The Three Black Pennys Part 17

"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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.serted; "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, G.o.d, 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 gla.s.s shades Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an alb.u.m 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 gla.s.s 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 mult.i.tude 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 repet.i.tion 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 gla.s.s 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 impa.s.sioned song, such poignant, lyric pa.s.sion, 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 ac.u.men 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 a.s.sociated, 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 compet.i.tion 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 acc.u.mulating 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 sc.r.a.p 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 gla.s.s 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 partic.i.p.ant 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sembly--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 facade 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 _Sat.u.r.day 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 Oth.e.l.lo, 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--st.u.r.dy, 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 alb.u.m 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed and half actual, he fastened the last hooks of her dress.

"As you know," he reminded her, "I don't attempt c.o.c.ktails. 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 alb.u.ms, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociates, 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 a.s.sured him that her affections had not been possessed. However, this condition, he knew, must soon come to an end; Mariana was instinct with s.e.x; 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 gla.s.s. 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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, h.e.l.l, 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 att.i.tude, 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 gra.s.s.

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 roles. 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