Chapter II: The Forge (2)

Jasper Penny, revolving the complications of his position, made his way directly over the uneven sidewalk of Spruce Street to Fourth; there, passing the high, narrow residences of Society Hill, he proceeded to Stephen's office, beyond Chestnut. It was in a square brick edifice of an earlier period, with a broad marble step and door and wide windows coped in scoured white stone. The lawyer's private chamber was bare, with snowy panelling and mahogany, the high sombre shelves of a calf-bound law library, a ponderous cabriolet table, sturdy, rush-seated Dutch chairs, and a Franklin stove with slender brass capitols and shining hod.

"A chair, Jasper," Stephen Jannan directed. "You ought to know them, they came out of Myrtle Forge--some of old Gilbert's. Your mother gave them to me when she did over the house in this new French fancy." Jasper Penny was momentarily at a loss for an adequate opening of the subject that had brought him there. Finally he plunged directly into his purpose. "You must know, Stephen," he said, "that I am decidedly obligated to a Mrs. Scofield." Jannan nodded shortly. "The thing dragged on for a number of years, but is quite dead now; in fact, it has been for a considerable number of months. That, in itself, doesn't bother me; it is comparatively simple; but there is a child, a girl, Stephen."

"I didn't know that," the other acknowledged. "It is an ugly difficulty. Do you wish to legitimatize your--the child? There is marriage of course."

"I have no intention of marrying Essie Scofield," Jasper Penny said coldly. "And I am almost certain she wouldn't consent if I had. I am quite willing to assume a proper responsibility; but there is a limit to my conception of that. There was never any serious question of marriage; there is none now. I simply wish to get complete control of Eunice; by adoption, perhaps; she is seven years old."

"There are no laws of adoption, as such, in Pennsylvania," Jannan told him. "The only State with that provision is Louisiana; there, by an act of Legislature, the thing can be legalized. I could arrange it through correspondence, a certain residence within the State. It would be cumbersome and expensive, but possible." He paused, frowning. "Devilish awkward," he muttered; "make a stench in a family such as ours. However," he added, "a contract practically to the same effect can be drawn. This, with her consent, would be entirely binding on Mrs. Scofield. If the child can write it would be well to have her signature on the deed. Bring them here; she should have counsel."

"After that, I suppose, the name could be arranged."

"Exactly. The child, of course, would have no legal status as your heir. Anything she got would have to be willed direct." The other nodded. It was all far more simple than he had hoped. He almost saw a definite lightening of the future. "Is the girl with her mother now?" Jannan queried.

"I took her away yesterday," Jasper Penny replied negligently. "We went to the Circus, and at present she is at Miss Brandon's Academy." He was surprised by the sudden concern on his cousin's handsome, florid countenance. "By heaven, Jasper," the lawyer exclaimed, "am I to understand that you took a--well, an illegitimate child, to Miss Brundon, left her in the School? It's--it's incredible."

"Why not?"

"If such a thing were known it would ruin Susan Brundon over night. Haven't you a conception of how this is regarded? She would be stripped of pupils as if the place reeked of malignant fever. A most beastly egotistical and selfish act."

"Never thought of that," Jasper Penny admitted. He saw again the fine, sensitive face of Miss Brundon, presiding over the establishment that was like an emanation of her diffident and courageous spirit; the last person alive he would harm. And people were exactly as Stephen had said, particularly women. They would destroy Susan Brundon ruthlessly, without a moment's hesitation. He thought of her as suffering incalculably, betrayed by his implied lie; he saw her eyes stricken with pain, her hands twisting together.... He rose sharply.

"A blind, infernal fool!" he ejaculated, grasping his hat. "I'm glad I saw you when I did. Put it right at once. Obliged, Stephen; come to you later about changing my will and the rest."

He was in such haste to remove the danger of Eunice from Susan Brundon that not until he again stood at the door of the Academy did he realize what a difficult explanation lay before him. Unconsciously he had reached a point where he would do his utmost to avoid hurting her. Already she occupied an unusual elevation in his thoughts, an unworldly plane bathed in a white radiance.

She was not in the office, but soon appeared, with a questioning gaze; and, he felt, an appealing lessening of her reserve. He hesitated, casting vainly about for an acceptable expression of his errand. Another lie, he thought, acutely distressed, must be necessary. "I am extremely sorry, Miss Brandon," he told her, "but unexpected developments in the last hour make it necessary for me to remove Eunice from your school."

A slow flush invaded her countenance lifted to meet his troubled gaze. "Mr. Penny!" she exclaimed, in a faint dismay. "Oh, I hope it is because of nothing--nothing derogatory you have heard. Please tell me directly--"

"Absolutely no," he replied, his voice carrying a vibrating reassurance. "You are entirely without the need of recommendation, far beyond any unfavourable report. I am profoundly disturbed by causing you inconvenience, and I only hope to offer you sufficient apology; but I shall have to take Eunice away with me, at once."

"Perhaps her mother can't bear separation."

"It is not that," he said grimly, a tangible hurt sharpening within; "but something that cannot be gone into, with you." She turned away immediately. "I will send for her," she replied. They stood facing but mutually avoiding each other's gaze while Eunice was being fetched. "Her things have already come from the hotel," Miss Brundon proceeded. "Where shall I send them?" Eunice broke in with a shrill protest. "Do I have to go? I don't want to." Her face was scarlet with revolt. "I can walk up and down the room with a book on my head, while another little girl had to be all done with a board to her back."

