distant echoes from somewhere in the direction of the Champ de Mars.

At length he murmured, “Perhaps we had better go into the cellar. The
last one was nearer.”

But she refused. “No. Why should I?” For she understood well enough that
to Callendar it was a matter of complete indifference. She knew his
whole philosophy could be expressed in a single sentence--“If one died,
one died.” The thing was to live while one was alive. “No,” she
repeated. “Why should I be afraid? You and Fergus aren’t frightened.”

“It’s not the same,” he said softly.

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.”

For a moment it may have seemed to her that she too was playing a part
in the spectacle. She too might for once undertake a little of the
danger they had known, the one with indifference, the other with a kind
of fierce excitement.

“It is much easier,” she murmured, “to be with you both than to be here
alone, not knowing what may happen to you.”

Under the heavy, sensuous lids Callendar’s gray eyes revealed a sudden
sparkle of admiration for the fierce and sullen defiance of her mood. He
must have known that she would have walked carelessly through the
street, as carelessly as Fergus had done, that she would in her present
mood have gone into an attack with a serene indifference; because she
was angry now, angry at the war for which she had such a contempt, at
circumstance, at the whole muddled business of living. She was angry and
defiant with an Olympian anger, careless of cost or consequence.

There was another crash, nearer this time in the direction of the
Trocadéro, and again Callendar’s eyelids flickered with slow admiration.
She did not move. She still sat with one hand on Hansi’s head looking
into the fire.

“I am not thinking about myself,” she observed suddenly with the air of
answering a question which he had not spoken. “It is my brother.”

“He must be safe by now at his rendezvous. The Avenue Kléber is not
far.”

She was thinking too, in a dazed fashion, of all that had happened in
the hour before Fergus blundered in upon them. Callendar had told her
that at last Sabine was divorcing him. He had not asked her to do it.
She had told him that she could endure the situation no longer. For the
part which Thérèse played in the affair, he could not answer. “I don’t
know,” he had said, smiling. “Sabine will say nothing and my mother
denies having spoken of the matter. But if she saw fit she would not
hesitate to lie deliberately. Sometimes I think she is not clever, and
then afterward I find she has been stupid only because it suited her,
because her stupidity was dictated by a devilish shrewdness.”

And then he had told her of all the tricks Thérèse had played to bring
about his remarriage, of how she had written him glowing letters about
Ellen. “All she wrote,” he added, “was true, of course. You can hardly
doubt that. Still, it was not the way to bring it about.”

And Ellen too had laughed and told of her interview with Thérèse in the
library of the house at Murray Hill on the night of her concert, and at
last she had asked abruptly, “Am I to interpret all this as a proposal?”

“My mother knew that there was no one else whom I would think of
marrying. There was no need to marry at all.”

After this speech she had been silent for a time and when at last she
looked up at him it was to ask, “And you want to marry me because it is
the only way you can have me?”

“No.”

Her mind wandered back to the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms when he
had so nearly swept away all her self-possession. He had been different
then, more ardent, more overwhelming, and yet she knew that the danger
then had not been so great as it was in this very moment when he sat
beside her in the big room, quiet and thoughtful, watching her with a
fierce concentration.

“But there was a time,” she said slowly, “when you would have taken me
in any way possible without marrying me.”

He was sitting with his body bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his
hands clasped. The hands were tense so that the knuckles showed through
the tanned, dark skin.

“No,” he said softly. “That is not true. I would have married you then.
I wanted to marry you, and I was younger then and not so wise. I fancied
then that I could get anything I wanted in this world for the asking.
And yet it was marriage that I had in mind. I have always had ...
everything. I will be honest. I have always had women if I wanted them
badly enough ... all save you.... And you are the only one I ever
_wanted_ to marry. I swear to God that what I am saying is true.”

Watching him, she could not believe that he was lying. She saw the
clenched hands. She saw that the mockery had gone out of him. She saw,
with a queer tragic catch of memory, the little vein in his throat
throbbing as she had seen the same vein throb in the throat of Clarence.
It was all so different now. There was no headlong recklessness, no
wild, sudden torrent of passion. He had not seized her now and tormented
her with caresses that assailed all her resistance. They talked calmly
in a fashion that might have been called calculating and cold-blooded
save that underneath it there lay a current which ran more deep and more
powerful than any emotion they had known on that sultry afternoon in the
Babylon Arms. It was all changed now. They were older, and wiser, and in
some ways more understanding. And the world about them had changed ...
the shabby little flat had given way to the old, beautiful, glowing
room. This calm, grave Richard was far more dangerous than the young and
ardent one had been. It was more perilous now, for she was assailed
through all her senses, and time was rushing on and on, past her....

She did not answer him, and presently in the same low voice he
continued. “You are a woman of the world now,” he said, “so you are not
likely to believe what you believed then. I do not make excuses for
myself. I did not love Sabine. I have never loved her. It was an
arranged, a proper marriage like thousands of others, but it turned out
badly.... I could not make myself love. No one can do that.” He paused
for a moment. “And she could not save herself....”

This last speech he made with such a sad humility that there was no air
of conceit in it. Besides Ellen knew its truth; she had seen Sabine with
her own eyes, weeping, suffering in a fashion she had once believed
impossible, and pretending all the while that such suffering had been
caused by a sick kitten. Yet it was this which somehow frightened her;
she was afraid lest one day she herself might be humbled in the same
fashion.

“My mother,” he was saying, “is as you know, a Greek, and there is a
great deal of the Greek in me. Sometimes I fancy I am Oriental ...
utterly, completely. An eastern man admires a woman of beauty and of
spirit. He wants such a woman for the mother of his children.” He
unclasped his hands and took her hand in his. “But don’t fancy that I
love you in that way only. Sabine was a fine match in a worldly sense.
She was rich. She was fashionable. But I too am that, so what could it
mean to me? It was more than that which I wanted. I still want it. I
want you to marry me as soon as it is possible.”

She did not free her hand, though the touch made her faint as it had
done so many years before. She was conscious suddenly that the old sense
of conflict was gone, the old feeling of a hidden antagonism between
them. Could it be that it was because he was humble now, asking
something of her rather than coming boldly to her to claim it?

“And still,” she heard herself saying, “I am not certain that it would
work out. I don’t know.... You must give me time.”

Then he had kissed her hand and murmured, “We have not so much time as
we once had.... Perhaps I have even less than I know now.”

To this she had chosen to make no answer. Instead, she had played for
him until Fergus blundered in upon them.

It was in the midst of these thoughts that she heard Callendar say, as
he stood balancing himself before the fire, “We could go to the south
to-morrow, if you like. I could arrange to have my permission extended.
De Cyon could do it for me. We could have a week together there.”

He must have known that it was too late now to ask such a thing. An hour
earlier, before Fergus had intruded upon them, he might have succeeded.
But everything was changed now. For an instant, during the time Fergus
had been there, she had caught a glimpse of the old, familiar Richard,
the mocking one; and the sense of conflict had risen once more sharply
between them.

“How could I do that?” she asked, and after a moment’s silence, “I can’t
do that sort of thing. It is impossible for me....”

He smiled. “But the world believes it of you already. The world will not
care. The world expects it of you. It can make no difference ... and
when the divorce is finished we will be married.”

Her answer was colored with a sudden bitterness. “You would not have
said such a thing to me once.”

It was true. There was a difference now, of a kind she had not thought
of before. It was a difference which had to do with age and all the slow
hardening which had come with each year that stood between them and the
hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms. Something had gone from them both ...
the warmth, the gallantry, the glow that had made him then so reckless,
so willing to marry her, a poor nobody, in the face of all his world. It
was gone from her too.... She knew exactly what it was now. It was the
thing which she had felt slip from her as a cloak on the night she sat
talking with Thérèse in the dark library on Murray Hill. They were no
longer young. They weighed chances now, cynically looking upon their
problem without regard for honor. The tragedy was that they could never
go back. What was gone was gone forever. And in the memory of the
fierce, youthful passion, so fresh and turbulent, this new love seemed
to her an obscene and middle-aged emotion.

“No,” she repeated. “I can’t do that. It is to myself that it
matters.... What the world thinks does not interest me.”

Long after midnight Callendar at last stirred himself and bade her good
night. They had talked, long and passionately, over the same ground
again and again, seeing it now in this light, now in that, arriving in
the end nowhere at all; and through it all, Ellen must have caught once
more the awful sense of his patience. He could wait; in the end he would
have what he desired. And this she knew with an understanding that lay
deeper than the mere surface of her consciousness.

Only it was all different now, even the significance of his patience,
because time was rushing on and on past her. She was no longer a young
girl; she was, as he had said, a woman of the world and therefore,
perhaps, all the more desirable in her unchallenged, unbroken spirit.

“It is very late,” said Callendar gently, as the black dog stirred
himself and, yawning, rubbed his head against Ellen’s hand. “And
to-morrow....”

But she did not permit him to say, “And to-morrow I shall be back at the
front.” She was afraid of his saying it, because all the evening she had
been fighting just this thought. She understood that it was his
strongest weapon, the one thing which might demolish the wall of her
resistance. It was not a fair weapon, but he would not hesitate to use
it where his own desire was concerned.

“It’s not late,” she said, “not late for me....” Yet she wanted him to
go because she was afraid. She wanted to be alone, to feel her old
strength return to her.

The dog followed them as they moved through the big room and up the
stairs. The last of the sounds had died away--the terrifying screech of
the sirens, the faint popping of the guns and the ominous shattering
crash of the falling bombs. The house and the city beyond it lay in
silence now, dark once more save for the showers of blue light from the
street lamps.

At the top of the stairs, which lay too in darkness, he put on his
greatcoat in silence, took up his cap and then faced her. He said
nothing; he simply looked at her, and after a moment she murmured in a
voice that was scarcely audible, “No, I cannot do it. The things which
stand in the way are much stronger than we are.” And bending her head,
as if she had in some way been accused, she added, “I will write you.”

He did not speak. Instead he simply placed his arms about her and in
silence kissed her. In the same fashion, her white hand grew tense once
more, just as it had done when Fergus came upon her unaware, to
understand all that was happening.

As he stepped into the street, she lingered in the doorway until, in the
direction of the Café des Tourelles, the darkness swallowed him. She was
alone again, and when she had closed the door she did not return to the
drawing-room but sat down weakly on the top step of the long stairs and
presently, overcome by the terrible sense of loneliness, she began to
weep in silence. She was (she thought scornfully) in spite of
everything, only a poor, weak, feminine creature.

Hansi flung his heavy body against her and, whimpering a little, put his
black head affectionately on her knee.

She was sitting thus when the dog leapt to his feet and barked savagely
at the sound of a sharp, sudden knock upon the door. It was the knock of
some one in haste. The sound, shattering the dead stillness, grew
terrifying, as if the one who knocked desired in some way to communicate
his terror to those inside the house.

Ellen sprang up. “Je viens! Je viens!” she cried, and to the dog, “Tais
toi! Hansi.” She cried “Je viens!” as if by arresting the efforts of the
knocker she might also destroy the foreboding in her heart.

Opening the door, she discerned dimly in the darkness the figure of a
fat, bent little old man with white mustaches that caught the faint
light emerging from the staircase. “Yes,” she said, in French. “What is
it you want?”

A voice which trembled a little with fright and carried the ring of an
accent from the Midi answered her. “You are Mees Tolliver. I come from
your brother. I am sent by him to fetch you.”

For a moment she stood without speaking to the queer, bent figure,
regarding him with the air of utter incredulity. He could not be quite
real ... this gnome with the enormous white mustaches. And unaccountably
there flashed through her mind a fragment of the letter Lily had written
her long ago--_And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain
that he is dead._

“He is hurt,” said Ellen. “Something has happened to him!”

The old man answered simply. “Yes. There was an accident. He is
wounded.”

Without questioning him further, she wrapped herself in a fur coat and
holding to the collar of Hansi she went out, after locking the door on
the silent house, to follow the old man.

As they walked there were times when the darkness was so profound that
she could not see him at all and was forced to call out for guidance. It
was Hansi who aided her. He kept close to the heels of the old man.

She had a sense of passing through the Place Passy into the Rue
Franklin.

“Who are you, mon vieux?” she asked.

The old man coughed. He went rapidly for one so old, but she fancied it
was terror that gave speed to his fat legs, terror that the Gothas might
return.

“I am the concierge of the building where Madame Nozières has an
apartment. It was she who sent me. It is close at hand ... in the Avenue
Kléber.”

Vaguely in the darkness, black against the deep blue of the sky, the
ugly towers of the Trocadéro appeared a little on the right. “What is it
that happened? Is he wounded ... gravely, seriously, ... my brother?”

