Chapter XI: Part 11

After dinner they went, followed by the dogs, back again into the drawing-room to the luxurious chairs by the fire, and after a time Ellen rose and played at the request of the old woman some Brahms, an air from La Belle Hélène and finally a waltz or two of Chopin. It was a beautiful piano, for Lily respected music, and the sound of its low, mellow beauty led Ellen into playing more and more passionately. When at last her hands dropped into her lap and she sat listening to the distant sound of the boat whistles along the Seine, Madame Gigon began to talk.

She had seen George Sand once a long time ago when, as a bride, her husband, M. Gigon (who had been a curator at the Musée Cluny and had been dead now for more than half a century) had taken her one night to dine at Magny’s where he might show her the celebrities of the town. She had seen George Sand, she repeated, come in with no less persons than Flaubert, yellow and bent, and the exquisite Théophile Gautier, to dine in a private room before the répétition generale of her play Le Batard, at the Odéon. The writer was an old woman then, come up from her farm, and bedizened with cheap jewelry, but every one noticed her. She had vitality. She was a sensation....

And she could remember too the funeral of Jules de Goncourt and how they stood in the rain quite near to this same Flaubert....

But Ellen had never heard of George Sand and knew, beyond his music, very little of Chopin, so it merely confused her to hear Madame Gigon call a man “she.” Lest she betray her ignorance she kept silent, and sometimes she did not listen at all, because this ancient talk did not interest her, though it seemed to be the very core of all the life that remained in the blind old woman.

Madame Gigon talked far into the night, with the air of one who had long been shut in solitude, and as she talked her English became more and more clear. She spoke almost as easily as she had spoken in the days, half a century earlier, when she had taken Lily’s mother and the other girls of the school on _pique-niques_ in the woods along the Seine at Sèvres. And after a time as the dull glow of her memories took fire, she fell to talking of old Julia Shane herself. But she talked of a Julia Shane who was still a young girl and not the sick old woman who, lying ill in her house among the black mills, was the last link in the chain that held Hattie Tolliver from her children.

And as Madame Gigon talked on and on to the accompaniment of the distant sounds from the misty river, there swept over Ellen a consciousness, new but unmistakable, of a delicate unity running through all of life. It was bound together, somehow, in an intricate web composed of such things as love and memories, hopes and sorrows and sentiment, but it was a web without pattern, without design, a senseless, crazy and beautiful thing. She saw then that she could never exist apart, in isolation, from all these others; there were filaments which bound her even to so remote and insubstantial a creature as this blind old woman. It was the web which made her uneasy. She must be free of it, somewhere, sometime....

Criquette began to wheeze and Madame Gigon prodding him with her toe said, “Heigh-ho!... We must go to bed.... Even the dogs have begun to snore.”

38

At the end of the week Lily returned from the south, wrapped in furs and shivering in the damp of Paris. She was a warm, sensuous creature who loved the sun and traveled north or south according to the variations in temperature. Even on the Riviera she was not content and, on the occasion of a mistral, she had been known to pack her bag and embark into Italy for Capri or Taormina where the sun was brighter and the flowers more fragrant.

She arrived early in the morning in company with the Baron, Madame Gigon’s nephew, and together they came upon Ellen, not yet fallen into the luxurious habits of the French, having breakfast alone in the dining room with Jean, who sat across the table from her plying her all the while with questions about his grandmère and about America and the Town where his mother was born. She was describing it to him....

“It is not a nice Town.... It is full of big Mills and furnaces and the soot blackens everything.... There’s nothing pretty in the Town ... nothing in the whole place half as pretty as your garden.... Your grandmother had a garden once that was as pretty as this one but it’s all dead now. The smoke killed it....”

Here Jean interrupted her to say, “I know!... I know!... Maman has a friend ... a Monsieur Schneidermann who owns Mills like that. Once when we were up north, we stopped at a town called Saarbrücken and saw the furnaces.... It was a long time ago when I was only seven ... but I remember....” He became silent and thoughtful for a time and then, looking at her wistfully, he added, “I’d like to go to that Town ... I’d like to see my grandmère.... But Maman says I can’t go ... at least until I’m grown up.... I suppose grandmère will be dead by then.... She’s an old, old woman....”

“But she’s not so old as Madame Gigon.... Think of it, Madame Gigon taught your grandmother in school when she was a young girl....”

She wanted by some means to escape from the subject of the Town. She could not, of course, tell the boy why he could never visit the Town; she could not tell him there were scores of old women who had been waiting for years just to know for certain that he existed at all. She could tell him about the smoke and filth, but she could not explain to him the nasty character of those women.

“I’m going to England to school in the autumn,” the boy said. “Maman has arranged everything.... I’ll like that better than going to school here.... Perhaps grandmère might come to visit us some time.”

“She might ...” replied Ellen, “but she’s very ill.... My mother is taking care of her now. You see, my mother lives in the Town. She’s your mother’s cousin ... her real first cousin. That’s how it comes that I’m your cousin.”

“And your mother? What is she like?” asked the boy.

