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

by Mazo de La Roche

  “Thanks awfully old man! There’s no doubt that it will be a relief for Pheasant, and we shall all feel reasonably sure that the kid won’t be upsetting Alayne. For my part I think it would be much better if he didn’t come to the table.”

  “He shall come to breakfast and tea but not to dinner or supper,” said Renny dictatorially.

  Mooey did not like this discussion about his meals. He laid his forehead against the edge of the table and wept. Piers got up, threw him across his shoulder as though he were a parcel, and carried him out.

  Before she followed him Pheasant said:

  “Thank you very much, Renny. It will be nice having a nurse. I’m not going to be excessively grateful though, because I think you are doing it much more for Alayne than for me.”

  They were alone, except for Wakefield. How often it seemed to Alayne that they were alone except for him. He had grown quieter of late. He was growing taller too, and he often had a brooding, half-sulky air. Then, again, he would be his mischievous precocious self.

  Renny turned sideways in his chair and crossed his legs, regarding her with a pleased air. “I’ve got something nice for you to do,” he said. Wakefield also turned sideways in his chair, crossed his legs, and folded his arms. Alayne drew the vase of roses from the centre of the table toward herself, withdrawing her hand just at the spot where the roses and their foliage would intervene between her face and Wake’s. This was an unpremeditated gesture. It was simply that she must do something, though it were merely symbolic, to shut him off from herself and Renny.

  “What is it?” she asked, trying to look pleasantly eager.

  “I’ve arranged for you to read French with the little Lebraux girl. You see, she has no one to speak it with now”

  “But why should I? I suppose she reads French better than I do already And I speak it very little.”

  “Then it will be a help to you as well”

  “But I don’t want to do it!” The thought of reading or speaking French to a child whose native tongue it was, bored and intimidated her. She would not have minded teaching a child ignorant of the language, but that the child should Know it better than she, should perhaps go home to criticise her accent to her mother, was not to be endured.

  “Don’t be silly! I’ve promised for you.”

  “It is impossible.”

  In exasperation he poured down a cup of scalding tea. That’s because you dislike Clara Lebraux.”

  “So her name is Clara!”

  “Why not?” He had nothing to conceal, but the colour of his face deepened at the implication of intimacy in her tone.

  “No reason at all. It is a name I’ve never cared for. And I do not feel attracted to Mrs. Lebraux. But that has nothing to do with my refusal to read French with her child.” Her voice wavered. She picked up a morsel of bread and began to pulverise it between her finger and thumb. “Renny, can’t you understand? It would be embarrassing for me to attempt to teach that girl!”

  “Not to teach! To read with. There’s a vast difference.”

  “I am sorry, but I can’t make the effort.”

  “Not to please me?”

  “To please you!” she repeated, raising two blazing eyes to his face. “Why should it be so necessary to your pleasure?”

  “It’s not. But I hope I have some compassion in me... Give me one sensible reason why you won’t do this and I’ll try to understand.”

  “I have explained.”

  “If anyone else offered such an excuse I can imagine what you’d say!”

  “Can you?” She turned her head aside indifferently.

  “Yes. You’d say they were being self-conscious and self-centred.”

  She directed a hurt and angry look at Wakefield, then rose from the table. “Not before an outsider, please,” she muttered, and left the room.

  Renny took out his cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lighted it. He smoked in silence, his face twisted into a peculiar grimace which, if it had been observed by one of his kin, would have been translated by them as expressing a mood of defiance and chagrin. No one saw it. Wakefield was sitting with his elbow on the table, his head resting on his hand. The last of three sighs drawn from the depths of his being disturbed Renny’s reflections. He shot an enquiring glance at the boy, noticed the despondent droop of the smooth dark head and the thinness of the childish wrist.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” he asked gently.

  “Nothing.” The word was scarcely audible.

  “Aren’t you feeling well? Are you tired?” A tone of anxiety at once came into the elder’s voice. Behind the sheltering hand he saw the boy’s mouth trembling.

  “Come here,” he said, and pushed his chair back from the table. Wakefield came round to him with averted face. Renny pulled him to his knee. “Tell me,” he repeated, “aren’t you well? Is it your heart?” He put his arm about him and pressed his thin muscular hand above the weak organ as though he would impart some of his vitality to it.

  Wakefield shook his head. Then he said, twisting a button on Renny’s coat:

  “It’s Alayne. She doesn’t like me any more. Just before she went she called me an outsider. Did you hear her?”

  Renny gave an embarrassed laugh. “That meant nothing! Married people call others outsiders sometimes—I can’t just explain why.”

  “Well—if you can’t explain—it’s just as though you call me an outsider too.”

  Renny answered impatiently—“When married people make love or quarrel they generally like to be unobserved.”

  “You didn’t mind my being here! And it wasn’t only what she said; it was what she did. She pulled the bouquet so that it shut me out. She didn’t think I noticed, but I did. She’d like to shut me out altogether, and there’s no use in your saying she wouldn’t, Renny.” He began to cry softly, producing a ball of a handkerchief and rubbing his eyes with it.

