Chapter II: The Forge (4)

This mood was interrupted by an imperative communication from Stephen--he must be in the other's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow. Nothing more definite was said; but Jasper Penny was not wholly surprised to see Essie Scofield huddled in a chair at the lawyer's table. She had made an attempt at the bravado of apparel, but it had evidently failed midway; her hair hung loosely about a damp brow, the strings of her bonnet were in disarray, a shawl partially hid a bodice wrongly fastened. Her face was apathetic, with leaden shadows and dark lips ceaselessly twisting, now drawn into a petulant line, now drooping in childish impotence. She glanced at him fleetly as he entered, but said nothing. Robbed of the pretensions of pride, stripped of feminine subterfuge, she was appalling. He involuntarily recalled the Essie who had swept him into a riot of emotion--a vivid and palpitating creature radiating the exuberance of careless health and youth. She could not, he calculated, be beyond thirty-seven now. He abruptly ceased his speculation, turned from her, with a feeling of impropriety. Stephen Jannan said shortly:

"Al Schimpf will be here. It seemed to me he was the best man to retain. It's obvious that I can't defend her. You will, of course, require everything possible done." Essie Scofield shivered. "I don't want to go into court," she articulated, "and answer all the dreadful questions." There was a stir without, and a hugely fat man in a black cape fastened with a silver chain and velvet collar entered. Al Schimpf's face was so burdened with rolling chins that he disregarded the customary fashion of whiskers, but a grizzled moustache lay above his well-formed lips, and an imperial divided his heavy, aggressive chin. He was, evidently, fully informed of the case before him; for, after saluting Jannan and Jasper Penny, he, seated himself directly before Essie Scofield, fastening upon her an unwavering, glacial gaze.

"Now, pay attention," he proceeded at once.

"I'll go over a few facts--this Daniel Culser, you were in love with him; no length you wouldn't go, lost your senses completely; and he--all he cared about was the money he could wring out of you. As soon as you were paid the sums that Mr. Penny allowed you, this Culser got it from you; he took every cent and wanted more. Said he would leave you unless you got hold of something really worth while. Then, of course, you carried on, promised to get him more and more; said you could force a fortune from Mr. Penny, anything to keep the young man. Hey?" he demanded suddenly.

The woman looked up with a haggard wonder, an irrepressible shudder; her hands raised and fell, and she nodded dumbly.

"Then, while Culser was in the house, Mr. Penny unexpectedly turned up and said--perhaps before Daniel himself--that you could expect nothing more, and made it plain that he was not to be intimidated. Daniel Culser was for leaving you, didn't intend to hang around for a bloody little quarterly; and, when you realized that he meant, or you thought he meant, what he said, you went crazy and shot him.... What!" He got no response from her now; she cowered away from him, hiding behind an updrawn shoulder, a fold of the shawl. "But listen to this," Al Schimpf shot at her, leaning forward, "here's what happened, and you must remember every fact:

"The fellow had been around the house day after day. You had encouraged him at first; but then you got frightened; he beat you--hear that?--struck you with his fist, and threatened worse if you didn't go through old Penny's pocket for him. He even hinted at something you might do together, and then get away with a mint. Culser was at it when Mr. Penny called, and took it up when he left, at about six o'clock. He said he wanted money bad, debts were hounding him; and he was going to get it out of Penny, out of you. There's where you said you would warn Jasper Penny; and remember how he struck you, in the back, because you turned, and it hurts yet--there up by the left shoulder, the left shoulder, the left! Then, he had been drinking in your house and at a tavern, he threatened to kill you if you didn't do what he wanted. You honestly thought he'd do it, and snatched a pistol out of a table drawer, and.... Do you understand? That's what happened, and it's all you know. Said he would kill you, apparently commenced then, and you acted in self-protection. Now, repeat that."

She gazed at him in a trembling confusion. "But," she objected, "he was only--he said. Oh! I was afraid I'd lose him." The lawyer moved closer to her, his unwinking, grey-green eyes like slate. "He said he'd kill you," he reiterated; "remember that, if you don't want to hang. He struck you; where?" After a long pause she replied haltingly, "In the back." Al Schimpf nodded, "Good. And he said you both were to get away with a mint. He told you it would be easy; the old man would gladly buy silence; and, by heaven, if he didn't--"

Jasper Penny stonily watched the intolerable degradation of the woman bullied into the safety of a lie. This was worse than anything that had gone before; he fell deeper and deeper into a strangling, humiliating self-loathing. Stephen Jannan's handsome countenance was fixed and pale; one hand lay on the table, empty and still. In the silence between Schimpf's insistent periods Jasper Penny could hear Essie's sobbing inspirations; he was unable to keep his gaze from her countenance, jelly-like and robbed of every trace of human dignity. He wondered vaguely at an absence of any sense of responsibility for what Essie Scofield had become; he felt that an attitude of self-accusation, of profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere. If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her.... A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed. Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born in him, laid dormant until, yes--it had been stirred into activity by Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed that natural development.

