The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 7
SIX weeks after the night the Governor drove furiously away from the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane gave her last dinner before sending Lily away. It was small, including only Mrs. Julis Harrison, her son William, and Miss Abercrombie, but it served her purpose clearly as a piece of strategy to deceive the Town. Irene was absent, having gone back to the convent in the east where she had been to school as a little girl. A great doctor advised the visit, a doctor who held revolutionary ideas gained in Vienna. It was, he said, the one means of bringing the girl round, since he could drag from her no sane reason for her melancholy and neurasthenic behavior. Her mother could discover nothing; indeed it appeared that the girl had a strange fear of her which struck her dumb. So Julia Shane overcame her distaste for the Roman Catholic church and permitted the girl to return, thanking Heaven that she had kept from her the truth. This, she believed, would have caused Irene to lose her mind.
In the drawing-room after dinner a discreet battle raged with Julia Shane on one side and Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie on the other. Lily and William Harrison withdrew to the library. In a curious fashion the drawing-room made an excellent battle-ground for so polite a struggle. It was so old, so mysterious and so delicate. There were no lights save the lamps, three of them, one majolica, one blue faience and one Ming, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the tall mirror and the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. The only flowers were a bowl of white peonies which Lily had been able to save from the wreck of a garden beaten for three days by a south wind.
"The Governor's visit," observed Mrs. Harrison, "turned out unfortunately. He succeeded in offending almost every one of importance."
"And his sudden going-away," added Miss Abercrombie, eagerly leaning forward.
Julia Shane stirred in her big chair. To-night she wore an old-fashioned gown of black lace, very tight at the waist and very low in the neck, which displayed boldly the boniness of her strong shoulders. "I don't think he intended slighting any one," she said. "He was called away by a telegram. A Governor, you know, has duties. When Colonel Shane was alive . . ." And she launched into an anecdote of twenty years earlier, told amusingly and skilfully, leading Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie for the time being far away from the behavior of the Governor. She spoke of her husband as she always did, in terms of the most profound devotion.
Mrs. Harrison was a handsome stout woman, a year or two older than Julia Shane but, unlike her, given to following the fashions closely. She preserved an illusion of youth by much lacing and secret recourse to rouge, a vain deception before Julia Shane, who knew rouge in all its degrees in Paris where rouge was used both skilfully and frankly. She moved, the older woman, with a slight pomposity, conscious always of the dignity of her position as the richest woman in the Town; for she was richer by a million or two than Julia Shane, to whom she acceded nothing save the prestige which was Cypress Hill and its tradition.
Miss Abercrombie, a spinster of uncertain age, wore her hair in a pompadour and spoke French, as she believed, perfectly. It was necessary that she believe in her own French, for she it was who instructed the young girls of the Town in French and in history, drawing upon a background derived from a dozen summers spent at one time or another on the continent. Throughout Julia Shane's long anecdote, Miss Abercrombie interrupted from time to time with little fluttering sighs of appreciation, with "Ohs!" and "Ahs!" and sudden observations of how much pleasanter the Town had been in the old days. When the anecdote at last was finished, she it was who brought the conversation by a sudden heroic gesture back to the Governor.
"And tell me, dear Julia," she said. "Is there no news of Lily? . . . Has nothing come of the Governor's devotion?"
There was nothing, Julia replied with a sharp, compressed smile. "Nothing at all, save a flirtation. Lily, you know, is very pretty."
"So beautiful!" remarked Mrs. Harrison. "I was telling my son William so, only to-night. He admires her . . . deeply, you know, deeply." She had taken to fanning herself vigorously for the night was hot. She did it boldly, endeavoring in vain to force some stray zephyr among the rolls of fat inside her tight bodice.
"What I can never understand," continued Miss Abercrombie, "is why Lily hasn't already married. A girl so pretty and so nice to every one . . . especially older people."
Mrs. Shane became falsely deprecating of Lily's charms. "She is a good girl," she said. "But hardly as charming as all that. The trouble is that she's very fastidious. She isn't easy to suit." In her deprecation there was an assumption of superiority, as though she could well afford to deprecate because no one could possibly take her seriously.
"She's had plenty of chances. . . . I don't doubt that," observed Miss Abercrombie. "I can remember that summer when we were all in Aix together. . . . Do you remember the young Englishman, Julia? The nice one with yellow hair?" She turned to Mrs. Julis Harrison with an air of arrogant pride and intimacy. "He was the second son of a peer, you know, and she could have had him by a turn of her finger."
And the association with the peerage placed for the time being Miss Abercrombie definitely on the side of Julia Shane in the drawing-room skirmish.
"And Harvey Biggs was so devoted to her," she babbled on. "Such a nice boy . . . gone now to the war like so many other brave fellows." Then as though remembering suddenly that William Harrison was not at the war but safe in the library across the hall, she veered quickly. "They say the Spanish atrocities in Cuba are beyond comprehension. I feel that we should spread them as much as possible to rouse the spirit of the people."
"I've thought since," remarked Mrs. Harrison, "that you should have had flags for decorations at the garden party, Julia. With a war on and especially with the Governor here. I only mention it because it has made people talk. It only adds to the resentment against his behavior."
"I thought the flowers were enough," replied Mrs. Shane, making a wry face. "They were so beautiful until cinders from your furnaces destroyed them. Those peonies," she added, indicating the white flowers that showed dimly in the soft light, "are all that is left." There was a moment's pause and the distant throb of the Mills filled the room, proclaiming their eternal presence. It was a sound which never ceased. "The garden party seems to have been a complete failure. I'm growing too old to entertain properly."
"Nonsense!" declared Mrs. Julis Harrison with great emphasis. "But I don't see why you persist in living here with the furnaces under your nose."
"I shan't live anywhere else. Cypress Hill was here before the Mills . . . long before."
Almost unconsciously each woman discovered in the eye of the other a faint gleam of anger, the merest flash of spirit, a sign of the eternal struggle between that which is established and that which is forever in a state of flux, which Mrs. Julis Harrison in her heart called "progress" and Julia Shane in hers called "desecration."