Part 6

“They’ve been caught ... the pair of them,” she said. “And Cousin Charlie did it.... They’ve been trying to get me to call him off.”

Lily regarded her mother with eyebrows drawn together in a little frown. Plainly she was puzzled. “But how Cousin Charlie?” she asked. “How has he caught them?”

The mother set herself to explaining the whole story. She went back to the very beginning. “Cousin Charlie, you know, is county treasurer. It was Judge Weissman who elected him. The Jew is powerful. Cousin Charlie wouldn’t have had a chance but for him. Judge Weissman only backed him because he thought he’d take orders. But he hasn’t. That’s where the trouble is. That’s why they’re worried now. He won’t do what Judge Weissman tells him to do!”

Here she paused, permitting herself to laugh again at the discomfiture of her early morning callers. So genuine was her mirthful satisfaction that for an instant, the guise of the worldly woman vanished and through the mask showed the farm girl John Shane had married thirty years before.

“You see,” she continued, “in going through the books, Cousin Charlie discovered that the Cyclops Mills owe the county about five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. He’s sued to recover the money together with the fines, and he cannot lose. Judge Weissman and Mrs. Harrison have just discovered that and they’ve come to me to call him off because he is set on recovering the money. He’s refused to take orders. You see, it hits their pocket-books. The man who was treasurer before Cousin Charlie has disappeared neatly. There’s a pretty scandal somewhere. Even if it doesn’t come out, the Harrisons and Judge Weissman will lose a few hundred thousands. The Jew owns a lot of stock, you know.”

The old woman pounded the floor with her ebony stick as though the delight was too great to escape expression by any other means. Her blue eyes shone with a wicked gleam, “It’s happened at last!” she said. “It’s happened at last! I’ve been waiting for it ... all these years.”

“And what did you tell them?” asked Lily.

“Tell them! Tell them!” cried Julia Shane. “What could I tell them? Only that I could do nothing. I told them they were dealing with an honest man. It is impossible to corrupt Hattie’s husband. I could do nothing if I would, and certainly I would do nothing if I could. They’ll have to pay ... just when they’re in the midst of building new furnaces.” Suddenly her face grew serious and the triumph died out of her voice. “But I’m sorry for Charlie and Hattie, just the same. He’ll suffer for it. He has killed himself politically. The Jew is too powerful for him. It’ll be hard on Hattie and the children, just when Ellen was planning to go away to study. Judge Weissman will fight him from now on. You’ve no idea how angry he was. He tried to bellow at me, but I soon stopped him.”

And the old woman laughed again at the memory of her triumph.

As for Lily her handsome face grew rosy with indignation. “It can’t be as bad as that! That can’t happen to a man because he did his duty! The Town can’t be as rotten as that!”

“It is though,” said her mother. “It is. You’ve no idea how rotten it is. Why, Cousin Charlie is a lamb among the wolves. Believe me I know. It’s worse than when your father was alive. The mills have made it worse.”

Then both of them fell silent and the terrible roar of the Cyclops Mills, triumphant and monstrous, invaded the room once more. Irene came in from a tour of the Flats and looking in at the door noticed that they were occupied with their own thoughts, and so hurried on to her room. At last Mrs. Shane rose.

“We must help the Tollivers somehow,” she said. “If only they weren’t so damned proud it would be easier.”

Lily, her eyes dark and serious, stood at the window now looking across the garden buried beneath blackened snow. “I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

XIX

For thirty years Christmas dinner had been an event at Shane’s Castle. John Shane, who had no family of his own, who was cut off from friends and relatives, adopted in the seventies the family of his wife, and established the custom of inviting every relative and connection to a great feast with wine, a turkey, a goose and a pair of roast pigs. In the old days before the MacDougal Farm was swallowed up by the growing town, New Year’s dinner at the farmhouse had also been an event. The family came in sleds and sleighs from all parts of the county to gather round the groaning table of Jacob Barr, Julia Shane’s brother-in-law and the companion of John Shane in the paddock now covered by warehouses. But all that was a part of the past. Even the farmhouse no longer existed. Christmas at Cypress Hill was all that remained.

Once there had been as many as thirty gathered about the table, but one by one these had vanished, passing out of this life or migrating to the West when the Mills came and the county grew crowded; for the MacDougals, the Barrs and all their connection were adventurers, true pioneers who became wretched when they were no longer surrounded by a sense of space, by enough air, unclogged by soot and coal gas, for their children to breathe.

On Christmas day there came to Cypress Hill a little remnant of seven. These with Julia Shane and her two daughters were all that remained of a family whose founder had crossed the Appalachians from Maryland to convert the wilderness into fertile farming land. They arrived at the portico with the wrought iron columns in two groups, the first of which was known as The Tolliver Family. It included Cousin Hattie, her husband Charles Tolliver, their daughter Ellen, two sons Fergus and Robert, and Jacob Barr, who made his home with them and shared with Julia Shane the position of Head of the Family.

