The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long facade, built of stone with an appearance of dark pinkish malleability masking its obduracy. His mother was awaiting him on the narrow portico, and he at once told her of Essie's release. They stood together, gazing out across the turf, faintly emerald, over the public road, at the grey, solid group of farm buildings beyond. The farmer's daughter, in a white slip, emerged against the barnyard, and called the chickens in a high, musical note, scattering grain to a hysterical feathery mob. The air was still with approaching twilight; the sun slipped below the western trees and shadows gathered under the lilac bushes; the sky was April green.

"Your father has been dead twelve years," Gilda Penny said unexpectedly. He looked down and saw that she was decrepit, an old woman. Her mouth had sunken, her ears projected in dry folds from her scant strands of hair. He recalled Daniel Barnes Penny; the earliest memories of his mother, a vigorous, brown-faced woman with alert, black eyes, quick-stepping, dictatorial in the sphere of her house and dependents. One after the other, like the sun, they were slipping out of the sight of Myrtle Forge; vanished and remained; passed from falling hand to hand the unextinguished flame of life. Gilda Penny was merging fast into the formless dark. She clung with pathetically tense fingers to his arm as they turned into the house.

He had ordered a carriage immediately after an early supper; and, informing his coachman of his wish to proceed alone, drove quickly away through the dusk. He was going to Shadrach Furnace, to meet Susan for the first time since the unhappy occasion in the Mayor's chamber. He had decided, stifling his increasing impatience, not to see her until Essie's trial was over. Susan had been at Graham Jannan's house for nine weeks. Her sight, he had learned, had almost completely failed in a general exhaustion; but, with rigorous care, she had nearly recovered. The Academy had been sold to the assistant mistress; and there was an expressed uncertainty about Susan's near future. It had, however, no existence in Jasper Penny's thoughts, plans—she must marry him; any other course would now be absurd. The track from Myrtle Forge to the Furnace was bound into his every thought and association; its familiarity, he mused, had been born in him; his horses, too, took correctly, without pressure, every turning of the way. The road mounted, and then dropped between rounded hills to the clustering buildings, where lighted, pale yellow windows floated on the dusk, crowned by the wide-flung radiance of the Furnace stack. The air was potent in the valley with the indeterminate scent of budding earth—the premonitory fragrance of blossoms; and, hardly less delicate, stars flowered whitely in blue space.

He paused for a moment before entering Graham Jannan's house, saturated with the pastoral tranquillity, listening to the flutter of wings under the eaves. Then he went in. They had finished supper, but were lingering at the table, with the candles guttering in an air from the open door. His greeting was simple and glad, and without restraint. Susan wore a dress like a white vapour, sprigged with pale buds, her throat and arms bare. She smiled the familiar, hesitating smile, met his questioning gaze with her undeviating courage. Jasper Penny took a chair opposite her. Little was said. Peace deepened about his spirit.

Graham, he saw, had a new ruddiness of health; he laid a shawl tenderly about his wife's shoulders; and Jasper remembered that a birth was imminent. Later he drifted with Susan to the door, and they passed out into the obscurity beyond. Even now he was reluctant to speak, to break with importunities the serene mood. "All the iron making," she spoke at last, "lovely. I have stood night after night in the cast house watching the metal pour out in its glorious colours. And, when I wake, I go to my window and see the reflections of the blast on the trees, on the first leaves. The charcoal burners come down like giants out of the mythology of the forest. And, when I first came, there was a raccoon hunt, with a great stirring of lanterns and barking dogs in the dark ... all lovely."

"It is yours," he said, bending over her. "You can come here at your will. A house built. And Myrtle Forge, too; whatever I have, am." He paused; but, without reply, continued more rapidly. "It's over, the—the misery of the past weeks; the mistakes are dead; they are paid, Susan. Now we may take what is left and make it as beautiful as possible. After suffering, reparation, happiness, is every one's due. And I am certain I can make you happy."

A longer pause followed, in which he regarded her with an increasing anxiety. Her face was turned away, her progress grew slower until they stood by the shadowy bulk of a small stone structure. The door was open, and it seemed to him that she looked within. "A store house," he explained. Nothing was visible in the interior gloom but some obscure shapes, bales, piled against the walls, and the scant tracery of a rude stair leading up to a greater blackness above. She stopped, as if arrested by his period, laying a hand on the door frame.

"Why don't you answer me, Susan?" he proceeded. "You know that I want to marry you; surely it is all right now. Everything possible has been done. A great deal of life remains." Her answer was so low that it almost escaped him; the faintest breath of pain, of longing and regret. "I can't," she whispered; "not with her, the child. I can't."

"That," he replied gently, "is a mistaken idea of responsibility, a needless sacrifice. I could never urge you into an injustice, a wrong; at last I have got above that; what I want is the most reasonable thing imaginable, the best, in every conceivable way, for yourself and—any other. You are harming, depriving, no one. You are taking nothing but your own, what has been yours, and only yours, from the first moment I saw, no—from my birth. What has happened brought me in a straight road to you, the long road I have never, really, left."

