Hattie Tolliver, dressed in shabby black, and weeping with joy, was on the pier, and with her, Robert, stolid and a little cynical of the grand manner with which his arrogant sister descended the gangplank. Seven trunks were gone through by customs men. Hattie Tolliver discovered that Miss Schönberg, instead of being a dark, sinister species of procuress, was red-haired, good-natured and immensely excited and triumphant. Robert, to his disgust, was told that he was quite a man, and Hattie was told that she was not a day older, that she must have a new hat ... a half-dozen new hats ... at once. And, at length, under the eyes of bedazzled fellow-passengers, the entire party, with immense gusto, got under way.
It was all different from the damp December day when a lonely young widow, secretly terrified, waved farewell to Fergus as the doddering old City of Paris slipped away from the pier. It was not Ellen Tolliver who was returning. She had been left behind somewhere in Europe. It was Lilli Barr.
The seven trunks did not go to the apartment in the Seventies; they were sent instead to the Ritz, to the rooms arranged by Raoul Schönberg, the diamond merchant, in accordance with instructions from his niece. Miss Schönberg went with the trunks and the wolf-like dog, but Ellen, with her hand clasped in both her mother’s, smiling in triumph beneath the gaze of her mother’s tear-stained eyes, went straight to the apartment. All the way Robert sat opposite them, stolidly. He was the bourgeois member of the family. For him there were no transports of joy and sorrow, no wild soarings of delight, no gay irresponsibility, no intense passions, no violent depressions, no fierce desire to set off wandering about the earth. And so it happened that he, the most dependable, the most unselfish, was the one whom all the others took for granted. For him there would never be any celebration to mark the prodigal’s return. Darkly he knew all this, and was in his quiet way, content. Somehow he had escaped the heritage of The Everlasting. Secretly he thought there was a great deal of bunk about Miss Schönberg and his sister Ellen; he suspected that their adventures had not been, in fact, so exciting as Miss Schönberg, with a magnificent embroidery of detail, made them seem.
Still, he knew nothing about their profession. Such nonsense might be necessary. Thank God, it was not necessary in the bond business to behave like a three ring circus!
It was long after midnight when Ellen at last joined her manager at the Ritz. Dressed in the smart clothes in which she left the ship, she remained at the apartment surrounded by her family, talking, laughing, even weeping a bit when the rich, violent emotion of her mother engulfed them all save Robert and The Everlasting in a sort of sentimental orgy. Gramp joined them too, for in a city apartment it was no longer possible to keep him shut away as they had done in the days when he occupied a room above the kitchen.
There was but one thing to sadden the reunion; it was the absence of Fergus. Ellen learned for the first time, when she asked for him, that he had gone to Europe. It was rotten luck, because in the depths of her heart he was the one she had wanted to see above all the others. He would have appreciated the grandiose triumph of her return; he would have laughed at it but he would have understood the importance of the spectacle. He would have known how well it was done. She needed his little touch of mocking humor, his complete sympathy.... And now he was gone. There was even a chance that she might never see him again.
The others had no interest in the spectacle. Her mother, it was clear, was proud that she was famous; but she really cared nothing at all for Lilli Barr. It was Ellen Tolliver who absorbed them all. They wanted to recapture Ellen Tolliver, pin her down and keep her with them forever. And that, of course, could not be done, because there was so little of Ellen and so much of Lilli.
Once, as they talked frantically, she caught a sudden twinkle in the eye of The Everlasting as he sat, silent and mocking, a little beyond the border of the family group. It was a brief twinkle, which vanished as quickly as it had come, but it told her that he, like Fergus, understood. He knew that she had carried the war into the enemy’s country and had won. They hadn’t, after all, pulled her down and clipped her wings.
And then, during a brief silence, in the flood of talk there sounded through the room the familiar echo of his demoniacal chuckle. He was thinking, perhaps, of the winter night when he threw a fit and so allowed Ellen to escape.
The occasion was so great that Gramp was allowed to have his dinner with the rest of the family, a privilege which had not been granted in more than fifteen years; for on that first night Hattie would have welcomed the devil himself and placed him on her right hand. Sitting there with his dim spectacles tilted on the end of his high thin nose, he watched them all without taking any part in the celebration. He listened while Ellen described Lily’s house in the Rue Raynouard, and he understood, what the others failed to understand, that of course the Baron was Lily’s lover. He saw quickly enough that Ellen had closed her eyes to all that took place in the lovely old house. And he knew what the others did not ... that Ellen had not really returned to them at all, that she had learned the wisdom of going her own way and allowing others to do the same. She had, in short, discovered freedom; she had found her way about in a strange world and had learned the tricks which gave her the upper hand. He was proud of her to have been so smart, to have learned so quickly.