Books 13-16: Return to Jalna / Renny's Daughter / Variable Winds at Jalna / Centenary at Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  He left the bridge and mounted the path at the other side of the ravine. Now he was free of the Griffiths and the atmosphere of Jalna reached out to receive him. There were lights in the rooms and the windows shone among the vines. The vines were the sleeping place of a score of young birds and their mothers. Earlier in the evening, when he had come out, he had disturbed them and they had rushed forth with sleepy flutterings, not knowing where to go or what to do. But the mothers had not been really afraid. They had collected the young ones on a telephone wire and in the hawthorn tree, quieting them with wise cheepings. Even after that there had been frantic flutterings in the creeper and the last sleepy-heads had tumbled into the open. There were but a few of them but they made a greater noise of fright than all the rest. The mothers sat on the wire and in the tree ignoring them, as if they had quite enough young without them and these last did not matter. But finally they all were safe on some perch and by the time Finch had crossed the lawn they were winging back into the sheltering vine.

  Finch found Wakefield alone, sitting on the seat in the stone porch. It was wonderful to come back and find him sitting there. In the dark, when the strained look in Wake’s eyes could not be seen, it was almost as though he had never been away. Finch dropped to the bench beside him and they exchanged a few casual remarks. Finch wanted to feel as they had felt when as boys they had lounged here together. Then he remembered how uncompanionable they had been, how Wake had irritated him by his artless assumption of superiority. It was later, when Finch had had a nervous breakdown, that they had been friends. Finch did not want to remember that time. Now it was Wake who was struggling against the effects of strain and exhaustion. But spiritually and physically Wake had been through hell in the past five years, thought Finch, and he put out his hand in the dark and touched him.

  “Does it feel good to be home?” he asked.

  “It’s bliss! I should like to sit here — feeling everything — seeing nothing — for six months — then sleep for the next six months and wake up having forgotten all I’d ever experienced.”

  “You’ll rest.”

  “I suppose I shall.”

  “It’s put new life in the uncles, having you back.”

  “Uncle Nick looks pretty old.”

  “He looks far better than he did last spring, and when his face lights up — he looks fine.”

  “Yes … what’s the matter with Renny?”

  “You’ve noticed something?”

  “God — how could I help? Is it trouble between him and Alayne? She looks depressed.”

  “We all are — depressed. But I hate to tell you, on your first night at home. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “Tell me.” Wakefield spoke impatiently.

  Finch moved closer to him on the seat and in a low voice poured out the story of the theft.

  “It’s impossible,” exclaimed Wakefield. “He couldn’t have done it. He couldn’t have taken the money, hidden it from himself, and then keep on doling it out to himself in that insane way. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Does an injured mind make sense? Does the war make sense? I have reached the point when nothing seems too crazy to be true. Do you remember how the spirit, Lorenzo, in Keat’s Isabella, said:

  I know what was, I feel full well what is,

  And I could rage, if spirits could go mad.

  “Don’t,” exclaimed Wakefield, moving uneasily in shadow.

  “I don’t know what will happen to Renny, if this goes on. He’s always searching — always trying to remember. It’s very hard on Alayne.”

  “Has he consulted a doctor?”

  “No. Nothing can persuade him to. He told me yesterday that he has lost eighteen pounds since this happened. He watches himself in a grim, detached sort of way. He thinks he’s headed for —”

  “For what?” Wakefield asked sharply, as Finch hesitated.

  “I don’t exactly know. But something disastrous. He’s just watching and waiting. Something must happen. He can’t go on like this.”

  “I should think that, when the money is all recovered, he’ll stop worrying.”

  “Perhaps. I hope so.”

  “How many of the bills have been found?”

  “About fifteen. That leaves thirty-five.”

  “It’s ghastly. It can’t go on. Why doesn’t Alayne do something?”

  “what can she do? Nothing but wait, like the rest of us.”

