But Thérèse was confident. “No, I have said prayers. I have burned candles. I have done everything.... I have paid an astrologer.... I have overlooked nothing. I am sure it will be a grandson. It is all arranged. You have made me happy, my child. I must arrange to reward you.”
(So Ellen had made two women fantastically happy ... her own mother and old Thérèse.)
“I will make a settlement on you. I will give you a present ... a magnificent present.” And she began to finger her reticule again as if she might draw from it a bag of great gold pieces. “I will send to-morrow for a lawyer. We will arrange it.”
And then, like Hattie, she began to offer piece after piece of advice, bits of good sense and weird snatches of ancient, tribal superstition. Ellen must do thus and so to make certain the child was a boy. She must eat this and that. And she must have the proper doctors ... the very best. They must take no risks. “I will pay for everything ...” she repeated. “You can charge it all to me. What is a little money to Thérèse Callendar?”
And at last she left, still excited and chattering. At the foot of the stairs, she turned, “I am going now to Madame de Thèbes to find out if it will be a boy.... But I am certain ... I am sure.” And she waddled up the long stairs and climbed again into the motor which drove her away on a round of fortune tellers.
The next morning she returned bringing her lawyer and with Ellen they sat for an hour in de Cyon’s study arranging the settlement. It was shrewdly managed. Thérèse made a fine gift, but with many strings to it. Ellen was not to be allowed to touch the principal. The income would be hers whether the child was a boy or a girl. If it was a boy the principal would go to him on the death of his mother; if a girl it would return to the estate. The money, whatever became of it, was never to escape from the Callendar-Leopopulos fortune; but the income was large enough to support Ellen in comfort for the rest of her life. She accepted it because it made her position impregnable; it protected her, it gave her possession over the boy (for she too was certain it would be a boy) to do with as she saw fit. And she need never again know the old terror of being poor.
It was not until two days later, when she examined the settlement carefully, that she discovered a part of it was in real estate and included the flamboyant Babylon Arms, fallen now upon evil days, grown shabby and no longer respectable. The house where poor Clarence had lived until he destroyed himself was to be the property of her child ... a child whose father was Richard Callendar.
Slowly the whole life in the big house came to revolve about Ellen and the coming child. June passed and July. The gentle de Cyon was moved with all his books and files and papers from the pavilion into a room on the second floor. (No man save one with the resistance of old Gramp had any chance in this household of women.) Thérèse, untidy, her eyes brighter and brighter with the reassurance given her by Madame de Thèbes and a dozen other soothsayers, came daily and bore Ellen away to a variety of doctors. Callendar came sometimes on calls which grew more and more formal as time passed; and Sabine called and sent baskets of fruit. Musicians, actresses, composers passed in and out. Through it all, Hattie moved in her triumphant way, older now but scarcely less subdued than she had been in the days when she sat darning, surrounded by her family in the shabby sitting room on Sycamore street. In Hattie there were elements of the eternal which took no account of changes in the life about her. It is possible that nothing in the whole spectacle seemed in the least strange to her. She appeared to accept its absurdity as a matter of course ... the presence of Lily’s French husband, of Jean who had had no father, the glittering dinners given in the Louis Quinze dining room which she never attended, the comings and goings of the untidy old woman who ate biscuits out of a handbag, the visits of the fastidious and fashionable Sabine, and even the occasional calls of Callendar himself, a man whom she regarded as a sinister and immoral creature, who would have ruined the life of any one of less character than a child of hers. She was busy. She had no time for memories. She had no longer to invent tasks for herself, and so she was happy. She was caught up again in the wild scurry and confusion of life.
Only Lily and old Gramp took the affair with calmness, the one gently with the air of knowing that in all the confusion some one must keep her head and smooth out all the little difficulties which arose from so strange a mélange of characters, the old man with an indifference which placed small value upon the arrival of one more child in a world already too well filled, a world in which there could no longer be any solitude save in one’s own soul. He came and went as he chose through the garden gate opening into the Rue de Passy, encountering on his way now Sabine, now old Thérèse, now de Cyon, now a doctor or two, all of whom regarded him with the air of looking upon a specter. It was impossible to believe that so old a man could still be alive. He passed them all without so much as a glance, absorbed always in his search for the youth which had escaped him forever. In him too there were elements of the eternal, which nothing could alter or change in any way. To Gramp, Sycamore Street and the Rue Raynouard were in the end the same.
And then one morning a taxicab appeared at the door and discharged into the midst of the confusion a triumphant Rebecca Schönberg, bustling and with a new light in her ferrety eyes, her mind full of schemes for fresh triumphs and new concert tours; for the news of the débâcle had come to her through the gentle and forgotten Schneidermann in Vienna where she had gone to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina. Already, before even she had seen Ellen, she had started under way news of the return of Lilli Barr to the concert stage. (She knew well enough that Ellen would never return to Callendar. She knew that in the end he had defeated himself. He had hung himself with his own rope; but he had done it so much sooner than she expected.)