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Title: The Three Black Pennys
A Novel
Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
Release Date: February 21, 2005 [EBook #15135]
Language: English
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THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
THE THREE BLACK PENNYS
A NOVEL
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
_By Arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf_
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_A DEDICATION_
_Dear John Hemphill_
_This is a record and act of memory
of you at Dower House--of June
nights on the porch, with the foliage
of the willow tree powdered against
the stars; the white-panelled hearth
of the yellow room in smouldering
winter dusks; dinner with the candles
wavering in tepid April airs; and
the blue envelopment of late September
noons. A quiet reach like the old
grey house and green fields, the little
valleys filled with trees and placid
town beyond the hill, where the calendar
of our days and companionship is
set._
_Joseph Hergesheimer_
CONTENTS
I THE FURNACE
II THE FORGE
III THE METAL
I THE FURNACE
I
A twilight like blue dust sifted into the shallow fold of the thickly
wooded hills. It was early October, but a crisping frost had already
stamped the maple trees with gold, the Spanish oaks were hung with
patches of wine red, the sumach was brilliant in the darkening
underbrush. A pattern of wild geese, flying low and unconcerned above
the hills, wavered against the serene, ashen evening. Howat Penny,
standing in the comparative clearing of a road, decided that the
shifting, regular flight would not come close enough for a shot. He
dropped the butt of his gun to the ground. Then he raised it again,
examining the hammer; the flint was loose, unsatisfactory. There was a
probability that it would miss firing.
He had no intention of hunting the geese. With the drooping of day his
keenness had evaporated; an habitual indifference strengthened,
permeating him. He turned his dark, young face toward the transparent,
green afterglow; the firm eyebrows drawn up at the temples, sombre eyes
set, too, at a slight angle, a straight nose, impatient mouth and
projecting chin. Below him, and to the left, a heavy, dark flame and
silvery smoke were rolling from the stack of Shadrach Furnace. Figures
were moving obscurely over the way that led from the coal house, set on
the hill, to the top and opening of the furnace; finishing, Howat Penny
knew, the charge of charcoal, limestone and iron ore.
Shadrach Furnace had been freshly set in blast; it was on that account
he was there, to represent, in a way, his father, who owned a half
interest in the Furnace. However, he had paid little attention to the
formality; his indifference was especially centred on the tedious
processes of iron making, which had, at the same time, made his family.
He had gone far out from the Furnace tract into an utterly uninhabited
and virginal region, where he had shot at, and missed, an impressive
buck and killed a small bear. Now, that he had returned, his apathy once
more flooded him; but he had eaten nothing since morning, and he was
hungry.
He could go home, over the nine miles of road that bound the Furnace to
Myrtle Forge and the Penny dwelling; there certain of whatever supper he
would elect. But, he decided, he preferred something now, less formal.
There were visitors at Myrtle Forge, Abner Forsythe, who owned the other
half of Shadrach, his son David, newly back from England and the study
of metallurgy, and a Mr. Winscombe, come out to the Provinces in
connection with the Maryland boundary dispute, accompanied by his wife.
All this Howat Penny regarded with profound distaste; necessary social
and conversational forms repelled him. And it annoyed his father when he
sat, apparently morose, against the wall, or retired solitary to his
room.
He would get supper here; they would be glad to have him at the house of
Peter Heydrick, the manager of the Furnace. Half turning, he could see
the dwelling at his back--a small, grey stone rectangle with a narrow
portico on its solid face and a pale glimmer of candles in the lower
windows. The ground immediately about it was cleared of brush and little
trees, affording Peter Heydrick a necessary, unobstructed view of the
Furnace stack while sitting in his house or when aroused at night. The
dwelling was inviting, at once slipping into the dusk and emerging by
reason of the warm glow within. Mrs. Heydrick, too, was an excellent
cook; there would be plenty of venison, roast partridge, okra soup.
Afterwards, under a late moon, he could go back to Myrtle Forge; or he
might stay at the Heydricks all night, and to-morrow kill such a buck as
he had lost.
The twilight darkened beneath the trees, the surrounding hills lost
their forms, in the east the distance merged into the oncoming night,
but the west was still translucent, green. There was a faint movement
in the leaves by the roadside, and a grey fox crossed, flattened on the
ground, and disappeared. Howat Penny could see the liquid gleam of its
eyes as it watched him. From the hill by the coal house came the heavy
beating of wild turkeys' wings.
He could go to Peter Heydrick's, where the venison would be excellent,
and Mrs. Heydrick was celebrated for her guinea pickle with cucumbers;
but ... the Heydricks had no daughter, and the Gilkans had. Thomas
Gilkan was only a founderman; his house had one room below and a
partition above; and Mrs. Gilkan's casual fare could not be compared to
Mrs. Heydrick's inviting amplitude. Yet there was Fanny Gilkan, erect
and flaming haired, who could walk as far as he could himself, and carry
her father's clumsy gun all the way.
His thoughts, deflected by Fanny Gilkan, left the immediate present of
supper, and rested upon the fact that his--his appreciation of her was
becoming known at the Furnace; while Dan Hesa must be circulating it,
with biting comments, among the charcoal burners. Dan Hesa, although
younger than Howat, was already contracting for charcoal, a forward
young German; and, Fanny had said with a giggle, he was paying her
serious attention. Howat Penny had lately seen a new moroseness among
the charcoal burners that could only have come from the association of
the son of Gilbert Penny and the potential owner of Myrtle Forge with
the founderman's daughter. Charcoal burners were lawless men, fugitive
in character, often escaped from terms of indenture; Dan Hesa was, he
knew, well liked by them; and the hazard created by his attraction to
Fanny Gilkan drew Howat Penny irresistibly away from the superior merits
of the Heydrick table.
That was his character: denial as a child had filled him with
slow-accumulating rage; later discipline at school had found him utterly
intractable. Something deep and instinctive within him resisted every
effort to make him a part of any social organization, however admirable;
he never formed any personal bonds with humanity in particular. He had
grown into a solitary being within whom were immovably locked all the
confidences, the spontaneous expressions of self, that bind men into a
solidarity of common failings and hopes. He never offered, nor,
apparently, required, any marks of sympathy; as a fact, he rarely
expressed anything except an occasional irrepressible scorn lashing out
at individuals or acts that conspicuously displeased him. This had
occurred more than once at Myrtle Forge, when assemblymen or members of
the Provincial Council had been seated at dinner.
It was after such a scene that his mother had witnessed perhaps his only
attempt at self-explanation. "I am sorry you were disturbed," he had
pronounced, after standing and regarding her for a silent, frowning
space; "but for me there is something unendurable in men herding like
cattle, protecting their fat with warning boards and fences. I can't
manage the fiddling lies that keep up the whole silly pretence of the
stuffy show. If it gets much thicker," he had threatened, waving vaguely
toward the west, "I'll go out to the Ohio, or the French forts."
That this was not merely a passive but an active state of mind was amply
expressed by his resolute movement toward Thomas Gilkan's house. He had,
ordinarily, an unusual liking for the charcoal burners, and had spent
many nights in their huts, built, like the charring stacks, of mud and
branches. But, organized by Dan Hesa into an opposition, a criticism of
his choice of way, they offered an epitome of the conditions he derided
and assailed.
His feeling for Fanny Gilkan was in the greater part understood,
measured; there was a certain amount of inchoate, youthful response to
her sheer physical well being, a vague blur of pleasant sensation at her
proximity; but beyond that he felt no attraction except a careless
admiration for her endurance and dexterity in the woods, a certain
relief in the freedom of her companionship. He had never considered her
concretely as a possible source of physical pleasure. He was not easily
excited sexually, and had had few adventures with women; something of
his contempt, his indifference, removed him from that, too. His emotions
were deep, vital; and hid beneath a shyness of habit that had grown into
a suspicious reserve. All bonds were irksome to him, and instinctively
he avoided the greater with the lesser; instinctively he realized that
the admission of cloying influences, of the entanglements of sex, would
more definitely bind him than any generality of society.
It had, he thought, grown dark with amazing rapidity. He could now see a
feeble light at the Gilkans, ahead and on the right. At the same moment
a brighter, flickering radiance fell upon the road, the thick foliage of
the trees. The blast was gathering at Shadrach Furnace. A clear, almost
smokeless flame rose from the stack against the night-blue sky. It
illuminated the rectangular, stone structure of the coal-house on the
hill, and showed the wet and blackened roof of the casting shed below.
The flame dwindled and then mounted, hanging like a fabulous oriflamme
on a stillness in which Howat Penny could hear the blast forced through
the Furnace by the great leather bellows.
He turned in, over the littered ground before the Gilkan house. Fanny
was standing in the doorway, her straight, vigorous body sharp against
the glow inside. "Here's Mr. Howat Penny," she called over her shoulder.
"Is everything off the table? There's not much," she turned to him, "but
the end of the pork barrel." A meagre fire was burning in the large,
untidy hearth; battered tin ovens had been drawn aside, and a pair of
wood-soled shoes were drying. The rough slab of the table, pushed back
against a long seat made of a partly hewed and pegged log, was empty
but for some dull scarred pewter and scraps of salt meat. On the narrow
stair that led above, a small, touselled form was sleeping--one of the
cast boys at the Furnace.
A thin, peering woman in a hickory-dyed wool dress moved forward
obsequiously. "Mr. Penny!" she echoed the girl's announcement; "and here
I haven't got a thing fit for you. Thomas Gilkan has been too busy to
get out, and Fanny she'll fetch nothing unless the mood's on her. If I
only had a fish I could turn over." She brushed the end of the table
with a frayed sleeve. "You might just take a seat, and I'll look
around."
Fanny Gilkan listened to her mother with a comprehending smile. Fanny's
face was gaunt, but her grey eyes were wide and compelling, her mouth
was firm and bright; and her hair, her father often said, resembled the
fire at the top of Shadrach. Howat knew that she was as impersonal, as
essentially unstirred, as himself; but he had a clear doubt of Mrs.
Gilkan. The latter was too anxious to welcome him to their unpretending
home; she obviously moved to throw Fanny and himself together, and to
disparage such suits as honest Dan Hesa's. He wondered if the older
woman thought he might marry her daughter. And wondering he came to the
conclusion that the other thing would please the mother almost as well.
She had given him to understand that at Fanny's age she would know how
to please any Mr. Howat Penny that chance fortune might bring her.
That some such worldly advice had been poured into Fanny's ears he
could not doubt; and he admired the girl's obvious scorn of such wiles
and surrenders. She sat frankly beside him now, as he finished a
wretched supper, and asked about the country in regions to which she had
not penetrated. "It's a three days' trip," he finished a recital of an
excursion of his own.
"I'd like to go," she returned; "but I suppose I couldn't find it
alone."
He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her--it would
be pleasant in the extreme--when her mother interrupted them from the
foot of the stair.
"A sensible girl," she declared, "would think about seeing the sights of
a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this
about tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your
naked knees."
Fanny Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny. He
was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with Fanny,
was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his entire
attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal burners.
"You wouldn't really go," he said aloud, half consciously.
The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin
light of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun
dress, coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory
stain, drew about her fine shoulders and full, plastic breast. "I'd like
it," she repeated; "but afterward. There is father--"
She had said father, but Howat Penny determined that she was thinking of
Dan Hesa; Dan was as strong as himself, if heavier; a personable young
man. He would make a good husband. But that, he added, was in the
future; Dan Hesa apparently didn't want to marry Fanny to-morrow, that
week. Meanwhile a trip with him to the headwaters of a creek would not
injure her in the least. His contempt of a world petty and iron-bound in
endless pretence, fanning his smouldering and sullen resentment in
general, flamed out in a determination to take her with him if possible.
It would conclusively define, state, his attitude toward "men herding
like cattle." He did not stop to consider what it might define for Fanny
Gilkan. In the stir of his rebellious self there was no pause for
vicarious approximations. If he thought of her at all it was in the
indirect opinion that she was better without such a noodle as Dan Hesa
threatened to become.
"I'd get two horses from the Forge," he continued, apparently to his
mildly speculative self; "a few things, not much would be necessary.
That gun you carry," he addressed Fanny indirectly, "is too heavy. I'll
get you a lighter, bound in brass."
She repeated sombrely, leaning with elbows on the table, her chin in her
hands, "And afterwards--"
"I thought you were free of that," he observed; "it sounds like the
town women, the barnyard crowd. I thought you were an independent
person. Certainly," he went on coldly, "you can't mistake my attitude. I
like you, but I am not in the least interested in any way that--that
jour mother might appreciate. I am neither a seducer nor the type that
marries."
"I understand that, Howat," she assured him; "and I think, I'm not sure
but I think, that what you mean wouldn't bother me either. Anyhow it
shouldn't spoil the fun of our trip. But no one else in the world would
believe that simple truth. If you could stay there, in those splendid
woods or a world like them, why, it would be heaven. But you have to
come back, you have to live on, perhaps for a great while, in the world
of Shadrach and Myrtle Forge. I'm not sure that I'd refuse if you asked
me to go, Howat. I just don't know if a woman can stand alone, for
that's what it would come to afterward, against a whole lifeful of
misjudgment. It might be better in the end, for everybody, if she
continued home, made the best of things with the others."
"You may possibly be right," he told her with a sudden resumption of
indifference. After all, it was unimportant whether or not Fanny Gilkan
went with him to the source of the stream he had discovered. Every one,
it became more and more evident, was alike, monotonous. He wondered
again, lounging back against the wall, about the French forts, outposts
in a vast wilderness. There was an increasing friction between the
Province and France, the legacy of King George's War, but Howat Penny's
allegiance to place was as conspicuous by its absence as the other
communal traits. Beside that, beyond Kaskaskia, at St. Navier and the
North, there was little thought of French or English; the sheer problem
of existence there drowned other considerations. He would, he thought,
go out in the spring ... leave Myrtle Forge with its droning anvil, the
endless, unvaried turning of water wheel, and the facile, trivial
chatter in and about the house. David Forsythe, back from England in the
capacity of master of fluxing metals, might acquire his, Howat's,
interest in the Penny iron.
Fanny Gilkan said, "You'll burn a hole in your coat with that pipe." He
roused himself, and she moved across the room and pinched the smoking
wicks. The embers on the hearth had expired, and the fireplace was a
sooty, black cavern. Fanny, at the candles, was the only thing clearly
visible; the thin radiance slid over the turn of her cheek; her hovering
hand was like a cut-paper silhouette. It was growing late; Thomas Gilkan
would soon be back from the Furnace; he must go. Howat had no will to
avoid Gilkan, but the thought of the necessary conversational exchange
wearied him.
The sound of footsteps approached the house from without; it was, he
thought, slightly annoyed, the founderman; but the progress deflected
by the door, circled to a window at the side. A voice called low and
urgent, "Seemy! Seemy!" It was repeated, and there was an answering
mutter from the stair, a thick murmur and a deep sigh.
The cast boy slipped crumpled and silent in bare feet across the floor.
"Yes," he called back, rapidly waking.
The voice from without continued, "They're going to start up the Oley."
"What is it?" Fanny demanded.
"The raccoon dogs," the boy paused at the door. "A lot of the furnacemen
and woodcutters from round about are hunting."
Fanny Gilkan leaned across the table to Howat, her face glowing with
interest. "Come ahead," she urged; "we can do this anyhow. I like to
hear the dogs yelping, and follow them through the night. You can bring
your gun, I'll leave mine back, and perhaps we'll get something really
big."
Howat himself responded thoroughly to such an expedition; to the mystery
of the primitive woods, doubly withdrawn in the dark; the calls of the
others, near or far, or completely lost in a silence of stars; the still
immensity of a land unguessed, mythical--endless trees, endless
mountains, endless rivers with their headwaters buried in arctic
countries beyond human experience, and emptying into the miraculous blue
and gilded seas of the tropics.
Fanny Gilkan would follow the dogs closely, too, with infinite swing
and zest. She knew the country better than himself, better almost than
any one else at the Furnace. He stirred at her urgency, and she caught
his arm, dragging him from behind the table. She tied a linsey-woolsey
jacket by its arms about her waist, and put out the candles. Outside the
blast was steadily in progress at the stack; the clear glow of the flame
shifted over the nearby walls, glinted on the new yellow of more distant
foliage, fell in sharp or blurred traceries against the surrounding
night.
They could hear the short, impatient yelps of the dogs; but, before they
reached them, the hunt was away. A lantern flickered far ahead, a minute
blur vanishing through files of trees. Fanny turned to the right,
mounting an abrupt slope thickly wooded toward the crown. A late moon,
past full, shed an unsteady light through interlaced boughs, matted
grape vines, creepers flung from tree to tree; it shone on a hurrying
rill, a bright thread drawn through the brush. Fanny Gilkan jumped
lightly from bank to bank. She made her way with lithe ease through
apparently unbroken tangles. It was Fanny who went ahead, who waited for
Howat to follow across a fallen trunk higher than his waist. She even
mocked him gaily, declared that, through his slowness, they were
hopelessly losing the hunt.
However, the persistent barking of the dogs contrived to draw them on.
They easily passed the stragglers, left a group gathered about a lantern
and a black bottle. They caught up to the body of men, but preferred to
follow a little outside of the breathless comments and main, stumbling
progress. They stirred great areas of pigeons and countless indifferent
coveys of partridges barely moved to avoid the swiftly falling feet. But
no deer crossed near them, and the crashing of a heavy animal through
the bushes diminished into such a steep gulley that they relinquished
thought of pursuit. The chase continued for an unusual distance; the
moon sank into the far, unbroken forest; the stars brightened through
the darkest hour of the night.
Fanny Gilkan and Howat proceeded more slowly now, but still they went
directly, without hesitation, in the direction they chose. They crossed
a log felled over a shallow, hurrying creek; the course grew steeper,
more densely wooded. "Ruscomb Manor," Fanny pronounced over her
shoulder. "Since a long way back," he agreed. Finally a sharper,
stationary clamour announced that the object of the hunt had been
achieved, and a raccoon treed. They made their way to the dim
illumination cast on moving forms and a ring of dogs throwing themselves
upward at the trunk of a tree. There was a concerted cry for "Ebo," and
a wizened, grey negro in a threadbare drugget coat with a scarlet
handkerchief about his throat came forward and, kicking aside the dogs,
commenced the ascent of the smooth trunk that swept up to the obscure
foliage above. There was a short delay, then a violent agitation of
branches. A clawing shape shot to the ground, struggled to its feet, but
the raccoon was instantly smothered in a snarling pyramid of dogs.
Howat Penny was overwhelmingly weary. He had tramped all day, since
before morning; while now another dawn was approaching, and the hunters
were at least ten miles from the Furnace. He would have liked to stay,
sleep, where he was; but the labour of preparing a proper resting place
would be as great as returning to Shadrach. Besides, Fanny Gilkan was
with him, with her new, cautious regard for the world's opinion. They
stood silent for a moment, under a fleet dejection born of the hour and
a cold, seeping mist of which he became suddenly conscious. The barrel
of his gun was wet, and instinctively he wiped off the lock. Two men
passing brushed heavily against him and stopped. "Who is it," one
demanded, "John Rajennas? By God, it's a long way back to old Shadrach
with splintering shoes." A face drew near Howat, and then retreated.
"Oh, Mr. Penny! I didn't know you were up on the hunt." It was, he
recognized, one of the coaling men who worked for Dan Hesa. The other
discovered Fanny Gilkan. "And Fanny, too," the voice grew inimical. The
men drew away, and a sharp whispering fluctuated out of the darkness.
"Come," Howat Penny said sharply; "we must get back or stay out here for
the rest of the night. I don't mind admitting I'd like to be where I
could sleep." She moved forward, now tacitly taking a place behind him,
and he led the return, tramping doggedly in the shortest direction
possible.
The hollows and stream beds were filled with the ghostly mist, and
bitterly chill; the night paled slightly, diluted with grey; there was a
distant clamour of crows. They entered the Furnace tract by a path at
the base of the rise from where they had started. On the left, at a
crossing of roads, one leading to Myrtle Forge, the other a track for
the charcoal sleds, a blacksmith's open shed held a faint smoulder on
the hearth. The blast from Shadrach Furnace rose perpendicular in the
still air.
Fanny Gilkan slipped away with a murmur. Howat abandoned all thought of
returning to Myrtle Forge that night. But it was, he corrected the
conclusion, morning. The light was palpable; he could see individual
trees, the bulk of the cast-house, built directly against the Furnace;
in the illusive radiance the coal house on the hill seemed poised on top
of the other structures. A lantern made a reddish blur in the
cast-house; it was warm in there when a blast was in progress, and he
determined to sleep at once.
Thomas Gilkan, with a fitful light, was testing the sealing clay on the
face of the Furnace hearth; two men were rolling out the sand for the
cast over the floor of the single, high interior, and another was
hammering on a wood form used for stamping the pig moulds. The interior
was soothing; the lights, blurred voices, the hammering, seemed to
retreat, to mingle with the subdued, smooth clatter of the turning wheel
without, the rhythmic collapse of the bellows. Howat Penny was losing
consciousness when an apparently endless, stuttering blast arose close
by. He cursed splenetically. It was the horn, calling the Furnace hands
for the day; and he knew that it would continue for five minutes.
Others had entered; a little group gathered about Thomas Gilkan's waning
lantern. Far above them a window glimmered against the sooty wall. Howat
saw that Dan Hesa was talking to Gilkan, driving in his words by a fist
smiting a broad, hard palm. The group shifted, and the countenance of
the man who had recognized Howat Penny in the woods swam into the pale
radiance. His lassitude swiftly deserted him, receding before the
instant resentment always lying at the back of his sullen
intolerance--they were discussing him, mouthing some foul imputation
about the past night. Hesa left the cast-house abruptly, followed by the
charcoal burner; and Howat rose, the length of his rifle thrust forward
under his arm, and walked deliberately forward.
The daylight was increasing rapidly; and, as he approached, Thomas
Gilkan extinguished the flame of the lantern. He was a small man, with a
face parched by the heat of the furnace, and a narrowed, reddened vision
without eyebrows or lashes. He was, Howat had heard, an unexcelled
founder, a position of the greatest importance to the quality of metal
run. There was a perceptible consciousness of this in the manner in
which Gilkan moved forward to meet Gilbert Penny's son.
"I don't want to give offence," the founderman said, "but, Mr. Penny,
sir--" he stopped, commenced again without the involuntary mark of
respect. "Mr. Penny, stay away from my house. There is more that I could
say but I won't. That is all--keep out of my place. No names, please."
Howat Penny's resentment swelled in a fiery anger at the stupidity that
had driven Thomas Gilkan into making his request. A sense of humiliation
contributed to an actual fury, the bitterer for the reason that he could
make no satisfactory reply. Gilkan was a freedman; while he was
occupying a dwelling at Shadrach Furnace it was his to conduct as he
liked. Howat's face darkened--the meagre fool! He would see that there
was another head founder here within a week.
But there were many positions in the Province for a man of Gilkan's
ability, there were few workmen of his sensitive skill with the charge
and blast. Not only Howat's father, but Abner Forsythe as well, would
search to the end all cause for the founderman's leaving. And, in
consequence of that, any detestable misunderstanding must increase. He
determined, with an effort unaccustomed and arduous, to ignore the
other; after all Gilkan was but an insignificant mouthpiece for the
familiar ineptitude of the world at large. Thomas Gilkan might continue
at the Furnace without interference from him; Fanny marry her stupid
labourer. Howat had seen symptoms of that last night. He would no longer
complicate her existence with avenues of escape from a monotony which
she patently elected.
"Very well, Gilkan," he agreed shortly, choking on his wrath. He turned
and tramped shortly from the interior. A sudden, lengthening sunlight
bathed the open and a sullen group of charcoal burners about Dan Hesa.
Their faces seemed ebonized by the grinding in of particles of blackened
wood. Some women, even, in gay, primitive clothes, stood back of the
men. As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose. He halted, and met
them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the murmur died in a
shuffling of feet in the dry grass. He turned again, and walked slowly
away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled by his head. In an
overpowering rage he whirled about, throwing his rifle to his shoulder.
A man detached from the group was lowering his arm; and, holding the
sights hard on the other's metal-buttoned, twill jacket, Howat pulled
the trigger. There was only an answering dull, ineffectual click.
The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man
he had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before
the momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man
articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "--saw the hammer
fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill
overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up.
He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities of the
ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken silence, stumbled away.
He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but
from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot
through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast at the
unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by
the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute
self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society to which
his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that, as his
peer, would have judged, condemned, him. Hundreds of faces--faces mean,
insignificant, or pock-marked--merged into one huge, dominant
countenance; hundreds of bodies, unwashed or foul with disease, or
meticulously clean, joined in one body, clothed in the black robe of
delegated authority, and loomed above him, gigantic and absurd and
powerful, and brought him to death. Deeper than his horror, than any
fear of physical consequences, lay the instinctive shrinking from the
obliteration of his individual being, the loss of personal freedom.
II
He was possessed by an unaccustomed desire to be at Myrtle Forge;
usually it was the contrary case, and he was escaping from the
complicated civilisation of his home; but now the well-ordered house,
the serenity of his room, appeared astonishingly inviting. Howat
progressed rapidly past the smithy, and turned to the right, about the
Furnace dam, a placid and irregular reach of water holding the
reflection of the trees on a mirror still dulled by a vanishing trace of
mist, above which the leaves hung in the motionless air, in the aureate
wash of the early sun, as if they had been pressed from gold foil.
Beyond the dam the path--he had left the road that connected Forge and
Furnace for a more direct way--followed the broad, rippling course of
the Canary, the stream that supplied the life of Myrtle Forge. He
automatically avoided the breaks in the rough trail; his mind, a dark
and confused chamber, still lighted by appalling flashes of memory. A
thing as slight, as incalculable, as a loose flint had been all that
prevented.... He wondered if Fanny and Thomas Gilkan were right in their
shared conviction; Fanny half persuaded, but the elder with a finality
stamped with an accent of the heroic. Whether or not they were right
didn't concern him, he decided; his only problem was to keep outside
all such entanglements. And at present he wanted to sleep.
The path left the creek and joined the road that swept about the face of
the dwelling at Myrtle Forge. The lawn, squarely raised from the public
way by a low brick terrace, showed the length of house behind the
dipping, horizontal branches, the beginning, pale gold, of a widespread
beech. It was a long structure of but two stories, built solidly out of
a dark, flinty stone with an indefinite pinkish glow against the lush
sod and sombre, flat greenery of a young English ivy about a narrow,
stiff portico.
Howat crossed the lawn above the house, where a low wing, holding the
kitchen and pantries, extended at right angles from the dwelling's
length. A shed with a flagging of broad stones lay inside the angle,
where a robust girl with an ozenbrigs skirt caught up on bare legs and
feet thrust into wooden clogs was scrubbing a steaming line of iron
pots. He quickly entered the centre hall from a rear door, and mounted,
as he hoped, without interruption to his room. That interior was
singularly restful, pleasant, after the confused and dishevelling night.
The sanded floor, patterned with a broom, held no carpet, nor were the
walls covered, but white and bare save for a number of small, framed
engravings--a view of Boston Harbour, Queene Anne's Tomb, and some black
line satirical portrait prints. A stone fireplace, ready for lighting,
had iron dogs and fender, and a screen lacquered in flowery wreaths on
a slender black stem. At one side stood a hinge-bound chest, its oak
panels glassy with age; on the other, an English set of drawers held a
mirror stand and scattered trifles--razors and gold sleeve-buttons, a
Barcelona handkerchief, candlesticks and flint, a twist of common,
pig-tail tobacco; while from a drawer knob hung a banian of bright
orange Chinese silk with a dark blue cord.
By the side of his curled black walnut bed, without drapery, and set,
like a French couch, low on three pairs of spiral legs, was a deep
cushioned chair into which he sank and dragged off his sodden buckskin
breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision--squat,
rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with
apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He
secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds,
he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into an immediate profound
slumber.
The shadows of late afternoon were once more gathering when he woke. He
lay, with hands clasped behind his head, watching a roseate glow
disperse from the room. From without came the faint, clear voice of
Marta Appletofft, across the road at the farm, calling the chickens; and
he could hear the querulous whistling of the partridges that invariably
deserted the fringes of forest to join the domesticated flocks at feed
time. A sense of well-being flooded him; the project of St. Xavier, the
French forts, drew far away; never before had he found Myrtle Forge so
desirable. He was, he thought, growing definitely older. He was
twenty-five.
A light knock fell on his door, and he answered comfortably, thinking
that it was his mother. But it was Caroline, his oldest sister. "How you
have slept," she observed, closing the door at her back; "it was hardly
nine when you came in, and here it is five. Mother heard you." Caroline
Penny was a warm, unbeautiful girl with a fine, slender body, two years
younger than himself. Her colouring was far lighter than Howat's; she
had sympathetic hazel eyes, an inviting mouth, an illusive depression in
one cheek that alone saved her from positive ugliness, and tobacco brown
hair worn low with a long, turned strand. She had on a pewter-coloured,
informal wrap over a black silk petticoat, lacking hoops, with a cut
border of violet and silver brocade; and above low, green kid stays with
coral tulip blossoms worked on the dark velvet of foliage were glimpses
of webby linen and frank, young flesh.
She came to the edge of the bed, where she sat with a yellow morocco
slipper swinging from a silk clocked, narrow foot. He liked Caroline,
Howat lazily thought. Although she did not in the least resemble their
mother in appearance--she could not pretend to such distinction of
being--Caroline unmistakably possessed something of the other's
personality, far more than did Myrtle. She said generally, patently only
delaying for the moment communications of much greater interest than
himself, "Where were you last night?" He told her, and she plunged at
once into a rich store of information.
"Did you know that Mr. and Mrs. Winscombe are staying on? It's so,
because of the fever in the city. David and his father stopped all
night, too, and only left after breakfast. He's insane about London, but
I could see that he's glad to get back to the Province. Mr. Forsythe is
very abrupt, but ridiculously proud of him--"
"These Winscombes," Howat interrupted, "what about them? The Forsythes
are a common occurrence."
"David's been gone more than three years," she replied. "And you should
hear him talk; he's got a coat with wired tails in his box he's dying to
wear, but is afraid of his father. Oh, the Winscombes! Well, he's rather
sweet, sixty or sixty-five years old; very straight up the back, and
wears the loveliest wigs. His servant fixes them on a stand--he turns
the curls about little rolls of clay, ties them with paper, and then
bakes it in the oven like a pudding. The servant is an Italian with a
long duck's bill of a nose and quick little black eyes. He makes our
negro women giggle like anything. It's evident he is fearfully
impertinent. And, what do you think?--he hooks Mrs. Winscombe into her
stays! Mother says that that isn't anything, really; Mrs. Winscombe is a
lady of the court, and the most extraordinary happenings go on there.
You see, mother knows a lot about her family, and it's very good; she's
part Polish and part English, and her name's Ludowika. She's ages
younger than her husband.
"Myrtle doesn't like her,--" she stopped midway in her torrent of
information. "I came in to talk to you about Myrtle," she went on in a
different voice; "that is, partly about Myrtle, but more of myself and
of--"
"How long are the others going to stay?" he cut in heedlessly.
"I don't know," she again repressed her own desire; "perhaps they will
have to go back to Annapolis--don't ask me why--but they hope to sail
from Philadelphia in a week or so. She has marvellous clothes, and I
asked her if she would send me some babies from London. You know what
they are, Howat--little wooden dolls to show off the fashion; but she
made a harrowing joke, right in front of father and Mrs. Forsythe. The
things she says are just beyond description; it seems that it's all
right to talk anyway now if you call it classic. And she has fans with
pictures and rhymes on, honestly--" words apparently failed her.
Howat laughed. "Little Innocence," he said. He fell silent, thinking of
their mother. The court, he knew, had been her right, too, by birth; and
he wondered if, with the reminder of Mrs. Winscombe and her reflections
of St. James, she regretted her marriage and removal to the Province.
She was essentially lady, while Gilbert Penny had been the son of a
small country squire. He had seen a profile of his father as a young
man, at the time he had first met Isabel Kingsfrere Howat. It was a
handsome profile, perhaps a shade heavy, but admirably balanced and
stamped with decisive power. He had characteristically invested almost
his last shilling in a tract of eight hundred acres in Pennsylvania and
the passage of himself and his bride to the Province.
It was natural for men so to adventure, but Howat thought of Isabel
Penny with, perhaps, the only marked admiration he felt for any being.
There had been a period, short but strenuous, of material difficulties,
in which the girl--she had been hardly a woman in years--entirely
unprepared for such a different activity, had been finely competent and
courageous. This had not endured long because Gilbert Penny had been
successful almost from the first day of his landing in a new world.
Chance letters had enlisted the confidence of David Forsythe, a Quaker
merchant of property and increasing importance; the latter became a part
owner of an iron furnace situated not far from the Penny holding; he
assisted Gilbert in the erection of a forge; and in less than twenty
years Gilbert Penny had grown to be a half proprietor in the Furnace,
with--
"Howat," Caroline broke in on his thoughts sharply, "I came in, as I
said, to talk about something very important to me, and I intend to do
it." Even after that decided announcement she hesitated, a deeper
colour stained her dear cheeks. "You mustn't laugh at me," she warned
him; "or think I'm horrid. I can talk to you like this because you seem
a--a little outside of things, as if you were looking on at a rather
poorly done play; and you are entirely honest yourself."
He nodded condescendingly, his interest at last retrieved from the
contemplation of his mother as a young woman.
"It's about David," Caroline stated almost defiantly. "Howat, I think
I'm very fond of David. No, you mustn't interrupt me. When he went away
I liked him a lot; but now that he is back, and quite grown up, it's
more than liking ... Howat. His father brought him out here right away
he returned, and for a special reason. He was very direct about it; he
wants David to marry--Myrtle. I heard father--yes, I listened--and him
talking it over, and our old darling was pleased to death. It's natural,
Mr. Forsythe is one of the most influential men in the city; and father
adores Myrtle more than anything else in the world." She paused, and he
studied her in a growing wonder; suddenly she seemed older, her mouth
was drawn in a hard line: a new Caroline. "You know Myrtle," she added.
He did, and considered the youngest Penny with a new objectivity. Myrtle
was an extremely pretty, even a beautiful girl. "You know Myrtle," she
repeated; "and why father is so blind is more than I can understand.
She doesn't care a ribbon for truth, she never thinks of anything but
her own comfort and clothes, and--and she'd make David miserable. Myrtle
simply can't fancy anybody but herself. That's very different from me,
Howat; or yourself. You would be a burning lover." He laughed
incredulously. "And I, well, I know what I feel.
"It's practically made up for David to marry Myrtle, that is, to urge it
all that's possible; and she will never care for him, while all he
thinks of now is how good looking she is. I want David, terribly," she
said, sitting erect with shut hands; "and I will be expected to step
aside, to keep out of the way while Myrtle poses at him. Oh, I know all
about it. I see her rehearsing before the glass. Or I will be expected
to act as a contrast, a plain background, for Myrtle's beauty.
"You see, there is no one I can talk to but yourself. Even mother
wouldn't understand, completely; and she couldn't be honest about
Myrtle. The best of mothers, after all, are women; and, Howat, there is
always a curious formality between women, a little stiffness."
"Well," he demanded, "what do you want me to say, or what did you think
I might do?"
"I don't know," she admitted, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "I
suppose I just wanted a little support, or even some encouragement. I
don't propose to let Myrtle walk off with David and not turn my hand.
Of course I am not a beauty, but then I'm not a ninny, either. And I
have a prettier figure; that is, it will still be pretty in ten or
fifteen years; Myrtle's soft."
"Good heavens," he exclaimed, half serious, "what Indians you all are!"
"I'm quite shameless," she admitted, "and this is really what I
thought--you can, perhaps, help me sometimes, I don't know how, but he
will be out here a lot, men talk together--"
"And I can tell him that Myrtle is an utterly untrustworthy person who
would make him ultimately miserable. I'll remind him that her beauty is
no deeper than he sees it. But that Caroline there, admirable girl,
seething with affection in a figure warranted against time or
accident--" her expression brought his banter to an end. He studied her
seriously, revolved what she had said. She was right about Myrtle, who
was undoubtedly a vain and silly little fish. His father's immoderate
admiration for her had puzzled him as well as the elder sister. He
remembered that never had he heard their mother express a direct opinion
of Myrtle; but neither had Isabel Penny shown the slightest question of
her husband's high regard for their youngest child. She was, he realized
with a warming of his admiration, beautifully cultivated in the wisdom
of the world.
Caroline was vastly preferable to Myrtle, he felt that instinctively;
and he was inclined to give her whatever assistance he could. But this
would be negligible, and he said so. "You will have to do the trick by
yourself," he advised her. "I wouldn't pretend to tell you how. As you
said, you're not a ninny. And Myrtle's none too clever, although she
will manage to seem so. It's wonderful how she'll pick up a hint or two
and make a show. You see--she will be talking iron to David as if she
had been raised in a furnace."
"Men are so senseless!" Caroline exclaimed viciously. She rose. "It's
been a help only to talk to you, Howat. I knew you'd understand. Supper
will be along soon. Make yourself into a charmer for Mrs. Winscombe. I'm
certain she thinks the men out here are frightful hobs." The light had
dimmed rapidly in the room, and he moved over to the chest of drawers,
where he lit the candles, settling over them their tall, carved glass
cylinders.
III
He dressed slowly, all that Caroline had said, and he thought, tangling
and disentangling deliberately in his mind. Mrs. Winscombe ... thinking
there were no presentable men in the Provinces. His hand strayed in the
direction of a quince-coloured satin coat; but he chose instead a
commonplace, dun affair with pewter buttons, and carelessly settled his
shoulders in an unremarkable waistcoat. Then, although he could hear a
concerted stir of voices below that announced impending supper, he
slipped into a chair for half a pipe. He was indifferent, not diffident,
and there was no hesitation in the manner in which he finally approached
the company seated at supper. His place was, as usual, at his mother's
side; but opposite him where Myrtle usually sat was a rigid, high
shouldered man in mulberry and silver, jewelled buckles, and a full,
powdered wig. He had thin, dark cheeks, a heavy nose above a firm mouth
with a satirical droop, and small, unpleasantly penetrating eyes. An
expression of general malice was, however, corrected by a high and
serene brow.
"Mr. Winscombe," Howat Penny's mother said, "my son." The former bowed
with formal civility, but gave a baffling effect of mockery which,
Howat discovered, enveloped practically every movement and speech. He
was, he said, enchanted to meet Mr. Penny; and that extravagant
expression, delivered in a slightly harsh, negligent voice, heightened
the impression of a personality strong and cold; a being as obdurate as
an iron bar masquerading in coloured satin and formulating pretty
phrases like the sheen on the surface of a deep November pool. Gilbert
Penny echoed the introduction at the other end of the table.
Howat saw, in the yellow candlelight, a woman not, he decided, any
better looking than Caroline, in an extremely low cut gown of scarlet,
with a rigid girdle of saffron brocade, a fluted tulle ruff tied with a
scarlet string about a long, slim neck, and a cap of sheer cambric with
a knot of black ribbons. Her eyes were widely opened and dark, her nose
short, and her mouth full and petulant. She, too, was conventionally
adequate; but her insincerity was clearer than her husband's, it was
pronounced quickly, in an impertinent and musical voice, without the
slightest pretence of the injection of any interest. Howat Penny felt,
in a manner which he was unable to place, that she vaguely resembled
himself; perhaps it lay in her eyebrows slanting slightly toward the
temples; but it was vaguer, more elusive, than that.
He considered it idly, through the course of supper. At intervals he
heard her voice, a little, high-pitched laugh with a curious,
underlying flatness: not of tone, her modulations were delicate and
exact; but deeper. Again he was dimly conscious of an aspect of her
which eluded every effort to fix and define. He could not even
comprehend his dwelling upon the immaterial traits of a strange and
indifferent woman; he was at a loss to understand how such inquiries
assailed him. He grew, finally, annoyed, and shut his mind to any
further consideration of her.
Mrs. Penny was talking with charming earnestness to the man on her other
hand. The amber radiance flickered over the beautiful curves of her
shoulders and cast a warm shadow at the base of her throat. She smiled
at her son; and her face, in spite of its present gaiety, held a
definite reminder of her years, almost fifty; but when she turned again
her profile, with slightly tilted nose and delightfully fresh lips and
chin, was that of a girl no older than Caroline. Howat had often noticed
this. It was amazing--with that slight movement she would seem to lose
at once all the years that had accumulated since she was newly married.
In a second she would appear to leave them all, her mature children, the
heavy, palpably aging presence of Gilbert Penny, the house and
obligations that had grown about her, and be remotely young, a stranger
to the irrefutable proof that her youth had gone. At such moments he was
almost reluctant to claim her attention, to bring her again, as it were,
into the present, with so much spent, lapsed: at times he almost
thought, in that connection, wasted.
She had, in addition to her profile, a spirit of youth that had remained
undimmed; as if there were within her a reserve warmth, a priceless
gift, which life had never claimed; and it was the contemplation of that
which gave Howat the impression that Isabel Penny's life had not fully
flowered. He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had
taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective
dejection; but the conviction remained. Gilbert Penny had been an almost
faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come
from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been
a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless
courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the
Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.
Howat Penny thought sombrely of love, of the emotion that had
brought--or betrayed?--Isabel Howat so far away from her birthright. It
had gripped his sister no less tyrannically; stripping them, he
considered, of their essential liberty. The thing was clear enough in
his mind--nothing more than an animal instinct, humiliating to the human
individual, to breed. It was the mere repetition of nature through the
working of an automatic law. No such obscure fate, he determined, should
overtake, obliterate, him. Yet it had involved his mother, a person of
the first superiority. A slight chill, as if a breath of imminent winter
had touched him, communicated itself to his heart.
A trivial conversation was in progress across the table between Mrs.
Winscombe and Myrtle. The latter was an embodiment of the familiar Saxon
type of beauty; her hair was fair, infinitely pale gold, her complexion
a delicately mingled crimson and white, her eyes as candidly blue as
flowers. Her features were finely moulded, and her shoulders, slipping
out from azure lutestring, were like smooth handfuls of meringue. Her
voice was always formal, and it sounded stilted, forced, in comparison
with Mrs. Winscombe's easy periods.
The supper ended, and the company trailed into a drawing room at the
opposite end of the house from the kitchen wing. Howat delayed, and
Caroline, urged forward by Mr. Winscombe's sardonically ubiquitous bow,
half lingered to cast back a glance of private understanding at her
brother. When he decided reluctantly to follow he was kept back by the
sound of a familiar explanation in his father's decisive, full tones.
"Howat," he pronounced, obviously addressing the elder Winscombe, "is a
black Penny. That is what we call them in our family. You see, the
Pennys, some hundreds of years back, acquired a strong Welsh strain. I
take it you are familiar with the Welsh--a solitary-living, dark lot.
Unamenable to influence, reflect their country, I suppose; but lovers
of music. I have a touch of that. Now any one would think that such a
blood, so long ago, would have spread out, been diluted, in a thick
English stock like the Pennys; or at least that we would all have had a
little, here and there. But nothing of the sort; it sinks entirely out
of sight for two or three and sometimes four generations; and then
appears solid, in one individual, as unslacked as the pure, original
thing. The last one was burned as a heretic in Mary's day; although I
believe he would have equally stayed Catholic if the affair had been the
other way around. Opposition's their breath. This boy--"
"You must not figure to yourself, Mr. Winscombe," Mrs. Penny's even
voice admirably cut in, "that the black is a word of reproach. I think
we are both at times at a loss with Howat, he is so different from us,
from the girls; but he is truly remarkable. I have an unusual affection
for him; really, his honesty is extraordinary."
He ought, he knew, either follow the others into the drawing room or
move farther away. His father's explanation repelled him; but his
mother's capital defence--it amounted to that--made it evident to him
that he should, by his presence, give her what support he could.
At the fireplace Gilbert Penny was lost in conversational depths with
Mr. Winscombe. About the opening, now closed for the introduction of a
hearth stove, were tiles picturing in gay glazes the pastoral history
of Ruth, and above the mantel a long, clear mirror held a similitude of
brilliant colour--the scarlet of Mrs. Winscombe's gown, Myrtle's azure
lutestring on a petticoat of ruffled citron spreading over her hoops and
little white kid slippers with gilt heels, Caroline's flowered Chinese
silk. The room was large and square, with a Turkey floor carpet, and
walls hung with paper printed in lavender and black perspectives from
copper plates. A great many candles had been lighted, on tables and
mantel, and in lacquer stands. One of the latter, at Mrs. Winscombe's
side, showed her features clearly.
Howat Penny saw that while she was actually no prettier than Caroline
she was infinitely more vivid and compelling. Her face held an
extraordinary potency; her bare arms and shoulders were more insistent
than his sister's; there was about her a consciousness of the allurement
of body, frankness in its employment. She made no effort to mask her
feeling, which at present was one of complete indifference to her
surroundings; and, not talking, a shadow had settled on her vision.
Caroline was seated on a little sofa across from the fireplace, and she
moved her voluminous skirt aside, made a place for him.
"Almost nothing of Annapolis," Mrs. Winscombe replied to a query of what
she had seen in Maryland. "We were there hardly two weeks, and I hadn't
recovered from the trip across the sea. When I think of returning God
knows I'd almost stay here. You wouldn't suppose one person could vent
so much. I believe Felix went to a Jockey Club, there were balls and
farces; but I kept in bed." Mrs. Penny asked, "And London--how are you
amused there now?" The other retied the bow of a garter. "Fireworks,
Roman candles to Mr. Handel's music, and Italian parties, Villeggiatura.
Covent Garden with paper lanterns among the trees, seductions--"
Gilbert Penny smote his hands on the chair arms. "This hectoring of our
commerce will have to rest somewhere!" he declared; "taking the duty
from pig iron, and then restricting its market to London, is no
conspicuous improvement. It is those enactments that provide our
currency with Spanish pieces instead of English pounds. The West Indies
are too convenient to be overlooked." Mr. Winscombe replied stiffly,
"The Government is prepared to meet infractions of its law." Mr. Penny
muttered a period about Germany in England, with a more distant echo of
Hanoverian whores and deformed firebrands. His guest sat with a harsh,
implacable countenance framed in the long shadows of his elaborate wig,
his ornate coat tails falling stiffly on either side of his chair.
Howat, bred in the comparative simplicity of the Province, found the
foppery of the aging man slightly ridiculous; yet he was aware that Mr.
Winscombe's essential character had no expression in his satin and
powder; his will was as rugged and virile as that of any adventuring
frontiersman clad in untanned hides. He was, Howat decided, at little
disadvantage with his young wife. He wondered if any deep bond bound the
two. Their personal feelings were carefully concealed, and in this they
resembled Isabel Howat, rather than Gilbert, her husband. The latter had
a habit of expressing publicly his affectionate domestic relations. And
Howat Penny decided that he vastly preferred the others' reserve.
An awkward silence had developed on top of the brief political
acerbities. There was no sound but the singing of the wood in the open
stove. Myrtle had an absent, speculative gaze; Caroline was biting her
lip; Mrs. Winscombe yawned in the face of the assembly. Gilbert Penny
suggested cards, but there was no reply. Howat left the room by a door
that opened on a rock threshold set in the lawn. The night was
immaculate, still and cold, with stars brightening in the advance of
winter. He walked about the house. The counting room of the forge was a
separate stone structure back of the kitchen; and to the right, and
farther away, was a second small building. The ground fell rapidly down
to the Forge on the water power below. He could barely discern the
towering bulk of the water wheel and roofs of the sheds.
He felt uneasy, obscurely and emotionally disturbed. Already Fanny
Gilkan seemed far away, to have dropped out of his life. He would give
some gold to the charcoal burner he had attempted to shoot. Mrs.
Winscombe annoyed him by her attitude toward Myrtle Forge, her
unvarnished air of condescension. How old was she? A few years more than
himself, he decided. The Italian hooked her into her stays. A picture of
this formed in his thoughts and dissolved, leaving behind a faint
stinging of his nerves. He recalled her bare--naked--arms ... the old
man, her husband.
She had spoken of Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan
labelled Villeggiatura--a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace
with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped
loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin. It was a different
scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the
person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the
face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of
strong and pure winds.
He was dimly conscious of the awakening in him of undivined pressures,
the stirring of attenuated yet persisting influences. He was saturated
in the space, the sheer, immense simplicity of the wild, hardly touched
by the narrow strip of inhabited coast. He had given his existence to
the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding
fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and
civilization. But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious
and far different had become sentient in his being. Italian parties, and
Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ... Trees clipped and
pruned, and gravel walks; seductions.
A falling meteor flashed a brilliant arc across the black horizon,
dropping into what illimitable wilderness? Fireworks set to the shrill
scraping of violins. One mingled with the other in his blood, fretting
him, spoiling the serene and sure vigour of youth, binding his feet to
the obscure past. Yet colouring all was the other, the black Welsh blood
of the Pennys. Ever since his boyhood he had heard the fact of his
peculiar inheritance explained, accepted. In the past he had been what
he was without thought, self-appraisal. But now he recognized an
essential difference from his family; it came over him in a feeling of
loneliness, of removal from the facile business of living in general.
For the first time he wondered about his future. It was unguarded by the
placid and safe engagements of the majority of lives. He would, he knew,
ultimately possess Myrtle Forge, a part of Shadrach, and a considerable
fortune. That was his obvious inheritance. But, suddenly, the material
thing, the actual, grew immaterial, and the visionary assumed a dark and
enigmatic reality.
Howat abruptly quitted the night of the lawn, his sombre questioning,
for the house. The candles had been extinguished in the drawing room. A
square, glass lamp hung at the foot of the stairs; and there he
encountered a man in a scratch wig, with a long nose flattened at the
end. He bowed obsequiously--a posturing figure in shirtsleeves with a
green cloth waistcoat and black legs. The Italian servant, Howat
concluded. He passed noiselessly, leaving a reek of pomatum and the
memory of a servile smile. Howat Penny experienced a strong sense of
distaste, almost depression, at the other's silent proximity. It
followed him to his room, contaminated his sleep with unintelligible
whispering, oily and disturbing gestures, and fled only at the widening
glimmer of dawn.
IV
The sun had almost reached the zenith before Mrs. Winscombe appeared
from her room. And at the same moment David Forsythe arrived on a spent
grey mare. He had come over the forty rough miles which separated Myrtle
Forge from the city in less than five hours. He was a year older than
Howat, but he appeared actually younger--a candid youth with high colour
and light, simply tied hair. He had, he told Howat, important messages
from his father to Mr. Winscombe. The latter and Gilbert Penny were
conversing amicably in the lower room at the right of the stairway--a
chamber with a bed that, nevertheless, was used for informal assemblage.
Mr. Winscombe wore an enveloping banian of russet brocade with deep
furred cuffs, and a turban of vermilion silk comfortably replacing a
wigged formality. Under that brilliant colour his face was as yellow as
an orange.
The written messages were delivered, and David returned to the lawn. The
day was superb--a crystal cold through which the sun's rays filtered
with a faintly perceptible glow. Caroline was standing at Howat's side,
and she gave his hand a rapid pressure as David Forsythe approached.
"Where's Myrtle?" the latter asked apparently negligently. Howat
replied, "Still in the agony of fixing her hair--for dinner; she'll be
at it again before supper." David whistled a vague tune. Caroline added,
"You've got fearfully dressy yourself, since London." He replied
appropriately, and then became more serious. "I wish," he told them,
"that we belonged to the church of England; you know the Penns have gone
back. It's pretty heavy at home after--after some other things. The
Quakers didn't use to be so infernally solemn. You should see the swells
about the Court; the greatest fun. And old George with a face like a
plum--"
"Don't you find anything here that pleases you?" Caroline demanded with
asperity.
"Myrtle's all right," he admitted; "not many of them are as pretty."
"I'll tell her you've come," Caroline promptly volunteered; "she won't
keep you waiting. There she is! No, it's Mrs. Winscombe."
She was swathed in a ruffled lilac cloak quilted with a dull gold
embroidery; satin slippers were buckled into high pattens of black
polished wood; and her head, relatively small with tight-drawn hair, was
uncovered. She was not as compelling under the sun as in candle light,
he observed. Her face, unpainted, was pale, an expression of petulance
discernible. Yet she was more potent than any other woman he had
encountered. "Isn't that the garden?" she asked, waving beyond the end
of the house. "I like gardens." She moved off in the direction
indicated; and--as he felt she expected, demanded--he followed slightly
behind.
A short, steep terrace descended to a formally planted plot, now
flowerless, enclosed by low privet hedges. There were walks of rolled
bark, and, against a lower, denser barrier, a long, white bench. The
ground still fell away beyond; and there was a sturdy orchard, cleared
of underbrush, with crimson apples among the grey limbs. Beyond, across
a low, tangled wild, an amphitheatre of hills rose against the sky,
drawn from the extreme right about the façade of the dwelling. They
seemed to enclose Myrtle Forge in a natural domain of its own; and,
actually, Gilbert Penny owned most of the acreage within that immediate
circle.
Mrs. Winscombe sank on the garden bench, where she sat with a hand
resting on either side of her. Above them a column of smoke rose from
the kitchen against the blue. A second, heavier cloud rolled up from the
Forge below. "They have been repairing the forebay," Howat explained;
"the Forge has been closed. I'm supposed to be in the counting house."
"You work?" she demanded surprised.
"At the ledger, put things down--what the men are paid, mostly in
tobacco and shoes, ozenbrigs and molasses and rum; or garters and
handkerchiefs for the women. Then I enter the pig hauled from Shadrach,
and the carriage of the blooms."
"I don't understand any of that," she announced.
"It probably wouldn't interest you; the pig's the iron cast at the
furnace. It's worked in the forges, and hammered into blooms and
anconies, chunks or stout bars of wrought iron. We do better than two
tons a week." The sound of a short, jarring blow rose from the Forge, it
was repeated, became a continuous part of the serene noon. "That's the
hammer now," he explained. "It goes usually all day and most nights.
We're used to it, don't hear it; but strangers complain."
"Mr. Forsythe said your father was an Ironmaster, one of the biggest in
the Province, and I suppose you'll become that too." She gazed about at
the hills, sheeted in scarlet and yellow, at the wide sunny hollow that
held Myrtle Forge. "Here," she added in a totally unexpected accent of
feeling, "it is very beautiful, very big. I thought all the world was
like St. James or Versailles. I've never been to Poland, my mother's
family came from there to Paris, but I'm told they have forests and such
things, too. This is different from Annapolis, that is only an echo of
London, but here--" she gazed far beyond him into the profound noon.
