The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 18
ON the following night the house, as it appeared from the squalid level of Halsted street, took on in its setting of snow-covered pines and false cypresses the appearance to which the Town had been accustomed in the old days. The drawing-room windows glowed with warm light; wreaths were hung against the small diamond shaped panes, and those who passed the wrought iron gates heard during the occasional pauses in the uproar of the Mills the distant tinkling of a piano played with a wild exuberance by some one who chose the gayest of tunes, waltzes and polkas, which at the same hour were to be heard in a dozen Paris music halls.
Above the Flats in the Town, invitations were received during the course of the week to a dinner party, followed by a ball in the long drawing-room.
"Cypress Hill is becoming gay again," observed Miss Abercrombie.
"It must be the return of Lily," said Mrs. Julis Harrison. "Julia will never entertain again. She is too broken," she added with a kind of triumph.
A night or two after Lily's return: Mrs. Harrison again spoke to her son William of Lily's beauty and wealth, subtly to be sure and with carefully concealed purpose, for Willie, who was thirty-five now and still unmarried, grew daily more shy and more deprecatory of his own charms.
It was clear enough that the tradition of Cypress Hill was by no means dead, that it required but a little effort, the merest scribbling of a note, to restore all its slumbering prestige. The dinner and the ball became the event of the year. There was Peat curiosity concerning Lily. Those who had seen her reported that she looked well and handsome, that her clothes were far in advance of the local fashions. They talked once more of her beauty, her charm, her kindliness. They spoke nothing but good of her, just as they mocked Irene and jeered at her work among the foreigners in the Flats. It was Lily who succeeded to her mother's place as chatelaine of the beautiful gloomy old house at Cypress Hill.
It was also Lily who, some two weeks before Christmas, received Mrs. Julis Harrison and Judge Weissman on the mission which brought them together in a social way for the only time in their lives. The strange pair arrived at Shane's Castle in Mrs. Harrison's victoria, the Jew wrapped in a great fur coat, his face a deep red from too much whiskey; and the dowager, in an imperial purple dress with a dangling gold chain, sitting well away to her side of the carriage as if contact with her companion might in some horrid way contaminate her. Lily, receiving them in the big hall, was unable to control her amazement at their sudden appearance. As the Judge bowed, rather too obsequiously, and Mrs. Harrison fastened her face into a semblance of cordiality, a look of intense mirth spread over Lily's face like water released suddenly from a broken dam. There was something inexpressibly comic in Mrs. Harrison's obvious determination to admit nothing unusual in a call made with Judge Weissman at ten in the morning.
"We have come to see your mother," announced the purple clad Amazon. "Is she able to see us?"
Lily led the pair into the library. "Wait," she replied, "I'll see. She always stays in bed until noon. You know she grows tired easily nowadays."
"I know . . . I know," said Mrs. Harrison. "Will you tell her it is important? A matter of life and death?"
While Lily was gone the pair in the library waited beneath the mocking gaze of John Shane's portrait. They maintained a tomb-like silence, broken only by the faint rustling of Mrs. Harrison's taffeta petticoats and the cat-like step of the Judge on the Aubusson carpet as he prowled from table to table examining the bits of jade or crystal or silver which caught his Oriental fancy. Mrs. Harrison sat bolt upright, a little like a pouter pigeon, with her coat thrown back to permit her to breathe. She drummed the arm of her chair with her fat fingers and followed with her small blue eyes the movements of the elk's tooth charm that hung suspended from the Judge's watch chain and swayed with every movement of his obese body. At the entrance of Julia Shane, so tall, so gaunt, so cold, she rose nervously and permitted a nervous smile to flit across her face. It was the deprecating smile of one prepared to swallow her pride.
Mrs. Shane, leaning on her stick, moved forward, at the same time fastening upon the Judge a glance which conveyed both curiosity and an undisguised avowal of distaste.
"Dear Julia," began Mrs. Harrison, "I hope you're not too weary. We came to see you on business." The Judge bobbed his assent.
"Oh, no, I'm quite all right. But if you've come about buying Cypress Hill, it's no use. I have no intention of selling it as long as I live."
Mrs. Harrison sat down once more. "It's not that," she said. "It's other business." And then turning. "You know Judge Weissman, of course."
The Judge gave an obsequious bow. From the manner of his hostess, it was clear that she did not know him, that indeed thousands of introductions could never induce her to know him.
