Mr. Fennel was about to close the eyes. The heavy lids resisted. Renny caught his arm.
“Don’t close her eyes! I won’t believe she’s dead! She can’t have died like that!”
He put his hand inside her tea gown and felt her heart. It was still. He brought a mirror and held it before her nostrils. It bright surface was undimmed. But he would not have her eyes closed.
Soon Dr. Drummond came and pronounced her dead, and himself closed her eyelids. He was an old man, and had brought all the younger Whiteoaks, from Meg down, into the world.
Ernest rose then and came to her, trembling. He stroked her face, and kissed it, sobbing: “Mama… Mama.”… But Nicholas sat motionless as a statue.
Renny could not stay in that house. He would go to Fiddler’s Hut and tell Eden and Alayne what had happened. He flung out through the side door into the grassy yard where the old brick oven stood. A waddling procession of ducks cocked their roguish eyes at him; Mrs. Wragge and the kitchenmaid peered after him with curiosity from a basement window. Galloping colts in the paddock came whimpering to the fence as he hurried past. Red and white cows in the pasture, heavy-uddered, turned their tolerant gaze after him. He entered the orchard. The days were already shortening. The red sun showed between the black trunks of the trees. He noticed that all colours were intensified into a sombre brightness. Little rosy mushrooms were resetted here and there in the lush grass. The orchard fence was smothered in goldenrod.
Between the orchard and the “old orchard” lay a field of potatoes. Old Binns was digging them and laying them in shallow ridges on the black loam. In that long day he had done perhaps a half-day’s work. He leaned on his spade and shouted: “Hi! Mr. Whiteoak! Hi!”
Renny stopped.
“Yes?”
“What do you s’pose be here now?”
“’What?”
“Blight. Blight be here.”
Renny threw up his hand.
“Put down that spade!” he shouted. “No more work here today!” He strode on.
No spade should stir the surface of the land she had loved. That land must lie quiet, mourning for her today, and tomorrow, and the next day.
Old Binns watched Renny disappear into the glowing density of the old orchard. He was aghast. Never in his life before had he had such an order. He must be going to lose his job! He thrust his spade deep into the soil and turned up three potatoes. Feverishly he thrust and grubbed for the potatoes. Never before had he worked with such vehemence. He kept muttering angrily to himself: “Blight be here, anyhow. Dang him!”
The old orchard, unpruned since a decade, displayed a fantastic exuberance of foliage. The branches of the apple trees, which later would be weighted with ripe fruit, never to be garnered, swept to the ground. Among them grew clumps of green hazel and sumach, with its rose-red plumes. Creepers of various kinds had caught at the lowest boughs and clambered up them, as though striving to drag the trees themselves to the earth. A discarded mowing machine was hidden beneath a rank growth of wild grapevine, its presence never to be guessed. As Renny moved along the path, wild rabbits bounded from his way, and heavy moths sometimes blundered against his face. As he neared the cottage he heard the spring talking secretly among the grasses.
Doors and windows of the cottage stood open, but there was no sound of voices. He went to the front door and looked in. Alayne was writing at a table, and Eden lay on the sofa, a cigarette between his lips and a book drooping from his hand. His face and body had filled out, his cheeks were brown, but Alayne looked pale and more slender. They had not heard Renny come up, and to him the room and its occupants, in the intense sunset glow, appeared unreal as in a tableau. It seemed unreal, fantastic, that they should be sitting unmoved, aware of nothing.
He made some incoherent sound, and, as though a spell had been broken, they both looked up. The pallor of Alayne’s cheeks, which had seemed intensified by the reddish light, appeared now to be touched into flame. Eden smiled, and his smile froze. He started up.
“Renny! What’s the matter?”
Alayne too rose.
He tried to speak to them, but no words would come. He stood silent, leaning against the doorpost, his face contorted into a forbidding grimace.
The two stood petrified, until Eden got out: “For Christ’s sake, Renny, speak to us! Tell us what’s wrong?”
He looked at them, filled with a strange antagonism for them, and then said, harshly: “She’s dead… Gran… I thought I should let you know.”
