Part 23

There was but one thing which diverted the stream of their gossip and this was the mention of the sacred name of Bonaparte. She gathered, after a time, that there was a Prince Bonaparte in whom the existence of all of them had found its core. She learned to her astonishment that they ignored the very existence of the Republic. A tottering old man, the son of a plumber’s daughter and a dubious prince who was a homicide (all this she gathered from their talk) was, to them, a shining figure invested with all the glory of the Corsican’s golden bees.

At length, when she could bear it no longer, Ellen had a piano brought in and placed in one of the great empty chambers in the gallery above the drawing-room, and there she played for hours in defiance of “le Prince” and his court of old women belowstairs. There were times when the music (especially the compositions of some of the hateful new composers) became so violent that it threatened to drown the gossip of Madame Gigon’s cronies. At such moments the blind old woman would raise her sightless eyes toward the ceiling and observe to the others, “That is Madame Shane’s cousin. She is a violent woman (une femme sauvage).... She suffers from an excess of élan.”

At which Madame de Cyon would wag her head and observe, “Tiens! Tiens! Perhaps if she had a lover it would help! A young widow like that....”

* * * * *

During the long months two things sustained her. One was, of course, the old passion for her music. The other was Jean. As they came to know each other, a warm and touching affection developed between them, for the boy, despite the good manners and the quiet grave charm born of his long association with older people, had in him a spark which the presence of his cousin fanned into a flame. The life he led was, to be sure, of a queer sort ... a life spent almost entirely within the walls of the beautiful old house with little company save old Madame Gigon, her fat dogs and the fussy music master who came twice a week to give him lessons. It was a somber, quiet life which changed only during the delirious summer months when, in company with his mother and old Madame Gigon, he went to stay in the country at Germigny l’Evec in the lodge of the park owned by Madame’s nephew, the Baron. There he could ride a pony, sometimes alone and sometimes following his mother and the Baron on their long rides at early morning through the damp forest on the opposite bank of the Marne. And there were the farmer’s boys for playmates.

But in winter everything was changed. Until his cousin came from America he played alone day after day in the little park dominated by the white pavilion. The fascination of having a cousin ... a real new cousin ... seemed likely to endure forever. Indeed the power of the novelty was so great that at times he slyly deserted old Madame Gigon and made his way secretly up the long stairs and along the gallery to sit on the floor outside Ellen’s door and listen, breathless, to the flood of music that welled up to fill all the house.

When Ellen took him walking in the Bois she did not, like his mother, walk in an indolent regal fashion; she moved rapidly, quite the way a person ought to walk, and she talked of the people they passed and sometimes even halted beside the pond and threw stones far out into the water.

The boy was, at that time, her only companion for, shut in by her ignorance of French and an incurable dislike for the stringy American students who sometimes sought her acquaintance, she had no opportunity for making friends. Yet she was content to be lonely, for she had always been so, save in two brief moments ... once when she had been overcome by the presence of Callendar and again when Lily had wept and embraced her. Jean worshiped her without claiming any part of her. He was, in this, like his mother, for Lily, in the wisdom and indolence of her nature, allowed Ellen to go her own way. It may have been that in this grain of wisdom lay the secret of her charm and her power even over the old women who came to gather about Madame Gigon’s chair and gossip. They succumbed to her like all the others, like the Baron....

There were times when the presence of César troubled Ellen. During all those months the first hatred she had for him failed to abate; she came to tolerate him, perhaps because she saw that it was necessary just as once it had been necessary to tolerate Mr. Wyck and the Bunces. She must have known that he worked against her. Yet in a strange, abstract fashion, she was able to understand the fascination of his hard and wiry masculinity. It was, of course, a thing which she herself could not have suffered for an instant, but she understood that to Lily it was a necessity. Beyond this point, however, her shrewd mind was unable to penetrate; it was impossible to fix the relationship of the pair. Lily never spoke of him, save in the most casual fashion. Indeed, Ellen, who could not bring herself to pry into such matters, never knew whether the Baron had been at Nice with her cousin or whether he had met her at the railway station. Madame Gigon spoke of him as her devoted nephew. She praised his virtues, and his constant presence at the house she interpreted as an interest in herself. At times Ellen could have cried out, “Rot! It’s not your nephew who’s supporting you and making you comfortable. It’s Lily. And it’s not you that he comes to see. It’s Lily.”

But she said nothing. The strangest thing of all was that she did not much care what their relationship might be. Once it might have disturbed her; now she looked upon it as a matter of no concern, a thing which had nothing to do with her. Yet there were moments in the evenings when, sitting with them in the long drawing-room, she felt vague, faint envy of her cousin. They came in the long silences when she would suddenly discover that Lily, so happy, so radiant, so lovely, in the long gowns of black velvet which she wore in the evening, was watching the Baron as he sat smoking his pipe, his feet stretched out before him toward the fire. The dogs adored him. He was the one person for whom they would desert Madame Gigon.

