“The Rajah gave her the ring because she saved the life of his son. They were riding together when the boy’s horse bolted. It was a spirited Arab steed and it became unmanageable.”
The Dean gave what was nearer to a grin than a smile. “And Adeline was a beautiful Irish hussy and she caught the Arab steed and saved the Rajah’s heir,” he said.
“Yes.” Augusta looked at him coldly.
“Was Philip there? Did he assist in the rescue?”
“No, I don’t think he was there. Why?”
“Well, the Rajah might not have rewarded an upstanding British officer so handsomely.”
“Frederick, I think you’re horrid!” she exclaimed, and left him to his own sinister musings.
It was Adeline’s idea to have their portraits painted while they were in England. They might never have another such opportunity. Certainly they would never be handsomer than they were at this time. Above all, she must have a real portrait — no mere daguerreotype would do — of Philip in all the glory of his uniform of an officer of Hussars. To the Hussars and to the Buffs the Whiteoak family had, in times past, supplied many a fine officer but never, in Adeline’s mind, one so dashing, so noble-looking, as Philip.
The idea was agreeable to Philp too, though the amount he had to hand over to the artist was rather staggering. But his portraits were fashionable, especially among the military class. Not only could he make a uniform look as though it would step out of the frame; he could impart a commanding look to the most insignificant and dyspeptic officer. Where lady sitters were concerned he was at his best with flesh tints, ringlets, and shimmering fabrics. Probably his portraits of Philip and Adeline were the most successful of his career. It was a heartbreak to him that they were to be taken out of England before they could be exhibited at the Academy. He did, however, give a large party to show them in his studio, at which the young people were present. This had been the night before they had seen The Bohemian Girl.
The idea of owning portraits of themselves in their prime had not been all that was in Adeline’s mind when she suggested this extravagance. She knew that it would entail many weeks in London for the sittings and she was determined to have as pleasureful a time as possible while in England. There had been three visits to London. This was their last. Tomorrow they were to return to the quiet cathedral town. Adeline threw herself into a stuffed velvet chair in the hotel bedroom and exclaimed dramatically: —
“I’m so transported I could die!”
“You feel too much,” returned Philip. “It would be better if you took things coolly, as I do.” He looked at her anxiously, then added: “You are quite pale. I shall ring for a glass of stout and some biscuits for you.”
“No. Not stout! Champagne! Nothing so prosaic as stout after that divine opera. Oh, never shall I forget this night! Oh, the heavenly voice of Thaddeus! Oh, how sweet Arline was! Philip, can you remember any of the songs? We must buy the music! Try if you can sing ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls’!”
“I couldn’t possibly.”
“Try ‘Then You’ll Remember Me.’”
“I couldn’t,” he returned doggedly.
“Then — ‘The Light of Other Days!’ Do try that!”
“I couldn’t — not to save my life.”
She sprang up, letting her fur-trimmed evening wrap fall to the floor, and began to pace up and down the room. She had a passionate but not very musical voice and little idea of tune, but she managed to get the first bars of her favourite song from the opera.
“I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side —”
As she sang she raised her chin, showing the beauty of her long milk-white neck. She smiled triumphantly at Philip. Her voluminous light-blue taffeta crinoline swayed about her, in all its ruchings and narrow velvet edgings. Above her tiny waist her round breasts rose, supporting a mass of lace, caught by turquoise pins and little velvet flowers. Her shoulders glistened in lovely pallor in the candlelight. Just touching her neck her auburn curls descended from her heavy chignon. Philip saw her beauty but he saw also the thinness of her arms, the too vivid redness of her lips and brightness of her eyes. He rose and pulled the bell cord and, when a servant appeared, ordered the stout.
She had given up the song. Now the tune had quite eluded her but she found it hard to settle down. She drew back the dark red curtains and looked down into the street where the gas lamps made pools of light on the wet pavement and the cab horses clip-clopped past with draggled manes and rain-soaked harness. The mysterious lives of the people in the cabs filled her with a strange longing. She turned to Philip.