The old man grunted. “I don’t know. I know nothing. There was a bomb
fell in the Avenue Kléber.” He raised his head and sniffed like a shaggy
old dog. “Smell,” he commanded. “You can smell the bomb.”

It was true. The faint odor of picric acid filled the damp night air. As
they walked the odor grew more and more intense. In the darkness Ellen’s
guide pointed to the left.

“The bomb fell over there,” he observed, “full in the street.”

“Who is this Madame Nozières?” asked Ellen.

“I don’t know,” her companion repeated. “I know nothing. She has an
apartment. She comes there sometimes. She is rich. She is generous. She
does not live there always. She only comes now and then ... when
Monsieur has permission from the front.”

“Monsieur Nozières?”

In the darkness, the old man was silent for a time. He was breathless
from the effort of their haste. “No,” he replied. “Monsieur ... your
brother.”

This then was the rendezvous for which Fergus had left the house in the
Rue Raynouard. There was some one then--some woman--who had the power of
taking him from her on the very night he had returned after so many
years. It must have been strong, this force, stronger than the power
which Callendar himself exerted. She understood his persistence. Against
such a power, she was, of course, helpless.

“It is here,” said her guide abruptly. “Follow me.”

He led the way through a corridor into an open court filled with summer
furniture, stacked now in the corners against the empty stone urns. In
the dim light that filtered through the shutters on the far side, she
was able to discern the outlines of chairs and tables, piled
helter-skelter, as if they too had felt the force of a bomb that hurled
them into a corner.

The old man knocked on a door that led into the apartment from which the
light showed itself. From inside the murmur of voices came to them,
distantly. And at last the door opened.

Against the dim light, Ellen was able to discern the figure of a small
woman, dressed in a trim dark suit. She wore no hat and her blonde hair,
cut short, stood about her head in a halo of ringlets which caught and
reflected the glow behind her. She had been weeping. Even in the emotion
of the moment, Ellen saw with a feminine instinct that she had chic, and
when she spoke she divined also that “Madame Nozières” was not a
cocotte but a lady. She had been weeping and something of the grief
carried over into her voice.

“You are Mees Tolliver,” she said. “I am Madame Nozières. I have heard
you play ... many times, but I did not know until to-night that you were
his sister. You do not know me, of course.”

There was a quality almost comic in the formality with which the
stranger went about the business of introductions. In the hallway, she
continued in a low voice, “I have known your brother for a long time. We
are very good friends.” And then she began to weep again. As Lily had
done in the letter written after César’s death, the woman made no
pretenses, thinking perhaps as Lily had thought, that at such a time
there was place only for the truth.

To Ellen the whole affair was shot through with the light of unreality.
Standing in the dark hallway, with this strange woman weeping beside
her--a woman who in some vague way had been brought close to her because
she too loved Fergus--she leaned back against the wall for a moment
trying frantically to bring her mind back to the truth. This could not
be.... It was unreal, fantastic....

The door opened and she saw, with a clarity that stamped the scene
forever on her brain, a big room furnished with luxury, and in the midst
of all the feminine softness--the pillows, the gilt chairs, the mirrors
and the satin--Fergus lying very white and very still upon a bed of
white and gilt with gilded swans on each of its four posts. At the side
of the bed stood a tall, grave man with a black beard who wore the
uniform of an army surgeon. He bowed to her and Madame Nozières
murmured, “Doctor Chausson.”

The name struck some chord of memory in Ellen’s brain, but before she
could trace it to its source, Fergus opened his eyes, and grinning a
little, said in a low voice, “Well, this is a pretty mess!” (This was
the old Fergus. She knew it at once. All the strangeness had gone....)

She asked no questions because from the look of the doctor and the tears
of Madame Nozières she understood that there was only one answer. She
wanted suddenly to weep, to beat her head against the wall, to cry out.
But she was silent. She approached the bed and pressed his hand.

They had taken off the blue tunic with the silver wings and he lay now
in his white shirt and the blue trousers with the silver braid along the
seam. Around his waist he wore a woolen ceinture of brilliant yellow.
The shirt was open and on his breast where the silver wings had been
there was a little spot of red ... a tiny spot, scarcely as large as a
strawberry.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “But you see I couldn’t come to-morrow ... as
I promised.”

She could find nothing to say. She could only press his hand more and
more tightly.

“I’m glad you brought the dog,” he continued. “It will be less lonely
for you.” And then he beckoned to the doctor and asked him and Madame
Nozières to leave the room for a moment. When they had gone, he drew
Ellen nearer to him and said, “You must not be hard with her. She is a
lady. Madame Nozières is not her name. It is I who am to blame if any
one. I wanted to marry her.... I’m not talking rot. We had planned it.”
And then for a time he was silent as if too weak to go on.

Pressing his hand more tightly, she whispered, “How could I be hard?
Nothing matters ... only one thing.”

He coughed and continued. “She has done everything. She has risked the
rest of her life to save me. Chausson is the great Chausson ... the
surgeon from Neuilly. She knows him and he knows her husband. They are
old friends. That was why he came. He is a busy man and a great surgeon.
You see, she risked everything ... her reputation, her future ...
everything. She did not hesitate to send for him.”

She knew now why the name had been familiar. She had heard it
everywhere in the journals, from her friends in Paris. If the great
Chausson believed there was no hope....

“She is a good woman ... a charming woman, Ellen. Madame Nozières is not
her name. If she chooses to tell you who she is, be good to her, because
I loved her.”

“I will do what you wish.”

He grinned again suddenly. “Think of it ... to get it now, after three
years ... to get it now on the asphalt a block from the Trocadéro!” And
then his face grew bitter. “It’s a joke ... that is!” And then, dimly,
sleepily, he murmured, “We must hurry ... we must hurry.”

Ellen, still silent, found that she was praying idiotically for a thing
which could never be. She knew now, sharply and cruelly, what the war,
that grand parade, had been. Fergus who had loved life so passionately,
who found pleasure and excitement everywhere! Fergus whom they had all
loved so that they had spoiled him! Fergus lying there with his blond,
curly head against the white pillows under the flying gilt swans! Those
voluptuous, sensual swans! Eagles they should have been!

She could do nothing but wait. The minutes rushed past her, furiously.
(We must hurry, he had said.) On the gilt dressing table one of the
candles had begun to gutter and fade.

“Call them back,” he said faintly. And she rose and opened the door.
Outside Doctor Chausson had taken both Madame Nozières’ small, exquisite
hands and was talking to her, in a soft low voice, warm with a sort of
understanding that moved Ellen queerly. They were so absorbed that they
did not even notice her as she opened the door.

“Madame Nozières,” she said softly, and the woman turned toward her. She
was beautiful, more beautiful than Ellen had supposed, even with the
tears swimming in her blue eyes. She was small and beautiful and
exquisite like a bit of Dresden china. She understood the whole thing
clearly; she understood perhaps even the profundity of the love which
Madame Nozières had for Fergus.

Doctor Chausson refused to come in with them. “I will stay here....
There is nothing I can do.” And so they left him, pale and hollow-eyed
from work and want of sleep, to wait in the dark hallway.

Inside the room the one candle had gone out and the only light came from
the single flame before the tall mirror. Fergus had closed his eyes once
more, and the lids showed against the dead whiteness of the skin in a
faint shade of purple. The two women sat one on each side of the gilded
bed, watching in silence. Presently he opened his eyes and looking at
Ellen said in English:

“This man....” He had grown weaker now and spoke with difficulty. “This
man ... Callendar. Are you going to marry him?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiled. “I saw you when I came in.... That’s how I knew. I saw your
hand.” And after a pause. “It’s funny ... I knew this was coming ... I
knew it as I stood outside your door.”

Then he closed his eyes once more and when he spoke again it was to say
weakly, “You must tell Ma.... It will be hard.... And you must not....
You must not tell her the truth.... She could never face the truth. She
has never faced it.”

He reached out weakly and took the hand, on one side of Ellen and on the
other of Madame Nozières. Raising himself, he grinned again and murmured
in French this time, “My life.... It’s running away ... inside me. You
can hear it.... I hear it ... now.” And then for a moment there was an
echo of triumph, a sudden flash of Gramp whom Fergus himself had named
The Everlasting. He grinned again and said, “It was a good life.... I
missed nothing ... nothing at all.”

And again slowly ... “This man Callendar ... this man....”

But he never finished the sentence. He sighed and slipped back into the
pillows of the bed surmounted by the four gilded swans. Madame Nozières
began to weep wildly and flung herself upon him, kissing him again and
again. For Ellen there was no such relief. She sat now, stark upright
and tragic, bound by all the years in which she had shown a proud and
scornful face to the world. No, there was no such relief for her. She
knew it. She could only sit there, quietly cold and white, and all the
time she wanted to scream, to cry out, to beat her head against the
stone floor of the corridor where Doctor Chausson stood waiting gravely.
She could only sit and watch while Madame Nozières wept out her heart.

It was the sound of weeping, wild and passionate, that summoned Doctor
Chausson. The two women had forgotten him, but the good man knew well
enough what the sound signified. Softly he opened the door and came into
the frivolous room. There beside the gilded bed he saw the sister, a
strange, silent, handsome woman, dressed in black with her fur coat
slipped to the floor at her feet, a woman (he thought) _bien Anglaise_,
who could not weep. He knew that she suffered more than the other, more
than Colette who had flung herself on the boy to weep hysterically.
Colette, the charming, the fastidious, the beautiful, flung down in
utter disarray, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, her golden hair
all disheveled.... Colette whom he had seen but two nights before
flushed and radiant at the Princesse de Guermantes’. He understood now
why she had been so beautiful and so happy. But the boy could not see
her now, and so nothing mattered.

He stood for a moment in silence, as if in respect for the grief of the
two women. All this he had seen before, many times, ... a young man, a
boy, who had loved life as this one had loved it, who could jest, as
this one had jested, with his very last breath. A boy whom women loved
as these two women, the one so wildly, the other so profoundly, with
such an intense, secret flame. It was cruel ... hideous....

He moved forward and touched Madame Nozières on her slim shoulder. And
all the while he was conscious that the eyes of the other woman were
watching him, stony and cold and tragic.

“Colette,” he said softly. “Colette.... You must not.... You must be
quiet.” With a gentle strength he lifted her from the bed. “Colette, it
is nearly dawn.... You must be discreet. There will be questions asked.”

But she paid no heed. She was sobbing now, bitterly and without shame.
“You must be discreet,” he repeated.

“What difference does that make now?... It is nothing ... less than
nothing....” And she fell to weeping once more.

He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, “There is
the necessary business. You must not be seen here ... like this.”

But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and
succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. “I will take him to my house,”
she said, quietly. “You may come there.... You may stay there if you
like. It is a big house ... in the Rue Raynouard.... No one will ever
know.”

She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. “I will take
care of things,” she said. “I will stay here if you will arrange for the
rest. I would like to stay ... alone. It was good of you.... There is
nothing I can say.”

So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale
and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the
stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the
big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber.
Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns
and summer chairs piled high in the corners.

When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat
down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to
her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too
late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanation
until now. She had come so near to being late ... only a matter of a
few hours, of a single night. For he had escaped them all now, forever.
They would never possess him again....

She looked at him, lying here white and still in the gay blue trousers
with the silver braid and the yellow sash, and she understood why it was
that he had seemed so young. It was because he had never really belonged
to any of them. He had not even had a country of his own. He had gone
out into a war which was none of his concern. There was nothing which
tied him down, not even the nonsense which people talked of “la gloire”
and “la patrie.” For she, in her aloofness, had known it for the
nonsense it was, just as he in his good-nature and love for all the
world had known it. She remembered what he had once written her.... “_A
man of our generation who has missed the war will not have lived at
all.... He will be a poor thing compared to the others. It is a game in
which one must take a chance. It is better to die than to have missed
it._”

He had believed that to the very end. Perhaps this was the secret of Old
Gramp who had roamed the world and lived in this very Paris under the
Second Empire. He had lived. He had done everything, and now in his old
age he had a stock of memories that would last forever, a life which
none of the others ever knew. He had been certain of only one life and
he had made the most of it, so that he was ready when his time came to
die with satisfaction, to take his chance on what lay beyond.

And as she sat there with the black dog by her side, in the slow, gray
light, it occurred to her that perhaps the end of Fergus had not been
after all so tragic. He had died in the very midst of life with the
woman he loved at his side. If he had lived.... Who could tell? There
was small place in the world for men like him. He never had the
strength, the fierce aloofness of Old Gramp, the savage contempt of the
old man for the drones and grubbers of life.

