Long before midnight the two boys, under the gentle urgence of their mother, had drifted sleepily to bed. Ellen remained, still playing, almost mournfully now with a kind of moving and tragic despair. Beyond the frozen windows the wind howled wildly and the snow piled against the wall of the house. Mrs. Tolliver darned savagely, with short, passionate stitches, because the thing of which she lived in constant terror had returned to come between her soul and that of Ellen.
On the great sofa, her husband snored gently.
At midnight she rose and, poking the ashes of the fire, she said to Ellen, “It’s time we were all asleep. Lock up and I’ll get papa to bed.”
The transference of Mr. Tolliver from the sofa to his bed was nightly an operation lasting many minutes. When Ellen returned, her mother still stood by the sofa urging her husband gently to stir himself.
“Please, papa,” she said, “come along to bed. It’s after midnight.”
There was a series of final plaints and slowly the gentle Mr. Tolliver sat up, placed his feet on the floor, yawned and made his way sleepily to the stairway. The mother turned off the gas and the room suddenly was bathed in the warm, mellow glow of the dying fire. Ellen, breathing against the frozen window pane, cleared a tiny space to look out upon the world. It stretched before her, white and mysterious, beckoning and inscrutable. And suddenly she saw far down the street the figure of a cab drawn by a skinny horse which leaned black against the slanting snow within the halo of a distant street lamp.
The mother joined her, watching the cab for an instant and murmuring at length, “I wonder who it could be at this time of night.”
“I know,” said Ellen softly. “It’s Mr. Murdock. He wascoming to-night on the express to stay with the Setons. He must have come on the same train with Lily.”
At the mention of Lily, her mother turned away. Ellen followed her and in the doorway Mrs. Tolliver halted abruptly and embraced her child, fiercely as if she would hold her thus forever. For an instant they clung together in the warm darkness and presently Mrs. Tolliver murmured, “Tell me, darling.... If you have any secrets, tell them to me. I’m your mother. Whatever happens to you happens to me.”
Ellen did not reply at once. For an instant she was silent, thoughtful. When at last she spoke, it was to say dully, “I haven’t any.” But the tears came suddenly into her blue eyes. She was lying, for she had her secrets. They were the secrets which youth finds it impossible to reveal because they are too precious. All the evening she had not been in the comfortable, firelit room. She had been far away in some vague and gigantic concert hall where people listened breathlessly while she made music that was moving and exquisite. The faces stretched out before her dimly in a half-light until in the farthest rows they were blurred and no longer distinguishable. And when she finished they cheered her and she had gone proudly off to return again and again as they crowded nearer to the great stage.
After the mother and daughter had climbed the creaking stairs, both lay awake for a long time, the one entangled in her wild and glowing dreams, the other terrified by the unseen thing which in her primitive way she divined with such certainty. It was not to be seen; she could not understand it, yet it was there menacing, impregnable.
And in a distant part of the house, a light was put out suddenly and Gramp Tolliver thrust his skinny legs between the blankets. All this time he had remained awake listening to the beauty of the music which came to him distantly above the wild howling of the storm. He was sure now of his secret. He could havetold Hattie Tolliver what it was that shut her out from the soul of her precious daughter. It was something that would keep the girl lonely so long as she lived. Gramp Tolliver knew about such things.
So at last all the house fell into sleep. Outside there lay a vast desert of white which, it seemed, began at the very walls of the warm shabby house and extended thence to the very ends of the world. Even the tracks, left a little while before by the passing of the cab which brought Clarence Murdock through the blizzard, were obliterated now. One might have said that he had not passed that way at all.
WHEN the cab bearing Clarence drew up at length before the heavy portals of the Seton house, there was a light still burning in the room with the filigreed wall-paper. Leaving the bony horse and the smelly vehicle behind him, Clarence stumbled through the storm and pulled the bell. Far away, deep inside the house, it tinkled dismally in response, and presently there arose from within the sound of bodies sleepily setting themselves in motion to prepare a welcome. Mr. Seton himself opened the door, tall, bony, forbidding behind his thin whiskers, cold as the storm yet not so fresh or so dry. There was always a distinct dampness hanging about him, even in the touch of his hand.
“Well, well,” he said in his hollow voice, “you’re almost a stranger.”
Behind him in a row stood Mrs. Seton, fat and obviously sleepy, and May who interspersed her giggles with yawns which she attempted to conceal with a refined hand. And last of all there was the anemic Jimmy, not at all sleepy, and fidgeting as usual, this time with the cord of the red plush portières which he kept pulling to and fro until halted in this pastime by his mother,who said, “Come, dear, you mustn’t do that just when Mr. Murdock is arriving. Step forward and shake Mr. Murdock’s hand like a little gentleman.”
So Jimmy shook hands in a fashion which he had been taught was the very peak of gentility.
As for Clarence, the whole scene proved much less warm, much less vivid than he had pictured it. Somehow those dreams with which his day had begun were now dissipated, indeed almost lost in all that had happened since then. In the greeting there was a certain barrenness, intangible yet apparent. It may have been the dimness of the hall that depressed him, for Mr. Seton never permitted more than a faint flicker of gas in the red glass chalice which hung suspended by Moorish chains from the ceiling.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Seton, “you’re almost one of the family with us. May has talked of nothing else but your coming.”
May wriggled a little and added, “Yes, we’re glad you’ve come.”
And Clarence, dropping his bag, shook the snow from his coat. He could find no answer that seemed appropriate. How could one answer such greetings? Somehow he had expected, after his journey through the wild storm, something of warmth; and there was only this strange, damp confusion, strained and inexplicable. In the room with the filigreed wall-paper there burned the remnants of a fire; it was clear that Mr. Seton had permitted it to die down for the night.
They asked him about his trip, whether the train had been delayed by the blizzard, which of the cab drivers he had engaged. He did not know the name of his driver, yet he was able to identify him because he had heard the name of the other one. (“I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has driven me ever since I was a little girl.”)
“Jerry.... Jerry was the name of the other driver,” Clarence announced suddenly, as if, not having heard their talk, he had brought his mind by some heroic effort back from a great distance.
Mrs. Seton said, “I can see Mr. Murdock is very tired. We mustn’t keep him up.... Mr. Seton will show you your room.”
So Clarence bade them good night and, led by his soft-footed host, made his way through the dark halls until the corset manufacturer opened a door and admitted him to a room that was damp with the chill of a tomb. The sudden flicker of the gas revealed an enormous bed with the cotton sheets turned back.