"Won't you sit down?" she said with a cold politeness, and the Judge settled himself into an easy chair, collapsing vaguely into rolls of fat.
"We should like to talk with you alone," said Mrs. Harrison. "If Lily could leave. . . ." And she finished the speech with a nod of the head and a turn of the eye meant to convey a sense of grave mystery.
"Certainly," replied Lily, and went out closing the door on her mother and the two visitors.
For two hours they remained closeted in the library while Lily wandered about the house, writing notes, playing on the piano; and once, unable to restrain her curiosity, listening on tip-toe outside the library door. At the end of that time, the door opened and there emerged Mrs. Julis Harrison, looking cold and massively dignified, her gold chain swinging more than usual, Judge Weissman, very red and very angry, and last of all, Julia Shane, her old eyes lighted by a strange new spark and her thin lips framed in an ironic smile of triumph.
The carriage appeared and the two visitors climbed in and were driven away on sagging springs across the soot-covered snow. When they had gone, the mother summoned Lily inte the library, closed the door and then sat down, her thin smile growing at the same time into a wicked chuckle.
"They've been caught . . . the pair of them," she said. "And Cousin Charlie did it. . . . They've been trying to get me to call him off."
Lily regarded her mother with eyebrows drawn together in a little frown. Plainly she was puzzled. "But how Cousin Charlie?" she asked. "How has he caught them?"
The mother set herself to explaining the whole story. She went back to the very beginning. "Cousin Charlie, you know, is county treasurer. It was Judge Weissman who elected him. The Jew is powerful. Cousin Charlie wouldn't have had a chance but for him. Judge Weissman only backed him because he thought he'd take orders. But he hasn't. That's where the trouble is. That's why they're worried now. He won't do what Judge Weissman tells him to do!"
Here she paused, permitting herself to laugh again at the discomfiture of her early morning callers. So genuine was her mirthful satisfaction that for an instant, the guise of the worldly woman vanished and through the mask showed the farm girl John Shane had married thirty years before.
"You see," she continued, "in going through the books, Cousin Charlie discovered that the Cyclops Mills owe the county about five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. He's sued to recover the money together with the fines, and he cannot lose. Judge Weissman and Mrs. Harrison have just discovered that and they've come to me to call him off because he is set on recovering the money. He's refused to take orders. You see, it hits their pocket-books. The man who was treasurer before Cousin Charlie has disappeared neatly. There's a pretty scandal somewhere. Even if it doesn't come out, the Harrisons and Judge Weissman will lose a few hundred thousands. The Jew owns a lot of stock, you know."
The old woman pounded the floor with her ebony stick as though the delight was too great to escape expression by any other means. Her blue eyes shone with a wicked gleam. "It's happened at last!" she said. "It's happened at last! I've been waiting for it . . . all these years."
"And what did you tell them?" asked Lily.
"Tell them! Tell them!" cried Julia Shane. "What could I tell them? Only that I could do nothing. I told them they were dealing with an honest man. It is impossible to corrupt Hattie's husband. I could do nothing if I would, and certainly I would do nothing if I could. They'll have to pay . . . just when they're in the midst of building new furnaces." Suddenly her face grew serious and the triumph died out of her voice. "But I'm sorry for Charlie and Hattie, just the same. He'll suffer for it. He has killed himself politically. The Jew is too powerful for him. It'll be hard on Hattie and the children, just when Ellen was planning to go away to study. Judge Weissman will fight him from now on. You've no idea how angry he was. He tried to bellow at me, but I soon stopped him."
And the old woman laughed again at the memory of her triumph.
As for Lily her handsome face grew rosy with indignation. "It can't be as bad as that! That can't happen to a man because he did his duty! The Town can't be as rotten as that!"
"It is though," said her mother. "It is. You've no idea how rotten it is. Why, Cousin Charlie is a lamb among the wolves. Believe me. I know. It's worse than when your father was alive. The mills have made it worse."
Then both of them fell silent and the terrible roar of the Cyclops Mills, triumphant and monstrous, invaded the room once more. Irene came in from a tour of the Flats and looking in at the door noticed that they were occupied with their own thoughts, and so hurried on to her room. At last Mrs. Shane rose.
"We must help the Tollivers somehow," she said. "If only they weren't so damned proud it would be easier."
Lily, her eyes dark and serious, stood at the window now looking across the garden buried beneath blackened snow. "I know," she said. "I was thinking the same thing."