WALKER’S Pond lay on the outskirts of the Town, a long sinuous expanse of water, frozen now, which wound its length between two long low hills left behind by the melting of the second great glacier. It twisted its way among the convolutions of rock and earth in a multitude of small coves and inlets, fringed by tangled bushes and low willows that stood black and naked in the winter wind. At the lower end the pond expanded into a broad and circular lake on the borders of which stood a low shed. Here it was that the crowds from the Town did their skating and here it was that May, in ignorance of the promise exacted by her impatient father, had brought the reluctant Clarence.
Any one watching the course of Ellen as she neared the spot must have realized that she had no intention of joining the crowd; instead of approaching the pond by the road of frozen clay which ended near the shed, she turned off through the fields, and swinging her skates, struck out for the far end where it lengthened into a serpentine canal. As she walked her skirts struck the ice coated stalks of the dead weeds, causing them to break off and fall beneath her feet with a slight tinkling sound of distant, crystal music. Among the bushes that bordered the fields the berries of the dogwood showed crimson against the black of the bare branches with a color rivaled only by the dark flame of the plumed sumach. Something in the day’s brilliance must have penetrated the soul of the girl, for she sang as she walked more and more quickly in the direction of the ice. There was in her manner, now that she was once more alone and unharassed, something wild and passionate, a sort of untamed fierceness of the spirit.
Before her from the crest of the low hill, the lower pond at last spread out its glittering oval, sprinkled now with the black figures of skaters moving round and round with a soft rhythmic motion. The crisp air rang with the distant sound of steel upon ice. It was a queer, muted sound, like the music of violins in a far-off orchestra. For a moment Ellen stood quietly among the trees contemplating the distant black figures, as if she stood, a goddess, upon some Olympian peak regarding the spectacle of Man; and then with a sudden bound, she ran down the long slope and in a little cove sheltered from the wind, fastened her skates, and sprang forward on to the glistening ice.
She skated superbly. The lines of her young body, so slender, so sinuous, so strong, despite all the awkwardness of her clothes, stood revealed in the triumphant swing of her strokes. Here in her own hidden cove, she gave full rein to the wild, secret ecstasy of a proud, shy soul. Now she flew ahead into the biting wind; now she halted, pirouetting in a wild freedom; now, with a careless grace, she skated backward for a time, and presently she fell to practising with the precision of an artist one intricate figure after another. In this lonely backwater, she must have skated thus, triumphing in her skill and grace, for more than an hour; and at length, when she had accomplished each figure with perfection, she glided to the bank and, removing her skates, set about gathering sticks. In another moment she had lighted a fire and sat down by the side of it, her hair streaming, her cheeks bright with the cold, to warm her hands and sit staring into the blaze. Drifting up the sinuous curves of the pond, the sound of skating still floated toward her, but of this she no longer appeared to take any notice. She sat thoughtfully, ignoring it, and presently the color began a little to recede from her cheek and the old expression of restlessness to steal back into her dark eyes. The hills shut her in now, as if they might imprison her in their brooding fashion forever.
She had been sitting thus for more than an hour, apparently in profound thought, when slowly she became aware that the solitude of her retreat had been violated. In the gathering dusk of the early winter evening she beheld, through the branches of the thick willows which sheltered her, the figure of an intruder—a man—who skated awkwardly and with an air of effort, as if the act required the most profound concentration. Yet it was clear that his mind wandered now and then to other things, for from time to time in the stillness of the evening the sound of his muttering reached her. He failed even to notice the smoke of the dying fire, and as he came nearer a sudden gust of wind carried his words toward her so that in snatches they became audible.
“I won’t do it.... I’ll be damned if I do. (And then the labored, steady ring of his skates on the glittering ice.) They can’t make me....” (Then once more a painful labored concentration upon skates and ankles that were too weak.)
By now Ellen must have recognized him. The figure was unmistakable—slight, rather stiff and incredibly neat, even to the carefully pressed line of his trousers. In place of a warm skating cap he wore a Fedora hat pulled over his ears to prevent the wind, which had reddened his smooth face, from blowing it astray. The man was Clarence Murdock. Ellen might have permitted him to pass unnoticed, save that in the next moment he came round the willows and, tottering upon his skates, stood face to face with her.
For a moment he stared at her silently, with the air of one who cannot believe his senses.
“Well?” said Ellen, rising to her feet slowly.
Clarence shook himself, balancing more and more perilously on his skates. “I didn’t know you were here,” he began. “I didn’t see you.”
“I wasn’tthere,” replied Ellen, indicating the direction of the round pond. “I’ve been skating here all afternoon.... You look cold. Wait, I’ll poke up the fire. I was going home, but I’m in no hurry.”
Once his astonishment had passed away, his manner assumed acertain calm; it appeared even that he experienced a relief in finding her there among the willows. He began to rub his ears vigorously while the fire, beneath the proddings of Ellen and the addition of more fuel, sprang into a blaze. It crackled cheerily and sent a bright shower of sparks heavenward. Within its glow Clarence, extending his hands toward the warmth, seated himself. He was more calm now, as if the quiet, capable directness of the girl had quieted his anxiety.
There was a long silence and presently Ellen asked, “Where’s May?” But all the answer she received was a nod of the head indicating the round pond that lay beyond the hill. Again the silence enveloped them.
“It’s fine skating,” said Ellen, in another attempt at conversation. “The best there has been this winter.” (It was clear that she could not say she had heard him talking to himself.)
“It is,” replied her companion, thoughtfully, “but I can’t skate very well. It’s been a long time....”
The girl was slipping on her skates once more with an air which said, “If you won’t talk then I’ll skate, at least until you warm yourself.” She slipped to the edge of the ice and glided away, but she did not go any great distance. She circled about, gracefully, with a sure strength which carried an air of defiance, as if she sought to show Mr. Murdock how well it could be done. She pirouetted and did difficult figures with all the grace of a soaring bird. Indeed, she should have been to Clarence Murdock an intolerable spectacle. But she was not insufferable; on the contrary she clearly inspired him with a profound wonder. He watched her with a concentration approached only by that which he had given to his own efforts in the same direction. To observe her more clearly, he had put on his nose glasses and, beneath their neatly polished surface, his near-sighted eyes grew bright with admiration. Presently as she approached the shore in a sudden graceful swoop, he stirred himself and said, “You skate beautifully.... I wonder if you could help me.”
