Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
She interrupted—“But anyone who knows anything of child psychology knows that to talk that way before him is the worst thing possible for him. It puts into his mind the thought of forlornness, dependence, weakness. Cannot you see?”
“No, I can’t,” he answered hotly. He glared at her with the look of old Adeline. “If your father had been a horse dealer, instead of a New England professor, we might understand each other better.”
“Renny,” she cried, “how can you?” and she flew upstairs to her room.
Her room was to be her refuge more and more often in the following weeks. Her feeling of estrangement from the family increased rather than decreased. For Renny, to the springs of whose life she had joined her own, in faith and in passion, she experienced a strange numbing of the emotions. She waited till this darkness should pass like a trailing cloud, and the light of their love burst forth again. She withdrew herself spiritually as well as physically. On his part, he treated her with more than usual politeness before the others and avoided her in secret. Piers and Pheasant believed :hat harmony had been restored between Renny and her, but believed also that a delicate balance was being maintained in their relations which might easily be upset. Wakefield brooded on the scene in the dining room but repeated nothing of it to the other members of the family. At this time he acquired the curious habit of going to the room he occupied with Renny when Alayne retreated to hers. When she closed her door, she often heard the closing of that door, as though in mockery. Sometimes, as she sat writing, she heard the door open, then, after a space, close again, as though he had stood in the doorway listening. What did the boy do in there? She was convinced that he did nothing but brood or dream, that he went there for no purpose but to vex her.
The weather was hot and her room, shaded by a giant fir tree, was always cool and pleasant. Mr. Cory, of the New York firm of publishers for whom she had been a reader,
sent her several advance copies of new books from his autumn list, asking for her opinion of them. He flattered her by telling her that he had found no one adequately to take her place, on whose judgment he could so rely. The books he sent, the subjects of which were history, biography, and travel, interested her intensely. She wrote him long letters about them. So she created for the time an independent world of her own within the walls of Jalna, in which she recaptured some of the spirit of tranquillity and contemplation of her old life. It was a false tranquillity, a contemplation born of her passion to conceal her real state from herself. A word, a glance, would be enough to shatter her self-control. But each day, as the heat increased, her face became more of a cool mask. She became even more fastidious in her dress. Renny, as though fastidiousness were a weapon which he could use as well as she, became more and more careful of his dress. Pheasant and Piers, in emulation, made themselves as spruce as possible. Even Wakefield wore his best clothes every day, and Mooey screamed for a silver napkin ring for his bib. Piers had forbidden Pheasant to bring him to the table, and Renny had not again expressed a desire to have him there. A depressing quiet hung over their meals, often only broken by Rags’s whispered conversations with Renny.
In late July Alayne had a letter from her aunts on the Hudson expressing their intention of visiting her. The thought of a visit from them was both delightful and worrying. They had never been to Jalna, and she longed to show them the old house and the rambling estate. Yet should she be able to conceal from their shrewd and loving eyes the present volcanic barrenness of her life? Might not an eruption be possible during their visit? She was all the more apprehensive because they had never met Renny. They had
met and given their hearts to Eden at first sight. The divorce and her remarriage to Eden’s brother had been a shock to them. It was only now that they could make up their minds to visit her. She wished that the elder Whiteoaks were at home. The presence of Augusta, Nicholas, and Ernest appeared to her now as a protecting wall behind which she might conceal her own heartache. She had always thought how interested she should be if she could see her aunts, so refined, so whimsically proper, so gingerly perched above all ugliness in life, in the same house with the three elderly Whiteoaks, across whom lay the lusty shadow of old Adeline.