It was then that Ellen became conscious of her loneliness as a distant, almost physical pain. She learned to kill the pain. Usually she rose, lighted a cigarette, and sitting at the piano, fell to playing wild and boisterous music out of the music halls.

* * * * *

Miss Rebecca Schönberg did not abandon her. She came once or twice to the house, where her bright shiny eyes penetrated every corner. She inspected, absorbed Madame Gigon and, having exhausted the possibilities of the old woman, put her forever out of her mind. She would, no doubt, have found marvelous material in Lily and the Baron but, as chance had it, they were never present. She took Ellen with her to the theater and twice to the opera, once to hear the inevitable Louise and once to hear Götterdämmerung, with all the guttural power of its German diction ironed out into smooth, elegant French. They called it Le Crêpuscule des Dieux, a whimsy which caused Ellen endless mirth. And at the end of two months, the restless Jewess having placed Ellen with an excellent teacher of French, left the Ritz and set out to visit an aunt who was married to a rich Gentile merchant in Riga.

But before she left she said to Ellen, “When I return we will arrange some entertainments. You must know the right people. That is vastly important. You must be modern, because during the next ten years to be modern will be to be chic.”

It occurred to Ellen that Miss Schönberg, with remarkable speed, had undertaken the position of guide and messenger toward the heights of success. She was like a trainer who had taken in charge a new animal to teach it a whole set of tricks. She did not protest, because Rebecca Schönberg did not annoy her; on the contrary she was vastly amusing. In her restless energy there was a quality akin to the vitality of Ellen herself. They went everywhere; they saw everything; they absorbed the people about them, and returned late at night as fresh as they had started.

“Vitality,” observed Rebecca, as they lunched at the Ritz on the day she left for Riga, “is nine-tenths of success. With one grain of genius and nine of vitality, any one can succeed.”

As she made this observation, she regarded Ellen with an intense and speculative scrutiny. The girl was looking about her with a naïve interest in the people who sat near them. Her whole manner was one of a vast wonder, as if she thought, “I, Ellen Tolliver, lunching at the Ritz in Paris. It is not possible that I am awake!” Miss Schönberg must have seen that she was still a bit crude, still not quite free of the multitude, but she had an unmistakable air, a certain distinction born in her which had to do with the superb poise of the head, the slight arch of the nose and the line of the throat. It had been sharpened and polished mysteriously during the few months in Paris. The clothes were right for her style ... simple almost to severity, fitting the tall, strong, energetic body to perfection. They came from dressmakers, Miss Schönberg reflected, who knew their business. Madame Shane must have had taste to have guided the girl so well. A touch here and there and she would be perfect. What she lacked was a sense of the bizarre which the public expected from artists. There was plenty of time to accomplish that....

“As I was saying,” continued Miss Schönberg, over her _coupe marron_, “vitality is everything. I once saw Mary Garden at a rehearsal on a stage cluttered by the jumbled scenery of Pelléas and Melisande. There were scores of people on the stage ... carpenters, musicians, a director, journalists ... all alive and moving about, but one didn’t see them. One saw only Mary moving back and forth, in and out among them. No one else existed. It was a case of vitality. She is ninety-nine per cent. vitality ... nothing else. She hypnotizes the public. Why, she has even adapted the French language to suit her own ideas.”

The men and women who sat at the adjoining tables must have found them an interesting pair; they were both so neat, so trim, so _raffiné_. It was not without reason that more than one person, in the years that followed, spoke of Ellen as resembling a fine greyhound. The one, it was plain, was a Jewess and very likely, if one could judge from the bright shrewd eyes, a clever one. The other might have been anything ... Russian, French, American, Hungarian; it was impossible to say. And she was young and handsome.

“You must exercise,” continued Miss Schönberg, “so as not to lose your figure or your vitality.”

* * * * *

So after Miss Schönberg had gone, Ellen took up riding, a thing she had not done since the days when, as a wild young girl, she had ridden her grandfather’s horses over fences and ditches without a saddle. And in the Bois, as in the Ritz, people came to notice her, that she rode magnificently and was dressed by the best of habit makers. Presently, Lily’s friend Paul Schneidermann, who sometimes called at the house in the Rue Raynouard to see young Jean, took to riding with her. He was a languid young man, devoted to the arts, who led a sybaritic life, but he came presently to rise at dawn in order to ride by her side through the dewy park.

In those days, she did not forget her mother; on the contrary she wrote to her more frequently than she had ever done, and her letters were real letters, filled with the details of her progress. She wrote that Sanson had placed her with the proper teachers, that she had been to see the great Philippe and that everything had been arranged for her to work under him. She described Rebecca Schönberg.