He was suddenly conscious that Al Schimpf had ceased domineering Essie. The lawyer swung about, facing them with an expression of commonplace satisfaction. "It's all in fine order," he declared. "I want, if possible, to study our jury through a preliminary case or so. We shall, of course, surrender our client at once, without making any difficulty about moving her from one police district to another. I can produce a witness to the fact that this Culser openly said that he expected shortly to come into more money. And he had dishonoured debts all about. You will have to appear, Mr. Penny; no way out of that, but our defence should go like a song. Now, Mrs. Scofield, I have a carriage outside."

When they had gone Jasper Penny and Jannan sat in a lengthening silence. Stephen's hand moved among the papers on the table; the other drew a deep breath. "I regret this tremendously for you," Stephen Jannan said at last. He spoke with feeling; his momentary anger at the entanglement of Susan vanished. "But it will pass, Jasper. You are too solid a man to be hurt permanently by private scandal. And you have no concrete political position to invite mud slinging. Yes, it will drop out of mind, and your iron will continue to support enterprise, extension."

"But Susan," Jasper Penny demanded, "what about her? Where is she?"

"With Graham at Shadrach. She was badly torn, and I insisted on her retreating for a week or more. There is a very capable assistant at the Academy. It's too early to speak conclusively, but I am afraid that Susan's usefulness is ended there. Have you seen the cheaper sheets? Every one, of course, is buying them. Rotten! The assistant, I understand, is anxious to procure the school, and I am considering allowing her the capital. Something might be arranged paying Susan an income.... If she would accept; confoundly difficult to come about."

"I am going to marry her," Jasper Penny asserted once more.

"What was the initial trouble?" the other asked, tersely.

"Essie." Stephen frowned.

"She would hit on that," he agreed; "stand until the last gasp of some fantastic conception of right."

Jasper explained:

"She thinks I ought to marry Essie, mostly on account of the child. She likes me, too, Stephen; I think I may tell you that. Well, I'll keep at her and at her. In the end she will get tired of refusal." The other shook his head doubtfully. "I've known Susan a good many years, and I have never seen her lose an ideal, or even an idea, yet."

Jasper Penny rose. "Meanwhile I'll have to go through with this trial. Thank God, Susan has no part in it." He warmly gripped Stephen's palm. "You're worth something in a life, immovable. Thank you, Stephen."

XXII

It was early in April, an insidiously warm morning with the ailanthus trees in bud before the State House, when Jasper Penny left the court room where Essie had been freed. Provision had been made for her--she had had a severe collapse during the trial--and a feeling almost of renewed liberty of spirit permeated Jasper, as, with his overcoat on an arm, he turned to the left and walked over the street in the blandly expanding mildness. A train left shortly for Jaffa, and he was bound directly home, to Myrtle Forge, anxious to steep himself in the echo of the trip hammer mingled with the poignant harmony of spring sounds drifting from the farm and woods. He was possessed by a sharpened hunger for all the--now recognized--beauty of the place of his allegiance and birth, the serenity of the acres Gilbert Penny had beaten out of the wild of the Province. He was astonishingly conscious of himself as a part of the whole Penny succession, proud of Gilbert, of Howat, who had always so engaged his fancy, of Casimir, and Daniel, his own father. Theirs was a good heritage; their part of the earth, the ring of their iron, his particular characteristic of a black Penny, formed a really splendid entity.

The low, horizontal branches of the beech tree on the lawn, older than the dwelling, opposed a pleasant variety on the long facade, built of stone with an appearance of dark pinkish malleability masking its obduracy. His mother was awaiting him on the narrow portico, and he at once told her of Essie's release. They stood together, gazing out across the turf, faintly emerald, over the public road, at the grey, solid group of farm buildings beyond. The farmer's daughter, in a white slip, emerged against the barnyard, and called the chickens in a high, musical note, scattering grain to a hysterical feathery mob. The air was still with approaching twilight; the sun slipped below the western trees and shadows gathered under the lilac bushes; the sky was April green.

"Your father has been dead twelve years," Gilda Penny said unexpectedly. He looked down and saw that she was decrepit, an old woman. Her mouth had sunken, her ears projected in dry folds from her scant strands of hair. He recalled Daniel Barnes Penny; the earliest memories of his mother, a vigorous, brown-faced woman with alert, black eyes, quick-stepping, dictatorial in the sphere of her house and dependents. One after the other, like the sun, they were slipping out of the sight of Myrtle Forge; vanished and remained; passed from falling hand to hand the unextinguished flame of life. Gilda Penny was merging fast into the formless dark. She clung with pathetically tense fingers to his arm as they turned into the house.

