Chapter X: Part 10

On the afternoon of the wedding the temptation was not to be overcome. For a long time she fought it and at last, putting on a large hat and a veil she descended from the Babylon Arms and made her way by tram car to the neighborhood of St. Bart’s. Before the church there was a great crowd (a fact for which she was doubtless thankful) which pressed close against the awnings and peered at the carriages that were beginning already to arrive. There was, she felt, something at once comic and pitiful in the spectacle of men and women crowding and pushing into the gutters for a glimpse of the fashionable people who descended and swept across the red carpet into the church. Among the arrivals there were dowagers who strained through the doors of tiny cabriolets, cow-eyed young girls, elderly bachelors dressed with the stiffness of starch, whole armies of relatives and friends, moving forward with a concentrated air of indifference to the stares, jostled fairly by men with cameras who climbed about on the steps and even as high as the façade of the church in order to capture brief glimpses of such people as the Apostle to the Genteel, Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, the questionable Mrs. Sigourney (who was always news), and the dewlapped Mrs. Mallinson.

With the arrival of the bridegroom’s mother the jam became terrifying. Women fought with one another to catch a glimpse of a fat little woman clad in purple satin with a bird’s nest on which a few violets had been carelessly planted, perched high on her head. Ellen, taller than most of the crowd, was able to see without being seen. She caught a swift glimpse of Thérèse as she emerged from the door of the cabriolet, only to see her swallowed up at once in the press of the onlookers. She appeared calm and had the air of a woman well satisfied. After all, she had succeeded in uniting two great fortunes. The bride was all that she should have been. The future was assured.

Of Richard Callendar himself, Ellen caught only a swift glimpse--a flash, no more, of a dark handsome face paler than she had ever seen it. A moment later the bride arrived, but of Sabine nothing was visible; her face was covered by a long veil of lace. The mob of democratic citizens rocked and quarreled and pushed; dowdy women from the suburbs elbowed their way through stenographers and errand girls; clerks and fat old men trod on the toes of angry females; and Sabine was swallowed up.

Ellen leaned against the stone of the church as if she had become suddenly faint. Here the sounds of the music came to her, distant and triumphant, now swelling, now diminishing, until at length it died away altogether to make silence for the ceremony.

* * * * *

It was not until the bridal party, still jostled by the crowd, came out of the church and descended the steps that she saw them fully. Standing now on a jutting piece of stone she saw Callendar and Sabine move toward the waiting carriage. They smiled as if that were what the world expected of them and once Ellen fancied that the bridegroom looked toward her. Of this she was not certain and she was sure that he could not have recognized her through the veil, but she slipped from her eminence and dropped to the sidewalk where she vanished in the pressing mob. Nevertheless she was suddenly happy and strong, for in the one swift glimpse of the two faces she had divined her victory. The face of Callendar, for all its fixed smile, was pale and a little drawn, and in the eyes of the bride there was a bright fixed look of unhappiness. Sabine, so intelligent, so grotesquely clever, must have known what Ellen knew--that although she had married Callendar she was not the one who possessed him. In the end she might perhaps lose her game of patience because, after all, it was not a simple game; there were in it elements beyond the control even of so shrewd a pair as herself and Thérèse Callendar.

* * * * *

All the way back to the Babylon Arms, Ellen hurried with an hysterical air of triumph. It may have been that she knew a profound feminine satisfaction in the sense of vanity gratified. She hurried too because Clarence would be waiting for her, tired and pathetic and hungry. It would please him to find her so happy, so excited. In this strange confusion of moods she passed between the lions of the Babylon Arms and made her way up to the tiny flat. She was neither happy nor unhappy; it was emotion beyond either thing, entangled somehow with the old sense of triumph.

The dark hallway with the red walls was the same; the red carpeted stairway, its splendor gone now and the cordage showing through, was unchanged, as it had always been. It was only when she ascended the very last step that she discovered anything unusual. The door of the apartment stood open a little way so that she was able to look through the room into the distant stretches that lay beyond the river. For an instant she halted, looking about her. The key was in the lock. On the smoking table there lay the remnants of the cigar which Clarence always smoked on his way home from the office. His coat and waistcoat, which he was accustomed to hang neatly in the closet, lay on the divan. They had been thrown down carelessly. The red sunset above the river illuminated the shabby room in a fiery glow.

Standing quite still in the center of the floor she waited, listening for some familiar sound; and presently when there was no interruption of the stillness, she called “Clarence! Clarence!” in a voice that sounded queer and strange to her. The excitement had gone from her now, drained away by a curious sense of foreboding. In that narrow life where every day each small act followed exactly the same plan, the sight of a coat flung down carelessly terrified her.