“To skate?” inquired Ellen.
Clarence coughed nervously. “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean in another way.”
Ellen, halting abruptly, seated herself on a rock. “In what way?” she asked. “I’ll help you if I can.”
For a time Clarence did not reply. In the distance, the faint whirring sound of the other skaters had grown gradually less and less distinct as one by one they withdrew from the ice to turn their feet homeward toward the Town. At last he said, “I oughtn’t to speak to you, but I thought you might understand ... being a woman.”
It was the first time any one had ever called her a woman, and, despite all her hard independence, it flattered her. She leaned forward a little and said, “Maybe I will ... I don’t know until you tell me what it is.”
And then Clarence blurted out the truth. “It’s about May.... I don’t want to marry her!”
Ellen laughed suddenly in a mocking fashion. “Well,” she said, “do you have to? Have you asked her to? There’s no law to make you do it.”
At this speech Clarence blushed, and to cover his embarrassment, he bent his head and started once more to rub his ears, so that when he spoke again it was without looking at her. “It isn’t that ... I haven’t asked her. But I’m in a bad position. You see, I promised her father that I’d ask her to-day.... I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. I had meant to once, but I changed my mind.... I can’t explain that. It was her father that forced the promise out of me.”
There was no doubt of his misery. Even to Ellen it must have been clear that he felt cornered, trapped, like some mild and inoffensive animal. He was such a nice young man.
Again Ellen laughed scornfully. “It’s what old man Seton would do ... the old skinflint!”
In the darkness beyond the little ring of flame the shadowsdanced on the black and naked bushes. There was in the lonely figures by the fire an air of infinite pathos. They were both so young, so ignorant, so perplexed by the business of living.
“You can always run away,” suggested Ellen. “They couldn’t arrest you for it....”
At this Clarence looked up suddenly. “But don’t you see, all my clothes are at the Setons’ ... everything I brought with me. I have to get them and if I go back I’ll have to face her father.”
“But is that the only reason?” asked his companion. “I should think you’d be glad enough to escape at the price of a few clothes.” She laughed suddenly with a curious, scornful mockery that confused Clarence. “That is, if you really want to escape. I should think you wouldn’t want to settle down in this nasty Town.... There’s nothing here for you. There’s nothing for any one. I’m going to run away before long myself,” she added boldly.
She spoke with such passion that Clarence made no reply for a long time. He sat watching her across the circle of light, contemplating her clear blue eyes, the fine glow of her face, the superb line of the throat which she herself admired so passionately. Something was happening to him; it was the old thing once more at work, the thing which betrayed him when he least expected it. Presently he said, “You’re still going to New York? To study?”
To which Ellen replied with the same intensity, “Of course I am. I don’t want a little shut-in world. They can’t smother me ... none of them! Not all of them together!”
It may have been that Clarence gathered strength from her strength, that far down in his timid soul some chord of his nature responded to the defiance of the girl. Certainly she was admirable ... the way she had come to this hidden spot to skate in solitude, to build a fire with her own hands, to ask him in a friendly way, so frank and so free from all coyness and giggling, to warm his anemic frozen body. Shewaslike the woman on the train. She wasn’t afraid. And she didn’t giggle....
“I’ve been wondering,” he said after a little time. “I’ve been wondering ...” and then he coughed suddenly. “Would you come with me to New York?”
At this speech Ellen looked at him with a sudden penetrating glance, as if she failed to understand his meaning. Then, with the caution of a proud nature, she said, “But you see, I haven’t enough money yet. It takes money for a girl alone in a city.” She did not expose herself to the peril of being hurt.
But Clarence, now that he was started, rushed on, “I don’t mean that ... I mean ... would you marry me? Would you come as my wife?”
The sound of the distant skating had died away until by now only the faintest ring of steel singing upon the ice was borne by the rising wind into the little cove. In the darkness Ellen bowed her head and sat thus silently for a long time. Her thoughts, whatever they may have been, were interrupted presently by the sound of Clarence’s voice, softer this time, and less frightened, though it still carried a timidity, almost the abjectness of an apology.
“I could help you.... I could make money and you could go on with your music. You see, this didn’t come over me suddenly. I’ve thought about it before ... ever since I saw you that first time.”
There was nothing in the least dominating in his manner. He sat there at a proper distance from her, mild and gentle, pleading his case. It was clear that he was even a little frightened, as if he had spoken almost without willing it. But the little vein in his throat which Lily had noticed so long before began to throb, slowly at first and then with steadily mounting rapidity. If Lily had been there, she would have understood its significance as surely as a ship’s captain watching his barometer in a storm. Lily understood such things.
When at last Ellen raised her head, it was to look at him directly and with a certain appraising frankness.
“Yes.... I’ll marry you,” she said at last. She spoke breathlessly, her voice clouded by a faint choking sound as if for the first time in her life she were really frightened.
“I’m glad,” said Clarence. “You see, I want to be great and famous some day. I want to be rich, and I want some one to share it with me. I couldn’t marry May. It would be like shutting myself up in a trap.” The terrible ambitions were loose again, running wild, leaping all bounds, intoxicating him. “I want to be great and rich ... if I can. I never told anybody this before, but I thought you might understand because you’re different.”
It was the longest speech he had ever made in her presence, and throughout its duration Ellen watched him with a growing wonder mirrored in her eyes.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” she said almost with reverence. “You never mentioned it before. I thought you’d be content with May.”
But all the same, her words lacked the ring of conviction. All at once she felt herself engulfed by a great and unaccustomed wave of pity that was quite beyond explanation. She felt that Mr. Murdock was pathetic. It was almost as if she could weep for him. It was not until long afterward that she understood this chaotic emotion. It passed quickly, and she said, “But you’d better go now and find May.... Don’t wait for me ... I’m all right.... She must be all alone by now, wondering where you are. I can look out for myself.”
And a little later Clarence, treacherously shepherding May on their last walk together, saw in the far distance against the dying glow the black silhouette of Ellen. Alone she moved over the crest of the high hill, walking slowly now, her head bent in thought ... remote, proud and somehow terrifying.
