Throughout an excellent dinner, terrapin and bass, wild turkey with oysters and fruit preserved in white brandy, he maintained a sombre silence. His mother, on the right, her sister opposite--Phebe's place seemed scarcely emptier than when she had actually occupied it--held an intermittent verbal exchange patently keyed to Jasper Penny's mood. They were women with yellow-white, lace-capped hair, blanched eyebrows and lashes, and small, quick eyes on hardy, reddened faces. Gilda Penny was slightly the larger, more definite; Amity Merken had a timid, almost furtive, expression in the opulence of the Penny establishment, while Gilda was complacent; but otherwise the two women were identical. Their dresses were largely similar--Amity's a dun, Gilda Penny's grey, moire silk, high with a tight lace collar, and bands of jet trimming from shoulder to waist, there spreading over crinoline to the floor. Lace fell about their square, capable hands, and Gilda wore broad, locked bracelets checked in black and gold. Sherry, in blue cut decanters stoppered with gilt, gave place to port. An epergne of glass and burnished ormolu, in the form of supporting oak leaves, with numerous sockets for candles, was set, filled with fruit, in the centre of the table; silver lustre plates were laid; but Jasper Penny heedlessly fingered the stem of a wine glass. He said suddenly, "I'm going to the city this afternoon." "Is it safe yet?" his mother queried doubtfully. "Hadn't you better wait till to-morrow, when you can drive easily, or without stopping at a tavern?" He looked up impatiently. "I shall go by the railroad," he stated decisively. "Can't you understand that, with the future of iron almost dependent on steam, it is the commonest foresight for me to patronize such customers as the Columbia Railway! I have no intention of adding to the ignorant prejudice against improved methods of travelling." "There's your arm," she insisted with spirit. "An untried engine. The Hecla works along smoothly at twenty miles an hour." Amity cast a glance of swift appeal at her sister, but Gilda Penny persisted. "Ungodly," was the term she selected. Jasper ignored her. He had decided to straighten the tangled affair of Eunice at once; he would see Essie that evening, arrive at an understanding about the child's future. It would be even more difficult to terminate his connection with Essie herself. That, he now recognised, was his main desire. The affair had actually died before Phebe; but its onerous consequences remained, blighting the future. The future! It was that, he now discovered, which occupied him, rather than the past. A new need had become apparent, a restless desire analogous to the urge of seeking youth. Jasper Penny was aware of a great dissatisfaction, a vast emptiness, in his existence; he had a feeling of waste growing out of the sense of hurrying years. Somehow, obscurely, he had been cheated. He almost envied the commonality of men, not, like himself, black Pennys, impatient of assuaging relationships and beliefs. Yet this, too, turned into another phase of his inheritance--his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge of living. "You'll stop at the Jannans?" his mother queried. "I think not, probably Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions." Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from gabbled scandal. Now, soon, it would all be over. Unconsciously he drew a deeper breath of relief, of prospective freedom. The Hecla, a wooden barrelled engine with a tall, hinged stack, drew its brigade of canary-coloured chariot cars forward with a rapid bumping over inequal rails. Jasper Penny's seat, number nineteen, was fortunately in the centre, close by the stove, where a warmth hung that failed to reach to the doors. Lost in speculation the journey was both long and vague. Twilight deepened within the car, and two flickering candles were lit at either end, their pallid light serving only to cast thin, climbing shadows over the rocking, box-like interior. At irregular intervals the train stopped with a succession of subsiding crashes, and started again at the blowing of a horn; passengers would leave or enter; or it would prove to be merely a halt to take on cut and piled wood fuel for the engine. Finally the train brigade reached the inclined plane leading to the river and city; the engine was detached, and the cars, fastened to a hemp cable, were lowered spasmodically to where a team of mules drew them through a gloomy, covered bridge echoing to the slow hoof falls and creaking of loose planks. Jasper Penny fastened the elaborate frogs of his heavily furred overcoat over his injured arm, and with a florid bandanna wiped the cinders from his silk hat. The coaches rolled into the station shed, where he changed, taking a swaying Mulberry Street omnibus to Fourth, and Sanderson's Hotel. It was a towering, square structure of five stories, with a columned white portico, and high, divided steps. The clerk, greeting him with a precise familiar deference, directed him to a select suite with a private parlour, a sombre chamber of red plush, dark walls and thickly draped, long windows. There he sat grimly contemplating a distasteful prospect. He knew the casual, ill-prepared dinners presided over by Essie, the covertly insolent man servant; and an overpowering reluctance came upon him to sit again at her table. But the confusion of the hotel ordinary repelled him too: he had seen in passing a number of men who would endeavour to force his opinion on the specie situation or speculation in canals. He rose and pulled sharply at the tasselled bell rope, ordering grilled pheasant, anchovy toast and champagne to be served