Page:Possession (1926).pdf/253

 and Ellen, watching his narrow back with the weak, sloping shoulders, knew that she would never see him again. She was sure now that it was this poor, furtive creature, with his strange, perverted love, who had given the dead man his final push over the abyss into eternity. For even the theft would not have driven Clarence from her; it could have been only the knowledge that she was lost to him forever.

So it was a man whom she had scorned, a creature whom she ignored and who hated her, who in his poor fumbling way had set her free. 

HE went to his own town for the funeral and there met for the first time his mother, a grim, tragic sort of woman with sharp, searching eyes and straight black hair pulled into a tight knot at the back of her neck. It was this woman with whom she shared the secret; none of the others knew, not even his sister (the one he had said played the piano), a mild, weary woman rather like Clarence, who was the mother of five children and went about throughout the visit weak and red-eyed with weeping. The neighbors flocked into the house, mostly middle-aged women and spinsters, black and crow-like, moving about in melancholy clusters with the air of vultures. They came and went, speaking always in whispers, saying the same things, wearing the same mournful countenances, talking always of their own losses and calamities, speculating always upon the deaths of certain well-established invalids in the community. Always they reached in time the same refrain. It was this—"If he'd been an old man it would have been different, but he was so young and so clever. He was such a brilliant fellow and doing so well in the city. He'd have been a big man some day. We were all proud of him here in Ogdensburg."

And Ellen, handsome and pale in her mourning, sat by quietly, listening while they surveyed her with a distant air of disapproval.