# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 56

IT was a wet night of the early spring when Fergus got down from the Metro at Passy bound for the house in the Rue Raynouard. He had been there before, many times, for Lily, pleased perhaps to have him in a house which seemed now so empty and desolate, had given him one of the rooms opening upon the long gallery to use as he saw fit. But the visits had not been too cheerful. He had found Lily alone in the house, mourning for old Madame Gigon and her nephew, the Baron. The old beauty of the place had not faded; even Lily had not changed greatly. She was still young, amazingly so, but she appeared saddened and more quiet than in the days when, bedazzled, he had sat by her side at the family dinners in Shane's Castle. There was left of Madame Gigon's pets only Criquette, the Aberdeen, old and fat and quizzical, who followed at the heels of Augustine, the maid, and sniffed continually at Madame Gigon's chair before the fire.
He had met there Lily's son Jean, his own cousin, whom he had never seen before—a tall, red haired boy, impatient and wild over the mutilation that kept him in Paris shut up in the offices of the Ministry of War. It was strange to see one's own cousin (and Jean resembled Fergus amazingly in many ways) a Frenchman, a foreigner who spoke English with an accent. He had met there at tea a Monsieur de Cyon who seemed devoted to Lily and who was connected in some way with the government—a distinguished, white haired man recently become a widower. It was all very queer and foreign, yet when one thought of it, not so different ​from Shane's Castle which in the midst of the Mills had always had its own strange air of the old world. It was Lily, the sinner of the family, the one who had surrounded herself with luxury and mystery, who explained it all. Knowing her, you could understand how there could be a bond between that smoky city of the Midlands and this quiet, beautiful house in the Rue Raynouard. She belonged to both and yet in a way to neither . . . a woman of the sort which had existed since the beginning of time. Fergus knew women rather better than most men, for they were attracted easily to him, but he knew of none who approached Lily in the perfection of her rôle. He understood Lily now. . . . He was no longer a little boy sitting fascinated by her side in the gloomy dining room of Shane's Castle. He knew the world now. Experience had come his way.
He thought of all this for the hundredth time as he emerged from the Metro into the drifting mist that obscured the tall white houses of the Square Alboni. In one sense he had changed. He was a man now, though he appeared little older than on the day he bade Ellen farewell. His features were more firmly molded; he had grown more handsome. But he was young still; it was the sense of youth which always impressed people, a reckless, headlong youth, of the sort which has no value in a worldly sense but glorifies all who are sensible to its glow. And he walked with a slight swagger born not of any pomp but of an excess of animal spirits, of a great vitality.
As he stepped out into the darkness the figure of the old flower woman sitting beneath her umbrella in a mist of rain and mimosa blossoms took form in the shadows. In the faint blue light from the darkened street lamp he stooped and bought from her a great armful of golden, powdery blossoms. (The mimosa was in full blossom now in Nice, showering Lily's white villa with its scented dust.)
Touched and warmed by his youth, the old woman chuckled. "Pour votre marraine?" she asked. (She had sold him flowers before now.)
​"No," he told her. "Not this time. They are for my sister."
It was Ellen whom he was to see in the Rue Raynouard, Ellen whom he had not seen in years. . . . Ellen who was famous now, a great musician.
As he moved away, it struck him as luck that he had come by chance on the flower woman. For a musician, an artist, flowers were the thing . . . an enormous bunch of flowers. Ellen would appreciate the gesture. She would play up to it. She would, he fancied, even expect it.
In the blue darkness (it was an excellent night, he thought, for an air raid) he turned the corner past the Café des Tourelles and the blind, steel-shuttered magasin. The houses stood forbidding and black. The Rue Raynouard between the magasin and the tobacconist's shop gaped like the mouth of Avernus. It would be difficult to find the house, turning its deceptive, insignificant face to the street, so lost among its commonplace neighbors. From far away, on the slope that led down toward the Seine, the sound of footsteps, muffled by the damp, came to him across the cobblestones. But the solitary walker turned away and the sound died presently into silence.
A hundred paces from the square he halted before a house to search for the number. In the darkness it remained invisible; it was impossible to find it even by sense of touch. Puzzled, he stood for an instant looking up and down the street, and then through the thick stillness there rose the faint sound of music, distant and fragmentary. Listening, he found presently that the melody took form: the fragments joined into a pattern of sound. It was the Appassionata. Only the crescendos were swept toward him through the damp night air, only the moments when the music rose into a wild abandon. There could be no mistaking it . . . the music was Ellen's, more magnificent than it had ever been.
As he stood there in the thin mist upon the doorstep the sound, coming distantly from inside the house up the long paneled stairs, had upon him an amazing effect. It was a sensation bordering upon clairvoyance; he no longer stood on the dripping cobble​stones before a solid door, his feet upon solid earth. It was as if he existed in space alone at a great height; rather as if he had died. There was in the feeling something of terror at the immensity which surrounded him, an emotion which he had known once or twice before when, flying at night, there had been for a time no earth below him, nothing solid in all creation—a time when, if he existed at all, it was as an atom lost in all time and space. It was, he felt dimly, like being dead . . . a reverent, humbled feeling.
And yet in a confused fashion all life had suddenly achieved an amazing clarity. He knew himself suddenly, honestly, for what he was—a man who had harmed none, who had achieved nothing, who had asked only to find pleasure in living. And the others—He saw them too with the same terrifying brilliance . . . Ellen, who for all her faults was so much more worthy, who had in her the elements of a great nobility; his mother, passionate and bursting with vitality, a little somber and tragic save that she would never recognize tragedy when it came her way; and Lily, who had lived by some plan which she had never revealed, choosing instead to hide it away among the other mysteries of her life; and Jean, whom he scarcely knew until this moment, Jean who was neither French nor American nor even an honest child. He saw Jean's life too and its queer, inarticulate tragedy. And Old Gramp, who stood outside them all, aloof and cold, uncaught by the web that bound them all together . . . Gramp hugging his secret passionately to him. But it was Ellen whom he saw more clearly than all the others, struggling, fighting with a strange unconquerable courage, using the weapons which she found at hand, weapons which were not always fair. Some day she would choose the honest ones and then . . .
Far away, somewhere in the blanket of darkness the music died away and presently he stood again before the door on the cobblestones, rubbing the sleeve of his blue greatcoat across his face with the gesture of one awaking from a profound sleep. The great bunch of mimosa lay at his feet. It was amazing. He had been ​for a moment dead, quite outside this world. The street was still again with a blue, dripping silence. Under each lamp there was a pool of blue light that was not light at all, but only another kind of darkness.
