Hattie’s room—the room to which she had come to spend the rest of her life—was large and airy with two tall windows which opened on the garden where Lily had taken Ellen’s place and was now walking up and down, up and down, with her tall red-haired son. He was a man now and it made Hattie tremble to think how little difference his improper existence had made. There in the garden, under the old trees, it seemed of no importance that he had never had, in the proper sense, a father. He belonged there, with Lily. There was a rightness about the whole thing which Hattie sensed from afar off but was unable to explain ... a vague feeling that Lily’s life had been, despite everything, a life complete and in the proper key, like a beautiful painting superbly drawn and executed with all the boldness of a sure hand. Lily perhaps had led the life for which she was born. Hattie saw that she was telling the boy something which had led her to weep, for she lifted her handkerchief to her eyes and the boy halted to face her with his brow crinkled into little furrows. He was so like Fergus....
And in the next instant she knew what it was that Lily had said. Ellen put her arms about her mother and murmured in a low voice, “I have some bad news, Ma.”
And Hattie, looking at her in a queer stony fashion, replied, “I know what it is. Robert too is dead.”
It was true. Little by little, while her mother sat listening in the same stony silence, Ellen told the whole story. It was Callendar who had brought the news. He had come from the front on leave this very morning. There—somewhere in the Argonne—he had come across Robert’s regiment and there they had become acquainted. And then on the night before Callendar left, he had been sent for by one of the Americans. He had gone to a dressing station, but Robert was dead when he arrived. He had been wounded while saving one of his own men caught among the barbed wire between the German lines and his own. The man had been saved; he would live. It was he who had told Callendar the whole story, he who in a sort of delirium had described the whole affair with a fantastic poetry ... the fog that had settled over the lines, the swift, brilliant flare of the Veery lights, the faint, malicious, pop! pop! of the gas shells as they buried their noses so neatly in the earth. It was in this wild, unearthly setting that Robert had given up his life. Robert (thought Hattie) who had said, “There’s nothing romantic about war.... The side which is the most efficient.... There won’t be any nonsense.... I’ll look out for myself.”
When Ellen had finished they were both silent for a time and at last, Hattie, still dry eyed, said in a firm voice, “It is a judgment ... I love my children too well ... better than my own God and now they have been taken from me.”
(If only it had been Robert.... And now it was Robert too.)
She lay down on the great bed, a strange, incongruous figure—this grim, primitive, black-clad woman—in the midst of all the luxury that Lily had provided. And presently she said, “I’d like to be alone for a time, Ellen. I’ll call you ... later on.”
So Ellen left her mother in solitude, but as the door closed behind her she knew that it was herself upon whom the remnants of her family—Hattie and The Everlasting—now depended. It was she who, after all these years in which she had neglected and forgotten them, had become the rock, the foundation. And she knew too that there could no longer be any doubt about marrying Callendar. She would have to marry now.... Now that Robert, too, was gone there were new reasons. There remained only one thing that she could do for her mother. It might as well be Callendar as any other man.
61
THEY were married a month before the armistice, quietly with only Monsieur de Cyon and Lily and Jean and Hattie at the ceremony. It was the family once more (the remnants of the vigorous family which had once filled the drawing-room at Shane’s Castle) which dominated all else in fitting fashion at such events as births and deaths and weddings. Thérèse was not present, for Ellen had decided quickly and there was not time for her to return from New York. Nor was Rebecca there. A week before the wedding there had been a scene in which Rebecca played all her cards in a forlorn hope of winning the game against Callendar. She had told Ellen that she herself was a Jewess and knew what men like Callendar were like. She had told her that he was cruel and domineering and that all his patience, all his quiet aloofness only covered the steel of a will which she would come in time to know too well. She said that in the end he would do his best to destroy her, not alone as a musician but as a woman. And Ellen listened quietly, secure against it all in the knowledge of the new duty that lay before her. It was not until Rebecca in a perfect debauch of fury screamed at her, “He is marrying you only to break your will ... to destroy you. It is that which lies behind it all.... A conflict.... I know.... A conflict. He has wanted it all these years,” that Ellen grew white and terrifying and told her to go.