01 The Building of Jalna (15 page)

“Oh, the meanness of him!” Adeline cried. “Oh, he’d take the coppers from a dead man’s eyes! He’d skin a flea for its hide and tallow! Of what use are my brothers’ things to me or to anyone here? I’ll not send him a copper for them! Oh, I don’t forget the time when I broke off my engagement to Edward O’Donnel! Edward refused to take back his ring. He said I was to do as I liked with it. My father said it would be a disgrace for me to wear the ring and he gave me twenty pounds for it. Later I found that he had sold it for four times as much and, when I upbraided him for it, he said he had needed the money to pay off a debt of my brother, Esmond’s. He’s my favourite brother so what could I do? But, oh, what a bold brazen face my father has! He can look you in the eye and say anything.”

“He can,” agreed Philip. “Just the same I think I shall send him the check for your brothers’ things. The trunks and portmanteaux are better than one can buy here. The guns and fishing tackle can always be used. As for the clothes, I dare say we can find someone who will be glad of them.”

The next letter Adeline had from Lady Honoria told of the marriage of the youthful pair in the Chapel at Killiekeggan Castle. After careful consideration, she wrote, they had decided that Conway must make honourable amends to the girl he had wronged. Mary herself had declared that she was the possessor of a tidy fortune and investigation had proved this was true. Therefore honour and foresight would each be satisfied. Mary was a sweet, gentle girl and already the family were becoming attached to her. It would look well on the part of Philip and Adeline if they would send a handsome wedding present.

Between one thing and another the summer passed. It rolled past swiftly and pleasantly like the St. Lawrence in its summer mood. Sometimes the heat was great but the house in the Rue St. Louis was comparatively cool. How lovely the walks on the terrace in the evening, when one gossiped with one’s friends, while far below the lamps of the Lower Town twinkled and the lights of ships came out like jewels on the breast of the river. Sometimes Adeline gave a mourning thought to the ayah whose slender bones must by this time be bare of her dusky flesh. The mystery of Gussie’s doll was never cleared. Gussie herself did not repeat the word “gone.” Now she was learning to chatter in French and when she was addressed in English she would turn away her little head with an offended air. She could toddle, holding fast to Marie’s hand, and she had an enchanting way of lifting her feet high as though she were mounting a flight of stairs. Patsy O’Flynn was her slave. She loved the smell of his strong pipe and the feel of his coarse grizzled hair in her hands. Pull as she would she could not pull it out.

James Wilmott came to the house every day. Philip supplied him with the London papers which came regularly. They talked politics by the hour, disagreeing just enough to make the discussions stimulating. If they grew a little heated, Wilmott invariably made his departure, as though he could not trust himself to quarrel.

“He’s a gloomy dog!” Philip would exclaim. “And I sometimes wonder why I like him about, but I do.”

“You like him because he has brains,” returned Adeline. “He has a very good mind. I wonder that he hasn’t done more with his life.”

“He tells me he is hard up. He can’t go on living here. He is going to take up land and farm.”

“Heaven help him!”

“It’s what I should like to do.”

“Aren’t you happy here, Philip?”

“Yes, but it is more Frenchified than I had expected and there is so much in the way of parties and gossip that we might almost as well have stayed in India. There’s something in me that isn’t satisfied.” He thrust his hands into his pockets and strode up and down the room.

“Still, you have a very good time with the officers in the Fort. You have had some splendid fishing. You are going duck shooting and deer shooting in the autumn.”

Philip frowned and pushed out his lips.

“Deer
shooting
!” he exclaimed. “
Shooting
deer! For a man who has chased the stag on horseback! It’s barbarous!”

“Then don’t do it.”

He glared at her. “Well, I’ve got to do
something
, haven’t I? A chap can’t sit twiddling his thumbs all day.”

Adeline suspended her needle and glared back at him. She was making a petticoat for the coming baby. It was of fine white flannel with a design of grapes and their leaves embroidered above its scalloped hem. She was an accomplished needlewoman and nothing in the way of ornament was too much trouble for her. Indeed a simple garment did not seem to her worth the making and it was a blessing her eyes were strong, for she bent over the finest stitching by the hour in candlelight. Now she suspended her needle and remarked: —

“The trouble with you is you’re too well. If you were miserable and ill, as I am, you would be glad to sit still.”

