Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“Oh, Sylvia,” said Fitzturgis, “I didn’t see you.” And with a strained smile he introduced the two girls. “My sister, Sylvia Fleming, Adeline Whiteoak.”
The resemblance between brother and sister was noticeable. Her face had the same modelling, too strongly marked for her extreme thinness to bear with advantage. She had the same crisp curly hair but that hers was fair, and her eyes were large and blue instead of narrow and grey. A feeling of relief came over Adeline. The sister was not so odd as she had expected. She was, in truth, attractive, and when she rose and crossed to the tea table her walk was singularly graceful.
“I’ll bring some more bread and butter,” she said and picked up the plate.
“No, please, no, Sylvia,” said Mrs. Fitzturgis anxiously. “It only fusses me to see you handling a knife. You’re so —”
Fitzturgis interrupted, — “You stay and talk to Adeline, Sylvia, I’ll get the bread and butter. We shall need lots of it.” He followed his mother who left driblets of tea behind her as she crossed the room.
Adeline might feel relieved by Sylvia’s appearance of normality but she did not want to be left alone with her. She had a child’s shrinking from the strange. She tried to speak lightly. “I can’t imagine what my uncle and cousin will think of me being away so long. They didn’t even know I left.”
“You came to look up Mait, did you?”
Adeline flushed. “Oh, no. I was driving in this direction and I lost my way and where I enquired he was there. It’s just a chance meeting.”
Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette. “You’re lucky,” she said, “to have a car to go about in. We can’t afford one and, even if we could — well, they’d not trust me with it. You saw what my mother was like about cutting the bread. They’ve got it into their heads that I’m … very nervous or something … while the truth is it’s they who are nervous. They behave sometimes as though they were nutty.” She lighted another cigarette.
Adeline tried to sympathize, to talk naturally and lightly, but she watched with apprehension both Sylvia and the increasing wind and rain beyond the windows.
“It’s turning into a hell of a night,” remarked Sylvia. “I love it, don’t you?”
“I might — if I hadn’t to go out into it in a strange car, on a strange road.”
“Better stay the night here.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
Sylvia regarded her thoughtfully. “My advice to you is — don’t start off your life by taking things hard.”
“Do you?” Adeline asked, and then, in panic, tried to recall the question and could not.
“I used to … Not now. I’ve discovered that nothing is worth tearing yourself to bits for.”
“I suppose that’s sensible.”
“Yes. I’ve worked out a philosophy to suit myself. The worst is
they
don’t agree.”
“whew,” thought Adeline, “I wish Mait would come back.”
Very soon he and his mother did return. This time he carried the teapot and she a tray on which was a plate of bread and butter, a dish of jam, and a square fruit cake.
“Plenty of fresh tea,” he said. “
And
plenty of butter on the bread.” He brought a small table and placed it beside Adeline. Mrs. Fitzturgis asked her many questions about her home and her family. She repeated her disappointment that her son had been forced to settle down in Ireland with no prospects to speak of.
“He was doing so well, my dear,” she said, “in a promising job on a rubber plantation in Malaya. Now, of course, that’s out of the question and we decided that the best thing for us to do was to come back to Ireland where this scrap of land is all that’s left of the property my husband inherited. He was one of those unfortunate men, though some people think he was to blame, and indeed everything would be very different now if he had been different, but then you may say that things would be still more different if all of us were different, but I say we’re all the creatures of circumstances which we can no more control than we can control that rainstorm outside though it’s obvious that all my husband needed was a little self-control. Don’t you agree?”
Adeline fervently said she did agree. She was so very hungry, the bread and jam and tea were so delicious, that she forgot her anxiety about the return journey and thought only of her pleasure in the nearness of Fitzturgis. When their eyes met, her heart gave several quick beats, and involuntarily her lips parted in a smile. Sylvia did not speak again but sat smoking, her eyes fixed on the wildly blowing rain beyond the windows.
When tea was over Adeline and Fitzturgis went to the front door which still stood open, with the edge of the storm wetting the stone floor.
“Do you think it will soon stop?” she asked.