It was all a strange business, surely. Strange and confused and without
sense. In the beginning, when she had first come into this frivolous
room (so cold and dead now in the gray light) she had been angry and
jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having
caused his death. She had thought, “If he had not been going to meet
her, he would not have been killed.”

But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and
monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to
his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now.
She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that
had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who
was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the
gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of
which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad
suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame
Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit ...
all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?

What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time
rushed on and on....

But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.

She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost
as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her--that
phrase out of Lily’s letter--_And then he rode away into the darkness. I
am certain he is dead._ He had gone away and she did not know where.
Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the
happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so
little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty
pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle ... a pitiful spectacle, so full
of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The old quotation came back to
her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare
with an intense passion. “Sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That was
it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who
never mounted to the heights but kept her eyes always on the ground,
frantically occupied with a thousand tiny things, never willing, as
Fergus had said, to face the truth. And now that he was gone, her
favorite of them all, what would she do? There remained nothing now
except the one truth which none could in the end escape.

It was daylight and the ghastly smell of picric acid had died away
before she stirred herself. The morning sun, pouring in at the window,
seemed to say, “This is another day. We must all go on. This is not the
end of everything.”

(The sun, she thought bitterly, which Fergus had always loved even as a
baby.)

So she had stirred herself wearily and gone over to the little
escritoire which stood in one corner of the room. There, with the pen of
gold and mother-of-pearl that belonged to Madame Nozières, she seated
herself and wrote, one letter to Callendar and one to her mother. To
Callendar she wrote that she would marry him as soon as it was possible.
To her mother she wrote a lie. She wrote that Fergus had died in the
house in the Rue Raynouard, alone with herself and Doctor Chausson who
was a great doctor and came only because he was a friend of hers.
Everything had been done which could be done. He would be buried not in
a grave at the front nor in a lonely Paris graveyard but at Trilport, in
the friendly cemetery where Madame Gigon lay, a little way off from
Germigny l’Evec where Lily went in the summer.

And in the end she added another lie, because she knew it was the one
thing above all else that Hattie Tolliver would want to hear. She even
framed the sentence shrewdly, sentimentally, though it was false to her
very nature. She wrote, “He died thinking of you. Your name was the last
word he said.”

For Hattie had at last to face the truth, and one must make it as easy
as possible for her.

Almost the last word he had said was, “Callendar.... This man ...
Callendar.” ... And she would never know now what it was that he had
meant to say.

There was a knock at the door. She knew what it was ... the men sent by
Doctor Chausson.

Ignoring it, she knelt beside the bed and pressed her cheek close to the
cold face of her brother. She was alone now, more alone than she had
ever been in all her life, where none could see her. Then as she stood,
looking down at him, it occurred to her that this death had been in a
strange way a perfect thing.... He had escaped in the midst of life,
happier than he had ever been before.... There were worse things than
death. It was only to those who remained that death was cruel.... It was
cruel to understand, in that frivolous room with the bright spring sun
streaming in at the window, that she had come to know him only when he
was dead. There had never been time before.... There had been only the
business of fame and glory and success.

When at last she opened the door, the men sent by Doctor Chausson saw a
handsome woman hard and cold, without sympathy, who stood holding by his
collar a great black dog who growled at them savagely.

In the days that followed Madame Nozières came twice to the Rue
Raynouard, once on foot and once in a taxicab though it was quite clear
that she was far more used to a motor of her own--a small, very
expensive motor like that of Sabine. She it was who had candles placed
in the room with Fergus and had masses said for him. And to all this,
which old Jacob Barr would have called “popery” and denounced as
rubbish, Ellen offered no resistance; for, not being sure any longer
that she herself believed in anything, she saw no harm so long as it
gave comfort to others. Fergus himself, she knew, would have smiled and
allowed it.

Madame Nozières wept and thanked Ellen and made her ill at ease and
miserable, but she did not say who she was or whence she came. Indeed,
Ellen learned no more of her identity than she had discovered from
Fergus himself, as he lay dying. She was a lady, a _femme du monde_, a
creature of charm and (despite her grief) of gaiety. She came out of
mystery and returned to it. “Madame Nozières” was a label, perhaps as
good as any other. Twice, long afterward, Ellen fancied that she saw
her,--once walking in the Bois and talking earnestly with Doctor
Chausson and once in the establishment of Reboux, but she could not be
certain because each time she turned quickly away lest Madame Nozières
should recognize her. She respected the mystery; she was afraid to
intrude upon it. In some way it seemed better to leave the tragedy with
its proper ending--in that frivolous room by candlelight in the Avenue
Kléber. It had been in its way a complete, a perfect thing. To follow it
further could lead only into triviality and disillusionment. She had no
desire to know too much of Madame Nozières.

But the sense of mystery fascinated her and, in the lonely days in the
Rue Raynouard, it appeared to change and soften all her beliefs. She saw
now that mystery had its place in the scheme of things, that it
possessed a beauty of its own which lent fascination to all life. There
were others, she knew, besides Callendar who were never to be understood
completely, never to be pinned down and taken apart as this or that. In
all her haste, she had fancied that life was thus and so, that people
were easy to fathom and understand. She doubted now whether she would
ever know any one--even Lily or Rebecca. There was always something
which escaped knowledge, something which lay hidden deep beneath layer
upon layer of caution, of shyness, of deceit, or mockery, of a thousand
things ... the something which in the end was one’s own self, the same
self she had guarded with savagery through so many years.

For all that people might say or think, she understood that this Fergus,
the one who stood in the candlelit room in the Avenue Kléber, had been
more beautiful than any other ... as he lay there clasping with one hand
his sister and with the other Madame Nozières!

57

It is true that Ellen in life and even Fergus in death did not really
know their own mother. They had said that she would not be able to face
the truth; yet she had done it, bravely and with a dignity that none of
them would have recognized; for they had not seen her on the day she
forced Judge Weissman, her enemy, to aid her because her children were
the ones at stake.

So the premonition which had troubled her for so long came now to be a
reality. With Ellen in Paris, Robert joined up with his own army, and
Fergus (her beloved Fergus) dead, there remained only Gramp, cold and
aloof and ageless, in his chamber surrounded by books.

It was the grim old man who found her lying in the darkness of the tiny
living room of the flat with Ellen’s letter crushed in her hand. In his
unearthly fashion he had divined the tragedy. He saw that she did not
weep; she did not even moan. She lay quite still, unconscious that he
stood there in the shadows watching her. It is impossible to imagine
what his thoughts could have been. For a time at least the hardness
which had protected him for so long must have melted a little; for
Fergus had been of all the family his favorite. It was Fergus to whom he
lent his precious books. It was Fergus who had seemed at times the very
incarnation of his own youth--so remote now, so buried beneath all his
intolerant scorn of those who were afraid to live.

For a long time he stood there watching his daughter-in-law, silently
and with an intense concentration as if he were obsessed by a desire to
study her sorrow with the passion of an anatomist. And then he had gone
up to her and quietly taken the damp, crumpled letter with a strange
gentleness out of the strong, worn hand. She did not resist; she did not
even stir. She lay quite still while he held the letter close to the
light and peering at it read it through, though he knew all the time
what was in it.

When he had finished he laid it again by her side and said in a low
voice, “The boy loved life, Hattie. And for those who die, death is not
hard. There are worse things.”

In thirty years it was the first time there had passed between the two
any speech purified of anger or resentment.

To one of Hattie’s nature there is consolation in the possession of the
dead. The grim small tasks, the polite and empty phrases of condolence,
the coming and going of those who care for the dead ... all this empty
hubbub and commerce serves in a fashion to conceal and break the anguish
of loss. But for Hattie there were not even these things. She was left
alone with Gramp in a flat which, though it had seemed empty before, now
achieved a desolation beyond all belief. She (who had lived only in her
children) had no friends about her; the very flat was not in the proper
sense a home, such as the house in Sycamore Street had been. It was a
barren, inhuman cave occupied before her by a procession of strangers
which, when she left, would again close over the brief years of her
tenancy. She found herself alone save for that ancient man her
father-in-law, in a strange city, without even the body of her son for a
bitter consolation.

So this woman, who had lived her life so richly ... a life florid and
overflowing with sentiment, a life that churned and raced along in an
overwhelming current of vitality, achieved in the face of tragedy a calm
and a dignity which she had never shown before. She understood, in the
primitive depths of her nature, that this truth which she must face was
the final one, from which there was no appeal. Always before there had
been some hope ahead, some chance of turning events by a vast energy and
a crude wilfulness to her own ends. There was nothing now ... nothing
save a few old clothes, some books and the Bible she had given him on
his tenth birthday. To these she clung with the tenacity of a savage,
and they were pitiful remnants to a woman whose love demanded the very
bodies of her children.

For Hattie there were none of those shades of grief and joy which are
the lot of those more completely civilized. She had no capacity for
seeing herself, or, like Ellen, for finding in the death of Fergus an
illumination which served in a mysterious fashion to light up the long
progression of her life. In her sorrow, Hattie no longer even pitied
herself; and this, of course, may have been the secret of her dignity.
Hattie, the martyr, who bore her cross and flung herself before her
family like the Pope before the Visigoths, no longer existed. In her
place there was a strong, almost grim woman, who was silent and did not
complain.

Nor had she, like the more civilized, the pleasure of books and of
philosophic reflection. Her life since the very beginning had been far
too active for such things; and now, when at last there was time, when
she had no one to care for save the independent old man, she could not
read, she could not reflect. Books were poor pale things by comparison
with the ferocious activity of life itself. There were no stockings to
darn, no one for whom she might make meringues, no dog to place upon his
mat before locking up the house. (To the apartment there was but one
door and it locked of itself. It was, properly speaking, no real home at
all.) So she came to invent things for herself to do. She lingered over
her work and took (though she was rich now) to such pale tasks as
embroidery and knitting, only to find that the objects of her labor,
having been created for no real purpose, accumulated dismally in the
drawers and cupboards.

She had letters both from Ellen and Robert which she kept in the family
Bible to read over and over again; and sometimes a shameful, bitter
thought crept into the recesses of her active mind. It was a terrible
thought, which she thrust hastily aside as impious and touched with
blasphemy; but it returned nevertheless again and again to torment her.
She thought, “If only it had been Robert instead of Fergus!” (Robert who
was so steadfast and reliable, who already was the youngest captain of
his division). She was proud of him too, but in a different way. She
could not say how....

The awful thought would not die. She would have given Robert to keep
Fergus, though in the solitude of the empty flat she sometimes cried
out, “It is not true. I could not think such a horrible thing!”

The squabbling with Gramp came quietly to an end, though neither of them
ever made any allusion to the change. They lived together for the most
part in silence but the old man ceased to torment and worry her. And on
her side without ever knowing why, she came to treat him in a new way,
almost to cherish and protect him like some brittle piece of glass, as
all that remained of the old life. She even made for him little
delicacies and had him to eat at the table with her. At such times they
sat, awkwardly, and without conversation, each perhaps abashed by the
weakness that lay in this strange truce.

In the long empty days there came to Hattie a mysterious sense of having
turned a corner, of having stepped from one room into another. The door
between had, she knew, closed forever, though she did not understand
why. She had come now into the borders of Gramp’s country. She was
growing old and so she came to understand a little the old man’s vast
indifference.

Before he sailed, Robert, dressed in his captain’s uniform, neat and
spotless, every button properly arranged, came to bid farewell. She
could feel certain of him. There would be no mad exploits, no wild
surges of temperament ending in disaster, no idle heroics undertaken for
their own selfish thrill. These things Robert would never understand.

As he sat talking to her (trying bravely in his solid, unspectacular way
to take the place of Fergus) he seemed square and massive and eternal as
her father, old Jacob Barr, had been. There was reassurance in the snub
nose, the solid jaw and the unruly red hair. Where Fergus had not even
been able to look out for himself, she knew that this other son would
care for his men with a detached and efficient thoroughness. There was
nothing in the death of Fergus which could be counted as a material
loss, even to herself. It was Robert who had earned money when it was
most needed; it was Robert who looked out for her and stood between her
and the world. It was upon men like Robert that the whole world rested;
he was a foundation, the beginning and end of all order and worth. And
yet.... And yet.... Even while he sat there doing his clumsy best to
make up for the loss of his brother, the old wicked thought kept
tormenting her.... She wanted to tear it out by its roots, to destroy it
forever; but there it was, always with her.... _If only it had been
Robert._

“You need not worry over me,” he assured her. “I will take no chances.
There’s nothing romantic about war ... at least not about this one. It’s
simply business. The side which is most efficient is bound to win. There
won’t be any nonsense. I’ll look out for myself.”

She said to him almost with indifference, “You’re all I have left,
because I don’t see much of Ellen any more. She’s too busy.”

