Chapter II: The Forge (3)

He moved slowly to his sombre bed room, with its dark velour hangings and ponderous black walnut furniture, precisely scrolled with gilt. The interior absorbed the light of a single lamp, robbing it of radiance. A clock deliberately struck the hour with an audible whirring of the spring. Jasper Penny took out from a drawer a tall, narrow ledger, its calf binding powdering in a yellow dust, with a blurring label, "Forgebook. Myrtle Forge, 1750." He sat, opening it on the arm of an old Windsor reading chair he had insisted on retaining among the recent upholstery, and studied the entries, some written in a small script with ornamental capitals and red lined day headings, others in an abrupt manner with heavy down strokes. The latter, he knew, had been made by his great grandfather, Howat.

"Jonas Rupp charged with three pair of woollen stockings ... shoes for Minnie." Howat had been young when Minnie's shoes were new; twenty something--five or six. He must have married not long after. Howat--like himself--a black Penny. The special interest Jasper Penny felt for this particular ancestor grew so vivid that he almost felt the other's presence in the room at his shoulder. He consciously repressed the desire to turn suddenly and surprise the shadowy and yet clear figure in the gloom. The features of the youth so long gone, and yet, too, he felt, the replica of his own young years, were plain; the dark eyes, slanted brows, the impatient mouth.

His community of sympathy with the other, who was still, in a measure, himself, was inexplicable; for obviously Howat had escaped Jasper's blundering--an early marriage, a son, the son whose name, like his mother's, made such an exotic note in a long, sound succession of Isabels and Carolines and Gilberts, was a far different tale from his own. Yet it persisted. It seemed to him that the silence of the room grew strained, there was the peculiar tension of a muteness desperately striving for utterance. He waited, listened, in a rigidity of which he was suddenly ashamed; ridiculous. He relaxed; the memory of his own youth flooded back, rapt him in visions, scents, sounds. The premonitory whirring of the clock spring sounded once more, followed by the slow, increasing strokes ... Again. His body wavered, on the verge of sleep, and he straightened himself sharply; then he rose and, putting back the Forgebook, undressed.

Susan, at breakfast, her shoulders wrapped in a serious-toned pelerine, said little. Jasper Penny instinctively excluded her from a trivial conversation. She was, he decided, paler than usual, the shadows under her eyes were indigo. He was filled with self-condemnation. Mrs. Penny, gazing at her with a beady discernment, asked if her rest had been interrupted. "I am always an indifferent sleeper," Susan Brundon replied evasively. He followed her into the carriage that was to take her to the station at Jaffa; and, ignoring her slight gasp of protest, grasped the reins held by the negro coachman. However, they proceeded over the short distance to the town without speech. He was torn between a wish to spare her and the desire to urge his own purpose. But more immediately he wanted to make secure the near hour of his seeing her again. He asked, finally, "Will you be at the Jannans' this week, or are visitors received at the Academy?"

"No," she replied to the first; "and I have very little time between classes. You see, they fill the whole day, tasks and pleasures. It is difficult for me to--to talk on a generality of themes with callers."

"I have no intention of being diffuse," he replied pointedly. "I could confine my entire conversation to one request--"

"Please," she interrupted pitiably. "I am utterly wretched now. The simplest gentility--" she paused, but her wish was clear. He restrained himself with difficulty. Drifting slowly across the scattered roofs of the town was the leaden smoke of his mills and fires; as they drove into the main street the thin crash of his iron was audible. Men everywhere bowed to him with marked respect. But the woman at his side sat erect, drawn away from him, unmoved by all that, to the world, he was. There was an appalling quality in her aloofness from what, materially, he might advance in extenuation; the things so generally potent here were no more than slag. He searched within for what might bend, influence, her, for whatever he might have of value in her eyes. He found nothing. It was a novel and painful experience; and it bred in him a certain anger; he became merely stubborn. He declared to himself, with an oath, that he would gain her; and he pulled up his horses viciously at the station rack. This, too, hurt her; she exclaimed faintly at the brutally drawn bits. A man hurried forward to take her bag, and then, in a blowing of horn, a harsh exhaust of steam, she was gone. A last, hurried impression of her delicate profile on a small pane of glass accompanied him back to Myrtle Forge. There his mother regarded him with an open concern. "Something's on your mind," she declared. "I passed your door at midnight, and there was light under it. I've often told you about sitting up late."

"I'm getting along," he replied lightly. "You fail to do justice to the weight of my increasing majority. But, in a little, you'll be astonished at my renewed youth." He became serious in speaking, conscious of the new life Susan would, must, bring into his existence.

XVIII

Since he had declared himself so decidedly and at once, no hesitation was possible; he must, he was aware, move remorselessly forward in assault. To sweep Susan Brundon into his desire, overwhelm her defences--he called them prejudices but immediately after withdrew that term--offered the greatest, the only promise of success. An obliterating snow fell for the following thirty hours, and a week went by in the readjustment to ordinary conditions of living and travel. But at the end of that period Jasper Penny left Myrtle Forge for the city, with a determined, an almost confident, mouth, and a bright, hard gaze. Late afternoon, he decided, would be the best time for his appearance at the Academy. And the western sky was a luminous, bright red when he passed under the stripped, uneasy branches of the willow trees to the school door.

