So she talked for what must have seemed to Lily hour upon hour. When the
younger woman betrayed any sign of leaving, Madame Blaise thrust her
tall thin body between her and the door. Even if Lily had desired to
speak she would have found small opportunity, for Madame Blaise never
once stopped talking. It was as if all the talk of years, repressed and
hidden, was suddenly rushing forth in a torrent. The room became
intolerably stuffy from the burning gas. Lily’s head began to ache and
her face to grow more and more pale. If she had been less pleasant by
nature she would have made her way by force past the old woman and out
into the open air. As it was, she kept hoping, no doubt, that Madame
Blaise would come to an end of her talk, that some one would come in and
interrupt her ... the maid perhaps ... any one. She no longer heard what
Madame Blaise was saying. The talk came to her in fragments, the
inexpressibly boring chatter of a cracked old woman. To break the
monotony she took up the pictures on the mantelpiece and began to
examine them. During a brief pause, she observed. “Your pictures are
interesting, Madame Blaise. I should like to call again when I have more
time, in order to see them all.”
“Ah, yes,” said the old woman. “So they are ... so they are. The men ...
they were not all lovers you understand. But I might have had them for
lovers by the raising of my finger.”
“This one,” said Lily, holding up the portrait of a heavily built man
wearing the mustachios of a dragoon. “He is interesting.”
“Yes ... yes. He was a Spaniard ... a nobleman, very aristocratic. Dead
now.... Extraordinary how many of them are dead!”
Then all at once the attention of Madame Blaise was arrested by the
most extraordinary change in her companion. So remarkable was the change
that the old woman actually stopped talking and fell to observing the
face of Madame Shane.
Lily held in her hand a small photograph, very faded and soiled, of a
man in a black coat with sharp eyes, a high brow and a full black beard.
It bore in one corner the stamp of a well-known photographer of the
seventies, a gentleman with an establishment in the Galerie des
Panoramas. It was a handsome face, fascinating, fanatic, which at once
arrested the attention. Beyond all doubt it was the mate of a photograph
which Julia Shane, dying, had left to her daughter. Across the face of
the one Lily held in her hand was written, “_A la Reine de la Nuit de
son Cavalier Irlandais_.” The ink was faded, almost illegible.
“You find that gentleman especially interesting?” asked Madame Blaise in
a tone of unbearable curiosity.
For a moment Lily did not reply. She regarded the photograph closely,
turning it this way and that under the gaslight.
“Yes,” she said at last in a low, hushed voice. “Who is he?”
Madame Blaise bridled. “He was a gentleman ... very interesting,” she
said. “He admired me ... greatly. The inscription? It was a joke between
us. He was full of deviltry and fun (_un vrai diable ... tout gamin_). I
have forgotten what the joke was.... He was forced to leave the country
by some unpleasantness.... I too went away for time.” And again her eyes
narrowed in a mysterious look, invoking romantic, glamorous things.
Lily, the picture still clasped in her hand, sat down weakly.
Above all else, old photographs have the power of calling up dead
memories. It is so perhaps because they are so terribly, so cruelly,
realistic. Those things which the memory, desiring to forget, succeeds
in losing among the shadows of time, remain in a photograph so long as
it exists ... the posture of a head, the betraying affected gesture of a
hand, the manner of carrying oneself, the arrogance of countenance, the
habit of dress ... all these things survive on a bit of paper no larger
perhaps than the palm of one’s hand.
The photograph with “_A la Reine de la Nuit_” written across it must
have invoked forgotten things ... memories of John Shane’s savage temper
and whimsical kindnesses, of terrible scenes between him and his proud
wife, of his contempt for the anemic Irene and his admiration for the
glowing Lily, of a thousand things distant yet appallingly vivid.
While Lily sat thoughtful and silent, Madame Blaise kept up a stream of
hysterical chatter, turning crazily from one subject to another, from
personalities to anecdotes, from advice to warning. Lily heard none of
it. When she had recovered a little, she said, “This gentleman interests
me. I wish you could tell me more of him.”
But Madame Blaise shook her head ruefully. “I have forgotten so much,”
she said. “It is terrible how one forgets. Do you know?” And again the
look of mad confidence came into her face. “I have forgotten his name.
What is it he calls himself in the inscription?”
She took the photograph from Lily’s hand and thrust it under the circle
of light, holding it at arm’s length and squinting in order to discern
it properly. “Ah, yes,” she said. “_Cavalier Irlandais_.... That was his
name. I don’t remember his other name, though I believe he had one.” She
paused, thoughtful, as if trying by a tremendous force of will to
recapture the thing which had escaped her. “His father was Irish, you
understand.... Strange I can’t remember his name.” So she talked on
crazily, answering Lily’s questions madly, tangling the answers
hopelessly in a flood of insane philosophy and distorted observation.
The look of mystery and the remnants of a grand manner persisted. Lily
watched her with a look of intense curiosity as if she believed that,
after all, the queer old creature might once have been young,--young,
mysterious and lovely. But she learned little of the gentleman in the
portrait. It was impossible for Madame Blaise to concentrate upon her
subject. Lily learned only that the gentleman had been forced to leave
the country following some unpleasantness arising out of a duel in which
he had killed a relative ... a cousin perhaps. She did not remember. He
had been in politics too. That played a part in his flight. He returned
once, Madame Blaise believed, but she did not remember why he had come
back.
Altogether it was hopeless. Lily replaced the photograph on the high
mantel, powdered her nose and drew on her gloves. Presently there came
an opening in the flood of Madame Blaise’ talk and Lily seized it
sharply.
“I must really go, Madame Blaise. I have stayed much too long. It has
been so interesting.”
She rose and began to move slowly backward in the direction of the door,
as if she feared to rouse the old woman to fresh outbursts. She made her
departure gently, vanishing noiselessly; but she got no further than the
inlaid music box when Madame Blaise, detecting her plan, sprang up and
seized her arm fiercely with her thin old hands.
“Wait!” she cried. “There is one more thing I must show you ... only
one. It will take but a second.”
The patient Lily acquiesced, though she kept up a mild protest. Madame
Blaise scurried away, rather sidewise as a crab moves, into a dark
corner of the room where she disappeared for an instant through a door.
When she returned, she bore two dusty paintings in oil. Each was
surrounded by a heavy gilt frame and together the pair burdened the
strength of the old woman. Her whole manner reeked of secrecy. With an
air of triumph she smiled to herself as she took from the chair where
she had been sitting a red silk handkerchief with which she dusted the
faces of the two paintings. All this time she kept them turned from
Lily. At last she stiffened her thin body suddenly and said sharply,
“Now, look!”
Lily, bending low, discerned in the light from the fire the character of
the two pictures. Each was the portrait of a woman, painted in the
smooth, skilful, slightly hard manner of Ingres. Yet there was a
difference, which the connoisseur’s eye of Lily must have detected. They
were cleverly done with a too great facility. But for that one might
almost have said they were the work of a genius. Clearly the same woman
had posed for both. In one she wore an enormous drooping hat, tilted a
little over one eye. In the other she wore a barbaric crown and robes of
Byzantine splendor.
Madame Blaise stood by with the air of a great art collector displaying
his treasures. “They are beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. “Superb! You
know I understand these things. I have never shown them to any one in
years. I am showing them to you because I know you understand these
things. I have seen your house. I have seen your beautiful things. You
see it is the same woman who posed for both.... The one is called ‘The
Girl in the Hat’ ... the other is ‘The Byzantine Empress.’ Theodora, you
know, who was born a slave girl.”