But she was not thinking of what she said: she was thinking that war
_was_ romantic. It must be so else it would not excite men as it excited
Fergus. It was the romance that was the bait in the trap ... romance and
the excitement. So long as these things existed, there would be wars,
for there would be men like Fergus who did not take their places
efficiently but went because (she remembered one of the phrases he had
used again and again in the face of her reproaches) “it was too big a
show to be missed.” It was not men like Robert who made war possible; it
was men like Fergus. She saw it all with a vision uncluttered by talk of
economics and politics; and so in her own fashion she came far nearer to
the truth than this solid, logical son of hers.

But he was sure of himself, Robert. You could fancy him ordering his men
about, ably and dispassionately, leading them admirably when it was
necessary, as his grandfather Barr, the Citizen, had done before him in
the Civil War. He would make a good job of it. You could see that he
would quietly and thoroughly win distinction, not as Fergus had done,
without once thinking of it, but because he had arranged it so. You
could see him being decorated with medals, as his brother had been
decorated, again and again; but not for the same reason. He would not
wear them as Fergus had done, with a swagger. He would cherish them, in
neat leather cases, and bring them out to show his children and his
grandchildren, because he could not tell them what the war was like,
give them the feel of it, as Fergus could have done ... Fergus who (if
he had lived) would have lost the medals or thrown them away long ago in
disgust like his Grandfather Tolliver, who found the Siege of Paris more
romantic than Bull Run or Gettysburg. He had, one fancied, already
counted his medals. One could see that he was cut out for a good
officer.

“I will see Ellen as soon as I have leave,” he murmured and thought,
“And I will not be walking about the streets during an air raid as if I
were at a church sociable.”

Yet he was not bitter because Fergus was the better loved; that fact he
had come long since to accept. He was scornful only because it seemed to
him an idiotic thing to be wandering carelessly into the midst of
danger. There could be no reason for it ... none on earth.

Before he left, Hattie burdened him with a great bundle of sweaters and
socks, all admirably made in the hours when she had been distracted by
her terror of idleness.

“You must wear them all yourself,” she said. “You’ll need them in time.
They’ll wear out and you’ll lose them. I’ll send you others from time to
time. It’s all I have to do nowadays.”

And on the way past the cell occupied by The Everlasting he must have
heard the squeaking of his grandfather’s chair as the old man rocked and
rocked, lost again in a torrent of memories; but he did not stop.

“Say good-by for me to The Everlasting,” he said and then, after kissing
her abruptly, he turned and disappeared quickly down the stairs, so that
she could not see his tears. For Robert was, unlike the others,
sentimental, though he had never once allowed his mother the joy of
discovering it. It was a thing which he thought shameful.

Even he had caught a sense of her terrible desolation.

There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a
variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow,
content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense
of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only
by those who possess the gift of awareness. Old Gramp in his solitude
knew well its workings, and Ellen, in Paris, had become, as the tempo of
her own life began to lose its intensity, to understand it dimly. For
Hattie, in the fretful ebb and flow of her existence there could never
be such knowledge. This rhythm, this beauty, existed outside her, a
thing apart, beyond the wall of her consciousness.

Gramp, in his solitude, knew too that there were in each life hills and
valleys and, rising above them all, one peak which pierced the clouds.
Out of the depths of his uncanny perception he came to understand that
Hattie’s life had passed its solitary peak. It had begun now to slip
down the other side; what remained could be but a gradual falling away,
a gentle decline until the end. What he knew from the summit of a
monstrous detachment came to Hattie vaguely through her senses; she knew
it as she knew the approach of damp weather by its effect upon her
rheumatism. It was that sense of having passed from one room into
another, with the door behind her closed and bolted forever.

And Ellen.... She too stood now on the summit, for ambition had been the
beginning and end of her existence. She had accomplished; she had won.
There would never be another peak so lofty, so enveloped in heady
invigorating air; nor one so lonely. But there remained the things which
lie always on the opposite slope of the peak--the things which the wise,
like Gramp, place above all the hurry, the scramble, the headlong
turmoil of the long ascent. There were the gentle pastures of
reflection, of kindliness, of warmth and fine thoughts, all the rewards
which succeed the terrible struggle. Ellen, he knew, had crossed the
summit; and she was still a young woman.

58

One bright spring morning as Hattie sat looking out into the street
while she sewed and thought, round and and round, over and over again,
those same thoughts which stole in upon her so frequently in these days
of idleness, the postman brought a letter from Ellen. It was a brief
letter, written it seemed in haste, but it contained two bits of news
that changed the whole face of the world.

Ellen was to be married, and she wanted Hattie to come to Paris and make
her home there.

“I have talked it over with Lily,” she wrote, “and she is delighted with
the plan. Her house here is enormous and comfortable, and Lily is rarely
in it save in the spring and autumn. You could do as you chose with no
one to annoy you. And you need never think or worry about housekeeping.
I am sending a cheque, and Rebecca’s uncle Mr. Schönberg is arranging
for tickets. It is difficult to travel nowadays, but I have talked to
Mrs. Callendar and she has written to a friend of hers, Malcolm Travers,
the banker, who will arrange passports for you. You will hear from him
within a few days after this letter.”

And about her own plans she wrote, “I am marrying Richard Callendar, the
son of the same Mrs. Callendar. You remember her? You met her on the
night of my first concert in America, a small, fat dark woman covered
with dirty diamonds. You may have read of the family in the papers, for
they are well known. They are very rich. He is four years older than me.
I have known him for nearly ten years. He wanted to marry me before,
years ago. (And then a sudden flash of the old Ellen who had walked
away in the sunlight to skate on Walker’s Pond.) Fancy me, marrying a
millionaire!”

So, in an instant, everything was changed and Hattie’s world grew bright
once more. It was all so preposterous--to have Ellen arranging
everything in this grand manner, the tickets, the passports, as if her
mother were a queen whose journey was to be made as simple and free of
trouble as possible. And the cheque and the millionaire husband! Yet,
when the sense of excitement had abated a little, she remembered that
she had always known her children were not of ordinary flesh and blood.
There had been something extraordinary about them. Look at Ellen! Famous
and rich and now marrying a millionaire.

But her satisfaction was not free from the old doubts. Was he--this
Callendar--good enough for her? Clarence had never been. It was a good
thing, she reflected, that he had died. What could she have done with
him during all these years ... Clarence, a poor thing at best, always
complaining of his health.

But this Callendar. Who was he and why had she never spoken of him
before? Surely she was a strange girl who kept such secrets so
passionately hidden. Where had he come from? Was he of good healthy
stock? What had his life been? For a time she paced up and down the room
in a ferment of curiosity. She tried to imagine what sort of man Ellen
would choose to marry. (This time she must be marrying only for love;
there could be no other reason.) She tried again and again to picture
him and she found herself baffled. It was impossible to imagine....

And when she had grown more calm and the sense of the dreary flat was
borne in upon her once more, she remembered The Everlasting. He was
ninety-five, and yet not really an old man; his mind had never faltered
in its course. But he was feeble and needed care. She could not desert
him now. She deceived herself into believing that it was her duty to
care for him until he died; and only the Almighty knew when that would
be. No, she must take him with her. She could not leave him, as Ellen
suggested, in some home for the aged. That would be wrong; it would be,
in a sense, indecent. He was after all the father of her husband, the
grandfather of her children. One could not do a thing like that. She
debated the matter with herself for hours, thinking, strangely enough,
only of reasons why she _should_ take him; and it never once occurred to
her that she really had no desire _not_ to take him. The arguments
against it were simply the habit of an intermittent civil war that had
endured for more than thirty years. She could not bear to leave him
behind, any more than she could have borne it to leave behind the old
clothes, the worn shoes, and the Bible she had given Fergus on his tenth
birthday. Gramp was a fixture now, a part of the past. Without him she
would feel lost and lonely.

When she told him the intoxicating news, the old man, with a wariness
that placed no trust in their unreal truce, looked at her sharply and
said, doubtfully, “I don’t know, Hattie. I’m too old and too feeble. I
think perhaps I’d better stay behind.” He opposed the idea in the belief
that if he opposed it she would insist upon its being carried through.

But she was firm. She would not even argue the matter. He must go with
her to Paris. He would be quite as well off there as anywhere else and
he would at least be where she could look after him.

“Much better off,” thought Gramp, whose only desire was to see Paris
again before he died. But he still maintained a resentful air as if he
opposed the idea with his last breath but was far too feeble to offer
any real resistance.

59

In Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival.
It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of
life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days
which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow.
All things pass in time and so the grief and loneliness had begun to
pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her
first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the
loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without
complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the
present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave,
dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected
with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of “Tiens!
Tiens!” de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to
the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from
the crêpe-laden “Tiens! Tiens!” and satisfied to have found so agreeable
a creature as Lily--a woman whom he described to his friends as
dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that
she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political
importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in
general and to France in particular.

And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In
the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other
confidences with Ellen, she said, “He is a gentleman and distinguished.
Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as
for me....” She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her
voice. “He will not bother me much. He is an old man.” But she was grave
too when she spoke again. “And I ... I am no longer young. I am
forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place
of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and
give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have
never had before.”

And then she grew thoughtful and added, “It will be good for Jean too.
It is time he had a father ... a thing he has never had. It is time that
I stepped out of the picture and made way for him.”

She had lived, if not a life beyond reproach, one that was at least
discreet and marked by good taste, and so the other things, since the
world is as it is, did not matter. Of those who had really known her
secret only three remained ... Ellen and Hattie and Jean. César and
Madame Gigon and Old Julia were dead. It did not, of course, occur to
her to include The Everlasting, who had known all the while.

Jean too was happier now, for he had grown used to wandering about on
crutches and had become accustomed to a new leg, made so admirably that
he could still ride as much as he liked. It would have been impossible
for him to have remained depressed; there was too much of Lily in him
and, it must not be forgotten, he resembled Fergus greatly. The old
friendship between him and Ellen waxed stronger than ever. It seemed to
her at times that Fergus had returned or had never died at all. In the
evenings while his mother sat talking quietly in the big soft drawing
room with Monsieur de Cyon, Ellen joined him at the piano in playing
with four hands the wildest songs out of the music halls. Rebecca in
rare moments of good humor added to the gaiety with imitations of poor
old Sarah Bernhardt or Mistinguette or Spinelly.

Rebecca had long since come to make herself at home in the big house.
She was settled now in one of the rooms opening on the long gallery and
she was perpetually with them, for it never occurred to Lily to offer
objections to one more guest; but, having nothing to occupy her time,
she grew irritable and restless. Her occupation had gone suddenly and
there remained nothing to absorb her energy. Ellen remained stubborn and
mysterious. She would not return to America where there was a fortune
awaiting her.

“I have enough,” she said. “I need not work myself to death. I am rich
now. I am through with struggling. Whenever I see fit I can return.”

But to Rebecca, it must have seemed that Ellen had slipped somehow out
of her reach, beyond the control which she had once held over her. She
would not even quarrel as they had once done so often and with such
vigor. She would simply repeat, “No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I
am going to rest for a time.”

It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca.
She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were
gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it
even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it
is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she
had never been.

“You are deceiving me,” Rebecca reproached her. “There is something that
I don’t know. You are keeping something from me.” And she would grow
tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. “Me,” she
would repeat, beating her thin breast, “who have given my life for you
... who have worked myself to the bone ... given all my time.... For no
other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful.”

And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, “Because you have
found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you
fastened upon me.... Because you found happiness in taking possession of
me and my life.”

But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that
quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, “And you told the
most wonderful lies about me.... You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr
is having a rest now. I am being myself ... Ellen Tolliver ... for a
little time.”

Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at
her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to
visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the
cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering
places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded
soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to
draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the
steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up
the rear.

July had passed and with it the last peril to Paris, but still Callendar
did not return. She heard from him whenever he had time to write. They
were busy now (he wrote). They were beginning to look toward the end.
The arrival of the Americans had done much for the French, not that they
counted for much because there were not enough of them, but because,
simply, they were _there_. He had kept on the _qui vive_ for her other
brother--Robert--but he had not come across him. It was not strange
since his own division was nowhere near the Americans. Still he might
see him.... One could never tell.... They expected to be shifted soon
eastward in the direction of the (here the word was deleted), quite near
to the Americans. It was easy for him to make himself acquainted since
he was, after all, half-American.

And he would write again and again, “Do not worry about me. I have the
most incredible luck--always. There are some men who go through the
thing _knowing_ that nothing will ever happen to them. I _know_ it. It’s
a feeling that is in the bones. In the worst messes, I have that feeling
... so strong that it is physical. ‘Nothing will happen to me ...
nothing whatever,’ I find myself repeating over and over again.”

