OF all the events, the emotions and the tragedy that occurred during the turbulent years spent in the Babylon Arms, nothing had hurt Ellen so much as the fashion in which Mrs. Callendar, after such a show of friendship and interest, vanished quickly and completely from her life. Even the affair with the son and the death of Clarence had had in them elements which her feminine mind found not unpleasing; there was a certain romance in the idea that it was herself whom Callendar really desired and not Sabine at all; there was even more romance, though perhaps a trifle bitter, in the idea that a man had taken his own life because he loved her too much to spoil her existence. In her headlong fashion, she was conscious that these elements contributed to her own personality; they made her an important figure with enhancing shades of romance and tragedy. That the facts were known to so few persons as to be almost secret, only increased their fascination. Sometimes, as she walked along the boulevards or rode in the Bois beside Schneidermann, paying little heed to the accompaniment of his pretty speeches and comment upon people, pictures or music, she found herself filled with a triumph at her secret knowledge. She thought, "People who see me and talk with me little know all that has happened. They do not know that they are talking with a powerful person. They do not know the mystery and tragedy."
She began even to think that she had consciously planned each step of her progress, and she came after a time to forget that all that had happened to her had been born either of headlong impulse or through some senseless operation of circumstance.
Nevertheless there were times when she grew troubled by a sensation of insecurity. Mrs. Callendar had deserted her without a word. Rebecca might easily do the same. It was only Lily in whom she placed any real trust; with Lily there were ties of family and of blood.
She was troubled too because she knew that there was still need of the Jewess. For all the arrogance that came more and more to assert itself in her nature, for all the confidence and the secret triumph with which she looked out upon the strangers who passed by her on the boulevards and in the Bois, she understood that she was not yet ready to stand alone. She needed the guidance of persons like the gentle Schneidermann and the busy Rebecca. They knew the world; they knew the tricks by which one advanced to fame; they knew the people who were the right ones to know. She could not try her own wings because they were not yet strong enough.
Yet she must have the aid of such as Schneidermann and Rebecca without once acknowledging it. The old, twisted pride forbade her to lean upon any of them. It was a hard business.
And she would pull in her horse so that the languid Schneidermann might come abreast of her and talk without having to shout at her back. She would smile indifferently at him and say,
"It is a beautiful morning. . . . Look at the dew shining beneath the hedge. And the spider webs like nets of shining silver."
Sometimes Schneidermann rode silently by her side, stealing glances at the color in her cheeks and the blue black of her hair as she rode so straight and so proud and yet so careless of her horse, reining him in at will or galloping him madly through the long tunnels under the dripping linden trees. He was a tall thin man with an arched nose and a blond drooping mustache, rather pale and mild, who never disputed with her the choice of bridle paths or the hour they were to return. She understood that he was interested in her; he had helped her with her accent, though in this they had made little progress, for she had a stubborn, careless way of sticking to her own version of the tongue just as she had never lost completely her way of saying "dawg" for dog and "watter" for water, and persisted in the burr which came to her doubly through a Scottish heritage and a middle-western childhood. She suspected sometimes that he might even be falling in love with her and this made her knit up her brows and scowl at him furtively. She did not want him, even with all his money. She had had one husband who was mild and gentle and a bit stupid. Schneidermann was, to be sure, more intelligent than Clarence, and he knew far more of the world; it amused her to talk with him of music and art and politics, but a relationship more intimate was to her inconceivable. Aside from this worldly knowledge he was like Clarence; he possessed the same humbleness, the same physical paleness. It annoyed her to believe that she attracted only men who must be dominated.
Yet there was Callendar. Unconsciously she came to compare the humbleness of Schneidermann and Clarence with the cat-like virility of Callendar. It was as if she were putting aside all other men in the knowledge that some day, at some time if she waited long enough, she would come to possess him. Yet when she thought of him, as she frequently did after she had gone up to the luxurious room looking out upon the white pavilion, she grew angry at the memory of that last visit to the Babylon Arms. He had watched her, cat-like, until, driven by some obscure desire, he could no longer play the game of waiting.
She came slowly, as she grew to know and understand the world, to see that he had looked upon her always as a naïve and helpless creature, awkward and a little ridiculous. It gave her a sort of restless and unhappy satisfaction that she had shown herself the more powerful.