Jasper Penny wondered if he would see Miss Brundon again soon. The last was an afterthought bred by the realization that he could not permit her to depart absolutely from his life. There was a great deal that he, a rich and influential man of practical affairs, might do for her. He was certain that Susan Brundon needed exactly the assistance he could give; probably people robbed her, traded callously on her unsuspicious nature. Yet, when the moment came to leave, he could think of nothing to say beyond the banality of looking for her at the Jannans'.

"I go out very little," she told him; "the work here absorbs me; and, unfortunately, my eyes are not strong. They require constant rest." He expressed regret once more for any disturbance he might have caused; and, after hesitating awkwardly, left with Eunice hanging fretfully at his hand. What, in God's name, was he to do with the child? He walked slowly, his face half lost in the fur of his overcoat, oblivious, in his concentration on the difficulties of her situation, of Eunice progressing discontentedly at his side. A petulant complaint rose at intervals to an audible sob. Looking down, as the sobs threatened to become a continuous crying, he saw the top of the velvet bonnet and her diminutive hands in scarlet knitted mitts. He would have to stop dragging her from place to place; a suitable position for the present was all he hoped for now. There must be other institutions, larger and farther away, to which Eunice could be sent. He had a vague memory of such a place somewhere on the Delaware, was it at Burlington?

But he could not continue living with his daughter at Sanderson's Hotel. Jasper Penny decided that he would take her that afternoon to the house of the head machinist of his nail works at Jaffa, the town that, its beginning growing largely out of the Penny industries, lay a scant mile from Myrtle Forge. Speever was a superior man; his wife, a robust Cornish woman in a crisp apron, would give Eunice an energetic and proper care.

A thin, flexible mantle of snow lay over the drab earth, sweeping up to a Grecian marble edifice, making more dreary the bulk of the Eastern Penitentiary and foundation of Girard College, and emphasizing the winter desertion of the reaches of the Fairmount Water Works. She soon grew absorbed in the various aspects of their transportation--the echo of the whip cracking over the mules that drew the coaches across the covered viaduct, the labouring stationary engine and their slow ascent beyond. They saw, lining the river, a cemetery elevated starkly against the sky; and followed a canal by a broken, black flood between snowy banks.

Past a town with impressive residences and manufactories with low spreading veils of smoke, they came on a confusion of canals and canal boats, lock dams and bridges, mules and raffish crews with tanned faces and brightly coloured jackets and boots. Again crossing the river and a shallow, tranquil valley, the train brigade rolled into the main street of Jaffa. It was a town of small brick dwellings, spaced in orderly yards, echoing to the diminished clamour of the Penny Rolling Mills on the outskirts. Beyond the walls, starkly red against the snow, the blackened main street, the river was spotted with ice.

Edgar Speever's wife accepted Eunice with an immediate and unquestioning capability, and Jasper Penny turned away with a momentary but immense relief. In a few days, after the deed for the possession of the child had been executed, he could place her more permanently. He walked out to the miscellaneous group of buildings and cluttered yards that held his inherited activity; and in the small single-roomed building of the main office discussed with his superintendent the changes, improvements of process, then under way. The old nail machines, propelled by the feet and hands of an operator, and producing but one nail at a time, had been replaced by a high power engine, self-heading machinery. The superintendent complained of the pig from the new hot blast furnaces. "Impure," he declared. "And this new stone coal firing, too, makes but poor stuff. It'll never touch the old charcoal forging. Hammered bar's at ninety, and I'm glad to get it then. The puddling furnaces will do something with the grey pig; we have eight in blast now, turning out the railroad and heavier bars. This year will see forty-five hundred tons of iron worked, and close to four thousand kegs of nails."

Jasper Penny listened attentively; it was his intention soon to dispense entirely with all the time-honoured methods of iron manufacture. Water power, with its unequal flow, any large employment of charcoal, growing increasingly expensive with the rapid diminishment of the forests, must give place to the steam blast machine and anthracite. If his manager was unable to change, develop, with the changing times he would find another, more scientific.

Outside the early twilight made more grey the dingy sheds and buildings, the heaped slag; the long brick rectangle of the rolling mill, with its triple imposed, ventilated roof and the high, smoking stacks of the puddling furnaces, rising four from either length, gave out an undiminished, deafening uproar, the clamour of the bars falling out from the rollers, the spatter of hammers and dull dragging of heavy weights. The engine of the nail works rent all other sound with an unaccustomed, harsh blast.... Jasper Penny was conscious of a deep, involuntary relief when he reached the comparative tranquillity, the secession of vexatious problems, accomplished by Myrtle Forge.

XIV

There was, as always, an elaborate, steaming supper, with his mother, in a pelisse of black silk ruching, and Amity Merken at their places. He noted that an empty chair had been put, as customary, at the opposite end of the table, and with a trace of impatience ordered its removal. He wondered momentarily at his petty act; and then his thoughts returned to Susan Brundon. Jasper Penny saw her blue gaze lifted to his face, the hesitating smile; he felt again the pervading influence of her delicate yet essentially unshrinking spirit. She would possess an enormous steadfastness of purpose, he decided; a potentiality of immovable self-sacrifice. Yet she was the gentlest person alive. An unusual and resplendent combination of traits, rare possibilities.