Miss Brundon's office, rigorous as the corridor of a hospital, had a table and uncompromising wooden chairs on a rectangle of bluish-pink carpet; a glowing, round stove held a place on a square of gleaming, embossed zinc, while the remaining surfaces were scrubbed oak flooring and white calcimine. A large geographer's globe, a sphere of pale, glazed yellow traced in violet and thin vermilion and cobalt, rested on an involuted mahogany stand; and a pile of text books covered in gay muslin made a single, decisive note of colour.

She kept him waiting, he felt uneasily, a long while; perhaps she had a class; but he felt that that was not the reason for her delay. When she finally appeared in soft brown merino, with a deep fichu of old, dark lace, and black ribbons, she courageously held out a delightfully cool, smooth hand. "At first," she said directly, "I thought it would be better not to see you at all. Yet that wasn't genteel; and I felt, too, that I must speak to you. Even at the danger, perhaps, of trespassing into your privacy."

"I have given you the absolute right to do that," he told her. "It will only bring me pleasure, to--to suppose I interest you enough--"

"Ah, but you do," she cried with clasping fingers. "It has made my work here very difficult; the quiet has gone before echoes that I think every child must hear, echoes from spaces and things that appall me. Here, you see, I have lived so apart from others, perhaps selfishly, that I had grown accustomed to a false sense of peace. Only lessons and little questions, little hands. It seems now that I have been outside of life itself, in a cowardly seclusion. Yet it had always been that way; I didn't know." Her face was deeply troubled, the clear depths of her eyes held a new questioning doubt.

"It's because of that, mainly, I ask you to marry me," he replied, standing before the table at which, unconsciously, she had taken her place; "it is because of your astonishing purity. You are so beautiful; and this quiet, peace--you must have it all your life; it is the air, the garden air, for you to flower in. I can give it to you, miles of it, farther than you can see. All that you care for heaped about you. But not that only," he insisted, "for I realized that no one lives to whom such things are less; I can give you something more, not to be talked about; whatever my life has been it has at least brought me to your feet. I have learned, for you, that there is a thing men must have, God knows exactly what--a craving to be satisfied, a--a reaching. And that itself, the knowledge of such need, is not without value. Because of it I again, and shall again, if necessary, ask you to marry me."

She replied in a low voice. "You must marry the child's mother." For the first time she avoided him; bright blood burned in her cheeks; a hand on the edge of the table was straining, white. A sudden feeling of helplessness came over him, with, behind it, the ever-present edge of anger, of impatience. He took a step forward, as if to crush, by sheer insistence, her opposition; but he stopped. He lost entirely the sense of her fragile physical being; she seemed only a spirit, shining and high, and insuperably lovely. Then all feeling was lost but the realization that he could not--in any true sense--live without her. "Susan," he said, leaning forward, "you must marry me. Do you care for me at all?"

Her breast rose and fell under the delicate contour of her wool gown. "The child's mother," she repeated, "you should marry her. How can you do differently? What can it matter if I care about you?" She raised a miserable face. "How can I?" she asked.

He could think of no other answer than to repeat his supreme necessity for her. He struggled to tell her that this was an altogether different man from Essie Scofield's companion; but his words were unconvincing, limited by the inhibition of custom. A transparent dusk deepened in the room accompanied by a pause only broken by the faint explosions of the soft coal. The power of persuasion, of speech, appeared to have left him. There must be some convincing thing to say, some last, all-powerful, argument. It eluded him. The exasperation returned, spreading through his being.

"Surely," she said laboriously, "there is only one course for you, for us all."

"I'll never marry Essie Scofield!" he declared bluntly. His voice was unexpectedly loud, unpleasant; and it surprised him only less than Susan Brundon. She drew back, and the colour sank from her cheeks; an increasing fear of him was visible. "In the first place," he continued, "Essie probably wouldn't hear of it. And if I managed that it would be only to make a private hell for us both. It would not, it couldn't, last a month. There is nothing magical in marriage itself, there's no general salvation in it, nothing to change a man or woman. Why, by heaven, that's what you have taught me, that is the heart of my wanting you. You must feel it to understand." He circled the table and laid a hand on the back of her chair. "Susan."

Her head was bowed, and he could see only her smooth, dark bands of hair and the whiteness of her neck. "Susan," he said again. "A second wrong will not cure the first. If one was inexcusable the other would be fatal. Married--to some one else, with yourself always before me--surely you must see the impossibility of that. And am I to come to nothing, eternally fail, because of the past? Isn't there any escape, any hope, any possibility? You don't realize how very much will go down with me. I am a man in the middle of life, and haven't the time, the elasticity, of youth. A few more years to the descent. But, with you, they could be splendidly useful, happy; happy, I think, for us both. I know that a great many people would say as you have, but it is wrong in every aspect, absolutely hopeless. Essie's values are totally different from yours; she has her own necessities; one measure will not do for all women."

