08 Whiteoaks of Jalna

by Mazo de La Roche

  This was the strangest room he had ever been in. The drawing-room had seemed strange when Grandmother lay there in her coffin with the lighted candles about her and the presence of death making the air heavy, but this was stranger still. For, though the air was heavy as death, it was pregnant with the life of battling emotions.

  Nicholas still sat in the corner with his pipe. He held it in his teeth, and stared at Renny and Wakefield as they came into the room without seeming to see them. He stroked the back of Nip, his terrier, with a large trembling hand, and seemed to be unaware of his presence also.

  Ernest was rubbing the nails of one hand against the palm of the other, as though he had never stopped, but now he did stop, and began to tap his teeth with them, as though all the polishing had been leading up to that. Augusta looked more natural than the others, but what disturbed Wake was that her eyes, fixed on Ernest, were full of tears. He had never seen tears in them before.

  The eyes of Piers, Maurice, and even the infant, Patience, were on Finch, and Finch looked more miserable than Wakefield had ever seen anyone look in all his life. Certainly he had not fallen heir to a fortune!

  “But who?” he entreated, in his penetrating treble. “Who?”

  All the eyes, dark and light, intense and mournful, turned on him. Words froze on his lips. He began to cry.

  “No wonder the child weeps,” said Augusta, regarding him gloomily. “Even he is conscious of the outrage of it.”

  Nicholas took his pipe from his mouth, tapped it over the hearth, then blew it out with a whistling sound. He said nothing, but Piers broke out: “I always knew he had a yellow streak. But how he accomplished this—”

  “My mother,” declared Augusta, “must have been demented. Let Mr. Patton say what he will—”

  “Old ninny,” said Piers, “to allow a woman of that age to play ducks and drakes with her money! It’s a case for the courts. We must never stand for it. Are you going to let yourself be done out of what is really yours, Renny?”

  “Really his I” cried Augusta.

  “Yes, really his I What about those other wills?” Augusta’s glazed eyes flashed away the tears. “What of the will in which all was left to your Uncle Ernest?”

  Ernest suddenly seemed to feel weak. He sat down and twisted his fingers between his knees, and his underlip between his teeth.

  “That was years ago!” retorted Piers.

  “She was sane then. She must have been quite mad when she made this will.”

  Ernest held up his hand. “Don’t! Don’t! I can’t bear to hear Mama spoken of so!”

  “But, Ernest, the money should be yours!”

  “I can do without the money.”

  Piers glared at Augusta. “I don’t see why the blazes you insist that the money should come to Uncle Ernest! What about Uncle Nick? What about Renny? Renny’s had the whole family to keep for years!”

  “Shut up!” growled Renny, savagely.

  “How dare you insult us?” cried Augusta. “This is my brothers’ home! I have been here to look after my mother. What could she have done without me, I should like to know?”

  “Kept up an establishment of her own! She’d plenty of money!”

  Nicholas pointed with his pipe at Piers. “Say one word more!” he thundered. He struggled to rise, but could not. Ernest sprang up, trembling, and went to him. Grasping his arm, he pulled him to his feet. Augusta also went to him, and the three stood together facing the younger generation.

  “I repeat what I said,” said Piers.

  Renny interrupted: “It doesn’t matter what he says! I’ve never grudged—”

  Nicholas exclaimed, sardonically: “Well, now, that’s handsome of you! Very handsome of you! You haven’t grudged us a roof! Our meals! We ought to feel grateful. Eh, Augusta? Eh, Ernest?”

  Renny’s face went white. “I don’t understand you. You purposely put me in the wrong!”

  Augusta drew back her head with an almost snakelike movement. “If 1 had ever known! If I had ever dreamed! But, never mind, I shall be going back to England soon.”

  “For God’s sake, be fair!” cried Renny. “Have I ever acted as though I didn’t want any one of you here? I have always wanted you. I always wanted Gran!”

  Piers burst out: “That’s the trouble! Renny’s been too generous. And now this is the thanks he gets!”

  “You to talk!” snarled Nicholas. “You who brought your wife here, when everyone was against it!”

