XXXI
ALL that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however, for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion its hunger after life.
When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”
But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived me.”
At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie. She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different. We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does with us as She pleases.”
But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.
“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily did help Ellen it was only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”
For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”
But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been called upon to endure so much.
As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children, goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was honest, he was sacrificed to the Mills. He settled himself, a man of forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.