He recovered slowly from the surprise of her unlooked for speech,
attitude. Howat studied her frankly, leaning forward with his elbows on
his knees. Her discontent was paramount. It was deeper than he had
supposed; like his there were disturbing qualities in her blood,
qualities at a variance with the obvious part of her being. A sense of
profound intimacy with her pervaded him.
"This," she continued, "is like a cure at a Bath, a great bath of air
and light. I should like to stay, I think.... Are you content?"
"It always seemed crowded to me," he admitted. "Usually I get as far
away as possible, into the woods, the real wilderness. But you heard my
father last night--I'm a black Penny, a solitary, dark lot. You couldn't
judge from what I might feel."
"Your father and you are not sympathetic," she judged acutely. "He is
practical, solid; but it isn't easy to say, even with an explanation,
what you are. In London--but I'm sick of London. Myrtle Forge. It's
appalling at night. I'd like to go into the real wilderness, leave off
my hoops and stays, and bathe in a stream; a water nymph and you ... but
that's only Watteau again, with a cicisbeo holding my shift and
stockings. In London you'd be that, a lady's servant of love; but, in
the Province, I wonder?"
He sat half comprehending her words mingling in his brain with the
pounding of the trip hammer at the Forge, one familiar and one
unfamiliar yet not strange sound. Above them, on the lawn, he could see
Myrtle--through the middle of the day the sun had increased its
warmth--with skirts like the petals of a fabulous tea rose. The sun
glinted on the living gold of her hair and bathed an arm white as snow.
David was there no doubt. His thoughts dwelt for a moment on Caroline,
then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward
her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air
of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch
of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication,
her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on
shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly
thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him
involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had
evoked in him the night before. His instinct for preservation from any
entanglements with life lay dormant before her surrender to influences
that left her crumpled, without the slightest interest in any exterior
fact.
A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted
waistcoat announced dinner from the foot of the terrace, and they moved
slowly toward the house. There was a concerted interest in the faces
they found already about the table. Howat took his seat at his mother's
side, Gilbert Penny assisted Mrs. Winscombe. David was placed between
Caroline and Myrtle. Mr. Winscombe, again formally wigged and coated,
was absorbed in thought. He said to his hostess, "It's the uncertainty
that puts me in doubt. Ogle thought the thing thoroughly reviewed, when
now Hamilton comes out with his damned Indians and Maryland rum.
Forsythe suggests my presence in Council to-morrow, and it's barely
possible that there will be a return to Annapolis. While Ludowika--"
"I can't travel another ell over the atrocities they call roads here,"
Mrs. Winscombe declared. "I expect to die returning to England as it is,
and I won't put up with any more preliminary torment. You'll have to
leave me."
"At Myrtle Forge," Gilbert Penny added at once; "at Myrtle Forge as long
as you like. Unless," he added with a smile, "you prefer the gaiety at
Abner Forsythe's." A hot colour suffused David's cheeks.
Mr. Winscombe bowed over the table, "I am inclined to take advantage of
that. Ludowika would be the better without even Quaker gaiety for a
little." He stopped, turned toward her. "I'd like it immensely," she
replied simply. "I am sure it would give me back all that I've lost in
passage. Perhaps," she leaned forward, smiling at Howat, "I could see
something of what's behind those hills, go into the real Arcadia."
"Out there," said Mr. Penny, "are the Endless Mountains."
The faint, involuntary chill again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar
imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father--the
Endless Mountains! It brought back his doubt, his questioning, of life.
It was the inconceivable term endless, without any finality of ultimate
rest, without even the arbitrary peace of death, that appalled him. He
thought of life going on and on, with nothing consummated, nothing
achieved nor final. He thought of the black Penny who had been burned as
a heretic to ashes years before; yet Howat was conscious of the martyr's
bitter stubbornness of soul, alive, still alive and unquenched, in
himself. He wondered about the heritage to come. There was a further
belief that it followed exclusively the male line. The Pennys, like many
another comparatively obscure name, went far back into the primeval soil
of civilization. If he had no issue the endlessness might be confounded;
a fatality in his long, dangerous excursions would have vanquished the
ineradicable Welsh blood. He might have no children; yesterday he would
have made such a decision; but now he was less sure of himself, of his
power to will. He was dimly conscious of vast exterior forces and
traitorous factors within. It was as if momentarily he had been lifted
to a cloud beyond time, from which he saw the entire, stumbling progress
of humanity, its beginning hid in humid mist, moving into a nocturnal
shadow like a thunder bank.
He sat with chin on breast and sombre eyes until his mother laid her
hand on his shoulder. "Howat," she protested, "you are too glum for the
comfort of any one near you. I think you must make a pose of being
black. I'd almost called one of the servants to fiddle in your ear."
Howat smiled at her; he returned slowly to the actual, the particular.
Mr. Winscombe had pushed back his chair, excusing himself in the
pressure of necessary preparations. His wife disappeared with him,
leaving behind the echo of a discussion about Cecco, the Italian
servant. The women followed, with David at Myrtle's shoulder, leaving
Howat and Gilbert Penny.
The latter was still a handsome man, with his own hair silvered on a
ruddy countenance, and a careful taste in clothes. His nose was
predominant, with a wide-cleft mouth above a square chin. "I had
thought," he said deliberately, "that you were employed in the counting
house, but Schwar tells me that it has been a week since you were seen
there." He raised a broad hand to silence Howat's reply. "While I can
afford to keep you merely at hunting, the result to the table is so
meagre that I'm not justified. There is no St. James here, in
Pennsylvania, no gentlemen supported by the Crown for the purpose of
amusement. You will have to sail for England if you expect that sort of
thing." He rose, "You owe an intelligent interest in Myrtle Forge, to
your sisters and mother, toward all that I have accomplished. It's a
rich property, and it's growing bigger. Already young Forsythe has a
list of improvements to be instituted at the Furnace--clerks and a
manager and new system for carrying on the blast."
"I'm not an iron man," Howat Penny told him, "I'm not a clerk. David
can take all that over for you, particularly if he marries one of the
girls."
"What are you?" the elder demanded sharply.
"You ought to know. You explained it fully enough to the Winscombes."
"If it wasn't for that you'd have been dumping slag five years ago. What
I hoped was that with maturity some sense of obligation would be born
into you. What is this pretended affection for your mother worth if you
are unwilling to conserve, make safe, her future, in case I die?" All
that his father said was logical, just; but it only brought him a
renewed sense of his impotence before very old and implacable inner
forces.
"I'll try again," he briefly agreed. "But I warn you, it will do little
good. There is no pretence in the affection you spoke of, but--but
something stronger--" he gave up as hopeless the effort to explain all
that had swept through his mind.
Gilbert Penny abruptly left the room.
It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge;
he was now assisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise
that was to carry Mr. Winscombe and David to the city. Howat pictured
the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Winscombe into her
clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain. When the
carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted space of the counting
room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still
conscious of a strong repulsion. It was idiotic to let such an
insignificant fact as the Winscombes' man persistently annoy him. But,
in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of
much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.
The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun,
at a small window, shifted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and
desk to a higher corner. He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and
the thin, irregular splash of falling water. Other sounds rose at
intervals--the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the
rumble of its deposit by the Forge. Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece
of paper in his hand. "Eleven hundred weight of number two," he read;
"at six pounds, and a load of charcoal. Jonas Hupp charged with three
pairs of woollen stockings, and shoes for Minnie, four shillings more."
Howat mechanically entered the enumerated items, his distaste for such a
petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing
him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the
doorway; it was Caroline. "I hardly saw him," she declared hotly.
"Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole." Her hoops
flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance. "There's one
thing about Myrtle," she continued, "she's frightfully proper in her
narrow little ideas. Myrtle's a prude. And I promise you I won't be if I
get a chance at David." She stood with vivid, parted lips, bright eyes;
almost, Howat thought, charming. Such a spirit in Caroline amazed him;
he hadn't conceived of its presence. He recognized a phase of his own
contempt for customary paths, accepted limitations and proprieties.
"Remember David's Quaker training," he told her in his habitual air of
jest. "David's been to London," she replied. "I saw him pinch the
Appletofft girl at the farm."
Again in his room, he changed into more formal clothes than on the
evening previous; he did this without a definite, conscious purpose; it
was as if his attitude of mind required a greater suavity of exterior.
He wore a London waistcoat, a gift from his mother, of magenta worked
with black petals and black stone buttons; his breeches were without a
wrinkle, and the tails of his coat, even if they were not wired like
those David was said to have brought from England, had a not
unsatisfactory swing.
At supper Mrs. Winscombe sat at his left, Caroline and Myrtle had taken
their customary places opposite, the elders had not been disturbed. Mrs.
Winscombe had resumed the animation vanished at noon. She wore green and
white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat shirred cap tied under her
chin. The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented
mist. He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of
her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk. She was
talking to Myrtle about the Court. "I am in waiting with the Princess
Amelia Sophia," she explained; "I have her stockings. There is a
frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel
bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another."
Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips. "It's
into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron," he asserted. Ludowika
Winscombe studied him. "In England," she said, "the American provinces
are supposed to lie hardly beyond the Channel, but here England seems to
be at the other end of the world." Myrtle added, "I'd like it
immensely."
And Howat thought of Ludowika--he thought of her tentatively as
Ludowika--in the brilliant setting of tropical silks and birds.
He considered the change that had overtaken his father, English born, in
the quarter century he had lived in America; the strong allegiance
formed to ideas fundamentally different from those held at St. James;
and he wondered if such a transformation would operate in Ludowika if
she could remain in the Province. It was a fantastic query, and he
impatiently dismissed it, returning to the contemplation of his mother's
problematic happiness. He determined to question the latter if a
permissible occasion arose; suddenly his interest had sharpened toward
her mental situation. He compared the two women, what he could
conjecture about Isabel Howat and Ludowika Winscombe; but something
within him, automatic and certain, whispered that no comparison was
possible. His mother possessed a quality of spirit that he had never
found elsewhere; he could see, in spite of their resemblance of blood
and position, that the elder could never have been merely provocative.
Such distinctions, he divined, were the result of qualities mysterious
and deeply concealed. Love, that he had once dismissed as the principle
of blind procreation, became more complex, enigmatic. He had no
increased desire to experience it, with the inevitable loss of personal
liberty; but he began to be conscious of new depths, unexpected
complications, in human relationship.
He was not so sure of himself.
They had moved to the less formal of the rooms used as places of
gathering. The bed in a corner was hung in blue shalloon over ruffled
white muslin, and there was blue at the windows. Against the wall a
clavichord, set aside as obsolete, raised its dusky red ebony box on
grooved legs. Myrtle was seated at it picking out an air from
Belshazzar. She held each note in a silvery vibration that had the
fragility of old age. Ludowika was by the fire, quartered across a
corner; there was no stove, and the wood burning in the opening sent out
frequent, pungent waves of smoke. She coughed and cursed. "Positively,"
she declared, "I'll turn salt like a smoked herring."
She rose, her gaze resting on Howat. "I must go out," she continued;
"breathe." He was strangely reluctant to accompany her, his feet were
leaden. Nevertheless, in a few moments he found himself at her side on
the lawn. Her sophistication had again disappeared, beneath the stars
drawn across the hills, over Myrtle Forge. There was a pause in the
hammering below. "Take me down there," she commanded.
He led the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn
logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the
stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous
gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling,
white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated
with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals a
flushing rod was withdrawn from a fire and plunged in a trough of water;
a cloud of ghostly steam arose, a forgeman's visage momentarily
illuminated like a copper mask. A grimy lantern was hung above the
anvil, its thin light falling on the ponderous head of the trip hammer
suspended at right angles from a turning cogged shaft projection through
the wall.
The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an
obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat,
drum bellows. The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies,
herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with
hooked bars. An incandescent mass was lifted, born, rayed in an
intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and,
as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the
blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks
dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The
hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like
gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals,
heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.
The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.
The hammering continued.
A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of
hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped
Howat. He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride
of Myrtle Forge, of his father's fibre--the iron of his character like
the iron he successfully wrought. He could grasp Gilbert Penny's
accomplishment here, take fire at its heroic quality; a thing he found
impossible in the counting room above, recording such trivial details as
wool stockings for Jonas Rupp. He could be a forgeman, he thought, but
never a clerk; and in that limitation he realized that he was inferior
to his father. There were aspects of himself beyond such discipline and
control.
Ludowika Winscombe grasped his arm. "Come away," she begged; "it's--it's
savage, like Vulcan and dreadful, early legends." She hurried him,
clinging to his arm, over the ascent to the orderly lawn, the tranquil
shine of candle-lit windows. There, with her hood fallen from her head,
she sat on a stone step.
"You frighten me, a little," she confessed. "Are you at all like--like
that below inside of you? I have a feeling that you might be. If you
were one of the men about Vauxhall you'd be kissing me now ... if I
liked you. But, although I do like you, I wouldn't kiss you for an
emerald buckle." He recognized that she spoke seriously; her voice bore
no connective suggestion. Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than
little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased. Yet the
idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts. He
considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was
conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense of her bodily
seductiveness.
At the same time an obscure uneasiness, rebellion, possessed him; it was
the old, familiar feeling of revolt, of distaste for imprisoning
circumstance. It came to him acutely, almost as if a voice had whispered
in his ear, warning him, urging him into the wild, to escape threatening
catastrophe. He determined to leave Myrtle Forge in the morning, to
return to the stream he had followed into the serene heart of the woods.
There he would stay until--until Ludowika Winscombe had gone. Howat had
no especial sense of danger from her; only for the moment she typified
the entire world of trivial artifice. He gazed at her with a conscious
detachment possible because of the rarity in his existence of such
figures as hers.
She had risen, and her cloak fallen upon the grass. Howat could see her
face beneath hair faintly powdered with silver dust and the ruffled
patch of white tied pertly under her chin. Her smoothly turning
shoulders, filmed in lawn, and low bodice crowned an extravagant
circumference of ruffled silk and rosettes. Against the night of the
Province, the invisible but felt presence of immutable hills, she was
like a puppet, a grotesque figure of comedy. He regarded her sombrely
from the step, his chin cupped in a hand.
But, again, she surprised him, speaking entirely out of the character he
had assigned her, in a spirit that seemed utterly incongruous, but which
was yet warm with conviction. "I want to explain a great deal to you,"
she said, "that really isn't explainable. It isn't sensible, and yet it
is the strongest feeling I remember. It's about here and you and me. You
can't picture my life, and so you don't know how strange this is, how
different from all I've ever lived.
"I think I told you I was born in Paris--you see some of us came to
France when Louis took a Polish princess, and there my mother married an
English gentleman. Well, it was always the Court, in France and in
England. Always the Court--do you know what that means? It's a place
where women are pretty pink and white candies that men are always
picking over. It's a great bed with a rose silk counterpane and closed
draperies. Champagne and music and scent and masques. Little plays with
the intrigue in the audience; favours behind green hedges. I was in it
when I was fourteen, and I had a lover the first year. He showed me how
to make pleasure. Don't think that I was indifferent to this," she added
directly; "that I wanted to escape it. I wasn't; I didn't. Only beneath
everything I had a feeling of not being completely satisfied; I
wanted--oh, not very strongly--something else, for an hour. At times the
air seemed choking; and inside of me, but not in my body, I seemed
choking too. I used to think about the Polish forests, and that would
help a little."
She resumed the place at his side, with her silk billowing against his
knee. "This is it," she declared, her face set against the illimitable,
still dark. "I recognized it only a little while ago. I think
unconsciously I came to America hoping to find it; there was nothing at
Annapolis, but here--" she drew a breath as deep, he noted, as her stays
would permit. "It includes you, somehow," she continued; "as if you were
the voice. What I said coming away from the Forge, about dreading you,
was only momentary. I have another feeling, premonition--" she broke
off, her manner changed. "All the Court believes in signs: Protestantism
and vampires.
"It seems unreal here; I mean St. James and all that was so
tremendously important; incredibly stupid--the Princess Amelia's
stockings. But you can't imagine the jealousy. Every bit of it shall go
out of my thoughts. You'll help me, a harmless magic. I'll be as simple
as that girl across the road, with the red cheeks, in a single slip. You
must call me Ludowika; Ludowika and Howat. I'm not so terribly old, only
twenty-nine."
"I am going away to-morrow," he informed her; "I won't be back before
you leave."
A slight frown gathered about her eyes. Her face was very close to his.
"But I don't like that either," she replied. "You were to be a part of
it, its voice; excursions in the woods. Is it necessary, your absence?"
He knew that it was not; and suddenly he was seized with the conviction
that he would not go. It was as if, again, a voice outside him had
informed him of the fact. But if there were no reason for his going
there was as little for his remaining at Myrtle Forge; that was, so far
as Ludowika Winscombe was concerned. He had been untouched by all that
she had said; untouched except for a faint involuntary shiver as she had
spoken of premonition. And that had vanished instantaneously. There was
his duty in the counting house. But he was forced to admit to himself
the insufficiency of that reason; it was too palpably false.
He had not been moved by the intent of what she had said, but his
imagination had been stirred, as if by the touch of delicate, pointed
fingers, at her description of Court--a bed with a silk counterpane ...
behind clipped greenery. He recalled the fan with its painted
Villeggiatura, the naked, wanton loves. "Something different," she half
repeated, with a sigh, an accent, of longing. Howat heard her with
impatience; it was absurd to try to picture her tramping in the
wilderness, breaking her way hour after hour through thorned underbrush,
like Fanny Gilkan. She wouldn't progress a hundred yards in her unsteady
pattens and fragile clothes.
Suddenly the Italian servant appeared absolutely noiselessly at her
side, speaking a ridiculous, oily gibberish. "At once," she replied. She
turned to Howat. "My bed has been prepared. Are you going to-morrow?"
"No," he answered awkwardly. She turned and left without further words.
The servant walked behind her, resembling an unnatural shadow.
The metallic clamour at the anvil rose and fell, diminished by the
interposed bulk of the dwellings, ceaselessly forging the Penny iron,
the Penny gold. He thought of himself as metal under the hammer; or
rather ore at the furnace: he hadn't run clear in the casting; there
were bubbles, bubbles and slag. Endless refinements--first the furnace
and then the forge and then the metal. A contempt for the lesser degrees
possessed him, for a flawed or clumsy forging, for weakness of the
flesh, the fatality of easy surrender. An overwhelming, passionate
emotion swept him to his feet, clenched his hands, filled him with a
numbing desire to reach the last purification.
The mood sank into an inexplicable nostalgia; he dragged the back of a
hand impatiently across his vision. His persistent indifference, the
inhibition that held him in a contemptuous isolation, again possessed
him, Howat, a black Penny. A last trace of his emotion, caught in the
flood of his paramount disdain, vanished like a breath of warm mist. He
entered the house and mounted to his room; the stairs creaked but that
was the only sound audible within. His candles burned without their
protecting glasses in smooth, unwavering flames. When they were
extinguished the darkness flowed in and blotted out familiar objects,
folded him in a cloak of invisibility, obliterated him in sleep. As he
lost consciousness he heard the trip hammer dully beating out Penny
iron, Penny gold; beating out, too, the Penny men ... Slag and metal and
ruffled muslin, roman candles and stars.
V
There came to him in the counting house, the following afternoon,
rumours and echoes of the day's happenings. David Forsythe had arrived
after dinner, and there had been word from Mr. Winscombe; he would be
obliged to return to Maryland, and trusted that Ludowika would not be an
onerous charge. David was to take Myrtle and Caroline back with him to
the city, for an exemplary Quaker party. "There's no good asking you,"
he told Howat, lounging in the door of the counting room. David was
flushed, his sleeve coated with dust. "Caroline," he exclaimed, "is as
strong as a forgeman; she upset me on the grass as quickly as you
please, hooked her knee behind me, and there I was. She picked me up,
too, and laughed at me," he stopped, lost in thought. "Myrtle's really
beautiful," he said again; "Caroline's not a thing to look at, and yet,
do you know, a--a man looks at her. She is wonderfully graceful."
Howat gave Caroline the vigorous stamp of his brotherly approval. "She
understands a lot, for a girl," he admitted. "Of course Myrtle's a
particular peach, but I'd never go to her if a buckle--" he stopped
abruptly as Myrtle appeared at David's side. "Isn't he industrious?"
she said indifferently. "You'd never guess how father's at him. Have you
heard, Howat--Mrs. Winscombe will be here perhaps a month. It's a wonder
you haven't gone away, you are so frightfully annoyed by people. Last
night you were with her over an hour on the lawn. I could see that
father thought it queer; but I explained to him that court women never
thought of little things like, well, husbands."
Howat gazed at her coldly, for the first time conscious that he actually
disliked Myrtle. He made up his mind, definitely, to assist Caroline as
far as possible. She was absurd, criticizing Mrs. Winscombe. "Where," he
demanded, "did you get all that about courts? And your sudden, tender
interest in husbands? That's new, too. You're not thinking of one for
yourself, are you? He'd never see you down in the morning."
A bright, angry colour flooded her cheeks. "You are as coarse as
possible," she declared. "I'm sure I wish you'd stay away altogether
from Myrtle Forge; you've never been anything but a bother." She left
abruptly. "Sweet disposition." Howat grinned. "You are seeing family
life as it's actually lived." Later his thoughts returned to what she
had said about Ludowika Winscombe; he recalled the latter's speech,
seated on the doorstep; some stuff about a premonition. Myrtle had
suggested that he was interested in her. What ridiculous nonsense! If
his father said anything on that score the other would discover that he
was no longer a boy. Besides, such insinuations were a breach of
hospitality. How Mrs. Winscombe would laugh at them if she suspected
Myrtle's cheap folly.
She had asked him to call her Ludowika. He decided that he would; really
he couldn't get out of it now. It would do no harm. Ludowika! It was a
nice name; undoubtedly Polish. He thought again about what she had said
of Polish forests, the dissatisfaction that had followed her for so many
years. A lover at fourteen. A surprising sentence formed of itself in
his brain.--She had never had a chance. That pasty court life had
spoiled her. It had no significance for himself; he was simply revolving
a slightly melancholy fact.
Felix Winscombe was a sere figure, yet he was extraordinarily full of a
polished virility, rapier-like. Howat could see the dark, satirical face
shadowed by the elaborate wig, the rigid figure in precise, foppish
dress. He heard Winscombe's slightly harsh, dominant voice. His position
in England was, he knew, secure, high. Ludowika had been very sensible
in marrying him. That was the way, Howat Penny told himself, that
marriage should be consummated. He would never marry. David Schwar
appeared with a sheaf of papers, which he himself proceeded to docket,
and Howat left the counting room.
He met Ludowika almost immediately; she advanced more simply dressed
than he had ever seen her before. She pointed downward to the water
flashing over the great, turning wheel. "Couldn't we walk along the
rill? There's a path, and it's beautiful in the shadow." The stream
poured solid and green through the narrow, masoned course of the
forebay, sweeping in a lucent arc over the lip of the fall. An earthen
path followed the artificial channel through a dense grove of young
maples, seeming to hold the sun in their flame-coloured foliage. Myrtle
Forge was lost, the leaves shut out the sky; underfoot some were already
dead. The wilderness marched up to the edges of the meagre clearings.
Ludowika walked ahead, without speech; irregular patches of ruddy light
slid over her flared skirt. Suddenly she stopped with an exclamation;
the trees opened before them on the broad Canary sweeping between flat
rocks, banks bluely green. Above, the course was broken, swift; but
where they stood it was tranquil again, and crystal clear. Yellow rays
plunging through the unwrinkled surface gilded the pebbles on the
shallower bottom. A rock, broad and flat, extended into the stream by
the partial, diagonal dam that turned the water into Myrtle Forge; and
Ludowika found a seat with her slippers just above the current. Howat
Penny sat beside her, then dropped back on the rocks, his hands clasped
behind his head.
A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them. He
watched a hawk, diminutive on the pale immensity above. "Heavens,"
Ludowika finally spoke, "how wonderful ... just to sit, not to be
bothered by--by things. Just to hear the water. Far away," she said
dreamily; "girl."
From where he lay he could see her arms, beautiful and bare, lost in
soft Holland above the elbows; he could see the roundness of her body
above the lowest of stays. Suddenly she fascinated him; he visualized
her sharply, as though for the first time--a warm, intoxicating entity.
He was profoundly disturbed, and sat erect; the stream, the woods,
blurred in his vision. He felt as if his heart had been turned
completely over in his body; the palms of his hands were wet. He had a
momentary, absurd impulse to run, beyond Shadrach Furnace, beyond any
distance he had yet explored, farther even than St. Xavier. Ludowika
Winscombe gazed in serene, unconscious happiness before her. He felt
that his face was crimson, and he rose, moved to the water's edge, his
back toward her. He was infuriated at a trembling that passed over him,
damned it in a savage and inaudible whisper.
What particularly appalled him was the fact that his overmastering
sensation came without the slightest volition of his own. He had had
nothing to do with it, his will was powerless. He was betrayed like a
fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a
concealed, traitor inside. In an instant he had been invaded, his being
levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown. He thought even that he heard a
dull crash, as if something paramount had irremediably fallen,
something that should have been maintained at any cost, until the end of
life.
Howat felt a sudden hatred of his companion; but that quickly
evaporated; he discovered that she had spread, like a drop of carmine in
a goblet of water, through his every nerve. By God, but she had become
himself! In the space of a breath she was in his blood, in his brain;
calling his hands about her, toward her smooth, beautiful arms. She was
the scent in his nostrils, the sound a breeze newly sprung up stirred
out of the leaves. A profound melancholy spread over him, a deep
sadness, a conviction of loss. Ludowika was singing softly:
"Last Sunday at St. James's prayers
--dressed in all my whalebone airs."
He had come on disaster. The realization flashed through his
consciousness and was engulfed in the submerging of his being in the
overwhelming, stinging blood that had swept him from his old security.
Yet he had been so detached from the merging influences about him, his
organization had been so complete in its isolation, his egotism so
developed, that a last trace of his entity lingered sentient, viewing as
if from a careened but still tenable deck the general submergence. His
thoughts returned to the automatic operation of the consummation
obliterating his person, the inexorable blind movement of the thing in
which he had been caught, dragged into the maw of a supreme purpose. It
was, of course, the law of mere procreation which he had before
contemptuously recognized and dismissed; a law for animals; but he was
no longer entirely an animal. Already he had considered the possibility
of an additional force in the directing of human passion, founded on
something beyond the thirst of flesh, founded perhaps on soaring
companionships, on--on--The condition, the term, he was searching for
evaded him.
He thought of the word love; and he was struck by the vast inaccuracy of
that large phrase. It meant, Howat told himself, literally nothing: what
complex feeling Isabel Penny might have for her husband, Caroline's
frank desire for David Forsythe, Myrtle's meagre emotion, Fanny Gilkan's
sense of Hesa and life's necessary compromises, his own collapse--all
were alike called love. It was not only a useless word but a dangerous
falsity. It had without question cloaked immense harm, pretence; it had
perpetuated old lies, brought them plausibly, as if in a distinguished
and reputable company, out of past superstitions and credulity; the real
and the meaningless, the good and the evil, hopelessly confused.
They were seated at supper, four of them only; Isabel and Gilbert Penny,
and, opposite him, Ludowika. Occasionally he would glance at her,
surreptitiously; his wrists would pound with an irregular, sultry
circulation; longing would harass him like the beating of a club. She,
it seemed to him, grew gayer, younger, more simple, every hour.
Happiness, peace, radiated in her gaze, the gestures of her hands. Howat
wondered at what moment he would destroy it. Reprehensible. A moment
must come--soon--when emotion would level his failing reserve, his
falling defences. He thrilled at the thought of the inevitable
disclosure. Would she fight against it, deny, satirize his tumult; or
surrender? He couldn't see clearly into that; he didn't care. Then he
wondered about the premonition of which she had spoken, deciding to ask
her to be more explicit.
An opportunity occurred later. Gilbert Penny had gone down to the Forge
store, his wife had disappeared. Ludowika Winscombe and Howat were
seated in the drawing room. Only a stand of candles was lit at her
elbow; her face floated like a pale and lovely wafer against the
billowing shadows of the chamber. The wood on the iron hearth was
charring without flame. He questioned her bluntly, suddenly, out of a
protracted silence. She regarded him speculatively, delaying answer.
Then, "I couldn't tell you like this, now; it would be too silly; you
would laugh at me. I hadn't meant to say even what I did. I'd prefer to
ignore it."
"What did you mean, what premonition came to you?" he insisted crudely.
She seemed to draw away from him, increase in years and an attitude of
tolerant amusement. Only an immediate reply would save them, he
realized. He leaned forward unsteadily, with clenched hands. "I warned
you," she proceeded lightly; "and if you do laugh my pride will suffer."
In spite of her obvious determination to speak indifferently her voice
grew serious, "I had a feeling that you mustn't kiss me, that
this--America, the Province, Myrtle Forge, you, were for something
different. You see, I had always longed for a peculiar experience,
release, and when it came, miraculously, I thought, it must not be
spoiled, turned into the old, old thing. That was all. It was in my
spirit," she added almost defiantly, as if that claim might too be
susceptible of derision.
He settled back into his chair, turning upon her a gloomy vision.
Whatever penalty threatened them, he knew, must fall. Nothing existing
could keep him from it. He felt a fleet sorrow for her in the inevitable
destruction of the release for which she had so long searched, her new
peace, so soon to be smashed. All sorrow for himself had gone under.
Isabel Penny returned to the drawing room, and moved about, her flowered
silk at once gay and obscure in the semidarkness. "The fire, Howat," she
directed; "it's all but out." He stirred the logs into a renewed blaze.
A warm gilding flickered over Ludowika; she smiled at him, relaxed,
content. He was surprised that she could not see the tumultuous feeling
overpowering him. He had heard that women were immediately aware of
such emotion. But he realized that she had been lulled into a false
sense of security, of present immunity from "the old, old thing," by her
own placidity. He did not know when his mother left the room. He
wondered continuously when it would happen, when the bolt would fall,
what she would do. Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle
sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance
through the dark, for a questionable end. This was the least part of
him, insignificant; his passion grew constantly stronger, more brutal.
In a last, vanishing trace of his superior consciousness he recognized
that the thing must have happened to him as it did; it was the price of
his more erect pride, his greater contempt, his solitary and unspent
state.
She rose suddenly and announced that she was about to retire. It saved
them for the moment, for that day; he muttered something
incomprehensible and she was gone.
Isabel Penny returned and took Mrs. Winscombe's place before the fire.
She spoke trivially, at random intervals. A great longing swept over him
to tell his mother everything, try to find an escape in her wise
counsel; but his emotion seemed so ugly that he could not lay it before
her. Besides, he had a conviction that it would be hopeless: he was
gone. She was discussing Ludowika now. "Really," she said, "they seem
very well matched, a good arrangement." She was referring, he realized,
to the Winscombes' experience. He never thought of Felix Winscombe as
married, Ludowika's husband; he had ceased to think of him at all. The
present moment banished everything else. "She has a quality usually
destroyed by life about a Court," the leisurely voice went on; "she
seems quite happy here, for a little, in a way simple. But, curiously
enough, she disturbs your father. He can't laugh with her as he usually
does with attractive women."
It was natural, Howat thought, that Gilbert Penny should be uneasy
before such a direct reminder of the setting from which he had taken
Isabel Howat. It was a life, memories, in which the elder had no part;
that consciousness dictated a part of his father's bitterness toward St.
James, the Royal Government. But Gilbert Penny had never had serious
reason to dread it. His wife had left it all behind, permanently,
without, apparently, a regret. He had a sudden, astonishing community of
feeling with the older man; a momentary dislike of St. James,
Versailles, the entire, treacherous, silk mob. A lover at fourteen!
Howat damned such a betrayal with a bitterness whose base lay deeply
buried in sex jealousy.
"I am glad," the other continued, "that you are not susceptible; I
suppose you'll be off hunting in a day or more; Mrs. Winscombe is bright
wine for a young man. Women like her play at sensation, like eating
figs." He thought contemptuously what nonsense was talked in connection
with feminine intuition; it was nothing more than a polite chimera,
like all the other famous morals and inhibitions supposed to serve and
direct mankind.
He wondered once more about his mother, what the course of her life had
been--happily occupied, filled, or merely self-contained, hiding much in
a deep, even flow? Her head was turned away from him, and he could see
the girlish profile, the astonishing illusion of youth renewed. Howat
wanted to ask her how she had experienced, well--love, since there was
no other word. It had come to her quickly, he knew; her affair with
Gilbert Penny had been headlong, or else it would not have been at all;
yet he felt she had not been the victim of such a tyranny as mastered
himself. But, perhaps, after all, secretly, every one was--just
animal-like. He repudiated this firmly, at once. He himself had felt
that he was not entirely animal.
"The girls," Isabel Penny said, "will be gallopading now. Myrtle has a
new dress, her father gave it to her, an apricot mantua."
"He's really idiotic about Myrtle," Howat declared irritably. His mother
glanced swiftly at him. She made no comment. "Now Caroline! It's
Caroline who ought to marry David Forsythe."
"Such things must fall out as they will."
God, that was true enough, terribly true! He rose and strode into the
farther darkness of the drawing room, returning to the fireplace,
marching away again. He saw the white glimmer of Ludowika's arms; he
had a vision of her tying the broad ribbon about her rounded, silken
knee. "... a man now," his mother's voice was distant, blurred.
"Responsibilities; your father--" He had heard this before without being
moved; but suddenly the words had a new actuality; he was a man now,
that was to say he stood finally, irrevocably, alone, beyond assistance,
advice. He had never heeded them; he had gone a high-handed, independent
way, but the others had been there; unconsciously he had been aware of
them, even counted on them. Now they had vanished.
Caroline and Myrtle, bringing David with them again, returned on the
following morning. It seemed to Howat that the former was almost lovely;
she had a gayer sparkle, a clearer colour, than he had ever seen her
possess before. On the other hand, Myrtle was dull; the dress, it
seemed, had not been the unqualified success she had hoped for.
Something newer had arrived in the meantime from London. Ludowika, it
developed, had one of the later sacques in her boxes; but that, she said
indifferently, must be quite dead now. It seemed to Howat that she too
regarded Myrtle without enthusiasm. Ludowika and Myrtle had had very
little to say to each other; Myrtle studied Mrs. Winscombe's apparel
with a keen, even belligerent, eye; the other patronized the girl in a
species of half absent instruction.
The sky was flawless, leaden blue; the sunlight fell in an enveloping
flood over the countryside, but it was pale, without warmth. There was
no wind, not a leaf turned on the trees--a sinuous sheeting of the
country-side like red-gold armour. But Howat knew that at the first stir
of air the leaves would be in stricken flight, the autumn accomplished.
Caroline dragged him impetuously down into the garden, among the brown,
varnished stems of the withered roses, the sere, dead ranks of scarlet
sage. "He hugged me," she told him; "I was quite breathless. It was in a
hall, dark; but he didn't say anything. What do you think?" There was
nothing definite that he might express; and he patted her shoulder. He
had a new kinship with Caroline; Howat now understood her tempest of
feeling, concealed beneath her commonplace daily aspect.
Myrtle and David joined them, and he left, resumed his place at the high
desk in the counting house. Strangely his energy of being communicated
itself to the prosaic work before him. It was, he suddenly felt,
important for him to master the processes of Myrtle Forge; it would not
do for him to remain merely irresponsible, a juvenile appendage to the
Penny iron. He would need all the position, the weight, he could assume;
and money of his own. He found a savage pleasure in recording every
detail put before him. He compared the value of pig metal, the cost of
charcoal, wages, with the return of the blooms and anconies they shipped
to England. Howat experienced his father's indignation at the manner in
which London limited the Province's industries. For the first time he
was conscious of an actual interest in the success of Myrtle Forge, a
personal concern in its output. He had always visualized it as
automatically prosperous, a cause of large, inexact pride; but now it
was all near to him; he considered the competition rapidly increasing
here, and the jealous menace over seas.
His final trace of careless youth had gone; he felt the advent of the
constant apprehension that underlies all maturity, a sense of the
proximity of blind accident, evil chance, disaster. At last he was
opposed to life itself, with an immense stake to gain, to hold; in the
midst of a seething, treacherous conflict arbitrarily ended by death.
There was no cringing, absolutely no cowardice, in him. He was glad that
it was all immediately about him; he was arrogant in pressing forward to
take what he wanted from existence. He forgot all premonitions, doubt
was behind him; he no longer gauged the value of his desire for Ludowika
Winscombe. She was something he would, had to, have.
David Forsythe sat across the back of a chair in Howat's room as the
latter dressed in the rapidly failing light. David had smuggled his
London coat with the wired tails out to Myrtle Forge, and had the
stiffened portion now spread smoothly out on either side. His cheerful,
freshly-coloured face was troubled; he seemed constantly on the point of
breaking into speech without actually becoming audible. Howat was
thinking of Ludowika. It would happen to-night, he knew. He was at once
apprehensive and glad.
"You knew," David ventured finally, "that I'm supposed to ask Myrtle to
marry me. That is, your father and mine hoped I would. Well," he drew a
deep breath, "I don't think I shall. Of course, she is one of the
prettiest girls any one ever saw, and she's quite bright--it's wonderful
what she has picked up about the Furnace, but yet--" his speech suddenly
ran out. With an effort Howat brought himself back from his own vastly
more important concern. "Yes?" he queried, pausing with his fingers in
the buttonholes of a mulberry damask coat. "I have decided to choose, to
act, for myself," David announced; "this is a thing where every man must
be absolutely free.--Caroline can have me if she likes."
Howat could not avoid a momentary, inward flicker of amusement at David
Forsythe's absolute freedom of choice. He felt infinitely older than the
other, wiser in the circuitous mysteries of being. He pounded David on
the back, exclaimed, "Good!"
"I don't know whether to speak to Abner," the other proceeded
unfilially, "or the great Penny first. I don't care too much for either
job. It would be pleasanter to go to Caroline. I have an idea she
doesn't exactly dislike me."
"Perhaps I oughtn't to tell you," Howat replied gravely; "but Caroline
thinks a lot of you. She has admitted it to me--"
David Forsythe danced agilely about the more serious figure; he kicked
Howat gaily from behind, ironically patted his cheek. "Hell's buttons!"
he cried. "Why didn't you tell me that before? You cast iron ass! I'll
marry Caroline if I have to take her to a charcoal burner's hut. She
would go, too."
Howat Penny gripped the other's shoulder, faced him with grim
determination. "Do you fully realize that Myrtle Forge, Shadrach, will
be us? They will be ours and our wives' and childrens'. We must stand
together, David, whatever happens, whatever we may, personally, think.
The iron is big now, but it is going to be great. We mustn't fail, fall
apart. We'll need each other; there's going to be trouble, I think."
David put out his hand. "I didn't know you felt like that, Howat," he
replied, the effervescent youth vanished from him too. "It's splendid.
We'll hammer out some good blooms together. And for the other, nothing
shall ever make a breach between us."
VI
They went down to the supper table silently, absorbed in thought. David
was placed where Mr. Winscombe had been seated, on Mrs. Penny's right,
and next to Myrtle. Gilbert Penny maintained a flow of high spirits; he
rallied every one at the table with the exception of, Howat noted,
Ludowika. Her hair was simply arranged and undecorated, she wore
primrose with gauze like smoke, an apparently guileless bodice with
blurred, warm suggestions of her fragrant body. Howat was conscious of
every detail of her appearance; she was stamped, as she was that
evening, indelibly on his inner being. He turned toward her but little,
addressed to her only the most perfunctory remarks; he was absorbed in
the realization that the most fateful moment he had met was fast
approaching. His father's cheerful voice continued seemingly
interminably; now it was a London beauty to which he affected to believe
David had given his heart. The latter replied stoutly:
"I brought that back safely enough; it's here the danger lies.
Humiliating to cross the ocean and then be lost in Canary Creek."
Gilbert Penny shot an obvious, humorous glance at Myrtle. She did not
meet it, but sat with lowered gaze. Caroline made a daring "nose" at
Howat; but he too failed to acknowledge her message. David's affair had
sunk from his thoughts. The drawing room was brilliantly lighted: there
was a constant stir of peacock silk, of yellow and apple green and coral
lutestring, of white shoulders, in the gold radiance of candles like
stiff rows of narcissi. Caroline drifted finally into the chamber back
of the dining room, and they could hear the tenuous vibrations of the
clavichord. Soon David had disappeared. The elder Penny discovered
Myrtle seated sullenly at her mother's side; and, taking her arm, he
escorted her in the direction of the suddenly silenced music.
Ludowika sat on a small couch away from the fireplace. She smiled at
Howat as he moved closer to her. She never did things with her hands, he
noticed, like the women of his family, embroidery or work on little
heaps of white. She sat motionless, her arms at rest. His mother seemed
far away. The pounding recommenced unsteadily at his wrists, the room
wavered in his vision. Ludowika permeated him like a deep draught of
intoxicating, yellow wine. He had a curious sensation of floating in
air, of tea roses. It was clear that, folded in happy contentment, she
still realized nothing.... She must know now, any minute. Howat saw that
his mother had gone.
He rose and stood before Ludowika, leaning slightly over her. She
raised her gaze to his; her interrogation deepened. Then her expression
changed, clouded, her lips parted; she half raised a hand. Her breast
rose and fell, sharply, once. Howat picked her up by the shoulders and
crushed her, silk and cool gauze and mouth, against him. Ludowika's
skirts billowed about, half hid, him; a long silence, a long kiss.
Her head fell back with a sigh, she drooped again upon the sofa. She
hadn't struggled, exclaimed; even now there was no revolt in her
countenance, only a deep trouble. "Howat," she said softly, "you
shouldn't have done that. It was brutal, selfish. You--you knew, after
all that I told you; the premonition--" she broke off, anger shone
brighter in her eyes. "How detestable men are!" She turned away from
him, her profile against the brocade of the sofa. Unexpectedly he was
almost cold, and self-contained; he saw the gilded angle of a frame on
the wall, heard the hickory disintegrating on the hearth.
He had kissed her as a formal declaration; what must come would come. "I
was an imbecile," she spoke in a voice at once listless and touched with
bitterness; "Arcadia," she laughed. "I thought it was different here,
that you were different; that feeling in my heart--but it's gone now,
dead. I suppose I should thank you. But, do you know, I regret it; I
would rather have stayed at St. James all my life and kept that single
little delusion, longing. The premonition was nonsense, too; nothing
new, unexpected, can happen. Kisses are almost the oldest things in the
world, kisses and their results. What is there to be afraid of? You see,
I learned it all quite young.
"I am an imbecile; only it came so suddenly. You would laugh at me if
you knew what I was thinking. I can even manage a smile at myself." She
appeared older, the Mrs. Winscombe who had first come to Myrtle Forge;
her mouth was flippant. "The eternal Suzanna," she remarked, "the
monotonous elders or younger." He paid little heed to her words; the
coldness, the indifference, were fast leaving him. His heart was like
the trip hammer at the Forge. Yellow wine. He was still standing above
her, and he took her hands in his. She put up her face with a movement
of bravado, of mockery, which he ignored.
"I didn't choose it," he told her; "it's ruined all that I was. Now, I
don't care; there is nothing else. One thing you are wrong about--if
there had been another in your life like myself you wouldn't be here
with--as you are. I'm certain of that. It's the only thing I do know. My
feeling may be a terrible misfortune; I didn't make it; I can't see the
end. There isn't any, I think." He pressed her hands to his throat with
a gesture that half dragged her from the sofa. A deeper colour stained
her cheeks, and her breath caught. "Endless," he repeated, losing the
word on her lips. She wilted into a corner of the sofa, and he strode
over to the fire, stood gazing blindly at the pulsating embers. Howat
returned to her almost immediately, but she made no sign of his
nearness. The bitterness had left her face, she appeared weary, pallid;
she sat heedlessly crumpling her flounces, a hand bent back on its
wrist.
"I think it is something in myself," she said presently; "something a
little wrong that I'm dreadfully tired of. Always men. Out here a Howat
Penny, just like any fribble about the Court. God, I'd like to be that
girl across the road, in the barnyard." He was back at the fire again
when Gilbert Penny entered the room. The latter dropped a palm on
Howat's shoulder.
"Schwar says the last sow metal was faulty," he declared; "the
Furnace'll need some attention with Abner Forsythe deeper in the
Provincial affairs. Splendid thing David's back. Look for a lot from
David." Howat hoped desperately that Ludowika would not leave, go to her
room, while his father was talking. "David says you have an
understanding, will do great things. I hope so. I hope so. I won't damn
him as an example but he will do you no harm. That is, if he touches
your confounded person at all. A black Penny, Mrs. Winscombe," he said,
turning to the figure spread in pale silk on the sofa. "Fortunate for
you to have no such confounded, stubborn lot on your hands. Although,"
he added laughingly, "Felix Winscombe's no broken reed. But this boy of
mine--you might think he had been run out of Shadrach," he tapped a
finger on Howat's back. "Not like those fellows about the Court, anyway.
They tell me he'll go fifty miles through the woods in a day. Now if we
could only keep that at the iron trade--"
His father went on insufferably, without end. Howat withdrew stiffly
from the other's touch. Irresistibly he drifted back, back to Ludowika.
She had not moved; her bent hand seemed dislocated. An immense
tenderness for her overwhelmed him; his sheer passion vapourized into a
poignant sweetness of solicitous feeling. He was protective; his jaw set
rigidly, he enveloped her in an angry barrier from all the world. He had
a sensation of standing at bay; in his mulberry damask, in brocade and
silver buttons, he had an impression of himself stooped and savage,
confronting a menacing dark with Ludowika flung behind him. Inexplicable
tremors assailed him, vast fears. His father's deliberate voice
destroyed the illusion; he saw the candles about him like white and
yellow flowers, the suave interior. The others had returned. He heard
Ludowika speaking; she laughed. His tension relaxed. Suddenly he was
flooded with happiness, as if he had been drenched in sparkling,
delightful water. He joined in the gay, trivial clamour that arose.
Isabel Penny gazed at him speculatively.
There would, it appeared, be no other opportunity that evening for him
to declare himself to Ludowika. He was vaguely conscious of his mother's
scrutiny; he must avoid exposing Ludowika to any uncomfortable
surmising. His thoughts leaped forward to a revelation that he began to
feel was inevitable; he got even now a tangible pleasure from the
consideration of an announcement of his passion for Ludowika Winscombe,
a sheer insistence upon it in the face of an antagonistic world. But for
the present he must be careful. This, the greatest event that had
befallen him, summed up all that he innately was; it expressed him, a
black Penny, absolutely; Howat felt the distance between himself, his
convictions, and the convictions of the world, immeasurably widening.
His feeling for Ludowika symbolized his isolation from the interwoven
fabric of the plane of society; it gave at last a tangible bulk to his
scorn.
As he had feared, presently she rose and went to her room. Myrtle took
her place on the sofa. Gilbert Penny vanished with a broad witticism at
the well known preference of youth, in certain situations, for its own
council. David Forsythe made a wry face at Howat. Caroline gaily laid
her arm across her mother's shoulder and propelled her from the room.
David stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor; and Howat, hardly less
clumsy, took his departure. He found Caroline awaiting him in the shadow
of his door; she followed him and stood silent while he made a light.
Her face was serious, and her hands clasped tightly. "Howat," she said
in a small voice, "it's--it's, that is, David loves me. Whatever do you
suppose father and Myrtle will say?"
"What do you think David is saying to Myrtle now?" he asked drily. "I am
glad, Caroline; everything worked out straight for you. David is a
damned good Quaker. For some others life isn't so easy." She laid a warm
hand on his shoulder. "I wish you were happy, Howat." A slight
irritation seized him at the facile manner in which she radiated her
satisfaction, and he moved away. "David's going back to-night. I wish he
wouldn't," she said troubled. "That long, dark way. Anything might
happen. But he has simply got to be at his father's office in the
morning. He is going to speak to him first, see what will be given us at
the Furnace."
"It should be quite a family party at breakfast," Howat predicted.
VII
He was entirely right. Ludowika rarely appeared so early; Myrtle's face
seemed wan and pinched, and her father rallied her on her indisposition
after what should have been an entrancing evening. She declared
suddenly, "I hate David Forsythe!" Gilbert Penny was obviously startled.
Caroline half rose, as if she had finished breakfast; but she sat down
again with an expression of determination. Howat looted about from his
removed place of being. "I do!" Myrtle repeated. "At first he seemed to
like--I mean I liked him, and then everything changed, got horrid. Some
one interfered." Resentment, suspicion, dominated her, she grew shrill
with anger. "I saw him making faces at Howat, as if he and Howat, as if
Howat had, well--"
"Don't generalize," said Howat coolly; "be particular."
"As if you had deliberately spoiled any chance, yes," she declared
defiantly, "any chance I had."
"That's ridiculous," Gilbert Penny declared. "What," he asked his wife,
"are they all driving at?" She professed herself equally puzzled. "Howat
would say nothing disadvantageous to young Forsythe. He knows what we
all hope." Caroline suddenly leaned forward, speaking in a level voice:
"This has nothing to do with Howat, but with me. I am going to tell you
at once, so that you can all say what you wish, get as angry as you
like, and then accept what--what had to be. David and I love each other;
we are going to be married."
Gilbert Penny's surprise slowly gave place to a dark tide suffusing his
countenance. "You and David," he half stuttered, "getting married--like
that." Myrtle was rigid in an indignation that left her momentarily
without speech. Mrs. Penny, Howat saw, drew into the slight remoteness
from which she watched the conflicts of her family. "I know I'm
fearfully bold, yes, indecent," Caroline went on, "and undutiful,
impertinent. I'm sorry, truly, for that. Perhaps you'll forgive me,
later. But I won't apologize for loving David."
"Incredible," her father pronounced. "A girl announcing, without the
slightest warrant or authority, that she intends to marry. And trampling
on her sister's heart in the bargain." Howat expostulated, "What does it
matter which he marries? The main affair is to consolidate the
families." The elder glared at him. "Be silent!" he commanded. Howat
Penny's ever present resentment rose to the surface. "I am not a girl,"
he stated; "nor yet a nigger. And, personally, I think David was
extremely wise."
"I was sure of it," Myrtle cried; "he--he has talked against me, helped
Caroline behind my back." She sobbed thinly, with her arm across her
eyes. "If I thought anything like that had occurred," their father
asserted, "Howat would--" he paused, gazing heavily about at his family.
Howat's ill temper arose. "Yes--?" he demanded with a sharp inflection.
"Be still, Howat," his mother said unexpectedly. "This is all very
regrettable, Gilbert," she told her husband; "but it is an impossible
subject of discussion." Gilbert Penny continued hotly, "He wouldn't stay
about here." She replied equably, "On the contrary, Howat shall be at
Myrtle Forge until he himself chooses to leave."
Howat was conscious of a surprise almost as moving as that pictured on
his father's countenance. He had never heard Isabel Penny speak in that
manner before; perhaps at last she would reveal what he had long
speculated over--her true, inner situation. But he saw at once that he
was to be again disappointed; the speaker was immediately enveloped in
her detachment, the air that seemed almost one of a spectator in the
Penny household. She smiled deprecatingly. How fine she was, Howat
thought. Gilbert Penny did not readily recover from his consternation;
his surprise had notably increased to that. His mouth was open, his face
red and agitated. "Before the children, Isabel," he complained. "Don't
know what to think. Surely, surely, you don't uphold Howat? Outrageous
conduct if it's true. And Myrtle so gentle, never hurt any one in her
life." Myrtle circled the table, and found a place in his arms. "If they
had only told me," she protested. "If Caroline--" He patted her flushed
cheeks. "Don't give it another thought," he directed; "a girl as pretty
as you! I'll take you to London, where you'll have a string of men, not
Quakers, fine as peacocks." He bent his gaze on his son.
"Didn't I tell you last evening that the cast metal has been light?" he
demanded. "Must I beg you to go to the Furnace? Or perhaps that too
conflicts with your mother's fears for you. There are stumps in the
road." There was a whisper of skirts at the door, and Ludowika Winscombe
stood smiling at them. Myrtle turned her tear-swollen face upon her
father's shoulder. Howat wondered if Ludowika had slept. He endeavoured
in vain to discover from her serene countenance something of her
thoughts of what had occurred. He had a sudden inspiration.
"I can go to Shadrach as soon as Adam saddles a horse," he told his
father. "You were curious about the Furnace," he added to Ludowika,
masking the keen anxiety he felt at what was to follow; "it's a sunny
day, a pleasant ride." She answered without a trace of feeling other
than a casual politeness. "Thank you, since it will be my only
opportunity. I'll have to change." She was gazing, Howat discovered,
lightly at Isabel Penny. "I must get the figures from Schwar," his
father said. Before he left the room he moved to his wife's side, rested
his hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him with a reassuring nod.
Howat saw that, whatever it might be, the bond between them was secure,
stronger than any differences of prejudices or blood, more potent than
time itself. The group, the strain, about the table, broke up.
The horses footed abreast over the road that crossed the hills and
forded the watered swales between Myrtle Forge and the Furnace.
Ludowika, riding astride, enveloped and hooded in bottle green, had her
face muffled in a linen riding mask. He wondered vainly what expression
she bore. Speech he found unexpectedly difficult. His passion mounted
and mounted within him, all his being swept unresistingly in its tide.
Howat said at last:
"Are you still so angry at life, at yourself?"
"No," she replied; "I slept that foolishness away. I must have sounded
like a character in _The Lying Valet._" Her present mood obscurely
troubled him; he infinitely preferred her in the pale crumpled silk and
candle light of the evening before. "I wish I could tell you what I
feel," he said moodily.
"Why not?" she replied. "It's the most amusing thing possible. You
advance and I seem to retreat; you reach forward and grasp--my fan, a
handful of petticoat; you protest and sulk--"
"Perhaps in Vauxhall," he interrupted her savagely, "but not here, not
like that, not with me. This is not a gavotte. I didn't want it; I tried
to get away; but it, you, had me in a breath. At once it was all over.
God knows what it is. Call it love. It isn't a thing under a hedge, I
tell you that, for an hour. It's stronger than anything else that will
ever touch me, it will last longer.... Like falling into a river.
