IV

The sun had almost reached the zenith before Mrs. Winscombe appeared

from her room. And at the same moment David Forsythe arrived on a spent

grey mare. He had come over the forty rough miles which separated Myrtle

Forge from the city in less than five hours. He was a year older than

Howat, but he appeared actually younger--a candid youth with high colour

and light, simply tied hair. He had, he told Howat, important messages

from his father to Mr. Winscombe. The latter and Gilbert Penny were

conversing amicably in the lower room at the right of the stairway--a

chamber with a bed that, nevertheless, was used for informal assemblage.

Mr. Winscombe wore an enveloping banian of russet brocade with deep

furred cuffs, and a turban of vermilion silk comfortably replacing a

wigged formality. Under that brilliant colour his face was as yellow as

an orange.

The written messages were delivered, and David returned to the lawn. The

day was superb--a crystal cold through which the sun's rays filtered

with a faintly perceptible glow. Caroline was standing at Howat's side,

and she gave his hand a rapid pressure as David Forsythe approached.

"Where's Myrtle?" the latter asked apparently negligently. Howat

replied, "Still in the agony of fixing her hair--for dinner; she'll be

at it again before supper." David whistled a vague tune. Caroline added,

"You've got fearfully dressy yourself, since London." He replied

appropriately, and then became more serious. "I wish," he told them,

"that we belonged to the church of England; you know the Penns have gone

back. It's pretty heavy at home after--after some other things. The

Quakers didn't use to be so infernally solemn. You should see the swells

about the Court; the greatest fun. And old George with a face like a

plum--"

"Don't you find anything here that pleases you?" Caroline demanded with

asperity.

"Myrtle's all right," he admitted; "not many of them are as pretty."

"I'll tell her you've come," Caroline promptly volunteered; "she won't

keep you waiting. There she is! No, it's Mrs. Winscombe."

She was swathed in a ruffled lilac cloak quilted with a dull gold

embroidery; satin slippers were buckled into high pattens of black

polished wood; and her head, relatively small with tight-drawn hair, was

uncovered. She was not as compelling under the sun as in candle light,

he observed. Her face, unpainted, was pale, an expression of petulance

discernible. Yet she was more potent than any other woman he had

encountered. "Isn't that the garden?" she asked, waving beyond the end

of the house. "I like gardens." She moved off in the direction

indicated; and--as he felt she expected, demanded--he followed slightly

behind.

A short, steep terrace descended to a formally planted plot, now

flowerless, enclosed by low privet hedges. There were walks of rolled

bark, and, against a lower, denser barrier, a long, white bench. The

ground still fell away beyond; and there was a sturdy orchard, cleared

of underbrush, with crimson apples among the grey limbs. Beyond, across

a low, tangled wild, an amphitheatre of hills rose against the sky,

drawn from the extreme right about the façade of the dwelling. They

seemed to enclose Myrtle Forge in a natural domain of its own; and,

actually, Gilbert Penny owned most of the acreage within that immediate

circle.

Mrs. Winscombe sank on the garden bench, where she sat with a hand

resting on either side of her. Above them a column of smoke rose from

the kitchen against the blue. A second, heavier cloud rolled up from the

Forge below. "They have been repairing the forebay," Howat explained;

"the Forge has been closed. I'm supposed to be in the counting house."

"You work?" she demanded surprised.

"At the ledger, put things down--what the men are paid, mostly in

tobacco and shoes, ozenbrigs and molasses and rum; or garters and

handkerchiefs for the women. Then I enter the pig hauled from Shadrach,

and the carriage of the blooms."

"I don't understand any of that," she announced.

"It probably wouldn't interest you; the pig's the iron cast at the

furnace. It's worked in the forges, and hammered into blooms and

anconies, chunks or stout bars of wrought iron. We do better than two

tons a week." The sound of a short, jarring blow rose from the Forge, it

was repeated, became a continuous part of the serene noon. "That's the

hammer now," he explained. "It goes usually all day and most nights.

We're used to it, don't hear it; but strangers complain."

"Mr. Forsythe said your father was an Ironmaster, one of the biggest in

the Province, and I suppose you'll become that too." She gazed about at

the hills, sheeted in scarlet and yellow, at the wide sunny hollow that

held Myrtle Forge. "Here," she added in a totally unexpected accent of

feeling, "it is very beautiful, very big. I thought all the world was

like St. James or Versailles. I've never been to Poland, my mother's

family came from there to Paris, but I'm told they have forests and such

things, too. This is different from Annapolis, that is only an echo of

London, but here--" she gazed far beyond him into the profound noon.

He recovered slowly from the surprise of her unlooked for speech,

attitude. Howat studied her frankly, leaning forward with his elbows on

his knees. Her discontent was paramount. It was deeper than he had

supposed; like his there were disturbing qualities in her blood,

qualities at a variance with the obvious part of her being. A sense of

profound intimacy with her pervaded him.

"This," she continued, "is like a cure at a Bath, a great bath of air

and light. I should like to stay, I think.... Are you content?"

"It always seemed crowded to me," he admitted. "Usually I get as far

away as possible, into the woods, the real wilderness. But you heard my

father last night--I'm a black Penny, a solitary, dark lot. You couldn't

judge from what I might feel."

"Your father and you are not sympathetic," she judged acutely. "He is

practical, solid; but it isn't easy to say, even with an explanation,

what you are. In London--but I'm sick of London. Myrtle Forge. It's

appalling at night. I'd like to go into the real wilderness, leave off

my hoops and stays, and bathe in a stream; a water nymph and you ... but

that's only Watteau again, with a cicisbeo holding my shift and

stockings. In London you'd be that, a lady's servant of love; but, in

the Province, I wonder?"