They drove up in a sleigh drawn by two horses--good horses, for Jacob Barr and Charles Tolliver were judges of horseflesh--and Mrs. Tolliver got down first, a massive woman, large without being fat, with a rosy complexion and a manner of authority. She wore a black feather boa, a hat trimmed with stubby ostrich plumes perched high on her fine black hair, and a short jacket of astrakhan, slightly _démodé_ owing to its leg-of-mutton sleeves. After her descended her father, the patriarch Jacob Barr. The carriage rocked beneath his bulk. He stood six feet three in his stocking feet and for all his eighty-two years was bright as a dollar and straight as a poker. A long white beard covered his neckerchief and fell to the third button of his embroidered waistcoat, entangling itself in the heavy watch chain from which hung suspended a nugget of gold, souvenir of his adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. He carried a heavy stick of cherry wood and limped, having broken his hip and recovered from it at the age of eighty.

Next Ellen got down, her dark curls transformed into a pompadour as her mother’s concession to a recent eighteenth birthday. She was tall, slim, and handsome despite the awkwardness of the girl not yet turned woman. Her eyes were large and blue and her hands long and beautiful. She had the family nose, prominent and proudly curved, which in Julia Shane had become an eagle’s beak. After her, Fergus, a tall, shy boy of fourteen, and Robert, two years younger, sullen, wilful, red-haired like his venerable grandfather, who in youth was known in the county as The Red Scot. The boys were squabbling and had to be put in order by their mother before entering Cousin Julia’s handsome house. Under her watchful eye there was a prolonged scraping of shoes on the doormat. She managed her family with the air of a field-marshal.

As for Charles Tolliver, he turned over the steaming horses to Hennery, bade the black man blanket them well, talked with him for a moment, and then followed the others into the house. Him Hennery adored, with the adoration of a servant for one who understands servants. In the stables, Hennery put extra zeal into the rubbing down of the animals, his mind carrying all the while the picture of a tall gentleman with graying hair, kindly eyes and a pleasant soft voice.

“Mr. Tolliver,” he told the mulatto woman later in the day, “is one of God’s gentlemen.”

The other group was known as The Barr Family. The passing of years had thinned its ranks until there remained only Eva Barr, the daughter of Samuel Barr and therefore a niece of the vigorous and patriarchal Jacob. Characteristically she made her entrance in a town hack, stopping to haggle with the driver over the fare. Her thin, spinsterish voice rose above the roaring of the Mills until at length she lost the argument, as she always did, and paid reluctantly the prodigious twenty-five cents. She might easily have come by way of the Halsted street trolley for five cents, but this she considered neither safe nor dignified. As she grew older and more eccentric, she had come to exercise extraordinary precautions to safeguard her virginity. She was tall, thin, and dry, with a long nose slightly red at the end, and hair that hung in melancholy little wisps about an equine face; yet she had a double lock put on the door of her room at Haines’ boarding house, and nothing would have induced her to venture alone into the squalid Flats. She was poor and very pious. Into her care fell the destitute of her parish. She administered scrupulously with the hard efficiency of a penurious housekeeper.

Dinner began at two and assumed the ceremonial dignity of a tribal rite. It lasted until the winter twilight, descending prematurely because of the smoke from the Mills, made it necessary for the mulatto woman and her black helpers to bring in the silver candlesticks, place them amid the wreckage of the great feast, and light them to illumine the paneled walls of the somber dining-room. When the raisins and nuts and the coffee in little gilt cups had gone the rounds, the room resounded with the scraping of chairs, and the little party wandered out to distribute itself at will through the big house. Every year the distribution followed the same plan. In one corner of the big drawing-room Irene, in her plain gray dress, and Eva Barr, angular and piercing in durable and shiny black serge, foregathered, drawn by their mutual though very different interest in the poor. Each year the two spinsters fell upon the same arguments; for they disagreed about most fundamental things. The attitude of Irene toward the poor was the Roman attitude, full of paternalism, beneficent, pitying. Eva Barr in her Puritan heart had no room for such sentimental slop. “The poor,” she said, “must be taught to pull themselves out of the rut. It’s sinful to do too much for them.”