She called again presently and, receiving no answer, she opened the door of their bedroom. It was empty. The room in which Fergus slept was likewise undisturbed. In the kitchen there was no one. Then slowly she made her way to the door of the bath-room. It stood open a little way as if inviting her, maliciously; yet it was not open wide enough for her to see what lay beyond. Gently she pushed it back until it struck some object that blocked its motion. Again she pushed, this time more firmly, and the obstacle gave way, moving a little to one side so that a foot became visible. It was then in a single, unreal moment, that she divined what had happened. She pushed harder and the door flew back. Behind it on the rug where he had done his exercises so patiently lay Clarence, face down, motionless. He had fallen forward and from beneath him there flowed a thin, dark stream. It had touched the white of his shirt and discolored it.

There was no doubt that he was dead. There was no doubt as to how he had died. The pistol, which had always been in the drawer of the bedroom table, lay beside him on the white floor. In the gathering darkness she knelt down at his side and began to weep, wildly, hysterically, like a savage. The darkness and the silence engulfed her.

It was thus that Fergus found her when he came in at last.

* * * * *

A doctor came and after him a policeman, but there was nothing to be done. The man was dead, and, as they observed to Fergus, you could see how he came to die. There would have to be the nasty business of an inquest. The news filtered through the apartment and the elevator man and the defunct actress with the white poodle in her arms came and stood at the doorway, whispering together and offering sympathy. It was Fergus who, with all the efficiency of Hattie Tolliver herself, “took hold” and managed things.

As for Ellen, she shut herself away, with a knowledge that roused in her a new agony infinitely more profound and terrible than the first brief outburst. In the darkness of her room she lay, alone now, on one of the apple green beds, silent and quite beyond so paltry a manifestation as tears. In one hand she held a note, crumpled and damp, which had been read again and again.

It was brief although the dead man, in his agitation, had written some things over and over again. It was simple, humble, inarticulate, more real, more vivid than he had ever been in all his mild existence. It was as if all the mysterious substance that was his soul had been poured out in that last moment upon the crumpled bit of paper. He had written it in a great speed; it seemed that, under the stress of fate, he had suddenly gone mad, flamed for an instant into a pitiful kind of heroism and then gone out forever. He had been almost poetic.

“Forgive me, beloved, for what I am doing. It was all that remained. It is better ... everything is better now, and you will be free again as you once were.

“I must tell you what you will soon learn. No one can keep it from you. I am a thief. I have stolen money and now there is no way to escape. If I ran away, it would be the same as what I am doing.... It would be the end. I would never dare ask to see you again. I would never tell you where I had gone. What I am doing is the only way out.”

(Here he had, in his agitation, written the same sentence twice as if he begged her not to hate him because he had been the cause of so much trouble. He had almost said, “Forgive me for being a bother to you.”)

Then it continued, “It was wrong from the beginning. I should never have asked you to run away with me, because I was not good enough. I tried to be and failed. I was a poor thing. So now, after I am gone again, there will be nothing to hold you ... not even from the man you really loved ... if it is not too late. You see, I know the truth! I know the truth! I discovered it in time. Forgive me, dearest. I love you always.”

* * * * *

Slowly during the long hours of the interminable night, the whole tragedy assumed a clarity of form. While she lay on the green bed, in a silence penetrated only by the faint nocturnal sounds that rose from the distant street, the little pieces fitted together ... bits of the past and the present, sudden stabbing memories and poignant flashes of intuition, odd scraps of old emotions vanished now forever ... the little pieces fitted together until, like a picture puzzle, they assumed a swift and startling completeness. She saw the answer in a quick bright flash; it was that she had destroyed him; she it was who had driven him into the abyss. The bitterness lay in the fact that all the while she had tried to save him, to make him happy.

If he had stolen money it could have been for one purpose alone--to give her more than he had been able to give her, to make her believe that he was far greater than he could ever have been. She understood that he had fought for her sake to create an illusion of grandeur, to raise before her eyes the figure of a man, successful and clever, who was not Clarence at all but a creature who existed only in the troubled flights of his ambition. And it was this very figure which, toppling from its pedestal, had destroyed him. She had known all along that there was no such creature. She could have told him....

His humbleness pained her. Even in the end he had chosen to destroy himself in a corner where it would make the least trouble.

There was, too, the vague confused affair of Callendar. The note said so little; it left the fear so incomplete. _There will be nothing to hold you, not even from the man whom you really loved._ He must have known that he had not freed her, even by his death, for he knew that in almost the same hour Callendar had himself ceased to be free. All that was gone now, lost forever, and a little time before it had been so near, quite within her grasp. In trying to have everything she had lost all save her soul and the fire which burned there.... _If it is not too late_....

