For an instant the face of the girl softened. There were signs of a

sudden collapse, of sobbing, of yielding utterly. Perhaps if it had come

in that moment--a sudden abrupt bursting of all restraint--the lives of

all the people in that warm and comfortable room would have been

changed. But it did not come, for one so young does not yield so easily.

The girl sighed, stiffened her body and sat upright.

“I don’t know,” she answered dully. And yet she lied, because she did

know, perfectly. In that moment life for her was an awful thing,

baffling, suffocating, overwhelming. It was impossible to say so,

because her mother would not have understood. It would have been the

same as when Mrs. Tolliver said, “It is beautiful, your music ...

lovely,” when she did not understand it at all, when she said such

things simply because she loved her daughter and was proud of her

cleverness.

Outside the storm persisted, increasing steadily in fury. And presently,

Ellen said, “To-night Cousin Lily arrives, doesn’t she?”

At which her mother regarded her sharply and paused in her darning to

say, “Yes. But why do you ask? You talk of nothing but Lily.”

And again Ellen answered, “I don’t know. I simply want to see her.”

* * * * *

Into the proud reflections of Mrs. Tolliver there entered from time to

time thoughts of the most profound satisfaction over the part she had

played in the existence of her children. In the beginning, even before

they were born, she had determined for them careers which were to follow

clearly demarcated lines. As a bride, after she had brought up her eight

brothers and sisters and married at last the patient Charles Tolliver,

she went, driven by eager duty, to a lecture given by a bearded man upon

the things every mother should know. This doctor had told her that it

was possible to begin even before birth to influence the characters of

one’s children, and so she had begun on that very night to plan their

lives.

The first, she had decided, was to be a musician. It was a story which

went back a long way into the days of Hattie Tolliver’s own youth when

she had longed in her passionate way to be a musician. But always there

had been something to intervene--an invalid mother; and after her death

the cares of a family of brothers and sisters and the management of her

father’s household, no easy task in those early days of great farms and

broad lands. Yet in spite of these things she had managed to learn by

sheer persistence something of the mysteries of the keyboard, and out of

these she had woven on the melodeon of the old farmhouse the tunes of a

few hymns, the Ninety and Nine, and snatches of The Blue Danube. So

before Ellen was born, these fragments were revived and brought into

service once more to be played over and over again on the upright piano

purchased in the early years of her husband’s prosperity. Thus, with the

support of a vast energy and an overwhelming optimism, she had begun to

plan the future of Ellen long before the girl was born.

* * * * *

Long before midnight the two boys, under the gentle urgence of their

mother, had drifted sleepily to bed. Ellen remained, still playing,

almost mournfully now with a kind of moving and tragic despair. Beyond

the frozen windows the wind howled wildly and the snow piled against the

wall of the house. Mrs. Tolliver darned savagely, with short, passionate

stitches, because the thing of which she lived in constant terror had

returned to come between her soul and that of Ellen.

On the great sofa, her husband snored gently.

At midnight she rose and, poking the ashes of the fire, she said to

Ellen, “It’s time we were all asleep. Lock up and I’ll get papa to bed.”

The transference of Mr. Tolliver from the sofa to his bed was nightly an

operation lasting many minutes. When Ellen returned, her mother still

stood by the sofa urging her husband gently to stir himself.

“Please, papa,” she said, “come along to bed. It’s after midnight.”

There was a series of final plaints and slowly the gentle Mr. Tolliver

sat up, placed his feet on the floor, yawned and made his way sleepily

to the stairway. The mother turned off the gas and the room suddenly was

bathed in the warm, mellow glow of the dying fire. Ellen, breathing

against the frozen window pane, cleared a tiny space to look out upon

the world. It stretched before her, white and mysterious, beckoning and

inscrutable. And suddenly she saw far down the street the figure of a

cab drawn by a skinny horse which leaned black against the slanting snow

within the halo of a distant street lamp.

The mother joined her, watching the cab for an instant and murmuring at

length, “I wonder who it could be at this time of night.”

