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.

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?”

She spoke with the air of an experienced traveler,--Hattie who had never

been outside the state. She begrudged every moment that she stayed in

the Town as a moment which kept her out of the future.

Bidding her not to worry and observing that eventually the train would

come as all trains did, her husband turned away and began to walk

silently up and down the worn bricks of the platform--the same bricks,

he remembered, that he had trod on the night he set out upon his futile

pursuit of his daughter.

It was one of those moments which occur sometimes between lover and

mistress, between husband and wife, between those who have loved each

other for years--a moment when it is impossible for the one to tell the

other what is in his heart because it is quite beyond understanding. He

could not say to her that he was sad because he was leaving so much that

he had loved; she, his own wife who loathed it all so deeply, would

think him a little mad. He could not say that he was sad because he

would never again see the pleasant farms of the county, never again talk

with his cronies of the Grand Circuit and quarrel about Pop Geers and

how he had driven his latest race. Never again would he have those long

arguments over horses in hotel bars and parlors during racing week,

never again see the sap running from the trees in maple sugar time,

never again talk with old Bayliss and Judge Wilkins about their

Guernseys and Shorthorns. He was leaving a world which, despite all the

disappointments it had brought him, he loved. There were friends in this

world which it pained him to believe that he would never meet again.

He was lonely in a way he had never known until now.

For a moment, at the far end of the platform, the gentle man halted and

fell to regarding his wife and his father with a strange and distant

expression, as if they were strangers to him. The one was so restless,

the other so indifferent. The one had love only for her children, the

other had love for nobody and nothing. No, they could not understand. It

was easy for them....

Far off a whistle sounded and he saw his wife hasten for the fifth time

to put all the luggage in order and pry old Gramp loose from his throne

of indifference upon the baggage truck. At the sight he turned and as he

moved, walking slowly toward them over the worn bricks, it occurred to

him that it was Ellen whom they were all pursuing and that he was being

dragged along with all the others.

He knew then what he had known before--that they would never recapture

her. She was gone forever.

* * * * *

From his eminence on the baggage truck old Gramp had been meditating the

selfishness of Julia Shane. She had left Hattie a fat sum of money,

enough to escape, but she had kept it until she died, allowing Hattie to

live for years on the very edge of poverty. Poor Hattie! She never saw

the reason; she never understood that the old woman had kept her poor so

that she might have her by her side as illness and old age claimed her.

It was poverty that gave Julia Shane possession over her niece, and she

had guarded the possession until the day her will was read, long after

she had grown cold in her grave on the bleak hill above the Town. She

was beyond help from Hattie now, and so, when she could keep her niece

no longer, she had set her free.

The train screeched over the crossing, through the mills and into the

station and Hattie, all agitation and worry now, jarred the old man

loose from his meditation and steered him in the direction of their car.

Five minutes passed and the great locomotive with a series of demoniacal

snorts pulled the train out of the station into the unknown. It carried

an old man, a middle-aged woman, her mild husband and a boy. It was the

last time that any of them ever saw the Town that bore the name of

Hattie’s grandfather.

42

The house in Paris to which Sabine and Richard Callendar returned after

their honeymoon stood in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. It belonged,

properly speaking, to Thérèse herself, an enormous florid house of white

stone built in the baroque German style which came to dominate the new

parts of Paris in the early part of the twentieth century. In all

honesty it could be said that Thérèse was not responsible either for its

architecture or its decoration; the house came to her in partial payment

for the loans she had made a year or two before the mysterious collapse

of the international banking firm, Wolff and Simon. It had been the

property of Wolff, and Thérèse, examining it one day shortly after the

transfer to her possession, decided that it would suit her admirably as

a _pied-à-terre_ in Paris. Instead of turning it into cash she kept it

and used it, unchanged, during her visits.

Wolff, in the heyday of his prosperity (long before he shot himself

after fleeing half-way across Europe from such tender creditors as

Thérèse) had fancied himself as a collector of art. The house remained

as a monument to his bad judgment in this matter; in a German fashion he

had absorbed quantities of sentimental pictures and rococo bronzes that

hung or stood on marble pedestals between enormous second-rate

tapestries. All pieces of any value had vanished long ago when Wolff, in

a frantic effort to save the collapse of his firm, had summoned a dealer

who stripped the place of its Degas, its Rodins, and even the Seurat and

the Rousseau which a mistress had led Wolff into buying against his will

because she thought it chic to “buy moderns.” All that remained were

remnants, grandiose, vulgar and sentimental, among which Thérèse

Callendar moved and lived with as great an indifference as she displayed

toward the solid house on Murray Hill. The vast mass of marble and

tapestry satisfied, it seemed, an Oriental longing for pomp and

splendor. All that was Greek in her and much that was French exulted in

this phantasmagoria of marble, red plush and mirrors.

The house depressed Sabine from the very moment she crossed the

threshold and beheld with a shudder the expanse of tesselated floor, the

red plush stair rail and the drawing-room beyond with its modern gilt

furniture set upon an authentic Savonnerie beneath sentimental German

pictures of the Dresden school. Unlike her mother-in-law she had an

Anglo-Saxon feeling that a home should be a place in which one was

surrounded by warm and beautiful things. To Thérèse Callendar a house

was a house. She owned houses in London, New York, Paris and

Constantinople. A house was simply four walls within which one found

rich food and soft beds during the brief weeks between journeys from one

capital to another; and so the houses she possessed, like the one in the

Avenue du Bois and the one on Murray Hill, came to have the indifferent

air of great caravanseries. The only rooms which might have attained the

dignity of the word “home” were those occupied by the concierges and the

caretakers.

* * * * *

It was in this house, after the turbulence of her honeymoon, that Sabine

found the time to analyze, with all her passion for such things, the

exact character of her position. The process began during the first week

when her husband, a little gruff over her dislike for the place, left

her a great deal in solitude. She found that he expected her, during the

day, to amuse herself; at night he was devoted enough, but the days

clearly were to be his to be spent among his friends of the Jockey Club

and elsewhere. The afternoons she passed languidly in a sitting room

which adjourned their bed-chamber and had once served as a boudoir for

the same mistress who led Wolff into buying a Seurat.

Sabine understood perfectly the character of the room; indeed, she found

amusement in reconstructing from the evidence furnished by the atrocious

house, the character and history of the suicide banker; and, though she

never knew it, she came miraculously close to the truth.

