Part 18 (1/2)
They accomplished little the following morning. Mariana, in a scant brown linen skirt, a sheer waist through which were visible precarious incidentals and narrow black ribbon, and the confoundedest green stockings he had ever seen, lounged indolently in a canvas swing. The heat increased in a reddish haze through which the sun poured like molten copper. ”You'd better come inside,” he said from the doorway; ”the house, shut up, is quite comfortable.” Within the damp of the old, stone walls made a comparative coolness. The shades were drawn down, and they sat in an untimely twilight.
”When I think of how energetic Eliza will be,” Mariana a.s.serted, ”I am already overwhelmed. But you never look hot, Howat; you are always beautiful.” His flannels and straw-coloured silk coat were crisply ironed; his hair, his scarf and l.u.s.trous yellow shoes, precise. ”Howat,”
she continued almost anxiously, ”you put a lot on, well--good form. You think that the way a man knots his tie is tremendously significant--”
”Perhaps,” he returned cautiously. ”A good many years have shown me that the right man usually wears the right things.”
”Couldn't that be just the smallest bit unfair? Aren't there, after all, droves of the right men in rubber collars? I don't know any,” she added hastily; ”that is, not exactly the same. But it seems to me that you have lived so exclusively in a certain atmosphere that you might have got blinded to--to other things.”
”Perhaps,” he said again, complacently. ”I can only judge by my own feeling and experience. Now Mapleson, never was a finer conductor of opera--you didn't catch him in a pink tie in the evening. And some of those others, who failed in a couple of weeks, I give you my word, dress s.h.i.+rts with forgetmenots.”
She regarded him with a frowning, half closed vision. ”It sounds wrong,”
she commented. ”It's been your life, of course.” He grew resentful under her scrutiny, the implied criticism. A sudden suspicion entered his mind, connected with her expression last evening, the young man whose name he had omitted to ask. His reluctance to question her returned. But if Mariana had attached herself to some rowdy, by heaven, he would....
He fixed the gla.s.s in his eye, and, pretending to be occupied with a periodical, studied her. He realized that he would, could, do nothing.
She was a woman of determination, and, her father dead, a very adequate income of her own. His fondness for Mariana resided princ.i.p.ally in a wish to see her free from the mult.i.tudinous snares that he designated in a group as common. He was fearful of her entanglement in the cheap implications of the undistinguished democracy more prevalent every year.
All that was notable, charming, in her, he felt, would be obliterated by trite connection; he had no more patience for the conventional fulfilment of her life than he had for the thought of women voting.
Howat Penny saw Mariana complete, fine, in herself, as the _Orpheo_ of Christopher Gluck was fine and complete. He preferred the contained artistry of such music to the cruder, more popular and moral, sounds.
Early in the afternoon she went to her room, although Honduras had no occasion to go to the station for considerably more than an hour, explaining that she must dress. Howat Penny sat with his palms on his white flannelled knees, revolving, now, himself in the light of his aspirations for Mariana. He wondered if, in the absence of any sympathy for the ma.s.s of sentiment and living, he was blind, too, to her greatest possibilities; if, in short, he was a vicious influence. Perhaps, as the old were said to do, he had hardened into a narrow and erroneous conception of values. Such doubts were both disturbing and unusual; ordinarily he never hesitated in the exact expression of his vigorously held opinions and prejudices; he seldom relaxed the critical elevation of his standards. He was, he thought contemptuously, growing soft; senility was diluting his fibre, blurring his inner vision.
Nothing of this was visible as he rose on Mariana's reappearance; there was not a line relaxed; his handsome, dark profile was as pridefully clear as if it had been stamped on a bronze coin. Mariana wore, simply, blue, with an amber veiling of tulle about her shoulders, and a short skirt that gave her a marked youthful aspect. She seemed ill at ease; and avoided his gaze, hurrying out to meet the motor as it noisily turned sharply in at the door. Howat Penny heard Eliza Provost's short, impatient enunciation, and a rapid, masculine utterance. Eliza entered, a girl with a decided, evenly pale face and brown eyes, in a severe black linen suit and a small hat, and extended a direct hand, a slightly smiling greeting. Mariana followed, for a moment filling the doorway.
”We'll go up, Eliza,” she said, moving with the other to the stair, a few feet distant. A man followed into the house, and Mariana half turned on the bottom step. ”Howat,” she proceeded hurriedly, ”this is James Polder.” Then she ascended with Eliza Provost.
