He dressed slowly, all that Caroline had said, and he thought, tangling
and disentangling deliberately in his mind. Mrs. Winscombe ... thinking
there were no presentable men in the Provinces. His hand strayed in the
direction of a quince-coloured satin coat; but he chose instead a
commonplace, dun affair with pewter buttons, and carelessly settled his
shoulders in an unremarkable waistcoat. Then, although he could hear a
concerted stir of voices below that announced impending supper, he
slipped into a chair for half a pipe. He was indifferent, not diffident,
and there was no hesitation in the manner in which he finally approached
the company seated at supper. His place was, as usual, at his mother's
side; but opposite him where Myrtle usually sat was a rigid, high
shouldered man in mulberry and silver, jewelled buckles, and a full,
powdered wig. He had thin, dark cheeks, a heavy nose above a firm mouth
with a satirical droop, and small, unpleasantly penetrating eyes. An
expression of general malice was, however, corrected by a high and
serene brow.
"Mr. Winscombe," Howat Penny's mother said, "my son." The former bowed
with formal civility, but gave a baffling effect of mockery which,
Howat discovered, enveloped practically every movement and speech. He
was, he said, enchanted to meet Mr. Penny; and that extravagant
expression, delivered in a slightly harsh, negligent voice, heightened
the impression of a personality strong and cold; a being as obdurate as
an iron bar masquerading in coloured satin and formulating pretty
phrases like the sheen on the surface of a deep November pool. Gilbert
Penny echoed the introduction at the other end of the table.
Howat saw, in the yellow candlelight, a woman not, he decided, any
better looking than Caroline, in an extremely low cut gown of scarlet,
with a rigid girdle of saffron brocade, a fluted tulle ruff tied with a
scarlet string about a long, slim neck, and a cap of sheer cambric with
a knot of black ribbons. Her eyes were widely opened and dark, her nose
short, and her mouth full and petulant. She, too, was conventionally
adequate; but her insincerity was clearer than her husband's, it was
pronounced quickly, in an impertinent and musical voice, without the
slightest pretence of the injection of any interest. Howat Penny felt,
in a manner which he was unable to place, that she vaguely resembled
himself; perhaps it lay in her eyebrows slanting slightly toward the
temples; but it was vaguer, more elusive, than that.
He considered it idly, through the course of supper. At intervals he
heard her voice, a little, high-pitched laugh with a curious,
underlying flatness: not of tone, her modulations were delicate and
exact; but deeper. Again he was dimly conscious of an aspect of her
which eluded every effort to fix and define. He could not even
comprehend his dwelling upon the immaterial traits of a strange and
indifferent woman; he was at a loss to understand how such inquiries
assailed him. He grew, finally, annoyed, and shut his mind to any
further consideration of her.
Mrs. Penny was talking with charming earnestness to the man on her other
hand. The amber radiance flickered over the beautiful curves of her
shoulders and cast a warm shadow at the base of her throat. She smiled
at her son; and her face, in spite of its present gaiety, held a
definite reminder of her years, almost fifty; but when she turned again
her profile, with slightly tilted nose and delightfully fresh lips and
chin, was that of a girl no older than Caroline. Howat had often noticed
this. It was amazing--with that slight movement she would seem to lose
at once all the years that had accumulated since she was newly married.
In a second she would appear to leave them all, her mature children, the
heavy, palpably aging presence of Gilbert Penny, the house and
obligations that had grown about her, and be remotely young, a stranger
to the irrefutable proof that her youth had gone. At such moments he was
almost reluctant to claim her attention, to bring her again, as it were,
into the present, with so much spent, lapsed: at times he almost
thought, in that connection, wasted.
She had, in addition to her profile, a spirit of youth that had remained
undimmed; as if there were within her a reserve warmth, a priceless
gift, which life had never claimed; and it was the contemplation of that
which gave Howat the impression that Isabel Penny's life had not fully
flowered. He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had
taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective
dejection; but the conviction remained. Gilbert Penny had been an almost
faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come
from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been
a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless
courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the
Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.
Howat Penny thought sombrely of love, of the emotion that had
brought--or betrayed?--Isabel Howat so far away from her birthright. It
had gripped his sister no less tyrannically; stripping them, he
considered, of their essential liberty. The thing was clear enough in
his mind--nothing more than an animal instinct, humiliating to the human
individual, to breed. It was the mere repetition of nature through the
working of an automatic law. No such obscure fate, he determined, should
overtake, obliterate, him. Yet it had involved his mother, a person of
the first superiority. A slight chill, as if a breath of imminent winter
had touched him, communicated itself to his heart.