"I can't," she said still again. "I want to, Jasper. Oh, with a heart full of longing; I am so tired that I would almost give the rest of my life for another secure hour with you. And I would pay that to give you what you want, what you should have. But something stronger than I am, more than all this, holds me; I can't forget that miserable woman, nor her child and yours, so thin and suspicious. I am not good enough to be her mother myself, even if I felt I had the right. Inside of me I am quite wicked, selfish. I want my own. But not with the other woman outside. She'd be looking in at the windows, Jasper, looking in at my heart. I would hear her." She leaned against her arm, her face hid, her shoulders trembling.

The musty odour of the stores floated out and enveloped him. He was suddenly annoyed. Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance. He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to necessity. His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low, insistent voice. She made no reply, but remained supported in the doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.

"You must change your mind," he asserted; "you can't be eternally so foolish. There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield."

"I don't want you to, really," she admitted in an agonized whisper. "I shall never again ask you to do that. Ah, God, how low I am."

He saw, in an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen, possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged white of her dress, her bare throat and arms, her cheeks wet with tears. Out of it her eyes, wide with pain, steadily met his angry scrutiny. Out of it she smiled at him before the reflection died.



III THE METAL



XXIII

In the warm, subdued light of a double lamp with apricot glass shades Howat Penny was turning over the pages, stiff with dry paste, of an album filled with opera programmes. The date of the brief, precisely penned label on the black cover was 1883-84; it was the first of a number of such thick, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas, the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival, erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade.

Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand, Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe lips—the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance, flooded back—the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina, kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer's occasion. His smile broadened—this was so characteristic of New York in the eighties. How different it had been; but it was no better, he added silently, now.

It was mid-August, and the air floating in through an open door was ladened with the richness of ultra-luxuriant vegetation, the persistent, metallic whirring of locusts, the mechanical repetition of katydids. One of the owls that inhabited the old willow tree before the house cried softly.... How different! He straightened up from the book open on his knees, and the glass fell with a small clatter over his formal, starched linen, swinging for an instant on its narrow ribbon. The unwavering lamp light was deflected in green points through the emeralds of his studs.

The thought of bygone, gala nights of opera fastened on him with a peculiar significance—suddenly they seemed symbolic of his lost youth. Such tides of impassioned song, such poignant, lyric passion, such tragic sacrifice and death, were all in the extravagant key of youth. The very convention of opera, the glorified unreality of its language, the romantic impossibility of its colour, the sparkling dress like the sparkling voices and blue gardens and gilded halls, were the authentic expression of the resplendent vagaries of early years.

The winter of eighty three and four; his first season of New York music. The autumn before he had returned from the five years spent in Europe, in Paris practically, with Bundy Provost, related to him by a marriage in the past generation, through the Jannans. He had gone abroad immediately after his graduation as a lawyer; and in the indolent culture of the five Parisian years, he now realized, he had permanently lost all hold on his profession. At his return he had drifted imperceptibly into an existence of polite pleasure. It had been different with Bundy; he had gone into the banking house of Provost, lately established in New York; and, with the extraordinary pertinacity and acumen sometimes developed by worldly and rich young men, he had steadily risen to a place of financial importance. An opening had, of course, been offered to Howat Penny when he had definitely decided not to settle in Philadelphia, where the Pennys had always been associated, and pursue the law. And, at first, he had occupied a desk in the Provost counting rooms. But he had soon grown discontented, he disliked routine and a clerk's condition; and, after two years of annoyed effort, withdrew to lead a more congenial existence on a secure, adequate income.

"It was a mistake," he said aloud, in a decided, clearly modulated voice, gazing blankly into the warm stillness of the room. It had come partly from his innate impatience with any inferior state whatever, and part from the old inability to identify himself with the practicalities of existence. He had always viewed with distaste the apparently necessary compromises of successful living; the struggle for money, commercial supremacy, seemed unendurably ugly; the jargon and subterfuges of financial competition beneath his exacting standard of personal dignity. That had been his expression at the time—permeated by an impatient sense of superiority; but now he felt that there was something essential lacking in himself. An absence of proper balance. Solely concerned with the appearance, the insignificant surface, of such efforts as Bundy Provost's, their moving, masculine spirit had evaded him. Yes, it had been a mistake. He had missed the greatest pleasure of all, that of accumulating power and influence, of virile achievement.

Well, it was over now; he was old; his life, his chance, had gone; and all that remained were memories of Patti smiling disdainfully in the flare of oil torches about her carriage; the only concrete record of so many years the scrap books such as that on his knees.

It had been an error; yet there had been, within him, no choice, no intimation of a different, more desirable, consummation. Bundy had gone one way and himself another in obedience to forces beyond their understanding or control. They had done, briefly, what they were. There was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to append. He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes of Campanini singing Elvino.

Now his recovered glass was intent on a programme of the rapidly successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in Fidelio. Even here, after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore's constancy and love. Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the Opera House ... That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final expression of luxury. Lehmann in the premier of Tristan und Isolde, with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast. Eames' rise; but that, and what followed, were in successive books. He closed the one under his hand.

As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in a cast—a production, however, less than grand—he had been conducted to a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible locations—he could not endure a club—became prohibitive; when his once adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing halls of assembly—he had retreated to the traditional place of his family. He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America.

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 Saturday 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 Othello, 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—sturdy, painted Dutch, winged Windsors and a slatted Hunterstown rocker.

