Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 51
THE sound of the same clock striking midnight failed to penetrate the thick old curtains muffling the library on Murray Hill. Here Thérèse and Ellen sat talking, almost, one might have said, as if nothing had happened since Ellen last passed through the bronze door on her way to the Babylon Arms. Under the long, easy flow of Thérèse's talk her irritation had dissolved until now, two hours after the concert, they faced each other much as they had done long ago. It was Ellen who had changed; Thérèse was older, a little weary, and a trifle more untidy but otherwise the same—shrewd, talkative, her brisk mind darting now here, now there, like a bright minnow, seeking always to penetrate the shiny, brittle surfaces which people held before them as their characters. She found, no doubt, that Ellen had learned the trick of the shiny, brittle surface; she understood that it was by no means as easy as it had been to probe to the depths the girl's inmost thoughts. She had learned to protect herself; nothing could hurt her now unless she chose to reveal a weakness in her armor. Thérèse understood at once that if her plan was to succeed, it must turn upon Ellen's own volition; the girl (she was no longer a girl but Thérèse still thought of her in that fashion) could not be tricked into a bargain. Beyond all doubt she understood that Richard was dangerous, that he had the power of causing pain.
As they talked, far into the night, Thérèse fancied that Ellen sat there—so handsome in the long crimson gown, so self-possessed, so protected by the shiny, brittle surface—weighing in her mind the question of ever seeing him again. They did not approach the topic openly; for a long time Thérèse chattered, in the deceptive way she had, of a thousand things which had very little to do with the case.
"You have seen Sabine now and then," she put forward, cautiously.
"Two or three times. She called on me."
Thérèse chuckled quietly. "She must admire you. It is unusual for her to make an advance of that sort."
The observation drew just the answer she had hoped for, just the answer which Ellen, thinking perhaps that the whole matter should be brought out into the light, saw fit to give.
"It was not altogether admiration," she said. "It was more fear. You see, she had imagined a wonderful story . . . a story that he had brought me to Paris, and that I was his mistress."
For a moment Ellen felt a twinge of conscience at breaking the pledge of confidence she had given Sabine. Still, she must use the weapons at hand. She understood perfectly that there was something they wanted of her; she understood that any of them (save only Callendar himself) would have sacrificed her to their own schemes. He would sacrifice her only to himself.
"She was a little out of her head, I think . . . for a long time after little Thérèse was born. She grieved too because she could never have another child. She wanted to give Dick an heir. . . . She was very much in love with him . . . then." The last word she added, as if by an afterthought.
At this Ellen thrust forward another pawn, another bit of knowledge which had come to her from Sabine. "He neglects her badly, doesn't he?"
Thérèse pursed her lips and frowned, as if for a moment the game had gotten out of hand. "I don't fancy it's a case of neglect. . . . They're simply not happy. You see, it was not . . ." She smiled with deprecation. "Shall I be quite frank? It was not a matter of love in the beginning. . . . It was a mariage de convenance."
"Yes. He told me that . . . himself. Before the wedding took place."
There was a light now in Ellen's eye, a wicked gleam as if the game were amusing her tremendously, as if she found a mischievous delight in baiting this shrewd old woman with bits of knowledge which showed her how little she really knew of all that had taken place.
"Of course," Thérèse continued, "she fell in love with him after a time. . . . But for him it was impossible. . . . You see, there is only one person with whom he has ever really been in love. It was a case of fascination. . . ."
Ellen did not ask who this person was because she knew now, beyond all doubt. She had a strange sense of having lived all this scene before, and she knew that it was her sense of drama which was again giving her the advantage; once before it had saved her when her will, her conscious will, had come near to collapse. (Long ago it was . . . in the preposterous Babylon Arms which Clarence had thought so grand.)
"He gave me a dog," she said, by way of letting Mrs. Callendar know that she understood who the mysterious person was. "Just before I left for Vienna. . . . I have him here with me, at the Ritz. He is very like Richard. . . ."
Mrs. Callendar poured out more sherry. She felt the need of something to aid her. And then she emerged abruptly, after the law of tactics which she usually followed, into the open.
"I don't mind saying, my dear, that you're the one who has fascinated him . . . always."
Ellen smiled coldly. "He is not what one might call a passionate lover."
"He is faithful."
Ellen's smile expanded into a gentle laugh. "One might call it, I suppose, . . . a fidelity of the soul, . . . of the spirit, a sublimated fidelity." There crept into her voice a thin thread of mockery, roused perhaps by the memory of Sabine's confidences.
Thérèse shrugged her fat shoulders and the movement set the plastron of dirty diamonds all a-glitter. "That is that," she observed. "You know him as well as I do."
("Better," thought Ellen, "so much better, because I know how dangerous he is.") But she kept silent.
"I think he would marry you to-morrow . . . if you would have him."
For an instant Ellen came very near to betraying herself. She felt the blood rise into her face. She felt a sudden faintness that emerged dimly from the memories of him as a lover, so charming, so subtle, so given to fierce, quick waves of passion.
"Did he send you to tell me that?" she asked in a low voice.
"No. . . . But I know it just the same. I have talked to him . . . not openly, of course."