Sometimes in the letters that came from the Town, Ellen discerned a note of subdued and passionate jealousy which had, somehow, taken the place of her mother’s old distrust of Lily. She understood all that well enough: Hattie Tolliver hated Lily for giving her daughter all those things which she had herself desired so earnestly to give. But there was in Hattie’s letters no sense of remoteness, not the faintest note of her having yielded the possession of her daughter. She treated Ellen still as a little girl. She saw her still as she had seen her on that last afternoon, a stiff, proud, awkward girl carrying her skates as she stepped through the door of the Tolliver house into the bright sunlight on her way to Walker’s Pond.

40

It was the death of old Julia Shane which set in motion the next event of importance to the Tollivers. Things happened like that in their family. For a time all would go forward, much as a wave moving in a great smooth swell approaches a reef, until presently some event interrupted and the courses of their lives had all to be redirected. The old woman was, perhaps, the center, the one who at that moment held all the skeins in her withered bony fingers. She chose at last to die, and so brought Lily back to the Town and freed her niece, the faithful Hattie.

Together they cared for old Julia; together they sat by the side of her bed and slowly, under the circumstances, being so close to death, there grew up between them a new and unaccustomed affection. It was Lily herself who, a day or two before her mother died, told Hattie that the old story about her having had a child was true. The existence of Jean shocked Mrs. Tolliver less than might have been expected, less even than she herself had expected it to do, perhaps because always deep in her heart she was certain that Lily had had a child born out of wedlock. It was old gossip, which she had endeavored always to crush, yet it was gossip which she knew had its foundations in truth. She knew it, always, just as she knew the days when it was certain to rain or to be windy. She could not have explained the feeling, save that she had always distrusted Lily’s charm. One could not be like Lily and still be a good woman....

For the sake of morality, she made known with an acute frankness her disapproval of such conduct, and when this had been done in conscientious fashion she came to the subject nearest to her heart, the question which interested her more profoundly at that moment than anything in the world.

It happened a day or two after the funeral when the old Julia, dressed for the last time in her mauve taffeta, was borne through the Flats past Mills made silent by the long awaited strike, up to the bleak hill where they buried her by the side of her brother-in-law, Jacob Barr, the pioneer.

The two cousins, Lily and Hattie, sat together in the gloomy drawing-room before a fire of cannel coal, surrounded by pictures which stood in piles against the wall and rosewood furniture wrapped in ghostly cheesecloth. Shane’s Castle, they both knew sadly, would no longer be a source of talk and excitement for the Town. Harvey Seton need no longer view it distantly with all the cold horror of a Calvinist. Its history was ended; there would never be within its walls another gathering of the clan.

The gentle melancholy which filled the old house had, it seemed, an effect upon the two women. Lily, clad in a loose gown of black velvet, sat watching her cousin with a curious look of speculation. She was as lovely as she had always been, so lovely, so gentle, so amiable that the Spartan Hattie in heart could not believe that she had changed her scandalous way of living. The older woman was, as usual, busy; it was as if her tireless fingers could cease only in sleep or in death. She sat now mending a bit of old lace which they had found while ransacking the vast attics of Shane’s Castle.

“I will mend it and send it to Ellen,” she said. “It is fine lace, better than anything she will be able to get in Paris.”

Lily smiled, perhaps because Hattie thought so little of Paris and the laces it might offer, perhaps because it seemed to her that lace was so wildly inappropriate to Ellen. What was lace to a creature so proud and fierce, so ruthless? For she had discovered what the others had not known and what Hattie, even in the moments when her daughter hurt her most savagely, would never believe--that Ellen _was_ ruthless.

“I am trusting you,” she murmured over the lace, “to look out for Ellen. She is young and even if she is a widow she knows little of the world.”

Lily smiled again. She thought, “As if it were possible for any man to seduce Ellen unless she chose to be seduced. She was born knowing the world!”

“Do you think she knows her way about with you away from her?”

Lily leaned forward and touched her cousin’s strong, skilful fingers. “Don’t fret over Ellen,” she said. “Why, Ellen is safer in Paris than I am. Nothing can ever happen to Ellen....” She bent her head and the warm color came into her cheeks. “I mean nothing of the sort that could happen to me. Why, Ellen’s complete.... You don’t understand how independent she is. She could go into the middle of Africa and land on her feet. She has no need of friends or guardians. Why, she’s never even homesick.”

Hattie’s fingers paused in their work. “Never?” she asked in a low voice. “Never?”

And Lily, understanding that she had hurt the proud woman, hastened to add, “Oh, not that she doesn’t want to see you all. She speaks of you constantly.... She wants some day to have you near her always.... You see, now she has to work.... I don’t think you understand how ambitious she is.”

