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 en
viable. 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 hesitated.
“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.
He drew her dress from her white shoulders and kissed them.
XXXI
EBB AND FLOW OF THE TIDE
IF love was making a man of Wakefield, it was making a child of Finch. To Wakefield it was the opening of a window, letting in light and the stir of life. To Finch it was the closing of a door, shutting out the tumult and pain of living, making him an ecstatic prisoner. He could not bear to be away from Sarah, for then his happiness became shadowed by doubt. There came a fire in his head and an ache in his breast—and he longed wildly for the time when he would be able to work again. But when he was with her his spirit pressed, as it were, into her breast and abode there.
Sarah was as ununderstandable to the family at Jalna as ever, but they could not see her without being aware of an incandescence from within that lighted her every gesture. On the days when Finch did not go to her house she came to Jalna, her car gliding along the drive between the evergreens, while her pug gazed with tip-tilted nose through the window.
She brought little presents to Ernest and Nicholas, who roused themselves from their brooding to receive her. But, even while they were playfully gracious over their gifts, they looked on her with distrust, remembering bitterly her claim on Jalna. They were more than ever anxious that her marriage to Finch should take place as quickly as possible.
Between her and Alayne there existed an intimacy that could not be called friendship, yet was a source of acute interest to both. Alayne had known Finch since he was a schoolboy, and Sarah listened with avid interest to every incident of his boyhood which Alayne could recall. Any of these that related to suffering, she drank in with a strange triumphant smile. “We both had an unhappy adolescence!” she would exclaim.
Alayne, in her turn, sought in Sarah’s mind some understanding of Renny which, she felt, Sarah possessed. It was as though Renny and Sarah had some quality in common which they wilfully concealed, and Alayne, if she could not discover it in him, might find it lurking in Sarah. No such definite thought was in Alayne’s mind, but she faintly discovered in both the adumbrations of a calculated passion so alien to herself as to repel her. Around this passion Sarah’s outer being irradiated palely like the faint nimbus of a star. Sometimes Alayne almost feared her and she wondered if perha
ps she had not done wrong in throwing her and Finch together.
To Wakefield and Pauline, Sarah was a bright and lovely being. Her Paris gowns, her white, exquisite skin, the glossy convolutions of her black braids, filled them with wonder and admiration. Her voice, her smile, fascinated them. Pauline would say of her—“If I were a man, there is the sort of woman I should love!” And Wakefield would return— “And if I didn’t adore you, I should fall for Sarah!”
Renny watched his young brothers in love with tolerant amusement. He was leading his own mature, secret life, and their loves were no more to him than the leapings and gam-bollings of young hares.
His attitude toward Alayne was at once taciturn and apologetic. He was taciturn because he wished to keep himself withdrawn from her, and apologetic because of the heaped-up faults which he was conscious she had accumulated against him.
One night, when it was close to twelve o’clock, he returned across the ravine and took, not the steep path that led to the lawn, but one scarcely perceptible which wavered alongside the stream and was lost at last in a pasture behind the stables. At the end of the path he came suddenly on a figure lurking darkly behind low-growing shrubs. He stopped, struck by suspicion. Was he being watched?
The figure came forward and in the pale light of the moon rising in her last quarter, he made out the face of Rags.
“I’ve been waiting for you, sir.”
“Well, and what do you want?” His tone was surly.
Rags held out a yellowish envelope.
“It’s a cablegram, sir. I thought I ought to deliver it myself as it might be important.”
How had the fellow known that he would come this way? He hesitated, with the envelope in his hand.
Rags went on—“Perhaps it’s about that ’orse you was talking of himporting from ’ome, sir.”
Renny grunted. “That was just talk. I’m not importing horses. Wish to God I were! But I don’t like this. I’m afraid Lady Buckley may be ill.”
Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune / The Master of Jalna / Whiteoak Harvest / Wakefield's Course Page 74