For an instant Ellen observed him thoughtfully. “She’s not a bit like your mother ... and yet she’s like her too in some ways.”

* * * * *

She did not finish the description, for at that moment, through the long vista of the rooms, she saw moving toward her Lily and a man who carried a handbag and across his arm a steamer rug. As they came in, Jean sprang from his chair and ran toward them, clasping his mother about the waist and kissing her as she leaned toward him.

“Maman has come back! Maman has come back!” he cried over and over again, and then, “I have a new cousin! I have a new cousin!”

The man laughed and Lily, smiling, bade the boy be quiet, turning at the same time to Ellen, whom she embraced, to say, “So you’ve come at last! I hope you’re going to stay a long time.”

It was the same Lily, a shade older, a shade less slender, but still warm, lovable, disarming. As they embraced, the faint scent of mimosa drifted toward Ellen and the odor raised a swift, clear picture of the drawing-room at Shane’s Castle with all the family assembled on Christmas day ... the last Christmas day they ever came together there. Old Jacob Barr was dead now. Ellen and Lily were in Paris, Fergus in New York. The drawing room was shut up and abovestairs in her vast bedroom Julia Shane herself, cared for by the capable Hattie, lay dying. In a few more years there would be none of the family left in the Town. They would be scattered over the world. It remained only for grandmère to die.

All this passed through Ellen’s mind as she spoke, “Yes, I shall stay a long time ... if you will have me.” She turned away. “I had to come,” she said. “There was nothing left to do.... But I’m sorry I brought you back from the south.”

“And this,” said Lily, “is Monsieur Carrière ... César. He is the nephew of Madame Gigon and a great friend of Jean and me.”

The stranger bowed and murmured, “Enchanté,” adding in English, “You are the musician.... Madame Shane expects you one day to be great.”

He was a swarthy man, rather handsome with sharply cut features and fierce mustachios, a Colonel of the Cuirassiers who had most of his time free. He smiled pleasantly, yet underneath the smile there was a hint of hostility, a mere spark which, however, struck a response in the breast of Ellen. It was on her side, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance, of the very assurance with which he conducted himself. It was as if he welcomed her to his own house. And it may have been that for reasons of his own he resented her presence. She too, was arrogant and assured, even though she said pleasantly enough, “If you will have me.” Underneath all that false humility, there ran a vein of domination, a strength which one less good-natured and indolent than Lily could discern at once. Still Lily had told him, long ago, that he would not like her cousin....

They were a handsome pair, Lily and the Baron, the one so blonde and voluptuous, the other so dark, so brusque, so like a bit of fine steel. There was about him a sense of something familiar, which tormented the dim recesses of Ellen’s memory.

“Well! Well!” he said, throwing down the coats and bags. “Let’s have some breakfast.” And with the same proprietary air he moved across and rang for the maid and ordered chocolate and rolls for himself and Lily.

When they had gone at last into the drawing-room and Madame Gigon, groping her way down the long stairs, and followed by the two fat dogs, had come in, Ellen understood what it was she had recognized at once in the swarthy Monsieur Carrière. It was nothing that had to do with his appearance; it was far more subtle and complicated than that. It was his manner, the very intonation of his voice when he spoke either to Ellen or Lily herself. He approached them, for all his smooth politeness, as if they were, in the final analysis, creatures inferior to himself, creatures who should be delighted to grant his every whim. With Lily, so good-natured, so generous, he may have been right: with her cousin it was as Mrs. Callendar used to say, “autres choses.” The girl bristled with subdued anger. As they sat there, the three of them, smoking before the bright fire, she knew they were destined to hate each other.

Yet it was this very quality, so hauntingly familiar, that reminded her of Richard Callendar. He had not asked her if she loved him; he had taken it simply for granted that she should do as he wished. The memory, in spite of everything, made her miserable. She heard his voice again, more gentle and soft than the voice of the Baron, and saw his hands, fascinating and persuasive.

He was somewhere in this same damp white city on his wedding journey with Sabine.

* * * * *

Presently the Baron observed with a brusque, important air that he must be off: Madame Gigon summoned Jean to the school-room for his lesson, and the two cousins were left alone. Before the others they had carried on a sort of made-up conversation, suitable for the ears of strangers, and neither had spoken honestly nor fully. As Madame Gigon, guided by Jean and followed by the waddling dogs, disappeared round the corner of the stairs, Lily took off her hat and observed, “Well, now I suppose we can have a long ... long talk. Come up to my room where we’ll be alone.”

The family, again after so long a time, asserted itself.

It was a large room, closely resembling the one in which Madame Gigon had placed Ellen, save that it was even more luxurious and smelled faintly of scents and powders. There was a canopied bed and on the wall hung reproductions of four drawings by Watteau. It was not until Lily had removed her corsets and, clad in a peignoir of lace, had flung herself down on the bed that the sense of strain disappeared utterly.

“Sit there on the chaise longue,” she said to Ellen, “and let’s have a good talk. There’s so much to say.”

