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The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer

J >> Joseph Hergesheimer >> The Three Black Pennys




Others had entered; a little group gathered about Thomas Gilkan's waning
lantern. Far above them a window glimmered against the sooty wall. Howat
saw that Dan Hesa was talking to Gilkan, driving in his words by a fist
smiting a broad, hard palm. The group shifted, and the countenance of
the man who had recognized Howat Penny in the woods swam into the pale
radiance. His lassitude swiftly deserted him, receding before the
instant resentment always lying at the back of his sullen
intolerance--they were discussing him, mouthing some foul imputation
about the past night. Hesa left the cast-house abruptly, followed by the
charcoal burner; and Howat rose, the length of his rifle thrust forward
under his arm, and walked deliberately forward.

The daylight was increasing rapidly; and, as he approached, Thomas
Gilkan extinguished the flame of the lantern. He was a small man, with a
face parched by the heat of the furnace, and a narrowed, reddened vision
without eyebrows or lashes. He was, Howat had heard, an unexcelled
founder, a position of the greatest importance to the quality of metal
run. There was a perceptible consciousness of this in the manner in
which Gilkan moved forward to meet Gilbert Penny's son.

"I don't want to give offence," the founderman said, "but, Mr. Penny,
sir--" he stopped, commenced again without the involuntary mark of
respect. "Mr. Penny, stay away from my house. There is more that I could
say but I won't. That is all--keep out of my place. No names, please."

Howat Penny's resentment swelled in a fiery anger at the stupidity that
had driven Thomas Gilkan into making his request. A sense of humiliation
contributed to an actual fury, the bitterer for the reason that he could
make no satisfactory reply. Gilkan was a freedman; while he was
occupying a dwelling at Shadrach Furnace it was his to conduct as he
liked. Howat's face darkened--the meagre fool! He would see that there
was another head founder here within a week.

But there were many positions in the Province for a man of Gilkan's
ability, there were few workmen of his sensitive skill with the charge
and blast. Not only Howat's father, but Abner Forsythe as well, would
search to the end all cause for the founderman's leaving. And, in
consequence of that, any detestable misunderstanding must increase. He
determined, with an effort unaccustomed and arduous, to ignore the
other; after all Gilkan was but an insignificant mouthpiece for the
familiar ineptitude of the world at large. Thomas Gilkan might continue
at the Furnace without interference from him; Fanny marry her stupid
labourer. Howat had seen symptoms of that last night. He would no longer
complicate her existence with avenues of escape from a monotony which
she patently elected.

"Very well, Gilkan," he agreed shortly, choking on his wrath. He turned
and tramped shortly from the interior. A sudden, lengthening sunlight
bathed the open and a sullen group of charcoal burners about Dan Hesa.
Their faces seemed ebonized by the grinding in of particles of blackened
wood. Some women, even, in gay, primitive clothes, stood back of the
men. As Howat passed, a low, hostile murmur rose. He halted, and met
them with a dark, contemptuous countenance, and the murmur died in a
shuffling of feet in the dry grass. He turned again, and walked slowly
away, when a broken piece of rough casting hurtled by his head. In an
overpowering rage he whirled about, throwing his rifle to his shoulder.
A man detached from the group was lowering his arm; and, holding the
sights hard on the other's metal-buttoned, twill jacket, Howat pulled
the trigger. There was only an answering dull, ineffectual click.

The rifle slid to the ground, and Howat stared, fascinated, at the man
he had attempted to kill. The charcoal burners were stationary before
the momentary abandon of Howat Penny's temper. "Right at me," the man
articulated who had been so nearly shot into oblivion. "--saw the hammer
fall." A tremendous desire to escape possessed Howat; a violent chill
overtook him; his knees threatened the loss of all power to hold him up.
He stepped backward, his gun stock trailing over the inequalities of the
ground; then he swung about, and, in an unbroken silence, stumbled away.

He was not running from anything the charcoal burner might say, do, but
from a terrifying spectacle of himself; from the vision of a body shot
through the breast, huddled in the sere underbrush. He was aghast at the
unsuspected possibility revealed, as it were, out of a profound dark by
the searing flash of his anger, cold at the thought of such absolute
self-betrayal. Howat saw in fancy the bald triumph of a society to which
his act consummated would have delivered him; a society that, as his
peer, would have judged, condemned, him. Hundreds of faces--faces mean,
insignificant, or pock-marked--merged into one huge, dominant
countenance; hundreds of bodies, unwashed or foul with disease, or
meticulously clean, joined in one body, clothed in the black robe of
delegated authority, and loomed above him, gigantic and absurd and
powerful, and brought him to death. Deeper than his horror, than any
fear of physical consequences, lay the instinctive shrinking from the
obliteration of his individual being, the loss of personal freedom.




