Part 19 (1/2)
”I could influence him,” she insisted; ”I'd at least count for as much as those shovellers and furnace men.”
”But not,” he proceeded relentlessly, ”against the Essie Scofield you dismissed so easily. I don't doubt for a minute the unhappiness you spoke of; it would he a part of his inheritance; and you'd never charm it out of him. d.a.m.n it, Mariana,” he burst out, ”he's inferior! That's all, inferior.” Anger and resentment destroyed his caution, his planned logic, restraint. ”I can see what your life would be, if you can't. You would live in a no-man's land; and all the clergymen in the world couldn't make you one.”
”It wouldn't be the clergymen, Howat,” she said simply. ”And you mustn't think I am only a silly with her first young man. I have kissed them before, Howat; yes, and liked it. I am not happy with Jim; it's something else, like tearing silk. He is so confident and so helpless; he's drinking now, too.”
”I suppose that is an added attraction,” he commented. She chose to ignore this. ”I half promised him,” she continued, ”to take dinner with his family. He will be in the city next week. I said I thought you'd bring me.”
”Well, I won't,” he replied in a startled energy. ”Mariana, you're out of your head. Go to Byron Polder's house! Me!” In his excitement he dropped a lighted cigarette on the Chinese rug. ”I have no one else,”
she told him. ”Perhaps I'll marry Jim, and go away ... I thought you might want to be with me, at the last.”
He fumbled for his gla.s.s, fixed it in his eye, and then dropped it out, clearing his throat sharply. He rose and crossed the room, and looked out through the open door at the night. The stars were hazy, and there was a constant reflection of lightning on the horizon. Howat Penny swore silently at his increasing softness, his betrayal by his years. Yet it might be a good thing for her to see the Polder family a.s.sembled, Byron--he was a pretentious looking fool--at one end of the table and Delia Mullen Polder at the other. There were more children, too. But if it became necessary, heaven knew how he would explain all this to Charlotte. ”I believe,” he said, apparently innocently, ”that they live in the north end of the city.”
”It won't damage you,” she replied indirectly. Already, he thought with poignant regret, a part of the old Mariana had gone; her voice was older, darker with maturity.
XXVI
Howat Penny arrived in town late on the day when he was to dine with Mariana at the Polders. He entered a taxicab, and was carried smoothly through the thick, hot air; open electric cars, ladened with damp, pallid salespeople, pa.s.sed with a harsh ringing; and the foliage in Rittenhouse Square hung dusty and limp and still. The houses beyond, on Nineteenth Street, where the Jannans' winter dwelling stood, were closed and blankly boarded. The small, provisional entrance before which he stopped opened, and a servant, out of livery, appeared. ”Shall I tell the driver to return, sir?” he queried; ”the telephone is disconnected.”
He issued instructions, and, with Howat Penny's bag, followed him into the darkened house.
The windows of a general chamber on the second floor had been thrown open; and there he found Mariana's brother. Kingsfrere Jannan was a young man with a broad white face, shadowed in pasty green, and leaden eyes. His countenance, Howat knew, masked a keen and avaricious temperament. He did uncommonly well at auction bridge in the clubs.
Kingsfrere, in a grey morning coat with white linen gaiters and a relentless collar, nodded and lounged from the room; and Mariana soon appeared. ”Perhaps, Howat,” she said, ”it would be better if you didn't dress. I have an idea the Polder men don't.”
At the stubborn expression which possessed him she exclaimed sharply, ”If you tell me that the Colonel or Gary Dilkes were always formally dressed at dinner I think I'll scream.” Nevertheless, he had no intention of relinquis.h.i.+ng a habit of years for the Polders, or the north end of the city; and when, later, he came down into the hall, where the man stood with his silk hat and cape, Mariana put an arm about his shoulders. ”I wish every one could he as beautiful as yourself,” she told him. They pa.s.sed the Square, bathed in dusk and the beginning s.h.i.+mmer of arc lights, went through the flattened and faintly thunderous arch of a railway, and turned into a broad asphalt street, on which wide, glistening bulk windows gave place to sombre shops with lurid, flame-streaked vistas, and continuous residences beyond. Howat Penny gazed curiously at the tall, narrow dwellings, often a continuous, similar facade from street corner to corner, then diversified in elaborate, individual design. All, however, had deep stone steps leading to the sidewalk, thronged with figures in airy white dresses, coatless men smoking contentedly; there was a constant light vibration of laughing voices and subdued calling, and the fainter strains of mechanical music, the beat of popular marches and attenuated voices of celebrated singers.
The motor turned suddenly in to the curb, and they got out. The house before them, like its fellows, was entered from a high flight of red sandstone steps, and was built of a smooth, soapy green stone, with red coursings, an elaborate cornice and tiled Italian roof. No one was sitting outside, although there was a pile of circular, gra.s.s-woven cus.h.i.+ons; and Howat sharply rang the bell. A maid in ap.r.o.ned black admitted them into a narrow hall, from which stairs mounted with a carved rail terminating in a newel post supporting an almost life-sized bronze nymph, whose flowing hair was encircled by a wreath of electrically lit flowers, and who held a dully s.h.i.+ning sheaf of jonquils. There was no other illumination, and Howat Penny discovered in the obscurity a high mirror bristling with elk horns, on which hung various hats and outer garments. He stood helpless, apparently, in an att.i.tude he found impossible to deny himself, waiting to be relieved of his coverings, when Mariana whispered angrily, ”Don't be so rotten, Howat.”