The former boudoir had a marble floor on which were spread a tiger skin

from India and a white bearskin from Siberia. There were mirrors on

every side; the lady who had once occupied the room could not have

turned her head without encountering a dozen reflections of her pink

voluptuous body. (Wolff, being a German and a Jew, was certain to choose

that sort of mistress.) The walls were covered with black satin on which

had been painted a Parisian decorator’s version of Tokyo in cherry

blossom time. The chaise longue, fashioned like an Egyptian couch with

carved lions’ heads at both ends, stood almost hidden beneath great

piles of cushions of fanciful design and color ... mauve, yellow, green,

crimson and black, all decorated with a profusion of tassels and gold

lace. Lying upon it Sabine gazed at her innumerable reflections and

thought that being a lady was much more satisfactory than being a

demi-mondaine; only to laugh aloud the very next moment at the picture

of her mother-in-law in respectable black satin and jet moving

complacently about amid such vulgar and guilty splendor.

But all her thoughts were not amusing ones. For a bride, they were

remarkably cynical and disillusioned. She was troubled by the change

which had come over Callendar since their marriage ... a change of which

she had become aware almost at the moment she turned away from the altar

of St. Bart’s. Being the wife of Richard Callendar, she understood, was

not the same as being his friend. This new relationship had altered

everything. As a friend she might have found him satisfactory until the

day of her death; as a husband ... she did not know. She was puzzled. It

seemed to her that in gaining a husband, she had lost a friend.

She understood, quite coldly and without conceit, that she was much more

clever than most women of her age. She was not silly; she had few

illusions. Nor was she, perhaps, romantic; though of this she could not

be so certain.

It puzzled her that in becoming the wife of Richard Callendar, she had

forfeited so quickly the old understanding, the habit they had of

exchanging jests and of mocking people in the manner of naughty school

children. She had tried from the first to revive the old intimacy, but

when he failed to respond to her sallies and regarded her with a queer

look of disapproval, she had grown depressed. It was as if the new

intimacy, so intensely physical with a man like Callendar, had killed

the old; as if by becoming his wife she had attained a position

immeasurably remote from that of his friend.

Would he, she wondered, treat a mistress in this fashion, as if she were

an institution? And an institution over which he had complete authority?

* * * * *

It was not that she thought him in love with her. Reflecting now with

some bitterness, she knew why he had married her. From his point of

view, the time had come for him to marry; she was suitable, and he must

have known that a woman so clear-headed would cause him no difficulties,

no scenes, no unpleasantnesses. His mother had desired it because she

liked Sabine and because it increased the already vast fortune for which

she cared so tenderly. Lately, when they dined out together, she had

come to understand even more--that he had perhaps chosen her because she

made the best of herself, because she was a woman of spirit who, on

entering a room, made an impression. There was in Callendar a strange

sort of vanity which demanded satisfaction, a vanity which was, perhaps,

another and a masculine manifestation of his mother’s passionate sense

of property. It would have been impossible for him to have married a

woman, no matter how pretty she might have been, who was simply

commonplace, sweet and insipid. He demanded in his wife an element of

the spectacular. He had devoted himself to the tawny Lorna Vale, to the

black and glittering Mrs. Sigourney, and to that strange, uncivilized

musician from the middle west. About them all, there had been a

spectacular quality, an undercurrent of fierce vitality, of outward

distinction from the mob which appeared to have fascinated him.

She did not flatter herself that he had married her through desire; yet

from the moment of their marriage he had been passionate after a fashion

which shocked her. It was confusing to find that a man who was so polite

and indifferent, so free from the little tendernesses which, to be

honest, she had never expected, could at times display a passion so

fierce and unexpected. It was as if in some way, love, passion,

desire--she could not in his case define it precisely--were isolated, a

thing apart.

* * * * *

There were reasons enough why she had married him. He was a great match;

women would have desired him even if he had not been rich. And, she

reflected with astonishing coldness, to have won him in the face of so

much competition was a triumph worth paying for with much unhappiness.

It was a victory over women who hated her and had sought with all the

bag of their nasty feminine tricks to outwit her. She had married him

too because she had come very nearly to the conclusion that she could

never fall passionately in love with any man and that, therefore, it was

far better to choose an interesting husband than a dull one. It was

impossible, she felt, for love to survive such a passion as hers for

dissection and analysis; love could not stand being pinned down and

pulled apart. She did not then expect great love, and for the rest of

it, Callendar had fascinated her as no other man had ever done, because

he had always eluded her, just as he was eluding her now that he was her

husband. In a sense, he offered her material vigorous enough to last a

lifetime.

More than once in the midst of such reflections there returned to her

the memory of the night when the raw young creature, whom she now

thought of as “that musician,” had fainted. She remembered how, on this

occasion, she had regarded Callendar minutely as he stood, his hands

clenching the back of a chair, watching the naked Burmese dancer swaying

to the insidious rhythm of tom-tom and flageolet. She remembered how the

dancer and the barbaric music had shocked her a little as being wildly

out of place in the big stuffy drawing-room. It was music which to her

meant very little save that it was mildly exciting. Upon Callendar and

his mother it had produced the most astonishing effect. Could it be that

in this lay the clue alike to his fascination and to her failure to

fathom that obscure thing which people called his soul? Though he had

been her husband, even her lover, for a long time, she knew him no

better than she had known him on the night of his mother’s absurd

soirée.

And lying in that preposterous boudoir that had once belonged to the

mistress of Wolff, she found herself admitting that slowly and certainly

he was gaining complete possession of her imagination. It troubled her

because she valued above all else in the world her own aloofness; so

long as she did not lose her sense of being a spectator, no one could

hurt her, not even her own husband. It troubled her too because she

could not be certain whether this new interest had any relation to love

or whether it had its roots in a sort of perverse attraction,

fundamentally intellectual in quality ... an attraction which carried an

element of the sensual hitherto entirely foreign to her nature. Day

after day she found herself smiling over the thought that this sensual

attraction should have been a little shocking and was not. In one sense

he had overwhelmed her. He was a cruel, a passionate lover. If she had

been less intelligent, more innocent, more sentimental, he might have

wounded her very soul; but the curse which made romantic love impossible

also saved her. Never, for more than a passing moment, had he been able

to dissipate her awful awareness.