She had told him that she seldom went about--her school absorbed her, and her eyes needed care, rest. He must ask Stephen Jannan further about her. They were sitting, Jasper Penny, his mother and her sister, in the parlour; a large, square chamber hung with dark maroon paper and long, many tasselled and corniced window curtains in sombre green plush. A white wedgewood mantel with ornaments in olive and blue, above a brass-fretted closed stove, supported a high mirror, against which were ranged a pair of tall astral lamps shining in green and red spars of light through their pendants, a French clock--a crystal ball in a miniature Ionic pavilion of gilt--and artificial bouquets of coloured wax under glass domes. A thick carpet of purplish black velvet pile covered the floor from wall to wall; stiff Adam chairs and settee with wheelbacks of black and gold were upholstered in dusky ruby and indigo. Ebony tables of framed, inlaid onyx held tortoise shell and lacquer ornaments, an inlaid tulip-wood music-box, volumes in elaborately tooled morocco, and a globe where, apparently, metallic fish were suspended in a translucent, green gloom.

The light from the multiple candelabras of ormolu and cut lustres streamed from the walls over Jasper Penny, sunk forward in profound absorption, and his mother's busy, fat hands working with gay worsteds. At her side a low stand of rubbed Chinese vermilion held her spilling yarns. Her face was placid, dryly pinkish and full. An irreproachable, domestic female. Herself the daughter of a successful Pennsylvania German Ironmaster, her wealth had doubled the Penny successes. There had been other children; Jasper could only faintly remember two, mostly in the form of infantile whimpering.

The inevitable termination of the evening was readied by the appearance of a pitcher of steaming, spiced mulled wine. A cupful was formally presented to Amity Merken; Gilda Penny sipped hers with an audible satisfaction, and Jasper Penny absently drank the fragrant compound of cinnamon bark and lemon, cloves, sugar and claret. A measure of that, before retiring, could not but be beneficial to Susan Brundon, fatigued by the duties of her Academy. He thought of the sharper breath of the brandy and oranges compounded by Essie Scofield. A thin odour of foxglove clung to the memory of his wife.

XV

Jasper Penny supplemented Jannan's letter to Essie Scofield, asking for an appointment with his client at the law office, with a short communication laying before her the condition in which he had found Eunice, his knowledge of her neglect to provide their daughter with the funds he had sent for that purpose, and definite plans for his complete control of the child. At the despatch of this he felt that his duty, where Essie as a formal parent resided, was ended. It was now only a question of an agreement on terms. He got no reply, other than a notification from Stephen Jannan that a meeting had been arranged for the following week. And, at eleven o'clock, on a clear, thin blue winter morning, he mounted, with Eunice, to the entrance of Jannan's offices on Fourth Street.

Essie Scofield, in widespread mulberry silk with tight sleeves and broad steel buttons, a close brimmed blue bonnet filled with lilacs and tied with an old rose ribbon, was more compelling than Jasper Penny had remembered her for, actually, years. A coffee-coloured India shawl, with a deep fringe and trace of a lining checkered in cherry and black slipping from her shoulders, toned her appearance to a potential dignity.

"Eunice," she exclaimed, as the child entered, "do come here at my side!" A small, cold mouth was silently raised for a straining embrace. Stephen Jannan proceeded at once, addressing Essie Scofield. "Mr. Penny informs me that he has written you explaining our purpose. I have already instructed you of the law in such a connexion, and there remains only your signatures to these papers. I begged you, if you will remember, to come with counsel, but since you have not done that it will be best for you to read this deed, which is quite clear in its intent."

Essie gazed dramatically at the paper the lawyer tended her. "It means," she said, "that I am to lose Eunice, and because I cannot offer her any advantages beyond those of a slim purse. I am a most unfortunate creature." Jasper Penny scraped his chair back impatiently, but Stephen enforced his silence with a gesture. "While my client understands that no monetary consideration can compensate for the breaking of ties of affection," Stephen Jannan went on smoothly, "and while he offers none in payment to that end, still we feel that some material recognition should be due you. Have you anything to say, suggest, at this point?"

Essie Scofield's arm was about Eunice's waist. "I am to be parted from my little daughter," she exclaimed; "and my tears are to be stopped with gold--an affectionate breast, a heart-wrung appeal, stilled by a bribe. That is the price paid by a trusting, an unsuspicious, female. Long ago, when a mere girl, dazzled by--"

"We won't go into that," Jannan interrupted, "but confine ourselves to the immediate development. By signing the paper in question, and accepting a sum of money, you surrender all claim to this child, known as Eunice Scofield."

"How will that affect my--my position in other ways?" she demanded, in a suddenly shrewd, suspicious tone. "Not at all," the lawyer assured her. She sobbed once, emotionally; and Eunice regarded her with a wide, unsparing curiosity. "A stranger to me," she gasped, with a paper white face and fluttering eyelids. Jasper Penny ejaculated sharply, "How much, Essie?" In a moment, he judged, familiar with a potential hysteria, she might faint, scream; there were clerks, people, in the next rooms. On the brink of collapse she hesitated, twisting her purple kid gloves.

"Ten thousand dollars," she said.

Stephen Jannan glanced swiftly at his cousin, and the latter nodded. "That is satisfactory," Jannan announced. "A mere formality--witnesses." Essie Scofield traced her signature in round, unformed characters; Jasper Penny followed with a hasty, small script; and Eunice, seated at the impressive table, printed her name slowly, blotting it with a trailing sleeve. The lawyer swung back the door of a heavy safe, and took out a package of white bills of exchange on the Bank of Pennsylvania. Essie counted the notes independently, thrust the money into a steel-beaded reticule with silk cords, and rose, gathering together her cashmere shawl. She ignored Eunice totally in the veiled gaze she directed at Jasper Penny. "It is better," she told him, "if you write first when you expect to visit me. Really, the last time, with some friends there, you were impossible." He bowed stiffly. "Don't let a sense of duty bring you," she concluded boldly. "I get on surprisingly well as it is, as it is," she reiterated, and, he thought, her voice bore almost a threat.

