The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche

by de la Roche, Mazo

  “Probably a couple of months.”

  Bell gave a little embarrassed laugh. “Don’t think me too inquisitive,” he said, “but I can’t help asking this. Someone — I think it was Mrs. Clapperton — told me that there is a sort of engagement between Adeline and her cousin. Is she — are they going over there as an engaged couple?”

  “I think almost everyone in the family wishes they were but it isn’t so. Adeline hasn’t shown any preference for Maurice and they’re too sensible to press her. Her father wouldn’t allow any urging. He’s in no hurry to give his daughter to a man who is to live three thousand miles away.”

  “whoever marries her,” said Bell, “will get a lovely wife.”

  “He will, and a high-spirited one. He’d need lots of character.”

  “It would be strange,” Bell now turned his inviting blue eyes on Finch, “to live in the house with one woman — one whom you loved desperately — and no one else … I used to live in the house with five women. Of course, that was very different. If you lived alone with a woman you deeply loved, everything she said or did would be terrifically important. And all the time you’d be watching yourself, in fear you might say or do something that might hurt her. And if by any chance she gave you a hurt you’d have to hide it from her. You’ve been married. Isn’t that so?”

  “There are worse things than being hurt,” said Finch. “There’s suffocation.”

  “But not if you really loved her!”

  “Well … you never know till you try it.”

  “I expect he’ll marry her all right,” said Bell, turning again to the thought of Maurice. “He’s got money and good looks, the family behind him. He’s got everything.”

  “Except Adeline’s love. He hasn’t that — yet.”

  “This journey together will do the trick. I can just see them in some picturesque old Irish mansion — the sort of place to captivate a girl.” Bell forced a smile to his small sensitive mouth, as though the picture were a pleasant one.

  Finch began to talk to him of Ireland, of old Dermot Court whose property had been inherited by Maurice. “Speaking of Ireland,” he went on, “my wife was an Irishwoman, a forty-second cousin. We separated and we came together again.”

  “That was good, eh?”

  “No. It didn’t last.”

  Walking homeward Finch remembered his wife Sarah. Her dark form glided out of the pale muffled wood and stood on the rustic bridge waiting for him. He saw her sleek black head with its convolutions of plaits, her white hands gripping the snowy handrail of the bridge, as though to keep herself from running to meet him. He remembered the feel of those hands on his neck … and now she was dead, dead as that fallen ash tree, blown down by a gale in its prime.… Of her there was left only the memory of her sensual hold on him — his struggle to escape — but he could never be the same again. She had done something to him.… Yet — had he ever been whole — sound? He doubted it. And here at Jalna was their son. Here was Dennis who was always so glad to have him at home. It touched him to see the little boy’s pleasure in his return. But, when it came to being a father, he felt himself to be a failure as compared with Renny — Renny who had been a father to his brothers, to Eden’s daughter, and now a better father than himself to Dennis.

  What bright elegance was Sarah’s! She was as finished as a china ornament. She was as ruthless as a storm. From her far-off grave in California she spoke to him in a moment’s communion and he hesitated on the bridge to hear that icy whisper. He looked back at his own deep footprints in the snow, blue caverns sunk in its whiteness. There was an oak tree that had somehow contrived against all the gales to retain two brown leaves. Now, in the still air, one of them detached itself and fluttered slowly downward like a weary bird.… The sound of the dogs’ barking came from the direction of the house. They barked angrily from the porch, wanting the door opened. In a moment it opened and the barking ceased. The door closed with a bang.

  Finch pictured the warmth and light inside the house. Whiteoaks had lived here for all but a century. Perhaps would live here for a century — two centuries — more. Who knew? He felt the pull of the house — urging him to hasten to it — not to lose any of the cherished hours under its roof, the only roof beneath which he felt sheltered, safe. Sometimes when he was on a tour, was playing the piano in a distant city, he would remember the piano in this house, and his spirit would return to it and his fingers return to that keyboard, and all else would be blotted out and the next day the critics would say he had played his best.

