Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“We could go and sit in the mow for a bit if you like,” she said, as though indifferently. “But if you think you’d better be going …”
“If Bob wouldn’t mind — I think I’ll sleep here in the hay. The colt’s played out.”
“Are you?” she asked, and her teeth gleamed.
He put both arms round her and drew her to him, kissing her hotly on the mouth.
“Well, then,” she whispered composedly, “we’ll go up.”
They mounted the ladder and she threw herself down, but at a little distance from him. He stood, so tall that he must bend his head under the sloping roof.
“Why don’t you sit down?” she asked.
“I’m all right.” His voice shook a little.
She undid her brooch and the red ribbon from her neck.
“I hate pressure on my throat,” she said. “I wish the fashion was to go bare-necked. Here, put these in your pocket. If they get into the hay I’ll never see them again.”
He put the ribbon and brooch carefully into his pocket.
She stretched her arms and yawned.
“Well,” she asked lazily, “what do you want to know?”
His voice came out of the dusk. “You were going to tell me how you came by those eyes.”
“It was my mother’s doing. Her husband was a good man. He was a respected man. But my mother got intimate with a Rumanian gypsy who came peddling things…. I was all she had of him.”
He came and knelt at her side.
“Let me look into them,” he said, his breath coming short.
She touched his white shoulder that showed through the tear in his coat. “It’s too dark for seeing,” she whispered.
The lightning flickered softly, seeking the cobwebs in the loft, touching the hay into a scented brightness.
He laid his hand on her lips and she kissed it. With a swift movement he drew it the length of her body, outlining its curves, to her feet. Then he held it above her as though in menace — as though he had drawn some weapon she had had concealed about her.
She sank before him, sighing as though wounded.
T
HE
R
ETURN
H
E WAS WOKEN
by a grinding, tearing sound. His face was against the hay and he felt half stifled. He kept his eyes shut and stretched out his hand to feel if Lulu were there. His hand slid across the depression where her body had lain. He opened his eyes and sat up, his fresh cheek seamed by his fragrant pillow.
Through the cracks of the loft the sunlight came slanting, bright-edged. He sat thinking of the night past, neither proud nor repentant, but pierced through by the new strange experience, as the virgin twilight of the loft by the dusky sun rays.
He would have remained there thinking for a while, but the sounds below disturbed him. Was the colt into some mischief?
With a supple movement he rose and descended the ladder. As the colt recognized his legs, it ceased to gnaw the boards of the stall and gave a welcoming whinny. When his head appeared it lifted its lip and showed its big teeth in a grimace of relief. Splinters of wood clung to the stiff hairs about its mouth. A great gouge was torn from the manger, the straw of its bed was kicked into the passage.
He went up to it warily, but it stretched its long head toward him and began talking in subdued rumbles of the long lonely night and its anxiety to be off.
Renny clasped its massive neck in his arms.
“Good boy,” he murmured. “Nice old boy! Whose nice old boy is he? Whose pretty old boy?” He was filled with a sudden, deep sadness at the thought of parting with the colt.
As they stood so embraced, Elvira appeared in the doorway. She looked cool and fresh, but a little startled, like a doe surprised in
the forest.
“Won’t you come and have some breakfast?” she asked.
“Just look,” he exclaimed, “what this young devil has done!”
“It doesn’t matter. The stable is falling to pieces anyway.”
“But it does matter! I must pay Bob for it.”
“He wouldn’t take anything.”
From a shiny new purse Renny took our a five dollar note. “Here,” he said, “you give it to him after I am gone.”
She took it. Then she said hesitatingly: —
“I want to tell you how sorry I am about your sister … the bad thing I did to her.”
He drew a deep sigh. “Yes,” he said heavily. “It has spoiled her life, she says.”
Elvira looked up at him miserably. “I loved him, but I’m sure now that he never loved me. Does she know that? It might make it easier for her to forgive him.”
Renny answered stiffly — “My sister must do what she thinks right.”
He brought water to the colt, fed him, and followed Elvira to the cottage. His mind turned to Lulu. How would she meet him in front of the others? He wished he might have seen her alone first.
But here she was in the kitchen, which was made clean and tidy, giving the four little girls their breakfast. Bob was already in the fields.
