The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 14
FOR days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a second promise . . . that she would never enter the church so long as her mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill. Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into their homes, facing all the deeprooted hostility and the suspicions of Shane's Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly in the lady from Shane's Castle.
It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express, unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily Shane might never return from Paris.
She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen's houses which had sprung up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as if they were not solid and real at all, but queer structures born out of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted street to Shane's Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her destination was the great black house on the hill.
As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead, abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.
Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull glow of the furnaces.
The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times, listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of welcome.
"Mama!" Lily called up the long polished stairway. "Irene! Mama! Where are you?"
She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her veil, the sound of her mother's limping step and the tapping of her stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later, Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.