Chapter VIII: Part 8

Despite the air of depression given out by the monstrous room, it possessed a somber magnificence. To Ellen, the only magnificence approaching it lay in the drawing-room of that gloomy house known as Shane’s Castle, set in the midst of the smoking furnaces. Aunt Julia’s house was like it, filled with pictures and furniture and carpets which, like these, had been brought out of Europe.

There were wines for dinner, not one or two, but an array of port, madeira, sauterne, sherry and, at the place where Mrs. Callendar seated herself in a chair raised more than the others so that she might dominate the massive table, a pint of champagne for herself in a tiny silver bucket filled with ice. It was a schoolgirl’s dream of magnificence ... something out of the pages of a super-romantic novelette. In the beginning, the spectacle, proceeding through course after course, dazzled Ellen and made her shy. It was superb food, for in the veins of Thérèse there blended the blood of Frenchman and Greek. It was food that had a taste ... not the boiled stuff of Anglo-Saxons.

* * * * *

After dinner, when they had all gone into the dark library, the moment came at last when Ellen’s tongue was loosed. It may have been the wine she drank or it may have been the cigarette which, in her new freedom, she smoked over the coffee (for in a single evening she had broken two of Clarence’s rules); but it is more likely that it was the picture hanging over the mantelpiece, which changed everything.

She looked at it carefully and then said, “Is that by Turner? My aunt has one by him.”

And a moment later, under the subtle urgence of Sabine, she was telling them everything. She described, for example, the Town, its Mills, its desolation, the misery of the workers. She painted for them a picture of her own family, of the Red Scot who lay now, helpless and childish, in her own big bed. She told them of her other grandfather, cold and aloof, who had run away in his youth and lived in the Paris of the Second Empire, and now existed in a room walled in by books. She recreated before their eyes the gloomy color of Shane’s Castle, only to be interrupted in the midst by Thérèse Callendar, who turned to Sabine and observed, “She is a cousin, you know, of the Madame Shane we saw once at Madame de Cyon’s in Paris.... You remember Madame de Cyon, the Russian woman, whose husband was French minister to Bulgaria.... She lived in the Avenue du Bois. A Bonapartist. Madame Shane was the beauty with red hair.... Miss Tolliver’s Aunt Julia is her mother.”

And then she permitted Ellen to continue, and the girl meanwhile, even as she talked, understood that Mrs. Callendar had not forgotten Lily. She had even fixed the place and time of their meeting. It was clear that she had been thinking of Lily, as every one did.

She told the story simply enough, but with an earnestness that was moving. To her the canvas which she painted was not remarkable, but to the listeners it appeared to hold, perhaps because it was so new to them, the fascination of a world which was utterly strange and a little exotic. They listened, moved by the simplicity of her utterance, and Richard Callendar asked her questions about the mills and furnaces, about the foreign population. The recital was a success and out of it she learned something new,--that there was nothing of such power as simplicity, nothing of such interest as individuality. She understood all that from the way in which they listened. It was the first time in all her life when she had thrown caution to the winds. She was, for an hour, her complete self.

But there was one part of the story which she did not tell. It was that part which concerned her elopement and all that had followed it. She said simply, “And so I came to New York to study, and luckily fell into the hands of Sanson....”

Richard Callendar stood up suddenly and poked the fire. His mother said, “You could not have done better,” and Sabine observed, “Here in New York we forget that the rest of the country exists.... I’ve never been out of New York except to go to Europe or to some summer place.”

To-night, instead of being a performer, one who played in public, she was the guest, the center of the evening.

* * * * *

She played for them the Moonlight Sonata and while she played, she became conscious again of the curious, breathless way in which Richard Callendar listened. It seemed, for a time, that he existed only in a single spirit which somehow enveloped her and the music of Beethoven. All the evening he had been silent and watchful, as silent and as watchful as herself, save in the moment when she was carried away by her own story. When she had finished playing she was conscious of another fact, perhaps even more interesting. It was that Sabine had noticed a difference and was regarding the handsome Callendar with a look so intent that Ellen, turning sharply, caught her unaware.

This new world was a world of shadows, of hints, of insinuations, a world of curious restraints and disguises. Out of these, in the very instant she turned from the piano, she understood that the relation between Sabine and young Callendar was more than a casual friendship. Sabine was in love with him, passionately, perhaps without even knowing it, for it must have required a terrible force to lead a woman so circumspect into such a betrayal.

* * * * *

That night, for a second time, Ellen left the house in company with Sabine and Richard Callendar. It came about that, as they were preparing to leave, young Callendar proposed to accompany them and without further discussion entered the carriage. In the past it had been the custom to send Ellen home in the cabriolet while Callendar followed in the brougham with Sabine. Sometimes these two walked to Sabine’s house. She lived in Park Avenue, a half dozen blocks away, in a tall narrow house, exceedingly stiff and formal in appearance ... a house which one could not but say suited her admirably.