He gathered up the damp flowers and knocked loudly. It was too dark to find the bell and he stood there for a long time before the door was opened by Augustine who it seemed had gone to bed in the belief that no one could be out on such a night. She stood in a sort of wrapper ornamented with a gay design of Cupids, holding up her black hair with one hand. He saw with an amazing clarity each tiny detail, even the veins in her big red feet half-muffled in gigantic purple slippers.
"Ah!" she said. "It's you, M'sieu Tolliver. . . . Madame Shane is not here. She is in Nice."
And again the sense of having returned from the dead swept over him. Augustine was as astonished as if she had opened the door upon a phantom. Yet there was nothing extraordinary in calling at ten o'clock in the evening, even on a night like this.
"It is my sister I've come to see . . . Miss Tolliver."
"She is here . . . in the salon. She told me I might go to bed. There is a gentleman with her."
Clearly it was impossible for Augustine, in her state of attire, to announce him. He took off his greatcoat while the Breton girl, her eyes shining in admiration for a young aviateur, stood by holding the mimosa. He was straight and tall in his blue uniform with the silver wings glittering on his breast. He had his effect upon Augustine . . . the blue eyes, the blond curling hair, the spoiled mouth.
"I'll go in myself," he said, taking the flowers from her once more. "It's all right, I know."
And he started down the long stairs where the candles glowed dimly against the satinwood paneling. Half way down, where the gallery led off on both sides, the sound of music reached him once more. This time it was different; there were no passionate crescendos of sound, no tides of melody that swept high. The ​music was low and gentle and filled with pathos. And presently he heard a voice—Ellen's voice—begin to sing in a clear contralto of unsuspected beauty. He went slowly, step by step, his shoulders brushing the satinwood beneath the dull flare of the candles. Out of the depths of the warm old room the sound came to him with the same amazing clarity which seemed to affect all his senses. . . .
She sang gently, with an infinite sadness. . . . Ellen who had damned the war, Ellen who had striven to ignore it, Ellen who had turned her back and taken no part in all the vast parade. What could she have known of it? What of Christmas and "les petits enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons."
And yet, listening, Fergus understood that she did know. This new Ellen, the artist, knew it as she knew all things because she was, in spite of Rebecca Schönberg, in spite of shrewd lighting and bouquets sent by the management, in spite of all the clap-trap, an artist. Standing there in the shadows of the stair, he knew without having seen her that she was changed. Something had happened to her.
Fergus moved down from the last step of the long stairs. The green music of Debussy died away, and as he entered the room he saw that Ellen was not alone. She sat at the piano in the far end near the bright fire where she had sat on that first day when she had entered from the same stairway to discover Madame Gigon, little Jean and the dogs. There was only Criquette left now, lying fat and lonely before the fire, and Hansi, the great black wolf. Beside her, with his back towards the stairs, sat a man with dark hair in a uniform blue like the one Fergus himself wore; and while he stood, silent in his surprise, he saw the stranger lean forward and, taking Ellen in his arms, kiss her. He saw too that her arms were about the stranger, but it was not the embrace that astonished him; it was the sight of Ellen's strong, white hand, clenched as if in resistance, as if in pain. Yet she did not struggle. It was only the hand . . . clenched, white, as if all her will, all her resistance were centered in it.
It gave Fergus the strangest shock. He found himself turning abruptly away and hiding in the stairway with an air of having witnessed something obscene. It was all spoiled now, all the entrance he had planned, the hope of finding her alone, the mocking, teasing, grandiose speeches he had planned. The stranger had taken possession of her, placed himself there between them as a barrier. It was ridiculous. . . .
Feeling like a small boy who had been caught eavesdropping, he coughed and scuffled his feet and then made a second entrance. This time they turned and Ellen, rising to her feet, stared at him for a moment and then rushed toward him cry​ing, "Fergus! Fergus! You should have told me you had leave!"
He knew at once that she guessed he had seen them. Her face was flushed with shame and hurt pride. He knew the fierce pudeur (there was no other word for it) that enveloped her. It was a part of her savage unwillingness to surrender, to reveal, anything of herself.
Her beauty astonished him. He had seen photographs of her, but in them he had seen nothing of the proud domination that gave her that look of swooping down on one. It occurred to him in a flash that old Julia Shane, Lily's mother, must have looked like this in her youth. Only she had worn crinolines and Ellen was all in black in a tight gown that made her look like (the old simile returned, the inevitable one) like a greyhound. She had changed enormously; the awkwardness had vanished. This was no girl who hurried toward him; it was a woman, superb, splendid, full of fire.
"Fergus!" she cried, and ignoring the mimosa she crushed the bright gold blossoms against his blue tunic so that the yellow pollen clung to it and dimmed the silver wings. She kissed him passionately and held him in her arms for a long time. She was excited. He had never seen her like this. The shyness, the restraint was gone, for the moment at least. He felt a quick satisfaction of vanity, almost as if he had been her husband instead of her brother. She was a creature to be proud of. No wonder this stranger . . .
The dark man had risen now and stood waiting quietly for them to join him by the fire. He was a handsome fellow of perhaps thirty-five, though he may have been older, thin perhaps from the hardships of war. And in the olive skin were set the strangest pair of gray eyes, which looked on now with an expression of mild amusement. They were eyes which fascinated you, which you were certain had the power of seeing things which other eyes had not.
​"Richard," said Ellen, "this is my brother Fergus . . . Mr. Callendar."
Her voice trembled a little with excitement. It may have been that this was the moment for which she had returned. She had them together now, with her, in the very same room, the two men—indeed, the two persons—whom she cherished above all others in the world. She had not been, after all, too late.
It must have been clear to Fergus, even in the disappointment of the moment, that he had stumbled awkwardly into the midst of some queer situation. He understood now why she had sent Augustine off to bed. It explained too the excitement of her manner and the sudden falling away of the reserve which she had always held before her as a warrior his shield. She still blushed, and she lighted a cigarette with a comically obvious air of covering her confusion. It was amazing to find in this woman who was by nature so self-possessed, so cold, a sudden air of school girl coquetry. This was an Ellen whom her brother had never seen, whom perhaps no one had seen until now.
And the stranger? He still stood with his feet well apart, finishing the last of his Chartreuse, balancing himself lightly on his toes, quite calm and smiling a little in a fashion that would have been warm and friendly save for the expression in the gray eyes. In their obscure, blank depths, there lay something sinister . . . "catlike" was the word. They were eyes like those of a cat, proud, sensual, indifferent, aloof, and incapable of smiling.