Ellen, stiff and severe in her mourning, sat down by the side of her glowing cousin and Lily, lying back among the pillows, appeared by contrast more lovely, more opulent than she had seemed an hour earlier. To her cousin, so changed since they had last met, so much more indifferent to such matters, there was an air of immorality and sensuousness in the room. Beside Lily she felt as lean, as spirited as a young greyhound.

“You know about Jean,” Lily observed casually. “You understand then why I did not insist on your coming to live with me. I was foolish perhaps ... but when the moment came there was always something which wouldn’t let me betray the secret....” She lighted a cigarette and lay back once more among the pillows. “I suppose it _was_ a secret,” she added, complacently.

“People talked, but no one knew anything.”

“No one knows anything here.... No one save Madame Gigon. They know less here because they haven’t so much time to think of other people’s affairs.” Slowly a smile crept over her face, from the rosy mouth up to the violet eyes. “Ah, wouldn’t they like to know in the Town?” But her voice was bitter.

Ellen smiled again. “It makes no difference. They say what they want to believe anyway.... They said that I ran away with Clarence because I was going to have a baby ... and I’ve never had it yet. It’s been a long while coming.”

“I wanted you to come ... always, but I was too lazy ever to come to the point. You can stay as long as you like and do as you please. This is a big house.... You need never see the rest of us if you don’t care to.” She spoke with the carelessness of one who was fabulously rich; there was a certain medieval splendor in her generosity. Ellen smiled again.

“Why do you smile?” her cousin asked.

“I was thinking that all this money comes out of the Town ... the same dirty old Town.”

“There’s satisfaction in that ... to think that people like Judge Weissmann are paying us rent.”

It was extraordinary how clearly the Town rose up before them. The thousands of miles which lay between made no difference. They belonged to the Town still, by a thousand ties. They were, each in her own way, American. All the years that Lily had lived in Paris could not alter the fact. She was extravagant as Americans are extravagant, content to live abroad forever as Americans are content to do. Yet all her wealth came out of America, out of the very factories in the dirty Town which they both despised. It was perhaps the Scotch blood in them that made them content wherever they saw fit to settle. In a strange country they would not, as the English do, strive to bring their native land with them; they would simply create a new world of their own. Their people have done it everywhere ... in St. Petersburg, in Constantinople, in Paris, in the Argentine and on the frontiers of Africa.

“And your husband,” began Lily. “Tell me about him.... I met him once, you know, coming out on the train to the West. He was going then to see a girl called....” She frowned slightly. “I’ve forgotten her name....”

“Seton,” murmured Ellen. “May Seton.” Lily was rousing memories now, which seemed far away and yet were faintly painful.

“Seton! That was it!... I’d never heard of them and it seemed to hurt him. I wrote you when I heard of his death. The letter must have passed you.”

“I never got it ... perhaps it’ll be forwarded.”

“Had he been ill long?” She must have wondered at the look in Ellen’s eyes. It was not a look of sorrow or desolation; rather it was a look of numb pain.

“He hadn’t been ill at all.” The girl frowned suddenly and looked out of the window. “All the same,” she continued, “you might have said he had been ill for a long time.” Then she rose and stood before the small panes looking out into the wet garden. “I’ve got to tell some one,” she said with an air of desperation. “You see....” And her voice became barely audible. “You see.... He killed himself.”

* * * * *

The veil was torn away now. Between them there remained no barrier. Each had made her confession, Lily concerning the child, Ellen concerning her husband, and in the torrent of emotion which engulfed them Lily sat up and drew her cousin down to the bed beside her. They both wept and each (with as little real cause) pitied herself.

Ellen told her story, punctuated by sobs, from the beginning. She confessed that she had never had any love for Clarence. She spoke of many things which, at the time of the tragedy, were not clear to her and which she had come to understand later during the hours of solitude on windswept decks. In the emotion of the moment she understood the whole affair even more clearly. She told Lily that she had tried, valiantly, to make Clarence happy. She had done her best to preserve his happiness and her own at the same time. There had come a time when this was no longer possible.

“Perhaps,” she said, when her sobbing had quieted a little, “it is not possible for two people to be completely happy together.”

If she had spoken all that was in her mind, she would have added, “When one of them is ambitious and a genius.” But this would have been preposterous because there was then no proof of such a thing. Another chapter of the tale she chose not to reveal. In all her torrent of sobbing and talk she never mentioned the name of Callendar.

When they had become more quiet, Lily kissed her and said, “You have been too unhappy. You must stay now with me ... forever, if you like. You must study and become a great musician. I am rich. I can help you.... If you won’t take the money, you can borrow it from me and pay me back when you are successful and famous....”

Lily rose languidly and brought a bottle of cologne and they both bathed their eyes. All the strangeness was gone now. Their tears, in the way of women, had brought them close to each other. The sun had come out and the little park was filled by its slanting rays. Belowstairs one of the tall windows opened and they heard on the gravel of the terrace the slow steps of blind Madame Gigon who, wrapped in an antiquated coat of fur and followed by the dogs, was moving up and down in the unaccustomed warmth. There was something in the sound which, as they listened, filled the room with the atmosphere of a conspiracy. For an instant the current of kinship ran swift and high, as high indeed as it had run in the old days when all the clan assembled for the annual feast at Shane’s Castle.