On the way, they talked music for a time and when the cabriolet approached Sabine’s corner, she said simply, “I am tired. You can drop me at home.”

So she bade them good night without further ado and disappeared into the narrow house. It was a strange thing for her to have done. Ellen and Callendar must have expected her to accompany them all the way to the Babylon Arms and to return alone with him; that would have been the order of things. But she was more subtle than they imagined. If she understood, as Ellen was certain she had, that there was some new thing come into the relations that existed among them all, she was clever. She did not attempt to change or even interrupt this new current; wise in the depths of her shrewd mind she saw that to be an obstacle was not the same as to be a goal. So she left Richard Callendar with the stranger who had become her rival. It may have caused her sleeplessness and torment; she may have felt a keen jealousy, but it was impossible to know. It may also have been that, knowing the continental ideas of Callendar, she was not concerned over her ultimate victory. By the rule of the very tradition which had shut her in, Callendar could not _marry_ this stranger.

29

As Callendar reëntered the cabriolet, Ellen settled back into her corner to wait. She watched, as always, but this time she was conscious that there was another who was watching. It seemed for the first time that there had risen up in her path a person, perhaps even an enemy, who played the same waiting game. Callendar sat in his corner, his dark face visible now and then as a streak of light from the lamps entered the door, and in that uncertain and shifting illumination, Ellen studied him closely for the first time.

It was a strangely pleasing face; the very dark pallor, so evenly distributed, so perfectly shaded caught her attention as a kind of beauty new to her. There was no ruddiness here, no boisterous energy. Rather it was a silent, subtle kind of beauty. The power behind it was not so much a crude energy as a strength that was placid yet possessed of the quality of steel. It was a strength that revealed itself in the firm, clean line of the jaw and in the square, almost hard modeling of the intelligent head. If there was a hint of passion it lay in the red lips that were so full and sensual beneath the fine black mustache. He wore the collar of his coat turned up a little, with his hat pulled well over his eyes so that the whole gave an impression of rakishness and adventure. Yet her instinct told her that here was something to be feared, something subtle and rather neat, of a sort strange to her.

They must have ridden several blocks in silence when he said to her, in a voice that was warm and carried faint traces of an accent, “I say, you are a remarkable person. I’d never dreamed how much it took to bring you where you are.”

When she answered, Ellen felt a new and absurd inclination to become a helpless, almost arch, young girl. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’d never thought about it.”

“It was an entertaining story you gave us.... You see people like me and Sabine seldom get any idea of what the real world is like.” He paused for a moment and then continued as if to make clear what he meant--“I mean a world in which people have to fight for things. We just have them. We forget about the others. And we’re in the minority of about ... shall we say ... one to a thousand. I’ve always had what I wanted.... I suppose I’ll always have it.”

This was strange talk, in a queer philosophic vein, to which Ellen answered again, “I don’t know ... I’ve never thought about the difference. I know what I want and some day ... I suppose I’ll have it.”

“You _are_ an extraordinary musician ... you know,” he continued. “I wonder if you know how extraordinary.”

Ellen did know; she was sure of it. But she saw fit not to answer because she was a little puzzled. In a world bounded by Clarence and Herman Biggs, she had not met a man of this sort. He was younger than Clarence and not much older than Herman but that made no difference. It was something that had nothing to do with age. Rather it was a matter of experience. She knew she was an excellent musician; she must have believed it or she could not have gone her own way with such unswerving directness, but she chose to answer modestly. In the dim light of the cab, it was impossible to know whether or not she actually smirked.

“Perhaps I am. How is one to know?... About one’s self, I mean.”

“My mother and I know about such things,” he replied, and then for a time the cabriolet fell into silence. They turned from the avenue into the park, and presently out of his corner he spoke again.

“You’re sure you told us everything to-night? You didn’t leave out of the story anything that might interest us?”

There was in this an impertinence which Ellen sensed and considered for a time. He was looking out of the window at the bare trees of the park with a splendid air of indifference, which Ellen felt was not indifference at all. Far back in her consciousness an odd feeling of triumph came into existence, a queer, inexplicable feeling that she was the dominant one, that somehow she had caught him now off his guard, as if she found he was not so clever as he thought. She became aware of a genuine sense of conflict, vague and undefined, ... a sort of conflict between her own intelligence and one that was quite as powerful. She watched the clear-cut ivory profile for a time and then said, “No. I left out nothing that could possibly interest anybody but me.”

(That much for his curiosity about the little man he saw for an instant through the open door at the Babylon Arms!)

Callendar turned to her. “I sound impertinent, but I only ask because it seems to me that you are even more interesting than the story you tell.”

Again this was bold and even personal, as though he sought to assume possession of that part of her which should belong to no one ... the part which was _herself_, at which he had no right to pry. The temptation to become feminine seized her once more.