  The door opened and Renny came into the porch, the light of the hall behind him. He stood clearly defined in his isolation. He was acquiescent in the doom he saw foretold for him. Yet he was master of himself as of the house. He was even cheerful and smiling.

  “Hullo,” he said. “I was wondering where you had taken yourself to. Having a confidential talk?”

  “It’s good to be home,” said Wake, “and just relax.”

  “It’s good to have you. We will not let you go away again in a hurry.”

  It was the same cry of the grandmother. “Don’t let them go away. Keep them together. Don’t let anything separate us.” Wakefield chafed in his spirit, even while he passionately longed to submerge himself in the family.

  “I should like,” said Finch, “to be at Jalna for the rest of my life.”

  Renny came and sat beside him and laid his hand on his knee. “Good man,” he exclaimed, “and so you shall.”

  “what about this concert tour Uncle Ernest was telling me of?” asked Wakefield.

  “Well, of course, I must do that. But I’ll come back when it’s over.”

  “He’s practising hard,” said Renny. “I like to hear him. I like those modern pieces. They sound even more muddle-headed than I am. Has Finch told you about me, Wake?”

  “Yes.” The word came out painfully. He hated to acknowledge that he knew.

  “what do you think of it?”

  “I think it will all come right.”

  “That’s good. So do I — sometimes.”

  “I think you’re as sound as a nut, Renny.”

  “Tell me that — when a week has passed — if you can.”

  “I’ll have a search for that money, myself.”

  “I wish you would. And I wish you’d watch me. I’ve begged them all to watch me. Alayne, Finch, all of them, but they won’t. They leave me to myself and the next thing I know I’ve been to the hiding place, brought out another note and hidden it again in some ridiculous spot. One would think they didn’t want to help me. But you will, won’t you?”

  “Of course, I will.” Wakefield’s heartiness of consent concealed the distress he felt. Renny, to be asking for help in such a pass! It was unbelievable.

  As a drowning man desperately reaching out for aid, Renny said, “Begin tomorrow, Wake. You may well be the one to run me down. I can tell you, I’m a wily one. But you always have seen everything that went on. By Heaven, I’m glad you’ve come home.”

  XXV

  THE FINDING

  WAKEFIFIELD ACCEPTED RENNY’S theory that a dual personality had been engendered in him by the concussion, as, when a small boy, he had accepted every longbow Renny had drawn. It even seemed to him plausible that Renny ’s personality should be split into two, the one a thief, the other an unwilling object of the thief ’s charity who continually sought to bring the thief to justice. Wakefield could believe anything, for a time at least. To Finch this theory was fantastic, yet he could offer nothing in its stead. So much and so helplessly did he brood on the mystery of it all, that he found it hard to settle down to the practising for his concert tour. Sometimes he felt that he should go away for this preparation, where he might have peace of mind. But where could he go? Here was the piano he loved, as he would never love another. Here, bent above him at night, was the roof beneath which alone his being was complete. All other places left him but half a man. In his boyhood he often had longed to get away from the bonds of Jalna. Now, when he was away, he gladly felt these bonds drawing him back. Was it the land? The house? The spirit of
his grandmother that gave him strength? Was it Renny? If Renny died — or if the dreadful thing that threatened him came to pass, would the bonds still hold? As he sat practising hour after hour in the shuttered coolness of the drawing-room, these thoughts came in on him.

  Renny was deeply glad that Wakefield was home again. Now the last source of anxiety for his brothers was gone. He would concentrate all his powers on the solution of the mystery that enmeshed him. His restlessness at night disturbed Alayne’s sleep. She lay always with an arm about him, so that if he rose to walk in his sleep she would know. But he never did. He noticed her paleness and returned to his own room. But in his room he made a trap for himself with cords drawn across the door which would cause him to stumble, or even fall, if he tried to go out. Nothing happened. The truth was that he slept little at night. He lay listening to the striking of the grandfather clock in the hall below, longing for the day. Morbid imaginings assailed him. Sometimes when he did fall asleep, he dreamed he was confined in a straitjacket and woke struggling to free himself, wet with the sweat of terror. His best sleep was in the daytime when he would stretch himself on the sofa in the library, stationing Wakefield nearby to watch him and to follow him, if he went out. The sound of the piano did not wake him. Sometimes Finch would come into the room and the two younger brothers would stand looking down into the high-coloured bony face that seemed formed to withstand the stress of life’s fiercest attack.