They sat down and for a moment Fergus was tempted to blurt out sharply that he had spied upon them unwittingly, that he knew exactly the mood into which he had blundered so clumsily. It would perhaps have shattered the tension and cleared the air, reducing them to a common ground of meeting upon which they might laugh and talk like old friends. It did not occur to him that Callendar might be his sister's lover because, in spite even of her blushes and confusion, he knew that such a thing was impossible. Besides, their manner toward each other was not that ​of lovers; it lacked the hidden intimacies which come of only one experience. They were a little formal, a little strange. The flame that leapt between them was not quite clear and white and unhindered; there were obstructions, misunderstandings. It was a complicated relationship, one could see at a glance, and a little ridiculous. Even Callendar, so clearly a man of the world, so clearly a man who was neither an innocent nor a yokel, was not at his ease.
"Mr. Callendar," said Ellen, "is an old friend of mine. Until the other day I had not seen him for years."
But for Fergus this could have been no explanation. It told nothing of all that passed in those missing years, nothing of the intriguing of old Thérèse, nothing of the slow passion, fed upon absence and memories that instead of dying had, as Thérèse knew, gained strength. It revealed nothing of all the forces, conscious or blundering and obscure, which had been at work weaving the slow web that was now near to its end. Fergus alone guessed how nearly it was finished. It came to him in a return of that sudden flight of clairvoyance which had seized him in the dark street outside the door. He understood with an unearthly certainty that this was the man whom fate (that nonsensical force) had marked for his sister. This was the man destined to know all the tempestuous sweep of her fierce energy, her vast capacity for devotion, all the forces that until now had lain buried and dormant. This perilous man . . . (It was strange that strong women were likely to be unhappy in love, to make so often a choice which all the world, even the stupidest fellow, could have told her was wrong.)
It was this current of thought which ran beneath the surface of all their polite conversation, made so scrupulously, with such labor in defiance of that strain which none—not even Callendar, who perhaps chose to make no such effort—could dissipate. For Ellen's moment had passed swiftly as such moments, awaited so long, are likely to pass. There had been a quick flare of delight in the possession of them both and then this confused disappointment and sense of ill-ease clouding everything.
​The tension lessened a little when Fergus, seeking in his amiable way one subject after another to pierce the indifference of the stranger, stumbled upon Loos and Amiens which Callendar knew as thoroughly from the ground as Fergus knew them from the air. But this led to nothing because it was now Ellen who found herself thrust outside the pale and left to grow sulky while they talked of this sector and of that one, each discovering with a swift heightening of interest that they had taken part in the same drive.
"My battery," said Callendar, "lay just back of Hill 408, in the curve of the road beyond Jouy. . . ."
"It was at Jouy," interrupted Fergus, his good-natured face flushing with interest, "that we broke up a German escadrille . . . four of them shot down."
"Did you ever see Reymont?" asked Callendar. . . . "The general of our division? . . . A pompous ass!"
"He was at St. Pol while I was there. He reviewed the division when it came in from the east. . . . I saw him on a balcony. . . ."
And so on, talking of this spectacle which Ellen despised as much because she could have no part in it as for any other reason. She would, at that moment, have preferred the spectacle to all the success, all the triumph; but it was no good. She was, for all her strength, all her power, simply a woman, thrust outside the experience which had enkindled Callendar and her brother. They had slipped away from her into a world of which she knew nothing.
At last, turning in pique from their talk, she went out and herself fetched them whiskey and soda, and when she had interrupted them long enough to pour out a glass for each she turned to the piano and fell to playing softly, as if to draw them quietly back to her. It was a plan which proved successful, for presently their talk abated a little and finally ceased; the war was put to rout and it was Ellen once more who held the center of the stage. The two men leaned back in their chairs, scrupulously silent, listening while she played for them in a fashion she had not done in years. And ​for a time she recaptured a little of the joy that had escaped so quickly.
She played the things she knew would please Fergus, the music which he had loved in the days of the house in Sycamore Street and the flat in the Babylon Arms, music she had played for him alone at the moments when Clarence was not there to disturb her with the silent, unrelieved pleading of his dim eyes. She played the simple old March from The Ruins of Athens, and one or two Chopin waltzes and the Marche Funèbre, which to Hattie would always be McKinley's Funeral March and which to Fergus invoked memories of Shane's Castle and Ellen in shirtwaist and skirt wearing at her belt a jingling thing they called a chatelaine. And she wooed them with such success that, hypnotized by the spell, they did not hear the first screams of the sirens rushing through distant streets nor the faint popping of the guns far away on the summit of Montmartre.
It was not until she paused, her hands resting thoughtfully on the ivory keys, that Callendar stirred himself and murmured in French, "The Boches are here. . . . Listen. The siren!"
And from the street nearby—perhaps from the Place Passy—the shriek of a fire engine penetrated the room, even through the heavy brocade curtains that muffled the windows. There was one more scream and then another and another, and then the faint, distant popping of guns, like a barrage of tiny fire-crackers. Fergus stood up and glanced at his wrist.
"I must go," he said. "I'm late already."
"Not now," protested Ellen, turning abruptly. "Not now in the midst of a raid. You can spend the night here. . . . There is plenty of room." She trembled a little, as if in terror of losing him so soon.
Fergus smiled. "I can't," he said. "You see, I have a rendezvous . . . with a man from my escadrille. He is waiting for me now."
"He won't be expecting you . . . not now."
​"I can't help it, Ellen. He'll be waiting. Great Heavens! I've been through a hundred raids. They've tried to blow us up every night. . . ."
She had taken his hand now and was pleading anxiously. "But this is different."
Fergus laughed. "It is different," he said. "There's not one chance in a million here. . . ."
Callendar merely smiled, as if to confirm the statement of Fergus that it was ridiculous to suppose there were any danger. He had, of course, no reason for wanting him to remain. It was Fergus who won in the end, merely by persistence—a strange thing, for usually it was the strong-minded Ellen who had her way. To-night he was firm and certain of his purpose. She thought perhaps that it was the war, the years that had passed since she last saw him, which had so hardened him and given strength to his will.
She went with him to the door and on the stairs, when they had turned out of the big room, she said, "You are not going back to the front to-morrow?"
"No. I shall come back here. I shall be in Paris for a week. Perhaps I'll spend a night or two with you here."
In their manner there was still an air of strangeness and formality, as if Callendar had in some way followed them out of the room and walked between them up the polished stairs. She helped him into his greatcoat and kissed him affectionately.
"To-morrow," she said, "it will be better. We can be alone." And then in a low voice she added, as if in explanation, "His permission is over to-morrow."
Extinguishing the candles, Fergus opened the door and looked out. The rain had ceased and far above them beyond the roofs of the houses on the opposite side of the street, the searchlights fingered a sky that, save for one or two clouds, was blue and luminous like the street lamps.
