Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
He found Pheasant working in her flower border.
“I’ve made up my mind to have more flowers this summer,” she said, kissing him rapturously, “now that you’re home!”
Under the embrace, she concealed the fact that she had been having a time of it with Philip. She had had hard work to keep from saying, “Just wait till your father comes back!”
Piers’ name often had been held over Philip’s head, by various members of the family, by Rags and by Wright. One look into Piers’ face had shown Philip what sort of man he was. In his presence the little boy was nothing less than an angel. The entrance of Piers into his vicinity had an effect nothing short of marvellous. The moment before he might have been looking and behaving like a small terror but the sound of Piers’ voice, his step, a glimpse of him coming his way, brought a look of sweet obedience into Philip’s face.
More than once Pheasant had to turn her own face away to hide the laughter in her eyes. She could not bear to tell Piers of his badness, though Maurice urged her to. It was Maurice’s earnest prayer that Piers would one day walk in on the scene of a fracas. But Philip seemed to have a sixth sense that warned him of his sire’s approach. Now he came into the garden and slipped a small grubby hand into Piers’, as though for protection. He raised his baby-blue eyes to Piers
Piers smiled at Pheasant. “By George, he’s like Grandfather! I believe he’s going to look even more like him than I do.”
“Same pugnacious spirit, too,” she replied.
Piers squeezed the little hand. He was proud of Philip. And of Nooky too, but the feeling of antagonism that Maurice had roused in him when a child was still roused by the youth. Piers tried to conceal this beneath a hearty manner but Maurice was conscious of it, even acknowledged to himself that he had expected it and that it would not take much to make him reciprocate. Yet they had been but two days together.
“where’s the puppy? where’s Trixie?” he asked. Maurice came out of the house with her.
“She’s just been making a puddle,” he said, “in the dining room.”
“I hope you cleaned it up,” said Pheasant.
“Indeed I did.”
“My God,” exclaimed Piers. “You’ve got an Irish accent.”
“He affects it occasionally,” said Pheasant.
“Don’t do it,” said Piers. “Trixie and I don’t like it. Do we, Trixie?” He picked up the puppy who went wild with kissing him and trying to fall out of his arms at one and the same time.
Piers became suddenly serious. “Have you heard the news?” he asked.
“what news?”
“This man, Clapperton, is going to build a model village or some sort of monstrosity on Vaughanlands.”
“No!” she cried, astonished. “who told you?”
“Himself. He must be pretty rich.”
“It’s a horrible idea,” Pheasant exclaimed. “Has Meg been told?”
“Yes. She can’t prevent it.”
“why didn’t she have building restrictions put in the agreement?”
“Don’t ask me! But she’s taking it without much fuss. Why not? Changes are in the air. Anyhow, he’ll probably lose all his money in the scheme. It’s crazy.”
“No, he won’t,” put in Maurice. “He has a wonderful business head. Everything he does prospers.”
“So you knew about it all the while?” said Piers, staring at him.
“Yes. Sidney Swift told me. But nothing could be done about it, so I kept it to myself.”
“A strange thing to do.”
Maurice flushed. “I knew it would be a worry.”
“Well, I’m not going to worry about it,” said Piers. ‘But just wait till Renny comes home! If he isn’t the death of that old blighter, it will be a wonder.”
Nothing, indeed, could disturb Piers for more than a moment. His serenity at being home once again was too deep. He woke each morning with a delicious, calm surprise at finding himself under his own roof, with the five hundred fertile acres of Jalna smiling in the May sunshine. The day was not long enough for all he had to do. He loosed the pent-up vitality of the imprisoned years on the waiting land. Wright did the ploughing and he the harrowing, the seeding. As he sat behind the massive bodies of the team, as a thousand times he had dreamed of doing, watched the dark tillage spread or thought of the grain sown, gladness filled him that he had survived with the strength to do a man’s work. Sometimes Pheasant’s image came between him and the fields. In the years of absence she had become strangely unreal, a symbol of love and womanhood rather than flesh and blood. But now she was a warm, breathing being again whose heart he felt beating against his, who could not keep her eyes off him, who treated him sometimes like the returned hero of the war and sometimes like a little lost child returned to her. Whichever way it was, it suited Piers.