She rose and stood facing him, very near, her crinoline swaying against him, and said blindly, "You shall marry her."

"I'll be damned if I do," Jasper Penny asserted. "I will marry you, you," he whispered, with his lips against the fineness of her ear. Her hands were on his shoulders; but she neither drew herself into his embrace nor repulsed him. He wanted to crush her softness in his arms, to kiss her still face into acquiescence. The quality, the kind, of his need made it impossible. She slipped back without a sound into her chair, drooping forward over the table.

A sharp pity invaded him, holding him back from her, silencing the flow of his reasoning and appeal. It defeated, in the stirring tenderness of its consideration, his purpose. He could not continue tormenting her, racking her delicate, taut sensibilities by a hard insistence. He withdrew quietly, to where his hat and stick rested on a chair, and gathered them up. Still she didn't move, raise her head, break the low fumbling of the soft coal. He could no longer distinguish her clearly, she was blurring in a dusk deeping so imperceptibly that it seemed a gradual failing of his vision. The geographer's globe appeared to sway slightly, like a balloon tied to a string; the gay muslin of the piled text books had lost their designs. Suddenly the room without motion, the approaching night, the desirable presence of the woman growing more immaterial, more shadow-like to elude his reaching hands, presented a symbol, an epitome, of himself. Day fading swiftly into dark; dissolving the realities of table and flesh and floor; leaving only the hunger, the insuperable inner necessity and sense of loss.

"Good-bye," he breathed. Jasper Penny saw that she raised her head, he caught the glimmering pallor of her face. But she said nothing, and sank back into the crumpled position on the table. He went out, closing the door of the office, shutting her into the loneliness of her resolve, her insistence.

In the familiar rooms at Sanderson's Hotel he revolved again and again all that she had said. For a little he even endeavoured to inspect calmly the possibility of a marriage with Essie Scofield. Steeped in Susan's spirit he thought of it as a reparation, to Eunice, perhaps to Essie, but more certainly to an essence within himself. But immediately he saw the futility of such a course; the inexorable logic of existence could not be so easily placated, its rhyming of cause and effect defeated. All that he had told Susan Brundon recurred strengthened to an immovable conviction. The thought of marrying Essie was intolerable, farcical; to the woman herself it would mean utter boredom. Such a thing must lead inevitably to a greater misfortune than any of the past. Susan, in her resplendent ignorance of facts, failed to realize the impossibility of what she upheld. No, no, it was out of the question.

He wondered if he had progressed in the other, his supreme, wish. And he felt, with a stirring of blood, that he had. Susan cared for him; her action had made that plain. That was a tremendous advantage; with another he would have thought it conclusive; but not--not quite with Susan Brundon. He had a deep regard for her determination, so surprising in the midst of her fragility. Yet, if pity had not prevented him, this afternoon, in her office, he might have forced her to a sharper realization of a more earthly need, the ache for sympathy, consolation, the imperative cry of self. That was his greatest difficulty, to overcome her lifelong habit of thinking of others before herself. Such, he knew, was the root of her appeal for Essie, rather than a cold, dogmatic conception. Self-effacement.

At this a restive state followed; personally he had no confidence in the sacrifice of individual aims and happiness. Any course of that sort, he told himself, in the management of his practical affairs, would have resulted in his failure. There were a hundred men in the country plotting for his overthrow, anxious to take his position, scheming to undersell him, to discover the secret of the quality of his iron rails. Others he had deliberately, necessarily, ruined. No good would have been served by his stepping aside, allowing smaller men to flourish and annoy him, cut down his production by inconsiderable sales. He, and his family, had built a great, yes, and beneficial, industry by ruthlessly beating out a broad and broader way for their progress. It was needful to gaze fixedly at the end desirable and move in the straightest line possible.

Susan stopped by the way. A thousand little acts of alleviation, at best temporary, interrupted her living. Children, not hers, dragged at her skirt. How much better for her to have a child of her own. Their child! A great deal that had been vague in his thoughts became concrete at that last period; not only the possible succession of the iron, but the comprehension that a child now, before the increasing sterility of multiplying years, would be an image of all his inmost craving and which must else be lost.

Eunice was different. Pity, mingled with a rigid sense of his duty and a faint accent of parenthood, comprehended his feeling for her. He stated this to himself clearly, admitting what delinquency it carried. It was, simply, an incontrovertible fact; and it was his habit to meet such things squarely. A black Penny, he had no impulse to see existence in imposed sentimental or formally moral conceptions. From all this he returned with a feeling of delight to his personal longing for Susan Brundon; he saw her bowed over the table in an exhaustion almost an attitude of surrender. A slender, pliable figure in soft merino and lace. He saw her beyond the candles of Graham Jannan's supper table, a rose geranium at her breast. The motto of the bon bon partially returned:

"... ange du ciel ... je t'aime! ... le bon heur supreme!"

