Part 9 (1/2)

The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality had necessarily freest play. Now he characterized it as mere uninformed wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.

Even at Myrtle Forge, where--in contrast to dwelling in the confines of a city--he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams. Yet it had been an especial kind of wildness; he owed that recognition to his vanished youth. The term generally included champagne parties and the companions.h.i.+p of various but similar ladies of the circus or opera house. But nothing of that had then entered into his deep-rooted rebellion. He had had merely a curious pa.s.sion for complete independence, an innate turning from street-bound affairs and men to the isolation and physical accomplishment of arduous excursions on horses or foot. He had, then, avoided, even dreaded, women. And that instinct, he told himself, s.h.i.+fting his injured arm to a more comfortable position, had been admirably founded.

The ax blows ceased; from his position he could just see the top of the great wheel that drove the Forge trip hammer; and slowly the rim blurred, commencing to turn. The forebay was open. A pennant of black smoke, lurid with flaming cinders, twisted up in the motionless air. The hammer fell once, experimentally, with a faint jar, and a grimy figure shovelled charcoal into a barrow.

His mind soon returned to the point where it had been deflected by the movement at the Forge; he could even visualize his mature boyhood--a straight, arrogant figure, black certainly, with up-sloping brows and an outthrust chin. And that, he thought, not without complacency, was not very far from a description of himself at present. There were, of course, the whiskers, severely trimmed on his spare face, and showing, in certain lights, a glimmer of silver; but he was as upright, as comfortably lean, now as then. He was still capable of prolonged physical exertion.... It was ridiculous to think of himself as definitely aging. Yet he was past forty, and the years seemed to go far more swiftly than at twenty-one.

Women! The silent p.r.o.nouncement included the smallest plural possible--only two; but it seemed to Jasper Penny that they comprised all the variations, the faults and virtues, of their entire s.e.x. With a certain, characteristic formality, propriety, he considered his wife first, now a year dead. He wondered if she had found the orthodox and concrete heaven in the frequent ecstatic contemplation of which so much of her life had been spent. It had been that fine superiority to the material that had first attracted him to her, a quality of s.h.i.+ning enthusiasm, of reflected inspiration from a vision, however trite, of eternal hymning; and it had been that same essence which finally held them apart through the greater number of their married years. Phebe's health, slowly ebbing, had drawn her farther and farther from the known world in general and the affairs and being of her husband in particular; her last strength had gone in the hysteria of protracted religious emotion, during which she had become scarcely more to Jasper Penny than an attenuated, rapt invalid lingering in his house.

Her pale, still presence was usurped by a far different, animated and colourful, figure. He thought of Essie Scofield, of all that she paramountly held and expressed, with a reluctance that had lately, almost within the past week, grown to resemble resentment, if not actual irritation. Yet, however, casting back through the years, in his present remoteness, he was able to recreate her and his emotions as they had first, irresistibly moved together. The absolute opposite of Phebe, already withdrawing into her religious, incorporeal region, Essie Scofield had immediately swept him into the whirlpool of her vivid, physical personality. Before her the memory of his wife faded into insignificance. But there was no mere retrospect in the considering of Essie; very much alive she presented, outside the Penny iron, the one serious preoccupation, complication, of his future.

At the time when he had first admitted, welcomed, her claim on him, he had felt a sudden energy in which he had recognized a play of the traits of a black Penny. Here was a satisfactory, if necessarily private, exercise of his inborn contempt for the evident hypocrisy, the cowardice, of perfunctory inhibitions and safe morals. That, however, had been speedily lost in his rocketing pa.s.sion, flaring out of a quiet continence into giddy s.p.a.ces of unrestraint. Essie, after a momentary surrender, had attempted retreat, expressing a doubt of the durability of their feeling; she had, in fact, made it painfully clear that she wished to escape from the uncomfortable volume of his fervour; but he had overborne her caution--her wisdom, he now expressed it.

That, more than anything else, brought before him the undeniable pa.s.sage of time, the fact that he was rapidly accomplis.h.i.+ng middle age--the total extinguis.h.i.+ng of an emotion which he had felt must outlast life.

It had gone, and with it his youth. Of course, he had recognized that he was no longer thirty; he had been well aware of his years, but only during the last few weeks had there been the slight, perceptible dragging down.... On the black walnut dressing stand past the window lay a letter he had received from Essie that morning; it contained her usual appeal for an additional sum of money--he gave her, formally, six thousand dollars a year; and the manner of the demand, for the necessities of their daughter, showed his sharpened perceptions that she had never really experienced the blindness of a generous emotion.

Eunice, the child, was incontrovertible proof of that--no more than an additional lever for her to swing.

His face darkened, and he moved his shoulder impatiently, as if to throw off a burden grown unendurable. But it was fastened immovably--his responsibility was as baldly apparent as the February noon, its greyness now blotted by a wind-driven, metallic s.h.i.+ft of snow.

He had been criminally negligent of Eunice. This realization was accompanied by no corresponding warmth of parenthood; there was no quickening of blood at the thought of his daughter, but only a newborn condemnation of his neglected, proper pride. He had, thoughtlessly, descended to a singularly low level of conduct. And it must abruptly terminate. Jasper Penny had not seen Eunice for seven, nine, months; he would remedy this at once, supervise advantages, a proper place, for her. Afterward Essie and himself could make a mutually satisfactory agreement.

