It was true. The more successful her children became, the less Hattie Tolliver saw of them.
“It is a warning,” said Ellen, “never to be too fond of your children.” She laughed ironically. “And yet, if it hadn’t been for Ma, I don’t suppose I’d be where I am ... or Fergus or Robert either. She brought us up well. She made us ambitious.” And she concluded the speech with the remark that “it was a damned funny world anyway.” She had never seen any one who was content.
There had been a time, even a little while before, when she might have said that Lily was the supreme example of contentment, but that time seemed to have passed. Lily was clearly unhappy during that summer. She became more grave and quiet. She was content only when the Baron came down to stay for a week or two and rode with her through the mists of the early summer mornings. When he had gone again, the vague restlessness returned.
Madame Gigon grew to be more and more of a care; and added to the calamities, Criquette on short notice gave birth to a family of puppies of which it appeared the black and tan at the farm was the father. Somehow Madame Gigon took this as a betrayal on the part of the hitherto virginal Criquette. She complained of it as if Criquette had been her own daughter, as indeed she might well have been for the affection and care lavished upon her by the blind old woman. She succumbed completely to her arthritis and lay most of the day in a chair under the clipped linden trees, wearing an injured, fretful air when Lily was not by her side to talk or read to her. Indeed it appeared that between the riotous visits of Jean and Nellie a grayness had descended upon the lodge.
LXVII
IT may have been that Madame Blaise played her part in the depression. After the night that Lily ran out of her house, she never saw the crazy old woman again, for a day or two later Madame Blaise, in a purple hat and a bright Venetian shawl, was led away on the promise of a wonderful adventure to a house in Versailles where well-to-do lunatics were cared for and allowed to indulge to the utmost their idiosyncrasies. Her guardian was none other than the handsome and distinguished M. de Cyon, who with his brother, a lawyer, looked after the old woman’s property. She seemed completely happy in the new establishment, so M. de Cyon reported, because she found there an elderly wine merchant who believed himself descended from Henri Quatre and Diane de Poitiers, and therefore the rightful heir to the French throne. Together they spent their days plotting intrigues and revolutions by which he was to be set upon the throne with Madame Blaise as his consort. So there was no opportunity for Lily to wring from the old woman any further information regarding the photograph of the handsome gentleman in the black beard. The photograph together with the hundreds of other pictures, was packed away in a cavernous storehouse in Montparnasse when the furniture was cleared out of the chalet in the enclosure near the Trocadero and it was let to an Englishwoman interested in art. Life, as old Julia Shane said, was after all no story book in which everything was revealed. Every man had secrets which he carried into the grave.
But before Madame Blaise was led away, she kept her threat and sent round to the house in the Rue Raynouard The Byzantine Empress and The Girl in the Hat. The pictures were left there by the driver of a battered fiacre who went off immediately. To Lily, the pictures had become objects of horror. She would not see them. She bade the housekeeper put them away in the top room of the house where she could not possibly find them. When they arrived she was still in bed, suffering from a wild headache that did not leave her for days after the experience with Madame Blaise.
“It was horrible,” she told Ellen. “More horrible than you can imagine, to see that old devil dancing before me like an omen ... a warning of old age. If you had seen her ... so like me in the pictures ... so like me even in the reality, like me as I might easily be some day. It was horrible ... horrible!” And she buried her face in her hands.
Ellen, as usual, consulted Madame Gigon.
“She is really ill, this time,” she said. “It isn’t that she’s just tired. She’s frightened by something. She’s much worse than she’s ever been before.”