Part 3 (1/2)
Mrs. Wins...o...b.. 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 mola.s.ses 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, att.i.tude. 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 s.h.i.+ft 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. Wins...o...b.., to himself. His entire att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+pboard 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 a.s.sisted Mrs. Wins...o...b... David was placed between Caroline and Myrtle. Mr. Wins...o...b.., 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 d.a.m.ned 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. Wins...o...b.. 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. Wins...o...b.. 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 pa.s.sage. 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. Wins...o...b.. 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. 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 inst.i.tuted 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 Wins...o...b..s.”
”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.