But the thing which hurt her most was the memory of two words which he had used. They were, strangely enough, words of endearment, of affection, even perhaps of something so strong as passion. He had dared in his note to say “dearest” and “beloved.” He was gone now; he would not have to face her, knowing that because his love had fallen upon barren ground he was ridiculous. In life these were two words which he had never dared to use. They burned now like scars that would never heal.

She could not talk to him now; she could no longer still his uneasiness with empty words and a kiss which cost her nothing. He lay near her, just beyond her door, upon the shabby divan, but she could not reach him. To the dead there was nothing she could say, nothing which she could explain. In death he had come to possess her, for it was she who was humbled now.

* * * * *

She did not hide herself away. When morning came she appeared, calm and cold, to aid a strangely subdued Fergus in all the bitter tasks of caring for the dead. She arranged the telegrams and even chose the wording for the one that went to his sister in Ogdensburg. In all of them she said merely that Clarence had died suddenly. The truth she withheld. (There was always his weak heart to lend credence to such a tale.) In the newspapers there appeared only a brief line or two recording the fact of one more suicide in a great city and this, of course, was never read in the Town or by the people who had known Clarence as a boy. So in the end, his mother was the only one who knew the truth and even of the truth there was a portion which she never learned; it was that her son was a thief.

Out of all the tragic confusion only one thing remained to puzzle her; it was how Clarence had come to know of Richard Callendar. The answer, never entirely clear, came to her from a source she had never considered, from a man whom she treated, when she bothered to think of him at all, as beneath her contempt.

In the midst of that first gray morning the door opened and Mr. Wyck came in, shabby and downcast, to pay his condolences. He returned to the flat where he had known the only happiness which had ever come his way, but he returned, clearly, under circumstances he had never foreseen in the most gloomy and portentous of his bitter imaginings. At the sight of Ellen, cold and capable, in the midst of her grief (for she did grieve in a fashion she would not have done for a man whom she had loved), his green eyes turned toward the tips of his boots and he murmured, “Ah, this is terrible ... terrible,” in the professional manner of an undertaker.

In his heart, he may have thought, “It was you who ruined him, you, who came here into this very flat, a nobody, to use him for what he was worth ... to turn me out into the streets.” But he kept silent, perhaps because she had always terrified him, filling him with a sense of one standing upon the rim of a volcano. He was afraid of scenes, Mr. Wyck, and so his hate found its way into the open through devious, hidden channels. He had not the courage, it seemed, even to look at her now.

They stood for a time in silence by the divan, symbols of that queer, distorted figure of which the dead Clarence formed the third angle--a figure all awry, perverted out of all drawing--Clarence, so white and still, gone now beyond the reach of either of them.

Mr. Wyck muttered oily and incoherent consolations.... “It is a bitter blow.... One must be brave.... He was a good man....” All the old banalities which somehow took on a bitter, ironical ring. And presently he snuffled and wiped his eyes, as much in pity for himself who had lost the one thing for which he had gambled, as for the man who lay quiet and still upon the divan.

Ellen, watching him, was filled with a slow, burning anger. She wanted suddenly to crush him as she had once wanted to crush poor May Seton, because he was sentimental, and silly and without strength. And suddenly it occurred to her to say abruptly, “It was not a case of suicide. It was not Clarence who killed himself.... It was others who killed him.”

She had spoken in a sudden moment of humility, acknowledging her own guilt, and the speech, so abrupt, so unexpected, produced upon Mr. Wyck the strangest effect. He looked at her sharply, for the first time, and then averted his eyes; but in the brief glance she discovered the answer to the mystery. It was Mr. Wyck who had betrayed her secret. It was Mr. Wyck who had told the story of Callendar, distended no doubt, and perverted by his malice. She knew it by the look of terror in the shifty eyes. He had used this secret as his last stake.... And he had lost, forever, beyond all hope.

Almost at once he turned away from the morbid fascination of the divan, bade her good-by and hurried out of the door; and Ellen, watching his narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature, with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she was lost to him forever.

So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free.

36

She went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this--“If he’d been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He’d have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg.”

And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval. She kept silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant and powerful figure.

* * * * *

In the Babylon Arms there was little to be done. Ellen paid a visit for the first time to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company and there learned that Clarence had stolen money which he collected and failed to deliver. The amount was something over fifteen hundred dollars. When she heard it she murmured, “It was so little too! Why, I could have paid it if he had told me. To have killed himself for so little!”

But she knew, of course, that if he had confessed he would have destroyed that splendid creature which he fancied he had created in her eyes. He had preferred himself to be destroyed. In death it would not matter that she discovered the fraud: he would not have to face her.

