The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (353 page)

She said—“Run and find Renny, Wake, please! I do hope he has not gone to the stables.” She wondered if he had been very angry when he had left the room. His expression had been gloomy, and no wonder, after so much combined criticism.
She herself felt tired out. There had been a time when she would not have been able to eat a morsel after such a wrangle, but now she found herself eagerly devouring bread and jam like the rest of them. A lock of fair hair had loosened and hung into her eyes. She looked pale and wan.

Meg began talking to her in the most friendly way, asking her advice about clothes for the South. She waited impatiently for Wakefield’s return.

He came running in and instantly snatched up a piece of bread. “I can’t find him anywhere,” he said, with his mouth full. “I’ve been up to his room and down to the kitchen. Wright had just come in and he said Renny wasn’t at the stable. His hat is hanging on the rack and his dogs are lying in the hall.”

“I should think he would hide his head,” observed his sister. “I think he has taken Aunt Augusta’s letter very much to heart. He realises, too, that we all blame him in this matter.”

“He’d be deaf as a post if he didn’t,” said Piers.

“He has found,” said Ernest, “that such high-handedness only reacts against himself.”

Nicholas growled. “Renny has inherited all the worst traits of the Courts and the Whiteoaks combined.”

“And yet,” cried Meg, “I have heard him boast that he had inherited the best from each family. What was that he said to us, Maurice, just the other day?”

“He said—‘From my English forebears, I got my love of horses. From my Irish, the instinct for selling horses. And from my Scotch my horse sense.’”

“That was it!” cried Meg delightedly. “Did you ever hear of such conceit?”

Piers said—“I’d forgotten that Renny’s mother was Scotch.”

“She was Scotch,” affirmed Meg. “And of an excellent family. Very different from—” She did not finish the sentence.

“Just the same,” said Piers, “I think the poor old chap should have his tea. I’ll have a look for him myself.”

“Oh, I wish you would!” breathed Alayne.

Piers left the room and before long returned with a puzzled expression on his candid face.

“He’s gone to bed.”

“To bed!” they echoed, in one voice.

“But I was in his room,” said Wakefield. “He wasn’t in bed then.”

Piers answered—“He’s not in his own bed.”

Once more the family turned and looked at Alayne. She felt her face tingling with the blood that had rushed to it. Like Ernest, earlier in the afternoon, she could utter no sound, only make grimaces.

Ernest laid his hand on hers. “Never mind, dear girl,” he said soothingly. “It’s only natural.”

Finch gave a loud guffaw, and his eyes sought those of Piers, which beamed back full of laughter.

Piers said—“He’s not where you think he is. He’s in Gran’s bed. The old painted bed he inherited from her.”

Food which was being masticated lay undisturbed in the mouths of the Whiteoaks or was hastily bolted. It was as though old Adeline herself had walked into their midst, her velvet tea gown trailing, her cap with the purple ribbons set for their subjection, her rings which had been divided among them, again flashing on her long fingers. “Renny in my bed? Well, why not? I left it to him! I bore his father there. Renny is bone of my bone... Let him rest his red head on my pillow and cool his hot temper in my bed. It’s his own place.”

Nicholas got himself with difficulty out of his chair. He hobbled towards the door and, after a moment’s wavering, all the others rose and followed him. They went down the hall where the late sunlight, diffused through the stained glass window, cast bright splotches of colour upon them. Wragge had built a great fire in the stove. Its sides were red and the smell of overheated pipes made the air heavy.

Nicholas opens the door of his mother’s room and looks in. There, propped on two pillows, lies the master of Jalna. His eyes closed, his thin muscular hands clasped on the coverlet, he appears to be lying in state. Boney, on his perch by the head of the bed, his plumage less bright than the plumage of the painted birds on the headboard, lifts his wings in a rage at the intrusion. He is moulting and, with the flapping of his wings, bright feathers are thrown from him and drift on to the bed.

“Shaitan! Shaitan Kabatka! Iflatoon! Chore! Chore!” He pours forth a volley of horrible Hindoo oaths. All the curses that have lain simmering in his drowsy brain, without utterance for the past three years, now come hurtling through his beak. His eyes revolve like the lamps in a lighthouse. At one moment he turns them full of ire on the family collected about the bed. At the next they beam, full of possessive affection, on the occupant of the bed.