He sat half comprehending her words mingling in his brain with the

pounding of the trip hammer at the Forge, one familiar and one

unfamiliar yet not strange sound. Above them, on the lawn, he could see

Myrtle--through the middle of the day the sun had increased its

warmth--with skirts like the petals of a fabulous tea rose. The sun

glinted on the living gold of her hair and bathed an arm white as snow.

David was there no doubt. His thoughts dwelt for a moment on Caroline,

then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward

her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air

of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch

of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication,

her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on

shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly

thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him

involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had

evoked in him the night before. His instinct for preservation from any

entanglements with life lay dormant before her surrender to influences

that left her crumpled, without the slightest interest in any exterior

fact.

A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted

waistcoat announced dinner from the foot of the terrace, and they moved

slowly toward the house. There was a concerted interest in the faces

they found already about the table. Howat took his seat at his mother's

side, Gilbert Penny assisted Mrs. Winscombe. David was placed between

Caroline and Myrtle. Mr. Winscombe, again formally wigged and coated,

was absorbed in thought. He said to his hostess, "It's the uncertainty

that puts me in doubt. Ogle thought the thing thoroughly reviewed, when

now Hamilton comes out with his damned Indians and Maryland rum.

Forsythe suggests my presence in Council to-morrow, and it's barely

possible that there will be a return to Annapolis. While Ludowika--"

"I can't travel another ell over the atrocities they call roads here,"

Mrs. Winscombe declared. "I expect to die returning to England as it is,

and I won't put up with any more preliminary torment. You'll have to

leave me."

"At Myrtle Forge," Gilbert Penny added at once; "at Myrtle Forge as long

as you like. Unless," he added with a smile, "you prefer the gaiety at

Abner Forsythe's." A hot colour suffused David's cheeks.

Mr. Winscombe bowed over the table, "I am inclined to take advantage of

that. Ludowika would be the better without even Quaker gaiety for a

little." He stopped, turned toward her. "I'd like it immensely," she

replied simply. "I am sure it would give me back all that I've lost in

passage. Perhaps," she leaned forward, smiling at Howat, "I could see

something of what's behind those hills, go into the real Arcadia."

"Out there," said Mr. Penny, "are the Endless Mountains."

The faint, involuntary chill again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar

imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father--the

Endless Mountains! It brought back his doubt, his questioning, of life.

It was the inconceivable term endless, without any finality of ultimate

rest, without even the arbitrary peace of death, that appalled him. He

thought of life going on and on, with nothing consummated, nothing

achieved nor final. He thought of the black Penny who had been burned as

a heretic to ashes years before; yet Howat was conscious of the martyr's

bitter stubbornness of soul, alive, still alive and unquenched, in

himself. He wondered about the heritage to come. There was a further

belief that it followed exclusively the male line. The Pennys, like many

another comparatively obscure name, went far back into the primeval soil

of civilization. If he had no issue the endlessness might be confounded;

a fatality in his long, dangerous excursions would have vanquished the

ineradicable Welsh blood. He might have no children; yesterday he would

have made such a decision; but now he was less sure of himself, of his

power to will. He was dimly conscious of vast exterior forces and

traitorous factors within. It was as if momentarily he had been lifted

to a cloud beyond time, from which he saw the entire, stumbling progress

of humanity, its beginning hid in humid mist, moving into a nocturnal

shadow like a thunder bank.

He sat with chin on breast and sombre eyes until his mother laid her

hand on his shoulder. "Howat," she protested, "you are too glum for the

comfort of any one near you. I think you must make a pose of being

black. I'd almost called one of the servants to fiddle in your ear."

Howat smiled at her; he returned slowly to the actual, the particular.

Mr. Winscombe had pushed back his chair, excusing himself in the

pressure of necessary preparations. His wife disappeared with him,

leaving behind the echo of a discussion about Cecco, the Italian

servant. The women followed, with David at Myrtle's shoulder, leaving

Howat and Gilbert Penny.

The latter was still a handsome man, with his own hair silvered on a

ruddy countenance, and a careful taste in clothes. His nose was

predominant, with a wide-cleft mouth above a square chin. "I had

thought," he said deliberately, "that you were employed in the counting

house, but Schwar tells me that it has been a week since you were seen

there." He raised a broad hand to silence Howat's reply. "While I can

afford to keep you merely at hunting, the result to the table is so

meagre that I'm not justified. There is no St. James here, in

Pennsylvania, no gentlemen supported by the Crown for the purpose of

amusement. You will have to sail for England if you expect that sort of

thing." He rose, "You owe an intelligent interest in Myrtle Forge, to

your sisters and mother, toward all that I have accomplished. It's a

rich property, and it's growing bigger. Already young Forsythe has a

list of improvements to be instituted at the Furnace--clerks and a

manager and new system for carrying on the blast."

"I'm not an iron man," Howat Penny told him, "I'm not a clerk. David

can take all that over for you, particularly if he marries one of the

girls."

"What are you?" the elder demanded sharply.

"You ought to know. You explained it fully enough to the Winscombes."

"If it wasn't for that you'd have been dumping slag five years ago. What

I hoped was that with maturity some sense of obligation would be born

into you. What is this pretended affection for your mother worth if you

are unwilling to conserve, make safe, her future, in case I die?" All

that his father said was logical, just; but it only brought him a

renewed sense of his impotence before very old and implacable inner

forces.

"I'll try again," he briefly agreed. "But I warn you, it will do little

good. There is no pretence in the affection you spoke of, but--but

something stronger--" he gave up as hopeless the effort to explain all

that had swept through his mind.

Gilbert Penny abruptly left the room.

