He was entirely right. Ludowika
rarely appeared so early; Myrtle’s face seemed
wan and pinched, and her father rallied her on her
indisposition after what should have been an entrancing
evening. She declared suddenly, “I hate
David Forsythe!” Gilbert Penny was obviously
startled. Caroline half rose, as if she had finished
breakfast; but she sat down again with an expression
of determination. Howat looted about from his
removed place of being. “I do!” Myrtle
repeated. “At first he seemed to like—I
mean I liked him, and then everything changed, got
horrid. Some one interfered.” Resentment,
suspicion, dominated her, she grew shrill with anger.
“I saw him making faces at Howat, as if he and
Howat, as if Howat had, well—”
“Don’t generalize,” said Howat coolly;
“be particular.”
“As if you had deliberately
spoiled any chance, yes,” she declared defiantly,
“any chance I had.”
“That’s ridiculous,”
Gilbert Penny declared. “What,” he
asked his wife, “are they all driving at?”
She professed herself equally puzzled. “Howat
would say nothing disadvantageous to young Forsythe.
He knows what we all hope.” Caroline suddenly
leaned forward, speaking in a level voice: “This
has nothing to do with Howat, but with me. I am
going to tell you at once, so that you can all say
what you wish, get as angry as you like, and then
accept what—what had to be. David and
I love each other; we are going to be married.”
Gilbert Penny’s surprise slowly
gave place to a dark tide suffusing his countenance.
“You and David,” he half stuttered, “getting
married—like that.” Myrtle was
rigid in an indignation that left her momentarily
without speech. Mrs. Penny, Howat saw, drew into
the slight remoteness from which she watched the conflicts
of her family. “I know I’m fearfully
bold, yes, indecent,” Caroline went on, “and
undutiful, impertinent. I’m sorry, truly,
for that. Perhaps you’ll forgive me, later.
But I won’t apologize for loving David.”
“Incredible,” her father
pronounced. “A girl announcing, without
the slightest warrant or authority, that she intends
to marry. And trampling on her sister’s
heart in the bargain.” Howat expostulated,
“What does it matter which he marries?
The main affair is to consolidate the families.”
The elder glared at him. “Be silent!”
he commanded. Howat Penny’s ever present
resentment rose to the surface. “I am not
a girl,” he stated; “nor yet a nigger.
And, personally, I think David was extremely wise.”
“I was sure of it,” Myrtle
cried; “he—he has talked against me,
helped Caroline behind my back.” She sobbed
thinly, with her arm across her eyes. “If
I thought anything like that had occurred,” their
father asserted, “Howat would—”
he paused, gazing heavily about at his family.
Howat’s ill temper arose.
“Yes?” he demanded with a sharp
inflection. “Be still, Howat,” his
mother said unexpectedly. “This is all very
regrettable, Gilbert,” she told her husband;
“but it is an impossible subject of discussion.”
Gilbert Penny continued hotly, “He wouldn’t
stay about here.” She replied equably,
“On the contrary, Howat shall be at Myrtle Forge
until he himself chooses to leave.”
Howat was conscious of a surprise
almost as moving as that pictured on his father’s
countenance. He had never heard Isabel Penny speak
in that manner before; perhaps at last she would reveal
what he had long speculated over—her true,
inner situation. But he saw at once that he was
to be again disappointed; the speaker was immediately
enveloped in her detachment, the air that seemed almost
one of a spectator in the Penny household. She
smiled deprecatingly. How fine she was, Howat
thought. Gilbert Penny did not readily recover
from his consternation; his surprise had notably increased
to that. His mouth was open, his face red and
agitated. “Before the children, Isabel,”
he complained. “Don’t know what to
think. Surely, surely, you don’t uphold
Howat? Outrageous conduct if it’s true.
And Myrtle so gentle, never hurt any one in her life.”
