Part 15

The smile wavered and clung to his face. Of course he said none of this. What he said was, “It is a dirty business. And I want nothing to do with it ... not even any stock. If it hadn’t been for the Mills, Lily might have married me.”

From the bed arose the scornful sound of a hoarse chuckle, “Oh no, she wouldn’t. You don’t know her! She wouldn’t marry you because you were such a poor thing.”

At this Willie began to tremble. His face became as white as the spotless coverlet, and he grasped the bed rail with such intensity that his thin knuckles showed blue against his skin. It was the old taunt of a mother toward a child whose gentleness and indecision were to her both incomprehensible and worthy only of contempt, a child who had never suited her gigantic ideas of power and wealth.

“And pray tell me what you _do_ intend to do,” she asked with rich sarcasm.

A tremulous quality entered Willie’s voice as he replied. “I want to have a farm where I can raise chickens and ducks and rabbits.”

“Great God!” replied his mother in her deep voice. It was all she said. Moving her head with a terrible effort, she turned her face to the wall away from her son. But Willie, though he still trembled a little in the presence of the old woman and the glowering portrait above his head, had a look of triumph in his pale eyes. It said, “I have won! I have won! I have achieved a victory. I am free at last from the monster which I have always hated.... I am through with the Mills. I am through with Judge Weissman.... I can be bullied no more!”

Outside the wind howled and tore at the eaves and presently there came a suave knock at the door ... the knock of the worldly, white haired butler. “Miss Abercrombie is here to see Mrs. Harrison,” came a suave voice, and before Willie could answer, his mother’s crony, her nose very red from the cold, had pushed her way like a wriggling ferret into the room.

At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a purely involuntary fashion.

“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you delighted?”

Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.

“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic child still wearing curls.

Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I have told her everything.”

And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia Shane.

XLVII

In the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.

The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.

Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the “boom spirit.” The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.

The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.

Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing. During the day while Irene was absent Lily, clad in a peignoir of black silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with the yellow backed French novels “skimmed” and cast away by her mother. These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she sought to pass the time by writing letters--addressed always to one of three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon’s cousin, the Baron. Wrapped in her mother’s old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.

She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy. Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their families.

She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls hooting among the branches of the dead trees.

The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the “old fogy” lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bearing a little black bag filled with papers. With Mrs. Tolliver, he shared an attitude of supreme indifference alike toward the strikers and the guards. It appeared that he still lived in a day when there were no mills and no strikers. He was a tall withered old man with drooping white mustaches and a thick mass of vigorous white hair. He went about his business gruffly, wasting no time over details, and no emotion over sentiment. He treated both sisters in the same cold, legal manner.

The will was brief and concocted shrewdly by Julia Shane and old Mr. Baines. Nor was it complicated. The house and all the old woman’s jewels were left to her daughter Lily. There was also a sizable gift for Hattie Tolliver and a strange bequest which came as a surprise to all but old Mr. Baines. It was added in a codicil, so he said, a short time before her death. It provided for a trust fund to support Welcome House and provide a visiting nurse until Mr. Baines and the two daughters deemed these things no longer necessary.

“That,” observed the cynical Mr. Baines drily, as he read the will, “will be as long as the human race exists. I tried to persuade her against it but she would not listen. She always knew what she was doing and just what she wanted, right to the very end.”

Thus Julia Shane placed herself for all time among the enemies of the Mills.

Otherwise the property was divided evenly with an allowance made to Irene for the value of the Cypress Hill holdings.

Then Mr. Baines delivered with considerable ceremony and advice two letters, one addressed to Lily and one to Irene, which had been left in his keeping.

The letter addressed to Lily read, “I am leaving the house to you because Irene hates it. I know that she would only dispose of it at once and give the money to the church. Likewise I am leaving my jewels to you, with the exception of two rings which I gave Hattie Tolliver years ago--the emerald set with diamonds and the single big emerald. No doubt you remember them. There is no use in leaving such things to Irene. She would only sell them and spend the money to buy candles for a saint. And that is not the purpose for which God made jewels. He meant them to adorn beautiful women. Therefore I give them to you.”

And thus the amethysts set in Spanish silver, two emerald rings, seven rings set with diamonds, a ruby necklace, a festoon of pearls, a quantity of earrings of onyx, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and a long diamond chain passed into the possession of the elder daughter.

“In worldly possessions,” the letter continued, “I have left you both wealthy. There are other possessions over which I had no control. They were left to you by your father and by me--the possessions which one cannot sell nor throw away, the possessions which are a part of you, possessions good and evil, bad and indifferent, the possessions which in the end are you yourself.