Perhaps I'm different, a black Penny, but what other men take like
water, a woman, is brandy for me. I'm--I'm not used to it. I haven't
wanted Kate here and Mary there; but only you. I've got to have you," he
said with a marked simplicity. "I've got to, or there will be a bad
smash."
Ludowika rode silently, hid in her mask. He urged his horse closer to
her, and laid a hand on her swaying shoulder. "I didn't choose this," he
repeated; "the blame's somewhere else." He felt a tremor run through
her. "Why say blame?" she finally answered. "I hate moralities and
excuses and tears. If you are set on being gloomy, and talking to heaven
about damnation, take it all away from me." A shadow moved across the
countryside, and he saw clouds rising out of the north. A sudden wind
swept through the still forest, and immediately the air was aflame with
rushing autumn leaves. They fell across Howat's face and eddied about
the horses' legs. The grey bank deepened in space, the sun vanished; the
wind was bleak. It seemed to Howat Penny that the world had changed,
its gold stricken to dun and gaunt branches, in an instant. The road
descended to the clustered stone houses about Shadrach Furnace.
The horses were left under the shed of the smithy at the primitive cross
roads. Thomas Gilkan had gone to the river about a purchase of casting
sand, but expected to be back for the evening run of metal. Fanny was
away, Howat learned, visiting Dan Hesa's family. They would, of course,
have dinner at the Heydricks; and the latter sent a boy home to prepare
his wife. Ludowika and Howat aimlessly followed the turning road that
mounted to the coal house. A levelled and beaten path, built up with
stone, led out to the top of the stack, where a group of sooty figures
were gathered about the clear, almost smokeless flame of the blast.
Below they lingered on the grassy edge of the stream banked against the
hillside and flooding smoothly to the clamorous fall and revolving wheel
by the wood shed that covered the bellows. Pointed downward the latter
spasmodically discharged a rush of air with a vast creasing of their
dusty leather. A procession of men were wheeling and dumping slag into a
dreary area beyond. There was a stir of constant life about the Furnace,
voices calling, the ringing of metal on metal, the creak of barrows,
dogs barking. The plaintive melody of a German song rose on the air.
Behind a blood red screen of sumach Howat again kissed Ludowika. Her
arms tightened about his neck; she raised her face to him with an
abandon that blinded him to the world about, and his entire being was
drawn in an agony of desire to his lips. She sank limply into his rigid
embrace, a warm sensuous burden with parted lips.
At the Heydricks he ate senselessly whatever was placed before him. The
house, solidly built of grey stone traced with iron, had two rooms on
the lower floor. The table was set before a fireplace that filled the
length of the wall, its mantel a great, roughly squared log mortared
into the stones on either side. Small windows opened through deep
embrasures, a door bound with flowering, wrought hinges faced the road,
and a narrow flight of stairs, with a polished rail and white post, led
above. Mrs. Heydrick, a large woman in a capacious Holland apron and
worsted shoes, moved about the table with steaming pewter trenchards
while Heydrick and their guests dined.
Howat Penny's face burned as if from a violent fever; his veins, it
seemed, were channels through which ran burning wine. He was deafened by
the tumult within him. Heydrick's voice sounded flat and blurred. They
were conscious at Shadrach of the thin quality of the last metal. The
charge had been poorly made up; he, Heydrick, had said at once, when the
cinders had come out black, that the lime had been short. His words fled
through Howat's brain like racing birds; the latter's motions were
unsteady, inexact.
The clouds had now widened in a sagging plain across the sky, some
scattered rain pattered coldly on the fallen leaves. It was pleasant
before the hickory burning in the deep fireplace; the Heydricks had
taken for granted that they would wait there for Thomas Gilkan, and they
protested when Howat and Ludowika moved toward the door. But Howat was
restless beyond any possibility of patiently hearing Mrs. Heydrick's
cheerful, trivial talk. He was so clumsy with Ludowika's cloak that she
took it from him, and, with a careless, feminine scorn in common with
Mrs. Heydrick, got into it without assistance. They stood for a while in
the cast house, watching a keeper rolling and preparing the pig bed for
the evening flow. They were pressed close together in a profound gloom
of damp warmth rising from the wet sand and furnace. An obscure figure
moved a heavy and faintly clanging pile of tamping bars. The sound of
rain on the roof grew louder, continuous. A poignant and then strangling
emotion clutched at Howat Penny's throat. Silently they turned from the
murky interior.
A grey rain was plastering the leaves on the soggy ground; puddles
accumulated in the scarred road; the smoke from the smithy hung low on
the roof. At the left a small, stone house had a half opened door.
Ludowika looked within. "For storing," Howat told her. Inside were piled
sledges and cinder hooks, bars and moulds, and bales of tanned hides.
Ludowika explored in the shadows. A sudden eddy of wind slammed to the
door through which they had entered. They drew together irresistibly,
and stood for a long while, crushed in each other's arms; then Ludowika
stepped back with her cloak sliding from her shoulders. She rested
against precarious steps leading aloft through a square opening in the
ceiling. "For storage," he said again. He thought his throat had closed,
and that he must suffocate. A mechanical impulse to show her what was
above set his foot upon the lower step, and he caught her waist. "You
see," he muttered; "things for the store ... the men, wool stockings,
handkerchiefs ... against their pay." The drumming rain was scarcely a
foot above their heads; an acrid and musty odour rose from the boxes and
canvas-sewed bales about the walls. "Ludowika," Howat said. He
stopped--she had shut her eyes. All that was Howat Penny, that was
individually sentient, left him with a pounding rush.
A faint sound, infinitely far removed, but insistent, penetrated his
blurred senses. It grew louder; rain, rain beating on the roof. Voices,
somewhere, outside. Ringing blows on an anvil, a blacksmith, and horses
waiting. Myrtle Forge. Ludowika. Ludowika Winscombe. No, by God, never
that last again!
He stood outside with his head bare and his face lifted to the cool
shock of the rain. Ludowika was muffled in her cloak. Howat could see a
renewed activity in the cast house; a group of men were gathered about
the furnace hearth, in which he saw Thomas Gilkan. He moved forward to
call the latter; but a tapping was in progress, and he was forced to
wait. Gilkan swung a long bar against a low, clay face, and instantly
the murky interior was ablaze with a crackling radiance against which
the tense figures wavered in magnified silhouettes. The metal poured out
of the furnace in a continuous, blinding white explosion hung with fans
of sparkling gold; the channels of the pig bed rapidly filled with the
fluid iron.
Finally Howat Penny lifted Ludowika to her saddle and swung himself up
at her side. The rain had stopped; below the eastern rim of cloud an
expanse showed serenely clear. Their horses soberly took the rise beyond
Shadrach Furnace and merged into the gathering dusk of the forest road.
A deep tranquillity had succeeded the tempest of Howat's emotions; it
would not continue, he knew; already the pressure of immense, new
difficulties gathered about him; but momentarily he ignored them. He
searched his feelings curiously.
The fact that struck him most sharply was that he was utterly without
remorse for what had occurred; it had been inevitable. He experienced
none of the fears against which Ludowika had exclaimed. He lingered over
no self-accusations, the reproach of adultery. He was absolutely unable
then to think of Felix Winscombe except as a person generally
unconcerned. If he repeated silently the term husband it was without
any sense of actuality; the satirical individual in the full bottomed
wig, now absent in Maryland, had no importance in the passionate
situation that had arisen between Ludowika and himself. Felix Winscombe
would of course have to be met, dealt with; but so would a great many
other exterior conditions.
Ludowika, in her linen mask, was enigmatic, a figure of mystery. A
complete silence continued between them; at times they ambled with his
hand on her body; then the inequalities of the road forced them apart.
The clouds dissolved, the sky was immaculate, green, with dawning stars
like dim white flowers. A faint odour of the already mouldering year
rose from the wet earth. Suddenly Ludowika dragged the mask from her
face. Quivering with intense feeling she cried:
"I'm glad, Howat! Howat, I'm glad!"
He contrived to put an arm about her, crush her to him for a precarious
moment. "We have had an unforgettable day out of life," she continued
rapidly; "that is something. It has been different, strangely apart,
from all the rest. The rain and that musty little store house and the
wonderful iron; a memory to hold, carry away--"
"To carry where?" he interrupted. "You must realize that I'll never let
you go now. I will keep you if we have to go beyond the Endless
Mountains. I will keep you in the face of any man or opposition
created."
A wistfulness settled upon her out of which grew a slight hope. "I am
afraid of myself, Howat," she told him; "all that I have been, my
life--against me. But, perhaps, here, with you, it might be different.
Perhaps I would be constant. Perhaps all the while I have needed this.
Howat, do you think so? Do you think I could forget so much, drop the
past from me, be all new and happy?"
He reassured her, only half intent upon the burden of her words. He
utterly disregarded anything provisional in their position; happiness or
unhappiness were unconsidered in the overwhelming determination that she
should never leave him. No remote question of that entered his brain.
The difficulties were many, but he dismissed them with an impatient
gesture of his unoccupied hand. Gilbert Penny would be heavily
censorious; he had, Howat recognized, the moral prejudices of a solid,
unimaginative blood. But, lately, his father had sunk to a place
comparatively insignificant in his thoughts. This was partly due to the
complete manner in which Isabel Penny had silenced the elder at
breakfast. His mother, Howat gladly felt, would give him the sympathy of
a wise, broad understanding. David and Caroline would interpose no
serious objection. Felix Winscombe remained; a virile figure in spite of
his years; a man of assured position and a bitter will.
He determined to speak on the day that Felix Winscombe returned from
Annapolis; there would be no concealment of what had occurred, and no
hypocrisy. A decent regret at Winscombe's supreme loss. The other would
not relinquish Ludowika without a struggle. Who would? It was
conceivable that he would summon the assistance of the law, conceivable
but not probable; the situation had its centre in a purely personal
pride. Nothing essential could be won legally. A physical encounter was
far more likely. Howat thought of that coldly. He had no chivalrous
instinct to offer himself as a sop to conventional honour. In any
struggle, exchange of shots, he intended to be victorious.... He would
have the naming of the conditions.
"It's beautiful here," Ludowika broke into his speculations; "the great
forests and Myrtle Forge. I can almost picture myself directing servants
like your mother, getting supplies out of the store, and watching the
charcoal and iron brought down to the Forge. The sound of the hammer has
become a part of my dreams. And you, Howat--I have never before had a
feeling like this for a man. There's a little fear in it even. It must
be stronger than the other, than Europe; I want it to be." They could
see below them the lighted windows at Myrtle Forge. The horses turned
unguided into the curving way across the lawn. A figure stood
obsequiously at the door; it was, Howat saw with deep automatic
revulsion, the Italian servant. He wondered again impatiently at the
persistently unpleasant impression the other made on him. Gilbert Penny
was waiting in the hall, and Howat told him fully the result of his
investigation.
His father nodded, satisfied. "You are taking hold a great bit better,"
he was obviously pleased. "We must go over the whole iron situation with
the Forsythes. It's time you and David stepped forward. I am getting
bothered by new complications; the thing is spreading out so
rapidly--steel and a thousand new methods and refinements. And the
English opposition; I'm afraid you'll come into that."
Ludowika did not again appear that evening, and Howat sat informally
before a blazing hearth with his mother, Gilbert Penny and Caroline.
Myrtle had retired with a headache. Howat felt pleasantly settled,
almost middle-aged; he smoked a pipe with the deliberate gestures of his
father. He wondered at the loss of his old restlessness, his revolt from
just such placid scenes as the present. Never, he had thought, would he
be caught, bound, with invidious affections, desires. Howat, a black
Penny! He had been subjugated by a force stronger than his rebellious
spirit. Suddenly, recalling Ludowika's doubt, he wondered if he would be
a subject to it always. All the elements of his captivity lay so
entirely outside of him, beyond his power to measure or comprehend, that
a feeling of helplessness came over him. He again had the sense of being
swept twisting in an irresistible flood. But his confusion was dominated
by one great assurance--nothing should deprive him of Ludowika. An
intoxicating memory invaded him, touched every nerve with delight and a
tyrannical hunger. His fibre seemed to crumble, his knees turn to dust.
Years ago he had been poisoned by berries, and limpness almost like this
had gone softly, treacherously, through him.
VIII
They entered into a period of secret contentment and understanding.
Ludowika displayed a grave interest in the details of the house and iron
at Myrtle Forge; he explained the processes that resulted in the wrought
blooms despatched by tons in the lumbering, mule-drawn wagons. They
explored the farm, where she listened approvingly to the changes he
proposed making, kitchen gardens to be planted, the hedges of roses and
gravelled paths to be laid--for her. She suggested an Italian walk,
latticed above, with a stone seat, and was indicating a corner that
might be transformed into a semblance of an angle of Versailles, when,
suddenly, she stopped, and clasped his wrist.
"No! No!" she exclaimed, with surprising energy. "We'll have no France,
no court, here, but only America; only you and myself, with no past, no
memories, but just the future." How that was to be realized neither of
them considered; they avoided all practical issues, difficulties. They
never mentioned Felix Winscombe's name. However, a long communication
came from him for his wife. She read it thoughtfully, in the drawing
room, awaiting dinner. No one else but Howat was present, and he was
standing with his hand on her shoulder. "Felix hasn't been well," she
remarked presently. "For the first time he has spoken to me of his age.
The Maryland affair drags, and that has wearied him."
"What does he say about returning?" Howat bluntly asked.
"Shortly, he hopes; that is, in another ten days. He says there is a
good ship, the _Lindamira_, by the middle of November." Howat said,
"Excellent." Ludowika gazed at him swiftly. "It will be difficult." His
face became grim, but he made no direct reply. A silence fell on the
room through which vibrated the blows of the trip hammer at the Forge.
The day was grey and definitely cold; a small cannon stove glowed in the
counting house; but Ludowika kept mostly to her room. She sent him a
note by the Italian, and Howat eyed the fellow bowing in the doorway. A
flexibility that seemed entirely without bones. His eyes were jet slits,
his lips shaven and mobile; a wig was repulsively saturated with scented
grease. Yet it was not in actual details that he oppressed Howat; but by
the vague suggestion of debasing commendations, of surreptitious
understanding, insinuations. He seemed, absurdly, unreal, a symbol the
intent of which Howat missed; he suppressed an insane movement to touch
the Italian, discover if he was actually before him.
He reread Ludowika's note whenever he was not actually employed in
recording, until he was obliged to conceal it in the Forge book.
Later Abner Forsythe arrived with David, and there was a stir of
preparing rooms and communication with the farm. David's mother was
dead, and Abner conducted the wedding negotiations with the Pennys. "I
thought it would be the pretty little one," he said at the table, with a
Quaker disregard of small niceties of feeling; "but, Gilbert, any girl
of yours would be more than the young men of the present deserve." It
was a difficult conversation for every one but Ludowika and Abner
Forsythe. A greater ease appeared after supper. David and Caroline
disappeared in the direction of the clavichord, from which sounded some
scattered, perfunctory measures. The two elder men returned, over a
decanter of French spirits, to the inevitable and engrossing subject of
iron and the Crown regulations; Myrtle sat stiffly before the fireplace
with Isabel Penny; and Howat moved up and across the room, his gaze
lying on Ludowika, spread in an expanse of orange chiffon and bold
silver tracery on the small sofa.
She smiled at him once, but, for the most part, she was lost in revery.
Ludowika had a fan, to hold against the fire; and her white fingers were
playing with its polished black sticks and glazed paper printed with an
ornamental bar of music. A faint colour stained her cheeks as he watched
her, and set his heart tumultuously beating. He told himself over and
over, with an unabated sense of wonder, that she was his. He longed for
the moment when they could discard all pretence and be frankly,
completely, together. That must happen after Felix Winscombe arrived.
Meanwhile he was forced to content himself with a look, a quick or
lingering contact of fingers, the crush of her body against his
momentarily in a passage. They had returned once to the rock where he
had first been intoxicated by her; in a strangling wave of emotion he
had taken her into his arms; but she had broken away. The width of the
stream and screen of trees had apparently disconcerted Ludowika, and she
contrived to make him feel inexcusably young, awkward.
But usually he dominated her; there was a depth to his passion that
achieved patience, the calmness of unassailable fortitude. She gazed at
him often with a surprise that bordered on fear; again she would delight
in his mastery, beg him to hold her forever safe against the past. He
reassured her of his ability and determination to accomplish that; there
was not the shadow of a doubt in his own mind. He was more troubled now
than formerly; but he was eager for the climax to pass, impatient to
claim his own.
As if a dam had been again thrown across the flood of his emotions he
felt them mounting, growing more and more irrepressible. He slept in
feverish snatches, with gaps in which he stared wide-eyed into the dark,
trying to realize his coming joy, visualizing Ludowika, a brilliant
apparition of flowing silk, on the night. He thought of the store house
at the Furnace, of the rain beating on the roof, and Ludowika ... God,
if that old man would only return, go, leave them! The clouds vanished
and left the nights emerald clear, the constellations glittered in
frosty immensities of silence. He stood at the open window with his
shoulders bare, revelling in the cold air that flowed over him, defying
winter, death itself. The moon waned immutably.
David was now at Shadrach Furnace, living with the Heydricks, and the
necessities that brought him to Myrtle Forge were endless. He was
absolutely happy, and Howat watched him with mingled longing and envy.
His affair, darker, more tragic in spite of a consummation that must be
joyous, seemed infinitely more mature. Caroline was a nice enough girl,
but Ludowika was supremely fascinating. David amused him:
"Caroline is a miracle. Of course there are prettier, and Mrs. Winscombe
has more air; but none has Caroline's charming manner. Of course, you
have noticed it. Even a thick-headed brother couldn't miss that. We have
plans for you, too. And it's no good your looking glum; we'll glum you."
The amusement faded from Howat's countenance, and he listened sullenly
to the end of the raillery. His temper was growing daily more uneven,
the delight had largely left his reflections. His passion had become too
insistent for happy conjecturing; the visions of Ludowika now only
tormented him. Her eyes were like burning sapphires, her warm palms
caressed his face; he was increasingly gaunt and shadowed. Once he gave
a note for her to the Italian servant, loathing the hand that adroitly
covered the folded sheet, the other's oblique smile; but she sent back
word that she was suffering from a headache. He began to plan so that he
would intercept her in unexpected places. She, too, was passionate in
her admissions; but, somehow, some one always stumbled toward them, or
they were summoned from beyond. He began to feel that this was not mere
chance, but desired, deliberately courted, by Ludowika. Very well, he
would end it all, as it were, with a shout when Felix Winscombe came
back.
When Felix Winscombe came back!
He was, too, increasingly aware of his mother's scrutiny. Howat was
certain that Isabel Penny had surmised a part of his feeling for
Ludowika. He didn't greatly care; any one might know, he thought
contemptuously. It had destroyed his sympathetic feeling for his mother,
the only considerate bond that had existed with his family.
Unconsciously he placed her on one side of a line, the other held only
Ludowika and himself.
He explained this to her in a sere reach of the garden. It was
afternoon, the sun low and a haze on the hills. Ludowika had on a
scarlet wrap, curiously vivid against the withered, brown aspect of the
faded flower stems. "You and me," he repeated. She gazed, without
answering, at the barrier of hills that closed in Myrtle Forge. From
the thickets came the clear whistling of partridges, intensifying the
unbroken tranquillity that surrounded the habitations. Howat was
suddenly conscious of the pressure of vast, unguessed regions, primitive
forces, illimitable wildernesses. It brought uppermost in him a
corresponding zest in the sheer spaciousness of the land, a feeling
always intensified by the thought of England. "The Province," he said
disjointedly, "a place for men. Did you see those that followed the road
this morning? Perhaps five with their women, some pack horses, kitchen
tins and hide tents. The men wore buckskin, and furred caps, and the
women's skirts were sewed leather. One was tramping along with a feeding
baby. Well, God knows where they have been, how many days they have
walked; their shoes were in shreds. And their faces, thin and serious,
have looked steadily over rifles at death. The women, too. You'll only
get them here, in a big country, a new--"
"They were terrible," Ludowika declared; "savage. I was glad when they
were by. The baby at the woman's great breast!" she shuddered at the
memory. "Like animals."
He gazed at her with a slight surprise; he had never heard her speak so
bitterly. He saw her more clearly than ever before; as if her words had
illuminated her extraordinary delicacy of being, had made visible all
the infinite refinements of which she was the result. He had a
recurrence of his sense of her incongruity here, balanced on polished
black pattens, against the darkening hills. The sun disappeared, there
was a cool flare of yellow light, and a feeling of impending evening.
The hills were indigo, the forest a dimmer gold, a wind moved audible in
the dry leaves.
Ludowika gasped. "It's so--so huge," she said, "all the lonely miles. At
times I can't bear to think of it." A faint dread invaded him. "Last
night, when I couldn't sleep, a thing howled in the woods. And I got
thinking of those naked men at the Forge, with their eyes rimmed in
black, and--and--"
He disregarded the publicity of their position and put an arm about her
shoulders, in an overwhelming impulse to calm and reassure her; but she
slipped away. "I'll be all right again," she promised; "but I think it's
more cheerful with the candles. We'll get your sister to play Belshazzar
and pretend we're across the green from St. James."
A mood darker than any he had lately known settled over him. It was
natural for Ludowika to be lonely, at first; but in a little she would
grow to love the wild like himself. She must. The Province was to be her
life. He was standing before the fire in the informal chamber beyond the
dining room, watching his mother's vigorous hands deftly engaged in
embroidery. There was no one present, and a sudden, totally desperate
recklessness possessed him. Isabel Penny said:
"Mr. Winscombe will be here shortly."
"I wish it would be to-night," he declared. She raised her calm gaze
with brows arched in inquiry. "There is something--" he broke off. "She
belongs to me," he said in a low, harsh voice, "and not to that old
man."
Mrs. Penny secured her needle, and put the colourful web aside. She was,
as he had been sure she would be, entirely composed, admirable. Her
questioning look grew keener. "I was afraid of that," she admitted
simply; "after the first. It is very unpleasant and difficult. This is
not London, and your father will make no allowances. You are not any
easier to bend, Howat. With Mrs. Winscombe--" she paused, "I am not
certain. But there is no doubt about the husband."
"She belongs to me," he reiterated sullenly.
"There is no need for you to make yourself offensively clear. I know
something of details of that kind. I told you once that they might mean
only a very little to--to certain women. I am not prepared to judge
about that. But I know you, what bitter feeling you are capable of. You
are a very pure man, Howat; and for that reason such an occurrence would
tear you up and across. There is no use in begging you to be cautious,
diplomatic. Mr. Winscombe, too, is very determined; he has many
advantages--maturity, coldness, experience. He won't spare you, either.
It's excessively unfortunate."
"I'll get it over as quickly as possible. I didn't want the thing to
happen, it wasn't from any choice; it hit me like a bullet. Nothing else
is of the slightest importance. I've gone over this again and again;
I'll tell him and let him try what he can. Ludowika's gone from--from
the fireworks and fiddles and stinking courts; I've got her, and, by
God, I'll keep her!"
"Talk quietly; you can't shout yourself into this. Are you certain that
Mrs. Winscombe really finds the courts--stinking? I remember, at first,"
she stopped. Even in the midst of his passion he listened for what
revelation she might make; but none followed. She was silent for a
minute. "They become a habit," she said finally; "love, loves, become a
habit. Only men brought up in the same atmosphere can understand. At
first Felix Winscombe will be infuriated with you for speaking, then he
will realize more, and the trouble will follow. Are you certain that you
have comprehended? It would be stupid to mistake an episode, you would
succeed only in making yourself ridiculous."
He lifted up both his hands and closed them with a quivering, relentless
force.
"Truly," Isabel Penny remarked, "truly I begin to be sorry for her.
There is something she has yet to learn about men. Nothing can be said;
and that is what your father will not penetrate. Howat, I am even a
little afraid ... now. That, I believe, is unusual for me. It's your
blackness, like powder. The explosion can kill. Nothing may be said.
Life drags us along by the hair."
Her questions about Ludowika joined to the memory of the latter's
revulsion from the primitive conditions of the Province and added to the
heaviness of his heart. He mentally denied his mother's suggestions,
drove them from him, but they left a faint enduring sting, a vague
unrest. His passion for Ludowika swelled, dominated, him; he forgot
everything but his own, supreme desire. Nothing else stood before its
flood; all thought of Ludowika's final happiness was lost with the other
detritus. The tense closing of his hands had symbolized his feeling, his
intent. He held her in a manner as nakedly primitive as the inchoate
sexuality of the emotion that had engulfed him.
Ludowika did not appear for supper, and he was possessed by a misery of
vague apprehensions. He must know something of her thoughts, have a
token from her of some feeling like his own; and, waiting, he stopped
the Italian on the stairs. The latter knew his purpose immediately,
without a spoken word; and he followed Howat's brusque gesture to his
room. He hastily wrote a note; and the latter brought him back a reply,
only partly satisfactory, with an air of relish. For the first time the
affair had the hateful appearance of an intrigue, like a court
adventure. It was the Italian servant, Howat decided; and immediately he
recognized why he disliked the other--it was because he expressed an
aspect of slyness that lay over Ludowika and himself. He put that from
him, too; but it was like brushing away cobwebs. His hunger for Ludowika
increased all the while; it became more burningly material, insatiable
and concrete.
On the day following she clung to him, when opportunity offered, with a
desperate energy of emotion. "You must hold me tighter," she told him.
Her mood rapidly changed, and she complained of the eternal, pervasive
fall of the forge hammer. "It will drive me mad," she declared almost
wildly. "I can't bear to think of its going on and on, year after year;
listening to it--" He heard her with sombre eyes. She had come to the
counting house, empty for the moment but for themselves, and stood with
her countenance shadowed by a frown. "If the hammer stops," he replied,
waving his hand largely, "all this, the Pennys, stop, too. I'm afraid
that sound of beating out iron will be always wrought through our lives.
You will get accustomed to it--"
Her expression grew petulant, resentful. "Do you mean that we couldn't,
perhaps, go to England, if--if I wanted?" He moved closer to her,
brushing the circumference of her skirt. "You asked me to hold you, to
keep you from the past; and I am going to do it. London is all that you
wish to forget; it must go completely out of your life ... never finger
you again." A faint dread that deepened almost to antagonism was
visible on her countenance. "I suppose to men talk like that seems a
sign of strength, of possession; but it doesn't impress women, really.
You see, women give, or else--there is nothing."
"I had no thought of impressing you," he said simply; "I only repeated
what came into my mind, what I mean. It would be a mistake for me to
take you to England, and make both of us miserable. Beside, there is
more to tend here than I'll ever accomplish." She objected, "But other
people, workmen, will do the actual labour. Surely you are not going to
keep on with anything so vulgar--" she indicated the office and desks.
Her features sharpened with contempt. "I'll not be a clerk," he told her
gravely. "But I am responsible for a great deal. You should understand
that for you showed it to me. Most of what I am now has been you." He
reached out his hands to her in a wave of tenderness, but she evaded
him. She stood irresolute for a moment and then abruptly turned and
disappeared.
A white rim of new moon grew visible at the edge of dusk, and he stood
gazing at it before he entered the dwelling. A dull unrest had become
part of his inner tumult, a premonition falling over him like an
advancing shadow. But above all his vague fears rose the knowledge that
he would never let Ludowika go from him; that was the root of his being.
Now she could never leave him. It was natural, he assured himself again,
that she should feel doubts at first; everything here was so different
from the life she had known; and women were variable. He would have to
understand that, learn to accommodate himself to changing, surface
moods, immovable underneath.
She had put on for supper, he saw, a daring dress; and her expression
was that which he had first noted, indifferent, slightly scoffing. Her
shoulders and arms gleamed under fragile gauze, her bodice was hardly
more than a caress of silk. He watched her every movement, and got a
sort of satisfaction from the knowledge that she grew increasingly
disturbed at his unwavering scrutiny. His mother's attitude toward Mrs.
Winscombe had not changed by a shade, an inflection; she was correctly
cordial in her slightly distant manner.
In the ebb and flow of the evening Howat was left with Ludowika for a
little, and he bent over her, kissing her sharply. She was coldly
unresponsive; and he kissed her again, trying vainly to bring some
warmth to her lips. She did not avoid him actually, but he felt that
something in her, essential, slipped aside from his caress. His emotion
changed to a mounting anger. "You will have to get over this now or
later," he asserted. She said surprisingly, "Felix will be home this
week." He stood with an arm half raised, his head turned, as he had been
arrested by her period.
"Well?" he demanded stupidly. Her tone had been beyond his
comprehension. "Felix," she went on, apparently at random, "is very
satisfactory." Something of her intent penetrated his stunned faculties.
He advanced toward her dark with rage. "And if he is," he replied, "it
will do him no good. It will do you no good, if you think--" he broke
off from an accession of emotion. "What damned thing are you thinking
of?"
"The Princess Amelia's stockings," she answered pertly.
"You'll never put them on her again, like any dirty chamber maid."
"Felix, the end of this week," she repeated.
"I'll kill him," Howat whispered; "if he lifts a hand I'll shoot him
through the head. This was forced on me; some one else, responsible, can
pay." Her chin was up, her expression mocking. "Ridiculous, like any
cloddish countryman." She walked deliberately away, seated herself in a
graceful eddy of panniered silk.
A cold torment succeeded his rage; he had the feeling of being
hopelessly trapped, stifling in his passion. He followed her. "Ludowika,
this is horrible, so soon. I am willing to think that I am to blame;
stupid; no experience. You will have to be patient with me. Naturally
everything, now--" he broke off and wandered to a window, holding aside
the draperies, gazing out into the night. The sky was so luminous that
the barriers of surrounding hills were printed clearly against starry
space. The forest swept about in a dark veil; nowhere could be seen a
glimpse of habitation. He heard the wavering cry of an owl.
The Province, immense, secretive! Paper lanterns strung in parks, hid
music, provocative smiles only playing with the heart! It was
tremendously unfortunate. Why must they suffer so unreasonably?
Something, he was certain, had gone wrong; it lay both within them and
outside; a force diverted, a purpose unaccomplished. It bent, broke,
them like two twigs; they were no more than two bubbles, momentarily
reflecting the sky, on a profound depth. A wind stirred, oppressed them,
and they were gone. A great pity for Ludowika took its place in his
feelings. He was sorry for himself. Suddenly the rustle of her skirts
approached.
An infinitely seductive, warm arm crept about his neck; she abandoned
herself to a ruthless embrace. "It's been wonderful, Howat; and--and it
isn't over, yet. Nothing lasts, it's a mistake to demand too much. We
must take what we may. Perhaps, even, later--in London. No, don't
interrupt me. After all, I'm wiser than you are. I was swept away for a
little. Impossibilities. I am what I am. I was always that, inside of
me. If the longing I told you about had been stronger, it, and not the
court, would have made me; but it was no more than a glimpse seen from a
window, a thing far away. I'd never reach it. This, now, has been the
best of me, all."
He had a mingled sense of the truth and futility of her words. It was
as if his passion stood apart from them, dominating them, lashing him
with desire. Nothing she might say, no necessity nor effort, could free
them. The uselessness of words smote him. She spoke again, an urgent
flow of dulcet sound against his ear; but it was without meaning, lost
in the drumming of his blood. The stir of feet approached, and he
released her, moving to the fireplace. It was Caroline. She stopped
awkwardly, advancing a needless explanation of a trivial errand from the
doorway, and vanished.
His position at Myrtle Forge was fast becoming impossible. There would
be an explosion now at any moment. He took the fire tongs and idly
rearranged the wood on the hearth. The flames blazed more brightly,
their reflection squirmed over the lacquer frames on the walls, gleamed
richly on polished black walnut, and fell across the Turkey floor
carpet. It even reached through the pale candle light and flickered on
Ludowika's dull red gown, flowered and clouded with blue. She was turned
away from him, against the window; her shoulders drooped in an attitude
of dejection. The flames died away again.
IX
Ludowika's manner toward him became self-possessed, even animated; and,
Howat thought, preoccupied. She was expectant, with a slightly impatient
air, as if she were looking beyond his shoulder. The cause occurred to
him in a flash that ignited his anger like a ready-charged explosive.
She was waiting, desiring, the return of her husband. Felix Winscombe,
she thought, would mean--escape. He used the word deliberately,
realizing that that now expressed her attitude toward the Province,
toward him. It made no difference in his feeling for her, his
determination that nothing should take her from him. His power of
detachment vanished; he became utterly the instrument of his passion.
He didn't press upon her small expressions of his emotion; somehow,
without struggle, she had made them seem foolish; beyond that they were
inadequate. He was conscious of the approach of a great climax; his
feeling was above the satisfaction of trivial caresses. Soon, he told
himself, soon he would absolutely possess her, for as long as they
lived. Ultimately she must be happy with him. He thought the same things
in a ceaseless round; he walked almost without sight, discharging
mechanically the routine of daily existence; answering inevitable
queries in a perfunctory, dull voice. Myrtle Forge made a distant
background of immaterial colours and sounds for the slightly mocking
figure of Ludowika.
In mid-afternoon David arrived with a face stung scarlet by beating
wind, and a clatter of hoofs. He immediately found Gilbert Penny, and
the two men sat together with grave faces, lowered voices. Howat, who
had left the counting house at the sound of the hurried approach, caught
a few words as he drew near the others:
"... a bad attack, crumpled him up. Coming out from the city now." They
were talking about Felix Winscombe, who, it appeared, had been assaulted
by a knife-like pain; and was returning to Myrtle Forge. "Watlow saw no
reason why it should be dangerous," David continued; "he thinks perhaps
it came from unusual exertions, entertaining. A little rest, he says. He
thinks the Winscombes will be able to sail on the _Lindamira_ as they
planned."
Ludowika listened seriously to Gilbert Penny's few, temperate words of
preparation. "He has had a pain like that before," she told them. "It
always passes away. Felix is really very strong, in spite of his age. He
won't ordinarily go to bed, but I'll insist on that now, simply for
rest." Felix Winscombe appeared at the supper hour. He was helped out
of Abner Forsythe's leather-hung chaise, and assisted into the house.
Howat saw him under the hanging lamp in the hall; with a painful
surprise he realized that he was gazing at the haggard face of an old
man. Before he had never connected the thought of definite age with Mr.
Winscombe. The man's satirical virility had forbidden any of the
patronage unconsciously extended to the aged.
A trace of his familiar, mocking smile remained, but it was tremulous;
it required, Howat saw, great effort. An involuntary admiration
possessed him for the other's unquenchable courage. The latter protested
vehemently against being led to his room by Ludowika; but she ignored
his determination to go into supper, swept him away with a firm arm
about his waist.
The house took on the slightly strange and disordered aspect of illness;
voices were grave, low; in the morning Howat learned that Felix
Winscombe had had another vicious attack in the night. Dr. Watlow
arrived, and demanded assistance. Howat Penny, in the room where
Ludowika's husband lay exhausted in a bed canopied and draped in gay
India silk, followed Watlow's actions with a healthy feeling of
revulsion. The doctor bared Winscombe's spare chest, then filled a
shallow, thick glass with spirits; emptying the latter, he set fire to
the interior of the glass; and, when the blue flame had expired, clapped
the cupped interior over the prostrate man's heart. There was, it
seemed, little else that could be done; bleeding was judged for the
once unexpeditious.
An effort at commonplace conversation was maintained at dinner. Ludowika
openly discussed the arrangements for their return to London. Felix
Winscombe had rallied from the night; his wife said that it was
difficult to restrain him. The most comfortable provisions, she
continued, had been made for their passage on the _Lindamira_. Howat
heard her without resentment. He had no wish to contradict her
needlessly even in thought; he was immovably fixed. Mr. Winscombe's
debilitated return had completely upset his intentions. An entirely
different proceeding would now be demanded, but with an identical end.
What pity he felt for the elder had no power to reach or alter his
passion.
He returned to the counting house, and worked methodically through the
afternoon, with an increasing sense of being involved in an irresistible
movement. This gave him a feeling almost of tranquillity; from the
beginning he had not been responsible. In the face of illness the
Italian servant proved utterly undependable; he cringed, stricken with
dread, from the spectacle of suffering. And when late in the day Mr.
Winscombe, partially drugged with opium, grew consciously weaker,
Howat's assistance was required.
Ludowika now remained in the room with her husband, and there was a
discreet movement in and out by various members of the household.
Isabel Penny remained for an hour, Caroline took her place, Myrtle
fluttered uncertainly in the doorway. Through the evening Felix
Winscombe lay propped on pillows, his head covered by a black gros de
Naples cap. His keen personality waned and revived on his long, yellow
countenance. At one side wigs stood in a row on blocks, a brilliant,
magenta coat lay in a huddle on a chair. At intervals he spoke, in a
thinner, higher voice than customary, petulantly uneasy, or with a
familiar, sardonic inflection. At the latter Ludowika would grow
immensely cheered. She entirely ignored Howat on the occasions when he
was in the room. He saw her mostly bent over leather boxes, into which
disappeared her rich store of silk and gold brocades, shoes of purple
morocco, soft white shifts. Howat watched her without an emotion visible
on his sombre countenance.
Occasionally Mr. Winscombe's tenuous fingers dipped into a snuff box of
black enamel and brilliants, and he lifted his hand languidly. The man's
vitality, his sheer determination, were extraordinary. Even now he was
far from impotence. He had, Howat had learned, completely dominated the
Provincial Councils, forced a mutual compromise and agreement on them.
He spoke of still more complicated affairs awaiting him in England. He
damned the Italian's "white liver," and threatened to leave him in
America. Dr. Watlow had been forced to return to the city.
Through the unaccustomed stir Howat was ceaselessly aware of his
feeling for Ludowika; he thought of it with a sense of shame; but it
easily drowned all other considerations. He continued to speculate about
their future together. Whatever his father might conclude about his
personal arrangements, the elder would see that he was necessary to the
future of the Penny iron. They might live in one of the outlying stone
dwellings at the Forge ... for the present. He was glad that Gilbert
Penny, that he, was rich. Ludowika could continue to dress in rare
fabrics, to step in elaborate pattens over the common earth. That could
not help but influence, assuage, her in the end. The Pennys' position in
the Province, too, was high; the most exclusive assemblies were open to
them. He regarded his satisfaction in these details with something of
Mr. Winscombe's bitter humour. In the past he had repudiated them with
the utmost scorn. In the past--dim shapes, scenes, that appeared to have
occurred years before, but which in reality reached to last month,
trooped through his mind. Youth had vanished like a form dropping behind
a hill. He looked back; it was gone; his feet hurried forward into the
unguessed future; anxiety joined him; the scent that was Ludowika
accompanied him, an illusive figure. He reached toward it.
He was standing at the foot of the bed where Felix Winscombe lay. The
latter was restless, and complained of pains in his arms, reaching down
to his fingers. Ludowika bent over him, her face stamped with concern.
She regarded Howat with a new expression--narrowed eyes and a glimmer of
flawless teeth: a look he had never foreseen there; but it was impotent
before the thing that was. It had, however, the effect of intensifying
his desire, his passion for her fragility of silk and flesh. He would
kiss her hate on her mouth.
She sat by the bedside, and Howat took a place opposite her. Candles
burned on a highboy, on a table at his back; and their auriferous light
flowed in about the bedstead. The latter was draped from the canopy to
the bases of the posts in a bright printing of pheasants and
conventional thickets--cobalt and ruby and orange; and across a heavy
counterpane half drawn up stalked a row of panoplied Indians in clipped
zephyr. It was a nebulous enclosure with the shadows of the hangings
wavering on the coloured wool and cold linen, on the long, seamed
countenance of the prostrate man.
A clock in the hall struck slowly--it needed winding--ten blurred notes.
Felix Winscombe took a sip of water. A minute snapping sounded from the
hearth. A window stirred, and there was a dry turning of leaves without;
wind. One of the Indians, Howat saw, had his arm raised, flourishing a
blade; a stupid effigy of savage spleen. Beyond the drapery Ludowika's
face was dim and white. It was like an ineffable May moon. Ludowika ...
Penny. For the first time Howat thought of her endowed with his name,
and it gave him a deep thrill of delight. He repeated it with moving but
soundless lips--Ludowika Penny.
Her husband lay with his eyes closed, his head bowed forward on his
chest, as if in sleep. At irregular intervals small, involuntary
contractions of pain twitched at his mouth. At times, too, he muttered
noiselessly. Extraordinary. Ludowika and Felix Winscombe and himself,
Howat Penny. A world peopled only by them; the silence of the room
dropped into infinite space, bottomless time. A sudden dread of such
vast emptiness seized Howat; he felt that he must say something,
recreate about them the illusion of safe and familiar spaces and walls.
It seemed that he was unable to speak; a leaden inhibition lay on his
power of utterance. He made a harsh sound in his throat, loud and
startling. Felix Winscombe raised his head, and Ludowika cried faintly.
Then silence again folded them.
Howat fastened his thoughts on trivial and practical affairs--the
furnishing of the house where he would take Ludowika, what David and
himself intended to do with the iron, and then his last, long talk with
his mother. She was astonishingly wise; she had seen far into Ludowika
and himself, but even her vision had stopped short of encompassing the
magnitude of his passion; she had not realized his new patience and
determination. He found himself counting the gorgeous birds in the
bed-hangings--twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and stopped
abruptly.
It had grown chilly in the room, and Ludowika had an India cashmere
shawl about her shoulders. The sombre garnets and blues hid the tinsel
gaiety of her gown and her bare shoulders. She appeared older than he
had ever seen her before. Her face, carefully studied, showed no trace
of beauty; her eyes were heavy, her lips dark; any efforts of animation
were suspended. She showed completely the effect of her life in courts
and a careless prodigality of hours and emotions. Howat, seeing all
this, felt only a fresh accession of his hunger for her; she was far
more compelling than when romantically viewed as a moon.
He sat with his chin propped on a palm; she was rigidly upright with her
arms at her sides; Felix Winscombe moved higher on the pillows. His eyes
glittered in a head like a modelling in clay; his arms stirred
ceaselessly with weaving fingers. Howat could almost feel Ludowika's
hatred striking at him across the bed. He smiled at her, and she faced
him with an expression of stony unresponse. He thought luxuriantly of
her in his arms, with the rain beating on the store house roof; he
caught the odours of the damp, heaped merchandise, the distant clamour
in the casting shed. He had a brutal impulse to lean forward and remind
her of what had occurred, of the fact that she was his; he wanted to
fling it against her present detachment, to mock her with it. Then he
would crush her against his heart. Felix Winscombe raised up on an
elbow, distorting the row of sanguinary Indians.
Ludowika moved to the edge of the bed, and put a firm, graceful arm
about him. A grey shadow of pain fell on Mr. Winscombe's features. The
silence was absolute. He seemed to be waiting in an attitude of mingled
dread and resolution. He whispered an unintelligible period, the pain on
his face sharpened, and he released himself from Ludowika's support. She
sank back on her chair, gazing at her husband with wide, concerned eyes.
Slowly the lines in his face deepened, and a fine, gleaming sweat
started out on his brow. His face contorted in a spasm of voiceless
suffering, and he drew a stiff hand down either arm. Howat watched him
in a species of strained curiosity, with a suspension of breath.
Something, he felt, should be done to relieve the oppression of agony
gathering on Felix Winscombe's countenance, but a corresponding sense of
complete helplessness settled like a leaden coffin about him. The other
became unrecognizable; his face seemed to be set in an unnatural grin.
His head drew back on a thin, corded neck, and a faint gasping for air
stirred in the shadows. Even Howat felt the pain to be unendurable, and
Ludowika, white as milk, had risen to her feet. She stood with a hand
half raised beneath a fringed corner of the India shawl.
It was incredible that the sufferer's agony should increase, but it was
apparent that it did remorselessly. All humanity was obliterated in an
excruciating spasm over which streamed some meagre tears. Mr.
Winscombe's arms raised and dropped; and, suddenly relaxed, he slipped
down upon the pillows. Immediately the torment vanished from his
countenance; it became peaceful, released. The familiar mockery of the
mouth came back. The head, slightly turned, seemed to regard Ludowika
with contentment and interrogation. Howat was conscious of a relief
almost as marked as that on the face before him. He had gripped his
hands until they ached. The tension in the room, too, seemed spent. He
was about to address a reassuring period to Ludowika, when, at a glimpse
of her expression, the words died on his lips.
He bent over the bed, with his hand on a ridged, still chest; he gazed
down at flaccid eyes, a dropped chin. Felix Winscombe was dead.
Howat raised up slowly, facing the woman through the draperies. She was
gazing in an incredulous, shocked surprise at the limp, prostrate body
capped in black gros de Naples. A shuddering fear passed over her, and
then her eyes met those of Howat Penny. Even separated from him by the
bed she drew away as if from his touch. He saw that she had forgotten
the dead man in a sharp realization of the portent of the living. She
glanced about the room in the panic of a trapped lark, an abject
fright, searching for an escape.
He realized that there was none; Ludowika now belonged to him
absolutely; he was as remorseless as the pain that had killed Felix
Winscombe. Below the automatic sensations of the moment Howat was
conscious of utter satisfaction. A miracle had given Ludowika to him; in
the passing of a breath all his difficulty had been ended. She was alone
with him in a province of forests and iron and stars. He would make her
forget the gardens of fireworks and scraping violins; but forget or not
she was his ... Ludowika Penny.
II THE FORGE
X
Jasper Penny stood at a window of his bed room, his left arm carried in
a black silk handkerchief, gazing down at the long, low roof of Myrtle
Forge, built by his great, great grandfather Gilbert over a hundred and
ten years before. It was February, and he could hear the ringing blows
of axes, cutting the ice out of the forebay to liberate the water power
for the completion of a forging of iron destined to be rolled into
tracks for the slowly lengthening Columbia Steam Railway System. It was
midday, a grey sky held a brighter, diffused radiance where the veiled
sun hung without warmth, and the earth was everywhere frozen
granite-like. He could see beyond the Forge shed heaped charcoal, and
the black mass seemed no more dead than the ground or bare, brittle
trees sweeping down and up to where, on encircling hills, they were
lifted sharply against the cloudy monotony.
He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more
depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection
communicated, in part at least, he felt, by the bleak prospect without.
Another, and infinitely more arresting, reason for this feeling had just
stirred his thoughts--for the first time he was conscious of the
invidious, beginning weariness of accumulating years. He was hardly past
forty, and he impatiently repudiated the possibility that he was
actually declining; in fact he had not yet reached the zenith of his
capabilities, physical or mental; yet his broken arm, slow in mending,
the pain, had unquestionably depleted him more than a similar accident
ten years ago. Not only this, but, during the forced inaction, his mind
had definitely taken a different cast; considerations that had seemed to
constitute the main business of existence had lately faded before
preoccupations and feelings ignored until now.
Jasper Penny saw, objectively, not so much the surrounding circumstance
as his own former acts and emotions; detached from his habitual being by
hardly more than a month his past was posed before his critical
judgment. Looked at in this manner his life appeared crowded with
surprisingly meaningless gestures and words, his sheer youth an
incomprehensible revolt. A greater part of that had been lately
expressed by his mother, when he had returned to Myrtle Forge with an
arm broken by a fall in a railroad coach travelling to Philadelphia. She
had said, shaking her head with tightened lips:
"I warned you plenty against those train brigades. It isn't safe nor
sensible with a good horse service convenient. But then you have always
been a knowing, head-strong boy and man.... A black Penny."
How she would get along without that last phrase he was at a loss to
conjecture, from his first consciousness he recalled it, now a term of
reproach and now extenuation. Only a few weeks before she had repeated
it in precisely the same tone of mingled admonition and complaint that
had greeted his most boyish mishaps. He had grown so accustomed to it,
not only from Gilda Penny but from every one familiar with the Pennys
and their history, that it had become part of his automatic entity.
Jasper--a black Penny.
The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes
remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality
had necessarily freest play. Now he characterized it as mere uninformed
wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he
had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.
Even at Myrtle Forge, where--in contrast to dwelling in the confines of
a city--he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of
constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or
merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams. Yet it
had been an especial kind of wildness; he owed that recognition to his
vanished youth. The term generally included champagne parties and the
companionship of various but similar ladies of the circus or opera
house. But nothing of that had then entered into his deep-rooted
rebellion. He had had merely a curious passion for complete
independence, an innate turning from street-bound affairs and men to the
isolation and physical accomplishment of arduous excursions on horses or
foot. He had, then, avoided, even dreaded, women. And that instinct, he
told himself, shifting his injured arm to a more comfortable position,
had been admirably founded.
The ax blows ceased; from his position he could just see the top of the
great wheel that drove the Forge trip hammer; and slowly the rim
blurred, commencing to turn. The forebay was open. A pennant of black
smoke, lurid with flaming cinders, twisted up in the motionless air. The
hammer fell once, experimentally, with a faint jar, and a grimy figure
shovelled charcoal into a barrow.
His mind soon returned to the point where it had been deflected by the
movement at the Forge; he could even visualize his mature boyhood--a
straight, arrogant figure, black certainly, with up-sloping brows and an
outthrust chin. And that, he thought, not without complacency, was not
very far from a description of himself at present. There were, of
course, the whiskers, severely trimmed on his spare face, and showing,
in certain lights, a glimmer of silver; but he was as upright, as
comfortably lean, now as then. He was still capable of prolonged
physical exertion.... It was ridiculous to think of himself as
definitely aging. Yet he was past forty, and the years seemed to go far
more swiftly than at twenty-one.
Women! The silent pronouncement included the smallest plural
possible--only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised
all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire sex. With a
certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his wife
first, now a year dead. He wondered if she had found the orthodox and
concrete heaven in the frequent ecstatic contemplation of which so much
of her life had been spent. It had been that fine superiority to the
material that had first attracted him to her, a quality of shining
enthusiasm, of reflected inspiration from a vision, however trite, of
eternal hymning; and it had been that same essence which finally held
them apart through the greater number of their married years. Phebe's
health, slowly ebbing, had drawn her farther and farther from the known
world in general and the affairs and being of her husband in particular;
her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious
emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than
an attenuated, rapt invalid lingering in his house.
Her pale, still presence was usurped by a far different, animated and
colourful, figure. He thought of Essie Scofield, of all that she
paramountly held and expressed, with a reluctance that had lately,
almost within the past week, grown to resemble resentment, if not actual
irritation. Yet, however, casting back through the years, in his present
remoteness, he was able to recreate her and his emotions as they had
first, irresistibly moved together. The absolute opposite of Phebe,
already withdrawing into her religious, incorporeal region, Essie
Scofield had immediately swept him into the whirlpool of her vivid,
physical personality. Before her the memory of his wife faded into
insignificance. But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of
Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one
serious preoccupation, complication, of his future.
At the time when he had first admitted, welcomed, her claim on him, he
had felt a sudden energy in which he had recognized a play of the traits
of a black Penny. Here was a satisfactory, if necessarily private,
exercise of his inborn contempt for the evident hypocrisy, the
cowardice, of perfunctory inhibitions and safe morals. That, however,
had been speedily lost in his rocketing passion, flaring out of a quiet
continence into giddy spaces of unrestraint. Essie, after a momentary
surrender, had attempted retreat, expressing a doubt of the durability
of their feeling; she had, in fact, made it painfully clear that she
wished to escape from the uncomfortable volume of his fervour; but he
had overborne her caution--her wisdom, he now expressed it.
That, more than anything else, brought before him the undeniable passage
of time, the fact that he was rapidly accomplishing middle age--the
total extinguishing of an emotion which he had felt must outlast life.
It had gone, and with it his youth. Of course, he had recognized that he
was no longer thirty; he had been well aware of his years, but only
during the last few weeks had there been the slight, perceptible
dragging down.... On the black walnut dressing stand past the window lay
a letter he had received from Essie that morning; it contained her usual
appeal for an additional sum of money--he gave her, formally, six
thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the
necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she
had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion.
Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that--no more than an
additional lever for her to swing.
His face darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw
off a burden grown unendurable. But it was fastened immovably--his
responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness
now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic shift of snow.
He had been criminally negligent of Eunice. This realization was
accompanied by no corresponding warmth of parenthood; there was no
quickening of blood at the thought of his daughter, but only a newborn
condemnation of his neglected, proper pride. He had, thoughtlessly,
descended to a singularly low level of conduct. And it must abruptly
terminate. Jasper Penny had not seen Eunice for seven, nine, months; he
would remedy this at once, supervise advantages, a proper place, for
her. Afterward Essie and himself could make a mutually satisfactory
agreement.
XI
Throughout an excellent dinner, terrapin and bass, wild turkey with
oysters and fruit preserved in white brandy, he maintained a sombre
silence. His mother, on the right, her sister opposite--Phebe's place
seemed scarcely emptier than when she had actually occupied it--held an
intermittent verbal exchange patently keyed to Jasper Penny's mood. They
were women with yellow-white, lace-capped hair, blanched eyebrows and
lashes, and small, quick eyes on hardy, reddened faces. Gilda Penny was
slightly the larger, more definite; Amity Merken had a timid, almost
furtive, expression in the opulence of the Penny establishment, while
Gilda was complacent; but otherwise the two women were identical. Their
dresses were largely similar--Amity's a dun, Gilda Penny's grey, moire
silk, high with a tight lace collar, and bands of jet trimming from
shoulder to waist, there spreading over crinoline to the floor. Lace
fell about their square, capable hands, and Gilda wore broad, locked
bracelets checked in black and gold.
Sherry, in blue cut decanters stoppered with gilt, gave place to port.
An épergne of glass and burnished ormolu, in the form of supporting oak
leaves, with numerous sockets for candles, was set, filled with fruit,
in the centre of the table; silver lustre plates were laid; but Jasper
Penny heedlessly fingered the stem of a wine glass. He said suddenly,
"I'm going to the city this afternoon."
"Is it safe yet?" his mother queried doubtfully. "Hadn't you better wait
till to-morrow, when you can drive easily, or without stopping at a
tavern?"
He looked up impatiently. "I shall go by the railroad," he stated
decisively. "Can't you understand that, with the future of iron almost
dependent on steam, it is the commonest foresight for me to patronize
such customers as the Columbia Railway! I have no intention of adding to
the ignorant prejudice against improved methods of travelling."
"There's your arm," she insisted with spirit.
