She bribed Augustine to let her know when Callendar came to the house, and when he arrived she took care that he did not escape without seeing her. She met him at the foot of the stairs. She did not flaunt her triumph; she was far too subtle for that. The same blood flowed in her veins and she understood how best to mock him.
She said, “Ah! It’s you. I hadn’t expected to see you here.” And holding out her hand with the air of a mourner, she murmured with sad looks and a bogus sincerity, “I’m so sorry it turned out badly. I had hoped you would be successful this time. I wanted you to know that I am full of sympathy.... But, of course, Ellen could not have done otherwise.”
And so she left him nothing to say. She sent him away, bedraggled and a little ridiculous, in defeat; for by the light in her eye he could not fail to see that she was jeering him. He had not subdued Lilli Barr. She belonged once more to Rebecca and to the world. And in the end it was women who defeated him—women who had always been his obsession, the women who surrounded Ellen—Lily and Hattie and Rebecca, the subtle Sabine and even Thérèse with her gift that made Ellen unpregnably secure. He had not broken her spirit, for he had never possessed her even for a moment; it was her awareness which had baffled him, standing like a wall across his path.
The perverse experiment had failed; there had not even been much pleasure in it. Youth lay behind him. What lay ahead? As he stepped from Lily’s door there were lines in the handsome, insolent face which no amount of exercise or massage could ever smooth away.... He was growing old. It was as if these women had banded together and, placing Ellen in their midst, now mocked him.... Women.... Women.... Women.... One could come to hate them all in the end.
So Rebecca too, in the wholly false supposition that she had come for a brief visit, was given a room that opened off the gallery and so joined all the colony which centered about Ellen in a world founded upon dividends from the black Mills in the Midlands.
And Ellen waited, growing more and more calm as her time approached. She found pleasure in the fantastic spectacle of Lily’s house. She was the center of it, and the old intoxication, so familiar to Lilli Barr, began slowly to claim her again.
66
THE thing happened on a hot breathless night in September when the shimmer of heat dying away with the fall of evening left the garden cool and dark save for the light that streamed from the windows of the long drawing room and from a single window of the white pavilion. The English nurse was there, waiting, and the doctor had come and gone to return in a little while. Everything went well, save that the patient (so the nurse explained to Hattie and Thérèse) was not accepting the ordeal in the proper mood. She had insisted upon playing bridge, when she should have been walking up and down, up and down, to hasten the birth of the child. She sat now in the drawing-room at a table with Lily, Jean and Rebecca, angry at not being allowed to smoke, desperate that she had no control over what was happening to her. She sat, holding her cards stiffly before her, clad in a peignoir of coral silk, her black hair drawn tightly back as she had worn it at her concerts.
“Two spades,” she said, and glared at Rebecca when the latter doubled. There was a dew of perspiration on her high smooth forehead and she bit her lips from time to time. She was magnificent and dominating (thought Lily). Really it was an amazing kind of fierce beauty.
In one corner de Cyon, ousted from the pavilion, sat reading his foreign newspapers—the threads which kept him in touch with the world of foreign politics. They lay spread out before him ... Le Journal de Genève, Il Seccolo of Milan, La Tribuna of Rome, the London Post, the London Times, the New York Times, Le Figaro, L’Echo de Paris, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin, L’Œuvre ... in a neat pile, from which he lifted them calmly in turn, to read them through and clip now here, now there, with the long silver scissors a bit of news, a king’s remarks, a prime minister’s speech or the leader of some Socialist editor. Ensconced behind the gilt table, he appeared cool and aloof, with his white hair and his pink face. What was going on almost at his side had no interest for him. His first wife had been barren and his second he had married too late. He clipped and clipped, the lean scissors snipping their way through words in Italian, Spanish, German, French and English. Snip ... snip ... snip ... they ran....