  “Yes, and who was she?” thrust Augusta.

  Nicholas proceeded: “And what did she do? Made a little hell here!”

  “Eden would have been all right,” cried Ernest, “if only she had let him alone!”

  Piers strode toward them, his hands clenched, but Meg interrupted with: “Everyone talks so selfishly! As though his side of the question was the only one. What about me? Put off with an old India shawl and a big gold watch and chain no one ever carries the like of now!”

  Augusta cried, passionately: “My mother’s watch was a valued possession to her! She thought you, as the only granddaughter, should have it, and those India shawls are priceless nowadays!”

  “Yes! I’ve seen Boney make his bed on this one!”

  Piers was trying to shoulder himself from Kenny’s restraining hand. “Do you expect me,” he muttered, “to let them say such things about Pheasant? I’ll murder someone before I’ve done!”

  Renny said, with composure, though he was still white: “Don’t be a fool! The old people are all wrought up. They don’t know what they’re saying. If you care a straw for me, Piers, hang on to yourself!”

  Piers bit his lip and scowled down at his boots.

  Meg’s voice was heard again. “When I think of the lovely things she had! I could have borne her giving the ruby ring to Pheasant, if she’d treated me fairly afterward. But a watch and chain—and a shawl that Boney’d made a nest in!”

  “Margaret!” thundered Augusta.

  Meg’s face was a mask of obstinacy. “What I want to know is who the ruby ring really belongs to!”

  “Belonged to, you mean, before your grandmother gave it away,” corrected Maurice.

  “I think,” said Ernest, “it was the one she intended for Alayne.”

  “As though Alayne needed one of my grandmother’s rings!” Meg’s mask of obstinacy was broken by temper.

  Renny said, with a chest vibration in his voice “Each grandson’s wife is to have a piece of jewellery, or the grandson a piece for his prospective wife. As I understand the will, Aunt Augusta and I are to make the choice. Isn’t that so, Aunt?”

  Augusta nodded, judicially. “Pheasant already has her bequest.”

  “She has nothing of the sort!” said Piers, vehemently. “The ruby ring was a present entirely outside the will.”

  “I agree,” said Renny.

  A sultry lull felt on the room for a moment, in which could be heard the ticking of the clock, the heavy breathing of Nicholas, and the loud tap of a woodpecker on a tree near the open window. The momentary silence was broken by Augusta’s contralto tones.

  “The whole situation is disgraceful,” she said. “I’ve never known such insensibility. Here I and my brothers are put off with not very valuable personal possessions of my mother’s, and expected to be content while all the squabbling goes on among the rest of you over her jewels.”

  Nicholas added fuel to the flame: “And the memory of our mother is insulted by one nephew who says she sponged on Renny—”

  “And we, too,” put in Ernest.

  Nicholas continued, gnawing his grey moustache: “While another nephew benevolently tells us that he’s never grudged us shelter and our meals!”

  “If you’re going to bring that up again,” Renny exclaimed, despairingly, “I shall get out, and that’s flat!”

  Maurice Vaughan said, heavily: “What we should all do is to get down to brass tacks, if possible, and find out why your grandmother did such an extraordinary thing as to leave all her mon
ey to Finch.”

  Augusta reared her head in his direction. “My mother was deranged—there is no doubt of it.”

  “Have you anything to go on?” asked Vauhan. “Had she been acting strangely, in your opinion?”

  “I’ve noticed a difference.”

  Meg asked eagerly: “What sort of things, Auntie?”

  “For one thing, I overheard her several times talking to herself.”

  Talking to herself! The phrase produced a strange tremor in the room. Those in the corners appeared to draw toward the centre, as though their intense individualism were about to be merged.

  “Ha!” said Vaughan. “Did you notice anything singular in what she said? Did she ever mention Finch’s name?”

  Augusta pressed her finger to her brow. “M—yes. Yes, she did! She muttered something once about Finch and a Chinese goddess.”

  Nicholas leaned forward, clasping his gouty knee. “Did you ask her what she meant?”

  “Yes. I said: ’Mama, whatever do you mean?’ and she said: That lad has guts, though you mightn’t think it!’… I did wish she would not use such coarse expressions!”

