The following day Howat Penny was both weary and irritable. Mariana
declared, remorsefully, that she had selfishly dragged him away from
Shadrach; and proposed countless trivial amends, which he fretfully
blocked. He had no intention of affording her such a ready escape from a
sense, he hoped, of error and responsibility. Before dinner, however, he
found himself walking with her over the deep green sod that reached to
the public road below. A mock orange hedge enclosed his lawn, bounding
the cross roads, the upper course leading to Myrtle Forge; and beyond
they passed, on the left, the collapsed stone walls and fallen shingles
of what, evidently, had been a small blacksmith's shed. Farther along
they came to the sturdy shell of an old, single-room building, erected,
perhaps, when Shadrach Furnace was new, with weeds climbing through the
rotten floor, and a fragment of steps, rising to the mouldering peak of
a loft, still clinging to a wall.
Without definite purpose they turned from the public way into an
overgrown path, banked with matted blackberry bushes, and were soon
facing the remains of the Furnace. It had been solidly constructed of
unmasoned stone, bound by iron rods, and its bulk was largely unaffected
by time. The hearth had fallen in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the
blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from
the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations
could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls
survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill,
and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and
the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut
stone and wood with its living greenery. Farther down a pathlike level
followed the side of the hill, ending abruptly in a walled fall, and a
confusion of broken beams, iron braces, and section of a large,
wheel-like circumference. Out beyond were other crumbling remains of old
activity--a stone span across the dried course of a water way, and a
wide bank, showing through a hardy vegetation the grey-brown
inequalities of slag.
The stillness, broken only by the querulous melody of a robin, and a
beginning, faint piping of frogs, was amazingly profound after the
roaring energy of the Medial Works. The decay of Shadrach Furnace showed
absolute against the crashing miles of industry on the broad river. A
breath of honeysuckle lifted to Howat Penny; the sky was primrose.
Mariana moved closer to him and took his arm. They said nothing.
A warm light was spilling across the darkening grass from the lower
windows of his dwelling, blurring in a dusk under the high leafage of
aged maples. The white roses were already in bud on the vine climbing
the lattices at his door, and Mariana fixed one in his buttonhole.
"Howat," she said, "it isn't as if you were doing it just for Jim, but
for a man, any man, really sick. I'll not even ask you to think of it
for me. He can sit on the porch and converse with your owls, and poke
about over the hills."
Howat considered the advisability of attempting to extract a promise
from her that she would stay away from Shadrach if James Polder was
there. He considered it--very momentarily. The possibility, he asserted
to himself, was without any alleviating circumstance. What, in heaven's
name, would Charlotte think if, as it well might, the knowledge came to
her that Mariana and a Polder--that name she never repeated--a married
Polder without his wife, were poking over the hills together at
Shadrach? She would have him, Howat, examined for lunacy. Mariana
demanded too much. He told her this with the dessert.
"It's only the commonest charity," she repeated. Her attack rapidly
veered. "Howat," she asked, "do you really dislike Jimmy?" Certainly, he
asserted, he--he disapproved of him ... altogether. A headstrong young
donkey who had made a shocking mess of his life. He would have to make
the best of a bad affair for which no one was to blame but himself. "It
is terrific," she agreed, almost cheerfully; and he had a vague sense of
having, somehow, delivered himself into her hands. "Perhaps something
can still be done," she said, frowning, increasing the dangers of his
position. He managed, by a stubborn silence, to check further
conversation in that direction; hoping, vainly, that James Polder
couldn't come, that Harriet, sensibly, would insist on his accompanying
her, or that Byron would solemnly intervene.
Mariana, later displaying a letter, dispelled his wishes. "It's been
arranged quite easily," she told him. "Harriet will go home. I'd like to
be here when he arrives, but I can't. You'll be a dear, Howat, won't
you?" she begged. "I'm certain James will give you no trouble. And do
send him to bed early." At this he grew satirical, and she laughed in an
unaccustomed, nervous manner that upset him surprisingly. Honduras drove
her to the station the next morning; and, three days later, deposited
James Polder on the worn stone threshold under the climbing rose.
After dinner the younger man faced him squarely across the apricot glow
of the lamp in the middle room. "This is the third time I've come here
without an invitation from you," he said directly. "It was Mariana this
last. I shut my mouth on what I'd once have crammed down your throat,
and came like any puppy. It wasn't on account of my health, there are
miles of quiet country; it wasn't--" he hesitated, then went
on--"altogether because of Mariana. I wanted to watch you closer; I want
to find out what you are like inside, so I might understand some--some
other things better. I can get out if it's a rank failure."
Howat issued a polite, general dissent. "Now, right there," Polder
stated; "you don't want me; you'd rather I was a thousand miles away,
dead. Well--why don't you say so?" He had not the least conception of a
decent reticence of address, Howat Penny thought, resentfully, at the
discomfort aroused by the young man's sharp attack.
"Certain amenities," he observed coldly, "have been accepted as
desirable, as obligations for--" he hesitated, casting about for a
phrase that would not too conspicuously exclude James Polder. "Say it,"
the latter burst out rudely, "gentlemen. And you all stand about with
one thing to say and another in your head."
