to-night ... after I have left you. I shall kill
as many men as possible. I can only submit. There is nothing I can do. I
am not a boy full of playing soldier.”

At this Lily winced suddenly as if he had struck her. Then she raised
herself slowly. The black cloak fell from her shoulders.

“I have in the war a son and a lover,” she said. “If you met them, you
would kill them. Is it not so?”

The Uhlan bowed his head in silent assent.

“And yet you do not believe in it?”

“No, Madame.”

“Then that is wrong. It is sinful.”

The stranger leaned toward her. “It is not I who would kill them. I am
only a chance, a little dagger in the hand of fate ... one of a billion
chances that have to do with their deaths. I myself would not be killing
them.... It would be a strange ... even an impossible accident, if I
killed one of them with my own hands. You understand, we are talking
facts now ... hard facts. There is no room for sentimentality at a time
like this....” He smiled ironically. “I can understand that it is
difficult for a woman to talk facts. It is simply a matter of chances
... like roulette shall we say?”

For a time Lily remained thoughtful and silent. At last she said, “They
are in the cavalry like yourself. You would kill them. You are one of
the chances.” The calmness of her manner stood in terrible contrast to
the hysterical outburst of the soldier.

“I can see you are a philosopher ... a _femme savant_,” mocked the
stranger.

“You might choose a better time to jeer.”

The man coughed. “Forgive me.... I am sorry.... I was wrong. If you were
a _femme savant_, I would not be talking to you like this.... You are a
woman ... a beautiful woman. One cannot help talking to you.”

“I am only a woman living by what she believes. That is simple enough.”

“It requires courage, Madame ... and indifference, far more of both than
I have.” He coughed again, nervously. “Perhaps I am too rational....
Perhaps I do not think resistance worth the trouble ... especially now,
at a time when the mob ... the politicians rule absolutely.”

“You are one of the chances,” Lily repeated stubbornly.




LXXXI


The German laughed softly. “You are a primitive woman, Madame. It
refreshes me to find a woman so charmingly direct, so completely
feminine. There are not many left. It is a quality which should always
accompany beauty. If a woman is not beautiful, it does not matter.” He
paused waiting for her to speak and when she said nothing, he continued.
“I envy your lover. He is a fortunate man.”

At this Lily stirred once more. It was a faint movement, yet it carried
a warning of anger.

“Of course, you may say and do what you please,” she said. “I am
completely helpless.”

The Uhlan rattled his spurs in the darkness. “Come ... come, now. I have
no intention of harming you. I told you that before. It seems to me that
this once ... on a night such as this ... we might talk honestly ... as
if there was no nonsense in the world. I do not know your name and you
do not know mine. We shall never meet again, for I, no doubt, will be
dead before many days. You have admitted that you have a lover.” He
leaned across the table with a curious pleading gesture. “You see, I am
tired. I mean to say that I am wearied of keeping up deceits. Has it
ever occurred to you how many barriers surround us all ... even those
friends whom we know very well. The countless secrets which lie behind
them ... the things which we never know, even about our dearest friends.
For once ... just once, it would be a delight to talk without pretense
... to speak as if each one of us were free, quite free, to do as he
pleased ... to answer to no one, to fear no one. There is no more
freedom in the world. There are too many people in the world. And the
life of no one is any longer his own.” He paused and passed a thin,
nervous hand across his brow as if he would clear away some
entanglement which had entrapped his thoughts. “I cannot say what I
mean. I, like all the others, have kept my secrets hidden for too long a
time. You see, if it were possible for us to talk thus with freedom ...
we might separate, you knowing me and I knowing you, better than any one
else in the world.” He laughed and his mood changed quickly from a
resigned weariness back to the old mocking flippancy. “It is an
interesting idea, but impossible of course ... because we no longer know
even ourselves. We have sacrificed ourselves to those who crowd in upon
us, who dare not share our secrets ... because the crowd is too stupid
... too cowardly ... too weak ... too bereft of understanding. The crowd
is like sheep. They must be protected by little shepherd laws ...
against themselves. And so the strong are sacrificed to the weak. That
will put an end to us all some day ... an end to all this blessed
civilization. Ah, if you knew how stupid sheep can be. I have a farm in
Silesia, Madame. I can tell you all about sheep.” For an instant he
paused, considering the imbecility of sheep. “And socialism! It’s no
better, Madame. It simply buries the individual deeper under layers of
muck. No, it is all wrong from the bottom up. We must kill ... kill ...
you understand ... until there is room to breathe! Until the earth is
freed of the sheep! Then we can be free! Then we can find solitude!”

Again his voice rang with subdued frenzy. Inside the house the frivolous
gilt traveling clock struck midnight, and far away in the direction of
Trilport there arose again the faint crackling sound like the brush
fires. It rose and fell, tossed about at the caprice of the night wind.

“They have begun again,” said the Uhlan. “In a little while I shall be
forced to leave. You see, we cannot remain here. We have pushed in too
far.” He leaned forward and drew with his lighted cigarette upon the top
of the table between them a V shaped line. “You see,” he said,
indicating the point of the V. “We have been pushed in here.... We
cannot possibly remain. It is as far as we shall advance. We have come
too far already. Any fool could see it. Any fool but Von Kluck.... Why,
my boot boy would know it.” He laughed again. “But my boot boy is not a
general. He is not stupid enough.”

He kept wriggling, wriggling helplessly, like a butterfly impaled by a
pin ... an individualist, a lonely man, caught by the savage rush of the
mob.




LXXXII


What he said appeared to pass ignored by Lily, for when he had finished
she began to talk once more. “I can understand the bravery of fighting
for that which you believe,” she said. “I cannot understand yielding
without a fight to the monster you despise. I knew a man....” For a
second she hesitated. “He fought for what he believed. He gave up
everything for the fight ... his health, his friends, his work, his
money. He was beaten and bloody and wounded. He would have given his
life if it had been necessary. He was a poor, ignorant Ukrainian peasant
... a Russian who could barely read. Yet he fought. He fought and
learned ... up from nothing.” Again she paused and the distant crackling
sound filled in the silence, this time more distinct and sharp, nearer
at hand. “You see, I am telling you this because it is the very monster
that you hate which he too fought. He is still fighting it. In the end
he will win.... If one could not believe such things, one could not
live. He will go on fighting because there is inside him something which
will not let him stop. But there are not many like him. There are too
many like you.”

Her voice carried the ring of supreme scorn. There was a quality of
iciness in it, penetrating, contemptuous, acid.

Suddenly she covered her face with her hands. “In times like this,” she
said, “I think of him. It helps one to live.” And after a moment, she
added bitterly. “He would not have gone off to kill!”

“I can see, Madame,” said the stranger, “that you despise me.”

“It is more than that,” answered Lily, her face still covered by her
white hands. “I am certain now that I hate you.”

The Uhlan frowned. “I am sorry,” he said, “I thought you were
sympathetic.”

The only answer was a laugh, incredibly cold and savage from so
beautiful a woman.

Within the château more lights appeared, and in the courtyard there rose
the sound of hoofs striking the cobblestones and of orders being shouted
back and forth in guttural German. Far away to the east a solitary
cannon barked. The noise ripped the blue stillness with the sound of a
tapestry being torn.