When she had gone the two men sat gazing in a common perplexity at the child. Stephen Jannan's lips were compressed, Jasper Penny's face was slightly drawn as if by pain. Eunice was investigating a thick stick of vermilion sealing wax and a steel die. "Well?" Jannan queried, nodding toward the table. "I thought something of Burlington," Penny replied, "but decided to place her in New York. Want to give her all the chance possible. I intend, at what seems the proper time, to secure her my own name." He stopped the objection clouding his cousin's countenance. "We won't argue that, please. Now about the will; the provision must be explicit and generous. There, at least, I am able to meet a just requirement." Jasper Penny's will was produced, a codicil projected, appended, and witnesses recalled.

"I wanted to inquire about Miss Brundon," Jasper said finally, the business despatched. "She seems to me very fragile for the conducting of an Academy. Is there no family, men, to support her? And her institution--does it continue to progress well?"

"Very." Jannan replied to the last question first. "Her children come from the best families in the city; and, under my advice, her charges are high. She has a brother, I believe, a cotton merchant of New Orleans, and quite prosperous. But he has a large family, and Susan will not permit him to deprive it of a dollar for her benefit. As you say, she is not strong; but in spite of that she needs no man's patronage. The finest qualities, Jasper, the most elevated spirit. A little too conscientious, perhaps; and, although she is thirty-nine, curiously ignorant of the world; but rare ... rare. It almost seems as if there were a conspiracy to keep ugly truths away from her."

Truths, Jasper Penny thought bitterly, such as had just been revealed in Stephen's office. There was, it seemed, nothing he could do for Susan Brundon. He envied the lawyer his position of familiar adviser, the ease with which the other spoke her name: Susan. He rose, fumbling with a jade seal. "Come, Eunice," he said, the lines deepening about his mouth and eyes. Stephen Jannan assisted him into the heavy, furred coat. "Well, Jasper," he remarked sympathetically, "if we could but look ahead, if we were older in our youth, yes, and younger in our increasing age, the world would be a different place." He held out to Eunice a newly minted Brazilian goldpiece. "Good-bye," he addressed her; "command me if I can be of any use." She clutched the gold tightly, and Jasper Penny led her out into the winter street. "We must have dinner," he said gravely. "With some yellow rock candy," she added, "and syllabubs."

XVI

He returned to Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the Pennys had not erected the unsightly buildings of their manufacturing about the scene of their initial activity and mansion. Jasper's father, Daniel Barnes Penny, under whose hand their success had largely multiplied, had grouped their first rolling mill and small nail works by the canal at Jaffa, preserving the pastoral aspect of Myrtle Forge, with its farmland and small, ancient, stone buildings.

Jasper had only made some unimportant changes at the Forge itself--the pigs were subjected to the working of two hearths now, the chafery, where the greater part of the sulphur was burned out, and the finery. The old system of bellows had been replaced by a wood cylinder, compressing air by piston into a chamber from which the blast was regulated. A blacksmith's shed had been added in the course of time, and a brick coke oven. He stopped at the Forge shed, filled with ruddy light and shadow, the ringing of hammers, and silently watched the malleable metal on the anvil. Flakes of glowing iron fell, changing from ruby to blue and black.

The Penny iron! The Forge had been operated continuously since seventeen twenty-seven, hammering out the foundation of his, Jasper's, position. He had taken a not inconsiderable place in the succession of the men of his family; in him the Pennys had reached their greatest importance, wealth. But after him ... what? He was, now, the last Penny man. The foothold Gilbert had cut out of the wild, which Howat and Casimir--an outlandish name obviously traceable to his mother, the foreign widow--had, in turn, increased for Daniel and Jasper, would be dissipated. His great, great aunt, Caroline, marrying a solid Quaker, had contributed, too, to the family stamina; while her granddaughter, wedding a Jannan, had increased the social prestige and connections of the family. The Jannans, bankers and lawyers, had already converted the greater part of their iron inheritance into more speculative finance; and the burden of the industry rested on Jasper Penny's shoulders.

At his death the name, the long and faithful labour, the tangible monument of their endurance and rectitude, except for the tenuous, momentary fact of Eunice, would be overthrown, forgot. He was conscious of a strong inner protest against such oblivion. He had, of course, often before lamented the fact that he had no son; but suddenly his loss became a hundred times more poignant, regrettable. Jasper Penny caught again the remembered, oppressive odour of foxglove, the aromatic reek of brandy and oranges; one, in its implications, as sterile as the other. He was possessed by an overwhelming sense of essential failure, a recurrence of the dark mood that had enveloped him in leaving the Jannans' ball.

Yet, he thought again, he was still in the midstride of his life, his powers. His health was unimpaired; his presence bore none of the slackening aspect of increasing years. These feelings occupied him, speeding in a single cutter sleigh over the crisp snow of the road leading from his home to Shadrach Furnace, where Graham Jannan and his young wife had been newly installed in the foremens' dwelling. There was a slight uneasiness about Graham's lungs, in consequence of which he had been taken out of the banking house of an uncle, Jannan and Provost, and set at the more robust task of picking up the management of an iron furnace.

