Part 17 (2/2)
Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey facade drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen; sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.
XXIV
The room in which he sat had two windows, set in the deep recesses of heavy stone walls, and three doors, two leading into opposite rooms and the third opening without. The double lamp stood on a low, gate-legged table of fibrous, time-blackened oak, together with an orderly array of periodicals--the white, typographical page of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_ under the dull rose of _The Living Age_ and chocolate-coloured bulk of the _Unpopular, Gil Blas_, the mid-week _Boston Transcript_ and yesterday's _New York Evening Post_. The table bore, in addition, a green morocco case of dominoes; a mahogany box that, in a recess, mysteriously maintained a visible cigarette; a study of Beethoven, in French; an outspread volume by Anatole France, _Jacques Tournebroche_, in a handsome paper cover; a set of copper ash trays; and a dull red figurine, holding within its few inches the deathless spirit of a heroic age. An angle of the wall before him was filled by a white panelled fireplace, the mantel close against the ceiling; and on the other side of a doorway, through which he could see Rudolph noiselessly preparing the dinner table, was a swan-like sofa, in olive wood and pale yellow satin, from the Venice of the _ottocento_. At his right, beyond a window, mounted a tall, austere secretary in waxed walnut; and behind him, under the white chair rail, bookcases extended across the width of the room. Gustavus Hesselius' portrait of the first Howat Penny hung on a yellow painted wall, his gilt-braided major's facings still vivid, his dark, perceptible scorn undimmed. There were, too, framed in oak, a large photograph of Tamagno, as Oth.e.l.lo, with a scrawled, cordial message; another of a graceful woman in the Page's costume of _Les Huguenots_, signed ”Sempre ... Scalchi”; a water colour drawing by Jan Beers; and a Victorian lithograph in powdery foliage and brick of _The Penny Rolling Mills. Jaffa_. A black-blue rug, from Myrtle Forge, partly covered the broad, oak boards of the floor; and there was a comfortable variety of chairs--st.u.r.dy, painted Dutch, winged Windsors and a slatted Hunterstown rocker.
Howat Penny's gaze wandered over the familiar furnis.h.i.+ng, come to him surviving the generations of his family, or carefully procured for his individual dictates. A sense of tranquillity, of haven, deepened about him. ”Rudolph,” he inquired, ”has Honduras gone for Miss Jannan?”
The man stopped in the doorway, answering in the affirmative. He was slight, almost fragile, with close, dark hair that stood up across his forehead, and dry, high-coloured cheeks. Rudolph hesitated, with a handful of silver; and then returned to his task. Mariana would be along immediately, Howat Penny thought. He put the alb.u.m aside and rose, moving toward the door that led without. He was a slender, erect figure, with little to indicate his age except the almost complete silvering of his hair--it had, evidently, been black--and a rigidity of body only apparent to a sharp scrutiny.
A porch followed that length of the house, and doubled the end, where he stood peering into the gathering dusk. The old willow tree, inhabited by the owls, spread a delicate, blurred silhouette across a darkened vista of shorn wheat fields, filled, in the hollows, with woods; and a lamp glimmered from a farm house on a hill to the left. His lawn dropped to the public road, the hedged enclosure swimming with fireflies; and beyond he saw the wavering light shafts of his small motor returning from the insignificant flag station on the railroad, a mile distant.
The noise of the engine increased, sliding into a lower gear on the short curve of the driveway; and he met Mariana Jannan at the entrance directly into the dining room. She insisted, to his renewed discomfort, on kissing him. ”It's wonderful here, after the city,” she proclaimed; ”and I've had to be in town three sweltering days. I'll dress right away.”
Honduras, his coloured man, as indispensable outside as Rudolph was in, followed with her bag up the narrow flight of steps to the floor above.
He waited through, he thought, a reasonable interval, and then called.
An indistinguishable reply floated down, mingled with the filling of a tub; and another half hour pa.s.sed before Mariana appeared in white chiffon, securing a broad girdle of silver oak leaves, about her slight waist. ”Do you mind?” she turned before him; and, with an impatience half a.s.sumed and half actual, he fastened the last hooks of her dress.
”As you know,” he reminded her, ”I don't attempt c.o.c.ktails. Will you have a gin and bitters?”
She wouldn't, frankly; and they embarked on dinner in a pleasant, unstrained silence. Mariana was, he realized, the only person alive for whom he had a genuine warmth of affection. She was a first cousin; her Aunt Elizabeth had married James Penny, his father; but his fondness for her had no root in that fact. It didn't, for example, extend to her brother Kingsfrere. He speculated again on the reason for her marked effect. Mariana was not lovely, as had been the charmers of his own day; her features, with the exception of her eyes, were unremarkable. And her eyes, variably blue, were only arresting because of their extraordinary intensity of vision, their unquenchable and impertinent curiosity. A girl absolutely different from all his cherished mental images; but, for Howat Penny, always potent, always arousing a response from his supercritical being, stirring his aesthetic heart. Everything he possessed--his pictures, the alb.u.ms, the moderate income, although she had little need of that--had been willed to her. It would be hers then just as it was, practically, now. And he was aware that her feeling generously equalled his own.