Renny glanced inquiringly at Lulu from under his lashes. He moved shyly toward the breakfast table, then turned to the washing stand in the corner. The children followed his every move fascinated, their spoons suspended, the bluish milk on their porridge undisturbed.
Lulu laid a clean towel on Renny’s shoulder and gave him a little push. She was complete in her self-assurance. When he slid to his chair opposite the children she leant over him and poured cream from a jug over his porridge. It dropped in thick yellow gouts. Her attitude implied that nothing was too good for him.
She sat at one end of the table and Elvira at the other. Renny tried to joke with the little girls, but they only stared at him in speechless trepidation. Elvira sat silent, still feeling rebuffed, and Lulu seemed bent only on serving Renny.
But when she stood beside him as he saddled the colt, and he turned and faced her expectantly, she said: —
“No. Don’t come again. We’ve had our time together. It’s over.”
“Over!” he repeated incredulously.
“Yes — you can’t keep coming back here. It’ll be something for you to look back on, just as it is. But I’m not the sort of woman to want a boy hanging around.”
“But you did want me, didn’t you?”
She smiled enigmatically.
“You did!” he repeated angrily, and moved toward her.
She drew back and exclaimed almost savagely: —
“Don’t dare touch me! I only want you to go!”
The look in her face satisfied him. He was no longer angry or hurt. He mounted the colt and, arranging its mane with his fingers, said: —
“I suppose if I ever do come this way you’ll refuse to see me?”
“Yes — I’ll refuse to see you.”
“Do you never want to see me again?”
“Well — I’ll not say that.”
“Aren’t you going to give me one kiss before I go?”
She came to his stirrup and held up her face, hard as a sculptured mask.
He bent down, then drew back. “Do you expect me to kiss that?”
“It’s the best I can give you.”
“Were you disappointed in me?”
“My God — no!”
She reached up, as though in a frenzy, and pulled his face down to hers and kissed him passionately. Then she turned away and walked swiftly along the path.
As he cantered down the road he had thought of all that had happened since he had left Jalna. It had been a strange time and he wished he might go straight home without delivering the colt to its new owner. The thought of parting with it now drove all other thoughts from his head. This morning he felt a new gracious understanding between them. His will was now the colt’s will. When he turned into the road that led to Mr. Ferrier’s, a black cloud hung over him.
It was nearly noon when the colt trotted docilely in at the gate. Mr. Ferrier, a bluff, purple-faced man, advanced to meet him.
“I expected you yesterday, young man,” he said severely.
Renny looked at him out of a woebegone face. “I myself expected to be here, sir,” he answered.
“Then why weren’t you here?”
Renny stroked the colt’s mane.
Mr. Ferrier looked the pair over. “You look as though you had been through a good deal.”
Renny drew down the corners of his mouth and dismounted. He put the bridle into Mr. Ferrier’s hand.
“Now see here,” said Mr. Ferrier, “I want you to tell me why your coat is torn half off your back, why your clothes look as though you’d spent the night in a haystack, and why this animal’s hide is stiff with sweat and dust. If you refuse to tell me, I’ll inquire your father about it.”
“The truth is,” returned Renny, “I had an awful time getting here.”
“I want no half-truths!” shouted Mr. Ferrier. “Is or is not this animal vicious?”
The colt answered for himself. He opened his mouth wide, then shut it with a grinding champ of his teeth full in the face of his new owner. Mr. Ferrier drew back in terror. He threw the bridle from him as though it were a poisonous reptile. Renny caught it and stood grinning sheepishly.
“Take him away!” ordered Mr. Ferrier. “I refuse to keep him! I’ll let your father hear from me! Thank God I haven’t given him my cheque! And just let me tell you, young fellow, those people you horrified in the motor car yesterday were my brother-in-law and his wife. They told me of the dastardly behaviour of this beast on the road and on the railway line. Your father will get a letter from me that will make his hair rise!”
Renny experienced an added sharpness in all his senses as he galloped along the homeward road. He felt that he could see the very veins on the smallest leaves of the new washed trees. The smell of the saddle, of the colt, of the warming earth, rose to him with piercing perfection. The feel of the horse beneath him, the measured thud of its hoofs, Lulu’s remembered kiss warm on his lips, filled him with joyous vitality. Life burned in him like a torch.