“I know,” said Ellen softly. “It’s Mr. Murdock. He was coming to-night

on the express to stay with the Setons. He must have come on the same

train with Lily.”

* * * * *

At the mention of Lily, her mother turned away. Ellen followed her and

in the doorway Mrs. Tolliver halted abruptly and embraced her child,

fiercely as if she would hold her thus forever. For an instant they

clung together in the warm darkness and presently Mrs. Tolliver

murmured, “Tell me, darling.... If you have any secrets, tell them to

me. I’m your mother. Whatever happens to you happens to me.”

Ellen did not reply at once. For an instant she was silent, thoughtful.

When at last she spoke, it was to say dully, “I haven’t any.” But the

tears came suddenly into her blue eyes. She was lying, for she had her

secrets. They were the secrets which youth finds it impossible to reveal

because they are too precious. All the evening she had not been in the

comfortable, firelit room. She had been far away in some vague and

gigantic concert hall where people listened breathlessly while she made

music that was moving and exquisite. The faces stretched out before her

dimly in a half-light until in the farthest rows they were blurred and

no longer distinguishable. And when she finished they cheered her and

she had gone proudly off to return again and again as they crowded

nearer to the great stage.

* * * * *

After the mother and daughter had climbed the creaking stairs, both lay

awake for a long time, the one entangled in her wild and glowing dreams,

the other terrified by the unseen thing which in her primitive way she

divined with such certainty. It was not to be seen; she could not

understand it, yet it was there menacing, impregnable.

And in a distant part of the house, a light was put out suddenly and

Gramp Tolliver thrust his skinny legs between the blankets. All this

time he had remained awake listening to the beauty of the music which

came to him distantly above the wild howling of the storm. He was sure

now of his secret. He could have told Hattie Tolliver what it was that

shut her out from the soul of her precious daughter. It was something

that would keep the girl lonely so long as she lived. Gramp Tolliver

knew about such things.

So at last all the house fell into sleep. Outside there lay a vast

desert of white which, it seemed, began at the very walls of the warm

shabby house and extended thence to the very ends of the world. Even the

tracks, left a little while before by the passing of the cab which

brought Clarence Murdock through the blizzard, were obliterated now. One

might have said that he had not passed that way at all.

11

When the cab bearing Clarence drew up at length before the heavy portals

of the Seton house, there was a light still burning in the room with the

filigreed wall-paper. Leaving the bony horse and the smelly vehicle

behind him, Clarence stumbled through the storm and pulled the bell. Far

away, deep inside the house, it tinkled dismally in response, and

presently there arose from within the sound of bodies sleepily setting

themselves in motion to prepare a welcome. Mr. Seton himself opened the

door, tall, bony, forbidding behind his thin whiskers, cold as the storm

yet not so fresh or so dry. There was always a distinct dampness hanging

about him, even in the touch of his hand.

“Well, well,” he said in his hollow voice, “you’re almost a stranger.”

Behind him in a row stood Mrs. Seton, fat and obviously sleepy, and May

who interspersed her giggles with yawns which she attempted to conceal

with a refined hand. And last of all there was the anemic Jimmy, not at

all sleepy, and fidgeting as usual, this time with the cord of the red

plush portières which he kept pulling to and fro until halted in this

pastime by his mother, who said, “Come, dear, you mustn’t do that just

when Mr. Murdock is arriving. Step forward and shake Mr. Murdock’s hand

like a little gentleman.”

So Jimmy shook hands in a fashion which he had been taught was the very

peak of gentility.

As for Clarence, the whole scene proved much less warm, much less vivid

than he had pictured it. Somehow those dreams with which his day had

begun were now dissipated, indeed almost lost in all that had happened

since then. In the greeting there was a certain barrenness, intangible

yet apparent. It may have been the dimness of the hall that depressed

him, for Mr. Seton never permitted more than a faint flicker of gas in

the red glass chalice which hung suspended by Moorish chains from the

ceiling.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Seton, “you’re almost one of the family with us. May

has talked of nothing else but your coming.”

