01 The Building of Jalna (3 page)

“We shall sometimes come back, shan’t we?” she asked.

“Of course we shall. I’ll engage to bring you back every second or third year. We are not going to bury ourselves in the wilds. And don’t forget New York. We will visit it too.”

She threw her arms about his neck and gave him a swift kiss.

“My angel,” she said. “If I had to go to bed tonight with anyone but you, I’d throw myself out of that window.”

“And quite properly,” he observed.

They drew apart and stood in decorous attitudes as the man-servant reappeared with the refreshments. He laid a snowy cloth on an oval, marble-topped table and then set out several bottles of stout, biscuits and cheese, a cold pigeon pie for Philip and a small bowl of hot beef extract for Adeline.

“How good it looks!” she exclaimed, when they were alone. “Do you know, I’m getting my appetite again! D’ye think I dare eat some of that cheddar cheese? I do love cheese!”

“What expressions you use! You love
me
and you love
cheese
! I suppose there’s no difference in your affection.”

She laughed. “You old silly!” Then she pressed her hands to her sides. “But really, Philip, you will have to unlace me before I attempt to eat or I shall have room for nothing but a biscuit.”

As he helped her with the intricate fastenings of her dress, he said seriously — “I cannot help thinking that this tight lacing is all wrong. In fact the doctor on shipboard told me that it is responsible for many of the difficult births.”

“Very well,” she declared, “when we are in Canada I shall leave off my stays and go about like a sack tied in the middle. Picture me in the wilds! I am on a hunting expedition. I have just trapped or shot a deer, a beaver, or something of the sort. I am on my way home with my quarry slung over my shoulder. Suddenly I am conscious of some slight discomfort. I recall the fact that I am
enceinte
. Possibly my hour has come. I find a convenient spot beneath an olive tree —”

“They don’t have ’em there.”

“Very well. Any tree will do. I make myself comfortable. I give birth to the child, with scarcely a moan. I place it in my petticoat. I resume the burden of the deer or beaver on my back. I return home. I cast my quarry at your feet and my infant on your knee. ‘By the way,’ I remark, ‘here’s a son and heir for you!’”

“Egad! That’s the way to do it.” He struggled with the hooks and eyes. “There — my angel. Out you step!”

The blue taffeta fell in bright cascades to the floor but the crinoline still stood out about her lower half, above which her tiny waist appeared as a fragile support for bust and shoulders. Somehow he got her out of the crinoline, the petticoat, and the many-gored corset cover but he had a time of it with the corset lace, which had tied itself in a tight knot. His fair face was flushed and he had given vent to an oath or two before she stood released and graceful in her shift. He gave her an abrupt little push instead of the kiss she expected, and said: —

“Now, put on your peignoir and let’s have something to eat.”

He stood watching her with an air half-possessive, half-coaxing, while she drew on a violet velvet dressing gown and divested her wrists of her bracelets. As she seated herself at the table she gave a little laugh of complete satisfaction. Her eyes swept across the viands.

“How hungry I am!” she declared. “And how good everything looks! I must have some of that cheese. I adore it!”

“There you go again!” he said, cutting a wedge from the cheese for her. “You adore
food
! You adore
me
! What’s the difference?”

“I said nothing whatever about adoring
you
,” she returned, putting her teeth into the cheese. She laughed like a greedy young girl. It was part of her charm, he thought, that she could sit there eating greedily and still look alluring. She appeared unself-conscious but her passionate love for him, her desire to express it, to put her nature beneath him, even while, in her femininity, she triumphed over him, made her slightest gesture, her half-glance, symbolic. He sat watching her, feeling that in some strange way the fact that she was eating greedily, that her arms were too thin, that her stays had been too tight, only increased her desirability.

At last she rose and came to him. My God, he thought, did ever a woman move as she moves! She can never grow old!

She came to him and sank into his arms. She lay along his body as though her will were to obliterate herself in him, willfully to become no more than a creature he had created by his passion. She tried to time her breathing with his, so that their two hearts should do even this in unison. He bent his face to hers, and their lips met. She turned her face swiftly away. Then, turning it again, with closed eyes, toward him, she kissed him in rapture.

But the next morning she felt a sadness in her. They were leaving London. When might she see it again? Perhaps never, with all the dangers of travel between. What would happen to them in the New World? What strange distant place lay awaiting them?

