When they had become more quiet, Lily kissed her and said, “You have been too unhappy. You must stay now with me ... forever, if you like. You must study and become a great musician. I am rich. I can help you.... If you won’t take the money, you can borrow it from me and pay me back when you are successful and famous....”
Lily rose languidly and brought a bottle of cologne and they both bathed their eyes. All the strangeness was gone now. Their tears, in the way of women, had brought them close to each other. The sun had come out and the little park was filled by its slanting rays. Belowstairs one of the tall windows opened and they heard on the gravel of the terrace the slow steps of blind Madame Gigon who, wrapped in an antiquated coat of fur and followed by the dogs, was moving up and down in the unaccustomed warmth. There was something in the sound which, as they listened, filled the room with the atmosphere of a conspiracy. For an instant the current of kinship ran swift and high, as high indeed as it had run in the old days when all the clan assembled for the annual feast at Shane’s Castle.
“She is growing feeble,” observed Lily. “Think of it. She’s eighty-five.”
Life was short. Only a little time before Madame Gigon had been a young widow come to the school of Mademoiselle Violet de Faux to teach, among others, an awkward young American called Julia Shane.
When Ellen had gone to her own room, she sat for a time before the fire, thinking, and slowly the face which she saw reflected in the dim old mirror began, though it was quite alone in the room, to smile back at her. It had not been difficult. It was all done now. The future was certain. She had gotten what was necessary, without asking for it; in some inexplicable fashion, quite without any planning, it had happened. She had not even been forced to say that all she had in the world were the seven francs that lay in the sunlight on the Louis Quinze console.
39
IN this one fleeting instant life had been briefly a perfect and exquisite thing. In the great house, surrounded by beauty, by warmth and friendliness, the past and, even for a time, the future did not exist. It was a moment which could not have endured; with such a person as Ellen a moment of that sort might have been called a miracle to have happened at all. As the months passed the very comfort which surrounded her degenerated into a sort of dulness. After a time, Lily returned to her beloved south and there remained in the house only Ellen, Madame Gigon and Jean. The endless talk of Lily’s guardian, which in the beginning had seemed vaguely diverting, became in the end merely the garrulity of a childish old woman. But there were worse things to bear.
She soon discovered that Lily, in her indifference, had virtually given over the house to Madame Gigon, and the old woman, poverty-stricken until Lily appeared on her horizon in need of a companion and watchdog, now used it to make up for all the years she had spent alone in a single room in a Versailles pension. Her friends were coming and going constantly, at the most inconvenient times, an endless procession of dowdy widows and spinsters. It was their habit to fortify themselves in the great drawing-room at just the moment chosen by Ellen for her practising. This they did with an air of the utmost assurance, as if their great age in some fashion gave them precedence over all else in this world. Thus they would sit for hours talking volubly in a tongue which so far as Ellen was concerned might have been Greek or Roumanian. But gradually as she came to understand a word here and there, the mystery surrounding their impassioned conversation was dissipated, and out of the fog there emerged the prosaic fact that their excitement had no foundation. They became as wild over the price of cheese or the health of Criquette as if they had been engaged in a battle to preserve la glorie de la patrie. Yet they were all rich; the very fingers which they shook so violently in the excess of their excitement glittered with diamonds and emeralds. And presently, as her knowledge of French increased, Ellen came to the dismal realization that the bulk of their talk was concerned with gossip. Gathered in a cluster about the blind old woman, they tore reputations as they might have torn cheese cloth. The words “maîtresse” and “intrigue” leapt from the conference a score of times within a single afternoon. Heads wagged and crêpe flowed, (for all of them were so old that they were perpetually in mourning for a husband or a brother or sister; indeed, they went beyond this and mourned darkly the demise of the most remote cousins). Madame de Cyon, the youngest of the lot and the one whom Mrs. Callendar had mentioned so long ago, had a way of narrowing her green eyes and saying, “Tiens! Tiens!” over some choice morsel, with an air of sniffing a bad smell. There were times when Ellen felt that if she said “Tiens! Tiens!” another time she would strangle her. Madame de Cyon was Russian but no better than the rest. They were all, Ellen came to understand, like the women of the Town; they visited Madame Gigon because she was blind and did not go out, and the remainder of their time, it seemed, was spent in collecting morsels for the delectation of the old woman.
There was but one thing which diverted the stream of their gossip and this was the mention of the sacred name of Bonaparte. She gathered, after a time, that there was a Prince Bonaparte in whom the existence of all of them had found its core. She learned to her astonishment that they ignored the very existence of the Republic. A tottering old man, the son of a plumber’s daughter and a dubious prince who was a homicide (all this she gathered from their talk) was, to them, a shining figure invested with all the glory of the Corsican’s golden bees.
At length, when she could bear it no longer, Ellen had a piano brought in and placed in one of the great empty chambers in the gallery above the drawing-room, and there she played for hours in defiance of “le Prince” and his court of old women belowstairs. There were times when the music (especially the compositions of some of the hateful new composers) became so violent that it threatened to drown the gossip of Madame Gigon’s cronies. At such moments the blind old woman would raise her sightless eyes toward the ceiling and observe to the others, “That is Madame Shane’s cousin. She is a violent woman (une femme sauvage).... She suffers from an excess of élan.”