# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 15

THE heavy snow lasted until the day before the New Year when the weather, turning suddenly, sent it slithering away down the gutters of the Town in streams of black water to swell the volume of the Black Fork so that in the Flats, where the stream meandered a tortuous course, it overflowed its banks and filled the cellars of the hovels with stinking damp. It was through this malodorous area that the fastidious carriages of the Town made their way on New Year's Eve to the eminence crowned by Shane's Castle, aglow now with the lights that had flashed into existence upon the arrival of Lily. Kentucky thoroughbreds picked their way daintily through the streaming gutters, drawing behind them the old families of the Town and one or two of the new, for the Shanes, the Barrs and the Tollivers did not, save in cases of rare distinction, admit the existence of the new. Consequently there was no carriage bearing a member of the Seton family. It was this circumstance, far more perhaps than any other, which had precipitated the dinner table crisis of Christmas Day. And its consequences had not ended there; they were destined once more to enter into the existence of Clarence Murdock.
On the same New Year's Eve at about the hour when the gaiety in the house among the mills, centering itself about the re​turned prodigal, had reached its height, Mrs. Seton, with a rustling of her voile skirts, drew May off to bed. Even the persistent Jimmy was swept with them, so that Clarence, left conspicuously alone with the father, understood that some event of grave importance had been arranged. Indeed, the manner of the corset manufacturer made his divination doubly sure. The man poked the remnants of the fire to make certain that it was entirely consumed before he retired, and then faced his guest.
Clarence, opposite him in a stiff backed chair of mahogany veneer, stirred with a sense of impending doom. The green eyes of his host fastened upon him with the old implication of guilt. From one corner of his narrow mouth there hung, limply, an unlighted and rather worn cigar which had done service all the day.
"I've been thinking it over," he said presently in his cold, deliberate voice. "I thought perhaps we'd better talk over a few things before you go away for good." A cinder slipping in the grate disturbed the stillness of the room and he continued. "I don't want to hurry you about anything, but it's best to come to an understanding."
In his uncomfortable chair, Clarence, swayed by the cold deliberate manner of the Elder, shifted his position as if he were sitting on a bag of rocks.
"Yes," he managed to articulate, as if he knew what was coming. "It's always better."
"First of all," began his host, "there is this matter of the Shane woman. . . . Lily Shane." He coughed and looked into the fire for a long time. And then, "It's a matter I don't care to discuss before May. . . . She's innocent, you know, like a flower. . . . The way girls should be."
"Yes," said Clarence agreeably; but there rang in his ears the horrid memory of May's knowing giggle.
"I don't understand how Jimmy could have found out unless he overheard his mother discussing it," continued the father. "We've always kept such things from the children. My wife and ​I are great believers in innocence . . . and purity. It's a fine protection."
A month ago, Clarence would have agreed. Now he murmured, "Yes," politely, but in his heart he felt stirring a faint desire to protest, to deny this assertion. Lately there had come into his mind a certainty that the greatest of all protections lay in knowledge. One could not know too much. Each bit of knowledge was a link in the armor.
"It's true . . . what Jimmy said."
And again there was a silence in which Clarence flushed slowly a deep red.
"We can speak of such things . . . man to man," continued the torturer and slowly there swept over Clarence a terrible sense of becoming involved. Life in the Babylon Arms in the midst of a great and teeming city was simple compared to the complications of these last few days.
"But it doesn't seem to make any difference," he said presently. "All the Town has gone to the ball. . . . I saw the carriages going there . . . a whole stream of them, and it's Lily Shane who is giving it."
For an instant, Harvey Seton remained silent, turning the worn cigar round and round in his thin lips, as if it might be the very thought he was turning over in much the same fashion in his own devious mind. "Yes," he replied, after a long time. "That's true. But it's because nobody really knows."
At this speech Clarence, moved perhaps by the memory of Lily leaning from the window of the cab as she drove off through the storm, asked, "But do you know?"
Slowly his host eyed him with suspicion. It was as if the veiled accusations contained in their depths had suddenly become defined, specific; as if he accused this model young man opposite him of being the father of the vague and suppositious child.
"I have no proofs . . . to be sure," he said. "But a woman, like that. . . . Well, to look at her is enough. To look at her in her fine Paris clothes. A woman has no right to make herself a ​lure to men. It's like the women of the streets." Then he added gruffly with a sudden glance at the dying fire, "She's always been bad. They're a bad lot . . . the whole family, unstable, not to be relied upon. They go their crazy way . . . all of 'em. Why there was Sam Barr, Lily Shane's uncle, who spent his whole life inventing useless things . . . never making a cent out of 'em. His daughter lives in a cheap boarding house now. . . . If he'd made an honest living instead of mooning about." He laughed scornfully. "Why, he even thought he could invent a perpetual motion machine." Then he halted abruptly as if he realized that he had protested too much, and returned to the main stream of his discourse. "As for the Town going to the ball, all the Town knows just what I know, and they talk about it, only they see fit to ignore it to-night because there is music and good food and champagne punch at Shane's Castle."
In the silence that followed Clarence bent his neatly brushed head and slipped away into a world of philosophy new and strange to him. "Yes," he found himself thinking, "the world is like that and nobody can change it much. If Lily Shane had asked you, you would have gone."
But in this he was unfair to his enemy; Skinflint Seton would not have gone, because he would have taken too great a satisfaction in refusing. It was this satisfaction, undoubtedly, which he now missed so bitterly.
But the turn things had taken exerted upon Clarence a curious effect. It was as if he found himself for the first time on the offensive, as if he were placed now within the ranks of all the others who were at the ball, laughing, dancing, forgetful (as Lily Shane had been) that Harvey Seton even existed. He had begun to lose the feeling of isolation, of being trapped. There appeared in the offing a gleam of hope.
