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

by Mazo de La Roche

  Pheasant snatched up the child, held him head downward and extracted the bead from his mouth, he immediately looking as though nothing had happened.

  “A close shave!” ejaculated Renny.

  But Piers had seen two heads at the window. His face flushed and he rapped out sharply:

  “Mooey, come down here!” He stopped the engine.

  “Now, Piers,” implored Pheasant.

  He turned on her. “What did you mean by telling me he was out?”

  “I thought he was. He must have just come back. Don’t be rough with him, please.”

  Young Maurice now appeared in the doorway and came slowly toward them, followed by his shadow, little Nook. It was true that neither boy showed any resemblance to Piers. Nor did they particularly favour their mother, though both had her quality of elusiveness, the look of sensitive woodland creatures, defensive yet vulnerable. Mooey was too tall for his age, thin, and rather pale. His brown hair fell in thick locks on his forehead, giving him a gypsy air. He was physically timid yet spiritually he could show great fortitude for his years. Nook had a look of real fragility, an exquisite skin, sleek fair hair, and hazel eyes, one of which showed a slight cast.

  Piers stared at his first-born.

  “Well,” he said sarcastically, “I hope your headache is better.”

  Mooey answered, not without dignity, “Yes, thank you, Daddy.”

  “I hope you feel able to come to Jalna and help school the ponies.”

  “Yes.” He stood hesitating as to whether he should get into the front seat with his father and Biddy or into the back with his uncle and the spaniels. Renny settled it by opening the door next him. “In you get,” he said, “mind you let me have a good account of your riding.”

  Piers looked at his wristwatch and exclaimed at the hour. The car started with a jerk. Pheasant and Nook were left searching in the grass for red beads.

  Renny, indicating the boxes of sweets, said, out of the side of his mouth — “Make a good showing with the ponies, Mooey, and I’ll leave one of these in the saddle-room for you, on the shelf below the ribbons.”

  Mooey smiled soberly and nodded, then looked straight ahead of him at his father’s stalwart back.

  Piers stopped the car at the gate of their sister’s low-set rambling house and Renny and his dogs alighted. The dogs were met by an Airedale who greeted them as friends. An elderly lady, sitting in a deck chair on the lawn, called out — “Good morning, Mr. Whiteoak! Won’t you come and talk to me?”

  He gave her a somewhat surly nod and strode quickly toward the front door. Here he had to make way for an incredibly sallow man coming out. The man stared at him almost aggressively.

  Followed by the dogs he went straight to his sister’s sitting room. He found her there alone.

  The eldest of the family, she was now aged forty-nine, would be fifty before the year was out. Her complexion had the clear freshness of Piers’s, only paler, her grey-blue eyes had an expression of innocent candour, and her pouting pink lips were girlish in their stubborn sweetness. Only greying hair, her thick waist, and over-plump neck showed her years. Her voice was caressing when she greeted him. She put both short arms round his neck and drew his hard-bitten, high-coloured face down to hers.

  “Dearest, dearest boy — I haven’t seen you for days and days! What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Who the devil are those people?” he growled against her cheek.

  “My P.G.s! You’ve met the old lady before — Mrs. Binkley-Toogood. I hope you weren’t as rude to her as you were the last time. The yellow gentleman is a newcomer.”

  He drew back and scowled at her. “Meggie, how can you take these people into your house?”

  She folded her arms across her full bosom and said reproachfully — “What can I do? With Maurice’s stocks going down and down — with my child growing older? I tell you, Renny, these paying guests are our salvation. And such nice people, too. I quite enjoy having them. Mrs. Binkley-Toogood has travelled in the East and the gentleman you met in the doorway has had the most interesting diseases. It’s all very broadening. I do wish you and Alayne would try it at Jalna. I think you ought to when you have a mortgage on the place and need money so badly.”

  “Alayne and I — at Jalna!” His eyebrows, his nostrils, the lines from nostril to corner of mouth were bent to his horror at the idea.

