The Three Black Pennys Part 25

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 s.p.a.ce; 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 gla.s.s 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 bra.s.s, 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 d.a.m.ned nuisance! Did Honduras meet you?"

She a.s.sured 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 princ.i.p.ally 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, acc.u.mulated 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 pa.s.sion 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 leaf.a.ge and gra.s.s 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 alb.u.ms; 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 rea.s.suring 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