“No. And if it did, it is impossible for you to go back to Glengorman tonight. You must stay with us. My mother says so.”
“But I can’t! They’d be wild if I didn’t come.”
“You can telephone them.”
“Oh,” she gave a gasp of relief. “You have a telephone!”
“Yes. It’s necessary for us to be able to call a doctor if he’s needed.”
“I see.” She had a momentary vision of a doctor coming at post haste in the middle of the night to that house. She said, — “I think I’d better telephone right away. They’ll be sure I’ve had an accident.”
He led the way to a small room at the back of the hall. A telephone, a kitchen chair, and a large glossy calendar advertising an Irish whiskey were the only furnishings. He turned on an unshaded electric bulb. Under its light they saw each other’s faces, pale and intimately revealed.
“Shall I call them for you?” he asked.
“Please.”
He looked up the number in the directory, asked for it, then put the receiver into her hand. He left her, closing the door behind him. Maurice himself answered. Even with his first word she was conscious of strain in his voice.
“Hello,” she called.
“Is that you, Adeline?”
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake tell me what’s happened!”
“Nothing. I’m all right. I’ll be back in the morning.”
“where are you?”
She was thankful for the distance between them, thankful that she was not face to face with him. She said haltingly:
“I’m spending the night with Mrs. Fitzturgis.”
She spoke so indistinctly that Maurice did not hear the prefix Mrs. — only the surname.
“Fitzturgis!” he almost screamed. “Are you quite mad?”
“I don’t see anything wrong in it,” she answered hotly.
“
Wrong!
” he repeated. “
Wrong!
Where is his house?”
“I don’t know the way well enough to explain. Don’t worry. I shall be back in the morning.”
“Send that man to the telephone,” Maurice ordered.
“Very well. He’s right here.”
She opened the door and said, — “Could you speak to Mooey, please, Mait ? He’s in an awful rage.”
Fitzturgis stared. “A rage? At you?”
“At both of us, I guess.”
He strode to the telephone, put the receiver to his ear. “Oh, hullo, Maurice,” he said.
Adeline could hear her cousin’s accusatory voice hollow in the telephone. She could hear the rain beating on a skylight in a passage behind the hall. Fitzturgis said:
“There’s no sense in talking that way. Adeline’s quite safe here.”
He listened to another outburst and then exclaimed, — “Good Lord — we’re not alone! My mother and sister are here … Adeline did tell you … I’m sure she did … Look here, Maurice, what sort of blackguard do you take me for?… Well, I hope you will come and see for yourself … About what time?… All right. We shall expect you.”
He turned and smiled at Adeline. “He thought I lived alone,” he said. “In any case, he seems to have a low opinion of me.”
“I told him I was staying at your mother’s!” she cried. “Really, Mooey is impossible to explain things to. He simply doesn’t listen.”
They stood close together in the tiny room. He looked at her intently. He said, in a low voice, — “Now you have seen them, do you understand?”
“You mean do I understand why you didn’t come to see me or write?”
“Yes.”
“Well — I don’t.”
“Adeline —” he spoke almost angrily — “surely you can understand my predicament. I had no right to show you that I love you …”
She interrupted joyfully, — “Then you still do?”
“You have never been out of my thoughts since we left the ship.”
“And never have you been out of mine!”
He turned his head away as though he could not bear to see that happy face. “My darling,” he said, “you and I have nothing to look forward to — that is, together.”
“Aren’t we going to get married, Mait?”
“How can we?” he exclaimed in exasperation. “I have nothing to offer you. You see what my life is. In the first place I’m poor, but I could soon remedy that — if I were free. I’m not free. My mother and sister are completely dependent on me. You see how unpractical my mother is — though she does her share of the work, make no mistake about that. My sister … well, there are times when I am the only person who can control her.”
“She doesn’t seem — terribly different. I quite like her.”
“She was one of the most attractive girls I’ve ever known. Gay — high-spirited — but now — well, now there are days when she’s sunk in melancholy, and other days when, as I said, I’m the only one who can control her.”
“Isn’t she going to get better?”
“She possibly may. She may get worse.”