  When he stood inside the hall where the bob-tailed sheepdog, the bulldog, and the Cairn terrier were humped by the stove pulling at the clots of snow between their toes, he stood warming his hands and listening to the voices of the two old uncles in the library, like the rustling of the two last oak leaves on the tree in the ravine, he thought. Urgent and steady came the tick of the grandfather clock. Now the sound of the dogs licking their wet paws, and a growl from the little Cairn as the sheepdog lay down too close to him.

  Cap in hand he stood in the doorway of the library.

  “I’ll not come in,” he said. “I’m too snowy.”

  “Thank you, dear boy,” said Uncle Ernest. “I am so very susceptible to cold.”

  “where have you been?” asked Uncle Nicholas.

  “A good walk. Then I dropped in on Humphrey Bell.”

  “Albino-looking fellow,” remarked Nicholas.

  “He served in the Air Force. A very nice young man,” reproved Ernest.

  “Didn’t say he wasn’t nice.” Nicholas spoke testily. “Said he looked like an albino.” Nicholas stretched till the chair creaked beneath him. “what a long day! I shall be glad when spring comes. Spring! It’s March. Think of the primroses in England. Why, you could hardly put your foot down without treading on ’em. Shall never see them again.” He voiced a “Ho-hum,” that was something between a yawn and a grunt of resignation, for he was not unhappy.

  “Your Uncle Nicholas has days,” Ernest remarked, “when he will not listen to the radio. Says it tires him.”

  His brother’s grey moustache bristled. “Didn’t say it tired me. Said it made me tired. It makes me tired because there are too many stars. Stars used to be few and far between and they shone brightly. Now there’s a regular Milky Way of radio stars. They make me tired. That’s what I said. Too much of everything. That’s what I say.”

  They heard Adeline’s footsteps flying down the stairs. She brought palpable joy into the room. “what do you suppose?” she cried. “Mother and Daddy have said I may go to Ireland with Maurice! And they’d like you to go with me, Uncle Finch, to look after me. As though I needed looking after! Daddy says the rest will do you so much good. Will you come, please? Because whether I go or not depends a great deal on you.”

  Renny now followed his daughter into the room and Finch asked of him, — “why don’t you take Adeline over yourself? She’d rather have you than anyone else.”

  “I know. And I’d like tremendously to go, but for one thing —”

  “Now don’t say it’s the money,” cried Adeline. “You know you can afford it, darling.”

  “For one thing,” he persisted, “it’s the expense. For another — and I won’t say it doesn’t count most — it’s that I’m afraid to leave home for fear of what Clapperton will do. I’ve heard that he plans to build a factory of some sort on the Black place.”

  “He couldn’t!” cried Ernest. “My parents would turn over in their graves.”

  “A lot he’d care. He’s a business man. It would be a paying venture. It would be two miles from his own house.”

  Nicholas said, — “He’ll never do it. I’m sure of that. It would depreciate the value of his own property. All this talk is to aggravate us. He knows it will and the horrid old fellow enjoys it.”

  “I think you’re right, Uncle Nick,” said Finch.

  Adeline caught his arm in her hands and rubbed her cheek on his shoulder. She said, — “It’s
decided somebody’s got to go with Mooey and me. Daddy won’t. So you must, Uncle Finch. It’ll simply break my heart if I can’t go.”

  “Alayne ought to go,” said Finch.

  “Of course she should,” agreed Renny. “It’s years and years since she was over there but she won’t go. She’s in a rut and won’t budge out of it.”

  Alayne in the doorway overheard this. In her heart she knew that Adeline would prefer the companionship of Renny or of Finch to hers. It was not a happy thought but it was so and she herself was probably to blame, for though she loved Adeline the child was not and never had been congenial to her. And there was her son. Was he congenial to her? He had her father’s lofty white forehead and piercing blue eyes but so far he had shown, not her father’s intellect or sweet, self-effacing nature, but an erratic mind and a profound egotism. She found herself not near to either of her children.

  She said, — “I can’t think of anyone who would enjoy the trip more than you, Finch. And I’m sure there is no one Adeline would rather have — with the exception of her father.”

