Part 13 (1/2)
The era of the greatness of the United States had hardly begun, while it was more than probable that the greatness, the power, of the Penny family faced an imminent destruction. His revolt at this, joining the more personal sense of the emptiness of his existence, filled him with a bitter energy, a determination to conquer, somehow, the obdurate facts hemming him in.
The sleigh dropped over a rise into a shallow fold of hills, with a collection of structures on a slope, and a number of solid, small grey stone dwellings. He glanced subconsciously at the stack of Shadrach Furnace, and saw that it was in blast--a colourless, lively flame, with a thin, white smoke like crumpled muslin, playing about its base. The metallic ring of a smithy rose at a crossing of roads, and, from the cast house, drifted the refrain of a German song. He turned in by the comparatively long, low facade of the house where the Jannans were living.
A negro led the horse and sleigh back to a stable; and, briskly sounding the polished iron doorknocker, he let himself into the dining room, a chamber with a wide, pot-hung fireplace and plain mahogany consul tables with wood chairs brightly painted with archaic flowers and scrolls in gold. Standing at the far side of the room, delicately outlined against a low, deeply embrasured window, was Susan Brundon.
A slow tide of colour rose to her ordinarily pale cheeks, corresponding with a formless gladness permeating his own being. She wore ruffled lavender with a clear lace pelerine caught at her breast by a knot of straw-coloured ribbon and sprig of rose geranium. ”Mr. Penny,” she said, with a little gasp of surprise; but her gaze was unwavering, candid.
”Why not?” he replied lightly. ”I have a small interest in Shadrach. You are surprising--so far from that absorbing Academy.”
”It's my eyes again,” she explained. ”I am obliged to rest. There is a very good a.s.sistant at the school; and Mary sweetly thought the country would do me good.”
”It is really miraculous,” Mary Jannan stated, entering from the kitchen; ”she'll almost never. Weren't we lucky?” She was a small woman with smooth brown hair and an air of quiet capability. ”And it's splendid to see you,” she continued to Jasper Penny. ”Don't for a minute think you'll get off before to-morrow, perhaps not then. Graham is out, chop-chopping wood. Actually--the suave Graham.” She indicated a high row of pegs for Jasper Penny's furs. ”Everything is terribly primitive. Most of the furniture was so sound that we couldn't bring ourselves to discard it all, however old-fas.h.i.+oned. Little by little.”
Graham Jannan entered, a tall, thin young man with crisp, pale yellow hair and a clean shaven, sanguine countenance with challenging light blue eyes. He greeted the older man with a firm, cold hand clasp. ”I suppose you've come out to discover what I have learned about iron.
Well, I know now that a sow is not necessarily a lady, and that some blooms have no bouquet. Good rum has, though, after sleighing.”
Upon alternately burning his fingers and throat with a steaming gla.s.s of St. Croix, Jasper Penny and Graham Jannan proceeded to the Furnace where, in the cast house, they watched the preparations for a flow of metal. The head founder, McQuatty, bearded to the eyes and swathed in a hide ap.r.o.n, stood at the Ironmaster's side. ”The charcoal you'd get's not worth a bawbee,” he complained; ”soft stuff would hardly run lead.
And where they'd cut six thousand cords of wood will no longer show more than four. Shadrach ought to put out twenty-eight tons of pig in a week; and you see the statements.”
”Stone coal,” Jasper Penny replied; ”and a hot blast.” He turned to describe the latter to Jannan. ”It'll come,” the founder agreed, ”and the quality will go.” He went forward to tap the clay-sealed hearth. The liquid iron poured into the channels of its sand bed, sputtering and slowly fading to dingy grey. ”I'd like you to take hold of this,” Jasper Penny told the younger man; ”great changes, improvements, are just over the hill. I'll miss them--a link between the old and the new. But you would see it all. The railroad will bring about an iron age; and then, perhaps, steel. I look for trouble, too--this d.a.m.ned States Rights. The South has been uneasy since the Carolina Nullification Act. It will be a time for action.” He gazed keenly at Graham Jannan. A promising young man, he thought, with a considerable a.s.set in his wife. A woman, the right woman, could make a tremendous difference in a man's capabilities.