XIX

In the morning he walked over to Stephen Jannan's office on Fourth Street. The day was unexpectedly warm, and a mist rose about the wet bricks of the city. He proceeded directly into Stephen's private enclosure. "I was about to write you," the latter stated. "It's well enough for you to direct Mrs. Scofield to confine her pleas to me, and comparatively simple to picture her drawing a quarterly sum in an orderly manner; but how you are going to realize that happy conception is increasingly beyond me. I have to point out to her daily--a great nuisance it is--that she cannot have her income before it is due. Heaven knows what she has done with the other money in so short a while. She hasn't moved, apparently increased her establishment; at your direction the bills were settled, and heaven knows she had no reluctance in presenting all that were permissible and a number doubtful. There is, of course, one probability."

Jasper Penny's thoughts returned to the stony, handsome youth he had seen in the company of Essie's friends, to the insinuations of the woman who had been removed protesting her superiority and warning him against a "tailor's dummy." Well, it was no longer his affair what Essie did with her money, what in her affections remained unimpaired. Rather it was reassuring that she had so promptly found solace; it enlarged his own feeling of freedom. "It got worse, yesterday," Stephen Jannan continued; "she came to the office, insisted on seeing me. Luckily I was busy with a mastership that kept me over three hours. But she left, I was told, with the air of one soon to return. She was brandied with purpose. There is no end, Jasper, to what I am prepared to do for you; but, my dear fellow, neither of us can have this. She wept. My young gentlemen were pierced with sympathetic curiosity. You must realize, Jasper, that you are not a sparrow, to float unnoticed from ledge to ledge."

An angry impotence seized Jasper Penny. He was tempted to have Stephen Jannan turn over to Essie, at once, a conclusive sum of money. That would put an end to any communication between them, provide her with the power of self-gratification which for Essie Scofield spelled forgetfulness.... For a little, he was obliged, wearily, to add. Together with such a young man as he had seen in her house her capacity for expenditure would be limitless. She would come back to him with fresh demands, perhaps at an inconceivably awkward time, in a calculated hysteria--he had cause to know--surprisingly loud and convincing. Susan must be absolutely secured against that possibility. He could not help but think of the latter as yielding in the end, married to him.

He gazed at Stephen Jannan in a sombre perplexity. "A nuisance," the other nodded. "Only time, I suppose, and the most rigid adherence to your statements will convince the lady of what she may expect. In the meanwhile, frankly, we had better put it in some other hands; not so much on my account as your own--the sympathetic young gentlemen, you see. That can be easily arranged."

Jasper Penny was not thinking of the material Essie, the present, concrete problem; but he was once more absorbed in the manner in which her influence followed, apparently shaped, his existence. He was again appalled by the vitality of the past; the phrase itself was an error, there was no past. All that had gone, that was to come, met ceaselessly in the present, a confusion of hope and regret. It was evident that he would have to see Essie again, and explain that what she had from him depended entirely on her reciprocal attitude. This could only be satisfactory in person. He would go to her at once, to-day. An enormous reluctance to enter her house again possessed him. The mere act had the aspect of an acknowledgment of her continued potency, her influence over him. He put it off as long as possible, and it was past five when he finally walked slowly toward her door.

She was in; and he saw, on the hall stand, a silk hat and overcoat cut in an extreme of current fashion. The servant preceded him above, toward the room usual for casual gatherings; and he heard a sudden low murmur, expostulation, follow the announcement of his name. Essie Scofield appeared at the top of the stairs. "Come up," she said in a hesitating, sullen voice. He mounted without reply. As he had expected Daniel Culser was present, and rose to greet him negligently, from a lounging attitude on the sofa. His coat, cut back to the knees, was relentlessly tapered, the collar enormously rolled and revered, and a white Marseilles waistcoat bore black spots as large as a Bolivian half dollar; while a black scarf, it was called the Du Casses, fell in an avalanche of ruffles. He moved toward the door, fitting his coat carefully about his slim waist, "I'm away, Essie," he proclaimed.

"When will you come again, Daniel?" she asked with an oppressive humility. She gazed at Jasper Penny with a momentary delay; then, with an utter disregard of his presence, laid her hands on the younger man's shoulders. "Soon," she begged. Obviously ill at ease he abruptly released himself. "I don't care," she cried defiantly; "I'll tell the whole world you are the sweetest man in it. Jasper's nothing to me nor I to him. And I'm not afraid of him, of what he might threaten, either. Stay, Daniel, and you'll see. I will look out for us, Dan."

Her unexpected frankness was inevitably followed by an awkward silence. Daniel Culser finally cursed below his breath, avoiding Jasper's cold inquiring gaze. "I'm glad I said it," Essie proceeded; "now he knows how things are." She went up again to the younger, and laid a clinging arm about his shoulders. "I'm mad about you, Daniel, you know it; there's nothing I wouldn't do for you, give you if I could. Isn't he beautiful?" she fatulously demanded of Jasper Penny.

"You are making a fool of yourself and me," the subject of her adulation roughly declared. He removed her arm so forcibly that the scarlet print of his fingers was visible on her soft, dead white skin. "Probably you have gone and spoiled everything. And remember what I said. I am a man of my word."