  “Surely,” returned his sister, “surely Alayne does not consider herself so much better than I am —”

  He interrupted — “It’s not that. It’s the thought of paying guests — or whatever you call them — at Jalna. I’d starve first.”

  “Well, I don’t see any sense in it.”

  “Meggie — you do! You’d never ask me to do such a thing. Why, Gran would turn over in her grave!”

  “I dare say she would. She’s the sort of dead person who would turn over in their grave. But she’d just have to get used to the new order of things as we all do.”

  A retort was on his lips, but a shooting pain through his shoulder made him wince.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I heaved the porch at the tea shop and gave my shoulder a crick.”

  “Poor dear!”

  “It’s nothing serious.”

  “But I hate you to be hurt. How is Mrs. Lebraux getting on?”

  “Not too badly. Everything looks nice.”

  “Doesn’t it? And such good tea! I was passing the other day and she called me in to have a cup. She absolutely refused to let me pay for it.”

  “As though she’d let you pay for it! She likes you, Meg, and you’ve always been nice to her. She’s had a hard time of it since Lebraux died — and before, God knows!”

  “I admire her,” said Meg fervently, all the more fervently because Renny’s wife had always been very cool toward Clara Lebraux.

  He produced the boxes of sweets. “I’ve brought you and the kid these. One each. The daffodils on the top are rather nice, aren’t they?”

  “Charming!” Meg’s eyes glowed as she opened the box. She had no modern ideas about keeping slim. She bit eagerly into a piece of maple cream fudge. “I have never been without sweets since the tea-room opened and as I eat almost nothing at table they are really good for me…. Ah, there is Patience! Come, darling, and see what Uncle Renny has brought us.”

  Patience came in through the low open window, straddling the sill with her bare brown legs. She was a charming child with her father’s wide grey eyes and her mother’s sweet pouting smile. She knew exactly what she wanted and almost always managed to get it. Dimples dented her cheeks when her favourite uncle put his offering into her hands. She hugged the box to her.

  “Oo,” she exclaimed, “just what I love! And one for Mums too! You are a darling!”

  “Be careful how you squeeze him!” warned Meg. “He’s hurt his shoulder.”

  “How?”

  “Lifting the side of a house,” he grinned.

  “You are a tease!” She threw herself on him.

  With these two he was happy. He settled himself in a stuffed chintz chair and lighted a cigarette with Patience on his knee. He suddenly thought of himself as extraordinarily blessed. He thought of Clara and Pauline Lebraux, of his long friendship and protective care for them. He thought of young Wakefield, to whom he had been as a father and mother. Soon Wake’s marriage to Pauline would weld the link stronger. He thought of Piers and Pheasant and their three boys. A vision of his two old uncles in their house in Devon hid all else for a moment from his eyes — dear old boys, he hoped they would come over for a visit this summer. He thought of his brother Finch, six months married, living with his bride in Paris, getting on well in concert work — a young fool in other ways, but most affectionate. His thoughts reached out to those distant parts drawing, in dark invisible strength, the images of his own flesh and blood nearer. Then his mind turned to Jalna and his own wife and child. He thought of Alayne and of their troubled, passionate life together, like a spr
ing bubbling out of the dark earth, unable to give a tranquil reflection of its surroundings. Then the face of his child obtruded itself, vivid, dark-eyed, scarlet-lipped, and his own lips softened into tenderness.

  Meg and Patience had been watching him.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” said Meg.

  “You’re such a dear old funny-face!” cried Patience.

  He gathered her to him with his sound arm and hugged her. “I was thinking of my dinner,” he said.

  All the way home, across the fields and down through the ravine, his thoughts were on his wife and child. Like some primitive ancestor he quickened his steps, as though anxious lest some harm had befallen them in his absence. He paused just once to examine the trunk of a great pine tree from which a branch had been cut the autumn before. Over this scar the resinous lifeblood of the tree had collected in amber-coloured coagulations and, in one place, had formed into an elongated thread reaching almost to the ground. Renny bent his head and sniffed the pungent smell. He laid his hand on the trunk of the tree.

