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

by Mazo de La Roche

  Clara Lebraux listened to all this with serious interest. She puffed at her cigarette, scowling intently at him through the smoke. Alayne had heard him say the same words with detached amusement, wondering at his ingenuousness.

  “The governess was afterwards your stepmother, wasn’t she?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you fond of her?”

  “Not particularly. I didn’t think much about her. She was often ill, I remember. She’d large blue eyes that she kept half shut, and yellow hair. Eden’s rather like her... She taught me poetry too. Can you believe that? Tennyson. And I have forgotten every line of it. If Eden had inherited a love of dates rom her instead of poetry, it would have been better.”

  “I suppose. I can’t read poetry at all. It bores me.”

  They smoked in silence, he gazing thoughtfully at her brogues, thinking how worn they looked; she, at his boots, admiring the soft glow attained by the leather after many polishings.

  Pauline came in, her small face flushed pink by the sun, her black frock worn at the elbows and too short for her. Renny said:

  “Now, let’s see what you know about history! What are the dates of Henry the Seventh?”

  She stood before him startled. She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  He grinned triumphantly at her mother. “I told you! She doesn’t know.” Then to Pauline: “Fourteen-eighty-five. Fifteen-nine. Now, Pauline, tell me the names of the kings from William the Conqueror.” His fierce eyes ruthlessly compelled hers, but he prompted—’First William the Norman, then William his son, Henry, Stephen, and Henry...’ By George, I’m telling them all to you!” He drew her to his side on the sofa. “Never mind! I’ll teach you them. We’re going to educate you among us. How will you like that?”

  She thought he was magnificent. She laid her head confidingly against his shoulder. “I shall like to have you teach me. Will you come here to do it, or must I go to Jalna?”

  “I think I’ll come here. But my wife will read French with you at Jalna.” By this time he felt sure that Alayne would acquiesce in the arrangement. How could she refuse?

  “I know French already,” said Pauline rather haughtily.

  “Don’t be ungracious,” said her mother. “It will be quite a different thing to read French literature.”

  “Papa read French books to me.” Somehow she did not think she would like to read French with Mrs. Whiteoak. There had been something in her cool gaze when they had met that had given the child a sense of being repulsed. However, she had been taught to be polite, so she added— “But, I suppose, these would be grown-up books. Quite different. Thank you, Renny.”

  Both mother and daughter called him Renny, as Tony Lebraux had done, but he had pronounced it René.

  Between Pauline and her father there had been a love, and an understanding almost extravagant, such as occasionally exists between father and daughter. She was only a small child when she realised that her parents were opposed in character. Long before she understood what their disagreements were about, she was on the side of her father, her heart aching in sympathy when she had thought his sensibilities were hurt. The fact that they spoke together a language her mother did not understand, that they were separated from her by religion, gave their love a strange and precious quality. It had been ecstasy to her to lie in his arms, her cheek against the soft cloth of his coat, gazing up into his olive-skinned face, admiring the full curve of his lips beneath his little black moustache, the hairs of which were strong and glittering, and were twisted at the ends into two little spikes, so sharp that they pricked you if a kiss were misdirected. Then, as she lay in his arms, they would whisper endearments and plan what they meant to do in the future. She would never leave him; never, never leave him. She would not marry because he would have all her love. She felt that his love for her made her inviolate against change or disaster. Even when he became ill, when he began to drink too much French brandy, his love still enfolded her. Nothing terrible could really happen to them. Yet she knelt before the crucifix in her room and prayed for him in ever-increasing foreboding of the spirit... She was spared nothing of the despair, the agony of his last days. In the small house nothing could be hidden.

  It was then that she had learned to look on Renny Whiteoak as a tower of strength. The sight of his tall figure, his lean red face in the room with her filled her with a wild timorous joy in these days of early summer. She lifted up her heart to be filled with the strength of his presence.

  She liked to listen to her mother and him talking together as they smoked endless cigarettes. It was strange how, even when they talked of worrying things, there was no sense of fear or irritation in the room. Sometimes they laughed, laughter sounding strange in that house. Pauline liked to hear it—Renny’s abrupt loud bark of a laugh, her mother’s deep, sputtering chuckle. After he had gone the child would throw her arms about her mother and exclaim —“Oh, Mummy, isn’t he nice?” Now that Tony Lebraux was gone, Clara and Pauline were drawing closer together.

  When Renny looked at his watch, Pauline exclaimed:

  “Oh, do stay for lunch. He must, mustn’t he, Mummy?”

  “Yes, do stay! You haven’t had a meal with us since January... But I’m afraid there isn’t much to tempt you.”

  “I’ll make an omelet! I can make a splendid one. And there’s ham!” She was willing, eager to use their supplies for the day to spread a feast for him.

  She tied a white-and-blue checked apron under her chin and turned back the cuffs of her black frock. He stood beside the stove watching her as she frowned anxiously at the mixture in the frying pan. What if the omelet would not rise? she thought. What if it rose and fell again?