"An untried engine. The Hecla works along smoothly at twenty miles an
hour." Amity cast a glance of swift appeal at her sister, but Gilda
Penny persisted. "Ungodly," was the term she selected. Jasper ignored
her. He had decided to straighten the tangled affair of Eunice at once;
he would see Essie that evening, arrive at an understanding about the
child's future. It would be even more difficult to terminate his
connection with Essie herself. That, he now recognised, was his main
desire. The affair had actually died before Phebe; but its onerous
consequences remained, blighting the future.
The future! It was that, he now discovered, which occupied him, rather
than the past. A new need had become apparent, a restless desire
analogous to the urge of seeking youth. Jasper Penny was aware of a
great dissatisfaction, a vast emptiness, in his existence; he had a
feeling of waste growing out of the sense of hurrying years. Somehow,
obscurely, he had been cheated. He almost envied the commonality of men,
not, like himself, black Pennys, impatient of assuaging relationships
and beliefs. Yet this, too, turned into another phase of his
inheritance--his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly,
graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but
greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation
rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living.
"You'll stop at the Jannans?" his mother queried.
"I think not, probably Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball
to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions."
Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated
to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity
consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan,
his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned
something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a
comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal. Now, soon, it
would all be over. Unconsciously he drew a deeper breath of relief, of
prospective freedom.
The Hecla, a wooden barrelled engine with a tall, hinged stack, drew its
brigade of canary-coloured chariot cars forward with a rapid bumping
over inequal rails. Jasper Penny's seat, number nineteen, was
fortunately in the centre, close by the stove, where a warmth hung that
failed to reach to the doors. Lost in speculation the journey was both
long and vague. Twilight deepened within the car, and two flickering
candles were lit at either end, their pallid light serving only to cast
thin, climbing shadows over the rocking, box-like interior. At irregular
intervals the train stopped with a succession of subsiding crashes, and
started again at the blowing of a horn; passengers would leave or enter;
or it would prove to be merely a halt to take on cut and piled wood fuel
for the engine.
Finally the train brigade reached the inclined plane leading to the
river and city; the engine was detached, and the cars, fastened to a
hemp cable, were lowered spasmodically to where a team of mules drew
them through a gloomy, covered bridge echoing to the slow hoof falls and
creaking of loose planks. Jasper Penny fastened the elaborate frogs of
his heavily furred overcoat over his injured arm, and with a florid
bandanna wiped the cinders from his silk hat.
The coaches rolled into the station shed, where he changed, taking a
swaying Mulberry Street omnibus to Fourth, and Sanderson's Hotel. It was
a towering, square structure of five stories, with a columned white
portico, and high, divided steps. The clerk, greeting him with a precise
familiar deference, directed him to a select suite with a private
parlour, a sombre chamber of red plush, dark walls and thickly draped,
long windows. There he sat grimly contemplating a distasteful prospect.
He knew the casual, ill-prepared dinners presided over by Essie, the
covertly insolent man servant; and an overpowering reluctance came upon
him to sit again at her table. But the confusion of the hotel ordinary
repelled him too: he had seen in passing a number of men who would
endeavour to force his opinion on the specie situation or speculation in
canals. He rose and pulled sharply at the tasselled bell rope, ordering
grilled pheasant, anchovy toast and champagne to be served where he sat.
Jasper Penny ate slowly, partly distracted by the market reports in the
_U.S. Gazette_. Ninety-two and a half had been offered for Schuylkill
Navigation, only fifteen for the West Chester Railroad, but Philadelphia
and Trenton had gone to ninety-eight; while a three and a half dividend
had been declared on the French Town Turnpike and Railway Company. He
was annoyed afresh by the persistent refusal of the Government to award
the mail to the Reading Steam System. His thoughts returned to Eunice,
his daughter, the coming scene--it would at least be that--with Essie
Scofield.
It was but a short distance from the hotel to where Essie lived, over
Fourth Street to Cherry; and almost immediately he turned by the three
story brick dwelling at the corner and was at her door. The servant, in
an untidy white jacket, stood stupidly blocking the narrow hall, until
Jasper Penny with an angry impatience waved him aside. There were other
silk hats and coats, and a woman's fringed wrap, on the stand where he
left his stick and outer garments; and from above came a peal of mingled
laughter. The presence of others, now, was singularly inopportune; it
would be no good waiting for their departure--here such gatherings
almost invariably drew out until dawn; and he abruptly decided that,
after a short interval, he would give Essie to understand that he wished
to talk to her privately.
A young woman with a chalk-white face and oleaginous bandeaux of dead
black hair, in scarlet and green tartan over an extravagant crinoline,
was seated on a sofa between two men, each with an arm about her waist
and wine glasses elevated in their free hands. Essie was facing them
from a circular floor hassock, in a blue satin, informal robe over
mussed cambric ruffles, heelless nonchalants, and her hair elaborately
dressed with roses, white ribbons and a short ostrich feather. Her body,
at once slim and full, was consciously seductive, and her face, slightly
swollen and pasty in the shadows, bore the same, heedless unrestraint.
Her dark, widely-opened eyes, an insignificant nose and shortly curved,
scarlet lips, held almost the fixed, painted impudence of a cynically
debased doll. She turned and surveyed Jasper Penny with a petulant,
silent inquiry, and whatever gaiety was in progress abruptly terminated
as he advanced into the room.
"You never let me know you'd be here," Essie complained; "but I suppose
I ought to be glad to see you anyway--after four months without a line.
Jasper, Mr. Daniel Culser." The younger of the men on the sofa, a
stolidly handsome individual with hard, blue eyes, rose with an
over-emphasized composure. "Mr. Penny, extremely pleased." Jasper Penny
was irritated by the other's instant identification, and he nodded
bluntly. "Lambert Babb and Myrtilla Lewis," Essie continued
indifferently. Babb, an individual of inscrutable age, with ashen
whiskers and a blinking, weak vision in a silvery face, was audibly
delighted. Myrtilla Lewis smiled professionally over her expanse of
bewildering silk plaid. "Wine in the cooler," Essie added, and Daniel
Culser moved to where a silver bucket reposed by a tray of glasses and
broken, sugared rusks. Jasper Penny refused the offered drink, and found
a chair apart from the others. A moody silence enveloped him which he
found impossible to break, and an increasing uneasiness spread over the
room.
"Well," Essie Scofield commanded, "say something. You look as black as
an Egyptian. What'll my friends think of you? I suppose it doesn't
matter any more what it is to me; but you might play at being polite."
"Don't chip at a man like that," Myrtilla advised. "Mr. Penny has a
right to talk or not." She smiled more warmly at him, and he saw that
she had had too much champagne. The room reeked with the thin, acrid
odour of the wine, and a sickly perfume of vanilla essence. Essie, as
usual, had a glass of her favourite drink--orange juice and French
brandy--on the floor beside her, the brandy bottle and fresh oranges
conveniently near. His repulsion for her deepened until it seemed as if
actual fingers were compressing his throat, stopping his breath. He
wondered suddenly how far he was responsible for her possible
degeneration. But he had not been the first; her admission of that fact
had in the beginning attracted him to an uncommon frankness in her
peculiar make-up. He was willing to assume his fault, to pay for it,
whatever payment was possible, and escape.... Not only from her, but
from all that she embodied, from himself--what he had been--as much as
anything else.
"You are an Ironmaster," Mr. Babb finally announced; "in fact, one of
our greatest manufacturers. Now, Mr. Penny, what is your personal
opinion of engine as against the public coach? Will the railroad survive
the experimental stage, and are such gentlemen as yourself behind it?"
"I saw in the _Ledger_ some days back," Daniel Culser added, "that your
arm had been broken travelling by steam."
"One had nothing to do with the other," Jasper stated tersely, ignoring
Babb's query, "but was entirely my own fault." The conversation lagged
painfully again, during which Essie skilfully compounded another mixture
of spirits and thick, yellow juice. She grew sullen with resentment at
Jasper Penny's attitude, and exchanged enigmatic glances with Culser.
The liquor brought a quick flush to her slightly pendulous cheeks, and
she was enveloped in an increasing bravado. "Penny's a solemn old boy,"
she announced generally. Lambert Babb attempted to embrace Myrtilla,
but, her gaze on the newcomer, she pushed him away. "You got to be a
gentleman with me," she proclaimed with a patently unsteady dignity. "My
grandfather was a French noble."
"What I'd like to know," Essie remarked, "is what's his granddaughter?"
"Better'n you!" Myrtilla heatedly asserted; "one who'd appreciate a real
man, and not be playing about private with a tailor's dummy." Daniel
Culser's face grew noticeably pinker. "I'm going," Myrtilla continued,
rising. "Mr. Penny, I'd be happy to meet you under more social
conditions. Here I cannot remain for--for reasons. I might be tempted
to--" Mr. Babb caught her arm under his, and, at an imperious gesture
from Essie, piloted her from the room. Culser rose.
"Don't go, Dan," Essie Scofield told him defiantly. But Jasper Penny
maintained a silence that forced the younger man to make a stiff exit.
"Well," Essie demanded, flinging herself on the deserted sofa, "now
you've spoiled my evening. Why did you come at all if you couldn't
behave genteel?"
"Where, exactly, is Eunice?" he asked abruptly.
She glanced at him with an instant masking of her resentment. "I've told
you a hundred times--in the house of a very respectable clergyman. My
letter was clear enough; she's had bronchitis, and there's the doctor,
and--"
"Just where is Eunice?" he repeated, interrupting her aggrieved recital.
"Where I put her," her voice grew shrill. "You haven't asked to see her
for near a year, you haven't even pretended an interest in--in your own
daughter. I've done the best I could; you know I don't like children
around; but I have attended to as much of my duty as you. Now you come
out and insist on being unpleasant all in an hour. Why didn't you write?
I'd had her here for you. Come back in two or three days."
"To-morrow," he replied. "I am going to see her in the morning."
"You just ain't. I did the best I knew, but, if it isn't all roses,
you'll blame everything on me. I will have Eunice fetched--"
"Where is she?" he asked still again, wearily.
Every instinct revolted against the degradation into which he had
blindly walked. His youth had betrayed him, involving him, practically a
different man, in a payment which he realized had but commenced.... To
escape. He had first thought of that with the unconscious conviction
that the mere wish carried its fulfilment. In fact, it would be
immensely difficult; a man, he saw, could not sever himself so casually
from the past; it reached without visible demarcation into the present,
the future. All was a piece, one with another; and Essie Scofield was
drawn in a vivid thread through the entire fabric of his being.
Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness,
persisted, grew--it had become the predominate design of his weaving.
Through this he recognized a reassertion of his pride, the rigid pride
of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been
overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion. Beyond forty men returned to
their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his
memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth.
His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled,
he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves. In the
maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp
recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny space.
He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the
latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie. Her face flushed
with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring
heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr.
Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have
seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done
nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice
Scofield, a child without--"
All that she had said was absolutely true, just.
"I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that
damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped
from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows.
"I haven't been well, either--a fierce pain here, in my heart."
It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine
parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly.
"Where? How?" He winced--the past reaching inexorably into the future.
Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he
admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased
within him--the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the
old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same
degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had
been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the
passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to
ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.
"Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something,
of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen
Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself."
"I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me
nothing."
"... what you are getting as long as you live?"
"That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron
is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and
never know it."
"If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified."
"You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she pronounced, mollified.
"At one time--do you remember?--you said if ever the chance came you
would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your
iron, gold. I--" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing,"
she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass.
"Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously.
"I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you
looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you
seemed like an old gentleman. Now Dan Culser," she hesitated, and then
swept on, "he's what you'd name young." At Daniel Culser's age, he told
himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now
Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his
hair. He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing
of flesh faintly reeking with brandy. "I have a great deal to pay, where
money goes I don't know, even a little would be a help." He left some
gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a
momentary release.
Outside Cherry Street was blackly cold, a gas lamp at the corner shed a
watery, contracted illumination. He made his way back toward the hotel,
but a sudden reluctance to mount to his lonely chambers possessed him.
Before the glimmering marble façade he took out his watch, a pale gold
efflorescence in the gloom, and rang the hour in minute, clear notes.
The third quarter past ten. He recalled the ball, but then commencing,
at Stephen Jannan's; there it would be indescribably gay, a house
flooded with the music of quadrilles, light, polite-chatter; and he
determined to proceed and have a cigar with Stephen.
He walked briskly up Mulberry Street to Sixth and there turned to the
left. Jasper Penny soon passed the shrouded silence of Independence
Square, with the new Corinthian doorway of the State House showing
vaguely through the irregularly grouped ailanthus trees. Beyond, the
brick wall with its marble coping and high iron fence reached, on the
opposite side, to the Jannan corner. The length of the brick dwelling,
with white arched windows and coursings faced the vague emptiness of
Washington Square, closed for the winter.
Inside the hall was bright and filled with the pungent warmth of fat
hearth coal. A servant, with a phrase of recognition, directed him
above, to a room burdened with masculine greatcoats and silk hats. There
an attendant told him that Mr. Jannan was below. Jasper Penny had no
intention of becoming a participant in the hall, but neither did he
propose to linger among wraps, listening to the supercilious chatter of
young men in the extreme mode of bright blue coats, painfully tight
black trousers with varnished pumps and expanses of ankle in grey silk.
One, inspecting him through an eyeglass on a woven hair guard, expressed
a pointed surprise at Jasper Penny's informal garb. "Christoval!" he
ejaculated. "It approaches an insult to the da-da-darlings." Another
commenced to sing a popular minstrel air:
"Blink--a--ho--dink! Ah! Ho!
"Roley Boley--Good morning Ladies all!"
Jasper Penny abruptly descended to a small room used for smoking. Young
men, he thought impatiently, could no longer even curse respectably.
They lisped like females at an embroidery frame. When he was young,
younger, he corrected himself, he could have outdrunk, outridden.... His
train of thought was abruptly terminated by a group unexpectedly
occupying the smoking room. He saw Stephen Jannan, his wife Liza, the
newly married young Jannans, and a strange woman in glacé muslin and a
black Spanish lace shawl about her shoulders. Stephen greeted him
cordially. "Jasper, just at the moment for a waltz with--with Susan."
The stranger blushed painfully, made an involuntary movement backward,
and Liza Jannan admonished her husband. "Do you know Miss Brundon,
Jasper?" she asked.
Jasper Penny bowed, and Miss Brundon, with an evident effort, smiled,
her shy, blue eyes held resolutely on his countenance. She at once
slipped into the background, talking in a low, clear voice to Graham
Jannan's wife; while the older men enveloped themselves in a fragrant
veil of cigars. "Come, Mary, Susan," Mrs. Jannan directed, "out of this
horrid, masculine odour." Accompanied by her son the women left, and
Stephen turned to his cousin. "Thought, of course, you knew Susan
Brundon," he remarked. "A school mistress, but superior, and a lady. Has
a place on Spruce Street, by Raspberry Alley, for select younger girls;
unique idea, and very successful, I believe."
Jasper Penny said comfortably, "Humm!" The other continued, "I want
Graham to get out to Shadrach Furnace as soon as may be. That old stone
house the foremen have occupied is nearly fixed for him. I am very well
content, Jasper, to have him in the iron trade, with you practically at
its head. No deliberate favours, remember, and I have told him to look
for nothing. But, at the same time--you comprehend: folly not to push
the boy on fast as possible. No reason for us all to go through with
the hardships of the first Gilbert and his times. Must have been
fatiguing, the wilderness and English troubles and all that."
"Splendid, I should say," Jasper Penny replied. He repeated satirically
the conversation he had heard above. "Makes me ill. You will remember
there was a Howat, son of our original settler--now he must have been a
lad! Married some widow or other; wild at first, but made iron in the
end."
"A black Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better
now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome
presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But
he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and
free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of
which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he
had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair
and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was
curious--that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished,
concrete, after generations. The one to hold it before Howat had been
burned in Mary's time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three
hundred years. Jasper had a sudden, vivid sense of familiarity with the
Howat who had married some widow or other. His mind returned to his own,
peculiar problem, to Essie Scofield, to the burden with which he had
encumbered himself, the payment that faced him for--for his sheer
youth. He said abruptly, belated:
"You fit the present formal ease of society, Stephen; you like it and it
likes you. In a superficial way I have done well enough, but
underneath--" his voice sank into silence. A profound, familiar
dejection seized him; incongruously he thought of Miss Brundon's
delicate shrinking from the mere contact of the amenities of speech.
Super-sensitive. "I must go," he announced, and refused Stephen Jannan's
invitation for the night.
"Stay for some supper, anyhow," the other insisted, and, a hand on his
arm, led him past the doors open upon the dancing.
Chandeliers, great coruscating pendants of glass prisms and candles,
glittered above the expanse of whirling crinoline and blue coats,
vermilion turbans, gilt feathers and flowered hair. The light fell on
shoulders as white and elegantly sloping as alabaster vases, draped in
rose and citron, in blanched illusion frosted and looped with silver; on
bouquets of camellias swinging from jewelled chains against ruffled and
belled skirts swaying about the revealed symmetry of lacy silk stockings
and fragile slippers. "Ah, Jasper," Stephen Jannan said; "in our time,
what! Do you remember your first Wellington boots? The gambling room and
veranda at Saratoga? Tender eyes, old boy, and little tapering hands."
Jasper Penny replied, "It seems my hair is grey." Silence fell on them
as they entered the dining room. A long table was burdened with
elaborate pagodas of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange
blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly
valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates;
with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted glass and ormolu; and,
everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller
radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres. Jasper Penny idly tore open
a bon bon wrapped in a verse on fringed paper,
"Viens! Viens! ange du ciel, je t'aime! je t'aime!
Et te le dire ici, c'est le bonheur supreme."
Love and the great hour of life! He had missed both; one, perhaps, with
the other. His marriage to Phebe, except for a brief flare at the
beginning, had been as empty as the affair with Essie Scofield. God, how
hollow living seemed! He had missed something; or else existence was an
ugly deception, the false lure of an incomprehensible jest. The music
beat in faint, mocking waves on his hearing, the lights of the supper
shone in the gold bubbles of his wine glass. He drained it hurriedly.
Outside the night, lying cold on deserted squares, blurred with gas
lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen
Jannan's ball. In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness
had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished. Death
... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart. A
duty, Eunice, remained. The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown
back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the
injustice he had wrought.
XII
The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade
that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry. At the river
the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached
almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood. The
boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet ship, the
_Susquehanna_, and into the narrow canal through Windmill Island. Camden
was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and
without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water. He inquired the
way to the Reverend Mr. Needles', passed a brick meeting house, and,
turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to
a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a
collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.
A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons,
and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles
was away on circuit. "I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny
explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded
surroundings. "She's not well," the woman replied, with instant
suspicion. "I don't just like to let a chancy person see her." He
discarded all subterfuge. "I am her father," he stated. The other
shifted to a whining self-defence. "And her in this sink!" she
exclaimed, gazing at Jasper Penny's furred coat, his glossy hat and
gloves and ebony cane.
"I did all for her I could, considering the small money I was promised,
and then half the time I didn't get that, neither. The lady owes for
three weeks right now. I suppose you'll have to come in," she concluded
grudgingly. They entered a dark hall, clay cold. Beyond, in a slovenly
kitchen hardly warmer, he found Eunice, his daughter; a curiously
sluggish child with a pinched, hueless face and a meagre body in a man's
worn flannel shirt and ragged skirt and stockings.
"Here's your father," Mrs. Needles ejaculated.
Eunice stood in the middle of the bare floor, staring with pallid, open
mouth at the imposing figure of the man. She said nothing; and Jasper
Penny found her silence more accusing than a shrill torrent of reproach.
"She's kind of heavy like," Mrs. Needles explained. "I have come to take
you away," Jasper Penny said. Then, turning to the woman: "Are those all
the clothes she has?" She grew duskily red. "There are some others
about, but I don't just know where, and then she spoils them so fast."
"That's a lie," the child announced, with a faint patch of colour on
either thin cheek. "Mr. Needles sold them." The man decided to ignore
such issues; his sole wish now was to take Eunice away as speedily as
possible. "Well," he directed impatiently, "get a shawl, something to
wrap her in." He regretted vainly that he had not come for the child in
a carriage. He paid without a question what the woman said was owing;
and, with Eunice folded in a ragged plaid, prepared to depart. "I
guess," the child decided, in a strangely mature voice, "we'd better
take my medicine." She turned toward a mantel, Mrs. Needles made a quick
movement in the same direction, but the small shape was before her.
Jasper Penny took a bottle from the diminutive, cold hand. The label had
been obliterated; but, impelled by a distrustful curiosity, he took out
the cork.
Laudanum!
He was at the point of an indignant condemnation when the words perished
without utterance--not the haggard woman before him, but himself, Jasper
Penny, was entirely guilty. He, in reality, had given the drug to his
daughter, placed her in this sorry and bitter poverty. "Come, Eunice,"
he said, taking her by the hand, his face grey and stony.
Once more in the city he walked with the child to the ferry and foot of
Chestnut Street, where they found places in The Reaper, a stage brightly
painted with snowy ships and drawn by four sorrel horses. His first
concern was to purchase proper clothes for his daughter; then he would
face the problem of her happier disposal. They passed the columned
façade of the Philadelphia Bank, the Custom House with its wide steps
set back from the street, hedged dwellings, and the United States Hotel
to Independence Square and Sixth Street, where he lifted the child from
the stage. They stopped before an entrance between bowed windows which
had above it the sign, The Misses Dunlop, Millinery.
Jasper Penny had had no idea that it would be so difficult to procure
clothes for a girl of seven. At first he was told that the necessary
garments could not be furnished, when discussion revealed the fact that
a nearly complete, diminutive wardrobe, especially ordered from Paris
and neglected by the customer, was to be had. In a surprisingly short
while a sentimental saleswoman had apparelled Eunice in black velvet
with rows of small bows and gold buckles and a lace collar, cambric
pantaloon ruffles swinging about her ankles, a quilted pink satin bonnet
tied, like those of her elders', with a bow under her right cheek, and a
muff and tippet of ermine. Other articles--a frock of rose gros de
chine, with a flounced skirt, a drab velvet bonnet turned in green
smocked silk, and sheer underthings--he ordered delivered at Sanderson's
Hotel.
The effect of what laudanum Eunice had taken faded, and her lethargy was
replaced by an equally still, incredulous amazement. She followed Jasper
Penny about with the mechanical rigidity of a minute sleepwalker. They
went into a jewelry store beyond, with a square low bow window and white
trimming, where he purchased a ring with a ruby, and small gold
bracelets with locks and chains. His restless desire was to clothe
Eunice in money, to overwhelm her with gifts; yet, although an evident
delight struggled through her stupefaction, he failed to get from the
expenditure the release he sought. A leaden sense of blood guiltiness
persisted in him. At Parkinson's, the confectioner opposite the State
House, he bought her syllabubs, a frozen rose cordial and black cake. On
leaving, he paused at the marble steps with a lantern on either side and
awning drawn out over the pavement, considering the next move. It should
be toys--a German doll, slate and coloured crayons and jumping-figures.
Then he took her back to his rooms at the Hotel.
Sitting in a stiff crimson chair opposite him, the doll clasped in
straining fingers, and a flush of excitement on her sharp features, she
presented an enormous difficulty. What, justly, was he to do with her?
How could he provide for a reasonable happiness, a healthy, normal
existence? He decided coldly that he would prevent Essie Scofield's
influence from ever touching the child again. Essie, he knew, was
utterly without any warmth of motherhood. She had solely and callously
used their daughter to extort money from him. But, he admitted to
himself, neither had he any feeling of parentage for the small, lonely
figure before him; nothing but a burning self-accusation, a lacerated
pride. His act proceeded entirely from his head in place of his heart.
For that very reason, Jasper Penny thought, he could give his daughter a
greater measure of security. He would see Stephen Jannan to-morrow and
with the lawyer's assistance get complete control of Eunice's future. He
must alter his will.
None of this, however, assisted in solving the actual immediate
necessity. There was, certainly, Myrtle Forge; his mother, however she
might silently suffer, protest, would ultimately accede in his wishes.
But it was a dreary place for a child, with only the companionship of
old women. He was, for the greater part, away in the interest of his
widely scattered activities, forges, furnaces, nail factories and
rolling mills.
He felt in anticipation the censure of the Penny connections that would
rise like a wall and shut Eunice from the companionship of the other
children, of the family, embittering her at what he had somewhere heard
described as the formative period of growth. His home, he decided, for
the present at least, was an undesirable place for his daughter.
It was, he discovered, past two, and he remorsefully summoned a servant.
He gazed with bewilderment at the list of dinner dishes tended him;
bear's meat, he felt, canvas back duck or terrapin, was not a diet
proper to seven; but he solved the perplexity by ordering snipe, rolled
and sugared cakes filled with whipped cream and preserved strawberries,
and a deep apple pandowdy. After this, and a block of nougat, Eunice
discovered herself to be sleepy. As she lay with tossed arms and pale
streaming hair under the feather coverlet of a great hotel bed he saw
with a sharp uneasiness that, in a subtle but unmistakable accent, she
resembled her mother, Essie Scofield.
XIII
His thoughts darkened with the falling day; he supposed them to be
solely addressed to the problem of Eunice; but, in reality, they
constantly evaded his will, following countless trivialities, and
returned to his own, peculiar need. He made some small changes of dress
for the evening, replacing brown with glazed black boots, and struggled,
with one hand, through the ordeal of tying a formal neckcloth. He had
purposely left behind his negro servant as a possible source of
unguarded chatter. When Jasper Penny had finished he went in to Eunice
and found her awake. The new clothes lay in their open boxes; and,
lighting candles, he wondered if he had better have some one in to
assist her. "Can you fix yourself up in these?" he asked, indicating the
purchases.
"Oh, yes," she assured him gravely; "that is except the very backest
buttons." She stood by the folded piles of shirred muslin, the elaborate
velvets and silks and ribbons, obviously at a loss before such an
unparalleled choice; and he was once more disturbed by the attenuation
of her small body. But that could be soon remedied; she had suffered
other, far greater, irremedial, oppressions; her very birth had
confronted her, in the puritanical self-righteousness of his world, with
an almost insuperable barrier to happiness. Still back of that, even
before the birth of himself and Essie Scofield, back, back in the
unguessed past, Eunice had been shaped, condemned. Her fate had only
culminated in his own unbalanced passion, in a desire that had blinded
him like a flash of ignited powder, leaving him with a sense of utter
void, of inexplicable need. "For what?" he demanded unconsciously and
bitterly aloud.
Eunice, startled, dropped the garment in her hands. She gazed at him
with a shrinking dread. "Come," he told her gently, "that will be very
pretty; and, don't you think, the velvet bonnet with green?" After
supper he questioned her. "What time do you usually go to bed?" She
answered promptly, "When it got too cold to stay up, at Mr. Needles',
but I wouldn't know here."
"We might go to the Circus," he suggested, half doubtful of the
propriety of such a course. However, they went. She clung tightly to his
sleeve before the illuminated, high-pillared façade of Welches' Circus,
where Jasper took seats in a box. Eunice was breathless before the
gleaming white and gold of the interior, the fabulous, glittering
chandelier, the crimson draperies and great curtain with its
equestrienne on a curvetting steed. The orchestra, with a blare of
trombones, announced the raising of the curtain and appearance of Mr.
John Mays, the celebrated clown. He was followed by Chinese sports, the
Vision of Cupid and Zephyr, and the songs, the programme stated, of
Lowrie and Williams. These gentlemen, in superb yellow satin, emphasized
harmoniously the fact that
"And joy is but a flower,
The heart with sorrow meeting
Will wither 'neath its power."
Jasper Penny wondered abstractedly what was to be done with the tense,
excitable child at his side? A voice from the wings announced: "Mouse
and Harebell, the Lilliputian ponies, with Infant Jockies, the smallest
schooled racers in existence." And the word "schooled" recalled to him
the diffident woman he had met at Stephen Jannan's, the night before.
Miss ... Brundon. A place for the education of younger girls. He could
send Eunice there, for the present at any rate; and decide later upon
her ultimate situation. Miss Brundon had a sensitive, yes, distinctly, a
fine face. Her school, he remembered, was at Raspberry Alley, far out
Spruce Street, close to Tenth. He drew a deep breath of relief at this
bridging of the immediate complications the child presented.
The next morning, again in the Reaper coach, they rolled west over
Chestnut Street, past a theatre with elevated statues of Comedy and
Tragedy, the Arcade with its outside stairs mounting across the front,
stone mansions set back in gardens with gravelled paths, and the Moorish
bulk of Masonic Hall half hid by stores. Beyond the Circus they
proceeded on foot to a four square brick dwelling with weeping willows
and an arched wood sign above the entrance painted with the designation,
"Miss Brundon's Select Academy."
Jasper Penny found Miss Brundon in a small, bare, immaculate office. She
was sitting at a table; and, as he entered, with Eunice dragging
desperately at his hand, she half rose, with a quick, faint blush.
"Mr. Penny," she exclaimed, in a low, charming surprise. "I didn't
expect, so soon, to have the pleasure ... here, at my school." He firmly
moved Eunice from her position at his back. "An unexpected pleasure for
me," he replied. "I came to consult with you about this little girl--the
daughter of a friend of mine. A friend, I may add, in difficult
circumstances, and for whom I am prepared to do a great deal. I had
hoped--Stephen Jannan told me about your exceptional establishment--that
you could take her. She needs just the supervision that I am certain you
offer."
"Of course," she replied immediately, "I'd be glad to have any one
recommended by you. I do think my school is unusual. You see, there is
almost no provision for the supervision of such young ladies. And I have
been very fortunate in my girls; I try not to be snobbish, Mr. Penny;
but, indeed, if a place like this is to be useful, some care is
required. Probably you would like an assurance of their studies and
deportment."
"No," he stopped her hastily; "it is quite enough to have seen you." A
deeper, painful colour suffused her cheeks. He had, he thought, been
inexcusably clumsy. He had unconsciously given voice to the conviction
that Miss Brundon, like her establishment, was exceptional. She was,
ordinarily, too pale for beauty; her countenance, with high, cheek
bones, was irregular; yet her eyes, tranquil blue, held a steady quality
almost the radiance of an inward light. Her diffidence, it was clear,
co-existed with a firm, inviolable spirit. He said, later:
"You will discover that there are many things Eunice requires, and I
would be obliged if you would procure them without stint, and send the
accounts to my Philadelphia office. The child has been in circumstances
of considerable poverty; but I wish to give her whatever advantages
money can bring. Yes--Eunice Scofield. And--" he hesitated, "in view of
this...."
"I understand, oh, completely," Susan Brundon interrupted him warmly.
"You don't wish your charity exposed; and not only on your own account,
but from consideration for the susceptibilities of the parents,
parent--a mother, I gather."
It had been, he thought, leaving, ridiculously simple. His meeting with
Miss Brundon was a fortunate chance. A fine, delicate, unworldly woman;
a fineness different from Phebe's, submerged in the pursuit of her own
salvation. The former, he realized, was close to forty. If she had been
sympathetic with a strange child such as Eunice how admirably she would
attend any of her own. Unmarried. The blindness of men, their fatuous
choice, suddenly surprised him.
He determined to proceed directly to Stephen Jannan, and put into motion
at once the solving of his daughter's future. Never, he repeated, should
Eunice fall again into the lax hands of Essie Scofield. Stephen would
advise him shrewdly, taking advantage of the law, or skilfully
overcoming its obstacles. He had unbounded faith in the power of money
where Essie was concerned; at the same time he had no intention of
laying himself open to endless extortion, threats, almost inevitable,
ultimate scandal. What a bog he had strayed into, a quagmire reaching
about him in every direction. He must discover firmer ground ahead,
release from the act of that other man, his youth. The memory of the
serene purity of Miss Brundon's office recurred to him like a breath
from the open spaces where he had first known the deep pleasure of an
utter freedom of spirit.
Jasper Penny, revolving the complications of his position, made his way
directly over the uneven sidewalk of Spruce Street to Fourth; there,
passing the high, narrow residences of Society Hill, he proceeded to
Stephen's office, beyond Chestnut. It was in a square brick edifice of
an earlier period, with a broad marble step and door and wide windows
coped in scoured white stone. The lawyer's private chamber was bare,
with snowy panelling and mahogany, the high sombre shelves of a
calf-bound law library, a ponderous cabriolet table, sturdy, rush-seated
Dutch chairs, and a Franklin stove with slender brass capitols and
shining hod.
"A chair, Jasper," Stephen Jannan directed. "You ought to know them,
they came out of Myrtle Forge--some of old Gilbert's. Your mother gave
them to me when she did over the house in this new French fancy." Jasper
Penny was momentarily at a loss for an adequate opening of the subject
that had brought him there. Finally he plunged directly into his
purpose. "You must know, Stephen," he said, "that I am decidedly
obligated to a Mrs. Scofield." Jannan nodded shortly. "The thing dragged
on for a number of years, but is quite dead now; in fact, it has been
for a considerable number of months. That, in itself, doesn't bother me;
it is comparatively simple; but there is a child, a girl, Stephen."
"I didn't know that," the other acknowledged. "It is an ugly difficulty.
Do you wish to legitimatize your--the child? There is marriage of
course."
"I have no intention of marrying Essie Scofield," Jasper Penny said
coldly. "And I am almost certain she wouldn't consent if I had. I am
quite willing to assume a proper responsibility; but there is a limit to
my conception of that. There was never any serious question of marriage;
there is none now. I simply wish to get complete control of Eunice; by
adoption, perhaps; she is seven years old."
"There are no laws of adoption, as such, in Pennsylvania," Jannan told
him. "The only State with that provision is Louisiana; there, by an act
of Legislature, the thing can be legalized. I could arrange it through
correspondence, a certain residence within the State. It would be
cumbersome and expensive, but possible." He paused, frowning. "Devilish
awkward," he muttered; "make a stench in a family such as ours.
However," he added, "a contract practically to the same effect can be
drawn. This, with her consent, would be entirely binding on Mrs.
Scofield. If the child can write it would be well to have her signature
on the deed. Bring them here; she should have counsel."
"After that, I suppose, the name could be arranged."
"Exactly. The child, of course, would have no legal status as your heir.
Anything she got would have to be willed direct." The other nodded. It
was all far more simple than he had hoped. He almost saw a definite
lightening of the future. "Is the girl with her mother now?" Jannan
queried.
"I took her away yesterday," Jasper Penny replied negligently. "We went
to the Circus, and at present she is at Miss Brandon's Academy." He was
surprised by the sudden concern on his cousin's handsome, florid
countenance. "By heaven, Jasper," the lawyer exclaimed, "am I to
understand that you took a--well, an illegitimate child, to Miss
Brundon, left her in the School? It's--it's incredible."
"Why not?"
"If such a thing were known it would ruin Susan Brundon over night.
Haven't you a conception of how this is regarded? She would be stripped
of pupils as if the place reeked of malignant fever. A most beastly
egotistical and selfish act."
"Never thought of that," Jasper Penny admitted. He saw again the fine,
sensitive face of Miss Brundon, presiding over the establishment that
was like an emanation of her diffident and courageous spirit; the last
person alive he would harm. And people were exactly as Stephen had said,
particularly women. They would destroy Susan Brundon ruthlessly, without
a moment's hesitation. He thought of her as suffering incalculably,
betrayed by his implied lie; he saw her eyes stricken with pain, her
hands twisting together.... He rose sharply.
"A blind, infernal fool!" he ejaculated, grasping his hat. "I'm glad I
saw you when I did. Put it right at once. Obliged, Stephen; come to you
later about changing my will and the rest."
He was in such haste to remove the danger of Eunice from Susan Brundon
that not until he again stood at the door of the Academy did he realize
what a difficult explanation lay before him. Unconsciously he had
reached a point where he would do his utmost to avoid hurting her.
Already she occupied an unusual elevation in his thoughts, an unworldly
plane bathed in a white radiance.
She was not in the office, but soon appeared, with a questioning gaze;
and, he felt, an appealing lessening of her reserve. He hesitated,
casting vainly about for an acceptable expression of his errand. Another
lie, he thought, acutely distressed, must be necessary. "I am extremely
sorry, Miss Brandon," he told her, "but unexpected developments in the
last hour make it necessary for me to remove Eunice from your school."
A slow flush invaded her countenance lifted to meet his troubled gaze.
"Mr. Penny!" she exclaimed, in a faint dismay. "Oh, I hope it is because
of nothing--nothing derogatory you have heard. Please tell me
directly--"
"Absolutely no," he replied, his voice carrying a vibrating reassurance.
"You are entirely without the need of recommendation, far beyond any
unfavourable report. I am profoundly disturbed by causing you
inconvenience, and I only hope to offer you sufficient apology; but I
shall have to take Eunice away with me, at once."
"Perhaps her mother can't bear separation."
"It is not that," he said grimly, a tangible hurt sharpening within;
"but something that cannot be gone into, with you." She turned away
immediately. "I will send for her," she replied. They stood facing but
mutually avoiding each other's gaze while Eunice was being fetched.
"Her things have already come from the hotel," Miss Brundon proceeded.
"Where shall I send them?" Eunice broke in with a shrill protest. "Do I
have to go? I don't want to." Her face was scarlet with revolt. "I can
walk up and down the room with a book on my head, while another little
girl had to be all done with a board to her back."
Jasper Penny wondered if he would see Miss Brundon again soon. The last
was an afterthought bred by the realization that he could not permit her
to depart absolutely from his life. There was a great deal that he, a
rich and influential man of practical affairs, might do for her. He was
certain that Susan Brundon needed exactly the assistance he could give;
probably people robbed her, traded callously on her unsuspicious nature.
Yet, when the moment came to leave, he could think of nothing to say
beyond the banality of looking for her at the Jannans'.
"I go out very little," she told him; "the work here absorbs me; and,
unfortunately, my eyes are not strong. They require constant rest." He
expressed regret once more for any disturbance he might have caused;
and, after hesitating awkwardly, left with Eunice hanging fretfully at
his hand. What, in God's name, was he to do with the child? He walked
slowly, his face half lost in the fur of his overcoat, oblivious, in his
concentration on the difficulties of her situation, of Eunice
progressing discontentedly at his side. A petulant complaint rose at
intervals to an audible sob. Looking down, as the sobs threatened to
become a continuous crying, he saw the top of the velvet bonnet and her
diminutive hands in scarlet knitted mitts. He would have to stop
dragging her from place to place; a suitable position for the present
was all he hoped for now. There must be other institutions, larger and
farther away, to which Eunice could be sent. He had a vague memory of
such a place somewhere on the Delaware, was it at Burlington?
But he could not continue living with his daughter at Sanderson's Hotel.
Jasper Penny decided that he would take her that afternoon to the house
of the head machinist of his nail works at Jaffa, the town that, its
beginning growing largely out of the Penny industries, lay a scant mile
from Myrtle Forge. Speever was a superior man; his wife, a robust
Cornish woman in a crisp apron, would give Eunice an energetic and
proper care.
A thin, flexible mantle of snow lay over the drab earth, sweeping up to
a Grecian marble edifice, making more dreary the bulk of the Eastern
Penitentiary and foundation of Girard College, and emphasizing the
winter desertion of the reaches of the Fairmount Water Works. She soon
grew absorbed in the various aspects of their transportation--the echo
of the whip cracking over the mules that drew the coaches across the
covered viaduct, the labouring stationary engine and their slow ascent
beyond. They saw, lining the river, a cemetery elevated starkly against
the sky; and followed a canal by a broken, black flood between snowy
banks.
Past a town with impressive residences and manufactories with low
spreading veils of smoke, they came on a confusion of canals and canal
boats, lock dams and bridges, mules and raffish crews with tanned faces
and brightly coloured jackets and boots. Again crossing the river and a
shallow, tranquil valley, the train brigade rolled into the main street
of Jaffa. It was a town of small brick dwellings, spaced in orderly
yards, echoing to the diminished clamour of the Penny Rolling Mills on
the outskirts. Beyond the walls, starkly red against the snow, the
blackened main street, the river was spotted with ice.
Edgar Speever's wife accepted Eunice with an immediate and unquestioning
capability, and Jasper Penny turned away with a momentary but immense
relief. In a few days, after the deed for the possession of the child
had been executed, he could place her more permanently. He walked out to
the miscellaneous group of buildings and cluttered yards that held his
inherited activity; and in the small single-roomed building of the main
office discussed with his superintendent the changes, improvements of
process, then under way. The old nail machines, propelled by the feet
and hands of an operator, and producing but one nail at a time, had been
replaced by a high power engine, self-heading machinery. The
superintendent complained of the pig from the new hot blast furnaces.
"Impure," he declared. "And this new stone coal firing, too, makes but
poor stuff. It'll never touch the old charcoal forging. Hammered bar's
at ninety, and I'm glad to get it then. The puddling furnaces will do
something with the grey pig; we have eight in blast now, turning out the
railroad and heavier bars. This year will see forty-five hundred tons of
iron worked, and close to four thousand kegs of nails."
Jasper Penny listened attentively; it was his intention soon to dispense
entirely with all the time-honoured methods of iron manufacture. Water
power, with its unequal flow, any large employment of charcoal, growing
increasingly expensive with the rapid diminishment of the forests, must
give place to the steam blast machine and anthracite. If his manager was
unable to change, develop, with the changing times he would find
another, more scientific.
Outside the early twilight made more grey the dingy sheds and buildings,
the heaped slag; the long brick rectangle of the rolling mill, with its
triple imposed, ventilated roof and the high, smoking stacks of the
puddling furnaces, rising four from either length, gave out an
undiminished, deafening uproar, the clamour of the bars falling out from
the rollers, the spatter of hammers and dull dragging of heavy weights.
The engine of the nail works rent all other sound with an unaccustomed,
harsh blast.... Jasper Penny was conscious of a deep, involuntary
relief when he reached the comparative tranquillity, the secession of
vexatious problems, accomplished by Myrtle Forge.
XIV
There was, as always, an elaborate, steaming supper, with his mother, in
a pelisse of black silk ruching, and Amity Merken at their places. He
noted that an empty chair had been put, as customary, at the opposite
end of the table, and with a trace of impatience ordered its removal. He
wondered momentarily at his petty act; and then his thoughts returned to
Susan Brundon. Jasper Penny saw her blue gaze lifted to his face, the
hesitating smile; he felt again the pervading influence of her delicate
yet essentially unshrinking spirit. She would possess an enormous
steadfastness of purpose, he decided; a potentiality of immovable
self-sacrifice. Yet she was the gentlest person alive. An unusual and
resplendent combination of traits, rare possibilities.
She had told him that she seldom went about--her school absorbed her,
and her eyes needed care, rest. He must ask Stephen Jannan further about
her. They were sitting, Jasper Penny, his mother and her sister, in the
parlour; a large, square chamber hung with dark maroon paper and long,
many tasselled and corniced window curtains in sombre green plush. A
white wedgewood mantel with ornaments in olive and blue, above a
brass-fretted closed stove, supported a high mirror, against which were
ranged a pair of tall astral lamps shining in green and red spars of
light through their pendants, a French clock--a crystal ball in a
miniature Ionic pavilion of gilt--and artificial bouquets of coloured
wax under glass domes. A thick carpet of purplish black velvet pile
covered the floor from wall to wall; stiff Adam chairs and settee with
wheelbacks of black and gold were upholstered in dusky ruby and indigo.
Ebony tables of framed, inlaid onyx held tortoise shell and lacquer
ornaments, an inlaid tulip-wood music-box, volumes in elaborately tooled
morocco, and a globe where, apparently, metallic fish were suspended in
a translucent, green gloom.
The light from the multiple candelabras of ormolu and cut lustres
streamed from the walls over Jasper Penny, sunk forward in profound
absorption, and his mother's busy, fat hands working with gay worsteds.
At her side a low stand of rubbed Chinese vermilion held her spilling
yarns. Her face was placid, dryly pinkish and full. An irreproachable,
domestic female. Herself the daughter of a successful Pennsylvania
German Ironmaster, her wealth had doubled the Penny successes. There had
been other children; Jasper could only faintly remember two, mostly in
the form of infantile whimpering.
The inevitable termination of the evening was readied by the appearance
of a pitcher of steaming, spiced mulled wine. A cupful was formally
presented to Amity Merken; Gilda Penny sipped hers with an audible
satisfaction, and Jasper Penny absently drank the fragrant compound of
cinnamon bark and lemon, cloves, sugar and claret. A measure of that,
before retiring, could not but be beneficial to Susan Brundon, fatigued
by the duties of her Academy. He thought of the sharper breath of the
brandy and oranges compounded by Essie Scofield. A thin odour of
foxglove clung to the memory of his wife.
XV
Jasper Penny supplemented Jannan's letter to Essie Scofield, asking for
an appointment with his client at the law office, with a short
communication laying before her the condition in which he had found
Eunice, his knowledge of her neglect to provide their daughter with the
funds he had sent for that purpose, and definite plans for his complete
control of the child. At the despatch of this he felt that his duty,
where Essie as a formal parent resided, was ended. It was now only a
question of an agreement on terms. He got no reply, other than a
notification from Stephen Jannan that a meeting had been arranged for
the following week. And, at eleven o'clock, on a clear, thin blue winter
morning, he mounted, with Eunice, to the entrance of Jannan's offices on
Fourth Street.
Essie Scofield, in widespread mulberry silk with tight sleeves and broad
steel buttons, a close brimmed blue bonnet filled with lilacs and tied
with an old rose ribbon, was more compelling than Jasper Penny had
remembered her for, actually, years. A coffee-coloured India shawl, with
a deep fringe and trace of a lining checkered in cherry and black
slipping from her shoulders, toned her appearance to a potential
dignity.
"Eunice," she exclaimed, as the child entered, "do come here at my
side!" A small, cold mouth was silently raised for a straining embrace.
Stephen Jannan proceeded at once, addressing Essie Scofield. "Mr. Penny
informs me that he has written you explaining our purpose. I have
already instructed you of the law in such a connexion, and there remains
only your signatures to these papers. I begged you, if you will
remember, to come with counsel, but since you have not done that it will
be best for you to read this deed, which is quite clear in its intent."
Essie gazed dramatically at the paper the lawyer tended her. "It means,"
she said, "that I am to lose Eunice, and because I cannot offer her any
advantages beyond those of a slim purse. I am a most unfortunate
creature." Jasper Penny scraped his chair back impatiently, but Stephen
enforced his silence with a gesture. "While my client understands that
no monetary consideration can compensate for the breaking of ties of
affection," Stephen Jannan went on smoothly, "and while he offers none
in payment to that end, still we feel that some material recognition
should be due you. Have you anything to say, suggest, at this point?"
Essie Scofield's arm was about Eunice's waist. "I am to be parted from
my little daughter," she exclaimed; "and my tears are to be stopped with
gold--an affectionate breast, a heart-wrung appeal, stilled by a bribe.
That is the price paid by a trusting, an unsuspicious, female. Long ago,
when a mere girl, dazzled by--"
"We won't go into that," Jannan interrupted, "but confine ourselves to
the immediate development. By signing the paper in question, and
accepting a sum of money, you surrender all claim to this child, known
as Eunice Scofield."
"How will that affect my--my position in other ways?" she demanded, in a
suddenly shrewd, suspicious tone. "Not at all," the lawyer assured her.
She sobbed once, emotionally; and Eunice regarded her with a wide,
unsparing curiosity. "A stranger to me," she gasped, with a paper white
face and fluttering eyelids. Jasper Penny ejaculated sharply, "How much,
Essie?" In a moment, he judged, familiar with a potential hysteria, she
might faint, scream; there were clerks, people, in the next rooms. On
the brink of collapse she hesitated, twisting her purple kid gloves.
"Ten thousand dollars," she said.
Stephen Jannan glanced swiftly at his cousin, and the latter nodded.
"That is satisfactory," Jannan announced. "A mere formality--witnesses."
Essie Scofield traced her signature in round, unformed characters;
Jasper Penny followed with a hasty, small script; and Eunice, seated at
the impressive table, printed her name slowly, blotting it with a
trailing sleeve. The lawyer swung back the door of a heavy safe, and
took out a package of white bills of exchange on the Bank of
Pennsylvania. Essie counted the notes independently, thrust the money
into a steel-beaded reticule with silk cords, and rose, gathering
together her cashmere shawl. She ignored Eunice totally in the veiled
gaze she directed at Jasper Penny. "It is better," she told him, "if you
write first when you expect to visit me. Really, the last time, with
some friends there, you were impossible." He bowed stiffly. "Don't let a
sense of duty bring you," she concluded boldly. "I get on surprisingly
well as it is, as it is," she reiterated, and, he thought, her voice
bore almost a threat.
When she had gone the two men sat gazing in a common perplexity at the
child. Stephen Jannan's lips were compressed, Jasper Penny's face was
slightly drawn as if by pain. Eunice was investigating a thick stick of
vermilion sealing wax and a steel die. "Well?" Jannan queried, nodding
toward the table. "I thought something of Burlington," Penny replied,
"but decided to place her in New York. Want to give her all the chance
possible. I intend, at what seems the proper time, to secure her my own
name." He stopped the objection clouding his cousin's countenance. "We
won't argue that, please. Now about the will; the provision must be
explicit and generous. There, at least, I am able to meet a just
requirement." Jasper Penny's will was produced, a codicil projected,
appended, and witnesses recalled.
"I wanted to inquire about Miss Brundon," Jasper said finally, the
business despatched. "She seems to me very fragile for the conducting of
an Academy. Is there no family, men, to support her? And her
institution--does it continue to progress well?"
"Very." Jannan replied to the last question first. "Her children come
from the best families in the city; and, under my advice, her charges
are high. She has a brother, I believe, a cotton merchant of New
Orleans, and quite prosperous. But he has a large family, and Susan will
not permit him to deprive it of a dollar for her benefit. As you say,
she is not strong; but in spite of that she needs no man's patronage.
The finest qualities, Jasper, the most elevated spirit. A little too
conscientious, perhaps; and, although she is thirty-nine, curiously
ignorant of the world; but rare ... rare. It almost seems as if there
were a conspiracy to keep ugly truths away from her."
Truths, Jasper Penny thought bitterly, such as had just been revealed in
Stephen's office. There was, it seemed, nothing he could do for Susan
Brundon. He envied the lawyer his position of familiar adviser, the ease
with which the other spoke her name: Susan. He rose, fumbling with a
jade seal. "Come, Eunice," he said, the lines deepening about his mouth
and eyes. Stephen Jannan assisted him into the heavy, furred coat.
"Well, Jasper," he remarked sympathetically, "if we could but look
ahead, if we were older in our youth, yes, and younger in our increasing
age, the world would be a different place." He held out to Eunice a
newly minted Brazilian goldpiece. "Good-bye," he addressed her; "command
me if I can be of any use." She clutched the gold tightly, and Jasper
Penny led her out into the winter street. "We must have dinner," he said
gravely. "With some yellow rock candy," she added, "and syllabubs."
XVI
He returned to Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of
pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The
loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have
its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down
the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted
from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing
prosperity, the Pennys had not erected the unsightly buildings of their
manufacturing about the scene of their initial activity and mansion.
Jasper's father, Daniel Barnes Penny, under whose hand their success had
largely multiplied, had grouped their first rolling mill and small nail
works by the canal at Jaffa, preserving the pastoral aspect of Myrtle
Forge, with its farmland and small, ancient, stone buildings.
Jasper had only made some unimportant changes at the Forge itself--the
pigs were subjected to the working of two hearths now, the chafery,
where the greater part of the sulphur was burned out, and the finery.
The old system of bellows had been replaced by a wood cylinder,
compressing air by piston into a chamber from which the blast was
regulated. A blacksmith's shed had been added in the course of time,
and a brick coke oven. He stopped at the Forge shed, filled with ruddy
light and shadow, the ringing of hammers, and silently watched the
malleable metal on the anvil. Flakes of glowing iron fell, changing from
ruby to blue and black.
The Penny iron! The Forge had been operated continuously since seventeen
twenty-seven, hammering out the foundation of his, Jasper's, position.
He had taken a not inconsiderable place in the succession of the men of
his family; in him the Pennys had reached their greatest importance,
wealth. But after him ... what? He was, now, the last Penny man. The
foothold Gilbert had cut out of the wild, which Howat and Casimir--an
outlandish name obviously traceable to his mother, the foreign
widow--had, in turn, increased for Daniel and Jasper, would be
dissipated. His great, great aunt, Caroline, marrying a solid Quaker,
had contributed, too, to the family stamina; while her granddaughter,
wedding a Jannan, had increased the social prestige and connections of
the family. The Jannans, bankers and lawyers, had already converted the
greater part of their iron inheritance into more speculative finance;
and the burden of the industry rested on Jasper Penny's shoulders.
At his death the name, the long and faithful labour, the tangible
monument of their endurance and rectitude, except for the tenuous,
momentary fact of Eunice, would be overthrown, forgot. He was conscious
of a strong inner protest against such oblivion. He had, of course,
often before lamented the fact that he had no son; but suddenly his loss
became a hundred times more poignant, regrettable. Jasper Penny caught
again the remembered, oppressive odour of foxglove, the aromatic reek of
brandy and oranges; one, in its implications, as sterile as the other.
He was possessed by an overwhelming sense of essential failure, a
recurrence of the dark mood that had enveloped him in leaving the
Jannans' ball.
Yet, he thought again, he was still in the midstride of his life, his
powers. His health was unimpaired; his presence bore none of the
slackening aspect of increasing years. These feelings occupied him,
speeding in a single cutter sleigh over the crisp snow of the road
leading from his home to Shadrach Furnace, where Graham Jannan and his
young wife had been newly installed in the foremens' dwelling. There was
a slight uneasiness about Graham's lungs, in consequence of which he had
been taken out of the banking house of an uncle, Jannan and Provost, and
set at the more robust task of picking up the management of an iron
furnace.
It was early afternoon; the sky was as dryly powdered with unbroken blue
as was the earth with white. The silver bells and scarlet pompons of the
harness crackled in the still, intense cold; and a blanched vapour hung
about the horse's head. Jasper Penny, enveloped in voluminous buffalo
robes and fur, gazed with an increased interest at the familiar, flowing
scene; nearby the forest had been cut, and suave, rolling fields
stretched to a far mauve haze of trees; the ultramarine smoke of
farmhouse chimneys everywhere climbed into the pale wash of sunlight;
orderly fence succeeded fence. How rapidly, and prosperous, the country
was growing! Even he could remember wide reaches of wild that were now
cultivated. The game, quail and wild turkey and deer, was fast
disappearing. The country was growing amazingly, too, extending through
the Louisiana Purchase, State by State, to Mexico and the Texan border.