He knew vaguely that it was difficult to deal with this man ​who sat opposite him; but he did not understand the reason—that it lay in the very positiveness of his opponent, in the fact that the world of Harvey Seton consisted entirely of blacks and whites. There were in between no soft, warm shades of gray. May was (despite that fatal giggle) innocent as a flower, just as Lily Shane was the apotheosis of sin; and they were so because he willed them to be so. Thus he had created them, knowing his own daughter perhaps no better than he knew Lily Shane.
Clarence looked at him and blushed slowly. The walls began once more to close about him; he was frozen into silence.
"It was about May," Seton repeated slowly. . . . "She's unhappy. . . . At least her mother says she is, and it's on account of you."
In response to this Clarence found nothing to say. He would have protested but there were no words with which to frame a protest. The corset manufacturer bore down upon his victim like a Juggernaut. Clarence could neither speak, nor scream, nor rise from its path.
"I've guessed for a long time that there was something between you two." And here he permitted himself to smirk suddenly with a frigid sentimentality. "I'm not sorry, you understand. . . . Nothing could please me more. I'll need some one to help me in the factory . . . until Jimmy's old enough to take hold."
In his chair before the chilly, dying fire Clarence sat motionless; betraying no sign of the tortured soul that writhed within him.
"But I don't . . ." he began. "I mean . . ."
The Juggernaut rolled on. "I understand your bashfulness," continued his host. "I once had the honor of speaking myself . . . to the fine woman who is now my wife. My boy, there is nothing like a wife. It's the finest step a man can take . . . to settle himself into honorable matrimony." Here he bit a piece from the badly worn cigar and spat it into the ashes of the fire. "I am only speaking to you because I wanted to know if your in​tentions are honorable. After all, you have been close to us now . . . for a long time, living as one of the family, and under such conditions it is not surprising that a young girl should . . . should have her interest aroused."
By now Clarence managed to speak. He sat upright and with superhuman effort turned upon his torturer.
"My intentions . . ." he began. "My intentions . . ." And then he ended weakly. "Of course they're honorable, sir. What did you think?" It was as if he were in some terrible nightmare in which there was no faint gleam of reality.
"Then," continued the Elder, "a declaration would clear up everything . . . everything. I wouldn't have hurried you except on the girl's account."
It was impossible to believe that this was happening to him—Clarence Murdock—that he was being forced slowly into a life of slavery, of horror, a world of damp cotton sheets and reinforced corsets, of cold piety and stewed mutton. He must fight for time, somehow.
"You know, sir," he heard himself saying from a great distance, "I am bashful. . . . I've meant to propose, but I can't screw up my courage. . . . I've . . . I've meant to all along . . . and then I thought I'd leave it until I went away."
"I have no intention," replied the Elder firmly, "of hurrying things. I only thought that it would make every one easier . . . yourself included."
"I'm going away to-morrow . . . for three days," said Clarence. "When I come back we're going on a skating party if it's cold enough. . . . I'll . . . I'll ask May then if she'll have me."
Harvey Seton rose and came over to him, placing one hand on his shoulder. "That's fine," he said. "May's a fine girl. She'll make you a fine wife." Then he withdrew his hand for an instant and regarded Clarence with his accusing green eyes. "I suppose," he began, "there's no reason why you shouldn't marry ​her?" And at the look of astonishment in the eyes of his guest he continued, "I mean, there's been no other woman . . . you've led a clean, pure life. You are fit to marry such a pure, innocent girl."
By now Clarence had became quite still, with the stillness of one who cannot believe the sensations conveyed by his own nerves. His mouth opened. It closed. At last he stammered, "Why. . . . Why . . . of course there's been no other woman. . . . I don't know anything about women." (And in the back of his mind a still small voice said, "But I'm learning . . . I'm learning.")
Harvey Seton backed away and stood with his lean legs between Clarence and the dead fire. He shook himself suddenly as if the chill had penetrated even his spare frame. "Well, I'm glad to hear that . . . I'm glad to hear that . . . I didn't know. Things are different in a city like New York. . . . And then you talked to Lily Shane. . . ."
"But she spoke to me first. . . ."
"I know . . . I know. I've encountered temptations." And he squared his thin shoulders with the air of St. Anthony resisting all the forces of the Devil. "I know." Then he turned suddenly and raised his arm toward the flickering gas. "It's gettin' chilly in here. . . . We'd best go to bed."
On the way to the door, the father turned in the darkness. "Of course," he said, "you can leave your things here if you're only going to be gone three days. . . . There's no use in lugging all that stuff away with you. . . . You can get it when you come back. . . ." There was a little pause, during which Clarence shuddered silently. "When you come back to propose to May. My, it'll make her happy. You know, she's one of the marryin' kind."
In the mind of Clarence there lingered the memory of that obscene giggle. With this new turn of affairs, it filled him with actual terror.
​After he had gone to his room, he stood for a time looking out of the window far across to the other side of the Town. The house stood on a hill so that it overlooked all the wide and flooded expanse of the Flats. It was impossible to have seen Shane's Castle but above the spot where it raised its gloomy pile there was a great glow that filled all the sky. To be sure, it was a glow caused by the flames from the furnaces but it might have come from a great house where there was a ball in progress with music and good food and champagne punch. . . . The glow appeared at length to spread over all the Town and penetrate the very blood of Clarence as he stood there silhouetted against the light. His bony legs shivered beneath his cotton nightshirt; it may have been the cold, or it may have been fright. Clarence himself could not have said which it was.
Presently he lifted the window a little way. Unmistakably it was growing colder. There would be skating in three days. Nothing could alter the course of nature.