“Here,” said Mr. Seton, with a contracted gesture of the hand intended clearly to be hospitable. “You will find it a little chilly in the spare room, but it is a cold night. Once you’re in bed it’ll be warm enough.”
Clarence murmured polite protests and Mr. Seton withdrew, closing the door behind him. The sound of its closing had a curious effect upon Clarence. For a moment he was tempted to turn suddenly, fling it open and run for his life. Why he should have experienced this impulse he did not know. The whole sensation was confused, disturbing, a part of the wretchedness which had overcome him as he saw the stranger enter her cab and drive off in the direction of the great black house among the flaming mills. He had visited this house before ... many times. He knew the habits of its owners. They had not changed. It was clear that the trouble lay hidden in himself. Something had happened to him, something quite outside his neat and pigeon-holed calculations. He had come prepared to win success and a comfortable wife, and now ... instead of that there was fear of something vague and indefinable, a curious instinct to escape from some dreadful trap.
For a time he sat quietly on a stiff chair, his overcoat thrown across his knees, trying to discover the cause of his uneasiness. It was entangled in some strange way with the woman of the veil.The Setons.... I know who they are although I don’t know them.And then,I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I should be safe with you.
Certainly he was not in love with her. Such a thing had neveroccurred to him. She was too remote, too far beyond even the wildest flights of his rarely erratic imagination.
And presently, shivering, he began to undress. With the routine of this daily act, he began at once to grow more calm and more assured. One by one, as he took each article from his pocket—a pen, a pencil, a pocketknife, the watch Uncle Henry had given him on his twenty-first birthday for never having touched tobacco, a few coins—the disturbing sensations seemed to loose their subtle hold. As he laid these things in turn on the mantelpiece beneath the chromo of Watts’ Hope, it seemed that he deposited with each of them a fear, an uneasiness, a premonition; the breath-taking sense of grand adventure oozed out of his finger tips.
At length he hung his coat and waistcoat over the back of the chair, placed his shoes beneath the bed and his trousers, carefully folded (to preserve the neat creases that meant so much in the world of himself and Mr. Bruce) beneath the mattress. In the flickering gaslight his body looked pinched and cold, as if he suffered from a lack of warm blood. He was a muscular little man, but his muscles were hard and tight and knotty, the muscles of a man whose only exercise was taken each morning beside the bath tub.
At last after turning out the flickering gas flame, he slipped, shivering and gasping, into his nightshirt and sprang courageously into the monumental bed. Seldom used, it was like the room, dampish and chilly, but before long the warmth of his body permeated the cotton sheets and, coupled with the sound of the wild storm outside, it filled him with a certain comfort which lulled him presently to sleep. In the air-tight room he slept with his mouth opened a little, his teeth exposed, so that in breathing he made a faint wheezing noise.
THE snow lingered for days, blackening slowly under a downpour of soot from the Mills that penetrated even the distant reaches of the old Town where the Tollivers and the Setons had their houses. Throughout the Flats where the aliens lived and in the park of Shane’s Castle it lay soft and thick as if a great and infernal blizzard had passed that way in a thick downfall of sable flakes. With the return of Lily, the old house set in the midst of the furnaces took on a new aspect. Lights glowed once more behind the diamond-shaped panes and the sound of music sometimes penetrated the tottering walls of the filthy houses where the steel workers dwelt. It was gay, triumphant music, for Lily was one whom the Town had never conquered. Any passer-by could have told that she had returned....
The days passed slowly and meanwhile Ellen made no effort to see her cousin. This Mrs. Tolliver observed with astonishment, setting it down in her hopeful way as proof that the restlessness was passing out of her stormy Ellen; but she did not remark upon it because she feared the mere sound of Lily’s name. There was something about Lily which made even Mrs. Tolliver uneasy; it was impossible to understand this woman who denied the existence of the Town, who could return to it when she chose out of a life which it was whispered was none too respectable, to dominate the townspeople again and again in her own disarming, pleasant fashion. In a vague way Lily stood for that vast land beyond the Mills which held such terror for the soul of the simple woman. It was as if Lily were a menace, as if there could be no peace, no contentment until she had gone back again into that vague and distant world from which she came. And here once more Mrs. Tolliver failed to understand. She did not see that Ellen, for all her stiff-necked pride, was shy and held by the same uncertain fear. It was a fear that Clarence Murdock knew.Somehow it had touched him and changed alike himself and the world about him. It was the fear of naïve souls for one that was perhaps not good but one that was experienced, that moved through life with a sure step, without fear for those things which would have terrified the less courageous. The soul of Mrs. Tolliver was simple. The soul of Clarence was small, and that of Ellen had not begun to grow; until now, save as a bundle of wild desires and feverish unrest, it had not been born.
At length came Christmas day when it was no longer possible for Ellen to avoid her cousin. For seventy years this day had been set aside in the clan composed of the Barrs, the Tollivers and the Shanes as a day given over to feasting, an occasion which brought the most remote members of the great family from every part of the county to the black house among the Mills. But the seventy years had wrought changes. The great house that once raised its bulk, proud and aloof on its hill amid the marsh land, now stood surrounded and blackened by the great mills and factories. Of the family only nine gathered about a table which once had seated forty. The old ones were dying off, slowly; the younger ones had gone away, all save Hattie Tolliver and her children, Irene Shane, and a spinster cousin, the daughter of the Samuel Barr who died after inventing the celebrated and useless perpetual motion machine.
Of the older generation only two remained ... the proud old Julia Shane and her brother-in-law Jacob Barr, the father of Mrs. Tolliver. This old man was an extraordinary character who at eighty still had a powerful stalwart figure and a great rosy face framed in white hair and a white beard which once had been red. In his youth the people of the county had called him The Red Scot and marveled at the superb strength of his great body. There were tales of his having moved his log barn alone and unaided when the men who were to have helped him failed to arrive at the appointed time. When at last they came, so thestory ran, they found Jacob Barr mopping his great, handsome face by the side of the windlass and the barn moved a full hundred yards from the spot it once occupied. At eighty he still managed his farm and scorned his daughter’s offer of care. He was the last of the pioneers.
There were times when this grandfather seemed even more remote to Ellen than old Gramp Tolliver in his cell lined with musty books; for the remoteness of Grandpa Barr was the remoteness of one who dwelt in a tower of unbending virtue. In the county he had been the first abolitionist, the first prohibitionist, the first advocate of woman suffrage. He had organized the Underground Railroad which aided slaves to escape to Canada. He was a Presbyterian without sympathy for those who were weak. His wife had died in bearing him child after child. For Gramp Tolliver his scorn was so profound that it was beyond all expression in words. He never spoke of Gramp Tolliver at all.