“You have forgotten,” said Lily, “that I have a son and a lover in the
war. You understand, they too are in the cavalry.”

She had scarcely finished speaking when the air was shattered by the
terrific rattle of a dozen rifles fired simultaneously below the terrace
somewhere among the buildings of the farm. A faint glare trembled above
the iron bridge and then a second volley, terrifying and abrupt, and a
second brief glare.

The Uhlan did not move but Lily sat up suddenly. They remained thus for
some time, the woman in an attitude of listening. It appeared that she
was straining every nerve, every muscle, lest the faintest sound escape
her. When the volley was not repeated she turned her head, slowly and
scornfully, in the direction of her companion. In her eyes there was a
look of terrible accusation, a look charged with contempt and hatred.
The stranger watched her as if fascinated and unable to remove his eyes
from her face. At last she spoke, slowly and distinctly, in an awed,
breathless whisper.

“What was that?”

The face of the Uhlan remained smooth and empty of all expression, as
clean of all emotion as a bit of smooth white paper. In the flickering
light from the lanterns which moved among the trees, the countenance
appeared vague and lineless, almost imbecile in its negation. Then
slowly his lips moved.

“It is the curé, Madame.... They have shot the curé.” The voice was as
smooth as the face. It carried the hard, mocking cruelty of
indifference. “They caught him signaling with his lantern from the
steeple of the church.”

Without a sound Lily lay back once more and buried her face in her
cloak. Her body shook silently.

“I could do nothing else,” continued the smooth voice. It came out from
the thin lipped mouth as a serpent from a crevice in a rock. “It was not
I who killed. I had nothing to say in the matter. I did what I could not
help doing. _Enfin_, it was the monster!”

Across the fields of wheat from the direction of Meaux the faint
crackling sound came nearer and nearer. It was as if the grain had
caught fire and the flames were rushing toward them. Lily still lay with
her eyes covered as if to shut out the picture which had risen in her
imagination. M. Dupont ... the friend of dying Madame Gigon, the priest
to whom she had told her life ... M. Dupont dead among the dungheaps of
the farmyard!

Somewhere in the direction of the Trilport bridge, the solitary cannon
fired again and as though it had summoned Madame Gigon back to life,
they heard her speaking suddenly inside the lodge. She was talking
rapidly in a low voice.

“You need not worry, Henri. To-morrow there will be fresh vegetables in
from the barrier. At dark, a balloon with two passengers will be
released at the Gare St. Lazare. Gabriel himself told me.” And then for
a time she muttered incoherently and when her speech became clear again,
she was saying, “There is a notice on the Rue de Rivoli that they are
selling animals in the Jardin de Plantes. For food you understand ... I
hear at ten sous the pound.” Again more mumbling and then, “Ah, that one
was close. Yesterday a shell exploded in the Boulevard Montparnasse. We
must place our faith in God.... Yes, we must pray, Henri. There is not
enough God in the world.”

Then she became silent for a time and the Uhlan said, “Madame is
delirious. She is living through 1870.... You see we have not progressed
at all. It is merely turn about, first the French, and then we take a
turn.” He laughed a nervous laugh devoid of mirth. “Ah, it is a pretty
business, Madame ... a pretty business. The sooner we are all killed off
the better. The animals could manage this world better than we have
done.”

He had not finished speaking when a sudden rattle of rifles sounded
somewhere near at hand, a little to the east by the copse in the long
meadow. At the same time the confusion in the stables and the little
park redoubled. A horse whinneyed. Men shouted. Water pails were
overturned. Out of the darkness a man in rough gray uniform appeared and
addressed the Captain in excited, guttural German. The Uhlans had begun
to leave the stable. They were making their way through the black trees
over the neatly ordered flowers to the gate in the garden wall.

The stranger talked for a moment with the soldier and then rising, he
said, “Good-by, Madame. It is not likely that we shall ever meet again.
I thank you for the conversation. It saved the night for an insomniac.
It is more stimulating to talk with a beautiful woman than with common
soldiers.”

Lily lay buried in her cloak. She did not even uncover her face, but the
Uhlan bowed in a polite ironic fashion and slipped away through the
trees, vanishing at once like a shadow. The uproar in the château
gardens and in the stable increased. It swallowed the stranger.

As the sound of his footsteps died away, she raised herself cautiously
and looked about her. The sound of firing continued. The air was full of
an unearthly red glow. Supporting herself on one elbow she saw that the
light came from the opposite side of the river. The farm had been fired
by the departing troops. For a time she watched the flames, eating their
way slowly at the windows and along the eaves, growing always in
intensity. The iron bridge was filled with retreating Uhlans, all black
against the red haze. The thunder of hoofs on the planks again filled
the air.




LXXXIII


Thus she remained as if under a spell, ignoring the uproar that had
arisen all about her, in the fields, in the château garden and along the
tow-path. When at last she moved, it was to sit up and place her feet
upon the ground where they struck some hard object that made a clicking,
metallic sound as it grated against the stone. Reaching down, her
fingers closed over the cold metal of a lugar pistol. In the confusion
and the shouting it had slipped from its holster. The stranger had
forgotten it. Slowly she raised the weapon and held it up in the glow of
the burning farm. For a long time she regarded the pistol as if it held
some sinister fascination and presently, leaning upon the back of her
chair, she rose slowly and concealed it in the folds of her cloak. When
she had gained a full sense of her balance, she moved off from the
terrace through the black trees in the direction of the iron bridge.

The firing had increased. There were cries in French and in guttural
German, and from the shrubbery along the garden wall the low moan of a
wounded soldier. With the long cloak trailing across the dewy grass she
continued to move in an unswerving line to the garden gate. As she
passed through it a stray bullet, striking the wall beside her, chipped
the ancient mortar into her face and her thick, disordered hair. Outside
on the towpath she walked until she stood on the little knoll above the
iron bridge.

In the center of the structure could be discerned the figures of three
men silhouetted against the flames of the burning farm. Two were
kneeling at work on some object which absorbed all their attention. The
third stood upright shielding his eyes from the glow, keeping watch and
urging them to hurry. He was slim and very neat, and carried himself
with a singular air of scorn. Unmistakably he was the visitor, the
stranger upon the terrace. At the far end of the bridge, three horses,
held in check by the rider of a fourth horse, curvetted and neighed in
terror at the leaping flames.

All this Lily saw from the eminence of the low knoll. And when she had
watched it for some time she raised her arm, holding the lugar pistol,
and slowly took careful aim. The cloak slipped from her shoulders into
the grass. Once she fired and then again and again. The slim, neat man
stumbled suddenly, struck his head against an iron girder of the bridge
and slipped struggling into the river. There was a faint splash and he
disappeared. Of the other two men, one fell upon his face, struggled up
again and, aided by his companion, crawled painfully toward the
terrified horses. The flames roared wildly. The horses leapt and
curvetted for a moment and then disappeared with their riders, followed
by the horse whose rider lay at the bottom of the Marne.

On the low knoll the pistol dropped from Lily’s hand and slipped quietly
into the river. A party of three French infantrymen coming suddenly out
of the sedges along the river discovered her lying in the thick wet
grass. Bending over her they talked volubly for a time and at last
carried her back through the gate into the lodge. They could wring from
her no sort of rational speech. She kept talking in the strangest
manner, repeating over and over again, “It is simply a matter of chance
... like roulette ... but one of a million chances ... but one ... but
one.... Still one chance is too many.”