  Renny burst into noisy laughter. “Why, you damned little idiot, you know very well that a dozen wives couldn’t come between you and me!” He hugged Wake to him and kissed him repeatedly. Wakefield’s crying, from being soft, rose to almost hysterical sobs.

  Alayne had left her book in the room and, thinking that by now Renny would have gone, she was returning for it. However, when she reached the door and saw the brothers, she quickly passed on toward the drawing-room.

  “Alayne!” Renny called. “Come here!”

  She returned to the doorway and looked in at them, with a self-controlled expression on her pale face.

  “You have hurt Wake’s feelings by calling him an outsider. I explained that to him. Now he says that you moved the flowers so that they would shut him off from us!” He gave her an entreating look as though to say—“I can’t have him worried! You must bear with his whims and with my love for him.”

  She saw the look and read in it only a repetition of his willingness to impose a disagreeable obligation on her that he might gratify someone who roused the protective instinct in him. The sight of Wakefield clinging about his neck, Wakefield’s, shuddering sobs, Renny’s look of entreaty, filled her with cold anger. What Renny wanted her to do, she felt, was to come in and pet and reassure the boy. She could not do that, something reticent in her forbade the demonstration. She felt that even to deny that she had moved the flowers for a purpose was a debasement of her dignity.

  After an inward struggle she said—“I had no idea that I would hurt Wakefield’s feelings. I’m sorry, if I did... But I can’t help thinking it is a pity he hears so much of the grown-up talk. He’s too introspective. He’s becoming neurotic, I’m afraid... And isn’t a boy of thirteen too big to be kissed?” She spoke in jerky, uneven sentences.

  “I’m not thirteen! I shan’t be thirteen till next week,” objected Wakefield, in a choking voice.

  Renny said—“His father was dead before he was born. His mother died when he was born. He’s always been— well—I’ve often wondered if I should rear him. You can scarcely blame me—”

&
nbsp; She interrupted—“But anyone who knows anything of child psychology knows that to talk that way before him is the worst thing possible for him. It puts into his mind the thought of forlornness, dependence, weakness. Cannot you see?”

  “No, I can’t,” he answered hotly. He glared at her with the look of old Adeline. “If your father had been a horse dealer, instead of a New England professor, we might understand each other better.”

  “Renny,” she cried, “how can you?” and she flew upstairs to her room.

  Her room was to be her refuge more and more often in the following weeks. Her feeling of estrangement from the family increased rather than decreased. For Renny, to the springs of whose life she had joined her own, in faith and in passion, she experienced a strange numbing of the emotions. She waited till this darkness should pass like a trailing cloud, and the light of their love burst forth again. She withdrew herself spiritually as well as physically. On his part, he treated her with more than usual politeness before the others and avoided her in secret. Piers and Pheasant believed :hat harmony had been restored between Renny and her, but believed also that a delicate balance was being maintained in their relations which might easily be upset. Wakefield brooded on the scene in the dining room but repeated nothing of it to the other members of the family. At this time he acquired the curious habit of going to the room he occupied with Renny when Alayne retreated to hers. When she closed her door, she often heard the closing of that door, as though in mockery. Sometimes, as she sat writing, she heard the door open, then, after a space, close again, as though he had stood in the doorway listening. What did the boy do in there? She was convinced that he did nothing but brood or dream, that he went there for no purpose but to vex her.

  The weather was hot and her room, shaded by a giant fir tree, was always cool and pleasant. Mr. Cory, of the New York firm of publishers for whom she had been a reader, sent her several advance copies of new books from his autumn list, asking for her opinion of them. He flattered her by telling her that he had found no one adequately to take her place, on whose judgment he could so rely. The books he sent, the subjects of which were history, biography, and travel, interested her intensely. She wrote him long letters about them. So she created for the time an independent world of her own within the walls of Jalna, in which she recaptured some of the spirit of tranquillity and contemplation of her old life. It was a false tranquillity, a contemplation born of her passion to conceal her real state from herself. A word, a glance, would be enough to shatter her self-control. But each day, as the heat increased, her face became more of a cool mask. She became even more fastidious in her dress. Renny, as though fastidiousness were a weapon which he could use as well as she, became more and more careful of his dress. Pheasant and Piers, in emulation, made themselves as spruce as possible. Even Wakefield wore his best clothes every day, and Mooey screamed for a silver napkin ring for his bib. Piers had forbidden Pheasant to bring him to the table, and Renny had not again expressed a desire to have him there. A depressing quiet hung over their meals, often only broken by Rags’s whispered conversations with Renny.

  In late July Alayne had a letter from her aunts on the Hudson expressing their intention of visiting her. The thought of a visit from them was both delightful and worrying. They had never been to Jalna, and she longed to show them the old house and the rambling estate. Yet should she be able to conceal from their shrewd and loving eyes the present volcanic barrenness of her life? Might not an eruption be possible during their visit? She was all the more apprehensive because they had never met Renny. They had met and given their hearts to Eden at first sight. The divorce and her remarriage to Eden’s brother had been a shock to them. It was only now that they could make up their minds to visit her. She wished that the elder Whiteoaks were at home. The presence of Augusta, Nicholas, and Ernest appeared to her now as a protecting wall behind which she might conceal her own heartache. She had always thought how interested she should be if she could see her aunts, so refined, so whimsically proper, so gingerly perched above all ugliness in life, in the same house with the three elderly Whiteoaks, across whom lay the lusty shadow of old Adeline.