“We shall sometimes come back, shan’t we?” she asked.
“Of course we shall. I’ll engage to bring you back every second or third year. We are not going to bury ourselves in the wilds. And don’t forget New York. We will visit it too.”
She threw her arms about his neck and gave him a swift kiss.
“My angel,” she said. “If I had to go to bed tonight with anyone but you, I’d throw myself out of that window.”
“And quite properly,” he observed.
They drew apart and stood in decorous attitudes as the man-servant reappeared with the refreshments. He laid a snowy cloth on an oval, marble-topped table and then set out several bottles of stout, biscuits and cheese, a cold pigeon pie for Philip and a small bowl of hot beef extract for Adeline.
“How good it looks!” she exclaimed, when they were alone. “Do you know, I’m getting my appetite again! D’ye think I dare eat some of that cheddar cheese? I do love cheese!”
“What expressions you use! You love me and you love cheese! I suppose there’s no difference in your affection.”
She laughed. “You old silly!” Then she pressed her hands to her sides. “But really, Philip, you will have to unlace me before I attempt to eat or I shall have room for nothing but a biscuit.”
As he helped her with the intricate fastenings of her dress, he said seriously — “I cannot help thinking that this tight lacing is all wrong. In fact the doctor on shipboard told me that it is responsible for many of the difficult births.”
“Very well,” she declared, “when we are in Canada I shall leave off my stays and go about like a sack tied in the middle. Picture me in the wilds! I am on a hunting expedition. I have just trapped or shot a deer, a beaver, or something of the sort. I am on my way home with my quarry slung over my shoulder. Suddenly I am conscious of some slight discomfort. I recall the fact that I am enceinte. Possibly my hour has come. I find a convenient spot beneath an olive tree —”
“They don’t have ’em there.”
“Very well. Any tree will do. I make myself comfortable. I give birth to the child, with scarcely a moan. I place it in my petticoat. I resume the burden of the deer or beaver on my back. I return home. I cast my quarry at your feet and my infant on your knee. ‘By the way,’ I remark, ‘here’s a son and heir for you!’”
“Egad! That’s the way to do it.” He struggled with the hooks and eyes. “There — my angel. Out you step!”
The blue taffeta fell in bright cascades to the floor but the crinoline still stood out about her lower half, above which her tiny waist appeared as a fragile support for bust and shoulders. Somehow he got her out of the crinoline, the petticoat, and the many-gored corset cover but he had a time of it with the corset lace, which had tied itself in a tight knot. His fair face was flushed and he had given vent to an oath or two before she stood released and graceful in her shift. He gave her an abrupt little push instead of the kiss she expected, and said: —
“Now, put on your peignoir and let’s have something to eat.”
He stood watching her with an air half-possessive, half-coaxing, while she drew on a violet velvet dressing gown and divested her wrists of her bracelets. As she seated herself at the table she gave a little laugh of complete satisfaction. Her eyes swept across the viands.
“How hungry I am!” she dec
lared. “And how good everything looks! I must have some of that cheese. I adore it!”
“There you go again!” he said, cutting a wedge from the cheese for her. “You adore food! You adore me! What’s the difference?”
“I said nothing whatever about adoring you,” she returned, putting her teeth into the cheese. She laughed like a greedy young girl. It was part of her charm, he thought, that she could sit there eating greedily and still look alluring. She appeared unself-conscious but her passionate love for him, her desire to express it, to put her nature beneath him, even while, in her femininity, she triumphed over him, made her slightest gesture, her half-glance, symbolic. He sat watching her, feeling that in some strange way the fact that she was eating greedily, that her arms were too thin, that her stays had been too tight, only increased her desirability.
At last she rose and came to him. My God, he thought, did ever a woman move as she moves! She can never grow old!
