Part 3

“It’s about Lily,” began Mrs. Tolliver. “I know Lily is beautiful. She’s very kind and pleasant ... but there are things about her that aren’t nice. In some ways Lily is a loose woman.... She’s laid herself open to talk.... People smirch her good name.... Perhaps she isn’t really bad.... Nobody really knows anything against her, but she is free with men.... There’s been talk, Ellen, and when there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Here Ellen interrupted her. “I don’t believe it.... I don’t believe any of it,” she exclaimed stubbornly. “It’s the way people talk. I know how they do.... I’ve heard.... It’s one reason why I hate the Town.”

And then Ellen saw her mother assume a great calmness, deliberately and with a certain ostentation, in order to impress Ellen with her sense of justice. It was like taking a cloak from a closet and putting it gravely about her. “I’ve never mentioned it to any one,” she said (never once guessing the thoughts in her daughter’s mind), “not to a soul.... Nothing could induce me to.... After all, Lily is my first cousin, the daughter of Aunt Julia, my own mother’s sister.... I wouldn’t permit any one to befoul her name in my presence.... But here we are alone, together, you and I.... It’s in the family. That makes a difference.... Sometimes, in the family, one has to face the facts. And the facts are that Lily hasn’t behaved well.... She’s lived in Paris for years, alone in the wickedest city in the world.... There’s even talk about her having had a baby ... and she’s never been married.... Nobody knows ... and Aunt Julia wouldn’t tell me.... You can’t get a word out of her.... You wouldn’t want to be like that, now would you?”

Ellen fell to pleating the folds of her cheap dress. Her dark brows drew closer together. She was sullen, awkward.

“I don’t see that it makes any difference ... not to Lily. She’s free.... She’s happy.”

“But she’s rich,” said her mother. “That’s why she’s free ... and only God knows whether she’s happy.... A woman like that can’t be happy.... I don’t want my daughter, my pure, lovely little daughter to be contaminated.”

The tide of Mrs. Tolliver’s emotions displayed all the signs of bursting the dam of her restraint. Ellen knew these signs. Her mother was beginning to drag in God. She was beginning to use words like “pure,” and “lovely.” And for the first time in her life, Ellen found herself instead of softening, growing harder and harder. Strangely enough, it was the words of the gentle, birdlike Miss Ogilvie which gave her a new power. This time, she was not to be defeated.

“Well, it doesn’t make any difference,” she said, rising from her mother’s lap. “I like Lily better than any one in this town ... I always will ... and nothing can change me.” The fine line of her young chin grew stubborn and there rose between mother and daughter the old impregnable wall.

It is impossible to imagine what ruse Mrs. Tolliver would have used next, impossible to calculate the depths of emotion into which she might have plunged, had she not been halted by so small a thing as the ringing of a doorbell. The sound jangled noisily through the house and Ellen, finding in it the opportunity for escape, sped away to open the door.

Outside on the doorstep, drenched, tow-headed and grinning, stood Jimmy Seton, the little brother of May Seton. In one grubby hand he held a note.

“It’s from May,” he grinned. “I guess it’s an invitation to a party.”

And without another word, he vanished like an imp into the dark wall of pouring rain.

4

The father of May Seton was rich according to standards. He was not so wealthy as the Harrison family which owned the Mills, or as Julia Shane, Mrs. Tolliver’s Aunt Julia, a great and proud lady who lived in Shane’s Castle, a gloomy house, relic of a past day, which stood isolated now upon a low hill in the midst of the clamorous and ascendant Mills. There were some who said that Harvey Seton was richer than Julia Shane, but it was impossible to know. The Seton wealth was public property. The wealth of Julia Shane, except for the land which she owned, lay concealed in the vaults of banks in Paris, in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Chicago. No one could gage it; and from the old woman’s mode of living, it was impossible to make any estimate. There had been a day when Shane’s Castle was the great house of the Town, even of the state. Great people stopped there, politicians, artists, musicians, even a President or two. But for years now, ever since Lily went to live in Paris, the famous drawing-room, glittering with crystal and silver and glowing with tapestries and paintings, had been closed and muffled in cheese-cloth. In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces, Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money. She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was concerned, no longer existed.

These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.

The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting. It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here that the bizarre makes its appearance.

There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, had invented a combination of gutta percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone. Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once it was started, would not stop until it flew into pieces of its own velocity; therefore one must have an open space about it so that no one might be injured by the flying fragments. With his brother-in-law, Colonel John Shane, he waited behind a tree for the machine to fly to bits. It revolved a few times and presently came to an abrupt halt. No fragments flew through space. The machine was a failure.