It transpired that the Italian servant was to be left at Myrtle Forge;

he was now assisting the servants in strapping a box behind the chaise

that was to carry Mr. Winscombe and David to the city. Howat pictured

the long, supple hands of the Italian hooking Mrs. Winscombe into her

clothes, and a sudden, hot revulsion clouded his brain. When the

carriage had gone, and he stood in the contracted space of the counting

room, before a long, narrow forge book open on a high desk, he was still

conscious of a strong repulsion. It was idiotic to let such an

insignificant fact as the Winscombes' man persistently annoy him. But,

in a manner entirely unaccountable, this Cecco had become a symbol of

much that was dark, potentially threatening, in his conjectures.

The hammer fell with a full reiteration through the afternoon; the sun,

at a small window, shifted a dusty bar across inkpots and quills and

desk to a higher corner. He could hear the dull turning of the wheel and

the thin, irregular splash of falling water. Other sounds rose at

intervals--the tramping of mules dragging pig iron from Shadrach, the

rumble of its deposit by the Forge. Emanuel Schwar entered with a piece

of paper in his hand. "Eleven hundred weight of number two," he read;

"at six pounds, and a load of charcoal. Jonas Hupp charged with three

pairs of woollen stockings, and shoes for Minnie, four shillings more."

Howat mechanically entered the enumerated items, his distaste for such a

petty occupation mounting until it resembled a concrete power forcing

him outside into the mellow end of the day. A figure darkened the

doorway; it was Caroline. "I hardly saw him," she declared hotly.

"Myrtle hung like a sickly flower in his buttonhole." Her hoops

flattened as she made her way through the narrow entrance. "There's one

thing about Myrtle," she continued, "she's frightfully proper in her

narrow little ideas. Myrtle's a prude. And I promise you I won't be if I

get a chance at David." She stood with vivid, parted lips, bright eyes;

almost, Howat thought, charming. Such a spirit in Caroline amazed him;

he hadn't conceived of its presence. He recognized a phase of his own

contempt for customary paths, accepted limitations and proprieties.

"Remember David's Quaker training," he told her in his habitual air of

jest. "David's been to London," she replied. "I saw him pinch the

Appletofft girl at the farm."

Again in his room, he changed into more formal clothes than on the

evening previous; he did this without a definite, conscious purpose; it

was as if his attitude of mind required a greater suavity of exterior.

He wore a London waistcoat, a gift from his mother, of magenta worked

with black petals and black stone buttons; his breeches were without a

wrinkle, and the tails of his coat, even if they were not wired like

those David was said to have brought from England, had a not

unsatisfactory swing.

At supper Mrs. Winscombe sat at his left, Caroline and Myrtle had taken

their customary places opposite, the elders had not been disturbed. Mrs.

Winscombe had resumed the animation vanished at noon. She wore green and

white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat shirred cap tied under her

chin. The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented

mist. He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of

her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk. She was

talking to Myrtle about the Court. "I am in waiting with the Princess

Amelia Sophia," she explained; "I have her stockings. There is a

frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel

bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another."

Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips. "It's

into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron," he asserted. Ludowika

Winscombe studied him. "In England," she said, "the American provinces

are supposed to lie hardly beyond the Channel, but here England seems to

be at the other end of the world." Myrtle added, "I'd like it

immensely."

And Howat thought of Ludowika--he thought of her tentatively as

Ludowika--in the brilliant setting of tropical silks and birds.

He considered the change that had overtaken his father, English born, in

the quarter century he had lived in America; the strong allegiance

formed to ideas fundamentally different from those held at St. James;

and he wondered if such a transformation would operate in Ludowika if

she could remain in the Province. It was a fantastic query, and he

impatiently dismissed it, returning to the contemplation of his mother's

problematic happiness. He determined to question the latter if a

permissible occasion arose; suddenly his interest had sharpened toward

her mental situation. He compared the two women, what he could

conjecture about Isabel Howat and Ludowika Winscombe; but something

within him, automatic and certain, whispered that no comparison was

possible. His mother possessed a quality of spirit that he had never

found elsewhere; he could see, in spite of their resemblance of blood

and position, that the elder could never have been merely provocative.

Such distinctions, he divined, were the result of qualities mysterious

and deeply concealed. Love, that he had once dismissed as the principle

of blind procreation, became more complex, enigmatic. He had no

increased desire to experience it, with the inevitable loss of personal

liberty; but he began to be conscious of new depths, unexpected

complications, in human relationship.

He was not so sure of himself.

They had moved to the less formal of the rooms used as places of

gathering. The bed in a corner was hung in blue shalloon over ruffled

white muslin, and there was blue at the windows. Against the wall a

clavichord, set aside as obsolete, raised its dusky red ebony box on

grooved legs. Myrtle was seated at it picking out an air from

Belshazzar. She held each note in a silvery vibration that had the

fragility of old age. Ludowika was by the fire, quartered across a

corner; there was no stove, and the wood burning in the opening sent out

frequent, pungent waves of smoke. She coughed and cursed. "Positively,"

she declared, "I'll turn salt like a smoked herring."

She rose, her gaze resting on Howat. "I must go out," she continued;

"breathe." He was strangely reluctant to accompany her, his feet were

leaden. Nevertheless, in a few moments he found himself at her side on

the lawn. Her sophistication had again disappeared, beneath the stars

drawn across the hills, over Myrtle Forge. There was a pause in the

hammering below. "Take me down there," she commanded.

He led the way on a beaten path that dropped sharply to a bridge of hewn

logs crossing the spent water. The Forge, a long shed following the

stream, was open on the opposite side; an enclosure of ruddy, vaporous

gloom with pools of molten colour, clangorous sounds. The bubbling,

white cores of three raised and hooded hearths were incessantly agitated

with long rods by blackened and glistening shapes. At intervals a

flushing rod was withdrawn from a fire and plunged in a trough of water;

a cloud of ghostly steam arose, a forgeman's visage momentarily

illuminated like a copper mask. A grimy lantern was hung above the

anvil, its thin light falling on the ponderous head of the trip hammer

suspended at right angles from a turning cogged shaft projection through

the wall.

