From that night on the sound of firing grew steadily more faint and the
glow in the sky more dim. There were times when Lily, lying delirious in
the lodge under the care of Madame Borgue, the farmer’s wife, behaved in
the wildest manner. When the wind blew from the north, it carried the
sound of the guns across forests and wheatfields into the park at
Germigny and the barrage, no longer confused and close at hand, took on
a pulsing regular throb like the beating of surf upon a beach of hard
shingle. At such times Lily would sit up and talk wildly in a mixture of
French and English of Mills and monsters, of cauldrons, of white hot
metal that absorbed the very bodies of men. The distant rumbling was for
all the world like the pounding which had enveloped Cypress Hill in the
days of Lily’s youth. But Madame Borgue, knowing nothing of all this,
could make no sense of the ravings of her patient.
She remained a long time ill. While she lay unconscious with the fever,
Madame Gigon was buried among the beaded _couronnes_ of the cemetery at
Trilport between her obscure husband, the curator, and the father who
had been ruined by his loyalty to Napoleon the Little.
It happened that on the very day of the lonely funeral, Madame de Cyon
died in Paris of indigestion brought on by overeating and the loss of
twenty francs at bridge, played secretly to be sure, for in those days
no one played bridge in Paris. So Madame Gigon, by dying first, was
cheated out of her triumphant, “I told you so!” Of course, it may have
been that in another world she knew this satisfaction; for it was true
that Nadine “went off just like that.”
And in early October, on the first day that Lily ventured from the lodge
out upon the green terrace, she read in the Figaro that she had been
decorated with the Croix de Guerre. The citation appeared in the midst
of the military news.
“_Shane, Madame Lily. Widow. American by birth. Decorated for valor at
Germigny l’Evec during the Battle of the Marne, when she prevented a
detachment of Uhlans from destroying an iron bridge of the utmost
importance to our troops._”
This she read aloud to Madame Borgue. It was tiny paragraph, printed in
very small black type, and it caused Lily to laugh, bitterly,
mirthlessly. Letting fall the Figaro by the side of her chair, she lay
back.
“As if,” she said, “I had ever thought of the bridge! As if I even knew
that they were trying to destroy it!”
And when Madame Borgue, alarmed by this outburst, sought to lead her
back into the house, Lily said, “I am not delirious.... Truly ... I am
not. It is so absurdly funny!” And she laughed again and again.
She never knew that it was M. de Cyon who brought the affair to the
attention of the Ministry of War and secured her the distinction.
Slowly it became clear that fate had not allotted to the dead Uhlan the
chance of Césaire’s death. She received no news of him. Even M. de Cyon,
in the government at Paris, could discover nothing. The hours grew into
days and the days into months until, at last, she was able to leave the
lodge and visit Jean in the hospital at Neuilly. There came at length a
day when there was no longer any doubt. The Baron was simply among the
missing ... the great number concerning whom there was no news. It was
as if he had bade her farewell at the vine-covered gate and galloped off
on the black horse into a darkness which swallowed him forever.
In Paris, the house in the Rue Raynouard acquired an air of complete
desolation. There was no one, not even Jean who lay at the hospital in
Neuilly with his right leg amputated at the knee, to share it with Lily.
The mirrors reflected nothing save the figures of the mistress, the
servants and M. de Cyon who appeared to find consolation for his recent
loss in visits to the big house at Numero Dix.
Ellen, escaped at last from Central Europe, had returned to America.
Madame Gigon was dead. Of her friends none remained. Madame de Cyon was
in her grave. Madame Blaise still lived in a polite madhouse, convinced
that the war was only a revolution which would place her friend, the
wine merchant, upon the throne of a glorified and triumphant France. The
others? Some had gone into the provinces, and of those who remained, all
were interested in their own families. They had sons, brothers, nephews,
cousins, at the front.... There were no more _salons_. It was impossible
to go alone to the theater. There remained nothing to do but visit Jean
(a sad business though he seemed cheerful enough) and sit in the big
empty house, so silent now, so empty of chatter, of music, of laughter.
Even the great piano under the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner remained
closed and silent save in the rare moments when Lily, as if unable any
longer to endure the silence, opened it and played with only half a
heart the tunes which once had filled the house and overflowed into the
garden. It was clear that it required more than mirrors, jades, pictures
and old carpets to make a dwelling endurable. As Lily remarked to M. de
Cyon at tea one afternoon in early November, these things, each one the
reminder of some precious association, only rendered Numero Dix the more
unbearable.
“I can understand,” she said, “that sometimes my mother must have died
of loneliness in the house at Cypress Hill.”
She told M. de Cyon the history of the burned house, bit by bit, from
the day it was built until the day it was destroyed. Indeed she told him
all the story of her father, of her own childhood, of the Mills and the
Town. She even told him something of Irene’s story, though not enough to
be sure for him to evolve the whole truth, for there were certain
barriers beyond which she allowed no one to penetrate; no one save an
old village priest who was, after all, not a man but an agent of God
himself. And he was dead now.
In those days the pair drew more closely to each other, as if they found
in the friendship a consolation for the melancholy and overwhelming
loneliness. And it is true that Lily had grown more sympathetic. The old
carefree gaiety had given place to a new and more gentle understanding.
The indolence, it seemed, had vanished before a new determination to
dominate her own aimless existence. She had grown more calm. Indeed
there were times now when she became wholly grave and serious, even
pensive, as she sat quietly with the pleasant, white-haired Frenchman
who found her company so agreeable that he seldom permitted a day to
pass without calling at Numero Dix on his way from the Ministry of War.
She became, as she had observed to Willie Harrison, more and more like
her mother.
Each day was like the one before, and this monotony to Lily must have
been a new and painful experience. The only variation occurred when Paul
Schneidermann, returning from a hospital in Cannes, arrived in Paris and
became a second visitor at the house in the Rue Raynouard. But even in
this there was an inexpressible sadness, for the bullet which had
wounded Schneidermann paralyzed forever his left arm. He was never again
able to play the piano in the long drawing-room nor the cello he had
brought to the house when Ellen was there.
With Ellen gone, the American newspapers no longer found their way into
the house. Indeed it seemed impossible to obtain them anywhere in Paris,
even if Lily had been capable of such an effort. So there were no more
clippings for the enameled box. The last one bore the date of the first
month of the war. Since then there had been nothing. It was as if
Krylenko, too,--the Krylenko whose progress Lily watched from so great a
distance--had died or gone away like all the others. There remained only
the wreckage of a life which had once been complete, content, even
magnificent in its quiet way.
When at last Jean was able to leave the hospital, he secured through M.
de Cyon an appointment at the Ministry of War. As for Lily, she
undertook presently the establishment of a soup kitchen for soldiers who
passed through Paris on leave. But at this diversion she was no more
successful than she had been at knitting socks for the strikers; and
after a few months she abandoned it completely to the care of women less
wealthy and more capable. She continued, however, until the end to
supply it lavishly with money. In her enthusiasm for the charities of
the war she succeeded in exhausting for the first time her annual
income. She even dipped into her principal. The two hundred thousand
dollars which the Town paid her for Cypress Hill she used to provide
food and comfort for the soldiers of another nation.