She paid the money, out of her savings and out of the amount brought by the sale of the furniture. She sold even the piano he had bought her as a wedding gift. And when she had finished there remained but little more than a hundred dollars.

On the very day the furniture was being taken from the flat she told Fergus the whole truth concerning her plans. They sat together amid the wreckage, brother and sister, both understanding for perhaps the first time that they were faced by the new problem of Hattie Tolliver. Both knew that she had set her mind upon coming to them, and having tasted freedom, neither was willing now to turn back.

“There is Ma,” said Ellen. “I don’t know what’s to be done about her. She’ll be coming here to live before long and I won’t be here. She’s worked all these years to come where she can be near us and now I’ve got to go away. I’m going to Paris.... It’s the only thing left.”

Fergus looked at her. “But you don’t know French,” he said, “and you haven’t any money.”

“I can’t turn back now. If I went back to Ma, it would be the end of me. I know that. I couldn’t.... I couldn’t ever begin again. I’ve enough money to take me there.... I’ll manage after that.... Besides, there is Lily.... She promised to help me when the time came.... The time has come.... I can’t turn back.”

Fergus listened in silence, moved perhaps by the new dignity that had come to her, a dignity touched with bitterness. She was beautiful too in a new fashion, more placid, more serene.

“You must be good to Ma,” she continued. “She’ll hate my running away, but I’ve got to go. She’s a wonderful woman. She’s the one who has sacrificed everything. She’s always done it ... for all of us. I couldn’t go if I didn’t know that you’re the one she loves best of all. You’re the one she worships. She loved you enough to let you go. I had to run away. You know it, Fergus, as well as I. You must be good to her. If anything happened to you, it would kill her. You mustn’t disappoint her. One day we must all make her proud of us. I mean to do it, and then when I’m rich, when I’m successful, I can reward her.” She paused for a moment and then added. “You see, she loves you best because you’re so like Pa. You’re the way he used to be when she fell in love with him.”

The boy’s face took on an unaccustomed gravity. He rose and looked out of the window over the beloved and magical city. “I’ll do my best,” he said presently. “I’ll do my best.... She’s a wonderful woman.” (Yet neither of them would turn back now.)

In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and said, “But you’re going to Lily.... Ma will hate that.”

“I know she will.... She’s always been afraid of Lily. She needn’t worry though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can ever happen to me again.”

It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of Ellen’s destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played for she never knew, of course, that if chance had not thrown her glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been blinded.

So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right. _Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them._

37

The world of Lily had its center in a house which stood in that part of Paris beyond the Trocadero in the direction of Auteuil and the Bois. Here she had lived for years, since the moment when she had found it agreeably necessary to live abroad. For her purposes the house possessed every advantage; it resembled, after a curious fashion, those convents of the eighteenth century to which ladies of fashion retired at the moments when they desired solitude and rest and yet wished not to be cut off entirely from the gaiety of the world. As the Baron had once observed, Lily herself belonged to the eighteenth century; there was about her always so much of luxury and indolence, so much of charm and unmorality.

The house stood in the Rue Raynouard a short distance from the place where it rushes down a slope to join a half dozen other streets in a whirlpool known as the Place Passy surrounded by magasins, cafés, and tobacconists’ shops. It was, in all truth, an eighteenth century house, built in the beginning as a château in the open country on the outskirts of Paris between the city and the Grand Trianon of Versailles. Here in the open fields the Marquise de Sevillac, an ugly, clever and eccentric woman, held a court of her own, a court indeed which in some respects outshone the splendor of Versailles. In her house were to be found the poets, the wits and the philosophers of the day. She corresponded with Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists came frequently to work in the rooms which overlooked the little park and the sheep pastures beyond. Indeed the Sage of Ferney on his triumphant return to Paris had planned a visit to the Marquise and was only prevented by the fatal illness which overtook so swiftly his skinny old body.

The Marquise had been the last of her family. There is a Marquis de Sevillac living to-day but the title is Bonapartist and has nothing to do with the ancient splendor of the true family. As an old woman, the Marquise clung to her house even with the approach of the revolution. During that cataclysm, which she faced in a bold and cynical fashion, she was allowed to survive because the people remembered her as the friend of the radicals and the philosophers who plagued their stupid King. She allied herself with the Girondists and took Madame Roland perilously to her bosom, and when the débâcle came at length her bony old body would have been dragged off to the guillotine along with the others save that she was so old and that Danton and Terezia Tallien intervened. So she died at last in her bed and the château became the property of the Directory.

Since her death it has known many occupants. For a time it served as a museum; it housed the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who gave his name to a street nearby; it passed through a period of neglect and emptiness and at last fell into the possession of a wealthy manufacturer of soap and chocolate. It was during his day and the day of his son that the château came to be pressed upon by other houses and by apartments in the florid German style, until there was left at length only the house itself and the little park designed by Le Nôtre which still remained the largest private garden in all the city of Paris.