He had come to her, after all, from Lorna Vale, from Mrs. Sigourney,

perhaps even from that American girl (though of this she could not be

certain) and, doubtless, from many other women. So much experience, she

understood, made him dangerous to any woman possessed of curiosity.

* * * * *

During those first weeks in Paris, it amazed Sabine to find that her

husband knew so few of his own countrymen; he told her that most

Americans who chose to live in Paris were either silly or depraved and

so revealed for the first time the fact that he did not consider himself

American. He became sulky when she asked him to dine with a school

friend of hers whose husband chose to live in Paris.

“I know her husband,” he answered in contempt. “He is an ass who tries

to live like the French. He’s not a Frenchman. His money comes out of a

New England shoe factory.”

But he went all the same, perhaps because she managed to convey to him

without saying it, that he was neglecting her. During the day she spent

a great deal of time with friends and acquaintances, mostly women who

had married foreigners of one sort or another. In their company she went

from shop to shop buying an endless number of clothes. The same taste

which caused her to shudder at the monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois

led her to love clothes passionately. She knew too that beautiful

clothes satisfied the strain of vanity in her husband which demanded a

wife who was dressed with taste and distinction. She had begun already

to plan how she might attract and keep him.

One evening, while they were dressing for the Opera, he said to her as

she came out of the boudoir and faced him, “It is true what Jacques said

at the club to-day. It takes the Parisian to make the clothes and the

American to wear them. The Americans are the best dressed women in the

world.”

And he looked at her in such a way that she grew warm suddenly in the

knowledge that her figure was superb, that her shoulders were

marvelously white and beautiful, and that her clothes were perfect.

Until lately she had dressed, like most American women, for the sake of

other women; now she understood that, without knowing it, she had been

dressing of late to please a man, because she had found one who

understood the beauty and importance of clothes. There was, despite all

her other doubts, great satisfaction in that.

She discovered too that his friends were not among the Americans and the

English but among the French and the Russians. She found herself, night

after night, at dinners watching him as he stood, straight, dark and

handsome, his queer gray eyes wrinkled a little with laughter, talking

to some friend who was a foreigner, and at such moments she was aware of

his great difference from her own people. He was, in some obscure

fashion, linked with that preposterous boudoir and its florid

decorations. Perhaps, secretly, he really liked the awful house as much

as his mother liked it.

She saw too, with the green eyes which took in everything, that the

women about her were intensely conscious of him, and she knew then that

she had been at the same time lucky and tragically unlucky. It would be

so easy for him ... a man of so much intelligence and a beauty like that

of a fine animal.

* * * * *

Toward the end of the first winter, a day or two after she had made

certain that she was to have a baby, she interrupted her shopping long

enough to have lunch at the Ritz. She had a table, alone, in one corner

of the big room and, having no one to talk with her, she fell to

observing the types at the other tables and reflecting upon the

vulgarity and self-conscious glitter which marked the patrons of such

hotels the world over. So she was startled when she found that the

personality of some one who entered the room at that moment had the

power of distracting her.

Two women came in together and stood for a time surveying the room. The

one (it was she who was disturbing) was tall, slender and handsome,

dressed smartly in a black suit with a black fur. The other, plainly a

Jewess (who understood perfectly the manipulation of head-waiters) was

small, with a ferrety, good-natured face and an energetic, chattering

manner. They took a table at a little distance so that Sabine was able

to watch them.

In the beginning, as she realized that there was some reason for her

having noticed the pair, she became aware of a sense of familiarity in

the taller woman. Then, as she watched them, the reason became quite

clear. It was the American girl ... the musician, in Paris and in the

Ritz of all places, and no longer dowdy but handsomely dressed!

By long established precedent, Sabine made no move toward approaching

the newcomer. It was her habit to avoid involving herself with too many

people; such a course made life far too tiresome and complicated. She

had known the girl well enough, but there was no point now in renewing

the acquaintance; indeed, it seemed idiotic even to consider the idea.

Vaguely, she reflected, it was a good idea to leave what was well enough

alone.

But the old, insatiable curiosity had been aroused; she found herself

puzzled as to the presence of Ellen ... (Tolliver, that was her name)

... in Paris. She had been poor. She had been, she told Sabine during

those stark conversations in the house on Murray Hill, hindered by a

hundred obstacles. Yet here she was, in Paris, dressed handsomely in

clothes which the appraising eye of Sabine told her had come from one of

the best establishments, probably Worth or Chanel. Sabine was curious

too regarding the whereabouts of the husband ... the husband whom she

had once mistaken very stupidly for the girl’s lover. And slowly, in the

midst of the noisy room filled with a fantastic assortment of people,

there rose in her memory a picture of that vulgar apartment the Babylon

Arms, and a glimpse as they opened the door of the tiny top floor flat,

of a mild little man in shirt sleeves. What had become of him?

She remembered too the confidences which she had exchanged with her

mother-in-law in the days when the young musician seemed so near to

upsetting their carefully laid plans. Mrs. Callendar had mentioned the

mild little man, saying, “I’m certain the girl doesn’t care a fig for

him. She’s tied to him by pity. That’s all. But we can be thankful for

him. He stands between her and Richard.”

Where was the little man to whom she was tied by pity?

* * * * *

Any one noticing Sabine as she made ready to leave the dining room might

easily have taken her for an adventuress. She drew her veil over her

face and holding her fur almost up to her eyes, she hastened out, taking

care on the way that her back was toward the tall girl and the busy

little Jewess. In the battle between an overwhelming curiosity and a

vague instinct of fear, it was fear which, unaccountably, won the

victory.

As her motor, very small and very expensive, sped away along the Rue de

Rivoli and across the white spaces of the Place de la Concorde into the

Avenue des Champs Elysées, Sabine succumbed to an inexplicable sense of

depression. It occurred to her that she did not really know whether the

girl had ever been the mistress of her husband. She could not even be

certain that Callendar had ever asked Ellen Tolliver to be his wife.

Thérèse Callendar had the word of the girl that there had been nothing;

yet with Callendar, it was impossible to know. If he had asked her to

marry him, it must have been but a step toward seducing her from her

husband, the mild little man. It did not occur to Sabine that with two

women a man might be two quite different persons.

The motor sped smoothly along the asphalt past the Elysée Palace, around

the Arc de Triomphe and on toward the huge house in the Avenue du Bois.