It is standing there to-day, in the midst of a field now cultivated by Bohemian immigrants. It is too bulky to be moved. It remains, like a gigantic rock, in the midst of waving corn, the single monument to Samuel Barr’s inventive genius. The other things,--the cash-carrier, the patent rocker, the synthetic whalebone have survived. With a few variations they whiz coins through gigantic department stores in a hundred cities; they support the tired backs of a million exhausted housewives; and they enclose the swelling forms of even more millions of too plump women. But Samuel Barr made no money out of these things. Others made the money and stole the credit. It was the perpetual motion machine which was the apple of his eye, the great creative effort of his soul. No one wanted that, so no one stole it from him. It remained, the single possession of his trusting soul. The weather is eating it slowly away. Sometimes people stop along the road and walk into the field to regard the strange Gargantuan engine. “Sam Barr’s Perpetual Motion Machine” exists, the only monument to his name.

Samuel Barr is important to this tale because it was he who founded Harvey Seton’s fortune, and because it was his machine which stands as a superb symbol for the taint which ran through all his family. It was the taint of a family of great energy which had fantastic visions, which gambled high, staking everything to win or lose. It was a curious taint, rare and unhappy, but out of it there sometimes rose a sudden genius--an artist, an adventurer, a philosopher, an inventor. The taint was in all of them. His sister Julia risked her fortune a dozen times and, winning, increased it a dozen times. His niece Hattie Tolliver never ceased to plan great undertakings which would make her husband rich. She risked her fortune a dozen times and, losing, saw it vanish into a mass of debts. His great-niece Ellen Tolliver had it strongly, though few would have suspected it. She was subtle like old Julia Shane. She told her affairs to no one.

* * * * *

When Harvey Seton, twenty-nine, rather pallid and ambitious in a cold-blooded fashion, heard of Samuel Barr’s invention, he set about to gain possession of it. This he accomplished in time, by methods not entirely honest, at the cost of one hundred and fifty dollars. Then he secured a partner and the Eureka Reinforced Corset Factory came to raise its walls in the factory district under the windows of Shane’s Castle.

In justice to Harvey Seton, it must be said that he struggled for a time with his conscience. He was not a bad man. His fault lay in a too great desire for wealth; that is to say, wealth in the abstract, for its own sake alone, and not for what it could bring to him of this world’s pleasures. He had some pangs over his treatment of Samuel Barr, but they were as nothing to the pangs he endured from the nature of his enterprise.... A Methodist corset manufacturer might seem a contradiction in terms, a combination of two elements which are in no way soluble, the one in the other; but somehow, Harvey Seton--perhaps because he was really shrewd--managed to unite them. He continued to sing in the church choir; and, on the left hand, he manufactured corsets. He knew, no doubt, that some of the most devout of his Methodist sisters wore stays beneath their clothes. Perhaps if they had been forced to wear them on the outside, the corset business would have suffered. The world being what it is, Harvey Seton prospered. His corsets became known in remote lands for their durability and their restrictive values. Eureka Reinforced Corsets came to be worn by the great ladies of New York and London, by the housewives of the Middle West, by the demi-mondaines of Paris and Brussels, by professors’ fat wives in Germany. They were introduced at length even among the bisque ladies of Polynesia and the black ladies of brothels in Mozambique. In 1897 Harvey Seton opened a branch factory at St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It brought him nearer to his continental markets.

Meanwhile Harvey Seton’s life followed a narrow path to and from the corset factory, and presently he married one of the plumpest of Methodist sisters who presented him after a hesitation of three years with a daughter, May. Then followed an hiatus of ten years and there appeared a thin anemic little boy. These are the facts of Harvey Seton’s life. There was nothing more and nothing less. It was the thin sickly little boy, now grown precocious and somewhat spiteful, who brought the note through the pouring autumn rain to Ellen’s doorstep and thus played his tiny, anemic part in the drama of her life.

* * * * *

But May and Ellen were friends, or as near friends as it was possible for any one to be with such a girl as Ellen. May frankly adored her. She admired her straight, slim figure, so different from her own vague softness, and her handsome dark hair. She envied her ability to play the piano. What Ellen said or believed, to May was gospel. And in this there was nothing extraordinary. It was the worship of a weak, good-natured soul for a strong, self-willed one. May was pretty in a plump, blonde, pale fashion. She giggled a great deal and liked the companionship of the Town boys. Ellen did neither of these things. In fact she hated the boys with a kind of savage resentment, as if it were presumptuous of them even to fancy they might interest her. She permitted May to worship her, since there seemed nothing to be done about it; yet the adoration annoyed her at times so profoundly that she wanted to strike the blonde, silly girl, to really hurt her, to destroy her as she might destroy some pale, stupid worm. She hated her because May had those things which would have made her own way easy. But her pride kept her silent. She smiled at May in her cold, aloof fashion and permitted her to continue worship.