The house turns to the world a deceptive face, for on the side facing the Rue Raynouard it is but one story high with a commonplace door and a single row of shuttered windows. It is this side which in the days of the Marquise faced the stables and dovecote; so the house now turns its back upon the world and preserves for its friends the glory of its three story façade of Caen stone. The façade, broken by rows of tall windows, looks upon a high terrace lined with crumbling urns carved in the classic Greek manner and a garden with a reticulation of paths laid out by Le Nôtre to center upon the pastry-cake pavilion erected to the God of Love. Inside the high wall which shuts out the noise and dust of the Rue de Passy there are great plane trees with trunks mottled like the backs of salamanders, and laburnums that cluster close about the Temple of Eros.

One could live forever within the boundaries of the ancient house and garden, surrounded by luxury and beauty, receiving one’s friends, seldom going into the world. It was an admirable house in which to live discreetly, almost secretly, and it was an admirable house for one of so indolent a nature as Lily’s. For Lily had succeeded the chocolate manufacturer, and the château of the Marquise de Sevillac with its ghosts of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the wanton Terezia Tallien and the clever Madame Roland, was tenanted now by a rich American out of a country which in the days of the Marquise had been no more than a howling wilderness--a woman the world knew as a widow, beautiful, charming, discreet and indolent, living under the guardianship of the most respectable and stuffy of Bonapartists, the ancient Madame Gigon.

* * * * *

On a dripping morning of December, of the sort which makes Paris a wretched city in midwinter, a carriage drew up before the door of this house and out of it stepped Ellen Tolliver, pale from traveling but unusually handsome in the black of her widowhood. There was with her a small thin young woman, trimly dressed rather in the practical style of a professional traveler, with red hair and pretty bright eyes which had a way of observing the slightest things which occurred in her vicinity. The stranger (after haggling with the driver over the fare) paid him and then, changing her mind, bade him wait for her. She pulled the bell with a swift, energetic jerk.

“It is a modest house,” she observed to Ellen in short, ironic syllables colored by an accent that was indefinable. “A modest house for a rich American. Usually they are more flamboyant.”

Impatiently she pulled the bell a second time and presently the commonplace door was opened by a Breton maid in a white cap who bade them enter. Inside, away from the dripping cobblestones of the Rue Raynouard, it was clear that the stranger succumbed to the magic of the house. For an instant, she remained silent, staring in astonishment at the long sweep of stairs and the array of glittering crystal. Then she made a grunting noise and addressed the maid in French.

“Madame Shane.... Is she in?”

“No,” replied the girl. “She is at Nice.... She has been gone since two weeks.”

The stranger translated the speech and for a moment there was a silence in which the face of Ellen, pale and handsome in her mourning, was shadowed by a sudden look of terror. It vanished quickly and she said to her companion, “Ask for Madame Gigon.”

Madame Gigon was in. She never went out any more. At the moment she was in the drawing room. Should she ask if Madame Gigon would see them?

“This,” observed the bright ferret, to the maid, “is Madame Shane’s cousin. She has come to pay her a visit.”

The stairway before them led downwards in the most unexpected fashion. Between panels of satinwood adorned with plaques of gilt and rock crystal and filled with candles, it swept down for the depth of two stories, past a gallery which led away on both sides, into a dim vista of polished floor at the end of which there was a high window with small panes of glass that gave out upon a garden. At the sight, a faint touch of color appeared on the cheeks of Ellen and her eyes grew bright with interest. It was all far grander than she had ever imagined, more magnificent than she had hoped. In such a house she might stay quietly, interfering with no one. It was possible to remain hidden in its depths for weeks at a time.

“Shall I stay?” asked her companion.

“I can manage.... It’s my affair. There’s no use troubling you any further. It was good of you to have bothered.”

“But what about speaking French?”

“Madame Gigon speaks English. She once had a school for English and American girls.... My great-aunt went to it.”

Up the long stairs, remotely, the maid was returning now.

“Bien,” she said. “Madame Gigon will see you.”

“Au revoir,” murmured the stranger. “If you want me, I shall be at the Ritz until the end of the month.... Miss Rebecca Schönberg.... You have my card....”

And with that she vanished through the rain into the waiting cab.