“I suppose,” she said, “that that is a compliment. I thank you for it. Of course, I don’t know how true it is.”

“It _is_ true,” he replied abruptly. “You are admirable ... and courageous. Spirit is a fine thing ... the greatest in the world.”

* * * * *

There was one thing for which she was thankful. He did not treat her as if she were a silly girl, as a man might, for example, have treated May Seton. In years he was not much older than herself yet in reality she understood that he was centuries older. Of that, she was certain. What she did not understand was that his approach to life, down to the veriest detail, was one which, by the nature of things, was not only alien but incomprehensible. He had patience, a quality which in her was so utterly lacking as to be inconceivable; he could wait. It was this which puzzled her ... this and the sense of conflict, so complicated, that was always a little way off, just out of reach and not to be understood.

From a great distance, she watched him and even herself, confused, puzzled, but profoundly interested. That much she had gained from the blood that flowed in old Gramp Tolliver’s veins. She was always watching, waiting, learning.

* * * * *

The rest of their conversation was less interesting. It possessed, to be sure, a strange quality of leisure; there were long silences not in the least awkward and uncomfortable. On the contrary, despite that sense of conflict and watching, there was a certain calmness about them, as of the silences which fall between old friends immersed in a perfect understanding. It was perhaps the same friendliness which she neglected always to take into consideration, in which she would never quite believe.

At the Babylon Arms they passed between the Syrian Lions of cast iron and at the elevator he left her. There was no prying this time, no evidence of curiosity. As he bade her good night, he suggested that one day they might lunch together. Then the swaying elevator bore her upward to Clarence and out of sight of Callendar.

The sense of conflict disturbed her, even after Clarence came in from the Bunces’, murmuring apologies for having forgotten her and stayed so late. He apologized too for having, in the enthusiasm of a pinochle game, invited the Bunces to dinner four weeks later when he had returned from his western trip.

30

Mrs. Callendar stayed two months longer than usual in New York. She was kept by the only things which could have kept her away from the sunshine of her adored Cannes; that is to say, difficulties over stocks and bonds, adjustments of the Callendar fortune. She saw to it that there were no slips and no losses. Indeed, by missing the season at Cannes she turned a profit of several hundred thousand dollars which might have been lost in the hands of one in whose veins there flowed less Levantine blood.

Richard, of course, remained with her, though he exhibited a curious indifference toward the affairs which made upon his mother claims so passionate. When she reproached him, as she frequently did, he turned to her sometimes in the dark library of the house on Murray Hill and said, “My God! I’m too rich now. What should I do with any more money? Why should I worry?”

It was an attitude in which there was nothing of softness, nothing of degeneracy; it was not even the case of a son pampered by riches. His mother must have known that, better than any one, because she had encountered in him a will not unlike her own ... a will troubled in his case by a strange restlessness born perhaps of the bizarre mixture of blood. If he was possessed of any passions they were for women, and for music, which had an effect that was amazing; it was the one thing which held the power of quieting him. There were times when he would sit motionless in the presence of music as if enchanted by it. Its effect upon him was primitive and barbaric like the hypnotism which a tom-tom exerts upon a savage.

There came a night when, as they sat alone over their coffee, estranged and a little silent after her reproaches, she turned to him and without warning said, “What about this _jeune prodige_ ... Miss Tolliver. I hear you’ve been lunching with her.”

At this direct sally, a smile appeared slowly on the dark face of the son. It began gently at first on the sensual red lips, and then spread itself until the effect was utterly disarming. He had a way of smiling thus, after a fashion that was disconcerting because its implications were so profound, so subtle, and so filled with disillusionment. It was a smile in which the gray eyes, lighting suddenly, played a tantalizing rôle--a smile which seemed to envelop its subject and, clinging there for a time, to destroy all power of deceit by its very friendliness. It said, gently and warmly, “Come now, let’s be honest and generous with each other.” The red lips curved ever so gently beneath the dark mustache. It was the smile of a man born knowing much that others seldom ever learn.

He smiled at her and said, “Ah! Who could have told you that?... Who but Sabine ... who knows everything?”

The very tone of his voice appeared to caress and yet mock his mother. (Sabine ... indeed all women.) Before such an assault even Thérèse Callendar had no resistance. Shifting her plump body so that the heavy bangles on her wrists jangled and clattered, she waited a moment before answering. Then a faint blush, which appeared to arise from a real sense of guilt, spread slowly up to the edges of her bright small eyes.

“It _was_ Sabine who told me,” she said. “You can’t blame her for that.”

“No ... she always knows everything.” He laughed abruptly. “Sometimes I think she must be in communication with the birds ... or the mice.”

“You know what I think.... I think that it’s time you married. It’s a responsibility ... the money.... There ought to be heirs. We can’t give all that money to charity or some drafty museum.” While she knocked off the ashes from her cigarette, he watched her silently with the same caressing, mocking smile. “You’re past twenty-five, you know.... I want my grandchildren to be the children of young parents. I believe in it.”

