Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
Adeline, petted and arrogant, was always getting in the way, having to be rescued from danger. She was gloriously happy, with an animal instinctive happiness. She saw nothing beyond this morning.
But it came to an end and Piers asked her if she would like to go home with him for dinner. Renny had lifted her from her pony and he smoothed the red hair back from her hot forehead.
“Want to go?” he asked.
“No. I’ll stay with you.”
“But I’m going out to lunch in Stead.”
“I’ll go with Uncle Piers, then.”
It was lovely at the Harbour, she thought — small and sunny, with zinnias and marigolds close to the door, and Baby Philip running and falling down and picking himself up again. She liked the looks of Pheasant in her yellow dress and necklace of beads like scarlet berries. Pheasant washed her and tidied her hair.
“Did you ever see such hair!” she exclaimed to Piers, as it flew after the comb. “And such skin! Oh, I wish I had a little girl!”
“It’s a pity Mooey isn’t one,” answered Piers.
“Didn’t he do well this morning?”
“I did well!” put in Adeline.
“I’ll say you did!” said Piers. “But he had two tumbles and both unnecessary.”
Pheasant looked reproachfully and pityingly at her eldest when he came to the table. He sat very straight, avoiding her eyes. She bent over him, whispering in his ear:
“Corn for lunch.”
He brightened and looked up at her with gratitude, not for the dish he liked best but for the sweet comfort in her tone.
After the roast pork, potatoes, and apple sauce, the corn came in a large dish. The full, smooth-pearled ears were wrapped in a snowy napkin. Adeline’s eyes glowed as Pheasant selected an ear for her.
“Golden Bantam!” she said, smacking her lips.
“It’s not. It’s Country Gentleman,” said Mooey, glad to contradict her. The schooling had made him nervous. He slid a piece of butter along the rows of his ear of corn and, when it had melted, buried his teeth in the kernels.
“Me! Me!” cried Baby Philip.
“No, no, darling,” said Pheasant, “you’re not big enough.”
Philip hurled himself back in his high chair, rage and misery in his blue eyes.
Piers already showed a tendency to humour this son. He put a small ear of corn into his hands and grinned approvingly as the baby attacked it.
“Well,” said Pheasant, “if he has colic all night, you may sit up with him.”
Philip rolled his eyes truculently at her over his buttery prize.
Nook knew that he could not digest corn and ate his baked potato pensively. He was thinking of how he had hidden his latest treasure — a wild canary’s nest in two tiers, with an unhatched cowbird’s egg in the lower one — at the first sound of Adeline’s voice. Now he could enjoy playing with her. Here he was on his own ground and was less intimidated by her than at Jalna.
Pheasant put them to rest together on a big bed, out of hearing of the baby. They rolled and laughed and shouted till Nook’s cheeks were a wild-rose pink and Adeline’s eyes glittered like a young animal’s. Mooey had gone off by himself to the woods.
After tea Renny called for Adeline. He tied his horse and had a cup with Pheasant, who had the baby on her knee.
“Philip is quiet, for him,” he said.
“Yes. He’s just been getting up the corn Piers gave him at dinner. Piers is so reckless with the children.”
“You should control him.” He spoke severely.
“Control him! Could Alayne control you?” Alayne’s name was out before she could stop herself. Well, surely there was no harm in speaking that name, when Renny had never acknowledged a break between them! She felt that she would rather like to force him to some admission.
He was startled but he stared at her as though he would stare down any intrusion on her part into his affairs. Then abruptly he answered her question with another, so shrewdly put that it forced a direct answer.
“You hear from her regularly, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Has she said when she is coming back?”
Well, two can play at hedging, thought Pheasant, and asked:
“Are you expecting her?”
“No.” Again he stared, and the blood surged to his hard, high-coloured face.
“It is a great pity.”
He rose instantly and looked at his wrist watch. “Where is Adeline?” he asked.
It was an unnecessary question, for the children were making a hubbub overhead.
Pheasant went into the hall and called:
“Nook, bring Adeline down. Her daddy is here.”