* * * * *

At the foot of the long stairs Ellen found herself suddenly in the great drawing-room. Beyond, through the tall window draped in blue brocade, she had a vista of dripping trees and a wet garden dominated by a white pavilion that resembled a pastry. The room was long and rectangular, for all the world like the drawing room at Shane’s Castle, save that it was not, even on this wet winter day, a gloomy room. There was in it far too much color. Even the satinwood paneling appeared warm and soft. At the far end before a neat fire of cannel coal she discerned among the shadows the figures of a tiny old woman and a small boy, sturdy, handsome and red haired. He sat at the feet of the crone, reading aloud to her in English and nearby lay two fat and elderly dogs, an Aberdeen and a West Highland. It was not until she had come quite close to them that they realized she had entered the room. The boy stood up and the old woman turned toward her with a curious dazed look in her eyes.

It was the old woman who spoke first. She peered, apparently without seeing her, in the general direction of Ellen and asked, “Are you Mees Tolliver?”

The boy regarded her, frankly, with a pleasant friendliness.

“Yes,” replied Ellen, “I am Madame Shane’s cousin.”

In an instant, as she watched the child and faced the sharp old woman, she grasped the identity of the boy. It came to her quickly, as a revelation out of all the mystery of the past. Of course she knew all about Madame Gigon; it was the boy for whom she was not prepared. About him there could no longer be any doubt. He was Lily’s child and the old story was true. It gave her a quick, inexplicable feeling of relief, as if after so many years she stood in the open, knowing at last the truth. It did not produce any shock, perhaps because she had been for so long prepared for the knowledge. So she had said without hesitation _Madame_ Shane, just as a little while before in order to take no chance in protecting Lily, she had said _Madame_ Shane to Miss Rebecca Schönberg.

The old woman coughed and said slowly, “I don’t speak English very well any more. I’m so old.... I almost forget.... Est-ce que vous parlez français?” And then, “Asseyez vous.”

Ellen simply stared at her, and in the emergency the boy, polite and eager, said in a piping voice, “She wants to know if you speak French.... She wants you to sit down.” His English was colored by an accent which struck Ellen with a remote sense of unreality. Lily’s child! Her own cousin! Speaking English as if it were a foreign tongue!

“I don’t,” said Ellen. “Will you tell her that I know no French?”

It was the old woman who answered in labored English. “Oh, I understand.... I know what you say.... I can no longer _speak_ English.... Asseyez vous.... Sit down.”

It was only then that Ellen understood the peering look in the eyes of the old woman. She had been sitting down, all the while. The old woman, who peered at her so earnestly, was blind.

“Did Madame Shane know you were coming?” asked Madame Gigon.

“No, I had no time.... I left America in haste.” She held back the truth. She did not say that she had come, deliberately and without warning, because she could take no chances on being refused. Sitting there, with only a few francs in the world, she felt secure. She was in Paris now in a house that was big and beautiful. The rest could be managed.

“She did not tell me.... She would have been here,” continued Madame Gigon. Then, as if her brain were fatigued by the strain of speaking English, the old woman addressed a torrent of French to the little boy. When she had finished he advanced to Ellen, shyly, and held out his hand.

“She says,” he repeated in the same piping voice, “that I must welcome you as master of the house. She says you are my cousin.” He smiled gravely. “I never had a cousin before. And,” he continued, “she says that if Maman had known she would have been here.”

He stood regarding her with a look of fascination as though so strange and exotic a thing as a cousin was too thrilling to be passed over lightly. Touched by the simplicity of the child, Ellen drew him near to her and, addressing both him and Madame Gigon, said, “You are good to believe that I am Madame Shane’s cousin. How could you know?”

Madame Gigon smiled shrewdly. She was withered and had a little black mustache. Again the boy translated her speech. “She says,” he repeated, “that you have ... une voix honnête.” He hesitated.... “An honest voice ... and that she knows the voice because she taught my mother in school and before her my grandmère. She says it is like my grandmère’s voice.”

As he spoke the old woman smiled again and wagged her head with extraordinary vigor. “Je connais la voix.... Je la connais bien.”

Then she addressed the boy again and he translated her speech. “She says she is blind and will you come near so that she may touch your face?”

Ellen drew her chair closer so that it disturbed the fatter of the two dogs and allowed Madam Gigon to pass her thin hands in a fluttering gesture over her handsome throat and the fine arch of her nose.

“Ah,” said the old woman triumphantly. “Le nez ... the nose.... C’est le nez de vôtre tante ... le même nez ... précisement. C’est un nez fier ... distingué.”

“It is a proud nose,” echoed the interpreter gravely.... “A high distinguished nose.... A nose like your aunt’s.”

And the old woman, wagging her head, fell suddenly into a silent train of old memories.

“My name is Jean,” said the boy shyly. “I am ten years old. Would you like to see my book? It is in English. I can read English just as well as French.” And he brought her Tom Brown’s School Days and showed her the picture of the boys climbing the tree to rob the rook’s nest. Ellen, leaning over his shoulder, was softened and showed a warm enthusiasm over the other illustrations. She even listened while he told the long story of Tom Brown.