Then suddenly, he pierced straight into the thing which she had avoided mentioning. “I shan’t marry Sabine,” he said. “I’ll find some one. I haven’t found her yet.”

“Sabine is excellent. She is well brought up.... She is rich. She is one of the few American women we know who is _mondaine_. I want you to marry an American. We need new blood. She knows her way about. She dresses superbly.... She will make an excellent hostess. She will be at home everywhere.”

“But I am not in love with her,” he said smiling.

For an instant a glint of hard anger appeared in her eyes. “You are old enough ... or at least wise enough not to be romantic.”

“It is not a question of romance, Mama.... It is more a question of necessity. I should prefer to be faithful to my wife.”

At this speech, she clucked her tongue, and crushed out the end of her cigarette. “_Ça ne marche pas_,” she observed coldly. “You can’t expect me to believe such nonsense.”

* * * * *

Thérèse was by no means innocent. She had lived in the world, always. She knew what things went on about her and, being Levantine and French, she expected even less than most women of experience. She understood that there were such things as mistresses and that most men of her world were not unacquainted with them; so she could not for a moment have supposed that her son, smiling at her in his knowing fashion, possessed a purity that was virginal. Indeed, it might be said that she knew more of his adventures than he ever supposed. Once she had scandalized Mrs. Champion by saying, “My son has an intrigue with the wife of one of my best friends in Paris. It puts me in a most uncomfortable position.”

Nevertheless she had said this in a tone that implied satisfaction; the mistress of her son was, at least, a lady and not a woman of the streets. There was only one thing (she was accustomed to say) that she regarded as unforgivable; it was that he should make a fool of himself or waste great sums of money on any woman. And this, she must have known, was extremely unlikely.

After their disagreement they sat for a time in the sort of strained silence that envelops a conflict between two people of extraordinary will. It was Thérèse who, with a sudden embarrassed cough, interrupted the stillness.

“This girl ...” she said. “I hope you’re not entangling yourself with her.”

Again he smiled and replied, “No, I haven’t entangled myself.”

“Because, it is dangerous with a girl of that sort.... She’s an American, you know, and not the sort one finds among musicians in Paris.... _Autres choses_.... She’s well brought up ... _bourgeoisie_, I should say, of the provinces.”

This time Richard laughed. “Not so _bourgeoise_ as you might think.”

She leaned forward a little. “That’s just it!” she said. “She’s not easy to win.... She’s not the ordinary sort. She’s a woman of character ... of will.” Then she moved back, folding the chubby hands, glittering with rings, on the brief expanse of her black satin lap. “No, you’d best keep clear of her.... Whatever happens is without my approval.”

“She is interesting,” the son replied. “I’ve never seen a woman quite like her.”

This, it appeared, was the cause for new alarm. After regarding him for a time curiously, she murmured, “You can’t marry her, of course. She’s too inexperienced.... Sometimes, she’s _gauche_. But that’s not the chief thing.... If you married her, I don’t think I should object ... not very greatly.... It’s new blood ... healthy blood. But I advise you against thinking of such a thing. Wherever she goes, trouble will follow. She’s born, like most people with a touch of genius, under a curse.” He would have interrupted her here, but she checked him with a gesture of her fat hand. “She is certain to affect the lives of every one about her ... because, well, because the threads of our lives are hopelessly tangled. Oh, don’t think I’m talking nonsense or saying this to discourage you.... I know it.... I’m sure of it.... Marry her if you will, but don’t expect happiness to come of it. She would doubtless bear you a son ... a fine strong son because she is a fine cold animal. But don’t expect any satisfaction from her. She knows too well exactly where she is bound.”

During this long speech the son stood smoking silently with a shadow of the mocking smile on his lips. When she had finished he did not answer her but sat, with a thoughtful air, looking out into the garden which Thérèse this year had not bothered to have planted.

After a time she spoke again to say, “Surely you don’t fancy you could ever control her.... She’s a wild young filly.... No man will ever control her ... not for long.”

“I’ve never thought of marrying her,” he replied quietly. “Why, she has a lover already.”

At this Mrs. Callendar’s countenance assumed an expression of passionate interest. “But she is not that sort ... not a _demi-mondaine_. She is an honest woman ... a cold woman. One can see that.”

He smiled, this time even more softly and mockingly and into the gray eyes there came a gleam of ironical humor. “It was Sabine who said she had a lover,” he said. “You remember, Miss Tolliver told us nothing of what has happened to her since she came here.... Besides, cold women are the most successful. They do not lose their heads.”

31

If Ellen had ever had any use for such a creature as a confidante, she would have told her no doubt that life, at this moment, was an exasperating puzzle. Between the manners of Herman Biggs and Clarence and the manners of such a man as Richard Callendar, there lay a vast gulf, a sort of blank page in the book of her experience, an hiatus that left her uneasy and disturbed.

