08 Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  “I want to tell you,” he said, “how happy it makes me to have you here.”

  Old Mrs. Whiteoak had fallen into a doze. Fate seemed to be napping. Alayne and Renny might have been the only two in the room, each so felt the isolating power of the other’s proximity.

  “I had to come. He wanted me—needed me so terribly.”

  “Of course. He needs you… And when—he gets better?”

  “Then I shall go back.”

  But the words sounded unreal to her. Though she had left her possessions in the apartment, had made preparations for only a summer’s stay, the words sounded unreal. The apartment, with its artistic rugs, its pretty lamps, its bits of brass and copper, seemed of less importance than the ebony stick of this sleeping old woman. Rosamond Trent seemed of no importance. This room spoke to her. Its cumbersome furniture had a message for her. Its thick walls, enclosing that subjugating atmosphere, had a significance which no other walls could have. She might not grasp the unqualified meaning of it. She had not courage for the attempt. The room might be only a trap, and she—a rabbit, perhaps—a limp, vulnerable rabbit—caught!

  His tone, when he spoke again, was almost crisp. “Well, you’ve come, and that’s the great thing. I can’t tell you what a load it takes off my mind. I believe it will mean recovery for Eden.”

  She must work, she must strain for Eden’s recovery. And that was right. One must obey the laws of one’s order. But what a fantastic interlude in her life this summer was to be!

  Augusta had gone out. Now she reappeared in the doorway and motioned them to come. They rose and went to her, moving cautiously so as not to awaken the grandmother.

  “He has fallen asleep,” said Augusta. “Done out, poor boy. And you must be so tired, too, my dear. Shouldn’t you like to come up to my room and tidy yourself before dinner? I’ll have a jug of hot water taken up to you.”

  Alayne thanked her. She would be glad to change her dress and wash.

  “Then,” continued Augusta, “I shall take you to the cottage—I think we had better drop that horrid name of Fiddler’s Hut, now that you are going to live there—and show you our preparations. I suppose I should say my mother’s preparations.” And she directed a reproachful look at Renny.

  He returned her look truculently. “I like the old name.” he said. “I don’t see any sense in changing it.”

  “I shall certainly never call it that again.”

  “Call it what you please! It’s Fiddler’s Hut.” He gave an angry gesture.

  “Why should one cling to low names?”

  “You’ll be sneering at Jalna next!”

  Alayne thought: “Have I ever been away? Here they are, wrangling in exactly the same fashion. I don’t see how I am to bear it. What has come over me now I am in this house? A mere movement of his arm disturbs me! In New York it was possible—here, I cannot! I cannot! Thank God, I shall be under another roof!”

  A red patch of light projected through the coloured glass of the window, rested on Renny’s head. His hair seemed to be on fire. He said, contemptuously: “The cottage, eh? Better call it Rose Cottage, or Honeysuckle Cottage. Make it sweet while you’re about it!” It was a passion with him that nothing about the place should be changed.

  The front door was thrown open, and Wakefield ran in. With him came a rush of spring wind and three dogs. The two spaniels began to bark and jump about their master. The old sheepdog sniffed Alayne and wagged the clump of fur that was his tail. He remembered her.

  Wakefield held out a small bunch of windflowers. “I’ve brought these for you,” he said. “You’re to keep them in your room.”

  Alayne clasped him to her. How adorable his little body felt! So light, so fragile, and yet how full of life! “Thank you! Thank you!” she breathed, and he laughed as he felt the warmth of her mouth against his ear. He wrapped himself about her.

  “Child,” admonished his aunt, “don’t be so rough with Alayne! She is coming to my room now. She is tired. You’re dragging her down.”

  Renny removed the little limpet, and Lady Buckley took Alayne by the arm.

  As they mounted the stairs, she said: “You have done nobly and rightly. I cannot express how I admire you for it. I wish I could say that I am sure you will be rewarded for your self-sacrifice, but I have not found it so in life.” And she sighed. “I have discovered a nice young Scotch girl who will come from the village every day to work for you at—you know where. I refuse to call the cottage by that odious name, even though Renny be disagreeable to me.”