He elaborated this thought fantastically at dinner, sitting opposite Susan Brundon. Mary Jannan wore orange crepe, with black loops of ball fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon's dress was noticeably simple. She volunteered little, but, when directly addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the directness, the conviction, of her replies. The right woman, Jasper Penny repeated silently. Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free, he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was exactly the wife he wanted. But no such person had appeared at that momentous period in his life.
However, then he had been a totally different being; perhaps the appreciation of Miss Brundon, her actual reality, lay for him entirely in his own perceptions. But if she would not have been the woman for him then, by heaven, she was now! He expressed this unaware of its wide implications, unconscious of the effect it would instantly have. The thing silently uttered bred an enormously increased need, the absolute determination that she was necessary to his most perfunctory being. The thought of her alone, he discovered, had been sufficient to give him a new energy, a sense of rare satisfaction.
Shortly expressed, he wanted to marry her; he had not, he told himself oddly, ever been married. The word had a significance which heretofore he had completely missed. A strange emotion stirred into being, a longing thrown out from his new desire, the late-born feeling of dissatisfaction; it was a wish for something in Susan Brundon which he experienced but could not name. Roughly stated it was a hunger to surround her with security, comfort, to fortify the, at best, doubtful position of life in death for her. Yet he acknowledged to himself that this regard for her safety was mostly the result of his own inner, blind striving. Her happiness had magically become his. Beyond that he was unable to penetrate.
After supper they gathered in the chamber beyond the dining room. Here Jasper Penny found an incongruous mingling of old and new furniture.
There was a high, waxed walnut desk and cabinet, severely simple, and before it a chair with a back of elaborately carved and gilded tulips tufted in plum-coloured velvet. The thick carpet was a deep rose, and the drapery of the mantel and windows garnet. A painted hood of brilliant Chinese colours had been fastened before what was evidently an open hearth, for which a coal stove was subst.i.tuted. On the middle of the floor was an oriental ha.s.sock in silver brocade; while a corner held a spinet-piano decorated in roseate cupids, flower sprays and gold leaf.
Again, an old clock in Spanish mahogany, with a rudely painted gla.s.s door, had been left on the wall.
Mary Jannan, at the piano, wove a delicate succession of arpeggios. She sang, in a small and graceful voice, a cavatina, _Tanti Palpiti_. Then, ”Ah, que les amours ... de beaux heurs.” Jasper Penny listened with an unconscious, approving pretence of understanding. But when, in the course of her repertoire, she reached _Sweet Sister Fay_, and _The Horn of My Loved One I Hear_, his pleasure became active. Susan Brundon, on the ha.s.sock, lifted her sensitive face to the mild candle light, and its still pallor gave him a shock of delight. Her hands were folded in the voluminous sweep of her crinoline; the ribbons at her breast rose and fell softly.
Jasper Penny and Graham were smoking long, fragrant cigars that the former had produced from a lacquered case, and Jannan had the ingredients of the hot punch at his elbow. It amused the young man to persuade Susan Brandon to take a sip from his gla.s.s; and they all laughed at her subsequent gasping. Jasper Penny was astoundingly happy; his being radiated a warmth and contentment more potent than that of the St. Croix rum. It was accompanied by an extraordinary lightness of spirit, a feeling of the desirability of life. The memory of his greying hair had left him; not, it was true, to be replaced by the surging emotions of youth, but by a deep satisfaction.
Susan Brundon, Susan ... the right woman. He marvelled again at the brightness of spirit that shone in her--like a flame through a fine paper lantern. Susan, at Myrtle Forge. His thought became concrete; he knew now, definitely, that he had determined to marry her. His peace of mind increased. There was no need for hurry, the mere idea was irradiating; yet there must be no unnecessary delay. Incontrovertibly he had pa.s.sed forty. The best period in a man's life. They would go to the West Indies, he decided. A ring with a square emerald, and roses of pearls. It was, almost immediately, time to retire. His room, narrow with a sloping wall, had a small window giving on a flawless rectangle of snow like the purity of Susan Brundon.