And as she read this, it occurred to her again that such a belief
belonged to the part of him which had always been strange to her--the
part which escaped in some nameless fashion even the limits of her
imagination. It was mystical and profound and uncanny. At the very
moment that she knew he must be right in his faith, she was terrified
too because he was so certain. She could not believe with such intensity
save in herself. Her beliefs were related always to the power, the force
which she herself had at her own command; and in all the senseless,
miserable killing there was no power which lay in one’s self. It was
simply a monstrous game of chance with the odds all against one.

But she found a happiness in those letters of a sort which she had never
imagined. It seemed to her that in some way a part of herself was there
with him enduring the same hardships and dangers, and for the first
time in all her life she touched the borders of the satisfaction which
comes of sharing an experience. She was troubled no longer by doubts;
now that she had given her word, it never occurred to her to change.
There was relief in the knowledge that all the years of indecision were
at an end. There was satisfaction in feeling that the thing had been
settled.

But she was abashed at the bold passion with which he wrote,
shamelessly, assailing the wall of her fierce reserve. She was abashed
and yet triumphant, for in all the years of struggle she had forgotten
at times that she was a woman and young. His letters made her know for a
little time some of the joy which Lily had possessed since the
beginning.

He wrote at length that Sabine’s divorce was completed. “I am free now
and will have a leave soon, so we can try then to make up for all the
wasted years. Because they have been wasted. We should have been married
long ago. We should have been courageous enough to have cut through the
tangle and set things right. We were cowardly then. It is tragic that we
only learn through long experience that wastes so much of joy, so much
of happiness. But you are mine now ... mine forever. I shall never lose
you again....”

But the letter troubled her strangely; it invoked with each line some
disturbing memory of the past. The allusion to courage.... Who could say
what had been courage and what cowardice? If the matter had rested with
Callendar alone, it would have been solved because he had had what he
believed was courage. He would have thrust poor Clarence aside and
trampled upon him, to take ruthlessly what he himself desired. It had
been a courage different from hers, whose foundations stood rooted in
self-denial. Yet she had saved no one in the end, not even Clarence.
Some power, in which Callendar placed such faith, had brought them
together in the end, destroying Clarence despite anything she could do
to save him. And it seemed to her that all the trouble, all the sorrow
went back to that winter evening on the shore of Walker’s Pond when she
had said “Yes” to Clarence and felt for him at the same moment a queer,
inarticulate pity--a pity which she was beginning at last to understand.

She experienced again a fierce satisfaction, almost a pleasure, which
Callendar, in the strangeness of his blood, would never know. It was the
satisfaction in having dominated even one’s own body.

But in the last lines there lay an echo of the old conflict. _You will
be mine ... mine forever. I will never lose you again._ It was an
arrogant speech, so like the way he had come to her years ago in the
Babylon Arms, not asking what she desired but simply taking for granted
that she would do as he wished. The memory of that afternoon disturbed
her again with the sense that this love of which he wrote was an
obscene, middle-aged emotion worn by a too great experience. The
freshness was gone and with it all the glow of their meetings in the
open windows of Sherry’s and the walks through the Spring in Central
Park.... It was this knowledge perhaps more than any other, that made
his passionate phrases seem shameful. All of that first youth was gone
from them, yet he posed, he wrote her still in the same ardent phrases,
grown threadbare and unconvincing, of a love that had once been clean
and fresh and despite all that she knew, even then, virginal. There was
a touch now that bordered upon the professional....

He told her that Sabine was in Paris and might pay her a call, as much
out of a gossip’s curiosity as from her curious passion for knowing the
truth, for knowing with a blazing clarity exactly how things stood.

Sabine did call, in her small, expensive motor, accompanied by little
Thérèse, an awkward, sickly girl of ten, but Ellen sent word that she
was out. She had no desire to see Sabine, perhaps because she feared
what Sabine had to tell her. And she could not turn back now; for too
many years she had followed a straight unswerving path.

60

It was a fantastic journey for Hattie and The Everlasting. On passports
arranged by Thérèse Callendar they were borne along a way made easy by
all the power behind Thérèse Callendar’s fortune, through all the hubbub
and turmoil of the war. Their companions on shipboard were
correspondents and doctors and nurses and soldiers and congressmen
(bound for the front to garner out of the very graves material for new
campaigns). The others aboard the ship must have found them a strange
pair concerning whom it was possible to speculate endlessly--this
handsome, grim woman and the old, old man in her charge. It is probable
that no one ever learned precisely who they were or whither they were
bound, for Hattie was a suspicious traveler who placed no trust in
fellow voyagers. She warned them away by her looks; and Gramp, of
course, had not the faintest desire to enter upon conversation. He read
his books and once a day made a circuit, under the escort of Hattie, of
the entire deck, his coonskin coat (from which he refused to be
separated) blowing in and out against his skinny old body. He never
spoke, even to Hattie, even in reply to such remarks as, “Now, Grandpa,
you must not eat that,” or “Now, Grandpa, you had best move your chair,
there’s a draft in that corner.”

(All this to Gramp who had never denied himself anything and had a
perfect digestion; who had never thought of drafts since he was born.)

Indeed, there was something touching in the spectacle of the middle-aged
woman, tending so carefully the old, old man. It was as if she feared
that he might by some ill chance be blown from the deck into the open
sea or fall down a companionway and shatter forever the brittle old
bones that had defied time itself. No one could have guessed that they
were enemies, that despite the temporary truce they could never be
anything but enemies by the very nature of things. Hattie treated him
still as if he were some fragile piece of old glass which she must
deliver safely to Lily’s house in the Rue Raynouard.

It was only after she had seen him safely to bed in his cabin that she
was able to give range to all her passionate energy and walk round and
round the deck, her ostrich plumes blowing in the gale, her strong,
buxom figure outlined against the luminous blue of the Atlantic night.
At such times she was almost happy again for it seemed to her that in
the winds and fogs Fergus was somewhere close at hand, just beyond
reach, waiting for her.

And she was going now to take up once more the threads of life. Ellen
was to be married.... Ellen was to be married.... She must have a
child.... She must have a child.... These things she thought over and
over again until she came at length to repeat them aloud to herself as
she walked, bracing her body against the gale, through the darkness. She
had joined Thérèse Callendar in this passionate desire for a grandchild,
but it was not for the same reason. To Hattie a grandchild would alter
everything. It would be for her like being young again, almost like
bearing a child of her own.

She had never traveled before; she knew not a word of French and The
Everlasting saw fit not to reveal his knowledge of the tongue; but she
was undaunted. In some way, by an heroic effort touched with a profound
scorn for a nation which chattered such an abominable tongue, she
managed everything ... the customs at Havre, the accommodations in
hotels already crowded to the doors and, last of all, the journey from
the port into the Gare du Nord. (Lily had sent a courier to meet her but
the meeting never occurred.) She was indomitable and she was almost
happy again in all the business of managing tickets and meals and
luggage, shepherding The Everlasting and his precious books. For Hattie
believed that nothing was impossible....

From the corridor of the crowded train, where she stood protecting Gramp
and jostling her fellow passengers, Hattie saw them standing on the
platform of the smoking cave called the Gare du Nord.... Ellen and Lily
and a dark man in a blue uniform; and as the train jolted to a halt, her
own car (for she thought of it thus) stopped almost abreast of them so
that she was able to see that they talked earnestly with grave faces and
an air of preoccupation. Wedged between a poilu slung round with a dozen
musettes and wine bottles, and a trim English colonel with white
mustaches and a red face, she was held immovable, unable to signal to
them though she pounded upon the glass and shouted to them through
windows open by some miracle against the stifling September heat. To
Hattie, nothing existed in all that echoing cavern save those three
figures, standing together amid mountains of luggage.

In the resounding shed steam hissed and engines squealed in ridiculous
Gallic fashion; soldiers shouted to one another and a cocotte just
beneath her window cried ribald jests to a lover somewhere in the same
car who joined in the shouts of laughter. They looked up and down the
platform--those three. It seemed that years passed before Lily, turning
languidly in the heat, caught a glimpse of Hattie’s red and agitated
face and Gramp’s sharp nose and inscrutable eyes.

They moved toward her; the English colonel whose toes had been trampled
gave way in indignation and Hattie, bearing an immense amount of luggage
and followed indifferently by Gramp, descended to the platform.

Ellen kissed her and then Lily, and at last she heard Ellen saying,
“This is Richard, Ma. He is on leave.”

Above all the flurry and the conversation, she and Callendar regarded
each other searchingly, the one with a piercing gaze of appraisal, the
other with an air almost of astonishment. He had not, perhaps, pictured
her as such a handsome woman, nor one, despite the grimness on which one
could not put one’s finger, of such immense gusto. She accounted for
Ellen’s strength and vitality, but there was clearly nothing subtle in
her and nothing cold: the answer to all that lay elsewhere--perhaps in
the ancient man who peered at them all like a spiteful mouse through
his dim spectacles.

As for Hattie, her eyes asked only one thing, “Was he--this man--good
enough for Ellen?” His foreign blood showed itself more plainly than she
had expected. It troubled her that her daughter should be marrying a man
of foreign blood; for, vaguely, all foreigners were associated in her
mind with those dark, sullen, violent men who worked in the black Mills
surrounding Shane’s Castle.

There flashed between the two--Callendar and Hattie--no spark either of
understanding or enmity. Rather it seemed that the opinions of both were
colored by surprise and a touch of suspicion. In Hattie’s eyes there was
a fire of pride and possession, the look of one who would fight for her
children, passionately; and in the gray eyes of Callendar there was only
the opaque, inscrutable expression which only Ellen, of them all, had
ever seen dissolve or change.

But they were grave, all of them, in a fashion that presently entered
Hattie’s spirit and made her feel that their welcome was lacking in
enthusiasm. Perhaps (she thought) it was the war; they were so close to
it and Ellen, like herself, must be thinking always of Fergus. Perhaps
they did not really want her there ... any of them. Yet they had written
her with so much eagerness. It was a doubt that filled her with a sharp
terror of growing old and useless and dependent.

Lily (whom she had not seen in years, Lily who was now Madame de Cyon)
seemed scarcely changed at all. She could not be (Hattie, watching her,
hastily calculated the years) she could not be a day less than
forty-five; yet there she was, a woman who had sinned, looking young,
almost fresh, scarcely a day older than Ellen who was twelve years
younger ... more plump than Ellen and, strangely enough, more soft.
Still, Hattie reflected, with a grim satisfaction, she had painted her
face, and her hair, it was certain, had been “touched up.”

Perhaps in Paris all life was different; perhaps such a life as Lily’s
made not too great a difference. Looking at her cousin, so beautiful, so
charming and so unnaturally young, all the deep rooted respectability of
Hattie’s nature rose and bristled. And as she stood on the steps of the
Gare du Nord waiting for Callendar to fetch the gray blue Government
motor to drive them to the Rue Raynouard, it swept over her that it was
a strange and ridiculous turn of affairs which had brought her of all
people “into the wickedest city in the world,” to live in the house of
Lily whom she had always distrusted. She had not thought of it until
this moment when she stood looking out across the Place Roubaix.

The motor came abreast of them with Callendar--a stranger, a
foreigner--at the wheel, driving with a cool recklessness. It was all
weird and unreal, so preposterous that Hattie grew suddenly frightened.
She was aware briefly of a terror at the spectacle of this new, strange
city where every one spoke an ungodly language. A little while before
she would not even have thought of such things. It occurred to her that
she must be growing old.

“I never felt younger in my life,” she repeated aloud to Lily who stood
waiting for her to enter the motor.

All this time The Everlasting had said nothing. Watching the others he
had kept his own silence, but he had not overlooked the Paris that lay
all about him, so changed now, so different, from the Paris of his
youth. He heard none of their talk, made almost laboriously against the
inexplicable depression, as they drove through the Rue Lafayette. How
could it have interested him who was concerned with another world ...? A
world of gaslight and crinoline, imperials and the waltzes of Strauss
and Waldteufel? To him, who had no future, this new Paris must have been
less than nothing ... this new Paris in which Lily with all her money
out of the black mills in the Middle West had a house and lived as if
she had been born a Parisian; this new Paris in which his own
granddaughter played a brilliant part. It was a Paris.... How could one
describe it?

Yet, as he rode over the sweltering asphalt, his eyes, his ears, his
nose drank in the sights and sounds and smells ... the sudden cry of
“L’Intran!... L’Intran!” and “Le Petit Parisien!” the withered dying
chestnut trees of the Boulevard Haussmann (he could remember when it was
new), the little tables.... Because youth was after an insidious fashion
returning to him, Gramp, the bitter, the aloof, grew sentimental. It had
been here, in this Paris, that he had climbed to the pinnacle of all his
life, the summit from which all else had been a gentle decline. He had
not died like Fergus. He had gone on and on until at last life itself
had lost all its savor....