“You are not miserable and ill,” he returned, “or you wouldn’t be, if you did not lace yourself so disgracefully.”

“Then you’d like to take me out looking like a bale of hay?”

“I’ll wager your mother never laced so, when she was in the family way.”

“She did! No one ever knew when she was going to have a baby.”

“No wonder she buried four!”

Adeline hurled the infant’s petticoat to the floor and sprang up. She looked magnificent.

At that moment Marie ushered Wilmott into the room. He threw Adeline an admiring look, took her hand, bent over it and kissed it.

“Upon my word,” exclaimed Philip, “you are getting Frenchified!”

“The fashion becomes this room and becomes Mrs. Whiteoak,” Wilmott returned, without embarrassment.

“It’s namby-pamby,” answered Philip.

“Namby-pamby!” repeated Wilmott, flushing.

“Yes,” said Philip, sulkily.

Wilmott gave a short laugh. He looked at Adeline.

“I like it,” she declared. “Manners can’t be too elegant for me.”

“Each country has its own,” said Philip. “I am satisfied to leave it at that.”

“It is much pleasanter,” she said, “to have your hand kissed than to be given a handshake that presses your rings into your fingers till you feel like screaming, as Mr. Brent does.”

She picked up her sewing and again seated herself. Wilmott took a stiff-backed chair in a corner. Philip opened the red shutters and put up the window. He looked into the street. The milk cart, drawn by a donkey, appeared. The brass can flashed in the hot sunshine. Six nuns passed close to the window, their black robes billowing, their grave faces as though carved from wax.

Philip went for his duck shooting and returned in high spirits. The sport had been excellent, the weather perfect. The St. Lawrence, now of a hyacinth blue, swept between its gorgeous banks that were tapestried in brilliant hues by the sharp night frosts of October. Adeline felt extraordinarily well as compared to the period before Augusta’s birth. She walked, she drove, she went to parties and gave parties. The friendship between her and Wilmott strengthened. He had a fine baritone voice and could accompany himself on the piano. Sometimes they sang together and, with him for support, Adeline managed to keep the tune. They would sing the songs she loved, from
The Bohemian Girl
. She would lean against the piano, looking down into his face while they sang, “I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls” or “Then You’ll Remember Me,” and wonder what his past had been. He was always reticent concerning it. He often
spoke of the necessity of his finding congenial work but made no move to do so. He left the lodgings he had taken and moved to still cheaper ones. Philip and Adeline had a suspicion that his meals were all too slight, yet he preserved his almost disdainful attitude toward food at their abundant board. He talked of purchasing land.

The sudden sharp cold, the squalls of snow that came in November, were a surprise. If November were like this, what would winter be! Philip bought Adeline a handsome sealskin sacque, richly shaded from golden brown to darkest, and of a rare fineness. A great muff accompanied it and, at the French milliner’s, she had a little toque made of the same fur. Philip declared he had never seen her handsomer. Against the background of the sealskin, the colours of her hair and eyes were brightly accented, the scarlet of her lips declared.

For himself Philip ordered to be made a greatcoat lined with mink and with a collar of mink. A wedge-shaped mink cap was worn at a jaunty angle on his fair head. Adeline could not behold him, thus clothed, without delighted laughter.

“Philip, you do look sweet!” she would exclaim and kiss him on both cheeks in the French manner she had acquired.

They both were proud of Gussie’s appearance. She stepped forth firmly in fur-trimmed boots of diminutive size, a white lamb coat and muff and a bonnet of royal-blue velvet. Marie then would place her in a snow-white sleigh with upward-sweeping runners and push her triumphantly along the steep and slippery streets. They chattered in French when Marie paused to rest.

Wilmott provided himself with no adequate protection against the cold. He must save his capital, he declared. He said he never felt the cold, though he looked half-frozen when he appeared at the Whiteoaks’ door and always went straight to the fire. Sometimes he would bring a newspaper printed in Ontario and read aloud advertisements of land for sale in that province, or accounts of its social and political life.