They could not hear her. She went halfway up the stairs, calling to him. The noise ceased and the children appeared smiling and flushed. Nook was so happy that he ran and fetched his bird’s nest to show Adeline. Proudly he displayed the chamber with the cowbird’s egg unhatched in it.
“You mustn’t touch,” he warned, but Adeline had already snatched it.
Pheasant wiped the sticky yolk from her little hand, Renny carried her off. Nook, in despair, was rolling on the floor. Philip found a piece of the eggshell and ate it.
Going home Adeline was in a state of bliss. Beneath her was the great powerful horse, at her back the muscular wall of her father’s body. When the horse turned his head she saw the glint of his teeth against the bit. Her father’s arm was the strongest in the world. The frosty air almost drove her mad with joy. Never before had she seen a new moon glitter out in a frosty sky — and she on horseback. She shouted at the top of her lungs. She rocked from side to side, testing the power of that never-failing arm. She would have liked to go on riding so forever.
But he would not even take her to the stables. He put her down at the door of the house and Rags called down the basement stairs to Alma that she was back. There was nothing to do but go to bed. She felt resentful toward the whole world.
She mounted the stairs reluctantly, dragging on Alma’s hand. She was a sight, Alma declared, with her jersey torn and her breeches sagging to her heels. She must be very quiet for Roma was fast asleep.
She realized that she was very tired. She could hardly drag one foot after the other. Outside her mother’s door she stopped and pointed a grimy finger.
“I want her,” she said.
“Well, you can’t have her,” said Alma. “She’s hundreds of miles away.”
“I know. She’s gone to get a baby. Like Wright’s. Only just so big.” She held up her hands two inches apart.
Alma smothered a laugh. “Oh, the things you say,” she giggled.
“’Cause I know,” said Adeline sturdily.
She was good and very quiet while she was undressed and washed. She ran naked to peep between the bars of the crib at Roma curled up, with a wisp of hair that looked white, starting from her white forehead. Adeline pushed out her lips to kiss her but Roma was too far away.
She felt very small and alone when the light was out. She comforted herself by remembering a little blue butterfly that, long ago, in the morning time, she had seen opening and shutting its wings like a fan. She wondered what had become of it.
A
LAYNE AND THE
N
EW
L
IFE
L
IFE IN THE
charming little house up the Hudson was not so easy as Alayne had expected. Not that she had looked forward to happiness, but she had expected the serenity, the simplicity of living which she had known there in the old days. She found that living alone had made a difference in Aunt Harriet. After spending her days in thought for her sister’s comfort, she had turned to spending them in thought for her own. It took little to upset her — a window opened that she had left shut — a disarranged couch — a newspaper thrown down carelessly. There was no doubt Alayne was less tidy than of old. Yet at Jalna she had been held up, sometimes as a paragon, sometimes as a tyrant of orderliness. Now she found herself intensely irritated by her aunt’s fussiness, her exacting care over things that were not, after all, of great value. It irritated her that Miss Archer should refuse to let the maid dust china that, at Jalna, would have been handled by the Wragges without restraint. Sometimes the very smallness of the table at which they ate their meals irked her. She was too conscious of her aunts fastidious preparation of each mouthful.
Yet, at times — nearly always, she was warmly grateful for the refuge of this house. To no other place could she turn for love and kinship.
She and Aunt Harriet talked for hours of days gone by. They recalled every incident of the visit which she, as a child, had made to the Miss Archers’. All Alayne’s childish sayings were recounted, not once but again and again, in the long autumn evenings. Hearing them she could not help thinking how much cleverer and more spiritual she had been than her own child. At other times she felt that she had been a little prig.
When the tale of Alayne’s childhood was exhausted Miss Archer turned to her own early life with her sister and brother, Alayne’s father. She brought out old photographs and daguerreotypes and recalled the very price and pattern of the dresses in them. She retold the lives of her own parents and grandparents. She even shed tears over the pathetic death of a young son of her great-grandmother’s. Living intimately in the memory of these forebears of hers Alayne could not wonder that she had found the Whiteoaks alien. She recalled the faces in the old photograph albums at Jalna and the anecdotes she had heard of their owners; how Nicholas would growl — “That old blackguard! Well — he was the scandal of County Meath, and that’s saying a good deal.” Or Ernest would exclaim — “That was Fanny Whiteoak — a beauty, but what a temper! Her husband used to beat her, and small wonder!”
