“I never want to see you again,” she said. “I am grateful for what you have done, but you cannot arrange all my life for me. What you say is a lie.... It isn’t true. You say it all because you can no longer plan my whole life.”
So Rebecca had gone, her bright ferret eyes red and savage. On the long stairs she met Callendar coming in but she did not so much as glance at him. In her heart she had not yet yielded the victory. She would defeat him in the end. She would let him defeat himself, for she knew he was certain to do it.
It was de Cyon himself who arranged the transfer of Callendar to the African service, and so it happened that they went to Tunis for the honeymoon to a villa on the outskirts of the city which belonged to one of Thérèse’s Greek cousins, a man who served as head of the Mediterranean banks of Leopopulos et Cie. Ellen wrote to them regularly, letters which were like all the others she had ever written her mother since that first one from the Babylon Arms, restrained, careful and filled with a host of details from which one could gather nothing, and at the end always the same comment on the weather and the beauty of their garden with a brief line to the effect that “we are well and happy.”
In the Rue Raynouard, Gramp lived the same life that he had lived for thirty years. He had his books (for Hattie was rich now and expense no longer mattered) and he had his rocking chair placed absurdly among the Empire furniture of the room which Lily had given him. Nothing had changed save that his windows looked out upon a garden laid out by Le Nôtre and that he could hear the whistles of the boats on the Seine and that he went sometimes afoot on solitary expeditions through the neighboring streets, once as far as the Invalides. It was his habit to steal away secretly through the gate in the garden wall leading into the Rue de Passy. He remained inscrutable, uncommunicative and aloof, save with Jean for whom he displayed a fancy. And none of them knew that the thing he was looking for on these solitary meanderings was a youth which had returned to him now with an unearthly clarity, though there were moments when he was childish and could not remember that he was in Paris or what had happened to him only yesterday.
And Hattie, living now with Lily, began slowly to regain her interest in life. She took to inspecting the big house room by room to see that it was properly cared for; she quarreled in a stifled, incoherent fashion with Augustine and the other servants; she fussed about the garden, insensible to its beauty, and interested only in its order. She even undertook after a time to do the marketing herself when she discovered with horror that the shopkeepers paid old Mélanie the housekeeper a commission on what she purchased.
So Lily, for a third time, turned over the possession of her house to another. Madame Gigon had once treated it as her own and after her César and Ellen had quarreled over it. And now, willingly, she delivered it into the keeping of Hattie who had greater need of it than any of the others. She told the servants that they must not mind Madame Tolliver’s eccentric behavior and she made up to old Mélanie the amount of her commissions. But even if she had not done these things, they would not have left her, for Lily understood servants and had a way with them. Old Mélanie had been with her for more than twenty years, since Lily had come to Madame Gigon, a little frightened but resolved, none the less, never to marry Jean’s father.
62
SABINE, in her defeat, did not complain. In all the business of the divorce, she conducted herself as she had always done, with an amazing control; so that no one, not even Thérèse, was able to discover whether she was willing or not to release the pretense of a possession she had held over Callendar for so many years. They talked it over quite calmly, arranging all the details in the most business-like and efficient fashion, under the guidance of that short, frumpy, powerful old woman, Thérèse, who appeared to know the law as thoroughly as she knew the world of banking. There was no word spoken in anger or in haste. The withdrawal of Sabine from the position of wife was executed with as superb an air of indifference as her entrance into the rôle.
“I want no settlement and no allowance,” she had said as the three of them sat about the tea table in the small sitting room of the house in the Avenue du Bois. “Whatever you care to do for little Thérèse is, of course, your own affair. She is yours as much as mine. (A lie, she thought, because they did not care for her at all.) I have all I want.”
And the leave-taking had been like the departure of a woman from the office of her lawyer. There was no anger and there were no tears. Sabine rose and said, “I will go now.... I have taken a house in the Rue Tilsit. I shall be there in case you want me. I do not know the telephone but I will send it to you.”