where he sat. Jasper Penny ate slowly, partly distracted by the market reports in the U.S. Gazette. Ninety-two and a half had been offered for Schuylkill Navigation, only fifteen for the West Chester Railroad, but Philadelphia and Trenton had gone to ninety-eight; while a three and a half dividend had been declared on the French Town Turnpike and Railway Company. He was annoyed afresh by the persistent refusal of the Government to award the mail to the Reading Steam System. His thoughts returned to Eunice, his daughter, the coming scene--it would at least be that--with Essie Scofield. It was but a short distance from the hotel to where Essie lived, over Fourth Street to Cherry; and almost immediately he turned by the three story brick dwelling at the corner and was at her door. The servant, in an untidy white jacket, stood stupidly blocking the narrow hall, until Jasper Penny with an angry impatience waved him aside. There were other silk hats and coats, and a woman's fringed wrap, on the stand where he left his stick and outer garments; and from above came a peal of mingled laughter. The presence of others, now, was singularly inopportune; it would be no good waiting for their departure--here such gatherings almost invariably drew out until dawn; and he abruptly decided that, after a short interval, he would give Essie to understand that he wished to talk to her privately. A young woman with a chalk-white face and oleaginous bandeaux of dead black hair, in scarlet and green tartan over an extravagant crinoline, was seated on a sofa between two men, each with an arm about her waist and wine glasses elevated in their free hands. Essie was facing them from a circular floor hassock, in a blue satin, informal robe over mussed cambric ruffles, heelless nonchalants, and her hair elaborately dressed with roses, white ribbons and a short ostrich feather. Her body, at once slim and full, was consciously seductive, and her face, slightly swollen and pasty in the shadows, bore the same, heedless unrestraint. Her dark, widely-opened eyes, an insignificant nose and shortly curved, scarlet lips, held almost the fixed, painted impudence of a cynically debased doll. She turned and surveyed Jasper Penny with a petulant, silent inquiry, and whatever gaiety was in progress abruptly terminated as he advanced into the room. "You never let me know you'd be here," Essie complained; "but I suppose I ought to be glad to see you anyway--after four months without a line. Jasper, Mr. Daniel Culser." The younger of the men on the sofa, a stolidly handsome individual with hard, blue eyes, rose with an over-emphasized composure. "Mr. Penny, extremely pleased." Jasper Penny was irritated by the other's instant identification, and he nodded bluntly. "Lambert Babb and Myrtilla Lewis," Essie continued indifferently. Babb, an individual of inscrutable age, with ashen whiskers and a blinking, weak vision in a silvery face, was audibly delighted. Myrtilla Lewis smiled professionally over her expanse of bewildering silk plaid. "Wine in the cooler," Essie added, and Daniel Culser moved to where a silver bucket reposed by a tray of glasses and broken, sugared rusks. Jasper Penny refused the offered drink, and found a chair apart from the others. A moody silence enveloped him which he found impossible to break, and an increasing uneasiness spread over the room. "Well," Essie Scofield commanded, "say something. You look as black as an Egyptian. What'll my friends think of you? I suppose it doesn't matter any more what it is to me; but you might play at being polite." "Don't chip at a man like that," Myrtilla advised. "Mr. Penny has a right to talk or not." She smiled more warmly at him, and he saw that she had had too much champagne. The room reeked with the thin, acrid odour of the wine, and a sickly perfume of vanilla essence. Essie, as usual, had a glass of her favourite drink--orange juice and French brandy--on the floor beside her, the brandy bottle and fresh oranges conveniently near. His repulsion for her deepened until it seemed as if actual fingers were compressing his throat, stopping his breath. He wondered suddenly how far he was responsible for her possible degeneration. But he had not been the first; her admission of that fact had in the beginning attracted him to an uncommon frankness in her peculiar make-up. He was willing to assume his fault, to pay for it, whatever payment was possible, and escape.... Not only from her, but from all that she embodied, from himself--what he had been--as much as anything else. "You are an Ironmaster," Mr. Babb finally announced; "in fact, one of our greatest manufacturers. Now, Mr. Penny, what is your personal opinion of engine as against the public coach? Will the railroad survive the experimental stage, and are such gentlemen as yourself behind it?" "I saw in the Ledger some days back," Daniel Culser added, "that your arm had been broken travelling by steam." "One had nothing to do with the other," Jasper stated tersely, ignoring Babb's query, "but was entirely my own fault." The conversation lagged painfully again, during which Essie skilfully compounded another mixture of spirits and thick, yellow juice. She grew sullen with resentment at Jasper Penny's attitude, and exchanged enigmatic glances with Culser. The liquor brought a quick flush to her slightly pendulous cheeks, and she was enveloped in an increasing bravado. "Penny's a solemn old boy," she announced generally. Lambert Babb attempted to embrace Myrtilla, but, her gaze on the newcomer, she pushed him away. "You got to be a gentleman with me," she proclaimed with a patently unsteady dignity. "My grandfather was a French noble." "What I'd like to