The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an

obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat,

drum bellows. The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies,

herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with

hooked bars. An incandescent mass was lifted, born, rayed in an

intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and,

as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the

blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks

dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The

hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like

gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals,

heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.

The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.

The hammering continued.

A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of

hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped

Howat. He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride

of Myrtle Forge, of his father's fibre--the iron of his character like

the iron he successfully wrought. He could grasp Gilbert Penny's

accomplishment here, take fire at its heroic quality; a thing he found

impossible in the counting room above, recording such trivial details as

wool stockings for Jonas Rupp. He could be a forgeman, he thought, but

never a clerk; and in that limitation he realized that he was inferior

to his father. There were aspects of himself beyond such discipline and

control.

Ludowika Winscombe grasped his arm. "Come away," she begged; "it's--it's

savage, like Vulcan and dreadful, early legends." She hurried him,

clinging to his arm, over the ascent to the orderly lawn, the tranquil

shine of candle-lit windows. There, with her hood fallen from her head,

she sat on a stone step.

"You frighten me, a little," she confessed. "Are you at all like--like

that below inside of you? I have a feeling that you might be. If you

were one of the men about Vauxhall you'd be kissing me now ... if I

liked you. But, although I do like you, I wouldn't kiss you for an

emerald buckle." He recognized that she spoke seriously; her voice bore

no connective suggestion. Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than

little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased. Yet the

idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts. He

considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was

conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense of her bodily

seductiveness.

At the same time an obscure uneasiness, rebellion, possessed him; it was

the old, familiar feeling of revolt, of distaste for imprisoning

circumstance. It came to him acutely, almost as if a voice had whispered

in his ear, warning him, urging him into the wild, to escape threatening

catastrophe. He determined to leave Myrtle Forge in the morning, to

return to the stream he had followed into the serene heart of the woods.

There he would stay until--until Ludowika Winscombe had gone. Howat had

no especial sense of danger from her; only for the moment she typified

the entire world of trivial artifice. He gazed at her with a conscious

detachment possible because of the rarity in his existence of such

figures as hers.

She had risen, and her cloak fallen upon the grass. Howat could see her

face beneath hair faintly powdered with silver dust and the ruffled

patch of white tied pertly under her chin. Her smoothly turning

shoulders, filmed in lawn, and low bodice crowned an extravagant

circumference of ruffled silk and rosettes. Against the night of the

Province, the invisible but felt presence of immutable hills, she was

like a puppet, a grotesque figure of comedy. He regarded her sombrely

from the step, his chin cupped in a hand.

But, again, she surprised him, speaking entirely out of the character he

had assigned her, in a spirit that seemed utterly incongruous, but which

was yet warm with conviction. "I want to explain a great deal to you,"

she said, "that really isn't explainable. It isn't sensible, and yet it

is the strongest feeling I remember. It's about here and you and me. You

can't picture my life, and so you don't know how strange this is, how

different from all I've ever lived.

"I think I told you I was born in Paris--you see some of us came to

France when Louis took a Polish princess, and there my mother married an

English gentleman. Well, it was always the Court, in France and in

England. Always the Court--do you know what that means? It's a place

where women are pretty pink and white candies that men are always

picking over. It's a great bed with a rose silk counterpane and closed

draperies. Champagne and music and scent and masques. Little plays with

the intrigue in the audience; favours behind green hedges. I was in it

when I was fourteen, and I had a lover the first year. He showed me how

to make pleasure. Don't think that I was indifferent to this," she added

directly; "that I wanted to escape it. I wasn't; I didn't. Only beneath

everything I had a feeling of not being completely satisfied; I

wanted--oh, not very strongly--something else, for an hour. At times the

air seemed choking; and inside of me, but not in my body, I seemed

choking too. I used to think about the Polish forests, and that would

help a little."

She resumed the place at his side, with her silk billowing against his

knee. "This is it," she declared, her face set against the illimitable,

still dark. "I recognized it only a little while ago. I think

unconsciously I came to America hoping to find it; there was nothing at

Annapolis, but here--" she drew a breath as deep, he noted, as her stays

would permit. "It includes you, somehow," she continued; "as if you were

the voice. What I said coming away from the Forge, about dreading you,

was only momentary. I have another feeling, premonition--" she broke

off, her manner changed. "All the Court believes in signs: Protestantism

and vampires.

"It seems unreal here; I mean St. James and all that was so

tremendously important; incredibly stupid--the Princess Amelia's

stockings. But you can't imagine the jealousy. Every bit of it shall go

out of my thoughts. You'll help me, a harmless magic. I'll be as simple

as that girl across the road, with the red cheeks, in a single slip. You

must call me Ludowika; Ludowika and Howat. I'm not so terribly old, only

twenty-nine."

"I am going away to-morrow," he informed her; "I won't be back before

you leave."

A slight frown gathered about her eyes. Her face was very close to his.

"But I don't like that either," she replied. "You were to be a part of

it, its voice; excursions in the woods. Is it necessary, your absence?"

He knew that it was not; and suddenly he was seized with the conviction

that he would not go. It was as if, again, a voice outside him had

informed him of the fact. But if there were no reason for his going

there was as little for his remaining at Myrtle Forge; that was, so far

as Ludowika Winscombe was concerned. He had been untouched by all that

she had said; untouched except for a faint involuntary shiver as she had

spoken of premonition. And that had vanished instantaneously. There was

his duty in the counting house. But he was forced to admit to himself

the insufficiency of that reason; it was too palpably false.

