CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXX, XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, XL, XLI, XLII, XLIII, XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, XLIX, L, LI, LII, LIII, LIV, LV, LVI, LVII, LVIII, LIX, LX, LXI, LXII, LXIII, LXIV, LXV, LXVI, LXVII, LXVIII, LXIX, LXX, LXXI, LXXII, LXXIII, LXXIV, LXXV, LXXVI, LXXVII, LXXVIII, LXXIX, LXXX, LXXXI, LXXXII, LXXXIII, LXXXIV, LXXXV, LXXXVI, LXXXVII, LXXXVIII, LXXXIX, XC, XCI.

THE GREEN BAY TREE

The
GREEN BAY
TREE

A Novel
by

LOUIS BROMFIELD



GROSSET & DUNLAP · PUBLISHERS · NEW YORK

By arrangement with FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY


Copyright, 1924, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

All Rights Reserved


Printed in the United States of America



TO

MY MOTHER,

WHO MUST HAVE KNOWN
AT SOME TIME IN HER LIFE
HATTIE TOLLIVER

THE GREEN BAY TREE

I

Here and there the hedge displayed signs of death. There were patches where the green had become withered, and other patches where there was no green at all but simply a tangled wall of hard, dead twigs. Where death had touched the barrier it was possible to see beyond the borders of the garden into regions filled with roaring furnaces, steel sheds, and a tangle of glittering railway tracks cluttered by a confusion of semaphores and signal lights which the magic of night transformed into festoons of glowing jewels—emeralds, rubies, cabuchons, opals, glowing in the thick darkness. But it was not yet dark and no one at the garden party peered through the dying gaps in the hedge because by daylight there lay beyond the borders of the garden only ugliness of the most appalling nature.

The little park sloped away on all sides from a great brick house, conceived in the most bizarre union of Georgian and Gothic styles. It was large and square and faced with white stone, but beyond this the Georgian style played no part. The roof carried a half-dozen high pitched gables; the windows were tall and pointed in the manner of a church rectory, and the chimneys, built of white stone, were carved in the most ornate Gothic fashion. Over all clambered a mass of vines,—woodbine, virginia creeper and wistaria—which somehow bound the grotesque combination of styles into one harmonious whole, characterized by a surprising look of age, considering the fact that the house stood in the midst of a community which less than a century before had been a complete and trackless wilderness.

The vines, like the hedge, had been more green and exotic at some earlier day. In places there were now no leaves at all, and elsewhere, though the season was early summer, the leaves appeared sickly and wretched, surrounded by dead bare tendrils pressing desperately against the faded bricks.

On the whole, however, the garden was at its best. Along the gravel walks leading to the arbor, irises raised crowns of mauve, royal purple and yellow. Peonies in the process of bursting from tight green buds into great pom-poms of pink and white tumbled across the flagged walk. At the feet of the flying Eros (made of cast iron and painted white), who carried a ring in one hand and thus served for a hitching post, ground pinks and white violets, brought from England by Julia Shane’s grandmother, peeped from among the blades of new grass. But the greatest splendor had its being in the wistaria. High up among the branches of the dead oak that towered gauntly above the horse block, its cascades of mauve and white and purple poured like water escaping from a broken dam. From the black iron portico tumbled more torrents of blossoms. They appeared even high up among the tips of the pointed cypresses which gave the house its name. To be sure these were not true cypresses at all, for true cypresses could not have survived the harsh northern winter. In reality they were cedars; but their tall, green-black spires, swaying in melancholy fashion at the least breath of air, resembled cypresses as one brother resembles another. John Shane, perhaps because the name roused memories of some secret world of his own, always called them cypresses and such, to all purposes, they had become. None knew why he called the house Cypress Hill or why he loved cypresses so much that he called cedars by that name when nature cheated him out of his heart’s desire. The Town set it down simply as another of his eccentricities. One more craziness no longer disturbed the Town. And John Shane had been dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was one of no importance whatever.

Under the wistarias on the wrought iron piazza his widow, Julia Shane, leaning on her stick of ebony filigreed in silver, surveyed the bright garden and the guests who moved about among the old trees, the men clad in sober black, the ladies in sprigged muslins or bright colored linens. She was a tall thin woman with a nose slightly hooked, which gave her the fleeting look of an eagle, courageous, bold, even a little pitiless and unrelenting. An air of dignity and distinction compensated the deficiencies of beauty; she was certainly not a beautiful woman and her fine skin was already crisscrossed by a million tiny lines no more substantial than cobweb. Like the women of the generation preceding hers, she made no attempt at preserving the illusion of youth. Although she could not have been long past middle age, she dressed as an old woman. She wore a gown of black and mauve of the most expensive materials,—a sign of mourning which she kept up for a husband dead ten years, a husband whose passing could have given her no cause for regret, whose memory could not possibly bring to her ivory cheeks the faintest flush of pleasure. But the black and mauve gave her great dignity and a certain melancholy beauty. On her thin fingers she wore rings set with amethysts and diamonds and about her neck hung a chain of amethysts caught in a setting of old Spanish silver. The chain reached twice about her thin throat and hung to the knees.