Howat Penny's gaze wandered over the familiar furnishing, 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 album 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 passed 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 assumed and half actual, he fastened the last hooks of her dress. "As you know," he reminded her, "I don't attempt cocktails. 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 albums, 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 passed 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 associates, 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 assured him that her affections had not been possessed. However, this condition, he knew, must soon come to an end; Mariana was instinct with sex; 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 glass. In the centre of the table linen, the Sheffield and crystal and pictorial Staffordshire, 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 Saturday, 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, hell, 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 attitude, 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 grass.

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

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 asserted, "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 lustrous 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 shirts 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 glass 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 principally in a wish to see her free from the multitudinous 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 mass 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 space 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."

"That," he declared coldly, "is unthinkable. You can't know all the facts."

"I do; but, somehow, I don't care."

"Everything about him is impossible—his history, family ... Why, Eunice Scofield, well, Penny, married a man from behind a counter, a fellow who sold womens' gloves; yes, and more than half Jew. And this man's mother was Delia Mullen, a daughter of the dirty ward leader. All this aside from—from his bad blood."

"It's partly yours, you know," she said quietly. "After all, there are other places I can see him." She turned away. "Eliza Provost is insane," he muttered. "No," Mariana returned, "only superior to narrow little prejudices. She can see life, people, as they are. Jim Polder is one of the most promising men in the steel mills. He is going up and up. That is enough for Eliza, it is enough for me; and if it won't do for my family—" she made an opening gesture with her fingers. Her expression had hardened; she gazed at him with bright, contemptuous eyes. In a moment the affectionate bonds between them seemed to have dissolved. His feeling was one of mingled anger and concern; but he endeavoured to regain his self-control, conscious that a hasty word more might do irreparable harm.

"Of course, I can't have you meeting him about the streets," he stated. "It is better here, if necessary. I am very much displeased," a note of complaint appeared, and she immediately returned to him, laid a hand on his shoulder. "Nothing is certain," she assured him. "I wanted to be sure, that is all. I don't want to make a mess out of things."

It was a part of the very quality of emotional courage he had so lately defined, extolled; a part of her disdain for ordinary prudence and conventional approbation. A direct dislike for this James Polder invaded him, a determined attitude of hyper-criticism. When the younger man reappeared Howat Penny found justification for this attitude. The details of Polder's apparel, although acceptable in the main, were without nicety. His shoes were a crude tan, and his necktie from the outer limbo. His hands, too, had a grimy surface and the nails were broken, unkempt.

But it was evident that all the criticism was not to be limited to his own. James Polder regarded the single glass with a scoffing lip, as if it were the appendage of a ludicrous Anglomania. He glanced with indifference at Howat Penny's pictures, books, the collected emblems of his cultivated years. His brows raised at the photograph of Scalchi in the Page's trunks—as if, the elder thought, she had been a "pony" in the Black Crook—and was visibly amused at the great Mapleson, posed in a dignified attitude by a broken column. An irrepressible and biting scorn, Howat Penny saw, was, perhaps, the young man's strongest attribute. He had violent opinions expressed in sudden, sharp movements, gestures with his shoulders, swift frowns and fragmentary sentences.

Howat Penny had never seen a more ill-ordered youth, and he experienced an increasing difficulty in keeping a marked asperity from his speech and conduct. Eliza Provost shortly came down, and the three strolled out into the ruddy light of late afternoon. Howat Penny consumed a long time dressing for the evening; and, in the end, irritably summoned Rudolph. "I can't get these damned studs in," he complained; "whatever do you suppose women use for starch now?" Rudolph dexterously fixed the emeralds, then held the black silk waistcoat. "And coats won't hang for a bawbee," he went on. "Gentlemen like Gary Dilkes used to go regularly to London, spring and fall, for their things. No doubt then about a man of breeding. You didn't see the other kind around. Wouldn't have 'em." Rudolph murmured consolingly. "Sat in the pit but never got into the boxes," his voice grew thin, querulous. "I'm moving along, Rudolph," he admitted suddenly; "the manners, and, by thunder, the music too, don't suit me any more. Give me the old Academy days in Irving Place." He hummed a bar from Ernani.

Through dinner he maintained a severe silence, listening with a frowning disapproval to Eliza Provost's tranquil, subversive utterances. Howat Penny couldn't think what her father was about, permitting her to harangue loafers by the streets and saloons. She was, in a cold way—she had Peter Jannan Provost's curious grey colouring—a handsome piece of a girl, too. "A fine figger," he told himself.

Later, Mariana and James Polder had gone out on the porch, he faced with reluctance the task of furnishing her with entertainment; but, to his extreme relief, she procured a leather portfolio, and addressed herself to a sheaf of papers. But that, in itself, was a peculiar way for a young woman to spend an evening. She would have done it, he felt, if he had been half his actual age. God help the man with a fancy for her! Charming visions were woven on his memory from the fading skeins of the past—a ride in a dilapidated, public fiacre after a masked ball in Paris ... at dawn. Confetti tangled in coppery hair, a wilful mouth, fragrantly painted, and phantomlike swans on a black lake. His silk hat had been telescoped in the process of smacking a Frenchman's eye. Perhaps, they had told each other, there would be cards later in the day, an affair of honour. He forgot what, exactly, had happened; but there had been no duel.