  They sought Augusta’s room, and she poured water from the heavy ewer into the basin, that Alayne might wash her face and hands.

  Finch, too, had gone to his room. The creak of the attic stairs, as he ascended, was to him the voice of the house. It welcomed him, and chided him. The attic complained that it had been so long deserted by him. No one there, all those weeks, to listen to the voice of the house at night. All that he might have heard it say on those nights was now lost to him forever. The walls of his room did not seem to be standing still. They seemed to move, to quiver in consciousness of him. The faded flowers of the wallpaper stirred as in a gust. He stood there, snuffing the familiar smells: the plaster, damp in one spot where the roof leaked—there was his water basin just where he had left it, placed to catch the drops; the faded carpet, not swept too thoroughly by Mrs. Wragge—it had a peculiar, fuzzy smell; the mustiness of the old books in the cupboard; and, permeating all, the essence of the house itself, which held a secret never to be told, though he thought he came near to guessing it.

  He threw open the window and let in the air. The trees, sombre and friendly, exhaled their teasing, resinous scents. Little rosy cones, like tiny candles for a fete day, stood upright on a mossy spruce. All the trees showed a green film of moss on that side of the trunk nearest the house, as if a visible sign of their communion with it. The leaves of the deciduous trees, in their newly opened freshness, were of a gloss unimpeachable and pure. Beyond the trees, the meadows, moist and verdant; the paddock, where a group of leggy foals stood in awe of their own newness; the apple orchard, where the pinkish-white blossoms were falling with every breeze to the dark red earth, like flowers before the feet of June, young Summer’s bride. The stream, its surface broken in a thousand sunny splinters, hastened down into the ravine, where only the trunks of the silver birches stood bright against the shade. A mourning dove uttered its pensive, wooing call.

  Finch threw out his arms and drew the beauty of it into his soul. He sent his spirit out of the window to meet the morning. His spirit returned to him, laden with the morning, heavy with the sweetness of it, as a bee with honey.

  He thought of his last day in this room, its humiliation. He had dreaded the homecoming as ignominious. But Piers had not been present to jeer at him. He had crept back, scarcely noticed, under the screen of Eden’s illness. Only Uncle Nicholas had growled, under his moustache: “Well, young man, I hope you’re ashamed of yourself. What you need is a good hiding.”

  And Renny, overhearing, had remarked, curtly: “If it hadn’t been for the kid we’d never have found Eden.”

  Cantankerous, magnificent Renny!

  Behind him he heard a light step. He turned and saw Wakefield in the doorway. The dignity of his bearing, the gravity of his small countenance, showed him to be in a mood which Finch detested. A darned patronizing mood that expressed itself in the most high-flown words at his command, words garnered from his conversations with Aunt Augusta and Mr. Fennel.

  “I see,” he said, enunciating clearly, “that you have repented you of your folly.”

  Finch hung on to himself. It was hard to keep his hands off the insufferable little fellow, but he must. A bad way that would be for reinstating himself. He wondered why Wakefield had no respect for him. Other small boys had for their seniors. In the house of one of his school friends he had seen an inquisitive young brother dismissed with a mere nod of the head.

  No harm in trying that on Wake, a
nyhow. He suspended the brush he had begun to use on his hair, and gave his head a peremptory jerk toward the door. The expression of his face, reflected in the looking glass, was one of cold authority.

  Wakefield did not move. He said: “I knew full well that you would repent you of your folly.”

  Finch threw down the hairbrush and bore down upon him. But you could not really hurt anything as fragile as this youngster. Why, his bones were only gristle! Finch flung him over his shoulder and ran down the stairs with him hanging limp and unresisting. But the instant Wake was set on his feet in the hall, his cock-a-hoop air returned, and he deftly placed himself at the head of the procession now entering the dining room.

  “Aha!” cried Grandmother, showing every tooth, “that’s what I like to hear! Young lads racketing about!”

  They were around the table, with the portraits of Captain Philip Whiteoak in his uniform and old Adeline in her heyday smiling down on them. Behind their chairs glided the form of Rags, his expression that queer mixture of servility and impudence, his shiny black coat, dragged on in haste at the last minute, very much up at the nape.