Never a day passed when he did not go to Jalna to see his uncles. Fresh from his farm work, ruddy, tanned by the increasing heat of the sun, he brought new vigour to them. It was amazing to see how they improved. Day by day they looked less and less like men nearing their end. Just to watch Piers eat his tea, just to witness the amount of bread and jam he consumed, was enough to make them hungry. He never visited them without telling them some ridiculous story to make them laugh. He made them go to the stables to inspect the fine calves and foals and little pigs that were arriving with an unprecedented strength and gusto. Even the hens hatched large broods as though to show him what they could do.
The note of peevishness left Ernest’s voice. He put on weight. Nicholas growled and grumbled less. His gout troubled him less, so that he was able to walk about and enjoy the garden. Piers’ return had given a new meaning to life at Jalna. Now it seemed possible that the torn fabric of that life might be mended, the course of its stream again might flow strongly.
No one felt this more deeply than Finch. No longer was he leaned on, as a last support. He took his place as a younger brother. He threw himself into the work with all his strength, which was not great at the outset, for he had been very tired at the end of his tour. But working with the horses, driving the truck in the early morning, planting the vegetable garden, gave him a new vitality. Many a time he thought he would like to go on living such a life, with music no more than a love to come home to rather than an overbearing mistress, as it must be in the life of a concert pianist.
There was one person who rejected all physical labour and that was young Maurice. Always there were his studies to intervene. To judge by what he said, Sidney Swift was an exacting teacher but often they were heard by Pheasant in lively conversation, not of a mathematical sort. Maurice often returned to Vaughanlands with Swift and sometimes they went to town together. Piers did not like the tutor and looked forward to the day when he would see the last of him.
GEMMEL AND MR. CLAPPERTON
G
EMMEL
G
RIFFITH LAY
on the side of a grassy knoll, drinking in the warmth of the sun with all her being, letting her mind wander free. She was so cruelly hampered in her physical movements that the pleasure of her life lay in her reckless and untrammelled thoughts. They were what Garda’s bodily activities were to her, Althea’s painting to her. Garda expressed her emotions of longing or fear or whatever they might be, by household work, by tearing along the country road on her bicycle, by gardening. Althea expressed the strange hidden self of her, in those fiercely individual drawings. What Gemmel liked was life itself. Lying on the edge of it, cloistered, free of responsibility, she watched it flow by her with hungry interest in all that came within her range. Passionately she longed for Althea or Garda to have love affairs. Oh, to watch their joys or miseries! To counsel or comfort them! She felt capable of anything. Oh, how she could love or hate, be frantically jealous, tear her heart out or break someone else’s! Her supple hands felt their way through moss and among the tiny blue violets, as she lay with closed eyes on the knoll.
Her sisters had taken her there in a wheelbarrow made of wicker that had been given them by Finch. It had stood in the old carriage house ever since he could remember. Before his grandmother had got past gardening, she had used it among her flower borders.
One day he had trundled it over to the fox farm, offering it in its lightness to the girls for their work. But it turned into a chariot for Gemmel. Lined with cushions, it enthroned her while her sisters laboured behind. They had possessed it for more than two years now. Little paths wound everywhere to show where Gemmel had been. This knoll, just inside the grounds of Jalna, was one of her favourite spots.
Now she lay there, the sun dappling her pale face, thinking over all she knew. She knew so much, she thought, that her knowledge was a world in itself. Yet, measured by the scholarship of schools, she knew almost nothing. She could not for the life of her have named the boundaries of foreign countries, or their mountains, or what king succeeded Edward III. She could not have explained latitude or longitude. But she could have repeated tales of strange happenings among the hills of Wales. She knew fanciful and frightening stories of the doings of the monks in the ruined abbey whose ancient walls dominated the stony farm, hidden among those hills, where she had spent the greater part of her life. The abbey and the tales of life there, represented all she knew of religion. She had never been inside a church, for her father had hated religion in all its forms. More than once she heard him say that he had retired to the house in Wales to get away from a world ruined by mechanism and religion.