"Look," said Fergus, softly. "They've spotted one of them." And they both stood in the open door fascinated by the sight of a ​Gotha turned to a silver dragon fly by a long finger of light. Far away in another part of the city there sounded a faint crash and then another and another. The sirens still screamed, now on one side of them, now on another.
"It is magnificent," said Ellen, breathlessly.
"You see, they're not dropping them anywhere near us. They are trying to hit the bridges and the government buildings. I'm only going around the corner . . . into the Avenue Kléber."
They were speaking in hushed voices, caught again in that mood of insignificance. One might have thought that in the blackness of the empty street there were figures listening. In the eyes of Fergus there was the light of fascination . . . a bird held captive by a glittering snake.
"I must go," murmured Fergus still watching the silver dragon fly. "I'm late already."
She stood in the doorway until the darkness had swallowed him up and then, turning, slowly closed the door and went thoughtfully down the stairs. The sound of guns, the scream of the sirens and the echo of the distant, reverberating crashes grew fainter and fainter as she descended.
In the long drawing-room, standing before the fire with his glass in his hand Callendar was awaiting her. As she came toward him, she said, "I am proud of my brother," with the air of making a challenge, as if she reproached him for his indifference.
"I have heard of him," he said, quietly. "He is well known in the Division Reymont."
To this she made no reply. She drew her chair nearer to the fire and sat staring for a time silently into the bright blaze. There was no sound save for the asthmatic breathing of Criquette, the grunts of comfort from Hansi, who had flung down his great black body by her side, and the distant echoes from somewhere in the direction of the Champ de Mars.
At length he murmured, "Perhaps we had better go into the cellar. The last one was nearer."
​But she refused. "No. Why should I?" For she understood well enough that to Callendar it was a matter of complete indifference. She knew his whole philosophy could be expressed in a single sentence—"If one died, one died." The thing was to live while one was alive. "No," she repeated. "Why should I be afraid? You and Fergus aren't frightened."
"It's not the same," he said softly.
"There's no reason why it shouldn't be."
For a moment it may have seemed to her that she too was playing a part in the spectacle. She too might for once undertake a little of the danger they had known, the one with indifference, the other with a kind of fierce excitement.
"It is much easier," she murmured, "to be with you both than to be here alone, not knowing what may happen to you."
Under the heavy, sensuous lids Callendar's gray eyes revealed a sudden sparkle of admiration for the fierce and sullen defiance of her mood. He must have known that she would have walked carelessly through the street, as carelessly as Fergus had done, that she would in her present mood have gone into an attack with a serene indifference; because she was angry now, angry at the war for which she had such a contempt, at circumstance, at the whole muddled business of living. She was angry and defiant with an Olympian anger, careless of cost or consequence.
There was another crash, nearer this time in the direction of the Trocadéro, and again Callendar's eyelids flickered with slow admiration. She did not move. She still sat with one hand on Hansi's head looking into the fire.
"I am not thinking about myself," she observed suddenly with the air of answering a question which he had not spoken. "It is my brother."
"He must be safe by now at his rendezvous. The Avenue Kléber is not far."
She was thinking too, in a dazed fashion, of all that had happened in the hour before Fergus blundered in upon them. Cal​lendar had told her that at last Sabine was divorcing him. He had not asked her to do it. She had told him that she could endure the situation no longer. For the part which Thérèse played in the affair, he could not answer. "I don't know," he had said, smiling. "Sabine will say nothing and my mother denies having spoken of the matter. But if she saw fit she would not hesitate to lie deliberately. Sometimes I think she is not clever, and then afterward I find she has been stupid only because it suited her, because her stupidity was dictated by a devilish shrewdness."
And then he had told her of all the tricks Thérèse had played to bring about his remarriage, of how she had written him glowing letters about Ellen. "All she wrote," he added, "was true, of course. You can hardly doubt that. Still, it was not the way to bring it about."
And Ellen too had laughed and told of her interview with Thérèse in the library of the house at Murray Hill on the night of her concert, and at last she had asked abruptly, "Am I to interpret all this as a proposal?"
"My mother knew that there was no one else whom I would think of marrying. There was no need to marry at all."
After this speech she had been silent for a time and when at last she looked up at him it was to ask, "And you want to marry me because it is the only way you can have me?"
"No."
Her mind wandered back to the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms when he had so nearly swept away all her self-possession. He had been different then, more ardent, more overwhelming, and yet she knew that the danger then had not been so great as it was in this very moment when he sat beside her in the big room, quiet and thoughtful, watching her with a fierce concentration.
"But there was a time," she said slowly, "when you would have taken me in any way possible without marrying me."
He was sitting with his body bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. The hands were tense so that the knuckles showed through the tanned, dark skin.
​"No," he said softly. "That is not true. I would have married you then. I wanted to marry you, and I was younger then and not so wise. I fancied then that I could get anything I wanted in this world for the asking. And yet it was marriage that I had in mind. I have always had . . . everything. I will be honest. I have always had women if I wanted them badly enough . . . all save you. . . . And you are the only one I ever wanted to marry. I swear to God that what I am saying is true."
Watching him, she could not believe that he was lying. She saw the clenched hands. She saw that the mockery had gone out of him. She saw, with a queer tragic catch of memory, the little vein in his throat throbbing as she had seen the same vein throb in the throat of Clarence. It was all so different now. There was no headlong recklessness, no wild, sudden torrent of passion. He had not seized her now and tormented her with caresses that assailed all her resistance. They talked calmly in a fashion that might have been called calculating and cold-blooded save that underneath it there lay a current which ran more deep and more powerful than any emotion they had known on that sultry afternoon in the Babylon Arms. It was all changed now. They were older, and wiser, and in some ways more understanding. And the world about them had changed . . . the shabby little flat had given way to the old, beautiful, glowing room. This calm, grave Richard was far more dangerous than the young and ardent one had been. It was more perilous now, for she was assailed through all her senses, and time was rushing on and on, past her. . . .
She did not answer him, and presently in the same low voice he continued. "You are a woman of the world now," he said, "so you are not likely to believe what you believed then. I do not make excuses for myself. I did not love Sabine. I have never loved her. It was an arranged, a proper marriage like thousands of others, but it turned out badly. . . . I could not make myself love. No one can do that." He paused for a moment. "And she could not save herself. . . ."
This last speech he made with such a sad humility that there ​was no air of conceit in it. Besides Ellen knew its truth; she had seen Sabine with her own eyes, weeping, suffering in a fashion she had once believed impossible, and pretending all the while that such suffering had been caused by a sick kitten. Yet it was this which somehow frightened her; she was afraid lest one day she herself might be humbled in the same fashion.
