It was early in April, an insidiously warm morning with the ailanthus
trees in bud before the State House, when Jasper Penny left the court
room where Essie had been freed. Provision had been made for her--she
had had a severe collapse during the trial--and a feeling almost of
renewed liberty of spirit permeated Jasper, as, with his overcoat on an
arm, he turned to the left and walked over the street in the blandly
expanding mildness. A train left shortly for Jaffa, and he was bound
directly home, to Myrtle Forge, anxious to steep himself in the echo of
the trip hammer mingled with the poignant harmony of spring sounds
drifting from the farm and woods. He was possessed by a sharpened hunger
for all the--now recognized--beauty of the place of his allegiance and
birth, the serenity of the acres Gilbert Penny had beaten out of the
wild of the Province. He was astonishingly conscious of himself as a
part of the whole Penny succession, proud of Gilbert, of Howat, who had
always so engaged his fancy, of Casimir, and Daniel, his own father.
Theirs was a good heritage; their part of the earth, the ring of their
iron, his particular characteristic of a black Penny, formed a really
splendid entity.
The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than
the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long façade, 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.