  II

  FATHER, MOTHER, AND CHILD

  RENNY’S WIFE, ALAYNE, was arranging some sprays of wild cherry blossom in a black glass vase in the drawing room. To her they seemed the very soul of spring, flowering in exquisite whiteness after the long bitter winter. She touched them tenderly for fear one petal might be bruised, and when a flower did fall, she carefully laid it on the water where it floated, with upturned face, like a tiny water lily. She had charming hands. She handled the sprays of bloom capably and, when she had arranged them to her liking, she stepped back a pace to see the effect. She was not satisfied. This room, with its heavy damask hangings and richly toned carpet, was not one that showed flowers to their advantage, least of all the fragile blossoms of the wild cherry. She rejoiced in the delicate lines of the Chippendale furniture and sometimes amused herself by imagining the background she would create for it, if she were given a free hand. But Renny thought it perfect as it was. The point where their taste differed most was the wallpaper with its massive gilt scrolls that had decked those walls for eighty years, and looked good for another eighty.

  Alayne shivered a little, for she had put on a thinner dress today and the room was cool. The dress was a flowered grey-and-blue foulard made with little ruchings. As she caught her reflection in a mirror she thought that both colour and style were kind to her.

  She had put little Adeline also into a thinner frock and she wondered if she had perhaps been too precipitate. There might be a cool breeze on the porch where the child played. There was no need to wonder where she played, for every now and again she made a noisy outcry in one of her games. Alayne went to the door and looked down on her.

  She had got a saddle that had belonged to her great-grandmother, a side saddle of old-fashioned design, and she was poised on it in an attitude both vigorous and graceful. She grasped a crop in her small hand and with it belaboured an imaginary mount which apparently shied at the jump at which she was putting him.

  Alayne stood, unseen by her, delighting in her strength and vivacity. Yet this very strength and this very animation stood between her and her child. Adeline was so different from what she had been as a little girl. She could remember her early childhood better than most, for she had been much alone with her parents and all her little sayings had been treasured and repeated to her, as her baby clothes had been carefully laid away as she outgrew them. Almost once a year she had been taken to the photographer and a most satisfactory portrait made. There was little Alayne at two, wearing a heavy-looking hat tied with a huge bow under her chin and standing solemnly on the seat of a padded chair. There was little Alayne at four, standing in a doorway with a butterfly bow on her fair hair. There she was at seven, holding flowers and showing a profile that was beginning to be something more than childish. In all the series of photographs the keynote was a sweet gravity, an earnest eagerness to understand things. It was a pleasure, her parents had often told her, to take her to the photographer’s and it had been difficult to select the best proofs, they were all so good.

  How different when she and Renny had taken Adeline to be photographed, at the age of two! It had been literally impossible to keep her quiet long enough to pose her. She had struggled to investigate everything in the studio. When they had tried to restrain her she had screamed. When the distraught photographer had brought out his most amusing toy to please her, she had been all too pleased, laughing immoderately, so that her very palate showed. She had laughed till she had wetted herself and Alayne, humiliated, had to carry her to the dressing room. There she had had an idea. Renny should hold the child on his knee to be photographed. He eagerly agreed to this, but Adeline was in a fever of excitement. She climbed all over him, hugging him, kissing him, shouting in glee. Of that lot of proofs not one had been worth finishing, though one pose had been so truly splendid of Renny that Alayne had felt a hot resentment at the grotesque little figure on his knee which, blurred and caricatured, had spoilt the picture. The one result from this terrible morning now stood in a silver frame on a table in the drawing room — an infant with a scowl, a too large nose, and an almost frightening resemblance to her great-grandmother.