II


He was possessed by an unaccustomed desire to be at Myrtle Forge;
usually it was the contrary case, and he was escaping from the
complicated civilisation of his home; but now the well-ordered house,
the serenity of his room, appeared astonishingly inviting. Howat
progressed rapidly past the smithy, and turned to the right, about the
Furnace dam, a placid and irregular reach of water holding the
reflection of the trees on a mirror still dulled by a vanishing trace of
mist, above which the leaves hung in the motionless air, in the aureate
wash of the early sun, as if they had been pressed from gold foil.
Beyond the dam the path--he had left the road that connected Forge and
Furnace for a more direct way--followed the broad, rippling course of
the Canary, the stream that supplied the life of Myrtle Forge. He
automatically avoided the breaks in the rough trail; his mind, a dark
and confused chamber, still lighted by appalling flashes of memory. A
thing as slight, as incalculable, as a loose flint had been all that
prevented.... He wondered if Fanny and Thomas Gilkan were right in their
shared conviction; Fanny half persuaded, but the elder with a finality
stamped with an accent of the heroic. Whether or not they were right
didn't concern him, he decided; his only problem was to keep outside
all such entanglements. And at present he wanted to sleep.

The path left the creek and joined the road that swept about the face of
the dwelling at Myrtle Forge. The lawn, squarely raised from the public
way by a low brick terrace, showed the length of house behind the
dipping, horizontal branches, the beginning, pale gold, of a widespread
beech. It was a long structure of but two stories, built solidly out of
a dark, flinty stone with an indefinite pinkish glow against the lush
sod and sombre, flat greenery of a young English ivy about a narrow,
stiff portico.

Howat crossed the lawn above the house, where a low wing, holding the
kitchen and pantries, extended at right angles from the dwelling's
length. A shed with a flagging of broad stones lay inside the angle,
where a robust girl with an ozenbrigs skirt caught up on bare legs and
feet thrust into wooden clogs was scrubbing a steaming line of iron
pots. He quickly entered the centre hall from a rear door, and mounted,
as he hoped, without interruption to his room. That interior was
singularly restful, pleasant, after the confused and dishevelling night.

The sanded floor, patterned with a broom, held no carpet, nor were the
walls covered, but white and bare save for a number of small, framed
engravings--a view of Boston Harbour, Queene Anne's Tomb, and some black
line satirical portrait prints. A stone fireplace, ready for lighting,
had iron dogs and fender, and a screen lacquered in flowery wreaths on
a slender black stem. At one side stood a hinge-bound chest, its oak
panels glassy with age; on the other, an English set of drawers held a
mirror stand and scattered trifles--razors and gold sleeve-buttons, a
Barcelona handkerchief, candlesticks and flint, a twist of common,
pig-tail tobacco; while from a drawer knob hung a banian of bright
orange Chinese silk with a dark blue cord.

By the side of his curled black walnut bed, without drapery, and set,
like a French couch, low on three pairs of spiral legs, was a deep
cushioned chair into which he sank and dragged off his sodden buckskin
breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision--squat,
rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with
apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He
secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds,
he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into an immediate profound
slumber.

The shadows of late afternoon were once more gathering when he woke. He
lay, with hands clasped behind his head, watching a roseate glow
disperse from the room. From without came the faint, clear voice of
Marta Appletofft, across the road at the farm, calling the chickens; and
he could hear the querulous whistling of the partridges that invariably
deserted the fringes of forest to join the domesticated flocks at feed
time. A sense of well-being flooded him; the project of St. Xavier, the
French forts, drew far away; never before had he found Myrtle Forge so
desirable. He was, he thought, growing definitely older. He was
twenty-five.