“In that case,” Adeline tried to make her voice impersonal, “you’d have to put her in a mental home, wouldn’t you?”
“That would be the end of her.”
“But they treat people in those places, so that they recover.”
“We have had the best advice. It is — give her a country life and as little restraint as possible. The local doctor is very good and gets on well with her.”
“She’ll get better,” cried Adeline. “She
must!
”
“It will be a long time.”
“Years?”
“Yes, years.”
“And we can’t be engaged?”
“No.”
“I’m willing to be.”
“Oh, you reckless child — you don’t realize what you’re saying.”
“You don’t realize how I love you … You know, Mait, all my family say I am my great-grandmother over again. I’m named for her. She had many little loves in her life but only one great love. I will be the same, and you are my great love.”
He turned to her. His face was ugly with pain.
“You’re making this terribly hard for me,” he said.
“It needn’t be.”
“Adeline — you don’t know what you say. You will look back on me, some time in the future, as one of your little loves —”
“I will not!” she cried, and broke into sobs.
In consternation he shut the door of the little room. He heard voices beyond the hall. He reached up and turned off the light. He took her in his arms and pressed his lips to hers, murmuring soothing words, then, as her sobs ceased, words of passionate endearment.
The mother’s voice came to them insistingly calling his name. He put Adeline gently to one side, turned on the light, opened the door. He crossed the hall and said, in a repressive tone, “I was helping Miss Whiteoak telephone to her cousin. I told her you said she must spend the night with us and she has accepted. He’s coming for her in the morning.”
Adeline then appeared and Mrs. Fitzturgis warmly welcomed her as a guest for the night. “It will seem like old times,” she said, “to have a young person staying in the house. We used to have so many visitors and, of course, when my daughter has recovered, we shall have many more. We are not accustomed, you know, to living like this. I well remember times when …”
She ran on in this vein while Fitzturgis crossed into the drawing-room and began to mend the fire. Sylvia was pacing the length of the long narrow room, her hands clasped behind her back.
“I feel restless tonight,” she said. “This weather stirs me. I wish I were a fish out there in the sea, with all that heaving salty space about me and the stormy sky overhead.”
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “you happen to be snug in your own house, with a good fire burning and a nice visitor. I must ask her to tell you about Jalna, her own home. It will amuse you. She’s mad about horses and takes prizes for riding at the big shows over there.”
“I wish I had a saddle horse,” said his sister. “If only I could gallop for miles and miles, I could get rid of this confused feeling in my head. I’m sure violent exercise would help me. Do you think you might get me a horse, Maitland? I’m cooped up too much with Mother.”
“Yes, after a while, when you’re stronger,” he said soothingly, while he strained to hear what was passing between his mother and Adeline.
They came into the room and he was startled by Adeline’s pallor which so accentuated the luminous darkness of her eyes.
“I’ve been telling my sister,” he said, “of your riding. She’d love to hear about your horses and the life at Jalna. Tell her of the feud between your father and that man Clapperton.”
“Imagine your remembering that,” she exclaimed, her eyes caressing him.
“Oh, do tell us,” cried Mrs. Fitzturgis, pleased as a child by the prospect of diversion. “We’ll sit cosily about the fire and you shall tell us about life in Canada.”
“I’d like to go there,” said her daughter.
“why, my dear, we can scarcely persuade you to go into the village!”
“That’s different,” said the girl gloomily.
They were seated about the fire and Fitzturgis drew on Adeline to talk.
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Fitzturgis, “that everything over there is very much better than here in Ireland. It must be so or the Irish wouldn’t have emigrated the way they have.”
“Oh, no,” said Adeline. “Lots of things here are far nicer than there. But we have some better things. A few, I mean.”
“what, for instance?” asked Mrs. Fitzturgis, happily clasping her hands on her stomach.
Adeline looked at the quietly flickering fire. She said — “Firewood, for instance. You should see the fire of birch logs my great-uncles sit in front of. It’s silver birch, very white and pretty, and the flames leap and crackle in it. It throws a terrific heat.”
“How lovely!” cried Mrs. Fitzturgis. “And have you central heating?”