  Sometimes he would wake and smile up at them. Then it was impossible to believe that anything was wrong with him. He would get up, light a cigarette and tell Finch to continue with his practising.

  “Come, Wake,” he would say, “we’ll see how he’s getting on.”

  The two would sit at a little distance from the piano; Wakefield, with his head resting on his hand, Renny leaning back in his chair, his eyes fixed on Finch’s hands. He was proud of their swift sure movements across the keyboard. When Finch had played Brahm’s variations on a theme by Handel, Renny would smile at Wakefield and remark, “Pretty good, eh?”

  “what’s that piece called?” he asked, when Finch had played Debussy’s “La Cathédrale Engloutie.”

  Finch told him, and he remarked, “I wish you’d play that to me every day.”

  At first Finch found the presence of his brothers a strain, but later he liked having them sitting quietly there. He began to think of the music as healing their scars of war. They had been hard and manly, he vulnerable. Now he felt he could heal them with his music.

  Sometimes Nicholas and Ernest joined them and the five men seemed to overcome even that large room by their presence. There seemed no place for any women in the room. The present suffering, the vulnerability, the scars, the recollections of the past, all were masculine.

  Piers seldom came to Jalna in these days. He always found something that needed doing about the farmlands. He was active despite the loss of his leg. He was proud to show what he could do. His muscular frame was hardening once more, after the years of inaction in the prison camp. But his chief reason for remaining away from Jalna was that he shrank from being for more than a short while with Renny, in his present state. He could meet him in the stables, on the land, talk to him of crops and the breeding of cattle, but to sit at Renny’s table, to spend an evening with him, conscious all the while of his abstraction — that look in his eyes — was too much.

  When one morning he met Alayne in the orchard, carrying a small basket of red apples she had gathered for the table, he was startled by the change in her. She looked wan. Her fair hair drooped lifelessly about her thin temples. Her lips were pale. He stood staring, making no attempt to conceal his scrutiny.

  She smiled. “Well, I am not improving in my appearance, am I?”

  “You’ll be ill, if you go on like this.”

  “To tell the truth, Piers, I don’t feel very well now.”

  “It’s a damned shame,” he broke out. “That fellow has got to see a doctor. If he won’t do it willingly, he must be forced.”

  “He’s not an easy person to force, as you know.”

  “Can’t he see what he’s doing to you?”

  “He doesn’t see anything clearly.”

  “Then he must be made to see.”

  Piers’ steady blue eyes, his stalwart body, gave out masculine strength and support to Alayne. She had a blind desire to throw herself on his breast and cling there. For an instant she loved him, he who so often had been antagonistic to her. In imagination she clung to him, kissing him. She was so overwrought she scarcely knew what was real or what was unreal. Piers suddenly put his arms about her and kissed her.

  “There, there,” he said comfortingly. “It will come out all right.”

  “I know,” she sobbed, and withdrew herself.

  “I’ll see what I can do with old Red Head. When did he find the last bill?”

  “Two days ago. Stuffed into the bowl of his meerschaum pipe which he hadn’t smoked for months.”

  “Tck. Whoever hides them is ingenious.”

  “Piers, do you believe it is Renny?”

  “I can’t see who else it could be.”

  “Adeline comes home for her midterm weekend tomorrow. I did so hope the atmosphere would be cleared by now. She was very conscious of the change in Renny. I often saw her looking at him in a puzzled way — and the scene after Othello! He would not have been so upset if he had been normal.”