He looked up with a sudden concern, as if his thoughts might have been clear to Eliza Provost, in irreproachable evening dress and shell rimmed glasses, intent on statistical pages. Mariana and James Polder appeared; the former, Howat Penny thought, disturbed. Polder's intense countenance was sombre, his brow corrugated. Mariana, accompanied by Eliza, soon after went up; and left the two men facing each other across a neutral silence. "You manufacture steel, I believe," the elder finally stated.

"The Company does," Polder replied more exactly. "I've been in the open hearth since I left school," he went on; "it was born in me, I've never thought of anything else." His tone grew sharp, as if it might occur to the other to contradict the legitimacy of his pursuit. "I have done well enough, too," he said pridefully. "Most of them come on from college. I went from shovelling slag in the pit, the crane, to second helper and melter; they gave me the furnace after a year and now I am foreman. It will be better still if a reorganization goes through. Not many men have a chance at the superintendent's office under thirty-five."

"That is very admirable," Howat Penny said formally. He wondered, privately, at the far channel into which the original Penny ability had flowed. There could be no doubt, however objectionable, that James Polder was the present repository of the family tradition. He had had it from the source; and the iron had not, apparently, been corroded by tainted blood. He was forced to admit that a coarser strain had, perhaps, lent it endurance. All this failed to detract from his initial dislike of young Polder. There was a lack of breeding in the manner in which he sat in his chair, thrust forward on its edge, in his arrogant proclamation of ability, success. James Polder was anxious, he realized, to impress him, Howat Penny, with the fact that he was not negligible. Such things were utterly unimportant to him. He was unable to justify, or even explain to himself, his standards of judgment. They were not founded on admirable conduct, on achievement, what was known as solid worth; but on vague accents, intuitive attitudes of mind visible in a hundred trivial, even absurd, signs. The "right things" were more indispensable to him than the sublimest attributes.

On the following morning Mariana, Eliza and Polder disappeared in his car—it seemed that the latter was an accomplished mechanic in addition to his other qualities—and Howat Penny faced the disagreeable possibilities of the near future. Mariana would, he knew, meet this fellow promiscuously if necessary. As she had indicated, it was impossible to conceive of him in Charlotte Jannan's house. The latter was a rigidly correct woman. She would, too, and properly, be nasty if she learned that such meetings had taken place at Shadrach. The only thing to do was to bring Mariana to what he designated as her senses. And, at the start, he had a conviction that he might fail.

She did not accompany Eliza Provost and Polder, when, late Sunday afternoon, they departed; but sat absorbed in thought through the evening meal. He found his affection for her increasing to an annoying degree; he was almost humble in his anxiety not to wound her.

"Life is so messy," she said with sudden violence. "You can't think, Howat, how I hate myself; the horridest things go round and round through my mind. We're all wrong—I'm more like you than I admitted—born snobs. I mean the kind who look down on people different from themselves. I can't help being on—on edge. I can tell you this, though, I care more for Jim Polder than for any other man I've ever met. I'm mad about him; and yet, somehow, I can't quite think of marrying him. He's asked me already. But I knew he would."

"You must wait," he temporized; "such things clear up after a little."

"And if they don't?" she demanded. "What if they are choked by a hundred cowardly or selfish thoughts? It can be too late so terribly soon, Howat. You must know that. You see, I can't decide what really is the most valuable, what should be held tight on to, or let go. There are two me's, it seems—one what I want and the other what I am. I want Jim and I'm Mariana Jannan. All that about Eunice or Essie, or whatever her name was, doesn't matter a bawbee, as you say. I hate it because I think at times it makes him unhappy. Really, I believe I am fonder of him because of it. We owe him something—the superior Jannans and Pennys. Why, Howat, he's your own blood, and you looked at him as if he were a grocer's assistant. And I watched hatefully for the little expressions that seemed common. Of course, out in those mills, he would pick up a lot that wouldn't touch us; and, after all, he could drop them."

"If you have any thought of reforming him," he commented dryly, "you might as well see a wedding stationer."

"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. Damn 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 glass, 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 assembled, 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, passed 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 relinquishing 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 passed the Square, bathed in dusk and the beginning shimmer 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, grass-woven cushions; and Howat sharply rang the bell. A maid in aproned 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 shining 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 attitude 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 multitude 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 attitude 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 pronounced 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 appraisements 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 muffled 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 glass 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 pronounced.

"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." Damn the solemn ass, 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."

"Imagine Isabella!" Jim Polder exploded. "It's quite the thing," that individual asserted. "Isabella," her mother declared, "it is twenty-five past seven. I wish you'd go out and see where dinner is." She rose with an expression of mingled surprise and pain. "Really, mother," she said, "that is an extraordinary request." Her brother snorted. There was a sudden muffled clamour of chimes from below, and Mrs. Polder gave a sigh of relief. "I didn't want it spoiled," she explained, descending; "Jim would be wild after all his eagerness to have things nice."

