Part 23 (1/2)
”Look here, Mariana,” he proclaimed, ”I won't have any nonsense, do you understand?”
”We can keep a photograph of Harriet on the table.”
James Polder entered, and put a temporary end to his determined speech.
When the former saw Mariana his shameless pleasure, Howat thought, was beyond credence. Positively neither of them paid any more attention to him than they did to Rudolph. His irritation gave place to a deeper realization that an impossible situation threatened. There was nothing, obviously, that he could do to-day; but he would speak seriously to Mariana to-morrow; one or both of them would have to leave Shadrach.
This determination took the present weight from his conscience; and, pottering about small concerns of his own, he ignored them comfortably.
They appeared late, dirty and hot, for dinner; and it was eight o'clock before Mariana came down in a gown like a white-petalled flower. She wore no rings, but about her throat was a necklace of old-fas.h.i.+oned seed pearls in loops and rosettes. ”It's family,” she told them; ”it belonged to Caroline Penny. And she married a Quaker, too; a David Forsythe.” She stopped suddenly, and Howat Penny recalled the tradition that Caroline Penny, Gilbert's daughter, had appropriated her sister Myrtle's suitor.
Mariana favoured him with a fleet glance, the quiver of a reprehensible wink. He glared back at her choking with suppressed wrath. ”I have a wonderful idea for to-morrow,” she proceeded tranquilly; ”we'll take lunch, and leave Honduras, and go to Myrtle Forge for the day.”
Her design was unfolded so rapidly, her directions to Rudolph so explicit, that he had no opportunity to oppose his plan of sending her away in the morning; and his impotence committed him to her suggestion.
She could go in the evening almost as well. After dinner he rattled the dominoes significantly, but Mariana, smiling at him absently, went through the room and out upon the porch. Polder, with an obscure sentence, followed her. A soft rain sounded on the porch roof; but there was no wind; the night was warm.
Howat glanced at his watch, after a period of restful ease, and saw that it was past ten. He moved resolutely outside. Mariana was banked with cus.h.i.+ons in the canvas swing, and Polder sat with his body extended, his hands clasped behind his head, in a gloomy revery. The night, apparently, had robbed her countenance of any bloom; more than once in the past year Howat had seen her stamped with the premonitory scarring of time. Polder rose as he approached, and Mariana struggled upright.
”Good night,” she said ungraciously, to them both, and flickered away through the dark. James Polder was savagely biting his lips; his hands, the elder saw, were clenched. ”Your wife,” Howat proceeded, ”how is she?” Polder gazed at him stonily, without reply. ”I asked after your wife,” Howat repeated irritably. ”No,” the other at last said, ”you reminded me of her. I suppose you are right.” He turned and walked abruptly from the porch, into the slowly dropping rain.
x.x.xIII
The road to Myrtle Forge mounted between rolling cultivated fields, the scattered, stone ruins of walls erected in the earliest iron days; and, after a pastoral course, came to the Forge dwelling, its shuttered bulk set in a tangle of bushes and rank gra.s.s. An ancient beech tree swept the ground with smooth, grey limbs, surrounded by long-acc.u.mulated dead leaves. James Polder shut off the motor by the low, stone wall that supported the lawn from the roadway; he crossed to the farm, where the house keys were kept, and Howat and Mariana moved slowly forward. A porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small apple orchard beyond.
Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side, where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
Inside, the house, empty of furnis.h.i.+ng, was a place of echoes m.u.f.fled in dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation, yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was unable to discover a souvenir of the generations of Pennys that had filled the rooms with the stir of their living. Once more outside they sat on the stone threshold of an office-like structure back of the main dwelling and indulged in cigarettes.
The disturbing tension of last night, Howat thought comfortably, had vanished. Mariana was flippant, James Polder enveloped in indolent ease.
”The Forge,” Howat Penny told them, ”was below.” A path descended across a steep face of spa.r.s.e gra.s.s; and, at the bottom, Polder's interest revived. ”It stood there,” he indicated a fallen shed beyond a masoned channel, choked with the broken stones of its walls and tangled shrubbery. ”You don't suppose a joke that size was the great Gilbert's plant. Here's the drop for the water power; yes, and the iron pinions of the overshot wheel.” He climbed down a precarious wall, and stood perhaps twelve feet below them. Securing a rough bolt, he brought it up for their inspection. ”Look at that forging,” he cried; ”after it has lain around for a century and a half. Like silk. Charcoal iron, and it was hammered, too. Metal isn't half worked any more. We could turn that into steel at almost nothing a ton.” He showed them in the mouldering shed the foundation of the anvil, traced the probable shafting of the trip hammer, marked the location of the hearths. ”Three,” he decided; ”and a cold trickle of air. A n.i.g.g.e.r pumping a bellows, probably. No, they could get that from the wheel,” he drew an explanatory diagram in the blackened dust.
