"Do you mind—no more at present." Susan Brundon said. "I am upset; please, another time; if it is necessary. I feel that I couldn't answer anything now, I must go up; no, your mother will show me." She rose, and he realized that she would listen no further. There was an astonishing strength of purpose behind her deprecating presence. She was more determined than himself. He watched her walk evenly from the room, heard the low stir of voices beyond, with a feeling that he had been perhaps fatally clumsy. All that he had said had been wrong, brutally selfish. He had deliberately invited failure; he should have been patient, waited; given her a chance to know and, if possible, value him, come to depend on him, on his judgment, his ability in her welfare. But, in place of making himself a necessity, he had launched at once into facts which she must find hideous. She had said, "another time, if necessary." His mouth drew into a set line—there would be another and another, until he had persuaded, gained, her.
He lit a cigar, and walked discontentedly up and across the room. The sound of the Forge hammer again crept into his consciousness: the Penny iron—the fibre, the actuality, of the Penny men! He repeated this arrogantly; but the declaration no longer brought reassurance; the certainty even of the iron faded from him; he had failed there, too, digging a pit of oblivion for all that their generations of toil had accomplished. The past inexorably woven into the pattern of the future! Eunice, so soon wary, distrustful, Susan had seen that immediately, would perpetuate all that he wished dead—Essie and himself bound together, projected in an undesirable immortality through endless lives striving, like himself, to escape from old chains.
If he failed with Susan his existence would have been an unmitigated evil; the iron, his petty, material triumphs, would rust, but the other go on and on. His thoughts became a maze of pity for Eunice, infinite regret of the past, a bitter energy of hope for what might follow.
He turned with pride to his forging—long-wrought charcoal iron; the world would know no better. Still, with his penetration of the future, he realized that the old, careful processes were doomed. He had difficulty in assembling enough adequate workmen to fill the increasing contracts for bar iron and rails now; and the demand, with the extension of steam railways, would grow resistlessly. More wholesale methods of production were being utilized daily; he was one of the foremost adherents of "improvement"; but suddenly he felt a poignant regret at the inevitable passing of the old order of great Ironmasters, the principalities of furnaces and forges. He was still, he felt, such a master of his men and miles of forests and clearings, lime pits and ore banks, coal holes, mills, coke ovens, hearths and manufactories. He might still drive to Virginia through a continuous line of his interests; his domination over his labourers, in all their personal and industrial implications, was patriarchal; he commanded, through their allegiance and his entire grasp on every iota of their living, their day's journey; but, he told himself, he was practically the last of his kind.
New and different industrial combinations were locking together in great agglomerations of widely-separated activities; the human was superseded by the industrial machine, where men were efficient, subservient cogs in a cold and successful automaton of business. A system of general credit was springing up; the old, old payments in kind, in iron or even meal and apparel, or gold, had given place to reciprocal understandings of deferred indebtedness. The actual thousands of earlier commerce were replaced by theoretical millions. His own realty, his personal property, because of such understandings, were outside computation. They were, he knew, reckoned in surprising figures; but in a wide-spread panic, forced liquidation, the greater part of his wealth would break like straw. It was the same with the entire country.
His thoughts returned to Susan, to the longing for the peace, the inviolable security, she would bring to the centre, the heart, of his life. No material catastrophe could shape, deplete, her richness of spirit. Fragile as she was, with her need of rest, her diffidence and pallor, she yet seemed to Jasper Penny the most—the only—secure thing in the world. She defied, he murmured, death itself. Wonderful.
He moved slowly to his sombre bed room, with its dark velour hangings and ponderous black walnut furniture, precisely scrolled with gilt. The interior absorbed the light of a single lamp, robbing it of radiance. A clock deliberately struck the hour with an audible whirring of the spring. Jasper Penny took out from a drawer a tall, narrow ledger, its calf binding powdering in a yellow dust, with a blurring label, "Forgebook. Myrtle Forge, 1750." He sat, opening it on the arm of an old Windsor reading chair he had insisted on retaining among the recent upholstery, and studied the entries, some written in a small script with ornamental capitals and red lined day headings, others in an abrupt manner with heavy down strokes. The latter, he knew, had been made by his great grandfather, Howat.
"Jonas Rupp charged with three pair of woollen stockings ... shoes for Minnie." Howat had been young when Minnie's shoes were new; twenty something—five or six. He must have married not long after. Howat—like himself—a black Penny. The special interest Jasper Penny felt for this particular ancestor grew so vivid that he almost felt the other's presence in the room at his shoulder. He consciously repressed the desire to turn suddenly and surprise the shadowy and yet clear figure in the gloom. The features of the youth so long gone, and yet, too, he felt, the replica of his own young years, were plain; the dark eyes, slanted brows, the impatient mouth.
His community of sympathy with the other, who was still, in a measure, himself, was inexplicable; for obviously Howat had escaped Jasper's blundering—an early marriage, a son, the son whose name, like his mother's, made such an exotic note in a long, sound succession of Isabels and Carolines and Gilberts, was a far different tale from his own. Yet it persisted. It seemed to him that the silence of the room grew strained, there was the peculiar tension of a muteness desperately striving for utterance. He waited, listened, in a rigidity of which he was suddenly ashamed; ridiculous. He relaxed; the memory of his own youth flooded back, rapt him in visions, scents, sounds. The premonitory whirring of the clock spring sounded once more, followed by the slow, increasing strokes ... Again. His body wavered, on the verge of sleep, and he straightened himself sharply; then he rose and, putting back the Forgebook, undressed.
Susan, at breakfast, her shoulders wrapped in a serious-toned pelerine, said little. Jasper Penny instinctively excluded her from a trivial conversation. She was, he decided, paler than usual, the shadows under her eyes were indigo. He was filled with self-condemnation. Mrs. Penny, gazing at her with a beady discernment, asked if her rest had been interrupted. "I am always an indifferent sleeper," Susan Brundon replied evasively. He followed her into the carriage that was to take her to the station at Jaffa; and, ignoring her slight gasp of protest, grasped the reins held by the negro coachman. However, they proceeded over the short distance to the town without speech. He was torn between a wish to spare her and the desire to urge his own purpose. But more immediately he wanted to make secure the near hour of his seeing her again. He asked, finally, "Will you be at the Jannans' this week, or are visitors received at the Academy?"