Inside the lodge, one of the soldiers struck a sulphur match and
discovered in the bed by the window the body of an old woman. He
summoned his companions and they too leaned over the body. Beyond all
doubt the old woman was dead.




LXXXIV


From that night on the sound of firing grew steadily more faint and the
glow in the sky more dim. There were times when Lily, lying delirious in
the lodge under the care of Madame Borgue, the farmer’s wife, behaved in
the wildest manner. When the wind blew from the north, it carried the
sound of the guns across forests and wheatfields into the park at
Germigny and the barrage, no longer confused and close at hand, took on
a pulsing regular throb like the beating of surf upon a beach of hard
shingle. At such times Lily would sit up and talk wildly in a mixture of
French and English of Mills and monsters, of cauldrons, of white hot
metal that absorbed the very bodies of men. The distant rumbling was for
all the world like the pounding which had enveloped Cypress Hill in the
days of Lily’s youth. But Madame Borgue, knowing nothing of all this,
could make no sense of the ravings of her patient.

She remained a long time ill. While she lay unconscious with the fever,
Madame Gigon was buried among the beaded _couronnes_ of the cemetery at
Trilport between her obscure husband, the curator, and the father who
had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little.

It happened that on the very day of the lonely funeral, Madame de Cyon
died in Paris of indigestion brought on by overeating and the loss of
twenty francs at bridge, played secretly to be sure, for in those days
no one played bridge in Paris. So Madame Gigon, by dying first, was
cheated out of her triumphant, “I told you so!” Of course, it may have
been that in another world she knew this satisfaction; for it was true
that Nadine “went off just like that.”

And in early October, on the first day that Lily ventured from the lodge
out upon the green terrace, she read in the Figaro that she had been
decorated with the Croix de Guerre. The citation appeared in the midst
of the military news.

“_Shane, Madame Lily. Widow. American by birth. Decorated for valor at
Germigny l’Evec during the Battle of the Marne, when she prevented a
detachment of Uhlans from destroying an iron bridge of the utmost
importance to our troops._”

This she read aloud to Madame Borgue. It was tiny paragraph, printed in
very small black type, and it caused Lily to laugh, bitterly,
mirthlessly. Letting fall the Figaro by the side of her chair, she lay
back.

“As if,” she said, “I had ever thought of the bridge! As if I even knew
that they were trying to destroy it!”

And when Madame Borgue, alarmed by this outburst, sought to lead her
back into the house, Lily said, “I am not delirious.... Truly ... I am
not. It is so absurdly funny!” And she laughed again and again.

She never knew that it was M. de Cyon who brought the affair to the
attention of the Ministry of War and secured her the distinction.

Slowly it became clear that fate had not allotted to the dead Uhlan the
chance of Césaire’s death. She received no news of him. Even M. de Cyon,
in the government at Paris, could discover nothing. The hours grew into
days and the days into months until, at last, she was able to leave the
lodge and visit Jean in the hospital at Neuilly. There came at length a
day when there was no longer any doubt. The Baron was simply among the
missing ... the great number concerning whom there was no news. It was
as if he had bade her farewell at the vine-covered gate and galloped off
on the black horse into a darkness which swallowed him forever.

In Paris, the house in the Rue Raynouard acquired an air of complete
desolation. There was no one, not even Jean who lay at the hospital in
Neuilly with his right leg amputated at the knee, to share it with Lily.
The mirrors reflected nothing save the figures of the mistress, the
servants and M. de Cyon who appeared to find consolation for his recent
loss in visits to the big house at Numero Dix.

Ellen, escaped at last from Central Europe, had returned to America.
Madame Gigon was dead. Of her friends none remained. Madame de Cyon was
in her grave. Madame Blaise still lived in a polite madhouse, convinced
that the war was only a revolution which would place her friend, the
wine merchant, upon the throne of a glorified and triumphant France. The
others? Some had gone into the provinces, and of those who remained, all
were interested in their own families. They had sons, brothers, nephews,
cousins, at the front.... There were no more _salons_. It was impossible
to go alone to the theater. There remained nothing to do but visit Jean
(a sad business though he seemed cheerful enough) and sit in the big
empty house, so silent now, so empty of chatter, of music, of laughter.
Even the great piano under the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner remained
closed and silent save in the rare moments when Lily, as if unable any
longer to endure the silence, opened it and played with only half a
heart the tunes which once had filled the house and overflowed into the
garden. It was clear that it required more than mirrors, jades, pictures
and old carpets to make a dwelling endurable. As Lily remarked to M. de
Cyon at tea one afternoon in early November, these things, each one the
reminder of some precious association, only rendered Numero Dix the more
unbearable.

“I can understand,” she said, “that sometimes my mother must have died
of loneliness in the house at Cypress Hill.”

She told M. de Cyon the history of the burned house, bit by bit, from
the day it was built until the day it was destroyed. Indeed she told him
all the story of her father, of her own childhood, of the Mills and the
Town. She even told him something of Irene’s story, though not enough to
be sure for him to evolve the whole truth, for there were certain
barriers beyond which she allowed no one to penetrate; no one save an
old village priest who was, after all, not a man but an agent of God
himself. And he was dead now.

In those days the pair drew more closely to each other, as if they found
in the friendship a consolation for the melancholy and overwhelming
loneliness. And it is true that Lily had grown more sympathetic. The old
carefree gaiety had given place to a new and more gentle understanding.
The indolence, it seemed, had vanished before a new determination to
dominate her own aimless existence. She had grown more calm. Indeed
there were times now when she became wholly grave and serious, even
pensive, as she sat quietly with the pleasant, white-haired Frenchman
who found her company so agreeable that he seldom permitted a day to
pass without calling at Numero Dix on his way from the Ministry of War.
She became, as she had observed to Willie Harrison, more and more like
her mother.

Each day was like the one before, and this monotony to Lily must have
been a new and painful experience. The only variation occurred when Paul
Schneidermann, returning from a hospital in Cannes, arrived in Paris and
became a second visitor at the house in the Rue Raynouard. But even in
this there was an inexpressible sadness, for the bullet which had
wounded Schneidermann paralyzed forever his left arm. He was never again
able to play the piano in the long drawing-room nor the cello he had
brought to the house when Ellen was there.

With Ellen gone, the American newspapers no longer found their way into
the house. Indeed it seemed impossible to obtain them anywhere in Paris,
even if Lily had been capable of such an effort. So there were no more
clippings for the enameled box. The last one bore the date of the first
month of the war. Since then there had been nothing. It was as if
Krylenko, too,--the Krylenko whose progress Lily watched from so great a
distance--had died or gone away like all the others. There remained only
the wreckage of a life which had once been complete, content, even
magnificent in its quiet way.

When at last Jean was able to leave the hospital, he secured through M.
de Cyon an appointment at the Ministry of War. As for Lily, she
undertook presently the establishment of a soup kitchen for soldiers who
passed through Paris on leave. But at this diversion she was no more
successful than she had been at knitting socks for the strikers; and
after a few months she abandoned it completely to the care of women less
wealthy and more capable. She continued, however, until the end to
supply it lavishly with money. In her enthusiasm for the charities of
the war she succeeded in exhausting for the first time her annual
income. She even dipped into her principal. The two hundred thousand
dollars which the Town paid her for Cypress Hill she used to provide
food and comfort for the soldiers of another nation.