A trivial conversation was in progress across the table between Mrs.
Winscombe and Myrtle. The latter was an embodiment of the familiar Saxon
type of beauty; her hair was fair, infinitely pale gold, her complexion
a delicately mingled crimson and white, her eyes as candidly blue as
flowers. Her features were finely moulded, and her shoulders, slipping
out from azure lutestring, were like smooth handfuls of meringue. Her
voice was always formal, and it sounded stilted, forced, in comparison
with Mrs. Winscombe's easy periods.
The supper ended, and the company trailed into a drawing room at the
opposite end of the house from the kitchen wing. Howat delayed, and
Caroline, urged forward by Mr. Winscombe's sardonically ubiquitous bow,
half lingered to cast back a glance of private understanding at her
brother. When he decided reluctantly to follow he was kept back by the
sound of a familiar explanation in his father's decisive, full tones.
"Howat," he pronounced, obviously addressing the elder Winscombe, "is a
black Penny. That is what we call them in our family. You see, the
Pennys, some hundreds of years back, acquired a strong Welsh strain. I
take it you are familiar with the Welsh--a solitary-living, dark lot.
Unamenable to influence, reflect their country, I suppose; but lovers
of music. I have a touch of that. Now any one would think that such a
blood, so long ago, would have spread out, been diluted, in a thick
English stock like the Pennys; or at least that we would all have had a
little, here and there. But nothing of the sort; it sinks entirely out
of sight for two or three and sometimes four generations; and then
appears solid, in one individual, as unslacked as the pure, original
thing. The last one was burned as a heretic in Mary's day; although I
believe he would have equally stayed Catholic if the affair had been the
other way around. Opposition's their breath. This boy--"
"You must not figure to yourself, Mr. Winscombe," Mrs. Penny's even
voice admirably cut in, "that the black is a word of reproach. I think
we are both at times at a loss with Howat, he is so different from us,
from the girls; but he is truly remarkable. I have an unusual affection
for him; really, his honesty is extraordinary."
He ought, he knew, either follow the others into the drawing room or
move farther away. His father's explanation repelled him; but his
mother's capital defence--it amounted to that--made it evident to him
that he should, by his presence, give her what support he could.
At the fireplace Gilbert Penny was lost in conversational depths with
Mr. Winscombe. About the opening, now closed for the introduction of a
hearth stove, were tiles picturing in gay glazes the pastoral history
of Ruth, and above the mantel a long, clear mirror held a similitude of
brilliant colour--the scarlet of Mrs. Winscombe's gown, Myrtle's azure
lutestring on a petticoat of ruffled citron spreading over her hoops and
little white kid slippers with gilt heels, Caroline's flowered Chinese
silk. The room was large and square, with a Turkey floor carpet, and
walls hung with paper printed in lavender and black perspectives from
copper plates. A great many candles had been lighted, on tables and
mantel, and in lacquer stands. One of the latter, at Mrs. Winscombe's
side, showed her features clearly.
Howat Penny saw that while she was actually no prettier than Caroline
she was infinitely more vivid and compelling. Her face held an
extraordinary potency; her bare arms and shoulders were more insistent
than his sister's; there was about her a consciousness of the allurement
of body, frankness in its employment. She made no effort to mask her
feeling, which at present was one of complete indifference to her
surroundings; and, not talking, a shadow had settled on her vision.
Caroline was seated on a little sofa across from the fireplace, and she
moved her voluminous skirt aside, made a place for him.
"Almost nothing of Annapolis," Mrs. Winscombe replied to a query of what
she had seen in Maryland. "We were there hardly two weeks, and I hadn't
recovered from the trip across the sea. When I think of returning God
knows I'd almost stay here. You wouldn't suppose one person could vent
so much. I believe Felix went to a Jockey Club, there were balls and
farces; but I kept in bed." Mrs. Penny asked, "And London--how are you
amused there now?" The other retied the bow of a garter. "Fireworks,
Roman candles to Mr. Handel's music, and Italian parties, Villeggiatura.
Covent Garden with paper lanterns among the trees, seductions--"
Gilbert Penny smote his hands on the chair arms. "This hectoring of our
commerce will have to rest somewhere!" he declared; "taking the duty
from pig iron, and then restricting its market to London, is no
conspicuous improvement. It is those enactments that provide our
currency with Spanish pieces instead of English pounds. The West Indies
are too convenient to be overlooked." Mr. Winscombe replied stiffly,
"The Government is prepared to meet infractions of its law." Mr. Penny
muttered a period about Germany in England, with a more distant echo of
Hanoverian whores and deformed firebrands. His guest sat with a harsh,
implacable countenance framed in the long shadows of his elaborate wig,
his ornate coat tails falling stiffly on either side of his chair.
