In the Town the tidings of Lily’s sudden departure followed the course
of all bits of news from Shane’s Castle. It created for a time a
veritable cloud of gossip. Again when it became gradually known that she
intended living in Paris, heads wagged for a time and stories of her
father were revived. Her name became the center of a myriad tales such
as accumulate about beautiful women who are also indifferent.
But of one fact the Town learned nothing. It had no knowledge of a
cablegram which arrived at Shane’s Castle containing simply the words,
“John has arrived safely and well.” Only the telegraph operator saw it
and to him the words could have meant nothing.
It was Mrs. Julis Harrison who kept alive the cloud of rumors that
closed over the memory of Lily. When she was not occupied with directing
the activities of the Mills through the mouthpiece of her son Willie,
she fostered her suspicions. The letter addressed to a friend in Paris
bore no fruit. Lily, it seemed, had buried herself. She was unknown to
the American colony. But Mrs. Harrison, nothing daunted, managed herself
to create a story which in time she came to believe, prefacing it to her
choicest friends with the remark that “Shane’s Castle has not changed.
More things go on there than this world dreams of.”
As for the Governor, he visited the Town two years later on the eve of
election; but this time he did not stay at Shane’s Castle. It was known
that he paid old Julia Shane a mysterious visit lasting more than an
hour, but what passed between them remained at best a subject for the
wildest speculation.
With the departure of Lily, her mother settled slowly into a life of
retirement. There were no more receptions and garden-parties. With Lily
gone, there appeared to be no reasons for gaiety. Irene, as every one
knew, hated festivities of every sort.
“I am growing too old,” said Julia Shane. “It tires me to entertain. Why
should I?”
It was not true that she was old, yet it was true that she was tired. It
was clear that she was letting slip all threads of interest, even more
apparent that she actually cherished her solitude.
She still condescended to go to an occasional dinner in the Town,
driving in her victoria with Hennery on the box through sweating smelly
Halsted street, across the writhing oily Black Fork and up the Hill to
the respectable portion of the Town where lived the people of property.
It was impossible to have guessed her thoughts on that infrequent
journey. They must have been strange ... the thoughts of a woman not
long past middle-age who had seen within her lifetime the most
extraordinary metamorphosis in the Town of her birth. She could remember
the days when she rode with John Shane in his paddock, now completely
buried beneath massive warehouses. She could remember the days when
Halsted street was only a private drive across the marshes to Cypress
Hill. Indeed it appeared, as the years passed, that Julia Shane was
slipping slowly back across all those years into the simplicity that
marked her childhood as a farmer’s daughter. She talked less and avoided
people. She no longer cared for the elegance of her clothes. As though
her gaunt and worldly air had been only a mockery she began to slough it
off bit by bit with the passing months. The few women who crossed the
threshold of Shane’s Castle returned with stories that Julia Shane,
having closed the rest of the house, had taken to living in two or three
rooms.
People said other things too, of Julia and her two daughters, but mostly
of Lily, for Lily somehow captured their imagination. In the midst of
the Town, born and bred upon the furnace girt hill, she was an exotic,
an orchid appearing suddenly in a prosperous vegetable garden.
People said such things as, “Julia Shane gets no satisfaction out of
her daughter Irene.... I believe myself that the girl is a little
queer.”
Or it might be that Mrs. Julis Harrison, with a knowing shake of the
head would remark, “It’s strange that Lily has never married. They say
she is enjoying herself in Paris, although she doesn’t see anything of
the Americans there. It’s like John Shane’s daughter to prefer the
French.”