Jacob Barr was a citizen. He had what people called “backbone,” and Ellen was not his granddaughter for nothing.
There was in this annual dinner a pomp, a circumstance that approached the medieval; it was a rite which symbolized the pride, the greatness of a family which admitted no weakness, no failure, no poverty; the persistence of a family which, because it lived sometimes in dreams when the reality became insupportable, knew no such thing as failure. What one does not admit, does not exist. This one sentence might indeed have stood above the crest of the clan. If Hattie Tolliver knew in her heart that Lily was a feeble reed, she ignored it. In her presence none would have dared to hint at such frailty; for Lily existed within the sacred barrier of the family.
On Christmas day, the guests arrived in a procession ... first Grandpa Barr, rugged, handsome, defiant of his years, yet yielding through bitter necessity to the stout stick of cherry wood which he carried; Mrs. Tolliver, large, powerful, vigorous in a shabbyastrakhan jacket, a beaver tippet and a small hat covered with ostrich plumes slightly frayed by age; Charles Tolliver, gentle, handsome, pleasant in his neat and faintly threadbare clothes; Ellen, stiff-necked, awkward, yet somehow handsome and overpowering and, last of all, the two brothers, Fergus, gentle, charming like his father and Robert, stocky and for all the world like the fierce, blue-eyed old Scot with his cherry stick. A vigorous family. And in the midst marched Mrs. Tolliver, erect and with a strange dignity, her plumes nodding a little as if she were a field marshal surrounded by a glorious army.
But Gramp Tolliver was nowhere to be seen. He had been left behind to have his Christmas meal alone in the room walled in by books. Gramp Tolliver, who never worked, who had wrought nothing in this world, was a disgrace which one did not air in public. He took his place among the things which one did not admit.
Before the wrought iron portico of Shane’s Castle, the little family defiled across the blackened snow to the heavy door. Mrs. Tolliver pulled the bell as Hennery, the black servant, drove off the sleigh drawn by horses which the Tollivers had for their keep since the latest débâcle in family fortunes. Ellen, trembling a little, perhaps at the thought of the cousin who awaited her inside the long, beautiful drawing-room, perhaps at the fear of the thing she had to ask of Lily, stood leaning against the iron railing, gazing out across the furnaces that flamed even on Christmas day below the eminence of the dying park.
Inside the house there was a distant tinkle and the door swung open presently to reveal Sarah, the mulatto housekeeper, and behind her a long hallway, hung with silver mounted mirrors and a chandelier of crystal that reflected its dull light against the long, polished stairway. For in the Flats, where the Mills reigned, the darkness was so great that lights burned even at midday in Shane’s Castle.
Once inside, there was the rustle of descending coats. Before the mirror Mrs. Tolliver frizzed her hair and Ellen patted thenewborn pompadour. Beneath her coat she wore a starched white shirtwaist and a skirt of blue voile, with a tight belt and a contrivance known as a chatelaine dangling and jingling at one side. The Town called her well-dressed. It marveled that she could afford such clothes, although it knew well enough that they came from Hattie Tolliver’s sewing machine. Yet she was ridiculous and in the next moment she knew it.
For as she turned there moved toward her out of the old drawing-room, that glittered softly in the reflected light of the candles upon mirror and bits of crystal and silver, the figure of Lily, whom she had not seen in seven years. Her cousin wore a gown of black stuff, exquisitely cut by the hand of some artist in the establishment of Worth, a gown which came from the other side of the earth, from a street known to every corner of the world. Her fine bronze hair she wore drawn back over her ears in a knot at the back of her beautiful head; about her throat close against the soft skin hung a string of pearls. As she moved there came from her the faint scent of mimosa, which smote the quivering nostrils of Ellen as some force strange and exotic yet almost recognizable. It was a perfume which she was never able to forget and one which so long as she lived exerted upon her a curious softening power. Years afterward as she passed the flower carts behind the Madeleine or moved along the Corniche above the unreal terraces of Nice the faint scent of mimosa still had the power of making her suddenly sad, even wistful ... and those were the years when she had conquered the world, when she was hard.
Now she only trembled a little and offered her hand awkwardly to the smiling cousin.
“Well,” said Lily, “and now, Ellen, you’re a woman. To think of it! When I last saw you, you were a little girl with pigtails.”
Her voice carried that thin trace of accent which Clarence had noticed. Somehow it made her strangeness, her glamour, overpowering; and thus it strengthened the very barrier which to Ellen seemed so impossible ever to pass. In that moment thererushed through the confused brain of the awkward girl a multitude of thoughts, but out of them only one emerged clearly defined. “Ah, if I could be like that, I would not care what people thought of me! To be so free, so certain, so gracious, to overcome every one so easily!”
For all Lily’s warmth the talk was not easy between them. Yet for the first time it seemed to Ellen that the door stood open a little way. It was as if already she looked out upon the world.
And then Lily turned away to speak to the others, smiling, disarming them, even Grandpa Barr, who in the isolation of his virtue glared secretly at her from beneath his shaggy brows, suspecting her as that which was too pleasant to be good.
And Ellen, with a wildly beating heart, turned to gaunt Aunt Julia Shane, who, leaning on her ebony stick and dressed all in black with amethysts, shook her hand harshly and disapproved of her pompadour.
“It is a silly thing the way girls disfigure themselves nowadays,” she said. But Ellen did not mind.
The old woman was handsome in a fierce, cold fashion and had the Barr nose, slightly curved, and intolerably proud, which had appeared again in this awkward great-niece of hers.
Then there was Irene to greet.... Aunt Julia Shane’s other daughter, given to charity and good works, thin, anemic, slightly withered, so different from the radiant, selfish Lily. Irene Ellen ignored, because Irene stood for a life which, it seemed to Ellen, it was best to forget. And beyond Irene there was the horse-faced Eva Barr, daughter of the perpetual motion machine, a terrifying spinster of forty-five who regarded Lily as obscene and spoke of Ellen as a “chit.” Both of them she hated passionately for their freedom, because to her it was a thing forever lost. She, like Miss Ogilvie, had been trapped by another tradition. It was too late now....
In the dark lovely room, all these figures passed before Ellen,but of them all, she saw only Lily who stood now before the fire of cannel coal beneath the glowing Venice painted by Mr. Turner. She was like the picture, and shared its warmth, its graciousness, its unreal, extravagant beauty.
Ellen in her dark corner savagely bit her lip. She would escape some day and herself see Venice. Lily should help her. Every one should help her. And into her handsome young face, beneath the absurd, ratted pompadour, there stole a look of determination so fierce that Irene, seeing it, was frightened, and old Julia Shane, seeing it, exulted in the spirit of this great-niece of hers.
