Mariana, however, followed him almost immediately. She stood before him
in an informal, belted black wool sweater, a ridiculously inadequate
skirt, and the solid shoes he detested on women. But he soon forgot her
garb.
"Howat," she told him, "I have made a cowardly and terrible mistake. I
was meant to marry Jimmy, and I didn't. Perhaps I have ruined his life.
Mine will be nothing without him." They were in the middle room, and a
fire of hickory was burning in the panelled hearth. She dropped on a
chair, and sat gazing into the singing flames. Here it's all to do over,
he thought, with a feeling of weariness. "He may get along very well
with his Harriet," he remarked, resentful of his dissipated contentment.
"You know he won't," she replied sharply. "He loves me; and I love him,
Howat. I never knew how much, or how little anything else mattered,
until I was in my room, after his wedding. It wasn't a wedding, really,"
she declared. "All that doesn't make one. He'll find it out, too. Jimmy
will be desperate, and I'm afraid he will drink harder. He told me they
were getting frightfully strict about that at the Works. And there's
that reorganization; it will embitter him if he isn't made
superintendent. He has worked splendidly for it. That woman he--he went
off with is a squash," she said vindictively. "She will be in bed when
he goes away in the morning, and in crêpe de Chine negligee when he gets
back. Perhaps it won't last," she added thoughtfully.
The sense of future security generated in Howat Penny by the marriage
abruptly departed. He fumbled with his glass, directed it at Mariana.
"What do you mean by that?" he demanded. "I would go to him like a shot,
if he needed me," she coolly returned. The dreadful part of it was that
he was sure she would. "Nonsense," he asserted, hiding his concern;
"there will be no fence climbing." All this came from the letting down
of conversational bars, the confounded books he found about on tables.
Words, like everything else, had lost their meanings. In his day a bad
woman was bad, a good, likewise, good; but the Lord couldn't tell them
apart now. It was the dancing, too. Might as well be married to a man,
he thought.
Mariana was haggard, the paint on her face crudely--paint. He saw that
there were tears in her eyes, and he turned away confused, rose. The
slot in his cigarette box refused to open, and he shook it violently,
then put it back with a clatter. "Tell Rudolph you're here," he said
disjointedly; and, miserable, left the room. Dressing he stood at a
window; the west held a narrow strip of crimson light under a windy mass
of cloud. The ruin of Shadrach Furnace was sombre. Within, the room was
almost bare. There was a large, high-posted bed without drapings, a
vermilion lacquered table, dark with age, supporting a glass lamp at its
side; a set of drawers with old brass handles; a pair of stiff Adam
chairs with wheel backs; and a modern mahogany dressing case, variously
and conveniently divided, a clear mirror in the door.
The day failed rapidly, and he lit a pair of small lamps on the set of
drawers. The sun sank in no time at all. Mariana, crying. The girl ought
to go to her mother, and not come out to him, an old man, with her
intimate troubles. "A name I never repeat," Charlotte had said. That was
just like her. Small sympathy there, and no more understanding. He
knotted his tie hurriedly, askew; and gathered the ends once more. It
tired him a little to dress in the evening; often he longed to stay
relaxed, pondering, until Rudolph called him to dinner. But every day
something automatic, tyrannical, dragged him up to his room, encased him
in rigid linen, formal black. Mariana, against the fireplace, ate
listlessly; and, later, he beat her with shameful ease at sniff.
"You can't do that," he pointed out with asperity, when she
thoughtlessly joined unequal numbers. "Why not?" she asked. She must be
addled. "It's against the rule." Mariana said, "I'm tired of rules."
She always had put away the dominoes, but to-night she ignored them, and
he returned the pieces to their morocco case. She relapsed into silence
and a chair; and he sat with gaze fixed on the hickory in the fireplace,
burning to impalpable, white ash.
What a procession of logs had been there reduced to dust, warming
generations of men now cold. The thought of all those lapsed winters and
lives soothed him; the clamour of living seemed to retreat, to leave him
in a grey tranquillity. His head sank forward, and his narrow, dark
hands rested in absolute immobility on the arms of his chair. He roused
suddenly to discover that Mariana had gone up, and that there were only
some fitful, rosy embers of fire left. In November it had been his
custom to go into town for the winter; and it was time for him to make
such arrangement; but, all at once, he was overwhelmingly reluctant to
face the change, the stir, of moving. The city seemed intolerably noisy,
oppressive; the thought of the hurrying, indifferent crowds disconcerted
him. At Shadrach it was quiet, familiar, spacious. He had had enough of
excursions, strange faces, problems.... He would speak to Rudolph. Stay.