  There they were, consuming large slices of underdone roast beef; potatoes roasted in the pan; turnips smothered in brown gravy; asparagus weltering in drawn butter; a boiled pudding with hard sauce; and repeated cups of hot tea. Alayne was touched because they had remembered that she did not eat pudding. There were jam tarts for her. “Baked in the little shell pattypans you like!” Grandmother pointed out. And there was sherry to drink, too. A New York clubman would have paid a pretty price for such sherry as this. How old Adeline liked it! She threw back her head, her cap-ribbons trembling, to drain the last drop. Renny whispered: “I’ll send some of this sherry to Fiddler’s Hut for Eden. Some good porter would buck him up, too. Do him more good than milk.” Alayne’s thoughts flew on swift wings of compassion to Eden, stretched on the sofa in the next room. She had had a glimpse of him as she passed, covered with a magenta crocheted afghan. Confusing for him, she thought, all this robust conversation. Nicholas, Ernest, their mother, were all talking at once. About food. What Ernest had had to eat in New York; what Nicholas had eaten in London, twenty-five years ago. What Grandmother had eaten in India, seventy-five years ago. Augusta, in contralto tones, extolled the flavour of English strawberries, lettuce, and cauliflower. There was an altercation among Augusta, Renny, and Wakefield as to whether or not the child should eat the fat of his beef. Only Finch was silent, eating as though he would never get enough.

  Sunshine, coming through the yellow blinds, bathed them all as in the thunderous glow of a Turner sunset. The salient features of each were mordantly emphasized. Grandmother’s cap, her eyebrows, her nose; Augusta’s fringe, the carriage of her head; Nicholas’s shoulders, the sardonic droop of his moustache; Ernest’s long white hands; Wake’s glowing dark eyes; Kenny’s red head, his Court nose. And in the essence of them there was no conformation to a standard. Life had not hammered them, planed them, fitted them to any pattern. After the wry wit of the talk to which she had listened, rather than taken part in, at dinners of the past year, all this gusto, this spendthrift tossing away of energy! But perhaps they were right. Perhaps they had some secret which others had lost or were losing. They did not save themselves. They were built on a wasteful plan. Like shouldering trees, they thrust down their roots, thrust out their limbs, strove with each other, battled with the elemental. They saw nothing strange or unlikely in themselves. They were the Whiteoaks of Jalna. There was nothing more to be said.

  XV

  VAUGHANLANDS

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON Renny and Wakefield descended the slope that led from the lawn into the ravine, crossed the bridge over the stream, and reascended the opposite slope, along the winding diversities of the continued path which led them, at last, to an open oak wood, the property of Maurice Vaughan. The house itself stood in a hollow, and so thick was the foliage of the surrounding trees, following a month of rains, that only the smoke from one of its chimneys, rising in a delicate blue cloud, was visible to them, though they could hear the sound of a woman’s voice singing inside.

  A field of corn lay between them and the lawn. In it a village boy stood beating indifferently on a pan to ward off the crows. The crows circled above him or fed at a short distance, with derisive side glances in his direction. Walking among them were two white gulls, flown all the way from the lake for this inland recreation.

  The boy was startled by having his pan and stick snatched from him. “Think you’ll frighten crows by those feeble taps?” demanded Renny “Listen to this!” He created a terrible din, not far from the boy’s ear. The crows rose straight in the air, screaming. The gulls, flying low abreast, sailed in the direction of the lake.

  The brothers walked on, the little one clutching his elder’s sleeve. By the time they had reached the gap in the cedar hedge which bordered the lawn, the beating on the tin had grown faint, and did not noticeably oppose the full clear tones of the woman’s voice, singing inside the house.

  “Renny!” Wakefield tugged at the sleeve. “Why did Piers bring Pheasant and Mooey over here, just when Eden and Alayne have come?”

  “Because Piers can’t abide Eden.”

  “Why?”

  “You couldn’t understand.”

  “Did Piers and Pheasant come over here so that Eden could come home and be nursed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought Meggie couldn’t abide Pheasant.”