He had not been moved by the intent of what she had said, but his

imagination had been stirred, as if by the touch of delicate, pointed

fingers, at her description of Court--a bed with a silk counterpane ...

behind clipped greenery. He recalled the fan with its painted

Villeggiatura, the naked, wanton loves. "Something different," she half

repeated, with a sigh, an accent, of longing. Howat heard her with

impatience; it was absurd to try to picture her tramping in the

wilderness, breaking her way hour after hour through thorned underbrush,

like Fanny Gilkan. She wouldn't progress a hundred yards in her unsteady

pattens and fragile clothes.

Suddenly the Italian servant appeared absolutely noiselessly at her

side, speaking a ridiculous, oily gibberish. "At once," she replied. She

turned to Howat. "My bed has been prepared. Are you going to-morrow?"

"No," he answered awkwardly. She turned and left without further words.

The servant walked behind her, resembling an unnatural shadow.

The metallic clamour at the anvil rose and fell, diminished by the

interposed bulk of the dwellings, ceaselessly forging the Penny iron,

the Penny gold. He thought of himself as metal under the hammer; or

rather ore at the furnace: he hadn't run clear in the casting; there

were bubbles, bubbles and slag. Endless refinements--first the furnace

and then the forge and then the metal. A contempt for the lesser degrees

possessed him, for a flawed or clumsy forging, for weakness of the

flesh, the fatality of easy surrender. An overwhelming, passionate

emotion swept him to his feet, clenched his hands, filled him with a

numbing desire to reach the last purification.

The mood sank into an inexplicable nostalgia; he dragged the back of a

hand impatiently across his vision. His persistent indifference, the

inhibition that held him in a contemptuous isolation, again possessed

him, Howat, a black Penny. A last trace of his emotion, caught in the

flood of his paramount disdain, vanished like a breath of warm mist. He

entered the house and mounted to his room; the stairs creaked but that

was the only sound audible within. His candles burned without their

protecting glasses in smooth, unwavering flames. When they were

extinguished the darkness flowed in and blotted out familiar objects,

folded him in a cloak of invisibility, obliterated him in sleep. As he

lost consciousness he heard the trip hammer dully beating out Penny

iron, Penny gold; beating out, too, the Penny men ... Slag and metal and

ruffled muslin, roman candles and stars.

V

There came to him in the counting house, the following afternoon,

rumours and echoes of the day's happenings. David Forsythe had arrived

after dinner, and there had been word from Mr. Winscombe; he would be

obliged to return to Maryland, and trusted that Ludowika would not be an

onerous charge. David was to take Myrtle and Caroline back with him to

the city, for an exemplary Quaker party. "There's no good asking you,"

he told Howat, lounging in the door of the counting room. David was

flushed, his sleeve coated with dust. "Caroline," he exclaimed, "is as

strong as a forgeman; she upset me on the grass as quickly as you

please, hooked her knee behind me, and there I was. She picked me up,

too, and laughed at me," he stopped, lost in thought. "Myrtle's really

beautiful," he said again; "Caroline's not a thing to look at, and yet,

do you know, a--a man looks at her. She is wonderfully graceful."

Howat gave Caroline the vigorous stamp of his brotherly approval. "She

understands a lot, for a girl," he admitted. "Of course Myrtle's a

particular peach, but I'd never go to her if a buckle--" he stopped

abruptly as Myrtle appeared at David's side. "Isn't he industrious?"

she said indifferently. "You'd never guess how father's at him. Have you

heard, Howat--Mrs. Winscombe will be here perhaps a month. It's a wonder

you haven't gone away, you are so frightfully annoyed by people. Last

night you were with her over an hour on the lawn. I could see that

father thought it queer; but I explained to him that court women never

thought of little things like, well, husbands."

Howat gazed at her coldly, for the first time conscious that he actually

disliked Myrtle. He made up his mind, definitely, to assist Caroline as

far as possible. She was absurd, criticizing Mrs. Winscombe. "Where," he

demanded, "did you get all that about courts? And your sudden, tender

interest in husbands? That's new, too. You're not thinking of one for

yourself, are you? He'd never see you down in the morning."

A bright, angry colour flooded her cheeks. "You are as coarse as

possible," she declared. "I'm sure I wish you'd stay away altogether

from Myrtle Forge; you've never been anything but a bother." She left

abruptly. "Sweet disposition." Howat grinned. "You are seeing family

life as it's actually lived." Later his thoughts returned to what she

had said about Ludowika Winscombe; he recalled the latter's speech,

seated on the doorstep; some stuff about a premonition. Myrtle had

suggested that he was interested in her. What ridiculous nonsense! If

his father said anything on that score the other would discover that he

was no longer a boy. Besides, such insinuations were a breach of

hospitality. How Mrs. Winscombe would laugh at them if she suspected

Myrtle's cheap folly.

She had asked him to call her Ludowika. He decided that he would; really

he couldn't get out of it now. It would do no harm. Ludowika! It was a

nice name; undoubtedly Polish. He thought again about what she had said

of Polish forests, the dissatisfaction that had followed her for so many

years. A lover at fourteen. A surprising sentence formed of itself in

his brain.--She had never had a chance. That pasty court life had

spoiled her. It had no significance for himself; he was simply revolving

a slightly melancholy fact.

Felix Winscombe was a sere figure, yet he was extraordinarily full of a

polished virility, rapier-like. Howat could see the dark, satirical face

shadowed by the elaborate wig, the rigid figure in precise, foppish

dress. He heard Winscombe's slightly harsh, dominant voice. His position

in England was, he knew, secure, high. Ludowika had been very sensible

in marrying him. That was the way, Howat Penny told himself, that

marriage should be consummated. He would never marry. David Schwar

appeared with a sheaf of papers, which he himself proceeded to docket,

and Howat left the counting room.

