Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
Adeline kept on wagging her head at Renny, but now with reproof. “Too old to be nursed,” she said.
“I know,” replied Renny, “but he will clamber over me.” He pushed Wakefield from his knee.
“Poor darling! He looks like a young robin pushed from the nest! Tell me, did you pray for me last night?”
“Yes, my grandmother.”
She looked triumphantly about her. “He never misses a night! And what did you pray?”
Wakefield drew up his eyebrows. “I prayed—let’s see—I prayed”—his eyes lit on Pheasant’s hand—“that you would give a present today, and—get one!”
She struck the arm of her chair with her palm. “Ha! Listen to that! A present! Now who would give me a present? No, no, I must do all the giving. Till the last. Then you can make me a present of a fine funeral Ha!”
Nicholas growled to Ernest: “I shall have to cuff that young rascal before he’ll stop this mischief of praying.”
“It’s very depressing for Mama,” said Ernest, gloomily. “It must be stopped.”
“A game of backgammon will divert her.”
Ernest looked dubious. “The last time I played with her she wasn’t very clear about it.”
“Never mind. She must be diverted. She’s in the mood to give presents all round. I don’t know what has come over her.”
He found the backgammon board, and the velvet bag containing the dice and dice boxes. He said to Wakefield, hovering near: “Ask your Grandmama and the parson if they will play backgammon. Place the small table between them. I shall cuff you if you persist in this praying business.”
“Yes, Uncle Nick.”
The little boy flew away, held whispered conversations, flew back.
“Uncle Nick!”
“Yes.”
“I’ve placed the table, and the parson, and Gran. They said they were nothing loath.”
Finch said: “He made that last up. They didn’t put it in those fool words.”
“You are odious, Finch,” retorted Wake. He adored his Aunt Augusta’s vocabulary and had no self-consciousness in employing it.
The opponents faced each other. Bearded, untidy Mr. Fennel; gorgeous, ancient Adeline.
“I’m black,” she said.
Very well, he was white. The men were placed on the tables. The dice were thrown.
“Deuce!” from the parson.
“Trey!” from Grandmother.
They made their moves. The dice rattled. The emeralds on her left hand winked.
“Doublets!”
“Quatre!” She pronounced it “cater.”
The dice were shaken; the players pondered; the men were moved.
“Deuce!”
“Trey!”
“Cinq!”
“Ace!”
The game proceeded. Her head was as clear as ever it had been. Her eyes were bright. She fascinated Finch. He stood behind Mr. Fennel’s chair watching her. Sometimes their eyes met, and always there was that flash between them, that complicity of conspirators. “Afraid of life!” her eyes said. “A Court afraid? Watch me!”
He watched her. He could not look away. Across the chasm of more than eighty years their souls met, touched fingers, touched lips.
One by one she got her men home. One by one she took them from the board. She had won the first game!
“A hit!” she cried, striking her hands together. “A hit!” Two groups had formed in the room, away from the players and Finch, who stood behind the rector, and Wakefield perched on the arm of his grandmother’s chair. One of these groups consisted of Meg, Nicholas, Ernest, and Augusta, who in under-tones discussed what portent the gift of the ring might have. The other group was composed of Piers, Pheasant, Maurice, and Renny, who talked rather loudly, in an effort to appear unconscious that there was trouble in the air. As Grandmother cried, “A hit!” the faces of the members of both groups turned toward her, and they clapped their hands, applauding her.
“Well played, my grandmother!” cried Wakefield, patting her on the back.
Finch’s eyes sought hers, found them, held them. She felt suddenly tired. She was very tired, but very happy.
“You have me badly beaten,” said Mr. Fennel, stroking his beard.
“Ah, yes. I’m in good form today,” she mumbled. “Very good form—tonight.”
Boney shuffled on his perch, shook himself, gaped. Two bright feathers were loosened, and sank slowly to the floor.
Mr. Fennel stared at him.
“He doesn’t talk now, eh?”
“No,” she answered, craning her neck so as to see the bird. “He doesn’t talk at all. Poor Boney! Poor old Boney! Doesn’t talk at all. Doesn’t say curse words. Doesn’t say love words. Silent as the grave, hey, Boney?”
“Shall we have another game?” asked Mr. Fennel.
The two groups had resumed their preoccupations. Kenny’s laugh broke out sharply.
“Another game? Yes, I’d like another game. I’m white!”
Mr. Fennel and Wakefield exchanged glances.