IN another part of the Town far on the Hill above the Flats, the Setons and their guest sat down to Christmas dinner at an hour somewhat earlier than that kept at Shane’s Castle, for Harvey Seton, in the manner of many men who have made their own success, created social laws for himself, as if in some way he could thus place himself above the rules. Certainly he could not have brought himself to follow the fashions set by Shane’s Castle. He was, he said, a simple man and hoped to remain so until he died.
The shadow of this unspoken defiance appeared to cloud the cheer of Christmas Day at the Setons. There was in the air a certain conscious tension, a vague uneasiness which manifested itself in a dozen ways ... in the unflinching frown of the father, in the extreme politeness of the mother, in the nervous and concentrated giggles of May herself. The most uneasy of them all was the guest himself. Alone of all the group the simian Jimmy appeared to enjoy himself; and in this there was nothing strange or unusual, for it was an atmosphere in which he flourished and one to which he was highly sensitized. With the sharpness of a sickly, precocious nature, he understood that the air about himwas heavy with foreboding. He knew that it required but a spark to precipitate a crisis with all the suddenness of an explosion. He waited now, joyful, expectant, watching the others with an impish satisfaction.
There was in the dampish atmosphere of the room an odor of unwonted richness ... the smell of a roast goose, strange and exotic in this household. But Christmas was a season which caused even Harvey Seton to unbend a little. It was the only occasion when the Christianity of the man was tempered even for an instant by anything faintly suggestive of warmth. His manner as he carved was touched, despite the thinness of the slices which fell from the breast of the bird, by a majestic air, which suggested more than ever his likeness to a grotesque Gothic saint; (he might have been one of those early fathers who battled and gave up their lives for some minute point of dogma.)
As he stood whetting the knife coldly against the steel, a sense of awe penetrated slowly one by one the hearts of those about the table ... all save Jimmy. With his small pointed head barely visible above the table’s edge, he waited. And presently, as if he could restrain his impatience no longer, he banged his knife sharply against the edge of his plate.
The effect was instantaneous. It brought from the harassed mother a sharp scream and a violent slap on the wrist.
“Don’t do that again or you’ll be sent to bed without any goose!”
But Jimmy, knowing his safety, only grinned and varied the method of torture by scratching the fork against the cold surface of the plate so that it produced a dreadful whining sound.
There were, to be sure, reasons for this strange condition of nerves. Since the night when Clarence arrived out of the blizzard, things had not progressed. Indeed, it appeared that, on the contrary, they were moving backwards. By now, everything should have been settled, and yet nothing was done; there had been no declaration, no hint. The wooer remained wary, suspicious; and the consciousness of his failure penetrated even the sluggish workings of May’s brain and hurt her pride. Mrs. Seton it baffled. She was conscious that some event, some obstacle, some peril which she was unable to divine had raised itself during these past few days full in the middle of her path.
“My,” said May presently, “it’s much warmer. I expect it’s the January thaw.”
Then the silence descended and again there was only the whine of Jimmy’s fork and the metallic click of the carving knife against the plated dish which bore the goose.
As for Clarence, he managed to conceal that wavering sense of uncertainty and terror which had assailed him with increasing force as the visit progressed. It was a terror which, strangely enough, centered itself in the father, for Clarence, in his chivalrous fashion, regarded women as creatures whom one could put aside. Never having been assailed, he had no fear of them. But the face of the Methodist elder, slightly green and intensely forbidding, filled him with uneasiness. When the corset manufacturer turned to address him, the fishy eyes accused him of unspeakable things.
In all those days in the dampish house there had been no mention of the encounter aboard the transcontinental express. If Lily Shane had been a light woman with whom (Heaven forbid!) Clarence had spent the night, he could have been no more silent concerning the adventure. Somehow he understood that the very name of Lily Shane had no place in the household of the Setons. And the longer he kept silent, the more glamorous and wicked the secret had become, until now it had attained the proportions of a monstrous thing. Each time the Elder looked at him the offense increased a degree or two in magnitude.
Yet in the end he betrayed himself. Perhaps it was the strained silence, perhaps the unbearable whine of Jimmy’s fork against the cold plate. In any case there came a moment when even Clarence could bear the strained silence no longer. He knew that something must be said. What he chose to say wascalamitous and no sooner had the words passed his lips than he knew his error.
He said, “Do you know a woman called Lily Shane? I met her on the train.”
It was purely an effort at conversation; he knew well enough that they knew her, but the effect was terrific. Mr. Seton’s carving halted in mid-air. The mouth of Mrs. Seton went down at the corners. May giggled nervously and Jimmy, sensing triumph, raised himself until he displayed several inches of skinny neck above the table’s edge.
“Yes,” said Mr. Seton in a hollow voice, “we know about her. She is not a good woman.” What he said was mild enough, yet it carried overtones of the unspeakable, of bacchanalian orgies, of debauchery. And the mother, seeing her chance, took it.
“She is not nice, you know. There are things about her....” She would have gone on but a look from her husband halted her. It was a look which said, “We do not discuss such women before May and Mr. Murdock.” So Mrs. Seton coughed and suppressed her revelations. Instead she made a conversational step aside. “I suppose she looks old and worn now. A woman leading that sort of life always pays in the end.”
At this point Clarence, like a plumed knight, went to the defense of the damozel. “No, I wouldn’t say that. She seemed quite young and beautiful.” And then as if he had gone too far, he added mildly, “Of course, I don’t know her well.”
“It’s better to avoid women like her,” rejoined the father. “Take a word of advice from an older man. Women like that can ruin men ... just by talking to them. They are creatures of the Devil.”
Somewhere within the mind of Clarence a great light broke, and he saw everything clearly. He understood then that all the visit differed from his expectations not because the Setons had changed but because he had encountered Lily Shane.... She lay at the root of the trouble. Yes, women like her were powerful. There was no denying it.
The talk came easily enough now. Mrs. Seton, following her instincts, saw an opportunity to destroy the single menace which she fancied stood between her and her success. “She is a cousin, you know, of Ellen ... that Tolliver girl. They all have bad blood in ’em.”
But she had taken a false turning and, though she never knew it, her implications were in their effect fatal. Without understanding it she brought into the room both Ellen and her cousin Lily Shane, and Clarence saw them there, aloof and proud, more clearly than he had ever seen them in the flesh. He saw in them the same qualities, the assurance, the subtle, bedeviling recklessness, the outward indifference that concealed beneath it things undreamed of.