  “Well, she’s made friends with her for Piers’s sake—and Eden’s.”

  Wakefield’s eyes, though dark with thought, were troubled. “I find it hard,” he said, “to keep things straight in my mind.”

  “You don’t need to. The less you think about them the better.”

  “But I’ve got my own ideas, just the same.” His tone was truculent.

  “You’ve too many ideas. You’re too inquisitive.” Wakefield raised his eyes, with the perfect touch of appeal in them. “I suppose it’s my delicate health,” he said. How well he gauged his elder! He was drawn against his side as they went into the house.

  No one in the dim parlour. The sitting-room, the dining room, empty. Still, the sweet, full woman’s voice flooded the house. They went up the stairs. Wakefield ran along the hallway, knocked on a door, and, almost immediately, opened it.

  The room discovered was splashed with sunshine coming through the swaying branches of trees. It was bright with highly glazed, gaily coloured chintz. A vase holding daffodils stood on the centre table. On the table also was a silver tray bearing a teapot, a plate of scones, and a small piece of honey in the comb. Meg was enjoying one of her little lunches.

  “Ha!” said Renny. “Nibbling as usual, eh?” He bent and kissed her.

  Wakefield pressed against her back, holding his hands over her eyes. “Guess who it is!”

  She drew down his hands till they lay on her breast, and turned her face back to his. They kissed. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “I taste honey on you!” He looked greedily at the square of honeycomb.

  “I had no appetite for dinner,” she exclaimed, “so I began to feel a little faint, and had this brought to me. I don’t really want it. You may finish it, Wake, darling.”

  He took the honeycomb in his fingers and began to devour it, Meg regarding him with indulgence, Renny with affectionate concern.

  Renny asked: “Do you think that is wholesome?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s a natural food. It couldn’t possibly hurt him.” “To think,” she exclaimed, “that you have been in New York since I saw you last!” She regarded him as if she expected to find something exotic in him. “What you must have seen! But before any of that, tell me about Eden. This is a great shock. Is he very ill ? If he is in danger, I don’t know how to bear it. Poor lamb. And he was always so well. Everything started with that wretched marriage of his. The day he first brought that girl to Jalna, I saw trouble ahead.” She screwed up her courage. “Renny, is Eden going to—” She glanced at th
e child. He must not hear anything terrible.

  “Well, he has a spot on one lung. He’s very thin… I think he isn’t quite so ill as that doctor made out. But he’ll need a lot of nursing.” He thought: “What will she say when I tell her that Alayne is here?” He continued: “Everything depends on fresh air and good nursing.”

  Meg exclaimed: “I should be the one to nurse him! But there’s Baby. I can’t expose her.”

  He reckoned with her indolence. “What about this ’mother’s help’—whatever you call her—couldn’t she look after the youngster?”

  Meg moved on her chair to confront him. Her short, plump arm lay across the table, her milk-white sensuously curved hand drooping over the edge. Her voice was reproachful. “Trust my baby to Minny Ware! She’s a featherbrain. One never knows what she will do next! Sometimes I wish I had never seen her.”

  They were silent a moment. The voice of the singer came cooingly from a distant room. He could not tell Meg yet that Alayne was at Jalna.

  She said: “It seems terrible to me to banish Eden to the Hut.”

  “It isn’t safe to have him in the house with the boys.” “And Finch is back! What a frightful responsibility life is for some people! While others… That is what takes my appetite—worry.”

  “Finch will be all right, now… He’s a queer young devil. You can’t get at him.”

  She observed, with complacence: “Finch would never have run away if I had been at home. Aunt Augusta simply cannot understand boys.”

  Renny was listening to the voice. He asked: “Is that girl always singing?”

  His sister nodded, as though in confirmation of inexpressible things. She bent toward him, whispering: “You know, it’s going to be terribly trying for me having Pheasant here. Nothing but my love for Piers would induce me. She made up to Minny Ware at once. Already they are talking together in corners… I ignore them.”

  A heavy step was heard in the hall. A knuckle touched the panel of the door.

  Meg’s smooth brow showed a pucker, but she murmured: “Come in.”