Chapter 17

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.