The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 6
THERE had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town, when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.
Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house. Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane's Castle and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town preferred their own name and it was known as Shane's Castle to the very end.
Who John Shane was or whence he came remained a mystery. Some said he was Irish, which might well have been. Others were certain that he was English because he spoke with the clipped accent of an Englishman. There were even some who held that so swarthy a man could only have come from Spain or Italy; and some were convinced that his love of travel was due to an obscure strain of gipsy blood. As to the light which Shane himself cast upon the subject, no one ever penetrated beyond a vague admission that he had lived in London and found the life there too tame.
He set himself up in the house at Cypress Hill to lead the life of a gentleman, a worldly cynical gentleman, perhaps the only gentleman in the archaic sense of the word in all the Western Reserve. In a frontier community where every one toiled, he alone made, beyond the control of his farms, no pretense at working. He had his horses and his dogs, and because there were no hounds to follow and no hunters to ride with him, he set aside on the land bordering the main street of the Town a great field where he rode every day including the Sabbath, and took the most perilous jumps to the amazement of the farmers and townspeople who gathered about the paddock to watch his eccentric behavior.
Among these were a Scotch settler and his son-in-law, Jacob Barr, who owned jointly a great stretch of land to the west of Shane's farm. They kept horses to ride though they were in no sense sporting men. They were honest stock, dignified and hard-working, prosperous and respected throughout the country as men who had wrested from the wilderness a prosperous living. MacDougal was the first abolitionist in the county. He it was who established the first station of the underground railway and organized the plans for helping slaves to escape across the border into Canada. These two sometimes brought their horses into the paddock at Shane's farm and there, under his guidance, taught them to jump.
The abolitionist activities culminated in the Civil War, and the three men joined the colors, Shane as a lieutenant because somewhere in his mysterious background there was a thorough experience in military affairs. His two friends joined the ranks, rising at length to commands. MacDougal lost his life in the campaign of the Wilderness. Jacob Barr returned stricken by fever, and Shane himself received a bullet in the thigh.
Returning as a colonel from the war he found that in place of the dead MacDougal he had as a riding companion the farmer's youngest daughter, a girl of nineteen. She had taken to the saddle with enthusiasm and was a horsewoman after his own heart. She knew no such thing as fear; she joined him recklessly in the most perilous feats and sat his most unruly horses with the ease and grace of an Amazon. She was not a pretty girl. The word "handsome" would have described her more accurately. She was strong, lithe and vigorous, and her features, though large like the honest MacDougal's, were clearly chiseled and beautiful in a large way.
The strange pair rode together in the paddock more and more frequently until, at last, the astonished county learned that John Shane, the greatest gentleman in the state, had taken MacDougal's youngest daughter east over the mountains and quietly made her mistress of Shane's Castle. It also learned that he had taken his bride to Europe, and that his housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged Irish woman who never mingled with the townspeople, had been sent away, thus ending rumors of sin which had long scandalized the county. It appeared, some citizens hinted, that Julia MacDougal had been substituted for the Irish woman.
For two years the couple remained abroad, but during that time they were separated, for Shane, conscious of his bride's rustic simplicity, sent her to a boarding school for English girls kept by a Bonapartist spinster named Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. During those two years he did not visit her, choosing instead to absent himself upon some secret business in the south of Europe; and: when he returned, his bride found it difficult to recognize in the man with a thick, blue black beard, the husband she had married two years earlier. The adornment gave him an appearance even more alien and sinister.
The two years were for the girl wretched ones, but in some incomprehensible fashion they hardened her and fitted her to begin the career her mysterious husband had planned. When they returned to Cypress Hill, Shane shaved off his beard once more and entered politics. From then on, great people came to stay at Cypress Hill—judges, politicians, lawyers, once even a president. As for Shane he sought no office for himself. It seemed that he preferred in politics to be the power behind the throne, the kingmaker, the man who advised and planned campaigns; he preferred the intrigues without the responsibilities. And so he became a figure in the state, a strange, bizarre, dashing figure which caught somehow the popular imagination. His face became known everywhere, as well as the stories about his private life, of strange brawls in the growing cities of the middle-west, of affairs with women, of scandals of every sort save those which concerned his personal honesty. Here he was immune. No one doubted his honesty. And the scandals did him little harm save in a small group of his own townspeople who regarded him as the apotheosis of sin, as a sort of Lucifer dwelling in a great brick house in the center of the Black Fork marshes.