know," Essie remarked, "is what's his granddaughter?" "Better'n you!" Myrtilla heatedly asserted; "one who'd appreciate a real man, and not be playing about private with a tailor's dummy." Daniel Culser's face grew noticeably pinker. "I'm going," Myrtilla continued, rising. "Mr. Penny, I'd be happy to meet you under more social conditions. Here I cannot remain for--for reasons. I might be tempted to--" Mr. Babb caught her arm under his, and, at an imperious gesture from Essie, piloted her from the room. Culser rose. "Don't go, Dan," Essie Scofield told him defiantly. But Jasper Penny maintained a silence that forced the younger man to make a stiff exit. "Well," Essie demanded, flinging herself on the deserted sofa, "now you've spoiled my evening. Why did you come at all if you couldn't behave genteel?" "Where, exactly, is Eunice?" he asked abruptly. She glanced at him with an instant masking of her resentment. "I've told you a hundred times--in the house of a very respectable clergyman. My letter was clear enough; she's had bronchitis, and there's the doctor, and--" "Just where is Eunice?" he repeated, interrupting her aggrieved recital. "Where I put her," her voice grew shrill. "You haven't asked to see her for near a year, you haven't even pretended an interest in--in your own daughter. I've done the best I could; you know I don't like children around; but I have attended to as much of my duty as you. Now you come out and insist on being unpleasant all in an hour. Why didn't you write? I'd had her here for you. Come back in two or three days." "To-morrow," he replied. "I am going to see her in the morning." "You just ain't. I did the best I knew, but, if it isn't all roses, you'll blame everything on me. I will have Eunice fetched--" "Where is she?" he asked still again, wearily. Every instinct revolted against the degradation into which he had blindly walked. His youth had betrayed him, involving him, practically a different man, in a payment which he realized had but commenced.... To escape. He had first thought of that with the unconscious conviction that the mere wish carried its fulfilment. In fact, it would be immensely difficult; a man, he saw, could not sever himself so casually from the past; it reached without visible demarcation into the present, the future. All was a piece, one with another; and Essie Scofield was drawn in a vivid thread through the entire fabric of his being. Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness, persisted, grew--it had become the predominate design of his weaving. Through this he recognized a reassertion of his pride, the rigid pride of a black Penny, which, in the years immediately past, had been overwhelmed by a temporary inner confusion. Beyond forty men returned to their inheritance, their blood; this fact echoed vaguely among his memories of things heard; and he felt in himself its measure of truth. His distaste for a largely muddled, pandering society, for men huddled, he thought, like domestic animals, returned in choking waves. In the maculate atmosphere of flat wine and stale cologne he had a sharp recurrence of the scent of pines, lifting warmly in sunny space. He produced a morocco bound note book, a gold pencil; and, with the latter poised, directed a close interrogation at Essie. Her face flushed with an ungovernable anger, and she pressed a hand over her labouring heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr. Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice Scofield, a child without--" All that she had said was absolutely true, just. "I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows. "I haven't been well, either--a fierce pain here, in my heart." It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly. "Where? How?" He winced--the past reaching inexorably into the future. Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased within him--the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life. "Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something, of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself." "I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me nothing." "... what you are getting as long as you live?" "That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and never know it." "If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified." "You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she pronounced, mollified. "At one time--do you remember?--you said if ever the chance came you would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your iron, gold. I--" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing," she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass. "Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously. "I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you looked so solemn, and there is grey in your hair, that all at once you seemed like an old gentleman. Now Dan Culser," she hesitated, and then swept on, "he's what you'd name young." At Daniel Culser's age, he told himself, he, Jasper Penny, could have walked the other blind; and now Essie Scofield was calling him old; she had noticed the grey in his hair. He rose to go, and she came close to him, a clinging, soft thing of flesh faintly reeking with brandy. "I have a great deal to pay, where money goes I don't know, even a little would be a help." He left some gold in her hand, thankful to purchase, at that slight price, a momentary release. Outside Cherry Street was blackly cold, a gas lamp at the corner shed a watery, contracted illumination. He made his way back toward the hotel, but a sudden reluctance to mount to his lonely chambers possessed him. Before the glimmering marble facade