A little while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned
from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past
the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill
worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in
the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the
dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse
of Irene’s sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill
shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she
whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took
their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly
abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green
ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of
beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko
stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had
passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of
action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard
him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something
in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to
keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to
leave.
The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins,
passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o’clock,
leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of
her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the
wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the
departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam
died out of Julia Shane’s eyes. She became again an old woman with a
tired bent figure, her sharp eyes half closed by dark swellings which
seemed to have appeared all at once with the death of the last chord.
“I’m going to bed,” she said, bidding the others good-night. “We can
discuss the party in the morning.”
She tottered up the stairs leaving her daughter and grand-niece together
in the long drawing-room. When she had gone, Lily rose and put out the
lamps and candles one by one until only three candles in a sconce above
the piano remained lighted.
“Now,” she said, lying back among the cushions of the divan and
stretching her long handsome legs, “play for me ... some Brahms, some
Chopin.”
The girl must have been weary but the request aroused all her
extraordinary young strength. She sat at the piano silhouetted against
the candle light ... the curve of her absurd pompadour, the more
ridiculous curve of her corseted figure. From the divan Lily watched her
through half-closed eyes. She played first of all two études of Chopin
and then a waltz or two of Brahms, superbly and with a fine freedom and
spectacular fire, as if she realized that at last she had the audience
she desired, a better audience than she would ever have again no matter
how celebrated she might become. Above the throbbing of the Mills the
thread of music rose triumphant in a sort of eternal beauty, now
delicate, restrained, now rising in a tremendous, passionate crescendo.
The girl invested it with all the yearnings that are beyond expression,
the youth, the passionate resentment and scorn, the blind gropings which
swept her baffled young soul. Through the magic of the sound she managed
to convey to the woman lying half-buried among the cushions those things
which it would have been impossible for her to utter, so high and
impregnable was the wall of her shyness and pride. And Lily, watching
her, wept silently at the eloquence of the music.
Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl
swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse
Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre,
yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy
room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning,
unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the
old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet
familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be
captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy,
swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for
but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond
the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and
came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on the
_prie dieu_ before the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation,
which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was
a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the
sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and
softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away
into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the
silence of the old room.
After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her
head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she
slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and
soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and
gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had
fainted.