Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 38
AT the end of the week Lily returned from the south, wrapped in furs and shivering in the damp of Paris. She was a warm, sensuous creature who loved the sun and traveled north or south according to the variations in temperature. Even on the Riviera she was not content and, on the occasion of a mistral, she had been known to pack her bag and embark into Italy for Capri or Taormina where the sun was brighter and the flowers more fragrant.
She arrived early in the morning in company with the Baron, Madame Gigon's nephew, and together they came upon Ellen, not yet fallen into the luxurious habits of the French, having breakfast alone in the dining room with Jean, who sat across the table from her plying her all the while with questions about his grandmère and about America and the Town where his mother was born. She was describing it to him. . . .
"It is not a nice Town. . . . It is full of big Mills and furnaces and the soot blackens everything. . . . There's nothing pretty in the Town . . . nothing in the whole place half as pretty as your garden. . . . Your grandmother had a garden once that was as pretty as this one but it's all dead now. The smoke killed it. . . ."
Here Jean interrupted her to say, "I know! . . . I know! . . . Maman has a friend . . . a Monsieur Schneidermann who owns Mills like that. Once when we were up north, we stopped at a town called Saarbrücken and saw the furnaces. . . . It was a long time ago when I was only seven . . . but I remember. . . ." He became silent and thoughtful for a time and then, looking at her wistfully, he added, "I'd like to go to that Town . . . I'd like to see my grandmère. . . . But Maman says I can't go . . . at least until I'm grown up . . . I suppose grandmère will be dead by then. . . . She's an old, old woman. . . ."
"But she's not so old as Madame Gigon. . . . Think of it, Madame Gigon taught your grandmother in school when she was a young girl. . . ."
She wanted by some means to escape from the subject of the Town. She could not, of course, tell the boy why he could never visit the Town; she could not tell him there were scores of old women who had been waiting for years just to know for certain that he existed at all. She could tell him about the smoke and filth, but she could not explain to him the nasty character of those women.
"I'm going to England to school in the autumn," the boy said. "Maman has arranged everything. . . . I'll like that better than going to school here. . . . Perhaps grandmère might come to visit us some time."
"She might . . ." replied Ellen, "but she's very ill. . . . My mother is taking care of her now. You see, my mother lives in the Town. She's your mother's cousin . . . her real first cousin. That's how it comes that I'm your cousin."
"And your mother? What is she like?" asked the boy.
For an instant Ellen observed him thoughtfully. "She's not a bit like your mother . . . and yet she's like her too in some ways."
She did not finish the description, for at that moment, through the long vista of the rooms, she saw moving toward her Lily and a man who carried a handbag and across his arm a steamer rug. As they came in, Jean sprang from his chair and ran toward them, clasping his mother about the waist and kissing her as she leaned toward him.
"Maman has come back! Maman has come back!" he cried over and over again, and then, "I have a new cousin! I have a new cousin!"
The man laughed and Lily, smiling, bade the boy be quiet, turning at the same time to Ellen, whom she embraced, to say, "So you've come at last! I hope you're going to stay a long time."
It was the same Lily, a shade older, a shade less slender, but still warm, lovable, disarming. As they embraced, the faint scent of mimosa drifted toward Ellen and the odor raised a swift, clear picture of the drawing-room at Shane's Castle with all the family assembled on Christmas day . . . the last Christmas day they ever came together there. Old Jacob Barr was dead now. Ellen and Lily were in Paris, Fergus in New York. The drawing room was shut up and abovestairs in her vast bedroom Julia Shane herself, cared for by the capable Hattie, lay dying. In a few more years there would be none of the family left in the Town. They would be scattered over the world. It remained only for grandmère to die.
All this passed through Ellen's mind as she spoke, "Yes, I shall stay a long time . . . if you will have me." She turned away. "I had to come," she said. "There was nothing left to do. . . . But I'm sorry I brought you back from the south."
"And this," said Lily, "is Monsieur Carrière . . . César. He is the nephew of Madame Gigon and a great friend of Jean and me."
The stranger bowed and murmured, "Enchanté," adding in English, "You are the musician . . . Madame Shane expects you one day to be great."
