“Will you stay and have some supper?” asked Clara.
A roll of thunder answered her. The storm was coming back. Renny and Wakefield got into the truck, the elder watching, with some trepidation, the erratic sidlings of the machine along the rough road. He had scarcely ever been in it before, and the sight of Wakefield driving such a vehicle was grotesque to him. Before they reached the sheds the storm was on them. By the time they reached the house they were wet through.
The work of obliterating all signs of building from the newly acquired land was soon under way. Renny himself took part in it, evincing a ruthless pleasure in tearing down the flimsy erections that had caused him so much chagrin. Maurice showed the same good-humoured interest in watching them pulled down as he had in their putting up. He had made up his mind that there should be no hard feeling between himself and Renny over the affair, but Meg, meeting Renny on the road, had refused to speak to him, had turned her face away. The house was shadowed by a feeling of bitter reproach. Ernest was resuming, one by one, his invalidish ways. He and Nicholas both avoided Renny, and at table they either addressed themselves to Alayne or talked in melancholy undertones of days gone by. Alayne would rather not have been so singled out by them, so definitely drawn to their side against Renny, for she felt something irrevocable in the tide thus moving them along, but she could not help herself. Something in her made it impossible for her to reach out to him, and he on his part felt himself in the position of one definitely in the wrong in the sight of his family. Wakefield alone was on his side, but he was still too much the child to oppose himself openly to his uncles. He sat silent at meals, wrapped in his own thoughts or perhaps teasing small Adeline, urging her to forwardness. She needed little urging and, young as she was, she was quite aware of the conflicting emotions about her. She would look long and speculatively upon the faces of Nicholas and Ernest or cast a defiant prideful look at her mother. She watched Renny’s every movement, tried to handle her spoon and fork as he did his, and refused to touch any food he did not like. If he said his bacon was undercooked she would not eat hers, and her infant opposition caused Alayne an irritation quite beyond its significance, for she saw in it a forecast of the future. At every opportunity her child would run from the house and follow Renny to the stables. He encouraged her in this, and Alayne, in proud resentment, let them have their way, so Adeline was nearly always dirty and smelling of the horses and with horsy words on her lips.
When Finch returned from his visit to Sarah the state of affairs was concisely put before him by Piers. Shut in the piggery together, Piers poured out the sorry tale of the spiritual disruption of Jalna and prophesied to Finch that he would one day be its master.
All Finch could do was to pull at his sensitive underlip and reiterate—“Well, well, well.”
He slunk to the dinner table not knowing, but feeling sure that he must soon declare, which side he was on. The haggard looks of the elderly men distressed him. The rings under Alayne’s eyes, her compressed lips, moved him to compassion. The look, reserved, suspicious, and hangdog, on Renny’s face, his sudden staccato outbursts of mirth at Adeline’s capers, repelled him. But it was Wakefield who hastened his decision. Wakefield’s attitude of intimate understanding toward Renny, and his encouragement of Adeline’s naughtiness, roused Finch’s resentment. The boy was modelling himself on Renny.
When Renny dropped a bit of meat to his spaniel and Adeline threw half hers on the floor, Wakefield said, apparently addressing the portrait of his grandmother:
“She is a perfect Court.”
Renny grinned at Wakefield. Alayne kept her eyes resolutely on her plate. Nicholas and Ernest, cloaked in gloom, seemed scarcely conscious of what went on about them.
What a homecoming! Finch thought. Why had he been kept in darkness as to the state of affairs at Jalna? Probably the family had decided that his mind must not be distracted from his lovemaking. And Sarah had kept her share in the business a secret from him. Was that a sign that she would always tell him just what she chose? Or had Renny perhaps exacted a promise of secrecy from her? The food stuck in his throat.
After the meal he lighted a cigarette and went out into the porch. It was a warm, sunless, sultry day in August. The chorus of locusts was subdued. The heavy air was scented with new-mown grass. All this was of the essence of home.
