Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“Don’t tell me that you believe in such a ridiculous superstition!”
“Gran always said —”
“There you go — ‘Gran’!”
“She said it meant death.”
Alayne laughed. “Well, I can think of people whose hairs I should like to cast to the birds.”
“I shan’t risk it.” He struck a match and touched the blanched hair with its flame. She looked on amused yet with a ridiculous feeling of sadness as this minute part of her shrivelled and turned to a puff of ash. She said suddenly:
“You do love me, don’t you?”
“What a question!”
“But you do? “ Her eyes filled with tears. “I want you to say you do.”
“Otherwise I might have given your hair to the birds.” He put his arm about her, then gave an exclamation of pain. “I believe I shall have to see the doctor,” he said. “I’ve hurt myself.”
Instantly her brows puckered in anxiety. “But when? Where? Why haven’t you told me?”
“It’s my shoulder. I was lifting something.”
She gave an exhalation of relief. A wrenched shoulder was not likely to be serious. She said, with more irritation than sympathy — “I have never known anyone who so often gets hurt. You are too impetuous really. You throw yourself into things so. What were you lifting?”
He returned, frowning — “I don’t throw myself into things. It’s nothing serious. I’ll get Piers to drive me over to the doctor’s.”
“But not before dinner.” They had dinner at one.
He agreed to wait till after dinner because Alayne disliked the hours of meals upset, but he had little appetite. He returned from the doctor’s with his arm in a sling. He had broken his collarbone.
T
HUNDERCLAP
T
HAT EVENING
C
LARA
Lebraux divested of her daffodil-strewn apron, sat on a rather uncomfortable rustic seat before the door of her own house and inhaled with deep enjoyment the smoke from a Russian cigarette. Her enjoyment of the cigarette had an edge all the more keen because of her deep unhappiness. She stared into the twilight of the trees beyond her small garden and reviewed her life. It was divided into three parts — her girlhood in Newfoundland, her married life in Quebec, and the years since coming to the vicinity of Jalna. Her father had made money in the fisheries. He and his family had lived extravagantly. Clara had married young and enjoyed a kind of bickering happiness for twelve years, clinging more and more to her child as she cared less for her husband. She had lived the open air life that suited her, tobogganing, snowshoeing, in the winter; sailing her yacht on the St. Lawrence in the summer. Then, when Pauline had been a long-legged child of fourteen, Clara’s father had lost his money and, in the same year, Antoine Lebraux had developed the disease which had proved fatal. From that time Clara had never known what it was to be free from anxiety and care. Her brother had moved to Ontario. She and Lebraux with their child had followed him and bought a small farm with the object of rearing silver foxes. In the long illness and death of her husband Clara had found a friend in Renny Whiteoak. He had been friend and protector to Pauline and her. Clara remembered how in her husband’s terrible illness she had depended more and more on Renny, how, after Antoine’s death, love had come to her. But not in place of friendship. They were good friends always, he never suspecting her love — not till that night last September when, in the twilit wood that now opened before her, they had found each other as lovers. They had come together in friendship and in passion. The harvest moon had burned in the dusky sky above them. She wanted him, had been wanting him for years and hiding her desire. She had exulted in giving herself to him. They had seemed small under the great harvest moon, but not insignificant. Their love had had an exultant meaning under the night sky. All through the autumn they had met, but not since then. She understood that she was no longer necessary to him in that way and she acquiesced. She was more primitive than passionate. Nothing could take from her what she had had. Now that the warm weather had come she sat smoking every evening staring into the wood, wondering if he might come to her.
Pauline, dressed in white, came out of the house and leaned against the back of the bench. She looked pale.
“I find these first warm days depressing,” she said, in her low voice that had a hint of her father’s French intonation.
Clara’s hand reached back to hers. “Do you, darling? But they are nice, after such a terrible winter, aren’t they?”
“I like the winter. I never mind the cold.”
“I know. But the cold is awful to me, even though I was brought up in Newfoundland…. Look here, Pauline.”
