A little before midnight she drove away for the last time from the house in the Avenue du Bois, having spent but ten hours of her life within its flamboyant walls. And by the time the taxicab arrived at Lily’s quiet, unobtrusive door her nerves were in a state of panic. She was filled with a dim sense of fleeing from some invisible, nameless thing as she had fled when a child through the dark halls of the house in Sycamore Street.
Lily and Hattie were waiting her, though she had sent no word of her coming. They were not surprised. There had been a cable from Tunis addressed to her, which they had opened and read,
“Sail to-morrow. R. C.”
After she had told them, abruptly and without explanation, that she had left Callendar forever, she locked herself in her room and looked at the cable again and again to make certain that she was not out of her senses. She had told him that she would stay at the house in the Avenue du Bois. How could he have known that she would escape so soon from that opulent, fleshly house to the refuge of Lily?
No, it was unbearable. One could not live with a man like that.
65
AS the weeks passed in the quiet of the big house in the Rue Raynouard, they did not annoy her. To Hattie, Ellen’s mood—her sulkiness, her silence—had a familiarity that was comforting; Ellen had been silent and sulky as a girl, she had behaved thus throughout that last happy winter before she escaped forever in company with poor Clarence. Hattie, in the midst of caring for a big house which ran much better when left to itself, went about mothering Ellen, respecting her silences, happy that for a little time her daughter seemed to have some need of her.
And Lily ... Lily was far too wise ever to pry into the affairs of any one. In time, she knew, everything became clear, everything would stand revealed. Besides there had been for her no element of surprise in the whole trouble. She had known men like Callendar; indeed, it was men like Callendar who had always been attracted to her (save only in the case of de Cyon with whom it was not a question of love). What puzzled her was the reason why a man like Callendar—a man capable of such intense passion, a man of such fascination and elusive masculinity—should ever have loved so persistently and in the end married a creature so independent, so fierce-willed as her cousin. One might as well have expected César to love Ellen; and César had hated her always with a passion which she returned. The whole affair had been wrong since the beginning ... perverse and unnatural. Any one could have known that they would be unhappy. And in a quiet, gentle fashion Lily found satisfaction in the spectacle of a humbled, unhappy Ellen married to a man who was a match for her, perhaps more than a match—a man who stood aside and watched her coldly in the way she had watched people all her life. It was almost as if the first poor, pale husband, whom Lily had met so long ago on the crowded train bound for the Town, was by some turn of circumstances being avenged.
Callendar, she knew, had come to the house not once but several times. He had talked with Ellen while they walked up and down the long garden beneath the mottled plane trees. She had watched them, secretly, wondering at the calm fashion in which they talked and at the inhuman hardness of Ellen. (She herself would have weakened and yielded long ago.) And each time he had gone away defeated, she knew, for the time being.
And then, slowly, bit by bit, the story came to her. She heard it even before Hattie heard it, how they had quarreled and how he had even gone so far as to strike her in a sudden gust of wild and unsuspected anger. She heard too of the women in the hotel at Tunis and of another woman, the wife of a French official living in a villa near them. Ellen had seen them walking together one night when she had stolen from the house to follow him.