He met Ludowika almost immediately; she advanced more simply dressed

than he had ever seen her before. She pointed downward to the water

flashing over the great, turning wheel. "Couldn't we walk along the

rill? There's a path, and it's beautiful in the shadow." The stream

poured solid and green through the narrow, masoned course of the

forebay, sweeping in a lucent arc over the lip of the fall. An earthen

path followed the artificial channel through a dense grove of young

maples, seeming to hold the sun in their flame-coloured foliage. Myrtle

Forge was lost, the leaves shut out the sky; underfoot some were already

dead. The wilderness marched up to the edges of the meagre clearings.

Ludowika walked ahead, without speech; irregular patches of ruddy light

slid over her flared skirt. Suddenly she stopped with an exclamation;

the trees opened before them on the broad Canary sweeping between flat

rocks, banks bluely green. Above, the course was broken, swift; but

where they stood it was tranquil again, and crystal clear. Yellow rays

plunging through the unwrinkled surface gilded the pebbles on the

shallower bottom. A rock, broad and flat, extended into the stream by

the partial, diagonal dam that turned the water into Myrtle Forge; and

Ludowika found a seat with her slippers just above the current. Howat

Penny sat beside her, then dropped back on the rocks, his hands clasped

behind his head.

A silence intensified by the whispering stream enveloped them. He

watched a hawk, diminutive on the pale immensity above. "Heavens,"

Ludowika finally spoke, "how wonderful ... just to sit, not to be

bothered by--by things. Just to hear the water. Far away," she said

dreamily; "girl."

From where he lay he could see her arms, beautiful and bare, lost in

soft Holland above the elbows; he could see the roundness of her body

above the lowest of stays. Suddenly she fascinated him; he visualized

her sharply, as though for the first time--a warm, intoxicating entity.

He was profoundly disturbed, and sat erect; the stream, the woods,

blurred in his vision. He felt as if his heart had been turned

completely over in his body; the palms of his hands were wet. He had a

momentary, absurd impulse to run, beyond Shadrach Furnace, beyond any

distance he had yet explored, farther even than St. Xavier. Ludowika

Winscombe gazed in serene, unconscious happiness before her. He felt

that his face was crimson, and he rose, moved to the water's edge, his

back toward her. He was infuriated at a trembling that passed over him,

damned it in a savage and inaudible whisper.

What particularly appalled him was the fact that his overmastering

sensation came without the slightest volition of his own. He had had

nothing to do with it, his will was powerless. He was betrayed like a

fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a

concealed, traitor inside. In an instant he had been invaded, his being

levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown. He thought even that he heard a

dull crash, as if something paramount had irremediably fallen,

something that should have been maintained at any cost, until the end of

life.

Howat felt a sudden hatred of his companion; but that quickly

evaporated; he discovered that she had spread, like a drop of carmine in

a goblet of water, through his every nerve. By God, but she had become

himself! In the space of a breath she was in his blood, in his brain;

calling his hands about her, toward her smooth, beautiful arms. She was

the scent in his nostrils, the sound a breeze newly sprung up stirred

out of the leaves. A profound melancholy spread over him, a deep

sadness, a conviction of loss. Ludowika was singing softly:

"Last Sunday at St. James's prayers

--dressed in all my whalebone airs."

He had come on disaster. The realization flashed through his

consciousness and was engulfed in the submerging of his being in the

overwhelming, stinging blood that had swept him from his old security.

Yet he had been so detached from the merging influences about him, his

organization had been so complete in its isolation, his egotism so

developed, that a last trace of his entity lingered sentient, viewing as

if from a careened but still tenable deck the general submergence. His

thoughts returned to the automatic operation of the consummation

obliterating his person, the inexorable blind movement of the thing in

which he had been caught, dragged into the maw of a supreme purpose. It

was, of course, the law of mere procreation which he had before

contemptuously recognized and dismissed; a law for animals; but he was

no longer entirely an animal. Already he had considered the possibility

of an additional force in the directing of human passion, founded on

something beyond the thirst of flesh, founded perhaps on soaring

companionships, on--on--The condition, the term, he was searching for

evaded him.

He thought of the word love; and he was struck by the vast inaccuracy of

that large phrase. It meant, Howat told himself, literally nothing: what

complex feeling Isabel Penny might have for her husband, Caroline's

frank desire for David Forsythe, Myrtle's meagre emotion, Fanny Gilkan's

sense of Hesa and life's necessary compromises, his own collapse--all

were alike called love. It was not only a useless word but a dangerous

falsity. It had without question cloaked immense harm, pretence; it had

perpetuated old lies, brought them plausibly, as if in a distinguished

and reputable company, out of past superstitions and credulity; the real

and the meaningless, the good and the evil, hopelessly confused.

They were seated at supper, four of them only; Isabel and Gilbert Penny,

and, opposite him, Ludowika. Occasionally he would glance at her,

surreptitiously; his wrists would pound with an irregular, sultry

circulation; longing would harass him like the beating of a club. She,

it seemed to him, grew gayer, younger, more simple, every hour.

Happiness, peace, radiated in her gaze, the gestures of her hands. Howat

wondered at what moment he would destroy it. Reprehensible. A moment

must come--soon--when emotion would level his failing reserve, his

falling defences. He thrilled at the thought of the inevitable

disclosure. Would she fight against it, deny, satirize his tumult; or

surrender? He couldn't see clearly into that; he didn't care. Then he

wondered about the premonition of which she had spoken, deciding to ask

her to be more explicit.