And then May giggled, nervously, as if she were smirking at the veiled improprieties which her mother kept concealed. The sound was more terrible than the scraping of the fork against the cold plate, for suddenly May stood revealed, and Clarence, in the nicety of his soul, was horrified.
“I couldn’t tell you the whole story,” continued Mrs. Seton. “Perhaps Mr. Seton could. I think you ought to know.”
But the thoughts of Clarence had wandered away from the little group, away from the goose and cranberry sauce on his plate. Indeed they had wandered a long way, for they were centered now on the great black house he had seen for an instant high above the flames of the furnaces, so distant, so unattainable. In his mind he had created a picture of the house, of what sort of a dinner must be in progress within its sooty, decaying walls. It was a picture, to be sure, far more magnificent than the reality and therefore more fatal to his happiness. The old ambitions began to stir once more, ponderously and terribly.
And far away he heard May saying, “She doesn’t stay much in the Town. She thinks it isn’t good enough for her.” And then following the cue of so bad a campaigner as her mother, “Neitherdoes Ellen. They’re both stuck up. They think there’s nothing good enough for them in the Town.”
“You’d think,” rejoined Mrs. Seton, “to see Ellen in her homemade clothes that she was a princess!”
A fierce resentment, bordering upon savagery, colored her voice. In the course of the conversation the fat, complacent woman became transformed into a spiteful, witch-like creature. And in the brain of Clarence there echoed a soft voice which said, “Ah, the Setons! To be sure, I know who they are but I don’t know them,” dismissing them all quite easily, without resentment, without savagery, even without thought, forgetting in the next moment their very existence.
And then the lightning struck.
The shrill voice of Jimmy, impatient of results, suddenly cut the dampish air like a knife. “I know what it is! She’s had a baby and she was never married!... She’s had a baby and she was never married!”
DUSK had already fallen and the black servants had placed silver candlesticks among the wreckage of the Christmas feast before the first chair was drawn back with a scraping sound in the paneled dining room of Shane’s Castle.
Throughout the long dinner, Ellen sat silent and somewhat abashed, eating little, hearing nothing, not even the family talk which each year followed the same course, rambling backward into reminiscences of the Civil War and of Grandpa Barr’s adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. Even when the old man, lost in a torrent of sweeping memories, described with flashing blue eyes and the resonant voice of youth the jungle tapestries of Panama and a terrible shipwreck off the Cocos Islands, Ellen did not raise her head. It was not these things which interested her;they were too far away and she was still too young, too egoistic, to understand the burning romance that lay in them.
It was only Lily who interested her, and with Lily she had been able to make no progress. Her cousin was placed opposite her, between Charles Tolliver and his son Fergus; and between these two Lily divided her attention, save in those moments when the stentorian tones of the Red Old Scot drowned all conversation. Even the boy she addressed with as much charm and as much interest as if he had been the most fascinating of men; and Fergus, young though he was, had been affected. His clear blue eyes, half-hidden by dark lashes, glowed with a naïve pleasure. Ellen, watching the pair, understood suddenly that this brother, so fascinated by the woman beside him, would one day escape as Lily had escaped. It was easy for him; it was easy for any man. For a girl to escape was a different matter. Yet, sitting there wrapped in despair, she planned how she might help him if she were the first to make her way into the world.
For Fergus exerted upon her a strange effect of softening. His fanciful mind she alone understood, and there were times in the long winter evenings when it was to him alone that she played her savage music. His shyness, which, unlike hers, lacked all the quality of savagery, aroused in her a fierce instinct of protection. There were times when the sight of his clear eyes, his blond curly head and snub nose filled her with an unaccountable melancholy and foreboding.
Sometimes during the dinner Ellen turned at the sound of a loud, rasping voice to regard her cousin Eva Barr, who sat by the side of Irene discussing harshly their work among the poor. Something about the horse-faced spinster filled her with a vague terror. It was as if Eva Barr stood as a symbol of that which a courageous, strong-minded woman might become if kept too long imprisoned. To Ellen, turning these things over secretly in her mind, it seemed that the way of her own destiny lay before her, branching now into two paths. At the end of the one stood the glowing Lily and at the end of the other Eva Barr, baffled,sour, dogmatic, driving herself with a fierce energy into good works.
In a sudden access of pity and sorrow, for herself as much as for Eva Barr and old Miss Ogilvie, the tears welled in her eyes and dropped to the starched front of her shirtwaist. But she dried them, quickly and proudly, before they were seen, with the handkerchief she kept in the jangling chatelaine at her waist.
Ah, she saw everything very clearly ... even the tragedy of her mother, so contented at this moment, in the midst of all her family, talking in her rich, vigorous voice to bitter old Julia Shane. Yet there was no way of saving any one, of changing anything. By some profound and feminine instinct, the girl knew this and it made her weep silently.... Ellen, who people said was so proud and had no heart.
Thus all her plans for seeking help from Lily were dissipated. If she had been less proud, she might, by an heroic effort, have approached her cousin saying, “You must give me money ... lend it to me. Some day I will pay you back, for I will be rich, powerful. You must help me to do what I know I must do.” But she found herself incapable of speaking the words, because the pride of a poverty which has been trained to show an indifferent face was too deeply planted in her. She would ask anything else ... anything. She could not ask for money.
It was Lily herself who, all unconsciously, closed the matter once and for all. As the family, much wrapped in coats and furs against the cold, stood in the dark hallway making their farewells, she drew Ellen aside and, placing a friendly arm about the waist of the girl, said, “You play superbly, Ellen. If you can play always as you have played to-day, you will be a great artist.” And then in a whisper, almost furtive, she said, “You must not throw it away. It is too great a gift. And don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen. Don’t waste your life.... And when the time comes, if you want to comeand study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.” For a moment, the girl blushed and regarded the floor silently. “I won’t let them,” she managed to murmur presently. “Thank you, cousin Lily.” It was all that she was able to say.
And when she stepped through the doorway into the cold air, the flames above the furnaces were blurred before her glistening eyes. Lily had promised Paris. That was something; but Paris was a long way off and the road between was certain to be hard.
THE heavy snow lasted until the day before the New Year when the weather, turning suddenly, sent it slithering away down the gutters of the Town in streams of black water to swell the volume of the Black Fork so that in the Flats, where the stream meandered a tortuous course, it overflowed its banks and filled the cellars of the hovels with stinking damp. It was through this malodorous area that the fastidious carriages of the Town made their way on New Year’s Eve to the eminence crowned by Shane’s Castle, aglow now with the lights that had flashed into existence upon the arrival of Lily. Kentucky thoroughbreds picked their way daintily through the streaming gutters, drawing behind them the old families of the Town and one or two of the new, for the Shanes, the Barrs and the Tollivers did not, save in cases of rare distinction, admit the existence of the new. Consequently there was no carriage bearing a member of the Seton family. It was this circumstance, far more perhaps than any other, which had precipitated the dinner table crisis of Christmas Day. And its consequences had not ended there; they were destined once more to enter into the existence of Clarence Murdock.