"My mother," he was saying, "is as you know, a Greek, and there is a great deal of the Greek in me. Sometimes I fancy I am Oriental . . . utterly, completely. An eastern man admires a woman of beauty and of spirit. He wants such a woman for the mother of his children." He unclasped his hands and took her hand in his. "But don't fancy that I love you in that way only. Sabine was a fine match in a worldly sense. She was rich. She was fashionable. But I too am that, so what could it mean to me? It was more than that which I wanted. I still want it. I want you to marry me as soon as it is possible."
She did not free her hand, though the touch made her faint as it had done so many years before. She was conscious suddenly that the old sense of conflict was gone, the old feeling of a hidden antagonism between them. Could it be that it was because he was humble now, asking something of her rather than coming boldly to her to claim it?
"And still," she heard herself saying, "I am not certain that it would work out. I don't know. . . . You must give me time."
Then he had kissed her hand and murmured, "We have not so much time as we once had. . . . Perhaps I have even less than I know now."
To this she had chosen to make no answer. Instead, she had played for him until Fergus blundered in upon them.
It was in the midst of these thoughts that she heard Callendar say, as he stood balancing himself before the fire, "We could go to the south to-morrow, if you like. I could arrange to have my permission extended. De Cyon could do it for me. We could have a week together there."
​He must have known that it was too late now to ask such a thing. An hour earlier, before Fergus had intruded upon them, he might have succeeded. But everything was changed now. For an instant, during the time Fergus had been there, she had caught a glimpse of the old, familiar Richard, the mocking one; and the sense of conflict had risen once more sharply between them.
"How could I do that?" she asked, and after a moment's silence, "I can't do that sort of thing. It is impossible for me. . . ."
He smiled. "But the world believes it of you already. The world will not care. The world expects it of you. It can make no difference . . . and when the divorce is finished we will be married."
Her answer was colored with a sudden bitterness. "You would not have said such a thing to me once."
It was true. There was a difference now, of a kind she had not thought of before. It was a difference which had to do with age and all the slow hardening which had come with each year that stood between them and the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms. Something had gone from them both . . . the warmth, the gallantry, the glow that had made him then so reckless, so willing to marry her, a poor nobody, in the face of all his world. It was gone from her too. . . . She knew exactly what it was now. It was the thing which she had felt slip from her as a cloak on the night she sat talking with Thérèse in the dark library on Murray Hill. They were no longer young. They weighed chances now, cynically looking upon their problem without regard for honor. The tragedy was that they could never go back. What was gone was gone forever. And in the memory of the fierce, youthful passion, so fresh and turbulent, this new love seemed to her an obscene and middle-aged emotion.
"No," she repeated. "I can't do that. It is to myself that it matters. . . . What the world thinks does not interest me."
Long after midnight Callendar at last stirred himself and bade her good night. They had talked, long and passionately, ​over the same ground again and again, seeing it now in this light, now in that, arriving in the end nowhere at all; and through it all, Ellen must have caught once more the awful sense of his patience. He could wait; in the end he would have what he desired. And this she knew with an understanding that lay deeper than the mere surface of her consciousness.
Only it was all different now, even the significance of his patience, because time was rushing on and on past her. She was no longer a young girl; she was, as he had said, a woman of the world and therefore, perhaps, all the more desirable in her unchallenged, unbroken spirit.
"It is very late," said Callendar gently, as the black dog stirred himself and, yawning, rubbed his head against Ellen's hand. "And to-morrow. . . ."
But she did not permit him to say, "And to-morrow I shall be back at the front." She was afraid of his saying it, because all the evening she had been fighting just this thought. She understood that it was his strongest weapon, the one thing which might demolish the wall of her resistance. It was not a fair weapon, but he would not hesitate to use it where his own desire was concerned.
"It's not late," she said, "not late for me. . . ." Yet she wanted him to go because she was afraid. She wanted to be alone, to feel her old strength return to her.
The dog followed them as they moved through the big room and up the stairs. The last of the sounds had died away—the terrifying screech of the sirens, the faint popping of the guns and the ominous shattering crash of the falling bombs. The house and the city beyond it lay in silence now, dark once more save for the showers of blue light from the street lamps.
At the top of the stairs, which lay too in darkness, he put on his greatcoat in silence, took up his cap and then faced her. He said nothing; he simply looked at her, and after a moment she murmured in a voice that was scarcely audible, "No, I cannot do it. The things which stand in the way are much stronger than ​we are." And bending her head, as if she had in some way been accused, she added, "I will write you."
He did not speak. Instead he simply placed his arms about her and in silence kissed her. In the same fashion, her white hand grew tense once more, just as it had done when Fergus came upon her unaware, to understand all that was happening.
As he stepped into the street, she lingered in the doorway until, in the direction of the Café des Tourelles, the darkness swallowed him. She was alone again, and when she had closed the door she did not return to the drawing-room but sat down weakly on the top step of the long stairs and presently, overcome by the terrible sense of loneliness, she began to weep in silence. She was (she thought scornfully) in spite of everything, only a poor, weak, feminine creature.
Hansi flung his heavy body against her and, whimpering a little, put his black head affectionately on her knee.
She was sitting thus when the dog leapt to his feet and barked savagely at the sound of a sharp, sudden knock upon the door. It was the knock of some one in haste. The sound, shattering the dead stillness, grew terrifying, as if the one who knocked desired in some way to communicate his terror to those inside the house.
Ellen sprang up. "Je viens! Je viens!" she cried, and to the dog, "Tais toi! Hansi." She cried "Je viens!" as if by arresting the efforts of the knocker she might also destroy the foreboding in her heart.
Opening the door, she discerned dimly in the darkness the figure of a fat, bent little old man with white mustaches that caught the faint light emerging from the staircase. "Yes," she said, in French. "What is it you want?"
A voice which trembled a little with fright and carried the ring of an accent from the Midi answered her. "You are Mees Tolliver. I come from your brother. I am sent by him to fetch you."
For a moment she stood without speaking to the queer, bent figure, regarding him with the air of utter incredulity. He could ​not be quite real . . . this gnome with the enormous white mustaches. And unaccountably there flashed through her mind a fragment of the letter Lily had written her long ago—And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain that he is dead.
"He is hurt," said Ellen. "Something has happened to him!"
The old man answered simply. "Yes. There was an accident. He is wounded."
Without questioning him further, she wrapped herself in a fur coat and holding to the collar of Hansi she went out, after locking the door on the silent house, to follow the old man.
As they walked there were times when the darkness was so profound that she could not see him at all and was forced to call out for guidance. It was Hansi who aided her. He kept close to the heels of the old man.
She had a sense of passing through the Place Passy into the Rue Franklin.
"Who are you, mon vieux?" she asked.