Jasper Penny dryly thought that the term man was singularly inappropriate in any connection with the meticulously garbed figure before him. Essie would have a difficult time with that stony youth. She regarded him with eyes of idolatry, drawing her fingers over the sleeve impatiently held aside from her touch. "I'm going," he stated once more, impolitely; but she barred him at the door. "I want you to stay," she cried excitedly; "hear what I am going to say, what I am going to do for you." She advanced toward Jasper Penny. "I asked that Jannan for more money because I had given Daniel all I had, and I wanted still more, to give him. I'll demand things all my life for him; everything I have is his." She gasped, at the verge of an emotional outburst. Her heart pounded unsteadily beneath an adventitious lace covering; her face was leaden with startling daubs of vermilion paint. "Give me a great deal of money, now, at once ... so that I can go to Daniel with my hands full."

"That is why I came here," Jasper Penny replied; "to tell you that you must not use up your income at once, on the first week, almost, of its payment; because you will be able to get no more until another instalment is due. I haven't the slightest interest in where your money goes, it is absolutely your own; but I cannot have you after it every second day. The administration will be put in a different quarter, rigidly dispensed; and any continued inopportunities will only result in difficulties for yourself."

She cursed him in a gasping, spent breath. Essie looked ill, he thought. Daniel Culser, listening at the door, made a movement to leave, but the woman prevented him, hanging about his neck. "No! No!" she exclaimed. "It will be all right, I can get it ... more. Be patient." Jasper Penny walked stiffly to the exit, where he paused at the point of repeating his warning. Essie Scofield was lifting a quivering, tear-drenched face to the vexation of the fashionable youth. He was attempting to repulse her, but she held him with a desperation of feeling. The elder descended the stairs without further speech.

Outside, the warmth of the day had continued into dusk. The mist had thickened, above which, in a momentary rift, he could see the stars swimming in removed constellations. He was wrapped in an utter loathing of the scene through which he had passed, his undeniable part in it. It was all hideous beyond words. His late need, his sense of void and illimitable longing, tormented him ceaselessly. He was sick with rebellion against life, an affair of cunning traps and mud and fog. Above the obscured and huddled odium of the city the distances were clear, serene. Above the degradation ... Susan. A tyrannical desire to see her possessed him, an absolute necessity for the purification of her mere presence. Unconsciously he quickened his step, charged with purpose; but he couldn't go to the Academy now; it was six o'clock. He must delay an hour at least. Habit prompted him to a supper which he left untried on its plates, the lighting of a cigar, quickly cold, forgot. At seven he hurried resolutely over the dark streets with the dim luminosity of occasional gas lamps floating on the unstirring white gloom. The bricks under foot were soggy, and the curved sign above her entrance, the bare willows, dropped a pattering moisture.

She saw him immediately, not in the familiar office, but in a hall laid with cold matting and nearly filled by a stairway, lit with a lamp at the further end. "I am sorry," she told him; "I have no place to take you. The rhetoric mistress is correcting papers there," she indicated the shut door. He made no immediate answer, content to gaze at her sensitive, appealing countenance. "It is so warm," she said finally, colouring at his intentness, "and I have been indoors all day. I might get my things. We could, perhaps ... a walk," she spoke rapidly, her head bent from him. She drew back, then hesitated. "Very well," he replied. Susan disappeared, but she quickly returned, in a little violet bonnet bound and tied with black, and a dark azure velvet cloak furred at her wrists and throat. She held a muff doubtfully; but, in the end, took it with her.

Outside, the mist and night enveloped them in a close, damp veil. They turned silently to the right, passing the narrow mouth of Currant Alley, and Quince Street beyond. The bricks became precarious, and gave place to a walk of boards; the corners about a broad, muddy way were built up; but farther on the dwellings were scattered--lighted windows showed dimly behind bare catalpas, iron fences enclosed orderly patches between sodden flats, gas lamps grew fewer.

A deep, all-pervading contentment surrounded Jasper Penny, an unreasoning, happy warmth. He said nothing, his stick now striking on the boards, now sinking into earth, and gazed down at Susan, her face hid by the rim of her bonnet. This companionship was the best, all, that life had to offer. He felt no need to importune her about the future, their marriage; curiously it seemed as though they had been married, and were walking in the security, the peace, of a valid and enduring bond. There was no necessity for talk, laborious explanation, periods infinitely more empty than this silence. They walked as close to each other as her skirt would permit; and at times her muff, swinging on a wrist, would brush softly against him. How strangely different the actual values of existence were from the emphasized, trite moments and emotions. In the middle of his life, at the point of his greatest capability for experience, his most transcendent happiness came from the present, the deliberate, unquestioning walk with Susan, the aimless progress through an invisible city and under a masked clear heaven of stars. No remembered thrill compared with it, reached the same height, achieved a similar dignity of consummation.