May wriggled a little and added, “Yes, we’re glad you’ve come.”

And Clarence, dropping his bag, shook the snow from his coat. He could

find no answer that seemed appropriate. How could one answer such

greetings? Somehow he had expected, after his journey through the wild

storm, something of warmth; and there was only this strange, damp

confusion, strained and inexplicable. In the room with the filigreed

wall-paper there burned the remnants of a fire; it was clear that Mr.

Seton had permitted it to die down for the night.

They asked him about his trip, whether the train had been delayed by the

blizzard, which of the cab drivers he had engaged. He did not know the

name of his driver, yet he was able to identify him because he had heard

the name of the other one. (“_I’ve known Jerry all my life.... He has

driven me ever since I was a little girl._”)

“Jerry.... Jerry was the name of the other driver,” Clarence announced

suddenly, as if, not having heard their talk, he had brought his mind by

some heroic effort back from a great distance.

Mrs. Seton said, “I can see Mr. Murdock is very tired. We mustn’t keep

him up.... Mr. Seton will show you your room.”

So Clarence bade them good night and, led by his soft-footed host, made

his way through the dark halls until the corset manufacturer opened a

door and admitted him to a room that was damp with the chill of a tomb.

The sudden flicker of the gas revealed an enormous bed with the cotton

sheets turned back.

“Here,” said Mr. Seton, with a contracted gesture of the hand intended

clearly to be hospitable. “You will find it a little chilly in the spare

room, but it is a cold night. Once you’re in bed it’ll be warm enough.”

Clarence murmured polite protests and Mr. Seton withdrew, closing the

door behind him. The sound of its closing had a curious effect upon

Clarence. For a moment he was tempted to turn suddenly, fling it open

and run for his life. Why he should have experienced this impulse he did

not know. The whole sensation was confused, disturbing, a part of the

wretchedness which had overcome him as he saw the stranger enter her cab

and drive off in the direction of the great black house among the

flaming mills. He had visited this house before ... many times. He knew

the habits of its owners. They had not changed. It was clear that the

trouble lay hidden in himself. Something had happened to him, something

quite outside his neat and pigeon-holed calculations. He had come

prepared to win success and a comfortable wife, and now ... instead of

that there was fear of something vague and indefinable, a curious

instinct to escape from some dreadful trap.

For a time he sat quietly on a stiff chair, his overcoat thrown across

his knees, trying to discover the cause of his uneasiness. It was

entangled in some strange way with the woman of the veil. _The

Setons.... I know who they are although I don’t know them._ And then,

_I’m careful who I speak to.... I knew I should be safe with you._

Certainly he was not in love with her. Such a thing had never occurred

to him. She was too remote, too far beyond even the wildest flights of

his rarely erratic imagination.

And presently, shivering, he began to undress. With the routine of this

daily act, he began at once to grow more calm and more assured. One by

one, as he took each article from his pocket--a pen, a pencil, a

pocketknife, the watch Uncle Henry had given him on his twenty-first

birthday for never having touched tobacco, a few coins--the disturbing

sensations seemed to loose their subtle hold. As he laid these things in

turn on the mantelpiece beneath the chromo of Watts’ Hope, it seemed

that he deposited with each of them a fear, an uneasiness, a

premonition; the breath-taking sense of grand adventure oozed out of his

finger tips.

At length he hung his coat and waistcoat over the back of the chair,

placed his shoes beneath the bed and his trousers, carefully folded (to

preserve the neat creases that meant so much in the world of himself and

Mr. Bruce) beneath the mattress. In the flickering gaslight his body

looked pinched and cold, as if he suffered from a lack of warm blood. He

was a muscular little man, but his muscles were hard and tight and

knotty, the muscles of a man whose only exercise was taken each morning

beside the bath tub.