“Yes, Mummie.” She answered as a child, but her eyes dwelt, with a woman’s appraisal, on her mother’s blunt, healthy face, her hair cut without elegance, her chest on which there was a red triangle of sunburn. Pauline suspected the relations between Renny and her mother, and the suspicion poisoned her life. She loved Renny with her passionate girl’s soul, with a piercing, hopeless love. And soon she was to marry Wakefield. Sometimes she felt that she was wrong in marrying Wakefield, but she had a deep affection for him, and she could not waste her life in love for a man who cared nothing for her as a woman, only loved her as a little friend. She had told of her indecision in the confessional and the priest had advised her to turn her heart confidently to Wakefield. He was sure they would be happy together. She must put Renny out of her mind. Her love for him was a sin.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Clara.
“Yes?” Pauline was scarcely interested. Her mother would certainly be thinking about the tea shop, and they had talked and thought so much of it.
“I’ve been thinking,” went on Clara, “that I ought to go away.”
“Go away? But where? And why?” Pauline’s words were almost a cry. She could scarcely believe her ears. Her mother go away!
Clara went on quietly — “Well, since your uncle’s wife has died, he needs a housekeeper.”
“He doesn’t need you!” said Pauline passionately. “He’s never been kind to you. I don’t like Uncle Fred. Why, Mummie” — her voice broke — “you couldn’t go away? You couldn’t!”
“You and Wake would be better alone. Any young married pair are better alone.”
“We don’t want you to go. We don’t want to be alone.” But even as her lips framed the words, her voice faltered. She was not convincing. Clara experienced a cruel pang. Yet how natural that the boy and girl should want to be in the house alone!
But Pauline was not thinking of Wakefield. A glimmering brightness had risen in her mind. If her mother went away there would no longer be the torture of seeing her and Renny together, of seeing them go off together talking intimately about some trivial matter.
“I have quite made up my mind.” Clara was saying. “Of course, I shall often come to see you. And I’ll write two or three times a week.” She spoke in a stolid matter-of-fact tone.
Pauline looked down at her curiously. What was behind that blonde impassive face? Why had she come to this decision? Pauline suddenly wanted to throw herself on Clara’s breast and cry. The twilight of the spring evening, the strangeness of her approaching marriage, the thought of parting from her mother, gave her a lost, frightened feeling. But she spoke calmly.
“Of course, if you want to go, Mummie. But you know how I feel about it. Why, I’ve never been away from you a night in my life. It will be horrible.”
Clara laughed teasingly. “Horrible! With Wake! It’s a good thing he can’t hear that.”
“He would understand.”
“Is he coming tonight?”
“No. He has gone to town to a mission for men. It is the Paulist Father’s mission. Wakefield is becoming more Catholic than I am. He really knows much more about the ritual. He’s wonderful, and he appreciates the beauty of it so.”
“Yes,” agreed Clara thoughtfully. “But I wish he had come to see you. It’s a night for young lovers. Do you smell something sweet on the air?”
“I’ve noticed it. I don’t know what it is. I’m perfectly happy with you. Shall we go for a stroll?”
Clara’s feet ached from being on them all day, but she was never too tired to walk with Pauline. She so habitually thought of Pauline before herself that a wish expressed by the girl became her own also. She rose and put her arm about Pauline’s waist.
“Which way shall we go?” she asked.
“Through the wood and down into the ravine.”
“Don’t you think it will be damp there?”
“I don’t mind.” Pauline’s childishly egotistical answer overrode any further objection Clara might have had. Clasped together they crossed their plot of shaven grass and from it found the narrow path that led across an open field into a copse of oaks. Here the path wound steeply into the ravine, from where the hurried murmur of the stream could be heard.
As they entered the wood a blackbird, hidden among the dense branches, let fall his last low whistle before, startled by their steps, he sought a still more remote shelter for the night. After that came the whirring cry of the nightjar who seemed not to fear them. He spun his velvet flight about them as they moved, now singly, toward the little bridge that crossed the stream.
All this belonged to Jalna, and from the other side of the water another path led upward to the house. Along this path they now heard a third person moving. The young bracken, crushed by his footsteps, added its scent to the already sweet-scented air. A bright spark, making a downward curving arc, showed that he smoked.
In the minds of both mother and daughter was the certainty that the descending figure was Renny Whiteoak’s and both felt an almost equal pang of regret that she was not to meet him alone. No regret dulled the eagerness with which he greeted them. They had not yet spent a summer in the place where they now lived, and it came as a pleasant surprise to him to find them standing together on the bridge on this first warm evening.
