Part 3 (2/2)
”I'll try again,” he briefly agreed. ”But I warn you, it will do little good. There is no pretence in the affection you spoke of, but--but something stronger--” he gave up as hopeless the effort to explain all that had swept through his mind.
Gilbert Penny abruptly left the room.
It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge; he was now a.s.sisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise that was to carry Mr. Wins...o...b.. and David to the city. Howat pictured the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Wins...o...b.. into her clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain. When the carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted s.p.a.ce of the counting room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still conscious of a strong repulsion. It was idiotic to let such an insignificant fact as the Wins...o...b..s' man persistently annoy him. But, in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.
The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun, at a small window, s.h.i.+fted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and desk to a higher corner. He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and the thin, irregular splash of falling water. Other sounds rose at intervals--the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the rumble of its deposit by the Forge. Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece of paper in his hand. ”Eleven hundred weight of number two,” he read; ”at six pounds, and a load of charcoal. Jonas Hupp charged with three pairs of woollen stockings, and shoes for Minnie, four s.h.i.+llings more.”
Howat mechanically entered the enumerated items, his distaste for such a petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the doorway; it was Caroline. ”I hardly saw him,” she declared hotly.
”Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his b.u.t.tonhole.” Her hoops flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance. ”There's one thing about Myrtle,” she continued, ”she's frightfully proper in her narrow little ideas. Myrtle's a prude. And I promise you I won't be if I get a chance at David.” She stood with vivid, parted lips, bright eyes; almost, Howat thought, charming. Such a spirit in Caroline amazed him; he hadn't conceived of its presence. He recognized a phase of his own contempt for customary paths, accepted limitations and proprieties.
”Remember David's Quaker training,” he told her in his habitual air of jest. ”David's been to London,” she replied. ”I saw him pinch the Appletofft girl at the farm.”
Again in his room, he changed into more formal clothes than on the evening previous; he did this without a definite, conscious purpose; it was as if his att.i.tude of mind required a greater suavity of exterior.
He wore a London waistcoat, a gift from his mother, of magenta worked with black petals and black stone b.u.t.tons; his breeches were without a wrinkle, and the tails of his coat, even if they were not wired like those David was said to have brought from England, had a not unsatisfactory swing.
At supper Mrs. Wins...o...b.. sat at his left, Caroline and Myrtle had taken their customary places opposite, the elders had not been disturbed. Mrs.
Wins...o...b.. had resumed the animation vanished at noon. She wore green and white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat s.h.i.+rred cap tied under her chin. The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented mist. He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk. She was talking to Myrtle about the Court. ”I am in waiting with the Princess Amelia Sophia,” she explained; ”I have her stockings. There is a frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another.”
Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips. ”It's into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron,” he a.s.serted. Ludowika Wins...o...b.. studied him. ”In England,” she said, ”the American provinces are supposed to lie hardly beyond the Channel, but here England seems to be at the other end of the world.” Myrtle added, ”I'd like it immensely.”
And Howat thought of Ludowika--he thought of her tentatively as Ludowika--in the brilliant setting of tropical silks and birds.
He considered the change that had overtaken his father, English born, in the quarter century he had lived in America; the strong allegiance formed to ideas fundamentally different from those held at St. James; and he wondered if such a transformation would operate in Ludowika if she could remain in the Province. It was a fantastic query, and he impatiently dismissed it, returning to the contemplation of his mother's problematic happiness. He determined to question the latter if a permissible occasion arose; suddenly his interest had sharpened toward her mental situation. He compared the two women, what he could conjecture about Isabel Howat and Ludowika Wins...o...b..; but something within him, automatic and certain, whispered that no comparison was possible. His mother possessed a quality of spirit that he had never found elsewhere; he could see, in spite of their resemblance of blood and position, that the elder could never have been merely provocative.
Such distinctions, he divined, were the result of qualities mysterious and deeply concealed. Love, that he had once dismissed as the principle of blind procreation, became more complex, enigmatic. He had no increased desire to experience it, with the inevitable loss of personal liberty; but he began to be conscious of new depths, unexpected complications, in human relations.h.i.+p.
He was not so sure of himself.
They had moved to the less formal of the rooms used as places of gathering. The bed in a corner was hung in blue shalloon over ruffled white muslin, and there was blue at the windows. Against the wall a clavichord, set aside as obsolete, raised its dusky red ebony box on grooved legs. Myrtle was seated at it picking out an air from Belshazzar. She held each note in a silvery vibration that had the fragility of old age. Ludowika was by the fire, quartered across a corner; there was no stove, and the wood burning in the opening sent out frequent, pungent waves of smoke. She coughed and cursed. ”Positively,”
she declared, ”I'll turn salt like a smoked herring.”
She rose, her gaze resting on Howat. ”I must go out,” she continued; ”breathe.” He was strangely reluctant to accompany her, his feet were leaden. Nevertheless, in a few moments he found himself at her side on the lawn. Her sophistication had again disappeared, beneath the stars drawn across the hills, over Myrtle Forge. There was a pause in the hammering below. ”Take me down there,” she commanded.
He led the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling, white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals a flus.h.i.+ng rod was withdrawn from a fire and plunged in a trough of water; a cloud of ghostly steam arose, a forgeman's visage momentarily illuminated like a copper mask. A grimy lantern was hung above the anvil, its thin light falling on the ponderous head of the trip hammer suspended at right angles from a turning cogged shaft projection through the wall.
The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat, drum bellows. The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies, herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with hooked bars. An incandescent ma.s.s was lifted, born, rayed in an intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and, as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals, heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.
The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.
The hammering continued.
A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped Howat. He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride of Myrtle Forge, of his father's fibre--the iron of his character like the iron he successfully wrought. He could grasp Gilbert Penny's accomplishment here, take fire at its heroic quality; a thing he found impossible in the counting room above, recording such trivial details as wool stockings for Jonas Rupp. He could be a forgeman, he thought, but never a clerk; and in that limitation he realized that he was inferior to his father. There were aspects of himself beyond such discipline and control.
Ludowika Wins...o...b.. grasped his arm. ”Come away,” she begged; ”it's--it's savage, like Vulcan and dreadful, early legends.” She hurried him, clinging to his arm, over the ascent to the orderly lawn, the tranquil s.h.i.+ne of candle-lit windows. There, with her hood fallen from her head, she sat on a stone step.
”You frighten me, a little,” she confessed. ”Are you at all like--like that below inside of you? I have a feeling that you might be. If you were one of the men about Vauxhall you'd be kissing me now ... if I liked you. But, although I do like you, I wouldn't kiss you for an emerald buckle.” He recognized that she spoke seriously; her voice bore no connective suggestion. Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased. Yet the idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts. He considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense of her bodily seductiveness.
At the same time an obscure uneasiness, rebellion, possessed him; it was the old, familiar feeling of revolt, of distaste for imprisoning circ.u.mstance. It came to him acutely, almost as if a voice had whispered in his ear, warning him, urging him into the wild, to escape threatening catastrophe. He determined to leave Myrtle Forge in the morning, to return to the stream he had followed into the serene heart of the woods.
There he would stay until--until Ludowika Wins...o...b.. had gone. Howat had no especial sense of danger from her; only for the moment she typified the entire world of trivial artifice. He gazed at her with a conscious detachment possible because of the rarity in his existence of such figures as hers.
<script>