Clarence and Herman Biggs, she understood, represented to a great degree the husband and lover of her own country. They were the ones who came seeking, the ones who idolized the object of their affections. They were, if not fascinating, affectionate and docile. They were perhaps, even convenient, so long as they did not get under foot. There was in them a certain childlike innocence, complicated alone by a Quixotic code of chivalry and honor which allowed them to be despoiled. Either they overlooked or were innocent of the ways of the world and so clung to the sentimental image of women as pure, devoted creatures who were always good and generous. There were, of course, such things as “bad women” but these did not concern them; such women were of a class apart, without any real relation to good women, a third sex one might have said, with its own uses. The women of their world had changed abruptly, swiftly, in a generation or two, from helpmates on a rude frontier adventure into creatures of luxury; and men like Herman and Clarence had not kept pace. These were the men whom Ellen had always known. There had never been any one like Richard Callendar.

In the absence of Clarence among the factories of the middle west Ellen lunched, not once, but several times with Callendar. Out of the money she had earned by her playing she was able now to dress herself in a fashion which, if not smart, was at least simple and charming. With the approach of the warm days, they lunched at Sherry’s (for he made no effort to conceal his attentions) in an open window which gave out upon the Avenue and the stream of carriages, disordered now by increasing inroads of noisy automobiles. She must have understood, out of the depths of her mother’s teachings, that what she did was an improper and even a dangerous thing. It was, at least, a misstep, taken through lack of experience ... a step which later on she might not have risked.

There was Callendar himself to be considered. It was clear that, despite all her coolness, he had an effect upon her. There were times when she would blush as if suddenly overcome by a sense of his presence, for he was charming to her--gentle, understanding, full of a fire which leapt up in sudden gusts to join the flame of her own triumph and zest in living. In the window overlooking Fifth Avenue there were moments when she must have forgotten everything save the future, hours when they talked of Europe, when he described to her with something very close to passion the brilliance of Paris or the smoky glow of London. Both were naïve, Ellen in the fashion of the inexperienced and Callendar, so dark, so charming, so utterly new, in the fashion of a man whose directness of action had nothing to do with the question of conventions. It was impossible for either to have understood the emotion that drew them together, for it was a romantic thing to which both were then insensible, the one because life had taught her not to expect such a thing as romance, the other because he had never believed in its existence.

One bright afternoon in May they walked all the way from Sherry’s through the park to the Babylon Arms. It was a soft day when the park appeared veritably to reflect its greenness upon the air itself, a day when the willows were softened by a haze of new leaves, and the rare clusters of cherry trees appeared in faint blurs of delicate pink. Along the edges of the lake, freed now of its burden of ice and not yet burdened anew with the old newspapers of sweltering August, the nursemaids divided the iron benches with vagabonds and old ladies who had come there simply to rest, to sit relaxed, silent, as if they were sustained somehow without effort by the very softness of the air. The quality of this pervading gentleness appeared to have its effect upon the two; for a time they were enveloped by a languor which drugged the intelligence and warmed the senses. They walked lazily, side by side, Ellen in a tight gray suit and a large picture hat, Callendar looking at her now and then out of his gray eyes and poking the fresh green grass with his malacca stick. At times they stopped and laughed, for Callendar was in a charming mood when he became a _blagueur_, irresistible and caressing. Under the influence of the day even the hardness of Ellen, which could be at times almost pitiful, appeared to melt away. She laughed at him. She even watched him slyly from the corner of her eyes, but not in the old hostile fashion. It was more the way one would watch a charming little boy, fearful lest his knowledge of the admiration might give him an advantage.

It could not have been the weather alone which so changed her. There were other things, among them beyond all doubt Callendar himself and the friendship which he had given her, the same friendship which his mother and even Sabine in her brusque, shy way had offered. They were friends in a way no one, save Lily, had ever been before. It is possible that there came to her on this soft warm day a knowledge of her kinship with these people, of a bond which if undefinable was none the less certain and secure. They had nothing to gain from her and they were not concerned with subduing her; they did not seek to change her in any way at all. They were like her old Aunt Julia and the mysterious Lily, who had warned her not to let people make her fit a pattern, not to let them drag her down to the level of their own mediocrity; she understood now what Lily meant. These were people who, by some quality of honesty that was almost a physical thing, had attained an aristocracy of their own, a state which had its foundations in that very honesty. There was, too, a distinction about them of a sort beyond such individuals as the genteel, decayed Mr. Wyck, May Seton and her giggles, Mr. Bunce who was so robust and kind, and (this thought must have occurred to her) even Clarence whose kindly humbleness barred him forever. They were not muddled; they stood outlined, for all their strangeness, with a sharp clarity.

It was an understanding that had come to her over a long time dimly as through a mist. To-day she knew it. She began to understand why there were some people whom she admired and some for whom she could have in her heart contempt or at best an emptiness that bordered upon pity.

