So she set about planning how it was possible to escape from the Town, to transport all her family and their belongings into a world which she had disliked and even feared but which now must be faced. Fantastical schemes were born, reared their heads and collapsed in a brain which considered nothing impossible. She would herself support them all if necessary, though she had not the faintest idea of how it was to be done. Surely in a great city like New York, there were ways of becoming rich, even fabulously so. She had read stories in the newspapers....
But her first action was a direct one. Dressed in black merino and armed with an umbrella which she carried on important occasions as a general bears his baton, she assailed her enemy Judge Weissman in the sanctuary of his untidy office, and after a scene in which she accused him of thievery, bribery and a dozen other crimes, she bullied him, playing shrewdly upon a horsewhipping incident out of his own past, into using his influence to gain for her husband some new work—not mere work but a position worthy of him and of the dignity of her family.
She won the battle and in her triumph, which mounted higher and higher during the walk home, she gave rein in her unbounded optimism to even wilder and more fantastic schemes. There was relief in the knowledge that at last she had taken things into her own hands. No longer was she to be a power behind the throne urging forward an amiable and indifferent husband. Things must change now. She herself would act. She had achieved an opening wedge. In time she would secure an appointment for her husband in New York. She could take the children there. She could be where she could drop in on Ellen at the Babylon Arms (preposterous name!). She would watch and aid them in their progress toward success and glory. Ah, she could wrest anything from life. It was, after all, nothing more than a question of energy and persistence.
These thoughts were whirling madly about her brain as she turned the corner into Sycamore Street in time to see a group of children congregated before the path that led into the shaggy domain of the Tollivers. They appeared to be watching something and clung to the gate peering in through the lilacs at the vine-covered house. Unconsciously she increased her pace, and as she approached the gate they fell back, with a look of awe and the sort of animal curiosity which comes into the eyes of children gathered on the scene of a catastrophe. Through their ranks and into the house, she made her way like a fine ship in full sail.
Once inside she learned the news.
It was this—that upstairs in the room once occupied by Ellen there lay on the bed the unconscious form of her father, the invincible Jacob Barr. They told her that the patriarch, while superintending the loading of hay in his mows, had made a miss-step and so crashed to the floor twenty feet below. They had brought him to her house on a truss of hay. The doctors, the same doctors whom Gramp Tolliver had baffled, said he might die suddenly or that he might live for years, but he would never walk again.
When she had put the place in order and driven out the confusion which accompanies physicians, she seated herself in a chair opposite the unconscious old man and presently began to weep.
“What good is it now? What difference does it make?” she repeated bitterly over and over again.
Where before there had been but one, there were now two old men to be managed, and Hattie Tolliver, understanding that it was now impossible to follow Ellen, settled herself to waiting. For what? Perhaps for death to claim her own father. It would have been, as she said, a blessing, for the fracture concerned far more than a hip bone; the very spirit of old Jacob Barr was crushed in that fall from the mows. Sinking back upon the pillows of Ellen’s bed, he gave up the struggle. A life in which there was no activity was for him no life at all. He became again like a little child, like his own little children whom his daughter Hattie had cared for through all the years of his widowhood. Sometimes he sang songs and there were hours when he talked to himself and to Hattie of things which had happened when she was a very little girl or before she was born. He lived again in the Civil War and in the days preceding it when the fleeing niggers hid in his great mows. Passers-by in Sycamore Street sometimes heard snatches of singing in a voice now cracked, now loud and strong and defiant.... John Brown’s Body lies a-moldering in the Grave, But his Soul goes marching on. Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
But Gramp Tolliver in his high room walled with books kept spry and alert, triumphant now in the knowledge that he had survived old Jacob Barr, that the stern virtue of the old Scotsman had not prolonged his health and happiness by so much as an hour. He read his old books and scribbled on bits of yellow paper, ageing not at all, remaining always spare, cynical, vindictive.