"Stone coal," Jasper Penny replied; "and a hot blast." He turned to describe the latter to Jannan. "It'll come," the founder agreed, "and the quality will go." He went forward to tap the clay-sealed hearth. The liquid iron poured into the channels of its sand bed, sputtering and slowly fading to dingy grey. "I'd like you to take hold of this," Jasper Penny told the younger man; "great changes, improvements, are just over the hill. I'll miss them—a link between the old and the new. But you would see it all. The railroad will bring about an iron age; and then, perhaps, steel. I look for trouble, too—this damned States Rights. The South has been uneasy since the Carolina Nullification Act. It will be a time for action." He gazed keenly at Graham Jannan. A promising young man, he thought, with a considerable asset in his wife. A woman, the right woman, could make a tremendous difference in a man's capabilities.
He elaborated this thought fantastically at dinner, sitting opposite Susan Brundon. Mary Jannan wore orange crêpe, with black loops of ball fringe and purple silk dahlias; and, beside her, Miss Brundon's dress was noticeably simple. She volunteered little, but, when directly addressed, answered in a gentle, hesitating voice that veiled the directness, the conviction, of her replies. The right woman, Jasper Penny repeated silently. Ten, fifteen, years ago, when he had been free, he would have acted immediately on the feeling that Susan Brundon was exactly the wife he wanted. But no such person had appeared at that momentous period in his life.
However, then he had been a totally different being; perhaps the appreciation of Miss Brundon, her actual reality, lay for him entirely in his own perceptions. But if she would not have been the woman for him then, by heaven, she was now! He expressed this unaware of its wide implications, unconscious of the effect it would instantly have. The thing silently uttered bred an enormously increased need, the absolute determination that she was necessary to his most perfunctory being. The thought of her alone, he discovered, had been sufficient to give him a new energy, a sense of rare satisfaction.
Shortly expressed, he wanted to marry her; he had not, he told himself oddly, ever been married. The word had a significance which heretofore he had completely missed. A strange emotion stirred into being, a longing thrown out from his new desire, the late-born feeling of dissatisfaction; it was a wish for something in Susan Brundon which he experienced but could not name. Roughly stated it was a hunger to surround her with security, comfort, to fortify the, at best, doubtful position of life in death for her. Yet he acknowledged to himself that this regard for her safety was mostly the result of his own inner, blind striving. Her happiness had magically become his. Beyond that he was unable to penetrate.
After supper they gathered in the chamber beyond the dining room. Here Jasper Penny found an incongruous mingling of old and new furniture. There was a high, waxed walnut desk and cabinet, severely simple, and before it a chair with a back of elaborately carved and gilded tulips tufted in plum-coloured velvet. The thick carpet was a deep rose, and the drapery of the mantel and windows garnet. A painted hood of brilliant Chinese colours had been fastened before what was evidently an open hearth, for which a coal stove was substituted. On the middle of the floor was an oriental hassock in silver brocade; while a corner held a spinet-piano decorated in roseate cupids, flower sprays and gold leaf. Again, an old clock in Spanish mahogany, with a rudely painted glass door, had been left on the wall.
Mary Jannan, at the piano, wove a delicate succession of arpeggios. She sang, in a small and graceful voice, a cavatina, Tanti Palpiti. Then, "Ah, que les amours ... de beaux heurs." Jasper Penny listened with an unconscious, approving pretence of understanding. But when, in the course of her repertoire, she reached Sweet Sister Fay, and The Horn of My Loved One I Hear, his pleasure became active. Susan Brundon, on the hassock, lifted her sensitive face to the mild candle light, and its still pallor gave him a shock of delight. Her hands were folded in the voluminous sweep of her crinoline; the ribbons at her breast rose and fell softly.
Jasper Penny and Graham were smoking long, fragrant cigars that the former had produced from a lacquered case, and Jannan had the ingredients of the hot punch at his elbow. It amused the young man to persuade Susan Brandon to take a sip from his glass; and they all laughed at her subsequent gasping. Jasper Penny was astoundingly happy; his being radiated a warmth and contentment more potent than that of the St. Croix rum. It was accompanied by an extraordinary lightness of spirit, a feeling of the desirability of life. The memory of his greying hair had left him; not, it was true, to be replaced by the surging emotions of youth, but by a deep satisfaction.
Susan Brundon, Susan ... the right woman. He marvelled again at the brightness of spirit that shone in her—like a flame through a fine paper lantern. Susan, at Myrtle Forge. His thought became concrete; he knew now, definitely, that he had determined to marry her. His peace of mind increased. There was no need for hurry, the mere idea was irradiating; yet there must be no unnecessary delay. Incontrovertibly he had passed forty. The best period in a man's life. They would go to the West Indies, he decided. A ring with a square emerald, and roses of pearls. It was, almost immediately, time to retire. His room, narrow with a sloping wall, had a small window giving on a flawless rectangle of snow like the purity of Susan Brundon.
As he lay in bed, staring wakefully against the dark, another memory crept into his thoughts—the echo of a small, querulous voice, "yellow rock candy and syllabubs." Eunice! A sudden consternation seized him as he realized the necessity of telling Susan fully about his daughter. No escape, evasion, was possible. If she discovered the existence, the history, of the child afterward—he lingered over the happiness that term implied—it would destroy her. This, he told himself, was not merely melodrama; he was thinking of her delicate spirituality, so completely shielded from the bald fatality of facts. An increasing dread seized him at the thought of the hurt his revelation would inflict on her. The interweaving of life in life, consequence on consequence, the unbroken intricacy of the whole fabric of existence, realized anew, filled him with bitter rebellion. The blind commitment of a vanished youth, potent after years, still hung in a dark cloud over Susan Brundon. He was conscious of the past like an insuperable lead weight dragging at his attempted progress. The secret errors of all the pasts that had made him rose in a haggard, shadowy troop about his bed, perpetuated, multiplied, against his aspirations of tranquil release.
Yet, he told himself, dressing in the bright flood of morning, if nothing perished but the mere, shredding flesh, one quality persisted equally with the other—the symbol of Essie Scofield was no more actual than Susan. He had breakfast early, with Graham Jannan; and, in a reviving optimism, arranged for the Jannans to bring Miss Brundon to Myrtle Forge for a night before her departure. He whirled away, in a sparkling veil of flung snow crystals, before the women appeared.