LXXXV


In the Town no new railway station raised its splendors because in those
years the Town and the Mills were too busy making money. In all the
haste even the new railway station was forgotten. The deserted park
became a storing place for the shells which the Mills turned out in
amazing numbers. Gas shells, high explosives, shrapnel cases ... all
these things were piled high along the brick paths where delphiniums and
irises once flourished. Even the Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo
Belvedere, cracked and smudged in the niches of the dead hedge, were
completely buried beneath munitions. Because somewhere in the world men
were being killed, the Mills did an enormous business. The Town grew as
it had never before grown. Prices were tremendous. The place reeked with
prosperity and progress. People even said that the war would finish
Germany, that no longer would she be able to compete in the great steel
markets of the world. And that, of course, meant more prosperity, more
riches.

The flames leapt high above the furnaces. The great sheds echoed with
such a pounding as had never before been heard upon this earth. Girls in
gas masks worked long hours filling shells with corroding acids which
turned their faces haggard, and yellow as the aprons they wore. Little
clerks acquired automobiles. Men who dealt in real estate grew rich.
Every one would have been content, save for an insatiable appetite for
even greater wealth.

Once, to be sure, there occurred an explosion which was for all the
world like the end of everything. Forty-seven blackened bodies were
carried out under white sheets which clung to the scorched flesh. Of
seventeen others nothing at all was found save a few bones, a hand or a
foot, a bit of blackened skin; and from these it was impossible to
construct any thing. So they were dumped into great trenches, and when
the earth had covered them, the world rushed merrily on. The flames
leapt higher and redder than ever. The sheds fairly split with the sound
of hammering. The little clerks dashed about madly in the sudden luxury
of their motors. Every one had money. The Town was prosperous. It grew
until it was the biggest in the state. Progress rattled on like
everything, so nothing else mattered.

In Paris the war came to an end. One or two statesmen and a whole flock
of politicians, after swooping about for a time, descended upon the
peace.

In those days Paris acquired an insane and desperate gaiety such as it
knew neither before nor since. The bright boulevards swarmed with the
soldiers of fourteen nations clad in ten times as many gay uniforms. It
became gay and frantic with the neurotic excitement of a madhouse.
Street walkers from the provinces, even from Italy and England and
Spain, rushed to Paris because business there was so good. In dives and
cabarets a barbaric abandon reigned. Every one learned new vices and
depravities. Brutes, vulgarians, savages stalked the avenues. Overnight
boys became old men, burdened with a corroding wisdom which otherwise
they might never have known.

And in the Town people shook their heads sagely and said that war was a
great thing when it was fought in a just cause. “It purifies!” they
said. “It brings out the finest side of men!”

What was prosperous was right. Wasn’t success its own vindication? About
this there could be no argument. Money talks, my boy! Money talks! What
is successful is right, Germany, the bully among nations! Germany, the
greedy materialistic Germany, was done in forever.

Of course it may have been that when they spoke of War as the Great
Purifier, they were thinking of the vast army of the Dead.




LXXXVI


When politicians gather it is necessary to have conventions, receptions,
or some sort of a congregation where they may talk or at least make of
themselves a spectacle. And so it happened that Paris, where most of the
politicians in the world had congregated, began to break out as if
suffering from a disease with receptions at this hotel, or that embassy
or this palace. It was important that every one should see every one
else. It was an opportunity not to be overlooked.

And so it happened that Lily Shane, one gray afternoon in the late
winter, found herself for the first time in years surrounded by her
countrymen. Rather weary, confused, and a little breathless, she
discovered a refuge from the throng in a little alcove of the Hotel
Crillon by a window which gave out upon the wide spaces of the Place de
la Concorde. The white square was filled now with trophies. High on the
terrace of the Tuileries gardens lay a row of shattered
aeroplanes--hawklike Gothas, Fokkers like chimney swifts, all torn and
battered now, their bright wings bedraggled by the mud and grease of
victory. At intervals along the parapet rose great pyramids of German
helmets, empty, ghastly, like the heaps of skulls strewn by Ghengis Khan
to mark his triumphant progress across the face of Europe. Near the
obelisk--so ancient, so withdrawn, so aloof, survivor of a dozen
civilizations--the captured guns crouched together pointing their steel
muzzles mutely toward the low gray sky. Some came from the great
furnaces of the Krupps, some from the celebrated Skoda mills. In the
circle marked by the seven proud cities of France, the statues of Lille
and Strasbourg, no longer veiled in crêpe, stood impassive, buried
beneath heaps of wreaths and flowers. The whole square appeared dimly
through the mists that rose from the Seine. The fog hung low and gray,
clinging in torn veils about the silent guns, settling low upon the
pyramids of empty, skull-like helmets, caressing the hard, smooth
granite of the eternal obelisk that stood aloof, mocking, ironic,
silent.

Lily sat alone watching the spectacle of the square, as if conscious
that in that moment she was at the very heart of the world. Behind her
at a little distance moved a procession of figures, confused, grotesque,
in the long crystal-hung corridors. It circulated restlessly through the
big rooms, moving about the gilt furniture, past the gilt framed
mirrors, brushing the heavy curtains. There were British, French,
Belgians, Italians, Portuguese, triumphant Japanese, smiling secretly
perhaps at the spectacle in the misty Place de la Concorde. There was,
of course, a vast number of Americans, ... politicians, senators,
congressmen, mere meddlers, some in neat cutaways, some in gray or blue
suits. There were women among them ... a great many women, brave in
mannish clothes, dominating and active in manner.

In all the crowd, so merry, so talkative over the victory, the figure of
Lily, withdrawn and silent, carried an inexpressible air of loneliness.
It was as if she imitated the obelisk and turned a scornful back upon
the restless, gaudy spectacle. She was dressed all in black in a neat
suit and a close fitting hat that covered all but a narrow band of amber
hair. About her full white throat she wore a tight collar of big pearls.
She was no longer young. The voluptuous curves had vanished. She was
thinner and, despite the rouge on her lips and cheeks, appeared old. The
youthful sparkle of her dark eyes had given place to a curious, hard
brilliance. The old indolence appeared to have vanished forever. She sat
upright, and at the moment the poise of her body carried a curious sense
of likeness to the defiance which had been her mother’s. Yet despite all
these things she was beautiful. It was impossible to deny her beauty,
even though its quality of flamboyance was gone forever. The new beauty
was serene, distinguished, worldly--above all else calm. Even the
weariness of her face could not destroy a beauty which had to do as much
with spirit as with body. She was, after all, no pretty blond thing of
the sort which fades into a haggard old age. She was a fine woman, a
magnificent woman, not to be overlooked even with youth gone forever.

After a time she turned away from the window and fell to watching the
procession of figures. Her rouged lips were curved in the faintest of
mocking smiles,--a smile which conveyed a hint of scoffing at some
colossal futility, a smile above all else of sophistication and
weariness, as if she were at once amused and saddened by the spectacle.
Yet it was a kindly smile, tolerant, sympathetic, colored by a hint of
some secret, profound, and instinctive wisdom. Motionless, she sat thus
for a long time stirring only to fumble with the clasp of the silver bag
that lay in her lap. No one noticed her, for she took no part in the
spectacle. She sat apart, a little in the shadow, in a backwater, while
the noisy tempestuous throng pushed its way through the long vista of
gilded, rococo rooms.