“Is he ill, do you think?” whispers Ernest.

“I don’t like it at all. He has gone too far,” growls Nicholas.

“To think that Boney should talk again—after all these years!” says Meg. She goes to the bed and lays her hand on her brother’s forehead. “Speak, Renny. Are you ill? Or is it just that your feelings are hurt?”

Oh, their glorious lack of self-consciousness! thinks Alayne. Oh, that I could so grandly let myself go! That I could be so magnificently a fool!

“Bring Wakefield! He will notice the child,” says Meg.

Piers, his teeth gleaming, pushes the boy forward.

Wakefield has been sadly overwrought. He bursts into tears and wrings his slender hands. “Renny, you’re not dying, are you?”

Renny opens his eyes. They look black in the dim light. “Somebody...”

Nicholas interrupts him. “You are not to say that! That’s carrying things too far!”

“Somebody fetch me a cup of tea.”

“Go and fetch him tea, Piers!” cries Meg. “Oh, Renny dear, whatever is the matter?”

He turns and hides his face in the crook of his arm. “Everyone is against me... no one has ever understood me but Gran...”

W
AS
he hers, Alayne questioned, or did he belong to the family? She had been ashamed for him. She had felt chagrin that he had so played up to the family’s attitude toward him. Yet she felt a certain elation, for, without doubt, she had solidified her own position in that flamboyant circle.

The next day was Sunday and they had all gone to church. No disruption could prevent their going to church. Sometimes she thought that they had the unquestioning faith of the Children’s Crusade, as they braved all kinds of weather, and sometimes she thought of them as pagans with a savage tenacity for the rites handed down to them by tradition. Once, just to test them on the subject, she had read aloud an illuminating chapter from a book by an eminent scientist on religion. The only one who had shown any interest in it had been Pheasant, and the opinion she had offered had been that the writer was talking about things he did not understand.

Alayne sat in the Whiteoaks’ pew, her feet on the hassock on which for so many years old Adeline’s large shapely feet had rested. On her left sat Piers and Finch, on her right Nicholas, Ernest, and Wake. Across the aisle, in the Vaughan
pew, sat Meg, Maurice, and Patience. The little girl peeped between her fingers across at her uncles. Wake shut one eye and glared at her with the other. She giggled and was reprimanded in a stage whisper by her mother. Meg was looking handsome, with black fur about her neck. Maurice’s face wore the expression of callous reverence attained by forty years of church-going. He had begun when he was four. The backbone of the responses and the hymns was supplied by these two pews. They never failed or faltered. Their fervour was not controlled by any graduations of volume suggested by the letters
ρ
or
dim
at the beginning of hymn lines.

Renny had been the lay reader since his return from the War. Now he mounted the steps behind the brass eagle that was a memorial to Captain Philip Whiteoak. Alayne had a glimpse of his thick-soled boots beneath his surplice. She thought of him as he had lain in his grandmother’s bed, from which he had only risen to come to church that morning. Would he return to it that night? Or would he, perhaps, just take to it when things upset him? No one could tell and no one had dared question him. By his act he had re-established himself as chieftain of the clan. His grandmother’s mantle hung about him. Because of it Boney had found his voice and had since raised it repeatedly, dragging from the feathered limbo of his brain every Hindoo word taught him by old Adeline in the thirty years of his life in her company.

Renny read the lessons in a loud voice with a modicum of respect for punctuation. But when he said—“Here endeth the Lesson—” he did so in an abrupt, hurried mumble. The family did not take their eyes off him. Patience covered hers with her fingers and peeped at him. When he had finished he returned to his seat and sat with bent head, his handsome nose outlined against dark oak carvings.

Piers and an old man with a beard took up the collection. Piers stood, stalwart and impassive, at the end of the pew while his family fished for their contributions. He and the old man marched up the aisle together and stood at the chancel steps facing Mr. Fennel, the old man’s bald head and bent back, Piers’s blond head and flat back toward the congregation.

It was Finch’s first Sunday at home. He thought of all that had happened to him since he last sat in that seat, and it seemed unbelievable. His brothers had jeered at him for sticking in one spot while away, but he wondered whether, if he had toured the whole of Europe, he could have had deeper and more varied experience. He had left a part of himself, that could never be regained, in Nymet Crews. He had brought away something within himself that would not die. The mood of hope and purpose that had risen in him the day before had not failed. He still felt that he would do great things with his life.

He left the church with Renny and Wakefield in the old car.

“I’m driving round by the fox farm,” observed Renny. “I must see Mrs. Lebraux for a moment on business.”

The roads were deep with snow. Finch remembered how spring had been coming in Devon even when he had left. How delicately, with what shy misgivings spring would come there! She would push one white foot, the toes as white as snowdrops, from under the coverlet of winter. She would let loose her hair, in a coil of golden daffodils, across its darkness. She would open her violet eyes, expose one bare shoulder. But these movements would be tentative. She would withdraw and weep softly to herself... And though spring still slept profoundly here, how she would leap up
when, at last, she was roused! She would bound from under her coverings stark naked, her breast thrust forward to meet the sun’s kiss. She would be brown as a berry almost before her whiteness had been acclaimed...

As the car stopped before the fox farm Wakefield asked— “Are you going to let me go to Florida, Renny?”

Renny gave him a rough caress in passing. “You will stay with me,” he said.

When he had gone Wake threw himself back in the car exclaiming—“I might have known! It was too good to be true! Yet—I shall always look on you as my benefactor, Finch, even though I don’t go!”

“Don’t be a young ass,” admonished Finch. He added: “Tell me about Mrs. Lebraux and Pauline. How have they been getting on?”

“Not very well. You see, they have no man about the place.”

“I can’t see what good Lebraux was to them.”

“Well, he made them a widow and an orphan. Women cannot be even those without a man having been about.”

Finch laughed and looked curiously at his young brother. He noticed his growing length of limb, the new curves of mouth and nostril. Whom was he going to be like? There was something of Eden about the lips, something of Gran in the eyes. A strange combination. One for poetry, passion, and pride.

“Finch, will you be my friend?”

“Of course, I will.”

“Will you shake hands on it?”

“Rather.”

Finch grasped the slender hand in his and they smiled into each other’s eyes.

“Do you often see Pauline?” Finch asked.

“Scarcely ever. I brought a poem I had written to read to her. It was in the autumn. But she was playing with her pet fox and I changed my mind... I’11 read it to you, if you like, Finch.”

“I didn’t know you wrote poetry.”

“I have been writing it for almost a year. I sent this one to Eden. And what do you suppose he wrote back to me? He wrote—“’You are not
going
to be a poet. You
are
one!’”

“Don’t believe everything Eden says.”

“Wait till you hear the poem! Now that you’re going to be my friend, I’ll read it to you. I have read it to Renny.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it was good,” said Wake, triumphantly.

“I think you should read the poem to Pauline. I might be here too. I should like that.”

“Should you? I will, then. Here she comes! She has been to Mass.”

They saw Pauline Lebraux approaching along the empty white road. Her movements were uneven as she walked over the deep ruts in the snow. The sun had the warmth of approaching spring in it and the snow was becoming soft and wet. As she drew near Finch saw that she still wore no touch of colour, but that her face, under the black beret, was flushed delicately pink by the exertion. She wore goloshes, above which her black-stockinged legs showed long and thin.

He opened the door of the car and sprang out, but, when he was face to face with her, he did not know what to say. He just stood smiling inanely, noticing the worn little prayer-book and rosary she held in her hand.

Wakefield was out beside him. He said, in the patronising tone Finch found so irritating:

“Pauline, do you remember my brother Finch?”

She smiled and gave Finch her hand. Again he saw that shadow of pain in her smile. It was purely physical—the sensitive curling of the lip—but it moved him to a strange compassion toward her. In spite of the hardships which he knew she must undergo in her life, he thought of it as an idyllic one. He thought of her as a young wilding, untouched by common things.

“I am glad you are back,” she said.