The dining room, resembling all the interior, was long and narrow, and had a high ceiling in varnished light wood. Byron Polder faced his wife at the opposite end of the table. Howat Penny sat beside Mariana, with Jim Polder across; Isabella was on her mother's right; and a waiting place was filled by a dark, surprisingly beautiful girl. "This is Kate," Mrs. Polder said proudly. Howat thought he had not seen such a handsome female for years. She wore a ruffled, transparent crepe de Chine waist that clung in frank curves to full, graceful shoulders; her hair was a lustrous, black coil, and she had sultry, topaz eyes and a mouth drooping like her father's, but more warmly bowed. Kate Polder met the direct pleasure of his inspection with a privately conveyed admission that she understood and subscribed to it. Here, at last, was a girl up to the standard of old days, the divinity of Scalchi herself. She would have created a sensation in Delmonico's, the real Delmonico's. Gary and the Colonel—

"We think they're elegant," Mrs. Polder's voice broke in on his revery. He looked up and saw a great fish on a huge platter before his host, a fish in surprising semblance to life, had it not been for the rosettes of lemon, the green bed, which surrounded it. "Gracious, no," she answered Mariana's query; "we don't do it home. Mr. Polder has them sent from a Rathskeller down town. He'll make a meal off one." The latter was plainly chagrined at this light thrown on his petty appetites. He assumed an air of complete detachment in the portioning of the dish; but, at the same time, managed to supply himself liberally. The conversation was sporadic. Howat Penny found the dinner lavish, and divided his attention between it and Kate Polder. James and Mariana addressed general remarks to the table at succeeding intervals. Mr. Polder gloomed, and Isabella went through the gestures, the accents, of the occasion with utter correctness. Howat studied Mariana, but he was unable to discover her thoughts; she was smiling and cordial; and apologized for losing her slipper. "I always do," she explained. James Polder hastily rose, and came around to assist her. The dinner was at an end, and she stood with a slim, silken foot outheld for him to replace the fragile object of search.

They reassembled above, and Mrs. Polder suggested music. "My son says you are very fond of good music," she addressed Howat Penny. "I can tell you it is a lovely taste. We have the prettiest records that come. Isabella, put on Hark, Hark, the Lark." She obediently rose, and, revolving the handle of the talking machine, fixed the grooved, rubber disk and needle. Howat listened with a stony countenance to the ensuing strains. Such instruments were his particular detestation. Mrs. Polder waved her hand dreamily. "Now," she said, "the Sextette, and The End of a Perfect Day. No, Mr. Penny would like to hear Salome, I'm sure, with all those cymbals and creepy Eastern tunes." An orgy of sound followed, applauded—perversely, he was certain—by Mariana. James, he saw, was as uneasy as himself; but for a totally different reason. He gazed at Mariana with a fierce devotion patent to the most casual eye; his expression was tormented with concern and longing.

"When do you return to Harrisburg?" Byron Polder inquired. "My son," he went on to Howat Penny, "is a practical iron man. I say iron, although that is no longer the phrase, because of natural associations. The present system of the manufacture of steel, as you doubtless know, evolved from the old Ironmasters, of whose blood James has a generous share. We look to him to re-establish, er—a departed importance. I need say no more." His women's anxiety at this trend of speech became painful. "Play a right lively piece," Mrs. Polder interjected, and an intolerable cacophony of banjoes followed, making conversation futile.

The evening, Howat Penny felt, was a considerable success; by heaven, Mariana would never get herself into this! Byron Polder's innuendoes must have annoyed her nicely. When the mechanical disturbance ceased, Mrs. Polder said, "I believe that's the bell." Evidently she had been correct, for, immediately after, a young woman with bright gold hair, and a mobile, pink countenance unceremoniously entered the room. "Oh!" she exclaimed, in an instinctively statuesque surprise; "I didn't know you were entertaining company."

"Come right in, Harriet," Mrs. Polder heartily proclaimed. "Miss Jannan, Mr. Penny, this is Isabella's friend, Harriet de Barry, a near neighbour and a sweet girl. She's an actress, too; understudies Vivian Blane; and is better, lots say, than the lead."

Harriet de Barry made a comprehensive gesture. "I wanted to say good-bye to you all," she announced. "I am going on tour. Leave at midnight. Just had a wire from Mrs. Blane." There were polite Polder exclamations, regret, congratulations; through which the son of the house moodily gazed at the carpet. "Haven't you anything to say to Hatty?" his mother demanded. "And after all the passes she sent you." Howat Penny saw Mariana's gaze rest swiftly on the latest comer's obvious good looks; and the scrutiny, he was certain, held a cold feminine appraisal. As they descended to leave Mariana lingered on the stairs with Jim. The latter closed the door of the public motor with a low, intense mutter; and, moving away, Howat Penny lit a cigarette with a breath of audible relief.

"I don't know which I detest most," Mariana declared viciously, "you or myself."

"You might include that fish," he added plaintively. She gazed at him in cold contempt, with an ugly, protruding lip. Nothing else was said until they were in the opened room at the Jannans. Mariana flung herself on a broad divan, with her narrowed gaze fixed on the points of her slippers. "Comfortable, isn't it," she addressed him; "this feeling of superiority?" He placidly nodded, inwardly highly pleased. "I wish I'd married Jim the first week I knew him, without trying to be so dam' admirable. Howat, what is it that makes people what they are, and aren't?" It was, he told her, difficult to express; but it had to do with inherited associations. "Mrs. Polder is as kind as possible," she asserted; "and I could see that you were absorbed in Kate."