So she walked very happily with the fascinating, dark young man, content perhaps that she might go on thus forever, that she might always have him and Sabine and Thérèse quite as they were, without any change. And in the depths of her heart it would have given her a sharp, leaping pleasure to have encountered suddenly on one of those asphalt paths May Seton and others of her townspeople. It would have pleased her to have had them witness her triumph. For she had not yet escaped the Town.

* * * * *

Into the midst of this a new knowledge came, sharp and unforeseen.

Under the shadow of Daniel Webster in the bronze attitude of a pouter pigeon, Callendar halted sharply and turned toward her with a swift directness, looking at her so closely that for an instant she blushed.

“Might I come in with you this afternoon?” he asked. “Will you be alone?”

Faced by the disarming gaze of the gray eyes, she forgot for a moment her game of watching. She answered, “Why, yes. I’ll be alone.” And then, as if she could not control herself, she looked away and started walking once more.

He did not speak again until they had reached the outer barrier of the park when he said,

“I’d like to have you play for me ... alone. I’ve never heard you save in a crowd. I fancy you would play best for an audience of one.”

They turned presently between the Syrian Lions of the Babylon Arms and, after being borne silently aloft in the swaying elevator, they climbed the two flights of stairs to the door of the tiny apartment which Ellen opened with her key. The room was in darkness until she lifted the shades which (on the advice of that passionate housekeeper, her mother) were drawn to protect the cheap, bright carpet from the sharp rays of the spring sun, and then the light revealed a shabby little room stuffed with the things which Clarence had bought her. There were chairs and sofas and pillows, pictures, ornaments and little tables. In one corner the grand piano stood somewhat apart in a little bay cleared of furniture. Richard, leaning on his stick and viewing the confusion gravely, must have thought her lover a poor sort, who could offer her only a great profusion of things in the poorest of taste. Yet he did not smile, perhaps because he was not greatly interested in the room. In the midst of all the stuff, Ellen, taking off her picture hat and blushing still with a hazy sense of confusion, possessed an air of aloofness, of being detached from all the shabby things. She rose above them as once before she had risen above the furniture in the Setons’ dismal parlor.

The gaiety that had flourished in the bright park became dampened now by a queer sense of strain, an awkwardness which made itself apparent in the silence of both. They were no longer in the bright open park: the walls which shut them in had changed everything, sharpened in some indefinable way the power of their senses. For an instant they stood regarding each other shyly, and presently Ellen said, “Do sit down there.... And I’ll play for you. What do you want to hear?”

Richard told her that the choice must be hers, and then he seated himself in Clarence’s leather arm chair and lighted a cigarette with the matches from Clarence’s smoking table in the Mission style. Without speaking again she began to play. It was as if she had said, “I will talk to you in this fashion,” and after the first few chords had fallen the sense of strain and conflict disappeared, swallowed up again, this time in the man’s attitude of passionate listening.

She played for him, first of all, some Schumann which was so like the shadowy, soft consciousness of this new feeling born with such abruptness there in the park; and then she played some of his beloved Chopin and turned at last into the Sonata Appassionata. She played as she played only for Fergus who listened in the same fashion, slumped down in his chair, his eyes half closed, his curling, golden hair all rumpled, with the air of one intoxicated by sound. It must have occurred to her, for the first time, that there was between her brother and this stranger a certain likeness, a capacity for wild abandonment that was terrifying. To-day all the things which for so long a time had been shut up within the walls of her bitter secrecy poured forth and overflowed into the music; and with this there was united a new fire, a sudden warmth that was strange to her. She knew a strange desire to share all that she possessed, a curious, aching desire close to the border of tears. It was so, perhaps, because love would always be to her like this ... a wild and passionate heightening of the senses which found its manifestation in an unearthly unity of spirit. For a time she carried Richard with her into the ecstasy she was able to invoke.

And when at length the last chords drifted slowly away, they permitted the silence to remain unbroken for a long time while he sat, still slumped in his chair, his eyes half closed, watching her with the air of one on whom a spell has been cast.

He sat there in Clarence’s chair in Clarence’s place, magnificent like herself in all that desert of commonplace things. There was a sense of unreality about the whole scene. She must have known, deep within that hard intelligence of hers, that what she saw was at best an illusion since between them both there lay differences, circumstances, facts that were not to be overcome.

He went presently, after they had exchanged a few stupid phrases drawn by sheer force from the depths of an emotion which neither was willing to betray save by their silence. They did not even speak of another meeting; nothing happened; upon the surface their parting was strangely empty and bare. And when the door had closed behind him, Richard halted for a moment in the dark hallway and leaned against the wall. Perhaps he remembered what his mother, so old in her wisdom and so shrewd, had told him. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her._

The mocking look had gone out of his eyes. Something had happened to him, an experience that was altogether new in a life by no means limited in such matters ... a thing which opened the fancy to a new magnificence, a new rapture, a new intoxication. It was a vision which he may have doubted because he had never believed in its existence. But between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which he might see but never touch. _She’s not the ordinary sort.... You’d best keep clear of her._

* * * * *

On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.