Renny followed and stood beside him. He said:
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am about your engagement to Sarah. I don’t know when I’ve been so pleased with one of you boys. Sarah and you are just suited to each other.” He gave Finch’s shoulder a squeeze. “And she has means, too. That’s not to be sneezed at.”
By God, thought Finch, he should not have mentioned her means! He mumbled:
“I’m glad you’re pleased. I don’t know if we are suited… I—we—we’re awfully in love…”
“Of course you are! There’s nothing like it. You two will be perfectly happy. Now, when are you going to get married?”
“In the spring. Then we’re going to Paris. I want to study there. And Sarah likes it. She’ll sell her house here.”
“Good! But don’t be away too long. You will stay with us when you come back. Alayne likes Sarah. It makes things so much more comfortable when the women like each other. You’ll find that out.”
“Yes,” returned Finch heavily. He hoped Renny would not speak of the mortgage, but he did.
“It took a load off my mind, I can tell you,” he said, “to get that loan from Sarah. It eased things up all round. I had a number of small anxieties—as well as the big ones. But everything is all right now.” His tone was determinedly happy. His brown eyes looked challengingly into Finch’s.
“The uncles aren’t very brisk,” answered Finch. “Uncle Ernest seems rather weak on his pins.”
Renny’s face fell. “I know, I know. They took it very hard. In fact”—he lowered his voice—“they and Piers and Meg have been pretty disagreeable to me ever since. But I pay no attention. Simply let them stew in their own juice.”
They could hear Ernest draggingly ascend the stairs for his afternoon rest. Nicholas rumble a complaint to Wragge. Adeline scream as Alayne prevented her following her father to the porch. Wakefield whistle “Live, Laugh, and Love” as he strolled toward the barn.
“I must be off too,” said Renny, and went down the steps to the drive.
Finch looked at his tall, sinewy figure. What a source of strength he had been to the family. For twelve years Gran had lived on his bounty while she hoarded her own fortune. Now, for nearly twenty years, his uncles had lived on it. Meg had been provided for till she was forty. Eden had never been off his mind. He had always backed Piers. No one but him had had a kind word to offer young Pheasant when Piers had brought her to Jalna. He had been a father to Wakefield and himself. Yet—there was something in him that roused antagonism. He was too taciturn or too expansive, too arrogant or too demonstratively affectionate. When he was in the room others were overshadowed.
Adeline came running on her sturdy legs to follow him, but Finch caught her.
“No, you don’t,” he said, while she, half laughing, beat him with her fists.
Alayne appeared and Renny asked of her:
“Can’t she come? I’ll see that she does not get dirty.”
Alayne answered sharply—“She is washed and dressed for the afternoon. Can’t you see that?”
The child was indeed dainty and in white.
Renny gave her a wry smile.
“Bye-bye,” he said, and waved his hand.
“Bye-bye,” she gasped, through her tears. She watched him disappear without further ado.
Alayne said—“I do so hope, Finch, that you and Sarah will be very happy.”
“So do I. But—sometimes I wonder if any one of us is cut out for marriage. Excepting Piers, of course.”
“If you two are not happy it will be Sarah’s fault. The love you both have for music will be a great joy in your life together. Having the
same tastes means so much.”
“I don’t believe it means anything to me. I love Sarah most for what is so different in her to myself.”
“Yes. Now. But wait. Later on you’ll rejoice in your companionship.”
He was aware of the longing in her tone and it embarrassed him. To change the subject he said, rather irritably:
“I think this engagement of Wake’s to Pauline is idiotic. He is just a kid. She is making a great mistake.”
“He is terribly in love, poor child.”
“But he’s so smug about it! Of course, he always has been a self-satisfied little beggar.”
“Well, I think that is a good thing. All this unhappiness around him does not touch him. He is secure in his own fortress.”
“Hmph… As for the fox farm, I think it’s a ghastly business transplanting it to Jalna.”