  Vaughan looked at the faces about him. “I think that is sufficient proof. Do what you like about an appeal, but I think no one who was sane would ramble like that.”

  Nicholas rolled his grey-crested head from side to side. He growled: “That’s nothing. If anyone could hear my mutterings to myself, I might easily be considered dotty.”

  Piers flashed: “You may be, but the rest of us aren’t! It’s a case for the courts!”

  “Yes, indeed!” chimed Meg. “We might easily arrange to have the money divided equally.”

  Augusta cocked her Queen Alexandra fringe. “If it could be done—it’s really the just way out of the difficulty.”

  Ernest raised his long face from gnawing his forefinger. “It seems to me,” he faltered, “that I’ve never known Mama brighter than she was that last day.”

  Meg exclaimed, ironically: “If you call it bright, giving away her most valuable ring, on a mere whim!”

  “For the Lord’s sake,” shouted Piers, “try to get your mind off that ring! One would think it represented a fortune!”

  “It quite probably does,” returned his sister suavely. “What can you know of the value of jewels—you, a crude boy who has been nowhere, seen nothing?”

  Piers’s eyes grew prominent. “I should like to know what you’ve seen and done?” he inquired, sarcastically. “You spent nearly twenty years trying to make up your mind to marry your next-door neighbour,”

  Meg burst into tears, and the baby, hearing her mother cry, put her kid slippers in the air and wept with all her might.

  Above the noise Maurice called to Piers: “I won’t have you insulting my wife!”

  “Make her let my wife alone then!” retorted Piers. Augusta boomed: “Is it our duty, I wonder, to make an appeal? To settle the matter in court?”

  “What’s that you say?” asked Nicholas. “I can’t hear you for the noise those girls are making!”

  “I said I wondered if we should go to law about it.”

  The sound of crying ceased as suddenly as it had begun. All the heads in the room—they seemed to Finch, sitting guiltily on his ottoman, to have swollen to the size of balloons—turned, as though drawn by a magnet, facing Renny. It was one of those volcanic moments when the entire family shouldered all responsibility upon him. The faces, which had been distorted with emotion, gradually smoothed out as though each had inhaled some numbing incense, and an almost ceremonial hush fell on the room. Renny, the chieftain, was to speak. Goaded, harried, he was to give expression to the sentiments of the clan.

  He stood, his hands resting on the table, his red hair raised into a crest as though distraught, and said, in his rather metallic voice: “We shall do no such thing! We’ll settle our affairs in our own way without any intervention from outsiders. I had rather give up Jalna than take Gran’s will into court! As to her sanity—sane or insane, her money was hers to do what she liked with! I believe she was perfectly sane. I think I never knew a better brain than hers. All her life she knew what she wanted to do—and did it. And if this last act of hers is a bitter pill for some of us, all we can do is to swallow it, and not get cockeyed fighting over it. Imagine the newspaper articles! ’Descendants of Centenarian at War over Will’! How should we like that?”

  “Horrible’.”said Ernest.

  “No, no, no. It would never do,” muttered Nicholas, indistinctly.

  “Newspapers—outsiders gossiping!” Augusta gasped. “I never could bear that!”

  “But still—” wavered Meg.

  Piers said: “You are the one most concerned, Renny. If you’re willing to take it lying down—”

  Nicholas heaved himself about in his chair and looked sombrely at Piers. “I can’t see why you persist in regarding Renny as the one chiefly concerned. It’s very irritating. It’s impertinent.”

  Renny broke in: “That’s beside the point, Uncle Nick! The point is that we can’t go to law over Gran’s will, isn’t it?”

  Nicholas gave a proud and melancholy assent. No, they could not go to law. The wall about them must be kept intact. Their isolation must not be thrown down like a glove, to challenge notoriety. Bitter as the disappointment was, it must be borne. The Whiteoaks would not supply a heading for a column in any of the tawdry newspapers of the day. Gossip for the neighbourhood! Their affairs settled by a court! They were a law unto themselves.

