The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 47
IN the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.
The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.
Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the "boom spirit." The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.
The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.
Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing. During the day while Irene was absent Lily, clad in a peignoir of black silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with the yellow backed French novels "skimmed" and cast away by her mother. These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she sought to pass the time by writing letters—addressed always to one of three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon's cousin, the Baron. Wrapped in her mother's old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.
She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy. Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their families.
She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls hooting among the branches of the dead trees.
The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the "old fogy" lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bearing a little black bag filled with papers. With Mrs. Tolliver, he shared an attitude of supreme indifference alike toward the strikers and the guards. It appeared that he still lived in a day when there were no mills and no strikers. He was a tall withered old man with drooping white mustaches and a thick mass of vigorous white hair. He went about his business gruff, wasting no time over details, and no emotion over sentiment. He treated both sisters in the same cold, legal manner.
The will was brief and concocted shrewdly by Julia Shane and old Mr. Baines. Nor was it complicated. The house and all the old woman's jewels were left to her daughter Lily. There was also a sizable gift for Hattie Tolliver and a strange bequest which came as a surprise to all but old Mr. Baines. It was added in a codicil, so he said, a short time before her death. It provided for a trust fund to support Welcome House and provide a visiting nurse until Mr. Baines and the two daughters deemed these things no longer necessary.
"That," observed the cynical Mr. Baines drily, as he read the will, "will be as long as the human race exists. I tried to persuade her against it but she would not listen. She always knew what she was doing and just what she wanted, right to the very end."
Thus Julia Shane placed herself for all time among the enemies of the Mills.
Otherwise the property was divided evenly with an allowance made to Irene for the value of the Cypress Hill holdings.
Then Mr. Baines delivered with considerable ceremony and advice two letters, one addressed to Lily and one to Irene, which had been left in his keeping.
The letter addressed to Lily read, "I am leaving the house to you because Irene hates it. I know that she would only dispose of it at once and give the money to the church. Likewise I am leaving my jewels to you, with the exception of two rings which I gave Hattie Tolliver years ago—the emerald set with diamonds and the single big emerald. No doubt you remember them. There is no use in leaving such things to Irene. She would only sell them and spend the money to buy candles for a saint. And that is not the purpose for which God made jewels. He meant them to adorn beautiful women. Therefore I give them to you."
And thus the amethysts set in Spanish silver, two emerald rings, seven rings set with diamonds, a ruby necklace, a festoon of pearls, a quantity of earrings of onyx, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and a long diamond chain passed into the possession of the elder daughter.
"In worldly possessions," the letter continued, "I have left you both wealthy. There are other possessions over which I had no control. They were left to you by your father and by me—the possessions which one cannot sell nor throw away, the possessions which are a part of you, possessions good and evil, bad and indifferent, the possessions which in the end are you yourself.
"There are some things which it is difficult to discuss, even between a mother and her daughter. I am gone now. I shall not be forced to look at you and feel shame at what you know. Yet I have always wanted to tell you, to explain to you that, after all, I was never so hard, so invincible, so hopelessly brittle as I must have seemed. You see, my dear, there are some things which one cannot control and one of these is the unconscious control over self-control—the thing which does not permit you to speak. Another is pride.
"You see there was never anything in common between your father and me, unless it was love of horses and that, after all, is not much. Before he ever saw me, he must have known more of life than I ever knew. But those things were secret and because of them, perhaps, I fell in love with him—after a fashion. I say 'after a fashion' because that is what it was. I was a country girl, the daughter of a farmer . . . nothing else, you understand. And you cannot know what that meant in the days when the Town was a village and no one in it ever went outside the state and seldom outside the county. He was fascinating . . . more fascinating than you can ever know. I married him on account of that. It was a great match. He was a wonderful lover . . . not a lover like the men of the county who make such good husbands, but a lover out of another world. But that, my dear, did not make him a good husband, and in a little while it became clear that I was little more to him than a convenience. Even sending me to France didn't help matters.
"It was a bad affair, but in my day when one married there was no thought of anything but staying married. So what was done was done. There was no unmaking a mistake, even less chance after you and Irene were born. He came of one race and I of another. And never once in our life together did we touch in our sympathies. It was, in short, a marriage founded upon passion alone—a despicable state of affairs which is frequently worse than a marriage de convenance, for in that there is no desire to burn itself out. . . . You see, I understood the affair of the Governor far better than you ever imagined.
"And so there are things descended to both of you over which I have no control. I can only ask God to be merciful. Be gentle with Irene and thank God that you are made so that life cannot hurt you. She cannot help that which she is. You see I have known and understood more than any one guessed."
That was all. The ending was as abrupt as the manner of Julia Shane while she lived. Indeed to Lily, reading the letter, it must have seemed that her mother was still alive. She sat thoughtfully for a long time and at last tearing the letter slowly into bits, she tossed it into the drawing-room fire. Of its contents she said nothing to Irene.
The letter to Irene was brief. It read, "I leave you your money outright with no string to it, because the dead have no rights which the living are bound to respect. You may do with it as you like. . . . You may give it all to your beloved church, though it will be without my approval. You may do anything with it which will bring you happiness. I have prayed to God to make you happy. If you can find happiness by burying yourself, do it before you are an hour older, for life is too short to waste even an hour of happiness. But do not believe that it is such an easy thing to find.
"I have loved you, Irene, always, though I have never been able to understand you. I have suffered for you, silently and alone. I, who am dead, may tell you these things which in life I could not tell you. Only know that I cherished you always even if I did not know how to reach you. There are some things that one cannot say. At least I—even I, your own mother—could not make you understand because I never really knew you at all. But remember always that I loved you in spite of all the wretched walls which separated even a mother from her daughter. God be with you and guide you."
Irene, in the stillness of her bare, austere room, wept silently, the tears streaming down her battered, aging face. When she had finished reading she thrust the letter inside her dress against her thin breasts, and a little later when she descended and found the drawing-room empty she tore it into tiny bits to be consumed by the same fire which had secretly destroyed Lily's letter a little while before.