Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 40
It was the death of old Julia Shane which set in motion the next event of importance to the Tollivers. Things happened like that in their family. For a time all would go forward, much as a wave moving in a great smooth swell approaches a reef, until presently some event interrupted and the courses of their lives had all to be redirected. The old woman was, perhaps, the center, the one who at that moment held all the skeins in her withered bony fingers. She chose at last to die, and so brought Lily back to the Town and freed her niece, the faithful Hattie.
Together they cared for old Julia; together they sat by the side of her bed and slowly, under the circumstances, being so close to death, there grew up between them a new and unaccustomed affection. It was Lily herself who, a day or two before her mother died, told Hattie that the old story about her having had a child was true. The existence of Jean shocked Mrs. Tolliver less than might have been expected, less even than she herself had expected it to do, perhaps because always deep in her heart she was certain that Lily had had a child born out of wedlock. It was old gossip, which she had endeavored always to crush, yet it was gossip which she knew had its foundations in truth. She knew it, always, just as she knew the days when it was certain to rain or to be windy. She could not have explained the feeling, save that she had always distrusted Lily's charm. One could not be like Lily and still be a good woman. . . .
For the sake of morality, she made known with an acute frankness her disapproval of such conduct, and when this had been done in conscientious fashion she came to the subject nearest to her heart, the question which interested her more profoundly at that moment than anything in the world.
It happened a day or two after the funeral when the old Julia, dressed for the last time in her mauve taffeta, was borne through the Flats past Mills made silent by the long awaited strike, up to the bleak hill where they buried her by the side of her brother-in-law, Jacob Barr, the pioneer.
The two cousins, Lily and Hattie, sat together in the gloomy drawing-room before a fire of cannel coal, surrounded by pictures which stood in piles against the wall and rosewood furniture wrapped in ghostly cheesecloth. Shane's Castle, they both knew sadly, would no longer be a source of talk and excitement for the Town. Harvey Seton need no longer view it distantly with all the cold horror of a Calvinist. Its history was ended; there would never be within its walls another gathering of the clan.
The gentle melancholy which filled the old house had, it seemed, an effect upon the two women. Lily, clad in a loose gown of black velvet, sat watching her cousin with a curious look of speculation. She was as lovely as she had always been, so lovely, so gentle, so amiable that the Spartan Hattie in heart could not believe that she had changed her scandalous way of living. The older woman was, as usual, busy; it was as if her tireless fingers could cease only in sleep or in death. She sat now mending a bit of old lace which they had found while ransacking the vast attics of Shane's Castle.
"I will mend it and send it to Ellen," she said. "It is fine lace, better than anything she will be able to get in Paris."
Lily smiled, perhaps because Hattie thought so little of Paris and the laces it might offer, perhaps because it seemed to her that lace was so wildly inappropriate to Ellen. What was lace to a creature so proud and fierce, so ruthless? For she had discovered what the others had not known and what Hattie, even in the moments when her daughter hurt her most savagely, would never believe—that Ellen was ruthless.
"I am trusting you," she murmured over the lace, "to look out for Ellen. She is young and even if she is a widow she knows little of the world."
Lily smiled again. She thought, "As if it were possible for any man to seduce Ellen unless she chose to be seduced. She was born knowing the world!"
"Do you think she knows her way about with you away from her?"
Lily leaned forward and touched her cousin's strong, skilful fingers. "Don't fret over Ellen," she said. "Why, Ellen is safer in Paris than I am. Nothing can ever happen to Ellen. . . ." She bent her head and the warm color came into her cheeks. "I mean nothing of the sort that could happen to me. Why, Ellen's complete. . . . You don't understand how independent she is. She could go into the middle of Africa and land on her feet. She has no need of friends or guardians. Why, she's never even homesick."
Hattie's fingers paused in their work. "Never?" she asked in a low voice. "Never?"
And Lily, understanding that she had hurt the proud woman, hastened to add, "Oh, not that she doesn't want to see you all. She speaks of you constantly. . . . She wants some day to have you near her always. . . . You see, now she has to work. . . . I don't think you understand how ambitious she is."