The old man coughed. He went rapidly for one so old, but she fancied it was terror that gave speed to his fat legs, terror that the Gothas might return.
"I am the concierge of the building where Madame Nozières has an apartment. It was she who sent me. It is close at hand . . . in the Avenue Kléber."
Vaguely in the darkness, black against the deep blue of the sky, the ugly towers of the Trocadéro appeared a little on the right. "What is it that happened? Is he wounded . . . gravely, seriously, . . . my brother?"
The old man grunted. "I don't know. I know nothing. There was a bomb fell in the Avenue Kléber." He raised his head and sniffed like a shaggy old dog. "Smell," he commanded. "You can smell the bomb."
It was true. The faint odor of picric acid filled the damp night air. As they walked the odor grew more and more intense. In the darkness Ellen's guide pointed to the left.
"The bomb fell over there," he observed, "full in the street."
​"Who is this Madame Nozières?" asked Ellen.
"I don't know," her companion repeated. "I know nothing. She has an apartment. She comes there sometimes. She is rich. She is generous. She does not live there always. She only comes now and then . . . when Monsieur has permission from the front."
"Monsieur Nozières?"
In the darkness, the old man was silent for a time. He was breathless from the effort of their haste. "No," he replied. "Monsieur . . . your brother."
This then was the rendezvous for which Fergus had left the house in the Rue Raynouard. There was some one then—some woman—who had the power of taking him from her on the very night he had returned after so many years. It must have been strong, this force, stronger than the power which Callendar himself exerted. She understood his persistence. Against such a power, she was, of course, helpless.
"It is here," said her guide abruptly. "Follow me."
He led the way through a corridor into an open court filled with summer furniture, stacked now in the corners against the empty stone urns. In the dim light that filtered through the shutters on the far side, she was able to discern the outlines of chairs and tables, piled helter-skelter, as if they too had felt the force of a bomb that hurled them into a corner.
The old man knocked on a door that led into the apartment from which the light showed itself. From inside the murmur of voices came to them, distantly. And at last the door opened.
Against the dim light, Ellen was able to discern the figure of a small woman, dressed in a trim dark suit. She wore no hat and her blonde hair, cut short, stood about her head in a halo of ringlets which caught and reflected the glow behind her. She had been weeping. Even in the emotion of the moment, Ellen saw with a feminine instinct that she had chic, and when she spoke she ​divined also that "Madame Nozières" was not a cocotte but a lady. She had been weeping and something of the grief carried over into her voice.
"You are Mees Tolliver," she said. "I am Madame Nozières. I have heard you play . . . many times, but I did not know until to-night that you were his sister. You do not know me, of course."
There was a quality almost comic in the formality with which the stranger went about the business of introductions. In the hallway, she continued in a low voice, "I have known your brother for a long time. We are very good friends." And then she began to weep again. As Lily had done in the letter written after César's death, the woman made no pretenses, thinking perhaps as Lily had thought, that at such a time there was place only for the truth.
To Ellen the whole affair was shot through with the light of unreality. Standing in the dark hallway, with this strange woman weeping beside her—a woman who in some vague way had been brought close to her because she too loved Fergus—she leaned back against the wall for a moment trying frantically to bring her mind back to the truth. This could not be. . . . It was unreal, fantastic. . . .
The door opened and she saw, with a clarity that stamped the scene forever on her brain, a big room furnished with luxury, and in the midst of all the feminine softness—the pillows, the gilt chairs, the mirrors and the satin—Fergus lying very white and very still upon a bed of white and gilt with gilded swans on each of its four posts. At the side of the bed stood a tall, grave man with a black beard who wore the uniform of an army surgeon. He bowed to her and Madame Nozières murmured, "Doctor Chausson."
The name struck some chord of memory in Ellen's brain, but before she could trace it to its source, Fergus opened his eyes, and grinning a little, said in a low voice, "Well, this is a pretty ​mess!" (This was the old Fergus. She knew it at once. All the strangeness had gone. . . .)
She asked no questions because from the look of the doctor and the tears of Madame Nozières she understood that there was only one answer. She wanted suddenly to weep, to beat her head against the wall, to cry out. But she was silent. She approached the bed and pressed his hand.
They had taken off the blue tunic with the silver wings and he lay now in his white shirt and the blue trousers with the silver braid along the seam. Around his waist he wore a woolen ceinture of brilliant yellow. The shirt was open and on his breast where the silver wings had been there was a little spot of red . . . a tiny spot, scarcely as large as a strawberry.
"I'm sorry," he murmured. "But you see I couldn't come to-morrow . . . as I promised."
She could find nothing to say. She could only press his hand more and more tightly.
"I'm glad you brought the dog," he continued. "It will be less lonely for you." And then he beckoned to the doctor and asked him and Madame Nozières to leave the room for a moment. When they had gone, he drew Ellen nearer to him and said, "You must not be hard with her. She is a lady. Madame Nozières is not her name. It is I who am to blame if any one. I wanted to marry her. . . . I'm not talking rot. We had planned it." And then for a time he was silent as if too weak to go on.
Pressing his hand more tightly, she whispered, "How could I be hard? Nothing matters . . . only one thing."
He coughed and continued. "She has done everything. She has risked the rest of her life to save me. Chausson is the great Chausson . . . the surgeon from Neuilly. She knows him and he knows her husband. They are old friends. That was why he came. He is a busy man and a great surgeon. You see, she risked everything . . . her reputation, her future . . . everything. She did not hesitate to send for him."
She knew now why the name had been familiar. She had heard ​it everywhere in the journals, from her friends in Paris. If the great Chausson believed there was no hope . . .
"She is a good woman . . . a charming woman, Ellen. Madame Nozières is not her name. If she chooses to tell you who she is, be good to her, because I loved her."
"I will do what you wish."
He grinned again suddenly. "Think of it . . . to get it now, after three years . . . to get it now on the asphalt a block from the Trocadéro!" And then his face grew bitter. "It's a joke . . . that is!" And then, dimly, sleepily, he murmured, "We must hurry . . . we must hurry."
Ellen, still silent, found that she was praying idiotically for a thing which could never be. She knew now, sharply and cruelly, what the war, that grand parade, had been. Fergus who had loved life so passionately, who found pleasure and excitement everywhere! Fergus whom they had all loved so that they had spoiled him! Fergus lying there with his blond, curly head against the white pillows under the flying gilt swans! Those voluptuous, sensual swans! Eagles they should have been!
She could do nothing but wait. The minutes rushed past her, furiously. (We must hurry, he had said.) On the gilt dressing table one of the candles had begun to gutter and fade.