A light knock fell on his door, and he answered comfortably, thinking
that it was his mother. But it was Caroline, his oldest sister. "How you
have slept," she observed, closing the door at her back; "it was hardly
nine when you came in, and here it is five. Mother heard you." Caroline
Penny was a warm, unbeautiful girl with a fine, slender body, two years
younger than himself. Her colouring was far lighter than Howat's; she
had sympathetic hazel eyes, an inviting mouth, an illusive depression in
one cheek that alone saved her from positive ugliness, and tobacco brown
hair worn low with a long, turned strand. She had on a pewter-coloured,
informal wrap over a black silk petticoat, lacking hoops, with a cut
border of violet and silver brocade; and above low, green kid stays with
coral tulip blossoms worked on the dark velvet of foliage were glimpses
of webby linen and frank, young flesh.

She came to the edge of the bed, where she sat with a yellow morocco
slipper swinging from a silk clocked, narrow foot. He liked Caroline,
Howat lazily thought. Although she did not in the least resemble their
mother in appearance--she could not pretend to such distinction of
being--Caroline unmistakably possessed something of the other's
personality, far more than did Myrtle. She said generally, patently only
delaying for the moment communications of much greater interest than
himself, "Where were you last night?" He told her, and she plunged at
once into a rich store of information.

"Did you know that Mr. and Mrs. Winscombe are staying on? It's so,
because of the fever in the city. David and his father stopped all
night, too, and only left after breakfast. He's insane about London, but
I could see that he's glad to get back to the Province. Mr. Forsythe is
very abrupt, but ridiculously proud of him--"

"These Winscombes," Howat interrupted, "what about them? The Forsythes
are a common occurrence."

"David's been gone more than three years," she replied. "And you should
hear him talk; he's got a coat with wired tails in his box he's dying to
wear, but is afraid of his father. Oh, the Winscombes! Well, he's rather
sweet, sixty or sixty-five years old; very straight up the back, and
wears the loveliest wigs. His servant fixes them on a stand--he turns
the curls about little rolls of clay, ties them with paper, and then
bakes it in the oven like a pudding. The servant is an Italian with a
long duck's bill of a nose and quick little black eyes. He makes our
negro women giggle like anything. It's evident he is fearfully
impertinent. And, what do you think?--he hooks Mrs. Winscombe into her
stays! Mother says that that isn't anything, really; Mrs. Winscombe is a
lady of the court, and the most extraordinary happenings go on there.
You see, mother knows a lot about her family, and it's very good; she's
part Polish and part English, and her name's Ludowika. She's ages
younger than her husband.

"Myrtle doesn't like her,--" she stopped midway in her torrent of
information. "I came in to talk to you about Myrtle," she went on in a
different voice; "that is, partly about Myrtle, but more of myself and
of--"

"How long are the others going to stay?" he cut in heedlessly.

"I don't know," she again repressed her own desire; "perhaps they will
have to go back to Annapolis--don't ask me why--but they hope to sail
from Philadelphia in a week or so. She has marvellous clothes, and I
asked her if she would send me some babies from London. You know what
they are, Howat--little wooden dolls to show off the fashion; but she
made a harrowing joke, right in front of father and Mrs. Forsythe. The
things she says are just beyond description; it seems that it's all
right to talk anyway now if you call it classic. And she has fans with
pictures and rhymes on, honestly--" words apparently failed her.

Howat laughed. "Little Innocence," he said. He fell silent, thinking of
their mother. The court, he knew, had been her right, too, by birth; and
he wondered if, with the reminder of Mrs. Winscombe and her reflections
of St. James, she regretted her marriage and removal to the Province.
She was essentially lady, while Gilbert Penny had been the son of a
small country squire. He had seen a profile of his father as a young
man, at the time he had first met Isabel Kingsfrere Howat. It was a
handsome profile, perhaps a shade heavy, but admirably balanced and
stamped with decisive power. He had characteristically invested almost
his last shilling in a tract of eight hundred acres in Pennsylvania and
the passage of himself and his bride to the Province.

It was natural for men so to adventure, but Howat thought of Isabel
Penny with, perhaps, the only marked admiration he felt for any being.
There had been a period, short but strenuous, of material difficulties,
in which the girl--she had been hardly a woman in years--entirely
unprepared for such a different activity, had been finely competent and
courageous. This had not endured long because Gilbert Penny had been
successful almost from the first day of his landing in a new world.
Chance letters had enlisted the confidence of David Forsythe, a Quaker
merchant of property and increasing importance; the latter became a part
owner of an iron furnace situated not far from the Penny holding; he
assisted Gilbert in the erection of a forge; and in less than twenty
years Gilbert Penny had grown to be a half proprietor in the Furnace,
with--

"Howat," Caroline broke in on his thoughts sharply, "I came in, as I
said, to talk about something very important to me, and I intend to do
it." Even after that decided announcement she hesitated, a deeper
colour stained her dear cheeks. "You mustn't laugh at me," she warned
him; "or think I'm horrid. I can talk to you like this because you seem
a--a little outside of things, as if you were looking on at a rather
poorly done play; and you are entirely honest yourself."