Two members of the family, the oldest, Jacob Barr, and the youngest, his grandson, disappeared completely, the one to make his round of the stables and park, the other to vanish into the library where, unawed by the sinister portrait of old John Shane, he poked about, stuffing himself with the candy sent by Willie Harrison as a token of a thrice renewed courtship. The grandfather, smoking what he quaintly called a cheroot, surveyed scrupulously the stable and the house, noting those portions which were falling into disrepair. These he later brought to the attention of Julia Shane; and the old woman, leaning on her stick, listened with an air of profound attention to her brother-in-law only to forget everything he had advised the moment the door closed upon him. Each year it was the same. Nothing changed.

In the far end of the drawing-room by the grand piano, Lily drew Ellen Tolliver and the tall shy brother Fergus to her side. Here Mrs. Tolliver joined them, her eyes bright with flooding admiration for her children. The girl was plainly fascinated by her glamorous cousin. She examined boldly Lily’s black gown from Worth, her pearls, and her shoes from the Rue de la Paix. She begged for accounts of the Opéra in Paris and of Paderewski’s playing with the Colonne Orchestra. There was something pitiful in her eagerness for some contact with the glamorous world beyond the Town.

“I’m going to New York to study, next year,” she told Lily. “I would go this year but Momma says I’m too young. Of course, I’m not. If I had money, I’d go anyway.” And she cast a sudden defiant glance at her powerful mother.

Lily, her face suddenly grave with the knowledge of Judge Weissman’s visit, tried to reassure her. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity, Ellen. You’re still a young girl ... only eighteen.”

“But there’s never any money,” the girl replied, with an angry gleam in her wide blue eyes. “Papa’s always in debt. I’ll never get a chance unless I make it myself.”

In the little alcove by the gallery, Julia Shane leaning on her stick, talked business with Charles Tolliver. This too was a yearly custom; her nephew, the county treasurer, gave her bits of advice on investments which she wrote down with a silver pencil and destroyed when he had gone. She listened and begged his advice because the giving of it encouraged him and gave him confidence. He was a gentle, honest fellow, and in her cold way she loved him, better even than she loved his wife who was her niece by blood. The advice he gave was mediocre and uninspired; besides Julia Shane was a shrewd woman and more than a match in business matters for most men.

When they had finished this little ceremony, the old woman turned the conversation to the Cyclops Mill scandal.

“And what’s to come of it?” she asked. “Are you going to win?”

Charles Tolliver smiled. “We’ve won already. The case was settled yesterday. The Mill owes the state some five hundred thousand with fines.”

Julia Shane again pounded the floor in delight. “A fine Christmas present!” she chuckled. “A fine Christmas present!” And then she did an unaccountable thing. With her thin ringed hand she slapped her nephew on the back.

“You know they came to me,” she said, “to get my influence. I told them to go to the Devil!... I suppose they tried to bribe you.”

The nephew frowned and the gentleness went out of his face. The fine mouth grew stern. “They tried ... carefully though, so carefully they couldn’t be caught at it.”

“It will make you trouble. Judge Weissman is a bad enemy. He’s powerful.”

“I know that. I’ve got to fight him. The farmers are with me.”

“But the Town is not, and it’s the Town which counts nowadays. The day of the farmer is past.”

“No, the Town is not.”

The face of Charles Tolliver grew serious and the blue eyes grave and worried. Julia Shane saw that he was watching his tall daughter who sat now at the piano, preparing to play.

“If you need money at the next election,” she said, “Come to me. I can help you.”

XX

At the sound of Ellen’s music, the conversation in the long drawing-room ceased save for the two women who sat the far corner--Irene and Eva Barr. They went on talking in an undertone of their work among the poor. The others listened, captivated by the sound, for Ellen played well, far better than any of the little group save Lily and Julia Shane knew. To the others it was simply music; to the old woman and her daughter it was something more. They found in it the fire of genius, the smoldering warmth of a true artist, a quality unreal and transcendental which raised the beautiful old room for a moment out of the monotonous slough of commonplace existence. Ellen, in high-collared shirtwaist and skirt with her dark hair piled high in a ridiculous pompadour, sat very straight bending over the keys from time to time in a caressing fashion. She played first of all a Brahms waltz, a delicate thread of peasant melody raised to the lofty realm of immortality by genius; and from this she swept into a Chopin valse, melancholy but somehow brilliant, and then into a polonaise, so dashing and so thunderous that even Irene and Eva Barr, ignorant of all the beauty of sound that tumbled flood-like into the old room, suspended their peevish talk for a time and sat quite still, caught somehow in the contagious awe of the others.

The thin girl at the piano was not in a drawing-room at all. She sat in some enormous concert hall on a high stage before thousands of people. The faces stretched out before her, row after row, until those who sat far back were misty and blurred, not to be distinguished. When she had finished the polonaise she sat quietly for a moment as though waiting for a storm of applause to arise after a little hush from the great audience. There was a moment of silence and then the voice of Lily was heard, warm and soft, almost caressing.

