Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 22
One night nearly two years after they were married, Clarence asked, "What do you hear from your cousin?"
And Ellen, who had been playing all the evening, turned and asked, "What cousin?"
"Miss Shane."
"Oh, Lily!" And a shadow settled on her face as if the mention of Lily's name suddenly aroused memories which she had been striving to forget. "Oh, Lily!" she repeated. "I haven't heard from her in weeks. She never writes. You know she is indolent. . . . When I last heard from her she was all right. She wrote from Nice."
Clarence kept silent for a moment. "Nice must be a beautiful place. A man from the office was there last year, our foreign agent. Nice and Monte Carlo. I guess they're quite close together."
"She has a house there. It's called the Villa Blanche."
Again Clarence remained thoughtful for a time. The newspaper had fallen from his hands and lay now, crumpled and forgotten by his side. Presently he blushed and murmured, "D'you think she might lend us the house some time. . . . We might be able to go there. . . . Not now, but when we have more money. I'd like to see Nice."
And the shadow on Ellen's face darkened. "We will . . . some day. When I'm famous and making money too."
"But I don't want to do it that way. I want to take you myself and pay for everything. . . . We might have Lily come and visit us."
Then to fill in the silence Ellen fell to playing again, softly now so that it did not halt the conversation; yet the sound in some way protected her. It was like the frail veil of lace which Lily wore. It shut her in suddenly. Clarence talked no more. He lay back in his stuffed chair, one hand strumming thoughtfully the wooden arm. A look of loneliness, more and more frequent of late, came into his brown eyes.
It was Ellen who turned to him presently, in the midst of the soft music and said, "I have good news for you. I am going to play to-morrow night in public. I am going to be paid for it. Sanson arranged it. I'm going to play at a party. It will mean money for us both."
But Clarence wasn't pleased. On the contrary he frowned and kept a disapproving silence.
"It's silly to feel that way about it," continued Ellen. "Why should I work as I do if not to make money in the end? Why shouldn't a wife help her husband? There's nothing wrong in it."
And then more music and more silence, while she destroyed slowly, bit by bit, his hopes of grandeur, of conquering a world for the sake of the woman he loved. He saw, perhaps, that despite anything he might do she would in the end surpass him.
"You see, we understood this when we married, Clarence. It's nothing new. . . . Is it? . . . Nothing new. Some day I shall be famous." She said this quite seriously, without the faintest trace of a smile. "Some day I shall be great and famous. I mean to be."
By now Clarence was leaning forward holding his head in his hands. His glasses had slipped from his pointed nose and lay forgotten in his lap. Presently he interrupted the music to say, mournfully, "And then I shall be Mr. Tolliver . . . husband of a famous woman."
As though amazed by this sudden resentment, Ellen ceased playing for an instant and regarded him with a curious penetrating look.
"It won't be like that," she said. And there entered her voice an unaccustomed note of warmth. It was the pity again, an old sense of sorrow.
"Besides," she continued, "the day will come when I must go to Paris. . . . You see, I will have to polish off there . . . I can live with Lily. It won't cost anything. You see, we can't forget that. We have to think of it. It's nothing new. . . . I told you that in the beginning."
For a long time there was no sound in the room save that of Ellen's music, soft, beautiful, appealing, as if she used it now as a balm for the wounds caused by all she had been forced to say. Presently her strong beautiful fingers wandered into the Fire Music and the tiny room was filled with a glorious sound of flame and sparks, wild yet subdued, thrilling yet mournful. And then for a time it seemed that, wrapped in the color of the music, they were both released and swept beyond the reach of all these petty troubles. When at last the music ceased, Clarence roused himself slowly and, coming to her side, knelt there and placed his arms about her waist, pressing his head against her. There was in the gesture something pitiful and touching, as if he felt that by holding her thus he might be able to keep her always. The little vein in his throat throbbed with violence. There were times when his adoration became a terrible thing.
It was the first time in all their life together that he had ever done anything so romantic, so beautiful, and Ellen, looking down at him in a kind of amazement, must have understood that there were forces at work quite beyond her comprehension—something which, for the moment, overwhelmed even his shame of love. The act, by its very suddenness, appeared to strike a response in the girl herself, for she leaned toward him and fell to stroking his hair.
"I didn't know," she said softly, "that you could be like this. . . . It frightens me. . . . I didn't know."
His arms slowly held her more and more tightly, in a kind of fierce desperation. "You won't go," he murmured, "you won't leave me. . . . There would be nothing left for me . . . nothing in the world."
"I'll come back to you. . . . It won't be for long. Perhaps, if there is money enough you could go with me."
But all the same, she was troubled by that simple act of affection. Somehow, she had never thought of his love in this fashion.
The rest of the evening was raised upon a different plane, new and strange in their existence together. Some barrier, invisible as it was potent, had given way suddenly, out of Clarence's dread of the future it seemed that there was born a new and unaccountable happiness. Ellen, watching him slyly with a look of new tenderness, played for him the simple music which he loved.
But at midnight when, at last, the music came to an end Clarence asked, "Where are you going to play to-morrow?"
"At the house of a Mrs. Callendar . . . I don't know who she is."
"If it's Mrs. Richard Callendar . . . she's rich and fashionable. One of the richest women in New York. . . . Rich and fashionable. . . ." But the rest was lost in a sudden return of a bitterness that seized him of late with a growing frequency. He knew of Mrs. Callendar. Wyck, in his snobbery, had spoken of her. One saw her name in the journals. It may have been that he had thoughts of his own which no one had ever guessed . . . not even Ellen.
"It is Mrs. Richard Callendar," she said.