  “I think he would ... Anyhow I’ll see him this morning and talk him into consulting a doctor. See if I don’t!”

  Piers set off at once to find Renny. Standing over him as he sat on the swivel chair in his office in the stable he said, “The time has come when you’ve got to do something about the lost money. All your searching won’t bring it back. You are ruining your health. You are ruining Alayne’s life. I am your brother and I know what I am talking about. I am going with you to consult a psychopathist. He’ll make you wish you had gone to him at the first. He’ll take the quirk out of your memory. Do it for Alayne’s sake. She is at breaking point. Come, now — say you will.”

  Renny raised his eyes to Piers’ face. “If I haven’t found the money at the end of a fortnight,” he said, “I will do whatever you say.”

  “Make it a week.”

  “Very well. A week.”

  Piers was elated. He had expected a struggle, possibly failure. He said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am — for all our sakes. It’s taken a load off my mind.”

  “I wish my mind were as easily relieved.”

  “Renny, I have worried about you more than you know. Now I feel that something is going to be done.”

  “what if the fellow says I’m deranged? That I’ll get worse?”

  “I would not believe him. You’re as sound as one of your own horses. Haven’t you seen a horse suddenly begin to shy at some object he has previously ignored? He’s got to be treated carefully — led up to it — walked round — encouraged to look at it from every side. That’s what the psychopathist will do for you.”

  “My God, I’ve looked at this thing from every side!”

  “You can’t cure yourself without help.”

  Renny made a sardonic grimace.

  But in spite of himself he felt a little cheered. In a week he would cast off responsibility and let the family do with him what they willed. On the other hand, he clung desperately to the coming week, dreading what might befall him at its end.

  He was glad to have the two young girls at home again. He aroused himself from the cloud that oppressed him, to chaff them, to make them laugh. Adeline’s laugh was high, gay. It seemed to come from all parts of her being, the natural expression of their mirth. Roma’s laugh was scarcely more than an audible smile. When she smiled her lips bent down at the outer corners, though the sensitive upper lip was raised. There was an oddness in her smile that later would be fascinating.

  A period of wet weather had set in after a long drought. The last of the apples fell into the long wet orchard grass. The red a
nd gold maple leaves showed their last brightness against the pewter-grey sky. The turkeys trailed among the blackberry canes, searching for the last berries. “Everything is at its last,” thought Renny, walking through the orchard path with the three dogs following him, more in stolid resolve not to lose sight of him than in pleasure. The long grass brushed their faces, they found no scent of wild creature.

  At the end of the orchard, Michaelmas daisies glowed in little mauve stars. A few oats had fallen there in the seeding time and now bore grain, hanging delicately from the stock, not garnered. There was a miniature graveyard, the resting place of all the dogs who had died at Jalna since its building. Twenty-eight little graves were there, each marked with a low stone on which was carved a name. Once they had been cared for but now many were so overgrown by wild grasses, Michaelmas daisies, and goldenrod, as to be lost. The oldest grave and the one with the tallest stone was that of Nero, the great Newfoundland, who had come from Quebec with Renny’s grandparents. Many a time he had heard old Adeline tell of Nero’s exploits. “Ha,” she would exclaim, “a great-hearted dog if ever there was one! He loved me and I loved him. The day he died I thought my heart would break from the grief in me.”

  Renny thought of all the dogs buried there, how they had padded over the farmlands, through the orchard, chased their quarry, sometimes caught it but more often lost it. Had their fun. Been cherished. Never ill-treated — no, not one. Yes — wait! There was the Irish terrier, Barney, who had been stabbed to death by a Scotch labourer because the poor dog had run about wildly, frothing at the mouth. But he had only been overcome by exertion with heat, he had not been mad. Renny’s brows drew together at the remembrance. Strange how painful memories hurt him more than ever in these days. He turned his eyes to the newest graves, those of his two Clumber spaniels, Floss and Merlin. Never could he love another dog as he had loved those two. And they had taken with them some of his best years.