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.