Chapter IV: Part 4

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.

13

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 him was 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 was calamitous 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, “Neither does 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!”

14

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 come and 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.

15

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 and I 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 do _you_ know?”

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 a lure 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 man who 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 your intentions 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 marry her?” 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.

16

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 present at 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 like _your_ grandfather, 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.

“It _was_ just 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 clothes three 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, people _would_ laugh 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 the path between the shaggy, frozen lilacs that marked the path to that extraordinary house of the shabby and respectable Tollivers.

17

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’t _there_,” 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 a certain 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.”