She had been standing on the piazza, a little withdrawn from her guests, all the afternoon because she knew that the mauve of her gown and the dull lavender sparkle of the amethysts blended superbly with the tumbling blossoms of the wistaria. She had not been, after all, the wife of John Shane for nothing. People said that he had taught his wife to make the best of herself because he could bear to have about him only those things which were in excellent taste. People also said that his wife was lame, not because she had fallen by accident down the long polished stairway, but because she had been thrown from the top to the bottom by her husband in an insane fit of rage.

From her point of vantage, her bright blue eyes swept the garden, identifying the guests—those whom she desired to have there, those to whose presence she was completely indifferent, and those whom political necessity had forced upon her. About most of them centered scornful, bitter, little thoughts that chased themselves round and round her tired brain.

Over against the hedge on the far side of the little pavilion stood a group which, it appeared, interested her more than any other, for she watched it with a faint smile that carried the merest trace of mockery. She discerned the black of the bombazine worn by Hattie Tolliver, her blood niece, and the sprigged muslin of Hattie’s daughter, Ellen, who stood by resentfully with an air of the most profound scorn while her mother talked to Judge Weissman. The mother talked voluably, exerting all her power to charm the Judge, a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant Viennese Jew. And the efforts of Hattie Tolliver, so solid, so respectable, so downright, were completely transparent, for the woman possessed no trace of subtlety, not the faintest power of dissimulation. She sought to win favor with the Jew because he was the one power in the county politics. He ruled his party with an undisputed sway, and Hattie Tolliver’s husband was a candidate for office. Perhaps from the pinnacle of her worldliness Julia Shane detected a quality naive and almost comic in the vulgar intrigue progressing so blatantly on the opposite side of the pavilion.

There was also a quality indescribably comic in the fierce attitude of the daughter, in her aloofness from the politician and the intensity of her glowering expression. She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful, spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the piano superbly, in a truly extraordinary fashion.

Presently Julia Shane, behind the shelter of the wistaria, sniffed suddenly as though the wind had carried to her among the delicate odors of the flowers the offensive smell of the fat perspiring Jew. He was there by political necessity, because the Governor desired his presence. Clearly she looked upon him as an intruder who defiled the little park.

Farther off at the side of the empty kennels, all buried beneath a tangle of vines, another group had gathered about a table where pink ices and pink and white cakes were being served. About the great silver punch bowl hung a dozen men, drinking, drinking, drinking, as though the little park were a corner saloon and the little table the accustomed free lunch. For a moment Julia Shane’s gaze fastened upon the men and her thin nostrils quivered. Her lips formed themselves to utter a word which she spoke quite loudly so that three women, perfect strangers to her who stood just beneath the piazza, overheard it and spread the story that Julia Shane had taken to talking to herself. “Pigs!” she said.

II

Outside, with faces pressed against the bars, stood a score of aliens from the hovels of the mill workers in the neighboring Flats. The little group included a dozen women wearing shawls and a multitude of petticoats, three or four children and as many half-grown boys still a year or two too young to be of any use to the Harrison Mills. They pushed and pressed against the handsome gates, striving for a glimpse at the spectacle of the bright garden animated by the figures of the men and women who ruled the Town, the Flats, the very lives and destinies of the little throng of aliens. A baby squalled in the heat and one of the boys, a tall powerful fellow with a shock of yellow hair, spat through the bars.

At the approach of the carriage the black Hennery sprang up and with the gesture of one opening the gates of Buckingham Palace, shouted to the crowd outside, “Look out, you all! There’s carriages a-coming!”

Then with a great clanging and shooting of bolts he swung open the gates and Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son William swept through. The hoofs of the dancing horses beat a tattoo on the cobblestones. The mother saw nothing, but the narrow eyes of her son appraised the group of boys and even the babies as potential workers in the Mills. These Dago children grew rapidly, but not fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the growing furnaces; and so many of them died before they reached manhood.

As the carriage swung into narrow Halsted Street, Mrs. Harrison, leaning forward so that the gold chain swayed like a pendulum from her mountainous bosom, surveyed the wretched houses, the yards bereft of all green, and the shabby railway station that stood a hundred yards from the very gates of Shane’s Castle.

“You’d think Julia Shane would move out of this filthy district,” she said. “Sentiment is all right, but there’s such a thing as running it into the ground. The smoke and soot is even killing the flowers. They’re not half so fine as last year.”

Her son William shrugged his narrow, sloping shoulders.

“The ground is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “Three railroads—the only site left. She could get her own price.”