She made a gesture of resignation. “I suppose it must be endured.”
And he observed that attitude of almost tense endurance in the days that followed. Nicholas and Ernest poured out their feelings to Finch in the privacy of their own rooms, for Rags was always about downstairs, and he—although he was supposed to know nothing of the situation—showed himself definitely on Renny’s side by hovering about him at table as though he were an invalid, speaking to him in a peculiarly hushed and sympathetic tone that set the nerves of the others on edge. On a particularly hot day he set before him an appetising omelette at dinner.
Renny’s eyebrows shot up.
“What’s this?”
“A homelette, sir, as Mrs. Wragge thought might tempt you. We noticed that you ’aven’t been eating well, along of the ’eat and the worry, if you’ll excuse me, sir.”
“Damned impudence,” growled Nicholas to his cutlet.
Ernest’s fork trembled. He eyed the omelette resentfully. His own appetite, he thought, needed tempting.
Wakefield said heartily—“It will do you good, Renny. I have heard my grandmother say that nothing else gave her appetite the fillip that a well-made omelette did.”
Renny slid the fluffy mixture to his plate with a glance of gratitude at Rags.
The day of the removal of the fox farm followed a night of wind and rain. The sun came up red and stormy but the clouds passed, his colour paled to gold, and a jocund breeze swept gaily across the harvest fields. The air was of that sparkling coolness which gives a man strength.
The great lumbering lorry crawled slowly down the road cumbered by the bulk of the Lebraux’s house. The house had a startled but submissive look, like a poor beast going to market. The face of the driver of the lorry was puckered with anxiety, but the master of Jalna, at his side, wore a grin that was almost hilarious.
He had put an end to Maurice’s obnoxious subdividing of his property. He had added the subdivision to his own land. Now he was about to place on it the house of two friends whose welfare was irrevocably bound up in his heart. The land was his own. The house was his own. He was going to improve it. No one would be able to say justly that it was an eyesore. Clara and Pauline would live there happily as long as they wanted. When times were better, as they soon must be, he would pay off the mortgage.
His bull terrier sat at his feet. His spaniels ran joyously barking on either side of the lorry, while inside the house, Piers’s fox-terrier, Biddy, raged from room to room infuriated by so unnatural a spectacle.
XXX
SEPTEMBER DUSK
IT WAS surprising how the transplanted house was improved in its new position. For one thing, it stood farther back from the road, and the clipped cedar hedge enriched its bareness. Then, in place of dingy white, Renny had had it painted a pleasant buff and its roof green. Wakefield had planted a young juniper tree on either side of the green front door. He and Clara had distempered the walls and ceilings of the rooms in varying shades of tan and green. Pauline had made curtains of pale-yellow net and filled the window boxes with nasturtiums in flower which she had brought from her garden. Even the enclosures for the foxes were half concealed behind a little grove. Ernest and Nicholas, spying on it from the shelter of their oaks, had to acknowledge that it looked quite respectable, and returned through the ravine with a slight lightening of their melancholy.
But they said no word in praise of it to Renny. Indeed his position at Jalna during these weeks was far from enviable. Silent reproach and disapproval sprang up in his shadow like gloomy weeds and, when he came into a room, what conversation survived was constrained. He and Alayne exchanged no more than was necessary for the sake of appearance. So he spent as much time away from the house as was possible. It was little better at Meg’s or Piers’s; therefore he made companions more and more of his horses and his stablemen.
One evening in late September when the breeze had begun to lisp through the leaves with the foreknowledge of their falling, he crossed the rustic bridge, hesitating for a moment to see his own reflection darkling in the pool, and climbed the steep path to the other side and so approached the fox farm. He had an almost childlike wonder in the thought that he now came to it in a quite different direction from the one to which he was accustomed, and that the house, although the same, had an appearance so different… Pauline had changed, too. She could not, it seemed, be his friend and love Wakefield. The Pauline he saw now was no more than the mirrored image of the girl he had loved with such protective affection… But Clara was unchanged. There was comfort in that thought. She would greet him with her look of sturdy eagerness, distinct from facile feminine animation. Her silence would harbour no suspicion.
