It may have been that Madame Blaise played her part in the depression.
After the night that Lily ran out of her house, she never saw the crazy
old woman again, for a day or two later Madame Blaise, in a purple hat
and a bright Venetian shawl, was led away on the promise of a wonderful
adventure to a house in Versailles where well-to-do lunatics were cared
for and allowed to indulge to the utmost their idiosyncrasies. Her
guardian was none other than the handsome and distinguished M. de Cyon,
who with his brother, a lawyer, looked after the old woman’s property.
She seemed completely happy in the new establishment, so M. de Cyon
reported, because she found there an elderly wine merchant who believed
himself descended from Henri Quatre and Diane de Poitiers, and therefore
the rightful heir to the French throne. Together they spent their days
plotting intrigues and revolutions by which he was to be set upon the
throne with Madame Blaise as his consort. So there was no opportunity
for Lily to wring from the old woman any further information regarding
the photograph of the handsome gentleman in the black beard. The
photograph together with the hundreds of other pictures, was packed away
in a cavernous storehouse in Montparnasse when the furniture was cleared
out of the chalet in the enclosure near the Trocadero and it was let to
an Englishwoman interested in art. Life, as old Julia Shane said, was
after all no story book in which everything was revealed. Every man had
secrets which he carried into the grave.
But before Madame Blaise was led away, she kept her threat and sent
round to the house in the Rue Raynouard The Byzantine Empress and The
Girl in the Hat. The pictures were left there by the driver of a
battered fiacre who went off immediately. To Lily, the pictures had
become objects of horror. She would not see them. She bade the
housekeeper put them away in the top room of the house where she could
not possibly find them. When they arrived she was still in bed,
suffering from a wild headache that did not leave her for days after the
experience with Madame Blaise.
“It was horrible,” she told Ellen. “More horrible than you can imagine,
to see that old devil dancing before me like an omen ... a warning of
old age. If you had seen her ... so like me in the pictures ... so like
me even in the reality, like me as I might easily be some day. It was
horrible ... horrible!” And she buried her face in her hands.
Ellen, as usual, consulted Madame Gigon.
“She is really ill, this time,” she said. “It isn’t that she’s just
tired. She’s frightened by something. She’s much worse than she’s ever
been before.”
And they sent for a physician, a great bearded man, recommended by
Madame de Cyon, who diagnosed the case as a _crise de nerfs_ and bade
her go at once to the lodge in the country. The servants remarked that
Madame seemed ill and tired for the first time in her life.
After a time she appeared to forget the mysterious photograph. It was
clear that her father was destined to remain, as he had always been, a
solitary, fascinating, malevolent figure translated by some turn of
circumstance from the intrigues of the old world into the frontier life
of the new. What lay in the past--murder, disgrace, conspiracy--must
remain hidden, the secret of the dead and of a mad old woman who in her
youth and beauty had been his mistress at the very moment that his bride
struggled in the school at St. Cloud to learn the tricks of a great
lady. Out of all the mystery only one thing seemed clear--that Lily was
his favorite child; and now the reason seemed clear enough. By some whim
of Fate she was like The Girl in the Hat, the lovely creature who was
now Madame Blaise.
So the _crise de nerfs_ persisted throughout the summer. Indeed there
were times when it appeared that Lily was on the verge of a settled
melancholia, times when she would walk in solitude for hours along the
towpaths beneath the mottled limbs of the plane trees. Yet her beauty
persisted. She might have been a goddess ... Ceres ... as she walked
along the green path, bordered on one side by the Marne and on the other
by waving fields of yellow grain.
As the weeks passed she suffered increasing annoyance through the
persistent efforts of the Town to acquire the property at Cypress Hill.
A dozen times a month letters arrived from Folsom and Jones, pressing
letters that carried threats which Folsom and Jones passed along
smoothly with all the suavity of true lawyers playing both ends against
the middle. Indeed, from the tone of certain of the communications it
appeared that they too, although they were Lily’s agents and paid by
her, believed that the interests of the Town surmounted those of their
client. Its growth, they wrote, was stupendous. It was rapidly becoming
one of the greatest steel centers in the world. If she could only be
induced to return for a visit, she would understand the anxiety of the
Town council to acquire the holdings at Cypress Hill. Surely she could
understand that while sentiment was a commendable thing, it had its
place. One could be too sentimental about a situation. The price offered
was excellent. (“But not so excellent as it will be in another five
years,” thought Lily with a certain malice.) The house brought her no
return. She only paid taxes on it. And so on, for page after page,
letter after letter.
All this, no doubt, sounded reasonable enough, but Lily reading those
letters aloud to Madame Gigon, who desired to be read aloud to no matter
what the material, would murmur irritably, “Why the devil can’t they
leave me in peace? Go back and visit that place? My God! What for?” And
then sarcastically, “To see Eva Barr, I suppose. I’m sure I’m not
interested in their prosperity.”
And she would write again that she had no intention of selling and that
the more they annoyed her the less she was likely to alter her decision.
It may have been that she enjoyed the sense of power with which the
possession of Cypress Hill endowed her ... a feature she had not
realized until it was shown her by Ellen. It may have been that she was
simply tired and a little perverse and ill-natured. And it was true that
she had not the slightest interest in the money involved. Indeed she had
no idea how rich she was. Each year she spent what she desired to
spend, and never did she come to the end of her income. What more could
she desire? What could she do with more money?
But it is also more than probable that somewhere far back in the dark
recesses of her consciousness, there were memories which kindled as she
grew older, new fires of resentment against the Mills and the Town and
all the things they stood for ... memories of her mother’s open hatred
for the Harrisons and Judge Weissman, memories of a terrible night when
men and women were shot down under the dead trees of the park, memories
of an heroic, unattainable figure, wounded and bloody, but undefeated
... a figure which doubtless grew in fascination as it receded into the
past. It is true, too, that there is sometimes greater peace, even
greater happiness, in renunciation than in fulfilment. What has never
been a reality, may remain a fine dream. Krylenko had never been more
than this.
And so the affair ran on until one evening in September Eustache, the
farmer’s boy, brought back from Meaux a small envelope bearing the post
mark of the Town and addressed in the scrawled, illiterate handwriting
of old Hennery. It recounted briefly the end of the house of Cypress
Hill. It had caught fire mysteriously in the night and before dawn
nothing remained save a hole in the ground filled with the scorched and
blackened fragments of fine old carpets, mirrors, jade, crystals, carved
chests and old chairs, all the beautiful things which encumbered the
site of the proposed railroad station.
The mulatto woman, Hennery wrote with difficulty and the most atrocious
spelling, swore that she saw two men running away from the house after
the fire began. The police, he added, had been able to find no trace of
them.
And the following day Lily received a polite letter from Folsom and
Jones giving her a brief account of the catastrophe. They also mentioned
the story told by the mulatto woman. They believed, however, that it was
simply the crazy imagining of a demented old woman.
“Perhaps now,” the letter concluded, “Miss Shane would desire to rid
herself of a property that could no longer hold her even by ties of
sentiment.”