Finally the maid secured his cape, and he was conscious of a stir at the head of the stairs. Immediately after, a shrill, subdued voice carried to where he stood. ”I told you,” it said violently, ”... dress suit.”
There was an answering murmur, in which he could distinguish, James Polder's impatient tones. The latter descended, and flooded the hall with, light from a globe in the ceiling. He was garbed in blue serge and flannels. ”Isabella,” he stated directly, belligerently even, ”thinks we ought to change our clothes; but we never do, and I wouldn't hear of--of lying for effect.” Howat Penny's dislike for him pleasantly increased.
Mariana, in rose crepe with a soft, dull gold girdle and long, trumpet-like sleeves of flowered gauze, smiled at him warmly. ”It is a harmless pose of Howat's,” she explained: ”a concession to the ghosts of the past.” She patted the elder on the shoulder.
Above, James Polder ushered them into a room hung with crimson and gilt stamped paper, an elaborately fretted cherry mantel about the asbestos rectangle of an artificial hearth, and a mult.i.tude of chairs and divans shrouded in linen. There was an upright, ebonized piano draped in a fringed, Roman scarf and holding a towering jar of roses, a great, carved easel with a painstaking, smooth oil painting of a dark man in an att.i.tude of fixed dignity, and an expensively cased talking machine. The original, evidently, of the portrait, and a small, rotund woman in mauve brocade, advanced to meet them. Young Polder said, ”My mother and father. This is Miss Jannan and Mr. Howat Penny.”
The latter saw that Mrs. Byron Polder was distinctly nervous; she twisted the diamonds that occupied a not inconsiderable portion of her short fingers, and smiled rigidly. ”I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Jannan,” she proceeded; ”and Mr. Penny too.” She held out a hand, then half withdrew it; but Mariana captured it in her direct palm. ”Thank you,” she replied. Byron Polder had a more confident poise; in reality there was a perceptible chill in his manner. He was a handsome man, with a cleanly-shaven face, introspective brown eyes and a petulant, drooping mouth. ”You have succeeded in finding your way to my house,” he p.r.o.nounced enigmatically, gazing at Howat Penny.
It was, Howat thought, just such an ill-bred utterance as he had looked for from Byron Polder; and he made no effort to mitigate it. He was conscious of, and resolutely ignored, Mariana's veiled entreaty. ”You don't know my girls,” Mrs. Polder continued rapidly. ”Here is Isabella, and Kate will be along for dinner.” A tall, bony woman of, perhaps, thirty-five, in an appalling complication of ribbons and silk, moved forward with a conventional sentence. In her, Howat's apprais.e.m.e.nts went on, virginity had been perpetuated in a captious obsession. They stood awkwardly silent until James Polder exclaimed, ”Good heavens, this isn't a wax works! Why don't we sit down?” The older woman glanced with a consuming anxiety at Isabella, and nodded violently toward an exit, ”It's a quarter after seven,” she said in a swift aside. Isabella, correctly disposed on a chair of m.u.f.fled and mysterious line, resolutely ignored the appeal.
”I didn't suppose you'd be in the city,” she addressed Mariana; ”I read in the paper that you had gone to Watch Hill with Mrs. Ledyard B.
Starr.”
”You can see that I'm back,” Mariana smiled. ”The family, of course, are at Andalusia, but we have all been in town the past days. I am really staying with Howat at Shadrach.”
”The former location of Shadrach Furnace, I believe,” Byron Polder stated. ”Now in ruins.” Howat Penny accurately gathered that the other inferred the collapse not only of the Furnace. He secured the single gla.s.s in his eye and looked deliberately around. Isabella watched him with a tense interest. Mrs. Polder gave a short, perturbed giggle. ”Just like George Arliss,” she told her son. James Polder, on the edge of a chair, was twitching with repressed uneasiness; he frowned antagonistically and then gazed appealingly at Mariana. ”I have been introduced to your cousin, Miss Provost,” Isabella again took up her social thread. ”A dear friend of mine, a talented actress, gave a recitation at Miss Provost's request, for suffrage.”
”Eliza's splendid,” Mariana p.r.o.nounced.
”Peter Jannan Provost's daughter,” Byron Polder added fully. But his voice indicated that even more, darkly unfavourable, might be revealed.
”Miss Provost has been under arrest.” d.a.m.n the solemn a.s.s, Howat Penny thought. ”She's been in the jug twice now,” Mariana went on cheerfully; ”Kingsfrere had to put up a bond the last time.” Mrs. Polder was rapidly regaining her ease. ”Wasn't her mamma scared?” she inquired. ”I'd go on if Isabella was taken up.”