The Three Black Pennys Part 10

Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness, persisted, grew--it had become the predominate design of his weaving.

Through this he recognized a rea.s.sertion of his pride, the rigid pride of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion. Beyond forty men returned to their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth.

His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled, he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves. In the maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny s.p.a.ce.

He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie. Her face flushed with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr.

Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice Scofield, a child without--"

All that she had said was absolutely true, just.

"I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that d.a.m.ned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows.

"I haven't been well, either--a fierce pain here, in my heart."

It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly.

"Where? How?" He winced--the past reaching inexorably into the future.

Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased within him--the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the pa.s.sion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.

"Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something, of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself."

"I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me nothing."

"... what you are getting as long as you live?"

"That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and never know it."

"If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified."

"You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she p.r.o.nounced, mollified.

"At one time--do you remember?--you said if ever the chance came you would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your iron, gold. I--" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing,"

she repeated, moving to secure a half-full gla.s.s.

"Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously.

"I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you seemed like an old gentleman. Now Dan Culser," she hesitated, and then swept on, "he's what you'd name young." At Daniel Culser's age, he told himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his hair. He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing of flesh faintly reeking with brandy. "I have a great deal to pay, where money goes I don't know, even a little would be a help." He left some gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a momentary release.

Outside Cherry Street was blackly cold, a gas lamp at the corner shed a watery, contracted illumination. He made his way back toward the hotel, but a sudden reluctance to mount to his lonely chambers possessed him.

Before the glimmering marble facade he took out his watch, a pale gold efflorescence in the gloom, and rang the hour in minute, clear notes.

The third quarter past ten. He recalled the ball, but then commencing, at Stephen Jannan's; there it would be indescribably gay, a house flooded with the music of quadrilles, light, polite-chatter; and he determined to proceed and have a cigar with Stephen.

He walked briskly up Mulberry Street to Sixth and there turned to the left. Jasper Penny soon pa.s.sed the shrouded silence of Independence Square, with the new Corinthian doorway of the State House showing vaguely through the irregularly grouped ailanthus trees. Beyond, the brick wall with its marble coping and high iron fence reached, on the opposite side, to the Jannan corner. The length of the brick dwelling, with white arched windows and coursings faced the vague emptiness of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, closed for the winter.

Inside the hall was bright and filled with the pungent warmth of fat hearth coal. A servant, with a phrase of recognition, directed him above, to a room burdened with masculine greatcoats and silk hats. There an attendant told him that Mr. Jannan was below. Jasper Penny had no intention of becoming a partic.i.p.ant in the hall, but neither did he propose to linger among wraps, listening to the supercilious chatter of young men in the extreme mode of bright blue coats, painfully tight black trousers with varnished pumps and expanses of ankle in grey silk.

One, inspecting him through an eyegla.s.s on a woven hair guard, expressed a pointed surprise at Jasper Penny's informal garb. "Christoval!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "It approaches an insult to the da-da-darlings." Another commenced to sing a popular minstrel air:

"Blink--a--ho--d.i.n.k! Ah! Ho!

"Roley Boley--Good morning Ladies all!"

Jasper Penny abruptly descended to a small room used for smoking. Young men, he thought impatiently, could no longer even curse respectably.

They lisped like females at an embroidery frame. When he was young, younger, he corrected himself, he could have outdrunk, outridden.... His train of thought was abruptly terminated by a group unexpectedly occupying the smoking room. He saw Stephen Jannan, his wife Liza, the newly married young Jannans, and a strange woman in glace muslin and a black Spanish lace shawl about her shoulders. Stephen greeted him cordially. "Jasper, just at the moment for a waltz with--with Susan."

The stranger blushed painfully, made an involuntary movement backward, and Liza Jannan admonished her husband. "Do you know Miss Brundon, Jasper?" she asked.

Jasper Penny bowed, and Miss Brundon, with an evident effort, smiled, her shy, blue eyes held resolutely on his countenance. She at once slipped into the background, talking in a low, clear voice to Graham Jannan's wife; while the older men enveloped themselves in a fragrant veil of cigars. "Come, Mary, Susan," Mrs. Jannan directed, "out of this horrid, masculine odour." Accompanied by her son the women left, and Stephen turned to his cousin. "Thought, of course, you knew Susan Brundon," he remarked. "A school mistress, but superior, and a lady. Has a place on Spruce Street, by Raspberry Alley, for select younger girls; unique idea, and very successful, I believe."

Jasper Penny said comfortably, "Humm!" The other continued, "I want Graham to get out to Shadrach Furnace as soon as may be. That old stone house the foremen have occupied is nearly fixed for him. I am very well content, Jasper, to have him in the iron trade, with you practically at its head. No deliberate favours, remember, and I have told him to look for nothing. But, at the same time--you comprehend: folly not to push the boy on fast as possible. No reason for us all to go through with the hards.h.i.+ps of the first Gilbert and his times. Must have been fatiguing, the wilderness and English troubles and all that."

"Splendid, I should say," Jasper Penny replied. He repeated satirically the conversation he had heard above. "Makes me ill. You will remember there was a Howat, son of our original settler--now he must have been a lad! Married some widow or other; wild at first, but made iron in the end."

"A black Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was curious--that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished, concrete, after generations. The one to hold it before Howat had been burned in Mary's time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three hundred years. Jasper had a sudden, vivid sense of familiarity with the Howat who had married some widow or other. His mind returned to his own, peculiar problem, to Essie Scofield, to the burden with which he had enc.u.mbered himself, the payment that faced him for--for his sheer youth. He said abruptly, belated:

"You fit the present formal ease of society, Stephen; you like it and it likes you. In a superficial way I have done well enough, but underneath--" his voice sank into silence. A profound, familiar dejection seized him; incongruously he thought of Miss Brundon's delicate shrinking from the mere contact of the amenities of speech.