How she had welcomed the departure of Ernest and Nicholas for England! She had looked forward to a summer of greater freedom in her life with Renny, a summer of fulfilment, of spiritual development of their love. And it had come to this! If the Uncles had not gone away it might not have come to this. Even that thought came to her. Over and over again she lived through their misunderstandings and tried to see what she might have done to prevent them. She could not discover anything in her most self-accusing mood that would have prevented them except the humbling of her spirit to his and the absolute conforming to the life of the house. She believed that if she had it all to live over again that she would do just that. Humble her spirit and conform absolutely to the life of the house. Perhaps, if only she had agreed to read French with that unattractive Lebraux child, all might have been well. But the thought of the child brought the thought of the mother, and the thought of the mother brought a rush of anger and jealousy that drove all else from her mind. She discovered that she was bitterly jealous of Mrs. Lebraux, that she was even jealous of little Pauline. When Piers made a remark to Renny in reference to
the fox farm, and Renny answered in obvious familiarity with its affairs, she dare not look at them lest they should read the anger in her eyes.
Looking back over her acquaintance with Renny she recognised that he had always irritated her, excited some latent antagonism in her, sometimes as though deliberately, more often by simply being himself. She and Eden had never quarrelled. From the first her love for him had in it a maternal quality. There was nothing maternal in her love for Renny. It was instinctive, violent, and without rest. And, though there was no rest in it, no peace in it, neither was there growth. It was like the sea, eternally beating against its shores, yet eternally bound by them.
What had they been quarrelling about? Old Benny—the sheepdog. Mooey—the baby. Pauline and Wakefield—children. Was their life together to be ruined by quarrels over dogs and children? If only she had a child of her own, things might be different. But Renny had never expressed a desire for a child of his own.
B
ARNEY
A
LMA
P
ATCH
was the girl who came as nursemaid to young Maurice. She was the niece of the village nurse, and her aunt was well pleased to be the means of installing her at Jalna. The village nurse was also the village gossip and, as the Whiteoaks were the mainstay of rumour and of tattle, Alma would be a conduit through which a continuous supply would flow.
She was a strong girl, with sandy hair, a freckled face, and she never raised her voice above a whisper except when she sang or laughed, which she did in a piercingly high soprano. She was as lazy as possible and very fond of children. To sit on the grass minding Mooey, while he trotted about her in his play, sometimes stopping to throw grass on her, or hug her, or even kick her, was Alma’s idea of bliss. Then, to fill her stomach with the good food, and her mind with the rich gossip, and to return home at dusk an object of rare importance to her friends, constituted a life of such perfection as it is given to few to enjoy.
About the time of Alma’s appearance at Jalna, Pauline Eebraux gave Renny a nine months’old Irish terrier dog,
named Barney. It had been sent to her for her birthday by a friend of her father’s in Quebec. It had been impossible for her to keep him because he spent all his time in barking at the foxes, exciting them to frenzy. So, though she loved him, and because she loved him, Pauline presented him in turn to Renny on his birthday. As though he needed another dog!
But he seemed to have unlimited room in his affections for dogs and children. He looked on Barney as the one dog to fill a long-felt want. But the terrier was the wildest, most untamable creature that had ever been on the place. Piers thought he was excessively inbred. Renny, who was an advocate of inbreeding, insisted that Barney was the victim of a system of raising dogs like wild animals. He guessed that he had been brought up in an enclosure without a word of kindness. To make friends with him, to teach him what companionship of man and dog may be, this was a task after Renny’s heart. And Barney was beautifully set up, had, beneath the untamed look in his eyes, a look of desperate need.
But he would not allow himself to be touched. He scarcely knew his name. He carried his meals into a corner, growling like a wild animal while he devoured them. He slept in Wright’s room over the garage, but he did not make friends with Wright. From the moment he was released in the morning he ran hither and thither as though half demented by the multitude of strange sights about him and the vast open spaces where he might run at will. The fields of grain were tall and a deep golden colour. Barney spent most of his days in them as in a jungle. Deep in a field a movement might be seen stirring the ears of wheat or barley, and then stillness again, for it was sultry weather and no breeze stirred the grain. Sometimes when Renny walked past the fields, followed by his two Clumber spaniels,
Barney’s face would appear watching them cautiously from the shelter of the grain. He would let them get a little way ahead, then, in his concealment, he would bound after them till he was again abreast, and again he would peer out with that same desperate look in his eyes.