He was a swarthy man, rather handsome with sharply cut features and fierce mustachios, a Colonel of the Cuirassiers who had most of his time free. He smiled pleasantly, yet underneath the smile there was a hint of hostility, a mere spark which, however, struck a response in the breast of Ellen. It was on her side, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance, of the very assurance with which he conducted himself. It was as if he welcomed her to his own house. And it may have been that for reasons of his own he resented her presence. She too, was arrogant and assured, even though she said pleasantly enough, "If you will have me." Underneath all that false humility, there ran a vein of domination, a strength which one less good-natured and indolent than Lily could discern at once. Still Lily had told him, long ago, that he would not like her cousin. . . .
They were a handsome pair, Lily and the Baron, the one so blonde and voluptuous, the other so dark, so brusque, so like a bit of fine steel. There was about him a sense of something familiar, which tormented the dim recesses of Ellen's memory.
"Well! Well!" he said, throwing down the coats and bags. "Let's have some breakfast." And with the same proprietary air he moved across and rang for the maid and ordered chocolate and rolls for himself and Lily.
When they had gone at last into the drawing-room and Madame Gigon, groping her way down the long stairs, and followed by the two fat dogs, had come in, Ellen understood what it was she had recognized at once in the swarthy Monsieur Carrière. It was nothing that had to do with his appearance; it was far more subtle and complicated than that. It was his manner, the very intonation of his voice when he spoke either to Ellen or Lily herself. He approached them, for all his smooth politeness, as if they were, in the final analysis, creatures inferior to himself, creatures who should be delighted to grant his every whim. With Lily, so good-natured, so generous, he may have been right: with her cousin it was as Mrs. Callendar used to say, "autres choses." The girl bristled with subdued anger. As they sat there, the three of them, smoking before the bright fire, she knew they were destined to hate each other.
Yet it was this very quality, so hauntingly familiar, that reminded her of Richard Callendar. He had not asked her if she loved him; he had taken it simply for granted that she should do as he wished. The memory, in spite of everything, made her miserable. She heard his voice again, more gentle and soft than the voice of the Baron, and saw his hands, fascinating and persuasive.
He was somewhere in this same damp white city on his wedding journey with Sabine.
Presently the Baron observed with a brusque, important air that he must be off: Madame Gigon summoned Jean to the school-room for his lesson, and the two cousins were left alone. Before the others they had carried on a sort of made-up conversation, suitable for the ears of strangers, and neither had spoken honestly nor fully. As Madame Gigon, guided by Jean and followed by the waddling dogs, disappeared round the corner of the stairs, Lily took off her hat and observed, "Well, now I suppose we can have a long . . . long talk. Come up to my room where we'll be alone."
The family, again after so long a time, asserted itself.
It was a large room, closely resembling the one in which Madame Gigon had placed Ellen, save that it was even more luxurious and smelled faintly of scents and powders. There was a canopied bed and on the wall hung reproductions of four drawings by Watteau. It was not until Lily had removed her corsets and, clad in a peignoir of lace, had flung herself down on the bed that the sense of strain disappeared utterly.
"Sit there on the chaise longue," she said to Ellen, "and let's have a good talk. There's so much to say."
Ellen, stiff and severe in her mourning, sat down by the side of her glowing cousin and Lily, lying back among the pillows, appeared by contrast more lovely, more opulent than she had seemed an hour earlier. To her cousin, so changed since they had last met, so much more indifferent to such matters, there was an air of immorality and sensuousness in the room. Beside Lily she felt as lean, as spirited as a young greyhound.
"You know about Jean," Lily observed casually. "You understand then why I did not insist on your coming to live with me. I was foolish perhaps . . . but when the moment came there was always something which wouldn't let me betray the secret. . . ." She lighted a cigarette and lay back once more among the pillows. "I suppose it was a secret," she added, complacently.
"People talked, but no one knew anything."
"No one knows anything here. . . . No one save Madame Gigon. They know less here because they haven't so much time to think of other people's affairs." Slowly a smile crept over her face, from the rosy mouth up to the violet eyes. "Ah, wouldn't they like to know in the Town?" But her voice was bitter.
Ellen smiled again. "It makes no difference. They say what they want to believe anyway. . . . They said that I ran away with Clarence because I was going to have a baby . . . and I've never had it yet. It's been a long while coming."
"I wanted you to come . . . always, but I was too lazy ever to come to the point. You can stay as long as you like and do as you please. This is a big house. . . . You need never see the rest of us if you don't care to." She spoke with the carelessness of one who was fabulously rich; there was a certain medieval splendor in her generosity. Ellen smiled again.
"Why do you smile?" her cousin asked.
"I was thinking that all this money comes out of the Town . . . the same dirty old Town."