On the same New Year’s Eve at about the hour when the gaiety in the house among the mills, centering itself about the returned prodigal, had reached its height, Mrs. Seton, with a rustling of her voile skirts, drew May off to bed. Even the persistent Jimmy was swept with them, so that Clarence, left conspicuously alone with the father, understood that some event of grave importance had been arranged. Indeed, the manner of the corset manufacturer made his divination doubly sure. The man poked the remnants of the fire to make certain that it was entirely consumed before he retired, and then faced his guest.
Clarence, opposite him in a stiff backed chair of mahogany veneer, stirred with a sense of impending doom. The green eyes of his host fastened upon him with the old implication of guilt. From one corner of his narrow mouth there hung, limply, an unlighted and rather worn cigar which had done service all the day.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” he said presently in his cold, deliberate voice. “I thought perhaps we’d better talk over a few things before you go away for good.” A cinder slipping in the grate disturbed the stillness of the room and he continued. “I don’t want to hurry you about anything, but it’s best to come to an understanding.”
In his uncomfortable chair, Clarence, swayed by the cold deliberate manner of the Elder, shifted his position as if he were sitting on a bag of rocks.
“Yes,” he managed to articulate, as if he knew what was coming. “It’s always better.”
“First of all,” began his host, “there is this matter of the Shane woman.... Lily Shane.” He coughed and looked into the fire for a long time. And then, “It’s a matter I don’t care to discuss before May.... She’s innocent, you know, like a flower.... The way girls should be.”
“Yes,” said Clarence agreeably; but there rang in his ears the horrid memory of May’s knowing giggle.
“I don’t understand how Jimmy could have found out unless he overheard his mother discussing it,” continued the father. “We’ve always kept such things from the children. My wife andI are great believers in innocence ... and purity. It’s a fine protection.”
A month ago, Clarence would have agreed. Now he murmured, “Yes,” politely, but in his heart he felt stirring a faint desire to protest, to deny this assertion. Lately there had come into his mind a certainty that the greatest of all protections lay in knowledge. One could not know too much. Each bit of knowledge was a link in the armor.
“It’s true ... what Jimmy said.”
And again there was a silence in which Clarence flushed slowly a deep red.
“We can speak of such things ... man to man,” continued the torturer and slowly there swept over Clarence a terrible sense of becoming involved. Life in the Babylon Arms in the midst of a great and teeming city was simple compared to the complications of these last few days.
“But it doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he said presently. “All the Town has gone to the ball.... I saw the carriages going there ... a whole stream of them, and it’s Lily Shane who is giving it.”
For an instant, Harvey Seton remained silent, turning the worn cigar round and round in his thin lips, as if it might be the very thought he was turning over in much the same fashion in his own devious mind. “Yes,” he replied, after a long time. “That’s true. But it’s because nobody really knows.”
At this speech Clarence, moved perhaps by the memory of Lily leaning from the window of the cab as she drove off through the storm, asked, “But doyouknow?”
Slowly his host eyed him with suspicion. It was as if the veiled accusations contained in their depths had suddenly become defined, specific; as if he accused this model young man opposite him of being the father of the vague and suppositious child.
“I have no proofs ... to be sure,” he said. “But a woman, like that.... Well, to look at her is enough. To look at her in her fine Paris clothes. A woman has no right to make herself alure to men. It’s like the women of the streets.” Then he added gruffly with a sudden glance at the dying fire, “She’s always been bad. They’re a bad lot ... the whole family, unstable, not to be relied upon. They go their crazy way ... all of ’em. Why there was Sam Barr, Lily Shane’s uncle, who spent his whole life inventing useless things ... never making a cent out of ’em. His daughter lives in a cheap boarding house now.... If he’d made an honest living instead of mooning about.” He laughed scornfully. “Why, he even thought he could invent a perpetual motion machine.” Then he halted abruptly as if he realized that he had protested too much, and returned to the main stream of his discourse. “As for the Town going to the ball, all the Town knows just what I know, and they talk about it, only they see fit to ignore it to-night because there is music and good food and champagne punch at Shane’s Castle.”
In the silence that followed Clarence bent his neatly brushed head and slipped away into a world of philosophy new and strange to him. “Yes,” he found himself thinking, “the world is like that and nobody can change it much. If Lily Shane had asked you, you would have gone.”
But in this he was unfair to his enemy; Skinflint Seton would not have gone, because he would have taken too great a satisfaction in refusing. It was this satisfaction, undoubtedly, which he now missed so bitterly.
But the turn things had taken exerted upon Clarence a curious effect. It was as if he found himself for the first time on the offensive, as if he were placed now within the ranks of all the others who were at the ball, laughing, dancing, forgetful (as Lily Shane had been) that Harvey Seton even existed. He had begun to lose the feeling of isolation, of being trapped. There appeared in the offing a gleam of hope.
He knew vaguely that it was difficult to deal with this manwho sat opposite him; but he did not understand the reason—that it lay in the very positiveness of his opponent, in the fact that the world of Harvey Seton consisted entirely of blacks and whites. There were in between no soft, warm shades of gray. May was (despite that fatal giggle) innocent as a flower, just as Lily Shane was the apotheosis of sin; and they were so because he willed them to be so. Thus he had created them, knowing his own daughter perhaps no better than he knew Lily Shane.
Clarence looked at him and blushed slowly. The walls began once more to close about him; he was frozen into silence.
“It was about May,” Seton repeated slowly.... “She’s unhappy.... At least her mother says she is, and it’s on account of you.”
In response to this Clarence found nothing to say. He would have protested but there were no words with which to frame a protest. The corset manufacturer bore down upon his victim like a Juggernaut. Clarence could neither speak, nor scream, nor rise from its path.
“I’ve guessed for a long time that there was something between you two.” And here he permitted himself to smirk suddenly with a frigid sentimentality. “I’m not sorry, you understand.... Nothing could please me more. I’ll need some one to help me in the factory ... until Jimmy’s old enough to take hold.”
In his chair before the chilly, dying fire Clarence sat motionless; betraying no sign of the tortured soul that writhed within him.
“But I don’t ...” he began. “I mean....”
