When the little procession had vanished around a corner, Mrs. Tolliver brushed her black clothes, gathered up her basket and umbrella and set out up the hill to the Town. It was the first time she had ever set foot inside an establishment which sold intoxicating liquors.
Behind her in the darkened room at Cypress Hill, the sound of shots and cries came distantly to Julia Shane as through a high impenetrable wall, out of another world. At the moment she was alive in a world of memories, a world as real and as tangible as the world of the Mills and the Flats, for the past may be quite as real as the present. It is a vast country full of trees and houses, animals and friends, where people may go on having adventures as long as they live. And the sounds she heard in her world bore no relation to the sounds in sordid Halsted street. They were the sounds of pounding hoofs on hard green turf, and the cries of admiration from a little group of farmers and townspeople who leaned on the rail of John Shane’s paddock while his wife, with a skilful hand sent his sleek hunter Doña Rita over the bars—first five, then six and last of all and marvelous to relate, a clean seven!
A stained and dusty photograph slipped from her thin fingers and lost itself among the mountainous bedclothing which she found impossible to keep in order. It was the portrait of a youngish man with a full black beard and eyes that were wild, passionate, adventurous ... the portrait of John Shane, the lover, as he returned to his wife at the school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.
XLI
AS Julia Shane grew weaker, it was Cousin Hattie Tolliver who “took hold” of the establishment at Shane’s Castle. It was always Mrs. Tolliver, capable and housewifely, who “took hold” in a family crisis. She managed funerals, weddings and christenings. Cousins came to die at her shabby house in the Town. She gathered into her large strong hands the threads of life and death that stretched themselves through a family scattered from Paris to Australia. Her relatives embroiled themselves in scrapes, they grew ill, they lost or made fortunes, they succumbed to all the weaknesses to which the human flesh is prone; and always, at the definitive moment, they turned to Hattie Tolliver as to a house built upon a rock.
Irene, so capable in succoring the miserable inhabitants of the Flats, grew helpless when death peered in at the tall windows of Shane’s Castle. Besides, she had her own work to do. As the strike progressed she came to spend days and nights in the squalid houses of Halsted street, returning at midnight to inquire after her mother. She knew nothing of managing a house and Hattie Tolliver knew these things intimately. More than that, Mrs. Tolliver enjoyed “taking hold”; and she extracted, beyond all doubt, a certain faintly malicious satisfaction in taking over the duties which should have fallen upon Irene, while Irene spent her strength, her very life, in helping people unrelated to her, people who were not even Americans.
So it was Hattie Tolliver, wearing a spotless apron and bearing a dustcloth, who opened the door when Hennery, returning from his solitary and heroic venture outside the gates, drove Lily up from the dirty red brick station, bringing this time no great trunks covered with gay labels of Firenze and Sorrento but a pair of black handbags and a small trunk neatly strapped. It may have been that Hennery, as Irene hinted bitterly, made that perilous journey through the riots of Halsted street only because it was Mis’ Lily who was returning. Certainly no other cause had induced him to venture outside the barren park.
The encounter, for Hattie Tolliver, was no ordinary one. From her manner it was clear that she was opening the door to a woman ... her own cousin ... who had lived in sin, who had borne a child out of wedlock. Indeed the woman might still be living in sin. Paris was a Babylon where it was impossible to know any one’s manner of living. Like all the others, Mrs. Tolliver had lived all her life secure in the belief that she knew Lily. She remembered the day of her cousin’s birth ... a snowy blustering day. She knew Lily throughout her childhood. She knew her as a woman. “Lily,” she undoubtedly told herself, “was thus and so. If any one knows Lily, I know her.” And then all this knowledge had been upset suddenly by a single word from Lily’s mother. It was necessary to create a whole new pattern. The woman who stood on the other side of the door was not Lily at all—at least not the old Lily—but a new woman, a stranger, whom she did not know. There might be, after all, something in what Aunt Julia said about never really knowing any one.
All this her manner declared unmistakably during the few strained seconds that she stood in the doorway facing her cousin. For an instant, while the two women, the worldly and the provincial, faced each other, the making of family history hung in the balance. It was Mrs. Tolliver who decided the issue. Suddenly she took her beautiful cousin into her arms, encircling her in an embrace so warm and so filled with defiance of all the world that Lily’s black hat, trimmed with camelias, was knocked awry.
“Your poor mother!” were Cousin Hattie’s first words. “She is very low indeed. She has been asking for you.”