They had turned now round Arc de Triomphe, and Ellen, sitting quietly by
the side of Callendar, frowned. She had been silent throughout the
drive, thinking, thinking, thinking bitterly with a savage secrecy
because she dared not betray herself even by the flicker of an eyelid.
She sat there silently, pondering how she might break the news which she
herself and no other must in the end relate. It seemed to her that the
whole affair was too cruel, too horrible. It was not possible that she
should be forced twice to do the same terrible thing.

The sound of her mother’s voice, cheerful and rich, as she talked to
Lily came to her over her shoulder.... “And the man wouldn’t open the
window so in the end I opened it myself and then he began to chatter and
yell at me in some ridiculous language ... French perhaps.”

“How was he dressed?” asked Lily, and Hattie described his uniform.

“Oh,” replied Lily in mirth. “He was Portuguese.... You must never mind
the Portuguese.”

“Well, I don’t know whether Portuguese smell worse than other
nationalities but the air in that train was enough to suffocate a strong
man.”

... And now they were coming nearer and nearer to the Trocadéro. They
were quite near now. Ellen turned away her eyes. They had passed the
house in the Avenue Kléber. She caught a swift glimpse of the doorway
which she had not seen since the bright morning she closed the door on
the frivolous little room of Madame Nozières. Ah, she knew how it
looked! She knew each tiny thing about it, and the gray courtyard with
the summer furniture heaped into one corner. It was cruel, incredible
... what she had to do.

Before they drew up to the door of the house in the Rue Raynouard,
Hattie too had grown silent under the gray depression which claimed all
the little party.

They had tea on the white terrace where they found the black dog and
poor tottering old Criquette and were joined by Jean and Monsieur de
Cyon, and Rebecca, whose sulkiness did nothing to raise the spirits of
the party. It was, Lily remarked, as she sat behind a table laden with
silver and flowers sent up from Germigny and the most delicate
sandwiches of pâté and cheese and jam, like a great family reunion. The
big house was full now; Lily was married, even with distinction. There
were no more secrets. In some ways life had grown simple, yet in others
its complexity had been increased, again and again.

Ellen, sitting there in her own pool of tragic silence, watched them all
with the old knowledge that their lives were all in some way entangled
and bound up together ... all that absurd and ill assorted group,
Monsieur de Cyon, gentle and white haired, Hattie, Rebecca, Jean, Lily,
Callendar and herself; and even Gramp who had disappeared already into
the solitude of the room which Lily had given him. Here they all were,
most of them--even de Cyon, himself, a foreigner--living on the wealth
poured out by the black mills of a town in the Midlands of America. And
she it was who had brought them together.

Watching her mother, it occurred to her that the indomitable Hattie was
no longer young. She would ask presently to be shown the room where
Fergus had died, and Ellen, still lying, would show it to her, and her
mother would weep and be satisfied in a pitiful fashion with the
deception. It was better sometimes to lie, better to deceive.

But the other thing.... She rose presently and walked away down into the
garden where she was joined after a little time by Jean on his crutches
and Hansi, panting and restless at being kept in the summer heat of the
city. And when she had gone Rebecca drifted away with an air of
resentful martyrdom. She would have been nasty to Hattie, if she had
dared, just as she had been nasty to Callendar who was only amused by
her and took pains to show her in a thousand small ways that Ellen
belonged to him now, and that she, Rebecca, no longer counted. But
Rebecca could wait; there was the same blood in both and Rebecca
understood how his game was played. She could wait, she thought
bitterly, as she went up to her own room. The game was not yet over and
she had not yielded the victory. She knew, perhaps better than any of
the others, even Ellen, what to expect of Callendar. There was no part
of him which remained a mystery to her, for she knew the men of her own
family ... the Uncle Ottos and Maximilians and Gustaves, all with a
touch of the Levant. But Ellen would never believe her; she would
believe only that Rebecca was jealous of him (which was true) and that
what she said was uttered only out of spite. She would not believe that
he was really cruel and domineering and thought of women as creatures
who belonged in a harem.... Sabine could have helped her, but Sabine
whom she had never met had been turned away from the door.

No, she had not yet lost the battle. She must save Ellen as much because
she herself needed her as on Ellen’s own account. She climbed the long
stairs and left Lily and de Cyon, Hattie and Callendar together on the
terrace, talking under the guidance of Callendar, who led them
gracefully here and there, finding, it seemed, a strange satisfaction in
ignoring the terrible knowledge which he shared only with Lily and
Ellen. Lily, watching him, must have thought him inhumanly cold. Perhaps
it occurred to her again, in the depths of her wisdom and experience,
that this marriage of Ellen could end in only one way.

Meanwhile under the old plane trees Ellen, who had been walking up and
down in silence with Jean and the dogs, took the departure of Monsieur
de Cyon for the white pavilion (which Lily had had fitted up for him as
a sort of study) as a signal to return. On the terrace she said to
Callendar, “I shan’t come down until dinner. If you want to see your
mother before she sails, you had best go now. I’ll be free later,” and
so dismissed him.

Then, turning to her mother, she said, “Come Ma, we’ll go up and get you
settled in your room,” and led her away leaving the garden to Lily and
Jean and fat old Criquette.

Hattie, who had noticed nothing either in the streets or in the house
itself (for, as Ellen knew, she did not see its beauty but saw it only
as the house which it might be said belonged to Ellen), noticed as she
walked through the big drawing-room that it resembled Shane’s Castle in
its warm, soft beauty. The portrait of old John Shane with a white
setter at his feet, and the glowing Venice of Mr. Turner which had once
hung in the house among the Mills now found places against the satinwood
paneling. She fancied too that she recognized the Aubusson carpet,
connected dimly in her memory with the picture of old Julia, hawk-like
and bitter, tracing the outlines of the extravagant flowers with her
stick of ebony and silver.

“It’s like the castle,” she murmured to Ellen, who hurried on up the
stairs without heeding her.

They turned off along the gallery and, as they passed one of the doors,
the squeaking of Gramp’s rocking chair (unpacked and long since placed
in readiness by Lily) came to them through the paneling. Time went on.
People were born and people died, but The Everlasting and his rocking
chair remained the same.

“He’s better now than he used to be,” observed Hattie. She did not
mention him by name, for Ellen knew well enough whom she meant; together
they had passed his door, together they had heard the same rhythmical
squeaking a thousand times. In a sense the sound of the decrepit rocker
bound them to each other in a way that nothing else could have done. It
was the one thing that remained constant, unchanged, out of all the
past.

Hattie’s room--the room to which she had come to spend the rest of her
life--was large and airy with two tall windows which opened on the
garden where Lily had taken Ellen’s place and was now walking up and
down, up and down, with her tall red-haired son. He was a man now and it
made Hattie tremble to think how little difference his improper
existence had made. There in the garden, under the old trees, it seemed
of no importance that he had never had, in the proper sense, a father.
He belonged there, with Lily. There was a rightness about the whole
thing which Hattie sensed from afar off but was unable to explain ... a
vague feeling that Lily’s life had been, despite everything, a life
complete and in the proper key, like a beautiful painting superbly drawn
and executed with all the boldness of a sure hand. Lily perhaps had led
the life for which she was born. Hattie saw that she was telling the boy
something which had led her to weep, for she lifted her handkerchief to
her eyes and the boy halted to face her with his brow crinkled into
little furrows. He was so like Fergus....

And in the next instant she knew what it was that Lily had said. Ellen
put her arms about her mother and murmured in a low voice, “I have some
bad news, Ma.”

And Hattie, looking at her in a queer stony fashion, replied, “I know
what it is. Robert too is dead.”

It was true. Little by little, while her mother sat listening in the
same stony silence, Ellen told the whole story. It was Callendar who had
brought the news. He had come from the front on leave this very morning.
There--somewhere in the Argonne--he had come across Robert’s regiment
and there they had become acquainted. And then on the night before
Callendar left, he had been sent for by one of the Americans. He had
gone to a dressing station, but Robert was dead when he arrived. He had
been wounded while saving one of his own men caught among the barbed
wire between the German lines and his own. The man had been saved; he
would live. It was he who had told Callendar the whole story, he who in
a sort of delirium had described the whole affair with a fantastic
poetry ... the fog that had settled over the lines, the swift, brilliant
flare of the Veery lights, the faint, malicious, pop! pop! of the gas
shells as they buried their noses so neatly in the earth. It was in this
wild, unearthly setting that Robert had given up his life. Robert
(thought Hattie) who had said, “There’s nothing romantic about war....
The side which is the most efficient.... There won’t be any nonsense....
I’ll look out for myself.”

When Ellen had finished they were both silent for a time and at last,
Hattie, still dry eyed, said in a firm voice, “It is a judgment ... I
love my children too well ... better than my own God and now they have
been taken from me.”

(_If only it had been Robert_.... And now it was Robert too.)

She lay down on the great bed, a strange, incongruous figure--this grim,
primitive, black-clad woman--in the midst of all the luxury that Lily
had provided. And presently she said, “I’d like to be alone for a time,
Ellen. I’ll call you ... later on.”

So Ellen left her mother in solitude, but as the door closed behind her
she knew that it was herself upon whom the remnants of her
family--Hattie and The Everlasting--now depended. It was she who, after
all these years in which she had neglected and forgotten them, had
become the rock, the foundation. And she knew too that there could no
longer be any doubt about marrying Callendar. She would have to marry
now.... Now that Robert, too, was gone there were new reasons. There
remained only one thing that she could do for her mother. It might as
well be Callendar as any other man.

61

They were married a month before the armistice, quietly with only
Monsieur de Cyon and Lily and Jean and Hattie at the ceremony. It was
the family once more (the remnants of the vigorous family which had once
filled the drawing-room at Shane’s Castle) which dominated all else in
fitting fashion at such events as births and deaths and weddings.
Thérèse was not present, for Ellen had decided quickly and there was not
time for her to return from New York. Nor was Rebecca there. A week
before the wedding there had been a scene in which Rebecca played all
her cards in a forlorn hope of winning the game against Callendar. She
had told Ellen that she herself was a Jewess and knew what men like
Callendar were like. She had told her that he was cruel and domineering
and that all his patience, all his quiet aloofness only covered the
steel of a will which she would come in time to know too well. She said
that in the end he would do his best to destroy her, not alone as a
musician but as a woman. And Ellen listened quietly, secure against it
all in the knowledge of the new duty that lay before her. It was not
until Rebecca in a perfect debauch of fury screamed at her, “He is
marrying you only to break your will ... to destroy you. It is that
which lies behind it all.... A conflict.... I know.... A conflict. He
has wanted it all these years,” that Ellen grew white and terrifying and
told her to go.

“I never want to see you again,” she said. “I am grateful for what you
have done, but you cannot arrange all my life for me. What you say is a
lie.... It isn’t true. You say it all because you can no longer plan my
whole life.”

So Rebecca had gone, her bright ferret eyes red and savage. On the long
stairs she met Callendar coming in but she did not so much as glance at
him. In her heart she had not yet yielded the victory. She would defeat
him in the end. She would let him defeat himself, for she knew he was
certain to do it.

It was de Cyon himself who arranged the transfer of Callendar to the
African service, and so it happened that they went to Tunis for the
honeymoon to a villa on the outskirts of the city which belonged to one
of Thérèse’s Greek cousins, a man who served as head of the
Mediterranean banks of Leopopulos et Cie. Ellen wrote to them regularly,
letters which were like all the others she had ever written her mother
since that first one from the Babylon Arms, restrained, careful and
filled with a host of details from which one could gather nothing, and
at the end always the same comment on the weather and the beauty of
their garden with a brief line to the effect that “we are well and
happy.”

In the Rue Raynouard, Gramp lived the same life that he had lived for
thirty years. He had his books (for Hattie was rich now and expense no
longer mattered) and he had his rocking chair placed absurdly among the
Empire furniture of the room which Lily had given him. Nothing had
changed save that his windows looked out upon a garden laid out by Le
Nôtre and that he could hear the whistles of the boats on the Seine and
that he went sometimes afoot on solitary expeditions through the
neighboring streets, once as far as the Invalides. It was his habit to
steal away secretly through the gate in the garden wall leading into the
Rue de Passy. He remained inscrutable, uncommunicative and aloof, save
with Jean for whom he displayed a fancy. And none of them knew that the
thing he was looking for on these solitary meanderings was a youth which
had returned to him now with an unearthly clarity, though there were
moments when he was childish and could not remember that he was in Paris
or what had happened to him only yesterday.

