CHAPTER XVII
When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all, the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must have seen in his fancy the very picture that was now so delightful to my eyes—the gray old fireplace with its tall columns wound with vines whose delicate leaves quivered as the firelight fanned them; before it Penelope, a slender figure, softly drawn in the evening's shadow, bent over the low tea-table as she worked with the rebellious lamp; from above, looking down kindly, half smiling, Reynolds's majestic lady, frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed circle drawn by the glowing coals. I sat in the half-darkness, for it was late in the day, and but a single shaded lamp burned in a distant corner. What was new in the room grew old under the wizard touch of shadows. The mahogany bookcases stretched away on either hand, and there were cobwebs on the diamond panes and dust on the ancient tomes. Penelope was in her home! A hundred years ago that majestic lady in frills and furbelows sat by this same fireplace, in that same old carved chair, making tea, and now she smiled with great content as from her frame she looked down on this child of her blood and bone. And the ancestor who had gathered those dusty volumes—what of him? Two hundred years it was, perhaps, since he had burrowed among the cobwebs, now caressing his rare old Horace, now turning the yellow pages of his learned treatise on astrology. He was a distinguished figure in his wig, his velvet coat and smallclothes, and something of his features, refined by intellectual pursuit, I read in the face that now was turned to mine. For blood does tell. Father Time is a reckless artist, clipping and cutting and recasting incessantly, and producing an appalling number of failures; but now and then it would seem that he did take some pains and, studying his models, combine the broad, low brow of this one with another's straight and finely chiselled nose, and still another's smoothly rounded cheek; and sometimes, in his cynical way, he will spoil it all with a pair of coarse hands borrowed from one of his rustic figures or the large, flat feet of some study of peasant life, which we should have thought cast away and forgotten. In Penelope we were offended by none of these grotesque fragments. They must have been long since cleared out of her ancestral line. When she raised herself after her battle with the rebellious lamp, it was with the grace of unconscious pride, with the majesty of the lady in the frame, but finer drawn, thanks to the thin old gentleman of the books, who had overfed his mind and bequeathed to his descendants a legacy of nerves.
This Penelope Blight, daintily clothed in soft black webs woven for her by a hundred toiling human spiders, was not even the Penelope Blight of my wildest boyish dreams. Our dreams are circumscribed by our experience, and in those days it had been inconceivable to me that she should grow more lovely than Miss Mincer, the butcher's daughter, and I had pictured myself walking proudly through the streets of Malcolmville at the side of a tall, slender girl, her head crowned by a glazed black hat, her body incased in a tight-fitting jersey. This Penelope Blight in the carved chair where generations of her grandmothers had made tea before her, by the stately fireplace at which her forebears had warmed their hands and hearts, could have no kin with the barefooted girl who had stood with me at the edge of the clearing and, pointing over the weeds to the forlorn cabin, called it home.
Was it a wonder that my tone was formal; that, overcome by a sense of estrangement, I talked of the weather as I sipped my tea; that I asked her if she had enjoyed last night's dance, speaking as though dancing were my own favorite amusement; that when I pronounced her name it was in a halting, embarrassed undertone? Even speaking, it thus seemed gross presumption. How unlikely, then, that I should refer to by-gone days in her presence when it was incredible that there had ever been days like those! In all probability she would draw herself up and reply that I must be thinking of some other Penelope Blight, that to her I was nothing more than a formal creature whom she had met somewhere, where she could not remember, a man like hundreds of others whom she knew, lay figures for the tailor's art, who spoke only a language limited to the last dance and the one to come. Believing this, I finished my tea, and, putting down my cup, I abandoned my one resource when conversation lagged. Why had I come at all?
I had come to sit with Penelope, just as we were sitting now, in the shadows, in the firelight. At home we had often sat together on the back steps, in the shadows of the valley, in the firelight of the clouds glowing in the last sun flames. Now we should be, as then, good comrades, and freely as I had talked to her then as from our humble perch we watched the departing day, so freely could I talk to her now in the statelier environment. In that short walk uptown I had left a thousand things unsaid. But one special thing I had left unsaid, one vital fact in my life unrevealed, that was of paramount importance. In the excitement of our first meeting my silence had been discretion, but discretion became deception as time passed, and every day was adding to its sum. Sometimes I could forget the vital fact. Sometimes at night in my room, sitting with my book at my side neglected, I would stare vacantly at the wall and treat myself to a feast of dreams, contentedly munch the most delicate morsels of the past and present. And by right of that past and present it was almost fore-ordained that Penelope and I were to go down the years together. Then I would remember. I would start from my chair with a despairing laugh and pace up and down my narrow room, restless and unhappy. I knew that I could not long delay revealing to Penelope the paramount fact, and in revealing it to her I seemed to say that after all she was only a casual friend, that all my life's interest was bound up in Gladys Todd, and my life's ambition expressed in a room with an easel by the window, a bird's-eye-maple mantel, and around the walls a rack for odd lots of china and black-framed prints. It was hard to tell her that, but I knew that I must, and I said that I should talk freely as in the old days of brotherly confidence, as though of all others she would be happiest in hearing of my good fortune. With my mind made up to face boldly this bad situation, I could not crush the consoling hope that in hearing she would give some sign of the pain of the wound that I was making. What a fatuous illusion! In her presence, in an environment which made that which I planned for myself seem so narrow and commonplace, she became a spirit thoroughly alien. I could as easily have talked to some foreign princess of the blood of Mr. Pound or Stacy Shunk. I could as easily have announced to Mrs. Bannister that I was engaged to Gladys Todd. And I must have gone away, fled ignominiously after one cup of tea, had not Penelope, with a sudden impatient movement, turned her chair and leaned forward with her chin cupped in her hands, as she used to sit in the old days on the back steps, with her eyes fixed on mine.
"David," she said, "did you really come here to talk to me about the weather or to tell me things I really want to know—of Mr. Pound, of Miss Spinner and Stacy Shunk. Who drives the stage now?"
I was on the edge of the divan, my hands playing an imaginary game of cat's-cradle when she spoke, and now I pushed back into the comfortable depths and stared at her in surprise. I was amazed at hearing this princess of the blood descend to an interest in such plebeians. She, seeing that I was silent, leaned back too, each small hand gripping an arm of that throne-like chair.
"Well?" she said; and when still I was silent she repeated more insistently: "Well, David?" Then raising her voice a little to a tone of command: "I asked you who drives the stage."
I forgot the carved chair and Reynolds's majestic lady. I forgot the imposing fireplace and the old gentleman in wig and smallclothes. I laughed with the sheer joy of being with Penelope again. I forgot even the great divan and made a futile effort to jump it nearer her in my burst of enthusiasm for our new-born friendship.
"Why, Joe Hicks," I said. "You remember Joe Hicks, Penelope?"