Philip had engaged the best English doctor in town for Adeline’s confinement but willfully, it seemed to him, she was
confined a fortnight before the expected time. The doctor had driven in his sleigh to a village twenty miles down the river to attend another accouchement when Adeline’s pains came on. She was sitting with Philip in the drawing-room playing a game of backgammon. It was late afternoon, the curtains were drawn and a fire blazed on the hearth. Boney, on his perch, was conducting a low-toned conversation with himself in Hindu. His breast was pouted, his neck sunk into his shoulders, he kept opening and closing one claw on the perch like sensitive fingers. Adeline gave a cry and put her hand to her side.

“A pain!” she cried. “A terrible pain!”

She doubled herself over the backgammon board, sending the men in all directions. Philip sprang up.

“I’ll fetch you some brandy,” he said.

He strode to the dining room and returned with a small glass of brandy. She still had her hand to her side but she was calm.

“Are you better?” he asked.

“Yes. But give me the brandy.” She sipped a little.

“It must be something you ate,” he said, eyeing her anxiously.

“Yes … those nuts … I shouldn’t touch Brazil nuts.” She took another sip.

“Come to the sofa and lie down.”

He raised her to her feet. She took a step, then gave another cry. Boney echoed it and peered inquisitively into her face.

“My God!” said Philip.

“Send for the doctor! Quick! Quick! Quick!” she cried. “The child’s coming!”

“It can’t! The doctor’s out of town.”

“Then fetch another!” She tore herself away from him, ran to the sofa and lay down, gripping her body in her hands. “Get Berthe Balestrier’s doctor! Call Marie!”

In half an hour a short, burly French doctor with a pointed black mustache stepped out of the December dark into the brightly lighted bedroom to which Marie had supported Adeline. Philip walked the floor below, filled with apprehension and distrust.

Inside of another hour a son was born to the Whiteoaks.

The celerity of this birth as compared to Gussie’s, and Adeline’s speedy recovery from it, were a miracle to her. She gave all the credit to Dr. St. Charles. She sang his praises to everyone who came to see her. She even gave him credit for the vigour of the lusty babe. Though Philip did not much like the idea, she added St. Charles to the chosen name, and, though Christmas was three weeks off, the name Noel. She was truly happy. Adeline was able to nurse Nicholas, which she had not been fitted to do for Gussie. She found an English nurse who, with the arrogance of her class, took almost complete possession of the babe. Marie however would not give up Gussie. She and the nurse established two hostile camps in the domestic quarters. The nurse had the advantage of knowing she was almost indispensable to Adeline. Marie knew that Philip reveled in her
soufflés
and meringues. When it came to having words, she had all the advantage of being able to pour forth a flood of mingled English and French, unintelligible as she grew angrier, unanswerable except by glares and head tossings. The nurse extolled her charge’s beauty. He was the handsomest infant in Quebec. He looked like the Christ Child. Marie could see no such resemblance and she, being a good Catholic, ought at least to know something of the appearance of the Blessed Infant. She told how people stopped her in the street to admire
la petite
Augusta, in her white lamb coat and blue velvet bonnet.

There was no disagreement between the parents as to the relative beauty of their children. Nicholas was indeed a fair child and, in the months that followed, he grew more attractive each week. His skin was like a milk-white flower petal. His brown eyes had golden lights in them and early sparkled with mischief and vitality. He was not bald at his birth but had a pretty coating of brown down which grew so fast that, by the time he was five months old, his nurse could coax it into a fine Thames tunnel, the very pride of her life. Adeline could see in him a strong resemblance to her mother but there was a promise of Whiteoak stalwartness in his infant frame. Philip said he was the image of Adeline without the red
hair. Adeline thanked God he had not inherited that. She hoped none of her children would for she looked on red hair as a blemish. She had her wish. Not one of her four children had an auburn hair in his head. It remained for her eldest grandson to inherit, even in a more pronounced degree, her colouring.

The christening was an event in Quebec. The robe worn by Adeline and her brothers, somewhat the worse for wear, was sent out from Ireland to adorn him. The ceremony at the Garrison Church, the guests being entertained afterwards at the Whiteoaks’ house where short but effective speeches were made and much champagne was drunk to the health and future happiness of Nicholas Noel St. Charles.