  “Now then, Finch,” said Renny, “it is up to you.”

  “Dear boy,” Ernest stretched out his hand and took one of Finch’s in it. “I think you should agree to go. Mooey very kindly invited me to accompany them and I think he intended to pay all expenses but the more I think it over the more certain I become that the effort would be too great for me. I am almost ninety-five. Can you believe that?” He raised his eyes rather pathetically to Finch’s face, as though he asked for assurance that this was not so.

  “There’s a good fellow, Finch,” said Nicholas. “There’s a good fellow.”

  It was impossible to resist. Besides he wanted to go. The thought of the sea voyage, the thought of Ireland, elated him. The thought of a journey with Maurice and Adeline elated him. All his journeyings were by plane or train and solitary, with a concert looming at the end. The thought of seeing his brother Wakefield, now acting in a play in London, elated him.

  As always when Finch was moved he lost control over his voice. Now it came loudly from his mouth. “I’ll go with Adeline. I’d like to go. It’s just what I’d like to do.”

  She threw both arms about him and he felt their strength. “Oh, splendid! Oh, heavenly!” She danced about the room weaving her way in and out among her elders.

  “what’s splendid? what’s heavenly?” asked Dennis from the doorway, his eyes shining beneath his yellow fringe.

  “Uncle Finch and I are going to Ireland.”

  “Can I go too?”

  “You’re too young.”

  “People go over when they’re babies.”

  “They go with their mothers.”

  “I’ll go with my father.”

  “No,” said Finch. “You can’t come.”

  “why?”

  “There are dozens of reasons.”

  “Tell me eleven.” He tugged at Finch’s sleeve.

  Finch wanted to get away from Dennis. He ran up to his room on the top floor two steps at a time. But he heard Dennis pursuing him. He heard him coming step after step without panting. Finch turned and faced him.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I want to go to Ireland.”

  “You’re too young. Your turn will come.”

  “If we all took turns by age my turn would never come till I was old.”

  “I’ll bring you something nice — whatever you want,” Finch said comfortingly and had a recollection of Wakefield as a small boy begging to go places.

  “M — m,” murmured Dennis. He took Finch’s hand and stroked it with his cheek. He pushed back Finch’s sleeve and stroked the inside of his wrist. He stroked it as Sarah had been wont to do.

  “Let me go,” he said, breathless. “You must run along, Dennis. There’s a good boy.”

  He got rid of him and shut the door behind him. He spread open and flexed the hand Dennis had caressed.

  VIII

  IN THE BASEMENT KITCHEN

  Rags the houseman sat on the smaller of the kitchen tables smoking one of Renny’s cigarettes. His wife was scraping the burnt top off a gingerbread. An aura of pale blue smoke was about her heated head and she sucked her underlip in exasperation.

  “You always will have the oven too ’ot,” he said, in his cool Cockney accent which he retained after nearly thirty years in this country.

  “Mind your own business,” she returned briefly in her Ontario voice.

  “Are you suggesting that it ain’t my business?” he asked. “when I take burnt gingerbread in on the tea tray I’d like to know who’ll get the glum looks — you or me.”

  “The old gentlemen never complain.”

  “Don’t they? And ’ow do you know?”

  “They never complain to me.”

  “That’s it. All the complaints are reserved for yours truly. Whatever goes wrong. Now there’s gas escaping! ’Aven’t you got no sense of smell?” He sprang from the table, went to the stove, and turned off the leaking faucet.

  “In some ways,” she remarked, “I liked me old coal range better.

  “Then why don’t you use it? It’s standing there.”

  “Light a fire in it for me then. The boss likes it best too.”

  “He likes everything that gives more trouble. They all do.”

  “Tell him that.”

  “Oh, him and me get on all right. Don’t you worry.”

  She banged the oven door shut and carried the gingerbread into the pantry. “It’d take more than you to make me worry,” she said.

  When she came back she found old Noah Binns, a former farm labourer at Jalna but long since retired because of age and rheumatism, sitting in the kitchen. He frequently dropped in for a cup of tea and a chat for old times’ sake.