LXXXVII


She must have been sitting there for half an hour when the smile
vanished suddenly and the fingers fumbling with the silver bag grew
still. Her face assumed an expression of rigidity, the look of one who
has seen something in which he is not quite able to believe.

Moving toward her down the long vista of crystal and brocade curtains
came a man. He was a big man, tall, massive, handsome in a florid way.
He must have been in his middle fifties, although there was but little
gray in the thick black hair which he wore rather long in a fashion
calculated to attract the notice of passersby. He wore horn-rimmed
spectacles and a flowing black tie in striking contrast to the gray
neatness of his cutaway and checkered waistcoat. Unmistakably he was an
American. His manner carried the same freedom, the identical naive
simplicity which characterized the figure of the vigorous Ellen. He
possessed the same overflowing vitality. Even as Lily stood, silently,
with her back to the tragic spectacle of the square, the vitality
overflowed suddenly in a great explosive laugh and a slap on the back of
a friend he had encountered in the throng. Above the subdued murmur, the
sound of his booming voice reached her.

“Well, well, well!... And what are you doing in wicked Paris? Come to
fix up the peace, I suppose!”

The answer of the stranger was not audible. The pair withdrew from the
path of the procession and talked for a moment. The conversation was
punctuated from time to time by the sudden bursts of laughter from the
man in the checkered waistcoat.

In her corner Lily leaned forward a little in order to see more clearly
the figure which had fascinated her. Presently he turned, bade his
friend good-by and moved away again, coming directly down the vista
toward Lily. He walked with a swinging stride, and as he approached his
large face beamed with satisfaction. He turned his head from side to
side with a patronizing air, an air which to Lily must have been
startlingly familiar. Even twenty years could not have dissipated the
memory of it. It was this which identified him beyond all doubt. He
beamed to right and to left. His whole figure betrayed an enormous
self-satisfaction. It was impossible any longer to doubt. The man was
the Governor. His success was written upon a face now grown heavy and
dark.

When he had advanced to within a few paces of Lily’s corner, she rose
and moved toward him. Only once did she hesitate and then at the very
moment he passed by her. Putting out her hand in a furtive movement, she
withdrew it hastily. He passed and was on his way to disappearing once
more in the throng. For a second she leaned against the wall and then,
as if she could no longer resist the temptation, she moved quickly
forward and touched his shoulder.

“Henry,” she said softly and waited.

The Governor turned and for an instant his face was clouded by a look of
bewilderment. Then slowly, almost breathlessly, he recovered himself.
The beaming look vanished completely, replaced by an expression of the
greatest gravity.

“Lily ...!” he said. “Lily Shane.... For the love of God!”

She drew him aside out of the path of the procession.

“Then you remember me?” she said with a faint, amused smile. “Twenty
years is not such a long time.”

Again he looked at her. “Lily.... Lily Shane!” he said. And he took her
hand and pressed it with a savage, startled warmth.

“I knew you,” she said. “I knew you at once.... There are some things
about a person which never change ... little things which _are_ the
person ... not much ... a gesture perhaps.... You were unmistakable.”

And when he had recovered a little from his astonishment, he managed to
say, “It’s the last place I’d expect to see you.”

Lily laughed at him, in a fashion which must have destroyed suddenly the
wall of twenty years. It was a fashion of laughing which belonged to her
alone. It was provocative, faintly mocking. Willie Harrison knew it
well. “I’ve lived in Paris for the last twenty years,” she retorted with
an amused grimace, “and I’m still here. I will be until I die.”

Spontaneity does not come easily to a conversation between persons
reunited unexpectedly after twenty years; and it was plain that the
circumstances surrounding the separation contributed nothing to the
facility of the conversation. Lily appeared to have forgotten, or at
least to have disregarded the night following the garden party at
Cypress Hill. Her manner was that of an old friend, nothing more,
nothing less. If she knew any shame, she concealed it admirably. Plainly
it was not so easy for her companion. The sudden pallor which had
attacked his florid face gave place to a blushing scarlet. He was like a
little boy caught in a shameful act.

“You haven’t changed much,” she said as if to clear the way, “I mean you
yourself have not changed ... not your figure.”

He laughed. “I’m fatter ... much fatter.”

It was true.

What had once been clearly a barrel-like chest was sunk to the low
estate of a stomach. “But you,” he continued, “You haven’t changed at
all. You’re as young as ever.”

“You still say the right thing, Henry. But it isn’t the truth. I use
rouge now.... I even dye my hair a little. We can’t pretend we’re not
growing old. It’s no use. It’s written.... It’s in our faces.”

The Governor thrust a hand into his pocket and fell to jingling a few
francs and a key ring. With the other hand he took out his watch.
“Couldn’t we find some place to sit?” he said. “We might talk for a
little while.” He coughed nervously. “I haven’t much time.”

At this she again laughed at him. Her laugh had not grown old. It
remained unchanged, still ringing with the same good humor.

“I’ve no intention of keeping you,” she said. “You may go whenever you
like.” For an instant she cast down her eyes. “When I saw you, I
couldn’t resist.... I had to speak to you. Nothing could have prevented
it. I felt, you see, as if I were possessed.”

And then she led him back to the corner by the tall window overlooking
the misty square. It had grown darker and the cold fog now veiled
completely the buildings on the far side of the river. There was only
the great square filled with cannon and helmets and shattered planes and
above the mass of trophies the rigid, eternal obelisk piercing the mist
like a sword.

There they settled themselves to talk, lost in a throng which paid no
heed to the middle-aged couple in the alcove. The Governor remained ill
at ease, sitting forward upon the edge of his chair as if prepared to
spring up and escape at the first opportunity. Lily, so calm, so placid,
appeared only to inspire him with confusion. It may have been that she
aroused a whole train of memories which he had succeeded in forgetting.

For a time, the conversation flowed along the most stiff and
conventional of channels. There were polite inquiries after each other’s
health. Lily told him of her mother’s death, of the fire at Cypress
Hill, of the fact that she had severed the last tie with the Town and
would never return to it.

“Never?” asked the Governor. “Never?”

“No. Why should I? It is not the same. I have nothing there to call me
back. My life is here now. I shall probably die here. The Town is
nothing to me.”

The Governor’s face lighted suddenly. He struck his thigh--a thigh which
had once been so handsome and now was flabby with fat--a sharp blow.

“No, it is not the same. You’ve no idea how it has grown. I was there
about six months ago. It’s twice as big as in the old days. You know,
it’s now one of the greatest steel towns in the world. You’ve a right to
be proud of it.”

But Lily said nothing. She was looking out of the tall window into the
white square.

“And Ellen,” the Governor continued, “I hear she has become famous.” He
laughed. “Who would have thought it? I remember her as a bad-tempered
little girl with pigtails. Of course I know nothing about music. It’s
not in my line. But they say she’s great.”

When she did not answer him, he regarded her silently for a time and
presently he coughed as if to attract her attention. At last he leaned
forward a little and said, “What are you thinking?”