IT was not until ten o’clock that Mrs. Tolliver began to grow uneasy. There had been, after all, nothing to cause alarm. An hour before supper Ellen had come in from skating with a countenance fresh and almost happy. True, Gramp Tolliver had returned late from one of his expeditions—the second that day—and was noisier and more impatient than usual in his room above stairs. Indeed his uproar continued even after feeding time, until long after Ellen, saying that she was to spend the evening at the Setons’, had gone out into the rising wind. If there was anything which alarmed Mrs. Tolliver it was the mutterings of the volcano overhead; so great was the variety of its manifestations that she remarked upon it to her husband.
“You know,” she said, “Gramp is restless again ... worse than ever ... worse than he was at election time.”
From his refuge on the great threadbare sofa her husband mumbled a reply, indistinct yet understandable because it was a speech he made so frequently when his wife insisted upon conversation.
“You’re worrying again.... There’s nothing to worry about.”
But she knew that she was right. It was a feeling which was almost physical, an intuition, an instinct which her husband, in the way of fathers (which at best were but poor things), did not share. After all he came by his conclusions in a logical fashion, not without the aid of a peculiar and individual philosophy, and therefore, by omitting the human equation, he gave his wife the opportunity more than once of saying, “I told you so.”
Though Mrs. Tolliver rocked and darned placidly enough, she was not, even out of respect for her husband’s love of slumber and forgetfulness, to be kept silent. When Ellen was out and there was no flow of music to bind together the comfort of the evening, it was necessary to talk; otherwise the peace became mere stillness, and the contentment a barren boredom. For Mrs. Tolliverneeded constant evidence of happiness or cordiality. It was a thing not to be taken easily and for granted; one must make a show of it.
“He behaved like this, only not as bad, when Judge Weissman—the dirty scoundrel—bought the last election.”
This time the only reply from the sofa was an engulfing silence, broken now and then by the aggravating sound of heavy breathing.
“Why don’t you say something?” she said at last in exasperation. “Why don’t you talk to me? I work all day and then when evening comes, all you do is to sleep.”
The blanket on the sofa heaved a little and Charles Tolliver changed his position, muttering at the same time, “What shall I say? What do you want me to say?” And then after a pregnant silence, “If Gramp is ranting around, I don’t see what we can do about it.”
He spoke thus of his father in the most natural fashion. It was as if the old man were something of a stranger to him, a vague figure entirely outside the circle of the family existence.
After another long silence, Mrs. Tolliver observed, “It’s nearly eleven o’clock and Ellen hasn’t come in yet.” Then she leaned forward to address her sons who lay sprawled on the floor, the older one reading as usual, the other lying on his back staring in his sulky way at the ceiling. “You boys must go to bed now. I’ll come up with you and see that you’re tucked in properly. It’s a cold night.”
The three departed and after a time, during which the hall clock sounded the hour of eleven, she descended from the neat upper regions and went into the kitchen to see that the door was locked, that the dog was on his mat, that the tap was not dripping, indeed, to oversee all the minutiæ of the household that were the very breath of her existence. When at last she reëntered the living room there was in her manner every evidence of agitation. She approached her husband and shook him from his comfortable oblivion.
“I don’t understand about Ellen,” she said. “It’s very late.Maybe you’d better go over to the Setons’ and see what has happened to her.”
But her spouse only groaned and muttered. “Wait a while.... Like as not she’s in bed asleep.”
“That couldn’t be ... not without my knowing it.”
What she would have done next was a matter for speculation, but before she had opportunity to act there rang through the silent house the sound of the doorbell being pushed violently and with annoying energy. It rang in a series of staccato periods, broken now and then with a single long and violent clamor. At the sound Mrs. Tolliver ran, and, as she approached the door, she cried out, “Yes!... Yes!... I’m coming. You needn’t wear out the battery!”
On opening it she discovered on the outside that source of all evil, Jimmy Seton. Even at sight of her he was unable to relinquish the pleasure of ringing the bell. Indeed he kept his hand upon the button until she knocked it loose by a sudden slap on the wrist.
“What do you mean by ringing like that?”
Jimmy, unabashed, faced her. “Ma,” he began, in his shrill voice, “wants to know if Mr. Murdock is over here. He ain’t been at our house since before supper. He said he was going to the barber shop and he never came back.”
For an instant, Mrs. Tolliver, wisely, held her tongue. The old instinct, working rapidly, told her that she must protect Ellen. It was clear then that the girl had not gone to the Setons’. Where could she be? Where was Mr. Murdock? Within the space of a second unspeakable catastrophes framed themselves in her mind. But she managed to answer. “He’s not here. He hasn’t been here. I don’t know anything about him.”
“All right,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell her.”
He made a faint gesture toward the button of the doorbell but Mrs. Tolliver thrust her powerful body between him and the object of his temptation, so that Jimmy, with a baffled air, turnedand sped away into the darkness. When he had vanished she closed the door slowly, and stood for an instant leaning against it. Then, before she moved away, she raised her voice in a summons.
“Papa!” she called, “Papa! Somethinghashappened. Ellen wasn’t at the Setons’ and Mr. Murdock is missing.”
In the moment or two while she stood thus with her hand resting on the knob of the door, there passed quickly through her mind in a series of isolated fragments all the events and the forebodings of the past few weeks. Gradually these fitted into a pattern. She understood well enough what had happened; she knew that Ellen had gone. Yet she refused to admit this, as if by refusing to acknowledge the fact it might come gradually to have no existence. She understood Gramp Tolliver’s ominous outburst of restlessness, Ellen’s strange look of triumph, the air almost of happiness which had come over the girl. Only one thing she could not understand.... Clarence Murdock! After all, Ellen had mocked him as something quite beneath her consideration. Why had she chosen him?
In that single brief moment she was hurt more deeply than she was ever hurt again. Those things which came afterward were not so cruel because she came in time to be used to them. But this ... this was so sudden, so cruel. She had no defenses ready, not even the defense which the less primitive have—a capacity for putting themselves into the shoes of the other fellow, of understanding why he should have acted thus and so. No, there was nothing, save only a sudden sharp physical pain and that which was far greater—a fear for a child who was gone suddenly from her protection.
When she reëntered the warm living room, she found her husband sitting on the edge of his sofa. Because he was a man whoenjoyed his sleep and was reluctant to shake it off, he was not altogether awake.
“You say,” he murmured drowsily, “that Ellen has run off with that Murdock?”
“They are both gone.... They must have gone together.”