With the lunch basket on the running board of the motor they ate sitting on the low boundary wall of the lawn. The heat increased through the late May noon, and Howat remained while Mariana and James Polder wandered in the direction of the orchard. Finally the sun forced the former to move; and he, too, proceeded in a desultory manner, entering the shade of a grove of old maples. The trees, their earliest red leaf.a.ge already emerald, followed the dry channel cut back from Canary Creek to the Forge, and he soon emerged at the broad, flas.h.i.+ng course of the stream. A flat rock jutted into the hurrying water by an overthrown dam, its sun-heated expanse now in shadow; and he stayed, listening to the gurgling flow. Far above him a hawk wheeled in ambient s.p.a.ce; a mill whistle sounded remotely from Jaffa.
The thought of Mariana hovered at the back of his lulled being; all he desired, he told himself, was her complete happiness. He might even have become reconciled to James Polder. His first, unfavourable opinion of the latter, he realized, had been modified by--by time. He had judged Polder solely in the light of an old standard. The fellow was painfully honest; good stuff there, iron ... the iron of the Pennys. But the other strain had betrayed him. A cursed shame. The material of the present, moulded, perhaps, into seemingly new forms, was always that of the past. This Polder was Essie Scofield and Jasper ... Byron. He, Howat Penny, was Penny and Jannan and Penny--Daniel, James, Casimir, and Howat once more, the older Howat who had married the widow of Felix Wins...o...b...
Black again. He wondered what the blackness, not spent like his own, had brought the other. A headstrong, dark youth with the characteristic sloping eyebrows and slender, vigorous, carriage. The traditional rebellious spirit had involved Jasper in disgrace; it had thinned his own blood.
Footfalls approached through the trees, and the others joined him. James Polder extended himself on the rock, and Mariana sat with her hands clasped about her slim knees. A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them. The hawk circled above, and Howat had an extraordinary sense of the familiarity of the bird hanging in limitless s.p.a.ce, of the warm stone and water choking in a smooth eddy. He had, as a boy, fished there. But his brain momentarily swam with a poignant, unrecognizable emotion, different from the sensation of childhood. He rose, confused and giddy. With old age, he muttered.
Mariana followed. ”It's all over,” she announced, decisively. ”We'll drive back and leave to-day.” She sighed. ”That's gone already,” James Polder showed her the sun slipping toward the western hills. She moved up to him, laid her hand on his arm. Howat Penny went ahead. He must speak to her after dinner. As the motor slowly gathered momentum he turned and looked back at the dark, pinkish dwelling in its tangle of gra.s.s and bushes run wild. Dusk appeared to have already gathered over it, although the sun still shone elsewhere in lengthening dusty gold bars; the wide-spread beech was sombre against blank shutters, the chimneys broken and cold.
x.x.xIV
A letter for James Polder was at Shadrach, and he opened it immediately, glancing over its scrawled sheet. Howat saw a curious expression overspread the other's countenance. He called, ”Mariana!” in a sharp tone. She appeared from the foot of the steps. ”Harriet never went home,” he told her; ”this is from Pittsburgh. She's back on the stage.”
A premonitory dread filled Howat Penny. Mariana stood quietly, her gaze lifted to Polder. ”She never went home,” he repeated; ”but writes that suddenly she--she didn't want to, and couldn't stand Harrisburg another week. She saw some one and had a part, that ought to be good, offered to her; and, so--”
”Is that all, Jim?”
”No,” he replied; ”there is more, absolutely unjustified. I think I'd like you to read it. It would be best.” Mariana took the letter, and followed its irregular course. ”It's true enough,” she said quietly, at the end. ”But I don't in the least mind, Jim. She had a perfect right to something of the sort. That is--I'm not annoyed about what she says of me, but it will upset you terribly. And it has been my fault, from the first.” He protested vehemently, but she stopped him with a gesture; then walked to the door opening on the porch; where, her head up, she stood gazing out into the serene, failing light.
James Polder followed her, and Howat heard the screen softly close. He was about to light a cigarette, but, his hand shaking, he laid it on the table. He put up his gla.s.s, without purpose, and then let it drop.