The spaniels appeared to understand all about him. In his own way Renny had explained the situation to them. They would give a friendly look in his direction but no more, walking with dignity at their master’s heels.
At last a day came when he emerged from the shelter of grain and ran in the open for a little way near Renny and the spaniels.
“Just watch,” Renny advised Piers, who had been inclined to jeer, “and you will see a splendid dog in him yet. He’s never had a chance till now, and he’s responding to it every day.”
“He’s getting to look a little beauty, no doubt about that,” acceded Piers. “He’s grown a lot since he came. But I’m willing to bet that it will be cold weather before he comes of his own accord to you and lets you pet him.”
“What will you bet?”
“A fiver.”
“Done.”
Renny won the bet by a wide margin. He was riding his Javourite roan one morning at a canter along the path through the wood, when suddenly he came upon Barney, his head in a burrow. When he withdrew his head he seemed too astonished for movement. He stood sniffing the roan’s legs, then raised himself to sniff Renny’s boots. When horse and rider moved on he trotted close behind. From that time he followed the roan whenever and wherever he could. Inside of a month he had come to Renny of his own accord and laid his head on his knee.
Renny’s pleasure in this achievement was so great that he boasted of it even to Alayne, who did not care for dogs, and for this dog less than others, since it had come from the fox farm. But she tried to soften her face, which felt rigid, into a sympathetic smile.
One day in late August, when a thunderstorm was pending, Renny and Piers, accompanied by Wright, went in the car to a sale twenty miles away. Pheasant was in bed that day, feeling ill. She had told Alayne that morning that she believed she was going to have a child.
Alayne wandered about the downstairs trying to settle herself at something, but the air was full of electricity; there was a sulphurous light in the sky which seemed uncomfortably near the treetops, and she felt disturbed, even shaken, by Pheasant’s news.
A second child for her and Piers! Perhaps another son! And there were no signs that she herself might become a mother. She had not yet been married a year and a half, but she had a morbid premonition that she was to be childless. That she was to see Meggie and Pheasant rejoicing in their motherhood, see Renny carrying their children in his arms, and feel herself married without the fulfilment of marriage. She leaned against the window of the sitting-room, looking out on the side lawn where, in the sultry shade, Mooey lay stretched on his back idly, lifting first one leg and then the other. Alma sat beside him, her face a blank from contentment and heat. Alayne wondered what went on in that head under the sandy hair. She watched the girl’s large pink hands pluck blades of grass and tickle her own lips with them.
As she was wondering this, Alma’s eyes became round and prominent with terror. She opened her mouth wide and gave a piercing scream. The shock to Alayne was all the
greater for never having heard the girl utter a sound above a whisper up to this moment. Mooey sat up and looked at Alma.
“Do it again!” he said.
As though at his bidding, Alma repeated her scream, and now Alayne saw what she was screaming about. Barney was flying round and round the lawn in a kind of aimless fury, his jaws snapping rhythmically, and foam whitening his lips. He passed beneath her window then, and she saw his eyes fixed in an hallucinated glare. From a window above came Pheasant’s shrieks, then her agonised call to Alma to run with Mooey to the house.
“This way!” cried Alayne. “This way! Bring him to me!”
Alma snatched up the child and passed him through the window to Alayne just as the dog again flitted by like a creature from a nightmare. Somehow she managed to drag the girl in also.
She ran to the hall and met Wragge there. His pale face lad become ashen.
“Did you know that that dog of Mr. W’iteoak’s ‘as gone mad, ma’am? Isn’t it terrible?” He ran to the front door, shut and locked it.
Alayne could hear a commotion of voices in the basement. She could hear Pheasant frantically questioning child and nurse upstairs. One of the farm-labourers, named Quinn, appeared at the back of the hall. He said:
“Don’t you think we’d better shoot the dog, ma’am? He’s gone clean mad!”
“Yes, yes—we must have him destroyed! It’s too terrible. Oh, I wish Mr. Whiteoak were here!”