The way became more uneven; low clustered sheds rose out of the darkness against a deeper black beyond, and they came to the river. The bank was marshy, but a track of pounded oyster shells, visible against the mud, led to a wharf extending into the solid, voiceless flow of the water. Jasper Penny stood with Susan gazing into the blanketing gloom. A wan, disintegrated radiance shone from a riding light in the rigging of a vessel, and a passing warm blur flattened over the wet deck as a lantern was carried forward. No other lights, and no movement, rose from the river; no sound was audible at their back. The city, from the evidence of Jasper Penny's sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious; he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition. He had been swept, he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking of seconds. "Outside death," he said fantastically, unconsciously aloud. A remarkable sentence recurred to him, the most profound, he told himself, ever written: "Before he was I am." Its vast implications easily evaded his finite mind, just as the essence of his present rapture--it was no less--lay beyond his grasp. He lingered over it; gave it up ... returned to Susan.

"Wonderful," she said gravely, with a comprehensive wave of her muff. And her simplicity thrilled him the more with the knowledge that she shared his feeling. She drew up the fur collar of her cloak, shivered; and, in the wordless harmony that pervaded them, they turned and retraced their way.

The rhetoric mistress had left the office with a low turned lamp, and Jasper Penny stopped, taking the furred wrap from Susan's shoulders. She slowly untied the velvet strings of her bonnet, and laid it on the table. She extended her hands toward him, and, taking their cool slightness, he drew her to him. She rested with the fragrance of her cheek against his face, with her hands pressed to his breast. They stood motionless; he closed his eyes, and she was gone. He was confused in the dimness empty except for himself, and fumbled with, his gloves. Susan's wrap lay limply over a chair; the damp bonnet ribbons trailed toward the floor. He looked slowly about, noting every object--a pile of folded yellow papers, the stove, the globe bearing a quiver of light on its varnished surface.

The willow trees and board above the entrance were dripping ceaselessly; the lights of the city, increasing at its centre, like the discs of floating sunflowers. If he slept he was unaware of it, the magic joy so equally penetrated his waking and subconscious hours, the feeling of an elevation higher than years and mountains was so strong. The morning, he found, was again cold, and clear. He must go out to Jaffa, where new blast machines demanded attention; but, the day after--

His thoughts were broken by a sharp rap on the outer door. Mr. Stephen Jannan was below, and demanded to see him immediately. Stephen's appearance at the hotel at that early hour, he recognized, was unusual. But a glance at his cousin's serious aspect showed him at once that the reason was urgent. Stephen Jannan, as customary, was particularly garbed; and yet he had an expression of haste, disturbance. He said at once, in the bedroom where Jasper Penny was folding his scarf.

"That young waster, Culser, Daniel Culser, was shot and killed in Mrs. Scofield's house last evening."

The ends of the scarf fell neglected over the soft, cambric frills of his shirt. Jasper Penny swallowed dryly. "At what time?" he asked.

"He was seen in the Old White Bear Tavern at about seven, then apparently he went back to the woman's. The servant said he found the body at something past nine, and that there had been no other caller but yourself."

His hearer expressed a deep, involuntary relief. "I was there late in the afternoon," he acknowledged; "but I left around six." Stephen Jannan, too, showed a sudden relaxation. "I have already sent a message to the Mayor," he continued; "confident that you would clear yourself without delay. Mrs. Scofield's history is, of course, known to the police. You have only to establish your alibi; she, Essie Scofield, can't be found for the moment. She may have taken an early stage out of the city; but it is probable that she has only moved into another police district. Just where were you, Jasper?"

The latter said stupidly, "Walking with Susan Brundon."

A swiftly augmented concern gathered on Stephen Jannan's countenance. "You were walking with Susan," he repeated increduously. "Yes," Jasper asserted, with a sharp inner dread. "You don't know, but I want to marry her." Stephen Jannan faced him with an exclamation of anger. "You want to marry her, and, in consequence, drag her, Susan, into the dirtiest affair the city is like to know for years. Susan Brundon, with her Academy; all she has, all her labour, destroyed, ruined, pulled to pieces by slanderous tongues! By God, Jasper, what a beast you look! The most delicate woman, alive, the one farthest from just this sort of muck, being sworn in the Mayor's office, testifying in an obscene murder case, before the Sheriff and Constable, and heaven knows what police and vilely curious!"

A sickening feeling of utter destruction seized on Jasper Penny, a dropping of his entire being from the heights of yesterday to the last degradation. He felt the blood leave his heart and pound dizzily in his brain, and then recede, followed by an icy coldness, a wavering of the commonplace objects of the room. He raised his fingers to his collar, stared with burning eyes at Stephen Jannan. "Everything spoiled," the latter said again; "her pupils will positively be taken from her at once by all the nice females. Her name will be pronounced, smiled over, in every despicable quarter of the city, printed in the daily sheets. I--I can't forgive you for this. Susan, our especial joy!"

Jasper Penny saw in a flash, as vivid and remorseless as a stab of lightning, that this was all true. The fatality of the past, sweeping forward in a black, strangling tide, had overtaken not only himself but Susan, too; Susan, in soft merino, in an azure velvet cloak; her face against his. "I shall go away at once," he said hoarsely. "I'll never appear, and they can think what they will. Then there will be no necessity for her to come forward. She shall be spared that, no matter what it costs."