“But, Gran,” cried Wakefield, “you were black before!”
“Black! Not a bit of it, I’m white.”
Mr. Fennel changed the men, giving her the white ones.
The men were placed. The dice shaken. The game proceeded.
“Deuce!”
“Cinq!”
“The Doublet!”
But her head was no longer clear. She fumbled for her men, and could not have got through the game had not Wakefield, leaning on her shoulder, helped her with the play.
She was beaten, but she did not know it.
“A double game!” she said, triumphantly. “A double game! Gammon!”
The rector smiled indulgently.
Finch felt himself sinking beneath a cloud.
“But, my grandmother,” cried Wakefield, “you’re beaten! Don’t you know when you’re beaten?”
“Me beaten? Not a bit of it. I won’t have it! I’ve won.” She was staring straight ahead of her into Finch’s eyes. “Gammon!”
Mr. Fennel began gathering up the men.
“Another game?” he asked. “You may make it backgammon, this time.”
She did not answer.
Wakefield nudged her shoulder. “Another game, Gran?”
“I’m afraid she’s a little tired,” said Mr. Fennel.
But she was still smiling, looking straight into Finch’s eyes. Her eyes were saying to him: “A Court afraid? A Court afraid of death? Gammon!”
Again Boney shook himself, and another feather fluttered to the floor.
Nicholas had risen to his feet, and was looking across the room. Suddenly he shouted: “Mother!”
They were all on their feet, except Wakefield, who still hung on her shoulder, realizing nothing.
Her head sank.
Finch watched them as they gathered about her, raising her head, holding smelling salts to her long nose, forcing brandy between her blanched lips, wringing their hands, being frightened, half-demented. He had seen her spirit, staunch and stubborn, leave the body. He knew it was futile to try to recall it.
Boney watched the scene with one detached yellow eye, apparently unmoved, but when they carried her to the sofa and laid her on it, he left his perch with a distracted tumble of wings and fluttered on to her prostrate body, screaming: “Nick! Nick! Nick!” It was the first time he had ever been known to utter a word of English.
He was with difficulty captured and taken to her bedroom, where he took his position on the head of the bed and relapsed into stoical silence.
Piers telephoned for the doctor. Meg was sobbing in Augusta’s arms. Ernest sat beside the table, his head buried in his arms across the backgammon board. Pheasant had flown upstairs to her bedroom to bedew the ruby ring with tears. Nicholas drew a chair to his mother’s side and sat with his shoulders bent, staring blankly into her face. The rector dropped his chin into his beard and murmured a short prayer
over the body, stretched out so straight that the feet, in black slippers, projected over the end of the sofa. Again she looked a tall woman.
Mr. Fennel was about to close the eyes. The heavy lids resisted. Renny caught his arm.
“Don’t close her eyes! I won’t believe she’s dead! She can’t have died like that!”
He put his hand inside her tea gown and felt her heart. It was still. He brought a mirror and held it before her nostrils. It bright surface was undimmed. But he would not have her eyes closed.
Soon Dr. Drummond came and pronounced her dead, and himself closed her eyelids. He was an old man, and had brought all the younger Whiteoaks, from Meg down, into the world.
Ernest rose then and came to her, trembling. He stroked her face, and kissed it, sobbing: “Mama… Mama.”… But Nicholas sat motionless as a statue.
Renny could not stay in that house. He would go to Fiddler’s Hut and tell Eden and Alayne what had happened. He flung out through the side door into the grassy yard where the old brick oven stood. A waddling procession of ducks cocked their roguish eyes at him; Mrs. Wragge and the kitchenmaid peered after him with curiosity from a basement window. Galloping colts in the paddock came whimpering to the fence as he hurried past. Red and white cows in the pasture, heavy-uddered, turned their tolerant gaze after him. He entered the orchard. The days were already shortening. The red sun showed between the black trunks of the trees. He noticed that all colours were intensified into a sombre brightness. Little rosy mushrooms were resetted here and there in the lush grass. The orchard fence was smothered in goldenrod.
Between the orchard and the “old orchard” lay a field of potatoes. Old Binns was digging them and laying them in shallow ridges on the black loam. In that long day he had done perhaps a half-day’s work. He leaned on his spade and shouted: “Hi! Mr. Whiteoak! Hi!”
Renny stopped.
“Yes?”
“What do you s’pose be here now?”
“’What?”
“Blight. Blight be here.”
Renny threw up his hand.
“Put down that spade!” he shouted. “No more work here today!” He strode on.