The era of the greatness of the United States had hardly begun, while it
was more than probable that the greatness, the power, of the Penny
family faced an imminent destruction. His revolt at this, joining the
more personal sense of the emptiness of his existence, filled him with a
bitter energy, a determination to conquer, somehow, the obdurate facts
hemming him in.
The sleigh dropped over a rise into a shallow fold of hills, with a
collection of structures on a slope, and a number of solid, small grey
stone dwellings. He glanced subconsciously at the stack of Shadrach
Furnace, and saw that it was in blast--a colourless, lively flame, with
a thin, white smoke like crumpled muslin, playing about its base. The
metallic ring of a smithy rose at a crossing of roads, and, from the
cast house, drifted the refrain of a German song. He turned in by the
comparatively long, low façade of the house where the Jannans were
living.
A negro led the horse and sleigh back to a stable; and, briskly sounding
the polished iron doorknocker, he let himself into the dining room, a
chamber with a wide, pot-hung fireplace and plain mahogany consul tables
with wood chairs brightly painted with archaic flowers and scrolls in
gold. Standing at the far side of the room, delicately outlined against
a low, deeply embrasured window, was Susan Brundon.
A slow tide of colour rose to her ordinarily pale cheeks, corresponding
with a formless gladness permeating his own being. She wore ruffled
lavender with a clear lace pelerine caught at her breast by a knot of
straw-coloured ribbon and sprig of rose geranium. "Mr. Penny," she said,
with a little gasp of surprise; but her gaze was unwavering, candid.
"Why not?" he replied lightly. "I have a small interest in Shadrach. You
are surprising--so far from that absorbing Academy."
"It's my eyes again," she explained. "I am obliged to rest. There is a
very good assistant at the school; and Mary sweetly thought the country
would do me good."
"It is really miraculous," Mary Jannan stated, entering from the
kitchen; "she'll almost never. Weren't we lucky?" She was a small woman
with smooth brown hair and an air of quiet capability. "And it's
splendid to see you," she continued to Jasper Penny. "Don't for a
minute think you'll get off before to-morrow, perhaps not then. Graham
is out, chop-chopping wood. Actually--the suave Graham." She indicated a
high row of pegs for Jasper Penny's furs. "Everything is terribly
primitive. Most of the furniture was so sound that we couldn't bring
ourselves to discard it all, however old-fashioned. Little by little."
Graham Jannan entered, a tall, thin young man with crisp, pale yellow
hair and a clean shaven, sanguine countenance with challenging light
blue eyes. He greeted the older man with a firm, cold hand clasp. "I
suppose you've come out to discover what I have learned about iron.
Well, I know now that a sow is not necessarily a lady, and that some
blooms have no bouquet. Good rum has, though, after sleighing."
Upon alternately burning his fingers and throat with a steaming glass of
St. Croix, Jasper Penny and Graham Jannan proceeded to the Furnace
where, in the cast house, they watched the preparations for a flow of
metal. The head founder, McQuatty, bearded to the eyes and swathed in a
hide apron, stood at the Ironmaster's side. "The charcoal you'd get's
not worth a bawbee," he complained; "soft stuff would hardly run lead.
And where they'd cut six thousand cords of wood will no longer show more
than four. Shadrach ought to put out twenty-eight tons of pig in a week;
and you see the statements."
"Stone coal," Jasper Penny replied; "and a hot blast." He turned to
describe the latter to Jannan. "It'll come," the founder agreed, "and
the quality will go." He went forward to tap the clay-sealed hearth. The
liquid iron poured into the channels of its sand bed, sputtering and
slowly fading to dingy grey. "I'd like you to take hold of this," Jasper
Penny told the younger man; "great changes, improvements, are just over
the hill. I'll miss them--a link between the old and the new. But you
would see it all. The railroad will bring about an iron age; and then,
perhaps, steel. I look for trouble, too--this damned States Rights. The
South has been uneasy since the Carolina Nullification Act. It will be a
time for action." He gazed keenly at Graham Jannan. A promising young
man, he thought, with a considerable asset in his wife. A woman, the
right woman, could make a tremendous difference in a man's capabilities.
He elaborated this thought fantastically at dinner, sitting opposite
Susan Brundon. Mary Jannan wore orange crêpe, with black loops of ball
fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon's dress
was noticeably simple. She volunteered little, but, when directly
addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the
directness, the conviction, of her replies. The right woman, Jasper
Penny repeated silently. Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free,
he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was
exactly the wife he wanted. But no such person had appeared at that
momentous period in his life.
However, then he had been a totally different being; perhaps the
appreciation of Miss Brundon, her actual reality, lay for him entirely
in his own perceptions. But if she would not have been the woman for him
then, by heaven, she was now! He expressed this unaware of its wide
implications, unconscious of the effect it would instantly have. The
thing silently uttered bred an enormously increased need, the absolute
determination that she was necessary to his most perfunctory being. The
thought of her alone, he discovered, had been sufficient to give him a
new energy, a sense of rare satisfaction.
Shortly expressed, he wanted to marry her; he had not, he told himself
oddly, ever been married. The word had a significance which heretofore
he had completely missed. A strange emotion stirred into being, a
longing thrown out from his new desire, the late-born feeling of
dissatisfaction; it was a wish for something in Susan Brundon which he
experienced but could not name. Roughly stated it was a hunger to
surround her with security, comfort, to fortify the, at best, doubtful
position of life in death for her. Yet he acknowledged to himself that
this regard for her safety was mostly the result of his own inner, blind
striving. Her happiness had magically become his. Beyond that he was
unable to penetrate.
After supper they gathered in the chamber beyond the dining room. Here
Jasper Penny found an incongruous mingling of old and new furniture.
There was a high, waxed walnut desk and cabinet, severely simple, and
before it a chair with a back of elaborately carved and gilded tulips
tufted in plum-coloured velvet. The thick carpet was a deep rose, and
the drapery of the mantel and windows garnet. A painted hood of
brilliant Chinese colours had been fastened before what was evidently an
open hearth, for which a coal stove was substituted. On the middle of
the floor was an oriental hassock in silver brocade; while a corner held
a spinet-piano decorated in roseate cupids, flower sprays and gold leaf.
Again, an old clock in Spanish mahogany, with a rudely painted glass
door, had been left on the wall.
Mary Jannan, at the piano, wove a delicate succession of arpeggios. She
sang, in a small and graceful voice, a cavatina, _Tanti Palpiti_. Then,
"Ah, que les amours ... de beaux heurs." Jasper Penny listened with an
unconscious, approving pretence of understanding. But when, in the
course of her repertoire, she reached _Sweet Sister Fay_, and _The Horn
of My Loved One I Hear_, his pleasure became active. Susan Brundon, on
the hassock, lifted her sensitive face to the mild candle light, and its
still pallor gave him a shock of delight. Her hands were folded in the
voluminous sweep of her crinoline; the ribbons at her breast rose and
fell softly.
Jasper Penny and Graham were smoking long, fragrant cigars that the
former had produced from a lacquered case, and Jannan had the
ingredients of the hot punch at his elbow. It amused the young man to
persuade Susan Brandon to take a sip from his glass; and they all
laughed at her subsequent gasping. Jasper Penny was astoundingly happy;
his being radiated a warmth and contentment more potent than that of the
St. Croix rum. It was accompanied by an extraordinary lightness of
spirit, a feeling of the desirability of life. The memory of his greying
hair had left him; not, it was true, to be replaced by the surging
emotions of youth, but by a deep satisfaction.
Susan Brundon, Susan ... the right woman. He marvelled again at the
brightness of spirit that shone in her--like a flame through a fine
paper lantern. Susan, at Myrtle Forge. His thought became concrete; he
knew now, definitely, that he had determined to marry her. His peace of
mind increased. There was no need for hurry, the mere idea was
irradiating; yet there must be no unnecessary delay. Incontrovertibly he
had passed forty. The best period in a man's life. They would go to the
West Indies, he decided. A ring with a square emerald, and roses of
pearls. It was, almost immediately, time to retire. His room, narrow
with a sloping wall, had a small window giving on a flawless rectangle
of snow like the purity of Susan Brundon.
As he lay in bed, staring wakefully against the dark, another memory
crept into his thoughts--the echo of a small, querulous voice, "yellow
rock candy and syllabubs." Eunice! A sudden consternation seized him as
he realized the necessity of telling Susan fully about his daughter. No
escape, evasion, was possible. If she discovered the existence, the
history, of the child afterward--he lingered over the happiness that
term implied--it would destroy her. This, he told himself, was not
merely melodrama; he was thinking of her delicate spirituality, so
completely shielded from the bald fatality of facts. An increasing dread
seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on
her. The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the
unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew,
filled him with bitter rebellion. The blind commitment of a vanished
youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan
Brundon. He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight
dragging at his attempted progress. The secret errors of all the pasts
that had made him rose in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed,
perpetuated, multiplied, against his aspirations of tranquil release.
Yet, he told himself, dressing in the bright flood of morning, if
nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted
equally with the other--the symbol of Essie Scofield was no more actual
than Susan. He had breakfast early, with Graham Jannan; and, in a
reviving optimism, arranged for the Jannans to bring Miss Brundon to
Myrtle Forge for a night before her departure. He whirled away, in a
sparkling veil of flung snow crystals, before the women appeared.
Susan Brundon would, naturally, shrink from what he must tell her; but
he was suddenly confident of his ability to convince her of the superior
importance of the actuality of what they together might make of the
future. He was accustomed to the bending of circumstance to his will; in
the end he would prove stronger than any hesitancy she might, perhaps,
reveal. His desire to have her had grown to such proportions that he
could not, for an instant, think of existence without her as an intimate
part. He even mentally determined when he should go to the city, the
jeweller's, for the square emerald and flowered pearls. He would do over
the rooms where he had lived in the thin formality of his marriage with
Phebe, settle an amount on Essie ... shredding flesh. It would do the
living woman no more injury than the dead. Oranges and brandy, satin and
gold and ease.
He wrote, through Stephen Jannan, to Essie Scofield that afternoon,
stating the generous terms of his final arrangement with her, making it
plain that all personal contact between them had reached an end.
Hereafter she must exclusively address any unavoidable communications to
Mr. Jannan. She disregarded this in a direct, inevitably complaining,
laborious scrawl. However, he could read through it her obvious relief
at complete independence. She would, she thought, stay where she was for
a little ... a period of perfunctory sentimentality followed. He
destroyed the letter, turning with deep pleasure to the message from
Graham Jannan that he would bring Susan Brundon and Mary to Myrtle Forge
the following day.
His mother, with Amity Merken like a timid and reduced replica at her
back, greeted the Jannans and Miss Brundon at the door. Jasper Penny
came forward from the smoking room, to the right of the main entrance;
where the men retired for an appetizer of gin and bitters. The older man
was garbed with exact care. His whiskers were closely trimmed on either
side of his severe mouth and shapely, dominant chin; and his sombre
eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples, held an unusual
raillery. Amity Merken, he learned, had desired to stay away from the
supper table; but, to her distress, he forced her into a chair set by
himself. Susan sat at the other end of the table, in the place that had
been Phebe's. He gazed at her with a satisfaction without surprise; for
it seemed to him that the woman beyond him had always occupied the fore
of his existence. She wore pale grey, the opening at her neck filled
with soft lace and pinned with a garnet brooch, and a deep-fringed,
white silk shawl. The conversation was ambling, but, to Jasper Penny,
pitched in a key of utter delight. He said little through supper; and,
at its end, with Graham Jannan, immediately followed the others into the
parlour.
There Mary Jannan repeated her songs, French, English and Italian; and
Jasper Penny listened with a poignant, emotional response. Graham and
his wife had arranged to sleigh back to Shadrach Furnace that evening;
but Susan Brundon was to stay at Myrtle Forge, and take the train from
Jaffa to-morrow. The Jannans, finally, departed; and Jasper Penny,
showing Susan through the chambers of the lower floor, succeeded in
delaying her, seated, in the smoking room.
XVII
Now that the moment which he had so carefully planned had arrived he was
curiously reluctant to precipitate Susan and himself into the future.
The lamps on a mantel, hooded in alabaster, cast a diffused radiance
over Susan's silvery dress, on her countenance faintly flushed above the
white folds of the shawl. "What is that sound?" she suddenly queried. "I
heard it all through supper and before. It seems to live in the walls,
the very air, here."
"The trip hammer of Myrtle Forge," he replied gravely. "I suppose it
might, fancifully, be called the beating of the Penny heart; it does
pound through every associated stone; and I have a notion that when it
stops we shall stop too. The Penny men have all been faithful to it, and
it has been faithful to us, given us a hold in a new country, a hold of
wrought iron."
"How beautiful," she murmured; "how strong and safe!"
"It pleases me that you feel that," he plunged directly into his
purpose; "for I intend to offer you all the strength and safety it
contains." Her hands fluttered to her cheeks; a sudden fear touched
her, yet her eyes found his unwaveringly. "If that were all," he
continued, standing above her, "if I had only to tell you of the iron,
if the metal were flawless, I'd be overwhelmed with gladness. But almost
no iron is perfect, the longest refining leaves bubbles, faults. Men are
like that, too ... Susan." She grew troubled, sensitively following his
mood; her hands were now pressed to her breast, her lips parted. She was
so bewilderingly pure, in her dim-lit, pearly haze of silk, that he
paused with an involuntary contraction of pain at what must follow.
"The child, Eunice," he struggled on; "I couldn't leave her at the
Academy because it might injure you. I had brought her in a most blind
egotism; and so I took her away. She is my daughter."
He saw that at first she totally missed the implication of his words.
"But," she stammered, "I was told you had no ... how would that--?" Then
she stopped as sharply as if a hand had compressed her throat. A vivid
mantle of colour rose in her face; she made a motion of rising, of
flight, but sank back weakly. "It is criminally indelicate to speak to
you of this," he said, "but it was absolutely necessary. I want to marry
you; in that circumstance a lie would be fatal, later or sooner."
She attempted to speak, her lips quivered, but only a low gasp was
audible. It was worse, even, than he had feared. Now, however, that he
had told her, he felt happier, more confident. Surely, after a little,
she would forgive, forget, "I want to marry you," he repeated, torn
with pity at her fragility, her visible suffering. "All that might hurt
you has been put out of my life, out of our future. The way is open
before us, the refining. I would do anything to spare you, believe that;
but the truth, now, best."
"Always," she said in a faint voice. "I am trying to--to realize. Oh! I
suppose such things do occur; but the child herself, you--don't see how
that, so near--" she broke off, gazing wide-eyed out of her misery. He
was conscious of the dull, regular beat of the Forge hammer. God, how
the imperfections persisted! But, he told himself savagely, in the end
the metal was steadfast. He would, certainly, overcome her natural
revulsion from what she had just heard. The colour had left her cheeks,
violet shadows gathered about her eyes; she seemed more unsubstantial
than ever. He would repay again and again the suffering he had brought
her. Having declared himself he was almost tranquil; there was a total
absence of the impetuous emotionalism of youth, the blind tyranny of
desire. His feeling was deeper, and accompanied by a far more involved
philosophy of self-recognition. At the same time, while acutely
conscious of his absolute need of Susan Brundon, he was at a loss to
discover its essence, shape. Before he had known her he had been
obsessed by a distaste for his existence; he had desperately wanted
something without definition ... And Susan was that desire, delicate,
clear-eyed Susan. Yet, still, the heart of her escaped him.
Jasper Penny had told himself that his new dissatisfaction was merely
the result of his accumulating years; but, beyond the fact that such an
increase might have brought him different and keener perceptions, that
explanation was entirely inadequate. He wanted a quality beyond his
experience, beyond, he realized, any material condition--Susan Brundon,
yes; but it was no comparatively simple urge of sex, the natural
selection of the general animal creation. There was no question of
passionate importunities; those, here, would be worse than futile; all
that he desired was beyond words, moving in obedience to a principle of
which he had not caught the slightest glimpse. Yet, confident of his
ultimate victory, he maintained the dominating presence of a black
Penny.
Susan Brundon had sunk back into the depths of her capacious chair; she
seemed utterly exhausted, as if she had been subjected to a prolonged
brutal strain. But still her eyes sought him steady in their hurt
regard. "There is so much that I can give you," he blundered,
immediately conscious of the sterility of his phrase. "I mean better
things--peace and attention and--and understanding. I won't attempt any
of the terms usual, commonplace, at such moments, you must take them,
where they are worthy, for granted. I only tell you a lamentable fact,
and ask you to marry me, promise you the tenderest care--"
"I know that," she replied, with obvious difficulty, hesitation. "I'll
not thank you. It is terribly difficult for me. I'd like to answer you
as you wish, I mean reply to--to your request. But the other, the child,
dragged about; there was such a distrust, a wariness, in her face."
"There is no good in thinking of that alone," he stated, with a return
of his customary decision. "No one can walk backwards into the future.
Try to consider only the immediate question, what I have asked you--will
you marry me?"
"Is that all you have to explain?" she asked. "Is there, now, no one
else that counts?" The edge of a cold dread entered his hopes. "If you
refer to the child's mother," he said stiffly, "she is amply well taken
care of, you need waste no sentimental thoughts on her."
"Ah!" Susan exclaimed, shrinking. Her hands closed tightly on the wide
silk of her skirt. The fear deepened within him; it would be impossible
to explain Essie to the woman before him. Essie, falsely draped in
conventional attributes, defied him to utter the simple truth. He raged
silently at his impotence, the inhibition that prevented the expression
of what might be said for himself. Essie Scofield had, like every one
else, lived in the terms of her being, attracting to herself what
essentially she was; it was neither bad nor good, but inevitable. His
contact with her had been the result of mutual qualities, qualities that
were no longer valid. Yet to say that would place him in a damnable
light, give him the aspect of the meanest opportunist. Susan breathed,
"That poor woman." It was precisely what he had expected, feared--the
adventitious illusion! He had an impulse to describe to her, even at the
price of his own condemnation, the condition in which he had found
Eunice; but that too perished silently. Jasper Penny grew restive under
the unusual restraint of his position.
"Do you mind--no more at present." Susan Brundon said. "I am upset;
please, another time; if it is necessary. I feel that I couldn't answer
anything now, I must go up; no, your mother will show me." She rose, and
he realized that she would listen no further. There was an astonishing
strength of purpose behind her deprecating presence. She was more
determined than himself. He watched her walk evenly from the room, heard
the low stir of voices beyond, with a feeling that he had been perhaps
fatally clumsy. All that he had said had been wrong, brutally selfish.
He had deliberately invited failure; he should have been patient,
waited; given her a chance to know and, if possible, value him, come to
depend on him, on his judgment, his ability in her welfare. But, in
place of making himself a necessity, he had launched at once into facts
which she must find hideous. She had said, "another time, if necessary."
His mouth drew into a set line--there would be another and another,
until he had persuaded, gained, her.
He lit a cigar, and walked discontentedly up and across the room. The
sound of the Forge hammer again crept into his consciousness: the Penny
iron--the fibre, the actuality, of the Penny men! He repeated this
arrogantly; but the declaration no longer brought reassurance; the
certainty even of the iron faded from him; he had failed there, too,
digging a pit of oblivion for all that their generations of toil had
accomplished. The past inexorably woven into the pattern of the future!
Eunice, so soon wary, distrustful, Susan had seen that immediately,
would perpetuate all that he wished dead--Essie and himself bound
together, projected in an undesirable immortality through endless lives
striving, like himself, to escape from old chains.
If he failed with Susan his existence would have been an unmitigated
evil; the iron, his petty, material triumphs, would rust, but the other
go on and on. His thoughts became a maze of pity for Eunice, infinite
regret of the past, a bitter energy of hope for what might follow.
He turned with pride to his forging--long-wrought charcoal iron; the
world would know no better. Still, with his penetration of the future,
he realized that the old, careful processes were doomed. He had
difficulty in assembling enough adequate workmen to fill the increasing
contracts for bar iron and rails now; and the demand, with the extension
of steam railways, would grow resistlessly. More wholesale methods of
production were being utilized daily; he was one of the foremost
adherents of "improvement"; but suddenly he felt a poignant regret at
the inevitable passing of the old order of great Ironmasters, the
principalities of furnaces and forges. He was still, he felt, such a
master of his men and miles of forests and clearings, lime pits and ore
banks, coal holes, mills, coke ovens, hearths and manufactories. He
might still drive to Virginia through a continuous line of his
interests; his domination over his labourers, in all their personal and
industrial implications, was patriarchal; he commanded, through their
allegiance and his entire grasp on every iota of their living, their
day's journey; but, he told himself, he was practically the last of his
kind.
New and different industrial combinations were locking together in great
agglomerations of widely-separated activities; the human was superseded
by the industrial machine, where men were efficient, subservient cogs in
a cold and successful automaton of business. A system of general credit
was springing up; the old, old payments in kind, in iron or even meal
and apparel, or gold, had given place to reciprocal understandings of
deferred indebtedness. The actual thousands of earlier commerce were
replaced by theoretical millions. His own realty, his personal property,
because of such understandings, were outside computation. They were, he
knew, reckoned in surprising figures; but in a wide-spread panic, forced
liquidation, the greater part of his wealth would break like straw. It
was the same with the entire country.
His thoughts returned to Susan, to the longing for the peace, the
inviolable security, she would bring to the centre, the heart, of his
life. No material catastrophe could shape, deplete, her richness of
spirit. Fragile as she was, with her need of rest, her diffidence and
pallor, she yet seemed to Jasper Penny the most--the only--secure thing
in the world. She defied, he murmured, death itself. Wonderful.
He moved slowly to his sombre bed room, with its dark velour hangings
and ponderous black walnut furniture, precisely scrolled with gilt. The
interior absorbed the light of a single lamp, robbing it of radiance. A
clock deliberately struck the hour with an audible whirring of the
spring. Jasper Penny took out from a drawer a tall, narrow ledger, its
calf binding powdering in a yellow dust, with a blurring label,
"Forgebook. Myrtle Forge, 1750." He sat, opening it on the arm of an old
Windsor reading chair he had insisted on retaining among the recent
upholstery, and studied the entries, some written in a small script with
ornamental capitals and red lined day headings, others in an abrupt
manner with heavy down strokes. The latter, he knew, had been made by
his great grandfather, Howat.
"Jonas Rupp charged with three pair of woollen stockings ... shoes for
Minnie." Howat had been young when Minnie's shoes were new; twenty
something--five or six. He must have married not long after.
Howat--like himself--a black Penny. The special interest Jasper Penny
felt for this particular ancestor grew so vivid that he almost felt the
other's presence in the room at his shoulder. He consciously repressed
the desire to turn suddenly and surprise the shadowy and yet clear
figure in the gloom. The features of the youth so long gone, and yet,
too, he felt, the replica of his own young years, were plain; the dark
eyes, slanted brows, the impatient mouth.
His community of sympathy with the other, who was still, in a measure,
himself, was inexplicable; for obviously Howat had escaped Jasper's
blundering--an early marriage, a son, the son whose name, like his
mother's, made such an exotic note in a long, sound succession of
Isabels and Carolines and Gilberts, was a far different tale from his
own. Yet it persisted. It seemed to him that the silence of the room
grew strained, there was the peculiar tension of a muteness desperately
striving for utterance. He waited, listened, in a rigidity of which he
was suddenly ashamed; ridiculous. He relaxed; the memory of his own
youth flooded back, rapt him in visions, scents, sounds. The premonitory
whirring of the clock spring sounded once more, followed by the slow,
increasing strokes ... Again. His body wavered, on the verge of sleep,
and he straightened himself sharply; then he rose and, putting back the
Forgebook, undressed.
Susan, at breakfast, her shoulders wrapped in a serious-toned pelerine,
said little. Jasper Penny instinctively excluded her from a trivial
conversation. She was, he decided, paler than usual, the shadows under
her eyes were indigo. He was filled with self-condemnation. Mrs. Penny,
gazing at her with a beady discernment, asked if her rest had been
interrupted. "I am always an indifferent sleeper," Susan Brundon replied
evasively. He followed her into the carriage that was to take her to the
station at Jaffa; and, ignoring her slight gasp of protest, grasped the
reins held by the negro coachman. However, they proceeded over the short
distance to the town without speech. He was torn between a wish to spare
her and the desire to urge his own purpose. But more immediately he
wanted to make secure the near hour of his seeing her again. He asked,
finally, "Will you be at the Jannans' this week, or are visitors
received at the Academy?"
"No," she replied to the first; "and I have very little time between
classes. You see, they fill the whole day, tasks and pleasures. It is
difficult for me to--to talk on a generality of themes with callers."
"I have no intention of being diffuse," he replied pointedly. "I could
confine my entire conversation to one request--"
"Please," she interrupted pitiably. "I am utterly wretched now. The
simplest gentility--" she paused, but her wish was clear. He restrained
himself with difficulty. Drifting slowly across the scattered roofs of
the town was the leaden smoke of his mills and fires; as they drove into
the main street the thin crash of his iron was audible. Men everywhere
bowed to him with marked respect. But the woman at his side sat erect,
drawn away from him, unmoved by all that, to the world, he was. There
was an appalling quality in her aloofness from what, materially, he
might advance in extenuation; the things so generally potent here were
no more than slag. He searched within for what might bend, influence,
her, for whatever he might have of value in her eyes. He found nothing.
It was a novel and painful experience; and it bred in him a certain
anger; he became merely stubborn. He declared to himself, with an oath,
that he would gain her; and he pulled up his horses viciously at the
station rack. This, too, hurt her; she exclaimed faintly at the brutally
drawn bits. A man hurried forward to take her bag, and then, in a
blowing of horn, a harsh exhaust of steam, she was gone. A last, hurried
impression of her delicate profile on a small pane of glass accompanied
him back to Myrtle Forge. There his mother regarded him with an open
concern. "Something's on your mind," she declared. "I passed your door
at midnight, and there was light under it. I've often told you about
sitting up late."
"I'm getting along," he replied lightly. "You fail to do justice to the
weight of my increasing majority. But, in a little, you'll be astonished
at my renewed youth." He became serious in speaking, conscious of the
new life Susan would, must, bring into his existence.
XVIII
Since he had declared himself so decidedly and at once, no hesitation
was possible; he must, he was aware, move remorselessly forward in
assault. To sweep Susan Brundon into his desire, overwhelm her
defences--he called them prejudices but immediately after withdrew that
term--offered the greatest, the only promise of success. An obliterating
snow fell for the following thirty hours, and a week went by in the
readjustment to ordinary conditions of living and travel. But at the end
of that period Jasper Penny left Myrtle Forge for the city, with a
determined, an almost confident, mouth, and a bright, hard gaze. Late
afternoon, he decided, would be the best time for his appearance at the
Academy. And the western sky was a luminous, bright red when he passed
under the stripped, uneasy branches of the willow trees to the school
door.
Miss Brundon's office, rigorous as the corridor of a hospital, had a
table and uncompromising wooden chairs on a rectangle of bluish-pink
carpet; a glowing, round stove held a place on a square of gleaming,
embossed zinc, while the remaining surfaces were scrubbed oak flooring
and white calcimine. A large geographer's globe, a sphere of pale,
glazed yellow traced in violet and thin vermilion and cobalt, rested on
an involuted mahogany stand; and a pile of text books covered in gay
muslin made a single, decisive note of colour.
She kept him waiting, he felt uneasily, a long while; perhaps she had a
class; but he felt that that was not the reason for her delay. When she
finally appeared in soft brown merino, with a deep fichu of old, dark
lace, and black ribbons, she courageously held out a delightfully cool,
smooth hand. "At first," she said directly, "I thought it would be
better not to see you at all. Yet that wasn't genteel; and I felt, too,
that I must speak to you. Even at the danger, perhaps, of trespassing
into your privacy."
"I have given you the absolute right to do that," he told her. "It will
only bring me pleasure, to--to suppose I interest you enough--"
"Ah, but you do," she cried with clasping fingers. "It has made my work
here very difficult; the quiet has gone before echoes that I think every
child must hear, echoes from spaces and things that appall me. Here, you
see, I have lived so apart from others, perhaps selfishly, that I had
grown accustomed to a false sense of peace. Only lessons and little
questions, little hands. It seems now that I have been outside of life
itself, in a cowardly seclusion. Yet it had always been that way; I
didn't know." Her face was deeply troubled, the clear depths of her eyes
held a new questioning doubt.
"It's because of that, mainly, I ask you to marry me," he replied,
standing before the table at which, unconsciously, she had taken her
place; "it is because of your astonishing purity. You are so beautiful;
and this quiet, peace--you must have it all your life; it is the air,
the garden air, for you to flower in. I can give it to you, miles of it,
farther than you can see. All that you care for heaped about you. But
not that only," he insisted, "for I realized that no one lives to whom
such things are less; I can give you something more, not to be talked
about; whatever my life has been it has at least brought me to your
feet. I have learned, for you, that there is a thing men must have, God
knows exactly what--a craving to be satisfied, a--a reaching. And that
itself, the knowledge of such need, is not without value. Because of it
I again, and shall again, if necessary, ask you to marry me."
She replied in a low voice. "You must marry the child's mother." For the
first time she avoided him; bright blood burned in her cheeks; a hand on
the edge of the table was straining, white. A sudden feeling of
helplessness came over him, with, behind it, the ever-present edge of
anger, of impatience. He took a step forward, as if to crush, by sheer
insistence, her opposition; but he stopped. He lost entirely the sense
of her fragile physical being; she seemed only a spirit, shining and
high, and insuperably lovely. Then all feeling was lost but the
realization that he could not--in any true sense--live without her.
"Susan," he said, leaning forward, "you must marry me. Do you care for
me at all?"
Her breast rose and fell under the delicate contour of her wool gown.
"The child's mother," she repeated, "you should marry her. How can you
do differently? What can it matter if I care about you?" She raised a
miserable face. "How can I?" she asked.
He could think of no other answer than to repeat his supreme necessity
for her. He struggled to tell her that this was an altogether different
man from Essie Scofield's companion; but his words were unconvincing,
limited by the inhibition of custom. A transparent dusk deepened in the
room accompanied by a pause only broken by the faint explosions of the
soft coal. The power of persuasion, of speech, appeared to have left
him. There must be some convincing thing to say, some last,
all-powerful, argument. It eluded him. The exasperation returned,
spreading through his being.
"Surely," she said laboriously, "there is only one course for you, for
us all."
"I'll never marry Essie Scofield!" he declared bluntly. His voice was
unexpectedly loud, unpleasant; and it surprised him only less than Susan
Brundon. She drew back, and the colour sank from her cheeks; an
increasing fear of him was visible. "In the first place," he continued,
"Essie probably wouldn't hear of it. And if I managed that it would be
only to make a private hell for us both. It would not, it couldn't, last
a month. There is nothing magical in marriage itself, there's no general
salvation in it, nothing to change a man or woman. Why, by heaven,
that's what you have taught me, that is the heart of my wanting you. You
must feel it to understand." He circled the table and laid a hand on the
back of her chair. "Susan."
Her head was bowed, and he could see only her smooth, dark bands of hair
and the whiteness of her neck. "Susan," he said again. "A second wrong
will not cure the first. If one was inexcusable the other would be
fatal. Married--to some one else, with yourself always before me--surely
you must see the impossibility of that. And am I to come to nothing,
eternally fail, because of the past? Isn't there any escape, any hope,
any possibility? You don't realize how very much will go down with me. I
am a man in the middle of life, and haven't the time, the elasticity, of
youth. A few more years to the descent. But, with you, they could be
splendidly useful, happy; happy, I think, for us both. I know that a
great many people would say as you have, but it is wrong in every
aspect, absolutely hopeless. Essie's values are totally different from
yours; she has her own necessities; one measure will not do for all
women."
She rose and stood facing him, very near, her crinoline swaying against
him, and said blindly, "You shall marry her."
"I'll be damned if I do," Jasper Penny asserted. "I will marry you,
you," he whispered, with his lips against the fineness of her ear. Her
hands were on his shoulders; but she neither drew herself into his
embrace nor repulsed him. He wanted to crush her softness in his arms,
to kiss her still face into acquiescence. The quality, the kind, of his
need made it impossible. She slipped back without a sound into her
chair, drooping forward over the table.
A sharp pity invaded him, holding him back from her, silencing the flow
of his reasoning and appeal. It defeated, in the stirring tenderness of
its consideration, his purpose. He could not continue tormenting her,
racking her delicate, taut sensibilities by a hard insistence. He
withdrew quietly, to where his hat and stick rested on a chair, and
gathered them up. Still she didn't move, raise her head, break the low
fumbling of the soft coal. He could no longer distinguish her clearly,
she was blurring in a dusk deeping so imperceptibly that it seemed a
gradual failing of his vision. The geographer's globe appeared to sway
slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled
text books had lost their designs. Suddenly the room without motion, the
approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more
immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a
symbol, an epitome, of himself. Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving
the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger,
the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss.
"Good-bye," he breathed. Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he
caught the glimmering pallor of her face. But she said nothing, and sank
back into the crumpled position on the table. He went out, closing the
door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her
insistence.
In the familiar rooms at Sanderson's Hotel he revolved again and again
all that she had said. For a little he even endeavoured to inspect
calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield. Steeped in
Susan's spirit he thought of it as a reparation, to Eunice, perhaps to
Essie, but more certainly to an essence within himself. But immediately
he saw the futility of such a course; the inexorable logic of existence
could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect
defeated. All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an
immovable conviction. The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable,
farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom. Such a thing
must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past.
Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the
impossibility of what she upheld. No, no, it was out of the question.
He wondered if he had progressed in the other, his supreme, wish. And he
felt, with a stirring of blood, that he had. Susan cared for him; her
action had made that plain. That was a tremendous advantage; with
another he would have thought it conclusive; but not--not quite with
Susan Brundon. He had a deep regard for her determination, so surprising
in the midst of her fragility. Yet, if pity had not prevented him, this
afternoon, in her office, he might have forced her to a sharper
realization of a more earthly need, the ache for sympathy, consolation,
the imperative cry of self. That was his greatest difficulty, to
overcome her lifelong habit of thinking of others before herself. Such,
he knew, was the root of her appeal for Essie, rather than a cold,
dogmatic conception. Self-effacement.
At this a restive state followed; personally he had no confidence in the
sacrifice of individual aims and happiness. Any course of that sort, he
told himself, in the management of his practical affairs, would have
resulted in his failure. There were a hundred men in the country
plotting for his overthrow, anxious to take his position, scheming to
undersell him, to discover the secret of the quality of his iron rails.
Others he had deliberately, necessarily, ruined. No good would have been
served by his stepping aside, allowing smaller men to flourish and annoy
him, cut down his production by inconsiderable sales. He, and his
family, had built a great, yes, and beneficial, industry by ruthlessly
beating out a broad and broader way for their progress. It was needful
to gaze fixedly at the end desirable and move in the straightest line
possible.
Susan stopped by the way. A thousand little acts of alleviation, at
best temporary, interrupted her living. Children, not hers, dragged at
her skirt. How much better for her to have a child of her own. Their
child! A great deal that had been vague in his thoughts became concrete
at that last period; not only the possible succession of the iron, but
the comprehension that a child now, before the increasing sterility of
multiplying years, would be an image of all his inmost craving and which
must else be lost.
Eunice was different. Pity, mingled with a rigid sense of his duty and a
faint accent of parenthood, comprehended his feeling for her. He stated
this to himself clearly, admitting what delinquency it carried. It was,
simply, an incontrovertible fact; and it was his habit to meet such
things squarely. A black Penny, he had no impulse to see existence in
imposed sentimental or formally moral conceptions. From all this he
returned with a feeling of delight to his personal longing for Susan
Brundon; he saw her bowed over the table in an exhaustion almost an
attitude of surrender. A slender, pliable figure in soft merino and
lace. He saw her beyond the candles of Graham Jannan's supper table, a
rose geranium at her breast. The motto of the bon bon partially
returned:
"... ange du ciel ... je t'aime!
... le bon heur supreme!"
XIX
In the morning he walked over to Stephen Jannan's office on Fourth
Street. The day was unexpectedly warm, and a mist rose about the wet
bricks of the city. He proceeded directly into Stephen's private
enclosure. "I was about to write you," the latter stated. "It's well
enough for you to direct Mrs. Scofield to confine her pleas to me, and
comparatively simple to picture her drawing a quarterly sum in an
orderly manner; but how you are going to realize that happy conception
is increasingly beyond me. I have to point out to her daily--a great
nuisance it is--that she cannot have her income before it is due. Heaven
knows what she has done with the other money in so short a while. She
hasn't moved, apparently increased her establishment; at your direction
the bills were settled, and heaven knows she had no reluctance in
presenting all that were permissible and a number doubtful. There is, of
course, one probability."
Jasper Penny's thoughts returned to the stony, handsome youth he had
seen in the company of Essie's friends, to the insinuations of the woman
who had been removed protesting her superiority and warning him against
a "tailor's dummy." Well, it was no longer his affair what Essie did
with her money, what in her affections remained unimpaired. Rather it
was reassuring that she had so promptly found solace; it enlarged his
own feeling of freedom. "It got worse, yesterday," Stephen Jannan
continued; "she came to the office, insisted on seeing me. Luckily I was
busy with a mastership that kept me over three hours. But she left, I
was told, with the air of one soon to return. She was brandied with
purpose. There is no end, Jasper, to what I am prepared to do for you;
but, my dear fellow, neither of us can have this. She wept. My young
gentlemen were pierced with sympathetic curiosity. You must realize,
Jasper, that you are not a sparrow, to float unnoticed from ledge to
ledge."
An angry impotence seized Jasper Penny. He was tempted to have Stephen
Jannan turn over to Essie, at once, a conclusive sum of money. That
would put an end to any communication between them, provide her with the
power of self-gratification which for Essie Scofield spelled
forgetfulness.... For a little, he was obliged, wearily, to add.
Together with such a young man as he had seen in her house her capacity
for expenditure would be limitless. She would come back to him with
fresh demands, perhaps at an inconceivably awkward time, in a calculated
hysteria--he had cause to know--surprisingly loud and convincing. Susan
must be absolutely secured against that possibility. He could not help
but think of the latter as yielding in the end, married to him.
He gazed at Stephen Jannan in a sombre perplexity. "A nuisance," the
other nodded. "Only time, I suppose, and the most rigid adherence to
your statements will convince the lady of what she may expect. In the
meanwhile, frankly, we had better put it in some other hands; not so
much on my account as your own--the sympathetic young gentlemen, you
see. That can be easily arranged."
Jasper Penny was not thinking of the material Essie, the present,
concrete problem; but he was once more absorbed in the manner in which
her influence followed, apparently shaped, his existence. He was again
appalled by the vitality of the past; the phrase itself was an error,
there was no past. All that had gone, that was to come, met ceaselessly
in the present, a confusion of hope and regret. It was evident that he
would have to see Essie again, and explain that what she had from him
depended entirely on her reciprocal attitude. This could only be
satisfactory in person. He would go to her at once, to-day. An enormous
reluctance to enter her house again possessed him. The mere act had the
aspect of an acknowledgment of her continued potency, her influence over
him. He put it off as long as possible, and it was past five when he
finally walked slowly toward her door.
She was in; and he saw, on the hall stand, a silk hat and overcoat cut
in an extreme of current fashion. The servant preceded him above, toward
the room usual for casual gatherings; and he heard a sudden low murmur,
expostulation, follow the announcement of his name. Essie Scofield
appeared at the top of the stairs. "Come up," she said in a hesitating,
sullen voice. He mounted without reply. As he had expected Daniel Culser
was present, and rose to greet him negligently, from a lounging attitude
on the sofa. His coat, cut back to the knees, was relentlessly tapered,
the collar enormously rolled and revered, and a white Marseilles
waistcoat bore black spots as large as a Bolivian half dollar; while a
black scarf, it was called the Du Casses, fell in an avalanche of
ruffles. He moved toward the door, fitting his coat carefully about his
slim waist, "I'm away, Essie," he proclaimed.
"When will you come again, Daniel?" she asked with an oppressive
humility. She gazed at Jasper Penny with a momentary delay; then, with
an utter disregard of his presence, laid her hands on the younger man's
shoulders. "Soon," she begged. Obviously ill at ease he abruptly
released himself. "I don't care," she cried defiantly; "I'll tell the
whole world you are the sweetest man in it. Jasper's nothing to me nor I
to him. And I'm not afraid of him, of what he might threaten, either.
Stay, Daniel, and you'll see. I will look out for us, Dan."
Her unexpected frankness was inevitably followed by an awkward silence.
Daniel Culser finally cursed below his breath, avoiding Jasper's cold
inquiring gaze. "I'm glad I said it," Essie proceeded; "now he knows how
things are." She went up again to the younger, and laid a clinging arm
about his shoulders. "I'm mad about you, Daniel, you know it; there's
nothing I wouldn't do for you, give you if I could. Isn't he beautiful?"
she fatulously demanded of Jasper Penny.
"You are making a fool of yourself and me," the subject of her adulation
roughly declared. He removed her arm so forcibly that the scarlet print
of his fingers was visible on her soft, dead white skin. "Probably you
have gone and spoiled everything. And remember what I said. I am a man
of my word."
Jasper Penny dryly thought that the term man was singularly
inappropriate in any connection with the meticulously garbed figure
before him. Essie would have a difficult time with that stony youth. She
regarded him with eyes of idolatry, drawing her fingers over the sleeve
impatiently held aside from her touch. "I'm going," he stated once more,
impolitely; but she barred him at the door. "I want you to stay," she
cried excitedly; "hear what I am going to say, what I am going to do for
you." She advanced toward Jasper Penny. "I asked that Jannan for more
money because I had given Daniel all I had, and I wanted still more, to
give him. I'll demand things all my life for him; everything I have is
his." She gasped, at the verge of an emotional outburst. Her heart
pounded unsteadily beneath an adventitious lace covering; her face was
leaden with startling daubs of vermilion paint. "Give me a great deal
of money, now, at once ... so that I can go to Daniel with my hands
full."
"That is why I came here," Jasper Penny replied; "to tell you that you
must not use up your income at once, on the first week, almost, of its
payment; because you will be able to get no more until another
instalment is due. I haven't the slightest interest in where your money
goes, it is absolutely your own; but I cannot have you after it every
second day. The administration will be put in a different quarter,
rigidly dispensed; and any continued inopportunities will only result in
difficulties for yourself."
She cursed him in a gasping, spent breath. Essie looked ill, he thought.
Daniel Culser, listening at the door, made a movement to leave, but the
woman prevented him, hanging about his neck. "No! No!" she exclaimed.
"It will be all right, I can get it ... more. Be patient." Jasper Penny
walked stiffly to the exit, where he paused at the point of repeating
his warning. Essie Scofield was lifting a quivering, tear-drenched face
to the vexation of the fashionable youth. He was attempting to repulse
her, but she held him with a desperation of feeling. The elder descended
the stairs without further speech.
Outside, the warmth of the day had continued into dusk. The mist had
thickened, above which, in a momentary rift, he could see the stars
swimming in removed constellations. He was wrapped in an utter loathing
of the scene through which he had passed, his undeniable part in it. It
was all hideous beyond words. His late need, his sense of void and
illimitable longing, tormented him ceaselessly. He was sick with
rebellion against life, an affair of cunning traps and mud and fog.
Above the obscured and huddled odium of the city the distances were
clear, serene. Above the degradation ... Susan. A tyrannical desire to
see her possessed him, an absolute necessity for the purification of her
mere presence. Unconsciously he quickened his step, charged with
purpose; but he couldn't go to the Academy now; it was six o'clock. He
must delay an hour at least. Habit prompted him to a supper which he
left untried on its plates, the lighting of a cigar, quickly cold,
forgot. At seven he hurried resolutely over the dark streets with the
dim luminosity of occasional gas lamps floating on the unstirring white
gloom. The bricks under foot were soggy, and the curved sign above her
entrance, the bare willows, dropped a pattering moisture.
She saw him immediately, not in the familiar office, but in a hall laid
with cold matting and nearly filled by a stairway, lit with a lamp at
the further end. "I am sorry," she told him; "I have no place to take
you. The rhetoric mistress is correcting papers there," she indicated
the shut door. He made no immediate answer, content to gaze at her
sensitive, appealing countenance. "It is so warm," she said finally,
colouring at his intentness, "and I have been indoors all day. I might
get my things. We could, perhaps ... a walk," she spoke rapidly, her
head bent from him. She drew back, then hesitated. "Very well," he
replied. Susan disappeared, but she quickly returned, in a little violet
bonnet bound and tied with black, and a dark azure velvet cloak furred
at her wrists and throat. She held a muff doubtfully; but, in the end,
took it with her.
Outside, the mist and night enveloped them in a close, damp veil. They
turned silently to the right, passing the narrow mouth of Currant Alley,
and Quince Street beyond. The bricks became precarious, and gave place
to a walk of boards; the corners about a broad, muddy way were built up;
but farther on the dwellings were scattered--lighted windows showed
dimly behind bare catalpas, iron fences enclosed orderly patches between
sodden flats, gas lamps grew fewer.
A deep, all-pervading contentment surrounded Jasper Penny, an
unreasoning, happy warmth. He said nothing, his stick now striking on
the boards, now sinking into earth, and gazed down at Susan, her face
hid by the rim of her bonnet. This companionship was the best, all, that
life had to offer. He felt no need to importune her about the future,
their marriage; curiously it seemed as though they had been married, and
were walking in the security, the peace, of a valid and enduring bond.
There was no necessity for talk, laborious explanation, periods
infinitely more empty than this silence. They walked as close to each
other as her skirt would permit; and at times her muff, swinging on a
wrist, would brush softly against him. How strangely different the
actual values of existence were from the emphasized, trite moments and
emotions. In the middle of his life, at the point of his greatest
capability for experience, his most transcendent happiness came from the
present, the deliberate, unquestioning walk with Susan, the aimless
progress through an invisible city and under a masked clear heaven of
stars. No remembered thrill compared with it, reached the same height,
achieved a similar dignity of consummation.
The way became more uneven; low clustered sheds rose out of the darkness
against a deeper black beyond, and they came to the river. The bank was
marshy, but a track of pounded oyster shells, visible against the mud,
led to a wharf extending into the solid, voiceless flow of the water.
Jasper Penny stood with Susan gazing into the blanketing gloom. A wan,
disintegrated radiance shone from a riding light in the rigging of a
vessel, and a passing warm blur flattened over the wet deck as a lantern
was carried forward. No other lights, and no movement, rose from the
river; no sound was audible at their back. The city, from the evidence
of Jasper Penny's sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his
consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or
hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious;
he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a
continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition. He had been swept,
he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking
of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud.
A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told
himself, ever written: "Before he was I am." Its vast implications
easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present
rapture--it was no less--lay beyond his grasp. He lingered over it; gave
it up ... returned to Susan.
"Wonderful," she said gravely, with a comprehensive wave of her muff.
And her simplicity thrilled him the more with the knowledge that she
shared his feeling. She drew up the fur collar of her cloak, shivered;
and, in the wordless harmony that pervaded them, they turned and
retraced their way.
The rhetoric mistress had left the office with a low turned lamp, and
Jasper Penny stopped, taking the furred wrap from Susan's shoulders. She
slowly untied the velvet strings of her bonnet, and laid it on the
table. She extended her hands toward him, and, taking their cool
slightness, he drew her to him. She rested with the fragrance of her
cheek against his face, with her hands pressed to his breast. They stood
motionless; he closed his eyes, and she was gone. He was confused in the
dimness empty except for himself, and fumbled with, his gloves. Susan's
wrap lay limply over a chair; the damp bonnet ribbons trailed toward the
floor. He looked slowly about, noting every object--a pile of folded
yellow papers, the stove, the globe bearing a quiver of light on its
varnished surface.
The willow trees and board above the entrance were dripping ceaselessly;
the lights of the city, increasing at its centre, like the discs of
floating sunflowers. If he slept he was unaware of it, the magic joy so
equally penetrated his waking and subconscious hours, the feeling of an
elevation higher than years and mountains was so strong. The morning, he
found, was again cold, and clear. He must go out to Jaffa, where new
blast machines demanded attention; but, the day after--
His thoughts were broken by a sharp rap on the outer door. Mr. Stephen
Jannan was below, and demanded to see him immediately. Stephen's
appearance at the hotel at that early hour, he recognized, was unusual.
But a glance at his cousin's serious aspect showed him at once that the
reason was urgent. Stephen Jannan, as customary, was particularly
garbed; and yet he had an expression of haste, disturbance. He said at
once, in the bedroom where Jasper Penny was folding his scarf.
"That young waster, Culser, Daniel Culser, was shot and killed in Mrs.
Scofield's house last evening."
The ends of the scarf fell neglected over the soft, cambric frills of
his shirt. Jasper Penny swallowed dryly. "At what time?" he asked.
"He was seen in the Old White Bear Tavern at about seven, then
apparently he went back to the woman's. The servant said he found the
body at something past nine, and that there had been no other caller but
yourself."
His hearer expressed a deep, involuntary relief. "I was there late in
the afternoon," he acknowledged; "but I left around six." Stephen
Jannan, too, showed a sudden relaxation. "I have already sent a message
to the Mayor," he continued; "confident that you would clear yourself
without delay. Mrs. Scofield's history is, of course, known to the
police. You have only to establish your alibi; she, Essie Scofield,
can't be found for the moment. She may have taken an early stage out of
the city; but it is probable that she has only moved into another police
district. Just where were you, Jasper?"
The latter said stupidly, "Walking with Susan Brundon."
A swiftly augmented concern gathered on Stephen Jannan's countenance.
"You were walking with Susan," he repeated increduously. "Yes," Jasper
asserted, with a sharp inner dread. "You don't know, but I want to marry
her." Stephen Jannan faced him with an exclamation of anger. "You want
to marry her, and, in consequence, drag her, Susan, into the dirtiest
affair the city is like to know for years. Susan Brundon, with her
Academy; all she has, all her labour, destroyed, ruined, pulled to
pieces by slanderous tongues! By God, Jasper, what a beast you look! The
most delicate woman, alive, the one farthest from just this sort of
muck, being sworn in the Mayor's office, testifying in an obscene murder
case, before the Sheriff and Constable, and heaven knows what police and
vilely curious!"
A sickening feeling of utter destruction seized on Jasper Penny, a
dropping of his entire being from the heights of yesterday to the last
degradation. He felt the blood leave his heart and pound dizzily in his
brain, and then recede, followed by an icy coldness, a wavering of the
commonplace objects of the room. He raised his fingers to his collar,
stared with burning eyes at Stephen Jannan. "Everything spoiled," the
latter said again; "her pupils will positively be taken from her at once
by all the nice females. Her name will be pronounced, smiled over, in
every despicable quarter of the city, printed in the daily sheets. I--I
can't forgive you for this. Susan, our especial joy!"
Jasper Penny saw in a flash, as vivid and remorseless as a stab of
lightning, that this was all true. The fatality of the past, sweeping
forward in a black, strangling tide, had overtaken not only himself but
Susan, too; Susan, in soft merino, in an azure velvet cloak; her face
against his. "I shall go away at once," he said hoarsely. "I'll never
appear, and they can think what they will. Then there will be no
necessity for her to come forward. She shall be spared that, no matter
what it costs."
"Romantic and youthful folly," Jannan declared; "loud-sounding and
useless. How little you understand Susan--immediately it is known Culser
was killed between seven and nine, whether you stay or go, she will come
forward with the truth, free you from any suspicion. I tell you every
detail will be canvassed, familiar to the boys on the street. A man
important as yourself, with all your industries and money, and such
salacity, together with Susan Brundon, will make a pretty story. If I
had a chance, Jasper, I'm almost certain I'd sacrifice you without a
quiver. How could you? Susan Brundon! Never telling her--"
"On the contrary, she knew everything. I am not so low as you seem to
think."
"That has no importance now!" Stephen Jannan exclaimed impatiently. "All
that matters is to make it as easy as possible for her, I have, I think,
enough position, influence, to keep the dregs out. But there will be
enough present, even then. Damnable insinuations, winks,
cross-questioning."
His excitement faded before the exigencies of the unavoidable situation;
he became cold, logical, legal. Jasper Penny listened, standing, to his
instructions, the exact forecasting of every move probable at the
hearing in the Mayor's chamber. "After that," Stephen added, "we can
face the problem of Susan's future. She thinks tremendously of her
school. It will fall to pieces in her hands. There can be no question of
material assistance; refused her own brother.
"Now, understand--stay in these rooms until I send for you. See no one.
I'll get on, go to Susan. The thing itself should be short; her
character will assist you there. What a mess you have made of living,
Jasper."
XX
In the silence of the sitting room Jasper Penny heard diverse and yet
mingled inner voices: Essie's younger, exuberant periods, her joy at
presents of gold and jewelled trifles; changing, rising shrilly, to her
last imploring sobs, her frantic embrace of the man that, beyond any
doubt, she had herself killed. Running through this were the strains of
a quadrille, the light sliding of dancing feet, and the sound of a low,
diffident voice, Susan Brundon at the Jannans' ball. The voice
continued, in a different surrounding, and woven about it was the thin
complaint of a child, of Eunice, taken against her will from the
Academy. These three, Essie and Susan and Eunice, combined, now one
rising above the other, yet inexplicably, always, the same. Back of them
were other, less poignant, echoes, flashes of place, impressions of
associated heat or cold, darkness or light:
He saw the features of Howat Penny, in the canvas by Gustavus Hesselius,
regarding him out of a lost youth; he recalled, and again experienced,
the sense of Howat's nearness; integral with himself; merging into his
own youth, no less surely lost, yet enduring. His mother joined the
immaterial company, accents, rigid with pride in him. And penetrating,
binding, all was the dull beat of the trip hammer at Myrtle Forge. He
had mechanically finished dressing, and stood absently twisting the
drapery at a window. A fine tracery of lines had suddenly appeared about
his eyes; the cold rays of the winter sun, streaming over his erect
figure, accentuated the patches of grey plentiful in his hair.