Presently Madame Gigon joined their talk and for a long time they held a conversation, translated always by the boy, that was animated and illumined by a warm friendliness. It was this which presently filled Ellen with a passionate desire to weep. She took off her hat and sat on the floor with Jean and the dogs, while Madame Gigon and the boy asked questions about America and old Julia Shane whom Jean called “grandmère” and whom he had never seen. And presently the Breton maid appeared with tea (for Madame Gigon, though she was French, had learned the custom of tea among the English) and over Ellen there swept slowly a strange feeling that, at last, after having been away a long time, she had come home. It was here that she belonged, here that she would be happy, in this great, beautiful house that was so friendly.

Jean was allowed one gâteau and the fat dogs devoured two apiece.

“She says,” translated Jean, “that Maman told her you would come some day ... just as you have come. She says she is not surprised ... your great-aunt, my grandmère, would have done the same.”

* * * * *

After tea, she was led away by the Breton maid up the stairs and along a gallery into which opened an endless procession of doors, until she came, at length, to the end, where a door was opened which revealed a square room dominated by a great bed hung with a canopy of brocade. The tall windows gave out upon the park which, lying now in the fog that succeeded the rain of an hour or two before, appeared blue and mysterious. In the heart of the mist the white pavilion showed vaguely, and beyond it, above the top of the garden wall, yellow globules of light from the lamps in the Rue de Passy cast the trunks of the old plane trees into sharp black shadows.

When the maid had left, she sat down before the bright small fire and without moving regarded the room closely, point by point, detail by detail. It was large and warm and beautiful, but the quality which moved her most profoundly was its elegance ... the same quality that was so evident in the great drawing-room belowstairs. She had never dreamed that there could be such warm, old beauty. There was nothing here of the barren, gas-lit pomp of Mrs. Callendar’s dining room out of the Second Empire, and nothing of the vast Callendar drawing-room lined with grim Dutch ancestors and gilt cabinets of tear bottles and Buddhas. This room ... this lovely house ... had been there always. It had been like this in the days of the ugly Marquise de Sevillac. The chaise longue on which she sat, the gilt chair that stood before the writing desk, the very mirror, with its dim rectangular panes of glass, had the effect of softening her. Indeed, for a time, these things made her dimly uneasy; far back in her consciousness there rose a grotesque fear that if she once succumbed to the splendor of that great bed, she might never rise from it again, that it might weaken her by its very luxury. She regarded it almost with suspicion, touched by an actual fear of all that was too beautiful and too splendid. She might become, like Lily, indolent and idle and charming. And slowly the realization swept over her that she was changed. She became aware that she was a woman now; she no longer wanted to be like Lily. She was strong, as she had never been before, strong as Lily would never be. Luxury, idleness, charm were not the things she desired. It must be something stronger than that, more heady, more challenging.

Dimly she understood the appeal of the room and of the dark misty garden with its white pavilion. It was insidious and peaceful, like an enchanted palace that swam mirage-like in the blue fog. And again she was overcome by a sense of returning home after having been away for a long time. The white squares of Paris, seen through the rain-spattered cab-windows on the way from the Gare du Nord, had moved her deeply; they had given her a wild sense of freedom, of escape. But this was different, more languorous, more intimate. It was the thing for which she had been born, the thing which, all her life, she had struggled to attain. It lay on the opposite side of the earth from the black Mills and the plain houses of the Town.

And then, pathetically and slowly, there came over her the wish that, as once she had planned, Clarence might have known this old splendor ... the splendor he had talked of seeing, “some day when they were rich enough.” There was that white villa at Nice....

* * * * *

She had understood, well enough, while she sat on the deck of the _City of Paris_, damp and chilled by the fog, that Clarence was not gone forever, simply because he was dead. She understood (indeed she thought of it constantly, even in the hours when she had listened in fascination to the talk of Rebecca Schönberg) that since his death he was more real to her than he had ever been in life. While he had lived there had never been time to consider him. There was only time, now, when he was gone. The very affection she had for him in life was nothing to the affection she now experienced, and in this new emotion there was no pity, because pity had been effaced by self-reproach. The one desire which obsessed her was a desire to see him, to explain, to justify herself.... Ellen, who had never bothered to justify her faintest whim. The power of the weak over the strong was still stirring. It had not altogether died.