It was early afternoon; the sky was as dryly powdered with unbroken blue as was the earth with white. The silver bells and scarlet pompons of the harness crackled in the still, intense cold; and a blanched vapour hung about the horse's head. Jasper Penny, enveloped in voluminous buffalo robes and fur, gazed with an increased interest at the familiar, flowing scene; nearby the forest had been cut, and suave, rolling fields stretched to a far mauve haze of trees; the ultramarine smoke of farmhouse chimneys everywhere climbed into the pale wash of sunlight; orderly fence succeeded fence. How rapidly, and prosperous, the country was growing! Even he could remember wide reaches of wild that were now cultivated. The game, quail and wild turkey and deer, was fast disappearing. The country was growing amazingly, too, extending through the Louisiana Purchase, State by State, to Mexico and the Texan border. The era of the greatness of the United States had hardly begun, while it was more than probable that the greatness, the power, of the Penny family faced an imminent destruction. His revolt at this, joining the more personal sense of the emptiness of his existence, filled him with a bitter energy, a determination to conquer, somehow, the obdurate facts hemming him in.

The sleigh dropped over a rise into a shallow fold of hills, with a collection of structures on a slope, and a number of solid, small grey stone dwellings. He glanced subconsciously at the stack of Shadrach Furnace, and saw that it was in blast--a colourless, lively flame, with a thin, white smoke like crumpled muslin, playing about its base. The metallic ring of a smithy rose at a crossing of roads, and, from the cast house, drifted the refrain of a German song. He turned in by the comparatively long, low facade of the house where the Jannans were living.

A negro led the horse and sleigh back to a stable; and, briskly sounding the polished iron doorknocker, he let himself into the dining room, a chamber with a wide, pot-hung fireplace and plain mahogany consul tables with wood chairs brightly painted with archaic flowers and scrolls in gold. Standing at the far side of the room, delicately outlined against a low, deeply embrasured window, was Susan Brundon.

A slow tide of colour rose to her ordinarily pale cheeks, corresponding with a formless gladness permeating his own being. She wore ruffled lavender with a clear lace pelerine caught at her breast by a knot of straw-coloured ribbon and sprig of rose geranium. "Mr. Penny," she said, with a little gasp of surprise; but her gaze was unwavering, candid.

"Why not?" he replied lightly. "I have a small interest in Shadrach. You are surprising--so far from that absorbing Academy."

"It's my eyes again," she explained. "I am obliged to rest. There is a very good assistant at the school; and Mary sweetly thought the country would do me good."

"It is really miraculous," Mary Jannan stated, entering from the kitchen; "she'll almost never. Weren't we lucky?" She was a small woman with smooth brown hair and an air of quiet capability. "And it's splendid to see you," she continued to Jasper Penny. "Don't for a minute think you'll get off before to-morrow, perhaps not then. Graham is out, chop-chopping wood. Actually--the suave Graham." She indicated a high row of pegs for Jasper Penny's furs. "Everything is terribly primitive. Most of the furniture was so sound that we couldn't bring ourselves to discard it all, however old-fashioned. Little by little." Graham Jannan entered, a tall, thin young man with crisp, pale yellow hair and a clean shaven, sanguine countenance with challenging light blue eyes. He greeted the older man with a firm, cold hand clasp. "I suppose you've come out to discover what I have learned about iron. Well, I know now that a sow is not necessarily a lady, and that some blooms have no bouquet. Good rum has, though, after sleighing."

Upon alternately burning his fingers and throat with a steaming glass of St. Croix, Jasper Penny and Graham Jannan proceeded to the Furnace where, in the cast house, they watched the preparations for a flow of metal. The head founder, McQuatty, bearded to the eyes and swathed in a hide apron, stood at the Ironmaster's side. "The charcoal you'd get's not worth a bawbee," he complained; "soft stuff would hardly run lead. And where they'd cut six thousand cords of wood will no longer show more than four. Shadrach ought to put out twenty-eight tons of pig in a week; and you see the statements."

"Stone coal," Jasper Penny replied; "and a hot blast." He turned to describe the latter to Jannan. "It'll come," the founder agreed, "and the quality will go." He went forward to tap the clay-sealed hearth. The liquid iron poured into the channels of its sand bed, sputtering and slowly fading to dingy grey. "I'd like you to take hold of this," Jasper Penny told the younger man; "great changes, improvements, are just over the hill. I'll miss them--a link between the old and the new. But you would see it all. The railroad will bring about an iron age; and then, perhaps, steel. I look for trouble, too--this damned States Rights. The South has been uneasy since the Carolina Nullification Act. It will be a time for action." He gazed keenly at Graham Jannan. A promising young man, he thought, with a considerable asset in his wife. A woman, the right woman, could make a tremendous difference in a man's capabilities.

He elaborated this thought fantastically at dinner, sitting opposite Susan Brundon. Mary Jannan wore orange crepe, with black loops of ball fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon's dress was noticeably simple. She volunteered little, but, when directly addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the directness, the conviction, of her replies. The right woman, Jasper Penny repeated silently. Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free, he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was exactly the wife he wanted. But no such person had appeared at that momentous period in his life.

However, then he had been a totally different being; perhaps the appreciation of Miss Brundon, her actual reality, lay for him entirely in his own perceptions. But if she would not have been the woman for him then, by heaven, she was now! He expressed this unaware of its wide implications, unconscious of the effect it would instantly have. The thing silently uttered bred an enormously increased need, the absolute determination that she was necessary to his most perfunctory being. The thought of her alone, he discovered, had been sufficient to give him a new energy, a sense of rare satisfaction.