For an instant, an unexpected note of tenderness entered his voice. He
peered at her closely, examining her soft white skin, the soft hair that
escaped from beneath her toque, the exquisite poise of her throat and
head. To this scrutiny Lily put an end by turning with a smile to say,
“Thinking? I was thinking that there is something hopelessly sad about
having no happy realities in the place where you spent your childhood.
You see, if I were to go back, I should find nothing. Cypress Hill
burned.... My Uncle Jacob’s farm buried under new houses, each one like
its neighbor, in ugly cheap rows ... the brook ruined by oil and filth.
Why, even the people aren’t the same. There’s no one I should like to
see except perhaps Willie Harrison, and it’s a long way to go just to
see one person. I was thinking that if I’d been born in France, I would
have had memories of a village and green country and pleasant stone
houses. The people would be the same always.... I couldn’t go back to
the Town now. I couldn’t.... I have memories of it. I wouldn’t want them
spoiled.” For an instant the tears appeared in her eyes. She leaned
toward him and touched his hand. “It’s not that I’m disloyal, Henry.
Don’t think that. It’s that I have nothing to be loyal to ... nothing
that I can cherish but memories. I couldn’t be happy there because
there’s nothing but noise and ugliness. I suppose that somewhere in
America there are towns full of realities that one could love, but they
aren’t in my part of the country. There’s nothing there.” There was a
little pause and she added, “It’s all happened so quickly. Think of
it--it’s all happened since I was a little girl.”

All this the Governor, it seemed, failed to understand. He looked at her
with a hopeless expression of bewilderment. But he said, “Yes, I
understand.” And again an awkward silence enveloped them.

At last Lily turned to him. “Tell me,” she said, “you’ve been
successful. Tell me about yourself.”

The Governor leaned back a little in his chair. “But you must have heard
all that,” he said with astonishment. “It’s been in the newspapers. If
you’re in politics you can’t keep out of the press.” The beaming look
returned to his eyes and with it the old manner of condescension.

“But you forget,” replied Lily. “I haven’t read American newspapers.
I’ve been away from America for a long time.”

“To be sure ... to be sure.” He coughed nervously. “There isn’t much to
tell. I’ve been elected senator now for five terms running. I guess I
can go on being elected as long as I live. I’ve gotten what I’ve set out
for.... I’m a success in my party. I helped to frame the tariff bill
that protected American industry and gave the Town a bigger boom than it
ever had before. Oh, I’ve done my share!... Perhaps more than my share!
We have a good life in Washington, my wife and I. She’s prominent, you
know. She’s chairman of the State Woman’s Republican Committee. Oh,
she’s very prominent ... a born leader and a splendid politician. You
should hear her make a speech.”

Lily listened with an air of profound interest. She was smiling again.
As Willie Harrison said, “It was impossible to know what Lily thought.
She was always smiling.”

The Governor was over-zealous; somehow it seemed that he protested too
much.

“Isn’t that fine?” she said. “You see, Henry, it has worked out as I
told you it would. I should have made you a wretched wife. I would have
been no good in politics.”

This, it seemed, made him nervous again. He sat forward on the edge of
his chair. It was clear that he became terrified when the conversation
turned too abruptly toward certain incidents of his youth. It was
impossible for him to talk simply and easily. Something kept intruding.
Lily may have guessed what it was, for she was a woman of experience in
such things. Her companion was merely uncomfortable. He stood up and
looked out into the misty square where the lights had begun to show
through the fog in little globes of indefinite yellow.

“Extraordinary,” he said, “the number of motors in the square.” He
turned toward her with a sudden enthusiasm. “There you have it! There’s
America for you ... motor upon motor! There are more motors with the
American High Commission than with any other two combined. We’re a rich
country, Lily. The war has made us powerful. We can rule the world and
do as we please. It’s ours from now on.... The future is ours if these
fools on the American commission don’t spoil everything.”

Lily smiled again. “Yes. It’s quite wonderful. We ought to be proud.”

“But you are, aren’t you?” he asked severely.

“Yes.”

“That’s one reason I came over here ... to put an end to this league of
nations nonsense. We won the war and now they’re trying to wriggle out.
There’s no reason we should be mixed up in their troubles.... There’s no
reason we should suffer for it. It’s none of our affair.”

He drew himself up until his stomach came near to regaining its old
place as a chest, His manner became pompous. It was the identical manner
Julia Shane had greeted with derision more than twenty years before in
the paneled dining-room at Cypress Hill. It was astounding how little
the years had softened him. They had, it seemed, brought him nothing of
gentleness, nothing of humor, nothing of wisdom ... only a certain
vulgar shrewdness.

“No,” he continued, shaking a finger at her, “I’ve no intention of
letting this nonsense pass. There’s no reason why we should help them
out of what they themselves created.”

Lily’s eyes grew large and bright. The smile, mysterious, faintly
mocking, persisted. “You’re wonderful, Henry,” she said. “I always knew
what you would be like. Do you remember? I told you once. You are just
like that ... just like my prediction.”

From her voice or her manner it was impossible to discover what she
meant by this cryptic statement. The Governor interpreted it in his own
fashion.

“Well,” he said, “I have no intention of seeing the American nation
being made a dupe just because we’re rich and prosperous and the others
have ruined themselves. My wife believes I am quite right. She too
expects to make a speaking tour.” He became enthusiastic again. “You
should hear her speak. She has an excellent voice, and great power.”

“Yes,” said Lily softly. “I would never be able to do all that. I would
have been such a failure....”

“She’s here with me now ... in Paris,” continued the Governor. “She’d
never been abroad. I thought she would enjoy the sights, too, so I
brought her along.”

“Is she here to-day?” asked Lily. Again the Governor betrayed signs of
an overwhelming confusion.

“Yes,” he said, “Yes.” And suddenly became silent.

For a moment Lily watched him as if the sight of his confusion provided
her with some secret amusement. At length she said, “I’d like to see
her. I don’t ask to meet her, of course. That would be questionable
taste. Besides, why should we meet? We could mean nothing to each
other.”

“No, perhaps not.”

Again he began staring out of the window. Lily glanced at the watch on
her wrist.

“I shall be forced to leave soon myself,” she said. “My husband will be
waiting for me.”

With a start her companion turned from the window toward her.

“So you’re married,” he said. “And you never told me.”

“You never asked me about myself. I didn’t think you were interested in
what my life had been.”

He thrust out a great hand. “I must congratulate you!” he said with an
overflowing enthusiasm. “I must congratulate you! I knew you’d marry
some day. How long has it been?” The news appeared to furnish him with a
genuine delight. Perhaps he felt more secure now, less frightened of
Lily.

She shook hands with him quietly.

“Not for long.... Since three months.”

“And what is his name?”

“De Cyon ... René de Cyon. He is in the new ministry.... You see I
married a politician after all.”

She laughed again in that same mysterious, half-mocking half-cynical
fashion. It was impossible to penetrate the barrier of her composure.
She was invulnerable. One could not hazard the faintest guess at what
she was thinking.

