The struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William
Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from
the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin
draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which
descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter
than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue eyes that protruded a little
from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth
narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was
conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity
necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.
“It is late, mother,” he said. “And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New
York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday.”
His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his
watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.
“Sailing!” repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and
suspending her fan in mid-air. “Sailing! Why didn’t you tell me, Julia?
I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily.”
“Sailing,” echoed Miss Abercrombie, “to France, my dear! I have some
commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?”
Lily smiled slowly. “Of course not. Can you send them down in the
morning? I’m afraid I won’t get up to the Town to-morrow.”
She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery’s
wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison’s
first speech.
“Tell Hennery,” she said, “to send round Mrs. Harrison’s carriage.” The
old woman was taking no chances now.
There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female
wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement
over the thought of a voyage to “the continent.” The carriage arrived
and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the
squalid street.
When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which,
sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the
Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered
his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear
him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.
“She refused me,” he said.
For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress
sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, “She may
come round.... You’re not clever with women, William.”
The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that
his mother’s opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There
was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope
had been killed--put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she
was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped
that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been
tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing
puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of
her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange
incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for
a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last,
despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.
“It couldn’t be,” she thought. “Julia would never have dared to invite
us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and
pleasant. No, it’s impossible!”
All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red
sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend
who lived in Paris.