The Juggernaut rolled on. “I understand your bashfulness,” continued his host. “I once had the honor of speaking myself ... to the fine woman who is now my wife. My boy, there is nothing like a wife. It’s the finest step a man can take ... to settle himself into honorable matrimony.” Here he bit a piece from the badly worn cigar and spat it into the ashes of the fire. “I am only speaking to you because I wanted to know if yourintentions are honorable. After all, you have been close to us now ... for a long time, living as one of the family, and under such conditions it is not surprising that a young girl should ... should have her interest aroused.”
By now Clarence managed to speak. He sat upright and with superhuman effort turned upon his torturer.
“My intentions ...” he began. “My intentions....” And then he ended weakly. “Of course they’re honorable, sir. What did you think?” It was as if he were in some terrible nightmare in which there was no faint gleam of reality.
“Then,” continued the Elder, “a declaration would clear up everything ... everything. I wouldn’t have hurried you except on the girl’s account.”
It was impossible to believe that this was happening to him—Clarence Murdock—that he was being forced slowly into a life of slavery, of horror, a world of damp cotton sheets and reinforced corsets, of cold piety and stewed mutton. He must fight for time, somehow.
“You know, sir,” he heard himself saying from a great distance, “I am bashful.... I’ve meant to propose, but I can’t screw up my courage.... I’ve ... I’ve meant to all along ... and then I thought I’d leave it until I went away.”
“I have no intention,” replied the Elder firmly, “of hurrying things. I only thought that it would make every one easier ... yourself included.”
“I’m going away to-morrow ... for three days,” said Clarence. “When I come back we’re going on a skating party if it’s cold enough.... I’ll ... I’ll ask May then if she’ll have me.”
Harvey Seton rose and came over to him, placing one hand on his shoulder. “That’s fine,” he said. “May’s a fine girl. She’ll make you a fine wife.” Then he withdrew his hand for an instant and regarded Clarence with his accusing green eyes. “I suppose,” he began, “there’s no reason why you shouldn’t marryher?” And at the look of astonishment in the eyes of his guest he continued, “I mean, there’s been no other woman ... you’ve led a clean, pure life. You are fit to marry such a pure, innocent girl.”
By now Clarence had became quite still, with the stillness of one who cannot believe the sensations conveyed by his own nerves. His mouth opened. It closed. At last he stammered, “Why.... Why ... of course there’s been no other woman.... I don’t know anything about women.” (And in the back of his mind a still small voice said, “But I’m learning.... I’m learning.”)
Harvey Seton backed away and stood with his lean legs between Clarence and the dead fire. He shook himself suddenly as if the chill had penetrated even his spare frame. “Well, I’m glad to hear that.... I’m glad to hear that.... I didn’t know. Things are different in a city like New York.... And then you talked to Lily Shane....”
“But she spoke to me first....”
“I know ... I know. I’ve encountered temptations.” And he squared his thin shoulders with the air of St. Anthony resisting all the forces of the Devil. “I know.” Then he turned suddenly and raised his arm toward the flickering gas. “It’s gettin’ chilly in here.... We’d best go to bed.”
On the way to the door, the father turned in the darkness. “Of course,” he said, “you can leave your things here if you’re only going to be gone three days.... There’s no use in lugging all that stuff away with you.... You can get it when you come back....” There was a little pause, during which Clarence shuddered silently. “When you come back to propose to May. My, it’ll make her happy. You know, she’s one of the marryin’ kind.”
In the mind of Clarence there lingered the memory of that obscene giggle. With this new turn of affairs, it filled him with actual terror.
After he had gone to his room, he stood for a time looking out of the window far across to the other side of the Town. The house stood on a hill so that it overlooked all the wide and flooded expanse of the Flats. It was impossible to have seen Shane’s Castle but above the spot where it raised its gloomy pile there was a great glow that filled all the sky. To be sure, it was a glow caused by the flames from the furnaces but it might have come from a great house where there was a ball in progress with music and good food and champagne punch.... The glow appeared at length to spread over all the Town and penetrate the very blood of Clarence as he stood there silhouetted against the light. His bony legs shivered beneath his cotton nightshirt; it may have been the cold, or it may have been fright. Clarence himself could not have said which it was.
Presently he lifted the window a little way. Unmistakably it was growing colder. There would be skating in three days. Nothing could alter the course of nature.
IT was about this time that Gramp Tolliver, as if he scented the imminence of stupendous happenings, began like a long dormant volcano to display signs of activity. Despite the bitter cold and the ice that lay thick upon the pavement, he left his cell and, clad in a beaver cap and a moth-eaten coonskin coat, took to wandering about the streets. This activity Hattie Tolliver observed with apprehension, not alone because of the risk which the glittering pavements placed upon his brittle old bones, but because from long experience she interpreted such behavior as an omen of disaster. Standing in the doorway she watched his daily departure with a hostile eye, knowing well enough that if he did not come to grief, he would return in time for meals; his appetite was the best and on the rare occasions when he undertook any exercise it suffered a consequent augmentation. All the signs were presentat meal time when the noise in the room above the kitchen became more violent and assumed a variety of manifestations. On occasion there was an admirable directness in Gramp Tolliver, not distantly akin to the directness of an elderly tiger at the approach of the feeding hour.
The sight of his grotesque figure, wrapped in furs and perambulating with uncanny skill the slippery places of the street, provided the people of the neighborhood with a divertissement of rare quality. As he passed along the street they took their children to the windows and there pointed out with ominous fingers his figure, saying, “There goes old man Tolliver, a living example of what laziness comes to. A perfect failure in life! Let him be an example to you.... Just watch him! If it was a good hard working man likeyourgrandfather, children, he would have fallen and broken his leg long ago. But not him! Not old man Tolliver! The devil looks out for him!”
And by that time Gramp Tolliver would have vanished around the next corner to draw new moralists to peer at him from behind the Boston fern that adorned each successive bay window.
Knowing these things, Hattie Tolliver in her respectable heart experienced a certain shame at this frank exposure of Gramp. She would have preferred some other person as a walking example of failure; but there was nothing to be done unless she locked him in his room, and then he might easily have climbed to freedom by way of the grape arbor, a proceeding even more perilous to his brittle limbs than these icy promenades.
Into the midst of Gramp Tolliver’s unusual behavior, Ellen returned from Shane’s Castle with her appearance altered almost beyond the realms of the imagination. She had stayed with Lily, at the request of her cousin, over the three days following the ball, and now, on her return, it was clear that something stupendous had taken place during the visit.