Alayne wondered when her aunt would become conscious of her condition. It seemed extraordinary that her state of health aroused no suspicion. But then, Miss Archer had never had anything to do with maternity. Still she often seemed to be worrying privately over something. It was possible, Alayne thought, that Aunt Harriet was getting tired of having her with her, and one day she bluntly put the question.
Miss Archer burst into tears. “No, no, dearest Alayne,” she sobbed, “it could never be anything but joy to have you with me. It is my investments that worry me. They are getting worse and worse.”
Alayne was aghast. “Have you seen your lawyer?”
“Oh yes. He has done all he can. But how could he know that my stocks would go down so? He is terribly disturbed.” Her pretty, old face quivered and was wet with tears.
“Now let us keep calm and go into this,” said Alayne.
They went into it and it was even worse than she had feared. The room began to go round with her, as it always did now, if things were upsetting. But she kept on patting Aunt Harriet’s plump back. “You must not worry so. It will be all right. I have enough for both of us and your stocks will recover. I am sure they will.” In her heart she did not believe they would. She found herself prone to look on the dark side of everything. She saw the money which she had so relentlessly guarded from Renny’s predatory hand, being spent to keep up this house — leaving nothing to bequeath to her child — her children! With terror she put from her the thought that her own income might shrink so that there would not be enough of it for them to live on. Still, she could always get a job with her old friend, Mr. Cory the publisher. She was sure of that. But who would care for her baby while she was away? Certainly not Aunt Harriet. She knew nothing of infants and was too old in any case. No, she would have to engage a nurse — and she pictured her aunt and herself in an apartment in New York being kept awake by the crying of a child.
Oh, if only this had not happened to her! She writhed spiritually as she considered all that it implied … if only she had found Renny out before this had happened to her! For a second it flashed into her mind that perhaps it would be better if she had never found him out — considering that then all was over between him and Clara…. Fiercely she put this weakness from her. She was glad she had found him out, glad she had escaped from the degradation of such a situation — glad that she had taken from him the power to say, “I have deceived her and got away with it. A man has to have a fling once in his married life. Mine was successful.” And how could she know that he would not have repeated the infidelity?
She was morbidly determined to hide the fact of her pregnancy from the family at Jalna. In a curious manner the knowledge that Minny had concealed the birth of her child from Eden worked on her mind. She conceived a strange connection between herself and Minny. The thought even came to her that her own child would be a girl and of the same pale colouring as Minny’s child. She pictured herself as dying at its birth and Aunt Harriet taking the child to Jalna — a companion to Roma.
In the dark fall days she took an unhappy solace in such thoughts as these. Her health was better and she forced herself to take long walks for the sake of the unborn child. She took them in the afternoon and it was at this hour that the postman made his rounds. As she turned homewards she could scarcely restrain her impatience to see if he had brought a letter to her from Canada. She said to herself that it was Pheasant’s letter she strained toward, with its news of Adeline. But in truth she was always expecting a letter from Renny — a letter demanding or imploring her return. The sight of the Canadian stamp set her heart pounding.
But the letter was always from Pheasant. She was a good correspondent. Alayne was the only person to whom she wrote and she had a deep sense of secret importance when she sat down to detail the doings at Jalna for her benefit. Alayne always carried the letter to her own room and first read it there, later on reading such parts as she wished to her aunt.
If Miss Archer thought that she kept anything back she gave no hint of her suspicion. Indeed suspicion could not describe any feeling of hers toward Alayne. Alayne had a right to her own privacy and the thought of infringing on that was obnoxious to Miss Archer. They were a family who always respected each other. Some of the extracts from Pheasant’s letters made it easy to realize what Alayne must have gone through in such an environment. And it had had its effect on her! One could tell by the way she read aloud, without turning a hair, things which she would once have found distasteful.