“She is growing feeble,” observed Lily. “Think of it. She’s eighty-five.”

Life was short. Only a little time before Madame Gigon had been a young widow come to the school of Mademoiselle Violet de Faux to teach, among others, an awkward young American called Julia Shane.

When Ellen had gone to her own room, she sat for a time before the fire, thinking, and slowly the face which she saw reflected in the dim old mirror began, though it was quite alone in the room, to smile back at her. It had not been difficult. It was all done now. The future was certain. She had gotten what was necessary, without asking for it; in some inexplicable fashion, quite without any planning, it had happened. She had not even been forced to say that all she had in the world were the seven francs that lay in the sunlight on the Louis Quinze console.

39

In this one fleeting instant life had been briefly a perfect and exquisite thing. In the great house, surrounded by beauty, by warmth and friendliness, the past and, even for a time, the future did not exist. It was a moment which could not have endured; with such a person as Ellen a moment of that sort might have been called a miracle to have happened at all. As the months passed the very comfort which surrounded her degenerated into a sort of dulness. After a time, Lily returned to her beloved south and there remained in the house only Ellen, Madame Gigon and Jean. The endless talk of Lily’s guardian, which in the beginning had seemed vaguely diverting, became in the end merely the garrulity of a childish old woman. But there were worse things to bear.

She soon discovered that Lily, in her indifference, had virtually given over the house to Madame Gigon, and the old woman, poverty-stricken until Lily appeared on her horizon in need of a companion and watchdog, now used it to make up for all the years she had spent alone in a single room in a Versailles pension. Her friends were coming and going constantly, at the most inconvenient times, an endless procession of dowdy widows and spinsters. It was their habit to fortify themselves in the great drawing-room at just the moment chosen by Ellen for her practising. This they did with an air of the utmost assurance, as if their great age in some fashion gave them precedence over all else in this world. Thus they would sit for hours talking volubly in a tongue which so far as Ellen was concerned might have been Greek or Roumanian. But gradually as she came to understand a word here and there, the mystery surrounding their impassioned conversation was dissipated, and out of the fog there emerged the prosaic fact that their excitement had no foundation. They became as wild over the price of cheese or the health of Criquette as if they had been engaged in a battle to preserve _la glorie de la patrie_. Yet they were all rich; the very fingers which they shook so violently in the excess of their excitement glittered with diamonds and emeralds. And presently, as her knowledge of French increased, Ellen came to the dismal realization that the bulk of their talk was concerned with gossip. Gathered in a cluster about the blind old woman, they tore reputations as they might have torn cheese cloth. The words “maîtresse” and “intrigue” leapt from the conference a score of times within a single afternoon. Heads wagged and crêpe flowed, (for all of them were so old that they were perpetually in mourning for a husband or a brother or sister; indeed, they went beyond this and mourned darkly the demise of the most remote cousins). Madame de Cyon, the youngest of the lot and the one whom Mrs. Callendar had mentioned so long ago, had a way of narrowing her green eyes and saying, “Tiens! Tiens!” over some choice morsel, with an air of sniffing a bad smell. There were times when Ellen felt that if she said “Tiens! Tiens!” another time she would strangle her. Madame de Cyon was Russian but no better than the rest. They were all, Ellen came to understand, like the women of the Town; they visited Madame Gigon because she was blind and did not go out, and the remainder of their time, it seemed, was spent in collecting morsels for the delectation of the old woman.

There was but one thing which diverted the stream of their gossip and this was the mention of the sacred name of Bonaparte. She gathered, after a time, that there was a Prince Bonaparte in whom the existence of all of them had found its core. She learned to her astonishment that they ignored the very existence of the Republic. A tottering old man, the son of a plumber’s daughter and a dubious prince who was a homicide (all this she gathered from their talk) was, to them, a shining figure invested with all the glory of the Corsican’s golden bees.

At length, when she could bear it no longer, Ellen had a piano brought in and placed in one of the great empty chambers in the gallery above the drawing-room, and there she played for hours in defiance of “le Prince” and his court of old women belowstairs. There were times when the music (especially the compositions of some of the hateful new composers) became so violent that it threatened to drown the gossip of Madame Gigon’s cronies. At such moments the blind old woman would raise her sightless eyes toward the ceiling and observe to the others, “That is Madame Shane’s cousin. She is a violent woman (une femme sauvage).... She suffers from an excess of élan.”

At which Madame de Cyon would wag her head and observe, “Tiens! Tiens! Perhaps if she had a lover it would help! A young widow like that....”