In the corner saloon a mechanical piano set up a tinny uproar and shattered fragments of The Blue Danube drifted out upon the hot air through the swinging doors into the street, throttling for the moment any further conversation.

The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them from him and swore.

“She needn’t think she’s so damned swell,” she said. “What’s she got to make her so proud? I should think she’d blush at what has happened in that rotten old house. Why, she’s got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for neighbors!”

She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.

With a loud, officious bang, Hennery closed the wrought iron gates and the wise, old faces of the alien women pressed once more against the bars. One of the throng—the big boy with the shock of yellow hair, a Ukrainian named Stepan Krylenko—shouted something in Russian as the gates banged together. It was a tongue foreign to Hennery but from the look in the fierce blue eye of the young fellow, the negro understood that what he said was not friendly. The women admonished the boy and fell to whispering in awe among themselves, but the offender in no way modified his manner. When Judge Weissman, fat and perspiring and covered with jewelry, whirled past him in a phaeton a moment later, the boy shouted in Russian, “Jew! Dirty Jew!” Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, “These foreigners are getting too free in their manners.... The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of these days.... There ought to be a law against letting them into the country.”

The Judge was angry, although his anger was stirred not by the shout of Stepan Krylenko but by the fact that Julia Shane had become suddenly blind as his phaeton swept round the corner of the old house. The shout was something upon which to fasten his anger.

III

“Then what is it, Irene? There must be some reason. Girls don’t behave like this for nothing. What have you done that has made you miserable?”

“Nothing,” sobbed the girl. “Nothing!”

The mother sat up a little straighter and began to trace with her ebony stick the outlines of the roses on the Aubusson carpet. At length she spoke again in a clear, hard voice.

“Then you must pull yourself together and come out. I want you to find Lily and the Governor.—Every one is leaving and they should be here. There’s no use in giving a party for him if he is going to snub the politicians.... Here—sit up!... Turn round while I fasten your hair.”

With perfect deliberation the mother arranged the girl’s hair, smoothed the crumpled muslin of her dress, patted straight the blue ribbon sash, dried her eyes, and bade her stand away to be surveyed.

“Now,” she said in the same crisp voice, “You look all right.... I can’t have you behaving like this.... You should be out in the garden. Before I die, Irene, I want to see you married. You never will be if you hide yourself where no one can see you.... I don’t worry over Lily—she can take care of herself. Go and find them and bring them back.... Tell them I said to return at once.”

The girl, without a word, went out of the room into the big dark hallway and thence into the garden. Her mother’s voice was one made to command. It was seldom that any one refused to carry out her orders. When Irene reached the terrace the guests were making their way back toward the house in little groups of two or three, ladies in summer dresses very tight at the waists, shielding their complexions from the June sun with small, bright-colored parasols ... Mrs. Mills, the rector’s wife, Miss Bird, the Town librarian, Mrs. Smyth, wife of the Methodist clergyman, Mrs. Miliken, wife of the sheriff, Miss Abercrombie, Mrs.... And behind them, the husbands, and the stray politicians who treated the little arbor over the punch bowl as though it were a corner saloon. The punch was gone now and the last of the pink ices melted. From other parts of the garden more guests made their way toward the house. Irene passed them, bowing and forcing herself to smile though the effort brought her a kind of physical pain. Among the rhododendrons she came upon a little terra cotta Virgin and Child brought by father from Sienna and, remembering her convent training, she paused for a moment and breathed a prayer.

Lily and the Governor were not among the rhododendrons. She ran on to the little pavilion beyond the iris walk. It was empty. The arbor, green with the new leaves of the Concord grapes, was likewise untenanted save by the shadows of the somber, tall cypresses. The girl ran on and on from one spot of shelter to another, distracted and terrified, her muslin dress soiled and torn by the twigs. The little park grew empty and the shadows cast by the setting sun sprawled across the patches of open grass. Two hiding places remained, but these Irene avoided. One was the clump of bushes far down by the iron gates. She dared not go there because the little crowd of aliens peering through the bars terrified her. Earlier in the afternoon she had wandered there to be alone and a big tow headed boy shouted at her in broken English, “There are bones ... people’s bones hidden in your cellar!”

No, she dared not again risk the torment of his shouting.

The other hiding place was the old well behind the stables, a well abandoned now and almost lost under a tangle of clematis. There was a sheltered seat by its side. The girl ran as far as the stables and then, summoning her strength to lie to her mother if the necessity arose, turned back without looking and hastened across the garden toward the piazza. She had not the courage to approach the well because she knew that it was there she would find her sister Lily and the Governor.

When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity. She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were present—the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.

“And where are they?—Have you found them?”

The girl’s lips grew pale, and when she replied, she trembled with the awful consciousness of lying to her mother.

“I cannot find them. I have looked everywhere.”