5

When Ellen arrived at the Setons’ on the night following the visit of Jimmy, she found that the family had not yet finished supper. They sat about the table, Seton _père_ at the head, thin, bloodless, bearded, looking like one of the more austere of the saints, rather than a corset manufacturer. Seton _mère_, fat, fleshy, good-natured, occupied a seat at the far end. Between them sat disposed little Jimmy, anemic and insignificant, May plump and pale, and last of all, a stranger.

“This,” said May Seton, giggling and indicating the young man at her left, “is Mr. Clarence Murdock. I’ve been wanting you to meet him, Ellen. I’m sure you’ll like each other. He’s from New York ... here to see Papa on business.”

The young man rose and bowed a little stiffly but with a flattering deference.

“May has told me so much about you ... I’m delighted to know you.”

“Sit down until we finish,” said May. “We’re just eating the last of our dessert.”

Now May’s introduction of Mr. Clarence Murdock was not altogether straightforward. From the phrases she chose, it could be gathered that it was the first time she had ever seen Mr. Murdock and that Ellen had never heard of him before. In this there was no truth for he had seen May many times. They even called each other by their Christian names. And May had given Ellen elaborately detailed descriptions of the young man, having gone even so far as to hint that there was more between them than mere friendship. But May could not resist doing things of this sort where a man was concerned. It was impossible for her to be honest. The mere shadow of a man upon the horizon goaded her into a display of dimples and coquetry. She bridled, grew arch and mysterious. She was taught by an aspiring mother that these things were a part of a game. Ellen might have replied, “Yes. I’ve heard a great deal concerning you, Mr. Murdock,” but she did not. She said, “I’m so glad to know you,” gave him a faint smile and a look which seemed not so much concerned with Mr. Murdock as with the dead fish and boiled lobsters in the ornamental print on the wall behind him. All the same she began quietly examining the points of the stranger.

He was not bad looking and he had nice manners. To be sure he might have been taller. He was not quite so tall as Ellen. He had nice brown hair sleekly brushed back from a high forehead, and he wore a starched collar of the high, ungainly sort which was the fashion in those days. His eyes were brown and gentle and near-sighted, his face well-shaped and his nose straight, though a trifle thin so that it gave his countenance a look of insignificance which one might expect in a perpetual clerk. He was not, Ellen decided, the sort of romantic figure which could sweep her off her feet. Still, he came from New York. That was something. He had lived in the world.

“My, what a rain we’ve been having,” observed Mrs. Seton. “I suppose it’s what you’d call the equinoctial storms.”

Yes, her spouse replied, it was just that. And he launched into a dissertation upon equinoctial storms, their origin, their effect, their endurance, their manifestations in various quarters of the globe,--in short all about them. Fifteen precious minutes passed beyond recall into eternity while Harvey Seton discussed equinoctial storms. No one else spoke, for it was the edict of this father that no one should interrupt him until he had exhausted his subject. He was indeed a King among Bores. And when he had finished, his wife, instead of going further with this topic or one of similar profundity, struck out in the exasperating fashion of women upon some new and trivial tangent.

“Herman Biggs is coming in, Ellen,” she observed brightly. “Right after supper.” And she beamed on Ellen with the air of a great benefactress. Her thoughts were not uttered, yet to one of Ellen’s shrewdness they were clear. The smile said, “Of course a poor girl like you could not aspire to a New Yorker like Mr. Murdock, but I am doing my best to see that you get a good husband. Herman Biggs is respectable and honest. He’ll make a good husband. We must look higher for May. She must have something like Mr. Murdock.”

And even as she spoke the doorbell rang and the anemic Jimmy sped away to open it as if on the doorstep outside stood not the freckled Herman Biggs but some wild adventure in the form of a romantic stranger.

* * * * *

It _was_ Herman Biggs. He came in as he had come in a thousand times before, and stood with his dripping hat in his hand, awkwardly, while he was introduced to Mr. Clarence Murdock. But he did not sit down. The lecture upon equinoctial storms had claimed the remainder of the time allotted to dessert. The little group rose and distributed itself through the house. Mr. Seton went into a room known as his den. Mrs. Seton went into the kitchen and the young people disappeared into the cavernous parlor, followed by Jimmy, still filled with the same expectancy of stupendous adventure, intent upon harassing the little party for the rest of the evening by the sort of guerilla warfare in which he excelled.