“That is why I am here to-day.” And then for the space of an instant she
betrayed herself. “Think of it,” she said. “What a long way from
Cypress Hill to being the wife of a French cabinet minister. We’ve both
traveled a long way since we last met, Henry. A great deal has happened
to both of us. On my side, I wouldn’t change a thing. There are lives
and lives, of course. Some like one sort and some another. I know you’ve
been thinking what a lot I’ve missed by not marrying you.” He moved as
if to interrupt her. “Oh, I know you didn’t say so openly. It’s good of
you to be so generous ... to want me to have shared it.” She cast down
her eyes suddenly and her voice grew more gentle although it still
carried that same devilish note of raillery. “I appreciate all that....
But I wouldn’t have changed anything. I wouldn’t have married you
anyway.”

Again the Governor coughed and looked out of the window.

“We all come to it sooner or later,” he said. “It’s a good thing to be
married.”

“Yes ... a lonely old age isn’t pleasant.”

And here a deadlock arose once more in the conversation.

The crowd had begun to thin a little. Down the long vista of rooms it
was possible now to distinguish a figure here and there in the throng.
Outside the darkness had descended, veiling completely the white square.
There was nothing now but the faint globes of light and the dim shooting
rays of the passing motors.

The Governor turned suddenly and opened his mouth to speak. Then he
closed it again sharply. It was clear that he had intended to say
something and had lost his courage. He spoke at last, evading clearly
what he had intended to say.

“Tell me.... Where’s Irene?”

“She’s buried.... She’s been buried these eleven years.”

The Governor frowned.

“I’d no idea,” he stammered. “I wouldn’t have asked if I had known.” He
was sinking deeper in his confusion. There was something almost pitiful
in his manner, so empty now of pompousness, so devoid of complacency.

Lily smiled. “Oh, she’s not dead. She’s a nun. She’s in the Carmelite
convent at Lisieux ... I meant that she was buried so far as life is
concerned. She’s lost to the world. She never leaves the convent, you
know. It’s part of her vow. She’s buried there ... alive! It’s a living
death.” All at once she cast down her eyes and shuddered. “Perhaps she
is dead.... When one’s faith is killed one is not alive any more. You
see, I killed her faith in this world. That’s all I meant. She’s really
buried, ... alive, you understand.”

The Governor made a low whistling sound. “I’m not surprised.”

As if she did not hear him, Lily said, “I used to think that it was
possible to live by one’s self, alone ... without touching the lives of
others. It isn’t possible, is it? Life is far too complicated.”

The Governor flushed slowly. He turned the speech nervously once more to
Irene. “You don’t forget how she acted on the night....” Suddenly he
choked. It was too late now and he finished the speech, inarticulately.
“On the night of the garden party!”




LXXXVIII


It was done now. He had betrayed himself. The wall was down, and before
them both there must have arisen once more the painful scene in the
library under the malignant portrait of John Shane. (Lily, a young girl,
smiling and saying, “I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself.
I might have married you once. I cannot now, because I know.” Julia
Shane, so long dead now, leaning on her ebony stick, hard, unflinching,
in the face of everything. “You see, I can do nothing. There is too much
of her father in her.”)

It stood before them now, the crisis of two lives, naked, stripped of
all forgetfulness. The Governor, his face scarlet and apoplectic,
remained silent, unable to speak. Lily said softly, “I’m sorry ... I’m
sorry. I should never have mentioned it. I did not guess it would pain
you so.”

The new gentleness, the new sympathy revealed itself for the first time
in all their talk together. It showed in her dark, lustrous eyes. There
could be no doubt of it. She was no longer mocking. She was sorry for
the lover, grown old, confused now by the memory of a youthful,
overwhelming passion. She even touched his hand gently.

“It does not matter now,” she said. “After all, it was simply a part of
life. I’m not sorry, myself ... and the world would say that it was I
who suffered most. I didn’t suffer.... Believe me, I didn’t suffer.” She
smiled. “Besides what could regrets possibly accomplish? It is the
future in which one must live ... not the past. The longer I live the
more certain I am of that.”

Still he remained silent. He had become humble, subdued, wilted before
the memory of something which had happened more than twenty years
before. She must have guessed then, for the first time, what in the
unwitting cruelty of her youth she had never known ... that he had
really suffered, far more deeply than she had ever imagined. It may have
been hurt pride, for he was a proud man. It may have been that he had
loved her passionately. He was, after all, a crude, unsubtle man who
must have regarded the whole affair as dishonorable and wretched. It was
clear that the wound had never healed, that it still had the power to
cause him pain.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.... There was never any question
of forgiveness. I was not injured.... Besides it was more my fault than
yours.”

And then the Governor did a fantastic thing. He bent over his own fat
stomach and raised her hand gently to his lips. There was in the gesture
a curious absence of sentimentality. It was not even theatrically
self-conscious, as well might have been expected. It was the simple
gesture of a man who made speeches before thousands and became helpless
and mute before one woman. It was eloquent. It spoke more than whole
volumes of words. And somehow it released his tongue.

“The boy?” he said, “What about the boy?”

For a moment Lily did not answer him. She turned away, looking out of
the window. She trembled a little and when at last she spoke, it was
with averted face, for she lied to him, coldly and with deliberation.

“He is dead,” she said gently. “He was killed in the war ... the very
first year, at the beginning.” And then she turned with a sudden air of
domination over herself and her ravaged, saddened lover. “I must go
now,” she said. “Good-by, Henry. I wish you luck. I know now that what I
respected in you is not dead. It has survived everything. It is not
completely destroyed. Until just now, I was afraid.”

“Good-by, Lily.”

In a moment she was gone, down the long corridor to the spot where M. de
Cyon awaited her. Halfway to her destination she turned and saw that the
Governor was still watching her. She saw that he watched her despite the
fact that he was talking now to a woman, a large woman who was
unmistakably his wife. She was deep-bosomed, of the type which becomes
masculine with the approach of middle age. She wore flat-heeled shoes
and a picture hat with a series of flowing veils. Her gown was of dark
blue foulard, figured with an enormous white pattern. Far out upon her
massive bosom hung a gold pince-nez suspended from a little hook
fashioned in the shape of an elaborate fleur-de-lis. Her manner was
commanding, a manner appropriate to the chairman of the State Woman’s
Republican Committee. She could, no doubt, make wonderful speeches.
Doubtless she had a powerful voice. Certainly her manner with the
Governor was executive. It is easy to see that in the world of politics
she had contributed much to the success of the husband she worshiped.
What energy she had! What an appalling power!

As Lily turned away, she saw that he was still watching her, slyly,
wistfully, with his head bent a little.




LXXXIX


It was not until the spring of 1920 that work was at last begun on the
new railway station in the Town. Months before the actual building was
undertaken, the Town Council raised on each side of the triangular and
barren park at Cypress Hill enormous signs with lettering three feet
high. The signs faced the tracks of three great transcontinental
railroads. Above the squalor and filth of the Flats they raised their
explosive legends. Each read the same.

                       MAKE YOUR HOME HERE!!!!!

               THE HIGHEST, HEALTHIEST, LIVEST, BIGGEST
                           CITY IN THE STATE

                           EIGHT STEEL MILLS
                                  AND
                     SIXTY-SEVEN OTHER INDUSTRIES

                           WATCH US GROW!!!!

