For days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which
neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping
or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a
second promise ... that she would never enter the church so long as her
mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the
families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill.
Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into
their homes, facing all the deep-rooted hostility and the suspicions of
Shane’s Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of
laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored
thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few
among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and
simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly
in the lady from Shane’s Castle.
It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home
after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending
word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of
the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express,
unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for
twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed
with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a
pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily
recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily
Shane might never return from Paris.
She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at
the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen’s houses which had sprung
up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as
if they were not solid and real at all, but queer structures born out
of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of
mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted
street to Shane’s Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab
window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the
glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it
touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a
dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel
workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed
at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the
Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her
destination was the great black house on the hill.
As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the
street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were
clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until
in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house
the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light
glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead,
abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.
Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright
labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and
Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and
deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria
vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of
the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull
glow of the furnaces.
The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times,
listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman
opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of
welcome.
“Mama!” Lily called up the long polished stairway. “Irene! Mama! Where
are you?”
She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her
veil, the sound of her mother’s limping step and the tapping of her
stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later,
Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene
clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.