“There are some things which it is difficult to discuss, even between a mother and her daughter. I am gone now. I shall not be forced to look at you and feel shame at what you know. Yet I have always wanted to tell you, to explain to you that, after all, I was never so hard, so invincible, so hopelessly brittle as I must have seemed. You see, my dear, there are some things which one cannot control and one of these is the unconscious control over self-control--the thing which does not permit you to speak. Another is pride.

“You see there was never anything in common between your father and me, unless it was love of horses and that, after all, is not much. Before he ever saw me, he must have known more of life than I ever knew. But those things were secret and because of them, perhaps, I fell in love with him--after a fashion. I say ‘after a fashion’ because that is what it was. I was a country girl, the daughter of a farmer ... nothing else, you understand. And you cannot know what that meant in the days when the Town was a village and no one in it ever went outside the state and seldom outside the county. He was fascinating ... more fascinating than you can ever know. I married him on account of that. It was a great match. He was a wonderful lover ... not a lover like the men of the county who make such good husbands, but a lover out of another world. But that, my dear, did not make him a good husband, and in a little while it became clear that I was little more to him than a convenience. Even sending me to France didn’t help matters.

“It was a bad affair, but in my day when one married there was no thought of anything but staying married. So what was done was done. There was no unmaking a mistake, even less chance after you and Irene were born. He came of one race and I of another. And never once in our life together did we touch in our sympathies. It was, in short, a marriage founded upon passion alone--a despicable state of affairs which is frequently worse than a _marriage de convenance_, for in that there is no desire to burn itself out.... You see, I understood the affair of the Governor far better than you ever imagined.

“And so there are things descended to both of you over which I have no control. I can only ask God to be merciful. Be gentle with Irene and thank God that you are made so that life cannot hurt you. She cannot help that which she is. You see I have known and understood more than any one guessed.”

That was all. The ending was as abrupt as the manner of Julia Shane while she lived. Indeed to Lily, reading the letter, it must have seemed that her mother was still alive. She sat thoughtfully for a long time and at last tearing the letter slowly into bits, she tossed it into the drawing-room fire. Of its contents she said nothing to Irene.

The letter to Irene was brief. It read, “I leave you your money outright with no string to it, because the dead have no rights which the living are bound to respect. You may do with it as you like.... You may give it all to your beloved church, though it will be without my approval. You may do anything with it which will bring you happiness. I have prayed to God to make you happy. If you can find happiness by burying yourself, do it before you are an hour older, for life is too short to waste even an hour of happiness. But do not believe that it is such an easy thing to find.

“I have loved you, Irene, always, though I have never been able to understand you. I have suffered for you, silently and alone. I, who am dead, may tell you these things which in life I could not tell you. Only know that I cherished you always even if I did not know how to reach you. There are some things that one cannot say. At least I--even I, your own mother--could not make you understand because I never really knew you at all. But remember always that I loved you in spite of all the wretched walls which separated even a mother from her daughter. God be with you and guide you.”

Irene, in the stillness of her bare, austere room, wept silently, the tears streaming down her battered, aging face. When she had finished reading she thrust the letter inside her dress against her thin breasts, and a little later when she descended and found the drawing-room empty she tore it into tiny bits to be consumed by the same fire which had secretly destroyed Lily’s letter a little while before.

XLVIII

She made no mention of this letter to Lily, but before she left the house late the same afternoon she went to Lily’s room, a thing which she had never done before. She found her sister lying on the bed in her darkened room.

“What is it, Irene?”

Irene standing in the doorway, hesitated for an instant.

“Nothing,” she said presently. “I just stopped to see if you were all right.” Again there was a little pause. “You aren’t afraid ... alone here in the evenings, are you?”

Out of the darkness came the sound of Lily’s laughter.

“Afraid? Lord, no! What is there to be afraid of? I’m all right.” And Irene went away, down the long drive into Halsted street which lay in thick blackness because the strikers had cut the wires of the street lights.

On the same evening Lily had dinner on a lacquer table before the fire in the drawing-room. She ate languidly, leaning back in her rosewood armchair, dividing her attention between the food and the pages of Henri Bordeaux. Save for a chair or two and the great piano, the room was still in camphor, the furniture swathed in linen coverings, the Aubusson carpet rolled up in its corner. Dawdling between the food and the book, she managed to consume an hour and a half before she finished her coffee and cigarette. Despite the aspect of the room there was something pleasant about it, a certain indefinable warmth and sense of space which the library lacked utterly.

The business of the will was virtually settled. She had announced her intention of leaving within a day or two. Two of her bags were already packed. One of them she had not troubled herself to unpack because she had not the faintest need of clothes unless she wished to dress each night for her lonely dinner as if she expected a dozen guests. And being indolent she preferred to lounge about comfortably in the black kimono embroidered in silver with a design of wistaria. Yet in her lounging there was nothing of sloppiness. She was too much a woman of taste. She was comfortable; but she was trim and smart, from her bronze hair so well done, to the end of her neat silver-slippered toe.