At last after turning out the flickering gas flame, he slipped,

shivering and gasping, into his nightshirt and sprang courageously into

the monumental bed. Seldom used, it was like the room, dampish and

chilly, but before long the warmth of his body permeated the cotton

sheets and, coupled with the sound of the wild storm outside, it filled

him with a certain comfort which lulled him presently to sleep. In the

air-tight room he slept with his mouth opened a little, his teeth

exposed, so that in breathing he made a faint wheezing noise.

12

The snow lingered for days, blackening slowly under a downpour of soot

from the Mills that penetrated even the distant reaches of the old Town

where the Tollivers and the Setons had their houses. Throughout the

Flats where the aliens lived and in the park of Shane’s Castle it lay

soft and thick as if a great and infernal blizzard had passed that way

in a thick downfall of sable flakes. With the return of Lily, the old

house set in the midst of the furnaces took on a new aspect. Lights

glowed once more behind the diamond-shaped panes and the sound of music

sometimes penetrated the tottering walls of the filthy houses where the

steel workers dwelt. It was gay, triumphant music, for Lily was one whom

the Town had never conquered. Any passer-by could have told that she had

returned....

The days passed slowly and meanwhile Ellen made no effort to see her

cousin. This Mrs. Tolliver observed with astonishment, setting it down

in her hopeful way as proof that the restlessness was passing out of her

stormy Ellen; but she did not remark upon it because she feared the mere

sound of Lily’s name. There was something about Lily which made even

Mrs. Tolliver uneasy; it was impossible to understand this woman who

denied the existence of the Town, who could return to it when she chose

out of a life which it was whispered was none too respectable, to

dominate the townspeople again and again in her own disarming, pleasant

fashion. In a vague way Lily stood for that vast land beyond the Mills

which held such terror for the soul of the simple woman. It was as if

Lily were a menace, as if there could be no peace, no contentment until

she had gone back again into that vague and distant world from which she

came. And here once more Mrs. Tolliver failed to understand. She did not

see that Ellen, for all her stiff-necked pride, was shy and held by the

same uncertain fear. It was a fear that Clarence Murdock knew. Somehow

it had touched him and changed alike himself and the world about him. It

was the fear of naïve souls for one that was perhaps not good but one

that was experienced, that moved through life with a sure step, without

fear for those things which would have terrified the less courageous.

The soul of Mrs. Tolliver was simple. The soul of Clarence was small,

and that of Ellen had not begun to grow; until now, save as a bundle of

wild desires and feverish unrest, it had not been born.

* * * * *

At length came Christmas day when it was no longer possible for Ellen to

avoid her cousin. For seventy years this day had been set aside in the

clan composed of the Barrs, the Tollivers and the Shanes as a day given

over to feasting, an occasion which brought the most remote members of

the great family from every part of the county to the black house among

the Mills. But the seventy years had wrought changes. The great house

that once raised its bulk, proud and aloof on its hill amid the marsh

land, now stood surrounded and blackened by the great mills and

factories. Of the family only nine gathered about a table which once had

seated forty. The old ones were dying off, slowly; the younger ones had

gone away, all save Hattie Tolliver and her children, Irene Shane, and a

spinster cousin, the daughter of the Samuel Barr who died after

inventing the celebrated and useless perpetual motion machine.

Of the older generation only two remained ... the proud old Julia Shane

and her brother-in-law Jacob Barr, the father of Mrs. Tolliver. This old

man was an extraordinary character who at eighty still had a powerful

stalwart figure and a great rosy face framed in white hair and a white

beard which once had been red. In his youth the people of the county had

called him The Red Scot and marveled at the superb strength of his great

body. There were tales of his having moved his log barn alone and

unaided when the men who were to have helped him failed to arrive at the

appointed time. When at last they came, so the story ran, they found

Jacob Barr mopping his great, handsome face by the side of the windlass

and the barn moved a full hundred yards from the spot it once occupied.

At eighty he still managed his farm and scorned his daughter’s offer of

care. He was the last of the pioneers.

