Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 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 same 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.