The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 13
MEANWHILE the Town grew. The farm where Julia Shane spent her youth disappeared entirely, broken up into checker board allotments, crossed by a fretwork of crude concrete sidewalks. Houses, uniform and unvaryingly ugly in architecture and cheap in construction, sprang up in clusters like fungi to house the clerks and the petty officials of the Mills. In the Flats, which included all that district taken over by the factories, hundreds of alien workmen drifted in to fill the already overcrowded houses beyond endurance. Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles, Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the very hedges of Shane's Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.
All this, Julia Shane, living in another world, ignored. She saw nothing of what happened beneath her very windows.
It was true that she found no satisfaction in her daughter Irene. On the return of the girl from a long rest at the convent, there took place between mother and daughter a terrible battle which did not end in a sudden, decisive victory but dragged its length across many weeks. Irene returned with her thin pretty face pale and transparent, her ash blond hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in severe nunlike fashion. She wore a suit of black stuff, plainly made and ornamented only by a plain collar of white lawn.
On the first evening at home, the mother and daughter sat until midnight in the library, a room which they used after dinner on evenings when they were alone. The little French clock struck twelve before the girl was able to summon courage to address her mother, and when at last she succeeded, she was forced to interrupt the old woman in the midst of a new book by Collette Willy, sent her by Lily, which she was reading with the aid of a silver mounted glass.
"Mother," began Irene gently. "Mother . . ."
Julia Shane put down the glass and looked up. "What is it?"
"Mother, I've decided to enter the church."
It was an announcement far from novel, a hope expressed year after year only to be trodden under foot by the will of the old woman. But this time there was a new quality in Irene's voice, a shade of firmness and determination that was not at all in keeping with the girl's usual humility. The mother's face grew stern, almost hard. Cheri slipped gently to the floor where it lay forgotten.
"Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?" The voice was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing—the Roman Catholic church—which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.
The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.
"Has this anything to do with Lily?" asked the mother with a sudden air of suspicion, and Irene answered "No! No!" with such intensity that Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.
"You know how I feel," she said. "I am old and I am tired. I have had enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last."
Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread until her whole body was shaking. "It is all I have," she cried.
"Don't be morbid!"
The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane's face—the look with which she faced down all the world save her own family.
"I won't hear of it," she added. "I've told you often enough, Irene. . . . I won't have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it." She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. "You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it."
The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared even to argue her case. "If it were Lily . . ." she began weakly.
"It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is out of the question. Lily is no fool. . . ."
The accusation of Irene was an old one, secret, cherished always in the depths of a lonely submissive heart. It was born now from the depths of her soul, a cry almost of passion, a protest against a sister whom every one pardoned, whom every one admired, whom all the world loved. It was an accusation directed against the mother who was so sympathetic toward Lily, so uncomprehending toward Irene.
"I suppose they have been talking to you . . . the sisters," continued Julia Shane. And when the girl only buried her face miserably in her arms, she added more gently, "Come here, Irene. . . . Come over here to me."
Quietly the daughter came to her side where she knelt down clasping the fingers covered with rings that were so cold against her delicate, transparent skin. For an instant the mother frowned as if stricken by some physical pain. "My God!" she said, "Why is it so hard to live?" But her weakness passed quickly. She stiffened her tired body, sighed, and began again. "Now," she said gruffy. "We must work this out. . . . We must understand each other better, my dear. If you could manage to confide in me . . . to let me help you. I am your mother. Whatever comes to you comes to me as well . . . everything. There are three of us, you and Lily and me." Her manner grew slowly more tender, more affectionate. "We must keep together. You might say that we stood alone . . . three women with the world against us. When I die, I want to leave you and Lily closer to each other than you and I have been. If there is anything that you want to confess . . . if you have any secret, tell it to me and not to the sisters."
By now Irene was sobbing hysterically, clinging all the while to the hand of her mother. "There is nothing . . . nothing!" she cried, "I don't know why I am so miserable."
"Then promise me one thing . . . that you will do nothing until we have talked the matter out thoroughly." She fell to stroking the girl's blond hair with her thin veined hand, slowly, with a hypnotic gesture.
"Yes . . . Yes. . . . I promise!" And gradually the sobbing ebbed and the girl became still and calm.
For a time they sat thus listening to the mocking frivolous tick-tick of the little French clock over the fireplace greater sound, rumbling and regular like the pounding of giant hammers they did not hear because it had become so much a part of their lives that it was no longer audible. The throb of the Mills, working day and night, had become a part of the very stillness.
At last Julia Shane stirred and said with a sudden passion, "Come, Irene! . . . Come up to my room. There is no peace here." And the pair rose and hurried away, the mother hobbling along with the aid of her ebony stick, never once glancing behind her at the portrait whose handsome malignant eyes appeared to follow them with a wicked delight.