There were times when this grandfather seemed even more remote to Ellen

than old Gramp Tolliver in his cell lined with musty books; for the

remoteness of Grandpa Barr was the remoteness of one who dwelt in a

tower of unbending virtue. In the county he had been the first

abolitionist, the first prohibitionist, the first advocate of woman

suffrage. He had organized the Underground Railroad which aided slaves

to escape to Canada. He was a Presbyterian without sympathy for those

who were weak. His wife had died in bearing him child after child. For

Gramp Tolliver his scorn was so profound that it was beyond all

expression in words. He never spoke of Gramp Tolliver at all.

Jacob Barr was a citizen. He had what people called “backbone,” and

Ellen was not his granddaughter for nothing.

* * * * *

There was in this annual dinner a pomp, a circumstance that approached

the medieval; it was a rite which symbolized the pride, the greatness of

a family which admitted no weakness, no failure, no poverty; the

persistence of a family which, because it lived sometimes in dreams when

the reality became insupportable, knew no such thing as failure. What

one does not admit, does not exist. This one sentence might indeed have

stood above the crest of the clan. If Hattie Tolliver knew in her heart

that Lily was a feeble reed, she ignored it. In her presence none would

have dared to hint at such frailty; for Lily existed within the sacred

barrier of the family.

On Christmas day, the guests arrived in a procession ... first Grandpa

Barr, rugged, handsome, defiant of his years, yet yielding through

bitter necessity to the stout stick of cherry wood which he carried;

Mrs. Tolliver, large, powerful, vigorous in a shabby astrakhan jacket,

a beaver tippet and a small hat covered with ostrich plumes slightly

frayed by age; Charles Tolliver, gentle, handsome, pleasant in his neat

and faintly threadbare clothes; Ellen, stiff-necked, awkward, yet

somehow handsome and overpowering and, last of all, the two brothers,

Fergus, gentle, charming like his father and Robert, stocky and for all

the world like the fierce, blue-eyed old Scot with his cherry stick. A

vigorous family. And in the midst marched Mrs. Tolliver, erect and with

a strange dignity, her plumes nodding a little as if she were a field

marshal surrounded by a glorious army.

But Gramp Tolliver was nowhere to be seen. He had been left behind to

have his Christmas meal alone in the room walled in by books. Gramp

Tolliver, who never worked, who had wrought nothing in this world, was a

disgrace which one did not air in public. He took his place among the

things which one did not admit.

Before the wrought iron portico of Shane’s Castle, the little family

defiled across the blackened snow to the heavy door. Mrs. Tolliver

pulled the bell as Hennery, the black servant, drove off the sleigh

drawn by horses which the Tollivers had for their keep since the latest

débâcle in family fortunes. Ellen, trembling a little, perhaps at the

thought of the cousin who awaited her inside the long, beautiful

drawing-room, perhaps at the fear of the thing she had to ask of Lily,

stood leaning against the iron railing, gazing out across the furnaces

that flamed even on Christmas day below the eminence of the dying park.

Inside the house there was a distant tinkle and the door swung open

presently to reveal Sarah, the mulatto housekeeper, and behind her a

long hallway, hung with silver mounted mirrors and a chandelier of

crystal that reflected its dull light against the long, polished

stairway. For in the Flats, where the Mills reigned, the darkness was so

great that lights burned even at midday in Shane’s Castle.

Once inside, there was the rustle of descending coats. Before the mirror

Mrs. Tolliver frizzed her hair and Ellen patted the newborn pompadour.

Beneath her coat she wore a starched white shirtwaist and a skirt of

blue voile, with a tight belt and a contrivance known as a chatelaine

dangling and jingling at one side. The Town called her well-dressed. It

marveled that she could afford such clothes, although it knew well

enough that they came from Hattie Tolliver’s sewing machine. Yet she was

ridiculous and in the next moment she knew it.