  How she had welcomed the departure of Ernest and Nicholas for England! She had looked forward to a summer of greater freedom in her life with Renny, a summer of fulfilment, of spiritual development of their love. And it had come to this! If the Uncles had not gone away it might not have come to this. Even that thought came to her. Over and over again she lived through their misunderstandings and tried to see what she might have done to prevent them. She could not discover anything in her most self-accusing mood that would have prevented them except the humbling of her spirit to his and the absolute conforming to the life of the house. She believed that if she had it all to live over again that she would do just that. Humble her spirit and conform absolutely to the life of the house. Perhaps, if only she had agreed to read French with that unattractive Lebraux child, all might have been well. But the thought of the child brought the thought of the mother, and the thought of the mother brought a rush of anger and jealousy that drove all else from her mind. She discovered that she was bitterly jealous of Mrs. Lebraux, that she was even jealous of little Pauline. When Piers made a remark to Renny in reference to the fox farm, and Renny answered in obvious familiarity with its affairs, she dare not look at them lest they should read the anger in her eyes.

  Looking back over her acquaintance with Renny she recognised that he had always irritated her, excited some latent antagonism in her, sometimes as though deliberately, more often by simply being himself. She and Eden had never quarrelled. From the first her love for him had in it a maternal quality. There was nothing maternal in her love for Renny. It was instinctive, violent, and without rest. And, though there was no rest in it, no peace in it, neither was there growth. It was like the sea, eternally beating against its shores, yet eternally bound by them.

  What had they been quarrelling about? Old Benny—the sheepdog. Mooey—the baby. Pauline and Wakefield—children. Was their life together to be ruined by quarrels over dogs and children? If only she had a child of her own, things might be different. But Renny had never expressed a desire for a child of his own.

  XX

  BARNEY

  ALMA PATCH was the girl who came as nursemaid to young Maurice. She was the niece of the village nurse, and her aunt was well pleased to be the means of installing her at Jalna. The village nurse was also the village gossip and, as the Whiteoaks were the mainstay of rumour and of tattle, Alma would be a conduit through which a continuous supply would flow.

  She was a strong girl, with sandy hair, a freckled face, and she never raised her voice above a whisper except when she sang or laughed, which she did in a piercingly high soprano. She was as lazy as possible and very fond of children. To sit on the grass minding Mooey, while he trotted about her in his play, sometimes stopping to throw grass on her, or hug her, or even kick her, was Alma’s idea of bliss. Then, to fill her stomach with the good food, and her mind with the rich gossip, and to return home at dusk an object of rare importance to her friends, constituted a life of such perfection as it is given to few to enjoy.

  About the time of Alma’s appearance at Jalna, Pauline Eebraux gave Renny a nine months’old Irish terrier dog, named Barney. It had been sent to her for her birthday by a friend of her father’s in Quebec. It had been impossible for her to keep him because he spent all his time in barking at the foxes, exciting them to frenzy. So, though she loved him, and because she loved him, Pauline presented him in turn to Renny on his birthday. As though he needed another dog!

  But he seemed to have unlimited room in his affections for dogs and children. He looked on Barney as the one dog to fill a long-felt want. But the terrier was the wildest, most untamable creature that had ever been on the place. Piers thought he was excessively inbred. Renny, who was an advocate of inbreeding, insisted that Barney was the victim of a system of raising dogs like wild animals. He guessed that he had been broug
ht up in an enclosure without a word of kindness. To make friends with him, to teach him what companionship of man and dog may be, this was a task after Renny’s heart. And Barney was beautifully set up, had, beneath the untamed look in his eyes, a look of desperate need.

  But he would not allow himself to be touched. He scarcely knew his name. He carried his meals into a corner, growling like a wild animal while he devoured them. He slept in Wright’s room over the garage, but he did not make friends with Wright. From the moment he was released in the morning he ran hither and thither as though half demented by the multitude of strange sights about him and the vast open spaces where he might run at will. The fields of grain were tall and a deep golden colour. Barney spent most of his days in them as in a jungle. Deep in a field a movement might be seen stirring the ears of wheat or barley, and then stillness again, for it was sultry weather and no breeze stirred the grain. Sometimes when Renny walked past the fields, followed by his two Clumber spaniels, Barney’s face would appear watching them cautiously from the shelter of the grain. He would let them get a little way ahead, then, in his concealment, he would bound after them till he was again abreast, and again he would peer out with that same desperate look in his eyes.

  The spaniels appeared to understand all about him. In his own way Renny had explained the situation to them. They would give a friendly look in his direction but no more, walking with dignity at their master’s heels.

  At last a day came when he emerged from the shelter of grain and ran in the open for a little way near Renny and the spaniels.

  “Just watch,” Renny advised Piers, who had been inclined to jeer, “and you will see a splendid dog in him yet. He’s never had a chance till now, and he’s responding to it every day.”