The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 48
SHE made no mention of this letter to Lily, but before she left the house late the same afternoon she went to Lily's room, a thing which she had never done before. She found her sister lying on the bed in her darkened room.
"What is it, Irene?"
Irene standing in the doorway, hesitated for an instant.
"Nothing," she said presently. "I just stopped to see if you were all right." Again there was a little pause. "You aren't afraid . . . alone here in the evenings, are you?"
Out of the darkness came the sound of Lily's laughter.
"Afraid? Lord, no! What is there to be afraid of? I'm all right." And Irene went away, down the long drive into Halsted street which lay in thick blackness because the strikers had cut the wires of the street lights.
On the same evening Lily had dinner on a lacquer table before the fire in the drawing-room. She ate languidly, leaning back in her rosewood armchair, dividing her attention between the food and the pages of Henri Bordeaux. Save for a chair or two and the great piano, the room was still in camphor, the furniture swathed in linen coverings, the Aubusson carpet rolled up in its corner. Dawdling between the food and the book, she managed to consume an hour and a half before she finished her coffee and cigarette. Despite the aspect of the room there was something pleasant about it, a certain indefinable warmth and sense of space which the library lacked utterly.
The business of the will was virtually settled. She had announced her intention of leaving within a day or two. Two of her bags were already packed. One of them she had not troubled herself to unpack because she had not the faintest need of clothes unless she wished to dress each night for her lonely dinner as if she expected a dozen guests. And being indolent, she preferred to lounge about comfortably in the black kimono embroidered in silver with a design of wistaria. Yet in her lounging there was nothing of sloppiness. She was too much a woman of taste. She was comfortable; but she was trim and smart, from her bronze hair so well done, to the end of her neat silver-slippered toe.
When she had finished her cigarette she rose and went to the piano where she played for a long time, rather sentimentally and without her usual ecstatic dash. She played as if a yearning sadness had descended upon her. It may have been the thought of quitting the old house which had come to the end of the road. In another week its only occupants would be Sarah and Hennery. The others would have vanished. . . . Irene, Lily, even the black servants. There was no such thing as age or tradition. The Town had no time for such things. There was no longer room for Cypress Hill. It stood in the way of progress. The Town council was eager to buy and destroy it in order to raise on its site a new railway station, more vast and pretentious than any in the state.
It may have been this which made her sad.
Certainly her mood drove her to the depths, for she played such music as the Liebestraume and a pair of sentimental German waltzes. And gradually she played more and more softly until at length her hands slipped from the keyboard to her lap and she sat with bowed head regarding the pink tips of her polished finger-nails.
The curtains were drawn across the windows so that no sound penetrated from the outside. In the grate the fire of cannel coal crackled softly and new flames leapt up.
Presently she returned to her chair and novel, but she did not read. She remained staring into the fire in the same distracted fashion.