* * * * *

During the long months two things sustained her. One was, of course, the old passion for her music. The other was Jean. As they came to know each other, a warm and touching affection developed between them, for the boy, despite the good manners and the quiet grave charm born of his long association with older people, had in him a spark which the presence of his cousin fanned into a flame. The life he led was, to be sure, of a queer sort ... a life spent almost entirely within the walls of the beautiful old house with little company save old Madame Gigon, her fat dogs and the fussy music master who came twice a week to give him lessons. It was a somber, quiet life which changed only during the delirious summer months when, in company with his mother and old Madame Gigon, he went to stay in the country at Germigny l’Evec in the lodge of the park owned by Madame’s nephew, the Baron. There he could ride a pony, sometimes alone and sometimes following his mother and the Baron on their long rides at early morning through the damp forest on the opposite bank of the Marne. And there were the farmer’s boys for playmates.

But in winter everything was changed. Until his cousin came from America he played alone day after day in the little park dominated by the white pavilion. The fascination of having a cousin ... a real new cousin ... seemed likely to endure forever. Indeed the power of the novelty was so great that at times he slyly deserted old Madame Gigon and made his way secretly up the long stairs and along the gallery to sit on the floor outside Ellen’s door and listen, breathless, to the flood of music that welled up to fill all the house.

When Ellen took him walking in the Bois she did not, like his mother, walk in an indolent regal fashion; she moved rapidly, quite the way a person ought to walk, and she talked of the people they passed and sometimes even halted beside the pond and threw stones far out into the water.

The boy was, at that time, her only companion for, shut in by her ignorance of French and an incurable dislike for the stringy American students who sometimes sought her acquaintance, she had no opportunity for making friends. Yet she was content to be lonely, for she had always been so, save in two brief moments ... once when she had been overcome by the presence of Callendar and again when Lily had wept and embraced her. Jean worshiped her without claiming any part of her. He was, in this, like his mother, for Lily, in the wisdom and indolence of her nature, allowed Ellen to go her own way. It may have been that in this grain of wisdom lay the secret of her charm and her power even over the old women who came to gather about Madame Gigon’s chair and gossip. They succumbed to her like all the others, like the Baron....

There were times when the presence of César troubled Ellen. During all those months the first hatred she had for him failed to abate; she came to tolerate him, perhaps because she saw that it was necessary just as once it had been necessary to tolerate Mr. Wyck and the Bunces. She must have known that he worked against her. Yet in a strange, abstract fashion, she was able to understand the fascination of his hard and wiry masculinity. It was, of course, a thing which she herself could not have suffered for an instant, but she understood that to Lily it was a necessity. Beyond this point, however, her shrewd mind was unable to penetrate; it was impossible to fix the relationship of the pair. Lily never spoke of him, save in the most casual fashion. Indeed, Ellen, who could not bring herself to pry into such matters, never knew whether the Baron had been at Nice with her cousin or whether he had met her at the railway station. Madame Gigon spoke of him as her devoted nephew. She praised his virtues, and his constant presence at the house she interpreted as an interest in herself. At times Ellen could have cried out, “Rot! It’s not your nephew who’s supporting you and making you comfortable. It’s Lily. And it’s not you that he comes to see. It’s Lily.”

But she said nothing. The strangest thing of all was that she did not much care what their relationship might be. Once it might have disturbed her; now she looked upon it as a matter of no concern, a thing which had nothing to do with her. Yet there were moments in the evenings when, sitting with them in the long drawing-room, she felt vague, faint envy of her cousin. They came in the long silences when she would suddenly discover that Lily, so happy, so radiant, so lovely, in the long gowns of black velvet which she wore in the evening, was watching the Baron as he sat smoking his pipe, his feet stretched out before him toward the fire. The dogs adored him. He was the one person for whom they would desert Madame Gigon.

It was then that Ellen became conscious of her loneliness as a distant, almost physical pain. She learned to kill the pain. Usually she rose, lighted a cigarette, and sitting at the piano, fell to playing wild and boisterous music out of the music halls.

* * * * *

Miss Rebecca Schönberg did not abandon her. She came once or twice to the house, where her bright shiny eyes penetrated every corner. She inspected, absorbed Madame Gigon and, having exhausted the possibilities of the old woman, put her forever out of her mind. She would, no doubt, have found marvelous material in Lily and the Baron but, as chance had it, they were never present. She took Ellen with her to the theater and twice to the opera, once to hear the inevitable Louise and once to hear Götterdämmerung, with all the guttural power of its German diction ironed out into smooth, elegant French. They called it Le Crêpuscule des Dieux, a whimsy which caused Ellen endless mirth. And at the end of two months, the restless Jewess having placed Ellen with an excellent teacher of French, left the Ritz and set out to visit an aunt who was married to a rich Gentile merchant in Riga.

But before she left she said to Ellen, “When I return we will arrange some entertainments. You must know the right people. That is vastly important. You must be modern, because during the next ten years to be modern will be to be chic.”

It occurred to Ellen that Miss Schönberg, with remarkable speed, had undertaken the position of guide and messenger toward the heights of success. She was like a trainer who had taken in charge a new animal to teach it a whole set of tricks. She did not protest, because Rebecca Schönberg did not annoy her; on the contrary she was vastly amusing. In her restless energy there was a quality akin to the vitality of Ellen herself. They went everywhere; they saw everything; they absorbed the people about them, and returned late at night as fresh as they had started.