Yet nothing had happened--nothing at all of which she could say, “It is this or that.”

32

Meanwhile from the Town there came to Ellen in the weekly letters of her mother bits of news which sometimes interested her but more often did not. There was the news of May Seton’s marriage to Herman Biggs, an evening wedding in the Methodist church with a supper afterwards at which Skinflint Seton, in a gesture of triumph and vindication, had flung loose the purse strings and gone so far as to provide an orchestra which played behind a screen of smilax and carnations.

“Herman,” wrote Hattie Tolliver, “looked a gawk, with his freckles, and May was too fat for her dress. It was cut princess fashion and trimmed with duchess lace. She carried a shower bouquet of white roses and sweet peas. Herman’s trousers bagged at the knees. At least this is what Cousin Eva Barr, who went to the wedding, told me. I wasn’t invited. They say that the Setons have been living on cold hash ever since.

“They went to French Lick Springs on their honeymoon and now Herman is back at the factory learning the corset business.”

Miss Ogilvie had not been well lately and Aunt Julia was becoming more and more eccentric. She had shut up all but one great room at Shane’s Castle and would see no one but the Doctor and Hattie Tolliver. “I go to see her three times a week. She needs some one to take hold of that great house. There’s no one else, so I do it. Miss Ogilvie comes in to sit with Pa while I’m gone. She’s given up some of her pupils. She says she finds she can’t do as much as she once could.

“Your father is doing well at the bank and I’ve managed to lay aside quite a sum after the debts were paid. We’ll need it to send Fergus to school. I’ve sold the rings that Aunt Julia gave me and we’re now on the prosperous side of things once more. If your father had only listened to me, we’d have been rich to-day, but he always said he knew best, and he trusted people too much. Before long we’ll have enough to come East. I want to be with my children.”

Then there were inquiries after her health and Clarence’s welfare and endless cautions and advice concerning the management of the flat, for distance made little difference to Hattie Tolliver when it concerned the interests of some one she loved. It was as if she ran Ellen’s household as well. In one letter she was even bold enough to ask whether there was any hope of her becoming a grandmother.

Each of these letters, though it bore a great similarity to all the others, was in a sense an epic. They recorded in sentences vigorously written and crowded with a host of details, the daily history of a community. They were fiercely personal and colored by the prejudices of Hattie Tolliver. In her enemies there was nothing good and in those she loved best nothing bad. Her world was one of a savage intensity, painted like Skinflint Seton’s entirely in blacks and whites.

She inquired frequently whether Clarence would be coming West, insisting that he must stop and see them in the Town and tell them all the news. And the credulous woman was put off with the story that Clarence had given up traveling and would not be in the West again for a long time. It was a lie that Ellen invented to protect him, since he was too timid ever to risk meeting any one who might recognize him as spiritual ravisher of Mrs. Herman Biggs (née May Seton).

And at length there came a letter containing the news that Grandpa Barr had died.

“He passed away,” wrote Mrs. Tolliver, “quietly. I was in the room and he was just lying there looking at the ceiling and singing an old song that he used to sing when Ma was still alive and I was a little girl. They used to sing it as a duet. ‘I will find my rest in the eagle’s nest,’ it was called, and they sang it in the long summer evenings when all the chores were done and they sat out under the trees. I can remember it well. He was humming this when suddenly he tried to sit up, and said, ‘Why, Ma.... There you are, come to meet me.... I’m coming to you.... In just a minute, as soon as I get the little red cow in from the field by the cairn.’ And then he lay back and died without another word. (It was indeed a long way from Grandpa Barr, dead now, with his memories of the frontier, to Thérèse Callendar and her carved emerald saved from the sack of Constantinople.)

“It was a good thing because he wanted to die for so long. It was hard on a man like that who had always been so active. He was like a little child. For a long time he hadn’t said anything sensible. I did everything for him and I don’t regret it. It was hard sometimes with so much else to worry me and take up my time.

“Aunt Julia is getting worse and worse. She can’t leave her bed now and can only eat things without sugar. I make her cakes every week and custards, the kind she likes. I can’t even have a holiday, because she grows restless and worse when I’m away.”

And then there was a significant paragraph, brightened by a certain spice of resentment. “Gramp remains just the same ... not a day older and just as strong as ever. It looks to me as if he’d live forever. _I don’t see what I’ve done to bear such a cross!_”

* * * * *

The letters from Ellen grew steadily fewer and more unsatisfactory. With her old instinct, she wrote only of those things which were of no importance, bits of news concerning the health of Clarence and herself, comments on the heat, even stories which she had read in the newspapers. Of her unhappiness she said nothing, though it was at the moment the one thing which dominated all her existence.