Super-sensitive. "I must go," he announced, and refused Stephen Jannan's invitation for the night.

"Stay for some supper, anyhow," the other insisted, and, a hand on his arm, led him past the doors open upon the dancing.

Chandeliers, great coruscating pendants of gla.s.s prisms and candles, glittered above the expanse of whirling crinoline and blue coats, vermilion turbans, gilt feathers and flowered hair. The light fell on shoulders as white and elegantly sloping as alabaster vases, draped in rose and citron, in blanched illusion frosted and looped with silver; on bouquets of camellias swinging from jewelled chains against ruffled and belled skirts swaying about the revealed symmetry of lacy silk stockings and fragile slippers. "Ah, Jasper," Stephen Jannan said; "in our time, what! Do you remember your first Wellington boots? The gambling room and veranda at Saratoga? Tender eyes, old boy, and little tapering hands."

Jasper Penny replied, "It seems my hair is grey." Silence fell on them as they entered the dining room. A long table was burdened with elaborate paG.o.das of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates; with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted gla.s.s and ormolu; and, everywhere, the pale mult.i.tudinous flames of candles and the fuller radiance of astral lamps hung with l.u.s.tres. Jasper Penny idly tore open a bon bon wrapped in a verse on fringed paper,

"Viens! Viens! ange du ciel, je t'aime! je t'aime!

Et te le dire ici, c'est le bonheur supreme."

Love and the great hour of life! He had missed both; one, perhaps, with the other. His marriage to Phebe, except for a brief flare at the beginning, had been as empty as the affair with Essie Scofield. G.o.d, how hollow living seemed! He had missed something; or else existence was an ugly deception, the false lure of an incomprehensible jest. The music beat in faint, mocking waves on his hearing, the lights of the supper shone in the gold bubbles of his wine gla.s.s. He drained it hurriedly.

Outside the night, lying cold on deserted squares, blurred with gas lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen Jannan's ball. In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished. Death ... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart. A duty, Eunice, remained. The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the injustice he had wrought.

XII

The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry. At the river the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood. The boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet s.h.i.+p, the _Susquehanna_, and into the narrow ca.n.a.l through Windmill Island. Camden was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water. He inquired the way to the Reverend Mr. Needles', pa.s.sed a brick meeting house, and, turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to a dingy wooden house with broken panes in the upper windows and a collapsing veranda at the edge of a blackened, skeleton wood.

A tall, gaunt woman in a ravelled worsted shawl answered his summons, and informed him, interrupted by a prolonged coughing, that Mr. Needles was away on circuit. "I came for a child staying with you," Jasper Penny explained shortly, suppressing an involuntary repulsion at the degraded surroundings. "She's not well," the woman replied, with instant suspicion. "I don't just like to let a chancy person see her." He discarded all subterfuge. "I am her father," he stated. The other s.h.i.+fted to a whining self-defence. "And her in this sink!" she exclaimed, gazing at Jasper Penny's furred coat, his glossy hat and gloves and ebony cane.

"I did all for her I could, considering the small money I was promised, and then half the time I didn't get that, neither. The lady owes for three weeks right now. I suppose you'll have to come in," she concluded grudgingly. They entered a dark hall, clay cold. Beyond, in a slovenly kitchen hardly warmer, he found Eunice, his daughter; a curiously sluggish child with a pinched, hueless face and a meagre body in a man's worn flannel s.h.i.+rt and ragged skirt and stockings.

"Here's your father," Mrs. Needles e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed.

Eunice stood in the middle of the bare floor, staring with pallid, open mouth at the imposing figure of the man. She said nothing; and Jasper Penny found her silence more accusing than a shrill torrent of reproach.

"She's kind of heavy like," Mrs. Needles explained. "I have come to take you away," Jasper Penny said. Then, turning to the woman: "Are those all the clothes she has?" She grew duskily red. "There are some others about, but I don't just know where, and then she spoils them so fast."

"That's a lie," the child announced, with a faint patch of colour on either thin cheek. "Mr. Needles sold them." The man decided to ignore such issues; his sole wish now was to take Eunice away as speedily as possible. "Well," he directed impatiently, "get a shawl, something to wrap her in." He regretted vainly that he had not come for the child in a carriage. He paid without a question what the woman said was owing; and, with Eunice folded in a ragged plaid, prepared to depart. "I guess," the child decided, in a strangely mature voice, "we'd better take my medicine." She turned toward a mantel, Mrs. Needles made a quick movement in the same direction, but the small shape was before her.

Jasper Penny took a bottle from the diminutive, cold hand. The label had been obliterated; but, impelled by a distrustful curiosity, he took out the cork.

Laudanum!

He was at the point of an indignant condemnation when the words perished without utterance--not the haggard woman before him, but himself, Jasper Penny, was entirely guilty. He, in reality, had given the drug to his daughter, placed her in this sorry and bitter poverty. "Come, Eunice,"

he said, taking her by the hand, his face grey and stony.

Once more in the city he walked with the child to the ferry and foot of Chestnut Street, where they found places in The Reaper, a stage brightly painted with snowy s.h.i.+ps and drawn by four sorrel horses. His first concern was to purchase proper clothes for his daughter; then he would face the problem of her happier disposal. They pa.s.sed the columned facade of the Philadelphia Bank, the Custom House with its wide steps set back from the street, hedged dwellings, and the United States Hotel to Independence Square and Sixth Street, where he lifted the child from the stage. They stopped before an entrance between bowed windows which had above it the sign, The Misses Dunlop, Millinery.