Part 2 (1/2)
”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 a.s.sistance 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. Wins...o...b... 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 gla.s.s cylinders.
III
He dressed slowly, all that Caroline had said, and he thought, tangling and disentangling deliberately in his mind. Mrs. Wins...o...b.. ... 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 b.u.t.tons, 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. Wins...o...b..,” 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sailed 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 acc.u.mulated 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. Wins...o...b.. discussing with her the unhappy pa.s.sion 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 repet.i.tion 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.
Wins...o...b.. 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. Wins...o...b..'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. Wins...o...b..'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 p.r.o.nounced, obviously addressing the elder Wins...o...b.., ”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. Wins...o...b..,” 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. Wins...o...b... 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. Wins...o...b..'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. Wins...o...b..'s side, showed her features clearly.