Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course

by Mazo de La Roche

  The last Hume had been dead for only a month, yet there was an accumulation of dust in the house that might have been collecting during the seven generations of their occupancy. As they moved from room to room it seemed that some gloomy revelation of the past might be presented to them at any moment. Nicholas became more and more depressed. In a small room that had apparently been used as a study he found a framed photograph of a cricket team at Oxford wearing striped blazers, flat straw hats, and little side whiskers. He drew Finch to it and pointed out himself and his brother-in-law, the Hume who had lately died. Finch thought he should like to have this for himself, and bought it from the agent for three shillings. With it under his arm he followed Nicholas through the dining room into the kitchen. They left Leigh and Sarah examining an old brass-bound writing-case. A new intimacy seemed to enfold them.

  The kitchen was the largest room in the house. The low ceiling was heavily beamed, the floor was of uneven stone, and the deep windows gave on a cobbled yard beyond which were the gabled stone stable, the shippen, and linhays. A long table, with benches on either side, filled one end of the room. At the other end was the fireplace and, at right angles to it, a high-backed settle. On the hearth lay a pair of heavy boots stained with mud, and on the settle a worn leather coat and a hat. These garments, belonging to the dead man, added the final touch of desolation to the scene. For the first time in his life Nicholas felt that he heard the portentous creak of the gates of death.

  The agent and two people, a man and a woman, were talking in subdued tones before a cupboard filled with china. They were half hidden by the settle.

  Suddenly the woman raised her voice on a note of energy and exclaimed: “1 really must have those adorable glass bottles, and, of course, the Toby jugs! What do you say; do you think I ought to buy the cupboard itself?”

  Nicholas reared his head as might an old lion who hears the voice of the hunter. He listened and heard what he expected—the mellow tones of his brother Ernest! Ernest and Miss Trent were there in quest of antiques! It was too horrible. His gorge rose at the thought. Ernest must have got wind of the sale, sent word to Miss Trent, and the two come post haste after bargains. Finch heard too and could not help approving of their sagacity, considering what he himself had at stake in Miss Trent’s enterprise.

  Nicholas grasped him by the arm and dragged him from the room. In the passage he glared at him, the deep downward lines of his face accentuated. He growled:

  “I’m off upstairs to hide. Try to keep out of their way, but if they see you, don’t let them know I’m here! When that woman takes herself off, come upstairs and find me.”

  Heavily he ascended the stairs. At the top he took off his hat and wiped his forehead, above which the iron-grey hair still grew strong and thick. “A damned close shave,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t have met that woman and that flibbertigibbet brother of mine for worlds.” He peered in at the principal bedrooms, finding no remembrance there but only distaste for the fly-blown mirrors and beds heaped with mounds of linen and pillows. Drawers of writing bureaux stood half-open, the yellowing papers within revealed.

  He felt half-stifled and longed for the moment of escape. He turned from each with a sigh and wondered where he would be safest from Miss Trent. He thought he would go into the room to which one descended by two shallow steps, and, if he heard them coming, he would simply put his back against the door and keep them out. He thumped down the two steps, opened the door, entered and closed it softly behind him.

  A sun blind, yellow with age, hung askew halfway down the window, dimming the light in the room to a sallow twilight. He was astonished to find that he was not alone there. A woman was sitting by the bureau looking over some papers she had taken from it.

  He would have escaped, but she looked up and their eyes met. He stood quite still, returning her gaze, with that peculiar feeling of having done all this before, of enacting a scene which he had previously rehearsed. Apart from that feeling his brain had ceased to function. He looked at the woman, saw that she was well dressed, elderly, distinguished-looking, but he was uncertain as to whether he and she were really existing in the world he knew.

  The sound of her voice dispersed this trancelike condition. She said—“Why, Nicholas, how strange to meet you here!”