This the husband considered for a moment. Foolishly exalting logic above intuition, he asked, “How do you know?” To which his wife retorted, “Know! Know! Because I do know! I’m sure of it.... What are we going to do?” Suddenly she leaned forward and shook him violently. “Why, they’re not even married. They can’t have been and they’ve gone off together. Anything might happen.”
The husband, out of the depths of knowledge which arose not from instinct or profound love but from long speculation upon the human race answered, “Don’t worry about that. Ellen’s no fool! She’s not in love with him!”
“When you talk like that, you’re like your father!” Nothing could have signified in clearer fashion the gravity of the situation, for this was a retort which Mrs. Tolliver used only upon occasions of profound disaster. It was, she believed, the most cruel thing she could say. This time she did not wait for him to reply.
“What train have they taken?... They’re bound to go east. Perhaps you can stop them. Come! Get up.... If you don’t go I will!”
With exasperating slowness her husband gained his feet. “There’s a train a little after eleven.” He regarded his watch. “We might be able to catch them, though I don’t think I can make it.”
Already his wife stood before him with the coat she had taken from the living room closet. “Here!” she said. “And wrap your throat well. It’s a bitter night.” Then she herself helped him into his coat and fastened his muffler with great care. Before she had finished, he asked, “What sort of a person is this Murdock?”
“It’s no time to ask that.... Go! Hurry!”
Barely had these speeding words fallen from her lips when from overhead there came with the suddenness of an explosion the sound of a terrific crash, as if some part of the house had suddenly collapsed. The sound distinctly came from the rear. The volcano at last had burst forth!
In a breathless instant, the pair faced each other. It was Mrs. Tolliver who spoke first.
“What has he done now?” And with a fierce emphasis she added, “I think the Devil himself has gotten into him.” Then she recovered herself quickly. “Go! Go! Catch Ellen. I’ll take care of Gramp.”
He argued for a moment—one precious moment—and losing as usual, was sped on his way by his powerful wife.
When her husband had vanished sleepily into the darkness, Mrs. Tolliver made her way up the back stairs to the room under the tin roof. As she opened the door, there rose before her in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp a room which had the appearance of a place wrecked by a cyclone. One of the vast bookcases lay overturned, the worn leather volumes sprawled in a wild confusion about the floor. Bits of paper covered with bird track handwriting lay scattered like fallen leaves and at one side, a little removed from the path of the catastrophe, lay stretched at full length the brittle body of Gramp Tolliver, still and apparently unconscious. There was in its rigidity something ghastly. Only a miracle had saved him from being buried under his own books, battered and broken perhaps by his own beloved Decline and Fall.
Climbing over the wreckage, Mrs. Tolliver leaned down and took the body of the old man in her arms. Thus a truce was declared, and when the one enemy had made certain that the other was still alive, she went downstairs, wrapped a shawl about her and fetched a doctor.
IT was midnight when Charles Tolliver returned alone. Without removing his coat or the carefully bound muffler, he made his way through the house to the back stairs which he climbed slowly and with an air of sheepishness. His wife was, after all, no easy woman to face under conditions like this. The news he had for her was not the best. Indeed it is probable that he experienced a great relief when he found that his wife was not alone. In the dusty room thrown now into a wild disorder which Mrs. Tolliver was already vigorously engaged in clearing away, the doctor stood beside the bed. There was a quality of the grotesque in the battered figure of the old man and the fantastic shadow of the physician cast by the flickering light upon the wall. At the sound of his footsteps Mrs. Tolliver, still holding in her arms volumes three and four of the Decline and Fall, looked up from her task. She stared hard at him as if by concentration she might produce out of thin air the figure of her daughter. But there was no mistake. He was alone.
It was Charles Tolliver who spoke first. He found no pleasure in airing his troubles in public, so he said nothing of his errand. “What’s the matter with Gramp?”
The doctor faced him. He was a short fat man with little mutton chop whiskers. “It seems he’s had a stroke,” he murmured. “And yet I don’t know. It might be something else. The symptoms aren’t right.” And he took up once more the bony wrist, to count the pulse. Instantly Mrs. Tolliver stepped close to her husband.
“Did you find her?” she asked in a low voice.
“No.... The train was pulling out just as I reached the station. I was a minute too late.”
“It was Gramp who let her get away. If you hadn’t stayed to argue. You could have hurried. My God, who knows what will happen to her.... My little girl!”
“She isn’t that.... Not any longer.”
But before she could reply the doctor interrupted. “No, I don’t know what it is. His pulse seems all right and he has no fever.” And the little man fell to wagging his head, in the manner of a physician who was always secretly doubtful of his own opinion. “To-morrow I’ll fetch another doctor. We’ll have to have a consultation.”
After that he packed his bag, wrapped himself up to the throat and bidding them good night in a mournful, bedside whisper, as if (thought Hattie sourly) Gramp had been an adored child cut off in the bloom of youth, made his way down the creaking stairs.
When he had gone, Mrs. Tolliver turned abruptly and said again, “You could have made it if Gramp hadn’t thrown this fit. And now she’s gone....”
In the shadows that covered the vast bed, Gramp Tolliver’s body lay stiff as a poker thrust beneath the sheets. But presently in the midst of the hushed talk that went on by his side, one eye opened slowly and surveyed the scene. For an instant there rose in the still cold air the echo—it could not have been more than that—of a far-off demoniacal chuckle. At the sound Mrs. Tolliver turned and approached the bed.
“He laughed,” she said to her husband. “I’m sure of it ...” and she shook the old man gently without gaining the faintest suspicion of a response. He lay rigid and still. At last she turned away.
“Go,” she said, “and take the next train. You might catch them at Pittsburgh. If you haven’t enough money there’s some tied in a handkerchief under the mattress.”
“But you.... What’ll you do?”
“Never mind me ... I’ll sit here in the rocker and keep watch....”
And until the gray winter dawn crept in at the windows she sat there, awake, with one eye on the old man, for the echo of that wicked chuckle had awakened in her mind the most amazing suspicions. In the single moment that she had stood listening to the sound of the catastrophe overhead, Ellen had made her escape.... How could he have known what no one else knew? Yet she was certain that he had known.
