Part 25 (2/2)
”Why, Howat,” she replied, admirably detached; ”you don't read the important sheets of the papers! Harriet has made a tremendous success with what was supposed to be a small part. A New York manager has engaged her in letters of fire, for an unthinkable amount. James and I sent her our obscure compliments, but we were virtuously rebuked by a legal gentleman. Harriet, it seems, is going to cast us off.”
Of all that she had said only the word obscure remained in his mind; and it roused in him an echo of his old, dogmatic pride. ”Mariana,” he demanded, ”didn't the reorganization come about; isn't James Polder superintendent?”
She hesitated, then replied in a low, steady voice. ”Yes, Howat, it did; but they didn't move Jim up. An older, they said steadier, man was chosen.” It was the oranges, he told himself, the oranges and brandy; the cursed young fool. ”You must come away, Mariana,” he continued more faintly; ”fair trial, failure--something to yourself, our family.”
”Leave Jimmy because he wasn't made superintendent!” she replied in an abstracted impatience. Then, ”I wonder about a smaller plant? Won't you understand, Howat,” she leaned softly over him; ”I need Jim as badly as he needs me; perhaps more. If I had any superior illusions they have all gone. I can't tell us apart. Of course, I'd like him to get on, but princ.i.p.ally for himself. Jim, every bit of him, the drinking and tempers, and tenderness you would never suspect, is my--oxygen. I can see that you want to know if I am happy; but I can't tell you, Howat.
Perhaps that's the answer, and I am--I have a feeling of being a part of something outside personal happiness, something that has tied Jim and me together and gone on about a larger affair. You see, Howat, I wasn't consulted,” she added in a more familiar impudence; ”whether I was pleased or not didn't appear to matter. In a position like that it's silly to talk about happiness as if it were like the thrill at your first ball.”
He drifted away from her through the nebulous haze deepening about him.
An occasional, objective buzzing penetrated to his removed place; but all the while he realized that he was getting farther and farther from such interruptions of an effort to distinguish a vaguely familiar, veiled shape. He saw, at last, that it was Howat, a black Penny. It was at once himself and that other Howat, yes, and Jasper. All three unremarkably merged into one. And the acts of the first, a dark young man with an erect, impatient carriage, a countenance and gaze of vigorous scorn, acc.u.mulated in a later figure, hardly less upright, slender, but touched with grey--a man in the middle of life. He paid with an anguished spirit for what had taken place; and at last an old man lingered with empty hands, the husk of a pa.s.sion that had burned out all vitality.
Mariana, too, had been drawn into the wide implications of this mingled past and present. But now, clearly, he recognized in her the meeting of spirit and flesh that had been denied to him. That was life, he thought, that was happiness. In the absence of such consummation he had come to nothing. In Jasper, in Susan Brundon who had married him over late, the two had warred.
Life took the spirit to itself, mysteriously; wove the gold thread into its design of scarlet and earth and green, or else ... a hearth soon cold, the walls of a Furnace crumbled and broken, a ruin covered from memory by growing leaf.a.ge and gra.s.s throbbing with the song of robins, the shrilling of frogs in the meadow.
The doctor and nurse, Rudolph and Mariana, moved about him in a far, low stir. At times they approached on a lighter flood of oxygen. Mariana wiped his lips--an immaterial red stain. But what was that confounded opera the name of which he had forgot? It would be in his alb.u.ms; in the first, probably. Downstairs. He had a sudden view of Mariana's face as she returned with the volume. An expression of piercing concern overwhelmed the rea.s.suring smile she had for him.
Howat understood at last, he was dying. An instinctive shuddering seized him; not in fear of the obliterating fact; but from a physical revulsion bred by his long years of delicate habit.
Yet it wouldn't do to expose Mariana to the terrors; and, after a sharp, inward struggle, he said almost fretfully, ”Further on.” She turned the pages slowly; but no one could read without a decent light. He moved his head, in an infinity of labour, toward the clear, grey opening of the window, and saw a pattern of flying geese wavering across the tranquil sky.
THE END
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