In the great house, his wife, whose life it was whispered was far from happy, bore him two daughters, a circumstance which might have disappointed most men. It pleased the perverse John Shane who remarked that he was glad there was no son to carry on "his accursed name."
As he grew older the unpopularity increased until among the poorer residents of the Town strange stories found their way into circulation, tales of orgies and wickedness in the great brick house. The stories at length grew by repetition until they included the unfortunate wife. But Shane went his proud way driving his handsome horses through the Town, riding like mad in the paddock. The Town grew and spread along the outskirts of his farm, threatening to surround it, but Shane would not sell. He scorned the arguments for progress and prosperity and held on to his land. At last there came a second railroad and then a third which crossed the continent, passing on their way along the banks of the sluggish Black Fork through the waving green swamp. Shane found himself powerless because the state condemned the land and it was his own party which promoted the railroad. He gave way and his land doubled and tripled in value. Factories began to appear and the marsh land became precious because in its midst three railroads crossed in a triangle which surrounded the house at Cypress Hill. Shane became older and more perverse. The tales increased, tales of screams heard in the night and of brutalities committed upon his wife; more scandals about a young servant girl leaked out somehow and were seized by the population of the Town. But throughout the state Shane's name still commanded respect. When the great came to the Town they stopped at Shane's Castle where the drawing-room was thrown open and receptions were held with the rag, tag and bobtail permitted to satisfy their curiosity. They found nothing but a handsome house, strange and beautifully furnished in a style unknown in the Town. John Shane and his wife, her face grown hard now as the jewels on her fingers, stood by this judge or that governor to receive, calm and dignified, distinguished by a worldliness foreign to the rugged, growing community.
And at last the master of Shane's Castle was stricken dead by apoplexy one winter night at the top of the long polished stairway; and the wiry, thin old body rolled all the way to the bottom. Irene, who was a neurotic, timid girl, saw him fall and ran screaming from the house. Lily was in Europe at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, a pensionnaire in the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux. The wife quietly raised the body, laid it on a sofa under the portrait in the library and summoned a doctor who made certain that the terrible old man at last was dead.
When the news of his death spread through the Town, Italian workmen passing along the railroad at the foot of Cypress Hill crossed themselves and looked away as though the devil himself lay in state inside the wrought iron gates. Governors, judges and politicians attended the funeral and the widow appeared in deep mourning which she wore for three years. She played the rôle of a wife bereft of a devoted husband. The world whispered tales of her unhappiness, but the world knew nothing. When great people came to the Town, they were still entertained at Cypress Hill. The legend of John Shane attained the most fantastic proportions; it became a part of the Town's tradition. The words which Stepan Krylenko, the tow-headed Ukrainian, shouted through the wrought iron gates at the terrified Irene were simply an echo of certain grotesque stories.
After the death of her husband, Julia Shane sold off piecemeal at prodigious prices the land in the marshes traversed by the railroads. Factory after factory was erected. Some built farming implements, some manufactured wooden ware, but it was steel which occupied most of the district. Rolling mills came in and blast furnaces raised their bleak towers until Shane's Castle was no longer an island surrounded by marshes but by great furnaces, steel sheds and a glistening maze of railway tracks. New families grew wealthy and came into prominence, the Harrisons among them. Some of the Shane farm land was sold, but out of it the widow kept a wide strip bordering Main Street where she erected buildings which brought her fat rents. The money that remained she invested shrewdly so that it increased at a startling rate. She became a rich woman and the legend of Shane's Castle grew, spurred on by envy.
To the foreigners who lived in the hovels at the gate of Cypress Hill, the house and the park became the symbols of an oppressing wealth, of a crude relentless power no less savage than the old world which they had deserted for this new one. It was true that Julia Shane had nothing to do with the mills and furnaces; her money came from the land she owned. The mills were owned by the Harrisons and Judge Weissman; but Shane's Castle became an easy symbol upon which to fix a hatred. Its fading grandeur arose in the very midst of the hot and overcrowded kennels of the workers.