And slowly Ellen turned into the melodies of one of Liebesträume—the one which is written about the lovers lost on a lake during a black storm.
In her strange way the girl loved her father best, perhaps because in his gentle impersonal way he made upon her none of those savage demands which her mother, in all the ferocity of her affection, constantly exacted. With Mrs. Tolliver love implied endearments, constant manifestations of affection. To her love between people separated by hundreds of miles was inconceivable. It was a thing to be touched, to be fondled and treasured. Those whom she loved must always be at hand, under her eye, full of protesting affection. Perhaps in this she was right; she was, after all, a primitive woman who trusted her instincts. There was no reason in her. Perhaps love is only fanned into life by close and breathless contacts.
Mr. Tolliver was so different. There was in him something of his father, a touch of the terrible philosophic aloofness of the gaunt old man who lived above the kitchen in another part of the house. But he lacked Gramp Tolliver’s strength, as well as that implacable resistance of the old man to all the assaults of emotion. Where the old man was aloof, powerful, and independent through the very quality of his indifference, the son had failed by some weakness of character. There was in him too much of humanity. People liked him. Farmers in their fields stopped their horses and abandoned their plows to talk with Charlie Tolliver. At the elections they had supported him to a man; but there were not enough of them. The Town was too powerful.
In the world Charles Tolliver failed because of his very gentleness. He had a way of regarding life with a fine sense of proportion, of seeing things in their proper relation. It was as if he stood already at the end of his own existence and looked back through it as through a long tunnel, seeing that those things which others labeled as mountains were after all but mole-hills, and those things which others would have called trivial possessed the most uncanny importance. And this was a weakness, for it led one into the paths of philosophic acceptance; and it was a weakness which none recognized more shrewdly than his own direct and vigorous wife.
Ah (she thought) if only he would see things in the proper light. If only I could make him fight as I would fight in his place! He’s innocent, like a little child; but it’s not his fault. That old man abovestairs is to blame; that old devil who never cared for his own children. And, goaded by these thoughts, a kind of baffled rage at Gramp Tolliver swept the honest woman. She had no subtle way of combating his deviltries, because to a woman of so violent a nature, indifference was an unconquerable barrier. Gramp Tolliver lived, in his sinister fashion, in a world which she not only failed to understand but even to imagine.
Suddenly Ellen ceased her music; it died away in a faint, diminishing breath, disappearing slowly into silence beneath the strong beautiful fingers. The girl leaned forward on the piano and buried her face silently in her hands. She did not sob, and yet one could be sure that she was miserable. In her silence there was something far more terrible than weeping. It rose up and filled all the room, so that Mrs. Tolliver, lost in her angry thoughts of the old man in the lonely room overhead, sensed it suddenly and ceased her darning. This thing had come so often of late to break in upon the happiness of their lives. It was a monster, savage, insatiable. Something more powerful than all of them.
For a time she watched her daughter and slowly there spread over her face a look of trouble and bewilderment. It was an expression which of late had come to Mrs. Tolliver so often that it had begun already to leave its mark in the fine lines about her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. It was at times like this that her heart ceased all at once to beat and a coldness swept through her body; for love with her was really an intense and physical thing.
On the sofa her husband slept peacefully, quieted at last by the Liebestraum; and again she resented his indifference, all his willingness to accept life, his refusal to struggle against fate. “Things come out right in the end,” he always said when she assailed him. “There is no use in struggling.”
Ah, she thought bitterly, but there is use in struggling. There is a satisfaction to the spirit. But this, of course, her husband could never have known.
“Ellen,” she murmured, “Ellen.” And the girl raised her head with a look in her eyes so terrible that it appalled her mother. “Are you tired?”