"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 glass 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 pagodas 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 glass and ormolu; and, everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres. 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. God, 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 glass. 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 ship, the Susquehanna, and into the narrow canal 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', passed 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 shifted 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 shirt and ragged skirt and stockings.
"Here's your father," Mrs. Needles ejaculated.