  Now looking at her Alayne felt that only a painter could do justice to her beauty, her creamy flower-petal skin, her hair of so rich and dark a red that its colour could only be compared to a rarely fine chestnut newly stripped of its sheath. This hair clustered in thick locks about her temples and nape, and seemed capable of expressing her very moods, seeming to rise and quiver when she was in a rage. Alayne remembered hearing Grandmother Whiteoak exclaim — “Eh, but my hair was my crowning glory when I was young!” She supposed it had been hair like this. She remembered the old lady showing a few rusty locks, whether of wig or dyed hair Alayne had never decided, beneath her impressive lace caps.

  Adeline brandished the crop and shouted:

  “Up, now — up, now, my pet! Over you go! Now — now — up!” She set her small mouth and stiffened her legs and back. Then, as once again the visionary steed balked, her face was contorted and she said, in a tense voice — “Damn you — you son of —”

  Alayne did not let her complete the horrifying imprecation. She ran and snatched Adeline from the saddle and gave her a little shake.

  “Baby, baby, you must not —” then she remembered that what she ought to do was to ignore the words, and faltered.

  “Must not what?” asked Adeline inquisitively. There was an amused smile on her fine lips.

  Alayne thought — “She sees through me. But I won’t let her get the best of me.” She answered — “You must not bounce and shout so. You will make yourself so hot. You will tire yourself out.”

  Adeline turned from her with a swagger and threw her leg over the saddle. She had the power of rousing antagonism in Alayne. With just such a gesture as this she could make Alayne’s heart beat quicker, make her even desire a scene, but she spoke in a controlled voice.

  “You must come now and have your hands washed. It is your dinnertime.”

  “No,” returned Adeline curtly. She rose and sank now on her plump behind as though in a comfortable jog-trot. “Can’t stop,” she added.

  Wragge, the houseman, now appeared and presented an evil-looking piece of paper on a silver plate. It was the fish dealer’s bill. It seemed to Alayne exorbitant, as it always did. She asked — “Is he waiting?”

  “Noaw, madam. I told him there weren’t noaw use.” For the thousandth time the mingled deference and impudence of his manner infuriated Alayne. With her cheeks burning she turned her back on him and lifted Adeline from the saddle.

  Either something in her mother’s face or the thought of her dinner prompted the child to acquiesce, but she objected to leaving the saddle behind.

  “I must take it upstairs to my room.”

  “Wragge,” said Alayne, “take that saddle away. I don’t know where it came from.”

  “From the cupboard under the stairs ’m. That’s where th
e old mistress kep’ it. Liked it near ’er, she did. Many a time she ’ad me carry it into ’er room and she’d stroke it and sniff the smell of the leather. She was a grand rider in ’er day and no mistike.” Wragge spoke as though he had known old Mrs. Whiteoak in her years of strength though he had never seen her till she was past ninety, when Renny had brought him home after the War. Rags had been his batman. But this, thought Alayne, was his way of showing his intimacy with the affairs of the Whiteoaks, of making her feel an outsider whenever possible, she who had been married to two Whiteoaks, who had experienced heaven and hell in that fusty old house. She said tersely:

  “Well put it away.”

  With a sliding provocative glance at Adeline, he picked up the saddle. She raised her crop threateningly and glared up into his face. He backed away in exaggerated fear of a blow. Alayne could barely restrain an access of anger at them both.

  She tore the riding crop from Adeline’s hands and put it into Wragge’s. She would have liked to strike him with it. “Put it and the saddle away,” she said sternly.

  But the child now threw herself face down on the saddle, clutching it with arms and legs and indeed the whole of her strong little body and filling the air with her yells of rage. They sounded as though she were being strangled. For a moment Alayne and Wragge looked down on her with equal consternation.

  Then a quick step crunched the gravel and Renny hurried toward them. He looked frightened.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

  “Just ’er ’igh temper, sir,” answered Wragge, speaking before Alayne could. She made a peremptory sign and he reluctantly withdrew though she was sure he lingered just inside the hall.

  The blind spaniel threw up his muzzle and howled but the Cairn puppy, darting to Adeline’s side, began to snuffle ecstatically against her face and in her thick tumbled hair. Her crying was stopped as if by magic and she rolled off the saddle and looked up into her father’s face.