"Call them back," he said faintly. And she rose and opened the door. Outside Doctor Chausson had taken both Madame Nozières' small, exquisite hands and was talking to her, in a soft low voice, warm with a sort of understanding that moved Ellen queerly. They were so absorbed that they did not even notice her as she opened the door.
"Madame Nozières," she said softly, and the woman turned toward her. She was beautiful, more beautiful than Ellen had supposed, even with the tears swimming in her blue eyes. She was small and beautiful and exquisite like a bit of Dresden china. She understood the whole thing clearly; she understood perhaps even the profundity of the love which Madame Nozières had for Fergus.
​Doctor Chausson refused to come in with them. "I will stay here. . . . There is nothing I can do." And so they left him, pale and hollow-eyed from work and want of sleep, to wait in the dark hallway.
Inside the room the one candle had gone out and the only light came from the single flame before the tall mirror. Fergus had closed his eyes once more, and the lids showed against the dead whiteness of the skin in a faint shade of purple. The two women sat one on each side of the gilded bed, watching in silence. Presently he opened his eyes and looking at Ellen said in English:
"This man. . . ." He had grown weaker now and spoke with difficulty. "This man . . . Callendar. Are you going to marry him?"
"I don't know."
He smiled. "I saw you when I came in. . . . That's how I knew. I saw your hand." And after a pause. "It's funny . . . I knew this was coming . . . I knew it as I stood outside your door."
Then he closed his eyes once more and when he spoke again it was to say weakly, "You must tell Ma. . . . It will be hard. . . . And you must not. . . . You must not tell her the truth. . . . She could never face the truth. She has never faced it."
He reached out weakly and took the hand, on one side of Ellen and on the other of Madame Nozières. Raising himself, he grinned again and murmured in French this time, "My life. . . . It's running away . . . inside me. You can hear it. . . . I hear it . . . now." And then for a moment there was an echo of triumph, a sudden flash of Gramp whom Fergus himself had named The Everlasting. He grinned again and said, "It was a good life. . . . I missed nothing . . . nothing at all."
And again slowly . . . "This man Callendar . . . this man . . ."
But he never finished the sentence. He sighed and slipped back into the pillows of the bed surmounted by the four gilded swans. Madame Nozières began to weep wildly and flung herself upon ​him, kissing him again and again. For Ellen there was no such relief. She sat now, stark upright and tragic, bound by all the years in which she had shown a proud and scornful face to the world. No, there was no such relief for her. She knew it. She could only sit there, quietly cold and white, and all the time she wanted to scream, to cry out, to beat her head against the stone floor of the corridor where Doctor Chausson stood waiting gravely. She could only sit and watch while Madame Nozières wept out her heart.
It was the sound of weeping, wild and passionate, that summoned Doctor Chausson. The two women had forgotten him, but the good man knew well enough what the sound signified. Softly he opened the door and came into the frivolous room. There beside the gilded bed he saw the sister, a strange, silent, handsome woman, dressed in black with her fur coat slipped to the floor at her feet, a woman (he thought) bien Anglaise, who could not weep. He knew that she suffered more than the other, more than Colette who had flung herself on the boy to weep hysterically. Colette, the charming, the fastidious, the beautiful, flung down in utter disarray, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, her golden hair all disheveled. . . . Colette whom he had seen but two nights before flushed and radiant at the Princesse de Guermantes'. He understood now why she had been so beautiful and so happy. But the boy could not see her now, and so nothing mattered.
He stood for a moment in silence, as if in respect for the grief of the two women. All this he had seen before, many times, . . . a young man, a boy, who had loved life as this one had loved it, who could jest, as this one had jested, with his very last breath. A boy whom women loved as these two women, the one so wildly, the other so profoundly, with such an intense, secret flame. It was cruel . . . hideous. . . .
He moved forward and touched Madame Nozières on her slim shoulder. And all the while he was conscious that the eyes of ​the other woman were watching him, stony and cold and tragic.
"Colette," he said softly. "Colette. . . . You must not. . . . You must be quiet." With a gentle strength he lifted her from the bed. "Colette, it is nearly dawn. . . . You must be discreet. There will be questions asked."
But she paid no heed. She was sobbing now, bitterly and without shame. "You must be discreet," he repeated.
"What difference does that make now? . . . It is nothing . . . less than nothing. . . ." And she fell to weeping once more.
He mixed for her a powder and forced her to drink it, saying, "There is the necessary business. You must not be seen here . . . like this."
But she would not go. It was Ellen who at last stirred herself and succeeded in quieting Madame Nozières. "I will take him to my house," she said, quietly. "You may come there. . . . You may stay there if you like. It is a big house . . . in the Rue Raynouard. . . . No one will ever know."
She drew Doctor Chausson aside and gave him the address. "I will take care of things," she said. "I will stay here if you will arrange for the rest. I would like to stay . . . alone. It was good of you. . . . There is nothing I can say."
So at last, in care of the great Doctor Chausson, Madame Nozières, pale and with swollen eyes and disheveled hair, was led away, across the stone courtyard, gray now with the faint rising light of dawn, into the big gray motor that had followed him from Neuilly to the Avenue Kléber. Ellen watched them as they crossed the yard between the empty stone urns and summer chairs piled high in the corners.
When they had gone, she returned to the room and, locking the door, sat down to wait. Slowly, in the gray solitude, the relief of tears came to her. She wept silently. She understood now her fear of returning too late, that vague, nameless fear for which there had been no explanation until now. She had come so near to being late . . . only a matter of a few hours, of ​a single night. For he had escaped them all now, forever. They would never possess him again. . . .
She looked at him, lying here white and still in the gay blue trousers with the silver braid and the yellow sash, and she understood why it was that he had seemed so young. It was because he had never really belonged to any of them. He had not even had a country of his own. He had gone out into a war which was none of his concern. There was nothing which tied him down, not even the nonsense which people talked of "la gloire" and "la patrie." For she, in her aloofness, had known it for the nonsense it was, just as he in his good-nature and love for all the world had known it. She remembered what he had once written her. . . . "A man of our generation who has missed the war will not have lived at all. . . . He will be a poor thing compared to the others. It is a game in which one must take a chance. It is better to die than to have missed it."
He had believed that to the very end. Perhaps this was the secret of Old Gramp who had roamed the world and lived in this very Paris under the Second Empire. He had lived. He had done everything, and now in his old age he had a stock of memories that would last forever, a life which none of the others ever knew. He had been certain of only one life and he had made the most of it, so that he was ready when his time came to die with satisfaction, to take his chance on what lay beyond.
