The mother sat up a little straighter and began to trace with her ebony stick the outlines of the roses on the Aubusson carpet. At length she spoke again in a clear, hard voice.
“Then you must pull yourself together and come out. I want you to find Lily and the Governor.—Every one is leaving and they should be here. There’s no use in giving a party for him if he is going to snub the politicians.... Here—sit up!... Turn round while I fasten your hair.”
With perfect deliberation the mother arranged the girl’s hair, smoothed the crumpled muslin of her dress, patted straight the blue ribbon sash, dried her eyes, and bade her stand away to be surveyed.
“Now,” she said in the same crisp voice, “You look all right.... I can’t have you behaving like this.... You should be out in the garden. Before I die, Irene, I want to see you married. You never will be if you hide yourself where no one can see you.... I don’t worry over Lily—she can take care of herself. Go and find them and bring them back.... Tell them I said to return at once.”
The girl, without a word, went out of the room into the big dark hallway and thence into the garden. Her mother’s voice was one made to command. It was seldom that any one refused to carry out her orders. When Irene reached the terrace the guests were making their way back toward the house in little groups of two or three, ladies in summer dresses very tight at the waists, shielding their complexions from the June sun with small, bright-colored parasols ... Mrs. Mills, the rector’s wife, Miss Bird, the Town librarian, Mrs. Smyth, wife of the Methodist clergyman, Mrs. Miliken, wife of the sheriff, Miss Abercrombie, Mrs.... And behind them, the husbands, and the stray politicians who treated the little arbor over the punch bowl as though it were a corner saloon. The punch was gone now and the last of the pink ices melted. From other parts of the garden more guests made their way toward the house. Irene passed them, bowing and forcing herself to smile though the effort brought her a kind of physical pain. Among the rhododendrons she came upon a little terra cotta Virgin and Child brought by father from Sienna and, remembering her convent training, she paused for a moment and breathed a prayer.
Lily and the Governor were not among the rhododendrons. She ran on to the little pavilion beyond the iris walk. It was empty. The arbor, green with the new leaves of the Concord grapes, was likewise untenanted save by the shadows of the somber, tall cypresses. The girl ran on and on from one spot of shelter to another, distracted and terrified, her muslin dress soiled and torn by the twigs. The little park grew empty and the shadows cast by the setting sun sprawled across the patches of open grass. Two hiding places remained, but these Irene avoided. One was the clump of bushes far down by the iron gates. She dared not go there because the little crowd of aliens peering through the bars terrified her. Earlier in the afternoon she had wandered there to be alone and a big tow headed boy shouted at her in broken English, “There are bones ... people’s bones hidden in your cellar!”
No, she dared not again risk the torment of his shouting.
The other hiding place was the old well behind the stables, a well abandoned now and almost lost under a tangle of clematis. There was a sheltered seat by its side. The girl ran as far as the stables and then, summoning her strength to lie to her mother if the necessity arose, turned back without looking and hastened across the garden toward the piazza. She had not the courage to approach the well because she knew that it was there she would find her sister Lily and the Governor.
When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity. She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were present—the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.
“And where are they?—Have you found them?”