It might be, she thought, that Callendar himself knew the girl was in

Paris. It might even be that he had arranged it for her to be there.

And again Sabine reflected that in her good fortune there was a tragic

element of bad luck.

Callendar came in late for tea. She heard the footman speaking to him as

he came through the vast hall across the tesselated floor. She waited

for him, sitting behind the silver tea things in the small sitting room

at the back of the house, and as he entered she was seized again by the

disturbing fear of losing herself. He kissed her, casually, and said,

“Well, have you had a busy day?”

“Nothing.... I went shopping with Madeleine and lunched alone at the

Ritz.”

She might easily have added, “And whom do you think I saw there?” But

she did not. On the contrary, she said, “It’s a funny show ... the

Ritz.... And you?... What have you done?”

She did not hear his answer, because her attention was swallowed up by a

sharp sense of his presence ... a vivid image of the dark face and the

fine, muscular hand as he raised his silk kerchief in a familiar gesture

to stroke his mustaches. In the back of her mind a small voice told her

that it was perilous and awful to have such emotions.

She poured his tea but he did not drink it.

“I’ll have a glass of port,” was his reply. And then, “I had luck

to-day. I won eleven thousand francs at baccarat ... playing with Henri

and Posselt, the Russian.”

“Good,” was her reply, and again it was not what she might have said.

This gambling worried her. It was not that he would bring them to

poverty by it; that was almost impossible. But there was in her mind a

feeling of disgust at the picture of men spending five hours of daylight

in gambling. She tried to reproach herself by the thought that the idea

was American and provincial. But she understood why his mother sometimes

reproached him for not thinking more of his business. (Always he

retorted that she liked business and he did not.)

There was silence and presently Sabine said, “I wonder, Dick, if we

can’t do something about this house ... either take one of our own or

clear out some of this rubbish.”

“It’s very comfortable.... There’s every luxury.”

She laughed. “Too much luxury.... I feel at times like a kept woman.

Wolff had it for his mistress.... I’m sure he did.”

Callendar smiled. “That’s true,” he replied. “Some of it is very bad,

but can’t we stick it out until spring? We’ll go to the country then or

to England for a time.”

She had spoken of the matter before and the answer had always been the

same. She now revived the discussion without hoping for any solution;

she wanted to know whether he really liked it, whether he was really

linked in some way to the extravagance of that awful boudoir. Watching

him as she spoke, she believed that he did.

For a time they smoked in silence and then Sabine, crushing out the ash

of her cigarette, observed with a magnificent air of indifference, “I

wonder what has become of that American girl ... the musician. You

remember, ‘Miss Tolliver’ was her name.”

She saw that he looked at her sharply and then, disarmed by her

indifference, that his face assumed an expression which matched her own.

“I don’t know. I suppose she’s still in New York. She was very

talented.”

“She planned to come to Paris some day. If she does, it would be a nice

thing to do to look her up.”

Her husband smiled before he answered her, a quiet amused smile such as

he used to display when he caught his mother in some intricate feminine

plot.

“I don’t see why we should. She probably wouldn’t like it. After all, it

wouldn’t be the same, would it?”

From this she could make nothing. All that he had said might mean

anything at all. It seemed to her that the more she talked, the more

confusing, the less clear everything became.

“I simply happened to think of her. She’s a remarkable girl. She’s had a

struggle from the beginning.”

“A damned fine lot,” was his comment. “You’ll hear from her some day.”

She must have understood that all her slyness was of no use, that

methods such as this brought her nowhere, for she fell silent after this

until Dick rose and said, “Shall we go up? My nerves are on edge from

playing all afternoon. I think I’ll sleep a bit.”

Then while she watched him, as from a great distance, it occurred to her

that all this was scarcely the behavior of a bridegroom on his

honeymoon; it was, on the contrary, as if already they had been married

for years.

As she rose to go with him, a sudden decision crossed her mind. Without

thinking why she was employing it, she used the one stake which she had

at hand.

“Dick,” she said abruptly, “I am going to have a baby.”

He turned, and into his face came an expression of pleasure the like of

which she had not seen there before. He smiled and, moving toward her,

took her gently into his arms.

“That’s fine,” he said softly. “That’s wonderful.” And she felt him kiss

her gently after a fashion that was new and disarming. It was neither a

casual kiss, nor a passionate one; those two moods she knew very well.

This was something new. She felt almost that she were an animal, a pet

for whom he had a great affection and a strong desire to protect.

“Your mother will be pleased,” she said, frightened again by the old

dread of losing herself. (She was ashamed too that he should feel her

tremble so.)

“She will be delighted. She wants an heir. She thinks I’m not much good

at taking care of all her money.” And he kissed her again in the same

tender fashion.

“But it might be a girl.”

He laughed a little. “No, I’m lucky.... Think of my eleven thousand

francs!”

But she saw that he wanted a boy, desperately, that he was not in the

least interested in a girl. It was very foreign of him ... that desire

for some one to carry on the name, to inherit all the fortune.

* * * * *

After they had gone up the stairs with the rail of red plush, he came

into the sitting room again to kiss her gently and to ask if she were

feeling well, and when he had gone Sabine, as she lay in the darkness

among the gaudy pillows of the chaise longue, understood clearly and

bitterly for the first time the change which their marriage had brought

about. He was being gentle and loving not because she was a woman or

because he loved her, but because she had become now by the course of

nature an institution, a wife, a prospective mother. He was being tender

not toward her but toward an idea. He placed her a little apart, so that

the old sense of companionship was no longer possible. She was a symbol

now ... the wife and mother who was the rock and foundation, the one who

produced sons to carry on name and property, but not by any chance the

one who was loved because she was a woman.

43

Of all the events, the emotions and the tragedy that occurred during the

turbulent years spent in the Babylon Arms, nothing had hurt Ellen so

much as the fashion in which Mrs. Callendar, after such a show of

friendship and interest, vanished quickly and completely from her life.

Even the affair with the son and the death of Clarence had had in them

elements which her feminine mind found not unpleasing; there was a

certain romance in the idea that it was herself whom Callendar really

desired and not Sabine at all; there was even more romance, though

perhaps a trifle bitter, in the idea that a man had taken his own life

because he loved her too much to spoil her existence. In her headlong

fashion, she was conscious that these elements contributed to her own

personality; they made her an important figure with enhancing shades of

romance and tragedy. That the facts were known to so few persons as to

be almost secret, only increased their fascination. Sometimes, as she

walked along the boulevards or rode in the Bois beside Schneidermann,

paying little heed to the accompaniment of his pretty speeches and

comment upon people, pictures or music, she found herself filled with a

triumph at her secret knowledge. She thought, “People who see me and

talk with me little know all that has happened. They do not know that

they are talking with a powerful person. They do not know the mystery

and tragedy.”