The mother frowned. “Bring me an ash tray, Irene, and do not lie to me. They are in the garden.” She crushed out the ember of her cigarette. “That man is a fool. He has offended a dozen important men after I took the trouble to invite them here. God knows, I didn’t want them!”

While she was speaking, the sound of footsteps arose in the open gallery that ran along the far side of the drawing-room, and two figures, silhouetted against the smoky, setting sun, appeared at the windows moving toward the doorway. They were the missing Lily and the Governor. He followed her at a little distance as though they had been quarreling and she had forbidden him to address her. At the sight of them, Irene moved toward the door, but her mother checked her escape.

“Irene! Where are you going now? What are you afraid of? If this behavior does not stop, I shall forbid you to go to mass. You are already too pious for any good on this earth.”

The frightened girl returned silently and sat down with her usual air of submission on the sofa that stood in the shadows by a mantelpiece which supported a painting of Venice, flamboyant and glowing, executed by the hand of Turner. At the sound of Lily’s voice, she shrank back among the cushions as if to hide herself. There was in the voice nothing to terrify her. On the contrary it was a voice, low and warm, indolent and ingratiating—a voice full of charm, one which inspired affection.

Lily was taller than her sister and two years older; yet there was an enormous difference between them which had to do less with age than with manner. There was about Irene something childish and undeveloped. Lily was a woman, a young woman, to be sure, tall and lovely. Her hair was the color of honey. It held bright copper lights; and she wore it, in the fashion of Irene, low on a lovely neck that carried a warning of wilfulness. Her skin was the transparent sort which artists love for its green lights, and her eyes were of a shade of violet which in some lights appeared a clear blue. Her arms were laden with irises, azure and pale yellow, which she had plucked on her way from the old well. She too wore a frock of muslin with a girdle of radiant blue. As she entered, she laid the flowers gently among the crystal and silver bibelots of a rosewood table and rang for Sarah, the mulatto wife of Hennery, guardian of the wrought iron gates.

The Governor followed her, a tall man of perhaps forty, strongly built with a fine chest and broad shoulders. His hair was black and vigorous and he wore it cropped close to a well-shaped head. He had the drooping mustaches of the period. His was a figure which commands the attention of mobs. His manner, when he was not too pompous or condescending, was charming. People said there was no reason why he should not one day be president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.

He was angry now with a primitive, boiling anger which threatened to burst the bonds of his restraint. His breath came huskily. It was the anger of a man accustomed to dominate, who has encountered suddenly some one who cares not a fig for his powers.

“Madame,” he said, “your daughter has refused to marry me.”

The mother took up her ebony stick and placed it squarely before her, at the same time leaning forward upon it. For a moment, she smiled, almost secretly, with a sort of veiled amusement at his pompous speech. She did not speak until the mulatto woman, slipping in noiselessly, had taken the flowers and disappeared again into the vast hall. Then she addressed Lily who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her lovely body slightly balanced, her manner as calm and as placid as if nothing had gone wrong.

“Is this true, Lily?”

The girl nodded and smiled, so slightly that the play of expression could scarcely have been called a smile. It was as though she kept the smile among her other secrets, not to be shared by people who knew nothing of its meaning.

“It is serious, Madame, I promise you,” the Governor interrupted. “I love your daughter. She has told me that she loves me.” He had grown a little pompous now, as though he were addressing an assembly of constituents. “What else is there?” He turned to Lily suddenly, “It is true, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I have told you that.... But I will not marry you.... I am not refusing because I want to be unkind.... I can’t help it. Believe me, I cannot.”

The mother began tracing the design on the carpet, round and round the petals of the faded roses. When she spoke she did not raise her head. She kept on tracing ... tracing....

“There must be some reason, Lily.... It is a match not to be cast aside lightly.... It would make me very happy.”

She was interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Irene had vanished into the gallery on the far side of the drawing-room. The three of them saw her running past the window back into the garden as though she were pursued. The mother fell once more to tracing the outlines on the carpet. In the growing darkness the scent of the lilac grew more and more strong.

The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane ... alone, if possible. There are some things which I must tell ... things which are unpleasant but of tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must confess them.”

At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed her head suddenly and looked away.

“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.

The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”

He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”

The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky, glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.

Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons. There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against Irene’s pale one.

IV

“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”

Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say.... It is, after all, her affair.”

The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.

It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it to-night one way or another, for good and all.”

The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before her.

“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue. “Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe you understand.”

The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you know ... certainly not now.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down thoughtfully.

The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law. You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”

The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one. No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”

“But why ... why?” began her mother.

“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”

V

The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”

For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say farewell.

“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then, checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been Irene.”

Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying slowly away as she ascended the stairs.

At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane, leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.

Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress Hill came abruptly to an end.

He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.

As for the third—Irene—she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.

VI

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 role 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.