She was alone in the little grove that hid the fox-runs. She was in white, more nicely dressed than was usual with her. In that light her tanned face and throat were coffee-coloured and her hair sleek and shining like a boy’s. The foxes were padding warily about their new quarters, of which they were still delicately suspicious, and a whippoor-will in the ravine threw his mournful exclamation on the air. A narrow rim of the red harvest moon burnt on the horizon.
She stood watching his approach till his face became clear to her, then she came toward him and held out her hand. When he had taken it and she had murmured a word or two of the beauty of the evening, they still stood linked, for from each hand a sudden and inexplicable happiness had been transmuted to the other.
It was as though a shadowy something between them had in that moment become tangible, manifesting itself in a tremulous wonder at the nearness of each to each, and a fear that the moment would pass, leaving them to loneliness of spirit.
The scent of the earth they both loved rose to them, filling their nostrils with the breath of its secret life. A night bird, like a blown leaf, fluttered past them, the beat of its pale wings troubling the quiet air.
“Are you alone tonight?” he asked, and she answered, almost in a whisper, that she was. Wakefield had taken Pauline out in a canoe on the lake.
Soon this moment will be gone, she thought, and will never come again, and she held it to her like a jewel she had found in the darkness.
She had loved for all these years and had cloaked her love beneath a man’s work, a man’s language, and a matter-of-fact companionship. It was beyond her hopes, nay—against her will, that he should recognise it. And now… here were his fingers clinging to hers, his hand trembling in startled happiness.
“A good moon,” he said, with an odd tremor in his voice; “it promises well for tomorrow.”
“Yes. A good moon,” she agreed. “The farmers are having fine weather for the harvest.”
“It’s a nice time of year.” He sniffed the scented air.
“Yes. It’s rather a nice time of year.”
“Are you warm enough in that thin dress?”
“Oh yes, I’m plenty warm enough.” She gave a little shiver.
“It looks thin.”
“It is thinner than I usually wear.”
She tried to withdraw her hand but he held it tightly. She acquiesced then, and her fingers closed on his.
“Clara—” He hesi
tated.
“Yes?”
“Oh, nothing… I’m not quite myself tonight… Well… Perhaps that’s wrong… I’m too much myself.”
“Not for me!”
“Do you feel”—he gave a short laugh—“anything new in yourself tonight?”
“No.”
“Does that mean that I am to keep my distance?”
“No.”
“It means then… that you want me to be near you?”
“Yes.”
He tried to see her face but the gently moving shadow of a tree lay across it.
“How long,” he asked, “have you felt like this?”
“Don’t ask me?”
“But I do ask you.”
“No, no, I won’t tell you!”
“A long while?”
“Yes.”
“And I never guessed it!”
He stopped beneath the pine tree where the whippoorwill had been singing. They heard its frightened flight and then, far off, its faint repeated cry. The pine needles lay thick and sweet beneath them.
Although he had touched her hand so often he had never before noticed how hardened it was through work. He raised it to his lips.
“My brave girl,” he said.
He withdrew from her then and stood leaning against the rough trunk of the pine. His face was in shadow but she could see the brilliance of his eyes. She stood motionless, her heart beating strongly, waiting to see what he would do. She stood acquiescent, like a wounded animal.
He watched the steady rise of the hunter’s moon as it climbed from branch to branch above the ravine. He felt happiness and strength welling up in him. “When the moon swings clear into the sky,” he told himself.
It swung clear and hung above them. The breeze lisped through the trees, not moving their branches but causing their leaves to vibrate. He came toward her, frowning. She felt only desire to surrender herself to him. She put a hand on each side of his head and drew his face down to hers. Their lips met.
“This will be our bed,” he said, indicating the pine needles.
The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche Page 322