She began even to think that she had consciously planned each step of

her progress, and she came after a time to forget that all that had

happened to her had been born either of headlong impulse or through some

senseless operation of circumstance.

Nevertheless there were times when she grew troubled by a sensation of

insecurity. Mrs. Callendar had deserted her without a word. Rebecca

might easily do the same. It was only Lily in whom she placed any real

trust; with Lily there were ties of family and of blood.

She was troubled too because she knew that there was still need of the

Jewess. For all the arrogance that came more and more to assert itself

in her nature, for all the confidence and the secret triumph with which

she looked out upon the strangers who passed by her on the boulevards

and in the Bois, she understood that she was not yet ready to stand

alone. She needed the guidance of persons like the gentle Schneidermann

and the busy Rebecca. They knew the world; they knew the tricks by which

one advanced to fame; they knew the people who were the right ones to

know. She could not try her own wings because they were not yet strong

enough.

Yet she must have the aid of such as Schneidermann and Rebecca without

once acknowledging it. The old, twisted pride forbade her to lean upon

any of them. It was a hard business.

And she would pull in her horse so that the languid Schneidermann might

come abreast of her and talk without having to shout at her back. She

would smile indifferently at him and say, “It is a beautiful

morning.... Look at the dew shining beneath the hedge. And the spider

webs like nets of shining silver.”

Sometimes Schneidermann rode silently by her side, stealing glances at

the color in her cheeks and the blue black of her hair as she rode so

straight and so proud and yet so careless of her horse, reining him in

at will or galloping him madly through the long tunnels under the

dripping linden trees. He was a tall thin man with an arched nose and a

blond drooping mustache, rather pale and mild, who never disputed with

her the choice of bridle paths or the hour they were to return. She

understood that he was interested in her; he had helped her with her

accent, though in this they had made little progress, for she had a

stubborn, careless way of sticking to her own version of the tongue just

as she had never lost completely her way of saying “dawg” for dog and

“watter” for water, and persisted in the burr which came to her doubly

through a Scottish heritage and a middle-western childhood. She

suspected sometimes that he might even be falling in love with her and

this made her knit up her brows and scowl at him furtively. She did not

want him, even with all his money. She had had one husband who was mild

and gentle and a bit stupid. Schneidermann was, to be sure, more

intelligent than Clarence, and he knew far more of the world; it amused

her to talk with him of music and art and politics, but a relationship

more intimate was to her inconceivable. Aside from this worldly

knowledge he was like Clarence; he possessed the same humbleness, the

same physical paleness. It annoyed her to believe that she attracted

only men who must be dominated.

Yet there was Callendar. Unconsciously she came to compare the

humbleness of Schneidermann and Clarence with the cat-like virility of

Callendar. It was as if she were putting aside all other men in the

knowledge that some day, at some time if she waited long enough, she

would come to possess him. Yet when she thought of him, as she

frequently did after she had gone up to the luxurious room looking out

upon the white pavilion, she grew angry at the memory of that last visit

to the Babylon Arms. He had watched her, cat-like, until, driven by

some obscure desire, he could no longer play the game of waiting.

She came slowly, as she grew to know and understand the world, to see

that he had looked upon her always as a naïve and helpless creature,

awkward and a little ridiculous. It gave her a sort of restless and

unhappy satisfaction that she had shown herself the more powerful.

* * * * *

It was not strange that she did not encounter the Callendars in Paris.

The world in which they moved was more remote from hers than the Babylon

Arms had been from the house on Murray Hill. True, the crêpe-hung Madame

de Cyon was an acquaintance of Thérèse, but Ellen took good care that

this fat, bedizened gossip should never learn of her acquaintance with

the Callendars, and so it did not occur to “Tiens! Tiens!” ever to

mention them. Of their life Ellen sometimes read a paragraph or two in

the Daily Mail or the Herald; they were off to New York or England or

had just returned to their house in the Avenue du Bois. She knew nothing

of the feverish, cosmopolitan society which surrounded them, nothing of

the seedy, impoverished Royalists who were the poor relations of Thérèse

and lived in fine, damp, decaying houses in the remote provinces,

clinging to the splendor of the past because so little else remained;

she knew nothing of the rich American women who had married titles.

At the lovely old house in the Rue Raynouard there were always the

friends of Lily and Madame Gigon, dowdy, bourgeois and dull, among whom

Lily moved with the calm of perfect security, as the one American who

had ever penetrated with any success the inmost circle about the

doddering Prince Bonaparte. The presence of so vigorous and arrogant a

creature as Ellen they resented bitterly and sometimes openly, so that

Ellen in the end was thrown for companionship, a thing of which she

stood very little in need, upon Rebecca Schönberg, Schneidermann and all

their hodgepodge of musicians, artists, writers and patrons of art.

Rebecca, as the months turned into years, had come to devote more and

more of her time to the house in the Rue Raynouard. When she returned

from Danzig, or Rome, or Vienna or wherever it happened to be, she came

day after day to Numéro Dix where it was her habit to sit quietly in the

big empty music room and listen with extraordinary attention while Ellen

played hour upon hour. She watched Ellen’s progress with an interest of

such intensity that Ellen at times grew ill-tempered and wished heartily

that the sandy haired creature would disappear forever. She would,

doubtless, have committed some act to sever their relationship forever

save that always in the back of her mind was the certainty that the

Jewess was valuable to her.

It was really the sense of Rebecca’s domination which at once annoyed

and confused her; otherwise she liked her well enough. It was Rebecca

who suggested the number of hours which she should practise; it was

Rebecca who bullied her into going out in the world; it was Rebecca who

insisted on helping her choose her clothes; it was Rebecca who even

brought to the Rue Raynouard people who sent Madame Gigon into the most

distant part of the house where she would be safe from the noise of

their violent, modern music. It was Rebecca who at times set the house

by the ears and threatened to bring about an open quarrel between Ellen

and the Baron.