And Hattie, living now with Lily, began slowly to regain her interest in
life. She took to inspecting the big house room by room to see that it
was properly cared for; she quarreled in a stifled, incoherent fashion
with Augustine and the other servants; she fussed about the garden,
insensible to its beauty, and interested only in its order. She even
undertook after a time to do the marketing herself when she discovered
with horror that the shopkeepers paid old Mélanie the housekeeper a
commission on what she purchased.

So Lily, for a third time, turned over the possession of her house to
another. Madame Gigon had once treated it as her own and after her César
and Ellen had quarreled over it. And now, willingly, she delivered it
into the keeping of Hattie who had greater need of it than any of the
others. She told the servants that they must not mind Madame Tolliver’s
eccentric behavior and she made up to old Mélanie the amount of her
commissions. But even if she had not done these things, they would not
have left her, for Lily understood servants and had a way with them. Old
Mélanie had been with her for more than twenty years, since Lily had
come to Madame Gigon, a little frightened but resolved, none the less,
never to marry Jean’s father.

62

Sabine, in her defeat, did not complain. In all the business of the
divorce, she conducted herself as she had always done, with an amazing
control; so that no one, not even Thérèse, was able to discover whether
she was willing or not to release the pretense of a possession she had
held over Callendar for so many years. They talked it over quite calmly,
arranging all the details in the most business-like and efficient
fashion, under the guidance of that short, frumpy, powerful old woman,
Thérèse, who appeared to know the law as thoroughly as she knew the
world of banking. There was no word spoken in anger or in haste. The
withdrawal of Sabine from the position of wife was executed with as
superb an air of indifference as her entrance into the rôle.

“I want no settlement and no allowance,” she had said as the three of
them sat about the tea table in the small sitting room of the house in
the Avenue du Bois. “Whatever you care to do for little Thérèse is, of
course, your own affair. She is yours as much as mine. (A lie, she
thought, because they did not care for her at all.) I have all I want.”

And the leave-taking had been like the departure of a woman from the
office of her lawyer. There was no anger and there were no tears. Sabine
rose and said, “I will go now.... I have taken a house in the Rue
Tilsit. I shall be there in case you want me. I do not know the
telephone but I will send it to you.”

Thérèse bent over the table and, gathering up the papers with her fat
glittering fingers, thrust them into the reticule in which she kept her
important documents ... a moldy old bag continually in a state of
confusion, from which she was able by a sort of magic to produce on a
moment’s notice any paper she required. As she sat watching her, it
occurred to Sabine that the old woman’s Levantine blood had begun to
claim her entirely. It was not only the diamonds and emeralds which now
stood in need of cleaning; the heavy black clothes which Thérèse wore
even in the hottest weather were now sometimes stained and discolored,
and she had taken to carrying fragments of biscuits among the papers of
her reticule, which she took out from time to time and nibbled with the
furtive air of a fat squirrel. She was more near-sighted than ever and
squinted up her eyes until they became mere slits through which appeared
the glitter of two tiny brilliant lights. All the charm was slipping
slowly away from her eccentricity; the queer abrupt manner, which in the
height of her power had seemed amusing and original, was slowly turning
into the queerness of an untidy old Greek woman.

Watching her, she thought, “God willing, I shall never turn into such a
grubby old woman. I shall care for myself to the very end. I shall die,
handsomely dressed, with my hair in perfect order and with my corsets
on. She is a Levantine after all. She might be an old woman with a fruit
stand in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.”

(Thérèse with the glitter in her dark almond eyes, poking about in a
reticule that contained a vast fortune in securities.)

Callendar walked with her through the comic opera hallway and out to her
motor where, with a great courtliness, he saw her step in and closed the
door after her.

“Good-by,” he murmured quietly. “If there is anything you want, let me
know.”

So although for a time it had seemed that all the cards were turning up
for her, she had in the end lost her game of patience. She had lost it,
she reflected, to Ellen Tolliver whom she had neglected to respect
sufficiently--a crude, uncivilized mountebank brought in to amuse the
guests in the house on Murray Hill. What was the secret that lay behind
all the mystery?

As the motor drove away, it occurred to her that the parting had been
like one between strangers. She had been to them, then, nothing at all;
she might have been a clerk employed in some branch of the Leopopulos
bank, a creature who had been of use to them and whom they sent away
when her usefulness was ended, willing to pension her if she desired it,
like an old family employee. More than twelve years she had given to
them ... years in which she tried, desperately, heart-breakingly to
establish some bond that was too strong to be broken in this cold,
matter-of-fact fashion. More than twelve years she had struggled against
something which was stronger, far stronger, than her own will and
self-possession. And now they sent her away without more than a formal
good-by.... Thérèse had her fortune still, vaster than it had ever been.
Nothing else mattered.

She took out the mirror from the side of her motor and fell to examining
her face. Here at least the twelve years had not taken the toll that
might have been expected. There was no gray in the brick-red hair that
lay under the small, chic gray hat. The narrow intelligent eyes, set
close together, were as bright as they had ever been, and the white
skin, like the thick petals of a camelia, was as perfect as ever beneath
the superbly disguised powder and rouge. She touched the tip of her long
nose with an immaculately gloved finger, and it occurred to her that the
face which looked out of the tiny rectangle of glass was a mask,
really,--an admirably fashioned mask which concealed effectively a
turbulence none would ever have imagined lay beneath it. They managed
things better in these days: once she would have been expected to retire
from the field with a broken heart, to exploit, as it were, her own
suffering; to swoon and weep ... like Lady Byron.

She looked, she felt, remarkably young; but not young enough. She could
not, she thought, begin all over again; there was not time. She was past
forty now. She might marry again ... a man her own age or older, but
that would not be the same. She had given what youth she possessed
(beneath that hard, controlled exterior) to Callendar and Thérèse. There
was not a chance of her ever being young in the way she had once been,
of loving with a fierce abandon that her pride had forced her to
conceal. (She fancied that they had never discovered how much and how
shamefully she had loved him, yet she could not be certain. Probably he
knew this too.)

She put away the mirror and, leaning back, fell to thinking, with all
her cold honesty, that she would even return to him now if he so much as
lifted a finger in her direction. There had been in all their life
together no memory of a violent scene, no memory of blows or accusations
... nothing about which she could build up a hatred or sense of
repulsion. There had been nothing since little Thérèse was born save
that aloof, courteous indifference which it had been impossible to
shatter. And for a time she tried to imagine what would have happened if
once--only once--he had for a moment melted and behaved toward her as
if she had been more than a mere institution, more than a wife whom one
protected and to whom one was always courteous.

And old Thérèse.... Once Sabine had fancied that they were friends. They
had been, she remembered, congenial, almost alike in their point of
view, in the angle from which they looked out upon the world. And then
Thérèse had slipped away, slowly, imperceptibly in a fashion that it was
impossible to define. There had been no quarrel, no bandying of words,
yet they had come somehow to hate each other, coldly and with an ironic
polish. She knew what it was that had come between them. It was that
fortune and the need of an heir. And now in the end Thérèse was becoming
slowly an untidy, disgusting old Levantine woman helpless in the power
of her obsession.

If she had not married Callendar she might have been a friend even now,
not alone of Thérèse but of Callendar himself. But that would have been
unbearable ... much worse than this. At least in this there was a sense
of finality.

So she tried as she had tried many times before, to pull those twelve
years apart and pick from among the ruins the elements which had been
the heart of her passion for him; but she found it impossible. She could
not say why she would have returned to him now if he had asked her. Over
all the years there hung a faint aura of evil (an evil which she told
herself was not evil at all, but simply seemed so because she had been
brought up to believe that sort of love was evil). It was desire which
she felt, perhaps nothing more than that; yet it was, she was certain,
not such a simple and uncomplicated thing. It was sinister, perhaps
entangled in all her passion for _knowing_ what people were, for taking
them apart (she smiled to herself) to look at the works. No, this
mystery was quite beyond her....

So (she thought) in the end she had not been able to compete with Ellen
Tolliver. He would have her now, as he had always wanted to have her.
She (Sabine) had then not been so wrong in the instinct that led her,
years before, to call at the house in Rue Raynouard. There had been
nothing to discover, and yet everything. What was true now of Callendar
and Ellen Tolliver was true then, as they sat in the long beautiful
drawing-room, just as true as it had been in the days when the girl had
come to the house on Murray Hill. It was only that they themselves had
changed and here (she thought almost with satisfaction) might lie the
seeds of one more disaster. For Lilli Barr could not possibly be the
same as the awkward, obscure Ellen Tolliver, and Callendar had hardened
slowly in all the qualities which made him impossible. Ellen Tolliver
would not submit to the unhappiness she herself had known; Ellen
Tolliver would not wait patiently to achieve her own desire. She was
capable of stormy scenes; she had clearly a genius for success, for
having her own way. He had, perhaps, in all his watching never
discovered this. And yet, as she thought it over and over on the drive
to the Rue Tilsit, it occurred to her that it might be just this and
nothing more that was the very core of that inexplicable, persistent
attraction between them.

Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr ... Lilli Barr.... She kept repeating the name
to herself. She still felt no resentment. If she herself could not have
Callendar, there was no reason why Lilli Barr should not have him. There
was, she knew, nothing more to be done.

The voice of Amedé, the driver, roused her as he opened the door. She
stepped out, bade him wait for orders, and turning, she saw little
Thérèse standing in the window with the governess. It reminded her that
she must see Thérèse’s friend Ella Nattatorini about the lease for the
house at Houlgate.... The sea would do little Thérèse good. And there
were servants to be engaged and the packing to be done....

The ocean of small things which made it possible to endure unhappiness
rose and swept over her.

63

The news of the wedding came to Sabine the following autumn while she
was staying in Newport. Even the war had not crowded out of the journals
an event of such interest. The bride, she read, was well known to the
public as a pianist. She had described herself as Ellen Tolliver,
American by birth, age thirty-four years. (It was the first time that
the world knew Lilli Barr was American, for Rebecca and the forgotten
Schneidermann had done their work well.) The bridegroom was prominent
and the member of many clubs, the last of his family, and had not lived
in America for more than ten years. He was a captain in the French army
and would be stationed in Tunis where they were to spend the honeymoon.

Laying aside the _Times_ and resuming her breakfast, she discovered that
her only response to the news was one of shock at the haste with which
the wedding had followed the divorce. It was almost as if they said that
all these years she had stood between them, and now that Callendar was
free, they must lose no time. Vaguely she felt that she should feel
insulted. It was not until evening, when she drove over to dine with
Mrs. Champion at The Cedars, that the sense of depression abated a
little.

It was a gloomy place--the Cedars--built in the Seventies in the ornate
style in favor at that time, and the presence of Mrs. Champion and the
Virgins did nothing to raise the tone. Janey and Margaret (it seemed to
her when she saw them in the dark cool rooms that she had known them
always) were, as she calculated it, now forty-two and forty-five
respectively and had reached the stage in which any spark that may have
dwelt within their narrow-chested frames was now sublimated into an
interest in garden clubs and work among the sailors. Things had changed
... enormously, but Janey and Margaret had gone on and on, living in the
gloomy Cedars with their mother, perpetually shocked and stimulated by
the stories of the oil magnates and financial adventurers who had taken
possession of the Casino. It was these stories which provided the
opening barrage of conversation at dinner.

“There is one woman who they say gives enormous parties,” Janey told her
at dinner, “who was once the cook for a cousin of Mrs. Mallinson.”

They assured her, although she knew it well enough, that Newport was not
the same. It had lost its tone; and in losing it (thought Sabine) it had
left Mrs. Champion and the Virgins far behind. Bishop Smallwood, the
Apostle to the Genteel, who came sometimes to spend a week with his
“wa’am friend” Mrs. Champion, shared their disgust on Sabine’s right and
expressed properly outraged sentiments.

If America were anything, Sabine thought, over her guinea fowl, it was
change ... change ... change. And God help those who didn’t keep up with
it! All the conversation gave her a curious sense of having passed poor
Janey and Margaret and the Apostle and left them far behind. They seemed
very far away. She felt that she was being kind to them in having come
to dine at The Cedars. And once Mrs. Champion’s word had been law in
that tight little world which was now exploded, leaving them stranded,
remote and helpless and pitiful, pretending all the while that it was
_their_ world, after all, which really counted.

She knew that they would find a bitter triumph in the news that had come
with the morning _Times_, for they could not have forgotten how she
stole Richard Callendar (by the lucky turn of events which they would
never know) from under the noses of all of them. There had been so
little excitement in their lives; certainly they had not forgotten,
certainly they would not miss an opportunity for which they had waited
so long. Yet they seemed so remote and negligible to her that she did
not even wince when at last Mrs. Champion sidled up to the subject.