"A degree of perception is always admirable," Howat Penny instructed
him. "That's a nasty one," Polder acknowledged; "but I got into it
myself. I can see that." His hand, seared with labour, was pressed on
the table; and the elder realized that, since he had witnessed a heat
tapped, he was not so censorious of the broken nails, the lines of
indelible black. He caught James Polder's gaze, and turned from its
intense questioning. Young cheeks had no business to be so gaunt.
Polder picked up the figurine in red clay, studied it with a troubled
brow, and replaced it with a gesture of hopelessness. "Possibly," Howat
Penny unexpectedly remarked, "possibly you find beauty in a piece of
open hearth steel."
"It's useful," Polder declared; "it has a tensile strength. I know what
it will do. This," he indicated the fragment of a grace razed over
twenty-three hundred years before, "is good for nothing that I see."
Now, Howat told himself, it was merely a question of tensile strength.
His old enthusiasms, his passionate admiration for the operas of
Christopher Gluck, the enthusiasms and admirations of his kind, were
being pushed aside for things of more obvious practicality. The very
term that had distinguished his world, men of breeding, had been
discarded. Individuals like James Polder, blunt of speech, contemptuous,
labour scarred, were paramount to-day.
His thoughts, he realized, were a part of the questioning thrust on him
by the intrusion of Mariana's unfortunate affair into his old age. She
was always dragging him to a perplexing spectacle for which he had
neither energy nor inclination. But he'd be damned if he would allow the
importunities of the young man beyond the table to complicate further
his difficulties, and he retired abruptly behind the _Saturday Review_.
"You'd better get along up," he said brusquely, after a little.
Breakfast at an end, they settled into a not uncomfortable, mutual
silence. They smoked; James Polder unfolded newspapers which he
neglected to read; Howat went through the periodicals with audible
expressions of displeasure. He wondered when Mariana would appear.
Mariana made a fool of him, that was evident; however, he would put his
foot on any philandering about Shadrach. He could be as blunt as James
Polder when the occasion demanded. After lunch the latter fell asleep in
his chair on the porch, pallidly insensible of the sparkling flood of
afternoon. Howat rose and went into the house. It was indecent to see a
countenance so wearily unguarded, shorn of all protective aggression.
Mariana walked in unannounced.
"Why didn't you telephone for Honduras?" he complained. "Always some
infernal difference in what you do." She frowned. "Suddenly," she
admitted, "I wasn't in a hurry to get here. I almost went back.
Idiotic."
"Sensible, it seems to me," he commented. "That Polder is asleep on the
porch." She nodded, "Splendid. And you needn't try to look fierce. I can
see through you and out the back." He lit a cigarette angrily. "Going to
stay for the night?" he demanded. "Several," she replied coolly. "Three
can play sniff."
"Look here, Mariana," he proclaimed, "I won't have any nonsense, do you
understand?"
"We can keep a photograph of Harriet on the table."
James Polder entered, and put a temporary end to his determined speech.
When the former saw Mariana his shameless pleasure, Howat thought, was
beyond credence. Positively neither of them paid any more attention to
him than they did to Rudolph. His irritation gave place to a deeper
realization that an impossible situation threatened. There was nothing,
obviously, that he could do to-day; but he would speak seriously to
Mariana to-morrow; one or both of them would have to leave Shadrach.
This determination took the present weight from his conscience; and,
pottering about small concerns of his own, he ignored them comfortably.
They appeared late, dirty and hot, for dinner; and it was eight o'clock
before Mariana came down in a gown like a white-petalled flower. She
wore no rings, but about her throat was a necklace of old-fashioned seed
pearls in loops and rosettes. "It's family," she told them; "it belonged
to Caroline Penny. And she married a Quaker, too; a David Forsythe." She
stopped suddenly, and Howat Penny recalled the tradition that Caroline
Penny, Gilbert's daughter, had appropriated her sister Myrtle's suitor.
Mariana favoured him with a fleet glance, the quiver of a reprehensible
wink. He glared back at her choking with suppressed wrath. "I have a
wonderful idea for to-morrow," she proceeded tranquilly; "we'll take
lunch, and leave Honduras, and go to Myrtle Forge for the day."
Her design was unfolded so rapidly, her directions to Rudolph so
explicit, that he had no opportunity to oppose his plan of sending her
away in the morning; and his impotence committed him to her suggestion.
She could go in the evening almost as well. After dinner he rattled the
dominoes significantly, but Mariana, smiling at him absently, went
through the room and out upon the porch. Polder, with an obscure
sentence, followed her. A soft rain sounded on the porch roof; but there
was no wind; the night was warm.
Howat glanced at his watch, after a period of restful ease, and saw that
it was past ten. He moved resolutely outside. Mariana was banked with
cushions in the canvas swing, and Polder sat with his body extended, his
hands clasped behind his head, in a gloomy revery. The night,
apparently, had robbed her countenance of any bloom; more than once in
the past year Howat had seen her stamped with the premonitory scarring
of time. Polder rose as he approached, and Mariana struggled upright.
"Good night," she said ungraciously, to them both, and flickered away
through the dark. James Polder was savagely biting his lips; his hands,
the elder saw, were clenched. "Your wife," Howat proceeded, "how is
she?" Polder gazed at him stonily, without reply. "I asked after your
wife," Howat repeated irritably. "No," the other at last said, "you
reminded me of her. I suppose you are right." He turned and walked
abruptly from the porch, into the slowly dropping rain.