XXXIV

A letter for James Polder was at Shadrach, and he opened it immediately, glancing over its scrawled sheet.  Howat saw a curious expression overspread the other’s countenance.  He called, “Mariana!” in a sharp tone.  She appeared from the foot of the steps.  “Harriet never went home,” he told her; “this is from Pittsburgh.  She’s back on the stage.”  A premonitory dread filled Howat Penny.  Mariana stood quietly, her gaze lifted to Polder.  “She never went home,” he repeated; “but writes that suddenly she—­she didn’t want to, and couldn’t stand Harrisburg another week.  She saw some one and had a part, that ought to be good, offered to her; and, so—­”

“Is that all, Jim?”

“No,” he replied; “there is more, absolutely unjustified.  I think I’d like you to read it.  It would be best.”  Mariana took the letter, and followed its irregular course.  “It’s true enough,” she said quietly, at the end.  “But I don’t in the least mind, Jim.  She had a perfect right to something of the sort.  That is—­I’m not annoyed about what she says of me, but it will upset you terribly.  And it has been my fault, from the first.”  He protested vehemently, but she stopped him with a gesture; then walked to the door opening on the porch; where, her head up, she stood gazing out into the serene, failing light.

James Polder followed her, and Howat heard the screen softly close.  He was about to light a cigarette, but, his hand shaking, he laid it on the table.  He put up his glass, without purpose, and then let it drop.  Rudolph was placing the silver for dinner; old forks faintly marked with a crest that Isabel Howat had brought to her husband.  A recurrence of the afternoon’s sense of the continuity of all living flowed over him, whispering with old voices, old longing and sorrow and regret, mingled dim features, and the broken clasping of hands.  He saw Mariana sweeping in a pale current—­a remote, eternal passion winding through the transient body of life.  She smiled, her subdued, mocking gaiety infinitely appealing, and vanished.

They came in to dinner without changing the informal garb of the day.  James Polder was silent, disturbed, but Mariana was serenely commonplace.  Her voice, clear and high, went unimportantly on; until, turning to Howat Penny, she said without the changing of a tone.  “I want James to take me back to Harrisburg with him, but he won’t.”  Howat endeavoured to meet this insanity with the silence usually opposed to Mariana’s frequent wildness of statement.  His knife scraped sharply against a plate; but, in the main, he successfully preserved an unmoved countenance.  “Now that Harriet has surrendered Mm,” she persisted, “I don’t see why I can’t be considered.  It is the commonest sense—­Jim can’t live alone, properly, in that house; I can’t exist properly without him.  You see, Howat, how reasonable it seems.”  What he did perceive was that his attitude of inattention must be sharply deserted.