Avoiding their eyes, his face still contorted, he turned hastily down the path and disappeared into the pine woods.
XIX
JALNA IN MOURNING
THERE she lies, the old woman, in her coffin; wreaths, sprays, crosses of sweet flowers, all about her. She has been bathed, embalmed, dressed in her best black velvet dress. Her hands are crossed on her breast, but they have left her only her wedding ring, worn to a mere thread of gold. If one could see inside the ring, one might decipher the words “Adeline, Philip, 1848.” She wears her best lace cap that has long been put by in a lavender-scented box awaiting this occasion. On a silver plate on the coffin is engraved the date of her birth, her death, her name, including her Christian names— Adeline Honora Bridget. All has been done for her that it is possible to do. All is arranged, perfected for her burial. She has been on this earth a long time, but now she is to be put into it for an infinitely longer period.
There is an ineffable air of dignity, of pomp, about her. She looks like an ancient empress, with that faintly contemptuous smile on her lips, that carven nose. She might have lived as the centre of court intrigues, instead of having passed three-quarters of her life in this backwater, with only her family to lord it over. Ireland and India, two countries the names of which begin with “I,” have left their mark on her. Her life has been lived, dominated by “I.”
At her head and her feet stand tall silver candelabra bearing lighted candles. Finch placed them there, when he stole downstairs to his last meeting with her, after the rest were all in bed. His gaunt young face was that of a mystic as he glided about her, touching each waxen column into flame.
Augusta, in the morning, ordered them to be taken away, exclaiming against such popish practices, but Nicholas said: “Let them be. Pomp suits her.”
By ones, twos, and threes her descendants came to mourn over their progenitress. Nicholas remained by her side all day, refusing food, his leonine head dishevelled, one end of his grey moustache caught in his teeth. Ernest wandered in and out, tall and elegant in his black frock coat. He escorted visitors to the casket, drawing their attention to the chiselled features, the beautiful expression of his Mama. He whispered the word a great many times to himself those days, for soon she would be gone, and he would have no Mama. All the sarcastic things she had ever said to him were obliterated from his mind, and only the times when she had been kind remained. He remembered how she had been dependent on him for certain things, and tears ran down his cheeks.
It was not so with Augusta. The contemptuous smile on her mother’s lips seemed to be especially directed toward her. Every now and again some humorous jibe from those lips would crop up in her mind. She kept remembering the last of them: how, when she had been dressing her for the last tea, she had remarked: “You look nice and bright this afternoon, Mama,” and her mother had returned: “I wish I could say the same for you!”
Augusta recalled happenings of her childhood. They were clearer to her than the events of the past year. She remembered the time of her marriage, when on the eve of her wedding day her mother had said to her: “I don’t think I need give you any advice, my dear. Buckley’s not much past your shoulder. You needn’t be afraid of him!” Mama could remember his name quite easily then; but once he had come into the title, it had always been Bunkley or Bilgeley or Bunkum!
Augusta reproached herself for recalling such little frictions at a time like this. Her sorrow was real, but her memory was very uncomfortable… She led Wa
kefield to the coffin. It was his first sight of death. She said, in impressive tones: “Look at her long, Wakefield. Try to impress her face on your mind. She was a very wonderful woman.”
The little boy was awestruck. He felt dizzy from the heavy scent of flowers. He gazed long at the calm face, at the shapely old hands folded in resignation.
“But, Aunt,” he exclaimed, his clear treble sounding incongruous in that room, “she looks so nice! Isn’t it a pity to bury her?”
Her old friends—there were not many left—agreed that they had never seen a corpse look so natural. Down in the basement Rags declared to his wife and the kitchenmaid, and a little gathering of workers from the stables, the farm, and Vaughanlands: “Bless me, if the old lady don’t look more natural than ’erself!”
What of Renny? Like one of the horses among which he spent so much of his time, his feeling toward death was one of almost animal alarm. He drew away, shivering, from the sinister presence that shadowed the house.