“It was beautiful, Ellen ... really beautiful. I had no idea you played so well.”

The girl, blushing, turned and smiled at the cousin who lay back so indolently among the cushions of the sofa, so beautiful, so charming in the black gown from Worth. The smile conveyed a world of shy and inarticulate gratitude. The girl was happy because she understood that Lily knew. To the others it was just music.

“Your daughter is an artist, Hattie,” remarked Julia Shane. “You should be proud of her.”

The mother, her stout figure tightly laced, sat very straight in her stiff chair, her work-stained hands resting awkwardly in her lap. Her face beamed with the pride of a woman who was completely primitive, for whom nothing in this world existed save her children.

“And now, Ellen,” she said, “play the McKinley Funeral March. You play it so well.”

The girl’s young face clouded suddenly. “But it’s not McKinley’s Funeral March, Mama,” she protested. “It’s Chopin’s. It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, you know what I mean ... the one you played at the Memorial Service for McKinley.” She turned to Lily, her pride written in every line of her strong face. “You know, Ellen was chosen to play at the services for McKinley. Mark Hanna himself made a speech from the same platform.”

XXI

An irrepressible smile swept Lily’s face. “They couldn’t have chosen better, I’m sure. Do play it, Ellen.”

The girl turned to the piano and a respectful silence fell once more. Slowly she swept into the somber rhythms of the _March Funèbre_, beginning so softly that the music was scarcely audible, climbing steadily toward a climax. From the depths of the old Pleyel she brought such music as is seldom heard. The faces in the drawing-room became grave and thoughtful. Lying among the pillows of the divan, Lily closed her eyes and listened through a wall of darkness. Nearby, her mother, leaning on the ebony stick, bowed her head because her eyes had grown dim with tears, a spectacle which she never permitted this world to witness. Presently the music swung again into a somber retarding rhythm; and then slowly, surely, with a weird, unearthly certainty, it became synchronized with the throbbing of the Mills. The steady beat was identical. Old Julia Shane opened her eyes and stared out of the window into the gathering darkness. The music, all at once, made the pounding of the Mills hideously audible.

When the last note echoing through the old house died away, Eva Barr, fidgeting with her embroidered reticule in search of a handkerchief to wipe her lean red nose, rose and said, “Well, I must go. It’s late and the hack is already here. He charges extra for waiting, you know.”

That was the inevitable sign. The dinner was ended. Grandpa Barr, very rosy from his promenade about the grounds, and the red-haired Robert, much stuffed with Willie Harrison’s courting chocolates, reappeared and the round of farewells was begun.

Before Hennery brought round from the stable the Tolliver’s sleigh, Lily placing her arm about Ellen’s waist, drew her aside and praised her playing. “You must not throw it away,” she said. “It is too great a gift.” She whispered. Her manner became that of a conspirator. “Don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen, don’t waste your life. The others ... the ones who aren’t remarkable in any way will try to pull you down from your pedestal to their level. But don’t let them. Fitting the pattern is the end of their existence. ‘Be like every one else,’ is their motto. Don’t give in. And when the time comes, if you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.”

The girl blushed and regarded the floor silently for a moment. “I won’t let them,” she managed to say presently. “Thank you, Cousin Lily.” At the door, she turned sharply, all her shyness suddenly vanished, an air of defiance in its place. “I won’t let them.... You needn’t worry,” she added with a sudden fierceness.

“And next week,” said Lily, “come here and spend the night. I want to hear more music. There’s no music in this Town but the Mills.”

By the fireplace under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, Julia Shane talked earnestly with her niece, Mrs. Tolliver, who stood warming her short astrakhan jacket by the gentle blaze.

“And one more thing, Hattie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been planning to give you these for some time but the opportunity never arose. I shan’t live many more years and I want you to have them.”

With an air of secrecy she took from her thin fingers two rings and slipped them into the red, worn hands of her niece. “Don’t tell any one,” she added. “It’s a matter between us.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s hand closed on the rings. She could say nothing, but she kissed Aunt Julia affectionately and the tears came into her eyes because the old woman understood so well the intricate conventions of pride in matters of money. The rings were worth thousands. Hattie Tolliver could not have accepted their value in money.

At the door the little party made its departure with a great deal of healthy hubbub, colliding at the same time with a visitor who had driven up unseen. It was Willie Harrison, come to call upon Lily and to propose a visit to the Mills to look over the new furnaces that were building. In the stream of light from the doorway the caller and Charles Tolliver recognized each other and an awkward moment followed. It was Willie Harrison, overcome with confusion, who bowed politely. Charles Tolliver climbed into his sleigh without making any sign of recognition. The feud between the old and the new, concealed for so many years, was emerging slowly into the open.

XXII