It was not strange that she did not encounter the Callendars in Paris. The world in which they moved was more remote from hers than the Babylon Arms had been from the house on Murray Hill. True, the crêpe-hung Madame de Cyon was an acquaintance of Thérèse, but Ellen took good care that this fat, bedizened gossip should never learn of her acquaintance with the Callendars, and so it did not occur to "Tiens! Tiens!" ever to mention them. Of their life Ellen sometimes read a paragraph or two in the Daily Mail or the Herald; they were off to New York or England or had just returned to their house in the Avenue du Bois. She knew nothing of the feverish, cosmopolitan society which surrounded them, nothing of the seedy, impoverished Royalists who were the poor relations of Thérèse and lived in fine, damp, decaying houses in the remote provinces, clinging to the splendor of the past because so little else remained; she knew nothing of the rich American women who had married titles.
At the lovely old house in the Rue Raynouard there were always the friends of Lily and Madame Gigon, dowdy, bourgeois and dull, among whom Lily moved with the calm of perfect security, as the one American who had ever penetrated with any success the inmost circle about the doddering Prince Bonaparte. The presence of so vigorous and arrogant a creature as Ellen they resented bitterly and sometimes openly, so that Ellen in the end was thrown for companionship, a thing of which she stood very little in need, upon Rebecca Schönberg, Schneidermann and all their hodgepodge of musicians, artists, writers and patrons of art.
Rebecca, as the months turned into years, had come to devote more and more of her time to the house in the Rue Raynouard. When she returned from Danzig, or Rome, or Vienna or wherever it happened to be, she came day after day to Numéro Dix where it was her habit to sit quietly in the big empty music room and listen with extraordinary attention while Ellen played hour upon hour. She watched Ellen's progress with an interest of such intensity that Ellen at times grew ill-tempered and wished heartily that the sandy haired creature would disappear forever. She would, doubtless, have committed some act to sever their relationship forever save that always in the back of her mind was the certainty that the Jewess was valuable to her.
It was really the sense of Rebecca's domination which at once annoyed and confused her; otherwise she liked her well enough. It was Rebecca who suggested the number of hours which she should practise; it was Rebecca who bullied her into going out in the world; it was Rebecca who insisted on helping her choose her clothes; it was Rebecca who even brought to the Rue Raynouard people who sent Madame Gigon into the most distant part of the house where she would be safe from the noise of their violent, modern music. It was Rebecca who at times set the house by the ears and threatened to bring about an open quarrel between Ellen and the Baron.
For a long time the enmity between these two had grown less and less concealed. Lily must have sensed conflict and in her quiet, indolent way have chosen to pretend that no strain existed. There was irony in the fact that a woman who sought only quiet and leave to do as she pleased should have found herself suddenly the battleground between two natures so violent. In dealing either with insolence or domination Lily had no difficulty; always she had gone quietly her own way achieving in the end by some unviolent coup her own desire. When she chose, even the dark, bumptious César obeyed her as a pet dog might have obeyed. She was even able to cope with Ellen (though she seldom interfered) in the very midst of the girl's most stubborn moods. Yet when César and her cousin came into conflict, she grew helpless; it was like living perpetually on the edge of a volcano. She knew, perhaps by instinct, what it was that caused the trouble . . . that each of them sought to rule the household.
So the peace had gone presently from the lovely old house. On one side were ranged César and his aunt, the blind old Madame Gigon, reënforced by the cohorts of crêpe-laden old women who came to her salons and impressed upon her the sense of her injury. On the other were ranged Ellen and her ally, the shrewd Rebecca. Between the opposing armies stood Lily who wished only peace and luxury and indolence.
One night early in May, before Lily's household had moved to Germigny, Rebecca failed to appear for a concert they had planned to attend. There had been good reason; an aunt of Rebecca's, very rich, had arrived without warning from Vienna. Yet Ellen was unreasonable and believed that Rebecca had failed her deliberately. She had gone out for a time to walk sullenly along the Seine and when she returned, she went silently to her room and locked the door. The disappointment, the softness of the evening, the look of the lights floating in the river . . . all these things created an overwhelming and terrible nostalgia.
Once inside the room she flung herself down on the canopied bed, her blue black hair all tossed and disheveled, and, weeping, reproached herself bitterly. She was, she believed, a horrible creature. She had treated her mother cruelly; she had forgotten the existence of her brother—of Fergus, with his humorous blue eyes and magical sympathy and his uncanny way of understanding what it was that terrified her, what it was that made her unhappy, what it was that drove her on and on without rest or peace. She saw too her father, a mild man who loved her without making any claim, without once speaking of love. On all these she had turned her back in a heartless fashion.
And Clarence . . . poor Clarence . . . was always with her in these terrible moments of solitude. She knew him then as she had never known him in life; she saw him with a terrible clarity, moving about meekly with the awful look of pleading in his near-sighted eyes. He had not been like that in the beginning; he had changed while he lived with her, changed, as it were, beneath her very eyes. And she saw him too as he lay for the last time on the divan of the little flat in the Babylon Arms, peaceful at last and untormented by a woman who always eluded him, a woman whom he loved so much that he made way with himself that he might hinder her no longer. And him she could never repay; it was impossible even to explain or to beg for forgiveness, though he would have said, no doubt, that there was nothing to forgive.
