“There you are, my boy!” he said, heartily, and a benevolent smile curved his lips as he observed the gusto with which Mooey returned to his drink.
He was not a Boy Scout. He had not the physical strength to take part in their enterprises. However, he liked the idea of beginning each day with a kind act. He was one whom it would be impossible to hamper by sectarianism, but who, nevertheless, was willing to take something of good from any creed.
He descended the stairs lightly.
In the hall below he was interested to see that Rags had just let someone in at the front door. It was Mr. Patton, Grandmother’s lawyer. He carried his brief-bag, and, as Rags divested him of his coat, he gave Wakefield a pleasant but rather nervous smile.
“Good morning,” he said, “and how are you?”
“Thank you, sir,” answered Wakefield, “I’m as well as can be expected, after all I’ve gone through.”
He had heard Aunt Augusta make this same remark to Mrs. Fennel the day before, and he saw no reason why a remark so fraught with mournful dignity should not serve for any member of the family.
Mr Patton looked at him sharply. “H’m,” he said, dryly. “I suppose so. Well, well.”
Aunt Augusta appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. She held out her hand to Mr. Patton, and Wakefield saw that almost all the family was gathered in the sitting room. Uncle Nicholas sat in an armchair in a corner, filling his pipe; Uncle Ernest was by a window, nervously rubbing the nails of one hand against the palm of the other. Piers and Renny stood together talking, and Mr. Patton was barely inside when Meg and Maurice arrived. Meg was carrying her infant daughter, Patience. Wakefield was consumed by curiosity. He was also humiliated to find that a family conclave had reached such a point as this without his knowledge.
Finch came along the hall, rather more sheepish than usual, and he too made toward the door of the sitting room. Wakefield caught his arm.
“What is it?” he asked, eagerly. “What are they up to?” “The will. Patton’s going to read the will.”
“The will? Oh! Then we’ll know who’s going to be the heir, shan’t we?”
“Shut up,” whispered Finch, and pushed past him.
But Wake was not to be put off so easily. He followed Finch into the sitting room and drew up a chair beside Mr. Patton where he sat at the square table, with some papers spread before him.
Mr. Patton looked at him over his glasses.
“I don’t think the child should be allowed to stay,” said Aunt Augusta.
“Of course he shouldn’t,” agreed Piers.
“Wake, darling,” said Meg, joggling Patience on her knee, “run along and feed your rabbits.”
Wakefield did not demur, but he hitched his chair a little nearer the table and pushed Aunt Augusta’s bottle of smelling salts within reach of Mr. Patton, in case of need.
“Put that child out,” growled Nicholas from his corner, pointing at Wake with his pipe.
“I don’t see—-” began Renny but Piers took the little boy by the arm and put him into the hall.
He stood there ruffled, like a young robin pushed from the nest, looking at the door so inexorably shut against him. He heard someone hurrying down the stairs and saw that it was Pheasant.
“Oh,” she said, as she saw the closed door, “I am late! I had to run upstairs to Mooey. I wonder what I’d better do.”
“Go and fetch Mooey,” advised Wakefield, glumly. “P’r’aps they’ll let you in if you’ve a kid in your arms. Meggie’s got her baby.”
Pheasant stared. “How funny! I’ve heard of women taking babies to police courts to influence the jury. Maybe she thinks…”
“There’s only the family in there,” said Wakefield, “and I think it was filthy to put me out.”
“Did they? I wonder if they’ll want me! Piers didn’t say to come, but then he didn’t say not to come. I wonder…”
Wakefield could not conscientiously encourage her.
“I think you’d better not go in, my girl,” he advised. “You’re safer out here with me.”
“If they think I’m after the old money!” she cried angrily.
“I bet I get it,” he said, boastfully.
“I bet you don’t!”
He put his eye to the keyhole. He could see nothing but Mr. Patton’s hands fumbling among papers. A good deal of coughing came from within. The family seemed to be collectively clearing its throat. Then Mr. Patton began to speak in a mumbling, unintelligible voice.
Wakefield looked around to where Pheasant had been standing. She was just disappearing up on the landing. He thought he would go out for a breath of fresh air while the will was being read.