  Her words came as the breaking of ice in a frozen stream, setting free a flood of memories. He saw clearly now that she was Millicent, the woman who had divorced him, and he realised that they were face to face, alone in a room of her dead brother’s house. He had the painful sense of returning reality that comes after the oblivion of an anaesthetic. Her voice sounded far away, yet it beat on his ears. Her face was the face of a stranger, yet the eyes pierced the intimacies of his heart.

  She had got up and come to him. “I’m afraid I gave you a start,” she said. “Hadn’t you better sit down? You look pale.”

  She too looked pale, and her voice, for all the coolness of her words, trembled with emotion.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m quite all right. But you did give me a start. I was feeling rather despondent, as it was, finding everything here so changed. The rooms, where we’d been so happy, torn up.” The muscles about his mouth twitched and he looked at her almost pathetically.

  “I know, I know. I was feeling badly too. I had no idea you were in England.”

  “Ernest and I are over here on a visit to Augusta. We’ve got a young nephew with us. He and another boy and one of the Court children are downstairs.”

  She was rubbing her palms with a wisp of a perfumed handkerchief. Good God, it was the same scent she had always used! How it brought things back to him! She asked—“Is Ernest here?”

  “Ernest!” he repeated wrathfully. “Don’t speak to me of Ernest! He’s down in the kitchen with a woman who is in the antique business. I believe they’re buying up the pots and pans for her shop.”

  “I hope they are. I’ll be very glad of the money.”

  “Did this place come to you?” he asked, his tone taking on the matter-of-fact note of intimates.

  She nodded. “I should have put the whole house in order and had a proper sale. But I really hadn’t the energy. I’m just letting this agent sell things off as best he can.”

  “I’ve a rich young chap downstairs. Perhaps I could get him interested in something.”

  “That would be good of you!” And she added, with the flicker of a smile—“You were always so kind, Nick!”

  His grey eyebrows went up. “It’s never too late to hear good news,” he said.

  “Oh, I never accused you of unkindness... except in court!”

  “Well, it’s about the only thing you didn’t accuse me of!”

  She gave a little laugh. “When I look back on it all it seems to me that we were very silly.”

  “Do you mean,” he asked, “that you think we might have got on?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. She wasn’t trying to make it up, was she? At this time of life! He said gruffly: “No, no, no. We never could have got on!”

  “No, I suppose not,” she sighed.

  “May I open the window?” he asked. “It’s very close here.”

  “Please do. I tried, but it was stuck. Isn’t this room terrible? The whole house depressing? Henry lived here alone for the last two years, with only a woman coming in by the day to look after him. He drank himself to death. He refused to see me.”

  He had let in the air and he took deep breaths of it. The door of a cupboard standing open revealed a mound of decaying apples on the floor and shelves crowded with empty spirit bottles. He sat down and gazed mournfully at her. “A bad business,” he said. “Apples and whiskey, eh? Well, well.”

  “I should have had the place tidied up,” she sighed again, “but I really was not fit for the effort.”

  “Is your health pretty good, now?” He remembered that she had always been complaining.

  “Better than it used to be,” she answered defiantly. />
  “You hold your age well. You’re a good-looking woman.”

  “You’re a handsome man still.”

  “No, no, I’m a wreck,”

  “Nonsense!”

  “No nonsense about it.”

  “You’re a distinguished-looking man, and always will be.”

  “Do you wish me well, Millicent?”

  She put out her hand and just touched his. He noticed her white, rather clawlike fingers, with the large, curving nails. They were just the same. He had intensely disliked her hands.

  He tugged at his moustache. His nerves felt shaken by this strumming on them of a half-forgotten tune.

  “I wish you very well,” she said. “And I’m glad we met— this last time.” No doubt about it, there was a note of sentimentality in her voice.

  “It’s odd,” she went on, “that you did not marry again.”

  “No desire.”

  “I suppose you know that my husband is dead.”

  “Yes, too bad!” He had liked the young Irish officer for whom she had left him, and whom she had married after the divorce. Nicholas had allowed her suit to go undefended. She had had good grounds.