"Really, Mariana," he protested, "at times you are a little rough. She is a very fine girl; in fact, reminds me of Scalchi. Old Byron, though, what—a regular catafalque!" A blundering step mounted to the stair; Kingsfrere entered and stood wavering and concerned, the collar wilted and a gaiter missing. "Ought to do something about the front door," he asserted; "frightful condition, no paint; and full of splinters. Very plump splinters," he specified, examining a hand. Mariana surveyed him coolly, thoroughly. "Sweet, isn't he?" she remarked. "Kingsfrere Gilbert Todd Jannan."

"That's absolutely all," that individual assured her. "Except if you want to add Sturgeon; some do. Hullow, Howat! Grand old boy, Howat," he told her. "But if he says I'm drunk, I will tell you one of Bundy's stories about him. This—this elegant deception tremendous noise with the song birds." He sat abruptly on a providentially convenient chair. There, limply, he hiccoughed. "Sweet," Mariana repeated. Kingsfrere finally rose, and, with a friendly wave, wandered from the room.

"It was good of you to take me, Howat," she told him wearily. "Although, now, I can see that you went willingly enough. You thought it would cure me. But of what, Howat—of love? Of a feeling that, perhaps, I'd found a reason for living?"

A decidedly uncomfortable feeling, doubt, invaded him. He had an unjustified sense of meddling, of blundering into a paramount situation to which he lacked the key. He had done nothing debatable, he assured himself; Mariana's inherent, well—prejudices, couldn't be charged to him. In the room where he was to sleep the uneasiness followed him. She was his greatest, his only concern. Howat Penny reviewed his desire for her, his preference for a Mariana untouched by the common surge of living. He recalled the discontent, the feeling of sterility, that had lately possessed him; the suspicion that his life had been in vain. All his philosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.

He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself, that consciousness was disturbing. It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect. He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner and cold. Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association. Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites, showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing pointedly wrong; he had—the inversion repeated itself—done nothing.



XXVII

At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the Evening Post that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the moment.

Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder appeared.

"I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan," the latter stated frankly and at once. Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply. "I believe she is well," he stated formally. "You will find it cooler here." It struck him that the young man was not deficient in that particular. More, of still greater directness, followed. "I suppose you know," Polder stated, "that I want to marry her ... and she won't."

"I had gathered something of the sort," the other admitted. "It's natural, in a way." Polder proceeded gloomily: "I'd take her away from so much. And, yet, look here—you can shut me up if you like—what's it all about? Can you tell me that?" Howat Penny couldn't. "I'm not to blame for that old mess any more than you. And it's not my fault if something of—of which you think so much came to me by the back door. I've always wanted what Mariana is," he burst out, "and I have never been satisfied with what I could get. And when I saw her, hell—what's the use!

"Any one in Harrisburg will tell you I am a good man," he reiterated, at a slightly different angle. "When you kick through out of that racket of hunkies and steel you've done something. Soon I'll be getting five or six thousand." He paused, and the other said dryly, "Admirable." The phrase seemed to him inadequate; it sounded in his ear as unpleasantly as a false note. Yet he was powerless to alter it, change its brusque accent. The personal tone of Polder's revelations was inherently distasteful to him. He said, rising, "If you will excuse me I'll tell Rudolph you will be here."

"But I won't," Polder replied; "there's a train back at eleven. I have to be at the mills for the day shift to-morrow. I came out because I had to talk a little about Mariana." He had deserted the more formal address. "And I wanted to tell some one connected with her that I have gimp of my own. I know why she won't marry me, and it's a small reason; it would be small in—"

"Hold up," Howat Penny interrupted, incensed. "Am I to understand that you came here to complain about Miss Jannan's conduct? That won't do, you know."

"It's a small reason," the other insisted hotly. "Hardly more than the idiotic fact that I'm not in the Social Register. I am ashamed of her, and I said so. It was so little that I told her I wouldn't argue. She could go to the devil."

"Really," the other observed, "really, I shall have to ask you to control your language or leave."

"I wonder if she will?" the surprising James Polder sombrely speculated. "I wonder if I am? But there are other women, with better hearts."

"Are we to construe this as a threat?" Howat asked in a delicately balanced tone.

"For God's sake," he begged, "can't you be human!" The other suddenly recalled Mariana's imploring anger at the Polders. "Don't be so rotten, Howat." The confusion of his valuations, his habitual attitudes of thought, returned. His gaze strayed to the obscured ruin of Shadrach Furnace, at once a monument of departed vigour and present disintegration. Perhaps, just as the energy had expired in the Furnace, it had seeped from him. It might be that he was only a sere husk, a dry bundle of inhibitions, insensible to the green humanity of life.

"I couldn't go on my knees to anything," the younger took up his burden. "Wrong or not it is the way I'm made. I'd not hang about where I wasn't wanted. Although you mightn't think it. And I am sorry I came here. I do things like that all the time; I mean I do, say, exactly the opposite of what I plan. You'll think I am a braying ass, of course."

