# Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 16

It was about this time that Gramp Tolliver, as if he scented the imminence of stupendous happenings, began like a long dormant volcano to display signs of activity. Despite the bitter cold and the ice that lay thick upon the pavement, he left his cell and, clad in a beaver cap and a moth-eaten coonskin coat, took to wandering about the streets. This activity Hattie Tolliver observed with apprehension, not alone because of the risk which the glittering pavements placed upon his brittle old bones, but because from long experience she interpreted such behavior as an omen of disaster. Standing in the doorway she watched his daily departure with a hostile eye, knowing well enough that if he did not come to grief, he would return in time for meals; his appetite was the best and on the rare occasions when he undertook any exercise it suffered a consequent augmentation. All the signs were present ​at meal time when the noise in the room above the kitchen became more violent and assumed a variety of manifestations. On occasion there was an admirable directness in Gramp Tolliver, not distantly akin to the directness of an elderly tiger at the approach of the feeding hour.
The sight of his grotesque figure, wrapped in furs and perambulating with uncanny skill the slippery places of the street, provided the people of the neighborhood with a divertissement of rare quality. As he passed along the street they took their children to the windows and there pointed out with ominous fingers his figure, saying, "There goes old man Tolliver, a living example of what laziness comes to. A perfect failure in life! Let him be an example to you. . . . Just watch him! If it was a good hard working man like your grandfather, children, he would have fallen and broken his leg long ago. But not him! Not old man Tolliver! The devil looks out for him!"
And by that time Gramp Tolliver would have vanished around the next corner to draw new moralists to peer at him from behind the Boston fern that adorned each successive bay window.
Knowing these things, Hattie Tolliver in her respectable heart experienced a certain shame at this frank exposure of Gramp. She would have preferred some other person as a walking example of failure; but there was nothing to be done unless she locked him in his room, and then he might easily have climbed to freedom by way of the grape arbor, a proceeding even more perilous to his brittle limbs than these icy promenades.
Into the midst of Gramp Tolliver's unusual behavior, Ellen returned from Shane's Castle with her appearance altered almost beyond the realms of the imagination. She had stayed with Lily, at the request of her cousin, over the three days following the ball, and now, on her return, it was clear that something stupendous had taken place during the visit.
She came upon her mother without warning in the very midst of a busy morning, and at sight of her Mrs. Tolliver halted her work abruptly and stood staring quietly for a good three minutes, ​while Ellen took off her hat and laid aside her coat. It was then that the shock became so great that Mrs. Tolliver broke the silence. She went at once into the heart of things.
"What has Lily done to you? What ideas has she put into your head?"
There was reason for her astonishment; the girl had changed. She appeared older, more mature. The wire rat, that so recently had supported the pompadour which was her pride, had vanished, and her fine black hair lay smooth and close to her head, in a fashion created by a doubtful lady named Cléo de Merode and appropriated not long afterward by Lily Shane. Her corsets, instead of being laced to give her the hourglass figure and the slight stoop forward so cherished in those days, were now worn so indecently loose that the clasps of her flaring skirt no longer fulfilled their mission. She was, according to the standards of the Town, extremely unfashionable in appearance, but she was far more beautiful. She belonged now not to the world of fashion plates fed to small towns by gigantic women's papers, but to a world of her own which had little to do with fashion or convention. Even though there was something ridiculous in her appearance, she had a new dignity. Something of the provinciality had slipped away. It was this, perhaps, which alarmed her mother—as if suddenly the girl had escaped into that horrid world where Lily moved and had her being.
"To think," said Mrs. Tolliver mournfully, "that I sent away my little girl and now she comes back to me a grown woman. That's what Lily has done to you. You aren't my little girl any longer."
To this Ellen made no reply. She stood, somewhat sullenly, as if she implied that there was no answer to such a sentimental observation.
"I suppose it's Lily who had you change your hair."
"I have beautiful hair. Why should I spoil it with a rat?"
"Lily said that. I know she did. . . . I can hear her saying it. ​But that doesn't make it right. . . . It's not the fashion, at least not in the Town. And that's where you're living."
For the first time Ellen smiled, in her old secretive fashion, as if she and Lily had entered upon some dark compact.
"It was just what Lily said. Rats are silly things, anyway."
"They'll laugh at you," continued her mother, with an air of feeling her way. "Young men don't like girls to be different. It makes them seem eccentric."