  Finch came hurrying up the stairs and into the room. Nicholas introduced him. “My nephew, Millicent. Finch, Mrs. O’Flynn, an old friend of mine.”

  They had trouble in finding Arthur Leigh and Sarah. At last Finch discovered them—she sitting on a stile that led into a field where there was a flock of sheep; Arthur standing, with one of her hands in both of his and an expression of joyous excitement on his sensitive face.

  XI

  ARTHUR, SARAH, AND FINCH

  As SOON as there was an opportunity Leigh drew Finch into the privacy of the little outbuilding where the lawn roller and the tennis net were kept. The sun had gone and the dew was falling, but the heavens were still transfused by a tender rose-coloured light. A chestnut tree shaded the outhouse, and the fallen petals of its bloom lay thick about the door, trampled by those who entered.

  Arthur sat down on the lawn roller and looked up at Finch with a half-pleading expression. He said:

  “Now all the misery and uncertainty of it is over and only the beautiful part is left, you’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

  “Forgive you what?” Finch asked in a hurried, nervous voice. He hoped that Arthur was not going to tell him of his feelings, disclose the spiritual distress that had been torturing him during all his visit.

  “You know quite well. I’ve been a perfect beast ever since I came. Honestly, I don’t believe I can ever remember having been so morose and so brutally selfish in all my life before. Especially to’ you, Finch, who mean most of all to me!”

  “More than Sarah?” asked Finch, trying to speak lightly.

  Arthur answered seriously—“Yes, more than Sarah, in some ways. Because you’re my dear close friend and she’s the woman I worship, and dearness and closeness don’t seem to go with that someway.”

  “I scarcely know anything,” said Finch. “Won’t you tell me? Of course, when I saw her sitting on the stile and you beside her, with that look, I knew there was something pretty serious. Arthur, is she going to marry you?”

  “She is! I can hardly believe it. I’ve been like a man lost in a forest, giving up all hope of finding his way out. I’ve felt half mad sometimes; it was all so sudden, so unexpected.” In spite of his reassurance, his new-found joy, there was still a look of distress on his face. “How can I make you understand? You’ve never been up against this kind of thing.”

  Finch looked at him compassionately and yet with a feeling of being himself hurt. Arthur had rushed into the midst of their scene, gathered into his own hands the strands of the tapestry Finch had slowly been weaving, and, in a kind of panic of passion, was changing it into a pattern all his own. Finch believed that it was the first time in Arthur’s life that he had ever been frightened by his own feelings, felt the possibility of being thwarted in a desire. Arthur had always worn the bright, silky look of youth that had never been crossed!

  “I can imagine something of what you are feeling. I’ve seen how unhappy you’ve been. But it couldn’t last. Things were bound to come right. How could any girl keep from loving you if you loved her?”

  “Oh, but you don’t know Sarah. A man might prostrate himself at Sarah’s feet and howl of his love till the stars were shaken, and it wouldn’t move her. Not unless she loved him too!”

  “But she does love you. It must be splendid to realise that.”

  “I can’t realise it! You know, I didn’t intend to speak of love to her today. All I intended was to ask her if we might meet sometimes. To tell her that I simply couldn’t bear to think that everything would end with my going back to London... She was sitting on the stile, with a big holly bush behind her, looking divinely distant... You know that little secret look at the corner of her mouth. Well, it maddened me, because I felt that, if she were thinking of me at all, it was only as a far-away mortal whose hopes or despairs could never mean anything to her... I said what I had meant to say about our meeting. She said that she very seldom came over to England. It had been three years since the last visit. I said then that I’d go to Ireland to see her, if she’d let me. She turned and looked at me with the most adorable smile, but she didn’t answer... There was something in the smile that made me lose my head. I poured out all my feelings. A regular flood, it must have seemed to her... At the end I said that if she would not marry me I’d not answer for what I might do. She said, very gently, that she’d marry me... Oh, that voice of hers! Did you ever hear a voice like it, Finch?”