He nodded condescendingly, his interest at last retrieved from the
contemplation of his mother as a young woman.

"It's about David," Caroline stated almost defiantly. "Howat, I think
I'm very fond of David. No, you mustn't interrupt me. When he went away
I liked him a lot; but now that he is back, and quite grown up, it's
more than liking ... Howat. His father brought him out here right away
he returned, and for a special reason. He was very direct about it; he
wants David to marry--Myrtle. I heard father--yes, I listened--and him
talking it over, and our old darling was pleased to death. It's natural,
Mr. Forsythe is one of the most influential men in the city; and father
adores Myrtle more than anything else in the world." She paused, and he
studied her in a growing wonder; suddenly she seemed older, her mouth
was drawn in a hard line: a new Caroline. "You know Myrtle," she added.

He did, and considered the youngest Penny with a new objectivity. Myrtle
was an extremely pretty, even a beautiful girl. "You know Myrtle," she
repeated; "and why father is so blind is more than I can understand.
She doesn't care a ribbon for truth, she never thinks of anything but
her own comfort and clothes, and--and she'd make David miserable. Myrtle
simply can't fancy anybody but herself. That's very different from me,
Howat; or yourself. You would be a burning lover." He laughed
incredulously. "And I, well, I know what I feel.

"It's practically made up for David to marry Myrtle, that is, to urge it
all that's possible; and she will never care for him, while all he
thinks of now is how good looking she is. I want David, terribly," she
said, sitting erect with shut hands; "and I will be expected to step
aside, to keep out of the way while Myrtle poses at him. Oh, I know all
about it. I see her rehearsing before the glass. Or I will be expected
to act as a contrast, a plain background, for Myrtle's beauty.

"You see, there is no one I can talk to but yourself. Even mother
wouldn't understand, completely; and she couldn't be honest about
Myrtle. The best of mothers, after all, are women; and, Howat, there is
always a curious formality between women, a little stiffness."

"Well," he demanded, "what do you want me to say, or what did you think
I might do?"

"I don't know," she admitted, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "I
suppose I just wanted a little support, or even some encouragement. I
don't propose to let Myrtle walk off with David and not turn my hand.
Of course I am not a beauty, but then I'm not a ninny, either. And I
have a prettier figure; that is, it will still be pretty in ten or
fifteen years; Myrtle's soft."

"Good heavens," he exclaimed, half serious, "what Indians you all are!"

"I'm quite shameless," she admitted, "and this is really what I
thought--you can, perhaps, help me sometimes, I don't know how, but he
will be out here a lot, men talk together--"

"And I can tell him that Myrtle is an utterly untrustworthy person who
would make him ultimately miserable. I'll remind him that her beauty is
no deeper than he sees it. But that Caroline there, admirable girl,
seething with affection in a figure warranted against time or
accident--" her expression brought his banter to an end. He studied her
seriously, revolved what she had said. She was right about Myrtle, who
was undoubtedly a vain and silly little fish. His father's immoderate
admiration for her had puzzled him as well as the elder sister. He
remembered that never had he heard their mother express a direct opinion
of Myrtle; but neither had Isabel Penny shown the slightest question of
her husband's high regard for their youngest child. She was, he realized
with a warming of his admiration, beautifully cultivated in the wisdom
of the world.

Caroline was vastly preferable to Myrtle, he felt that instinctively;
and he was inclined to give her whatever assistance he could. But this
would be negligible, and he said so. "You will have to do the trick by
yourself," he advised her. "I wouldn't pretend to tell you how. As you
said, you're not a ninny. And Myrtle's none too clever, although she
will manage to seem so. It's wonderful how she'll pick up a hint or two
and make a show. You see--she will be talking iron to David as if she
had been raised in a furnace."

"Men are so senseless!" Caroline exclaimed viciously. She rose. "It's
been a help only to talk to you, Howat. I knew you'd understand. Supper
will be along soon. Make yourself into a charmer for Mrs. Winscombe. I'm
certain she thinks the men out here are frightful hobs." The light had
dimmed rapidly in the room, and he moved over to the chest of drawers,
where he lit the candles, settling over them their tall, carved glass
cylinders.