Shortly expressed, he wanted to marry her; he had not, he told himself oddly, ever been married. The word had a significance which heretofore he had completely missed. A strange emotion stirred into being, a longing thrown out from his new desire, the late-born feeling of dissatisfaction; it was a wish for something in Susan Brundon which he experienced but could not name. Roughly stated it was a hunger to surround her with security, comfort, to fortify the, at best, doubtful position of life in death for her. Yet he acknowledged to himself that this regard for her safety was mostly the result of his own inner, blind striving. Her happiness had magically become his. Beyond that he was unable to penetrate.

After supper they gathered in the chamber beyond the dining room. Here Jasper Penny found an incongruous mingling of old and new furniture. There was a high, waxed walnut desk and cabinet, severely simple, and before it a chair with a back of elaborately carved and gilded tulips tufted in plum-coloured velvet. The thick carpet was a deep rose, and the drapery of the mantel and windows garnet. A painted hood of brilliant Chinese colours had been fastened before what was evidently an open hearth, for which a coal stove was substituted. On the middle of the floor was an oriental hassock in silver brocade; while a corner held a spinet-piano decorated in roseate cupids, flower sprays and gold leaf. Again, an old clock in Spanish mahogany, with a rudely painted glass door, had been left on the wall.

Mary Jannan, at the piano, wove a delicate succession of arpeggios. She sang, in a small and graceful voice, a cavatina, _Tanti Palpiti_. Then, "Ah, que les amours ... de beaux heurs." Jasper Penny listened with an unconscious, approving pretence of understanding. But when, in the course of her repertoire, she reached _Sweet Sister Fay_, and _The Horn of My Loved One I Hear_, his pleasure became active. Susan Brundon, on the hassock, lifted her sensitive face to the mild candle light, and its still pallor gave him a shock of delight. Her hands were folded in the voluminous sweep of her crinoline; the ribbons at her breast rose and fell softly.

Jasper Penny and Graham were smoking long, fragrant cigars that the former had produced from a lacquered case, and Jannan had the ingredients of the hot punch at his elbow. It amused the young man to persuade Susan Brandon to take a sip from his glass; and they all laughed at her subsequent gasping. Jasper Penny was astoundingly happy; his being radiated a warmth and contentment more potent than that of the St. Croix rum. It was accompanied by an extraordinary lightness of spirit, a feeling of the desirability of life. The memory of his greying hair had left him; not, it was true, to be replaced by the surging emotions of youth, but by a deep satisfaction.

Susan Brundon, Susan ... the right woman. He marvelled again at the brightness of spirit that shone in her--like a flame through a fine paper lantern. Susan, at Myrtle Forge. His thought became concrete; he knew now, definitely, that he had determined to marry her. His peace of mind increased. There was no need for hurry, the mere idea was irradiating; yet there must be no unnecessary delay. Incontrovertibly he had passed forty. The best period in a man's life. They would go to the West Indies, he decided. A ring with a square emerald, and roses of pearls. It was, almost immediately, time to retire. His room, narrow with a sloping wall, had a small window giving on a flawless rectangle of snow like the purity of Susan Brundon.

As he lay in bed, staring wakefully against the dark, another memory crept into his thoughts--the echo of a small, querulous voice, "yellow rock candy and syllabubs." Eunice! A sudden consternation seized him as he realized the necessity of telling Susan fully about his daughter. No escape, evasion, was possible. If she discovered the existence, the history, of the child afterward--he lingered over the happiness that term implied--it would destroy her. This, he told himself, was not merely melodrama; he was thinking of her delicate spirituality, so completely shielded from the bald fatality of facts. An increasing dread seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on her. The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew, filled him with bitter rebellion. The blind commitment of a vanished youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan Brundon. He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress. The secret errors of all the pasts that had made him rose in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed, perpetuated, multiplied, against his aspirations of tranquil release.

Yet, he told himself, dressing in the bright flood of morning, if nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted equally with the other--the symbol of Essie Scofield was no more actual than Susan. He had breakfast early, with Graham Jannan; and, in a reviving optimism, arranged for the Jannans to bring Miss Brundon to Myrtle Forge for a night before her departure. He whirled away, in a sparkling veil of flung snow crystals, before the women appeared.

Susan Brundon would, naturally, shrink from what he must tell her; but he was suddenly confident of his ability to convince her of the superior importance of the actuality of what they together might make of the future. He was accustomed to the bending of circumstance to his will; in the end he would prove stronger than any hesitancy she might, perhaps, reveal. His desire to have her had grown to such proportions that he could not, for an instant, think of existence without her as an intimate part. He even mentally determined when he should go to the city, the jeweller's, for the square emerald and flowered pearls. He would do over the rooms where he had lived in the thin formality of his marriage with Phebe, settle an amount on Essie ... shredding flesh. It would do the living woman no more injury than the dead. Oranges and brandy, satin and gold and ease.

He wrote, through Stephen Jannan, to Essie Scofield that afternoon, stating the generous terms of his final arrangement with her, making it plain that all personal contact between them had reached an end. Hereafter she must exclusively address any unavoidable communications to Mr. Jannan. She disregarded this in a direct, inevitably complaining, laborious scrawl. However, he could read through it her obvious relief at complete independence. She would, she thought, stay where she was for a little ... a period of perfunctory sentimentality followed. He destroyed the letter, turning with deep pleasure to the message from Graham Jannan that he would bring Susan Brundon and Mary to Myrtle Forge the following day.