  “It’s very sweet.”

  “Sweet! It’s as though a star spoke! And the way she moves! Like a lily on its stem... And the way she won’t look at you, and then turns and looks into the very depths of you! She is like the angel that troubled the waters and brought out all that was potent in them. It’s that way with me. Now I know she loves me, I feel as though I have a new power for living.”

  “I’m frightfully glad for you, Arthur.”

  “I know you are! And to think it all came through you! I wonder how her aunt will take it?”

  “She likes you. I can see that.”

  “Well, like or not like, she can’t stop us. We’re going to be married right away.”

  Mrs. Court raised no difficulties. In fact she seemed to be delighted with the idea of having Leigh for a nephew. She told Augusta that she believed she herself had brought about the match by her tact and understanding of the young people. Augusta was offended because of her plans for Finch and Sarah. She had an inward conviction that Mrs. Court was making the best of a bad job. If she had to lose an unpaid companion, she would get what credit she could out of the affair and trust that Sarah, in her future affluence, would not forget her kind old aunt. She took a motherly tone with Leigh, was anxious about his paleness. She was having a course of codliver oil and begged him to join her in it. Leigh, always nervous in regard to his health, was persuaded. After each meal Ellen carried a small tray to her on which was a bottle of the oil and a tablespoon. The rest of the party watched fascinated while she measured out the nauseous dose; turned away as she opened wide her thin-lipped mouth and gulped it; turned back again, with sickly smiles, to see her lick the spoon.

  “It’s all in getting used to it,” she declared. “Once you are used to it, it grows on you.”

  The moment Leigh consented to try it she ordered two tablespoons to be brought. She poured out his dose herself and trotted round to his side, balancing it on the spoon. He opened his mouth. She thrust it in. His expression of heroic suffering delighted Sarah. She threw one of her malicious looks at Finch.

  Inside of a few days Mrs. Court could perceive an improvement in him. “Isn’t he getting a pretty boy?” she cried. “I call him my poppet! My pretty poppet.”

  It was arranged that Mrs. Court and Augusta should take Sarah to London to buy clothes for the wedding. Arthur was to accompany them.

  When Nicholas
and Finch found themselves alone at Lyming for a space they were pleased rather than otherwise. Nicholas had been finding it increasingly difficult to get on with Augusta. He was tired of Mrs. Court, her passion for whist and playing accompaniments, her habit of taking cod-liver oil in public. He was tired of hearing her extol the virtues of Thomas Court and condemn the habits of Dennis, for he had disliked one and liked the other. Besides, he wanted an opportunity of seeing something of Eden and Minny. He resented the fact that, because of Mrs. Court, he could not have Eden come to see him at the Hall.

  Finch had been living under a strain since Arthur’s arrival. Now he could relax and let the days pass in indolent succession. He would get up in time to see the sun rise, watching its face, red as a garnet, push up out of the meadow mist till it swam above the church tower into the clear sky. He would spend most of the day in its warmth, his neck turning a deep brown, until the sunset faded in a glory of dying wings behind the tors. In the heat of noon he lay on the short grass in the shadow of the ivied wall, with a book or just dreaming. The form of Sarah glided in and out of his dreams, both waking and sleeping, sometimes seeming to flee from him, at others to beckon him. In the evenings he fancied he could see her on the garden seat in her poppycoloured shawl. When she had been in the house with him he had forgotten her almost as soon as her physical presence was removed, but, now that she was gone, he could not forget her for a moment. Arthur he seldom thought about, except to wonder how much Sarah really loved him. He conceived the idea that the intensity of Arthur’s passion had evoked a response in her, and he wondered whether, if he had burned with love for her, she would have responded. But no girl could help loving Arthur, if he set about making her love him. For himself, he fancied he would be hard to love. He would be blundering even in that relation.