Charles Tolliver did not overtake his daughter; indeed, on that night she escaped from him forever. He saw her afterward ... long afterward, but he never recaptured her, even for one fleeting moment. Perhaps in the dismal solitude of a day coach filled with weary travelers rushing eastward through the winter night, he understood this in his own way. It was, after all, a way different from that of his father, Old Gramp, or his wife who sat patiently now in a kind of dumb, animal agony by the side of the old man. Of Charles Tolliver, it might have been said that he expected nothing of life, that from the very first he had accepted life as at best a matter of compromise. One took what came and was thankful that it was not worse. Because he was like this people called him a weak man.
And it is impossible to say that he regretted profoundly the flight of his daughter. In his gentleness, he understood that this thing which she had done was inevitable. Nothing could have prevented it. Even the pursuit was a futile thing. If Ellen were recaptured, it was vain to hope that she would remain so; yet the pursuit was in itself a symbol of action and therefore it satisfied his wife in at least a small way. It may even have been that in the rare wakeful moments of his lonely, fruitless journey he envied Ellen; that he saw in her escape a hope which had always eluded him. He had been known since childhood as a worthy man, the unfortunate son of a father who was worthless and a failure. He had existed always as a symbol of virtue, as one who had stood by his mother (dead now these many years) in the long periods of poverty and unhappiness. If he had been ruthless instead of dutiful, if he had escaped, if he had ventured into a new world.... What might have happened? But even this thought could not have troubled him for long. He slipped easily back into the pleasant oblivion of sleep.
The passengers wakeful, uncomfortable, restless in the close air of the crowded car could never have guessed that the gray-haired, handsome man, who slept so peacefully, was a father in pursuit of an eloping daughter.
And in another train a hundred miles beyond, rushing faster and faster toward the rising dawn, sat Ellen and Clarence Murdock. They too rode in the common car, for the train was crowded. They sat bolt upright and rather far apart for lovers. From time to time Clarence reached out and touched her hand, gently, almost with deprecation, and to this she submitted quietly, as if she were unconscious of the humble gesture toward affection. It is true that they were both a little frightened; what had happened had happened so quickly. Even Clarence could not have explained it. To Ellen, though she came in the end to understand it all, it must have been a great mystery.
The romance—what little of it there had been—was all vanished now, gone cold before the glare of the flaring lights, beneath the staring, bleary eyes of their fellow passengers. Somehow everything had turned cold and stuffy, touched by the taste of soot and the accumulated dust of half a continent. The train rocked and swayed over the glittering rails, and presently Clarence, who had been frowning for a long time over something, said, “D’you think they’ll ever send on my hand bags?”
Ellen laughed and regarded him suddenly with a curious glance of startled affection. For a moment one might have taken them for a mother and child ... a mother who saw that her child must be protected and pitied a little.
“I wouldn’t worry over that,” she answered. “What difference does it make now?”
“And May ...” began Clarence once more.
“It’s done now,” said Ellen gravely. “Besides in a little while she’ll forget everything and marry some one else. Any man will suit May. It’s onlyaman she wants, nottheman.”
But Clarence was not comforted; there was his conscience totorment him, and worse than that there was a distrust, vague and undefined, of what lay ahead. He could not have described it. If he had been a strong man, he would have said, “All this is a mistake. We will not marry. It is wrong, everything about it.” He could have turned back then and saved himself; but he did not. He sat quietly against the dusty plush, watching Ellen now and then out of the corner of his nice eyes with the manner of a man resting upon the rim of a volcano.
By dawn the train had come in sight of the furnaces on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and the color of the flames mingled with the cold gray of the January sky. He had come out on the train with Lily; he was going back on the train with her cousin. He stood there, timidly, upon the threshold of his new world—a world filled with people who haunted those rare flights of a treacherous imagination.
IT was not until noon of the following day that the amazing news percolated fully through the houses of the Town. Women congregated and discussed it, passionately; men greeted each other with the news, “Have you heard that Charlie Tolliver’s girl has eloped with that young Murdock who was visiting Skinflint Seton?” They turned the news over and over, worrying it, adding details, filling in the gaps in a story which could have been known to no one. And always the conclusion was the same ... that here was another evidence of the wildness and eccentricity of the Barr family. Old Julia Shane, in her youth, had done the same thing. And then there was Sam Barr and his crazy perpetual motion machine. The history of this spirited family was ransacked and a thousand odd, half-forgotten stories brought to light. There was, of course, that element which hinted that Ellen had eloped because the circumstances made it necessary. Women said this, not because they believed it, but because they hated Ellen and old Julia Shane.
In her sooty house among the Mills this grim old woman received the news, rather later than most (it was brought her by one of her negro servants) with a sort of wicked delight. This was a great-niece worthy of her blood, who took matters into her own hands and acted, quickly, sensationally! And before an hour had passed she seated herself with a quill pen and wrote the news triumphantly to Lily who, that morning, had started back to Paris. The letter finally overtook her daughter a month later when Lily, installed once more in her big house in the Rue Raynouard, sat awaiting the arrival of her friend the Baron. To him she read it aloud, creating for his pleasure a picture of the smoky Town, of the effect the news would have upon its residents. She described to him the fierce impetuous Ellen. She told him the Town was a town like Roubaix or Tourcoing or Lille, only more provincial.
Across the silver-laden tea table in her long drawing-room in Passy, she said, “You may see her one day yourself. I’ve told her to come here and live with me. She wants to be a great pianist.... A girl like that can accomplish anything she sets her mind to.... But I don’t think you’ll like her.... She’s too powerful.”
Nearer home, the news came to May Seton and her mother a little after midnight when Jimmy, sent a second time as messenger, brought back the suspicion of their elopement. In the beginning the situation was embarrassing, for May in her optimism had spread the story that thefiançaillesof Clarence and herself had been accomplished. Once this had passed, she experienced a sort of inverted triumph, superior if possible even to that which might have arisen from the capture of a New York young man. She understood presently that people regarded her as a martyr, a virgin robbed of her lover, and once she got the full sense of this she played the rôle to perfection. Dressed in her most somber clothing, as if she mourned a lover worse than dead, she paidand received a great number of calls, always in company with her mother who now assumed the rôle of duenna and garnished May’s account of the affair with appropriate and growing details. Old ladies swooped about and settled upon the tale to pick it over and contemplate the ruins with ghoulish satisfaction, until at length the event, now of proportions beyond the realms of the imagination, became an epic in the chronicles of the Town, a piece in which May Seton played the rôle of injured innocence and Ellen that of adventuress in the grand manner of East Lynne or Lady Audley’s Secret. In short, what had appeared in the beginning to be a calamity, turned out to be a triumph. Husbands might be found at every turn, but public martyrdom comes rarely. Indeed before many weeks had passed, potential husbands began to loom upon the horizon and crowd into the middle distance. Because May in her bereavement had become what she had never been ... a figure of interest.