He had ordered a carriage immediately after an early supper; and, informing his coachman of his wish to proceed alone, drove quickly away through the dusk. He was going to Shadrach Furnace, to meet Susan for the first time since the unhappy occasion in the Mayor's chamber. He had decided, stifling his increasing impatience, not to see her until Essie's trial was over. Susan had been at Graham Jannan's house for nine weeks. Her sight, he had learned, had almost completely failed in a general exhaustion; but, with rigorous care, she had nearly recovered. The Academy had been sold to the assistant mistress; and there was an expressed uncertainty about Susan's near future. It had, however, no existence in Jasper Penny's thoughts, plans--she must marry him; any other course would now be absurd. The track from Myrtle Forge to the Furnace was bound into his every thought and association; its familiarity, he mused, had been born in him; his horses, too, took correctly, without pressure, every turning of the way. The road mounted, and then dropped between rounded hills to the clustering buildings, where lighted, pale yellow windows floated on the dusk, crowned by the wide-flung radiance of the Furnace stack. The air was potent in the valley with the indeterminate scent of budding earth--the premonitory fragrance of blossoms; and, hardly less delicate, stars flowered whitely in blue space.

He paused for a moment before entering Graham Jannan's house, saturated with the pastoral tranquillity, listening to the flutter of wings under the eaves. Then he went in. They had finished supper, but were lingering at the table, with the candles guttering in an air from the open door. His greeting was simple and glad, and without restraint. Susan wore a dress like a white vapour, sprigged with pale buds, her throat and arms bare. She smiled the familiar, hesitating smile, met his questioning gaze with her undeviating courage. Jasper Penny took a chair opposite her. Little was said. Peace deepened about his spirit.

Graham, he saw, had a new ruddiness of health; he laid a shawl tenderly about his wife's shoulders; and Jasper remembered that a birth was imminent. Later he drifted with Susan to the door, and they passed out into the obscurity beyond. Even now he was reluctant to speak, to break with importunities the serene mood. "All the iron making," she spoke at last, "lovely. I have stood night after night in the cast house watching the metal pour out in its glorious colours. And, when I wake, I go to my window and see the reflections of the blast on the trees, on the first leaves. The charcoal burners come down like giants out of the mythology of the forest. And, when I first came, there was a raccoon hunt, with a great stirring of lanterns and barking dogs in the dark ... all lovely."

"It is yours," he said, bending over her. "You can come here at your will. A house built. And Myrtle Forge, too; whatever I have, am." He paused; but, without reply, continued more rapidly. "It's over, the--the misery of the past weeks; the mistakes are dead; they are paid, Susan. Now we may take what is left and make it as beautiful as possible. After suffering, reparation, happiness, is every one's due. And I am certain I can make you happy."

A longer pause followed, in which he regarded her with an increasing anxiety. Her face was turned away, her progress grew slower until they stood by the shadowy bulk of a small stone structure. The door was open, and it seemed to him that she looked within. "A store house," he explained. Nothing was visible in the interior gloom but some obscure shapes, bales, piled against the walls, and the scant tracery of a rude stair leading up to a greater blackness above. She stopped, as if arrested by his period, laying a hand on the door frame.

"Why don't you answer me, Susan?" he proceeded. "You know that I want to marry you; surely it is all right now. Everything possible has been done. A great deal of life remains." Her answer was so low that it almost escaped him; the faintest breath of pain, of longing and regret. "I can't," she whispered; "not with her, the child. I can't."

"That," he replied gently, "is a mistaken idea of responsibility, a needless sacrifice. I could never urge you into an injustice, a wrong; at last I have got above that; what I want is the most reasonable thing imaginable, the best, in every conceivable way, for yourself and--any other. You are harming, depriving, no one. You are taking nothing but your own, what has been yours, and only yours, from the first moment I saw, no--from my birth. What has happened brought me in a straight road to you, the long road I have never, really, left."

"I can't," she said still again. "I want to, Jasper. Oh, with a heart full of longing; I am so tired that I would almost give the rest of my life for another secure hour with you. And I would pay that to give you what you want, what you should have. But something stronger than I am, more than all this, holds me; I can't forget that miserable woman, nor her child and yours, so thin and suspicious. I am not good enough to be her mother myself, even if I felt I had the right. Inside of me I am quite wicked, selfish. I want my own. But not with the other woman outside. She'd be looking in at the windows, Jasper, looking in at my heart. I would hear her." She leaned against her arm, her face hid, her shoulders trembling.

The musty odour of the stores floated out and enveloped him. He was suddenly annoyed. Susan herself lost some of her beauty, her radiance. He muttered that she was merely stubborn, blind to reality, to necessity. His attitude hardened, and he commenced to argue in a low, insistent voice. She made no reply, but remained supported in the doorway, a vague form against the inner dark.

"You must change your mind," he asserted; "you can't be eternally so foolish. There is absolutely no question of my marrying Essie Scofield."

"I don't want you to, really," she admitted in an agonized whisper. "I shall never again ask you to do that. Ah, God, how low I am."

He saw, in an unsparing flash of comprehension, that it was useless. She would never marry him as long as the past stayed embodied, actual, to peer into their beings. A return of his familiar irritability, spleen, possessed him. "You are too pure for this world," he said brutally. She turned and stood facing him, meeting his scorn with an uplifted countenance. A shifting reflection from the Furnace stack fell over her in a wan veil, over the vaporous, sprigged white of her dress, her bare throat and arms, her cheeks wet with tears. Out of it her eyes, wide with pain, steadily met his angry scrutiny. Out of it she smiled at him before the reflection died.