("No," thought Ellen, "not openly, but like this, like the way you are talking to me." It was dangerous, this business of insinuation.)
"It is remarkable that the feeling has lasted so long . . . so many years," Thérèse continued. "It has not been like that with any other woman. I think he is fascinated by your will, your power, your determination."
"You make me a great person," observed Ellen with irony, "but not a very seductive one."
"There are ways and ways of seduction. What seduces one man passes over the head of another."
"It is a perverse attraction. . . ."
"Perhaps. . . . But most attractions are."
Thérèse had seen the sudden change at the mention of her son's name, just as she had seen the change in her son when Ellen's name had been brought into the light. She meditated for a time in silence and then observed, "You are looking tired to-night."
There were dark circles under Ellen's eyes, pale evidences of the strain, the excitement which had not abated for an instant since they embarked for Vienna.
"I am tired," she said, "very tired."
"You should rest," pursued Thérèse. "You could go to the place on Long Island. You could be alone there, if you liked. I shouldn't bother you. I shall be busy in town until this tangle over money is settled."
Ellen stirred and sighed. "No, that's impossible. It's good of you to offer it, but I can't accept. . . . I can't stop now. You see the ball has been started rolling. One must take advantage of success while it's at hand. Never let a chance slip past. I know that . . . by experience. You see, Miss Schönberg—she's my manager—has arranged a great many engagements."
"Whenever you want a place to rest," continued Thérèse, "let me know."
It was true that she was tired, bitterly tired; and more troubling, more enduring than the mere exhaustion was the obscure feeling that she had passed from one period of her life into another, that she had left behind somewhere in these three exciting years a milestone that marked the borderland of youth, of that first, fresh, exuberant youth which, at bottom, had been the source of all her success. It had slipped away somehow, in the night, without her knowing it. She was still strong (she knew that well enough), still filled with energy, but something was gone, a faint rosy mist perhaps, which had covered all life, even in the bitterest moments, with a glow that touched everything with a glamorous unreality, which made each new turning seem a wild adventure. It was gone; life was slipping past. Here she sat, a woman little past thirty, and what had she gained in exchange? Fame, perhaps? And wealth, which lay just around the next corner? Something had escaped her; something which in her mind was associated dimly with Lily and the memory of the pavilion silvered by the moon.
She stirred suddenly. "I must go. My mother and Miss Ogilvie are waiting at the Ritz."
She rose and Thérèse pulled herself with an heroic effort from the depths of her chair. Together they walked through the bleak, shadowy hall and at the door Mrs. Callendar said, "You will come to dinner with me some night . . . yes? I will ring you up to-morrow."
And as Ellen moved away down the steps, she added, "Remember, you must not overwork. . . . You must care for yourself. You are not as young as you were once."
It was that final speech You are not as young as you were once which, like a barbed arrow, remained in her mind and rankled there as she drove in the Callendar motor through the streets to the Ritz where she found her mother and Miss Ogilvie sitting sleepily with an air of disapproval while Sanson and Rebecca and Uncle Raoul drank champagne and labored to be gay in celebration of the triumph.
It was about this hour that the amorous wailing of the tom-cat died forever upon the ears of Mr. Wyck.
In the morning the newspapers printed, in the column devoted to murders, suicides and crimes of violence, a single paragraph
"Herbert Wyck, aged forty-three, single, committed suicide last night by inhaling gas in his room in a boarding house at West 35th street. The only existing relative is Miss Sophronia Wyck residing in Yonkers. It is said that the dead man's family once played a prominent part in the life of New York in the Seventies."
But no one saw it . . . not Hattie Tolliver, nor her husband, nor Robert, nor Ellen; they were all busy reading the triumphant notices of the concert at which, more than one critic said, a new Tèresa Carreño had arrived.
Thus passed Mr. Wyck whose one happiness was desolated because Lily Shane had encountered Clarence Murdock in the dining car of a transcontinental train. "Women like that," Harvey Seton had said. . . .
Ellen went to dine in the ugly dining room copied from the Duc de Morny not once but many times and she met there those people—Mrs. Mallinson, the Honorable Emma, the Apostle to the Genteel, Mr. Wickham Chase and scores of others—who had once sat on the opposite side of the lacquered screen waiting for the Russian tenor, the Javanese dancer and the unknown young American girl. She sat at dinner between bankers and bishops, between fashionable young men and elderly millionaires. She was a success, for she possessed an indifference bordering upon rudeness which allowed her dinner companions to talk as much as they pleased about themselves and led them into extraordinary efforts to win a gleam of interest from her clear blue eyes. And she learned that many things had changed since she last dined in the Callendar house. She learned that Mrs. Sigourney was no longer fashionable but merely material for the newspapers, and that Mrs. Champion and her Virgins had sunk into a brownstone obscurity in the face of a new age which no longer had a great interest in virginity; and that artists, musicians and writers were becoming the thing, that no dinner was complete without them. But it was amazing how little the whole spectacle interested her. She knew that it had all been arranged with a purpose; the indomitable Thérèse, for all her fatigue and worry, was preparing for the next step. These dinners gave Lilli Barr a place in the world of the Honorable Emma and the Apostle to the Genteel; they fixed her.