An opportunity occurred later. Gilbert Penny had gone down to the Forge

store, his wife had disappeared. Ludowika Winscombe and Howat were

seated in the drawing room. Only a stand of candles was lit at her

elbow; her face floated like a pale and lovely wafer against the

billowing shadows of the chamber. The wood on the iron hearth was

charring without flame. He questioned her bluntly, suddenly, out of a

protracted silence. She regarded him speculatively, delaying answer.

Then, "I couldn't tell you like this, now; it would be too silly; you

would laugh at me. I hadn't meant to say even what I did. I'd prefer to

ignore it."

"What did you mean, what premonition came to you?" he insisted crudely.

She seemed to draw away from him, increase in years and an attitude of

tolerant amusement. Only an immediate reply would save them, he

realized. He leaned forward unsteadily, with clenched hands. "I warned

you," she proceeded lightly; "and if you do laugh my pride will suffer."

In spite of her obvious determination to speak indifferently her voice

grew serious, "I had a feeling that you mustn't kiss me, that

this--America, the Province, Myrtle Forge, you, were for something

different. You see, I had always longed for a peculiar experience,

release, and when it came, miraculously, I thought, it must not be

spoiled, turned into the old, old thing. That was all. It was in my

spirit," she added almost defiantly, as if that claim might too be

susceptible of derision.

He settled back into his chair, turning upon her a gloomy vision.

Whatever penalty threatened them, he knew, must fall. Nothing existing

could keep him from it. He felt a fleet sorrow for her in the inevitable

destruction of the release for which she had so long searched, her new

peace, so soon to be smashed. All sorrow for himself had gone under.

Isabel Penny returned to the drawing room, and moved about, her flowered

silk at once gay and obscure in the semidarkness. "The fire, Howat," she

directed; "it's all but out." He stirred the logs into a renewed blaze.

A warm gilding flickered over Ludowika; she smiled at him, relaxed,

content. He was surprised that she could not see the tumultuous feeling

overpowering him. He had heard that women were immediately aware of

such emotion. But he realized that she had been lulled into a false

sense of security, of present immunity from "the old, old thing," by her

own placidity. He did not know when his mother left the room. He

wondered continuously when it would happen, when the bolt would fall,

what she would do. Howat was hot and cold, and possessed by a subtle

sense of improbity, a feeling resembling that of a doubtful advance

through the dark, for a questionable end. This was the least part of

him, insignificant; his passion grew constantly stronger, more brutal.

In a last, vanishing trace of his superior consciousness he recognized

that the thing must have happened to him as it did; it was the price of

his more erect pride, his greater contempt, his solitary and unspent

state.

She rose suddenly and announced that she was about to retire. It saved

them for the moment, for that day; he muttered something

incomprehensible and she was gone.

Isabel Penny returned and took Mrs. Winscombe's place before the fire.

She spoke trivially, at random intervals. A great longing swept over him

to tell his mother everything, try to find an escape in her wise

counsel; but his emotion seemed so ugly that he could not lay it before

her. Besides, he had a conviction that it would be hopeless: he was

gone. She was discussing Ludowika now. "Really," she said, "they seem

very well matched, a good arrangement." She was referring, he realized,

to the Winscombes' experience. He never thought of Felix Winscombe as

married, Ludowika's husband; he had ceased to think of him at all. The

present moment banished everything else. "She has a quality usually

destroyed by life about a Court," the leisurely voice went on; "she

seems quite happy here, for a little, in a way simple. But, curiously

enough, she disturbs your father. He can't laugh with her as he usually

does with attractive women."

It was natural, Howat thought, that Gilbert Penny should be uneasy

before such a direct reminder of the setting from which he had taken

Isabel Howat. It was a life, memories, in which the elder had no part;

that consciousness dictated a part of his father's bitterness toward St.

James, the Royal Government. But Gilbert Penny had never had serious

reason to dread it. His wife had left it all behind, permanently,

without, apparently, a regret. He had a sudden, astonishing community of

feeling with the older man; a momentary dislike of St. James,

Versailles, the entire, treacherous, silk mob. A lover at fourteen!

Howat damned such a betrayal with a bitterness whose base lay deeply

buried in sex jealousy.

"I am glad," the other continued, "that you are not susceptible; I

suppose you'll be off hunting in a day or more; Mrs. Winscombe is bright

wine for a young man. Women like her play at sensation, like eating

figs." He thought contemptuously what nonsense was talked in connection

with feminine intuition; it was nothing more than a polite chimera,

like all the other famous morals and inhibitions supposed to serve and

direct mankind.

He wondered once more about his mother, what the course of her life had

been--happily occupied, filled, or merely self-contained, hiding much in

a deep, even flow? Her head was turned away from him, and he could see

the girlish profile, the astonishing illusion of youth renewed. Howat

wanted to ask her how she had experienced, well--love, since there was

no other word. It had come to her quickly, he knew; her affair with

Gilbert Penny had been headlong, or else it would not have been at all;

yet he felt she had not been the victim of such a tyranny as mastered

himself. But, perhaps, after all, secretly, every one was--just

animal-like. He repudiated this firmly, at once. He himself had felt

that he was not entirely animal.

"The girls," Isabel Penny said, "will be gallopading now. Myrtle has a

new dress, her father gave it to her, an apricot mantua."

"He's really idiotic about Myrtle," Howat declared irritably. His mother

glanced swiftly at him. She made no comment. "Now Caroline! It's

Caroline who ought to marry David Forsythe."

"Such things must fall out as they will."

God, that was true enough, terribly true! He rose and strode into the

farther darkness of the drawing room, returning to the fireplace,

marching away again. He saw the white glimmer of Ludowika's arms; he

had a vision of her tying the broad ribbon about her rounded, silken

knee. "... a man now," his mother's voice was distant, blurred.