Myrtle circled the table, and found a place in his
arms. “If they had only told me,”
she protested. “If Caroline—”
He patted her flushed cheeks. “Don’t
give it another thought,” he directed; “a
girl as pretty as you! I’ll take you to
London, where you’ll have a string of men, not
Quakers, fine as peacocks.” He bent his
gaze on his son.
“Didn’t I tell you last
evening that the cast metal has been light?”
he demanded. “Must I beg you to go to the
Furnace? Or perhaps that too conflicts with your
mother’s fears for you. There are stumps
in the road.” There was a whisper of skirts
at the door, and Ludowika Winscombe stood smiling
at them. Myrtle turned her tear-swollen face upon
her father’s shoulder. Howat wondered if
Ludowika had slept. He endeavoured in vain to
discover from her serene countenance something of her
thoughts of what had occurred. He had a sudden
inspiration.
“I can go to Shadrach as soon
as Adam saddles a horse,” he told his father.
“You were curious about the Furnace,” he
added to Ludowika, masking the keen anxiety he felt
at what was to follow; “it’s a sunny day,
a pleasant ride.” She answered without a
trace of feeling other than a casual politeness.
“Thank you, since it will be my only opportunity.
I’ll have to change.” She was gazing,
Howat discovered, lightly at Isabel Penny. “I
must get the figures from Schwar,” his father
said. Before he left the room he moved to his
wife’s side, rested his hand on her shoulder.
She looked up at him with a reassuring nod. Howat
saw that, whatever it might be, the bond between them
was secure, stronger than any differences of prejudices
or blood, more potent than time itself. The group,
the strain, about the table, broke up.
The horses footed abreast over the
road that crossed the hills and forded the watered
swales between Myrtle Forge and the Furnace.
Ludowika, riding astride, enveloped and hooded in bottle
green, had her face muffled in a linen riding mask.
He wondered vainly what expression she bore.
Speech he found unexpectedly difficult. His passion
mounted and mounted within him, all his being swept
unresistingly in its tide. Howat said at last:
“Are you still so angry at life, at yourself?”
“No,” she replied; “I
slept that foolishness away. I must have sounded
like a character in The Lying Valet.”
Her present mood obscurely troubled him; he infinitely
preferred her in the pale crumpled silk and candle
light of the evening before. “I wish I could
tell you what I feel,” he said moodily.
“Why not?” she replied.
“It’s the most amusing thing possible.
You advance and I seem to retreat; you reach forward
and grasp—my fan, a handful of petticoat;
you protest and sulk—”
“Perhaps in Vauxhall,”
he interrupted her savagely, “but not here, not
like that, not with me. This is not a gavotte.
I didn’t want it; I tried to get away; but it,
you, had me in a breath. At once it was all over.
God knows what it is. Call it love. It isn’t
a thing under a hedge, I tell you that, for an hour.
It’s stronger than anything else that will ever
touch me, it will last longer.... Like falling
into a river. Perhaps I’m different, a
black Penny, but what other men take like water, a
woman, is brandy for me. I’m—I’m
not used to it. I haven’t wanted Kate here
and Mary there; but only you. I’ve got to
have you,” he said with a marked simplicity.
“I’ve got to, or there will be a bad smash.”
Ludowika rode silently, hid in her
mask. He urged his horse closer to her, and laid
a hand on her swaying shoulder. “I didn’t
choose this,” he repeated; “the blame’s
somewhere else.” He felt a tremor run through
her. “Why say blame?” she finally
answered. “I hate moralities and excuses
and tears. If you are set on being gloomy, and
talking to heaven about damnation, take it all away
from me.” A shadow moved across the countryside,
and he saw clouds rising out of the north. A sudden
wind swept through the still forest, and immediately
the air was aflame with rushing autumn leaves.
They fell across Howat’s face and eddied about
the horses’ legs. The grey bank deepened
in space, the sun vanished; the wind was bleak.
It seemed to Howat Penny that the world had changed,
its gold stricken to dun and gaunt branches, in an
instant. The road descended to the clustered
stone houses about Shadrach Furnace.