After one look at the face of the dead woman, he left the room and did not return to it until the hour of the funeral. Death, as he had seen it during the War, had not affected him greatly. He had been overseas when his father and his stepmother had died. This experience was to him terrifying. He left the arrangements for the funeral to Augusta, Ernest, and Piers. In one matter only he took an interest, the choosing of the pallbearers. These, he decided, must be the four eldest grandsons. Eden expostulated, he was not strong enough yet to undertake such a thing. Alayne thought, and said with some vehemence, that it would be wrong, impossible for him to tax his strength so. But Renny was adamant. Eden looked to him almost as well as ever; he should and must take his place among his brothers to bear the body of their grandmother to her grave. He went to Fiddler’s Hut, and the three sat about the table talking excitedly, his red hair in an unkempt crest, his lean narrow face flushed, the sharp lines of his face set against opposition. Eden gave in.
The day of the funeral broke infinitely lovely. There had been a heavy dew, which lay like a sparkling veil across the lawn. It was a still day, except for the chatter of small birds in the evergreens along the drive. There was a tender aloofness about the day, as though summer hesitated, drawing a deep breath before departing. Old Adeline had loved such a day as this. If she had been living, she would have assuredly taken one of her little walks as far as the gate, supported by her sons. But instead she was to take her last ride. During her lifetime she had consistently refused to get into a motor car, but she had asked to have a motor hearse at her funeral. “I like to think,” she had said, “that I’ll have a ride behind a motor instead of a horse before I’m laid away. No one can say that I was old-fashioned.”
Wakefield was awed to see all the family, even to Finch, in deep black. He would have liked a black suit himself, but he had to be content with the black band that Meggie stitched on the sleeve of his grey Norfolk jacket. He felt very conscious of this badge of mourning, very dignified and aloof. He greatly wished that he were big enough to be one of the pallbearers.
The funeral cortege was almost ready to leave the door. The four who were to carry the coffin stood shoulder to shoulder, Eden and Piers near enough to hear each other breathing! Renny had had trouble with Piers before he could persuade him to be, even for so short a time, near Eden. But he had overridden them both. There they were beside him, and he was head of the clan. Short prayers were said by Mr. Fennel. The pallbearers raised the coffin to their shoulders.
The hearse moved slowly from the door, followed by a car in which rode the four brothers. This in turn was followed by one in which were Augusta, Nicholas, Ernest, and Mr. Fennel. Next the Vaughans and Wakefield. Pheasant had made an excuse of some baby ailment of Mooey’s to remain at home. She peeped through a curtain above and saw Eden’s fair head shining among his brothers’, and she made little moaning sounds, remembering her short and sultry passion for him. It had nearly wrecked her life and Piers’s, but tragedy had been averted—she was safe, safe with Piers and her baby!
Alayne also had stayed behind. She had gone for one long look at that aloof old face, which indeed had always looked kindly on her. Shrewd as old Adeline had been, Alayne felt sure that she had never guessed that she had ceased to love Eden, any more than she could be convinced that she was not an American heiress.
Alayne had left the house in a mood of deep depression. She had felt, not the aversion of a sensitive animal from the presence of death, as Renny had, but a profound shrinking from the mourning of the inanimate Jalna. It had seemed to her that the solid walls had drawn nearer to enclose that body, that the ceiling had lowered to shelter it, that the very doors had narrowed to delay its passage from thence… Leaving, she had looked back at it from the edge of the lawn, and it seemed to her that the whole house had shrunken into itself with grief!
After the chief mourners there followed the friends of the family, and many people from the surrounding villages and countryside in motors and old-fashioned buggies, a long procession. Here was the funeral of one whom the oldest of them could remember, from their earliest days, as a married woman. A landmark was gone. Not a tree, not the steeple of a church, but a living, dominating being! Many of the mourners had not seen her for years, but her tall form, her rust-red hair, her piercing brown eyes, were impressed on their memories forever. Every now and again some story of her temper or her idiosyncrasies would float about. Today it was remembered how until the last year she had never—or almost never—missed a morning service in the grey stone church built by Captain Whiteoak, driving there in her shabby phaeton behind the two stout bays. And, though she might have been close-fisted enough in some ways, she had each Christmas given a present to every child in her own village of Evandale, built on what was once part of the estate of Jalna. In her last years she had depended on Ernest to buy these presents for her. Next Christmas the children would miss that.