"Stop for a breath," Howat Penny recommended; "a breath, and a cigarette." He extended his case; and, in place of taking a cigarette, Polder examined the case resentfully. "There is it," he declared; "correct, like all the rest of you. And it's only old leather. But mine would be different. I could sink and Mariana wouldn't put out a hand just on account of that. It's wrong," he insisted. Expressed in that manner it did seem to Howat Penny a small reason for the withholding of any paramount salvation. Yet, he told himself, he had no intention, desire, to undertake the weight of any reformation. A futile effort, he added, with his vague consciousness of implacable destiny, his dim sense of man moved from without, in locked progression. Polder was young, rebellious; but he could grow older; he would grow older and comprehend; or else beat himself to death on obdurate circumstance. What concerned Howat was the hope that Mariana would be no further involved in either process. She too had this to learn—that, in the end, blood was stronger than will; the dead were terribly potent. He had, even, no inclination to say any of this to the man frowning in the dusk at his side. It would be useless, a mere preaching. An expression, too, of a slight but actual sympathy for James Polder would be misleading. In the main Howat was entirely careless of what might happen to the other; it was only where, unfortunately, he touched Mariana that he entered into the elder's world. He would sacrifice him for Mariana in an instant. Polder rose.

"I must leave," he announced. Howat Penny expressed no regret, and the other hesitated awkwardly. "It's no use!" he finally exclaimed. "I can't reach you; as if one of us spoke Patagonian. Hellish, it seems to me." He turned and disappeared, as violently as he had come, over the obscurity of the lawn. A reddish, misshapen moon hung low in the sky, and gave the aging man an extraordinarily vivid impression of dead planets, unthinkable wastes of time, illimitable systems and spaces. James Polder's passionate resentment, his own emotion, were no more articulate than the thin whirring of the locusts. He went quickly into the house, to the warm glow of his lamp, the memories of his pictures, the figurine in baked clay with Hermes' wand of victory.



XXVIII

The heat dragged through the remainder of August and filled September with steaming days and heavy nights, followed by driving grey storms and premonitory, chill dawns. A period of sunny tranquillity succeeded, but crimson blots of sumach, the warmer tone of maples, made it evident that summer had lapsed. Honduras mulched the strawberries, and set new teeth in his lawn rakes. The days passed without feature, or word from Mariana, and Howat Penny fell into an almost slumberous monotony of existence. It was not unpleasant; occupied with small duties, intent on his papers, or wandering in a past that seemed to grow clearer, rather than fade, as time multiplied, he maintained his erect, carefully ordered existence. Then, among his mail, he found a large, formal-appearing envelope which he opened with a mild curiosity. His attitude of detachment was soon dispelled.

Mrs. Corinne de Barry desired the pleasure of his attendance at the wedding of her daughter, Harriet, to James Polder. Details, a church and hour, were appended. The headlong young man, he thought, with a smile, Mariana was well out of that. He had been wise in saying nothing to Charlotte; the thing had expired naturally. But, irrationally, he thought of Polder with a trace of contempt—a man who had, unquestionably, possessed Mariana Jannan's regard marrying the pink-faced understudy to a second-rate emotional actress! In a way it made him cross; the fellow should have shown a—a greater appreciation, delicacy. "Commonplace," he said decisively, aloud. The following day Mariana herself appeared, with a touch of sable and a small, wickedly becoming hat.

He was at lunch; and, without delay, she took the place smilingly laid for her by Rudolph. It was characteristic that she made no pretence of concealing the reason that had brought her to Shadrach. "Jim's going to marry that Harriet de Barry," she said at once, nicely casual. "I had a card," he informed her. "It's to be on the thirtieth," Mariana proceeded, "at eight o'clock and in church. Of course you are going."

"Not at all of course," he replied energetically. "And you'll stay away for the plainest decency."

"We will go together," she proceeded calmly. "I want to see Jim married, happy." She gazed at him with narrowed eyes.

"Mariana," he told her, "that's a shameful lie. It is cold, feminine curiosity. It's worse—the only vulgar thing I can remember your considering. I won't hear of it." He debated the wisdom of recounting James Polder's last visit to Shadrach and decided in the negative. "Let the young man depart with his Harriet in peace."

"It's sickening, isn't it?" she queried. "And yet it is so like Jim. He had a very objectional idea of his dignity; he was sensitive in a way that made me impatient. He couldn't forget himself, you see. That helped to make it difficult for me; I wasn't used to it; his feelings were always being damaged."

Howat Penny nodded. "You'll recall I emphasized that." Mariana looked worn by her gaiety, he decided, white; for the first time in his memory she seemed older than her actual years. Her friends, he knew, her existence, bore the general appellation, fast; Howat had no share in the condemnatory aspect of the term, but he realized that it had a literal application. Their pace was feverish, and Mariana plainly showed its effects. Her voice, already noted as more mature, had, he was sure, hardened. She dabbled her lips thickly with a rouge stick. "Mariana," he said querulously, "I wish, you'd stop this puppet dance you're leading. I wish you would marry."

"I tried to," she coolly replied, "but you spoiled my young dream of happiness."

"That isn't true," he asserted sharply, perturbed. "Anything that happened, or didn't happen, was only the result of yourself, of what you are. I am extremely anxious to have you settled, and your legs out of the Sunday papers. I—I am opposed to your present existence; it's gone on too long. I believe I'd rather see you orating on the streets, like Eliza Provost. And, by thunder, I never thought I should come to that! Champagne and those damnable syncopated tunes played by hysterical niggers make a poor jig." He spoke impetuously, unconscious of any reversal of previous judgments, opinions.