The horses were left under the shed
of the smithy at the primitive cross roads. Thomas
Gilkan had gone to the river about a purchase of casting
sand, but expected to be back for the evening run of
metal. Fanny was away, Howat learned, visiting
Dan Hesa’s family. They would, of course,
have dinner at the Heydricks; and the latter sent a
boy home to prepare his wife. Ludowika and Howat
aimlessly followed the turning road that mounted to
the coal house. A levelled and beaten path, built
up with stone, led out to the top of the stack, where
a group of sooty figures were gathered about the clear,
almost smokeless flame of the blast. Below they
lingered on the grassy edge of the stream banked against
the hillside and flooding smoothly to the clamorous
fall and revolving wheel by the wood shed that covered
the bellows. Pointed downward the latter spasmodically
discharged a rush of air with a vast creasing of their
dusty leather. A procession of men were wheeling
and dumping slag into a dreary area beyond. There
was a stir of constant life about the Furnace, voices
calling, the ringing of metal on metal, the creak of
barrows, dogs barking. The plaintive melody of
a German song rose on the air.
Behind a blood red screen of sumach
Howat again kissed Ludowika. Her arms tightened
about his neck; she raised her face to him with an
abandon that blinded him to the world about, and his
entire being was drawn in an agony of desire to his
lips. She sank limply into his rigid embrace,
a warm sensuous burden with parted lips.
At the Heydricks he ate senselessly
whatever was placed before him. The house, solidly
built of grey stone traced with iron, had two rooms
on the lower floor. The table was set before
a fireplace that filled the length of the wall, its
mantel a great, roughly squared log mortared into
the stones on either side. Small windows opened
through deep embrasures, a door bound with flowering,
wrought hinges faced the road, and a narrow flight
of stairs, with a polished rail and white post, led
above. Mrs. Heydrick, a large woman in a capacious
Holland apron and worsted shoes, moved about the table
with steaming pewter trenchards while Heydrick and
their guests dined.
Howat Penny’s face burned as
if from a violent fever; his veins, it seemed, were
channels through which ran burning wine. He was
deafened by the tumult within him. Heydrick’s
voice sounded flat and blurred. They were conscious
at Shadrach of the thin quality of the last metal.
The charge had been poorly made up; he, Heydrick,
had said at once, when the cinders had come out black,
that the lime had been short. His words fled
through Howat’s brain like racing birds; the
latter’s motions were unsteady, inexact.
The clouds had now widened in a sagging
plain across the sky, some scattered rain pattered
coldly on the fallen leaves. It was pleasant
before the hickory burning in the deep fireplace; the
Heydricks had taken for granted that they would wait
there for Thomas Gilkan, and they protested when Howat
and Ludowika moved toward the door. But Howat
was restless beyond any possibility of patiently hearing
Mrs. Heydrick’s cheerful, trivial talk.
He was so clumsy with Ludowika’s cloak that she
took it from him, and, with a careless, feminine scorn
in common with Mrs. Heydrick, got into it without
assistance. They stood for a while in the cast
house, watching a keeper rolling and preparing the
pig bed for the evening flow. They were pressed
close together in a profound gloom of damp warmth
rising from the wet sand and furnace. An obscure
figure moved a heavy and faintly clanging pile of
tamping bars. The sound of rain on the roof grew
louder, continuous. A poignant and then strangling
emotion clutched at Howat Penny’s throat.
Silently they turned from the murky interior.
A grey rain was plastering the leaves
on the soggy ground; puddles accumulated in the scarred
road; the smoke from the smithy hung low on the roof.
At the left a small, stone house had a half opened
door. Ludowika looked within. “For
storing,” Howat told her. Inside were piled
sledges and cinder hooks, bars and moulds, and bales
of tanned hides. Ludowika explored in the shadows.