So, though she had been almost as immovable as a tree, her reputation grew, year by year, as girth is added to a tree. Those who had come to pay respect to her remains felt that they were taking part in a momentous and climacteric occasion.
To stout Hodge, who had driven her phaeton for the past thirty years, her death had been a tragedy. The meaning of his life was gone. No longer would he groom the bays—each nearing thirty—to satin sleekness, on a Sunday morning, polishing their jangling harness to a bright finish. No longer wash down the creaking wheels of the phaeton or put on his tight coachman’s coat with the velvet collar. His dignity was gone. He was nothing but an ageing stableman.
He had come to Nicholas with tears on his cheeks, and said: “I suppose, sir, I’ll never need to bring out the old phaeton again… It does seem hard.”
And Nicholas had growled: “My brother and I will use the phaeton for a long time yet, I hope,” Nicholas would have preferred to go to church in a motor car, now that the widow’s veil of his mother would no longer dominate the phaeton, but one could not hurt Hodge. He was the one old servant left. The others came and went, and had no old-fashioned pride in their work.
Renny, in the car with his brothers, was thinking of the phaeton. He was remembering how his grandmother delighted in having her horses possess the middle of the road, thereby preventing him or any other motorist from passing. But him in particular. Yes, she had liked to get the best of him. God, but she was game!
He wished she might have seen the number who had turned out to do her honour. It seemed too bad that she could never know. And the flowers! A car filled with them. He liked that wreath of roses and carnations from the Hunt Club… He looked his brothers over. It was good to see Eden fit again. A summer at Jalna was bound to do it. Good, too, to see him and Piers riding in the same car. It had taken some willpower to bring that about. He wondered if it were possible to bridge that chasm. He was afraid not. Wives brought into the family had a way of messing things up. A good thing probably that he had never married. His mind dwelt, for one aching moment, on the thought of Alayne. The funer
al procession became a phantom procession. She was in his arms. He closed his eyes, giving himself up to the desire that tore at his heart.
When he opened them again, they rested on Finch, who was sitting between Piers and him, his long legs very much in the way. Finch had been in a detached, almost hallucinated state of mind since his grandmother’s death, but now, of all times, with his face exposed to the gaze of Renny and Piers, he had broken down. He was giving way to spasmodic sobs; even the frequent wiping of his eyes on a large folded handkerchief could not keep them dry. Poor young devil, Renny thought, and he put his hand on the boy’s bony knee, at which he cried the more. He felt that Piers was regarding him with contempt, but Piers did not see him. His eyes were fixed on Eden’s back, before him on the front seat with Wright.
The funeral procession, phantom momentarily to Renny, was nothing but phantom to Piers. The one reality was Eden, sitting before him. Eden well again. Eden ready for more mischief. Eden, whom he longed to beat with his fists into insensibility. Except for that one glimpse of him by the paddock, he had not seen him since that summer day two years ago on the night of which young Finch had come white-faced to tell him that Eden and Pheasant were in the birch wood together. If only Eden had not got away that night! If only he could have had it out with him! Now, he supposed, they would never have it out.
Eden was conscious of Piers’s eyes on the back of his head. He would have given a good deal to know what was in Piers’s mind. Melodramatic, blood-and-thunder thoughts, no doubt. He smiled a little, as he imagined them, but he shifted uneasily in his seat. He pitied himself, rather. Here he was, on his first outing of the entire summer, and it a funeral! Had been forced, dragged into it, and into a proximity with Piers that, in spite of his cynicism, made his nerves feel shaky. He could not feel as the others did about his grandmother. They had seemed to expect her to go on living forever. She had had a longer innings than he would ever have. He ached all over, had an uncomfortable, trembling sensation, after the effort of carrying his share of her coffin. Alayne had been against it. She had known he wasn’t fit for it. And ahead of him lay the journey from the hearse into the church, and from the church to the graveside. He wished that he had sat behind and looked at Piers’s back instead of having Piers glaring, in that early Victorian way, at his.
08 Whiteoaks of Jalna Page 27