At Cypress Hill, Julia Shane and her elder daughter returned, when the
door had closed on their guests, to the drawing-room to discuss after a
custom of long standing the entertainment of the evening. They agreed
that Mrs. Harrison had grown much too stout, that she was indeed on the
verge of apoplexy; that Miss Abercrombie became steadily more fidgety
and affected.
“A woman should marry,” said Julia Shane, “even if she can do no better
than a day laborer.”
Two candles by the side of the tall mirror and one by the flaming Venice
of Mr. Turner guttered feebly and expired. Now that she was alone, the
old woman lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke quietly into the still
air. It was Lily who interrupted the silence.
“Willie proposed to me again,” she said presently.
The mother made no answer but regarded the girl quietly with a curious
questioning look in her tired eyes. Lily, seated in the glow of light
from the majolica lamp, must have understood what was passing in her
mind.
“No,” she said, “if I had wanted to marry, I could have had a man ... a
real man.” For a second her eyes grew dark with emotion and her red lips
curved as if she remembered suddenly and with a shameless pleasure the
embraces of her lover. “No,” she continued, “I wouldn’t play such a
trick, even on a poor thing like Willie.”
The old woman knocked the ashes from her cigarette. The rings flashed
and glittered in the candle light. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I
think you are hopeless ... altogether abandoned.”
There was a note of melancholy in her voice, so poignant that the girl
suddenly sprang from her chair, crossed the little space between them
and embraced her mother impulsively. “I’m sorry for your sake, Mama,”
she said. “I’m sorry....” She kissed the hard, handsome face and the
mother returned the embrace with a sudden fierce burst of unaccustomed
passion.
“It’s all right, Lily dear. I’m only thinking of you. I don’t think
anything can really hurt me any longer. I’m an old warrior, tough and
well-armored.” For a second she regarded the girl tenderly and then
asked, “but aren’t you afraid?”
“No!” The answer was quiet and confident.
“You’re a strange, strange girl,” said the mother.
X
Madame Gigon with Fifi lived in a tiny apartment in the Rue de la
Assomption. In the summer she went to live at Germigny l’Evec in a curve
of the Marne after it has passed Meaux and Trilport, wandering its soft
and amiable way between sedges and wild flags under rows of tall plane
trees with bark as green and spotted as the backs of salamanders. Here
she occupied the lodge of the château belonging to her cousin, a
gentleman who inherited his title from a banker of the First Empire and
lent the lodge rent free to Madame Gigon, whose father, also a banker,
was ruined by the collapse of the Second Empire. M. Gigon, a scholar and
antiquarian, one of the curators of the Cluny Museum, was long since
dead--an ineffectual little man with a stoop and a squint, who lived his
life gently and faded out of it with so little disturbance that even
Madame Gigon sometimes examined her conscience and her respectability
because there were long periods when she forgot that he had ever existed
at all. Fifi was to her far more of a personality--Fifi with her fat
waddle, her black and tan coat, and her habit of yapping for gateaux at
tea time.
Although Madame Gigon was not English at all, tea was a fixed rite in
her life. She came by the custom at the boarding school of Mademoiselle
Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the edge of Paris where tea was a
regular meal because there was always a score of English girls among
Mademoiselle’s _pensionnaires_. On the passing of Monsieur Gigon she had
taken, under the stress of bitter necessity, a place as instructress in
art and history at the establishment of the aging Mademoiselle de Vaux,
who, like herself was a Bonapartist, a _bourgeoise_ and deeply
respectable. She saved from her small salary a comfortable little
fortune, and at length retired with Fifi to the little flat in the Rue
de la Assomption to live upon her interest and the bounty of her cousin
the Baron. But above even her respectability and her small fortune, she
honored her position, an element which she had preserved through a
lifetime of adversity. She was respected still as the daughter of a man
who had ruined himself to support Napoleon the Little. She still
attended the salons of the Bonapartist families in the houses and
apartments of Passy, of the Boulevard Flandrin, and the new Paris of the
Place de l’Etoile. She was respected still in the circles which moved
about the aging figure of the Prince Bonaparte and, greatest of all, she
received a card of admission signed by his own hand whenever the Prince
addressed the Geographical Society.
Madame Gigon was in the act of closing her tiny apartment in the Rue de
la Assomption for the summer when the letter of Julia Shane arrived. At
the news it contained, she suspended the operations necessary to her
departure for the lodge of Germigny l’Evec and settled herself to await
the arrival of pretty Lily Shane, contenting herself meanwhile with
taking Fifi for airings in the Bois de Boulogne, a suitable distance
away for one of Madame’s age and infirmities. And when the day came, she
managed to meet Lily in a fiacre at the Gare du Nord.
There was something touching in Madame Gigon’s reception of the girl,
something even more touching in Lily’s reception by the fat and wheezing
Fifi. The shrewd old dog remembered her as the girl who had been
generous with gateaux, and when Lily, dressed smartly in a purple suit
with a large hat covered with plumes, climbed into the fiacre, the plump
Fifi shouted and leapt about with all the animation of a puppy.
Throughout the journey to Meaux and on the succeeding trip by carriage
along the Marne to Germigny, the pair made no mention of Julia Shane’s
letter. They talked of the heat, of the beauty of the countryside, of
Mademoiselle de Vaux, who was past ninety and very feeble, of the new
girls at the school ... until the peasant coachman drew up his fat horse
before the gate of the lodge and carried their luggage into the vine
covered cottage.