That night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled
dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by
tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined
alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly,
and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she
was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the
old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches
furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia
Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do
most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject
some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.
At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the
room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon
the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the
light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and
addressed him.
“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began.
“It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”
For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the
table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.
“I have told you that I love Lily.”
The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a
second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the
faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of
his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity
of an iceberg.
“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for
anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The
diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it
forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love
can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”
Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the
ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to
say.... It is, after all, her affair.”
The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books
and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of
Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture
had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a
decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood
against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall
man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat
reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the
small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was
bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its
color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested
on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an
aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It
was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both
handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the
other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character
before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much
drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes,
which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a
strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It
was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a
creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a
horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was
baffling.
It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence
for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message
from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs
reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until
she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which
she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop
her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She
carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the
dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a
moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath
the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind
him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the
cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing
the door softly behind her.
“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know
everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it
to-night one way or another, for good and all.”
The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before
her.
“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue.
“Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe
you understand.”
The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you
know ... certainly not _now_.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down
thoughtfully.
The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end
in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law.
You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”
The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve
thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one.
No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us
alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to
speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re
afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a
child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”
“But why ... why?” began her mother.
“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want
to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of
passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have
money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”
V
For a little while the room grew silent save for the distant pounding of
the Mills, regular and reverberant, monotonous and unceasing. The wind
from the South bore a smell of soot which smothered the scent of
wistaria and iris. All at once a cry rang out and the Governor, very red
and handsome in his tight coat, fell on his knees before her, his arms
about her waist. The girl remained sitting quietly, her face quite white
now against the black of her cloak.
“Please ... please, Lily,” the man cried. “I will give up everything ...
I will do as you like. I will be your slave.” He became incoherent and
muddled, repeating over and over again the arguments he had used in the
afternoon by the old well. For a long time he talked, while the girl sat
as still as an image carved from marble, regarding him curiously as
though the whole scene were a nightmare and not reality at all. At last
he stopped talking, kissed her hand and stood up once more. The old
woman seated under the portrait said nothing. She regarded the pair
silently with wise, narrowed eyes.
It was Lily who spoke. “It is no use.... How can I explain to you? I
would not be a good wife. I know ... you see, I know because I know
myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my
affair.” A note almost of stubbornness entered her voice. “Two days ago
I might have married you. I cannot now, because I know. I wanted to
know, you see.” She looked up suddenly with a strange smile. “Would you
have preferred me to take a lover from the streets?”
For the first time the mother stirred in her chair. “Lily ... Lily....
How can you say such a thing?”
The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is
nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do
you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”
For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man
and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her
passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a
terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say
farewell.
“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her
father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of
hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray
portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then,
checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been
Irene.”
Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing
behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying
slowly away as she ascended the stairs.
At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the
Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane,
leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long
drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the
miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the
corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the
swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the
night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.
Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress
Hill came abruptly to an end.
He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the
great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring
into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from
Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have
upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one
of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn
before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.
As for the third--Irene--she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin
for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she
buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy
the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.