An expression of amazement, deepening almost to dismay, was momentarily visible on Howat Penny's countenance. His face felt hot, and there was an uncomfortable pressure in his throat, such as might come from shock.
Surely Mariana wouldn't ... without warning him--! He was conscious of the necessity, facing a tall, spare young man with an intent expression, of a polite phrase; and he articulated an adequate something in a noticeably disturbed tone. But, of course, he had made a mistake. James Polder's intensity increased, concentrated in a gaze at once belligerent and eager. He said:
”Then Miss Jannan didn't tell you. It was a mistake. It may be I am not exactly desirable here,” his voice sharpened, and he retreated a step toward the door.
”No,” Howat Penny replied; ”she didn't.” He found himself studying a face at once youthful and lined, a good jaw contradicted by a mouth already traced with discontent, and yellow-brown eyes kindling with a surprising energy of resentment. ”You are Byron Polder's son?” he said in a manner that carried its own affirmation. ”Eunice Scofield's grandson.”
”Eunice Penny's,” the other interjected. ”Your own grandfather saw to that.” His hand rested in the doorway, and he stopped Honduras, carrying in the guests' bags. Howat Penny's poise rapidly returned. ”Go right up, Honduras,” he directed; ”the Windmill room, I think. I had never seen you,” he said to James Polder, as if in apology. ”But your father has been pointed out to me.” He waved the younger man into the room beyond, and moved forward the cigarettes.
James Polder took one with an evident relief in the commonplace act. He struck a match and lit the cigarette with elaborate care. ”Will you sit for a little?” the elder proceeded. ”Or perhaps you'd rather change at once. I've no doubt it was sticky in the city.”
”Thank you; perhaps I'd better--the last.” Rudolph appeared, and conducted the young man above. Howat Penny sat suddenly, his lips folded in a stubborn line. Mariana had behaved outrageously; she must be familiar with the whole, miserable, past episode; she had given him some very bad moments. He had a personal bitterness toward that old, unhappy affair, the dereliction of his dead grandfather--it had been, he had always felt, largely responsible for his own course in life; it had, before his birth even, formed his limitations, as it had those of his father.
The latter had been the child of a dangerously late marriage, a marriage from which time and delay had stripped both material potency and sustaining illusion. Jasper Penny had been nearing fifty when his son was born; and that act of deliberate sacrifice on the part of his wife, entering middle age, had imposed an inordinate amount of suffering on her last years. Their child, it was true, had been of normal stature, and lived to within a short s.p.a.ce of a half century. But then he had utterly collapsed, died in three days from what had first appeared a slight cold; and, throughout his maturity, he had been a man of feverish mind. His disastrous, blind struggle against the great, newly discovered iron deposits of the Middle West was characteristic of his ill balance.
And, in his own, Howat Penny's, successive turn, the latter told himself again, he had paid part of the price of his grandfather's indulgence.
It was incorporated in the Penny knowledge that Susan Brundon had refused to marry Jasper while the other woman was alive. The latter had died, some years after the disgraceful publicity of the murder and trial; the wedding had then taken place; but it seemed to Howat Penny to have been almost perfunctory. Yes, he had paid too, in the negative philosophy, the critical sterility, of his existence. He recognized this in one of the disconcerting flashes of perception that lately illuminated him as if from without. Some essential proportion had been disturbed. He looked up, at a slight sound, and saw Mariana standing before him. His expression, he knew, was severe; he had been quite upset.
”I can see,” she proceeded slowly, ”that I have been very wicked. I didn't realize, Howat, that it might affect you; how real all that old stir might be. I am tremendously sorry; you must know that I am awfully fond of you. It was pure, young selfishness. I was afraid that if I spoke first you wouldn't let him come. And it was important--I must see him and talk to him and think about it. You can realize mother and Kingsfrere!”
”Where did you meet him?” he demanded shortly.
”With Eliza, at a meeting,” she went on more rapidly. ”He's terribly brilliant, and a steel man. Isn't it funny? The Pennys were steel, too; or iron, and that's the same. I wish you could be nice to him or just decent, until--until I know.”
”Mariana!” he exclaimed, rising. ”You don't mean that you are really--.
That you--”
”Perhaps, Howat,” she answered gravely. ”I have only seen him twice; and he has said nothing; but, you see, I am an experienced young woman. No other man has made the same impression.”