It was a gaunt house constructed in a bad period when houses broke out into cupolas, unusual bay windows and variations of the mansard roof. Outside it was painted a liverish brown; inside the effect was the same. In the parlor there was an enormous bronze chandelier with burners constructed in imitation of the lamps found during the excavation of Pompeii, an event which considerably agitated the world of the eighties. The walls were covered with deep red paper of a very complicated design of arabesques upon which was superimposed a second design in very elegant gold, even more complicated. Against this hung engravings of Dignity and Impudence, The Monarch of the Forest, and The Trial of Effie Deans. Pampas grass in vases ornamented with realistic pink porcelain roses, waved its dusty plumes above a bronze clock surmounted by a bronze chariot driver and horses which rushed headlong toward a collision with a porcelain rosebud. By the side of the clock stood a large conch shell bearing in gilt lettering the legend, “Souvenir of Los Angeles, Cal.”

“Shall we play hearts?” asked May, with appropriate glances, “or shall we just talk?... There’s no moon and the piazza is all wet.”

Ellen said nothing; she continued to regard Mr. Murdock with a curious, speculative air.

“Let’s play hearts,” said the anemic Jimmy, fidgeting and climbing over the sofa. “I kin play, Mr. Murdock,” he added proudly.

Upon the pride of the Seton family, Ellen turned a withering glance, charged with homicidal meaning. It said, “What are you doing here?... If you were my brother you’d be in bed where you belong.”

“Ellen wants to play hearts!... Ellen wants to play hearts!” sang out Jimmy, pulling awry the shade of the imitation bronze lamp.

Herman Biggs blushed and stammered that it made no difference to him. Mr. Murdock was gentle and polite. “Let’s talk,” he suggested mildly, “we might as well get acquainted.” As the oldest by nearly ten years and the most sophisticated by virtue of his residence in New York, he took the lead.

“I think so too,” replied Ellen and a curious flash of understanding passed between them, a glance which implied a mutual superiority founded upon something deep in Ellen’s nature and upon Mr. Murdock’s superior age and metropolitan bearing.

So they talked, rather stupid talk, punctuated by May’s giggles, the guffaws of Herman Biggs, and the pinches of the anemic Jimmy, who was never still. Now this pale pest swung himself from the curtains, now he climbed the back of a chair, now he sought the top of the oak piano, menacing lamps and vases and pictures. And after a while Ellen was induced to sit at the piano and play for the party. It was ragtime they wanted, so she played “I’m afraid to go home in the dark” and “Bon-bon Buddy” and other favorites which Mr. Murdock sang in a pleasant baritone voice. After that he gave imitations of various vaudeville artists singing these same ballads.

At length May and Herman Biggs retired, accompanied by Jimmy, to bring in the refreshments, and Ellen was left alone with the stranger.

“I suppose,” she began, “you find it dull here after New York.”

Mr. Murdock coughed. “No, it’s pleasant enough.... Mr. Seton has been very kind to me.... I’ll be here another week or two installing the electrical equipment.”

Ellen raised her head proudly. “I’m going to New York myself soon ... probably this winter.... I’m going to study music.”

Mr. Murdock was very ready. “Well, we must meet again there.... It’s a lonely place for a girl without family or friends.”

“But I don’t get homesick,” said Ellen, with the sophisticated air of an experienced traveler. “I certainly wouldn’t be homesick in New York.”

From that moment Mr. Murdock began to regard her with a deeper interest. Perhaps he saw that by her side May had no points to be compared with Ellen’s air of quiet assurance, her youthful dignity, her curiously apparent respect for herself as an individual. She sat in the plush rocker within the glow from the bronze lamp. At the moment she was not awkward at all; she was tall, graceful, dark, even a little imposing. The essence of her individuality rose triumphant above the plush rocker, the engravings that hung against the elaborate wall paper, above even the cheap dress which concealed her young slenderness. She stirred the imagination. Certainly her face was interesting.

“I didn’t know,” began Mr. Murdock, “that you were a professional musician.... I don’t suppose you like playing ragtime.... Maybe you’d play me something good ... something classical, really good, I mean like Nevin or MacDowell.”

And Mr. Murdock, growing communicative, went on to say that his sister played too. She lived in Ogdensburg, New York. He had come from Ogdensburg to make his fortune in the city. That was the reason, he said, that he understood how lonely a person could be.

“Of course, it’s different now,” he continued, “I have lots of friends.... Homer Bunce and Herbert Wyck.... But you’ll meet them when you come to New York.”

He was very pleasant, Mr. Murdock. And he was nice looking in a rather spiritless way. His eyes were kind and his hands nice. To Ellen hands were important features. Shrewd beyond her years, she saw people by their hands and their mouths. Mr. Murdock’s mouth was a trifle small and compressed, but otherwise all right. He might be a prig, but underneath the priggishness there lay a character nice enough.

“And now won’t you play for me?” he persisted, “something of Nevin or MacDowell?”