But there was one part of the story which remained known to only one person in the Town. It was the space of time which elapsed between the hour that Clarence departed for the mythical barber shop and the hour the train left for the east. This was a matter of five hours, in which much might have taken place. No one seemed able to account for it. No one had seen either of them. They had, to all intents, disappeared for five hours ... a thing which in the Town was incredible.
Yet there was one person who knew, and she was the last whom any one could suspect. It was impossible to believe that a creature so birdlike, so gentle, could have played a part in so scandalous an affair as the rape of May Seton’s lover. Yet it was true; the guilty pair had spent the five hours in the room filled with conch shells and pampas grass and plush, for Miss Ogilvie had kept her rash promise to Ellen. Indeed, the whole affair had been planned under her very eyes. But in the little house surrounded by lilacs and syringa bushes, she kept her secret as faithfully as she had kept her promise, though it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. It was almost as if she herself had escapedinto a great world where there were no neighbors and no sewing circles.
But the two who suffered most were the two whose pride was greatest ... those born enemies Mrs. Tolliver and Skinflint Seton. From the moment of the elopement the ancient feud over the swindle of the synthetic corset stays emerged without shame or pretense into the open, and the story became common property that Harvey Seton had been seen on the Tollivers’ piazza being ordered into the street because he suggested that Ellen had eloped because the circumstances made it necessary.
Scarcely less mysterious than the missing five hours was the nature of Gramp’s illness, a thing which had baffled the consultations and head waggings of the Town’s best medical talent. Two days later he was up and about again perambulating once more, in his coonskin coat, the icy pavement of the Town. And it was with a new look of defiant malice that he regarded the faces peering at him from behind the Boston ferns of Sycamore Street. The sharp old eyes mocked the passers-by. They said, “My Granddaughter has a good deal of the old man in her. She has the courage to do as she sees fit. You’ll hear from that girl!” All this punctuated by the sharp tap! tap! tap! of his tough hickory stick on icy pavements where an ordinary man would long ago have slipped and broken his leg.
WEEKS passed before there came from Ellen any news beyond the mere statement that she was alive, comfortable and well, and that although she was sorry for her actions she could not have done otherwise. Some day, she implied with romantic overtones, they would understand.
When at last a real letter came, it was turbulent, hard and unrepentant. Nor was the spelling the best.
“I am sorry for May ... a little,” she wrote, “but it won’t make any difference to her. She is in love with men and not one man. To have lost Clarence won’t end her happiness. Any man will do as well. In a year she’ll be married, like as not to Herman Biggs. It was different with me. Everything depended upon Clarence ... everything, you understand. To me he made all the difference.
“And we are happy,” she continued, as if this was, after all, a matter of secondary importance. “Clarence loves me. We have a nice apartment quite near to Riverside Drive that overlooks the river where the warships anchor. It is the top floor of an enormous apartment house ... ten stories high, and the view is wonderful. You can see over half the city. It is called the Babylon Arms.
“You see, Clarence and two friends of his (a Mr. Bunce and a Mr. Wyck) shared it before I came and now we have it to ourselves, because his two friends kindly moved elsewhere. Mr. Bunce is nice but Mr. Wyck is a poor sport, always talking about his relatives. You see, he’s what he calls an ‘old New Yorker,’ sort of run-down and pathetic, and awfully dependent. I think he hates me for having taken Clarence away from him, and for breaking up the apartment. But it doesn’t matter. He’s too insignificant to count.
“Mr. Bunce got married the other day. He says we drove him to it, chasing him out into the street with no place to live. That’s the way he talks ... hearty and pleasant but a bit noisy. The girl isn’t much—a big, pleasant girl like himself whose father is a building contractor in Hoboken, which is really a suburb of New York.”
And so she sketched briefly, and with the careless cynicism of youth, the downfall of Mr. Wyck; for it is true that the reverberations of the elopement made themselves felt in a place so far from the Town as the Magical City. With her appearance the whole world of Mr. Wyck toppled, hung for a moment in mid-air, and at last collapsed, leaving him in the backwater of a grimyboarding house on lower Lexington Avenue. No longer had he any one to admire or honor him for the sake of the ancient Wyck blood and the spinster aunts in Yonkers. On the very day of Ellen’s arrival the name of Wyck Street was changed to Sullivan in honor of a Tammany politician. Night after night, a lonely little man, he sat, an outcast, on the edge of his narrow bed, waiting for his milk to heat over the gas jet in the fourth floor rear. He mourned Clarence who represented the only friendship he had ever known. He mourned the Babylon Arms where for a time he had been almost a man, independent and free. And as he mourned the hatred grew in the recesses of his timid, unhappy soul.
It is true that in her letter Ellen revealed a great deal, but it is true that she did not reveal everything, for there remained between her and a complete revelation the pride which would not allow her to admit disillusion. She did not, for example, say that the view from her windows included, besides the noble river, glimpses of wooden shacks and bleak factories, half-veiled in smoke and mist, on the distant Jersey shore. Nor did she say that beneath her window there were monotonous and hideous rows of brownstone houses, unrelieved in their ugliness even by tiny patches of mangy grass. And she said nothing of the railway tracks that lay between her and the river, crowded with cars that imprisoned lines of wretched cattle standing shoulder to shoulder, whose presence sometimes filled the lofty flat with the faint, dismal sounds and odors of the barnyard. These things she could not bring herself to set down on paper because they would have dimmed the splendor raised by such a name as The Babylon Arms.
Nor did she say that after all Mr. Bunce and Mr. Wyck and even perhaps Clarence were not so different from the people in the Town; because this might have given rise to a faint suspicion that, after all, she had not escaped. There were things and shades of things which the Town must never know. She understood, perhaps even then, the affair of building a career. There must be glory, only glory, and triumph.
And Mrs. Tolliver, reading the letter over and over in the long darkness of the winter evenings, stirred herself night after night to observe that “something had happened to Ellen.”