For a long time the enmity between these two had grown less and less

concealed. Lily must have sensed conflict and in her quiet, indolent way

have chosen to pretend that no strain existed. There was irony in the

fact that a woman who sought only quiet and leave to do as she pleased

should have found herself suddenly the battleground between two natures

so violent. In dealing either with insolence or domination Lily had no

difficulty; always she had gone quietly her own way achieving in the end

by some unviolent coup her own desire. When she chose, even the dark,

bumptious César obeyed her as a pet dog might have obeyed. She was even

able to cope with Ellen (though she seldom interfered) in the very midst

of the girl’s most stubborn moods. Yet when César and her cousin came

into conflict, she grew helpless; it was like living perpetually on the

edge of a volcano. She knew, perhaps by instinct, what it was that

caused the trouble ... that each of them sought to rule the household.

So the peace had gone presently from the lovely old house. On one side

were ranged César and his aunt, the blind old Madame Gigon, reënforced

by the cohorts of crêpe-laden old women who came to her salons and

impressed upon her the sense of her injury. On the other were ranged

Ellen and her ally, the shrewd Rebecca. Between the opposing armies

stood Lily who wished only peace and luxury and indolence.

* * * * *

One night early in May, before Lily’s household had moved to Germigny,

Rebecca failed to appear for a concert they had planned to attend. There

had been good reason; an aunt of Rebecca’s, very rich, had arrived

without warning from Vienna. Yet Ellen was unreasonable and believed

that Rebecca had failed her deliberately. She had gone out for a time to

walk sullenly along the Seine and when she returned, she went silently

to her room and locked the door. The disappointment, the softness of the

evening, the look of the lights floating in the river ... all these

things created an overwhelming and terrible nostalgia.

Once inside the room she flung herself down on the canopied bed, her

blue black hair all tossed and disheveled, and, weeping, reproached

herself bitterly. She was, she believed, a horrible creature. She had

treated her mother cruelly; she had forgotten the existence of her

brother--of Fergus, with his humorous blue eyes and magical sympathy and

his uncanny way of understanding what it was that terrified her, what it

was that made her unhappy, what it was that drove her on and on without

rest or peace. She saw too her father, a mild man who loved her without

making any claim, without once speaking of love. On all these she had

turned her back in a heartless fashion.

And Clarence ... poor Clarence ... was always with her in these terrible

moments of solitude. She knew him then as she had never known him in

life; she saw him with a terrible clarity, moving about meekly with the

awful look of pleading in his near-sighted eyes. He had not been like

that in the beginning; he had changed while he lived with her, changed,

as it were, beneath her very eyes. And she saw him too as he lay for the

last time on the divan of the little flat in the Babylon Arms, peaceful

at last and untormented by a woman who always eluded him, a woman whom

he loved so much that he made way with himself that he might hinder her

no longer. And _him_ she could never repay; it was impossible even to

explain or to beg for forgiveness, though he would have said, no doubt,

that there was nothing to forgive.

Then growing a little more quiet, she asked herself in one of her rare

moments of reflection what power had driven her to act as she had done.

To this there was no answer; it was quite beyond her. She knew, as

indeed she had always known, that she must go her way, solitary and

ruthless, to fulfil a rather shadowy ambition, a confused desire for

vindication, a hunger for the sight of the world at her feet.

It would do no good now to turn back, because such a course could only

create disaster. Sitting up among the pillows of the canopied bed she

fell to staring hopelessly into the darkness. For a long time she sat

thus, pale and disheveled, her long black hair streaming over the

crimson peignoir. She had discovered an awful thing. She, Ellen

Tolliver, who had wanted only to be free, was entangled and caught

beyond all escape. She could not turn back. She could only go forward

along the path which she herself had chosen, and it was a lonely path, a

path so enveloped in solitude that she fell to weeping again over the

desolate waste of its loneliness.

* * * * *

There was a moon which painted all the garden outside with a pale green

light; the pastry-cake pavilion of Le Nôtre had turned to silver and the

leaves of the old plane trees, rustling together now in the soft spring

air, cast black shadows across the white terrace. Lured by the faint

stream of silver that spilled in through the darkness at the tall

window, Ellen rose presently and, sitting on the chaise longue, looked

out over the garden. To-night the familiar, distant sound of the boat

whistles along the Seine seemed very close. The hoofs of a horse passing

along the cobblestones of the Rue de Passy struck up a slow tattoo that

leapt the garden wall and came up to the very window. It was a foreign

horse, passing along a foreign street and the garden had become remote

and melancholy with a new sort of beauty. It was as if she suffered from

an enchantment, as if all that had happened since the day she had gone

off to skate alone on Walke’s Pond had been an hallucination, detached

from all reality. She might wake and find herself once more in the

shabby comfortable sitting room of the house on Sycamore Street. Still

it could not be a dream; because if she returned to that shabby room,

she would find it occupied by strangers she had never seen. Her mother

would no longer be there, darning in the firelight, nor her father

sleeping on the great divan, nor Fergus, nor Robert. They were all gone

now ... gone, strange to say, in pursuit of herself. Perhaps one day

they would come as far as this lovely garden. Ma would like it only

because her children were there, but Fergus would know its meaning, how

much of old beauty that was beyond expression lay in the silver

pavilion, in the mottled trunks of the old trees and in the black

filigree of shadows across the white terrace. If only Fergus could be

there she would not be lonely....

And for the first time in all her life, she became sharply aware of the

passing of time. She heard it rushing past her and knew that slowly,

like a tide rising upon a beach of shingle, the years were stealing upon

her, the years and a desperate haunting loneliness which it seemed

impossible ever to escape.

* * * * *

Sitting there in the moonlight, the whole of the past rose up in a

queer, muddled procession. There had been in the progression of events

neither rule nor reason. Fate, one might call it, but fate was a silly

name. It meant nothing; it could not explain how Clarence had turned

toward her and so changed all the course of her existence; it did not

explain Mr. Wyck and his muddled part in the suicide of Clarence; it did

not solve that sudden, passionate interval with Richard Callendar. It

was all senseless and muddled.

People might judge her as hard and cold and calculating but that, she

thought, would be unjust. She had been forced to make her own way, to

clear her path by the best means at hand. She had tried always to do it

without harm to others. She was not, like Sabine Cane, born with all

that one needed in this world. If she had been born, having those

things, she might have been more happy, less lonely, less aloof. Sabine,

she reflected bitterly, had everything ... wealth and friends and

happiness. Even her husband had been delivered into her hands, a man

who, if chance had been less cruel, might not have been hers. She envied

Sabine.

