Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
She should not have let him come with her, she thought. Why had he offered to come? His presence was a torture. She looked sidewise at his stern, dark profile, the bitter bend of his lips, and wondered if this were indeed her young lover.
Sarah’s voice came to them from behind. She was gliding toward them, dressed in grey fur and followed by Meg.
“It’s a good thing the train is late,” she said, “or we should have kept them waiting. Meg was so annoyed. But then I’m always late.”
She looked sharply into their faces. “How wan you two are! But stations always make people look dreadful. I believe I’ll go out and wait in the car. I don’t want Finch to think I’ve lost all my looks.”
“You look all right,” said Wakefield, shortly. He made room for her between him and Molly.
Meg came to his other side and squeezed his arm. “Isn’t it lovely to think Finch is coming?” she exclaimed, and added in a whisper, “But I suppose we shall scarcely have a word with him. Sarah is so possessive. Still, we can look at him!”
“There they come!” said Wakefield.
They were among the last of the passengers to appear and they made an arresting group. Even to Molly, who was accustomed to the oddities of her stepsisters, they looked strange in this new setting. To Meg they were strange and touching. To Sarah they were bizarre and a little ridiculous. She gave them an amused smile, then flew to Finch’s arms. He clasped her to him, in her scented fur, and felt a dizzy joy mingled with foreboding.
“Darling!” she breathed. “What I’ve gone through, with you on the sea! Every night I’ve woken, picturing your ship sunk by a submarine! How well you look! Not a bit as though you’d been worried. Yet think what I’ve been through since we parted! It’s a wonder I’m here to meet you.”
She clung to his arm, deliberately placing herself between him and his brother and sister.
Meg had almost forgotten Finch in her interest in the three sisters. Finch had led the way with Garda at his side. She was wearing a black bonnet-like cap tied under her chin and beneath it her thick dark hair hung down to her shoulders. She wore a heavy black coat and was weighted with bags and parcels. Out of this sombre attire her round child’s face stared, rosy as an apple. She looked surprised at everything and held her mouth as though about to whistle. When she saw Molly, tears began to run out of her eyes.
Gemmel was being carried by a Negro train porter and a red-capped station porter. She too was in black but a feather hung from the brim of her velvet hat. She clung to the men’s necks and her pointed features were still more sharpened by anxiety. She too began to cry when Molly appeared.
Althea came last, wearing an old-fashioned fur-trimmed cloak that had been her mother’s. Her fairness was so accentuated as to be ethereal and the expression of her face was as remote as when Wakefield had first seen her on the mountainside in Wales. She too carried a number of parcels and a traveling rug for Gemmel.
To Molly their coming signified the breaking up of her old life. So long as she had been able to picture her family in Wales she had felt a certain solidity in her background. The fact that they had been uprooted had added to the distress of the past weeks. But even while they were tossing on the dangerous waves of the ocean she had not quite brought herself to believe in the upheaval. The picture in her mind, that picture of the dark Welsh hills, was still firm. She saw Christopher walking near the ruined Abbey with his sheep, Althea painting her strange harsh pictures and hiding from the outside world, Gemmel and Garda always about the house.
But now she saw them in this new land and she felt in truth that her world was shattered.
She sat with Althea and Garda in the rear seat of the car. Gemmel sat beside Wakefield, who drove. Molly could find no words. Her throat might have been paralyzed. She sat rigid, holding the hand of a stepsister on either side, her eyes fixed on Wakefield. How he had changed! He did not look like the same boy, she thought. Just that glimpse of the cheek, the compressed lips, the eyes fixed straight ahead, was enough to prove how he too was suffering. It was wrong of him to come! He should have sent someone else to drive the car, not subjected the two of them to this torture of hopeless nearness. The car skidded a little and she thought — “I wish we might have an accident and I be thrown into his arms and die there. It would be over and done with and I should be glad.”
She thought of Renny with sudden fierce anger. It was his fault. He had done this to them. If he had kept his secret to himself what would it have mattered! Time and again she had remarked his paternal attitude toward his brothers. That fatherliness was one of his strongest characteristics, she thought. Yet she had seen not a sign of it toward herself and he had roused no feeling of a daughter from her. They were man and woman, connected by a tragic bond. That was all.