  No need to worry. It rose in a yellow foam; at its height it attained just enough firmness to support it; it turned a golden brown. She laid it on the heated platter and Renny went to the garden to get parsley to garnish it. Old Noah Binns was seated under a tree, eating his lunch from a package wrapped in newspaper. He tilted his head to drink cold tea from a bottle, pointing his white beard heavenward and exposing the activities of his Adam’s apple. A dog fox had climbed to the roof of its kennel the better to observe him. It sat there fiercely erect, aware in every nerve of his slightest movement. The bright eyes of the vixen peered from the opening of the kennel. Noah Binns grew restive under their gaze. He shied a bit of pork rind he could not swallow against the wire netting of the run.

  “Go to earth, dang you!” he shouted.

  Renny turned, with the bunch of parsley in his hand.

  “Never do that again,” he said sternly. “Don’t you know that Mrs. Lebraux makes pets of her foxes? Don’t let me ever catch you frightening them.”

  Noah twisted his beard in his fingers, looking like a strange old man in a play.

  “Fox himself!” he muttered at Renny’s back. “Pet fox? Whose pet fox? Hers! Dang ‘em both!”

  Renny had brought enough parsley to garnish a roast young pig, but Pauline would use it all. So the omelet came to the table resting on a bank of green, resembling a verdant mountain capped with the gold of sunset.

  Pauline felt a quivering sense of pride in her achievement, elation at the presence of a guest—and that guest Renny. She smiled, lifting her lip and showing her small white teeth. They talked of foxes, and Pauline told of the aabits, the knowing tricks, of each. The man who worked for them had made her a seat in one of the shady trees about which the enclosures were built, and there she sat by the hour watching the foxes. They were become so used to her that even the shyest no longer scurried into his den when she climbed the steps to her seat. The boldest knew her. They knew (she said) the names she had given them. The cubs loved her. They were wonderful foxes, no two of a like disposition.

  “She knows more about them now than I do,” said Clara Lebraux.

  “Experience shows,” Renny said, “that the more foxes are handled as tame animals the better they thrive. Better cubs. Better fur.”

  “If onl
y,” cried Pauline,” I might keep them all! But I have my pets and they must always be kept for breeding.”

  “You must not be sentimental,” he said. “I would sell any horse I own.”

  “But not to be skinned.”

  “Well, perhaps not. I agree that that’s hard.”

  While Mrs. Lebraux cleared away the luncheon things, Pauline led Renny upstairs to the vacant room next her mother’s where the incubator was kept.

  “What do you think I do?” she exclaimed, squeezing his arm when she had him alone. “I steal eggs from the poultryhouse and feed them to my baby foxes!”

  “But that is wrong,” he said, looking down at her as severely as he could. “Those eggs are worth something.”

  “Bah, a few eggs!” she cried, with the exact expression of her father.

  “But look at these! See what they are doing!” He pointed through the narrow glass door of the incubator.

  An egg next the glass was rocking like a little boat on the sea. Another showed a dark triangular chip. Through a third was thrust a gaping yellow beak. Far in the twilight, at the back, staggered a pitiable object, wet, goggle-eyed, half-fainting, hemmed in by the rows of uncompanionable spheres in which slept, cheeped, chipped, or lay dying, his contemporaries. His woebegone expression showed his consciousness of being hatched too soon.

  Renny had struck a match and held it near the glass. They peered in, rough black head and red head touching.

  “Isn’t he a sight?” breathed Pauline in ecstasy.

  “Poor devil,” said Renny. “That’s what it is to be born the eldest of a family.”

  XIX

  THE OUTSIDER

  SINCE THE DEPARTURE of Nicholas and Ernest, Rags had been laying tea in the dining room instead of carrying it to the drawing-room as was the custom in old Adeline’s day. Her sons would have resented the change, but the younger members of the family enjoyed having their bread and butter, cakes, and jam spread out before them, and sitting around he table to it.

  Renny had not returned until tea time. He entered the house in rather a propitiatory mood towards Alayne. In spite of her hard words to him he felt that, as a sensitive and fastidious woman, she had probably had a good deal to annoy her that morning. He knew that the servants were not what they should be, but he felt quite sure that nothing she could do would change them. He knew that he and old Benny the sheepdog were not all they should be, from her point of view, but he hoped that in time she would become accustomed to them and their ways. He rather admired the spirit she had shown that morning. He had never seen her in a temper before. To think that she would hit the old dog with her slipper! And tell her husband that he talked like a fool! He grinned when he thought of it. He was elated by the idea of getting Alayne to read French with little Pauline. He felt that, if she would agree, it would be the means of drawing her and Clara Lebraux together. It would be good for each of them to find a friend in the other. It would be especially good for Alayne to have an interest outside Jalna, for he realised that often time hung heavy on her hands.

  He went up to his room and changed into another suit, after having scrubbed his face and hands till they were red and flattened his hair with a damp brush. This was done in order that she should today have no complaint that he brought the smell of the stable with him.

