The Three Black Pennys | Page 3

not easily
excited sexually, and had had few adventures with women; something
of his contempt, his indifference, removed him from that, too. His
emotions were deep, vital; and hid beneath a shyness of habit that had
grown into a suspicious reserve. All bonds were irksome to him, and
instinctively he avoided the greater with the lesser; instinctively he

realized that the admission of cloying influences, of the entanglements
of sex, would more definitely bind him than any generality of society.
It had, he thought, grown dark with amazing rapidity. He could now
see a feeble light at the Gilkans, ahead and on the right. At the same
moment a brighter, flickering radiance fell upon the road, the thick
foliage of the trees. The blast was gathering at Shadrach Furnace. A
clear, almost smokeless flame rose from the stack against the
night-blue sky. It illuminated the rectangular, stone structure of the
coal-house on the hill, and showed the wet and blackened roof of the
casting shed below. The flame dwindled and then mounted, hanging
like a fabulous oriflamme on a stillness in which Howat Penny could
hear the blast forced through the Furnace by the great leather bellows.
He turned in, over the littered ground before the Gilkan house. Fanny
was standing in the doorway, her straight, vigorous body sharp against
the glow inside. "Here's Mr. Howat Penny," she called over her
shoulder. "Is everything off the table? There's not much," she turned to
him, "but the end of the pork barrel." A meagre fire was burning in the
large, untidy hearth; battered tin ovens had been drawn aside, and a pair
of wood-soled shoes were drying. The rough slab of the table, pushed
back against a long seat made of a partly hewed and pegged log, was
empty but for some dull scarred pewter and scraps of salt meat. On the
narrow stair that led above, a small, touselled form was sleeping--one
of the cast boys at the Furnace.
A thin, peering woman in a hickory-dyed wool dress moved forward
obsequiously. "Mr. Penny!" she echoed the girl's announcement; "and
here I haven't got a thing fit for you. Thomas Gilkan has been too busy
to get out, and Fanny she'll fetch nothing unless the mood's on her. If I
only had a fish I could turn over." She brushed the end of the table with
a frayed sleeve. "You might just take a seat, and I'll look around."
Fanny Gilkan listened to her mother with a comprehending smile.
Fanny's face was gaunt, but her grey eyes were wide and compelling,
her mouth was firm and bright; and her hair, her father often said,
resembled the fire at the top of Shadrach. Howat knew that she was as
impersonal, as essentially unstirred, as himself; but he had a clear doubt
of Mrs. Gilkan. The latter was too anxious to welcome him to their
unpretending home; she obviously moved to throw Fanny and himself
together, and to disparage such suits as honest Dan Hesa's. He

wondered if the older woman thought he might marry her daughter.
And wondering he came to the conclusion that the other thing would
please the mother almost as well. She had given him to understand that
at Fanny's age she would know how to please any Mr. Howat Penny
that chance fortune might bring her.
That some such worldly advice had been poured into Fanny's ears he
could not doubt; and he admired the girl's obvious scorn of such wiles
and surrenders. She sat frankly beside him now, as he finished a
wretched supper, and asked about the country in regions to which she
had not penetrated. "It's a three days' trip," he finished a recital of an
excursion of his own.
"I'd like to go," she returned; "but I suppose I couldn't find it alone."
He was considering the possibility of such a journey with her--it would
be pleasant in the extreme--when her mother interrupted them from the
foot of the stair.
"A sensible girl," she declared, "would think about seeing the sights of
a city, and of a cherry-derry dress with ribbons, instead of all this about
tramping off through the woods with a ragged skirt about your naked
knees."
Fanny Gilkan's face darkened, and she glanced swiftly at Howat Penny.
He was filling a pipe, unmoved. Such a trip as he had outlined, with
Fanny, was fastening upon his thoughts. It would at once express his
entire attitude toward the world, opinion, and the resentful charcoal
burners.
"You wouldn't really go," he said aloud, half consciously.
The girl frowned in an effort of concentration, gazing into the thin light
of the dying fire and two watery tallow dips. Her coarsely spun dress,
coloured with sassafras bark and darker than the yellow hickory stain,
drew about her