Mingled with these very thoughts was the knowledge that somewhere in this strange city that was so familiar, Callendar and Sabine were living. They must be there quite near her; she was sure of it. They were moving about, dining, going to the theater and the opera, all the while in ignorance of what had happened to her, knowing nothing of her presence. For them, her reason told her, she was forgotten; yet something stronger than reason, a belief which beyond all doubt had its roots in the memory of Callendar’s face upon his wedding day, told her that she was not forgotten. She had been there, with them, all the while, ... perhaps, she thought triumphantly, even upon their wedding night. It was a thought utterly free from any desire to hurt Sabine; indeed, toward Sabine she had no feeling at all. Callendar was the one who roused her malice; she wanted to torment him, to be herself the one who dominated. The thought would have appeased her vanity save for the fact that she could never capture the whole truth; it was impossible because, in the months that had separated them, she had returned again to the old feeling that she did not know Callendar at all, that there was a part of him beyond her understanding, which escaped her always. She was afraid of him.

* * * * *

She dressed to the accompaniment of water dripping from the high roof on to the white terrace of the garden and, under the stimulus of physical activity, she came presently to forget both Clarence and Richard Callendar. Her thoughts turned to Miss Schönberg, that small, good-natured, ferrety creature who was so kind to her. The encounter had occurred, by chance, on the _City of Paris_ when the stranger, watching Ellen as she paced in her tireless way round and round the deck through the fog and the blowing rain, finally offered her a book to read. Ellen did not, as a rule, read anything, but she accepted the book, gratefully enough, more as a symbol of the stranger’s friendliness than for its own qualities. She could not, now, even remember what it was, nor anything about it save that it was bound in green and was written by a man called de Morgan. She was, at that time, engaged in thinking of her own story, which was indeed quite as good as anything concocted by a novelist. For the sense of rôle, the awareness of herself as a dramatic figure “living by her wits,” had grown upon her steadily, until in her mind there had been born a suspicion that such a rôle possessed a value. She was not, after all, commonplace. Already, though she was but twenty-four, tremendous things had happened to her ... things which were romantic and even tragic, but things in which she found satisfaction. She had wished, as far back as she could remember, to have a life that was eventful. She wanted not to die until she had known her share of life, and in life she did not seek, like Lily, simple happiness and contentment. She desired experience, and so she resembled greatly old man Tolliver.

It may have been a sense of all this which attracted the stranger, for Miss Schönberg despite all her fine clothes and her habit of wandering from one spot to another, lived vicariously. She searched breathlessly for excitement. At thirty she was a confirmed and passionless virgin who lived on the fringes of life, perpetually stimulated by her sense of the spectacle. She had no real home nor any real nationality, unless one might identify as a nation that army of restless wanderers which moved from hotel to hotel across the face of Europe. Her best friends, or at least those who knew her most intimately, were the proprietors of such establishments as the Hotel Negresco and the Beau Rivage, the Royal Splendide, Claridge’s, the Cavendish, the Adlon, the Ritz and sometimes, for the sake of atmosphere, such a place as the France et Choiseul. She was an orphan and rich. In Vienna she had an aunt; in Trieste a handful of cousins; in New York an uncle who traded in diamonds. She was a Jewess and an emancipated woman, regarded with suspicion by the orthodox members of her tribe. And her emancipation had the fierce quality which envelops Jewish virgins who have determined at all costs to be free. It was a sort of aggressive freedom. She had never succumbed to or even understood love and it was extremely unlikely that her bright, shiny mind would ever be weakened by an emotion so sentimental.

All this Ellen had learned from her, either by intuition or by her own confession, for Miss Schönberg was much given to conversation, especially of the self-revelatory variety. From Ellen, in turn, she had learned what the girl chose to tell her, fragments of the truth strung together in such a fashion that the whole seemed an honest but rather dull and erratic tale. Yet she knew more of Ellen than the young widow ever guessed, for if Ellen had been as dull and uninteresting as the story she told, Miss Schönberg would never have bothered to address her a second time.

* * * * *

And now Ellen, as she dressed to dine alone with the blind old woman belowstairs, wondered why Rebecca Schönberg had been at all interested in her. She had, it was true, faith in her own star; she knew that she would one day be famous. That any one beside herself could have any intimation of this appeared on the surface preposterous.

When she descended, she found that Jean had gone to bed and before the fire there was only Madame Gigon with Criquette and Michou, the dogs, who had not stirred from their places but lay fat and lazy, basking in the warmth of the blaze. With the eager interpreter gone, Madame Gigon, under the stress of necessity, cudgeled her old brain into speaking a very passable sort of English. At dinner, she told Ellen that Lily was stopping in the white villa at Nice. (It was not in Nice proper but Cimiez, high up on the hill beside the ruined Roman arena with a magnificent view overlooking Villefranche and the Bay of Angels. It lay just above the statue of Queen Victoria carven with a very realistic reticule and an umbrella.) She had telegraphed Lily to come home and greet her cousin properly.