"You are so difficult to please, Howat," she said wearily; "you were aghast at the thought of my marrying James, and now you are complaining of the natural alternative. The truth is," she added brutally, "you are old-fashioned; you think life goes on just as it did when the Academy of Music was the centre of your world. And nothing is the same." She rose, and, with a lighted cigarette and half-shut eyes, fell into a rhythmic step of sensuous abandon. "You see," she remarked, pausing. An increasing dread for her filled his heart. He felt, in response to her challenge, a sudden bewilderment in the world of to-day. Things, Howat Penny told himself, were marching to the devil. He said this irritably, loud, and she laughed. "I'm going in by an early train," she proceeded. "We have left the country. Will you stop for me on the thirtieth? Early, Howat, so we can be sure of a good place."

His helplessness included the subject of her remarks; he would, he realized, be at James Polder's wedding, but he persisted in his opinion. "A low piece of business," Howat declared. When she had gone he felt that he had not penetrated her actual attitude toward Polder's deflection. He had not for a moment got beneath her casual manner, her lightness, pretended or actual. He wished vehemently that he were back again in the past he comprehended, among the familiar figures that had thronged the notable dinner to Patti, the women who had floated so graciously through the poetry of departed waltzes. He got out his albums once more, scrutinized through his polished glass the programmes of evenings famous in song. But he went to bed a full two hours earlier than customary; his feet positively dragged up the stairs; above he sat strangely exhausted, breathing heavily for, apparently, no reason whatever.

He retraced, with Mariana, the course over the broad, asphalt way into the north end of the city early on the evening of the thirtieth. They found the church easily, by reason of a striped canvas tunnel stretched out to the curb; and a young man with plastered hair and a gardenia led them, Mariana on his arm, to a place on the centre aisle. The church had a high nave newly vaulted in maple, and stained glass windows draped with smilax, garish in colour against electric lights. Above the altar a great illuminated cross maintained an unsteady flickering; and—it was unseasonably cold—heating steam pipes gave out an expanding racket.

The pews through the centre filled rapidly; there was a low, excited chatter of voices, and a spreading tropical expanse of the dyed feathers and iridescent foliage of womens' hats. An overpowering scent of mingled perfumes rose and filled the interior. The strains of an organ grew audible, contesting with the rattle of the steam pipes. Howat Penny was detached, critical. Mariana, in a dull, black satin wrap of innumerable soft folds and wide paisley collar slipping from a sheath-like bodice of gleaming, cut steel beading, was silent, incurious. He turned to her, to point out an extravagant figure, but he said nothing. She was, evidently, in no mood for the enjoyment of the ridiculous. This disturbed him; he had not thought that she would be so—so concerned. He suppressed an impatient exclamation, and returned to the scrutiny of the culminating ceremony.

Here was a sphere, vastly larger than his own, to the habits and prejudices of which he was complete stranger. It was as James Polder had said—as if one or the other spoke Patagonian. He had no wish to acquire the language about him; a positive antagonism to his surrounding possessed him, beyond reason. He thought—how different Mariana is from all this, and was annoyed again at her serious bearing. Then he was surprised by his presence there at all; confound the girl, why didn't she play with her own kind! Yet only the other day the glimpse she had given him of her natural associates had filled him with dread. His mind, striving to encompass the problem of Mariana's existence, failed to overcome the walls built about him by time, by habit. He gave it up. The louder pealing of the organ announced immediate developments.

There was a stir in the front of the church, a clergyman in white vestment advanced; and, at a sudden murmurous interest, a twisting of heads, the wedding procession moved slowly up the aisle. The ushers, painstakingly adopting various lengths of stride to the requirements of the organ, passed in pairs; then followed an equal number of young women, among whom he instantly recognized the handsome presence of Kate Polder, in drooping blue bonnets, with prodigious panniers of celestial-hued silk, carrying white enamelled shepherd's crooks from which depended loops of artificial buttercups. An open space ensued, in the centre of which advanced a child with starched white skirts springing out in a lacy wheel about spare, bare knees, her pale yellow hair tied in an overwhelming blue bow; and holding outstretched, in a species of intense and quivering agony, a white velvet cushion to which were pinned two gold wedding bands.

After that, Howat Penny thought, the prospective bride could furnish only the diminished spectacle of an anti-climax. Led by the virginal presence of Isabella Polder she floated forward in a foam of white tulle and dragging satin attached below her bare, full shoulders. A floating veil, pinned with a wreath of orange blossoms, manifestly wax, covered the metallic gold of her hair. Her countenance was unperturbed, statuesque, and pink. As the sentimental clamour of the organ died the steam pipes took up, with renewed vigour, their utilitarian noise. "Why don't they turn them off?" Mariana exclaimed in his ear. Personally he enjoyed such an accompaniment to what he designated as the performance.

He cast the participants in their inevitable roles—the bride as prima donna, James Polder the heroic tenor. Mrs. Corinne de Barry, a thin, concerned figure in glistening lavender, supported a lamenting mezzo, the bulky, masculine figure at her side, with an imposing diamond on a hand like two bricks, was beautifully basso—