The Fennels had several times called on the Griffiths. They had been invited to the Rectory but only Garda had gone. Only Garda had been induced to go to church. Althea could not have borne the gaze of so many strangers. Yet she was as interested as Gemmel in hearing of all that Garda had seen and heard there. Now Garda often went to the services but only in a spirit of curiosity. The three were in truth pagans and felt no need for religion in their lives. They believed in the supernatural and clung to certain peasant superstitions they had got from servants in Wales.
Gemmel lay on the knoll thinking of how much more profound was her understanding of life than was her sisters’. She so loved it. She felt impatient of Althea’s supersensitiveness, of Garda’s contented acceptance of things as they were. Her hearing was acute and now she heard a step on the grass. She called out, in an impatient tone: “Come here!”
As the steps drew near she opened her eyes expecting to see one of her sisters. But it was Finch Whiteoak. He said smiling:
“I don’t know whether or not to come. Your invitation isn’t exactly warm.”
“I thought you were one of the girls. But — as you aren’t — I’m delighted.” She raised herself on her elbows and smiled back at him.
He dropped to the grass beside her. “Are the girls out of favour then?”
“I get tired of the same company. And they bore me by the way they behave. You’d think they had a hundred years ahead of them, the way they never make a move to change things. That attitude may have been all right in the old days but now, at the speed things move with, it’s all wrong.”
Was she just trying to appear knowing, Finch wondered. He asked:
“what do you want them to do?” Did she realize, he wondered, that they always had her on their hands, always had to consider her first.
She made an expressive gesture with her hands that looked almost too supple, too capable, as though they had too completely taken on the work of her disabled members. She said:
“I want Althea to show her sketches, not hide them. They’re clever, I tell you. I wish you could see the sketch she made of you the other day. It was a wonderful likeness — the sort of portrait that could only be made when — oh, well —” she plucked at the grass and then added, “when someone thinks a great deal about another.”
“I’d like to see it,” he said, a little embarrassed. “Do you think she’d show it to me?”
“Never! But I might contrive to let you see it. You’ll be surprised. It’s full of feeling, yet I suppose you think Althea is cold.”
“No, I have never thought that. I’m sure she feels too much. If you’ll forgive my saying so, I think you three sisters are sometimes bad for each other.”
“I’m sure we are,” she agreed. “But it makes our lives so much more complicated and interesting. Oh, if you could know what Althea is! But you never will. No one ever will but me. As for Garda — what do you think of Sidney Swift?”
“what has he to do with Garda?”
“Well, he’s always coming to see her and talking to her about himself by the hour. Do you like him?”
“I think he is what my uncles would call a
philanderer
.”
“You mean when he doesn’t come to see Garda he goes to see Patience Vaughan.”
“He’s wasting his time there.”
“He speaks of Patience as the ‘little heiress.’”
“Good heavens, she won’t inherit a fortune.”
“I’d call it a tidy sum if it were to be mine. Sidney is always talking of riches and what they will do.”
“They can make you miserable,” said Finch.
“He talks,” went on Gemmel, “of Mr. Clapperton’s wealth as though he were Mr. Clapperton’s heir. Perhaps he is. I don’t know. All I know is that I won’t have him breaking poor little Garda’s heart.”
As she said this, Gemmel sat up straight, with a defiant air. Her attitude, the fierce tone in her voice, made her sisters appear suddenly as two fragile children whom she had all their life protected and would continue to protect. Her love for them seemed greater than the love between any man and woman could be. Her egotism was such that she appeared ready to face any living menace on their behalf.
“Don’t you ever think of yourself, Gem?” he asked, for the first time calling her by her sisters’ abbreviation of her name.
“Never!” she declared. “I don’t count.”
But, when he had left her and she was alone again on the knoll, one would have thought she counted herself very greatly, for she fell into a paroxysm of weeping, she sobbed in despair and tore up the violets by their roots. “I do love him,” she whispered hoarsely, with her mouth pressed to the warm earth. “I love him. I love him! Oh, if only he were in trouble and I might comfort him! I’d hold him in my arms and stroke his head and I’d kiss him.”