His mother, with Amity Merken like a timid and reduced replica at her back, greeted the Jannans and Miss Brundon at the door. Jasper Penny came forward from the smoking room, to the right of the main entrance; where the men retired for an appetizer of gin and bitters. The older man was garbed with exact care. His whiskers were closely trimmed on either side of his severe mouth and shapely, dominant chin; and his sombre eyes, under their brows drawn up toward the temples, held an unusual raillery. Amity Merken, he learned, had desired to stay away from the supper table; but, to her distress, he forced her into a chair set by himself. Susan sat at the other end of the table, in the place that had been Phebe's. He gazed at her with a satisfaction without surprise; for it seemed to him that the woman beyond him had always occupied the fore of his existence. She wore pale grey, the opening at her neck filled with soft lace and pinned with a garnet brooch, and a deep-fringed, white silk shawl. The conversation was ambling, but, to Jasper Penny, pitched in a key of utter delight. He said little through supper; and, at its end, with Graham Jannan, immediately followed the others into the parlour.

There Mary Jannan repeated her songs, French, English and Italian; and Jasper Penny listened with a poignant, emotional response. Graham and his wife had arranged to sleigh back to Shadrach Furnace that evening; but Susan Brundon was to stay at Myrtle Forge, and take the train from Jaffa to-morrow. The Jannans, finally, departed; and Jasper Penny, showing Susan through the chambers of the lower floor, succeeded in delaying her, seated, in the smoking room.

XVII

Now that the moment which he had so carefully planned had arrived he was curiously reluctant to precipitate Susan and himself into the future. The lamps on a mantel, hooded in alabaster, cast a diffused radiance over Susan's silvery dress, on her countenance faintly flushed above the white folds of the shawl. "What is that sound?" she suddenly queried. "I heard it all through supper and before. It seems to live in the walls, the very air, here."

"The trip hammer of Myrtle Forge," he replied gravely. "I suppose it might, fancifully, be called the beating of the Penny heart; it does pound through every associated stone; and I have a notion that when it stops we shall stop too. The Penny men have all been faithful to it, and it has been faithful to us, given us a hold in a new country, a hold of wrought iron."

"How beautiful," she murmured; "how strong and safe!"

"It pleases me that you feel that," he plunged directly into his purpose; "for I intend to offer you all the strength and safety it contains." Her hands fluttered to her cheeks; a sudden fear touched her, yet her eyes found his unwaveringly. "If that were all," he continued, standing above her, "if I had only to tell you of the iron, if the metal were flawless, I'd be overwhelmed with gladness. But almost no iron is perfect, the longest refining leaves bubbles, faults. Men are like that, too ... Susan." She grew troubled, sensitively following his mood; her hands were now pressed to her breast, her lips parted. She was so bewilderingly pure, in her dim-lit, pearly haze of silk, that he paused with an involuntary contraction of pain at what must follow.

"The child, Eunice," he struggled on; "I couldn't leave her at the Academy because it might injure you. I had brought her in a most blind egotism; and so I took her away. She is my daughter."

He saw that at first she totally missed the implication of his words. "But," she stammered, "I was told you had no ... how would that--?" Then she stopped as sharply as if a hand had compressed her throat. A vivid mantle of colour rose in her face; she made a motion of rising, of flight, but sank back weakly. "It is criminally indelicate to speak to you of this," he said, "but it was absolutely necessary. I want to marry you; in that circumstance a lie would be fatal, later or sooner."

She attempted to speak, her lips quivered, but only a low gasp was audible. It was worse, even, than he had feared. Now, however, that he had told her, he felt happier, more confident. Surely, after a little, she would forgive, forget, "I want to marry you," he repeated, torn with pity at her fragility, her visible suffering. "All that might hurt you has been put out of my life, out of our future. The way is open before us, the refining. I would do anything to spare you, believe that; but the truth, now, best."

"Always," she said in a faint voice. "I am trying to--to realize. Oh! I suppose such things do occur; but the child herself, you--don't see how that, so near--" she broke off, gazing wide-eyed out of her misery. He was conscious of the dull, regular beat of the Forge hammer. God, how the imperfections persisted! But, he told himself savagely, in the end the metal was steadfast. He would, certainly, overcome her natural revulsion from what she had just heard. The colour had left her cheeks, violet shadows gathered about her eyes; she seemed more unsubstantial than ever. He would repay again and again the suffering he had brought her. Having declared himself he was almost tranquil; there was a total absence of the impetuous emotionalism of youth, the blind tyranny of desire. His feeling was deeper, and accompanied by a far more involved philosophy of self-recognition. At the same time, while acutely conscious of his absolute need of Susan Brundon, he was at a loss to discover its essence, shape. Before he had known her he had been obsessed by a distaste for his existence; he had desperately wanted something without definition ... And Susan was that desire, delicate, clear-eyed Susan. Yet, still, the heart of her escaped him.

Jasper Penny had told himself that his new dissatisfaction was merely the result of his accumulating years; but, beyond the fact that such an increase might have brought him different and keener perceptions, that explanation was entirely inadequate. He wanted a quality beyond his experience, beyond, he realized, any material condition--Susan Brundon, yes; but it was no comparatively simple urge of sex, the natural selection of the general animal creation. There was no question of passionate importunities; those, here, would be worse than futile; all that he desired was beyond words, moving in obedience to a principle of which he had not caught the slightest glimpse. Yet, confident of his ultimate victory, he maintained the dominating presence of a black Penny.