Slowly, as Lily spoke, the cloud passed a little from Mrs. Tolliver. When her cousin had finished, she raised her head and said in a low voice, “Oh, I know all that. I’ve been thinking about it all lately ... thinking a great deal. Only I never understood why it was she never came home before she went to you.”

“There were reasons,” said Lily. “Good reasons.... One was that she hadn’t the money and wouldn’t ask you for it. She doesn’t know that I discovered that ... but I did ... I know just how much money she had. When she came to me, there were only seven francs left.... D’you know how much that is? It’s a little more than a dollar. That’s all she had left. A girl who would take such a risk is not likely to fail. You’ll see her famous some day, Hattie. You can be sure of that. You’ll be proud of her.”

The fingers were busy again with the lace, and Lily knew suddenly that she had hurt Mrs. Tolliver again, this time in quite a different fashion. She had touched the old pride that had to do with money ... that curious, hard vein of pride so incomprehensible to Lily who had never thought of money, save only as something that was always at hand to make the wheels of life run smoothly.

“To think,” murmured Mrs. Tolliver, “that there wasn’t enough money to bring her home to me.” A tear slipping down the worn cheeks dropped into the web of old lace and Lily hastened to speak.

“It wasn’t only that,” she said. “Money would have made little difference. She couldn’t have come back.... She didn’t dare to come. You see, she was discouraged.... How can I say it? She told me the whole story. She said that if she had turned back then she would have been lost forever. She would have turned into a pitiful old maid like Eva Barr. She could never have married any one in the Town. There was no one with enough spirit. The ones with spirit ... enough spirit for her, all leave the Town.” Then after a silence: “You see the death of her husband was so tragic.... It hurt her.”

For a second Mrs. Tolliver raised her head and faced the beautiful cousin. “She never loved him.... I know that.”

Lily, a little frightened, kept silent for a time. She had come close to betraying the awful secret. “No,” she said, presently. “I suppose she didn’t love him. He was a creature without spirit ... a nice man, but no mate for an eagle.”

“You knew him?” asked Hattie. “Where? You never told me that.”

“I met him on the train ... the last time I came here. I think,” she added with a faint smile, “that he was a little _épris_ of me ... a little taken by me. I know the signs.... But he was terribly frightened ... timid like a rabbit.”

And then Mrs. Tolliver came round again to the old observation. “I always said he wasn’t good enough for her. I couldn’t see why she had anything to do with him.”

“Ah,” said Lily. “You don’t know your own daughter yet ... Hattie. He helped her to escape.”

But she knew that Hattie would never believe such a thing.

* * * * *

It was a strange circumstance that Lily--the Lily whom Hattie had always feared and distrusted--became in those days the one to whom the vigorous woman turned for comfort and companionship. Somehow the indolent Lily, so filled with understanding and knowledge of the world, served as a bond between the mother and the daughter in far off Paris. She succeeded in softening all the wounds made by Ellen in the abrupt notes which came with an efficient regularity, for Lily possessed a great power in such matters; it was a power which had more to do with the sound of her warm, low voice than with any logic in the arguments she used. Her arguments were neither logical nor profound; usually they were only observations as to the shyness of Ellen in all the range of affection, and the fierce ambition that tormented her.

“You will understand some day,” she said, “that all she is doing is more for you than for herself. It is because she wants you to be proud of her.”

“I don’t care about that....” Hattie would say over and over again. “Not very much. But I don’t want her to escape me forever. I couldn’t bear that. She’s different from Fergus. He is warm and shows his love. But there are times when I’m afraid I’ll lose Ellen forever.”

And Lily, in the depths of her placid mysterious soul, knew that here again it was a matter of possession ... the same possession which the Baron must always have over herself, the possession which Ellen, without willing it, had exercised over poor Clarence. Hattie would not abandon her claim to her children. She could not say to Hattie, without hurting her, that her daughter was a creature whom none had possessed or ever would possess even quietly, secretly, as Lily knew that she possessed the Baron, despite all his boisterous show of domination.

41

On a gray winter morning early in the year 1912, the Tolliver family stood on the platform of the Town station, a dirty affair covered with soot and shameful in a community so prosperous. There was no new station because none could be built so long as Shane’s Castle stood upon the only site worthy of so grandiose a building as the Town had planned. The old woman was dead but her daughter Lily refused to sell, and Hattie Tolliver, standing now on the platform with the air of a field marshal surrounded by his troops, took satisfaction in this knowledge. Her family was on the retreat now before the onslaught of the Mills and she herself stood in command of the tiny rear guard.

“They’d give a lot for that land,” she remarked to her husband. “I hope Lily will keep it. She doesn’t need the money.”