The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (68 page)
Authors: Mazo de la Roche
Tags: #FIC045000 – FICTION / Sagas
“How did you rescue Gussie?” asked Lucy Sinclair.
“I jumped overboard,” he said complacently. “It’s a good thing I swim so well. That is twice I have rescued her. But please don’t tell.”
The Sinclairs, amused and puzzled, promised.
Philip and Adeline now returned. She exclaimed, “That young daughter of mine has
such
a temperament! She’s a thorough young flibbertigibbet. I really can’t follow her moods.” She sank down on her chair.
Lucy Sinclair said, “I think you have a most fascinating family, Mrs. Whiteoak. My husband and I admire them excessively.”
“Ah, they’re a lively lot,” sighed Adeline. “Nicholas is like my family. Ernest and the baby are Whiteoaks. But Gussie, she’s like nobody except her own queer self.”
At this moment, Gussie, alone in her cabin, again locked the door, opened her portmanteau, and took from it a spyglass. This had been a present from young Blanchflower, just before her sailing. She had told him of the loss of her own, told him without shyness, without a shadow of hinting; and he had told her that, on leaving England, his uncle had presented him with one which lay unused, neglected, and all but forgotten, on a shelf in his clothes cupboard. Would she accept it, he asked, as a goodbye present, a small token of the regard he had for her? She accepted it with modesty but hid it from her family with determination. It was her most treasured possession.
Now she took it out of her portmanteau, and after dusting it with an enormous silk handkerchief that rightly belonged to her father and smelt of his cigars, she went to the open porthole and peered through it.
There came a loud knocking on the door. It was Nicholas, who called out: “Gussie — come! See the last of Canada. Mrs. Sinclair begs you to come.”
“I don’t think I care to.”
“Papa orders you to come! And, look here, the Sinclairs have been told nothing. Come along, do.”
Without further hesitation Gussie, now in a mood of daring, followed Nicholas up the stairs to the deck, carrying the spyglass. The sea was a little rough. The coast rose, rocky and dim. Wild and dim were the gulls flying from coast to sea and back again.
“It’s getting rough,” said Curtis Sinclair and came and stood at Gussie’s side.
“I envy you,” he said, in his Southern accent.
She could scarcely believe her ears.
“But — why?” she asked, her low sweet voice scarcely audible.
“Because,” he smiled, “you are on your way to England for the first time and you own a spyglass.”
She offered the spyglass to him but he refused. “No, Miss Gussie, I had rather watch you looking through it. May I say that I admire the picture you make?” He moved away a short distance, then stood looking back.
Gussie’s hair was blown from off her face by the strong fresh wind. She held the spyglass to her eyes, gazing, as it were, into her future, and not at the receding coast. For the remainder of the voyage she was dreamy, aloof.
Adeline and Philip were happy to be again in the company of the Sinclairs. They discovered that they were going to the same hotel in London. The Sinclairs were lively and appeared to be in affluent circumstances.
“Upon my word,” Adeline remarked to Philip, “I shall jump for joy when we reach London and I am able to engage a proper nurse for the baby — he’s wearing me out.”
“He’s grown into a little boy,” said Philip, “and no baby. The Sinclairs greatly admire him.”
“Philip” — Adeline spoke seriously — “where do you suppose all their money comes from? I thought they were ruined when the South was defeated.”
“It’s cotton” — his eyes shone — “Sinclair’s father sent cotton to Manchester. Now Sinclair is coming over to make further arrangements. He advises me to invest in cotton.”
“I should love to visit France with them,” said she, “but the children cramp all our movements. I had thought Gussie would take part charge of Baby — but no — she moons about with that silly spyglass.”
“I shall make some arrangement to please you,” said Philip. “I promise you that.”
She threw her arms about him and gave him three kisses. After the third she said, “The children would be quite happy with my parents in Ireland. Did I tell you that they are coming to meet us? I had a letter from my mother.”
“You didn’t tell me,” he exclaimed.
“I forgot.”
He made the best of it. “That will be nice.” He reflected that this would be better than having a visit from them at Jalna. He added firmly, “Please don’t tell your father that I expect to make a good deal of money from cotton.”
“Indeed, I will not, for he would be sure to want to borrow from you.”
It was a smooth and sunny voyage. When the ship docked at Liverpool, there were Adeline’s parents to meet them. They would journey with them and the Sinclairs to London on the following day.
Adeline was proud of her parents, proud of the impression they made on the Sinclairs. Indeed they looked little changed since she had last seen them.
The six grown-ups and four children took possession of a large sitting room in the Adelphi Hotel. Lucy Sinclair remarked to Renny Court, Adeline’s father, “It is easy to see how dear Mrs. Whiteoak came by her handsome eyes and — her hair.”
“The eyes aren’t bad,” said Renny Court, “but the hair — well, I suppose it’s an affliction for a woman.”
“I admire it excessively,” she returned. “Your daughter is the most strikingly handsome woman I know. Her children are lovely. I envy her them.”
“My wife and I are taking the children to Ireland,” said Renny Court, “for a long visit.”
“What fun!” exclaimed Lucy Sinclair.