His speculation, penetrating deeper than customary, rewarded him with the thought that she was unusual in the courage of her emotions. That was it--the courage of her emotions! There was a total lack of any penurious trait, any ulterior thought of appraising herself against a possible advantageous barter. She was never concerned with a conscious prudery in the arrangement of her skirt. Mariana was aristocratic in the correct sense of the term; a sense, he realized, now almost lost. And he rated aristocracy of bearing higher than any other condition or fact.
He wondered a little at her patent pleasure in visiting him, an old man, so frequently. Hardly a month pa.s.sed but that, announced by telegram, she did not appear and stay over night, or for a part of the week. She would recount minutely the current gaiety of her polite existence. He knew the names of her a.s.sociates, a number of them had been exhibited to him at Shadrach; the location of their country places; and what men temporarily monopolized her interest. None of the latter had been serious. He was, selfishly, glad of that; and waited uneasily through her every visit until she a.s.sured him that her affections had not been possessed. However, this condition, he knew, must soon come to an end; Mariana was instinct with s.e.x; and a short while before he had sent his acknowledgment of her twenty-sixth birthday.
She sat occupied with salad against the cavernous depths of a fireplace that, between the kitchen door and a built-in cupboard, filled the side of the dining room. The long mantel above her head was ladened with the grey sheen of pewter, and two uncommonly large, fluted bowls of blue Stiegel gla.s.s. In the centre of the table linen, the Sheffield and crystal and pictorial Staffords.h.i.+re, was a vivid expanse of rose geraniums. She broke off a flower and pinned it with the diamond bar on her breast. ”Howat,” she said, ”to-morrow's Sat.u.r.day, and I've asked two people out until Sunday night. Eliza Provost and a young man. Do you mind?”
”Tell Rudolph,” he replied. It was not until after dinner, when they were playing sniff, that he realized that she omitted the young man's name. He intended to ask it, but, his mind and hand hovering over an ivory domino, he forgot. ”Twenty,” he announced, reaching for the scoring pad. ”Oh, h.e.l.l, Howat!” she protested. ”That's the game, almost.” She emptied her coffee cup, and speculatively fingered one of the thin cigars in the box at his hand. ”It's the customary thing in Peru,” she observed, pinching the end from the cigar and lighting it. He watched her absently, veiled in the fragrant, bluish smoke.
Automatically his thoughts returned to the women that, at a breath of scandal, had refused to attend the dinner to Patti. So much changed; the years fled like birds in a mist.
”I feel like a politician,” she told him. ”Eliza Provost would pat me on the back. She's talking from a soap box on the street corners now, winging men for such trifles as forced birth. I'm fond of Eliza; she's got a splendid crust. I wish you'd get excited about my rights; but your interest really goes no further than a hat from Camille Marchais. You are deleterious, Howat. Isn't that a lovely word! Which was the first double?” He blocked and won the game. ”Fifty-five,” she announced; ”and ninety-five before. I owe you a dollar and a half.”
She paid the debt promptly from a flexible gold mesh bag on the table; then stooped and wandered among his books. Howat Penny turned to yesterday's _Evening Post_, and Mariana settled beyond the lamp. Outside the locusts were desperately shrill, and the heavy ticking of an old clock grew audible. ”I don't like George Moore!” she exclaimed. He raised surprised, inquiring eyebrows. ”He is such a taster,” she added, but particularized no more. She sat, with the scarlet bound book clouded in the white chiffon of her lap, gazing at the wall. Her lips were parted, and a brighter colour rose in her cheeks. Her att.i.tude, her expression, vaguely disturbed him; he had never seen her more warmly, dangerously, alive. A new reluctance stopped the question forming in his mind; she seemed to have retreated from him. ”Moore is a very great artist,” he said instead.
”That's little to me,” she replied flippantly, rising. ”I think I'll go up; and I almost think I will kiss you again.” He grumbled a protest, and watched her trail from the room, the silver girdle and chiffon emphasizing her thin, vigorous body, the lamplight falling on her bare, sharp shoulders. Howat Penny had early acquired a habit of long hours, and it was past one when he put aside his papers, stood for a moment on the porch. The fireflies were gone, the locusts seemed farther away, and the soft, heavy flight of an owl rose from the warm gra.s.s.
Below, on the right, he could vaguely see the broken bulk of what had been Shadrach Furnace, the ruined shape of the past. The Pennys no longer made iron. His father had marked the last casting. They no longer listened to the beat of the trip hammer, but to the light rhythm of a conductor's baton; they heard, in place of ringing metal, a tenor's grace notes. Soon they would hear nothing. They went out, for all time, with himself. It was fitting that the last, true to their peculiar inheritance, should be a black Penny. He, Howat, was that--the ancient Welsh blood finally gathered in a cup of life before it was spilled.
Old influences quickened within him; but, attenuated, they were no more than regrets. They came late to trouble his remnant of living. He was like the Furnace, a sign of what had been; yet, he thought in self-extenuation, he had brought no dishonour, no dragging of the tradition through the muck of a public scandal. Not that ... nor anything else. Now, when it was absurd, he was resentful of the part he had played in life; like a minor, cracked voice, he extended a former figure with a saving touch of humour, importuning the director because he had not been cast in the great roles. The night mist came up and brushed him; he was conscious of a sudden chill, an aching of the wrists. ”Cracked,” he repeated, aloud, and retreated into the house; where, Rudolph gone up, he put out the lights and stiffly retired.
XXV
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