Blindly she saw the town left behind, saw the grey foam-flecked lake, the winter woods, the frozen fields. She heard Gemmel raining questions on Wakefield. She was thankful that the two beside her did not want to talk. Blindly she helped to carry the parcels into the house. She and Wakefield gripped hands and carried Gemmel up the slippery steps and put her down in the warm living room.
“How lovely!” cried Gemmel.
“Oh. I’m so glad to be here!” cried Garda.
“Anything more you want?” asked Wakefield.
“Nothing more…. You’ve been so kind…. Thank you…. Goodbye … goodbye.”
An hour later, in their bedroom, Gemmel said to Garda: —
“I knew Molly would feel badly about Father but I’d no idea how badly. Did you ever see anyone cry so? I thought she’d die of her grief.”
FINCH AT HOME AGAIN
T
HE SCENE IN
the car which carried Meg, Sarah, and Finch was very different. Maurice too was there, in the driver’s seat. During most of the drive he played the part of listener but the two women talked ceaselessly, pouring out the news to Finch and asking him a thousand questions. Finch too was eager and excited, glad to be home again after a considerable absence. Everything his eye rested on came to him with the brightness of familiarity. The scene seemed to offer itself for inspection and approval. The country seemed to say — “War has not really touched me yet. I’m young and unhurt.” His eyes rested on lake, on fields; now on Sarah’s face, now on Meg’s.
When they passed the gates of Jalna he wished he might have alighted from the car and gone into the house alone. He craned his neck to have a good view of it. There was not a soul in sight, not even horse or dog or circling pigeons. The house looked very quiet and a little remote.
When they reached Vaughanlands, Sarah almost dragged him out of the car.
“Hurry! Hurry!” she exclaimed. “Baby is dying to meet his papa!”
Baby’s papa felt suddenly shy. He was afraid he would not be enthusiastic enough to please Sarah. He stood with Maurice, inspecting a new collie.
“You think more of that dog than you do of your own son!” cried Sarah angrily.
Finch laughed. “Very well, show me the prodigy.” He followed her into the house.
Meg had already hurried upstairs as fast as her increasing weight would allow. She appeared on the landing, the infant in her arms. Sarah had him dressed in old-fashioned long robes, a mass of frills and fine tucks. He was pink-faced and fair.
“There!” cried Sarah delightedly. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s the image of you”
“Poor little devil,” said Finch. Gingerly he bent and kissed the tiny face. He sniffed the scent of talcum and warm flannel.
“He’s nice,” he said. “What did you say his name is?”
Meg gave him a warning look. He would have the girl in hysterics. “You’re impossible, Finch. You know quite well what his name is. Dennis Finch.”
Finch’s sensitive ear was afflicted. “The two don’t go well together,” he said, and he pronounced the name grievously, dwelling on the hissing sounds.
“I know,” said Sarah, “but he had to have both names. Names of the only two men I’ve loved.”
The only two! Finch thought of his dead friend, Arthur Leigh, her first husband, and of how he had loved Sarah. How could she be so cold to his memory! She read his thoughts.
“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s true. It’s true. It’s true.”
“Well, I loved him, anyway,” said Finch, “and I shall never forget him. I’d like to call the baby Dennis Arthur. Is he christened yet?”
“My God, no!” cried Sarah. “Do you think I would have him christened before you came? Everything is waiting for you and you spoil it all!”
“Now, you two mustn’t quarrel,” said Meg. “It’s disgraceful at a moment like this. Sarah is quite right about the names. Arthur wouldn’t be at all appropriate.”
“I want it,” said Finch stubbornly.
“Have it then! Have everything your own way. Oh, I have lived for this day! I have planned for it — dreamed of it!” She almost screamed these words, then went to her room and slammed the door behind her.
“Now you’ve upset her,” said Meg, patting the baby’s back. “She’s a terribly difficult girl.”
Finch fingered his son’s finery. “I’ll bet I was never decked out like this,” he said.
“No. You wore Piers’s old baby clothes. Now go and make it up with Sarah.”
“I don’t want to. I want to stay with you.” Like a boy he rubbed his cheek against her shoulder. The baby stared up at them out of opaque eyes.