Slowly, as Lily spoke, the cloud passed a little from Mrs. Tolliver. When her cousin had finished, she raised her head and said in a low voice, "Oh, I know all that. I've been thinking about it all lately . . . thinking a great deal. Only I never understood why it was she never came home before she went to you."
"There were reasons," said Lily. "Good reasons. . . . One was that she hadn't the money and wouldn't ask you for it. She doesn't know that I discovered that . . . but I did . . . I know just how much money she had. When she came to me, there were only seven francs left. . . . D'you know how much that is? It's a little more than a dollar. That's all she had left. A girl who would take such a risk is not likely to fail. You'll see her famous some day, Hattie. You can be sure of that. You'll be proud of her."
The fingers were busy again with the lace, and Lily knew suddenly that she had hurt Mrs. Tolliver again, this time in quite a different fashion. She had touched the old pride that had to do with money . . . that curious, hard vein of pride so incomprehensible to Lily who had never thought of money, save only as something that was always at hand to make the wheels of life run smoothly.
"To think," murmured Mrs. Tolliver, "that there wasn't enough money to bring her home to me." A tear slipping down the worn cheeks dropped into the web of old lace and Lily hastened to speak.
"It wasn't only that," she said. "Money would have made little difference. She couldn't have come back. . . . She didn't dare to come. You see, she was discouraged. . . . How can I say it? She told me the whole story. She said that if she had turned back then she would have been lost forever. She would have turned into a pitiful old maid like Eva Barr. She could never have married any one in the Town. There was no one with enough spirit. The ones with spirit . . . enough spirit for her, all leave the Town." Then after a silence: "You see the death of her husband was so tragic. . . . It hurt her."
For a second Mrs. Tolliver raised her head and faced the beautiful cousin. "She never loved him. . . . I know that."
Lily, a little frightened, kept silent for a time. She had come close to betraying the awful secret. "No," she said, presently. "I suppose she didn't love him. He was a creature without spirit . . . a nice man, but no mate for an eagle."
"You knew him?" asked Hattie. "Where? You never told me that."
"I met him on the train . . . the last time I came here. I think," she added with a faint smile, "that he was a little épris of me . . . a little taken by me. I know the signs. . . . But he was terribly frightened . . . timid like a rabbit."
And then Mrs. Tolliver came round again to the old observation. "I always said he wasn't good enough for her. I couldn't see why she had anything to do with him."
"Ah," said Lily. "You don't know your own daughter yet . . . Hattie. He helped her to escape."
But she knew that Hattie would never believe such a thing.
It was a strange circumstance that Lily—the Lily whom Hattie had always feared and distrusted—became in those days the one to whom the vigorous woman turned for comfort and companionship. Somehow the indolent Lily, so filled with understanding and knowledge of the world, served as a bond between the mother and the daughter in far off Paris. She succeeded in softening all the wounds made by Ellen in the abrupt notes which came with an efficient regularity, for Lily possessed a great power in such matters; it was a power which had more to do with the sound of her warm, low voice than with any logic in the arguments she used. Her arguments were neither logical nor profound; usually they were only observations as to the shyness of Ellen in all the range of affection, and the fierce ambition that tormented her.
"You will understand some day," she said, "that all she is doing is more for you than for herself. It is because she wants you to be proud of her."
"I don't care about that . . ." Hattie would say over and over again. "Not very much. But I don't want her to escape me forever. I couldn't bear that. She's different from Fergus. He is warm and shows his love. But there are times when I'm afraid I'll lose Ellen forever."
And Lily, in the depths of her placid mysterious soul, knew that here again it was a matter of possession . . . the same possession which the Baron must always have over herself, the possession which Ellen, without willing it, had exercised over poor Clarence. Hattie would not abandon her claim to her children. She could not say to Hattie, without hurting her, that her daughter was a creature whom none had possessed or ever would possess even quietly, secretly, as Lily knew that she possessed the Baron, despite all his boisterous show of domination.