Then growing a little more quiet, she asked herself in one of her rare moments of reflection what power had driven her to act as she had done. To this there was no answer; it was quite beyond her. She knew, as indeed she had always known, that she must go her way, solitary and ruthless, to fulfil a rather shadowy ambition, a confused desire for vindication, a hunger for the sight of the world at her feet.
It would do no good now to turn back, because such a course could only create disaster. Sitting up among the pillows of the canopied bed she fell to staring hopelessly into the darkness. For a long time she sat thus, pale and disheveled, her long black hair streaming over the crimson peignoir. She had discovered an awful thing. She, Ellen Tolliver, who had wanted only to be free, was entangled and caught beyond all escape. She could not turn back. She could only go forward along the path which she herself had chosen, and it was a lonely path, a path so enveloped in solitude that she fell to weeping again over the desolate waste of its loneliness.
There was a moon which painted all the garden outside with a pale green light; the pastry-cake pavilion of Le Nôtre had turned to silver and the leaves of the old plane trees, rustling together now in the soft spring air, cast black shadows across the white terrace. Lured by the faint stream of silver that spilled in through the darkness at the tall window, Ellen rose presently and, sitting on the chaise longue, looked out over the garden. To-night the familiar, distant sound of the boat whistles along the Seine seemed very close. The hoofs of a horse passing along the cobblestones of the Rue de Passy struck up a slow tattoo that leapt the garden wall and came up to the very window. It was a foreign horse, passing along a foreign street and the garden had become remote and melancholy with a new sort of beauty. It was as if she suffered from an enchantment, as if all that had happened since the day she had gone off to skate alone on Walke's Pond had been an hallucination, detached from all reality. She might wake and find herself once more in the shabby comfortable sitting room of the house on Sycamore Street. Still it could not be a dream; because if she returned to that shabby room, she would find it occupied by strangers she had never seen. Her mother would no longer be there, darning in the firelight, nor her father sleeping on the great divan, nor Fergus, nor Robert. They were all gone now . . . gone, strange to say, in pursuit of herself. Perhaps one day they would come as far as this lovely garden. Ma would like it only because her children were there, but Fergus would know its meaning, how much of old beauty that was beyond expression lay in the silver pavilion, in the mottled trunks of the old trees and in the black filigree of shadows across the white terrace. If only Fergus could be there she would not be lonely. . . .
And for the first time in all her life, she became sharply aware of the passing of time. She heard it rushing past her and knew that slowly, like a tide rising upon a beach of shingle, the years were stealing upon her, the years and a desperate haunting loneliness which it seemed impossible ever to escape.
Sitting there in the moonlight, the whole of the past rose up in a queer, muddled procession. There had been in the progression of events neither rule nor reason. Fate, one might call it, but fate was a silly name. It meant nothing; it could not explain how Clarence had turned toward her and so changed all the course of her existence; it did not explain Mr. Wyck and his muddled part in the suicide of Clarence; it did not solve that sudden, passionate interval with Richard Callendar. It was all senseless and muddled.
People might judge her as hard and cold and calculating but that, she thought, would be unjust. She had been forced to make her own way, to clear her path by the best means at hand. She had tried always to do it without harm to others. She was not, like Sabine Cane, born with all that one needed in this world. If she had been born, having those things, she might have been more happy, less lonely, less aloof. Sabine, she reflected bitterly, had everything . . . wealth and friends and happiness. Even her husband had been delivered into her hands, a man who, if chance had been less cruel, might not have been hers. She envied Sabine.
So she fell to thinking of Callendar. What might have happened if she had hurt Clarence deliberately and gone away with her lover? Callendar would have married her. She would have been rich. She would have been free. There would have been no more of this struggle.
But she could not be certain. For the first time, thinking of him now out of the detachment of her loneliness, she doubted him. He might not have married her, after all. Why should he have done it? And if he had married her he might not have been stronger than this other thing which kept driving her on, this terrible ambition that was like a disease with which one was born.
What would love have been with a man like Callendar? She trembled a little at the memory of him, grown softer now with the passing of time and more sentimental. With Clarence love had been a poor timid growth, choked and inarticulate, a thing that somehow he made shameful. Callendar was not like that. Love with him must be a great glowing passion that would overwhelm all else, even her own terrible awareness.
She sighed and bound up her hair. All that had passed long ago and was done. She might die now without ever knowing anything more wonderful than the stifled, timid embraces of Clarence.