Susan Brundon had sunk back into the depths of her capacious chair; she seemed utterly exhausted, as if she had been subjected to a prolonged brutal strain. But still her eyes sought him steady in their hurt regard. "There is so much that I can give you," he blundered, immediately conscious of the sterility of his phrase. "I mean better things--peace and attention and--and understanding. I won't attempt any of the terms usual, commonplace, at such moments, you must take them, where they are worthy, for granted. I only tell you a lamentable fact, and ask you to marry me, promise you the tenderest care--"

"I know that," she replied, with obvious difficulty, hesitation. "I'll not thank you. It is terribly difficult for me. I'd like to answer you as you wish, I mean reply to--to your request. But the other, the child, dragged about; there was such a distrust, a wariness, in her face."

"There is no good in thinking of that alone," he stated, with a return of his customary decision. "No one can walk backwards into the future. Try to consider only the immediate question, what I have asked you--will you marry me?"

"Is that all you have to explain?" she asked. "Is there, now, no one else that counts?" The edge of a cold dread entered his hopes. "If you refer to the child's mother," he said stiffly, "she is amply well taken care of, you need waste no sentimental thoughts on her."

"Ah!" Susan exclaimed, shrinking. Her hands closed tightly on the wide silk of her skirt. The fear deepened within him; it would be impossible to explain Essie to the woman before him. Essie, falsely draped in conventional attributes, defied him to utter the simple truth. He raged silently at his impotence, the inhibition that prevented the expression of what might be said for himself. Essie Scofield had, like every one else, lived in the terms of her being, attracting to herself what essentially she was; it was neither bad nor good, but inevitable. His contact with her had been the result of mutual qualities, qualities that were no longer valid. Yet to say that would place him in a damnable light, give him the aspect of the meanest opportunist. Susan breathed, "That poor woman." It was precisely what he had expected, feared--the adventitious illusion! He had an impulse to describe to her, even at the price of his own condemnation, the condition in which he had found Eunice; but that too perished silently. Jasper Penny grew restive under the unusual restraint of his position.

"Do you mind--no more at present." Susan Brundon said. "I am upset; please, another time; if it is necessary. I feel that I couldn't answer anything now, I must go up; no, your mother will show me." She rose, and he realized that she would listen no further. There was an astonishing strength of purpose behind her deprecating presence. She was more determined than himself. He watched her walk evenly from the room, heard the low stir of voices beyond, with a feeling that he had been perhaps fatally clumsy. All that he had said had been wrong, brutally selfish. He had deliberately invited failure; he should have been patient, waited; given her a chance to know and, if possible, value him, come to depend on him, on his judgment, his ability in her welfare. But, in place of making himself a necessity, he had launched at once into facts which she must find hideous. She had said, "another time, if necessary." His mouth drew into a set line--there would be another and another, until he had persuaded, gained, her.

He lit a cigar, and walked discontentedly up and across the room. The sound of the Forge hammer again crept into his consciousness: the Penny iron--the fibre, the actuality, of the Penny men! He repeated this arrogantly; but the declaration no longer brought reassurance; the certainty even of the iron faded from him; he had failed there, too, digging a pit of oblivion for all that their generations of toil had accomplished. The past inexorably woven into the pattern of the future! Eunice, so soon wary, distrustful, Susan had seen that immediately, would perpetuate all that he wished dead--Essie and himself bound together, projected in an undesirable immortality through endless lives striving, like himself, to escape from old chains.

If he failed with Susan his existence would have been an unmitigated evil; the iron, his petty, material triumphs, would rust, but the other go on and on. His thoughts became a maze of pity for Eunice, infinite regret of the past, a bitter energy of hope for what might follow.

He turned with pride to his forging--long-wrought charcoal iron; the world would know no better. Still, with his penetration of the future, he realized that the old, careful processes were doomed. He had difficulty in assembling enough adequate workmen to fill the increasing contracts for bar iron and rails now; and the demand, with the extension of steam railways, would grow resistlessly. More wholesale methods of production were being utilized daily; he was one of the foremost adherents of "improvement"; but suddenly he felt a poignant regret at the inevitable passing of the old order of great Ironmasters, the principalities of furnaces and forges. He was still, he felt, such a master of his men and miles of forests and clearings, lime pits and ore banks, coal holes, mills, coke ovens, hearths and manufactories. He might still drive to Virginia through a continuous line of his interests; his domination over his labourers, in all their personal and industrial implications, was patriarchal; he commanded, through their allegiance and his entire grasp on every iota of their living, their day's journey; but, he told himself, he was practically the last of his kind.

New and different industrial combinations were locking together in great agglomerations of widely-separated activities; the human was superseded by the industrial machine, where men were efficient, subservient cogs in a cold and successful automaton of business. A system of general credit was springing up; the old, old payments in kind, in iron or even meal and apparel, or gold, had given place to reciprocal understandings of deferred indebtedness. The actual thousands of earlier commerce were replaced by theoretical millions. His own realty, his personal property, because of such understandings, were outside computation. They were, he knew, reckoned in surprising figures; but in a wide-spread panic, forced liquidation, the greater part of his wealth would break like straw. It was the same with the entire country.

His thoughts returned to Susan, to the longing for the peace, the inviolable security, she would bring to the centre, the heart, of his life. No material catastrophe could shape, deplete, her richness of spirit. Fragile as she was, with her need of rest, her diffidence and pallor, she yet seemed to Jasper Penny the most--the only--secure thing in the world. She defied, he murmured, death itself. Wonderful.