Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/258

 arrested by the most extraordinary change in her companion.

So remarkable was the change that the old woman actually stopped talking and fell to observing the face of Madame ane.

Lily held in her hand a small photograph, very faded and soiled, of a man in a black coat with sharp eyes, a high brow and a full black beard. It bore in one corner the stamp of a well-known photographer of the seventies, a gentleman with an establishment in the Galerie des Panoramas. It was a handsome face, fascinating, fanatic, which at once arrested the attention. Beyond all doubt it was the mate of a photograph which Julia Shane, dying, had left to her daughter. Across the face of the one Lily held in her hand was written, "À la Reine de la Nuit de son Cavalier Irlandais." The ink was faded, almost illegible.

"You find that gentleman especially interesting?" asked Madame Blaise in a tone of unbearable curiosity.

For a moment Lily did not reply. She regarded the photograph closely, turning it this way and that under the gaslight.

"Yes," she said at last in a low, hushed voice. "Who is he?"

Madame Blaise bridled. "He was a gentleman . . . very interesting," she said. "He admired me . . . greatly. The inscription? It was a joke between us. He was full of deviltry and fun (un vrai diable . . . tout gamin). I have forgotten what the joke was. . . . He was forced to leave the country by some unpleasantness. . . . I too went away for a time." And again her eyes narrowed in a mysterious look, invoking romantic, glamorous things. Lily, the picture still clasped in her hand, sat down weakly.

Above all else, old photographs have the power of calling up dead memories. It is so perhaps because they are so terribly, so cruelly, realistic. Those things which the memory, desiring to forget, succeeds in losing among the shadows of time, remain in a photograph so long as it exists. . . the posture of a head, the betraying affected gesture of a hand, the manner of carrying oneself, the arrogance of countenance, the habit of dress. . . all these things survive on a bit of paper no larger perhaps than the palm of one's hand.

The photograph with "AÀ [sic] la Reine de la Nuit" written across