She came to him and sank into his arms. She lay along his body as though her will were to obliterate herself in him, willfully to become no more than a creature he had created by his passion. She tried to time her breathing with his, so that their two hearts should do even this in unison. He bent his face to hers, and their lips met. She turned her face swiftly away. Then, turning it again, with closed eyes, toward him, she kissed him in rapture.
But the next morning she felt a sadness in her. They were leaving London. When might she see it again? Perhaps never, with all the dangers of travel between. What would happen to them in the New World? What strange distant place lay awaiting them?
It was a journey of many hours from London to the cathedral town of Penchester. When Adeline alighted from the train she was very tired. Dark shadows made her eyes sombre. She looked ill. But the Dean’s carriage was waiting to meet them, with its comfortable cushioned seats and its lamps shining bright in the dusk. The streets were quiet, so they bowled along easily. Soon the towering shape of the Cathedral rose against the luminous west. Its windows still held a glimmer from the sunken sun. It looked ethereal, yet as though it would last forever. Adeline leant forward to gaze at it through the carriage window. She wanted to imprint its image on her mind, to take with her to Quebec. She felt that not even the Dean understood and loved the Cathedral as she did. And the sweet little streets that clustered about it — so dim, so orderly, so melting into the tradition of the past!
And the Dean’s house itself! Adeline wished she owned it as she descended from the carriage. It looked so sedate, so warm-coloured, so welcoming. She might indeed have been the mistress, to judge by her luggage that cumbered the hall, her husband’s voice that rapped out orders to the servants, her infant that made the echoes ring with its crying, her parrot which rent the air with erotic endearments when it heard her voice. Augusta and the Dean seemed mere nobodies in their own house. Adeline flew to the parrot, chained to its perch in the drawing-room.
“Boney, my sweet, I’m back!” she cried, advancing her lovely aquiline face to the bird’s beak.
“Ah, Pearl of the Harem!” he screamed, in Hindu. “Dilkhoosa! Nur Mahal! Mera lal!” He nibbled her nostril. His dark tongue quivered against her lips.
“Where did he learn all that?” asked the Dean.
Adeline turned her bold gaze on him. “From the Rajah,” she returned. “The Rajah who gave him to me.”
“It hardly seems nice,” said Augusta.
“It isn’t,” answered Adeline. “It’s beautiful — and wicked and fascinating.”
Philip broke in, “I say, Augusta, has our infant been howling ever since we left?”
His sister’s face clouded. The Dean answered for her.
“She has indeed. As a matter of fact I could not find a single spot where I could write my sermons in peace — between baby and parrot.” Then he added genially — “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”
But it did matter. Philip knew very well that a dean requires more quiet than does a Hussar, and he was annoyed with his daughter. She was now almost a year old and ought surely to have a little sense. The first time he had her to himself he took her to task. Holding her in his strong hands, so that her sallow little face was on a level with his fresh-coloured one, he said: —
“You young minx, don’t you know which side your bread is buttered on? Here are your uncle and auntie, childless. Here are you — a baby girl — just what they want! You could stay here with them, at any rate till your mother and I are settled in Canada. If you behaved yourself they’d make you their heir. Now what I mean is, I want you to stop this howling every time your aunt looks at you. You are not to cry. Do you understand?”
What Gussie understood most clearly was her discomfort. She suffered from constant colic induced by injudicious feeding and still more injudicious dosing with medicine when the food was not digested. Yet the ayah thought that no one but herself was capable of caring for the child. Certainly she poured out love and selfless devotion on her.
Gussie was precocious, partly because of remarkable intelligence, partly because of the constant changes of scene which had been her lot. She understood that the powerful being who held her high up between his two hands and spoke in such a resonant voice was ordering her not to cry, to keep her miseries of pain and shyness to herself. The next time her aunt on a sudden impulse of affection snatched her up and dandled her, the little creature made what was to her stupendous effort and controlled her desire to burst into tears. She fixed her mournful gaze on Augusta’s face, her mouth turned down at the corners; her eyes grew enormous but she kept back the tears that welled up in them.
