But her satisfaction was not free from the old doubts. Was he—this Callendar—good enough for her? Clarence had never been. It was a good thing, she reflected, that he had died. What could she have done with him during all these years ... Clarence, a poor thing at best, always complaining of his health.
But this Callendar. Who was he and why had she never spoken of him before? Surely she was a strange girl who kept such secrets so passionately hidden. Where had he come from? Was he of good healthy stock? What had his life been? For a time she paced up and down the room in a ferment of curiosity. She tried to imagine what sort of man Ellen would choose to marry. (This time she must be marrying only for love; there could be no other reason.) She tried again and again to picture him and she found herself baffled. It was impossible to imagine....
And when she had grown more calm and the sense of the dreary flat was borne in upon her once more, she remembered The Everlasting. He was ninety-five, and yet not really an old man; his mind had never faltered in its course. But he was feeble and needed care. She could not desert him now. She deceived herself into believing that it was her duty to care for him until he died; and only the Almighty knew when that would be. No, she must take him with her. She could not leave him, as Ellen suggested, in some home for the aged. That would be wrong; it would be, in a sense, indecent. He was after all the father of her husband, the grandfather of her children. One could not do a thing like that. She debated the matter with herself for hours, thinking, strangely enough, only of reasons why she should take him; and it never once occurred to her that she really had no desire not to take him. The arguments against it were simply the habit of an intermittent civil war that had endured for more than thirty years. She could not bear to leave him behind, any more than she could have borne it to leave behind the old clothes, the worn shoes, and the Bible she had given Fergus on his tenth birthday. Gramp was a fixture now, a part of the past. Without him she would feel lost and lonely.
When she told him the intoxicating news, the old man, with a wariness that placed no trust in their unreal truce, looked at her sharply and said, doubtfully, “I don’t know, Hattie. I’m too old and too feeble. I think perhaps I’d better stay behind.” He opposed the idea in the belief that if he opposed it she would insist upon its being carried through.
But she was firm. She would not even argue the matter. He must go with her to Paris. He would be quite as well off there as anywhere else and he would at least be where she could look after him.
“Much better off,” thought Gramp, whose only desire was to see Paris again before he died. But he still maintained a resentful air as if he opposed the idea with his last breath but was far too feeble to offer any real resistance.
59
IN Paris the house in the Rue Raynouard was got ready for the arrival. It had begun again to take on a little of the old gaiety and sense of life, for it had passed through the depths of its depression in the days which first Lily and then Ellen had spent there alone in their sorrow. All things pass in time and so the grief and loneliness had begun to pass from the house. Lily, as the shrewd Rebecca predicted during her first quarrel with Ellen, found in time some one to console her for the loss of César. It was impossible that one so simple, so without complexities, should have gone on mourning; Lily lived as much in the present as Ellen lived in the future. Her consoler was the grave, dignified Monsieur de Cyon (the same white-haired gentleman connected with the government, whom Fergus had met at tea) the widower of “Tiens! Tiens!” de Cyon, whom Ellen had loathed long ago when she first came to the Rue Raynouard. He was glad no doubt to have been freed by death from the crêpe-laden “Tiens! Tiens!” and satisfied to have found so agreeable a creature as Lily—a woman whom he described to his friends as dignified, worldly, cultivated and beautiful, not omitting the fact that she was very rich and that she was an American, a factor of political importance at a moment when America was so necessary to Europe in general and to France in particular.
And Lily too was, in her casual way, content with such a marriage. In the room, smelling of scent and powder, where she had exchanged other confidences with Ellen, she said, “He is a gentleman and distinguished. Perhaps he may be in the next cabinet. I am rich. I can help him. And as for me....” She laughed softly, with a touch of the old abandon in her voice. “He will not bother me much. He is an old man.” But she was grave too when she spoke again. “And I ... I am no longer young. I am forty-three. I must begin to look about for something to take the place of youth. I shall make him a good wife. I shall be able to entertain and give dinners that will help him and I will have a position that I have never had before.”
And then she grew thoughtful and added, “It will be good for Jean too. It is time he had a father ... a thing he has never had. It is time that I stepped out of the picture and made way for him.”