III


He dressed slowly, all that Caroline had said, and he thought, tangling
and disentangling deliberately in his mind. Mrs. Winscombe ... thinking
there were no presentable men in the Provinces. His hand strayed in the
direction of a quince-coloured satin coat; but he chose instead a
commonplace, dun affair with pewter buttons, and carelessly settled his
shoulders in an unremarkable waistcoat. Then, although he could hear a
concerted stir of voices below that announced impending supper, he
slipped into a chair for half a pipe. He was indifferent, not diffident,
and there was no hesitation in the manner in which he finally approached
the company seated at supper. His place was, as usual, at his mother's
side; but opposite him where Myrtle usually sat was a rigid, high
shouldered man in mulberry and silver, jewelled buckles, and a full,
powdered wig. He had thin, dark cheeks, a heavy nose above a firm mouth
with a satirical droop, and small, unpleasantly penetrating eyes. An
expression of general malice was, however, corrected by a high and
serene brow.

"Mr. Winscombe," Howat Penny's mother said, "my son." The former bowed
with formal civility, but gave a baffling effect of mockery which,
Howat discovered, enveloped practically every movement and speech. He
was, he said, enchanted to meet Mr. Penny; and that extravagant
expression, delivered in a slightly harsh, negligent voice, heightened
the impression of a personality strong and cold; a being as obdurate as
an iron bar masquerading in coloured satin and formulating pretty
phrases like the sheen on the surface of a deep November pool. Gilbert
Penny echoed the introduction at the other end of the table.

Howat saw, in the yellow candlelight, a woman not, he decided, any
better looking than Caroline, in an extremely low cut gown of scarlet,
with a rigid girdle of saffron brocade, a fluted tulle ruff tied with a
scarlet string about a long, slim neck, and a cap of sheer cambric with
a knot of black ribbons. Her eyes were widely opened and dark, her nose
short, and her mouth full and petulant. She, too, was conventionally
adequate; but her insincerity was clearer than her husband's, it was
pronounced quickly, in an impertinent and musical voice, without the
slightest pretence of the injection of any interest. Howat Penny felt,
in a manner which he was unable to place, that she vaguely resembled
himself; perhaps it lay in her eyebrows slanting slightly toward the
temples; but it was vaguer, more elusive, than that.

He considered it idly, through the course of supper. At intervals he
heard her voice, a little, high-pitched laugh with a curious,
underlying flatness: not of tone, her modulations were delicate and
exact; but deeper. Again he was dimly conscious of an aspect of her
which eluded every effort to fix and define. He could not even
comprehend his dwelling upon the immaterial traits of a strange and
indifferent woman; he was at a loss to understand how such inquiries
assailed him. He grew, finally, annoyed, and shut his mind to any
further consideration of her.

Mrs. Penny was talking with charming earnestness to the man on her other
hand. The amber radiance flickered over the beautiful curves of her
shoulders and cast a warm shadow at the base of her throat. She smiled
at her son; and her face, in spite of its present gaiety, held a
definite reminder of her years, almost fifty; but when she turned again
her profile, with slightly tilted nose and delightfully fresh lips and
chin, was that of a girl no older than Caroline. Howat had often noticed
this. It was amazing--with that slight movement she would seem to lose
at once all the years that had accumulated since she was newly married.
In a second she would appear to leave them all, her mature children, the
heavy, palpably aging presence of Gilbert Penny, the house and
obligations that had grown about her, and be remotely young, a stranger
to the irrefutable proof that her youth had gone. At such moments he was
almost reluctant to claim her attention, to bring her again, as it were,
into the present, with so much spent, lapsed: at times he almost
thought, in that connection, wasted.

She had, in addition to her profile, a spirit of youth that had remained
undimmed; as if there were within her a reserve warmth, a priceless
gift, which life had never claimed; and it was the contemplation of that
which gave Howat the impression that Isabel Penny's life had not fully
flowered. He had never known her to express a regret of the way she had
taken; he had never even surprised her in a perceptible retrospective
dejection; but the conviction remained. Gilbert Penny had been an almost
faultless husband, tender and firm and successful; but his wife had come
from other blood and necessities than domestic felicities; she had been
a part of a super-cultivation, a world of such niceties as the flawless
courtesy of Mr. Winscombe discussing with her the unhappy passion of the
Princess Caroline for Lord Hervey.

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