When she had finished her cigarette she rose and went to the piano where she played for a long time, rather sentimentally and without her usual ecstatic dash. She played as if a yearning sadness had descended upon her. It may have been the thought of quitting the old house which had come to the end of the road. In another week its only occupants would be Sarah and Hennery. The others would have vanished.... Irene, Lily, even the black servants. There was no such thing as age or tradition. The Town had no time for such things. There was no longer room for Cypress Hill. It stood in the way of progress. The Town council was eager to buy and destroy it in order to raise on its site a new railway station, more vast and pretentious than any in the state.

It may have been this which made her sad.

Certainly her mood drove her to the depths, for she played such music as the Liebesträume and a pair of sentimental German waltzes. And gradually she played more and more softly until at length her hands slipped from the keyboard to her lap and she sat with bowed head regarding the pink tips of her polished finger-nails.

The curtains were drawn across the windows so that no sound penetrated from the outside. In the grate the fire of cannel coal crackled softly and new flames leapt up.

Presently she returned to her chair and novel, but she did not read. She remained staring into the fire in the same distracted fashion.

XLIX

She was sitting thus when she turned at the sound of shuffling footsteps and saw Sarah coming softly toward her. The countenance of the mulatto carried a vague, indefinable expression of fear. It was gray with terror.

“What is it, Sarah?” asked Lily. “In the name of Heaven what is the matter?”

The woman trembled. “There’s trouble a-brewin’, Miss Lily,” she said. “The park is full of men. They’ve been comin’ in at the gate and they’re all over the place.” The woman hesitated again. “Hennery’s watching now. He sent me to ask if he was to send for the police?”

Lily stood up and fastened the black and silver kimono higher about her throat.

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know, Miss Lily. Hennery thinks mebbe they’re strikers. He’s put out the light at the back, so he can watch ’em without bein’ seen.”

For a moment Lily remained silent and thoughtful. Presently she said, “Put out the lights in here, Sarah. I’ll go and look myself.”

And she went out, leaving the frightened servant to extinguish the lamps.

A moment later, groping her way through the dark hallway to the servants’ quarters, she stumbled suddenly upon the terrified figure of Hennery kneeling down by a window, keeping watch.

“It’s Miss Lily, Hennery,” she said. “Don’t be frightened.”

The window was a blue rectangle against the wall of the hallway. It was a clear night but moonless, although the bright, cold sky was all powdered with glistening stars. Outside in the park, among the dead trunks of the trees, moved scores of figures black against the blue gray snow. Some of them carried lanterns of one sort or another. There were even women among them, women with shawls over their heads, wearing short heavy skirts which cleared the top of the deep snow. Behind them, the searchlights from the mill yard fingered the blue dome of the sky nervously, sweeping now up and down, now across striking the black chimneys and furnace towers, cutting them cleanly in two as if the cold rays of light were knives.

In the hallway the nervous breathing of Hennery became noisy. It was clear that something about the scene ... something which had to do with the silent, cold furnaces, the dead trees and the blackness of the moving figures aroused all the superstitious terror of the negro.

Outside the number of men increased. They appeared to be congregating now, in a spot near the deserted kennels. The lanterns moved among the trees like dancing lights above a swamp.

“It’s all right, Hennery,” said Lily presently. “It’s all right The police would only make matters worse. I suppose Miss Irene told them to meet here in the park. The police won’t let them meet anywhere else. It’s the last place they have.”

“Mebbe,” Hennery muttered, doubtfully. “Mebbe.”

The figure of the mulatto woman appeared shuffling her way along the wall of the corridor.

“The best thing to do,” said Lily softly, “is for you to go to bed and forget about it. Nothing will happen. Just don’t interfere. Forget about it. I’ll go up to my own room.... You might see that all the doors are locked.”

And with that she left the two negroes crouching on the floor of the corridor gazing with a sort of fascination at the spectacle in the barren park.

Upstairs in her own room, she drew up the chaise longue and pulled aside the curtains from the window. The glass ran to the floor so that she was able, lying down, to watch everything that took place in the park. The room was in darkness and the French traveling clock, as if to comfort her, chimed out ten as she flung herself down, covering her long limbs with a silk comforter against the chill that crept in everywhere.

Outside the strange pageant continued to grow in size and animation. Sometimes the searchlight, swinging low in its course, flashed swiftly across the park, revealing for an instant a hundred swarthy faces and as many figures wrapped in heavy coats, bits of old blanket, rags ... anything to shut out the bitter cold. Above each figure hung a little cloud of steaming breath, a soul hovering above a body. There were negroes among them,--the negroes doubtless, whom she had seen working in the choking fumes of the acid vats.