he took out his watch, a pale gold efflorescence in the gloom, and rang the hour in minute, clear notes. The third quarter past ten. He recalled the ball, but then commencing, at Stephen Jannan's; there it would be indescribably gay, a house flooded with the music of quadrilles, light, polite-chatter; and he determined to proceed and have a cigar with Stephen. He walked briskly up Mulberry Street to Sixth and there turned to the left. Jasper Penny soon passed the shrouded silence of Independence Square, with the new Corinthian doorway of the State House showing vaguely through the irregularly grouped ailanthus trees. Beyond, the brick wall with its marble coping and high iron fence reached, on the opposite side, to the Jannan corner. The length of the brick dwelling, with white arched windows and coursings faced the vague emptiness of Washington Square, closed for the winter. Inside the hall was bright and filled with the pungent warmth of fat hearth coal. A servant, with a phrase of recognition, directed him above, to a room burdened with masculine greatcoats and silk hats. There an attendant told him that Mr. Jannan was below. Jasper Penny had no intention of becoming a participant in the hall, but neither did he propose to linger among wraps, listening to the supercilious chatter of young men in the extreme mode of bright blue coats, painfully tight black trousers with varnished pumps and expanses of ankle in grey silk. One, inspecting him through an eyeglass on a woven hair guard, expressed a pointed surprise at Jasper Penny's informal garb. "Christoval!" he ejaculated. "It approaches an insult to the da-da-darlings." Another commenced to sing a popular minstrel air: "Blink--a--ho--dink! Ah! Ho! "Roley Boley--Good morning Ladies all!" Jasper Penny abruptly descended to a small room used for smoking. Young men, he thought impatiently, could no longer even curse respectably. They lisped like females at an embroidery frame. When he was young, younger, he corrected himself, he could have outdrunk, outridden.... His train of thought was abruptly terminated by a group unexpectedly occupying the smoking room. He saw Stephen Jannan, his wife Liza, the newly married young Jannans, and a strange woman in glace muslin and a black Spanish lace shawl about her shoulders. Stephen greeted him cordially. "Jasper, just at the moment for a waltz with--with Susan." The stranger blushed painfully, made an involuntary movement backward, and Liza Jannan admonished her husband. "Do you know Miss Brundon, Jasper?" she asked. Jasper Penny bowed, and Miss Brundon, with an evident effort, smiled, her shy, blue eyes held resolutely on his countenance. She at once slipped into the background, talking in a low, clear voice to Graham Jannan's wife; while the older men enveloped themselves in a fragrant veil of cigars. "Come, Mary, Susan," Mrs. Jannan directed, "out of this horrid, masculine odour." Accompanied by her son the women left, and Stephen turned to his cousin. "Thought, of course, you knew Susan Brundon," he remarked. "A school mistress, but superior, and a lady. Has a place on Spruce Street, by Raspberry Alley, for select younger girls; unique idea, and very successful, I believe." Jasper Penny said comfortably, "Humm!" The other continued, "I want Graham to get out to Shadrach Furnace as soon as may be. That old stone house the foremen have occupied is nearly fixed for him. I am very well content, Jasper, to have him in the iron trade, with you practically at its head. No deliberate favours, remember, and I have told him to look for nothing. But, at the same time--you comprehend: folly not to push the boy on fast as possible. No reason for us all to go through with the hardships of the first Gilbert and his times. Must have been fatiguing, the wilderness and English troubles and all that." "Splendid, I should say," Jasper Penny replied. He repeated satirically the conversation he had heard above. "Makes me ill. You will remember there was a Howat, son of our original settler--now he must have been a lad! Married some widow or other; wild at first, but made iron in the end." "A black Penny, Jasper; resembled you. Personally, I like it better now." Jasper Penny surveyed with approbation Stephen's full, handsome presence. Jannan was a successful, a big, man. Well, so was he too. But he thought with keen longing of the time when he was twenty-one, and free, free to roam self-sufficient. He thought of that Howat Penny of which they had spoken, black as he was black in the family tradition; he had seen Hesselius's portrait of the other; and, but for the tied hair and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself. It was curious--that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished, concrete, after generations. The one to hold it before Howat had been burned in Mary's time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three hundred years. Jasper had a sudden, vivid sense of familiarity with the Howat who had married some widow or other. His mind returned to his own, peculiar problem, to Essie Scofield, to the burden with which he had encumbered himself, the payment that faced him for--for his sheer youth. He said abruptly, belated: "You fit the present formal ease of society, Stephen; you like it and it likes you. In a superficial way I have done well enough, but underneath--" his voice sank into silence. A profound, familiar dejection seized him; incongruously he thought of Miss Brundon's delicate shrinking from the mere contact of the amenities of speech. Super-sensitive. "I must go," he announced, and refused Stephen Jannan's invitation for the night. "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.