After the stifled farewell on the afternoon in May Callendar appeared to vanish. Clarence returned and they gave their party for the Bunces--a party to which Mr. Wyck, somewhat uppish and deeply wretched, brought a spinister heiress from Brooklyn. They played pinochle and drank beer which the radiant Clarence brought in from a delicatessen store. Ellen, it must be said, behaved beautifully and played for them to dance until the tenant from the floor below, a retired actress with yellow hair and a white poodle, made a profane protest to the janitor. She was kind to Clarence and even affectionate, as if in some way the tenderness brought her peace.

Only once was there an unpleasantness and this occurred when Mr. Wyck, finding her alone in a corner looked at her out of his green eyes and observed, “I understand you’re growing famous. I hear that you play a great deal in public ... at fashionable parties.”

For an instant, Ellen looked at him sharply and then, believing perhaps that he knew nothing, replied, “Not often ... now and then.... It is profitable.”

He did not address her again but sat meditating in a sour fashion, absorbed apparently in the color of the beer he held in his long soft hands, and presently, with the air of emerging from a fog of thought, he observed, “It’s too bad Clarence can’t enjoy the parties too.”

“He would hate them,” said Ellen abruptly.

This observation Wyck turned over in his mind and when he spoke again, it was with an air of confidence, of making a concession.

“No,” he said, “I understand that. He wouldn’t feel at home. He’d be the most miserable person there.”

But the look in his eye, the soft insinuation of his voice said, without saying it, “No, you and I are different. We were made for the fashionable world.”

Ellen laughed, but there was in the laugh a little sudden choke of bitterness. She came to her husband’s defense. “I don’t think he’d like it, but it wouldn’t be on that account.”

It was the most friendly conversation they had ever had, and although he did not address her again during the remainder of the evening, she was aware at odd moments that he was watching her. The sight disturbed her, perhaps because she understood vaguely that the anemic little man possessed an amazing sense of intuition. She understood too that, under the air of condescension which he observed toward the other guests, there was at work all the old hostility, heightened now by a new knowledge that had come to him from some mysterious source. It was as if she were in combat with a woman, sharp-witted and feline, over the possession of a man whom she had no desire to own. Absurdity enveloped the idea of any one fighting for possession of Clarence. He was so easy to possess.

* * * * *

Not even when she went to the Callendars’ to play did she have a glimpse of Richard. The group had dwindled now as one by one the friends of Mrs. Callendar betook themselves into the country. There remained during the hot months only the good-natured hostess and occasionally Sabine who was staying in town until Mrs. Callendar sailed. They made excuses for Richard; they told her when she noted his absence that he was at Newport, or in Philadelphia, or vaguely that he was in the country; they kept up a little game in which Mrs. Callendar and Sabine told lies and Ellen accepted them, and both sides knew that the other had no belief in the deceit. Beyond the shrewd probing which the plump Greek woman practised on the evenings when Ellen came to dine with her alone there was no sign on either side. Yet a grayness enveloped them all, altering in its descent the whole tone of their days.

Sabine gave least evidence of the change, but with her it was impossible from her behavior ever to discover the faintest knowledge of her heart, impossible to know anything that lay behind the shield of her terrible self-possession. She had betrayed herself only once, for an instant. Beyond that one could only judge that she was waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... with an overpowering patience, as if she knew the rules of the world in which she lived would give her the prize in the end. There was magnificence in the sight of her, sitting there in the evenings, marvelously dressed, not beautiful but fantastically attractive, listening quietly to the music made by a woman whom she had every reason to hate.

They all talked of the same things, in the same fashion, refusing to admit that anything had happened to change the pleasant, even way of their existence; and each knew that the other knew exactly what she knew. There were times, after dinner in the dark library, when there would be long silences broken only by the faint click of a tiny coffee cup against a saucer. Each of them watched the others, and in those long evenings the two who were so old, so wise in experience, came to respect the newcomer who played the game quite as well as themselves.

* * * * *

A night or two before Thérèse Callendar sailed, Ellen came to dine with her alone. Throughout the long dinner, which the Greek woman had served in the library at a small table, they kept up the game. It was not until the cigarettes and coffee were brought in that Thérèse as the servant closed the door behind him, said abruptly, “I want to talk to you about my son.”

It came so suddenly, after so much waiting, that Ellen said nothing. She blushed and the tears came into her eyes. She kept silent.

“I think I know what has happened,” said Mrs. Callendar. She did not speak now in her old cynical fashion, slipping quickly from one thing to another. All the evening she had been grave and now, mingled with the gravity, there was a curious warmth, a sympathy which reached out and touched Ellen. She understood, it seemed, that the matter had arrived at the point where it was necessary to go beneath the thin surface of their pretense, when she must delve under all those polished little speeches that made life move along an easy path and deal, directly, with a thing that was stronger than any of them.