Howat, bred in the comparative simplicity of the Province, found the
foppery of the aging man slightly ridiculous; yet he was aware that Mr.
Winscombe's essential character had no expression in his satin and
powder; his will was as rugged and virile as that of any adventuring
frontiersman clad in untanned hides. He was, Howat decided, at little
disadvantage with his young wife. He wondered if any deep bond bound the
two. Their personal feelings were carefully concealed, and in this they
resembled Isabel Howat, rather than Gilbert, her husband. The latter had
a habit of expressing publicly his affectionate domestic relations. And
Howat Penny decided that he vastly preferred the others' reserve.
An awkward silence had developed on top of the brief political
acerbities. There was no sound but the singing of the wood in the open
stove. Myrtle had an absent, speculative gaze; Caroline was biting her
lip; Mrs. Winscombe yawned in the face of the assembly. Gilbert Penny
suggested cards, but there was no reply. Howat left the room by a door
that opened on a rock threshold set in the lawn. The night was
immaculate, still and cold, with stars brightening in the advance of
winter. He walked about the house. The counting room of the forge was a
separate stone structure back of the kitchen; and to the right, and
farther away, was a second small building. The ground fell rapidly down
to the Forge on the water power below. He could barely discern the
towering bulk of the water wheel and roofs of the sheds.
He felt uneasy, obscurely and emotionally disturbed. Already Fanny
Gilkan seemed far away, to have dropped out of his life. He would give
some gold to the charcoal burner he had attempted to shoot. Mrs.
Winscombe annoyed him by her attitude toward Myrtle Forge, her
unvarnished air of condescension. How old was she? A few years more than
himself, he decided. The Italian hooked her into her stays. A picture of
this formed in his thoughts and dissolved, leaving behind a faint
stinging of his nerves. He recalled her bare--naked--arms ... the old
man, her husband.
She had spoken of Italian parties; he had seen a picture on a fan
labelled Villeggiatura--a simpering exquisite in a lascivious embrace
with a frail beauty on the bank of a stream, and a garland of stripped
loves reeling about a slim, diapered Harlequin. It was a different
scene, a different world, from the Province; and its intrusion in the
person of Mrs. Winscombe was like an orris-scented air moving across the
face of great trees sweeping their virginal foliage into the region of
strong and pure winds.
He was dimly conscious of the awakening in him of undivined pressures,
the stirring of attenuated yet persisting influences. He was saturated
in the space, the sheer, immense simplicity of the wild, hardly touched
by the narrow strip of inhabited coast. He had given his existence to
the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding
fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and
civilization. But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious
and far different had become sentient in his being. Italian parties, and
Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ... Trees clipped and
pruned, and gravel walks; seductions.
A falling meteor flashed a brilliant arc across the black horizon,
dropping into what illimitable wilderness? Fireworks set to the shrill
scraping of violins. One mingled with the other in his blood, fretting
him, spoiling the serene and sure vigour of youth, binding his feet to
the obscure past. Yet colouring all was the other, the black Welsh blood
of the Pennys. Ever since his boyhood he had heard the fact of his
peculiar inheritance explained, accepted. In the past he had been what
he was without thought, self-appraisal. But now he recognized an
essential difference from his family; it came over him in a feeling of
loneliness, of removal from the facile business of living in general.
For the first time he wondered about his future. It was unguarded by the
placid and safe engagements of the majority of lives. He would, he knew,
ultimately possess Myrtle Forge, a part of Shadrach, and a considerable
fortune. That was his obvious inheritance. But, suddenly, the material
thing, the actual, grew immaterial, and the visionary assumed a dark and
enigmatic reality.
Howat abruptly quitted the night of the lawn, his sombre questioning,
for the house. The candles had been extinguished in the drawing room. A
square, glass lamp hung at the foot of the stairs; and there he
encountered a man in a scratch wig, with a long nose flattened at the
end. He bowed obsequiously--a posturing figure in shirtsleeves with a
green cloth waistcoat and black legs. The Italian servant, Howat
concluded. He passed noiselessly, leaving a reek of pomatum and the
memory of a servile smile. Howat Penny experienced a strong sense of
distaste, almost depression, at the other's silent proximity. It
followed him to his room, contaminated his sleep with unintelligible
whispering, oily and disturbing gestures, and fled only at the widening
glimmer of dawn.