“She’s told me more in this letter than she has ever told me in all her life before. She must be happy or she couldn’t write such a letter.”
And for a time she consoled herself with this thought, only to utter after a long silence the eternal doubt. “I only hope he’s good enough for her.”
Then, when her husband had fallen into a final deep slumber from which he stubbornly refused to be roused, it was the habit of the woman to go to the piano and dissipate the terrible stillness of the lonely room with the strains of The Blue Danube and The Ninety and Nine played laboriously with fingers that were stained and a little stiff from hard work.
The faint, awkward sounds, arising so uncertainly from the depths of a piano accustomed now to silence, must have roused in her a long sequence of memories turning backward slowly as she played, into the days when she had struggled for time from household cares to learn those pitiful tunes. The hours spent at the old harmonium in her father’s parlor were hours stolen from cooking and baking, from caring for her younger brothers and sisters, hours which, so long ago, had raised in her imagination sounds and scenes more glamorous than anything found in the borders of the country that was her home. They were not great, these two melodies—one born of Evangelism and the other out of the gaiety of an Austrian city—yet they were in a fashion the little parcel of glamour which life had dealt out to Hattie Tolliver. The rest was work and watchfulness, worries and cares.
There must have been in the woman something magnificent, for never, even in deep recesses of her heart, did she complain of the niggardliness of that tiny parcel. She sought only to wrest alarger share for her children, for her Ellen who was gone now a-seeking glamour on her own.
And, of course, the sound of the music made by her stiffened fingers may have brought back for a time something of her lost Ellen.
Because there was in Hattie no softness which would allow her to admit defeat, she set about, once the first shock of the affair had softened, to reconstruct all her existence upon a new plan, motivated by a single ideal. How this change came about, she would have been the last to understand. It came, in a sense, as a revelation. She awoke one morning and there it was, clear as the very winter landscape—a vision of the sort which guides people of passionate nature. True, there were circumstances which led her mind in that one direction; there was, to be sure, the look that had come into the blue eyes of her elder son since the day when Ellen had fled. Any one could have seen it, a look so eloquent and so intense, which said, “I too must have my chance. I too must go into the world.” Perhaps he remembered the half-humorous promises to help him that Ellen had made so frequently. There was, she knew, a secret sympathy between the two in which she played no part. It was a look which came often enough into the eyes of Hattie Tolliver’s family. If the boy had been old enough to reason and understand such things, he might have said, “My grandfathers set out into a wilderness to conquer and subdue it. It was a land filled with savages and adventure. I too must have my chance. I am of a race of pioneers but I no longer have any frontier. I must turn back again, as Ellen has turned, to the east!” In a little while—a few years more—the look was certain to come into the eyes of Robert, the youngest.
And doubtless the woman came to understand that it was impossible any longer to hope that her husband might realize any of the wild and gaudy dreams she had held so often before his philosophic and indifferent eyes. He was a gentleman, and no longer young; he had indeed turned the corner into middle age. What must be done rested with her alone.
And so, understanding that Ellen would never turn back, the plan of her existence ceased to find its being in the smoky Town; it became instead a pursuit of her children. If they would not remain in the home she had made for them then she must follow them, and, like a nomad, place her tent and build her fires where they saw fit to rest.
So she set about planning how it was possible to escape from the Town, to transport all her family and their belongings into a world which she had disliked and even feared but which now must be faced. Fantastical schemes were born, reared their heads and collapsed in a brain which considered nothing impossible. She would herself support them all if necessary, though she had not the faintest idea of how it was to be done. Surely in a great city like New York, there were ways of becoming rich, even fabulously so. She had read stories in the newspapers....
But her first action was a direct one. Dressed in black merino and armed with an umbrella which she carried on important occasions as a general bears his baton, she assailed her enemy Judge Weissman in the sanctuary of his untidy office, and after a scene in which she accused him of thievery, bribery and a dozen other crimes, she bullied him, playing shrewdly upon a horsewhipping incident out of his own past, into using his influence to gain for her husband some new work—not mere work but a position worthy of him and of the dignity of her family.
She won the battle and in her triumph, which mounted higher and higher during the walk home, she gave rein in her unbounded optimism to even wilder and more fantastic schemes. There was relief in the knowledge that at last she had taken things into her own hands. No longer was she to be a power behind the throne urging forward an amiable and indifferent husband. Things must change now. She herself would act. She had achieved an opening wedge. In time she would secure an appointment for her husband in New York. She could take the children there. She could be where she could drop in on Ellen at the Babylon Arms (preposterous name!). She would watch and aid them in theirprogress toward success and glory. Ah, she could wrest anything from life. It was, after all, nothing more than a question of energy and persistence.
These thoughts were whirling madly about her brain as she turned the corner into Sycamore Street in time to see a group of children congregated before the path that led into the shaggy domain of the Tollivers. They appeared to be watching something and clung to the gate peering in through the lilacs at the vine-covered house. Unconsciously she increased her pace, and as she approached the gate they fell back, with a look of awe and the sort of animal curiosity which comes into the eyes of children gathered on the scene of a catastrophe. Through their ranks and into the house, she made her way like a fine ship in full sail.
Once inside she learned the news.
It was this—that upstairs in the room once occupied by Ellen there lay on the bed the unconscious form of her father, the invincible Jacob Barr. They told her that the patriarch, while superintending the loading of hay in his mows, had made a miss-step and so crashed to the floor twenty feet below. They had brought him to her house on a truss of hay. The doctors, the same doctors whom Gramp Tolliver had baffled, said he might die suddenly or that he might live for years, but he would never walk again.
When she had put the place in order and driven out the confusion which accompanies physicians, she seated herself in a chair opposite the unconscious old man and presently began to weep.
“What good is it now? What difference does it make?” she repeated bitterly over and over again.
Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible to follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death to claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing, for thefracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of old Jacob Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon the pillows of Ellen’s bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which there was no activity was for him no life at all. He became again like a little child, like his own little children whom his daughter Hattie had cared for through all the years of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang songs and there were hours when he talked to himself and to Hattie of things which had happened when she was a very little girl or before she was born. He lived again in the Civil War and in the days preceding it when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows. Passers-by in Sycamore Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a voice now cracked, now loud and strong and defiant....John Brown’s Body lies a-moldering in the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob Barr, that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his health and happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and scribbled on bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always spare, cynical, vindictive.