XI

Throughout an excellent dinner, terrapin and ba.s.s, wild turkey with oysters and fruit preserved in white brandy, he maintained a sombre silence. His mother, on the right, her sister opposite--Phebe's place seemed scarcely emptier than when she had actually occupied it--held an intermittent verbal exchange patently keyed to Jasper Penny's mood. They were women with yellow-white, lace-capped hair, blanched eyebrows and lashes, and small, quick eyes on hardy, reddened faces. Gilda Penny was slightly the larger, more definite; Amity Merken had a timid, almost furtive, expression in the opulence of the Penny establishment, while Gilda was complacent; but otherwise the two women were identical. Their dresses were largely similar--Amity's a dun, Gilda Penny's grey, moire silk, high with a tight lace collar, and bands of jet tr.i.m.m.i.n.g from shoulder to waist, there spreading over crinoline to the floor. Lace fell about their square, capable hands, and Gilda wore broad, locked bracelets checked in black and gold.

Sherry, in blue cut decanters stoppered with gilt, gave place to port.

An epergne of gla.s.s and burnished ormolu, in the form of supporting oak leaves, with numerous sockets for candles, was set, filled with fruit, in the centre of the table; silver l.u.s.tre plates were laid; but Jasper Penny heedlessly fingered the stem of a wine gla.s.s. He said suddenly, ”I'm going to the city this afternoon.”

”Is it safe yet?” his mother queried doubtfully. ”Hadn't you better wait till to-morrow, when you can drive easily, or without stopping at a tavern?”

He looked up impatiently. ”I shall go by the railroad,” he stated decisively. ”Can't you understand that, with the future of iron almost dependent on steam, it is the commonest foresight for me to patronize such customers as the Columbia Railway! I have no intention of adding to the ignorant prejudice against improved methods of travelling.”

”There's your arm,” she insisted with spirit.

”An untried engine. The Hecla works along smoothly at twenty miles an hour.” Amity cast a glance of swift appeal at her sister, but Gilda Penny persisted. ”UnG.o.dly,” was the term she selected. Jasper ignored her. He had decided to straighten the tangled affair of Eunice at once; he would see Essie that evening, arrive at an understanding about the child's future. It would be even more difficult to terminate his connection with Essie herself. That, he now recognised, was his main desire. The affair had actually died before Phebe; but its onerous consequences remained, blighting the future.

The future! It was that, he now discovered, which occupied him, rather than the past. A new need had become apparent, a restless desire a.n.a.logous to the urge of seeking youth. Jasper Penny was aware of a great dissatisfaction, a vast emptiness, in his existence; he had a feeling of waste growing out of the sense of hurrying years. Somehow, obscurely, he had been cheated. He almost envied the commonality of men, not, like himself, black Pennys, impatient of a.s.suaging relations.h.i.+ps and beliefs. Yet this, too, turned into another phase of his inheritance--his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living.

”You'll stop at the Jannans?” his mother queried.

”I think not, probably Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions.”

Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal. Now, soon, it would all be over. Unconsciously he drew a deeper breath of relief, of prospective freedom.

The Hecla, a wooden barrelled engine with a tall, hinged stack, drew its brigade of canary-coloured chariot cars forward with a rapid b.u.mping over inequal rails. Jasper Penny's seat, number nineteen, was fortunately in the centre, close by the stove, where a warmth hung that failed to reach to the doors. Lost in speculation the journey was both long and vague. Twilight deepened within the car, and two flickering candles were lit at either end, their pallid light serving only to cast thin, climbing shadows over the rocking, box-like interior. At irregular intervals the train stopped with a succession of subsiding crashes, and started again at the blowing of a horn; pa.s.sengers would leave or enter; or it would prove to be merely a halt to take on cut and piled wood fuel for the engine.

Finally the train brigade reached the inclined plane leading to the river and city; the engine was detached, and the cars, fastened to a hemp cable, were lowered spasmodically to where a team of mules drew them through a gloomy, covered bridge echoing to the slow hoof falls and creaking of loose planks. Jasper Penny fastened the elaborate frogs of his heavily furred overcoat over his injured arm, and with a florid bandanna wiped the cinders from his silk hat.

The coaches rolled into the station shed, where he changed, taking a swaying Mulberry Street omnibus to Fourth, and Sanderson's Hotel. It was a towering, square structure of five stories, with a columned white portico, and high, divided steps. The clerk, greeting him with a precise familiar deference, directed him to a select suite with a private parlour, a sombre chamber of red plush, dark walls and thickly draped, long windows. There he sat grimly contemplating a distasteful prospect.

He knew the casual, ill-prepared dinners presided over by Essie, the covertly insolent man servant; and an overpowering reluctance came upon him to sit again at her table. But the confusion of the hotel ordinary repelled him too: he had seen in pa.s.sing a number of men who would endeavour to force his opinion on the specie situation or speculation in ca.n.a.ls. He rose and pulled sharply at the ta.s.selled bell rope, ordering grilled pheasant, anchovy toast and champagne to be served where he sat.