As he lay in bed, staring wakefully against the dark, another memory crept into his thoughts--the echo of a small, querulous voice, ”yellow rock candy and syllabubs.” Eunice! A sudden consternation seized him as he realized the necessity of telling Susan fully about his daughter. No escape, evasion, was possible. If she discovered the existence, the history, of the child afterward--he lingered over the happiness that term implied--it would destroy her. This, he told himself, was not merely melodrama; he was thinking of her delicate spirituality, so completely s.h.i.+elded from the bald fatality of facts. An increasing dread seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on her. The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew, filled him with bitter rebellion. The blind commitment of a vanished youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan Brundon. He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress. The secret errors of all the pasts that had made him rose in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed, perpetuated, multiplied, against his aspirations of tranquil release.
Yet, he told himself, dressing in the bright flood of morning, if nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted equally with the other--the symbol of Essie Scofield was no more actual than Susan. He had breakfast early, with Graham Jannan; and, in a reviving optimism, arranged for the Jannans to bring Miss Brundon to Myrtle Forge for a night before her departure. He whirled away, in a sparkling veil of flung snow crystals, before the women appeared.
Susan Brundon would, naturally, shrink from what he must tell her; but he was suddenly confident of his ability to convince her of the superior importance of the actuality of what they together might make of the future. He was accustomed to the bending of circ.u.mstance to his will; in the end he would prove stronger than any hesitancy she might, perhaps, reveal. His desire to have her had grown to such proportions that he could not, for an instant, think of existence without her as an intimate part. He even mentally determined when he should go to the city, the jeweller's, for the square emerald and flowered pearls. He would do over the rooms where he had lived in the thin formality of his marriage with Phebe, settle an amount on Essie ... shredding flesh. It would do the living woman no more injury than the dead. Oranges and brandy, satin and gold and ease.
He wrote, through Stephen Jannan, to Essie Scofield that afternoon, stating the generous terms of his final arrangement with her, making it plain that all personal contact between them had reached an end.
Hereafter she must exclusively address any unavoidable communications to Mr. Jannan. She disregarded this in a direct, inevitably complaining, laborious scrawl. However, he could read through it her obvious relief at complete independence. She would, she thought, stay where she was for a little ... a period of perfunctory sentimentality followed. He destroyed the letter, turning with deep pleasure to the message from Graham Jannan that he would bring Susan Brundon and Mary to Myrtle Forge the following day.
His mother, with Amity Merken like a timid and reduced replica at her back, greeted the Jannans and Miss Brundon at the door. Jasper Penny came forward from the smoking room, to the right of the main entrance; where the men retired for an appetizer of gin and bitters. The older man was garbed with exact care. His whiskers were closely trimmed on either side of his severe mouth and shapely, dominant chin; and his sombre eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples, held an unusual raillery. Amity Merken, he learned, had desired to stay away from the supper table; but, to her distress, he forced her into a chair set by himself. Susan sat at the other end of the table, in the place that had been Phebe's. He gazed at her with a satisfaction without surprise; for it seemed to him that the woman beyond him had always occupied the fore of his existence. She wore pale grey, the opening at her neck filled with soft lace and pinned with a garnet brooch, and a deep-fringed, white silk shawl. The conversation was ambling, but, to Jasper Penny, pitched in a key of utter delight. He said little through supper; and, at its end, with Graham Jannan, immediately followed the others into the parlour.
There Mary Jannan repeated her songs, French, English and Italian; and Jasper Penny listened with a poignant, emotional response. Graham and his wife had arranged to sleigh back to Shadrach Furnace that evening; but Susan Brundon was to stay at Myrtle Forge, and take the train from Jaffa to-morrow. The Jannans, finally, departed; and Jasper Penny, showing Susan through the chambers of the lower floor, succeeded in delaying her, seated, in the smoking room.