In these days his daughter-in-law rarely addressed him, and less and less frequently she came to see that his room was in order. There were other cares to occupy her energy. There was a husband, working now, and two growing boys and her own father to care for; in addition to all these she had taken to sewing, secretly, for friends whose fortunes were better. (She was a magnificent needle-woman.) And she had each day to write a long letter to Ellen, though the letters in return came but weekly and sometimes not so often.
They kept her informed of the bare facts of her daughter’s life. They told her, in a new, amusing and somewhat cynical fashion of Ellen’sadventures among the music teachers of the city ... of weeks spent wandering through the bleak and drafty corridors of studio buildings, tormented with the sounds made by aspiring young musicians. They described the charlatans, the frauds, which she found on every side, teachers who offered every sort of trick and method by which fame and fortune could be reached by the one and only short cut. There were women called Madame Tessitura and Madame Scarlatti, who had been born Smith or Jones and knew less of music than May Seton, and men who wore velveteen jackets and insisted upon being called “Maestro.” There were the usual adventures (alarming to Hattie Tolliver who saw her daughter still as a little girl) with lecherous old men. Indeed, in this connection Ellen wrote with a certain hard mockery that was utterly strange and carried overtones of an unmoral point of view, as if such things were to be treated more as preposterous jokes than as “grave offenses.” And in this Mrs. Tolliver fancied she discerned some traces of Lily’s influence. To a woman like Lily, such things didn’t matter. She took them too lightly, as a part of the day’s experience ... carefree, charming, indolent Lily, so impossible to combat.
And at last, wrote Ellen, she had stumbled upon the proper person ... an old man, a Frenchman, who bore the name of Sanson. He knew what music could be, and so she had settled with him, working under his guidance. In his youth he had known Liszt, and he had been a friend of Teresa Carreño, until a quarrel with that temperamental beauty ended the friendship. Ellen, he had hinted, might one day become as famous as Carreño (she was like her in a way) but she must work, work, work and not lose her head. It would be a long hard path with Paris at the end! (It was always this thought which filled Mrs. Tolliver with a nameless dread. Paris! Paris! And Lily!)
But what troubled her most was the absence of any comment upon Clarence beyond a simple statement that he was well. By now she must have realized that Ellen had no love for him. From her letters it was clear that she had not found him actually offensive. He was a good enough husband; he did everything for Ellen. It was, indeed, clear that he worshiped her. But on herside there appeared to be only a great void, a colossal emptiness where there should have been the emotion that was the very foundation of her mother’s life.
Mrs. Tolliver worried too about the expenses of her daughter’s household. In such matters, distance made no difference. It was her habit to remark to her husband, “If only I could be near Ellen I could teach her so much about managing. Clarence must make a great deal of money to have such a flat and pay for her lessons too.”
And when she questioned Ellen in her letters, she received the reply that Ellen had spoken to her husband and been told that there was no need to worry. He had, he said, plenty of money ... eight thousand a year.
It is possible of course that Ellen never loved him for an instant; it is probable that the state of her affections never progressed beyond the stage of the kindly pity which is akin to love. She was not a bad wife. She cared for him admirably. She kept his house in order. She even cooked for him delicacies which she had learned from her mother. He insisted that she have a servant, declaring that he could easily afford it. She gave him all that he asked, even of herself, and yet there was a difference ... a difference with altered everything. It was that difference which Hattie Tolliver, expert in such things, sensed in the letters of her daughter. It filled her with a vague suspicion that Ellen had sold herself to satisfy a thing no greater than mere ambition.
Of Clarence’s sentiments there could have been no doubt. He sang his wife’s praises to the men at the Superba Electrical Company, to the men whom he met on those trips into the west when Ellen was left behind alone in the Babylon Arms. He bought her present after present until, at length, the whole aspect of their little apartment was changed. Bit by bit the furniture altered its character. First there was a small grand piano, and then a sofa and presently a chair or two, and at last the brass bedswhich he and Bunce had once occupied gave place to twin beds of pale green ornamented with garlands of salmon pink roses. And strangely enough as the apartment brightened, the little man himself appeared slowly to fade. In contrast with his handsome and energetic wife, he grew more and more pale. It was as if he were being devoured by some inward malady. Yet there was nothing wrong. Doctors could discover nothing save the usual weakness of his heart.
If he desired a more demonstrative affection than that given him by Ellen, he said nothing of the desire. He never spoke of love. Indeed, long afterward, when Ellen followed back her memories of their life together she was unable to recall any mention of the word. If he desired her passionately he sought her silently and with timidity, as if each caress she gave him were far beyond that which he had any reason to expect. He was a shy man and with Ellen it was impossible to speak of such things; there was a coolness about her, a chastity of the sort which surrounds some women regardless of everything. And always it was she who dominated, always she who gave, coldly and without passion, as if she felt that in all honor she owed him a debt.
With the passing of the months the breach between Ellen and Mr. Wyck became complete. The other friends came sometimes to the Babylon Arms where Clarence, with a sudden expansion of temperament, entertained them in lordly fashion and beamed with pride in his wife. But Mr. Wyck no longer came. There had been no open quarrel, not even a hasty word. Quietly he had dropped from the habit of seeing Clarence at home. It was a change so imperceptible that before Clarence understood it, it was complete.
They met sometimes at lunch in one of the cheap restaurants frequented by Mr. Wyck, for Clarence, so far as his own needs and pleasures were concerned, had taken to a program of economy. And there, over greasy food, they talked of the old days together, Clarence speaking with sentiment and Mr. Wyck with a curious wistfulness. He too had grown pale and cadaverous upon thediet in his Lexington Avenue boarding house. He hated Ellen. He had hated her from the moment she had stepped through the door of the apartment, so cool and arrogant, so sure of herself. But he was too wise to betray his feeling save in subtle gibes at her and references to the jolly old days that were passed. He was lost now in the obscenities of a boarding house, a nobody treated scornfully even by the old aunts in Yonkers who looked upon him still as an anemic little boy with Fauntleroy curls playing among the iron dogs and deers of their front lawn.
And no one, of course, knew that Mr. Wyck, wrapped in his shabby overcoat, sometimes walked the streets after dark in the neighborhood of Riverside Drive, the gale from the North River piercing his bones, his pale eyes upturned toward the pleasant light that beamed from the top floor of the Babylon Arms.