“Vitality,” observed Rebecca, as they lunched at the Ritz on the day she left for Riga, “is nine-tenths of success. With one grain of genius and nine of vitality, any one can succeed.”

As she made this observation, she regarded Ellen with an intense and speculative scrutiny. The girl was looking about her with a naïve interest in the people who sat near them. Her whole manner was one of a vast wonder, as if she thought, “I, Ellen Tolliver, lunching at the Ritz in Paris. It is not possible that I am awake!” Miss Schönberg must have seen that she was still a bit crude, still not quite free of the multitude, but she had an unmistakable air, a certain distinction born in her which had to do with the superb poise of the head, the slight arch of the nose and the line of the throat. It had been sharpened and polished mysteriously during the few months in Paris. The clothes were right for her style ... simple almost to severity, fitting the tall, strong, energetic body to perfection. They came from dressmakers, Miss Schönberg reflected, who knew their business. Madame Shane must have had taste to have guided the girl so well. A touch here and there and she would be perfect. What she lacked was a sense of the bizarre which the public expected from artists. There was plenty of time to accomplish that....

“As I was saying,” continued Miss Schönberg, over her _coupe marron_, “vitality is everything. I once saw Mary Garden at a rehearsal on a stage cluttered by the jumbled scenery of Pelléas and Melisande. There were scores of people on the stage ... carpenters, musicians, a director, journalists ... all alive and moving about, but one didn’t see them. One saw only Mary moving back and forth, in and out among them. No one else existed. It was a case of vitality. She is ninety-nine per cent. vitality ... nothing else. She hypnotizes the public. Why, she has even adapted the French language to suit her own ideas.”

The men and women who sat at the adjoining tables must have found them an interesting pair; they were both so neat, so trim, so _raffiné_. It was not without reason that more than one person, in the years that followed, spoke of Ellen as resembling a fine greyhound. The one, it was plain, was a Jewess and very likely, if one could judge from the bright shrewd eyes, a clever one. The other might have been anything ... Russian, French, American, Hungarian; it was impossible to say. And she was young and handsome.

“You must exercise,” continued Miss Schönberg, “so as not to lose your figure or your vitality.”

* * * * *

So after Miss Schönberg had gone, Ellen took up riding, a thing she had not done since the days when, as a wild young girl, she had ridden her grandfather’s horses over fences and ditches without a saddle. And in the Bois, as in the Ritz, people came to notice her, that she rode magnificently and was dressed by the best of habit makers. Presently, Lily’s friend Paul Schneidermann, who sometimes called at the house in the Rue Raynouard to see young Jean, took to riding with her. He was a languid young man, devoted to the arts, who led a sybaritic life, but he came presently to rise at dawn in order to ride by her side through the dewy park.

In those days, she did not forget her mother; on the contrary she wrote to her more frequently than she had ever done, and her letters were real letters, filled with the details of her progress. She wrote that Sanson had placed her with the proper teachers, that she had been to see the great Philippe and that everything had been arranged for her to work under him. She described Rebecca Schönberg.

Sometimes in the letters that came from the Town, Ellen discerned a note of subdued and passionate jealousy which had, somehow, taken the place of her mother’s old distrust of Lily. She understood all that well enough: Hattie Tolliver hated Lily for giving her daughter all those things which she had herself desired so earnestly to give. But there was in Hattie’s letters no sense of remoteness, not the faintest note of her having yielded the possession of her daughter. She treated Ellen still as a little girl. She saw her still as she had seen her on that last afternoon, a stiff, proud, awkward girl carrying her skates as she stepped through the door of the Tolliver house into the bright sunlight on her way to Walker’s Pond.

40

It was the death of old Julia Shane which set in motion the next event of importance to the Tollivers. Things happened like that in their family. For a time all would go forward, much as a wave moving in a great smooth swell approaches a reef, until presently some event interrupted and the courses of their lives had all to be redirected. The old woman was, perhaps, the center, the one who at that moment held all the skeins in her withered bony fingers. She chose at last to die, and so brought Lily back to the Town and freed her niece, the faithful Hattie.

Together they cared for old Julia; together they sat by the side of her bed and slowly, under the circumstances, being so close to death, there grew up between them a new and unaccustomed affection. It was Lily herself who, a day or two before her mother died, told Hattie that the old story about her having had a child was true. The existence of Jean shocked Mrs. Tolliver less than might have been expected, less even than she herself had expected it to do, perhaps because always deep in her heart she was certain that Lily had had a child born out of wedlock. It was old gossip, which she had endeavored always to crush, yet it was gossip which she knew had its foundations in truth. She knew it, always, just as she knew the days when it was certain to rain or to be windy. She could not have explained the feeling, save that she had always distrusted Lily’s charm. One could not be like Lily and still be a good woman....

For the sake of morality, she made known with an acute frankness her disapproval of such conduct, and when this had been done in conscientious fashion she came to the subject nearest to her heart, the question which interested her more profoundly at that moment than anything in the world.