He saw, on the street below, a parade of firemen, in scarlet tunics and
brass helmets, dragging a glittering engine. The men walked evenly
abreast, at cross ropes. A leader blew a brilliant fanfare on an
embossed, silver horn. Women passed, foreshortened into circular bells
of colour, draped with gay pelerines and rich India shawls. He saw all
and nothing. The horn of the firemen sounded without meaning on his
distracted hearing. The flood of his suffering rose darkly, oppressing
his heart, choking his breath. Perhaps if, as he had desired, he had
gone away, Susan would be spared. But Stephen was right; nothing could
keep her from the pronouncement of the words that would free him and
bind herself in intolerable ill. Her uprightness was terrible. It would
take her fearful but determined into the pits of any hell. His hands
slowly clenched, his muscles tightened, in a spasm of anguish. God, why
hadn't he recognized the desperation in Essie's quivering face! It would
have been already too late, he added in thought; it went back, back--
A knock sounded discreetly on the door: and, opening it, he saw a young
man, remembered as a law student in Stephen's office. "They are ready
for you, sir, at the City Hall," he stated, in an over-emphasized,
professional calm.
XXI
The restrained curiosity and inaudible comments which greeted his
passage through the lower floor of the hotel gave place to a livelier
interest when he was readily recognized on the street. The news of the
murder had, evidently, already become city property. He was indicated to
individuals unaware of his identity, with a rapid sketch of the crime,
of fabulous ascribed possessions, and hinted oriental indulgence. He
strode on rapidly, his shoulders squared, his expression contemptuous,
challenging; but within he was possessed by an apprehension increasing
at every step. It was not, fortunately, far from Sanderson's Hotel to
the City Hall; west on Chestnut Street they reached their destination at
the following corner. The loungers from the trees before the State House
had gathered, with an increasing mob aware of the hearing within, at the
entrance to the municipal offices. The windows on either side of the
marble steps were crowded with faces, ribald or blank or censorious, and
Jasper Penny had to force his way into the building. He tried to recall
if there was another, more private, ingress, through which Susan might
be taken; but his thoughts evaded every discipline; they whirled in a
feverish course about the sole fact of the public degradation he had
brought on Susan Brundon. They passed the doors of civic departments, he
saw their signs--Water, City Treasurer, and then entered the Mayor's
chamber.
The latter was seated at a table facing the room with his back to a wide
window, opening on the blank brick wall of the Philosophical Society
building; and at one side the High Constable of the district in which
the murder had been committed was conversing with the Sheriff. Beside
them, Jasper Penny saw, there were only some clerks present and three
policemen. The Mayor spoke equably to the Ironmaster, directed a chair
placed for his convenience, and resumed the inspection of a number of
reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers,
a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous
sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk
hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated
their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously
far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor,
finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay of
the ballet, spoke to the room in general. "Ten and past. Well! Well!
Where are the others? Who is to come still, Hoffernan?"
"Mr. Jannan, sir; and a witness," a clerk answered. The other gazed at
the paper before him.
"Susan Brundon," he read in a loud, uncompromising tone. Jasper Penny's
eyes narrowed belligerently; he would see that these pothouse
politicians gave Susan every consideration possible. He was, with
Stephen, a far from negligible force in the city elections. "School
mistress," the Mayor read on. "Never heard of her or her school. Ah--"
Stephen Jannan had entered with Susan.
Jasper rose as she came forward, and the Mayor had the grace to remove
his hat. She wore, he saw, the familiar dress of wool, with a sober,
fringed black silk mantle, black gloves and an inconspicuous bonnet. She
met his harried gaze, and smiled; but beneath her greeting he was aware
of a supreme tension. There was, however, no perceptible nervousness in
the manner of her accepting an indicated place; she sat with her hands
quietly folded in her lap, the mantle drooping back over the chair.
Stephen Jannan, facing the Mayor, made a concise statement in a cold,
deliberate voice. "I now propose to show your honour," he finished,
"that, between the hours in which Daniel Culser is said to have been
shot to death, my client was peacefully in the company of Miss Brundon,
strolling in an opposite quarter of the city."
"Hoffernan," the Mayor pronounced, waving toward the seated woman. The
clerk advanced with a Bible; and, rising, Susan followed the words of
the oath in a low, clear voice. To Jasper Penny the occasion seemed
intolerably prolonged, filled with needless detail. Never had Susan
Brundon appeared more utterly desirable, never had his need to protect,
shield, her been stronger. He--protect her, he added bitterly; rather he
had betrayed her, dragged her immaculate sweetness down into the foul
atmosphere of a criminal hearing. His attention, fastening on the
trivialities of the interior, removed him in a species of self-hypnotism
from the actualities of the scene. He heard, as if from a distance, the
questioning of the Mayor, "At what time, exactly, did you say? How did
you know that?" Susan said, "I saw the clock at the back of the hall. I
noticed it because I wondered if the younger children had retired."
"You say you walked with Mr. Penny--where?... How long did you remain at
the river? No way of knowing. Seemed surprisingly short, I'll venture."
Why didn't Stephen put an end to such ill-timed jocularity? "And Mr.
Penny had spoken to you of his--his relations with Mrs. Scofield, the
woman in whose house Culser was killed. Did he refer to her on this
particular evening, standing by the river's brink?" Susan replied in the
negative. "Did he seem ill at ease, worried about anything? Was he
hurried in manner?"
To all of this Susan Brundon answered no, in a voice that constantly
grew lower, but which never faltered, hesitated. The Mayor turned aside
for a whispered consultation with the High Constable. The former nodded.
"Have you any--shall we say--proprietary interest in Mr. Penny's
affairs?" Her reply was hardly audible in the room stilled for what
might be revealed. "No," she breathed, her gloved fingers interlacing.
Jasper Penny's lips were drawn in a hard line; Stephen gazed fixedly at
the floor. The Mayor gesticulated affably toward the lawyer. "That'll
do," he declared. "Pleasure, Mr. Penny, to have you so completely
cleared. I shall have to demand your assistance further,
though--knowledge of Mrs. Scofield. And, in the case of her apprehension
and trial, you will, of course, be called. Communication will be made
through Mr. Jannan. No doubt in our mind now of the facts." A policeman
opened the door and a surge of the curious pressed in. "Take her away,"
Jasper Penny whispered to Jannan; "this is damnable."
Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan's side.
He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their
way out through the corridor. Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction,
waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked
rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the
railroad for Jaffa. A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and
was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting
engine beyond. He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the
Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had
preceded him. To-morrow's papers would provide them with full accounts,
the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details.... The meanest
cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a
leer.
His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed.
"Take Mr. Penny's overcoat," she brusquely directed a servant. He had
never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he
tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the
maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his
mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a
species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the
deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's
bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained,
soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his
overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost
somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives
of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires
inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of
constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month
by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond
his power.
A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply,
straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender
had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference,
was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was
the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it
immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of
the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to
its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of
the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh
realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at
once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what
life still, and so fully, held.
His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater
part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into
long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and
of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past. At the usual
hour the hot wine appeared; the glassful was pressed on Amity Merken;
his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction. An old
custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding,
in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings. He saw that his
mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her
hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the glass. Her lined face
quivered as she said good night. He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow,
conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing
warmth. He had done this, too--hastened her death; she must have
suffered inordinately in her prideful affection. She said nothing,
beyond the repeated admonition that he must not sit up into the night.
The next day he forced himself to read to the end the report of the
murder in the _Gazette_. The references to Susan Brundon were as scant
as, evidently, Stephen Jannan could arrange; but her name, her Academy,
were invested with an odious publicity. Jasper Penny saw again that he
was a person of moment; his part in the affair gave it a greatly
augmented importance. Yet now the worst, he told himself, was at an end;
the publicity would recede; after a decent interval he could see Susan.
This mood was interrupted by an imperative communication from
Stephen--he must be in the other's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow.
Nothing more definite was said; but Jasper Penny was not wholly
surprised to see Essie Scofield huddled in a chair at the lawyer's
table. She had made an attempt at the bravado of apparel, but it had
evidently failed midway; her hair hung loosely about a damp brow, the
strings of her bonnet were in disarray, a shawl partially hid a bodice
wrongly fastened. Her face was apathetic, with leaden shadows and dark
lips ceaselessly twisting, now drawn into a petulant line, now drooping
in childish impotence. She glanced at him fleetly as he entered, but
said nothing. Robbed of the pretensions of pride, stripped of feminine
subterfuge, she was appalling. He involuntarily recalled the Essie who
had swept him into a riot of emotion--a vivid and palpitating creature
radiating the exuberance of careless health and youth. She could not, he
calculated, be beyond thirty-seven now. He abruptly ceased his
speculation, turned from her, with a feeling of impropriety. Stephen
Jannan said shortly:
"Al Schimpf will be here. It seemed to me he was the best man to retain.
It's obvious that I can't defend her. You will, of course, require
everything possible done." Essie Scofield shivered. "I don't want to go
into court," she articulated, "and answer all the dreadful questions."
There was a stir without, and a hugely fat man in a black cape fastened
with a silver chain and velvet collar entered. Al Schimpf's face was so
burdened with rolling chins that he disregarded the customary fashion of
whiskers, but a grizzled moustache lay above his well-formed lips, and
an imperial divided his heavy, aggressive chin. He was, evidently, fully
informed of the case before him; for, after saluting Jannan and Jasper
Penny, he, seated himself directly before Essie Scofield, fastening upon
her an unwavering, glacial gaze.
"Now, pay attention," he proceeded at once.
"I'll go over a few facts--this Daniel Culser, you were in love with
him; no length you wouldn't go, lost your senses completely; and he--all
he cared about was the money he could wring out of you. As soon as you
were paid the sums that Mr. Penny allowed you, this Culser got it from
you; he took every cent and wanted more. Said he would leave you unless
you got hold of something really worth while. Then, of course, you
carried on, promised to get him more and more; said you could force a
fortune from Mr. Penny, anything to keep the young man. Hey?" he
demanded suddenly.
The woman looked up with a haggard wonder, an irrepressible shudder; her
hands raised and fell, and she nodded dumbly.
"Then, while Culser was in the house, Mr. Penny unexpectedly turned up
and said--perhaps before Daniel himself--that you could expect nothing
more, and made it plain that he was not to be intimidated. Daniel Culser
was for leaving you, didn't intend to hang around for a bloody little
quarterly; and, when you realized that he meant, or you thought he
meant, what he said, you went crazy and shot him.... What!" He got no
response from her now; she cowered away from him, hiding behind an
updrawn shoulder, a fold of the shawl. "But listen to this," Al Schimpf
shot at her, leaning forward, "here's what happened, and you must
remember every fact:
"The fellow had been around the house day after day. You had encouraged
him at first; but then you got frightened; he beat you--hear
that?--struck you with his fist, and threatened worse if you didn't go
through old Penny's pocket for him. He even hinted at something you
might do together, and then get away with a mint. Culser was at it when
Mr. Penny called, and took it up when he left, at about six o'clock. He
said he wanted money bad, debts were hounding him; and he was going to
get it out of Penny, out of you. There's where you said you would warn
Jasper Penny; and remember how he struck you, in the back, because you
turned, and it hurts yet--there up by the left shoulder, the left
shoulder, the left! Then, he had been drinking in your house and at a
tavern, he threatened to kill you if you didn't do what he wanted. You
honestly thought he'd do it, and snatched a pistol out of a table
drawer, and.... Do you understand? That's what happened, and it's all
you know. Said he would kill you, apparently commenced then, and you
acted in self-protection. Now, repeat that."
She gazed at him in a trembling confusion. "But," she objected, "he was
only--he said. Oh! I was afraid I'd lose him." The lawyer moved closer
to her, his unwinking, grey-green eyes like slate. "He said he'd kill
you," he reiterated; "remember that, if you don't want to hang. He
struck you; where?" After a long pause she replied haltingly, "In the
back." Al Schimpf nodded, "Good. And he said you both were to get away
with a mint. He told you it would be easy; the old man would gladly buy
silence; and, by heaven, if he didn't--"
Jasper Penny stonily watched the intolerable degradation of the woman
bullied into the safety of a lie. This was worse than anything that had
gone before; he fell deeper and deeper into a strangling, humiliating
self-loathing. Stephen Jannan's handsome countenance was fixed and pale;
one hand lay on the table, empty and still. In the silence between
Schimpf's insistent periods Jasper Penny could hear Essie's sobbing
inspirations; he was unable to keep his gaze from her countenance,
jelly-like and robbed of every trace of human dignity. He wondered
vaguely at an absence of any sense of responsibility for what Essie
Scofield had become; he felt that an attitude of self-accusation, of
profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon
him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere.
If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he
had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her....
A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as
he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed.
Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad
manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside
dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the
first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born
in him, laid dormant until, yes--it had been stirred into activity by
Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed that natural
development.
He was suddenly conscious that Al Schimpf had ceased domineering Essie.
The lawyer swung about, facing them with an expression of commonplace
satisfaction. "It's all in fine order," he declared. "I want, if
possible, to study our jury through a preliminary case or so. We shall,
of course, surrender our client at once, without making any difficulty
about moving her from one police district to another. I can produce a
witness to the fact that this Culser openly said that he expected
shortly to come into more money. And he had dishonoured debts all about.
You will have to appear, Mr. Penny; no way out of that, but our defence
should go like a song. Now, Mrs. Scofield, I have a carriage outside."
When they had gone Jasper Penny and Jannan sat in a lengthening silence.
Stephen's hand moved among the papers on the table; the other drew a
deep breath. "I regret this tremendously for you," Stephen Jannan said
at last. He spoke with feeling; his momentary anger at the entanglement
of Susan vanished. "But it will pass, Jasper. You are too solid a man to
be hurt permanently by private scandal. And you have no concrete
political position to invite mud slinging. Yes, it will drop out of
mind, and your iron will continue to support enterprise, extension."
"But Susan," Jasper Penny demanded, "what about her? Where is she?"
"With Graham at Shadrach. She was badly torn, and I insisted on her
retreating for a week or more. There is a very capable assistant at the
Academy. It's too early to speak conclusively, but I am afraid that
Susan's usefulness is ended there. Have you seen the cheaper sheets?
Every one, of course, is buying them. Rotten! The assistant, I
understand, is anxious to procure the school, and I am considering
allowing her the capital. Something might be arranged paying Susan an
income.... If she would accept; confoundly difficult to come about."
"I am going to marry her," Jasper Penny asserted once more.
"What was the initial trouble?" the other asked, tersely.
"Essie." Stephen frowned.
"She would hit on that," he agreed; "stand until the last gasp of some
fantastic conception of right."
Jasper explained:
"She thinks I ought to marry Essie, mostly on account of the child. She
likes me, too, Stephen; I think I may tell you that. Well, I'll keep at
her and at her. In the end she will get tired of refusal." The other
shook his head doubtfully. "I've known Susan a good many years, and I
have never seen her lose an ideal, or even an idea, yet."
Jasper Penny rose. "Meanwhile I'll have to go through with this trial.
Thank God, Susan has no part in it." He warmly gripped Stephen's palm.
"You're worth something in a life, immovable. Thank you, Stephen."
XXII
It was early in April, an insidiously warm morning with the ailanthus
trees in bud before the State House, when Jasper Penny left the court
room where Essie had been freed. Provision had been made for her--she
had had a severe collapse during the trial--and a feeling almost of
renewed liberty of spirit permeated Jasper, as, with his overcoat on an
arm, he turned to the left and walked over the street in the blandly
expanding mildness. A train left shortly for Jaffa, and he was bound
directly home, to Myrtle Forge, anxious to steep himself in the echo of
the trip hammer mingled with the poignant harmony of spring sounds
drifting from the farm and woods. He was possessed by a sharpened hunger
for all the--now recognized--beauty of the place of his allegiance and
birth, the serenity of the acres Gilbert Penny had beaten out of the
wild of the Province. He was astonishingly conscious of himself as a
part of the whole Penny succession, proud of Gilbert, of Howat, who had
always so engaged his fancy, of Casimir, and Daniel, his own father.
Theirs was a good heritage; their part of the earth, the ring of their
iron, his particular characteristic of a black Penny, formed a really
splendid entity.
The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than
the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long façade, built of
stone with an appearance of dark pinkish malleability masking its
obduracy. His mother was awaiting him on the narrow portico, and he at
once told her of Essie's release. They stood together, gazing out across
the turf, faintly emerald, over the public road, at the grey, solid
group of farm buildings beyond. The farmer's daughter, in a white slip,
emerged against the barnyard, and called the chickens in a high, musical
note, scattering grain to a hysterical feathery mob. The air was still
with approaching twilight; the sun slipped below the western trees and
shadows gathered under the lilac bushes; the sky was April green.
"Your father has been dead twelve years," Gilda Penny said unexpectedly.
He looked down and saw that she was decrepit, an old woman. Her mouth
had sunken, her ears projected in dry folds from her scant strands of
hair. He recalled Daniel Barnes Penny; the earliest memories of his
mother, a vigorous, brown-faced woman with alert, black eyes,
quick-stepping, dictatorial in the sphere of her house and dependents.
One after the other, like the sun, they were slipping out of the sight
of Myrtle Forge; vanished and remained; passed from falling hand to hand
the unextinguished flame of life. Gilda Penny was merging fast into the
formless dark. She clung with pathetically tense fingers to his arm as
they turned into the house.
He had ordered a carriage immediately after an early supper; and,
informing his coachman of his wish to proceed alone, drove quickly away
through the dusk. He was going to Shadrach Furnace, to meet Susan for
the first time since the unhappy occasion in the Mayor's chamber. He had
decided, stifling his increasing impatience, not to see her until
Essie's trial was over. Susan had been at Graham Jannan's house for nine
weeks. Her sight, he had learned, had almost completely failed in a
general exhaustion; but, with rigorous care, she had nearly recovered.
The Academy had been sold to the assistant mistress; and there was an
expressed uncertainty about Susan's near future. It had, however, no
existence in Jasper Penny's thoughts, plans--she must marry him; any
other course would now be absurd. The track from Myrtle Forge to the
Furnace was bound into his every thought and association; its
familiarity, he mused, had been born in him; his horses, too, took
correctly, without pressure, every turning of the way. The road mounted,
and then dropped between rounded hills to the clustering buildings,
where lighted, pale yellow windows floated on the dusk, crowned by the
wide-flung radiance of the Furnace stack. The air was potent in the
valley with the indeterminate scent of budding earth--the premonitory
fragrance of blossoms; and, hardly less delicate, stars flowered whitely
in blue space.
He paused for a moment before entering Graham Jannan's house, saturated
with the pastoral tranquillity, listening to the flutter of wings under
the eaves. Then he went in. They had finished supper, but were lingering
at the table, with the candles guttering in an air from the open door.
His greeting was simple and glad, and without restraint. Susan wore a
dress like a white vapour, sprigged with pale buds, her throat and arms
bare. She smiled the familiar, hesitating smile, met his questioning
gaze with her undeviating courage. Jasper Penny took a chair opposite
her. Little was said. Peace deepened about his spirit.
Graham, he saw, had a new ruddiness of health; he laid a shawl tenderly
about his wife's shoulders; and Jasper remembered that a birth was
imminent. Later he drifted with Susan to the door, and they passed out
into the obscurity beyond. Even now he was reluctant to speak, to break
with importunities the serene mood. "All the iron making," she spoke at
last, "lovely. I have stood night after night in the cast house watching
the metal pour out in its glorious colours. And, when I wake, I go to my
window and see the reflections of the blast on the trees, on the first
leaves. The charcoal burners come down like giants out of the mythology
of the forest. And, when I first came, there was a raccoon hunt, with a
great stirring of lanterns and barking dogs in the dark ... all lovely."
"It is yours," he said, bending over her. "You can come here at your
will. A house built. And Myrtle Forge, too; whatever I have, am." He
paused; but, without reply, continued more rapidly. "It's over, the--the
misery of the past weeks; the mistakes are dead; they are paid, Susan.
Now we may take what is left and make it as beautiful as possible. After
suffering, reparation, happiness, is every one's due. And I am certain I
can make you happy."
A longer pause followed, in which he regarded her with an increasing
anxiety. Her face was turned away, her progress grew slower until they
stood by the shadowy bulk of a small stone structure. The door was open,
and it seemed to him that she looked within. "A store house," he
explained. Nothing was visible in the interior gloom but some obscure
shapes, bales, piled against the walls, and the scant tracery of a rude
stair leading up to a greater blackness above. She stopped, as if
arrested by his period, laying a hand on the door frame.
"Why don't you answer me, Susan?" he proceeded. "You know that I want to
marry you; surely it is all right now. Everything possible has been
done. A great deal of life remains." Her answer was so low that it
almost escaped him; the faintest breath of pain, of longing and regret.
"I can't," she whispered; "not with her, the child. I can't."
"That," he replied gently, "is a mistaken idea of responsibility, a
needless sacrifice. I could never urge you into an injustice, a wrong;
at last I have got above that; what I want is the most reasonable thing
imaginable, the best, in every conceivable way, for yourself and--any
other. You are harming, depriving, no one. You are taking nothing but
your own, what has been yours, and only yours, from the first moment I
saw, no--from my birth. What has happened brought me in a straight road
to you, the long road I have never, really, left."
"I can't," she said still again. "I want to, Jasper. Oh, with a heart
full of longing; I am so tired that I would almost give the rest of my
life for another secure hour with you. And I would pay that to give you
what you want, what you should have. But something stronger than I am,
more than all this, holds me; I can't forget that miserable woman, nor
her child and yours, so thin and suspicious. I am not good enough to be
her mother myself, even if I felt I had the right. Inside of me I am
quite wicked, selfish. I want my own. But not with the other woman
outside. She'd be looking in at the windows, Jasper, looking in at my
heart. I would hear her." She leaned against her arm, her face hid, her
shoulders trembling.
The musty odour of the stores floated out and enveloped him. He was
suddenly annoyed. Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance.
He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to
necessity. His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low,
insistent voice. She made no reply, but remained supported in the
doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.
"You must change your mind," he asserted; "you can't be eternally so
foolish. There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield."
"I don't want you to, really," she admitted in an agonized whisper. "I
shall never again ask you to do that. Ah, God, how low I am."
He saw, in an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She
would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to
peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen,
possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She
turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted
countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her
in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged white of her dress, her bare
throat and arms, her cheeks wet with tears. Out of it her eyes, wide
with pain, steadily met his angry scrutiny. Out of it she smiled at him
before the reflection died.
III THE METAL
XXIII
In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades
Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an
album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely
penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a
number of such thick, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas,
the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic
period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely
embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of
limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of
fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than
any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the
single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the
announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf
before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the
campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the
forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a
conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring
heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical
combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival,
erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade.
Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been
coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in
voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the
scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph
and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it
had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no
better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand,
Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe
lips--the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from
the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance,
flooded back--the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the
room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more
men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave
manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina,
kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a
multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more
prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were
clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the
dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the
Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer's
occasion. His smile broadened--this was so characteristic of New York in
the eighties. How different it had been; but it was no better, he added
silently, now.
It was mid-August, and the air floating in through an open door was
ladened with the richness of ultra-luxuriant vegetation, the persistent,
metallic whirring of locusts, the mechanical repetition of katydids. One
of the owls that inhabited the old willow tree before the house cried
softly.... How different! He straightened up from the book open on his
knees, and the glass fell with a small clatter over his formal, starched
linen, swinging for an instant on its narrow ribbon. The unwavering lamp
light was deflected in green points through the emeralds of his studs.
The thought of bygone, gala nights of opera fastened on him with a
peculiar significance--suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth.
Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such
tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth.
The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language,
the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the
sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic
expression of the resplendent vagaries of early years.
The winter of eighty three and four; his first season of New York
music. The autumn before he had returned from the five years spent in
Europe, in Paris practically, with Bundy Provost, related to him by a
marriage in the past generation, through the Jannans. He had gone abroad
immediately after his graduation as a lawyer; and in the indolent
culture of the five Parisian years, he now realized, he had permanently
lost all hold on his profession. At his return he had drifted
imperceptibly into an existence of polite pleasure. It had been
different with Bundy; he had gone into the banking house of Provost,
lately established in New York; and, with the extraordinary pertinacity
and acumen sometimes developed by worldly and rich young men, he had
steadily risen to a place of financial importance. An opening had, of
course, been offered to Howat Penny when he had definitely decided not
to settle in Philadelphia, where the Pennys had always been associated,
and pursue the law. And, at first, he had occupied a desk in the Provost
counting rooms. But he had soon grown discontented, he disliked routine
and a clerk's condition; and, after two years of annoyed effort,
withdrew to lead a more congenial existence on a secure, adequate
income.
"It was a mistake," he said aloud, in a decided, clearly modulated
voice, gazing blankly into the warm stillness of the room. It had come
partly from his innate impatience with any inferior state whatever, and
part from the old inability to identify himself with the practicalities
of existence. He had always viewed with distaste the apparently
necessary compromises of successful living; the struggle for money,
commercial supremacy, seemed unendurably ugly; the jargon and
subterfuges of financial competition beneath his exacting standard of
personal dignity. That had been his expression at the time--permeated by
an impatient sense of superiority; but now he felt that there was
something essential lacking in himself. An absence of proper balance.
Solely concerned with the appearance, the insignificant surface, of such
efforts as Bundy Provost's, their moving, masculine spirit had evaded
him. Yes, it had been a mistake. He had missed the greatest pleasure of
all, that of accumulating power and influence, of virile achievement.
Well, it was over now; he was old; his life, his chance, had gone; and
all that remained were memories of Patti smiling disdainfully in the
flare of oil torches about her carriage; the only concrete record of so
many years the scrap books such as that on his knees.
It had been an error; yet there had been, within him, no choice, no
intimation of a different, more desirable, consummation. Bundy had gone
one way and himself another in obedience to forces beyond their
understanding or control. They had done, briefly, what they were. There
was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to
append. He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the
radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes of Campanini singing
Elvino.
Now his recovered glass was intent on a programme of the rapidly
successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with
Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in _Fidelio_. Even here,
after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore's
constancy and love. Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the
Opera House ... That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were
gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey
red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final
expression of luxury. Lehmann in the premier of _Tristan und Isolde_,
with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the
third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast. Eames' rise; but that, and
what followed, were in successive books. He closed the one under his
hand.
As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more
indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further
and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of
harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as
if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in
a cast--a production, however, less than grand--he had been conducted to
a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which
he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The
final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years
had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New
York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had
dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of
his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible
locations--he could not endure a club--became prohibitive; when his once
adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere
sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his
own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing
halls of assembly--he had retreated to the traditional place of his
family. He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America.
Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his
inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's
early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a
comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey façade
drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had
been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen;
sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly
married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of
iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had
returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.
XXIV
The room in which he sat had two windows, set in the deep recesses of
heavy stone walls, and three doors, two leading into opposite rooms and
the third opening without. The double lamp stood on a low, gate-legged
table of fibrous, time-blackened oak, together with an orderly array of
periodicals--the white, typographical page of the _Saturday Review_
under the dull rose of _The Living Age_ and chocolate-coloured bulk of
the _Unpopular, Gil Blas_, the mid-week _Boston Transcript_ and
yesterday's _New York Evening Post_. The table bore, in addition, a
green morocco case of dominoes; a mahogany box that, in a recess,
mysteriously maintained a visible cigarette; a study of Beethoven, in
French; an outspread volume by Anatole France, _Jacques Tournebroche_,
in a handsome paper cover; a set of copper ash trays; and a dull red
figurine, holding within its few inches the deathless spirit of a heroic
age. An angle of the wall before him was filled by a white panelled
fireplace, the mantel close against the ceiling; and on the other side
of a doorway, through which he could see Rudolph noiselessly preparing
the dinner table, was a swan-like sofa, in olive wood and pale yellow
satin, from the Venice of the _ottocento_. At his right, beyond a
window, mounted a tall, austere secretary in waxed walnut; and behind
him, under the white chair rail, bookcases extended across the width of
the room. Gustavus Hesselius' portrait of the first Howat Penny hung on
a yellow painted wall, his gilt-braided major's facings still vivid, his
dark, perceptible scorn undimmed. There were, too, framed in oak, a
large photograph of Tamagno, as Othello, with a scrawled, cordial
message; another of a graceful woman in the Page's costume of _Les
Huguenots_, signed "Sempre ... Scalchi"; a water colour drawing by Jan
Beers; and a Victorian lithograph in powdery foliage and brick of _The
Penny Rolling Mills. Jaffa_. A black-blue rug, from Myrtle Forge, partly
covered the broad, oak boards of the floor; and there was a comfortable
variety of chairs--sturdy, painted Dutch, winged Windsors and a slatted
Hunterstown rocker.
Howat Penny's gaze wandered over the familiar furnishing, come to him
surviving the generations of his family, or carefully procured for his
individual dictates. A sense of tranquillity, of haven, deepened about
him. "Rudolph," he inquired, "has Honduras gone for Miss Jannan?"
The man stopped in the doorway, answering in the affirmative. He was
slight, almost fragile, with close, dark hair that stood up across his
forehead, and dry, high-coloured cheeks. Rudolph hesitated, with a
handful of silver; and then returned to his task. Mariana would be
along immediately, Howat Penny thought. He put the album aside and rose,
moving toward the door that led without. He was a slender, erect figure,
with little to indicate his age except the almost complete silvering of
his hair--it had, evidently, been black--and a rigidity of body only
apparent to a sharp scrutiny.
A porch followed that length of the house, and doubled the end, where he
stood peering into the gathering dusk. The old willow tree, inhabited by
the owls, spread a delicate, blurred silhouette across a darkened vista
of shorn wheat fields, filled, in the hollows, with woods; and a lamp
glimmered from a farm house on a hill to the left. His lawn dropped to
the public road, the hedged enclosure swimming with fireflies; and
beyond he saw the wavering light shafts of his small motor returning
from the insignificant flag station on the railroad, a mile distant.
The noise of the engine increased, sliding into a lower gear on the
short curve of the driveway; and he met Mariana Jannan at the entrance
directly into the dining room. She insisted, to his renewed discomfort,
on kissing him. "It's wonderful here, after the city," she proclaimed;
"and I've had to be in town three sweltering days. I'll dress right
away."
Honduras, his coloured man, as indispensable outside as Rudolph was in,
followed with her bag up the narrow flight of steps to the floor above.
He waited through, he thought, a reasonable interval, and then called.
An indistinguishable reply floated down, mingled with the filling of a
tub; and another half hour passed before Mariana appeared in white
chiffon, securing a broad girdle of silver oak leaves, about her slight
waist. "Do you mind?" she turned before him; and, with an impatience
half assumed and half actual, he fastened the last hooks of her dress.
"As you know," he reminded her, "I don't attempt cocktails. Will you
have a gin and bitters?"
She wouldn't, frankly; and they embarked on dinner in a pleasant,
unstrained silence. Mariana was, he realized, the only person alive for
whom he had a genuine warmth of affection. She was a first cousin; her
Aunt Elizabeth had married James Penny, his father; but his fondness for
her had no root in that fact. It didn't, for example, extend to her
brother Kingsfrere. He speculated again on the reason for her marked
effect. Mariana was not lovely, as had been the charmers of his own day;
her features, with the exception of her eyes, were unremarkable. And her
eyes, variably blue, were only arresting because of their extraordinary
intensity of vision, their unquenchable and impertinent curiosity. A
girl absolutely different from all his cherished mental images; but, for
Howat Penny, always potent, always arousing a response from his
supercritical being, stirring his aesthetic heart. Everything he
possessed--his pictures, the albums, the moderate income, although she
had little need of that--had been willed to her. It would be hers then
just as it was, practically, now. And he was aware that her feeling
generously equalled his own.
His speculation, penetrating deeper than customary, rewarded him with
the thought that she was unusual in the courage of her emotions. That
was it--the courage of her emotions! There was a total lack of any
penurious trait, any ulterior thought of appraising herself against a
possible advantageous barter. She was never concerned with a conscious
prudery in the arrangement of her skirt. Mariana was aristocratic in the
correct sense of the term; a sense, he realized, now almost lost. And he
rated aristocracy of bearing higher than any other condition or fact.
He wondered a little at her patent pleasure in visiting him, an old man,
so frequently. Hardly a month passed but that, announced by telegram,
she did not appear and stay over night, or for a part of the week. She
would recount minutely the current gaiety of her polite existence. He
knew the names of her associates, a number of them had been exhibited to
him at Shadrach; the location of their country places; and what men
temporarily monopolized her interest. None of the latter had been
serious. He was, selfishly, glad of that; and waited uneasily through
her every visit until she assured him that her affections had not been
possessed. However, this condition, he knew, must soon come to an end;
Mariana was instinct with sex; and a short while before he had sent his
acknowledgment of her twenty-sixth birthday.
She sat occupied with salad against the cavernous depths of a fireplace
that, between the kitchen door and a built-in cupboard, filled the side
of the dining room. The long mantel above her head was ladened with the
grey sheen of pewter, and two uncommonly large, fluted bowls of blue
Stiegel glass. In the centre of the table linen, the Sheffield and
crystal and pictorial Staffordshire, was a vivid expanse of rose
geraniums. She broke off a flower and pinned it with the diamond bar on
her breast. "Howat," she said, "to-morrow's Saturday, and I've asked two
people out until Sunday night. Eliza Provost and a young man. Do you
mind?"
"Tell Rudolph," he replied. It was not until after dinner, when they
were playing sniff, that he realized that she omitted the young man's
name. He intended to ask it, but, his mind and hand hovering over an
ivory domino, he forgot. "Twenty," he announced, reaching for the
scoring pad. "Oh, hell, Howat!" she protested. "That's the game,
almost." She emptied her coffee cup, and speculatively fingered one of
the thin cigars in the box at his hand. "It's the customary thing in
Peru," she observed, pinching the end from the cigar and lighting it. He
watched her absently, veiled in the fragrant, bluish smoke.
Automatically his thoughts returned to the women that, at a breath of
scandal, had refused to attend the dinner to Patti. So much changed; the
years fled like birds in a mist.
"I feel like a politician," she told him. "Eliza Provost would pat me on
the back. She's talking from a soap box on the street corners now,
winging men for such trifles as forced birth. I'm fond of Eliza; she's
got a splendid crust. I wish you'd get excited about my rights; but your
interest really goes no further than a hat from Camille Marchais. You
are deleterious, Howat. Isn't that a lovely word! Which was the first
double?" He blocked and won the game. "Fifty-five," she announced; "and
ninety-five before. I owe you a dollar and a half."
She paid the debt promptly from a flexible gold mesh bag on the table;
then stooped and wandered among his books. Howat Penny turned to
yesterday's _Evening Post_, and Mariana settled beyond the lamp. Outside
the locusts were desperately shrill, and the heavy ticking of an old
clock grew audible. "I don't like George Moore!" she exclaimed. He
raised surprised, inquiring eyebrows. "He is such a taster," she added,
but particularized no more. She sat, with the scarlet bound book clouded
in the white chiffon of her lap, gazing at the wall. Her lips were
parted, and a brighter colour rose in her cheeks. Her attitude, her
expression, vaguely disturbed him; he had never seen her more warmly,
dangerously, alive. A new reluctance stopped the question forming in
his mind; she seemed to have retreated from him. "Moore is a very great
artist," he said instead.
"That's little to me," she replied flippantly, rising. "I think I'll go
up; and I almost think I will kiss you again." He grumbled a protest,
and watched her trail from the room, the silver girdle and chiffon
emphasizing her thin, vigorous body, the lamplight falling on her bare,
sharp shoulders. Howat Penny had early acquired a habit of long hours,
and it was past one when he put aside his papers, stood for a moment on
the porch. The fireflies were gone, the locusts seemed farther away, and
the soft, heavy flight of an owl rose from the warm grass.
Below, on the right, he could vaguely see the broken bulk of what had
been Shadrach Furnace, the ruined shape of the past. The Pennys no
longer made iron. His father had marked the last casting. They no longer
listened to the beat of the trip hammer, but to the light rhythm of a
conductor's baton; they heard, in place of ringing metal, a tenor's
grace notes. Soon they would hear nothing. They went out, for all time,
with himself. It was fitting that the last, true to their peculiar
inheritance, should be a black Penny. He, Howat, was that--the ancient
Welsh blood finally gathered in a cup of life before it was spilled.
Old influences quickened within him; but, attenuated, they were no more
than regrets. They came late to trouble his remnant of living. He was
like the Furnace, a sign of what had been; yet, he thought in
self-extenuation, he had brought no dishonour, no dragging of the
tradition through the muck of a public scandal. Not that ... nor
anything else. Now, when it was absurd, he was resentful of the part he
had played in life; like a minor, cracked voice, he extended a former
figure with a saving touch of humour, importuning the director because
he had not been cast in the great rôles. The night mist came up and
brushed him; he was conscious of a sudden chill, an aching of the
wrists. "Cracked," he repeated, aloud, and retreated into the house;
where, Rudolph gone up, he put out the lights and stiffly retired.
XXV
They accomplished little the following morning. Mariana, in a scant
brown linen skirt, a sheer waist through which were visible precarious
incidentals and narrow black ribbon, and the confoundedest green
stockings he had ever seen, lounged indolently in a canvas swing. The
heat increased in a reddish haze through which the sun poured like
molten copper. "You'd better come inside," he said from the doorway;
"the house, shut up, is quite comfortable." Within the damp of the old,
stone walls made a comparative coolness. The shades were drawn down, and
they sat in an untimely twilight.
"When I think of how energetic Eliza will be," Mariana asserted, "I am
already overwhelmed. But you never look hot, Howat; you are always
beautiful." His flannels and straw-coloured silk coat were crisply
ironed; his hair, his scarf and lustrous yellow shoes, precise. "Howat,"
she continued almost anxiously, "you put a lot on, well--good form. You
think that the way a man knots his tie is tremendously significant--"
"Perhaps," he returned cautiously. "A good many years have shown me that
the right man usually wears the right things."
"Couldn't that be just the smallest bit unfair? Aren't there, after
all, droves of the right men in rubber collars? I don't know any," she
added hastily; "that is, not exactly the same. But it seems to me that
you have lived so exclusively in a certain atmosphere that you might
have got blinded to--to other things."
"Perhaps," he said again, complacently. "I can only judge by my own
feeling and experience. Now Mapleson, never was a finer conductor of
opera--you didn't catch him in a pink tie in the evening. And some of
those others, who failed in a couple of weeks, I give you my word, dress
shirts with forgetmenots."
She regarded him with a frowning, half closed vision. "It sounds wrong,"
she commented. "It's been your life, of course." He grew resentful under
her scrutiny, the implied criticism. A sudden suspicion entered his
mind, connected with her expression last evening, the young man whose
name he had omitted to ask. His reluctance to question her returned. But
if Mariana had attached herself to some rowdy, by heaven, he would....
He fixed the glass in his eye, and, pretending to be occupied with a
periodical, studied her. He realized that he would, could, do nothing.
She was a woman of determination, and, her father dead, a very adequate
income of her own. His fondness for Mariana resided principally in a
wish to see her free from the multitudinous snares that he designated in
a group as common. He was fearful of her entanglement in the cheap
implications of the undistinguished democracy more prevalent every year.
All that was notable, charming, in her, he felt, would be obliterated by
trite connection; he had no more patience for the conventional
fulfilment of her life than he had for the thought of women voting.
Howat Penny saw Mariana complete, fine, in herself, as the _Orpheo_ of
Christopher Gluck was fine and complete. He preferred the contained
artistry of such music to the cruder, more popular and moral, sounds.
Early in the afternoon she went to her room, although Honduras had no
occasion to go to the station for considerably more than an hour,
explaining that she must dress. Howat Penny sat with his palms on his
white flannelled knees, revolving, now, himself in the light of his
aspirations for Mariana. He wondered if, in the absence of any sympathy
for the mass of sentiment and living, he was blind, too, to her greatest
possibilities; if, in short, he was a vicious influence. Perhaps, as the
old were said to do, he had hardened into a narrow and erroneous
conception of values. Such doubts were both disturbing and unusual;
ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously
held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation
of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft;
senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his inner vision.
Nothing of this was visible as he rose on Mariana's reappearance; there
was not a line relaxed; his handsome, dark profile was as pridefully
clear as if it had been stamped on a bronze coin. Mariana wore, simply,
blue, with an amber veiling of tulle about her shoulders, and a short
skirt that gave her a marked youthful aspect. She seemed ill at ease;
and avoided his gaze, hurrying out to meet the motor as it noisily
turned sharply in at the door. Howat Penny heard Eliza Provost's short,
impatient enunciation, and a rapid, masculine utterance. Eliza entered,
a girl with a decided, evenly pale face and brown eyes, in a severe
black linen suit and a small hat, and extended a direct hand, a slightly
smiling greeting. Mariana followed, for a moment filling the doorway.
"We'll go up, Eliza," she said, moving with the other to the stair, a
few feet distant. A man followed into the house, and Mariana half turned
on the bottom step. "Howat," she proceeded hurriedly, "this is James
Polder." Then she ascended with Eliza Provost.
An expression of amazement, deepening almost to dismay, was momentarily
visible on Howat Penny's countenance. His face felt hot, and there was
an uncomfortable pressure in his throat, such as might come from shock.
Surely Mariana wouldn't ... without warning him--! He was conscious of
the necessity, facing a tall, spare young man with an intent expression,
of a polite phrase; and he articulated an adequate something in a
noticeably disturbed tone. But, of course, he had made a mistake. James
Polder's intensity increased, concentrated in a gaze at once belligerent
and eager. He said:
"Then Miss Jannan didn't tell you. It was a mistake. It may be I am not
exactly desirable here," his voice sharpened, and he retreated a step
toward the door.
"No," Howat Penny replied; "she didn't." He found himself studying a
face at once youthful and lined, a good jaw contradicted by a mouth
already traced with discontent, and yellow-brown eyes kindling with a
surprising energy of resentment. "You are Byron Polder's son?" he said
in a manner that carried its own affirmation. "Eunice Scofield's
grandson."
"Eunice Penny's," the other interjected. "Your own grandfather saw to
that." His hand rested in the doorway, and he stopped Honduras, carrying
in the guests' bags. Howat Penny's poise rapidly returned. "Go right up,
Honduras," he directed; "the Windmill room, I think. I had never seen
you," he said to James Polder, as if in apology. "But your father has
been pointed out to me." He waved the younger man into the room beyond,
and moved forward the cigarettes.
James Polder took one with an evident relief in the commonplace act. He
struck a match and lit the cigarette with elaborate care. "Will you sit
for a little?" the elder proceeded. "Or perhaps you'd rather change at
once. I've no doubt it was sticky in the city."
"Thank you; perhaps I'd better--the last." Rudolph appeared, and
conducted the young man above. Howat Penny sat suddenly, his lips folded
in a stubborn line. Mariana had behaved outrageously; she must be
familiar with the whole, miserable, past episode; she had given him some
very bad moments. He had a personal bitterness toward that old, unhappy
affair, the dereliction of his dead grandfather--it had been, he had
always felt, largely responsible for his own course in life; it had,
before his birth even, formed his limitations, as it had those of his
father.
The latter had been the child of a dangerously late marriage, a marriage
from which time and delay had stripped both material potency and
sustaining illusion. Jasper Penny had been nearing fifty when his son
was born; and that act of deliberate sacrifice on the part of his wife,
entering middle age, had imposed an inordinate amount of suffering on
her last years. Their child, it was true, had been of normal stature,
and lived to within a short space of a half century. But then he had
utterly collapsed, died in three days from what had first appeared a
slight cold; and, throughout his maturity, he had been a man of feverish
mind. His disastrous, blind struggle against the great, newly discovered
iron deposits of the Middle West was characteristic of his ill balance.
And, in his own, Howat Penny's, successive turn, the latter told himself
again, he had paid part of the price of his grandfather's indulgence.
It was incorporated in the Penny knowledge that Susan Brundon had
refused to marry Jasper while the other woman was alive. The latter had
died, some years after the disgraceful publicity of the murder and
trial; the wedding had then taken place; but it seemed to Howat Penny to
have been almost perfunctory. Yes, he had paid too, in the negative
philosophy, the critical sterility, of his existence. He recognized this
in one of the disconcerting flashes of perception that lately
illuminated him as if from without. Some essential proportion had been
disturbed. He looked up, at a slight sound, and saw Mariana standing
before him. His expression, he knew, was severe; he had been quite
upset.
"I can see," she proceeded slowly, "that I have been very wicked. I
didn't realize, Howat, that it might affect you; how real all that old
stir might be. I am tremendously sorry; you must know that I am awfully
fond of you. It was pure, young selfishness. I was afraid that if I
spoke first you wouldn't let him come. And it was important--I must see
him and talk to him and think about it. You can realize mother and
Kingsfrere!"
"Where did you meet him?" he demanded shortly.
"With Eliza, at a meeting," she went on more rapidly. "He's terribly
brilliant, and a steel man. Isn't it funny? The Pennys were steel, too;
or iron, and that's the same. I wish you could be nice to him or just
decent, until--until I know."
"Mariana!" he exclaimed, rising. "You don't mean that you are really--.
That you--"
"Perhaps, Howat," she answered gravely. "I have only seen him twice; and
he has said nothing; but, you see, I am an experienced young woman. No
other man has made the same impression."
"That," he declared coldly, "is unthinkable. You can't know all the
facts."
"I do; but, somehow, I don't care."
"Everything about him is impossible--his history, family ... Why, Eunice
Scofield, well, Penny, married a man from behind a counter, a fellow who
sold womens' gloves; yes, and more than half Jew. And this man's mother
was Delia Mullen, a daughter of the dirty ward leader. All this aside
from--from his bad blood."
"It's partly yours, you know," she said quietly. "After all, there are
other places I can see him." She turned away. "Eliza Provost is insane,"
he muttered. "No," Mariana returned, "only superior to narrow little
prejudices. She can see life, people, as they are. Jim Polder is one of
the most promising men in the steel mills. He is going up and up. That
is enough for Eliza, it is enough for me; and if it won't do for my
family--" she made an opening gesture with her fingers. Her expression
had hardened; she gazed at him with bright, contemptuous eyes. In a
moment the affectionate bonds between them seemed to have dissolved.
His feeling was one of mingled anger and concern; but he endeavoured to
regain his self-control, conscious that a hasty word more might do
irreparable harm.
"Of course, I can't have you meeting him about the streets," he stated.
"It is better here, if necessary. I am very much displeased," a note of
complaint appeared, and she immediately returned to him, laid a hand on
his shoulder. "Nothing is certain," she assured him. "I wanted to be
sure, that is all. I don't want to make a mess out of things."
It was a part of the very quality of emotional courage he had so lately
defined, extolled; a part of her disdain for ordinary prudence and
conventional approbation. A direct dislike for this James Polder invaded
him, a determined attitude of hyper-criticism. When the younger man
reappeared Howat Penny found justification for this attitude. The
details of Polder's apparel, although acceptable in the main, were
without nicety. His shoes were a crude tan, and his necktie from the
outer limbo. His hands, too, had a grimy surface and the nails were
broken, unkempt.
But it was evident that all the criticism was not to be limited to his
own. James Polder regarded the single glass with a scoffing lip, as if
it were the appendage of a ludicrous Anglomania. He glanced with
indifference at Howat Penny's pictures, books, the collected emblems of
his cultivated years. His brows raised at the photograph of Scalchi in
the Page's trunks--as if, the elder thought, she had been a "pony" in
the _Black Crook_--and was visibly amused at the great Mapleson, posed
in a dignified attitude by a broken column. An irrepressible and biting
scorn, Howat Penny saw, was, perhaps, the young man's strongest
attribute. He had violent opinions expressed in sudden, sharp movements,
gestures with his shoulders, swift frowns and fragmentary sentences.
Howat Penny had never seen a more ill-ordered youth, and he experienced
an increasing difficulty in keeping a marked asperity from his speech
and conduct. Eliza Provost shortly came down, and the three strolled out
into the ruddy light of late afternoon. Howat Penny consumed a long time
dressing for the evening; and, in the end, irritably summoned Rudolph.
"I can't get these damned studs in," he complained; "whatever do you
suppose women use for starch now?" Rudolph dexterously fixed the
emeralds, then held the black silk waistcoat. "And coats won't hang for
a bawbee," he went on. "Gentlemen like Gary Dilkes used to go regularly
to London, spring and fall, for their things. No doubt then about a man
of breeding. You didn't see the other kind around. Wouldn't have 'em."
Rudolph murmured consolingly. "Sat in the pit but never got into the
boxes," his voice grew thin, querulous. "I'm moving along, Rudolph," he
admitted suddenly; "the manners, and, by thunder, the music too, don't
suit me any more. Give me the old Academy days in Irving Place." He
hummed a bar from _Ernani_.
Through dinner he maintained a severe silence, listening with a frowning
disapproval to Eliza Provost's tranquil, subversive utterances. Howat
Penny couldn't think what her father was about, permitting her to
harangue loafers by the streets and saloons. She was, in a cold way--she
had Peter Jannan Provost's curious grey colouring--a handsome piece of a
girl, too. "A fine figger," he told himself.
Later, Mariana and James Polder had gone out on the porch, he faced with
reluctance the task of furnishing her with entertainment; but, to his
extreme relief, she procured a leather portfolio, and addressed herself
to a sheaf of papers. But that, in itself, was a peculiar way for a
young woman to spend an evening. She would have done it, he felt, if he
had been half his actual age. God help the man with a fancy for her!
Charming visions were woven on his memory from the fading skeins of the
past--a ride in a dilapidated, public fiacre after a masked ball in
Paris ... at dawn. Confetti tangled in coppery hair, a wilful mouth,
fragrantly painted, and phantomlike swans on a black lake. His silk hat
had been telescoped in the process of smacking a Frenchman's eye.
Perhaps, they had told each other, there would be cards later in the
day, an affair of honour. He forgot what, exactly, had happened; but
there had been no duel.
He looked up with a sudden concern, as if his thoughts might have been
clear to Eliza Provost, in irreproachable evening dress and shell rimmed
glasses, intent on statistical pages. Mariana and James Polder appeared;
the former, Howat Penny thought, disturbed. Polder's intense countenance
was sombre, his brow corrugated. Mariana, accompanied by Eliza, soon
after went up; and left the two men facing each other across a neutral
silence. "You manufacture steel, I believe," the elder finally stated.
"The Company does," Polder replied more exactly. "I've been in the open
hearth since I left school," he went on; "it was born in me, I've never
thought of anything else." His tone grew sharp, as if it might occur to
the other to contradict the legitimacy of his pursuit. "I have done well
enough, too," he said pridefully. "Most of them come on from college. I
went from shovelling slag in the pit, the crane, to second helper and
melter; they gave me the furnace after a year and now I am foreman. It
will be better still if a reorganization goes through. Not many men have
a chance at the superintendent's office under thirty-five."
"That is very admirable," Howat Penny said formally. He wondered,
privately, at the far channel into which the original Penny ability had
flowed. There could be no doubt, however objectionable, that James
Polder was the present repository of the family tradition. He had had it
from the source; and the iron had not, apparently, been corroded by
tainted blood. He was forced to admit that a coarser strain had,
perhaps, lent it endurance. All this failed to detract from his initial
dislike of young Polder. There was a lack of breeding in the manner in
which he sat in his chair, thrust forward on its edge, in his arrogant
proclamation of ability, success. James Polder was anxious, he realized,
to impress him, Howat Penny, with the fact that he was not negligible.
Such things were utterly unimportant to him. He was unable to justify,
or even explain to himself, his standards of judgment. They were not
founded on admirable conduct, on achievement, what was known as solid
worth; but on vague accents, intuitive attitudes of mind visible in a
hundred trivial, even absurd, signs. The "right things" were more
indispensable to him than the sublimest attributes.
On the following morning Mariana, Eliza and Polder disappeared in his
car--it seemed that the latter was an accomplished mechanic in addition
to his other qualities--and Howat Penny faced the disagreeable
possibilities of the near future. Mariana would, he knew, meet this
fellow promiscuously if necessary. As she had indicated, it was
impossible to conceive of him in Charlotte Jannan's house. The latter
was a rigidly correct woman. She would, too, and properly, be nasty if
she learned that such meetings had taken place at Shadrach. The only
thing to do was to bring Mariana to what he designated as her senses.
And, at the start, he had a conviction that he might fail.
She did not accompany Eliza Provost and Polder, when, late Sunday
afternoon, they departed; but sat absorbed in thought through the
evening meal. He found his affection for her increasing to an annoying
degree; he was almost humble in his anxiety not to wound her.
"Life is so messy," she said with sudden violence. "You can't think,
Howat, how I hate myself; the horridest things go round and round
through my mind. We're all wrong--I'm more like you than I
admitted--born snobs. I mean the kind who look down on people different
from themselves. I can't help being on--on edge. I can tell you this,
though, I care more for Jim Polder than for any other man I've ever met.
I'm mad about him; and yet, somehow, I can't quite think of marrying
him. He's asked me already. But I knew he would."
"You must wait," he temporized; "such things clear up after a little."
"And if they don't?" she demanded. "What if they are choked by a hundred
cowardly or selfish thoughts? It can be too late so terribly soon,
Howat. You must know that. You see, I can't decide what really is the
most valuable, what should be held tight on to, or let go. There are two
me's, it seems--one what I want and the other what I am. I want Jim and
I'm Mariana Jannan. All that about Eunice or Essie, or whatever her name
was, doesn't matter a bawbee, as you say. I hate it because I think at
times it makes him unhappy. Really, I believe I am fonder of him because
of it. We owe him something--the superior Jannans and Pennys. Why,
Howat, he's your own blood, and you looked at him as if he were a
grocer's assistant. And I watched hatefully for the little expressions
that seemed common. Of course, out in those mills, he would pick up a
lot that wouldn't touch us; and, after all, he could drop them."
"If you have any thought of reforming him," he commented dryly, "you
might as well see a wedding stationer."
"I could influence him," she insisted; "I'd at least count for as much
as those shovellers and furnace men."
"But not," he proceeded relentlessly, "against the Essie Scofield you
dismissed so easily. I don't doubt for a minute the unhappiness you
spoke of; it would he a part of his inheritance; and you'd never charm
it out of him. Damn it, Mariana," he burst out, "he's inferior! That's
all, inferior." Anger and resentment destroyed his caution, his planned
logic, restraint. "I can see what your life would be, if you can't. You
would live in a no-man's land; and all the clergymen in the world
couldn't make you one."
"It wouldn't be the clergymen, Howat," she said simply. "And you mustn't
think I am only a silly with her first young man. I have kissed them
before, Howat; yes, and liked it. I am not happy with Jim; it's
something else, like tearing silk. He is so confident and so helpless;
he's drinking now, too."