Clara noticed before Pauline that his arm was in a sling. She gave an exclamation of dismay, then asked curtly:
“What did you do to it?”
“Nothing!” he laughed. “Honestly, nothing.”
“Well … if you are going to answer me as though I were a fool …” she said sulkily.
“What is it really?” asked Pauline. She drew close to him, trying to see his features, but she could only make out the brightness of his eyes, and the line of his lips against the cigarette.
He answered — “I was wrestling with the Daffodil tea shop and put it in its place too.”
“It’s a damned shame!” exclaimed Clara. “I’m absolutely sick about it. Is anything broken?”
“The collarbone.”
“And you’re due to ride in the Show in a few weeks. How awful!”
“It’s only a crack really. I shall be all right.”
Clara put out her hand and laid it gently on his shoulder. “I had rather the old tea shop had fallen down,” she said.
She kept her hand on his shoulder because she could not take it away. It was as though the maimed shoulder were a magnet that held her hand irresistibly. If he had backed from her across the bridge, she would have followed him as unconsciously as the iron the magnet. In the semi-darkness Pauline was aware of this irresistible drawing of her mother and she felt a wild rage against her. “When she goes,” Pauline thought, “I shall never be tortured like this any more. I shall be far happier.” She said — “I think I shall go back to the house. Wakefield may come.”
Without turning her head, Clara answered:
“I thought you said he had gone to the mission.”
“He may not stay. He said he might come rather late.”
“Oh, very well.”
Clara spoke, almost without knowing that words left her lips. But, after a few moments, she made a great effort and said to Renny:
“I am going to keep house for my brother. It is better for Pauline and Wakefield to be alone together.”
“Going away!” he repeated incredulously. “You can’t. It’s perfect nonsense. They don’t need to be alone together. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Why should they want to be alone together?”
“It’s better for married people. They get on better.”
He returned hotly — “None of us have been alone when we were first married. Not Eden and Alayne. Not Piers and Pheasant. Not Alayne and me.”
She gave a little laugh. “Well, have the lot of you always got on?”
“My Uncle Nicholas and his wife were alone together and they got to hate each other.”
“I have another reason.”
Something in her voice made him try to see her face. “What is it, Clara?” he asked.
“I feel that it is not safe for me to be near you.”
“You need not be afraid of me.”
“You have shown me that. But I can’t trust myself. I must take my hateful self away.”
His voice broke out harshly. “Clara, I need you! I can’t let you go away! I want you near me!” He put his uninjured arm about her and drew her to him so that their breasts were together. She did not answer but, with supreme effort, tried to draw every particle of bliss possible from his embrace for her solace later. Yet she did not falter in her resolve.
Pauline had retreated to the top of the path but had not yet returned to the house when she heard Renny’s voice raised in what, in the extreme stillness of that place, amounted almost to an outcry. She stood transfixed in an ecstasy of jealousy. She was not the only person who had overheard his excited words. He stood in the singular position at that moment of a man who holds in his arms a woman who loves him, while two other women who love him, stand as listeners unseen and unable to see the principal actors in the drama.
Having seen Renny go toward the ravine, Alayne had a sudden desire to follow him there. She had last seen the stream frozen and the bridge arched in snow. She would stand on it with him and listen to the talking of the stream. A passionate tenderness toward life stirred her emotionally. She felt the largeness and strength of the springtime renewal. A heaviness, as though her own body partook in it, caused her to move slowly. She made no sound as she opened the wicket gate and stood at the top of the descent into the ravine.
When she heard his outburst of “Clara, I need you! I want you near me! I can’t let you go away!” — she did not stop in her slow descent but moved forward, as though by a power other than her own. The path seemed to flow under her feet and yet she was able to move steadily. It was her brain that felt as though it were falling, in a dizzy flight down into the darkness. All the while she had a hard pride in the thought that she could walk so steadily after hearing words like these. She planted one foot after the other among the curled green heads of the bracken fronds. She carried her electric torch in her hand, unlighted, but, when she reached the bridge, she turned on its beam and pointed it, as though it were a weapon, at the two who had drawn apart in consternation.