A sudden eddy of wind slammed to the door through
which they had entered. They drew together irresistibly,
and stood for a long while, crushed in each other’s
arms; then Ludowika stepped back with her cloak sliding
from her shoulders. She rested against precarious
steps leading aloft through a square opening in the
ceiling. “For storage,” he said again.
He thought his throat had closed, and that he must
suffocate. A mechanical impulse to show her what
was above set his foot upon the lower step, and he
caught her waist. “You see,” he muttered;
“things for the store ... the men, wool stockings,
handkerchiefs ... against their pay.” The
drumming rain was scarcely a foot above their heads;
an acrid and musty odour rose from the boxes and canvas-sewed
bales about the walls. “Ludowika,”
Howat said. He stopped—she had shut
her eyes. All that was Howat Penny, that was
individually sentient, left him with a pounding rush.
A faint sound, infinitely far removed,
but insistent, penetrated his blurred senses.
It grew louder; rain, rain beating on the roof.
Voices, somewhere, outside. Ringing blows on
an anvil, a blacksmith, and horses waiting. Myrtle
Forge. Ludowika. Ludowika Winscombe.
No, by God, never that last again!
He stood outside with his head bare
and his face lifted to the cool shock of the rain.
Ludowika was muffled in her cloak. Howat could
see a renewed activity in the cast house; a group
of men were gathered about the furnace hearth, in
which he saw Thomas Gilkan. He moved forward to
call the latter; but a tapping was in progress, and
he was forced to wait. Gilkan swung a long bar
against a low, clay face, and instantly the murky
interior was ablaze with a crackling radiance against
which the tense figures wavered in magnified silhouettes.
The metal poured out of the furnace in a continuous,
blinding white explosion hung with fans of sparkling
gold; the channels of the pig bed rapidly filled with
the fluid iron.
Finally Howat Penny lifted Ludowika
to her saddle and swung himself up at her side.
The rain had stopped; below the eastern rim of cloud
an expanse showed serenely clear. Their horses
soberly took the rise beyond Shadrach Furnace and
merged into the gathering dusk of the forest road.
A deep tranquillity had succeeded the tempest of Howat’s
emotions; it would not continue, he knew; already
the pressure of immense, new difficulties gathered
about him; but momentarily he ignored them. He
searched his feelings curiously.
The fact that struck him most sharply
was that he was utterly without remorse for what had
occurred; it had been inevitable. He experienced
none of the fears against which Ludowika had exclaimed.
He lingered over no self-accusations, the reproach
of adultery. He was absolutely unable then to
think of Felix Winscombe except as a person generally
unconcerned. If he repeated silently the term
husband it was without any sense of actuality; the
satirical individual in the full bottomed wig, now
absent in Maryland, had no importance in the passionate
situation that had arisen between Ludowika and himself.
Felix Winscombe would of course have to be met, dealt
with; but so would a great many other exterior conditions.
Ludowika, in her linen mask, was enigmatic,
a figure of mystery. A complete silence continued
between them; at times they ambled with his hand on
her body; then the inequalities of the road forced
them apart. The clouds dissolved, the sky was
immaculate, green, with dawning stars like dim white
flowers. A faint odour of the already mouldering
year rose from the wet earth. Suddenly Ludowika
dragged the mask from her face. Quivering with
intense feeling she cried:
“I’m glad, Howat! Howat, I’m
glad!”
He contrived to put an arm about her,
crush her to him for a precarious moment. “We
have had an unforgettable day out of life,” she
continued rapidly; “that is something.
It has been different, strangely apart, from all the
rest. The rain and that musty little store house
and the wonderful iron; a memory to hold, carry away—”
“To carry where?” he interrupted.
“You must realize that I’ll never let
you go now. I will keep you if we have to go beyond
the Endless Mountains. I will keep you in the
face of any man or opposition created.”
A wistfulness settled upon her out
of which grew a slight hope. “I am afraid
of myself, Howat,” she told him; “all that
I have been, my life—against me. But,
perhaps, here, with you, it might be different.