F
AMILY
P
LEASURES
P
HILIP AND MARY
stood on either side of a swing that hung from a low branch of an oak tree beside the croquet lawn. In the swing Eden sat clutching the ropes tightly, ecstatic at the experience of being swung through the air from one parent to another. His mother would push him gently on the back and, at about every fifth swing, his father would catch his feet, hold them a second, and send him back to his mother with added momentum.
The baby, Piers, toddled about, drawing a small wooden horse on wheels. But he was becoming old enough to have feelings of jealousy when his brother was the centre of interest. He stalled his horse under the drooping branches of a syringa in flower and came toward the swing, frowning.
“Me! Me! Me!” he demanded.
“Look out!” cried Philip.
Mary snatched up the child in her arms. He pushed at her breast. “Me!” he repeated, pointing at the swing.
“Put him on my lap!” cried Eden. “I’ll hold him.”
Mary placed the little one carefully on Eden’s knees and, supporting him there, swung them gently to and fro. But the baby would not have it so. With one chubby hand he grasped the rope himself and with the other tried to push Eden from the swing.
Philip threw Mary an amused glance. “He is going to be a rough one,” he observed. “You sit in the swing, Molly. Perhaps he’ll tolerate your holding him.”
The change was made. Mary spread out her frilly skirt, settled the baby in front of her, and Philip, holding his pipe in his teeth, sent them flying toward the leafy greenness. Piers shouted with joy; Mary’s skirts blew back, displaying her white embroidered petticoat and slim black silk ankles.
“Oh, how lovely!” she cried.
Eden, hearing the sound of horse’s hooves at the gate, darted through the shrubbery and appeared directly in front of Renny and the colt as they entered the drive.
The colt reared and held itself rigid for a moment, then moved on its hind legs, as though preparing to dance.
Eden rushed toward it shouting “Whoa! Whoa!”
“Get back, Eden,” ordered Renny, “you little fool!”
The last word was jolted from him in a grunt as he was hurled to the ground from the colt’s back. Philip ran to the scene, his final push to the swing so uneven that Mary was left precariously zigzagging.
The colt now stood quite still and let Philip to take it by the bridle. He did so, and his full blue eyes swept over it and his son.
“Well,” he said slowly, “you’re a pretty pair!”
“It was Eden’s fault,” said Renny, “He must learn not to run out on the drive like that.”
Philip asked — “And what about the pickle you’re in? Is that Eden’s fault?”
Mary came through the trees carrying the baby on her arm. At the sight of Renny’s cheek, which had been scratched on the gravel, and his generally ruffianly appearance, she screamed. At the sight and sound of his mother’s distress Eden too gave a shrill cry.
“Enough of that!” exclaimed Philip testily. “If anyone should scream I am the one. Now,” he turned to his eldest son — “explain!”
Renny passed his hand over his head. “Mr. Ferrier refused to keep the colt.”
“Refused to keep the colt? But why?”
“The colt bit at him, Father. It all but took the face off him. I couldn’t ask him to keep it after that.”
Philip groaned. “And to think I haven’t his cheque!”
Renny proceeded. “And he tore my coat, as you see, and he nearly jumped into a motor car with two people who turned out to be relations of Mr. Ferrier, and he ate the manger at the hotel, and I nearly lost my life at a railway crossing because of him. I’m lucky enough to have got back at all after what I’ve been through!”
Philip laughed derisively.
“It’s all very well for
you
to laugh,” said Renny.
“What on earth shall we do with the brute?” asked Philip, looking ruefully over the colt.
Renny answered eagerly: —
“He’s a splendid fellow, Dad! I’ve never known a colt I liked better. He will be a fine jumper. All he needs is the right handling.
I’m the one to do it! Please let me school him! There’s nothing I’d like so much.”
Philip looked thoughtfully into his son’s eyes, then he said — “Very well, I agree. But if he persists in this biting habit — Eden! Keep away from his head, will you!”
Renny jumped to the saddle and Eden cried — “May I ride with him to the stable?” Piers too held out his arms toward Renny.