"Romantic and youthful folly," Jannan declared; "loud-sounding and useless. How little you understand Susan--immediately it is known Culser was killed between seven and nine, whether you stay or go, she will come forward with the truth, free you from any suspicion. I tell you every detail will be canvassed, familiar to the boys on the street. A man important as yourself, with all your industries and money, and such salacity, together with Susan Brundon, will make a pretty story. If I had a chance, Jasper, I'm almost certain I'd sacrifice you without a quiver. How could you? Susan Brundon! Never telling her--"

"On the contrary, she knew everything. I am not so low as you seem to think."

"That has no importance now!" Stephen Jannan exclaimed impatiently. "All that matters is to make it as easy as possible for her, I have, I think, enough position, influence, to keep the dregs out. But there will be enough present, even then. Damnable insinuations, winks, cross-questioning."

His excitement faded before the exigencies of the unavoidable situation; he became cold, logical, legal. Jasper Penny listened, standing, to his instructions, the exact forecasting of every move probable at the hearing in the Mayor's chamber. "After that," Stephen added, "we can face the problem of Susan's future. She thinks tremendously of her school. It will fall to pieces in her hands. There can be no question of material assistance; refused her own brother.

"Now, understand--stay in these rooms until I send for you. See no one. I'll get on, go to Susan. The thing itself should be short; her character will assist you there. What a mess you have made of living, Jasper."

XX

In the silence of the sitting room Jasper Penny heard diverse and yet mingled inner voices: Essie's younger, exuberant periods, her joy at presents of gold and jewelled trifles; changing, rising shrilly, to her last imploring sobs, her frantic embrace of the man that, beyond any doubt, she had herself killed. Running through this were the strains of a quadrille, the light sliding of dancing feet, and the sound of a low, diffident voice, Susan Brundon at the Jannans' ball. The voice continued, in a different surrounding, and woven about it was the thin complaint of a child, of Eunice, taken against her will from the Academy. These three, Essie and Susan and Eunice, combined, now one rising above the other, yet inexplicably, always, the same. Back of them were other, less poignant, echoes, flashes of place, impressions of associated heat or cold, darkness or light:

He saw the features of Howat Penny, in the canvas by Gustavus Hesselius, regarding him out of a lost youth; he recalled, and again experienced, the sense of Howat's nearness; integral with himself; merging into his own youth, no less surely lost, yet enduring. His mother joined the immaterial company, accents, rigid with pride in him. And penetrating, binding, all was the dull beat of the trip hammer at Myrtle Forge. He had mechanically finished dressing, and stood absently twisting the drapery at a window. A fine tracery of lines had suddenly appeared about his eyes; the cold rays of the winter sun, streaming over his erect figure, accentuated the patches of grey plentiful in his hair.

He saw, on the street below, a parade of firemen, in scarlet tunics and brass helmets, dragging a glittering engine. The men walked evenly abreast, at cross ropes. A leader blew a brilliant fanfare on an embossed, silver horn. Women passed, foreshortened into circular bells of colour, draped with gay pelerines and rich India shawls. He saw all and nothing. The horn of the firemen sounded without meaning on his distracted hearing. The flood of his suffering rose darkly, oppressing his heart, choking his breath. Perhaps if, as he had desired, he had gone away, Susan would be spared. But Stephen was right; nothing could keep her from the pronouncement of the words that would free him and bind herself in intolerable ill. Her uprightness was terrible. It would take her fearful but determined into the pits of any hell. His hands slowly clenched, his muscles tightened, in a spasm of anguish. God, why hadn't he recognized the desperation in Essie's quivering face! It would have been already too late, he added in thought; it went back, back--

A knock sounded discreetly on the door: and, opening it, he saw a young man, remembered as a law student in Stephen's office. "They are ready for you, sir, at the City Hall," he stated, in an over-emphasized, professional calm.

XXI

The restrained curiosity and inaudible comments which greeted his passage through the lower floor of the hotel gave place to a livelier interest when he was readily recognized on the street. The news of the murder had, evidently, already become city property. He was indicated to individuals unaware of his identity, with a rapid sketch of the crime, of fabulous ascribed possessions, and hinted oriental indulgence. He strode on rapidly, his shoulders squared, his expression contemptuous, challenging; but within he was possessed by an apprehension increasing at every step. It was not, fortunately, far from Sanderson's Hotel to the City Hall; west on Chestnut Street they reached their destination at the following corner. The loungers from the trees before the State House had gathered, with an increasing mob aware of the hearing within, at the entrance to the municipal offices. The windows on either side of the marble steps were crowded with faces, ribald or blank or censorious, and Jasper Penny had to force his way into the building. He tried to recall if there was another, more private, ingress, through which Susan might be taken; but his thoughts evaded every discipline; they whirled in a feverish course about the sole fact of the public degradation he had brought on Susan Brundon. They passed the doors of civic departments, he saw their signs--Water, City Treasurer, and then entered the Mayor's chamber.