“I wonder how long it will take,” he said to Rags, who had just missed seeing him with his eye to the keyhole.
“It’ll take some time,” replied Rags, dusting the mirror of the hat rack, topped by a carved fox’s head; and he added sarcastically: “I expect you’ll ’ave time to order yerself a new touring car, in cise you’re the old lidy’s heir.”
“There isn’t any ’in case,” said Wakefield, on a sudden impulse. “I am.”
“Of course you are!” jeered Rags. “Sime as I won the Calcutter Sweepstikes! We’ll go araound the world on a tour together.”
“It’s all very well to laugh,” returned Wakefield, gravely, “but it’s the truth! She told me so herself, not long before she died.”
Rags gaped at him, duster in hand. He could not help being impressed. “Well, if wot you s’y is true, them in there will get the surprise of their lives.”
“Yes,” agreed Wakefield, “and they’ll feel meaner after shutting me out and all.”
“I wish I knew if you’re telling the truth.”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
Wakefield went out into the morning. He sauntered along the flower border, brilliant with marigolds, zinnias, and asters. Bright cobwebs veiled the cedar hedge where the sun had not yet struck. A birch tree was letting fall little yellow leaves into the moist green of the lawn.
What should he do to pass the time until the reading of the will was over? This was an important hour in his life, he felt, and should be spent in no trivial fashion. He began to feel qualms of hunger, but the thought of re-entering the house was intolerable to him. The blue and gold of the morning, the little breezes that skipped about like young lambs, the spaciousness of open air, were necessary to his mood. He strolled, hands in pockets, to the back of the house, and there came upon a tub set beneath an eave, full of rainwater. He squatted beside it, peering at his reflection, darkly bright in the water. So looked the heir to the Whiteoak millions! He lengthened his face, trying to make his nose into a Court nose, and when it began to ache from the strain he eased it with a hideous grimace or two.
The sight of these grimaces reflected made him burst out laughing, and the tiny cockerel, which had followed him, responded with a boastful crow.
“What have you to crow about?” asked Wakefield. “If you were me, you might crow. What are you heir to, I’d like to know? A dirty old nest, and a worm or two. Do you know what I am? I’m heir to the Whiteoak millions, and it’ll pay you to crow when I tell you to, and not before!”
The cockerel looked at him so hard that it turned its head almost upside down. Its bright amber eye glittered with greed.
Then in the rainwater Wakefield discovered a black beetle half drowned, lying on its back, only a feeble kicking of the legs showing it to be still alive. He picked a blade of grass and with it steered the beetle round the tub. A dear little boat making a tour of the world. He made it call at various ports—Gibraltar, Suez, Ceylon, Penang. How he loved these names in his geography lessons with Mr. Fennel! Lucky, lucky beetle!
Alas! Just as they reached Shanghai, it sank. Rather ungrateful of it. Not many Canadian beetles had a chance to go to Shanghai!
He peered down at it, lying on its back in the depths of the tub. It must be rescued. He pushed up his sleeve and put his slender
brown arm into the water, found the beetle, and laid it right side up in the sunshine. He lay down beside it, watching with satisfaction the slow but sure return to life. It was his second kind act that morning.
A slender, pale worm was descending on a gossamer thread out of the sky. The lightest breeze swung it, now above the tub of rainwater, now above the grass. Unperturbed, it continued its descent, the silver thread lengthening, let out from some invisible reel. A robin ran across the yard, a peewee said “peewee” from a maple tree.
The worm had arrived. An undulation passed through its slender body; it moved delicately beneath a towering blade of grass. But Wakefield was not to discover its destination or why it had descended to this sphere from another. A swaggering black ant fell on it, worried it, choked it, slew it. He was such an important, toplofty fellow that he was quite above conveying the body to the anthill. Apparently he put his feelers to his mouth and whistled, for a company of little ants appeared from nowhere, snatched it, fought over it, dragged it, trailing palely, through the grass-blades, out of sight. Wakefield was not the only spectator of the tragedy, for a strange fellow in a fuzzy yellow waistcoat and a saffron-coloured stern appeared on the rim of a burdock leaf, and stared goggle-eyed, now and again wringing his antenna.