So she fell to thinking of Callendar. What might have happened if she

had hurt Clarence deliberately and gone away with her lover? Callendar

would have married her. She would have been rich. She would have been

free. There would have been no more of this struggle.

But she could not be certain. For the first time, thinking of him now

out of the detachment of her loneliness, she doubted him. He might not

have married her, after all. Why should he have done it? And if he had

married her he might not have been stronger than this other thing which

kept driving her on, this terrible ambition that was like a disease with

which one was born.

What would love have been with a man like Callendar? She trembled a

little at the memory of him, grown softer now with the passing of time

and more sentimental. With Clarence love had been a poor timid growth,

choked and inarticulate, a thing that somehow he made shameful.

Callendar was not like that. Love with him must be a great glowing

passion that would overwhelm all else, even her own terrible awareness.

She sighed and bound up her hair. All that had passed long ago and was

done. She might die now without ever knowing anything more wonderful

than the stifled, timid embraces of Clarence.

Idly, out of nowhere, into her brain there strayed presently a memory of

old Julia Shane. It had happened when Ellen was a little girl and she

could not think why she had remembered it, yet unaccountably it was

there in her head, very clear, like an old photograph found by chance

after many years. She saw old Julia sitting in the big drawing-room of

Shane’s Castle on a Christmas day talking with Grandpa Barr. She was

thin and hawklike and leaned forward now and then on her ebony stick to

give the coals in the grate an angry poke. She had been quarreling with

the vigorous old man and presently she said sharply, poking the fire for

emphasis, “Fate! Pooh! Robert! Fate is no great tide that sweeps

everything before it. It is a river that goes this way and that, and the

smart fellow is the one who jumps when it turns in his direction!”

Aunt Julia has been right. Fate was like that and, Ellen reflected, she

had jumped when she saw it coming her way, but by ill luck she had

jumped sometimes full into the midst of the stream and been swept along

by it.

* * * * *

Lost in this sudden memory she was interrupted sharply by a murmur of

voices arising from the garden. Without stirring she listened and,

presently, recognizing that one was Lily’s and the other that of the

Baron, she made no attempt to move out of hearing. Once, a long time ago

when she had first come to Paris, she would have moved away or have let

them know by some sign that she was nearby, watching and listening; but

that time had long gone by. She listened now either because she was

shameless or because in the mood of the moment it did not matter what

things she learned. And in some way the sight of the two dark figures,

moving so close to each other up and down the white terrace, dissipated

the terrible loneliness.

The pair below her knew, no doubt, that Madame Gigon was long since

snoring among the gimcracks of her bedroom, and they believed that she

herself was out, at the theater with Rebecca. In the French manner, the

servants did not matter; it is probable that of all the people in the

house they knew most of Lily and her life.

The Baron’s voice, deep and rich, drifted up to the open window.

“Jean, you say, will be back from school in June?”

He wore his uniform, and the perfection of its lines emphasized all the

trim, masculine hardness of his slight figure. Beside him in her black

gown, with the stole of sable thrown round her for warmth, Lily was soft

and lovely. His voice it seemed, caressed her.

“He is growing big now ... fourteen. Think of it....” He laughed softly.

“_You_ with a big boy of fourteen! It is impossible ... _incroyable!_”

Lily said something which was not audible and then, “Yes. We must be

more careful. He will begin to see things.”

“In England boys are not so sharp ... at least not about affairs between

men and women.”

In silence they walked for a time, once up and once down the terrace.

The leaves of the plane trees rustled and a boat far below in the Seine

whistled faintly. Once more they passed beneath the window.

“June is more than a month away,” said the Baron. “We could go to Nice

for three long weeks.”

Lily, it seemed, was unwilling, for he argued with her, saying in a

voice that would have melted steel, “Think of it.... We have not been

alone for months. Think of it ... the mornings ... waking together ...

looking out over the bay.... Alone ... alone.” He paused suddenly and

seizing her in his arms kissed her. For a long time they stood thus.

Ellen could see them quite plainly, standing in the shadow of one of the

white urns, Lily with her head against his shoulder while he kissed her

again and again.

Then slowly, with the air of waking from a dream, Lily raised her head

and passing her hand against her eyes, murmured, “I should not like

Ellen to know.”

At this he laughed and a new note, one of hard anger, entered his voice.

“She knows already if she is not a fool.”

At the intonation Lily withdrew and leaned against one of the white

urns. “She doesn’t. I’m sure of it. She has said nothing.”

Again he laughed, scornfully. “She’s no fool. She knows it would be more

unpleasant for her than for you. She needs a home and money ... just

now. She’ll not open her eyes so long as it might harm her plans.”

Sitting there in the darkness, Ellen succumbed to a slow anger that rose

to her head like a fever. She had believed that he spoke against her;

now she was sure of it. She hated him vaguely, because he dared even to

say such a thing to her cousin. He was so sure of himself, the amorous

beast.

She was hurt too, as if some one had struck her, because what César had

said was so near to the truth.

But Lily turned away from him. “I won’t have you say such things,” she

said. “It is ridiculous and unjust.”

He did not use words in defense of himself, perhaps because words were

to him such weak and awkward weapons. Instead, he simply took Lily once

more in his arms, and beneath his kisses, Ellen saw that all resistance,

all anger melted from her. It was like a bit of wax touched suddenly by

a flame.... An amazing sight which seemed to illumine sharply the whole

of Lily’s strange life.

After a moment, he placed his arm about her waist and they moved away

down the steps into the shadow of the plane trees. Once they halted for

a time while he kissed her again and then, resuming their way in the

same state of enchantment, they disappeared through the filigree of

black shadows into the white pavilion, silvered by the moon.

And in the room above the terrace, Ellen slipped from the chaise longue

to the floor where she lay flung out, weeping passionately. The

loneliness returned now more terribly than ever before.