And as she sat there with the black dog by her side, in the slow, gray light, it occurred to her that perhaps the end of Fergus had not been after all so tragic. He had died in the very midst of life with the woman he loved at his side. If he had lived. . . . Who could tell? There was small place in the world for men like him. He never had the strength, the fierce aloofness of Old Gramp, the savage contempt of the old man for the drones and grubbers of life.
It was all a strange business, surely. Strange and confused and without sense. In the beginning, when she had first come into this frivolous room (so cold and dead now in the gray light) she ​had been angry and jealous at his deception, and bitter at Madame Nozières for having caused his death. She had thought, "If he had not been going to meet her, he would not have been killed."
But she knew better now. She had been a fool. It was absurd and monstrous that any one, even herself, should fancy he could bend fate to his own ends. It was too imbecile, too senseless. No, she was wiser now. She was not the headlong fool she had once been. In the face of all that had happened in this one terrible night, she was utterly humbled. Who was she to question the behavior of this brother who lay dead under the gilded swans? Who was she, a cold, hard woman, to question a love of which she knew nothing? And what did it matter now? She was glad suddenly, with a strange, wild happiness, that he had known this Madame Nozières. Her blondeness, her beauty, her fine clothes, her spirit . . . all these things had made him happy, on how many leaves in Paris?
What did it matter now? One lived but an instant, frantically, and time rushed on and on. . . .
But he was right. Their mother must never know the truth.
She thought too of Callendar, for he was with her all the time, almost as if he had never gone away. The old foreboding returned to her—that phrase out of Lily's letter—And then he rode away into the darkness. I am certain he is dead. He had gone away and she did not know where. Perhaps she had been wrong to refuse him, cruel to have denied him the happiness that Madame Nozières had given to Fergus. Things mattered so little now. It seemed to her that she stood somewhere on a lofty pinnacle, looking down on the spectacle . . . a pitiful spectacle, so full of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." The old quotation came back to her out of the dim memories of the past when she had hated Shakespeare with an intense passion. "Sound and fury, signifying nothing." That was it. It was far better to be like her mother, the invincible Hattie, who never mounted to the ​heights but kept her eyes always on the ground, frantically occupied with a thousand tiny things, never willing, as Fergus had said, to face the truth. And now that he was gone, her favorite of them all, what would she do? There remained nothing now except the one truth which none could in the end escape.
It was daylight and the ghastly smell of picric acid had died away before she stirred herself. The morning sun, pouring in at the window, seemed to say, "This is another day. We must all go on. This is not the end of everything."
(The sun, she thought bitterly, which Fergus had always loved even as a baby.)
So she had stirred herself wearily and gone over to the little escritoire which stood in one corner of the room. There, with the pen of gold and mother-of-pearl that belonged to Madame Nozières, she seated herself and wrote, one letter to Callendar and one to her mother. To Callendar she wrote that she would marry him as soon as it was possible. To her mother she wrote a lie. She wrote that Fergus had died in the house in the Rue Raynouard, alone with herself and Doctor Chausson who was a great doctor and came only because he was a friend of hers. Everything had been done which could be done. He would be buried not in a grave at the front nor in a lonely Paris graveyard but at Trilport, in the friendly cemetery where Madame Gigon lay, a little way off from Germigny l'Evec where Lily went in the summer.
And in the end she added another lie, because she knew it was the one thing above all else that Hattie Tolliver would want to hear. She even framed the sentence shrewdly, sentimentally, though it was false to her very nature. She wrote, "He died thinking of you. Your name was the last word he said."
For Hattie had at last to face the truth, and one must make it as easy as possible for her.
Almost the last word he had said was, "Callendar. . . . This man . . . Callendar." . . . And she would never know now what it was that he had meant to say.
​There was a knock at the door. She knew what it was . . . the men sent by Doctor Chausson.
Ignoring it, she knelt beside the bed and pressed her cheek close to the cold face of her brother. She was alone now, more alone than she had ever been in all her life, where none could see her. Then as she stood, looking down at him, it occurred to her that this death had been in a strange way a perfect thing. . . . He had escaped in the midst of life, happier than he had ever been before. . . . There were worse things than death. It was only to those who remained that death was cruel. . . . It was cruel to understand, in that frivolous room with the bright spring sun streaming in at the window, that she had come to know him only when he was dead. There had never been time before. . . . There had been only the business of fame and glory and success.
When at last she opened the door, the men sent by Doctor Chausson saw a handsome woman hard and cold, without sympathy, who stood holding by his collar a great black dog who growled at them savagely.
In the days that followed Madame Nozières came twice to the Rue Raynouard, once on foot and once in a taxicab though it was quite clear that she was far more used to a motor of her own—a small, very expensive motor like that of Sabine. She it was who had candles placed in the room with Fergus and had masses said for him. And to all this, which old Jacob Barr would have called "popery" and denounced as rubbish, Ellen offered no resistance; for, not being sure any longer that she herself believed in anything, she saw no harm so long as it gave comfort to others. Fergus himself, she knew, would have smiled and allowed it.
Madame Nozières wept and thanked Ellen and made her ill at ease and miserable, but she did not say who she was or whence she came. Indeed, Ellen learned no more of her identity than she had discovered from Fergus himself, as he lay dying. She was a ​lady, a femme du monde, a creature of charm and (despite her grief) of gaiety. She came out of mystery and returned to it. "Madame Nozières" was a label, perhaps as good as any other. Twice, long afterward, Ellen fancied that she saw her,—once walking in the Bois and talking earnestly with Doctor Chausson and once in the establishment of Reboux, but she could not be certain because each time she turned quickly away lest Madame Nozières should recognize her. She respected the mystery; she was afraid to intrude upon it. In some way it seemed better to leave the tragedy with its proper ending—in that frivolous room by candlelight in the Avenue Kléber. It had been in its way a complete, a perfect thing. To follow it further could lead only into triviality and disillusionment. She had no desire to know too much of Madame Nozières.
But the sense of mystery fascinated her and, in the lonely days in the Rue Raynouard, it appeared to change and soften all her beliefs. She saw now that mystery had its place in the scheme of things, that it possessed a beauty of its own which lent fascination to all life. There were others, she knew, besides Callendar who were never to be understood completely, never to be pinned down and taken apart as this or that. In all her haste, she had fancied that life was thus and so, that people were easy to fathom and understand. She doubted now whether she would ever know any one—even Lily or Rebecca. There was always something which escaped knowledge, something which lay hidden deep beneath layer upon layer of caution, of shyness, of deceit, or mockery, of a thousand things . . . the something which in the end was one's own self, the same self she had guarded with savagery through so many years.
For all that people might say or think, she understood that this Fergus, the one who stood in the candlelit room in the Avenue Kléber, had been more beautiful than any other . . . as he lay there clasping with one hand his sister and with the other Madame Nozières!