Wakefield did not like the looks of him. He plucked the burdock leaf and turned it upside down on top of him.
“Here endeth,” he said, “the second lesson.”
The peewee chanted “peewee”; the cockerel crowed. Wakefield threw him a Chest and Lung Tablet. “Perhaps this will help your voice,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything so squeaky. Suck it slowly.”
The cockerel bolted it, and liked the liquorice flavour so well that it came close, on the look-out for another. It was then that it espied the black beetle, making cumbersome attempts to reshoulder the responsibilities of life. The cockerel cocked an eye, pecked, gulped. There was no beetle in sight.
Wakefield rose, dusted his bare knees, and uttered a sigh of bliss. A third kind act, providing the cockerel with a beetle! His cup was full.
But not his stomach! It seemed hard that he, heir to the Whiteoak millions, should go empty.
He crouched before a window of the basement kitchen and peered into the twilight depths below. He could see Mrs. Wragge kneading dough, her red fists pounding it so vigorously that one could not help wondering whether it might not hurt the dough. Bessie, the kitchenmaid, was paring vegetables in a corner, her hair in her eyes. Rags, cigarette in mouth, was cleaning knives, dipping the cork first in a little puddle of water on the knife board, then in a small mound of Bath brick, before he angrily furbished the blades. Rags was always angry when he was in the basement. No matter how cool his temper might be above, it rose to boiling point as he clattered down the stairs. No, Wakefield did not want his breakfast from that galley!
He ran across the fields, climbed the sagging rail fence, and was on the road. Soon he was opposite the door of the blacksmith shop, between its tall elms. John Chalk, the smith, was shoeing a grey farm horse. He glanced at Wake from under his shaggy brows, and went on hammering the shoe.
When he dropped the hoof, and straightened his back, Wakefield remarked: “My pony’s cast that last shoe you put on her.”
“That’s queer,” said Chalk. “Are you sure it was that one? She’d no right to cast that one so soon.”
Wake looked at him dubiously. “Hadn’t she? I had my doubts of it when you put it on. I thought it was a very queer-looking job.”
Chalk glared. “I like your cheek! There was never a shoe better put on than that shoe, and I’d like you to know it!”
Wakefield folded his arms. “I don’t want,” he said, “to take my custom from you.”
“You and your custom!” bawled the blacksmith. “You and your one little pony that I could pick up under my arm like a sheep! Take it away, and be darned to you. I guess I can make ends meet without it!” He wiped his brow with a blackened hand.
“Well,” said Wake, “if it only was one pony you might be snifty! But it’ll likely be a whole string of racehorses before long. You see, I’m the heir to the—my grandmama’s money.”
“A likely story,” jeered Chalk. “The old lady ’ud never leave it to a little whippersnapper like you!”
“That’s just why she did it. She knew I needed it—what with my weak heart and all. I’ve known it for a long time, but the family’s just finding it out this morning.”
Chalk regarded him with mingled admiration and disapproval. “Well, if that’s true, and you’ve got the old lady’s money, I pity them, for of all the highcockalorum, head-upand-tail-over-the-dashboard young rascals I ever set eyes on, you’re the worst.” He began to hammer so loudly on his anvil that further conversation was impossible. Though fast friends, their intercourse was often stormy.
He let the smith feel the weight of his gaze for a few moments, before he moved on with dignity along the straggling street. At the Wigles’ cottage he stopped. Muriel, as usual, was swinging on the gate. He brought it to a standstill so abruptly that the little girl fell off. Before she could begin to cry, Wakefield took her by the hand and said: “Come along, Muriel. I’m going to take you with me for a treat.”
The door of the cottage opened and Mrs. Wigle stuck out her head.
“Muriel!” she called. “Don’t you dare leave the yard! Come back here this instant moment!”
“But he ’th taking me out for a treat!” whined Muriel. “I want to go out for a treat!”
“Treat nothing,” retorted her mother. “The last time he took you out for a treat you came home in rags and tatters. Treats may be fun for him, but he ain’t going to take my daughter to ’em!”