"I suppose that is an added attraction," he commented. She chose to
ignore this. "I half promised him," she continued, "to take dinner with
his family. He will be in the city next week. I said I thought you'd
bring me."
"Well, I won't," he replied in a startled energy. "Mariana, you're out
of your head. Go to Byron Polder's house! Me!" In his excitement he
dropped a lighted cigarette on the Chinese rug. "I have no one else,"
she told him. "Perhaps I'll marry Jim, and go away ... I thought you
might want to be with me, at the last."
He fumbled for his glass, fixed it in his eye, and then dropped it out,
clearing his throat sharply. He rose and crossed the room, and looked
out through the open door at the night. The stars were hazy, and there
was a constant reflection of lightning on the horizon. Howat Penny swore
silently at his increasing softness, his betrayal by his years. Yet it
might be a good thing for her to see the Polder family assembled,
Byron--he was a pretentious looking fool--at one end of the table and
Delia Mullen Polder at the other. There were more children, too. But if
it became necessary, heaven knew how he would explain all this to
Charlotte. "I believe," he said, apparently innocently, "that they live
in the north end of the city."
"It won't damage you," she replied indirectly. Already, he thought with
poignant regret, a part of the old Mariana had gone; her voice was
older, darker with maturity.
XXVI
Howat Penny arrived in town late on the day when he was to dine with
Mariana at the Polders. He entered a taxicab, and was carried smoothly
through the thick, hot air; open electric cars, ladened with damp,
pallid salespeople, passed with a harsh ringing; and the foliage in
Rittenhouse Square hung dusty and limp and still. The houses beyond, on
Nineteenth Street, where the Jannans' winter dwelling stood, were closed
and blankly boarded. The small, provisional entrance before which he
stopped opened, and a servant, out of livery, appeared. "Shall I tell
the driver to return, sir?" he queried; "the telephone is disconnected."
He issued instructions, and, with Howat Penny's bag, followed him into
the darkened house.
The windows of a general chamber on the second floor had been thrown
open; and there he found Mariana's brother. Kingsfrere Jannan was a
young man with a broad white face, shadowed in pasty green, and leaden
eyes. His countenance, Howat knew, masked a keen and avaricious
temperament. He did uncommonly well at auction bridge in the clubs.
Kingsfrere, in a grey morning coat with white linen gaiters and a
relentless collar, nodded and lounged from the room; and Mariana soon
appeared. "Perhaps, Howat," she said, "it would be better if you didn't
dress. I have an idea the Polder men don't."
At the stubborn expression which possessed him she exclaimed sharply,
"If you tell me that the Colonel or Gary Dilkes were always formally
dressed at dinner I think I'll scream." Nevertheless, he had no
intention of relinquishing a habit of years for the Polders, or the
north end of the city; and when, later, he came down into the hall,
where the man stood with his silk hat and cape, Mariana put an arm about
his shoulders. "I wish every one could he as beautiful as yourself," she
told him. They passed the Square, bathed in dusk and the beginning
shimmer of arc lights, went through the flattened and faintly thunderous
arch of a railway, and turned into a broad asphalt street, on which
wide, glistening bulk windows gave place to sombre shops with lurid,
flame-streaked vistas, and continuous residences beyond. Howat Penny
gazed curiously at the tall, narrow dwellings, often a continuous,
similar façade from street corner to corner, then diversified in
elaborate, individual design. All, however, had deep stone steps leading
to the sidewalk, thronged with figures in airy white dresses, coatless
men smoking contentedly; there was a constant light vibration of
laughing voices and subdued calling, and the fainter strains of
mechanical music, the beat of popular marches and attenuated voices of
celebrated singers.
The motor turned suddenly in to the curb, and they got out. The house
before them, like its fellows, was entered from a high flight of red
sandstone steps, and was built of a smooth, soapy green stone, with red
coursings, an elaborate cornice and tiled Italian roof. No one was
sitting outside, although there was a pile of circular, grass-woven
cushions; and Howat sharply rang the bell. A maid in aproned black
admitted them into a narrow hall, from which stairs mounted with a
carved rail terminating in a newel post supporting an almost life-sized
bronze nymph, whose flowing hair was encircled by a wreath of
electrically lit flowers, and who held a dully shining sheaf of
jonquils. There was no other illumination, and Howat Penny discovered in
the obscurity a high mirror bristling with elk horns, on which hung
various hats and outer garments. He stood helpless, apparently, in an
attitude he found impossible to deny himself, waiting to be relieved of
his coverings, when Mariana whispered angrily, "Don't be so rotten,
Howat."
Finally the maid secured his cape, and he was conscious of a stir at the
head of the stairs. Immediately after, a shrill, subdued voice carried
to where he stood. "I told you," it said violently, "... dress suit."
There was an answering murmur, in which he could distinguish, James
Polder's impatient tones. The latter descended, and flooded the hall
with, light from a globe in the ceiling. He was garbed in blue serge and
flannels. "Isabella," he stated directly, belligerently even, "thinks we
ought to change our clothes; but we never do, and I wouldn't hear of--of
lying for effect." Howat Penny's dislike for him pleasantly increased.
Mariana, in rose crêpe with a soft, dull gold girdle and long,
trumpet-like sleeves of flowered gauze, smiled at him warmly. "It is a
harmless pose of Howat's," she explained: "a concession to the ghosts of
the past." She patted the elder on the shoulder.
Above, James Polder ushered them into a room hung with crimson and gilt
stamped paper, an elaborately fretted cherry mantel about the asbestos
rectangle of an artificial hearth, and a multitude of chairs and divans
shrouded in linen. There was an upright, ebonized piano draped in a
fringed, Roman scarf and holding a towering jar of roses, a great,
carved easel with a painstaking, smooth oil painting of a dark man in an
attitude of fixed dignity, and an expensively cased talking machine. The
original, evidently, of the portrait, and a small, rotund woman in mauve
brocade, advanced to meet them. Young Polder said, "My mother and
father. This is Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny."
The latter saw that Mrs. Byron Polder was distinctly nervous; she
twisted the diamonds that occupied a not inconsiderable portion of her
short fingers, and smiled rigidly. "I am very pleased to meet you, Miss
Jannan," she proceeded; "and Mr. Penny too." She held out a hand, then
half withdrew it; but Mariana captured it in her direct palm. "Thank
you," she replied. Byron Polder had a more confident poise; in reality
there was a perceptible chill in his manner. He was a handsome man, with
a cleanly-shaven face, introspective brown eyes and a petulant, drooping
mouth. "You have succeeded in finding your way to my house," he
pronounced enigmatically, gazing at Howat Penny.
It was, Howat thought, just such an ill-bred utterance as he had looked
for from Byron Polder; and he made no effort to mitigate it. He was
conscious of, and resolutely ignored, Mariana's veiled entreaty. "You
don't know my girls," Mrs. Polder continued rapidly. "Here is Isabella,
and Kate will be along for dinner." A tall, bony woman of, perhaps,
thirty-five, in an appalling complication of ribbons and silk, moved
forward with a conventional sentence. In her, Howat's appraisements went
on, virginity had been perpetuated in a captious obsession. They stood
awkwardly silent until James Polder exclaimed, "Good heavens, this isn't
a wax works! Why don't we sit down?" The older woman glanced with a
consuming anxiety at Isabella, and nodded violently toward an exit,
"It's a quarter after seven," she said in a swift aside. Isabella,
correctly disposed on a chair of muffled and mysterious line, resolutely
ignored the appeal.
"I didn't suppose you'd be in the city," she addressed Mariana; "I read
in the paper that you had gone to Watch Hill with Mrs. Ledyard B.
Starr."
"You can see that I'm back," Mariana smiled. "The family, of course, are
at Andalusia, but we have all been in town the past days. I am really
staying with Howat at Shadrach."
"The former location of Shadrach Furnace, I believe," Byron Polder
stated. "Now in ruins." Howat Penny accurately gathered that the other
inferred the collapse not only of the Furnace. He secured the single
glass in his eye and looked deliberately around. Isabella watched him
with a tense interest. Mrs. Polder gave a short, perturbed giggle. "Just
like George Arliss," she told her son. James Polder, on the edge of a
chair, was twitching with repressed uneasiness; he frowned
antagonistically and then gazed appealingly at Mariana. "I have been
introduced to your cousin, Miss Provost," Isabella again took up her
social thread. "A dear friend of mine, a talented actress, gave a
recitation at Miss Provost's request, for suffrage."
"Eliza's splendid," Mariana pronounced.
"Peter Jannan Provost's daughter," Byron Polder added fully. But his
voice indicated that even more, darkly unfavourable, might be revealed.
"Miss Provost has been under arrest." Damn the solemn ass, Howat Penny
thought. "She's been in the jug twice now," Mariana went on cheerfully;
"Kingsfrere had to put up a bond the last time." Mrs. Polder was rapidly
regaining her ease. "Wasn't her mamma scared?" she inquired. "I'd go on
if Isabella was taken up."
"Imagine Isabella!" Jim Polder exploded. "It's quite the thing," that
individual asserted. "Isabella," her mother declared, "it is twenty-five
past seven. I wish you'd go out and see where dinner is." She rose with
an expression of mingled surprise and pain. "Really, mother," she said,
"that is an extraordinary request." Her brother snorted. There was a
sudden muffled clamour of chimes from below, and Mrs. Polder gave a sigh
of relief. "I didn't want it spoiled," she explained, descending; "Jim
would be wild after all his eagerness to have things nice."
The dining room, resembling all the interior, was long and narrow, and
had a high ceiling in varnished light wood. Byron Polder faced his wife
at the opposite end of the table. Howat Penny sat beside Mariana, with
Jim Polder across; Isabella was on her mother's right; and a waiting
place was filled by a dark, surprisingly beautiful girl. "This is Kate,"
Mrs. Polder said proudly. Howat thought he had not seen such a handsome
female for years. She wore a ruffled, transparent crêpe de Chine waist
that clung in frank curves to full, graceful shoulders; her hair was a
lustrous, black coil, and she had sultry, topaz eyes and a mouth
drooping like her father's, but more warmly bowed. Kate Polder met the
direct pleasure of his inspection with a privately conveyed admission
that she understood and subscribed to it. Here, at last, was a girl up
to the standard of old days, the divinity of Scalchi herself. She would
have created a sensation in Delmonico's, the real Delmonico's. Gary and
the Colonel--
"We think they're elegant," Mrs. Polder's voice broke in on his revery.
He looked up and saw a great fish on a huge platter before his host, a
fish in surprising semblance to life, had it not been for the rosettes
of lemon, the green bed, which surrounded it. "Gracious, no," she
answered Mariana's query; "we don't do it home. Mr. Polder has them sent
from a Rathskeller down town. He'll make a meal off one." The latter was
plainly chagrined at this light thrown on his petty appetites. He
assumed an air of complete detachment in the portioning of the dish;
but, at the same time, managed to supply himself liberally. The
conversation was sporadic. Howat Penny found the dinner lavish, and
divided his attention between it and Kate Polder. James and Mariana
addressed general remarks to the table at succeeding intervals. Mr.
Polder gloomed, and Isabella went through the gestures, the accents, of
the occasion with utter correctness. Howat studied Mariana, but he was
unable to discover her thoughts; she was smiling and cordial; and
apologized for losing her slipper. "I always do," she explained. James
Polder hastily rose, and came around to assist her. The dinner was at an
end, and she stood with a slim, silken foot outheld for him to replace
the fragile object of search.
They reassembled above, and Mrs. Polder suggested music. "My son says
you are very fond of good music," she addressed Howat Penny. "I can tell
you it is a lovely taste. We have the prettiest records that come.
Isabella, put on _Hark, Hark, the Lark_." She obediently rose, and,
revolving the handle of the talking machine, fixed the grooved, rubber
disk and needle. Howat listened with a stony countenance to the ensuing
strains. Such instruments were his particular detestation. Mrs. Polder
waved her hand dreamily. "Now," she said, "the _Sextette_, and _The End
of a Perfect Day_. No, Mr. Penny would like to hear _Salome_, I'm sure,
with all those cymbals and creepy Eastern tunes." An orgy of sound
followed, applauded--perversely, he was certain--by Mariana. James, he
saw, was as uneasy as himself; but for a totally different reason. He
gazed at Mariana with a fierce devotion patent to the most casual eye;
his expression was tormented with concern and longing.
"When do you return to Harrisburg?" Byron Polder inquired. "My son," he
went on to Howat Penny, "is a practical iron man. I say iron, although
that is no longer the phrase, because of natural associations. The
present system of the manufacture of steel, as you doubtless know,
evolved from the old Ironmasters, of whose blood James has a generous
share. We look to him to re-establish, er--a departed importance. I need
say no more." His women's anxiety at this trend of speech became
painful. "Play a right lively piece," Mrs. Polder interjected, and an
intolerable cacophony of banjoes followed, making conversation futile.
The evening, Howat Penny felt, was a considerable success; by heaven,
Mariana would never get herself into this! Byron Polder's innuendoes
must have annoyed her nicely. When the mechanical disturbance ceased,
Mrs. Polder said, "I believe that's the bell." Evidently she had been
correct, for, immediately after, a young woman with bright gold hair,
and a mobile, pink countenance unceremoniously entered the room. "Oh!"
she exclaimed, in an instinctively statuesque surprise; "I didn't know
you were entertaining company."
"Come right in, Harriet," Mrs. Polder heartily proclaimed. "Miss Jannan,
Mr. Penny, this is Isabella's friend, Harriet de Barry, a near neighbour
and a sweet girl. She's an actress, too; understudies Vivian Blane; and
is better, lots say, than the lead."
Harriet de Barry made a comprehensive gesture. "I wanted to say good-bye
to you all," she announced. "I am going on tour. Leave at midnight. Just
had a wire from Mrs. Blane." There were polite Polder exclamations,
regret, congratulations; through which the son of the house moodily
gazed at the carpet. "Haven't you anything to say to Hatty?" his mother
demanded. "And after all the passes she sent you." Howat Penny saw
Mariana's gaze rest swiftly on the latest comer's obvious good looks;
and the scrutiny, he was certain, held a cold feminine appraisal. As
they descended to leave Mariana lingered on the stairs with Jim. The
latter closed the door of the public motor with a low, intense mutter;
and, moving away, Howat Penny lit a cigarette with a breath of audible
relief.
"I don't know which I detest most," Mariana declared viciously, "you or
myself."
"You might include that fish," he added plaintively. She gazed at him in
cold contempt, with an ugly, protruding lip. Nothing else was said until
they were in the opened room at the Jannans. Mariana flung herself on a
broad divan, with her narrowed gaze fixed on the points of her slippers.
"Comfortable, isn't it," she addressed him; "this feeling of
superiority?" He placidly nodded, inwardly highly pleased. "I wish I'd
married Jim the first week I knew him, without trying to be so dam'
admirable. Howat, what is it that makes people what they are, and
aren't?" It was, he told her, difficult to express; but it had to do
with inherited associations. "Mrs. Polder is as kind as possible," she
asserted; "and I could see that you were absorbed in Kate."
"Really, Mariana," he protested, "at times you are a little rough. She
is a very fine girl; in fact, reminds me of Scalchi. Old Byron, though,
what--a regular catafalque!" A blundering step mounted to the stair;
Kingsfrere entered and stood wavering and concerned, the collar wilted
and a gaiter missing. "Ought to do something about the front door," he
asserted; "frightful condition, no paint; and full of splinters. Very
plump splinters," he specified, examining a hand. Mariana surveyed him
coolly, thoroughly. "Sweet, isn't he?" she remarked. "Kingsfrere Gilbert
Todd Jannan."
"That's absolutely all," that individual assured her. "Except if you
want to add Sturgeon; some do. Hullow, Howat! Grand old boy, Howat," he
told her. "But if he says I'm drunk, I will tell you one of Bundy's
stories about him. This--this elegant deception tremendous noise with
the song birds." He sat abruptly on a providentially convenient chair.
There, limply, he hiccoughed. "Sweet," Mariana repeated. Kingsfrere
finally rose, and, with a friendly wave, wandered from the room.
"It was good of you to take me, Howat," she told him wearily. "Although,
now, I can see that you went willingly enough. You thought it would cure
me. But of what, Howat--of love? Of a feeling that, perhaps, I'd found a
reason for living?"
A decidedly uncomfortable feeling, doubt, invaded him. He had an
unjustified sense of meddling, of blundering into a paramount situation
to which he lacked the key. He had done nothing debatable, he assured
himself; Mariana's inherent, well--prejudices, couldn't be charged to
him. In the room where he was to sleep the uneasiness followed him. She
was his greatest, his only concern. Howat Penny reviewed his desire for
her, his preference for a Mariana untouched by the common surge of
living. He recalled the discontent, the feeling of sterility, that had
lately possessed him; the suspicion that his life had been in vain. All
his philosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in
hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.
He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself,
that consciousness was disturbing. It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect.
He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner
and cold. Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter
loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for
the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association.
Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So
many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the
determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been
bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites,
showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing
pointedly wrong; he had--the inversion repeated itself--done nothing.
XXVII
At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat
reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the
_Evening Post_ that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully
described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding
of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the
successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns
of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture
in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an
extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a
reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the
moment.
Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was
seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements
of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder
appeared.
"I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan," the latter stated frankly and at
once. Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply. "I believe she is well,"
he stated formally. "You will find it cooler here." It struck him that
the young man was not deficient in that particular. More, of still
greater directness, followed. "I suppose you know," Polder stated, "that
I want to marry her ... and she won't."
"I had gathered something of the sort," the other admitted. "It's
natural, in a way." Polder proceeded gloomily: "I'd take her away from
so much. And, yet, look here--you can shut me up if you like--what's it
all about? Can you tell me that?" Howat Penny couldn't. "I'm not to
blame for that old mess any more than you. And it's not my fault if
something of--of which you think so much came to me by the back door.
I've always wanted what Mariana is," he burst out, "and I have never
been satisfied with what I could get. And when I saw her, hell--what's
the use!
"Any one in Harrisburg will tell you I am a good man," he reiterated, at
a slightly different angle. "When you kick through out of that racket of
hunkies and steel you've done something. Soon I'll be getting five or
six thousand." He paused, and the other said dryly, "Admirable." The
phrase seemed to him inadequate; it sounded in his ear as unpleasantly
as a false note. Yet he was powerless to alter it, change its brusque
accent. The personal tone of Polder's revelations was inherently
distasteful to him. He said, rising, "If you will excuse me I'll tell
Rudolph you will be here."
"But I won't," Polder replied; "there's a train back at eleven. I have
to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow. I came out because I
had to talk a little about Mariana." He had deserted the more formal
address. "And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have
gimp of my own. I know why she won't marry me, and it's a small reason;
it would be small in--"
"Hold up," Howat Penny interrupted, incensed. "Am I to understand that
you came here to complain about Miss Jannan's conduct? That won't do,
you know."
"It's a small reason," the other insisted hotly. "Hardly more than the
idiotic fact that I'm not in the Social Register. I am ashamed of her,
and I said so. It was so little that I told her I wouldn't argue. She
could go to the devil."
"Really," the other observed, "really, I shall have to ask you to
control your language or leave."
"I wonder if she will?" the surprising James Polder sombrely speculated.
"I wonder if I am? But there are other women, with better hearts."
"Are we to construe this as a threat?" Howat asked in a delicately
balanced tone.
"For God's sake," he begged, "can't you be human!" The other suddenly
recalled Mariana's imploring anger at the Polders. "Don't be so rotten,
Howat." The confusion of his valuations, his habitual attitudes of
thought, returned. His gaze strayed to the obscured ruin of Shadrach
Furnace, at once a monument of departed vigour and present
disintegration. Perhaps, just as the energy had expired in the Furnace,
it had seeped from him. It might be that he was only a sere husk, a dry
bundle of inhibitions, insensible to the green humanity of life.
"I couldn't go on my knees to anything," the younger took up his burden.
"Wrong or not it is the way I'm made. I'd not hang about where I wasn't
wanted. Although you mightn't think it. And I am sorry I came here. I do
things like that all the time; I mean I do, say, exactly the opposite of
what I plan. You'll think I am a braying ass, of course."
"Stop for a breath," Howat Penny recommended; "a breath, and a
cigarette." He extended his case; and, in place of taking a cigarette,
Polder examined the case resentfully. "There is it," he declared;
"correct, like all the rest of you. And it's only old leather. But mine
would be different. I could sink and Mariana wouldn't put out a hand
just on account of that. It's wrong," he insisted. Expressed in that
manner it did seem to Howat Penny a small reason for the withholding of
any paramount salvation. Yet, he told himself, he had no intention,
desire, to undertake the weight of any reformation. A futile effort, he
added, with his vague consciousness of implacable destiny, his dim sense
of man moved from without, in locked progression. Polder was young,
rebellious; but he could grow older; he would grow older and comprehend;
or else beat himself to death on obdurate circumstance. What concerned
Howat was the hope that Mariana would be no further involved in either
process. She too had this to learn--that, in the end, blood was stronger
than will; the dead were terribly potent. He had, even, no inclination
to say any of this to the man frowning in the dusk at his side. It would
be useless, a mere preaching. An expression, too, of a slight but actual
sympathy for James Polder would be misleading. In the main Howat was
entirely careless of what might happen to the other; it was only where,
unfortunately, he touched Mariana that he entered into the elder's
world. He would sacrifice him for Mariana in an instant. Polder rose.
"I must leave," he announced. Howat Penny expressed no regret, and the
other hesitated awkwardly. "It's no use!" he finally exclaimed. "I can't
reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me."
He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the
obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky,
and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead
planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces.
James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more
articulate than the thin whirring of the locusts. He went quickly into
the house, to the warm glow of his lamp, the memories of his pictures,
the figurine in baked clay with Hermes' wand of victory.
XXVIII
The heat dragged through the remainder of August and filled September
with steaming days and heavy nights, followed by driving grey storms and
premonitory, chill dawns. A period of sunny tranquillity succeeded, but
crimson blots of sumach, the warmer tone of maples, made it evident that
summer had lapsed. Honduras mulched the strawberries, and set new teeth
in his lawn rakes. The days passed without feature, or word from
Mariana, and Howat Penny fell into an almost slumberous monotony of
existence. It was not unpleasant; occupied with small duties, intent on
his papers, or wandering in a past that seemed to grow clearer, rather
than fade, as time multiplied, he maintained his erect, carefully
ordered existence. Then, among his mail, he found a large,
formal-appearing envelope which he opened with a mild curiosity. His
attitude of detachment was soon dispelled.
Mrs. Corinne de Barry desired the pleasure of his attendance at the
wedding of her daughter, Harriet, to James Polder. Details, a church and
hour, were appended. The headlong young man, he thought, with a smile,
Mariana was well out of that. He had been wise in saying nothing to
Charlotte; the thing had expired naturally. But, irrationally, he
thought of Polder with a trace of contempt--a man who had,
unquestionably, possessed Mariana Jannan's regard marrying the
pink-faced understudy to a second-rate emotional actress! In a way it
made him cross; the fellow should have shown a--a greater appreciation,
delicacy. "Commonplace," he said decisively, aloud. The following day
Mariana herself appeared, with a touch of sable and a small, wickedly
becoming hat.
He was at lunch; and, without delay, she took the place smilingly laid
for her by Rudolph. It was characteristic that she made no pretence of
concealing the reason that had brought her to Shadrach. "Jim's going to
marry that Harriet de Barry," she said at once, nicely casual. "I had a
card," he informed her. "It's to be on the thirtieth," Mariana
proceeded, "at eight o'clock and in church. Of course you are going."
"Not at all of course," he replied energetically. "And you'll stay away
for the plainest decency."
"We will go together," she proceeded calmly. "I want to see Jim married,
happy." She gazed at him with narrowed eyes.
"Mariana," he told her, "that's a shameful lie. It is cold, feminine
curiosity. It's worse--the only vulgar thing I can remember your
considering. I won't hear of it." He debated the wisdom of recounting
James Polder's last visit to Shadrach and decided in the negative. "Let
the young man depart with his Harriet in peace."
"It's sickening, isn't it?" she queried. "And yet it is so like Jim. He
had a very objectional idea of his dignity; he was sensitive in a way
that made me impatient. He couldn't forget himself, you see. That helped
to make it difficult for me; I wasn't used to it; his feelings were
always being damaged."
Howat Penny nodded. "You'll recall I emphasized that." Mariana looked
worn by her gaiety, he decided, white; for the first time in his memory
she seemed older than her actual years. Her friends, he knew, her
existence, bore the general appellation, fast; Howat had no share in the
condemnatory aspect of the term, but he realized that it had a literal
application. Their pace was feverish, and Mariana plainly showed its
effects. Her voice, already noted as more mature, had, he was sure,
hardened. She dabbled her lips thickly with a rouge stick. "Mariana," he
said querulously, "I wish, you'd stop this puppet dance you're leading.
I wish you would marry."
"I tried to," she coolly replied, "but you spoiled my young dream of
happiness."
"That isn't true," he asserted sharply, perturbed. "Anything that
happened, or didn't happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you
are. I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of
the Sunday papers. I--I am opposed to your present existence; it's gone
on too long. I believe I'd rather see you orating on the streets, like
Eliza Provost. And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that!
Champagne and those damnable syncopated tunes played by hysterical
niggers make a poor jig." He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any
reversal of previous judgments, opinions.
"You are so difficult to please, Howat," she said wearily; "you were
aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining
of the natural alternative. The truth is," she added brutally, "you are
old-fashioned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of
Music was the centre of your world. And nothing is the same." She rose,
and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic
step of sensuous abandon. "You see," she remarked, pausing. An
increasing dread for her filled his heart. He felt, in response to her
challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day. Things, Howat
Penny told himself, were marching to the devil. He said this irritably,
loud, and she laughed. "I'm going in by an early train," she proceeded.
"We have left the country. Will you stop for me on the thirtieth? Early,
Howat, so we can be sure of a good place."
His helplessness included the subject of her remarks; he would, he
realized, be at James Polder's wedding, but he persisted in his opinion.
"A low piece of business," Howat declared. When she had gone he felt
that he had not penetrated her actual attitude toward Polder's
deflection. He had not for a moment got beneath her casual manner, her
lightness, pretended or actual. He wished vehemently that he were back
again in the past he comprehended, among the familiar figures that had
thronged the notable dinner to Patti, the women who had floated so
graciously through the poetry of departed waltzes. He got out his albums
once more, scrutinized through his polished glass the programmes of
evenings famous in song. But he went to bed a full two hours earlier
than customary; his feet positively dragged up the stairs; above he sat
strangely exhausted, breathing heavily for, apparently, no reason
whatever.
He retraced, with Mariana, the course over the broad, asphalt way into
the north end of the city early on the evening of the thirtieth. They
found the church easily, by reason of a striped canvas tunnel stretched
out to the curb; and a young man with plastered hair and a gardenia led
them, Mariana on his arm, to a place on the centre aisle. The church had
a high nave newly vaulted in maple, and stained glass windows draped
with smilax, garish in colour against electric lights. Above the altar a
great illuminated cross maintained an unsteady flickering; and--it was
unseasonably cold--heating steam pipes gave out an expanding racket.
The pews through the centre filled rapidly; there was a low, excited
chatter of voices, and a spreading tropical expanse of the dyed
feathers and iridescent foliage of womens' hats. An overpowering scent
of mingled perfumes rose and filled the interior. The strains of an
organ grew audible, contesting with the rattle of the steam pipes. Howat
Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of
innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a
sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent,
incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he
said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the
ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be
so--so concerned. He suppressed an impatient exclamation, and returned
to the scrutiny of the culminating ceremony.
Here was a sphere, vastly larger than his own, to the habits and
prejudices of which he was complete stranger. It was as James Polder had
said--as if one or the other spoke Patagonian. He had no wish to acquire
the language about him; a positive antagonism to his surrounding
possessed him, beyond reason. He thought--how different Mariana is from
all this, and was annoyed again at her serious bearing. Then he was
surprised by his presence there at all; confound the girl, why didn't
she play with her own kind! Yet only the other day the glimpse she had
given him of her natural associates had filled him with dread. His mind,
striving to encompass the problem of Mariana's existence, failed to
overcome the walls built about him by time, by habit. He gave it up. The
louder pealing of the organ announced immediate developments.
There was a stir in the front of the church, a clergyman in white
vestment advanced; and, at a sudden murmurous interest, a twisting of
heads, the wedding procession moved slowly up the aisle. The ushers,
painstakingly adopting various lengths of stride to the requirements of
the organ, passed in pairs; then followed an equal number of young
women, among whom he instantly recognized the handsome presence of Kate
Polder, in drooping blue bonnets, with prodigious panniers of
celestial-hued silk, carrying white enamelled shepherd's crooks from
which depended loops of artificial buttercups. An open space ensued, in
the centre of which advanced a child with starched white skirts
springing out in a lacy wheel about spare, bare knees, her pale yellow
hair tied in an overwhelming blue bow; and holding outstretched, in a
species of intense and quivering agony, a white velvet cushion to which
were pinned two gold wedding bands.
After that, Howat Penny thought, the prospective bride could furnish
only the diminished spectacle of an anti-climax. Led by the virginal
presence of Isabella Polder she floated forward in a foam of white tulle
and dragging satin attached below her bare, full shoulders. A floating
veil, pinned with a wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered
the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed,
statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the
steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. "Why
don't they turn them off?" Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he
enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he designated as the performance.
He cast the participants in their inevitable rôles--the bride as prima
donna, James Polder the heroic tenor. Mrs. Corinne de Barry, a thin,
concerned figure in glistening lavender, supported a lamenting mezzo,
the bulky, masculine figure at her side, with an imposing diamond on a
hand like two bricks, was beautifully basso--
His train of thought was abruptly upset by James Polder's familiar,
staccato utterance. The precipitant young man! It stamped out all Howat
Penny's humorous condescension; his sensitive ear was conscious of a
note, almost, of desperation. He avoided looking at Mariana. Damn it,
the thing unexpectedly cut at him like a knife. James Polder said, "I
will." The clear, studied tones of Harriet de Barry, understudy to
Vivian Blane, were spoiled by the crackling of steam. Howat moved
uneasily; he had an absurd sense of guilt; he hated the whole
proceeding. What was that Polder, whose voice persisted so darkly in his
hearing, about, getting himself into such a snarl? He recalled what the
younger had said on his porch--"women with better hearts." He had
implored him, Howat Penny, to be "more human." The memory, too, of the
shaken tone of that request bothered him. Now it appeared that he might
have been, well, more human. He composed himself, facing such
sentimental illusions, into a savage indifference to what remained of
the ceremony; he ignored the passage of Polder, with Harriet Polder on
his arm; the relief of the unspeakable child carrying the white velvet
cushion no longer in the manner of a hot plate; the united bridesmaids
and ushers. "Thank heaven, that's over!" he ejaculated in the
deeply-comfortable space of the Jannan's motor laundalet. "But it
isn't," Mariana said briefly. She sat silent, with her head turned from
him, through the remainder of the short drive about Rittenhouse Square.
Then she went abruptly to her room.
Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the
living room. The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance,
squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned,
had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was assertive and final.
Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana,
was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty
by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now.
They were discussing, he discovered, the family.
"It's an outrage, Howat," Charlotte told him, "you never married, and
that the name will go. Here's Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and
nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have
another child. I wish now I'd had a dozen. It is really the duty of the
proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's
their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault
of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling.
Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about
votes for no reason under heaven but superior associates."
"Howat will feelingly curse the present with you," Sophie said rising.
"I must go. Borrow the motor, if you don't mind. I saw in the paper a
Polder was married." Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid. "A
name I never repeat," Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left.
He heard again the echo of James Polder's intense voice, "I will."
Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated. Howat
thought of Mariana, in her room--alone with what feelings? He realized
that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that
direction. He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a
connection. However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a
multitude of similarly futile imaginings.
Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence
of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her
complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too--too
worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was,
at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name.
Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to
have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had
been caught in an ugly net of circumstance. A great deal had been upset
since his day, when the boxes and pit had been so conveniently
separated; old boundaries no longer defined, limited, their content;
social demarcations were being obliterated by a growing disaffection. It
was very unfortunate, for, as he was seeing, unhappiness ensued. It was
bound to. An irritability seized him at being dragged into such useless
conjecturing; into, at his age, confusing complications; and he greeted
with relief the long, low front of his dwelling at Shadrach, its old
grey stone a seeming outcropping of the old green turf, the aged,
surrounding trees.
XXIX
Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately. She stood before him
in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate
skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women. But he soon forgot her
garb.
"Howat," she told him, "I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake. I
was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn't. Perhaps I have ruined his life.
Mine will be nothing without him." They were in the middle room, and a
fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth. She dropped on a
chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames. Here it's all to do over,
he thought, with a feeling of weariness. "He may get along very well
with his Harriet," he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.
"You know he won't," she replied sharply. "He loves me; and I love him,
Howat. I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered,
until I was in my room, after his wedding. It wasn't a wedding, really,"
she declared. "All that doesn't make one. He'll find it out, too. Jimmy
will be desperate, and I'm afraid he will drink harder. He told me they
were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works. And there's
that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn't made
superintendent. He has worked splendidly for it. That woman he--he went
off with is a squash," she said vindictively. "She will be in bed when
he goes away in the morning, and in crêpe de Chine negligee when he gets
back. Perhaps it won't last," she added thoughtfully.
The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage
abruptly departed. He fumbled with his glass, directed it at Mariana.
"What do you mean by that?" he demanded. "I would go to him like a shot,
if he needed me," she coolly returned. The dreadful part of it was that
he was sure she would. "Nonsense," he asserted, hiding his concern;
"there will be no fence climbing." All this came from the letting down
of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables.
Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings. In his day a bad
woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn't tell them
apart now. It was the dancing, too. Might as well be married to a man,
he thought.
Mariana was haggard, the paint on her face crudely--paint. He saw that
there were tears in her eyes, and he turned away confused, rose. The
slot in his cigarette box refused to open, and he shook it violently,
then put it back with a clatter. "Tell Rudolph you're here," he said
disjointedly; and, miserable, left the room. Dressing he stood at a
window; the west held a narrow strip of crimson light under a windy mass
of cloud. The ruin of Shadrach Furnace was sombre. Within, the room was
almost bare. There was a large, high-posted bed without drapings, a
vermilion lacquered table, dark with age, supporting a glass lamp at its
side; a set of drawers with old brass handles; a pair of stiff Adam
chairs with wheel backs; and a modern mahogany dressing case, variously
and conveniently divided, a clear mirror in the door.
The day failed rapidly, and he lit a pair of small lamps on the set of
drawers. The sun sank in no time at all. Mariana, crying. The girl ought
to go to her mother, and not come out to him, an old man, with her
intimate troubles. "A name I never repeat," Charlotte had said. That was
just like her. Small sympathy there, and no more understanding. He
knotted his tie hurriedly, askew; and gathered the ends once more. It
tired him a little to dress in the evening; often he longed to stay
relaxed, pondering, until Rudolph called him to dinner. But every day
something automatic, tyrannical, dragged him up to his room, encased him
in rigid linen, formal black. Mariana, against the fireplace, ate
listlessly; and, later, he beat her with shameful ease at sniff.
"You can't do that," he pointed out with asperity, when she
thoughtlessly joined unequal numbers. "Why not?" she asked. She must be
addled. "It's against the rule." Mariana said, "I'm tired of rules."
She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and
he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence
and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace,
burning to impalpable, white ash.
What a procession of logs had been there reduced to dust, warming
generations of men now cold. The thought of all those lapsed winters and
lives soothed him; the clamour of living seemed to retreat, to leave him
in a grey tranquillity. His head sank forward, and his narrow, dark
hands rested in absolute immobility on the arms of his chair. He roused
suddenly to discover that Mariana had gone up, and that there were only
some fitful, rosy embers of fire left. In November it had been his
custom to go into town for the winter; and it was time for him to make
such arrangement; but, all at once, he was overwhelmingly reluctant to
face the change, the stir, of moving. The city seemed intolerably noisy,
oppressive; the thought of the hurrying, indifferent crowds disconcerted
him. At Shadrach it was quiet, familiar, spacious. He had had enough of
excursions, strange faces, problems.... He would speak to Rudolph. Stay.
XXX
The countryside, it appeared to Howat Penny, flamed with autumn and
faded in a day. Throughout the night he heard the crisp sliding of dead
leaves over the roof, the lash of the wind swung impotently about the
rectangular, stone block of his dwelling. At the closing of shutters the
December gales only penetrated to him in a thin, distant complaint. The
burning hickory curtained the middle room with a ruddy warmth. It was a
period of extreme peace; he slept for long hours in a deep chair, or sat
lost in a simulation of sleep, living again in the past. The present was
increasingly immaterial, unimportant; old controversies occupied him,
long since stilled; and among the memories of opera, of Eames as a
splendid girl, forgotten rôles, were other, vaguer associations,
impressions which seemed to linger from actual happenings, but
persistently evaded definition. At times, his eyes closed, the glow of
his fireplace burned hotter, more lurid, and was filled with faintly
clamorous sounds; at times there was, woven through his half-wakeful
dreaming, a monotonous beat ... such as the fall of a hammer. He saw,
too, strange and yet familiar faces--a girl in silk like an extravagant
tea rose; a countenance seamed and glistening with pain floated in
shadow; and then another mocked and mocked him. Once he heard the
drumming of rain, close above; and the illusion was so strong that he
made his way to the door; a black void was glistening with cold and
relentless stars.... Now he was standing by a dark, hurrying river,
nothing else was visible; and yet he was thrilled by a sense of utter
rapture.
He developed a feeling of the impermanence of life, his hold upon it no
stronger than the tenuous cord of a balloon straining impatiently in
great, unknown currents. The future lost all significance, reality;
there were only memories; the vista behind was long and clear, but the
door to to-morrow was shut. Looking into his mirror the reflection was
far removed; it was hollow-cheeked and silvered, unfamiliar. He half
expected to see a different face, not less lean, but more arrogant, with
a sharply defined chin. The actual, blurred visage accorded ill with his
trains of thought; it was out of place among the troops of gala youth.
A wired letter, a customary present of cigarettes, came from Mariana on
Christmas, gifts from Charlotte and Bundy Provost. There was champagne
at his place for dinner; and he sealed crisp money in envelopes
inscribed Rudolph, Honduras, and the names of the cook and maid. He
drank the wine solemnly; the visions were gone; and he saw himself as an
old man lingering out of his time, alone. There was, however, little
sentimental melancholy in the realization; he held an upright pride, the
inextinguishable accent of a black Penny. His disdain for the
commonality of life still dictated his prejudices. He informed Rudolph
again that the present opera was without song; and again Rudolph gravely
echoed the faith that melody was the heart of music.
The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before
drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened. There
was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was
accomplished. A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house;
and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place.
Mariana soon appeared.
"I wouldn't miss the spring at Shadrach for a hundred years of
hibiscus," she told him. He gathered that she had been south. She
brought him great pleasure, beat him with annoying frequency at sniff,
and was more companionable than ever before. She had, he thought, forgot
James Polder; and he was careful to avoid the least reference to the
latter. Mariana was a sensible girl; birth once more had told.
She was better looking than he had remembered her, more tranquil; a
distinguished woman. It was incredible that a man approximately her
equal had not appeared. Then, without warning--they were seated on the
porch gazing through the tender green foliage of the willow at the
vivid young wheat beyond--she said:
"Howat, I am certain that things are going badly with Jimmy. He wrote to
me willingly in the winter, but twice since then he hasn't answered a
letter."
He suppressed a sharp, recurrent concern. "It's that Harriet," he told
her, capitally diffident. "You are stupid to keep it up. What chance
would he have had answering her letters married to you?"
"This is different," she replied confidently. He saw that he had been
wrong--nothing had changed, lessened. Howat swore silently. That
damnable episode might well spoil her entire existence. But he wisely
avoided argument, comment. A warm current of air, fragrant with apple
blossoms, caught the ribbon-like smoke of his cigarette and dissipated
it. She smiled with half-closed eyes at the new flowering of earth. Her
expression grew serious, firm. "I think we'd better go out to
Harrisburg," she remarked, elaborately casual, "and see Jimmy for
ourselves."
He protested vehemently, but--from experience in that quarter--with a
conviction of futility. "She'll laugh at you," he told Mariana. "Haven't
you any proper pride?" She shook her head.
"Not a scrap. It's just that quality in Jim that annoyed me, and spoiled
everything. I'd cook for them if it would do any good." Irritation
mastered him. "This is shameful, Mariana," he declared. "Don't your
position, your antecedents, stand for anything? If I had Jasper Penny
here I would tell him what I thought of his confounded behaviour!" He
rose, and walked the length of the porch and back.
"The first part of next week?" she queried. "I won't go a mile," he
stated, in sheer bravado. "Then," said Mariana, "I must do it alone." He
muttered a period in which the term hussy was solely audible. "Which of
us?" she asked, calmly. "Actually," he exploded, "I feel sorry for that
Harriet. I sympathize with her. She got the precious James fair enough,
and the decent thing for you is to keep away."
"But I'm not decent either," Mariana continued. "If you could know what
is in my head you'd recognize that. I seem to have no good qualities. I
don't want them, Howat," her voice intensified; "I want Jim."
He was completely silenced by this desire persisting in spite of every
established obstacle. It summoned an increasing response at the core of
his being. Such an attitude was, more remotely, his own; but in him it
had been purely negative, an inhibition rather than a challenge; he had
kept out of life instead of actively defying it. In him the family
inheritance of blackness was subsiding with the rest.
Howat maintained until the moment of their departure his protest, his
perverse community with Harriet Polder. "You'll find a happy house," he
predicted, "and come home like a fool. I hope you do. It ought to help
make you more reasonable. She will tell James to give you a comfortable
chair, and apologize for not asking you to dinner." She gazed through
the car window without replying. He realized that he had never seen
Mariana more becomingly dressed--she wore a rough, silver-coloured suit
with a short jacket, a pale green straw hat, like the new willow leaves,
across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced
waist of thinnest batiste. A square, deep emerald hung from a platinum
chain about her neck; and a hand, stripped of its thick white glove,
showed an oppressive, prismatic glitter of diamonds.
The morning was filled with dense, low, grey cloud, under which the
river on their left flowed without a glimmer of brightness. Howat was
aware of an increasing sulphurous pall, and suddenly the train was
passing an apparently endless confusion of great, corrugated iron sheds,
rows of towering, smoking stacks, enormous, black cylinders, systems of
tracks over which shrilling locomotives hauled carloads of broken slag,
or bumped strings of trucks, with reckless energy, in and out of the
grimy interiors. The overpowering magnitude of the steel works--Howat
Penny needed no assurance of its purpose--exceeded every preconception.
Shut between the river and an abrupt hillside, where scattered dwellings
and sparse trees and ground were coated with a soft monotony of
rose-brown dust, the mills were jumbled in mile-long perspectives.
Above the immediate noise of the train he could hear the sullen, blended
roar of an infinity of strident sounds--the screaming of whistles, a
choked, drumming thunder, rushing blasts of air, the shattering impact
of steel rails, raw steam, and a multitudinous clangour of metal and
jolting wheels and connective power. He passed rusting mountains
straddled by giant gantries, the towering lifts of mammoth cranes, banks
of chalk-white stone, dizzy super-structures mounted by spasmodic skips.
As the train proceeded with scarcely abated speed, and the vast
operation continued without a break, mill on mill, file after file of
stacks, Howat Penny's senses were crushed by the spectacle of such
incredible labour. Suddenly a column of fire, deep orange at the core,
raying through paler yellow to a palpitating white brilliancy, shot up
through the torn vapours, the massed and shuddering smoke, to the
clouds, and was sharply withdrawn in a coppery smother pierced by a
rapid, lance-like thrust of steel-blue flame.
These stupendous miles were, to-day, the furnaces and forges that
Gilbert Penny had built and operated in the pastoral clearings of the
Province. Howat recalled the single, diminutive shed of Myrtle Forge,
the slender stream, the wheel, its sole power; the solitary stack of
Shadrach Furnace, recreated in his vision, opposed its insignificant
bulk against the living greenery of overwhelming forests. Now the
forests were gone, obliterated by the mills that had grown out of
Gilbert's energy and determination, his pioneer courage. His spirit, the
indomitable will of a handful of men, a small, isolated colony, had
swept forward in a resistless tide, multiplying invention, improvement,
with success until, as Howat had seen, their flares reached to the
clouds, their industry spread in iron cities. James Polder had a part in
this. Here, under the ringing walls of the steel mills, he got a fresh
comprehension of the bitter, restless virility of the younger man.
Out of the station Mariana furnished the driver of a public motor with
James Polder's address, and they twisted through congested streets, past
the domed Capitol, rising from intense green sod, flanked by involved
groups of sculpture, to a quieter reach lying parallel with the river.
They discovered Polder's house occupying a corner, one of a short row of
yellow brick with a scrap of lawn bound by a low wall, and a porch
continuous across the face of the dwellings.
The door opened after a long interval, and a woman with bare arms and a
spotted kitchen apron admitted them to an interior faintly permeated
with the odours of cooking. There were redly varnished chairs, upright
piano, a heavily framed saccharine print of loves and a flushed,
sleeping divinity; a table scarred by burning cigarettes, holding cerise
knitting on needles one of which was broken, glasses with dregs of beer,
a photograph in a tarnished silver frame of Harriet de Barry Polder
with undraped shoulders and an exploited dimple, and a copy of a
technical journal. A fretful, shrill barking rose at their heels; and
Howat Penny swung his stick at a diminutive, silky white dog with
matted, pinkish eyes, obsessed by an impotent fury.
An indolent voice drifted from above. "Cherette!" And a low, masculine
protest was audible. Mariana Jannan's face was inscrutable. The woman
continued audibly, "How can I--like this? You will have to see what it
is." A moment later James Polder, drawing on a coat, descended the
stairs. He saw Mariana at once, and stood arrested with one foot on the
floor, and a hand clutching the rail. A sudden pallor invaded his
countenance and Howat turned away, inspecting the print. But he could
not close his hearing to the suppressed eagerness, the stammering joy,
of Polder's surprise.
"And you, too," he said to the elder, with a crushing grip. Howat
immediately recognized that the other was marked by an obvious ill
health; his eyes were hung with shadows, like smudges of the iron dust,
and his palm was hot and wet. "Harriet," he called up the stair, "here's
Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny to see us." A complete silence above,
then a sharp rustle, replied to his announcement. "Harriet will be right
down," he continued; "fixing herself up a little first. Have trouble
finding us? Second Street is high for a foreman, but we're moving out
against the future."
The dog maintained a stridulous barking; and James Polder carried her,
in an ecstasy of snarling ill-temper, out. "Cherette doesn't appreciate
callers," he stated, with an expression that contradicted the mildness
of his words. His gaze, Howat thought, rested on Mariana with the
intensity of a fanatic Arab at the apparition of Mohammed. And Mariana
smiled back with a penetrating comprehension and sympathy. The
proceeding made Howat Penny extremely uncomfortable; it was--was
barefaced. He hoped desperately that something more appropriately casual
would meet the appearance of Harriet. Mariana said:
"You haven't been well." Polder replied that it was nothing. "I get a
night shift," he explained, "and I've never learned to sleep through the
day. We're working under unusual pressure, too; inhuman contracts,
success." He smiled without gaiety. "You didn't answer my letter," the
outrageous Mariana proceeded. Howat withered mentally at her cool
daring, and Polder, now flushed, avoided her gaze. The necessity of
answer was bridged by the descent of his wife. Her face, as always,
brightly coloured, was framed in an instinctively effective twist of
gold hair; and she wore an elaborately braided, white cloth skirt, a
magenta georgette crêpe waist, with a deep, boyish collar, drawn tightly
across her full, soft body.
"Isn't it fierce," she demanded cheerfully, "with Jim out as many nights
as he's in bed?" She produced a pasteboard package of popular
cigarettes and offered them to Howat Penny and Mariana. "Sorry, I can't
smoke any others," she explained, striking a match. "I heard you saying
he doesn't look right," she addressed Mariana. "And it's certainly the
truth. Who would with what he does? I tell him our life is all broke up.
One night stands used to get me, but they're a metropolitan run compared
with this. Honest to God," she told them good naturedly, "I've
threatened to leave him already. I'd rather see him a property man with
me on the road."
"It must be a little wearing," Mariana agreed; "but then, you know, your
husband is a steel man. This is his life." Howat Penny could see the
cordiality ebbing from the other woman's countenance. Positively,
Mariana ought to be ... "I can get that," Harriet Polder informed her.
"We are only hanging on till Jim's made superintendent. Then we'll be
regular inhabitants. Any other small thing?" At the sharpening note of
her voice James Polder hurriedly proceeded with general facts. "You'll
want to see the Works, as much as I can show you. Hardly any of the
public are let through now. It will interest you, sir, to see what the
Penny iron trade has become. I can take you down this afternoon. Harriet
will find us some lunch." The latter moved in a sensuous deliberation,
followed by a thin, acidulous trail of smoke, into inner rooms. "When do
you have to go back?" Polder asked.
"This evening," Howat told him; "we just stopped to--"
"To see how you were," Mariana interrupted him baldly, studying the
younger man with a concerned frown. "You ought to rest, you know," she
decided. "That's possible," he returned. "I thought of asking for a
couple of weeks. I hurried back right after I was married. They are
coming to me." She enigmatically regarded Howat Penny; he saw that she
was about to speak impetuously; but, to his great relief, she stopped.
"It's been pretty hard on Harriet," he said instead. "After the stage
and audiences, and all that." Mariana's expression was cold. Confound
her, why didn't she help the fellow! Howat Penny fidgeted with his
stick. What a stew Polder had gotten himself into. This was worse, even,
than the marriage threatened.
Lunch was a spasmodic affair of cutlets hardening in grease, blue boiled
potatoes, sandy spinach and blanched ragged bread. There was more beer;
but Jim, his wife proceeded, liked whiskey and water with his meals. The
former glanced uneasily at Mariana, tranquilly cutting up her cutlet.
The diamonds on her narrow, delicate hand flashed, the emerald at her
throat was superb. Their surroundings were doubly depressing contrasted
with her fastidious dress and person. Before her composure Harriet
Polder seemed over-florid; a woman of trite phrases, commonplace,
theatrical attitudes and emotions. As lunch progressed the latter
relapsed into a sulky silence; she glanced surreptitiously at Mariana's
apparel; and consumed cigarettes with a straining assumption of easy
indifference.
Howat Penny was acutely uncomfortable, and Polder scowled at his plate.
The whiskey and water shook in a tense, unsteady hand. He rose from the
table with a violent relief. He proposed almost immediately that they go
over to the Works, and Mariana turned pleasantly to his wife. "Shall you
get a hat?" The other hesitated, then asserted defiantly, "I've always
said I wouldn't go into that rackety place, and I won't now. It's bad
enough to have it tramped back over things." Mariana extended a hand.
"Then good-bye," she proceeded. "I think we won't get back here. We're
tremendously obliged for the lunch. It has been interesting to see where
Jim lives." Harriet Polder's cheeks were darker than pink as they moved
out to the sidewalk. "Jim," she called, with an unmistakably proprietary
sounding of the familiar diminution; "don't forget my cigarettes, and a
half pound of liver for Cherette."
XXXI
James Polder conducted them to the river, sweeping away in a wide curve
beneath solid grey stone bridges into a region of towering hills. They
turned to the left, and, walking on a high embankment, passed blocks of
individually pretentious dwellings, edifices of carved granite,
alternating with the simpler brick faces of an older period. A narrow,
whitely dusty sweep of green park was followed by a speedy degeneration
of the riverside; the houses shrunk to rows of wood marked by the grime
of steel mills. Soon after they reached a forbidding fence; and, passing
a watchman's inspection, entered into a clamorous region of sheds,
tracks and confusing levels such as Howat Penny had viewed from the
train.
"I'm in the open hearth," Polder told them, leading the way over a
narrow boardwalk, still skirting the broad expanse of the river. "It's a
process, really, but the whole mill is called after it. We make steel
from iron scrap; that's our specialty in the Medial Works; and our
stuff's as good as the best. The bigger concerns mostly use pig. Turn in
here." They were facing the towering end of an iron shed, and mounted a
steep ascent to gain the upper entrance. The multiplication of noises
beat in an increasing volume about Howat Penny. Below him a locomotive
screeched with a freight of slag; beyond was a heap of massive, broken
moulds; and a train of small trucks held empty iron boxes beside an
enormous bank of iron scrap dominated by a huge crane swinging a
circular magnet that dispassionately picked up ton loads and bore them
to the waiting cars.
Inside he gazed through a long vista under a roof lost in tenebrious
shadow. On one side were ranged the furnaces, a continuous bank of brick
bound in iron; each furnace with five doors, closed with black slides in
which a round opening emitted an intolerable, dazzling white glare. But
few men, Howat thought, were visible in proportion to the magnitude of
the work; deliberately engaged, with leather shields hanging from their
wrists and blue spectacles pushed up on their grimy brows.
A crane advanced with the shrill racket of an electric gong, its
operator caged in midair, and herculean grappling chains swinging. A
grinding truck, filling the width of floor, moved forward to where Howat
stood. It was, Polder told him, the charging machine. An iron beam
projected opposite the furnace doors, and it was locked into one of the
charging boxes, filled with scrap metal, standing on the rails against
the furnaces. A man behind him dragged forward a lever, the slide which
covered a door rose ponderously on a blinding, incandescent core, and
the beam thrust forward into the blaze, turning round and round in the
emptying of the box. It was withdrawn, the slide dropped, and the
machine retreated, its complex movements controlled by a single engineer
at crackling switches where the power leaped in points of light like
violets.
At another furnace, an opened door, where the heat poured out in a
constricting blast, workmen were shovelling in powdery white stone;
moving up with their heads averted, and quickly retreating with
shielding arms. "That's dolomite," James Polder's explanations went
rapidly forward. "They are banking up the furnace. The other, in the
bins, is ferro manganese." He procured a pair of spectacles; and, with a
protected gaze, Howat looked into a furnace, an appalling space of
apparently bubbling milk over which played sheets of ignited gases. The
skin on his forehead shrivelled like scorching paper.