  She was pouring tea when he went into the dining room, sitting at her end of the table with a book she had been reading open beside her. Piers and Pheasant were talking with rather ostentatious good spirits to each other. Mooey had been brought to the table and was perched on the large volume of British Poets on which Wakefield had been used to sit. As he ate his bread and butter his eyes were fixed on Alayne with a wondering look as though he expected her at any moment to attack him. As his parents were present to protect him he would not have been altogether sorry to see her make some such demonstration. He smiled up at Wakefield, who sat beside him, and whispered—“I’m not f’ightened of Auntie Alayne.”

  “Of course you’re not,” said Wakefield, patting his head. “So long as you do just what Uncle Wakefield tells you, nothing can harm you.” Renny grinned at the children, then went and sat near Alayne. She had given Wragge a few roses for the table, which he, in a conciliatory mood, had placed in a vase beside her plate. As he entered the room with a fresh pot of tea for Renny he cast his eyes on the roses and then on Alayne, emphasising the fact that they were his gift to her.

  She looked up from her book and smiled at Renny—a somewhat forced smile—then lowered her eyes again, abstractedly eating a small iced cake while she read. With her book, her roses, and her cake she was separated from the other members of the family in a kind of frosty seclusion. At tea Renny liked a pot to himself, which Wragge always ostentatiously placed beside him. He was very hungry after the lunch at the fox farm, accustomed as he was to a solid one o’clock dinner. He ate in silence for a time, feeling himself in rather an uncomfortable position midway between the opposing factions at the table. Vaguely he wondered what he could do to please Alayne, to show her that the words she had cast at him that morning had not rankled. He discovered the roses and drew the vase across the table to him. Glancing at Alayne from under his thick dark lashes to make sure that she was observing him, he sniffed each rose in turn, thrusting his handsome bony nose into the heart of each like some enormous predatory bee.

  “These smell awfully nice,” he said. “Out of our own garden?”

  “Yes,” she returned, closing her book on her finger. “You had better put them in the centre of the table. I don’t know why Wragge should have set them by my place.”

  Piers and Pheasant had ceased their animated talk long enough to listen to this exchange of words. Now they began to talk again, their eyes dancing. They paid no attention to their child, who sat gazing in astonishment at the large piece of cake Wakefield had put on his plate while he still held another piece in his hand.

  Alayne returned to her book and Renny set the vase of roses carefully in the middle of the table. His first effort had failed. Wragge had come into the room and was gazing at him with an adoring expression. He came and bent over him, whispering:

  “Is your tea all right, sir?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s quite all right.” He looked up into Rags’s pale eyes as though for inspiration.

  It might be well, he thought, to show Alayne that he was definitely on her side regarding Mooey’s misbehaviour of the morning. He fixed his nephew with his gaze and said:

  “What’s this I hear about you? Going into Auntie Alayne’s room and flinging her powder about. Let me catch you in there again and I’ll warm you so that you’ll not want to sit down for a week.”

  Mooey’s eyes overflowed with tears. He laid down the cake he had been eating beside the piece he had not yet begun, and clutched his head in both his sticky hands. He made his mouth square and emitted a wail. Piers shook his finger at him.

  “None of that!” he said. “Sit up and take your medicine. Take that cake off his plate, Wake.”

  Mooey gulped back his woe and wiped his eyes on a corner of his bib.

  “It’s pretty hard,” exclaimed Pheasant, “always to restrain a small child so that he’ll never get into the least little bit of mischief!”

  “You must manage it somehow,” said Renny

  “If only Alayne would keep her door shut! Mooey can’t manage doorknobs yet.”

  “Alayne can’t keep her door shut. She doesn’t want it shut. She likes the air to stir through it.”

  “But she’s always complaining of draughts!”

  “A draught in the sitting-room and a draught in her bedroom are two very different things.”

  Alayne sat listening with the feelings of one engaged in a lawsuit who sits silent, made to writhe alternately by the attorneys for and against. She had come to tea scarcely knowing how to face Renny. She had brought her book to the table as a protection. Now Renny’s attitude of aggressiveness on her behalf gave her an agreeable sense of power. For the first time
she felt the possibility of influence over him. If only she had him to herself! But how little likelihood there was of that since even now he was fretting at the small-ness of the family! While he was in his present mood it might be timely to introduce the subject of a nurse for Mooey.

  She said, looking down the table at Pheasant and speaking gently—“I know it is quite impossible to keep babies out of mischief. Don’t you think it would be better if you had a nurse for Mooey? It would give you so much more freedom. Mrs. Patch has a young niece who might easily be got to come by the day.”

  “I can’t afford a nurse for him. Pheasant has nothing else to do, and Bessie takes him off her hands sometimes,” said Piers.

  “One could see this morning,” returned Alayne, still looking at Pheasant, “how well Bessie looks after him. He might easily have got into danger.”

  “I quite agree,” said Renny. “We’ll engage the Patch girl, and I’ll pay her wages.”

  This was not at all what Alayne had intended. It was not fair. Already he was doing far more than was necessary for Pheasant and Piers. Alayne sometimes wondered if they or he realised what the cost of keeping three people amounted to in a year. In spite of her effort to control it, her face fell, the corners of her mouth went down. Piers’s eyes were on her. He smiled triumphantly as though at a victory beyond mere matter of money and said: