The road to Myrtle Forge mounted between rolling cultivated fields, the
scattered, stone ruins of walls erected in the earliest iron days; and,
after a pastoral course, came to the Forge dwelling, its shuttered bulk
set in a tangle of bushes and rank grass. An ancient beech tree swept
the ground with smooth, grey limbs, surrounded by long-accumulated dead
leaves. James Polder shut off the motor by the low, stone wall that
supported the lawn from the roadway; he crossed to the farm, where the
house keys were kept, and Howat and Mariana moved slowly forward. A
porch, added, the former said, in Jasper Penny's time, extended at the
left; and they stood on the broken flooring and gazed down at a
featureless tangle once a garden and the gnarled remainder of a small
apple orchard beyond.
Polder soon returned, and they proceeded to a door on the further side,
where the kitchen angle partly enclosed a flagging of broad stones.
Inside, the house, empty of furnishing, was a place of echoes muffled in
dust; the insidious, dank odours of corrupting wood and plaster; walls
with melancholy, superimposed, stripping papers; older, sombrely
blistered paint and panelled wainscoting varnished in an imitation,
yellow graining. It was without a relic of past dignity. Mariana was
unable to discover a souvenir of the generations of Pennys that had
filled the rooms with the stir of their living. Once more outside they
sat on the stone threshold of an office-like structure back of the main
dwelling and indulged in cigarettes.
The disturbing tension of last night, Howat thought comfortably, had
vanished. Mariana was flippant, James Polder enveloped in indolent ease.
"The Forge," Howat Penny told them, "was below." A path descended across
a steep face of sparse grass; and, at the bottom, Polder's interest
revived. "It stood there," he indicated a fallen shed beyond a masoned
channel, choked with the broken stones of its walls and tangled
shrubbery. "You don't suppose a joke that size was the great Gilbert's
plant. Here's the drop for the water power; yes, and the iron pinions of
the overshot wheel." He climbed down a precarious wall, and stood
perhaps twelve feet below them. Securing a rough bolt, he brought it up
for their inspection. "Look at that forging," he cried; "after it has
lain around for a century and a half. Like silk. Charcoal iron, and it
was hammered, too. Metal isn't half worked any more. We could turn that
into steel at almost nothing a ton." He showed them in the mouldering
shed the foundation of the anvil, traced the probable shafting of the
trip hammer, marked the location of the hearths. "Three," he decided;
"and a cold trickle of air. A nigger pumping a bellows, probably. No,
they could get that from the wheel," he drew an explanatory diagram in
the blackened dust.
With the lunch basket on the running board of the motor they ate sitting
on the low boundary wall of the lawn. The heat increased through the
late May noon, and Howat remained while Mariana and James Polder
wandered in the direction of the orchard. Finally the sun forced the
former to move; and he, too, proceeded in a desultory manner, entering
the shade of a grove of old maples. The trees, their earliest red
leafage already emerald, followed the dry channel cut back from Canary
Creek to the Forge, and he soon emerged at the broad, flashing course of
the stream. A flat rock jutted into the hurrying water by an overthrown
dam, its sun-heated expanse now in shadow; and he stayed, listening to
the gurgling flow. Far above him a hawk wheeled in ambient space; a mill
whistle sounded remotely from Jaffa.
The thought of Mariana hovered at the back of his lulled being; all he
desired, he told himself, was her complete happiness. He might even have
become reconciled to James Polder. His first, unfavourable opinion of
the latter, he realized, had been modified by--by time. He had judged
Polder solely in the light of an old standard. The fellow was painfully
honest; good stuff there, iron ... the iron of the Pennys. But the other
strain had betrayed him. A cursed shame. The material of the present,
moulded, perhaps, into seemingly new forms, was always that of the
past. This Polder was Essie Scofield and Jasper ... Byron. He, Howat
Penny, was Penny and Jannan and Penny--Daniel, James, Casimir, and Howat
once more, the older Howat who had married the widow of Felix Winscombe.
Black again. He wondered what the blackness, not spent like his own, had
brought the other. A headstrong, dark youth with the characteristic
sloping eyebrows and slender, vigorous, carriage. The traditional
rebellious spirit had involved Jasper in disgrace; it had thinned his
own blood.
Footfalls approached through the trees, and the others joined him. James
Polder extended himself on the rock, and Mariana sat with her hands
clasped about her slim knees. A silence intensified by the whispering
stream enveloped them. The hawk circled above, and Howat had an
extraordinary sense of the familiarity of the bird hanging in limitless
space, of the warm stone and water choking in a smooth eddy. He had, as
a boy, fished there. But his brain momentarily swam with a poignant,
unrecognizable emotion, different from the sensation of childhood. He
rose, confused and giddy. With old age, he muttered.
Mariana followed. "It's all over," she announced, decisively. "We'll
drive back and leave to-day." She sighed. "That's gone already," James
Polder showed her the sun slipping toward the western hills. She moved
up to him, laid her hand on his arm. Howat Penny went ahead. He must
speak to her after dinner. As the motor slowly gathered momentum he
turned and looked back at the dark, pinkish dwelling in its tangle of
grass and bushes run wild. Dusk appeared to have already gathered over
it, although the sun still shone elsewhere in lengthening dusty gold
bars; the wide-spread beech was sombre against blank shutters, the
chimneys broken and cold.