It happened a day or two after the funeral when the old Julia, dressed for the last time in her mauve taffeta, was borne through the Flats past Mills made silent by the long awaited strike, up to the bleak hill where they buried her by the side of her brother-in-law, Jacob Barr, the pioneer.

The two cousins, Lily and Hattie, sat together in the gloomy drawing-room before a fire of cannel coal, surrounded by pictures which stood in piles against the wall and rosewood furniture wrapped in ghostly cheesecloth. Shane’s Castle, they both knew sadly, would no longer be a source of talk and excitement for the Town. Harvey Seton need no longer view it distantly with all the cold horror of a Calvinist. Its history was ended; there would never be within its walls another gathering of the clan.

The gentle melancholy which filled the old house had, it seemed, an effect upon the two women. Lily, clad in a loose gown of black velvet, sat watching her cousin with a curious look of speculation. She was as lovely as she had always been, so lovely, so gentle, so amiable that the Spartan Hattie in heart could not believe that she had changed her scandalous way of living. The older woman was, as usual, busy; it was as if her tireless fingers could cease only in sleep or in death. She sat now mending a bit of old lace which they had found while ransacking the vast attics of Shane’s Castle.

“I will mend it and send it to Ellen,” she said. “It is fine lace, better than anything she will be able to get in Paris.”

Lily smiled, perhaps because Hattie thought so little of Paris and the laces it might offer, perhaps because it seemed to her that lace was so wildly inappropriate to Ellen. What was lace to a creature so proud and fierce, so ruthless? For she had discovered what the others had not known and what Hattie, even in the moments when her daughter hurt her most savagely, would never believe--that Ellen _was_ ruthless.

“I am trusting you,” she murmured over the lace, “to look out for Ellen. She is young and even if she is a widow she knows little of the world.”

Lily smiled again. She thought, “As if it were possible for any man to seduce Ellen unless she chose to be seduced. She was born knowing the world!”

“Do you think she knows her way about with you away from her?”

Lily leaned forward and touched her cousin’s strong, skilful fingers. “Don’t fret over Ellen,” she said. “Why, Ellen is safer in Paris than I am. Nothing can ever happen to Ellen....” She bent her head and the warm color came into her cheeks. “I mean nothing of the sort that could happen to me. Why, Ellen’s complete.... You don’t understand how independent she is. She could go into the middle of Africa and land on her feet. She has no need of friends or guardians. Why, she’s never even homesick.”

Hattie’s fingers paused in their work. “Never?” she asked in a low voice. “Never?”

And Lily, understanding that she had hurt the proud woman, hastened to add, “Oh, not that she doesn’t want to see you all. She speaks of you constantly.... She wants some day to have you near her always.... You see, now she has to work.... I don’t think you understand how ambitious she is.”

Slowly, as Lily spoke, the cloud passed a little from Mrs. Tolliver. When her cousin had finished, she raised her head and said in a low voice, “Oh, I know all that. I’ve been thinking about it all lately ... thinking a great deal. Only I never understood why it was she never came home before she went to you.”

“There were reasons,” said Lily. “Good reasons.... One was that she hadn’t the money and wouldn’t ask you for it. She doesn’t know that I discovered that ... but I did ... I know just how much money she had. When she came to me, there were only seven francs left.... D’you know how much that is? It’s a little more than a dollar. That’s all she had left. A girl who would take such a risk is not likely to fail. You’ll see her famous some day, Hattie. You can be sure of that. You’ll be proud of her.”

The fingers were busy again with the lace, and Lily knew suddenly that she had hurt Mrs. Tolliver again, this time in quite a different fashion. She had touched the old pride that had to do with money ... that curious, hard vein of pride so incomprehensible to Lily who had never thought of money, save only as something that was always at hand to make the wheels of life run smoothly.

“To think,” murmured Mrs. Tolliver, “that there wasn’t enough money to bring her home to me.” A tear slipping down the worn cheeks dropped into the web of old lace and Lily hastened to speak.

“It wasn’t only that,” she said. “Money would have made little difference. She couldn’t have come back.... She didn’t dare to come. You see, she was discouraged.... How can I say it? She told me the whole story. She said that if she had turned back then she would have been lost forever. She would have turned into a pitiful old maid like Eva Barr. She could never have married any one in the Town. There was no one with enough spirit. The ones with spirit ... enough spirit for her, all leave the Town.” Then after a silence: “You see the death of her husband was so tragic.... It hurt her.”

For a second Mrs. Tolliver raised her head and faced the beautiful cousin. “She never loved him.... I know that.”

Lily, a little frightened, kept silent for a time. She had come close to betraying the awful secret. “No,” she said, presently. “I suppose she didn’t love him. He was a creature without spirit ... a nice man, but no mate for an eagle.”

“You knew him?” asked Hattie. “Where? You never told me that.”

“I met him on the train ... the last time I came here. I think,” she added with a faint smile, “that he was a little _épris_ of me ... a little taken by me. I know the signs.... But he was terribly frightened ... timid like a rabbit.”