  “Howd’do, Mrs. Wragge,” he said, in his pessimistic tones. “Tarrible weather, ain’t it?”

  “I haven’t time to notice weather,” she said. “It takes my husband here to do that.”

  “There ain’t,” said Noah Binns, “goin’ to be no spring.”

  “No spring!” She stared.

  “No spring whatever.” He grinned, showing his one upper tooth. “We’re goin’ straight from the depths of winter straight into roastin’ boilin’ bakin’ summer — the worst yet. All the signs pint to it.”

  “Well, I never.”

  “Nor did anyone never. It’ll beat all.”

  Rags said, — “Don’t go discouraging the wife. She’s just burnt her gingerbread.”

  “I prefer it burnt,” said Binns. “It tastes less like gingerbread.”

  “I guess I won’t offer you a piece after that,” said the cook.

  “whatever you bake is good, Mrs. Wragge,” Binns hastened to say.

  With her rolling gait she went into the pantry and returned with a plate of gingerbread cut into squares.

  “I see the kettle is biling,” said Binns.

  “It’s always boiling in this kitchen. Make us a cup of tea, wife, do.” Rags now spoke affectionately.

  Noah Binns continued with his gloomy weather predictions till they all sat about the table with their cups full of hot tea. The light came into the basement windows direct off snow mounded outside the windows. Rows of aluminum and even a few old copper utensils hung on the walls. There were shelves covered by packages and bottles of cleaning mixtures, so many that Alayne often wondered how the Wragges could use them all. There was a large rack in which stood platters from many bygone dinner services mostly having their enamel cracked by much overheating. A table was crowded with brass and silver objects waiting to be cleaned.

  Rags nodded toward them. “Silver-cleaning day tomorrow. Like to come and give me a hand, Noah?”

  Binns was for a moment speechless from gingerbread, then he said, — “My working days are over. Nobody in this neighbourhood has worked so long and hard as me. And the way I’ve rung that bell.”

  The two Wragges winked simultaneously at each other.

  “The chu
rch bell you mean, Noah,” said Mrs. Wragge.

  “I rung that bell,” he said, his voice vibrating with pride, “for fifty years. Nobody before or after has rung it so loud. When I was in my prime the churchwardens spoke to me for fear I’d bust it. I could put words into the mouth of that bell. Whenever I seen Colonel Whiteoak late for church I’d make that bell say — ‘Hurry up, you redheaded son of a gun, dang you — dang you — dang you!’ And the bell would ring it clear.”

  The Wragges shook with laughter. “And would he hurry?” she asked, making a picture of it in her mind.

  “Hurry? why, he’d come on the run. But the work got too heavy for me. For a year I ain’t been able to ring the bell and I never seen so much lateness as there is now.”

  “There’s a new drug what cures rheumatism,” said Rags. “But it won’t be ready for a year or two.”

  “I’ve no faith in drugs,” said Noah. “I’ve took enough drugs to make an atom bomb and they done me no good. The only medicine I take now is senna. I started off with senna and I’ll end with senna.”

  A knock came on the outer door. Mrs. Wragge called out — “Come in” — and Wright the head stableman entered. He was ruddy-cheeked, square built, and had been working at Jalna since he was eighteen, thirty years ago. He made a clatter stamping off snow, then greeted them with a cheerfully sarcastic, — “Lovely spring day, isn’t it?”

  Noah Binns groaned. “It’s all the spring we’ll see. Straight from this we’ll go into roastin’ boilin’ bakin’ summer. All the signs pint to it.”

  “Well, I guess we can stand it after all we’ve been through,” said Wright, drawing up a chair.

  “We don’t know what trouble is in this country,” said Rags, “except what we make for ourselves.”

  “We don’t make the bugs and the blight, do we?” Noah Binns demanded, his voice trembling with anger.

  “The greatest troublemaker about here,” said Wright, “is old Clapperton.”

  Mrs. Wragge placed tea and gingerbread in front of him. “what’s his latest?” she asked.

  “Well, you know about the Black place?”