No spade should stir the surface of the land she had loved. That land must lie quiet, mourning for her today, and tomorrow, and the next day.
Old Binns watched Renny disappear into the glowing density of the old orchard. He was aghast. Never in his life before had he had such an order. He must be going to lose his job! He thrust his spade deep into the soil and turned up three potatoes. Feverishly he thrust and grubbed for the potatoes. Never before had he worked with such vehemence. He kept muttering angrily to himself: “Blight be here, anyhow. Dang him!”
The old orchard, unpruned since a decade, displayed a fantastic exuberance of foliage. The branches of the apple trees, which later would be weighted with ripe fruit, never to be garnered, swept to the ground. Among them grew clumps of green hazel and sumach, with its rose-red plumes. Creepers of various kinds had caught at the lowest boughs and clambered up them, as though striving to drag the trees themselves to the earth. A discarded mowing machine was
hidden beneath a rank growth of wild grapevine, its presence never to be guessed. As Renny moved along the path, wild rabbits bounded from his way, and heavy moths sometimes blundered against his face. As he neared the cottage he heard the spring talking secretly among the grasses.
Doors and windows of the cottage stood open, but there was no sound of voices. He went to the front door and looked in. Alayne was writing at a table, and Eden lay on the sofa, a cigarette between his lips and a book drooping from his hand. His face and body had filled out, his cheeks were brown, but Alayne looked pale and more slender. They had not heard Renny come up, and to him the room and its occupants, in the intense sunset glow, appeared unreal as in a tableau. It seemed unreal, fantastic, that they should be sitting unmoved, aware of nothing.
He made some incoherent sound, and, as though a spell had been broken, they both looked up. The pallor of Alayne’s cheeks, which had seemed intensified by the reddish light, appeared now to be touched into flame. Eden smiled, and his smile froze. He started up.
“Renny! What’s the matter?”
Alayne too rose.
He tried to speak to them, but no words would come. He stood silent, leaning against the doorpost, his face contorted into a forbidding grimace.
The two stood petrified, until Eden got out: “For Christ’s sake, Renny, speak to us! Tell us what’s wrong?”
He looked at them, filled with a strange antagonism for them, and then said, harshly: “She’s dead… Gran… I thought I should let you know.”
Avoiding their eyes, his face still contorted, he turned hastily down the path and disappeared into the pine woods.
J
ALNA IN
M
OURNING
T
HERE
she lies, the old woman, in her coffin; wreaths, sprays, crosses of sweet flowers, all about her. She has been bathed, embalmed, dressed in her best black velvet dress. Her hands are crossed on her breast, but they have left her only her wedding ring, worn to a mere thread of gold. If one could see inside the ring, one might decipher the words “Adeline, Philip, 1848.” She wears her best lace cap that has long been put by in a lavender-scented box awaiting this occasion. On a silver plate on the coffin is engraved the date of her birth, her death, her name, including her Christian names— Adeline Honora Bridget. All has been done for her that it is possible to do. All is arranged, perfected for her burial. She has been on this earth a long time, but now she is to be put into it for an infinitely longer period.
There is an ineffable air of dignity, of pomp, about her. She looks like an ancient empress, with that faintly contemptuous smile on her lips, that carven nose. She might have lived as the centre of court intrigues, instead of having passed three-quarters of her life in this backwater, with only her family to lord it over. Ireland and India, two countries the
names of which begin with “I,” have left their mark on her. Her life has been lived, dominated by “I.”
At her head and her feet stand tall silver candelabra bearing lighted candles. Finch placed them there, when he stole downstairs to his last meeting with her, after the rest were all in bed. His gaunt young face was that of a mystic as he glided about her, touching each waxen column into flame.
Augusta, in the morning, ordered them to be taken away, exclaiming against such popish practices, but Nicholas said: “Let them be. Pomp suits her.”
By ones, twos, and threes her descendants came to mourn over their progenitress. Nicholas remained by her side all day, refusing food, his leonine head dishevelled, one end of his grey moustache caught in his teeth. Ernest wandered in and out, tall and elegant in his black frock coat. He escorted visitors to the casket, drawing their attention to the chiselled features, the beautiful expression of his Mama. He whispered the word a great many times to himself those days, for soon she would be gone, and he would have no Mama. All the sarcastic things she had ever said to him were obliterated from his mind, and only the times when she had been kind remained. He remembered how she had been dependent on him for certain things, and tears ran down his cheeks.