Perhaps I would be constant. Perhaps all the while
I have needed this. Howat, do you think so?
Do you think I could forget so much, drop the past
from me, be all new and happy?”
He reassured her, only half intent
upon the burden of her words. He utterly disregarded
anything provisional in their position; happiness or
unhappiness were unconsidered in the overwhelming determination
that she should never leave him. No remote question
of that entered his brain. The difficulties were
many, but he dismissed them with an impatient gesture
of his unoccupied hand. Gilbert Penny would be
heavily censorious; he had, Howat recognized, the
moral prejudices of a solid, unimaginative blood.
But, lately, his father had sunk to a place comparatively
insignificant in his thoughts. This was partly
due to the complete manner in which Isabel Penny had
silenced the elder at breakfast. His mother,
Howat gladly felt, would give him the sympathy of
a wise, broad understanding. David and Caroline
would interpose no serious objection. Felix Winscombe
remained; a virile figure in spite of his years; a
man of assured position and a bitter will.
He determined to speak on the day
that Felix Winscombe returned from Annapolis; there
would be no concealment of what had occurred, and no
hypocrisy. A decent regret at Winscombe’s
supreme loss. The other would not relinquish
Ludowika without a struggle. Who would? It
was conceivable that he would summon the assistance
of the law, conceivable but not probable; the situation
had its centre in a purely personal pride. Nothing
essential could be won legally. A physical encounter
was far more likely. Howat thought of that coldly.
He had no chivalrous instinct to offer himself as
a sop to conventional honour. In any struggle,
exchange of shots, he intended to be victorious....
He would have the naming of the conditions.
“It’s beautiful here,”
Ludowika broke into his speculations; “the great
forests and Myrtle Forge. I can almost picture
myself directing servants like your mother, getting
supplies out of the store, and watching the charcoal
and iron brought down to the Forge. The sound
of the hammer has become a part of my dreams.
And you, Howat—I have never before had a
feeling like this for a man. There’s a little
fear in it even. It must be stronger than the
other, than Europe; I want it to be.” They
could see below them the lighted windows at Myrtle
Forge. The horses turned unguided into the curving
way across the lawn. A figure stood obsequiously
at the door; it was, Howat saw with deep automatic
revulsion, the Italian servant. He wondered again
impatiently at the persistently unpleasant impression
the other made on him. Gilbert Penny was waiting
in the hall, and Howat told him fully the result of
his investigation.
His father nodded, satisfied.
“You are taking hold a great bit better,”
he was obviously pleased. “We must go over
the whole iron situation with the Forsythes.
It’s time you and David stepped forward.
I am getting bothered by new complications; the thing
is spreading out so rapidly—steel and a
thousand new methods and refinements. And the
English opposition; I’m afraid you’ll come
into that.”
Ludowika did not again appear that
evening, and Howat sat informally before a blazing
hearth with his mother, Gilbert Penny and Caroline.
Myrtle had retired with a headache. Howat felt
pleasantly settled, almost middle-aged; he smoked
a pipe with the deliberate gestures of his father.
He wondered at the loss of his old restlessness, his
revolt from just such placid scenes as the present.
Never, he had thought, would he be caught, bound,
with invidious affections, desires. Howat, a black
Penny! He had been subjugated by a force stronger
than his rebellious spirit. Suddenly, recalling
Ludowika’s doubt, he wondered if he would be
a subject to it always. All the elements of his
captivity lay so entirely outside of him, beyond his
power to measure or comprehend, that a feeling of
helplessness came over him. He again had the sense
of being swept twisting in an irresistible flood.
But his confusion was dominated by one great assurance—nothing
should deprive him of Ludowika. An intoxicating
memory invaded him, touched every nerve with delight
and a tyrannical hunger. His fibre seemed to
crumble, his knees turn to dust. Years ago he
had been poisoned by berries, and limpness almost like
this had gone softly, treacherously, through him.