The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 8
THE struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue-eyes that protruded a little from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.
"It is late, mother," he said. "And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday."
His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.
"Sailing!" repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and suspending her fan in mid-air, "Sailing! Why didn't you tell me, Julia? I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily."
"Sailing," echoed Miss Abercrombie, "to France, my dear! I have some commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?"
Lily smiled slowly. "Of course not. Can you send them down in the morning? I'm afraid I won't get up to the Town to-morrow."
She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery's wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison's first speech.
"Tell Hennery," she said, "to send round Mrs. Harrison's carriage." The old woman was taking no chances now.
There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement over the thought of a voyage to "the continent." The carriage arrived and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the squalid street.
When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which, sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.
"She refused me," he said.
For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, "She may come round. . . . You're not clever with women, William."
The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that his mother's opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope had been killed—put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last, despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.
"It couldn't be," she thought. "Julia would never have dared to invite us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and pleasant. No, it's impossible!"
All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend who lived in Paris.