"That's absolutely all," that individual assured her. "Except if you want to add Sturgeon; some do. Hullow, Howat! Grand old boy, Howat," he told her. "But if he says I'm drunk, I will tell you one of Bundy's stories about him. This—this elegant deception tremendous noise with the song birds." He sat abruptly on a providentially convenient chair. There, limply, he hiccoughed. "Sweet," Mariana repeated. Kingsfrere finally rose, and, with a friendly wave, wandered from the room.
"It was good of you to take me, Howat," she told him wearily. "Although, now, I can see that you went willingly enough. You thought it would cure me. But of what, Howat—of love? Of a feeling that, perhaps, I'd found a reason for living?"
A decidedly uncomfortable feeling, doubt, invaded him. He had an unjustified sense of meddling, of blundering into a paramount situation to which he lacked the key. He had done nothing debatable, he assured himself; Mariana's inherent, well—prejudices, couldn't be charged to him. In the room where he was to sleep the uneasiness followed him. She was his greatest, his only concern. Howat Penny reviewed his desire for her, his preference for a Mariana untouched by the common surge of living. He recalled the discontent, the feeling of sterility, that had lately possessed him; the suspicion that his life had been in vain. All his philosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.
He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself, that consciousness was disturbing. It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect. He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner and cold. Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association. Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ... No children. So many, so much, dead. His countenance, however, grew firm with the determination that age should not find him a coward. He had always been bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites, showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance. But he had done nothing pointedly wrong; he had—the inversion repeated itself—done nothing.
XXVII
At Shadrach his customary decision returned; he went about, or sat reading, well-ordered, cool-appearing, dogmatic. He learned from the Evening Post that Mariana was at Warrenton. She had carefully described to him the Virginia country life, the gaiety and hard riding of the transplanted English colonies; and he pictured her at the successive horse shows, in the brilliant groups under the Doric columns of the porticoes. Then, he saw, she had gone north; he found her picture in a realistic Egyptian costume with bare, painted legs at an extravagant ball. He studied her countenance, magnifying it with a reading glass; but he saw nothing beyond a surface enjoyment of the moment.
Then, to his utter surprise, on an evening after dinner, when he was seated in the settling dusk of the porch, intent on the grey movements of his familiar owls, a quick step mounted the path, and James Polder appeared.
"I wanted to ask about Miss Jannan," the latter stated frankly and at once. Howat Penny cleared his throat sharply. "I believe she is well," he stated formally. "You will find it cooler here." It struck him that the young man was not deficient in that particular. More, of still greater directness, followed. "I suppose you know," Polder stated, "that I want to marry her ... and she won't."
"I had gathered something of the sort," the other admitted. "It's natural, in a way." Polder proceeded gloomily: "I'd take her away from so much. And, yet, look here—you can shut me up if you like—what's it all about? Can you tell me that?" Howat Penny couldn't. "I'm not to blame for that old mess any more than you. And it's not my fault if something of—of which you think so much came to me by the back door. I've always wanted what Mariana is," he burst out, "and I have never been satisfied with what I could get. And when I saw her, hell—what's the use!