Ellen must have known, in her shrewd way, that her mother was not speaking frankly. She knew beyond all doubt that her mother was not concerned with what the young men would think. She was talking thus because she saw these things—the rat, the corsets, the new air—all as signs of something far deeper. She was fighting against the escape of her child, battling to keep her always.
"Yes, they would laugh, wouldn't they?" remarked Ellen presently. And then, quite suddenly, the timbre of her voice changed. "Well, let 'em," she added abruptly.
As if she saw the beginnings of a storm, her mother sighed, turned away and observed casually, "Gramp has started to wander about again. It worries me."
But Ellen swept past her and placing her handbag on the dining room table, she opened it, saying, "Lily gave me some clothes."
"You shouldn't have taken them. I don't want Lily making paupers of us."
"I thought about that," said Ellen with an air of reflection. "But you don't understand Lily. . . . It wasn't like that at all. She doesn't do things that way. . . . She gave them to me as a present, the way she might have given me a book."
For a time there was a silence during which Ellen proceeded with the unpacking of her bag. Reverently, almost with an air of worship, she took out from among her own threadbare clothes ​three gowns of superb material and spread them across the table under the gray winter light. One was of black, one of green—the color of deep jade—and the third was the color of flame, so brilliant that in the comfortable shabby room it destroyed all else.
"I'm sorry I let you stay at Shane's Castle," began her mother. "Lily . . . Lily . . ." she halted abruptly and regarded her daughter with suspicion. "She didn't promise you anything, did she?"
Ellen laughed, but through the sound of her soft mirth there ran, like a taut singing wire, the echo of subdued bitterness. "No. At least nothing very definite. . . . She said that when I came to Paris to study I could live with her. We didn't get beyond that."
"But you don't want to go to Paris. . . . It's a wicked city. . . . I thought you'd given all that up long ago."
But Ellen only lifted the flame colored gown and said, "Look at it. Feel it. Isn't it beautiful?" And she ran her hand over the soft brocade with a sensuous air that was new and alarming. "There's nothing like it in all the Town."
Dumbly the mother fingered the stuff; she felt of it tenderly, reverently, and after a long time she said, "But you couldn't wear such clothes here. Nobody has ever seen anything like them . . . except on Lily, and she's different. That's why people talk about her. No, you couldn't wear them here. People would laugh at you."
For an answer Ellen only held up the green gown and then the black one. They were simply made and not dissimilar, the flame colored one girdled by a chain of glittering rhinestones, the others by cords of silver. They were so scant there seemed to be nothing to them, so simply made that their lack of ornament conveyed to Hattie Tolliver a sense of nakedness. People in the Town wore bows, rosebuds, festoons of lace—all save Lily.
"I don't see what Lily was thinking of," she observed presently. And she drew in her lower lip doubtfully with an air of meditation as if the gowns raised before her eyes a wild vista of foreign orgies.
​"Yes, people would laugh at me," said Ellen, "not that it makes any difference."
And placing the gowns over her arm, she turned away and started up the stairs to her own room. Her mother, staring after her, made a clucking sound which was her invariable signal of alarm. She must have speculated upon what passed between Ellen and her mysterious cousin within the depths of the gloomy house among the Mills; but she said nothing. In such a mood, it was impossible to learn anything from the girl.
And as she turned at last to resume her duties in the kitchen, the shadow of a motheaten coonskin coat and beaver hat passed the window. It was the ominous shadow of Gramp Tolliver hungrily returning for his noon meal. Clearly there was calamity in the air. He had never been so active before. . . .
Ellen had a way of dealing with the truth which must have alarmed her mother. It was not that she lied; rather it was that by some selective process she withheld certain truths and brought forward others so that the resulting effect was one of distortion, complicated by the wildest variation of mood. At the moment the girl appeared to be elated, perhaps only by the possession of the three naked gowns—so elated that her high spirits carried into the afternoon when she announced her intention of going skating.
"Are you going with May?" questioned her mother as she left the house.
"No, I'm going alone. May has Clarence Murdock. I don't imagine she'll want to be disturbed." And then with a sort of grim malice she added, "Things aren't moving very fast for May. . . . Not fast enough to suit her mother. You see she spread the story months ago that she was already engaged, and now she has to make it work out."
And without another word she passed out of the door into the bright cold sunshine, her tall, fine figure moving briskly down the ​path between the shaggy, frozen lilacs that marked the path to that extraordinary house of the shabby and respectable Tollivers.