And then Mrs. Tolliver came round again to the old observation. “I always said he wasn’t good enough for her. I couldn’t see why she had anything to do with him.”

“Ah,” said Lily. “You don’t know your own daughter yet ... Hattie. He helped her to escape.”

But she knew that Hattie would never believe such a thing.

* * * * *

It was a strange circumstance that Lily--the Lily whom Hattie had always feared and distrusted--became in those days the one to whom the vigorous woman turned for comfort and companionship. Somehow the indolent Lily, so filled with understanding and knowledge of the world, served as a bond between the mother and the daughter in far off Paris. She succeeded in softening all the wounds made by Ellen in the abrupt notes which came with an efficient regularity, for Lily possessed a great power in such matters; it was a power which had more to do with the sound of her warm, low voice than with any logic in the arguments she used. Her arguments were neither logical nor profound; usually they were only observations as to the shyness of Ellen in all the range of affection, and the fierce ambition that tormented her.

“You will understand some day,” she said, “that all she is doing is more for you than for herself. It is because she wants you to be proud of her.”

“I don’t care about that....” Hattie would say over and over again. “Not very much. But I don’t want her to escape me forever. I couldn’t bear that. She’s different from Fergus. He is warm and shows his love. But there are times when I’m afraid I’ll lose Ellen forever.”

And Lily, in the depths of her placid mysterious soul, knew that here again it was a matter of possession ... the same possession which the Baron must always have over herself, the possession which Ellen, without willing it, had exercised over poor Clarence. Hattie would not abandon her claim to her children. She could not say to Hattie, without hurting her, that her daughter was a creature whom none had possessed or ever would possess even quietly, secretly, as Lily knew that she possessed the Baron, despite all his boisterous show of domination.

41

On a gray winter morning early in the year 1912, the Tolliver family stood on the platform of the Town station, a dirty affair covered with soot and shameful in a community so prosperous. There was no new station because none could be built so long as Shane’s Castle stood upon the only site worthy of so grandiose a building as the Town had planned. The old woman was dead but her daughter Lily refused to sell, and Hattie Tolliver, standing now on the platform with the air of a field marshal surrounded by his troops, took satisfaction in this knowledge. Her family was on the retreat now before the onslaught of the Mills and she herself stood in command of the tiny rear guard.

“They’d give a lot for that land,” she remarked to her husband. “I hope Lily will keep it. She doesn’t need the money.”

It was her parting shot at the Town. She stood now, free of it forever, surrounded by her husband, her son Robert and the everlasting Gramp. There was money in her pocket, money which Aunt Julia had left her, and so there were no perils ahead for a little time at least. And in her heart there were no qualms over leaving the place in which she had been born and lived a life filled with petty cares and worries. She regarded it, on the contrary, as a malignant desert from which two of her children had fled as soon as they were able, a pest-hole filled with factories and furnaces which had ruined her husband and forced her into poverty. She left nothing behind her for which she had the faintest affection; for the dog was dead long since of old age. Out of a family whose founder had settled the wilderness on this spot, only one remained ... the hard and pious Eva Barr. They were all gone, the uncles, the brothers, the cousins, the sisters ... all of them ... dead now or gone out into the world.

Of this world, her ideas were still somewhat vague, for she never had been outside the borders of the state: it was perhaps a great, roaring place full of adventure, or again it might be very much like the county. It really made very little difference; she was free now, with money in her pocket, setting out at last in pursuit of her children.

A little way off, wrapped in a shawl and the coonskin coat, Gramp Tolliver sat peering indifferently through the fog that had settled over the Flats. In the depths of his heart, he respected his enemy. She stood there in command of the party, beside her son and her husband, so self-assured, so utterly fearless of the future. She might have been, he thought, a prophetess, a leader in an Old Testament migration....

Only a week earlier there had been a skirmish between them over the matter of his possessions. Hattie had been for leaving them behind altogether with much of the family stuff; she had been for brushing aside carelessly all his shelves of books, his beloved rocking chair and the ponderous, antiquated desk. He would, she told him, be able to find all the books he wanted in the libraries of so great a city as New York. (As if, indeed, books out of libraries were the same as his own in which he had written along the borders such remarks as “excellent,” “penetrating,” or “tosh,” and “rubbish”!)

Gramp had learned long ago the great power which lay in simple inertia; by taking no course of action, one became the possession of other people. He knew that they could not cast him aside like a piece of old furniture. He was a relative, a father; and one could not abandon a father. So he waited, and when Hattie threatened not to send his books and chair and desk along with him, he had refused to go at all and threatened her wickedly with the awful scandal of staying behind and entering the poorhouse. He knew the keeper well, he said (lying) and there at least they would let him keep his books.

In the end he had won. The desk, the rocking chair, and ten cases of books had been shipped ahead. With those things he would be content. He would be able again to raise his sanctum somewhere among the buildings of New York.

“The train is late,” observed Hattie with irritation. “Why is it that it is never on time?”