Part 2

When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity. She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were present--the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.

“And where are they?--Have you found them?”

The girl’s lips grew pale, and when she replied, she trembled with the awful consciousness of lying to her mother.

“I cannot find them. I have looked everywhere.”

The mother frowned. “Bring me an ash tray, Irene, and do not lie to me. They are in the garden.” She crushed out the ember of her cigarette. “That man is a fool. He has offended a dozen important men after I took the trouble to invite them here. God knows, I didn’t want them!”

While she was speaking, the sound of footsteps arose in the open gallery that ran along the far side of the drawing-room, and two figures, silhouetted against the smoky, setting sun, appeared at the windows moving toward the doorway. They were the missing Lily and the Governor. He followed her at a little distance as though they had been quarreling and she had forbidden him to address her. At the sight of them, Irene moved toward the door, but her mother checked her escape.

“Irene! Where are you going now? What are you afraid of? If this behavior does not stop, I shall forbid you to go to mass. You are already too pious for any good on this earth.”

The frightened girl returned silently and sat down with her usual air of submission on the sofa that stood in the shadows by a mantelpiece which supported a painting of Venice, flamboyant and glowing, executed by the hand of Turner. At the sound of Lily’s voice, she shrank back among the cushions as if to hide herself. There was in the voice nothing to terrify her. On the contrary it was a voice, low and warm, indolent and ingratiating--a voice full of charm, one which inspired affection.

Lily was taller than her sister and two years older; yet there was an enormous difference between them which had to do less with age than with manner. There was about Irene something childish and undeveloped. Lily was a woman, a young woman, to be sure, tall and lovely. Her hair was the color of honey. It held bright copper lights; and she wore it, in the fashion of Irene, low on a lovely neck that carried a warning of wilfulness. Her skin was the transparent sort which artists love for its green lights, and her eyes were of a shade of violet which in some lights appeared a clear blue. Her arms were laden with irises, azure and pale yellow, which she had plucked on her way from the old well. She too wore a frock of muslin with a girdle of radiant blue. As she entered, she laid the flowers gently among the crystal and silver bibelots of a rosewood table and rang for Sarah, the mulatto wife of Hennery, guardian of the wrought iron gates.

The Governor followed her, a tall man of perhaps forty, strongly built with a fine chest and broad shoulders. His hair was black and vigorous and he wore it cropped close to a well-shaped head. He had the drooping mustaches of the period. His was a figure which commands the attention of mobs. His manner, when he was not too pompous or condescending, was charming. People said there was no reason why he should not one day be president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.

He was angry now with a primitive, boiling anger which threatened to burst the bonds of his restraint. His breath came huskily. It was the anger of a man accustomed to dominate, who has encountered suddenly some one who cares not a fig for his powers.

“Madame,” he said, “your daughter has refused to marry me.”

The mother took up her ebony stick and placed it squarely before her, at the same time leaning forward upon it. For a moment, she smiled, almost secretly, with a sort of veiled amusement at his pompous speech. She did not speak until the mulatto woman, slipping in noiselessly, had taken the flowers and disappeared again into the vast hall. Then she addressed Lily who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her lovely body slightly balanced, her manner as calm and as placid as if nothing had gone wrong.

“Is this true, Lily?”

The girl nodded and smiled, so slightly that the play of expression could scarcely have been called a smile. It was as though she kept the smile among her other secrets, not to be shared by people who knew nothing of its meaning.

“It is serious, Madame, I promise you,” the Governor interrupted. “I love your daughter. She has told me that she loves me.” He had grown a little pompous now, as though he were addressing an assembly of constituents. “What else is there?” He turned to Lily suddenly, “It is true, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I have told you that.... But I will not marry you.... I am not refusing because I want to be unkind.... I can’t help it. Believe me, I cannot.”

The mother began tracing the design on the carpet, round and round the petals of the faded roses. When she spoke she did not raise her head. She kept on tracing ... tracing....

“There must be some reason, Lily.... It is a match not to be cast aside lightly.... It would make me very happy.”

She was interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Irene had vanished into the gallery on the far side of the drawing-room. The three of them saw her running past the window back into the garden as though she were pursued. The mother fell once more to tracing the outlines on the carpet. In the growing darkness the scent of the lilac grew more and more strong.

The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane ... alone, if possible. There are some things which I must tell ... things which are unpleasant but of tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must confess them.”

At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed her head suddenly and looked away.

“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.

The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”

He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”

The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky, glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.

Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons. There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against Irene’s pale one.

IV

That night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly, and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.

At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and addressed him.

“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began. “It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”

For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.

“I have told you that I love Lily.”

The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity of an iceberg.

“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”

Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say.... It is, after all, her affair.”

The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.

It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it to-night one way or another, for good and all.”

The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before her.

“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue. “Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe you understand.”

The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you know ... certainly not _now_.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down thoughtfully.

The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law. You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”

The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one. No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”

“But why ... why?” began her mother.

“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”

V

For a little while the room grew silent save for the distant pounding of the Mills, regular and reverberant, monotonous and unceasing. The wind from the South bore a smell of soot which smothered the scent of wistaria and iris. All at once a cry rang out and the Governor, very red and handsome in his tight coat, fell on his knees before her, his arms about her waist. The girl remained sitting quietly, her face quite white now against the black of her cloak.

“Please ... please, Lily,” the man cried. “I will give up everything ... I will do as you like. I will be your slave.” He became incoherent and muddled, repeating over and over again the arguments he had used in the afternoon by the old well. For a long time he talked, while the girl sat as still as an image carved from marble, regarding him curiously as though the whole scene were a nightmare and not reality at all. At last he stopped talking, kissed her hand and stood up once more. The old woman seated under the portrait said nothing. She regarded the pair silently with wise, narrowed eyes.

It was Lily who spoke. “It is no use.... How can I explain to you? I would not be a good wife. I know ... you see, I know because I know myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my affair.” A note almost of stubbornness entered her voice. “Two days ago I might have married you. I cannot now, because I know. I wanted to know, you see.” She looked up suddenly with a strange smile. “Would you have preferred me to take a lover from the streets?”

For the first time the mother stirred in her chair. “Lily ... Lily.... How can you say such a thing?”

The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”

For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say farewell.

“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then, checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been Irene.”

Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying slowly away as she ascended the stairs.

At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane, leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.

Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress Hill came abruptly to an end.

He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.

As for the third--Irene--she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.

VI

There had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town, when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.

Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house. Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane’s Castle and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town preferred their own name and it was known as Shane’s Castle to the very end.

Who John Shane was or whence he came remained a mystery. Some said he was Irish, which might well have been. Others were certain that he was English because he spoke with the clipped accent of an Englishman. There were even some who held that so swarthy a man could only have come from Spain or Italy; and some were convinced that his love of travel was due to an obscure strain of gipsy blood. As to the light which Shane himself cast upon the subject, no one ever penetrated beyond a vague admission that he had lived in London and found the life there too tame.

He set himself up in the house at Cypress Hill to lead the life of a gentleman, a worldly cynical gentleman, perhaps the only gentleman in the archaic sense of the word in all the Western Reserve. In a frontier community where every one toiled, he alone made, beyond the control of his farms, no pretense at working. He had his horses and his dogs, and because there were no hounds to follow and no hunters to ride with him, he set aside on the land bordering the main street of the Town a great field where he rode every day including the Sabbath, and took the most perilous jumps to the amazement of the farmers and townspeople who gathered about the paddock to watch his eccentric behavior.