This was just what Meg liked — to have one of her brothers clinging to her, in spite of his wife. Now that she came to think of it, she believed she hated all their wives. She cast Dennis Finch, or Dennis Arthur, or whatever his name was, on to the bed in the spare room and clasped Finch to her deep bosom.
“You are a naughty boy!” she said.
An infantile love for Meg welled up in him. He wanted to lie on her bosom, as the baby had done. He wanted to toddle by her side holding to her skirt. He wanted her to pay no attention to anyone but him. He stood rubbing his cheek against her shoulder while she brooded over him.
At last she pushed him away. “Now go and make it up with Sarah. I must take baby back to his cot and then see about lunch. I have a Swedish maid and I smell something burning.”
“I’ll look after the baby. I’ll carry him to Sarah.”
“That’s a good idea. Oh, how nice it is to have you back! All four brothers at home. If only Eden were here! Do you know, Finch, I can sometimes see him as he was at the last, leaning over the banister in that light blue dressing gown, watching me bring an eggnog up to him. He was so weak he’d lean hard on the banister — and that look in his eyes! But he’d smile.” Tears choked her.
“I remember.”
Why should she recall Eden at this moment! Finch pushed the thought of Eden from him when Meg left him. He refused to let the thought of death touch him. He stood motionless in the passage between his wife and his son, undecided what to do. Obscure physical feelings pressed in on him from both directions. What should he do next? Go to Sarah and try to reestablish their old relations or make them over, if possible, into something new? Go to that mysterious being in the spare room who seemed to be lying there sardonically viewing the parents that had given him life? It was settled for him by the sound of Sarah’s footsteps coming toward the door. He darted into the room with the child and knelt by the bed.
She came and looked in. She was one of those rare women who can make a scene, weep or scream, and immediately afterward look as smooth as a cat.
Full of self-protective duplicity, Finch knelt by the baby, gazing into its pink face.
“He’s a miracle,” he said.
“Then you really love him?”
“He’s yours and mine. Isn’t that enough?”
“Then why were you so detached when you first saw him? You asked his name and if he were christened, as though he were a stranger’s child.”
“Everything went out of my head. I felt bewildered. It was all so new and strange.”
He thought — “I’m acting. I’m insincere. But I can’t help it. Something new has got to come out of this.”
She knelt beside him. She was radiant. He saw how easy it was for her to forgive him — if only he would worship at her new shrine.
“You adore him, don’t you, Sarah?”
“I’m like a tigress with her young.” She laughed but she was in earnest.
“And I am nothing but the poor old tiger now, eh, Sarah?”
She gave him an absent-minded caress. “See his hands. He’ll play the piano too, with such hands. Do you really want to add Arthur to his names?”
“Not if you don’t.”
“I agree. Dennis Arthur Finch. I really believe it’s more euphonious.”
Lunch was over before Finch set out for Jalna. It had snowed all the night before and that morning the wind blew, heaping the snow in drifts. The walk would be too much for Sarah. A cap on his head and a muffler round his neck, Finch ran through the drifts across the lawn, leaped the fence, and found the path to Jalna.
He saw smoke rising from the chimney of the fox farm. The girls were settling in. He thought of the four of them, each so different from the others! He had got to know Gemmel and Garda very well on the voyage but Althea remained a mystery. He had not exchanged a dozen remarks with her. She had so openly avoided him that he might well have taken offence, but she was like that with everyone, outside the family, her sisters said. He liked the thought of them in that house. He would go to see them with Wakefield or by himself.
Boyhood reached out to him from the snowy wood where pine needles lay scattered on the drifts. He felt almost miraculously isolated and free. In a sense he was more bound than ever, being the father of a child, yet he had a perverse, wild sense of freedom. Something had happened to him, had given a fresh glow to his day. The air through the pine trees was vibrant with this something. What had the child given him? Somehow it had given him freedom, he was persuaded of that. Sarah’s eyes had not that possessive look in them. Her attention was riveted on the child — a tigress with her young! Journeying toward her he had been filled with the same desolate fancies which her approaching nearness always brought, a sense of frightening loneliness. But now her emotions were focused on the child! Freedom ran through his thoughts like a wind through shocks of ruffled wheat. He hugged it to him like a fairy bride.