The latter was seated at a table facing the room with his back to a wide window, opening on the blank brick wall of the Philosophical Society building; and at one side the High Constable of the district in which the murder had been committed was conversing with the Sheriff. Beside them, Jasper Penny saw, there were only some clerks present and three policemen. The Mayor spoke equably to the Ironmaster, directed a chair placed for his convenience, and resumed the inspection of a number of reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers, a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor, finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay of the ballet, spoke to the room in general. "Ten and past. Well! Well! Where are the others? Who is to come still, Hoffernan?"

"Mr. Jannan, sir; and a witness," a clerk answered. The other gazed at the paper before him.

"Susan Brundon," he read in a loud, uncompromising tone. Jasper Penny's eyes narrowed belligerently; he would see that these pothouse politicians gave Susan every consideration possible. He was, with Stephen, a far from negligible force in the city elections. "School mistress," the Mayor read on. "Never heard of her or her school. Ah--" Stephen Jannan had entered with Susan.

Jasper rose as she came forward, and the Mayor had the grace to remove his hat. She wore, he saw, the familiar dress of wool, with a sober, fringed black silk mantle, black gloves and an inconspicuous bonnet. She met his harried gaze, and smiled; but beneath her greeting he was aware of a supreme tension. There was, however, no perceptible nervousness in the manner of her accepting an indicated place; she sat with her hands quietly folded in her lap, the mantle drooping back over the chair. Stephen Jannan, facing the Mayor, made a concise statement in a cold, deliberate voice. "I now propose to show your honour," he finished, "that, between the hours in which Daniel Culser is said to have been shot to death, my client was peacefully in the company of Miss Brundon, strolling in an opposite quarter of the city."

"Hoffernan," the Mayor pronounced, waving toward the seated woman. The clerk advanced with a Bible; and, rising, Susan followed the words of the oath in a low, clear voice. To Jasper Penny the occasion seemed intolerably prolonged, filled with needless detail. Never had Susan Brundon appeared more utterly desirable, never had his need to protect, shield, her been stronger. He--protect her, he added bitterly; rather he had betrayed her, dragged her immaculate sweetness down into the foul atmosphere of a criminal hearing. His attention, fastening on the trivialities of the interior, removed him in a species of self-hypnotism from the actualities of the scene. He heard, as if from a distance, the questioning of the Mayor, "At what time, exactly, did you say? How did you know that?" Susan said, "I saw the clock at the back of the hall. I noticed it because I wondered if the younger children had retired."

"You say you walked with Mr. Penny--where?... How long did you remain at the river? No way of knowing. Seemed surprisingly short, I'll venture." Why didn't Stephen put an end to such ill-timed jocularity? "And Mr. Penny had spoken to you of his--his relations with Mrs. Scofield, the woman in whose house Culser was killed. Did he refer to her on this particular evening, standing by the river's brink?" Susan replied in the negative. "Did he seem ill at ease, worried about anything? Was he hurried in manner?"

To all of this Susan Brundon answered no, in a voice that constantly grew lower, but which never faltered, hesitated. The Mayor turned aside for a whispered consultation with the High Constable. The former nodded. "Have you any--shall we say--proprietary interest in Mr. Penny's affairs?" Her reply was hardly audible in the room stilled for what might be revealed. "No," she breathed, her gloved fingers interlacing. Jasper Penny's lips were drawn in a hard line; Stephen gazed fixedly at the floor. The Mayor gesticulated affably toward the lawyer. "That'll do," he declared. "Pleasure, Mr. Penny, to have you so completely cleared. I shall have to demand your assistance further, though--knowledge of Mrs. Scofield. And, in the case of her apprehension and trial, you will, of course, be called. Communication will be made through Mr. Jannan. No doubt in our mind now of the facts." A policeman opened the door and a surge of the curious pressed in. "Take her away," Jasper Penny whispered to Jannan; "this is damnable."

Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan's side. He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their way out through the corridor. Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction, waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the railroad for Jaffa. A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting engine beyond. He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had preceded him. To-morrow's papers would provide them with full accounts, the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details.... The meanest cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a leer.

His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed. "Take Mr. Penny's overcoat," she brusquely directed a servant. He had never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond his power.

A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply, straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference, was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what life still, and so fully, held.

His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past. At the usual hour the hot wine appeared; the glassful was pressed on Amity Merken; his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction. An old custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding, in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings. He saw that his mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the glass. Her lined face quivered as she said good night. He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow, conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing warmth. He had done this, too--hastened her death; she must have suffered inordinately in her prideful affection. She said nothing, beyond the repeated admonition that he must not sit up into the night.

The next day he forced himself to read to the end the report of the murder in the _Gazette_. The references to Susan Brundon were as scant as, evidently, Stephen Jannan could arrange; but her name, her Academy, were invested with an odious publicity. Jasper Penny saw again that he was a person of moment; his part in the affair gave it a greatly augmented importance. Yet now the worst, he told himself, was at an end; the publicity would recede; after a decent interval he could see Susan.