"Responsibilities; your father--" He had heard this before without being

moved; but suddenly the words had a new actuality; he was a man now,

that was to say he stood finally, irrevocably, alone, beyond assistance,

advice. He had never heeded them; he had gone a high-handed, independent

way, but the others had been there; unconsciously he had been aware of

them, even counted on them. Now they had vanished.

Caroline and Myrtle, bringing David with them again, returned on the

following morning. It seemed to Howat that the former was almost lovely;

she had a gayer sparkle, a clearer colour, than he had ever seen her

possess before. On the other hand, Myrtle was dull; the dress, it

seemed, had not been the unqualified success she had hoped for.

Something newer had arrived in the meantime from London. Ludowika, it

developed, had one of the later sacques in her boxes; but that, she said

indifferently, must be quite dead now. It seemed to Howat that she too

regarded Myrtle without enthusiasm. Ludowika and Myrtle had had very

little to say to each other; Myrtle studied Mrs. Winscombe's apparel

with a keen, even belligerent, eye; the other patronized the girl in a

species of half absent instruction.

The sky was flawless, leaden blue; the sunlight fell in an enveloping

flood over the countryside, but it was pale, without warmth. There was

no wind, not a leaf turned on the trees--a sinuous sheeting of the

country-side like red-gold armour. But Howat knew that at the first stir

of air the leaves would be in stricken flight, the autumn accomplished.

Caroline dragged him impetuously down into the garden, among the brown,

varnished stems of the withered roses, the sere, dead ranks of scarlet

sage. "He hugged me," she told him; "I was quite breathless. It was in a

hall, dark; but he didn't say anything. What do you think?" There was

nothing definite that he might express; and he patted her shoulder. He

had a new kinship with Caroline; Howat now understood her tempest of

feeling, concealed beneath her commonplace daily aspect.

Myrtle and David joined them, and he left, resumed his place at the high

desk in the counting house. Strangely his energy of being communicated

itself to the prosaic work before him. It was, he suddenly felt,

important for him to master the processes of Myrtle Forge; it would not

do for him to remain merely irresponsible, a juvenile appendage to the

Penny iron. He would need all the position, the weight, he could assume;

and money of his own. He found a savage pleasure in recording every

detail put before him. He compared the value of pig metal, the cost of

charcoal, wages, with the return of the blooms and anconies they shipped

to England. Howat experienced his father's indignation at the manner in

which London limited the Province's industries. For the first time he

was conscious of an actual interest in the success of Myrtle Forge, a

personal concern in its output. He had always visualized it as

automatically prosperous, a cause of large, inexact pride; but now it

was all near to him; he considered the competition rapidly increasing

here, and the jealous menace over seas.

His final trace of careless youth had gone; he felt the advent of the

constant apprehension that underlies all maturity, a sense of the

proximity of blind accident, evil chance, disaster. At last he was

opposed to life itself, with an immense stake to gain, to hold; in the

midst of a seething, treacherous conflict arbitrarily ended by death.

There was no cringing, absolutely no cowardice, in him. He was glad that

it was all immediately about him; he was arrogant in pressing forward to

take what he wanted from existence. He forgot all premonitions, doubt

was behind him; he no longer gauged the value of his desire for Ludowika

Winscombe. She was something he would, had to, have.

David Forsythe sat across the back of a chair in Howat's room as the

latter dressed in the rapidly failing light. David had smuggled his

London coat with the wired tails out to Myrtle Forge, and had the

stiffened portion now spread smoothly out on either side. His cheerful,

freshly-coloured face was troubled; he seemed constantly on the point of

breaking into speech without actually becoming audible. Howat was

thinking of Ludowika. It would happen to-night, he knew. He was at once

apprehensive and glad.

"You knew," David ventured finally, "that I'm supposed to ask Myrtle to

marry me. That is, your father and mine hoped I would. Well," he drew a

deep breath, "I don't think I shall. Of course, she is one of the

prettiest girls any one ever saw, and she's quite bright--it's wonderful

what she has picked up about the Furnace, but yet--" his speech suddenly

ran out. With an effort Howat brought himself back from his own vastly

more important concern. "Yes?" he queried, pausing with his fingers in

the buttonholes of a mulberry damask coat. "I have decided to choose, to

act, for myself," David announced; "this is a thing where every man must

be absolutely free.--Caroline can have me if she likes."

Howat could not avoid a momentary, inward flicker of amusement at David

Forsythe's absolute freedom of choice. He felt infinitely older than the

other, wiser in the circuitous mysteries of being. He pounded David on

the back, exclaimed, "Good!"

"I don't know whether to speak to Abner," the other proceeded

unfilially, "or the great Penny first. I don't care too much for either

job. It would be pleasanter to go to Caroline. I have an idea she

doesn't exactly dislike me."

"Perhaps I oughtn't to tell you," Howat replied gravely; "but Caroline

thinks a lot of you. She has admitted it to me--"

David Forsythe danced agilely about the more serious figure; he kicked

Howat gaily from behind, ironically patted his cheek. "Hell's buttons!"

he cried. "Why didn't you tell me that before? You cast iron ass! I'll

marry Caroline if I have to take her to a charcoal burner's hut. She

would go, too."

Howat Penny gripped the other's shoulder, faced him with grim

determination. "Do you fully realize that Myrtle Forge, Shadrach, will

be us? They will be ours and our wives' and childrens'. We must stand

together, David, whatever happens, whatever we may, personally, think.

The iron is big now, but it is going to be great. We mustn't fail, fall

apart. We'll need each other; there's going to be trouble, I think."

David put out his hand. "I didn't know you felt like that, Howat," he

replied, the effervescent youth vanished from him too. "It's splendid.

We'll hammer out some good blooms together. And for the other, nothing

shall ever make a breach between us."