At Christmas a revival of spirit overtook him; a long letter came from Mariana, Bundy Provost sent him a tall silver tankard, with a lid, for his night table. Howat, polishing his glass with a maroon bandanna, read Mariana's letter in the yellow light of the lamp and burning logs.
"I have been to see a new steel process," she wrote; "the Duplex, with immense tilting furnaces and the Bessemer blast. I know a great deal about iron now; far more than a Howat Penny who should be an authority. Jim is frightfully busy, but lately he has been able to sleep after the night shift, which makes it better for every one. He is one of the best men here, and that comes from the Works, and the reorganization is slowly but surely progressing, and we are progressing with it. I am not a particle lonely, with only one servant; really don't want another, and make a great deal more than desserts. You have no idea how absorbing it is to have a lot of things that must be done. The days simply fade. You mustn't worry about me, Howat; I always hated polite affairs and parties and people; even when I was young as possible I was more than anything else a Hell in the Corner."
He smiled, recognizing an old flippant phrase, and let his hand drop while he recalled Mariana—turning to him to hook her gown, constructing annoying towers with the dominoes, reprehensible and amusing. He resumed reading:
"It would be wonderful if—no, it is wonderful! But Howat, I can tell only you this, I wish oranges had never been invented." He drew his mouth into a compressed line. James was drinking. He remembered when the other first made the concoction of orange juice and brandy; he saw him clearly, leaning in the doorway to the dining room, with the emptied goblet, and a curious, introspective expression on his mobile countenance. "He ought to be hung!" he exclaimed sharply. The fellow should see himself as a mat for Mariana's feet. But that wasn't life, he realized; existence seemed to become more and more heedless of the proprieties, of the simplest concessions to duty. He saw the world as a ship which, admirably navigated a score or more years ago, had jammed its rudder. No one could predict what rocks the unmanageable sphere might be driving for.
The significance born by that sentence robbed the remainder of the letter of pleasure. He read that Mariana had ordered the customary gift of cigarettes, and hoped they would last him longer than everybody knew they would. The implied affection of all the paragraphs was visible in the last words. He put the letter carefully away. The cigarettes were sufficient for a considerable time beyond customary. Something of his appetite had gone; the periods of half wakeful slumber in his chair drew out through whole evenings. The actual world retreated; his memories, as bright as ever, became a little confused; the years, figures, mingled incongruously; famous arias were transposed to operas in which they had not been sung.
Winter retreated, but the latter part of March and April were bitterly cold; no leaves appeared; the ground remained barren; he seldom got out.
The albums of programmes were brought from their place on the low shelves, but now, more than often, they were barely opened, scanned. Then, on an evening when belated snow was sifting through the cracks of the solid shutters, he came on an oblong package, wrapped in strong paper. He opened it, in a momentary revival of interest, of life. It was a tall ledger, bound in crumbling calf, with stained and wrinkled leaves. Howat had not seen it for twenty years, but he recalled immediately that it was a forge book kept in Gilbert Penny's day; then Myrtle Forge had been new, that other Howat alive. He opened it carefully, powdered his knees with leather dust, and studied the faded entries; what flourishing, pale violet initials, what rubicund lines and endings!
There were two handwritings, listing commonplace transactions now invested by time with an accumulated, poignant significance, one smooth and clerkly, the other abrupt, with heavy, impatient strokes. Youth, probably, held at an unwelcome task; and, more than likely, Howat ... October, in seventeen fifty. Years of virility, of struggle and conquest, of iron—iron, James Polder had shown him, still uncorrupted, better than the metal of to-day—and iron-like men. The ledger slipped to the floor, tearing the spongy leather and crumbling the sere leaves. He recovered it, dismayed at the damage wrought. A sheet apparently had come loose, and he bent forward with difficulty, a swimming head. Howat made an attempt to find its place, when he discovered that it was not a part of the volume. It was, he saw, a note, obliterated by creases but with some lines still legible, hurriedly scrawled, by a woman:
"You must be more careful ... Your mother. So hot-headed, Howat. I can't do what you ask. I have a headache now thinking about Felix and you and myself. No one must find out." What followed was lost, then came a signature that, with the aid of a reading glass, he barely deciphered—"Ludowika."
That was the name of the woman, a widow, Gilbert's son had married. Her first husband, Felix Winscombe, had died at Myrtle Forge during a diplomatic mission from England.... An old man with a young wife! His confusion, slowly resolving into a comprehension of what the note implied, filled him with an increasing revolt. The earlier Howat, too, like Jasper, in the tangle of an intrigue—not a public scandal and shame, as had been the later, but no less offensive. In a flare of anger Howat Penny crumpled the paper and flung it into the fire. There it instantly blackened, burst into flame and wavered, a shuddering cinder, up the chimney. He put the ledger, loosely wrapped in its covering, on the table, and sat breathing rapidly, curiously disturbed. The old fault, projected so unexpectedly out of the faithless burial of the past, struck at him with the weight of a personal affront.