She was able to tell them and Bishop Smallwood, who in the decline of
the season was fairly panting for gossip, that Lilli Barr _was_ the same
girl who had played at that scandalous party of Thérèse Callendar’s.
(Did they remember the naked Javanese--or was it Senegalese--dancer?
asked Mrs. Champion. She had commanded Janey and Margaret to shield
their faces with their fans). Lilli Barr _was_ the same girl with whom
Richard Callendar had lunched so many times in the open window at
Sherry’s. She saw fit to pass over the implication, thrust in slyly by
Mrs. Champion, that he was making the girl, after so many years, an
honest woman. Because she herself did not really know.

And speaking of the divorce, she remarked brazenly, “It was all settled
without difficulty. I knew that he was planning to marry her. We talked
it over and thought it the best solution.”

At which Mrs. Champion shook her head and made a clucking sound to
indicate, as clearly as she dared, that the cold-blooded behavior of
Sabine’s generation in such matters was obscene and immoral. And the
Apostle to the Genteel, in obeisance to his high church opinions and his
disapproval of divorce, looked gravely and silently into the depths of
his sherbet, but with an air of believing that there was much to be said
on both sides. (It would not be wise to offend so rich and fashionable a
woman as Sabine Callendar.) Janey and Margaret only stared at her, with
the round, stupid eyes of little girls.

And when she left (a little after nine when she could endure the party
no longer) Mrs. Champion was able at last to deliver the blow which she
had held in reserve all the evening. As they stood in the porte cochère
waiting for Sabine’s motor to come up, she murmured under the protection
of the darkness, “I could have warned you long ago, my dear. You should
never have married Richard Callendar. If you had a mother--” She sighed
and continued. “I should never have allowed Janey or Margaret to accept
a proposal from him.”

Such a speech would have made her angry once and have aroused the sharp
tongue for which she had been famous; but it made no difference to her
now, save that it amused her to think of Janey or Margaret standing
there, a pair of Alices in Wonderland, as the wife of Richard. And she
reflected that she possessed an experience which they would never know.
It was better to have been the wife of Callendar than to have dried up
in the pale, shriveled fashion of Janey and Margaret (and they had been
pretty once, in a silly, pink and white fashion). And she knew, with a
curious pang of pity, that as they stood there in the shadow of their
powerful mother, they too were thinking the same thing. They had never
escaped that dowdy, stupid old woman....

“Good night,” she said. “I shan’t see you again. I am sailing on
Friday.”

And then for the first time in her life, the wall of cold common sense
collapsed and she exposed herself deliberately to the peril of boredom.
“If you do decide to come to Paris, Janey, you must pay me a visit.” For
there was something unbearable to her in the thought of Janey, free for
the first time from the dominion of her mother, alone in Paris. It would
be like a bird set free which no longer knows how to fly....

In the darkness Janey stammered and gushed like a girl of seventeen
(Janey who would never see forty again), “It’s kind of you, Sabine. It’s
wonderful. You see I’ve never been in Paris before without mother ...
and I wouldn’t know just what to do ... I’ll come.” And she subsided
into a chaos of maidenly gurglings.

But as Sabine drove away from the barren shadows of the Cedars, she
reproached herself for having succumbed so weakly. Something had
happened to her. A year ago she would not have done such a stupid
thing.... “Perhaps,” she thought, above the distant roar of the surf, “I
am growing old....”

As the months passed and she returned to Paris--a Paris gay and gaudy
with the excitement of the last days of the peace conference--she came
to understand the satisfaction which lies of knowing that a thing is
finished. She would no longer go through the torture of seeing Callendar
day after day, always at hand and yet remote as the summit of a cold
mountain peak. All that was over, finished; and in the sense of finality
there was peace. Until now she had never known how terribly the
monstrous house in the Avenue du Bois had oppressed her. It was only
since she had her own house in the Rue Tilsit, a house filled with all
the exquisite things she cherished and which meant so much to her, that
she understood completely the torture of the house which she had called
“a sort of World’s Fair exhibit.”

For she had never, in all the years of their life together, been able to
escape from it. Always Callendar had resisted silently, quietly in the
way he had, until she had come in the end to accept the place without
complaint. She had been silent in the hope that he might appreciate her
silence and her virtue in submitting to his will. But he had simply
taken it as a matter of course. She had never been able properly to
entertain because the house was so awful that one could not even forget
its shame in the hollow pretense that it was bizarre and consequently
chic. And she knew now beyond all doubt that he liked the house. It
satisfied him in the way it satisfied his mother. And she understood
that he belonged in it just as Thérèse belonged there, more than ever
since her Levantine blood had come into its own.

There in the Rue Tilsit, in her own house, among the things chosen by
her own fastidious taste, she began once more to take up her own life,
to descend from the unreal, extravagant level of the Callendars to a
plane where she might exist in her proper relation to all about her. For
more than twelve years, she came to realize, her life had not been her
own, even for a moment. It had been Callendar’s to do with as he
chose.... She had been his possession. It was only now that she was
beginning again to be free....

In the beginning, after that day when she had said good-by so formally
to Richard and his mother, when all the arrangements had been completed
and Thérèse had stuffed all her papers back into her reticule, she could
not bring herself to reënter the house, even to return for the
possessions--pictures, bits of jade and silver and silk--which she had
left behind her. It was only now, long afterward, when she had come to
feel the full sense of her freedom that she considered going to fetch
them.

At last, after she had been in Paris for weeks, she rang up the house
and learning from Victorine that it was empty and that no one was
expected (Thérèse was in London, Victorine told her, and Richard and
Ellen still in Tunis) she arranged to call for the things late that
afternoon.

64

It was a cold gray afternoon in the spring when the sun, breaking
through the clouds, picked out for brief moments the faint green on the
trees of the little park in the Avenue du Bois. Side by side the white
houses stood, withdrawn a little from the street, flamboyant yet cold,
ornate but barren. Sabine, watching them from the window of her tiny
motor, was thankful again in a comfortable indefinite fashion that she
had escaped from their insufferable pomp into the tiny, exquisite house
in the Rue Tilsit.

Of late she had come at times to forget all the secret misery of the
twelve years; she had been almost happy, as nearly happy as it was
possible for her to be. It seemed to her now that circumstances had been
cruel. She should have been born a man; and as a man, with a freedom
from all the world of Mrs. Champion and her Virgins, she would have
turned her mind to science. It was that sort of a mind; and it was only
recently that she had come to believe it wasted ... frittered away on
tiny, nonsensical things, things which in the end only ate into her own
chance for happiness. In all her life there had been nothing which had
taken possession of her--nothing save the barren, futile passion for her
husband. Her life, she reflected, had been a wasted one. As a man, she
would have been free ... free in the same fashion as Ellen Tolliver. She
could have done as she liked, waiting upon no one. It seemed to her that
her whole life had been spent in going from place to place, always in a
tiny, expensive motor, arriving nowhere in the end. She was neither one
thing nor the other; she had fallen somewhere between the sterility of
Janey and Margaret Champion and the fierce activity of Ellen Tolliver.

Ellen Tolliver had been free, without background, without friends,
alone, an adventuress (not at all in the evil sense) but one who had
gone unhindered toward the thing which possessed her. Perhaps Ellen
Tolliver would succeed now where she had failed. None, thought Sabine,
knew the perils which lay ahead so well as herself and the old curiosity
began to assail her; she wanted passionately to see Ellen Tolliver, to
find out from her in any fashion possible, scrupulous or otherwise, what
had happened in those months since she said good-by to Callendar and
Thérèse. Perhaps Ellen saw him more clearly than herself; perhaps she
had discovered his secret ... the nature of him. She had come to respect
Ellen Tolliver.

The car halted. Amedé, neat and mustachioed, stood holding the door for
her. With an effort of will she wrapped her fur cloak about her and
stepped on to the pavement.

“Wait for me,” she said. “I may want you to carry some things. I’ll send
Victorine when I want you.”

The big ornate house had the look of a place closed and deserted; the
shutters were up and the shades drawn save in the entresol. At the door,
Victorine, who had been clearly watching for her, stood waiting with a
gleam in her eye which Sabine, from long association, was able to read.
It was a look with which Victorine triumphantly announced household
calamities. As Sabine stepped into the great hall, the housekeeper put
her finger to her mustachioed lips and murmured, “Madame Callendar is
here....” And then, with the air of turning the morsel about, she added,
“The _young_ Madame Callendar.” And again, when her former mistress
seemed not to be sufficiently shocked, she continued, “The _new_ Mrs.
Callendar.”

For a moment Sabine stood hesitating, as if deciding whether to turn and
run; it would have been an excellent excuse for never entering the house
again. But far back in her consciousness, the old, insatiable curiosity
gnawed and gnawed.

“Why has she returned?” she asked. “Where is Monsieur Callendar?”

Victorine shrugged her fat shoulders. “I don’t know, Madame. None of us
knows anything. A cable came at noon to-day with the news that she was
arriving ... to make things ready. I telephoned you.... I sent messages.
The word came that you did not return for lunch and no one knew where
you were.” With an air of drama, she said again, “The new Madame
Callendar came in an hour ago.”

Sabine stood biting her crimson lips. If Ellen Tolliver had returned
from Tunis, it was not likely that she would be going away soon, and it
would be awkward to ask her permission to enter the house. Why had she
returned? Why had Callendar not come with her? She turned to Victorine.

“Where is she now?”

“Resting,” replied Victorine, “in the boudoir.”

(That terrible room with the bearskin rugs and the mirrors sending back
and forth innumerable reflections, as if the place were filled with a
host of people ... a host of personalities all of whom were in the end
contained within the flesh of the on-looker.... Many persons in each of
us, thought Sabine. It was comic to think of Ellen Tolliver, so
distinguished, so self-possessed, so cold, in the midst of all that
cheap demi-mondaine splendor.)

“Are my things ready?”

“I was not sure, Madame, how many things you wished to take away with
you. I got ready the things I _knew_. There may be others.”

Sabine made her decision. “I will come in and get them now. Say nothing
to Madame Callendar. If she’s resting, I’ll hurry away without her
knowing that I’ve come.”

She slipped a ten franc note into the insinuating palm of Victorine who
promptly said, “It’s good to see you again, Madame,” in a voice which
carried another meaning--“We would much prefer you to the new Mrs.
Callendar.”

Sabine ignored her. “And Monsieur Callendar?” she asked again.

“He did not return, Madame. Nothing was said of him.”

In the boudoir everhead Ellen lay, with her black dog by her side,
staring resentfully at the reflections. She was unable to rest. Lying on
the Egyptian chaise longue she surveyed the room and decided that she
would have the indecent mirrors taken down to-morrow. She was certain
that Sabine was not responsible for them; she suspected, out of the
knowledge that had come to her in the past six months, that they were
perhaps an idea of Callendar. They were unhealthy, she thought; all the
house, for that matter, was unhealthy, even the hall and the glimpse of
the darkened drawing room she had been able to snatch on her way up the
marble stairs with the red plush rail. It was unhealthy to be stared at,
accused day in and day out by these innumerable stupid reflections. It
was, truly, an amazing house, and so like Thérèse. Why, she wondered,
had Sabine not changed it? Sabine, with her faultless taste, her
reserve, her ironic shell, must have hated it, always. Perhaps ...
perhaps she had not dared to oppose him. Perhaps he too, like his
mother, had been fond of the house. Perhaps he had looked at Sabine
(smiling with his mouth but not his eyes) and said, “We will let it rest
for the present. Some day ...” and so slipped away in that inexplicable,
unconquerable fashion he had revealed in the villa at Tunis. Perhaps....
She began to understand a little of what Sabine’s life had been. Out of
her own short, vivid experience, she was able to reconstruct bits of it,
here and there. And Sabine had endured it for more than twelve years....

The mirrors put her nerves on edge. She loathed the reflections staring
back at her from every wall. They were like faces peering in at her ...
her own face repeated over and over again, tiresomely, for she was not
vain and wasted no time over mirrors. No, she would have them down at
once. If this was to be her home, she would not be prevented by old
Thérèse or Richard himself.

Her body ached from the fatigue of the journey from Marseilles yet it
was impossible to rest. Her mind was awake, nervous, irritable, now
angry, now frustrated, now cold and resolute, but always in its depths
uncertain and muddled in a way it had never been before. Could it be
that she was losing her grip upon life? That she was being swallowed up?
Always she had known exactly what it was she wanted, what it was she
would do. But now....

At length the restlessness became unbearable and, followed by the black