Idly, out of nowhere, into her brain there strayed presently a memory of old Julia Shane. It had happened when Ellen was a little girl and she could not think why she had remembered it, yet unaccountably it was there in her head, very clear, like an old photograph found by chance after many years. She saw old Julia sitting in the big drawing-room of Shane's Castle on a Christmas day talking with Grandpa Barr. She was thin and hawklike and leaned forward now and then on her ebony stick to give the coals in the grate an angry poke. She had been quarreling with the vigorous old man and presently she said sharply, poking the fire for emphasis, "Fate! Pooh! Robert! Fate is no great tide that sweeps everything before it. It is a river that goes this way and that, and the smart fellow is the one who jumps when it turns in his direction!"
Aunt Julia has been right. Fate was like that and, Ellen reflected, she had jumped when she saw it coming her way, but by ill luck she had jumped sometimes full into the midst of the stream and been swept along by it.
Lost in this sudden memory she was interrupted sharply by a murmur of voices arising from the garden. Without stirring she listened and, presently, recognizing that one was Lily's and the other that of the Baron, she made no attempt to move out of hearing. Once, a long time ago when she had first come to Paris, she would have moved away or have let them know by some sign that she was nearby, watching and listening; but that time had long gone by. She listened now either because she was shameless or because in the mood of the moment it did not matter what things she learned. And in some way the sight of the two dark figures, moving so close to each other up and down the white terrace, dissipated the terrible loneliness.
The pair below her knew, no doubt, that Madame Gigon was long since snoring among the gimcracks of her bedroom, and they believed that she herself was out, at the theater with Rebecca. In the French manner, the servants did not matter; it is probable that of all the people in the house they knew most of Lily and her life.
The Baron's voice, deep and rich, drifted up to the open window.
"Jean, you say, will be back from school in June?"
He wore his uniform, and the perfection of its lines emphasized all the trim, masculine hardness of his slight figure. Beside him in her black gown, with the stole of sable thrown round her for warmth, Lily was soft and lovely. His voice it seemed, caressed her.
"He is growing big now . . . fourteen. Think of it. . . ." He laughed softly. "You with a big boy of fourteen! It is impossible . . . incroyable!"
Lily said something which was not audible and then, "Yes. We must be more careful. He will begin to see things."
"In England boys are not so sharp . . . at least not about affairs between men and women."
In silence they walked for a time, once up and once down the terrace. The leaves of the plane trees rustled and a boat far below in the Seine whistled faintly. Once more they passed beneath the window.
"June is more than a month away," said the Baron. "We could go to Nice for three long weeks."
Lily, it seemed, was unwilling, for he argued with her, saying in a voice that would have melted steel, "Think of it. . . . We have not been alone for months. Think of it . . . the mornings . . . waking together . . . looking out over the bay. . . . Alone . . . alone." He paused suddenly and seizing her in his arms kissed her. For a long time they stood thus. Ellen could see them quite plainly, standing in the shadow of one of the white urns, Lily with her head against his shoulder while he kissed her again and again.
Then slowly, with the air of waking from a dream, Lily raised her head and passing her hand against her eyes, murmured, "I should not like Ellen to know."
At this he laughed and a new note, one of hard anger, entered his voice. "She knows already if she is not a fool."
At the intonation Lily withdrew and leaned against one of the white urns. "She doesn't. I'm sure of it. She has said nothing."
Again he laughed, scornfully. "She's no fool. She knows it would be more unpleasant for her than for you. She needs a home and money . . . just now. She'll not open her eyes so long as it might harm her plans."
Sitting there in the darkness, Ellen succumbed to a slow anger that rose to her head like a fever. She had believed that he spoke against her; now she was sure of it. She hated him vaguely, because he dared even to say such a thing to her cousin. He was so sure of himself, the amorous beast.
She was hurt too, as if some one had struck her, because what César had said was so near to the truth.
But Lily turned away from him. "I won't have you say such things," she said. "It is ridiculous and unjust."
He did not use words in defense of himself, perhaps because words were to him such weak and awkward weapons. Instead, he simply took Lily once more in his arms, and beneath his kisses, Ellen saw that all resistance, all anger melted from her. It was like a bit of wax touched suddenly by a flame. . . . An amazing sight which seemed to illumine sharply the whole of Lily's strange life.
After a moment, he placed his arm about her waist and they moved away down the steps into the shadow of the plane trees. Once they halted for a time while he kissed her again and then, resuming their way in the same state of enchantment, they disappeared through the filigree of black shadows into the white pavilion, silvered by the moon.
And in the room above the terrace, Ellen slipped from the chaise longue to the floor where she lay flung out, weeping passionately. The loneliness returned now more terribly than ever before.