THE END
M
AZO DE LA
R
OCHE
T
HE
G
OVERNESS
T
HIS WAS LIKE
no awakening she had ever had. She was in a strange house, among strange people, in a strange land. Her few belongings she had unpacked that lay scattered about the room, made it look all the stranger. Yet the day would come when all this would be familiar, when her belongings there would not look so alien, so pathetic; not that it was a grand room. It was just a comfortably furnished, moderately-sized room with a mahogany dressing-table and washing-stand with basin and ewer ornamented with red roses, a heavy white counterpane, an engraving of the Bridge of Sighs and another of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their young family about them. A Virginia creeper which she had noticed last night massed over the front of the house and enveloping the porch, had even extended its growth to this side and was spreading a few vigorous shoots across the window. From it the early morning sunlight took a greenish tinge.
Mary was glad she had waked early. She wanted time to lie still and collect her thoughts. Her mind appeared to her as a kaleidoscope that had been so shaken it could not regain its original pattern. The theme of that pattern had been her life in London with her brilliant but unstable father, a journalist who was always startling
editors either by his good or his bad writing. He seemed unable to do anything moderately well. He was always startling Mary by his high spirits or his deep melancholy. Her mother had died when she was a child so there had been no influence in her life to counteract these vicissitudes. She had come to wear rather a startled look when her eyes were not dreaming. Her eyes were grey, her fair hair so fine that it slipped from under hairpins in a disconcerting way but luckily had a natural wave in it. Her father had been proud of her beauty, so proud of it that the thought of her doing anything to earn her living had been abhorrent to him. Possibly pride in himself had had as much to do with it. Neither of them had been clearly conscious of the way he was going down hill physically till it was too late to save him. Then he was gone from her.
Now lying in this strange bed between the smooth linen sheets Mary rolled her head on the pillow at the anguished recollection of those terrible months of early spring. His bank account had seen him through his illness, little more. Mary remembered how he had thrown money about. But at the last he had spent it on little but drink. Events, struggling to be remembered, hammered at the door of her mind but she would not let them in. Now, on this June morning, she must be self-controlled, firm in the beginning of this new life. It lay spread before her like an unknown sea, upon which she, chartless, had embarked, no past experience to help her.
She had not wanted to be a governess. If she could have thought of any other way of earning her living she would have turned to it, but there were few openings for women in the nineties. The only work she felt capable of attempting, considering her ignorance and lack of experience, was teaching the young. The fact that she had had little to do with children did not trouble her. She thought of them as innocent little pitchers which she would fill with knowledge gained from text-books and coloured maps. She would set them to memorizing poems, lists of foreign countries, their capitals, rivers, capes, mountains and products. The important thing had been to get the situation. Once secured she felt equal to coping with it. In truth she had to find work or starve.
She had answered a number of advertisements and indeed had obtained interviews with several of the advertisers but they all had come to nothing. She had not the sort of looks, of manner, of voice, that made people want to have her as a governess for their children. In looks she was quite lovely, very tall and slender and very fair, with a skin so delicate that it seemed never to have been roughened by cold winds or to have lost its first beauty by exposure to the heat of the sun. But it was her smile that did the most harm. It lighted her face in the most extraordinary manner and then her mouth which had been wistful and almost melancholy, became alluring, gay and even provocative. She looked a dangerous creature to bring into the house where there was a grown-up son or even a husband.
If only she had known she could have subdued this smile and substituted an appropriately prim one for it but there was no one to warn her and before each interview was over she had given herself away — damned her chances. She had not the sort of face ladies looked for in governesses, in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Her lack of proper references had been a handicap almost as great as her too charming looks. Her only reference had been from the editor of a newspaper for which her father had sometimes written. The reference had been based on the fact that Mary had once lived in his house for a month as companion to his docile little daughter while the child’s mother was ill. The editor had been very kind to Mary and when she required a reference, had made much of her stay in his house, her efficiency and her excellent way with children.
In reading over this reference Mary had not considered it as exaggerated. There was a spaciousness in her nature which made her feel capable of all that was written there. She found it no more than truth. Only after many rebuffs had her courage failed her and she had opened her newspaper and turned to the advertisements with less and less hope.
Now, with the sheet cool against her chin, she looked at the bunches of lilac on the wall-paper, held together by streamers of rose-coloured ribbon and remembered the morning in London,
less than a month ago, when she had been engaged to come to this house in Canada. Then too the air had been bright with sunshine. The sound of horses’ hoofs which marked the rhythm of the life of London had seemed to have a new vitality. Drays, drawn by heavy horses, rattled over the cobbles, buses and four-wheelers and hansoms, drawn by well-fed, well-groomed horses, made the streets lively, giving an air of temperate activity and prosperity. The very breeze coming in at the open window had fresh life in it and a tremor of new hope ran through Mary’s nerves as she scanned the advertisements.
Almost at once her eyes were caught and held. She read:
“Wanted a capable governess to go to Canada and take complete charge of two children. Passage and all expenses paid. Only a woman of firm character need apply. Call at Brown’s Hotel, asking for Mr. Ernest Whiteoak.”