Augusta was really shocked to see such an expression on the little face.
“Why,” she said, aghast, “Baby hates the sight of me! I can see that she does!”
“Nonsense,” said Philip. “It’s just shyness. She’ll get over it.” He snapped his fingers at Gussie.
“No she won’t. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to make friends with her. And just now she gave me such a desperate look! As though she were controlling herself with all her might, when what she really wanted to do was to scream at me. Here, take her, Adeline.”
Adeline took the child and gave her a not very gentle pat on the back. It was more than Gussie could bear. She stiffened herself and shrieked. The Dean came into the hall, putting on his cloak.
“I think I shall go to the Vestry,” he said. “Perhaps I can have peace there.”
Then Adeline and Philip became aware that the parrot was screaming too. It was a mercy the Dean could not understand Hindu, for the words Boney was screaming were the worst in his vocabulary, he having picked them up on board ship.
Adeline and Philip began to feel that the time had come for their visit to end. He was impatient to begin the new life but she would have been willing to linger a little longer in the quiet of Penchester, enlivened by visits to London. She loved the sunny walled garden behind the Dean’s house where crocuses were in bloom and daffodils swelling into bud, though it was still only February.
One morning Augusta took her brother into the privacy of her own sitting room, and said: —
“I do not think, Philip, that you have had your proper share of our parents’ belongings.”
Philip’s blue eyes widened in pleasurable anticipation. “Were you thinking of giving me something, Augusta?” he asked.
“Yes, if you feel you can safely take fine furniture with you. I should hate to think that precious possessions which our family long cherished might be handled roughly.”
“They won’t,” he eagerly assured her. “They will be strongly crated and I’ll personally oversee the loading on to the ship and off it. We are sailing by fast clipper which, I am told, is almost as quick and much cleaner and more comfortable than by steamship.”
She sighed. “Oh, I do wish you weren’t going! It seems so hard to have you return from India, only to lose you again. And I do so dread the voyage for the dear baby.”
“Augusta,” he said
earnestly, “if you’d like to keep the baby for a time —”
“No, no. It would never do. Baby Augusta does not take to me. She cries too much. It upsets Frederick. She shall come to visit me when she is older …”
“She is a spoilt little creature,” said Philip. He frowned, then brightened. “The house Uncle Nicholas left me is well-built, in the French style, I am told. I want to furnish it well,” he said. “We brought some things from India, as you know. Adeline has a really picturesque bedstead and inlaid cabinets. We have some fine rugs. Oh, we shall get on! Don’t worry.”
“But I do worry. I want you to take your place in Quebec as people of consequence and you cannot do that in a sparsely furnished house.”
“Oh, we shall get on. I fancy that there aren’t many officers of Hussars in the town and Adeline is the granddaughter of a marquis, as you know.”
“Yes. She is distinguished-looking, too. Did she show you the pearl brooch and bracelet I gave her?”
“She did indeed and I’m delighted.”
“Now I am going to give you the furniture I had from our home. It is mostly real Chippendale and would grace any drawing-room. But I do not need it. This house was filled with furniture when Frederick brought me to it. I have no children to save it for. Will you like to have it, Philip dear?”
“I shall like it tremendously,” Philip exclaimed. “It’s very handsome of you, Augusta.”
Adeline was charmed by Augusta’s generosity. Her spirits were high. Her talk, her laughter, the sound of her eager footsteps, filled the house. Philip did not know what it was to desire peace and quiet. But how earnestly the Dean and Augusta wished for it! By the time the visitors had departed with their mountain of luggage (the noise of the furniture being crated had nearly driven the Dean mad), their crying child and its ayah who kept the kitchen in a ferment with her demands of strange food, and their noisy and often blasphemous parrot, the sedate couple were exhausted. Their sincerest wish was to see the last of their relatives and never again to have a prolonged visit from them.
Jalna: Books 1-4: The Building of Jalna / Morning at Jalna / Mary Wakefield / Young Renny Page 2