44

In the morning, after coffee and brandy, Ellen rose at dawn to ride in

the Bois. She went purposely without Schneidermann, leaving him to a

vain pursuit, in order that she might be alone; and when she returned

she found that Lily was already awake and had come down from her room to

breakfast on the terrace. The May sunlight poured into the garden and

beat against the stone of the façade, enveloping her with its reflected

warmth, as she sat at the iron table before a bowl of hot chocolate, a

dish of rolls and two piles of letters. One heap had been opened and the

contents lay scattered over the table and on the flagging beneath. As

Ellen, tall and slim in her riding habit and hard hat, stepped through

the tall window Lily put down a letter and said, “I brought your mail

out here. It isn’t interesting this morning ... mostly bills.”

Ellen throwing down her crop and hat, ran her fingers through her dark

hair and seated herself on the opposite side of the table, while Lily

sent for more chocolate and hot rolls.

“You look tired,” observed Lily. “Were you out late?”

“No. Rebecca couldn’t go with me, and I was tired so I didn’t go at all.

But I slept badly.”

Lily turned the page of the note she was reading. “You work too hard,”

she said. “Try taking a rest. Come down to the country with me in June.”

“No, I can’t do that.... I’m going to play in London. Rebecca and

Schneidermann have arranged it. It will be my début.”

She announced the news abruptly, without any show of emotion.

Lily put down the letter and leaned toward her. “You didn’t tell me it

would be so soon.”

“I only knew it for certain last night. I’m superstitious about speaking

of things until they’re certain. I’m to play in Wigmore Street on the

third.”

Her cousin was all interest now. She drew her chair a little nearer and

carelessly pushed her letters off the edge of the table.

“Have you chosen a gown? We’ll send for the motor and choose one this

morning. That’s important, you know ... especially in England where they

recognize good clothes but never wear them.”

“I can’t go this morning.... I’m going to Philippe.”

“To-morrow then,” said Lily. “I shall go over to London for the concert

and bring Jean back with me.... Perhaps César can go too.”

“Not him!” Ellen interrupted sullenly. “He’d spoil everything.”

For a moment the two cousins regarded each other in silence. In Ellen’s

face there was a look of bitterness that appeared more and more

frequently of late, a sort of devil-may-care expression that puzzled

Lily and disturbed her. They had never recognized the breach before ...

not, at least, openly.

“Why shan’t César come?” she put forward gently.

“He hates me! I know that!”

Lily endeavored to pour oil on the waters. “It’s not true. You’re rude

to each other ... both of you. Why is it? There’s no reason. He doesn’t

really dislike you?”

For a time, Ellen came very close to being unpleasant; she was tempted

to reveal all she had seen and heard from the window above the moonlit

garden. The memory of César’s words rang in her ears, a taunt in which

there was too much of truth. But she could not say that she hated César

because he never allowed her any peace of mind. She could not say that

she never saw him without thinking of Callendar.

“It’s nothing ... nonsense, I daresay, on both sides.” The power of

Lily’s eager friendliness overwhelmed her. “I’m sorry,” she added, “that

I’m disagreeable sometimes.... I’ve been worried lately. I know the

quarrel is my fault too.” She tore open one of her letters and then,

looking very pale, she added, “Bring him, if he would like to come....

It won’t matter.”

And Lily never knew what it was that softened her so abruptly. She did

not know, of course, that Ellen was thinking of Callendar, hoping

desperately that he could be there to listen to her music as he had

listened so many times, with all the passionate abandon which meant so

much to her. She needed Fergus too, for she was frightened now that the

chance, awaited so long, was at hand. With César present she would at

least be reminded of Callendar. It would be the next best thing to

having him or Fergus in a cold audience of strangers.

* * * * *

On the top of the little pile of letters was one from her mother from

which she read portions aloud to her cousin.

“We are settled now in seven rooms in East Seventieth Street. There is

room for Fergus and Robert and Papa and I, and a room for Gramp and his

books, which he would not leave behind. And an extra room which I have

let to a young man who works with an electrical company. He has nice

manners and seems to be of a very good family. He talks a great deal

about them. It seems that his family was rich once, a long time ago. He

was very unhappy in a boarding house, but he likes it here....”

Lily, who had been listening closely to the news, looked up as Ellen

suddenly stopped reading and allowed the letter to slip to the ground.

She saw that her cousin reached down hastily and recovered it, as if she

wished to conceal her agitation.

“Not bad news?” asked Lily.

“No. I was just surprised for a moment by something in the letter. I

think ... I think I know the young man she writes of. Still I can’t

understand what chance brought him and Ma together.... It’s an idiotic

world.... There’s no sense in it.” She lighted a cigarette, and after a

thoughtful silence added, “Ma is a remarkable woman. Think of her,

tearing a whole family up by its roots and transplanting it without a

thought.”

Then she continued reading. The family, she learned, were all very

comfortable in their new home. Fergus might be going abroad in a year or

two ... some sort of writing work, with a newspaper. Hattie had

recaptured him only to lose him again at once. Robert was the same, the

plodder of the family, silent, unbrilliant, a sort of rock and

foundation as old Jacob Barr had been before him. They were hoping to

see Ellen soon now. She must come home, now that they were settled in

New York. And in the end there was the usual refrain. _I am looking

forward to the day when I can make a home for all my children_.

When she had finished reading, they both sat for a time in silence and

at last Lily said simply, “She’ll never give up, will she?”

* * * * *

In the same pile there was a note from Rebecca sent by hand from the

Regina where she was stopping. It read:

“I’m sorry about last night but it couldn’t be helped. How was I to know

that Aunt Lina was arriving from Vienna and hadn’t been in Paris for

twenty-five years? She had to be looked after and will take a great deal

of my time, I suppose, as she plans to stay a month if I cannot get her

off before that. She is important because she is very rich and has no

children. Uncle Otto owns a sapphire mine in Cambodia. And I am her

god-daughter. (Her real name is Rebecca, but in the family they call her

Lina because there are so many Rebeccas.) Besides, some day she may be

of use to us in Vienna, especially when the time comes for you to play

there. She is rich and has myriads of rich friends who all spend money

on the arts.

“I won’t let her interfere with the plans for London. I’ve talked to

Schneidermann and in case I can’t get away at once, he will go over and

arrange things in plenty of time. He knows the ropes. Don’t let Lily

help to choose your gown without my being there. She has beautiful taste

but it’s too quiet for an artist. The public, especially in England and

America, expects something spectacular from a musician. I’ll try to run

out for a moment to-day if I can get rid of Aunt Lina. Perhaps I can

make her believe she is tired from the journey and stay in bed all day.

Here’s to the triumph in London!