The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 4
THAT night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly, and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.
At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and addressed him.
"It is your career, then, which is your first consideration," she began. "It is that which you place above everything else . . . above everything?"
For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.
"I have told you that I love Lily."
The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity of an iceberg.
"It is I," she said, "who should be offended. You have no cause for anger." She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. "Besides," she added softly, "Love can be so many things. . . . Believe me, I know."
"Slowly's he pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say. . . . It is, after all, her affair."
The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.
It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing the door softly behind her.
"Sit down," said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. "I know everything that has happened. . . . We must talk it per and settle it to-night one way or another, for good and all."
The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before her.
"Lily," he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue. "Lily . . . I don't believe you realize what has happened. I don't believe you understand."
The girl smiled faintly. "Oh, yes . . . I know . . . I am not a child, you know . . . certainly not now." All the while she kept her eyes cast down thoughtfully.
The mother leaning forward, interrupted. "I hadn't thought it would end in this fashion," she said. "I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law. You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don't you love him?"
The girl turned quickly. "I love him. . . . Yes, . . . I love him and I've thought of him. . . . You needn't fear a scandal. There is no need for one. No one would ever have known if he hadn't told you. It was between us alone." The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to speak but the girl halted him. "I know . . . I know," she said. "You're afraid I might tell some one. . . . You're afraid there might be a child. . . . Even if there was it would make no difference."
"But why . . . why?" began her mother.
"I can't tell why . . . I don't know myself. I only know that I don't want to marry him, that I want to be as I am. . . ." For a second the shadow of passion entered her voice. "Why can't I be? Why won't you let me? I have money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair."