The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (455 page)

“Goodness,” said Alayne. “I thought it would take him hours to rest, after all that talk.”

“So did he,” returned Adeline. “But when this idea came he forgot his tiredness. He’s coming now!”

They could hear Nicholas coming, with a shuffling haste, down the stairs. He appeared in flowered dressing gown and with grey hair upright on his head.

“I’ve got an idea!” he said.

Adeline flew to him and clasped him tightly about the waist. Nicholas went on: —

“I want this child to go with you to Ireland, Renny. It was my mother’s country and Adeline ought to see it. By gad, I’d like Dermot Court to see
her!
It isn’t as though you would be on a prolonged stay. Now, I am willing to pay half her expenses if Ernest will pay the other half. It would be an experience she would never forget and, as I said to her just now, if war comes dear knows what will be left of Ireland!”

“I’m willing, if Alayne is,” said Renny. “It’s mighty generous of you, Uncle Nick.”

Adeline turned pale with excitement. “Now I can do it, if Uncle Ernest will toe the scratch!”

Nicholas broke into laughter. He turned to Renny. “Mamma will never be dead while Adeline lives,” he said.

“That sounded very cold and calculating to me,” said Alayne. “I’m ashamed of you. Adeline.”

“What should I have said?” asked Adeline.

Alayne hesitated, feeling helpless to explain. “If instinct does not tell you, I can’t,” she said.

“Ha, ha,” laughed Nicholas, “instinct did tell her! Now I shall go straight to the telephone and ask Ernest what he thinks about it.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Adeline, “and if he doesn’t” — not wishing to use the offensive phrase again she substituted “seem agreeable, I’ll talk to him!”

They went off, linked together.

“No one,” said Alayne, “could bring up children properly, with Uncle Nicholas in the house.”

“Only too true,” said Renny. “What do you think about it? Are you willing for her to go?”

In truth Alayne found herself more than willing. Six weeks of freedom from Adeline’s vital activities would be a relief. Yet, even while she was conscious of this, she felt shame that it should be so and, when Adeline came back exultant, Alayne put both arms about her and held her close. Love for her child surged through all her being. Adeline’s response to the embrace was to clasp Alayne’s neck so hard that she feared for a moment it had cracked. She put her hand to it and turned her head from side to side.

“What a hug!” she exclaimed.

“Sorry,” said Adeline. “My nature is boiling over. How can I live till the day!”

From then to the day of departure the time swept on. There were a thousand things to be bought for Adeline, or so it seemed to her. Alayne took her to town and they did their first shopping together as mother and daughter, and lunched happily in a restaurant. They sat smiling into each other’s eyes, eating ice cream and cakes. The most exciting thing to Adeline was being given a cabin trunk that had been her great-grandmother’s and bearing the same initials as her own. Each one of the family gave her a little present before she left. She was full of gratitude, but its richest flow was to her two great-uncles.

The day came, blustering, wild and sweet, with the first scents of earth on the wind and the first robin singing in the silver birch tree on the lawn. Renny and Adeline looked out of the car window at the assembled family gathered on the steps, and waved their hands. Piers and his boys cheered. Archer ran down the drive after the car and fell. The car turned into the road. The massed evergreens hid the house. They were off.

Adeline had made up her mind that her father must never regret having taken her with him, or her great-uncles that they had paid her passage. Everything Renny told her about washing, undressing, and sleeping in the train, she drank in with wide-open eyes and parted lips. She did exactly as she was bid, except to sleep soundly. She had always been a poor sleeper. At night her vivid imagination ran away with her. A part of her that was tranquil during the day drew a strange vitality from the night, so that she could do with far less sleep than the normal child and would have liked to dance and sing and shout in the extreme of her lively fancies; indeed she often had and this was one of Alayne’s trials.

Tonight she lay awake for hours, listening to the throb of the engine, feeling the vibration of it through all her being. The steady roaring, the scream of the whistle at a crossing, the jolts and gratings when the train stopped, jumbled the pictures she carried in her mind, like a pocketful of coins thrown on to a counter. Like faces engraved on coins, she saw her mother’s face with its quick changes of expression: now serene, as she read a book aloud or arranged flowers in a bowl; now smiling, as she played with Archer; now suddenly exasperated or severe; now with the look she had for Renny which fascinated Adeline and filled her with a strange unease. Then the coin with Uncle Nick’s face on it turned up — the thick grey hair and moustache, the big nose, the deep eyes that looked right into you, and the mouth with its smile that was both funny and sad. Then Uncle Ernest, looking as though he had just had a bath and his hair tidied, his lips shaped as they were when he was showing you how to pronounce a word properly — in the English way. Then Roma, with her hair like those things saints wore, or that look her face had when she was going to tell you something she was not supposed to know. Roma’s face lasted a long while, sometimes almost fading away, blurred by those strange tears she often shed for nothing, then suddenly close again and shining like gold. Archer’s little face came and went a dozen times, now contorted by rage, now stretched in some newly discovered grimace, now with that piercing look their mother called spiritual and their father said was caused by wind on the stomach. Piers’s face, Mooey’s face, Nook’s face, the faces of all the fourteen relatives she had left behind, came to keep Adeline from sleep. Even the dogs and the horses came, and the house servants and the grooms and stableboys. She tried to imagine the houses she was going to. She pictured Cousin Malahide as gliding about like a snake; Cousin Dermot as living in a castle. Strange shapes came to torment her, wild music rose from the wheels of the train and hands reached out in the dark to touch her. She burst into tears. She filled her hands with her red hair and made herself rigid with anguish. She kicked the weight of the heavy blanket from her. She thought she saw the black hands of the Negro porter untying the tapes of her curtains. He would kill her!

“Daddy!” she cried, in spite of her teeth that she clenched against calling. “Daddy!”

He did not hear but in a moment she heard his voice. He was saying to the porter: —

“You may get my berth ready now.”

“Yes, sah. Ah hope your li’l gal is comfortable, sah.”

“I’ll find out.”

Cautiously he put his head between the curtains.

“Sleeping, pet?”

“Yes, Daddy. Like a top.”

She put up her arms and drew his head close.

“I’ll be just across the way,” he said.

“Good.”

Soon she was asleep.

She went on being no trouble, except for the responsibility of her, right through the brief stay in New York and on to the ship. When she found herself actually on the deck, with the glistening skyscrapers of New York retreating and the harbor a tumble of foam-flecked waves, she drew a deep breath, her nostrils dilated to smell the salt air. Her being was too small at that moment to support the spirit in her. She clenched her fist and struck it on the rail. “We’re off!” she exclaimed.

They stopped at Halifax to take on a cargo of apples. A dock hand loading them fell into the icy water. Adeline sent a shriek for help.

“Save him!” she screamed. “You’re letting him drown!”

But he was pulled out of the water and stood shaking with cold on the dock. He put up his hand and saluted her.

She was beside herself from excitement. Then she noticed that some of the barrels were from the orchard at Jalna. “R. C. Whiteoak” was painted on them. She flew to his side and clutched his arm.

“Look!” she cried. “Our own apples! On the ship with us!”

He was almost as pleased as she. They stood grinning down at the barrels. Adeline called out authoritatively to the men: —

“Don’t you drop those! They’re ours!”

She was so hot from excitement that she pulled off her hat and the icy wind played with her hair.

But toward the social life of the ship she was restrained and her behaviour at table was decorous. Ernest had lectured her well before she left. She ate the food Renny ordered for her and, before eating it, bent her head with gravity and said grace. They two had a table to themselves.

She was standoffish toward the other children on board and reserved when questioned by grownups. Only once did she get into trouble with Renny. That was when he found her throwing the dice for the horse races. When she had finished he beckoned her from the door and, seeing the look in his eye, she went abashed.

Outside he said, “Don’t ever again let me catch you making yourself cheap in a crowd. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’ve a mind to take a stick to your back. Throwing dice, with a lot of strange men about you! Don’t do it again, do you hear?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She was nine and it was hard to understand. In a small voice she asked: — “May I go and look on?”

“Of course.”

“And bet?”

“If you like. But I’ll take you after this.”

“Thank you.” She squeezed his hand. The blood that had rushed into her face retreated. She made up her mind she would be more careful as to what she did. When next day he asked her if she would like to go to the horse races with him, she said — “Not unless you want me to.”

“I do,” he said, smiling.

They sat close together and between them lost five shillings.

It was a rough voyage. Once, looking about the dining room at lunch, Adeline remarked: —

“I am the only woman who has survived. What a good thing Mummie didn’t come!” She talked a good deal of those they had left behind, dwelling on their perfections. She exclaimed: —

“I guess there isn’t a single person on this ship who has so many nice people at home as we have.”

They landed at Cóbh, in a soft rain and a choppy sea. The tiny boat that took them ashore bounced on the frothy green waves. There was a monk aboard with a brown cassock and a rope about his middle. There were women wearing shawls and selling Irish lace. Out of her own money Adeline bought handkerchiefs with donkey carts embroidered in one corner and shamrocks in another to send to the children at home.

She stepped sturdily on to the soil which old Adeline had left as a young girl to go to India.

DERMOT’S LONELINESS

D
ERMOT
C
OURT AND
Renny Whiteoak sat on that first evening, over their wine and cigars, strengthening the friendship that had budded when Renny had come to Ireland after the Great War. Dermot’s two sons were long dead and his only grandson had been killed in a hunting accident ten years ago. He had no near relatives left. The only one of those he had who was accessible was Malahide Court, and he thought little of him. He wished very much that Renny lived near, for he was a man after his own heart.

“No man,” he said, “has a right to do what my grandfather did. He had nine sons and planted them over the countryside. Now they crop up in all sorts of unexpected places. The first and second generations of them have passed on but the other day I came across a Court who had a bicycle repair shop. I would have thought he had no right to use the name — till I saw the Court nose on him! It was one of the finest specimens I’ve seen. I had to have some excuse for going into his shop, so I bought a bicycle bell and sounded it all the way home in my distress.”

“I hear from my boys,” said Renny, “that Paris Court is a nice young fellow.”

“He is indeed, or seems so. I can’t trust any son of Malahide’s. I wish you were my son, Renny. You know, when I last saw you I was very hard-up indeed, and for many years after. But now, in my decline, at the last hurdle, my affairs have looked up. A brewery I own shares in has begun to make some new soft drink and, such is the degeneracy of the day, it’s selling like wildfire. I’ve had the old house put in order, as you’ve seen. Now what I lack is an heir.”

Renny fixed his bright eyes eagerly on his kinsman and moved his chair a shade closer. Dermot Court went on: —

“I want to fool all these relatives of mine. Especially I want to fool Malahide, who, if he can get me to himself often enough, will somehow worm my money out of me. I feel a weakness coming over me when I’m with him.”

“Good God,” said Renny, “you must keep away from him!”

Dermot dolefully shook his head. “Easier said than done. In a weak moment I told him about the brewery and since then he’s dogged my footsteps like a bailiff. Now what I want is a child in the house — a boy. I’ve a good ten years more of life in me. I’d like a boy with new blood — from the New World. Now your brother Piers has three boys. Do you think he’d let me have one of them?”

For a moment Renny was too surprised to speak or even think. Then the faces of Piers’s three boys flashed before his mental vision. What a chance for one of them! Particularly Mooey, with whom Piers did not get on any too well. He said, gravely: — “I think it’s doubtful if Piers and his wife would consider parting with one of them. In any case, none of them are Courts, though the eldest sometimes has a look of the family. But he’s a thoughtful boy and not very keen about horses.”

“I like a thoughtful boy. I was too harum-scarum myself. How old is he?”

“Thirteen.”

“Just the right age. I’d last till he was twenty-one, — I’m sure of it, — barring accidents. They wouldn’t be giving him up entirely. He could visit them every year or so.”

There was something pathetic in Dermot’s desire for a boy. Renny looked at him consideringly, thinking how extremely nice it would be if he himself might be selected as heir. But to have anyone of the family chosen would be great good fortune.

Adeline came in to say goodnight. She was in pale blue pyjamas with a little padded silk jacket. Dermot Court put an arm about her and scanned her face.