As for Hattie, the news appeared to change the whole tone and color of her life. Besides running the house she began to fuss and fidget over her Ellen. She recommended this and that; she was always advising her on the subject of prenatal influence. “You must remember,” she said, “that I planned you should be a musician long before you were born. You can mold the whole life of the child.”
She did not care whether the child was a girl or a boy. It was enough that she was to have a grandchild.
On the other side of the Atlantic, old Thérèse received only the calamitous news that there had been a separation. Instantly she had wound up her affairs, closed the house on Murray Hill and engaged a cabin. There was no time to be lost. Richard and Ellen must be reconciled at once. They must be brought together again. If this last chance failed, it would be the end of everything. There would be no more Callendars and no more men to care for the Callendar fortune and the ancient banking firm of Leopopulos et Cie. In an agony of uncertainty, the fat, bedizened, energetic old woman crossed the Atlantic and rushed by motor from Havre to Paris. In her heart, she had known all along that the marriage could not endure. She had played all her stakes on the chance that it would endure long enough to accomplish her purpose.
Still in ignorance of the prospects, she arrived in Paris late in the afternoon and went straight to the house in the Avenue du Bois where her son waited her in the small sitting room. Black and untidy, with her precious reticule swung over her fat arm, she closed the door behind her and faced him in a fury. She did not greet him. She did not even wait for him to speak.
“What is it you have done now? I know it is your fault. You have ruined everything.” Her beady eyes glittered and she panted for breath as she flung herself down, thinking “After I work for years to accomplish this marriage.”
He smiled at her. “I have done nothing,” he said. “I do not know why she ran away.”
But she knew he was lying. “You do know,” she cried. “You do know. It is another woman.... Why can’t you leave women alone? You,” she mocked, “who thought yourself so wise, so clever with women, have ruined everything again.” Her fury mounted and she began to shriek at him incoherently like a mad woman. “She will never divorce you as Sabine did.... Of what use are you to any one? Who would regret it if you died? You are worthless.... You are a waster ... a devil.” She beat her reticule with her fat bejeweled hands and gasped for breath. “I spend all my life caring for your fortune and you only waste it and run after women.... What sort of a man are you? You cannot even give me an heir.... There is a curse on you.”
Callendar stood by the open window looking out, his back the picture of a cold and maddening indifference. It must have been clear to him that she cared more for her fortune than for her son. Her fortune.... It was the one thing left her now, and what could she do with it? She could not take it into her grave. She could not even rest there knowing that it was being wasted and would in the end be broken up into small bits and distributed among obscure cousins she had never seen ... the fortune which her family, the family of the green-eyed old banker of Pera, had built up over centuries....
“Does all that mean nothing to you? Does nothing have any meaning for you?” she cried.
They were in open warfare now, the mother and the son, and after all that had been said nothing would ever again be the same between them. They stood there naked in combat, stripped of all pretense and intriguing.