For as she turned there moved toward her out of the old drawing-room,

that glittered softly in the reflected light of the candles upon mirror

and bits of crystal and silver, the figure of Lily, whom she had not

seen in seven years. Her cousin wore a gown of black stuff, exquisitely

cut by the hand of some artist in the establishment of Worth, a gown

which came from the other side of the earth, from a street known to

every corner of the world. Her fine bronze hair she wore drawn back over

her ears in a knot at the back of her beautiful head; about her throat

close against the soft skin hung a string of pearls. As she moved there

came from her the faint scent of mimosa, which smote the quivering

nostrils of Ellen as some force strange and exotic yet almost

recognizable. It was a perfume which she was never able to forget and

one which so long as she lived exerted upon her a curious softening

power. Years afterward as she passed the flower carts behind the

Madeleine or moved along the Corniche above the unreal terraces of Nice

the faint scent of mimosa still had the power of making her suddenly

sad, even wistful ... and those were the years when she had conquered

the world, when she was hard.

Now she only trembled a little and offered her hand awkwardly to the

smiling cousin.

“Well,” said Lily, “and now, Ellen, you’re a woman. To think of it! When

I last saw you, you were a little girl with pigtails.”

Her voice carried that thin trace of accent which Clarence had noticed.

Somehow it made her strangeness, her glamour, overpowering; and thus it

strengthened the very barrier which to Ellen seemed so impossible ever

to pass. In that moment there rushed through the confused brain of the

awkward girl a multitude of thoughts, but out of them only one emerged

clearly defined. “Ah, if I could be like that, I would not care what

people thought of me! To be so free, so certain, so gracious, to

overcome every one so easily!”

For all Lily’s warmth the talk was not easy between them. Yet for the

first time it seemed to Ellen that the door stood open a little way. It

was as if already she looked out upon the world.

* * * * *

And then Lily turned away to speak to the others, smiling, disarming

them, even Grandpa Barr, who in the isolation of his virtue glared

secretly at her from beneath his shaggy brows, suspecting her as that

which was too pleasant to be good.

And Ellen, with a wildly beating heart, turned to gaunt Aunt Julia

Shane, who, leaning on her ebony stick and dressed all in black with

amethysts, shook her hand harshly and disapproved of her pompadour.

“It is a silly thing the way girls disfigure themselves nowadays,” she

said. But Ellen did not mind.

The old woman was handsome in a fierce, cold fashion and had the Barr

nose, slightly curved, and intolerably proud, which had appeared again

in this awkward great-niece of hers.

Then there was Irene to greet.... Aunt Julia Shane’s other daughter,

given to charity and good works, thin, anemic, slightly withered, so

different from the radiant, selfish Lily. Irene Ellen ignored, because

Irene stood for a life which, it seemed to Ellen, it was best to forget.

And beyond Irene there was the horse-faced Eva Barr, daughter of the

perpetual motion machine, a terrifying spinster of forty-five who

regarded Lily as obscene and spoke of Ellen as a “chit.” Both of them

she hated passionately for their freedom, because to her it was a thing

forever lost. She, like Miss Ogilvie, had been trapped by another

tradition. It was too late now....

In the dark lovely room, all these figures passed before Ellen, but of

them all, she saw only Lily who stood now before the fire of cannel coal

beneath the glowing Venice painted by Mr. Turner. She was like the

picture, and shared its warmth, its graciousness, its unreal,

extravagant beauty.

Ellen in her dark corner savagely bit her lip. She would escape some day

and herself see Venice. Lily should help her. Every one should help her.

And into her handsome young face, beneath the absurd, ratted pompadour,

there stole a look of determination so fierce that Irene, seeing it, was

frightened, and old Julia Shane, seeing it, exulted in the spirit of

this great-niece of hers.

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.”

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 shadows danced 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. She _was_ like 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.

18

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. Tolliver needed 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, turned and 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! Something _has_ happened. 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 who enjoyed 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.

19

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

only _a_ man she wants, not _the_ man.”

But Clarence was not comforted; there was his conscience to torment

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.

20

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 the

_fiançailles_ of 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 paid and

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

escaped into 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.

21

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 grimy boarding 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 a larger 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.