"There's satisfaction in that . . . to think that people like Judge Weissmann are paying us rent."
It was extraordinary how clearly the Town rose up before them. The thousands of miles which lay between made no difference. They belonged to the Town still, by a thousand ties. They were, each in her own way, American. All the years that Lily had lived in Paris could not alter the fact. She was extravagant as Americans are extravagant, content to live abroad forever as Americans are content to do. Yet all her wealth came out of America, out of the very factories in the dirty Town which they both despised. It was perhaps the Scotch blood in them that made them content wherever they saw fit to settle. In a strange country they would not, as the English do, strive to bring their native land with them; they would simply create a new world of their own. Their people have done it everywhere . . . in St. Petersburg, in Constantinople, in Paris, in the Argentine and on the frontiers of Africa.
"And your husband," began Lily. "Tell me about him. . . . I met him once, you know, coming out on the train to the West. He was going then to see a girl called . . ." She frowned slightly. "I've forgotten her name. . . ."
"Seton," murmured Ellen. "May Seton." Lily was rousing memories now, which seemed far away and yet were faintly painful.
"Seton! That was it! . . . I'd never heard of them and it seemed to hurt him. I wrote you when I heard of his death. The letter must have passed you."
"I never got it . . . perhaps it'll be forwarded."
"Had he been ill long?" She must have wondered at the look in Ellen's eyes. It was not a look of sorrow or desolation; rather it was a look of numb pain.
"He hadn't been ill at all." The girl frowned suddenly and looked out of the window. "All the same," she continued, "you might have said he had been ill for a long time." Then she rose and stood before the small panes looking out into the wet garden. "I've got to tell some one," she said with an air of desperation. "You see . . ." And her voice became barely audible. "You see . . . He killed himself."
The veil was torn away now. Between them there remained no barrier. Each had made her confession, Lily concerning the child, Ellen concerning her husband, and in the torrent of emotion which engulfed them Lily sat up and drew her cousin down to the bed beside her. They both wept and each (with as little real cause) pitied herself.
Ellen told her story, punctuated by sobs, from the beginning. She confessed that she had never had any love for Clarence. She spoke of many things which, at the time of the tragedy, were not clear to her and which she had come to understand later during the hours of solitude on windswept decks. In the emotion of the moment she understood the whole affair even more clearly. She told Lily that she had tried, valiantly, to make Clarence happy. She had done her best to preserve his happiness and her own at the same time. There had come a time when this was no longer possible.
"Perhaps," she said, when her sobbing had quieted a little, "it is not possible for two people to be completely happy together."
If she had spoken all that was in her mind, she would have added, "When one of them is ambitious and a genius." But this would have been preposterous because there was then no proof of such a thing. Another chapter of the tale she chose not to reveal. In all her torrent of sobbing and talk she never mentioned the name of Callendar.
When they had become more quiet, Lily kissed her and said, "You have been too unhappy. You must stay now with me . . . forever, if you like. You must study and become a great musician. I am rich. I can help you. . . . If you won't take the money, you can borrow it from me and pay me back when you are successful and famous. . . ."
Lily rose languidly and brought a bottle of cologne and they both bathed their eyes. All the strangeness was gone now. Their tears, in the way of women, had brought them close to each other. The sun had come out and the little park was filled by its slanting rays. Belowstairs one of the tall windows opened and they heard on the gravel of the terrace the slow steps of blind Madame Gigon who, wrapped in an antiquated coat of fur and followed by the dogs, was moving up and down in the unaccustomed warmth. There was something in the sound which, as they listened, filled the room with the atmosphere of a conspiracy. For an instant the current of kinship ran swift and high, as high indeed as it had run in the old days when all the clan assembled for the annual feast at Shane's Castle.
"She is growing feeble," observed Lily. "Think of it. She's eighty-five."
Life was short. Only a little time before Madame Gigon had been a young widow come to the school of Mademoiselle Violet de Faux to teach, among others, an awkward young American called Julia Shane.
When Ellen had gone to her own room, she sat for a time before the fire, thinking, and slowly the face which she saw reflected in the dim old mirror began, though it was quite alone in the room, to smile back at her. It had not been difficult. It was all done now. The future was certain. She had gotten what was necessary, without asking for it; in some inexplicable fashion, quite without any planning, it had happened. She had not even been forced to say that all she had in the world were the seven francs that lay in the sunlight on the Louis Quinze console.