In the deserted park at Cypress Hill workmen appeared who cut down the
remaining dead trees. The Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo Belvedere were
pulled down from their pedestals in the dead hedge. One of the workmen,
a Calabrian, carted them off, scrubbed them clean of the corroding soot
and set them up in the back yard of his little house in the Flats. They
came to a good end, for the workman cherished them earnestly. In the
little garden behind his house, which by some miracle of devotion he
managed to fill with green things, he placed the two statues on
pedestals which he himself constructed of bricks and concrete. At the
base he planted ivy which flourished and spread over the cracked marble
and the adjoining fence. So in all the desert of the great mill town
there was one corner at least where beauty was worshiped in a humble
setting of cabbages and tomato vines. In the evening when the light was
not too bright, the little corner looked for all the world like a bit of
a Florentine garden.

The steam shovels set to work on a bright April morning with a terrific
sound of hissing steam, of grinding cables and clattering chains. In
great gulps they tore up the earth which had lain undisturbed since the
passing of the second great glacier. For the Town was not satisfied with
the destruction of the house at Cypress Hill; it was not content until
the Hill itself was scooped up and carted away. It was a wonderful feat
and brought the Town a vast amount of advertisement. Pictures of the
hill’s destruction found their way into the illustrated papers. They
were shown in movie palaces in every part of the country.

It happened that on the very day the steam shovels set to work Eva Barr
died in the boarding house where she had lived for more than a decade
upon the pension provided by her cousin, Lily Shane. Of the family which
had founded the Town, she was the last.

On the hill there remained a few people who remembered Cypress Hill in
the days of its glory. But most persons had never heard of Shane’s
Castle and knew nothing of Lily and Irene Shane. When their names were
mentioned, the old residents would say, “Yes ... Lily and Irene. Of
course, you never knew them. They belonged to the old Town. Lily was
very beautiful and a little fast, so the stories ran, although no one
ever knew for certain. Of course, they may be dead by now. I believe
Lily was living in Paris the last that was heard of her.”

That was all. Within a century Shane’s Castle had risen and disappeared.
Within a century the old life was gone, and with it the memory of a
great, respectable family which had made the history of the county. It
survived only in the name of the Town; and that it would have been
unprofitable to change since the Town was known round the world as one
of the greatest of industrial centers.




XC


With Lily’s marriage and the end of the war, the house in Rue Raynouard
regained something of its old life and gaiety. For M. de Cyon, the match
was one surrounded by advantages. His wife was rich and beautiful. She
had superb taste. She spoke excellent French and yet she was an American
and thus provided a bond with the powerful nation whose favor was
invaluable to every nation of Europe. His friends were charmed by her,
for she had a way of listening to them, of drinking in their talk with a
breathless air. Therefore they declared her not only beautiful but
clever, a distinction which even Lily had never claimed. The world knew
only that she was an American widow, wealthy, distinguished, beautiful,
who had lived very quietly in Paris for more than twenty years. None
knew anything against her. Indeed the only person who knew her story was
dead, shot in the dungheaps of a French barnyard.

Yet there was, as people said, something about Lily de Cyon that aroused
curiosity, even a tenuous suspicion. Somehow she did not fit the story
of a quiet existence among the dowdy friends of Madame Gigon. She
appeared to have mysterious resources, of instinct, of knowledge, of
mystery. Enfin! She was a fascinating woman.

The strange gift of the crazy Madame Blaise appeared no longer to fill
her with horror; for The Girl in the Hat and The Byzantine Empress were
brought down from their hiding place in the dusty garret of Numero Dix
and hung on either side of the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. They were
greatly admired by the painters whom Paul Schneidermann brought to the
house. Some attributed them to Ingres, but none was certain. It was
impossible to say who had painted them for they bore no signature. There
were some who believed that they were the only great pictures of an
obscure artist whose solitary rise from mediocrity came through the
inspiration of a woman, a marvelously beautiful woman with dark amber
hair and green white skin.

In the spring of 1920, the postman left with the concierge of Numero Dix
a thin letter bordered in black bearing the postmark of Lisieux. It
contained only a line or two, the mere mention of the death of Sister
Monica. She was buried within the walls of the convent which she had not
left in more than thirteen years.




XCI


The pavilion in the garden Lily gave to M. de Cyon for a study. Here it
was her habit to meet him daily on his return from the Ministry when his
motor, a gift from her, left him at the gate on the Rue de Passy.

One bright October day of the same year, she went as usual to the
pavilion to amuse herself until he arrived by reading the newspapers
which were placed upon his table. They lay in a neat pile ... Le Journal
de Genève, Il Seccolo of Milan, La Tribuna of Roma, the London Post, the
London Times, Le Figaro, L’Echo de Paris, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin,
L’Oeuvre.

She skimmed through them, reading snatches of news, of the opera, and
the theater, of society, of politics, of races, the personals in the
London Times ... this or that, whatever caught her fancy.

In the drawing-room Ellen and Jean, with his crutches by his side, sat
at the piano playing with four hands snatches of music from the
operettas of the moment, from Phi-Phi and La Reine Joyeuse. They sang
and laughed as they played. The sound of their gaiety drifted out across
the garden.

Lily read the journals until she grew bored. Something had delayed M. de
Cyon. Already he was late by half an hour. She came at last, languidly,
to the bottom of the pile, to L’Oeuvre which lay buried beneath the more
pompous and expensive papers. This she never read because it was a
socialist daily and therefore dull. Doubtless she would have passed it
by again for the hundredth time but a name, buried in one corner in the
smallest of print, caught her attention. It must have struck her
suddenly with all the force of a blow in the face, for she closed her
eyes and leaned back in her chair. The paper slipped to the floor
forgotten.

It was a brief paragraph, not more than three or four lines. It
recounted the death of one Stepan Krylenko, a man well known as a leader
in international labor circles. He died, according to the despatch, of
typhus in Moscow whither he had been deported by the American
government.

(Perhaps, after all, the Uhlan was right. The Monster would devour them
all in the end.)

After a time Lily rose and went out of the pavilion into the garden
where she walked slowly up and down for a long time, seating herself at
last on the bench under the laburnum tree.

Inside the house the wild merriment persisted. Ellen was singing now in
a rich contralto voice a valse which she played with an exaggerated
sweep of sentimentality. From the peak of her hard and cynical
intelligence, she mocked the song. She sang,

    “O, la troublante volupté
     de la première etreinte
     qu’on risque avec timidité
     et presque avec contrainte
     Le contact vous fait frisonner....”

In a wild burst of mocking laughter, the song came abruptly to an end.
The shattered chords floated out into the garden where Lily sat leaning
against the laburnum tree, silent and thoughtful, her eyes filled with
sorrow and wonder. She was in that moment more beautiful than she had
ever been before ... a symbol of that which is above all else eternal,
which knows no bonds, which survives cities and mills and even nations,
which is in itself the beginning and end of all things, without which
the world itself must fail.

And presently, far down among the plane trees, the gate in the high wall
swung gently open and, against the distant lights of the Rue de Passy,
the figure of the white haired M. de Cyon came into the garden.


THE END


Miss Abercombie sighed deeply=> Miss Abercrombie sighed deeply {pg 116}

feminine stubborness=> feminine stubborness {pg 198

Guermantes’ _soireés_=> Guermantes’ _soirées_ {pg 210}

Who it it=> Who is it {pg 260}






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