Wakefield listened to this tirade with a reproachful air. “Mrs. Wigle,” he said, “it wasn’t my fault that Muriel fell in the stream, and the old sheep tossed her about, and the burrs got in her hair. I did what I could to save her. But I’d forgotten the sheep’s name, and she won’t come for any other name but her own. You see, all our animals have names, we make such pets of them.”
Mrs. Wigle came down the path, her arms rolled in her apron. She looked somewhat mollified.
“Where did you plan to take her this morning?” she asked.
“Only to Mrs. Brawn’s shop to buy her something nice to eat.”
“Well, fetch her straight back here afterward. And there’s one thing I wish you’d tell me. Have you ever heard your brother say aught about mending my roof? It leaks into the best room like all possessed every time it rains.”
Wakefield knitted his slender black brows. “I’ve never heard him say a single word about it, Mrs. Wigle. He doesn’t seem to mind what roof leaks so long as the stable roof doesn’t. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll mend your roof myself!”
“Bless the child! As though you could mend my roof!”
“I mean, I’ll have it mended for you. You see, IVe inherited all my grandmama’s money, and HI be wanting to do all sorts of nice things for ladies that have been kind to me. Come along, Muriel.”
Mrs. Wigle was dazed before the splendour of it. A little boy with all that fortune! Beautiful to see him holding her Muriel by the hand. She followed them, rolling her arms tightly in her apron, into Mrs. Brawn’s shop. She did not give him time to tell his news to fat Mrs. Brawn. She poured it out for him, and the two women stood, wrapped in admiration, while he scrutinized the contents of the window.
“I was so excited,” he murmured, half to himself, “that I couldn’t eat my breakfast. ‘Air,’I said, ‘I’ve got to have air’… I think I’ll have two currant buns, a little dish of custard cakes, and three bottles of Orange Crush. Muriel, what would you like?”
He stood before the counter, slender, fragile, the toe of one crossed foot resting on the floor, his dark head bent above the bottle from which the lovely drink ebbed through two straws into his throat. Before him stood the unopened bottles, the custard cakes, a currant bun. He held the other bun, soft, sticky,
warm from the oven. At his shoulder was the tow head of Muriel, her eyes raised adoringly to his face, as she munched a bun. She would have followed him to the ends of the earth.
Above his head the voices of the two women babbled on, discussing his wonderful prospects. Mrs. Brawn cared nothing that he owed her twenty cents and was fast running up his account. Mrs. Wigle forgot her leaky roof. She rolled and unrolled her hands in her apron. From the stove in the back room was wafted the insidious smell of burning cakes. Wakefield’s head was full of beautiful thoughts—like whirling golden coins.
XXI
BEQUEST
IN THE HALL he almost ran into Mr. Patton, who was putting on his coat. Mr. Patton had the uncomfortable expression on his face of one who has eaten something that has disagreed with him. The expression on the face of Renny, who was accompanying him to the door, was even more uncomfortable. He said: “You’re sure there’s no doubt of her sanity?”
Mr. Patton puckered his lips. “None whatever.”
“Well, she had a right to do what she liked with her own money, but—it’s rather hard on my uncles.”
“Yes, yes… Yes, indeed.”
“And so entirely unexpected. She never seemed to care especially for him. She was much more partial to Piers.”
“You never can tell.”
“With women—I suppose not.”
“Nor men, either. It’s extraordinary what some of them will do.” Mr. Patton took his hat from the rack, looked into it; then, casting a furtive look into the silent sitting room, he added, in a muffled tone: “I actually tried to dissuade her. I don’t mind saying this to you. But—she was—” He shrugged.
“Not very tolerant of interference. I know.”
Mr. Patton said, picking up his brief-bag, and looking into Renny’s eyes with some embarrassment: “It’s hard on you, too. Particularly as in most of the former wills—”
Renny scowled. “I’m not worrying about that. How many wills did you say there have been?”
“Eight during the twenty years I have looked after her affairs. Some changes, of course, were only minor. In most of them you—”
Books 5-8: Whiteoak Heritage / Whiteoak Brothers / Jalna / Whiteoaks of Jalna Page 117