  The temporary breach in their protective wall closed up, knitting them together, uniting them against interference. Renny had spoken, and a sigh of acquiescence, even of relief, rose from the tribe. Not one of them—not, in his heart of hearts, even Piers—wanted to go to law over the will. That would have been to acknowledge weakness, to have offered submission to a decree from outside Jalna.

  Even Maurice Vaughan felt the hypnotic spell of the family. Impossible to fight against it. Knuckle under and bear with them, that was all one could do. They raised Cain, and then they took hands and danced in a circle around the Cain they had raised. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirl-wind, but they wanted no outside labour to help garner that harvest… Maurice took his baby daughter and dandled her. She was the image of her mother. He wondered if she would have her mother’s nature. Well, she might do worse. Meggie was almost perfect. He was lucky to have got her. And the baby, too!

  Piers was standing with his back to the mantel, looking at Finch with narrowed eyes. ‘There’s one thing I think we should find out,” he said.

  He got no further, for at that moment a tap sounded on the folding doors, they were drawn apart, and the dining room was discovered, with the table set for dinner.

  Rags said, addressing Augusta: “The dinner has been ready for some time, your ladyship. You seemed so occupied that I thought I ’ad better not disturb you before.” His eyes flew about the room, his impudent nose quivered, scenting trouble.

  Augusta rose and passed her hands down her sides, smoothing her dress. She said to Renny: “Shall you ask your sister and her husband to dinner?”

  He thought: “She’s punishing me for what Piers said about her and the uncles stopping here so long. She won’t take it on herself to invite Meg and Maurice to dinner. Lord, as though there weren’t enough trouble!” Well, he would not give her the satisfaction of appearing to notice anything. He said: “Of course you two will stay to dinner.”

  “There’s Baby,” said Meg.

  “Tuck her up on the sofa. She’s all but asleep.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I had better!” Her tears overflowed again.

  Nicholas hobbled up, stiff after sitting so long in one position, and tucked his hand under her arm. “Come, come, Meggie, stop your grizzling and have a good dinner,” he rumbled. “‘More was lost at Mohacs Field.’”

  Even with old Adeline gone, they retained the air of a procession as they moved into the dining room. Nicholas first, holding by the arm plump-c
heeked Meg; next Ernest, struggling against self-pity, comforted by Augusta at his side, full of pity for him. Then Piers, Finch, and Wakefield. Finch looked as though he did not see where he was going, and when Piers jostled against him in the doorway he all but toppled over. Maurice and Renny came last.

  Maurice said, grinning: “So you’re to have the old painted bedstead! What are you going to do with it?”

  “Get into it and stay there, if this sort of thing keeps up,” returned the master of Jalna.

  He sat down at the head of his table and cast his sharp glance over the clan. Still a goodly number, even though Gran and Eden were missing. After a while young Mooey would be big enough to come to table… But Pheasant was not there. He frowned. Just then she entered timidly, and slid into her place between Piers and Finch.

  “Where have you been hiding all morning ?” asked Renny.

  “Oh, I thought I was superfluous,” she answered, trying to appear sophisticated, entirely grown up, and not at all nervous.

  Piers pressed his ankle against hers. She trembled. Was it possible that he was signalling her—telling her that Mooey was the heir? Her eyes slid toward his face. No jubilation there. A grim, half-jocular look about the firm, healthy lips. Poor little Mooey had not got the money Then who had? Her gaze, sheltered by long lashes, sought one face after another, and found no answer. Had there been a mistake? Was there perhaps no fortune after all? Under cover of the voices of Maurice and Renny, discussing the points of a two-year-old with determined cheerfulness, she whispered to Finch on her left: “For goodness’ sake, tell me, who is the lucky one?”

  His voice tame in a sepulchral whisper:

  “Me!”

  She whispered back: “There may be thousands who would believe you, but I can’t.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It is not!”

  Yet, looking into his eyes, she saw that it was. She began to laugh, silently, yet hysterically, shaking from head to foot. It was too much for Finch; he, too, shook with soundless mirth, very near to tears. The eyes of all at the table were turned on them in shocked disapproval or disgust. Finch—an indecent young ruffian. Pheasant—a hussy.