Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 36
SHE went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this—"If he'd been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He'd have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg."
And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval. She kept silent. Perhaps to these crow-like women, Clarence had been a brilliant and powerful figure.
In the Babylon Arms there was little to be done. Ellen paid a visit for the first time to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company and there learned that Clarence had stolen money which he collected and failed to deliver. The amount was something over fifteen hundred dollars. When she heard it she murmured, "It was so little too! Why, I could have paid it if he had told me. To have killed himself for so little!"
But she knew, of course, that if he had confessed he would have destroyed that splendid creature which he fancied he had created in her eyes. He had preferred himself to be destroyed. In death it would not matter that she discovered the fraud: he would not have to face her.
She paid the money, out of her savings and out of the amount brought by the sale of the furniture. She sold even the piano he had bought her as a wedding gift. And when she had finished there remained but little more than a hundred dollars.
On the very day the furniture was being taken from the flat she told Fergus the whole truth concerning her plans. They sat together amid the wreckage, brother and sister, both understanding for perhaps the first time that they were faced by the new problem of Hattie Tolliver. Both knew that she had set her mind upon coming to them, and having tasted freedom, neither was willing now to turn back.
"There is Ma," said Ellen. "I don't know what's to be done about her. She'll be coming here to live before long and I won't be here. She's worked all these years to come where she can be near us and now I've got to go away. I'm going to Paris. . . . It's the only thing left."
Fergus looked at her. "But you don't know French," he said, "and you haven't any money."
"I can't turn back now. If I went back to Ma, it would be the end of me. I know that. I couldn't. . . . I couldn't ever begin again. I've enough money to take me there. . . . I'll manage after that. . . . Besides, there is Lily. . . . She promised to help me when the time came. . . . The time has come. . . . I can't turn back."
Fergus listened in silence, moved perhaps by the new dignity that had come to her, a dignity touched with bitterness. She was beautiful too in a new fashion, more placid, more serene.
"You must be good to Ma," she continued. "She'll hate my running away, but I've got to go. She's a wonderful woman. She's the one who has sacrificed everything. She's always done it . . . for all of us. I couldn't go if I didn't know that you're the one she loves best of all. You're the one she worships. She loved you enough to let you go. I had to run away. You know it, Fergus, as well as I. You must be good to her. If anything happened to you, it would kill her. You mustn't disappoint her. One day we must all make her proud of us. I mean to do it, and then when I'm rich, when I'm successful, I can reward her." She paused for a moment and then added. "You see, she loves you best because you're so like Pa. You're the way he used to be when she fell in love with him."
The boy's face took on an unaccustomed gravity. He rose and looked out of the window over the beloved and magical city. "I'll do my best," he said presently. "I'll do my best. . . . She's a wonderful woman." (Yet neither of them would turn back now.)
In the room there was no sound for a long time save the ticking of the clock, wrapped now in paper to be carted away. At last he turned and said, "But you're going to Lily. . . . Ma will hate that."
"I know she will. . . . She's always been afraid of Lily. She needn't worry though. I can take care of myself. I imagine nothing very serious can ever happen to me again."
It was Lily again, always Lily who was concerned in the whole course of Ellen's destiny. Yet Ellen never knew how great a part she had played for she never knew, of course, that if chance had not thrown her glamorous cousin into the path of Clarence on a wintry night years before, he might have been alive and happy now, the husband of a stupid woman who would have thought him as wonderful as the figure he had given his life to create. He had looked for an instant at the sun and been blinded.
So perhaps, in the end, Skinflint Seton had been right. Women like that can ruin men . . . just by talking to them.