She came upon her mother without warning in the very midst of a busy morning, and at sight of her Mrs. Tolliver halted her work abruptly and stood staring quietly for a good three minutes,while Ellen took off her hat and laid aside her coat. It was then that the shock became so great that Mrs. Tolliver broke the silence. She went at once into the heart of things.
“What has Lily done to you? What ideas has she put into your head?”
There was reason for her astonishment; the girl had changed. She appeared older, more mature. The wire rat, that so recently had supported the pompadour which was her pride, had vanished, and her fine black hair lay smooth and close to her head, in a fashion created by a doubtful lady named Cléo de Merode and appropriated not long afterward by Lily Shane. Her corsets, instead of being laced to give her the hourglass figure and the slight stoop forward so cherished in those days, were now worn so indecently loose that the clasps of her flaring skirt no longer fulfilled their mission. She was, according to the standards of the Town, extremely unfashionable in appearance, but she was far more beautiful. She belonged now not to the world of fashion plates fed to small towns by gigantic women’s papers, but to a world of her own which had little to do with fashion or convention. Even though there was something ridiculous in her appearance, she had a new dignity. Something of the provinciality had slipped away. It was this, perhaps, which alarmed her mother—as if suddenly the girl had escaped into that horrid world where Lily moved and had her being.
“To think,” said Mrs. Tolliver mournfully, “that I sent away my little girl and now she comes back to me a grown woman. That’s what Lily has done to you. You aren’t my little girl any longer.”
To this Ellen made no reply. She stood, somewhat sullenly, as if she implied that there was no answer to such a sentimental observation.
“I suppose it’s Lily who had you change your hair.”
“I have beautiful hair. Why should I spoil it with a rat?”
“Lily said that. I know she did.... I can hear her saying it.But that doesn’t make it right.... It’s not the fashion, at least not in the Town. And that’s where you’re living.”
For the first time Ellen smiled, in her old secretive fashion, as if she and Lily had entered upon some dark compact.
“Itwasjust what Lily said. Rats are silly things, anyway.”
“They’ll laugh at you,” continued her mother, with an air of feeling her way. “Young men don’t like girls to be different. It makes them seem eccentric.”
Ellen must have known, in her shrewd way, that her mother was not speaking frankly. She knew beyond all doubt that her mother was not concerned with what the young men would think. She was talking thus because she saw these things—the rat, the corsets, the new air—all as signs of something far deeper. She was fighting against the escape of her child, battling to keep her always.
“Yes, they would laugh, wouldn’t they?” remarked Ellen presently. And then, quite suddenly, the timbre of her voice changed. “Well, let ’em,” she added abruptly.
As if she saw the beginnings of a storm, her mother sighed, turned away and observed casually, “Gramp has started to wander about again. It worries me.”
But Ellen swept past her and placing her handbag on the dining room table, she opened it, saying, “Lily gave me some clothes.”
“You shouldn’t have taken them. I don’t want Lily making paupers of us.”
“I thought about that,” said Ellen with an air of reflection. “But you don’t understand Lily.... It wasn’t like that at all. She doesn’t do things that way.... She gave them to me as a present, the way she might have given me a book.”
For a time there was a silence during which Ellen proceeded with the unpacking of her bag. Reverently, almost with an air of worship, she took out from among her own threadbare clothesthree gowns of superb material and spread them across the table under the gray winter light. One was of black, one of green—the color of deep jade—and the third was the color of flame, so brilliant that in the comfortable shabby room it destroyed all else.
“I’m sorry I let you stay at Shane’s Castle,” began her mother. “Lily ... Lily ...” she halted abruptly and regarded her daughter with suspicion. “She didn’t promise you anything, did she?”
Ellen laughed, but through the sound of her soft mirth there ran, like a taut singing wire, the echo of subdued bitterness. “No. At least nothing very definite.... She said that when I came to Paris to study I could live with her. We didn’t get beyond that.”
“But you don’t want to go to Paris.... It’s a wicked city.... I thought you’d given all that up long ago.”
But Ellen only lifted the flame colored gown and said, “Look at it. Feel it. Isn’t it beautiful?” And she ran her hand over the soft brocade with a sensuous air that was new and alarming. “There’s nothing like it in all the Town.”
Dumbly the mother fingered the stuff; she felt of it tenderly, reverently, and after a long time she said, “But you couldn’t wear such clothes here. Nobody has ever seen anything like them ... except on Lily, and she’s different. That’s why people talk about her. No, you couldn’t wear them here. People would laugh at you.”
For an answer Ellen only held up the green gown and then the black one. They were simply made and not dissimilar, the flame colored one girdled by a chain of glittering rhinestones, the others by cords of silver. They were so scant there seemed to be nothing to them, so simply made that their lack of ornament conveyed to Hattie Tolliver a sense of nakedness. People in the Town wore bows, rosebuds, festoons of lace—all save Lily.
“I don’t see what Lily was thinking of,” she observed presently. And she drew in her lower lip doubtfully with an air of meditation as if the gowns raised before her eyes a wild vista of foreign orgies.
“Yes, peoplewouldlaugh at me,” said Ellen, “not that it makes any difference.”
And placing the gowns over her arm, she turned away and started up the stairs to her own room. Her mother, staring after her, made a clucking sound which was her invariable signal of alarm. She must have speculated upon what passed between Ellen and her mysterious cousin within the depths of the gloomy house among the Mills; but she said nothing. In such a mood, it was impossible to learn anything from the girl.
And as she turned at last to resume her duties in the kitchen, the shadow of a moth-eaten coonskin coat and beaver hat passed the window. It was the ominous shadow of Gramp Tolliver hungrily returning for his noon meal. Clearly there was calamity in the air. He had never been so active before....
Ellen had a way of dealing with the truth which must have alarmed her mother. It was not that she lied; rather it was that by some selective process she withheld certain truths and brought forward others so that the resulting effect was one of distortion, complicated by the wildest variation of mood. At the moment the girl appeared to be elated, perhaps only by the possession of the three naked gowns—so elated that her high spirits carried into the afternoon when she announced her intention of going skating.
“Are you going with May?” questioned her mother as she left the house.
“No, I’m going alone. May has Clarence Murdock. I don’t imagine she’ll want to be disturbed.” And then with a sort of grim malice she added, “Things aren’t moving very fast for May.... Not fast enough to suit her mother. You see she spread the story months ago that she was already engaged, and now she has to make it work out.”
And without another word she passed out of the door into the bright cold sunshine, her tall, fine figure moving briskly down thepath between the shaggy, frozen lilacs that marked the path to that extraordinary house of the shabby and respectable Tollivers.