IT was in the weeks which followed the final meeting that Ellen came really to suffer. Together there in the shabby little room she had been sustained by the very struggle between them, by all the excitement that warmed and strengthened her. Now that he was gone forever, he kept returning to her in a fashion more terrifying than he had ever been in the flesh. Even at night when she lay in the apple green bed, so near and yet remote from Clarence, trying always to conceal from him the faintest suspicion, she could not free her memory from the sound of his voice and the persuasion of his hands. The memory of him haunted her, so that she grew pale and thin and Clarence, filled as always with nervous anxiety, urged her to go away into the country. In moments of depression she even reproached herself with being a fool for having thrown away what Callendar could have given her ... his wealth, which she needed, the place which he could have given her in the world. Indeed when life seemed altogether hopeless, she went so far as to contemplate a return to the Town, a thing she had sworn never to do save in triumph.
Clarence, understanding dimly that she was unhappy, sought to help her with a kindness that hurt her more deeply than any cruelty could have done. There were nights when he lay awake listening until the gray light appeared over the river and the sound of her regular breathing told him that at last she was asleep. Beneath the strain he too became pale and thin. His nose grew more pointed and his little round shoulders more and more stooped. In the mornings when Ellen, busy over his breakfast, caught rare glimpses of him, as he patiently did his exercises on the floor of the bath room, she was smitten with the old sense of pity at the thinness of his poor body. It hurt her in a fierce way because it was so different from the catlike suppleness of the man who was gone now forever. It was the valiant quality in Clarence, the struggle to be worthy of her, to make her always love him that made her helpless. Until now she had never clearly understood the power he had over her. It was the terrible power which the weak have over the strong.
It proved a hot, breathless summer when the asphalt turned spongy and the carriage wheels left great ruts and ridges. Even on the top floor of the Babylon Arms there was no coolness save on the rare nights when the wind, blowing up the river from the free and open sea, penetrated the high windows. It became more and more difficult too when Clarence came to her one evening and said, “I’m sorry dear, but we must economize. I find that we have been living beyond our income.”
He said it so meekly, so apologetically and he looked so weary that she kissed him and replied, “I have money saved ... money that I earned this winter. We can use that if we’re in a tight place.”
But he refused it. He assured her that there was no such deep necessity. He would not, he said, take anything she earned. He must support them always. And when she told him that this was absurd, he straightened himself and grew indignant.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “If you’ll give me time, we’ll be rich one day.... I’m getting ahead. It’s not easy. There’s so much competition. Don’t think I’m a failure.” He took her hand and pressed it savagely. “You won’t think that ... will you?... Just be patient and give me time. I’ll be rich some day.”
Time! Time! She knew then what she had always known—that time would make no difference with Clarence. There was no way out. Whatever was to be done, she must do it herself. The old passion swept her. She would not sink. She would not yield to circumstance. She would die rather than fail!
35
WHEN Fergus came in early September to make his home in the little flat atop the Babylon Arms, the strain, the weariness, the very heat itself appeared for a time to dissipate. He was, of course, a novelty. Into an existence which had become flat and stale through the long routine of petty things, into a monotony which even the energy of Ellen was unable to dissipate, the brother carried a sense of excitement. At seventeen he bore a resemblance to his father, but only in a physical sense, for there was more dash, more vitality in him than there had ever been in Charles Tolliver. Tall, with wide shoulders and blue eyes that looked out from beneath sensuous drooping lids, he possessed the same blond charm which in Charles Tolliver’s youth had made the vigorous Hattie Barr his slave. In the son there was even the same echo of that quality which the world, in its stupidity, called weakness and which was not weakness at all. The boy as yet was too young to understand what it was; the father, long past middle age, knew that it was a precious gift, a quality which protected him against the pettiness of the same stupid world. It was a disarming tolerance and geniality that made him friend alike to every one, beggar or prince, who passed his way. Father or son would have been at home in any part of the world; they would have found friends among the Lapps as easily as among the farmers of their own county; the Moros would have received them as honored comrades. It was a quality that transcended limitations of family, of nationality, of race; it was a simple friendliness. And in their way they loved life as passionately as Ellen and Hattie Tolliver; the difference lay in the fact that their joy was a warm, glowing, steady emotion less spectacular and vivid.
It was Clarence who suffered the first onslaught of the brother’s charm, for Fergus arrived to find his brother-in-law lying in one of the green beds, alone in the flat. Carrying bundles of luggage carefully prepared by the hand of Hattie, he burst into the room and came suddenly upon Clarence, asleep beneath the blankets, his mouth open a little way, his face a shade near to the green of the painted beds. Asleep and off his guard, Clarence was not a spirited picture. Fergus could not have remembered him distinctly, for he had seen him but twice and then long ago in the days when he was courting May Seton. More than three years had passed and Fergus, standing now at the foot of the bed, big and placid and blond, regarded his brother-in-law with the air of a stranger. Clarence slept quietly; his narrow nose appeared more pinched than it had been; the brown tousled hair had thinned until at the back of his head there appeared a tiny island that was entirely bald. The nervous, knotty hands lay outside the cover, pale and covered with pallid skin that was transparent and showed beneath it a network of tiny blue veins.