The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 64
SO she talked for what must have seemed to Lily hour upon hour. When the younger woman betrayed any sign of leaving, Madame Blaise thrust her tall thin body between her and the door. Even if Lily had desired to speak she would have found small opportunity, for Madame Blaise never once stopped talking. It was as if all the talk of years, repressed and hidden, was suddenly rushing forth in a torrent. The room became intolerably stuffy from the burning gas. Lily's head began to ache and her face to grow more and more pale. If she had been less pleasant by nature she would have made her way by force past the old woman and out into the open air. As it was, she kept hoping, no doubt, that Madame Blaise would come to an end of her talk, that some one would come in and interrupt her . . . the maid perhaps . . . any one. She no longer heard what Madame Blaise was saying. The talk came to her in fragments, the inexpressibly boring chatter of a cracked old woman. To break the monotony she took up the pictures on the mantelpiece and began to examine them. During a brief pause, she observed. "Your pictures are interesting, Madame Blaise. I should like to call again when I have more time, in order to see them all."
"Ah, yes," said the old woman. "So they are . . . so they are. The men . . . they were not all lovers you understand. But I might have had them for lovers by the raising of my finger."
"This one," said Lily, holding up the portrait of a heavily built man wearing the mustachios of a dragoon. "He is interesting."
"Yes . . . yes. He was a Spaniard . . . a nobleman, very aristocratic. Dead now. . . . Extraordinary how many of them are dead!"
Then all at once the attention of Madame Blaise was arrested by the most extraordinary change in her companion.
So remarkable was the change that the old woman actually stopped talking and fell to observing the face of Madame ane.
Lily held in her hand a small photograph, very faded and soiled, of a man in a black coat with sharp eyes, a high brow and a full black beard. It bore in one corner the stamp of a well-known photographer of the seventies, a gentleman with an establishment in the Galerie des Panoramas. It was a handsome face, fascinating, fanatic, which at once arrested the attention. Beyond all doubt it was the mate of a photograph which Julia Shane, dying, had left to her daughter. Across the face of the one Lily held in her hand was written, "À la Reine de la Nuit de son Cavalier Irlandais." The ink was faded, almost illegible.
"You find that gentleman especially interesting?" asked Madame Blaise in a tone of unbearable curiosity.
For a moment Lily did not reply. She regarded the photograph closely, turning it this way and that under the gaslight.
"Yes," she said at last in a low, hushed voice. "Who is he?"
Madame Blaise bridled. "He was a gentleman . . . very interesting," she said. "He admired me . . . greatly. The inscription? It was a joke between us. He was full of deviltry and fun (un vrai diable . . . tout gamin). I have forgotten what the joke was. . . . He was forced to leave the country by some unpleasantness. . . . I too went away for a time." And again her eyes narrowed in a mysterious look, invoking romantic, glamorous things. Lily, the picture still clasped in her hand, sat down weakly.
Above all else, old photographs have the power of calling up dead memories. It is so perhaps because they are so terribly, so cruelly, realistic. Those things which the memory, desiring to forget, succeeds in losing among the shadows of time, remain in a photograph so long as it exists . . . the posture of a head, the betraying affected gesture of a hand, the manner of carrying oneself, the arrogance of countenance, the habit of dress . . . all these things survive on a bit of paper no larger perhaps than the palm of one's hand.
The photograph with "A la Reine de la Nuit" written across it must have invoked forgotten things . . . memories of John Shane's savage temper and whimsical kindnesses, of terrible scenes between him and his proud wife, of his contempt for the anemic Irene and his admiration for the glowing Lily, of a thousand things distant yet appallingly vivid.
While Lily sat thoughtful and silent, Madame Blaise kept up a stream of hysterical chatter, turning crazily from one subject to another, from personalities to anecdotes, from advice to warning. Lily heard none of it. When she had recovered a little, she said, "This gentleman interests me. I wish you could tell me more of him."
But Madame Blaise shook her head ruefully. "I have forgotten so much," she said. "It is terrible how one forgets. Do you know?" And again the look of mad confidence came into her face. "I have forgotten his name. What is it he calls himself in the inscription?"
She took the photograph from Lily's hand and thrust it under the circle of light, holding it at arm's length and squinting in order to discern it properly. "Ah, yes," she said. "Cavalier Irlandais. . . . That was his name. I don't remember his other name, though I believe he had one." She paused, thoughtful, as if trying by a tremendous force of will to recapture the thing which had escaped her. "His father was Irish, you understand. . . . Strange I can't remember his name." So she talked on crazily, answering Lily's questions madly, tangling the answers hopelessly in a flood of insane philosophy and distorted observation. The look of mystery and the remnants of a grand manner persisted. Lily watched her with a look of intense curiosity as if she believed that, after all, the queer old creature might once have been young,—young, mysterious and lovely. But she learned little of the gentleman in the portrait. It was impossible for Madame Blaise to concentrate upon her subject. Lily learned only that the gentleman had been forced to leave the country following some unpleasantness arising out of a duel in which he had killed a relative . . . a cousin perhaps. She did not remember. He had been in politics too. That played a part in his flight. He returned once, Madame Blaise believed, but she did not remember why he had come back.
Altogether it was hopeless. Lily replaced the photograph on the high mantel, powdered her nose and drew on her gloves. Presently there came an opening in the flood of Madame Blaise' talk and Lily seized it sharply.
"I must really go, Madame Blaise. I have stayed much too long. It has been so interesting."
She rose and began to move slowly backward in the direction of the door, as if she feared to rouse the old woman to fresh outbursts. She made her departure gently, vanishing noiselessly; but she got no further than the inlaid music box when Madame Blaise, detecting her plan, sprang up and seized her arm fiercely with her thin old hands.
"Wait!" she cried. "There is one more thing I must show you . . . only one. It will take but a second."
The patient Lily acquiesced, though she kept up a mild protest. Madame Blaise scurried away, rather sidewise as a crab moves, into a dark corner of the room where she disappeared for an instant through a door. When she returned, she bore two dusty paintings in oil. Each was surrounded by a heavy gilt frame and together the pair burdened the strength of the old woman. Her whole manner reeked of secrecy. With an air of triumph she smiled to herself as she took from the chair where she had been sitting a red silk handkerchief with which she dusted the faces of the two paintings. All this time she kept them turned from Lily. At last she stiffened her thin body suddenly and said sharply, "Now, look!"
Lily, bending low, discerned in the light from the fire the character of the two pictures. Each was the portrait of a woman, painted in the smooth, skilful, slightly hard manner of Ingres. Yet there was a difference, which the connoisseur's eye of Lily must have detected. They were cleverly done with a too great facility. But for that one might almost have said they were the work of a genius. Clearly the same woman had posed for both. In one she wore an enormous drooping hat, tilted a little over one eye. In the other she wore a barbaric crown and robes of Byzantine splendor.
Madame Blaise stood by with the air of a great art collector displaying his treasures. "They are beautiful, aren't they?" she said. "Superb! You know I understand these things. I have never shown them to any one in years. I am showing them to you because I know you understand these things. I have seen your house. I have seen your beautiful things. You see it is the same woman who posed for both. . . . The one is called 'The Girl in the Hat' . . . the other is 'The Byzantine Empress.' Theodora, you know, who was born a slave girl."