He felt, looking down, the pride of an artist in his
picture, of a sculptor who, secure from curious eyes,
draws the sheet from the still moist clay of his modeling,
and now from this angle, now from that, studies, criticizes,
and exults.
But Anthony Cardew never built his house on the cliff.
Time was to come when great houses stood there, like
vast forts, overlooking, almost menacing, the valley
beneath. For, until the nineties, although the
city distended in all directions, huge, ugly, powerful,
infinitely rich, and while in the direction of Anthony’s
farm the growth was real and rapid, it was the plain
people who lined its rapidly extending avenues with
their two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite
tenderness and quiet, along tree-lined streets, where
the children played on the cobble-stones, and at night
the horse cars, and later the cable system, brought
home tired clerks and storekeepers to small havens,
already growing dingy from the smoke of the distant
mills.
Anthony Cardew did not like the plain people.
Yet in the end, it was the plain people, those who
neither labored with their hands nor lived by the
labor of others—it was the plain people
who vanquished him. Vanquished him and tried
to protect him. But could not. A smallish
man, hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved
others. He had one fetish, power. And one
pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters.
Howard would be an iron master, and Howard’s
son.
But Howard never had a son.
All through her teens Lily had wondered about the
mystery concerning her Aunt Elinor. There was
an oil portrait of her in the library, and one of
the first things she had been taught was not to speak
of it.
Now and then, at intervals of years, Aunt Elinor came
back. Her mother and father would look worried,
and Aunt Elinor herself would stay in her rooms, and
seldom appeared at meals. Never at dinner.
As a child Lily used to think she had two Aunt Elinors,
one the young girl in the gilt frame, and the other
the quiet, soft-voiced person who slipped around the
upper corridors like a ghost.
But she was not to speak of either of them to her
grandfather.
Lily was not born in the house on lower East Avenue.
In the late eighties Anthony built himself a home,
not on the farm, but in a new residence portion of
the city. The old common, grazing ground of
family cows, dump and general eye-sore, had become
a park by that time, still only a potentially beautiful
thing, with the trees that were to be its later glory
only thin young shoots, and on the streets that faced
it the wealthy of the city built their homes, brick
houses of square solidity, flush with brick pavements,
which were carefully reddened on Saturday mornings.
Beyond the pavements were cobble-stoned streets.
Anthony Cardew was the first man in the city to have
a rubber-tired carriage. The story of Anthony
Cardew’s new home is the story of Elinor’s
tragedy. Nor did it stop there. It carried
on to the third generation, to Lily Cardew, and in
the end it involved the city itself. Because
of the ruin of one small home all homes were threatened.
One small house, and one undying hatred.