"I particularly wanted you to see a heat tapped," Polder told Mariana.
"And they're making a test at number four." They followed him to where a
small ladle of metal had been dipped out of a furnace. It was poured,
with a red-gold shower of sparks, into a mould, then dropped in a trough
of water. The miniature ingot, broken under the wide sweep of a sledge,
was examined by a lean, grizzled workman--"the melter"--who nodded. "We
must get back of the furnace," Polder continued, indicating a narrow
opening between brick walls through the unstopped chinks of which
seethed the scorifying blaze.
Howat Penny stood at a railing, looking down into an apparent confusion
of slag and cars, pits and gigantic ladles and upright moulds set upon
circular bases. A crane rumbled forward, grappled a hundred-ton ladle, a
fabulous iron pot, and petulantly deposited it under a channel extending
out from the base of the furnace where they had been stationed. A
workman steadied himself below their level and picked with a long iron
bar at a plugged opening. It was, James Polder went on, the most
dangerous moment of the process--"sometimes the furnace blows out." The
labour of tapping was prolonged until Howat was conscious of an
oppressive tension. Workmen had gathered, waiting, in the pit. More
appeared along the railing above. This was, he felt, the supreme, the
dramatic, height of steel making. The men suddenly seemed puny,
insignificant, before the stupendous, volcanic energy they had evoked.
The tapping stopped. Polder commenced, "It will be rammed out from the
front--"
A stunning white flare filled the far roof with a dazzling illumination;
and, in a dull explosion, a terrific billowing of heat, a cataract of
liquid steel burst out through lambent orange and blue flames. It
poured, searing the vision, into the ladle, over which rosy clouds
accumulated in a bank drifting through the great space of the shed.
Nothing, Howat thought, could contain, control, the appalling expansion,
the furious volume, of seething white metal. He was obliged to turn
away, blinded by sheets of complementary green hanging before his eyes.
The uproar subsided, the flooding steel became bluer, a solid stream
curving into the black depths of the ladle. Vapours of green and sulphur
and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.
Polder called a warning into Mariana's ear, they drew back as a lump of
coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle. A dull vermilion blaze
followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation--"recarburizing."
He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container. Men,
Polder said shortly, had fallen in.... Utterly unthinkable. With a
sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on
the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second
receptacle below. That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools
widened across the riven ground. The steel itself escaped in a milky
incandescence. "A wild heat," James Polder told them, pleased. "The
bottom of a furnace may drop out. I was almost caught in the pit at
Cambria." The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten
metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular
group of moulds. There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central
pipe. "Bottom-filled," Polder concluded, assisting Mariana over the
precarious flooring; "the metal rises into the ingot forms."
They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the
superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the
boardwalk. They passed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous
crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a
system of rollers through a black, dripping compression. "I can take you
to the Senate," James Polder told them, once more outside; "or the
Engineers' Society. Dinner will be ready at the club."
He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly
constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club. The dining
room was already filling but they secured a small table against the
wall. Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle.
Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority
in their manner, pronouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with
immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden
gravity of thought, silent calculation. He saw the smooth, deft hands of
draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder's, had
laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.
He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed. He
was sapped by the crushing entity of the steel works, the enormous heat
and energy and strain of the open hearth. If the younger did not lay off
he would, unquestionably, break. Nevertheless, Howat was totally
unprepared for the amazing suggestion quietly advanced by Mariana.
"Jimmy," she said, "couldn't you come to Shadrach for those two weeks?
You'd find the quiet there wonderful. And any doctor will advise you to
leave your family for a proper rest. I'm certain Howat would be as nice
as possible."
A sudden, patent longing leaped to James Polder's countenance. Actually
he stuttered with a surprised delight. Damn it, there was nothing for
him, Howat, to do but stare like a helpless idiot. He ought to say
something, second Mariana's impudent invitation, at once. She ignored
him, gazing intently at the younger man. He, too, meeting Mariana's
eyes, had apparently totally forgot the unimportant presence of Howat
Penny. And he had been married to his Harriet for a scant half year!
Howat Penny thought mechanically of the Polders' depressing house, the
odours of old cooking and cheap cigarettes, the feverish yapping of the
silky animal, Cherette, with matted, pinkish eyes. The precipitant,
prideful, young fool! Why hadn't he held onto the merest memory, the
most distant chance in the world, of Mariana, rather than fling himself,
his injured self-opinion, into this stew?
"Don't say it can't be managed," she persisted. "Anything may. It's
absolutely necessary; you can get a prescription--two weeks of green
valley and robins and country eggs. Howat will take your money from you
at penny sniff, and I'll--I'll come out for dinner."
"Harriet thought of going back to the family," he replied; "but it
might--" he turned at last to Howat Penny. "Would you have me?" he asked
directly. What, in thunder, choice of reply did he have? Howat couldn't
point out the shamelessness of such an arrangement. Harriet, it seemed,
was not to be considered; just as if she were a merely disinterested
connection. He issued a belated period to the effect that Shadrach was
spacious and Rudolph a capable attendant. It was, he saw, sufficient.
"We can write," said Mariana. She endeavoured to caress Howat's hand,
but he indignantly frustrated her.
"I'll have to get back to the hearth," James Polder announced
regretfully. "It's been wonderful," he told Mariana Jannan. Howat
scraped his chair at the baldness of Polder's pleasure. "Your work is
tremendous, Jim," she replied; "the only stirring thing I have ever
known in a particularly silly world. But you mustn't let it run you,
too, into steel rails. President Polder," she smiled brilliantly at him.
"Why not?" queried James, the sanguine, at once defiant, haggard and
intense.
XXXII
The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana
declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from
Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully
blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a
sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he
found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to
the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding
the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond
they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles
of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along
they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected,
perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the
rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of
a loft, still clinging to a wall.
Without definite purpose they turned from the public way into an
overgrown path, banked with matted blackberry bushes, and were soon
facing the remains of the Furnace. It had been solidly constructed of
unmasoned stone, bound by iron rods, and its bulk was largely unaffected
by time. The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the
blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from
the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations
could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls
survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill,
and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and
the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut
stone and wood with its living greenery. Farther down a pathlike level
followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a
confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large,
wheel-like circumference. Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old
activity--a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a
wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown
inequalities of slag.
The stillness, broken only by the querulous melody of a robin, and a
beginning, faint piping of frogs, was amazingly profound after the
roaring energy of the Medial Works. The decay of Shadrach Furnace showed
absolute against the crashing miles of industry on the broad river. A
breath of honeysuckle lifted to Howat Penny; the sky was primrose.
Mariana moved closer to him and took his arm. They said nothing.
A warm light was spilling across the darkening grass from the lower
windows of his dwelling, blurring in a dusk under the high leafage of
aged maples. The white roses were already in bud on the vine climbing
the lattices at his door, and Mariana fixed one in his buttonhole.
"Howat," she said, "it isn't as if you were doing it just for Jim, but
for a man, any man, really sick. I'll not even ask you to think of it
for me. He can sit on the porch and converse with your owls, and poke
about over the hills."
Howat considered the advisability of attempting to extract a promise
from her that she would stay away from Shadrach if James Polder was
there. He considered it--very momentarily. The possibility, he asserted
to himself, was without any alleviating circumstance. What, in heaven's
name, would Charlotte think if, as it well might, the knowledge came to
her that Mariana and a Polder--that name she never repeated--a married
Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at
Shadrach? She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy. Mariana
demanded too much. He told her this with the dessert.
"It's only the commonest charity," she repeated. Her attack rapidly
veered. "Howat," she asked, "do you really dislike Jimmy?" Certainly, he
asserted, he--he disapproved of him ... altogether. A headstrong young
donkey who had made a shocking mess of his life. He would have to make
the best of a bad affair for which no one was to blame but himself. "It
is terrific," she agreed, almost cheerfully; and he had a vague sense of
having, somehow, delivered himself into her hands. "Perhaps something
can still be done," she said, frowning, increasing the dangers of his
position. He managed, by a stubborn silence, to check further
conversation in that direction; hoping, vainly, that James Polder
couldn't come, that Harriet, sensibly, would insist on his accompanying
her, or that Byron would solemnly intervene.
Mariana, later displaying a letter, dispelled his wishes. "It's been
arranged quite easily," she told him. "Harriet will go home. I'd like to
be here when he arrives, but I can't. You'll be a dear, Howat, won't
you?" she begged. "I'm certain James will give you no trouble. And do
send him to bed early." At this he grew satirical, and she laughed in an
unaccustomed, nervous manner that upset him surprisingly. Honduras drove
her to the station the next morning; and, three days later, deposited
James Polder on the worn stone threshold under the climbing rose.
After dinner the younger man faced him squarely across the apricot glow
of the lamp in the middle room. "This is the third time I've come here
without an invitation from you," he said directly. "It was Mariana this
last. I shut my mouth on what I'd once have crammed down your throat,
and came like any puppy. It wasn't on account of my health, there are
miles of quiet country; it wasn't--" he hesitated, then went
on--"altogether because of Mariana. I wanted to watch you closer; I want
to find out what you are like inside, so I might understand some--some
other things better. I can get out if it's a rank failure."
Howat issued a polite, general dissent. "Now, right there," Polder
stated; "you don't want me; you'd rather I was a thousand miles away,
dead. Well--why don't you say so?" He had not the least conception of a
decent reticence of address, Howat Penny thought, resentfully, at the
discomfort aroused by the young man's sharp attack.
"Certain amenities," he observed coldly, "have been accepted as
desirable, as obligations for--" he hesitated, casting about for a
phrase that would not too conspicuously exclude James Polder. "Say it,"
the latter burst out rudely, "gentlemen. And you all stand about with
one thing to say and another in your head."
"A degree of perception is always admirable," Howat Penny instructed
him. "That's a nasty one," Polder acknowledged; "but I got into it
myself. I can see that." His hand, seared with labour, was pressed on
the table; and the elder realized that, since he had witnessed a heat
tapped, he was not so censorious of the broken nails, the lines of
indelible black. He caught James Polder's gaze, and turned from its
intense questioning. Young cheeks had no business to be so gaunt.
Polder picked up the figurine in red clay, studied it with a troubled
brow, and replaced it with a gesture of hopelessness. "Possibly," Howat
Penny unexpectedly remarked, "possibly you find beauty in a piece of
open hearth steel."
"It's useful," Polder declared; "it has a tensile strength. I know what
it will do. This," he indicated the fragment of a grace razed over
twenty-three hundred years before, "is good for nothing that I see."
Now, Howat told himself, it was merely a question of tensile strength.
His old enthusiasms, his passionate admiration for the operas of
Christopher Gluck, the enthusiasms and admirations of his kind, were
being pushed aside for things of more obvious practicality. The very
term that had distinguished his world, men of breeding, had been
discarded. Individuals like James Polder, blunt of speech, contemptuous,
labour scarred, were paramount to-day.
His thoughts, he realized, were a part of the questioning thrust on him
by the intrusion of Mariana's unfortunate affair into his old age. She
was always dragging him to a perplexing spectacle for which he had
neither energy nor inclination. But he'd be damned if he would allow the
importunities of the young man beyond the table to complicate further
his difficulties, and he retired abruptly behind the _Saturday Review_.
"You'd better get along up," he said brusquely, after a little.
Breakfast at an end, they settled into a not uncomfortable, mutual
silence. They smoked; James Polder unfolded newspapers which he
neglected to read; Howat went through the periodicals with audible
expressions of displeasure. He wondered when Mariana would appear.
Mariana made a fool of him, that was evident; however, he would put his
foot on any philandering about Shadrach. He could be as blunt as James
Polder when the occasion demanded. After lunch the latter fell asleep in
his chair on the porch, pallidly insensible of the sparkling flood of
afternoon. Howat rose and went into the house. It was indecent to see a
countenance so wearily unguarded, shorn of all protective aggression.
Mariana walked in unannounced.
"Why didn't you telephone for Honduras?" he complained. "Always some
infernal difference in what you do." She frowned. "Suddenly," she
admitted, "I wasn't in a hurry to get here. I almost went back.
Idiotic."
"Sensible, it seems to me," he commented. "That Polder is asleep on the
porch." She nodded, "Splendid. And you needn't try to look fierce. I can
see through you and out the back." He lit a cigarette angrily. "Going to
stay for the night?" he demanded. "Several," she replied coolly. "Three
can play sniff."
"Look here, Mariana," he proclaimed, "I won't have any nonsense, do you
understand?"
"We can keep a photograph of Harriet on the table."
James Polder entered, and put a temporary end to his determined speech.
When the former saw Mariana his shameless pleasure, Howat thought, was
beyond credence. Positively neither of them paid any more attention to
him than they did to Rudolph. His irritation gave place to a deeper
realization that an impossible situation threatened. There was nothing,
obviously, that he could do to-day; but he would speak seriously to
Mariana to-morrow; one or both of them would have to leave Shadrach.
This determination took the present weight from his conscience; and,
pottering about small concerns of his own, he ignored them comfortably.
They appeared late, dirty and hot, for dinner; and it was eight o'clock
before Mariana came down in a gown like a white-petalled flower. She
wore no rings, but about her throat was a necklace of old-fashioned seed
pearls in loops and rosettes. "It's family," she told them; "it belonged
to Caroline Penny. And she married a Quaker, too; a David Forsythe." She
stopped suddenly, and Howat Penny recalled the tradition that Caroline
Penny, Gilbert's daughter, had appropriated her sister Myrtle's suitor.
Mariana favoured him with a fleet glance, the quiver of a reprehensible
wink. He glared back at her choking with suppressed wrath. "I have a
wonderful idea for to-morrow," she proceeded tranquilly; "we'll take
lunch, and leave Honduras, and go to Myrtle Forge for the day."
Her design was unfolded so rapidly, her directions to Rudolph so
explicit, that he had no opportunity to oppose his plan of sending her
away in the morning; and his impotence committed him to her suggestion.
She could go in the evening almost as well. After dinner he rattled the
dominoes significantly, but Mariana, smiling at him absently, went
through the room and out upon the porch. Polder, with an obscure
sentence, followed her. A soft rain sounded on the porch roof; but there
was no wind; the night was warm.
Howat glanced at his watch, after a period of restful ease, and saw that
it was past ten. He moved resolutely outside. Mariana was banked with
cushions in the canvas swing, and Polder sat with his body extended, his
hands clasped behind his head, in a gloomy revery. The night,
apparently, had robbed her countenance of any bloom; more than once in
the past year Howat had seen her stamped with the premonitory scarring
of time. Polder rose as he approached, and Mariana struggled upright.
"Good night," she said ungraciously, to them both, and flickered away
through the dark. James Polder was savagely biting his lips; his hands,
the elder saw, were clenched. "Your wife," Howat proceeded, "how is
she?" Polder gazed at him stonily, without reply. "I asked after your
wife," Howat repeated irritably. "No," the other at last said, "you
reminded me of her. I suppose you are right." He turned and walked
abruptly from the porch, into the slowly dropping rain.
XXXIII
The road to Myrtle Forge mounted between rolling cultivated fields, the
scattered, stone ruins of walls erected in the earliest iron days; and,
after a pastoral course, came to the Forge dwelling, its shuttered bulk
set in a tangle of bushes and rank grass. An ancient beech tree swept
the ground with smooth, grey limbs, surrounded by long-accumulated dead
leaves. James Polder shut off the motor by the low, stone wall that
supported the lawn from the roadway; he crossed to the farm, where the
house keys were kept, and Howat and Mariana moved slowly forward. A
porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the
left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a
featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small
apple orchard beyond.
Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side,
where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
Inside, the house, empty of furnishing, was a place of echoes muffled in
dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls
with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely
blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation,
yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was
unable to discover a souvenir of the generations of Pennys that had
filled the rooms with the stir of their living. Once more outside they
sat on the stone threshold of an office-like structure back of the main
dwelling and indulged in cigarettes.
The disturbing tension of last night, Howat thought comfortably, had
vanished. Mariana was flippant, James Polder enveloped in indolent ease.
"The Forge," Howat Penny told them, "was below." A path descended across
a steep face of sparse grass; and, at the bottom, Polder's interest
revived. "It stood there," he indicated a fallen shed beyond a masoned
channel, choked with the broken stones of its walls and tangled
shrubbery. "You don't suppose a joke that size was the great Gilbert's
plant. Here's the drop for the water power; yes, and the iron pinions of
the overshot wheel." He climbed down a precarious wall, and stood
perhaps twelve feet below them. Securing a rough bolt, he brought it up
for their inspection. "Look at that forging," he cried; "after it has
lain around for a century and a half. Like silk. Charcoal iron, and it
was hammered, too. Metal isn't half worked any more. We could turn that
into steel at almost nothing a ton." He showed them in the mouldering
shed the foundation of the anvil, traced the probable shafting of the
trip hammer, marked the location of the hearths. "Three," he decided;
"and a cold trickle of air. A nigger pumping a bellows, probably. No,
they could get that from the wheel," he drew an explanatory diagram in
the blackened dust.
With the lunch basket on the running board of the motor they ate sitting
on the low boundary wall of the lawn. The heat increased through the
late May noon, and Howat remained while Mariana and James Polder
wandered in the direction of the orchard. Finally the sun forced the
former to move; and he, too, proceeded in a desultory manner, entering
the shade of a grove of old maples. The trees, their earliest red
leafage already emerald, followed the dry channel cut back from Canary
Creek to the Forge, and he soon emerged at the broad, flashing course of
the stream. A flat rock jutted into the hurrying water by an overthrown
dam, its sun-heated expanse now in shadow; and he stayed, listening to
the gurgling flow. Far above him a hawk wheeled in ambient space; a mill
whistle sounded remotely from Jaffa.
The thought of Mariana hovered at the back of his lulled being; all he
desired, he told himself, was her complete happiness. He might even have
become reconciled to James Polder. His first, unfavourable opinion of
the latter, he realized, had been modified by--by time. He had judged
Polder solely in the light of an old standard. The fellow was painfully
honest; good stuff there, iron ... the iron of the Pennys. But the other
strain had betrayed him. A cursed shame. The material of the present,
moulded, perhaps, into seemingly new forms, was always that of the
past. This Polder was Essie Scofield and Jasper ... Byron. He, Howat
Penny, was Penny and Jannan and Penny--Daniel, James, Casimir, and Howat
once more, the older Howat who had married the widow of Felix Winscombe.
Black again. He wondered what the blackness, not spent like his own, had
brought the other. A headstrong, dark youth with the characteristic
sloping eyebrows and slender, vigorous, carriage. The traditional
rebellious spirit had involved Jasper in disgrace; it had thinned his
own blood.
Footfalls approached through the trees, and the others joined him. James
Polder extended himself on the rock, and Mariana sat with her hands
clasped about her slim knees. A silence intensified by the whispering
stream enveloped them. The hawk circled above, and Howat had an
extraordinary sense of the familiarity of the bird hanging in limitless
space, of the warm stone and water choking in a smooth eddy. He had, as
a boy, fished there. But his brain momentarily swam with a poignant,
unrecognizable emotion, different from the sensation of childhood. He
rose, confused and giddy. With old age, he muttered.
Mariana followed. "It's all over," she announced, decisively. "We'll
drive back and leave to-day." She sighed. "That's gone already," James
Polder showed her the sun slipping toward the western hills. She moved
up to him, laid her hand on his arm. Howat Penny went ahead. He must
speak to her after dinner. As the motor slowly gathered momentum he
turned and looked back at the dark, pinkish dwelling in its tangle of
grass and bushes run wild. Dusk appeared to have already gathered over
it, although the sun still shone elsewhere in lengthening dusty gold
bars; the wide-spread beech was sombre against blank shutters, the
chimneys broken and cold.
XXXIV
A letter for James Polder was at Shadrach, and he opened it immediately,
glancing over its scrawled sheet. Howat saw a curious expression
overspread the other's countenance. He called, "Mariana!" in a sharp
tone. She appeared from the foot of the steps. "Harriet never went
home," he told her; "this is from Pittsburgh. She's back on the stage."
A premonitory dread filled Howat Penny. Mariana stood quietly, her gaze
lifted to Polder. "She never went home," he repeated; "but writes that
suddenly she--she didn't want to, and couldn't stand Harrisburg another
week. She saw some one and had a part, that ought to be good, offered to
her; and, so--"
"Is that all, Jim?"
"No," he replied; "there is more, absolutely unjustified. I think I'd
like you to read it. It would be best." Mariana took the letter, and
followed its irregular course. "It's true enough," she said quietly, at
the end. "But I don't in the least mind, Jim. She had a perfect right to
something of the sort. That is--I'm not annoyed about what she says of
me, but it will upset you terribly. And it has been my fault, from the
first." He protested vehemently, but she stopped him with a gesture;
then walked to the door opening on the porch; where, her head up, she
stood gazing out into the serene, failing light.
James Polder followed her, and Howat heard the screen softly close. He
was about to light a cigarette, but, his hand shaking, he laid it on the
table. He put up his glass, without purpose, and then let it drop.
Rudolph was placing the silver for dinner; old forks faintly marked with
a crest that Isabel Howat had brought to her husband. A recurrence of
the afternoon's sense of the continuity of all living flowed over him,
whispering with old voices, old longing and sorrow and regret, mingled
dim features, and the broken clasping of hands. He saw Mariana sweeping
in a pale current--a remote, eternal passion winding through the
transient body of life. She smiled, her subdued, mocking gaiety
infinitely appealing, and vanished.
They came in to dinner without changing the informal garb of the day.
James Polder was silent, disturbed, but Mariana was serenely
commonplace. Her voice, clear and high, went unimportantly on; until,
turning to Howat Penny, she said without the changing of a tone. "I want
James to take me back to Harrisburg with him, but he won't." Howat
endeavoured to meet this insanity with the silence usually opposed to
Mariana's frequent wildness of statement. His knife scraped sharply
against a plate; but, in the main, he successfully preserved an unmoved
countenance. "Now that Harriet has surrendered Mm," she persisted, "I
don't see why I can't be considered. It is the commonest sense--Jim
can't live alone, properly, in that house; I can't exist properly
without him. You see, Howat, how reasonable it seems." What he did
perceive was that his attitude of inattention must be sharply deserted.
"Your words, Mariana," he said coldly, "'proper' and 'reasonable,' in
the connection you have used them, would be ridiculous if they weren't
disgraceful. I have been patient with a certain amount of rash talk,
yes--and conduct, but this must be the end. I had intended to have you
leave Shadrach this morning, then later. Either that or I'll be forced
to make my excuses to James Polder." He glanced with a veiled anxiety at
the latter but could read nothing from the lowered, pinched countenance.
"We could leave together if you are tired of us," Mariana continued.
"It's James, really, who is making all the trouble. He has some stupid
idea about nobility of conduct and my best good. But the real truth is
that he's afraid, for me, of course, and so he won't listen."
"Won't you show her that it is impossible?" the younger man cried at
Howat Penny. "I can't take advantage of her heavenly courage. She
doesn't realize the weight of opinion. It would make--"
"Stuff," she interrupted. "You'd make steel, and I would make an
occasional dessert. You must be told, Jimmy, that the afternoon calling
you have confused with life really isn't done any more. You have been
brought up in rather a deadly way. You ought to be saved from yourself.
I am a very mature person, and I am advising you calmly."
The dinner had come to an end; a decanter, in old-fashioned blue and
gold cutting, of brandy, a silver basket of oranges, the coffee cups and
glasses, were all that remained; and James Polder played with the cut
fruit, the half-full cordial glass before him. "I am going to be
brutally frank, Jimmy," she said again. "You know that is a habit of
mine, too. You are a very brilliant young man, but you are not
omnipotent--you require stiffening, like a collar. And I would be a
splendid laundress for you. Harriet is a long shot too lenient. I might
not be so comfortable to live with, but I'd be bracing. I'd have you in
that dirty little superintendent's box in no time."
He made no reply; and, obviously tormented, automatically squeezed a
half orange into his goblet. Then he took a sip of brandy.
"Together, James," Mariana asserted, "we would go up like a kite. By
yourself--forgive me--you haven't enough patience, enough balance; you
wouldn't fly steadily. You might break all your sticks on the ground."
He moodily emptied what remained of his brandy into the goblet and
orange juice, and pushed it impatiently away. "I'd rather do that," he
answered, "than try to carry you with me on such a flight."
Howat Penny was conscious of a diminution of his fears. He had entirely
underrated James Polder; the latter was an immense sight steadier than
Mariana. His thoughts strayed momentarily to Harriet, back again in her
public orbit. He could imagine that she had found Harrisburg insuperably
dull, the hours with only Cherette empty after the emotional debauches
of the plays elected by Vivian Blane. Yes, this young Polder would stand
admirably firm. Mariana frowned at the cobalt smoke of her cigarette. "I
am in a very bad temper," she told them. "No one for a minute thinks of
what my feeling may be. You are both entirely concerned with your own
nice sense of virtue."
"Not at all, but of your future," Howat Penny asserted.
Her lower lip assumed the contempt of which it was pre-eminently
capable. She made no immediate reply. James Polder's fingers absently
clasped the goblet before him; he drew it toward his plate, tipped the
thick liquid it contained. "Just what do you recommend me to do?"
Mariana challenged Howat. "Go through with a lifeful of winters like the
last! Marry another Sam Lewis! I am not celebrated for reliability; it
is only with Jimmy--" she broke off. Howat Penny recalled her callous
expression, photographed in Egyptian dress at a period ball, her
description of the hard riding and reckless parties of the transplanted
English colonies in the south.
Polder lifted the goblet to his lips, but set it back untasted. Howat
looked away from Mariana's scornful interrogation, unable to reply.
Finally, "I am old, as you once reminded me," he stated; "I'm out of my
time, don't understand, I can only remember, and remembering isn't any
longer of use. The men I knew, the kind, I hope, I was, would ruin
themselves a hundred times before compromising a woman. Polder appears
to understand that. And women I had the privilege of meeting sacrificed
themselves with a smile for what you dismiss as mere stupidity. God
knows which is right. They looked the loveliest of creatures then. There
was a standard, we thought high.... Things a man couldn't do. But I
don't know--it seems so long ago." He stopped to watch James Polder take
a sip of the mixture in his hand. The latter tasted it slowly, and then
emptied the goblet. His face was blank, with eyes nearly closed.
"I could carry Jimmy up in my hands," Mariana said. "Don't," she added
vaguely, as he squeezed out the remaining half of his orange and poured
fresh brandy into it. "It's curious," he told her; "not at all bad."
They moved out of the dining room, and Mariana and Polder continued to
the porch. Howat stood with a hand resting on the mahogany cigarette
box; he had the feeling of a man unexpectedly left by a train thundering
into the distance. It would not stop, back, for him now; he was dropped.
He sank relaxed into an accustomed chair; his brain surrendered its
troubling; the waking somnolence settled over him. He was conscious of
his surrounding, recognized its actuality; yet, at the same time, it
seemed immaterial, like the setting of a dream. He roused himself after
a little and smoked, nodding his head to emphasize the points of his
thought.
This Polder had shown the instinct of breeding; while Mariana was--just
what she was he couldn't for the life of him determine. A hussy, he
decided temporarily. After all, his own time, when black and white had
been distinguishable, was best. Howat Penny relinquished, with a sigh,
the effort to penetrate to-day; he was content to be left behind; out of
the grinding rush, the dizzy speed, of progression. His day, when black
had been black, was immeasurably superior; the women had been more
charming, the men erect, clothed in proper garb and pride. Where, now,
could be seen such an audience as Dr. Damrosch had gathered for his
first season of German opera? Not, certainly, at the performance he had
heard with Mariana two, no--three, winters ago. A vulgarized performance
in the spirit of a boulevard café. The whole present air, he told
himself, was wrong.
He looked at his watch, and was surprised to see that it was past ten.
Not a sound came from the porch; and he determined to go outside,
exercise the discretion which Mariana had cast to the winds. However, he
didn't stir; he could not summon the energy necessary for the combating
of their impetuous youth. He unfolded a paper, but it drooped on his
knees, slid, finally, to the floor. Then Mariana appeared, walked
swiftly, without a word, through the room, and vanished upstairs. Not
even a civil period at the end of the evening. After another, long wait
James Polder entered. The latter stood uneasily by the table, with a
furrowed brow, a ridiculous, twitching mouth.
Polder went out into the dining room; where, through the doorway, Howat
Penny could see him hovering over the silver basket of oranges, placed
upon the sideboard. "If you don't mind," he called back, and there were
a rattle of knives, a thin ring of glass. The light was dim beyond, and
he stood in the doorway with the brandy decanter and orange juice. He
drained the mixture and leaned, absorbed, against the woodwork. "This is
a hell of a world!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Everything worth having is
fenced off. A woman won't understand. Does any one suppose that I don't
want Mariana! It's the responsibility. She's right--I am afraid of it.
And she laughed at me. Nothing cowardly in her," his voice deepened.
"It is ignorance," Howat stated.
"I thought so, for a minute; you are wrong. She's had more experience
than we'd get in a thousand years. The life she knows would fix that.
She talked me into a tangled foolishness in five minutes; made me look
like a whiskered hypocrite. Nothing I said sounded real, and yet I must
be right. Suppose Harriet should turn nasty, suppose--oh, a thousand
things."
"It isn't arguable," Howat Penny agreed.
This afforded the other no consolation. "What is she to do?" he
demanded. "Mariana won't settle quietly against a wall. She told you
that. She's full of--of a sort of energy that must be at something.
Mariana hasn't the anchor of most women--respectability."
"Am I to gather that that is no longer considered admirable?" the elder
inquired. "If you gather anything you are lucky," Polder replied
gloomily. "I'm not sure about my own name. Good-night," he disappeared
abruptly.
Above, Howat slowly made his preparations for retiring, infinitely
weary. Waking problems fell from him like a leaden weight into the sea
of unconsciousness. He was relieved, at breakfast, to see Mariana come
down in a hat, with the jacket of her suit on an arm. He waited for her
to indicate the train by which she was leaving, so that he could tell
Honduras to have the motor ready; but she sat around in a dragging
silence. Polder walked up and down the room in which they were gathered.
Howat wished he would stop his clattering movement. An expression of
ill-nature deepened in Mariana; she looked her ugliest; and James Polder
was perceptibly fogged from a lack of sleep. Finally he said:
"Look here, we can't go on like this." He stopped in front of Mariana,
with a quivering face. She raised her eyebrows. "Come outside," he
begged. "What's the use?" she replied; but, at the same time, she rose.
"Don't get desperate, Howat," she said over her shoulder. "Even I can't
do any more; I can only take my shamelessness back to Andalusia." Polder
held open the screen door; and as, without her jacket, she went out,
Howat Penny had a final glimpse of the man bending at her side. Like two
fish in a net, he thought ungraciously. He was worn out by their
infernal flopping. With a determined movement of his shoulders, a fixing
of his glass, he turned to the accumulation of his papers.
Later he heard the changing gears of a motor. He thought for a moment
that it was Honduras at his own car; then he recognized the stroke of a
far heavier engine. The powerful, ungraceful bulk of an English machine
was stopping at his door. Immediately after he distinguished the
slightly harsh, dominating voice of Peter Provost. The latter entered,
followed by Kingsfrere Jannan. Peter Provost, a member of the New York
family and connection of the Jannans, had, since the elder Jannan's
death, charge of the family's interest in the banking firm of Provost,
Jannan and Provost. He occupied, Howat knew, a position of general
advisor to Charlotte and her children. He was a large man who had never
lost the hardness of a famous university career in the football field,
with a handsome, cold countenance and spiked, grey moustache. He shook
hands with Howat Penny, and plunged directly into his present purpose.
"Kingsfrere," he said, "has heard some cheap stuff in the city,
principally about that young Polder married last fall. Personally, I
laughed at it, but Charlotte seemed upset. This Polder's wife, an
actress, has left her husband, and gone back to the stage because--so
Byron asserted; you know Byron--Mariana had broken up their home."
"Old Polder said just that," Kingsfrere affirmed. "And that wasn't
all--he added that Mariana was out here with the fellow."
Provost laughed.
"Well," Howat Penny replied, "James Polder is staying at Shadrach. He
was asked here because his health was threatening. He had two weeks
leave; and, although I wasn't really anxious, I said he might recuperate
with me."
"And Mariana?" Provost inquired.
"Came out day before yesterday, late; leaving this morning."
Howat Penny was conscious of a growing anger. There was no reason for
his submitting to an interrogation by Peter Provost; he didn't have to
justify his actions, the selection of his guests; and he had no
intention of explaining his attitude toward Mariana. But Provost, it
became evident, had no inclination to be intrusive. It was, he made that
clear, wholly Charlotte. But Kingsfrere Jannan was increasingly
impatient. "Where is Polder?" he demanded. Howat surveyed him with
neither favour nor reply. Suddenly he understood the feeling of both
men--they considered that he was too old to have any grip or
comprehension of life. They were quietly but obviously relegating him to
the back of the scene. His anger mounted; he was about to make a sharp
reply, when he paused. There was a possibility that they were right; he
was, undoubtedly, old; and he had been unable to influence, turn,
Mariana, in the slightest degree. He didn't approve of her present,
head-strong course ... only a few hours ago he had voluntarily, gladly,
relinquished all effort to comprehend it.
"Perhaps," Provost suggested, "since we are here we'd better talk to
him. I suppose they're out about the place. You could send Rudolph."
Howat replied that he would find them himself. He wanted, now, to
prepare James Polder for any incidental unpleasantness. The latter, he
knew, had a hasty temper, a short store of patience. After all, he had
acted very well in a difficult situation. It had been Mariana. Howat
Penny was aware of a growing sympathy for young Polder. His was a more
engaging person than Kingsfrere's pasty presence and sharp reputation at
cards. He got his hat, and went out over the thick, smooth sod, into the
slumberous, blue radiance of the early summer noon.
He found Mariana and James Polder sitting on a bank by the Furnace.
"Peter Provost's here with Kingsfrere," he told them quietly. "They want
to see.... James, about some nonsense bantered around town." Polder
rose quickly, instantly antagonistic. "At the house?" he demanded,
already moving away. Mariana stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't pay any attention to what they may say, Jimmy," she commanded.
"It isn't Peter Provost's affair, and Kingsfrere in a fatherly pose is a
scream." They moved forward together. "I'll see them," she added
cuttingly.
"I will attend to this," James Polder told her. "I don't want any woman
explaining my actions. They haven't a whisper on me. I'm glad enough of
an opportunity to talk to a man."
"If you lose your temper--" Howat commenced, but Mariana impatiently
interrupted him. "Why shouldn't Jim lose his temper?" she demanded. "I
would. Personally, I'd be glad if he did, although it mightn't be
fortunate for Kingsfrere. He's a good deal of a dumpling. But I will be
furious if you look guilty. Tell them we're mad about each other and
that I am waiting for the smallest encouragement to go with you."
Howat Penny left Mariana at the door, and went in with Polder. Provost
was seated, with an open paper; Kingsfrere studying the photograph of
Scalchi. "This," said Howat generally, "is my guest, James Polder."
Peter Provost extended his square, powerful hand; but the other, Jannan,
made no movement. "Well?" Polder demanded aggressively. Howat Penny
proceeded through the room to the porch, where he met Mariana. They
walked to the further end and found chairs. "What makes me sick,"
Mariana proceeded, "is the way men calmly take everything into their own
hands; as if women were still tied up, naughty bundles. Jim will have
all the fun, and he has only said 'no' in horrified tones."
Again he could think of no adequate reply. He listened in vain for the
sound of raised voices within. "What, in heaven's name, brought them?"
Howat told her what he had heard. "I'm glad I did break up that mess
they called a home," she asserted. "It was rotten with stale beer and
half pounds of liver for that disgusting animal!"
The heat increased in waves; a wagon passing on the road below was
enveloped in a cloud of dust. "I wish they'd hurry," Mariana said
sharply. Howat Penny thought he heard Kingsfrere speaking in abrupt
periods. Then a chair scraped, and Peter Provost's deliberate voice
became audible. It was, however, impossible to distinguish his words;
but suddenly Polder exclaimed, "Say something I can pound into you."
Mariana rose, her hands clenched. "Go back to your mouldy little life!"
James Polder continued. "I'm not surprised Miss Jannan wants to get out
of it. I am sorry I hesitated. It seemed to me I couldn't offer her
anything good enough; but that was before I'd listened to you.... And if
you in particular come worming about me again I'll smash your flat
face." The screen door was wrenched violently open, and James Polder
strode up to Mariana. "Suppose we get out of this slag pit," he said,
his chest labouring; "I can't breathe here."
"I am ready, Jimmy," she replied quietly; "perhaps Howat will look up a
train and let Honduras drive us to the station." She laid her hand on
his arm. "Now we can forget them," she said. They turned, and, together,
vanished into the house. Howat Penny followed them slowly. He found
Peter Provost apparently undisturbed. "Nothing to be done," the latter
commented. "I saw that immediately he turned up. Kingsfrere made a short
effort, but it wasn't conspicuously successful; I imagine it rather
worse than failed. God knows what's getting into these young women,
Howat--Eliza and the rest of 'em--it's a gamble they don't. All right,
Kingsfrere." Jannan lingered with a dark mutter, but the other
unceremoniously drove him into the waiting car.
Mariana soon descended, with Polder carrying two bags. "One seven,"
Howat told them. In the extraordinary situation he found nothing
adequate to say. Mariana might have been going unremarkably to Charlotte
and her home; she was absolutely contained. James Polder had a dazed
expression; without his companion, Howat thought, he would blunder into
the walls. He stood, holding the bags until told to put them down.
Honduras was soon at the door. Mariana moved forward, and mechanically
Howat Penny made his customary pretence of avoiding her kiss. The warm
fragrance of her lips remained long after she had gone.
A pervasive stillness settled upon Shadrach; outside the sunlight lay on
the hills in a thick, yellow veil; the cool interior held only the
familiar crepitation of the old clock above. Now, he told himself, he
could read the papers peacefully; but he sat with empty hands. Mariana
had gone. "Outrageous conduct," he said aloud, without conviction. His
voice sounded thin, unfamiliar. His dreams of her continued superiority
to the commonplace, of her fine aloofness like the elevation of the
strains of _Orfeo_, had been utterly destroyed. He could not imagine a
greater descent than the one which had overtaken her. As he rehearsed
its details they seemed increasingly disgraceful. He could not forgive
James Polder for his relapse, his shocking failure to maintain the
standards, the obligations, bred into himself, Howat Penny, by so many
years, and by blood. It was that miserable old business of Jasper's once
more, blighting the present, betraying Mariana.
This wheeled in his brain throughout summer. He had, as he expected, no
word from her. Charlotte, too, sent no line; he was isolated in the
increasing and waning heat, in a sea of greenery growing heavy and grey
with dust, then swept by rain, and touched with the scarlet finality of
frost. Rudolph lit again the hickory fires in the middle hearth; the
days shortened rapidly; sitting before the glow of the logs he could
see, through a western window, the afternoon expiring in a sullen red
flame. The leaves streamed sibilantly by the eaves and accumulated in
dry, russet heaps in angles and hollows; they burned in crackling fires,
filling the air with a drifting haze rich with suggestion and memories.
He saw the first snow on a leaden morning when the flexible and bald
white covering, devoid of charm, held the significance of barrenness,
death. All day this chilling similitude lingered in his mind. He walked
about the house slowly, unpleasantly conscious of the striking of his
feet on the wood floors.
At Christmas a revival of spirit overtook him; a long letter came from
Mariana, Bundy Provost sent him a tall silver tankard, with a lid, for
his night table. Howat, polishing his glass with a maroon bandanna, read
Mariana's letter in the yellow light of the lamp and burning logs.
"I have been to see a new steel process," she wrote; "the Duplex, with
immense tilting furnaces and the Bessemer blast. I know a great deal
about iron now; far more than a Howat Penny who should be an authority.
Jim is frightfully busy, but lately he has been able to sleep after the
night shift, which makes it better for every one. He is one of the best
men here, and that comes from the Works, and the reorganization is
slowly but surely progressing, and we are progressing with it. I am not
a particle lonely, with only one servant; really don't want another,
and make a great deal more than desserts. You have no idea how
absorbing it is to have a lot of things that must be done. The days
simply fade. You mustn't worry about me, Howat; I always hated polite
affairs and parties and people; even when I was young as possible I was
more than anything else a Hell in the Corner."
He smiled, recognizing an old flippant phrase, and let his hand drop
while he recalled Mariana--turning to him to hook her gown, constructing
annoying towers with the dominoes, reprehensible and amusing. He resumed
reading:
"It would be wonderful if--no, it is wonderful! But Howat, I can tell
only you this, I wish oranges had never been invented." He drew his
mouth into a compressed line. James was drinking. He remembered when the
other first made the concoction of orange juice and brandy; he saw him
clearly, leaning in the doorway to the dining room, with the emptied
goblet, and a curious, introspective expression on his mobile
countenance. "He ought to be hung!" he exclaimed sharply. The fellow
should see himself as a mat for Mariana's feet. But that wasn't life, he
realized; existence seemed to become more and more heedless of the
proprieties, of the simplest concessions to duty. He saw the world as a
ship which, admirably navigated a score or more years ago, had jammed
its rudder. No one could predict what rocks the unmanageable sphere
might be driving for.
The significance born by that sentence robbed the remainder of the
letter of pleasure. He read that Mariana had ordered the customary gift
of cigarettes, and hoped they would last him longer than everybody knew
they would. The implied affection of all the paragraphs was visible in
the last words. He put the letter carefully away. The cigarettes were
sufficient for a considerable time beyond customary. Something of his
appetite had gone; the periods of half wakeful slumber in his chair drew
out through whole evenings. The actual world retreated; his memories, as
bright as ever, became a little confused; the years, figures, mingled
incongruously; famous arias were transposed to operas in which they had
not been sung.
Winter retreated, but the latter part of March and April were bitterly
cold; no leaves appeared; the ground remained barren; he seldom got out.
The albums of programmes were brought from their place on the low
shelves, but now, more than often, they were barely opened, scanned.
Then, on an evening when belated snow was sifting through the cracks of
the solid shutters, he came on an oblong package, wrapped in strong
paper. He opened it, in a momentary revival of interest, of life. It was
a tall ledger, bound in crumbling calf, with stained and wrinkled
leaves. Howat had not seen it for twenty years, but he recalled
immediately that it was a forge book kept in Gilbert Penny's day; then
Myrtle Forge had been new, that other Howat alive. He opened it
carefully, powdered his knees with leather dust, and studied the faded
entries; what flourishing, pale violet initials, what rubicund lines and
endings!
There were two handwritings, listing commonplace transactions now
invested by time with an accumulated, poignant significance, one smooth
and clerkly, the other abrupt, with heavy, impatient strokes. Youth,
probably, held at an unwelcome task; and, more than likely, Howat ...
October, in seventeen fifty. Years of virility, of struggle and
conquest, of iron--iron, James Polder had shown him, still uncorrupted,
better than the metal of to-day--and iron-like men. The ledger slipped
to the floor, tearing the spongy leather and crumbling the sere leaves.
He recovered it, dismayed at the damage wrought. A sheet apparently had
come loose, and he bent forward with difficulty, a swimming head. Howat
made an attempt to find its place, when he discovered that it was not a
part of the volume. It was, he saw, a note, obliterated by creases but
with some lines still legible, hurriedly scrawled, by a woman:
"You must be more careful ... Your mother. So hot-headed, Howat. I can't
do what you ask. I have a headache now thinking about Felix and you and
myself. No one must find out." What followed was lost, then came a
signature that, with the aid of a reading glass, he barely
deciphered--"Ludowika."
That was the name of the woman, a widow, Gilbert's son had married. Her
first husband, Felix Winscombe, had died at Myrtle Forge during a
diplomatic mission from England.... An old man with a young wife! His
confusion, slowly resolving into a comprehension of what the note
implied, filled him with an increasing revolt. The earlier Howat, too,
like Jasper, in the tangle of an intrigue--not a public scandal and
shame, as had been the later, but no less offensive. In a flare of anger
Howat Penny crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire. There it
instantly blackened, burst into flame and wavered, a shuddering cinder,
up the chimney. He put the ledger, loosely wrapped in its covering, on
the table, and sat breathing rapidly, curiously disturbed. The old
fault, projected so unexpectedly out of the faithless burial of the
past, struck at him with the weight of a personal affront.
The heat subsided in the hearth, with the nightly ebbing of steam in the
radiator; the hickory, disintegrating into blocks, faded from cherry red
to pulsating, and finally dead, ash. Lost in the bitterness of his
thoughts he made no movement to replenish the fire.
He wondered if the explored histories of other families would show such
scarring records as his own. Were there everywhere, back of each heart,
puddles, sloughs, masked in the deceiving probity maintained for public
view? And now--Mariana! Yet, somehow, her affair did not appear as ugly
as these others. Stated coldly, in conventional terms, it was little
different. Why, in plain words she had ... but Mariana evaded plain
words, her challenging courage forbade them. Here was more than could be
arraigned, convicted, by a stereotyped judgment. Or perhaps this was
only his affection for her, blinding him to the truth.
The first Howat and Jasper, striking contemptuously across the barriers
of social morals, lived in Mariana, alone with James Polder in
illegitimate circumstance, and in himself--an old man without family,
without the supporting memory of actual achievement; the negative decay
of a negative existence. His mind, confronted by a painful complexity of
unanswerable problems, failed utterly. He was conscious of his impotence
chilling his blood, deadening his nerves. Thin tears fell over his
hollow cheeks; and he rose shakily, fiercely dragging at his bandanna.
But he discovered that his hand was numb with cold. The fire lay black
and dead. The shrilling wind, ladened with snow, wrenched at the
shutters. The room was bitter. He must get up to bed ... warm blankets.
A chill touched him with an icy breath. It overtook him midway on the
stair, and he clung to the railing, appalled at its violence in his
fragile being. He got, finally, to his room, to the edge of his bed,
where he sat waiting for the assault to subside. He wanted Rudolph, but
the effort to move to the door, call, appeared insuperable. The chill
left him; and blundering, hideously delayed, he wrapped himself in the
bed covering.
Not all the wool in the world, he thought, would be sufficient to drive
the cold from his body. He fell into a temporary exhaustion of sleep;
but was waked later by sharp and oppressive pains in his chest,
deepening when he breathed. The suffering must be mastered, and he lay
with gripping hands, striving by force of will to overcome what he
thought of as the brutal play of small, sharp knives. He conquered, it
seemed; the pain grew less; but it had left an increasing difficulty in
his breathing; it was a labour to absorb sufficient air even for his
small, aged demands. Sleep deserted him; and he waited through seeming
years for the delayed appearance of dawn. He had hoped that the new day
would be sunny, warm; it was overcast, he could see the snow drifted in
the lower window panes.
Rudolph usually knocked at the door at half past eight; but, apparently,
to-day he had forgot. Howat Penny's watch lay on the table, at his hand,
yet it was far distant; he couldn't face the heavy effort of its
inspection. At last the man came in with his even morning greeting.
Howat was so exhausted that he could make no reply; and Rudolph moved
silently to the bedside. His expression, for an instant, was deeply
concerned. "I have a cold, or something of the sort," the other said. He
raised his head, but sank back, with a thin, audible inspiration. "It
would be best, sir, to have the doctor from Jaffa," the servant
suggested. Howat, in the midst of protest, closed his eyes; the pain had
returned. When he had again defeated it Rudolph was gone.
The room blurred, lost its walls, became formless space; out of which,
to his pleasurable surprise, he saw the carefully garbed figure of
Colonel Mapleson walking toward him. He never forgot that tea rose!
Confound him--probably another benefit for one of his indigent song
birds. As Howat was about to speak the Colonel disappeared. It was
Scalchi, in street dress, a yellow fur about her throat, warm,
seductive. He had sent the divine Page the bouquet in paper lace. But
she too vanished. He heard the strains of an orchestra; lingering he had
missed the overture, and it might be the first duet--with Geister in
superb voice. He was waiting for Mariana, that was it ... always late.
Then her hand was under his arm. But it was the doctor from Jaffa.
Rudolph was at the foot of the bed, and the two men moved aside,
conversed impolitely in hushed tones. I'm sick, he thought lucidly. One
word reached him--oxygen. It all melted away again, into a black lake
with ghostly swans, a painted mouth and showering confetti; one of the
supreme waltzes that Johann Strauss alone could compose. Later a woman
in a folded linen cap was seated beside him, a chimera. But she laid
cool fingers on his Wrist, held a brownish, distasteful mixture to his
lips. A draught of egg nog was better, although it wasn't as persuasive
as some he had had: Bundy Provost's, for example.
Bundy was a galliard youth, but he was clear as ice underneath. He
wouldn't have let them put that thing over his, Howat's, face. He tried
to turn aside, but a cap of darkness descended upon him. Afterward his
breathing was easier. A blue iron tank was standing nearby, and the
nurse was removing a rubber mask attached to a flexible tube. The latter
led from a glass bottle, with a crystal pipe into the tank; the bottle
held water; and the water was troubled with subsiding, clear bubbles.
More of the dark, unpleasant mixture, more egg nog. Why did they trouble
and trouble him--already he was late getting to Irving Place.
The opera, as he had feared, had commenced; and it was at once strange
and familiar. The chorus and orchestra were singing in a deep ground
tone; the stage was set with a row of great, seething furnaces; glaring
white bars of light cut through vaporous, yellow gases and showered
steel sparks where coppery figures were labouring obscurely in a flaming
heat that rolled out over the audience. There was a shrilling of
violins, and then a deafening blare of brass, an appalling volume of
sound pouring out like boiling metal.... But here was Rudolph; the
performance was at an end; it was time to go home.
"I took the liberty of searching for--for Miss Jannan's address," the
other told him. Well, and why not! "Mr. Provost and Mrs. Jannan are away
for a week." Howat hoped that Kingsfrere would not turn up with his
flat face. He was conscious of smiling at a memory the exact shape of
which escaped him--something humorous that had happened to the pasty
youth. A refreshing air came in at the open windows, and he struggled
for a full, satisfying breath. The relief of what he dimly recognized as
oxygen followed. The nurse moved to the door and Mariana entered.
"Howat," she exclaimed, sitting beside him, "how silly of you! A cold
now with winter done. The snow is running away. And these soda-watery
tanks." He felt a warmth communicated by her actual presence. "It's just
my breathing," he told her; "it gets stopped up. A damned nuisance! Did
Honduras meet you?"
She assured him that she had been correctly received, and vanished to
remove her hat. Mariana must not sit in here, with the windows open, he
told the nurse; but then, he added, it was no good giving Mariana
advice. She wouldn't listen to it, except to do the opposite. She came
back, in one of her eternal knitted things, this one like a ripe banana,
and sat in the nurse's place. There was a great deal he wanted to know,
in a few minutes, when he felt less oppressed. The night came swiftly,
lit by his familiar lamps; Rudolph moved about in the orderly
disposition of fresh white laundry. A coat needed pressing. It would do
to-morrow. The doctor hurt him with a little scraping stab at the
bottom of his ear.
"Mariana," he at last made the effort of speech, questioning: "I have
been bothered about your--your temporary arrangement. That Harriet, you
know ... make trouble."
"Why, Howat," she replied, admirably detached; "you don't read the
important sheets of the papers! Harriet has made a tremendous success
with what was supposed to be a small part. A New York manager has
engaged her in letters of fire, for an unthinkable amount. James and I
sent her our obscure compliments, but we were virtuously rebuked by a
legal gentleman. Harriet, it seems, is going to cast us off."
Of all that she had said only the word obscure remained in his mind; and
it roused in him an echo of his old, dogmatic pride. "Mariana," he
demanded, "didn't the reorganization come about; isn't James Polder
superintendent?"
She hesitated, then replied in a low, steady voice. "Yes, Howat, it did;
but they didn't move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was
chosen." It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy;
the cursed young fool. "You must come away, Mariana," he continued more
faintly; "fair trial, failure--something to yourself, our family."
"Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!" she replied in an
abstracted impatience. Then, "I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you
understand, Howat," she leaned softly over him; "I need Jim as badly as
he needs me; perhaps more. If I had any superior illusions they have all
gone. I can't tell us apart. Of course, I'd like him to get on, but
principally for himself. Jim, every bit of him, the drinking and
tempers, and tenderness you would never suspect, is my--oxygen. I can
see that you want to know if I am happy; but I can't tell you, Howat.
Perhaps that's the answer, and I am--I have a feeling of being a part of
something outside personal happiness, something that has tied Jim and me
together and gone on about a larger affair. You see, Howat, I wasn't
consulted," she added in a more familiar impudence; "whether I was
pleased or not didn't appear to matter. In a position like that it's
silly to talk about happiness as if it were like the thrill at your
first ball."
He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him.
An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but
all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from
such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar,
veiled shape. He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny. It was
at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper. All three
unremarkably merged into one. And the acts of the first, a dark young
man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of
vigorous scorn, accumulated in a later figure, hardly less upright,
slender, but touched with grey--a man in the middle of life. He paid
with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old
man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a passion that had burned out
all vitality.
Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled
past and present. But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of
spirit and flesh that had been denied to him. That was life, he thought,
that was happiness. In the absence of such consummation he had come to
nothing. In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the
two had warred.
Life took the spirit to itself, mysteriously; wove the gold thread into
its design of scarlet and earth and green, or else ... a hearth soon
cold, the walls of a Furnace crumbled and broken, a ruin covered from
memory by growing leafage and grass throbbing with the song of robins,
the shrilling of frogs in the meadow.
The doctor and nurse, Rudolph and Mariana, moved about him in a far, low
stir. At times they approached on a lighter flood of oxygen. Mariana
wiped his lips--an immaterial red stain. But what was that confounded
opera the name of which he had forgot? It would be in his albums; in the
first, probably. Downstairs. He had a sudden view of Mariana's face as
she returned with the volume. An expression of piercing concern
overwhelmed the reassuring smile she had for him.
Howat understood at last, he was dying. An instinctive shuddering
seized him; not in fear of the obliterating fact; but from a physical
revulsion bred by his long years of delicate habit.
Yet it wouldn't do to expose Mariana to the terrors; and, after a sharp,
inward struggle, he said almost fretfully, "Further on." She turned the
pages slowly; but no one could read without a decent light. He moved his
head, in an infinity of labour, toward the clear, grey opening of the
window, and saw a pattern of flying geese wavering across the tranquil
sky.
THE END
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