It was a journey of many hours from London to the cathedral town of Penchester. When Adeline alighted from the train she was very tired. Dark shadows made her eyes sombre. She looked ill. But the Dean’s carriage was waiting to meet them, with its comfortable cushioned seats and its lamps shining bright in the dusk. The streets were quiet, so they bowled along easily. Soon the towering shape of the Cathedral rose against the luminous west. Its windows still held a glimmer from the sunken sun. It looked ethereal, yet as though it would last forever. Adeline leant forward to gaze at it through the carriage window. She wanted to imprint
its image on her mind, to take with her to Quebec. She felt that not even the Dean understood and loved the Cathedral as she did. And the sweet little streets that clustered about it — so dim, so orderly, so melting into the tradition of the past!

And the Dean’s house itself! Adeline wished she owned it as she descended from the carriage. It looked so sedate, so warm-coloured, so welcoming. She might indeed have been the mistress, to judge by her luggage that cumbered the hall, her husband’s voice that rapped out orders to the servants, her infant that made the echoes ring with its crying, her parrot which rent the air with erotic endearments when it heard her voice. Augusta and the Dean seemed mere nobodies in their own house. Adeline flew to the parrot, chained to its perch in the drawing-room.

“Boney, my sweet, I’m back!” she cried, advancing her lovely aquiline face to the bird’s beak.

“Ah, Pearl of the Harem!” he screamed, in Hindu. “Dilkhoosa! Nur Mahal! Mera lal!” He nibbled her nostril. His dark tongue quivered against her lips.

“Where did he learn all that?” asked the Dean.

Adeline turned her bold gaze on him. “From the Rajah,” she returned. “The Rajah who gave him to me.”

“It hardly seems nice,” said Augusta.

“It isn’t,” answered Adeline. “It’s beautiful — and wicked and fascinating.”

Philip broke in, “I say, Augusta, has our infant been howling ever since we left?”

His sister’s face clouded. The Dean answered for her.

“She has indeed. As a matter of fact I could not find a single spot where I could write my sermons in peace — between baby and parrot.” Then he added genially — “But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter. Philip knew very well that a dean requires more quiet than does a Hussar, and he was annoyed with his daughter. She was now almost a year old and ought surely to have a little sense. The first time he had her to himself he took her to
task. Holding her in his strong hands, so that her sallow little face was on a level with his fresh-coloured one, he said: —

“You young minx, don’t you know which side your bread is buttered on? Here are your uncle and auntie, childless. Here are you — a baby girl — just what they want! You could stay here with them, at any rate till your mother and I are settled in Canada. If you behaved yourself they’d make you their heir. Now what I mean is, I want you to stop this howling every time your aunt looks at you. You are
not to cry
. Do you understand?”

What Gussie understood most clearly was her discomfort. She suffered from constant colic induced by injudicious feeding and still more injudicious dosing with medicine when the food was not digested. Yet the ayah thought that no one but herself was capable of caring for the child. Certainly she poured out love and selfless devotion on her.

Gussie was precocious, partly because of remarkable intelligence, partly because of the constant changes of scene which had been her lot. She understood that the powerful being who held her high up between his two hands and spoke in such a resonant voice was ordering her not to cry, to keep her miseries of pain and shyness to herself. The next time her aunt on a sudden impulse of affection snatched her up and dandled her, the little creature made what was to her stupendous effort and controlled her desire to burst into tears. She fixed her mournful gaze on Augusta’s face, her mouth turned down at the corners; her eyes grew enormous but she kept back the tears that welled up in them.

Augusta was really shocked to see such an expression on the little face.

“Why,” she said, aghast, “Baby hates the sight of me! I can see that she does!”

“Nonsense,” said Philip. “It’s just shyness. She’ll get over it.” He snapped his fingers at Gussie.

“No she won’t. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to make friends with her. And just now she gave me
such a desperate look
! As though she
were controlling herself with all her might, when what she really wanted to do was to
scream
at me. Here, take her, Adeline.”

Adeline took the child and gave her a not very gentle pat on the back. It was more than Gussie could bear. She stiffened herself and shrieked. The Dean came into the hall, putting on his cloak.

“I think I shall go to the Vestry,” he said. “Perhaps I can have peace there.”

Then Adeline and Philip became aware that the parrot was screaming too. It was a mercy the Dean could not understand Hindu, for the words Boney was screaming were the worst in his vocabulary, he having picked them up on board ship.

Adeline and Philip began to feel that the time had come for their visit to end. He was impatient to begin the new life but she would have been willing to linger a little longer in the quiet of Penchester, enlivened by visits to London. She loved the sunny walled garden behind the Dean’s house where crocuses were in bloom and daffodils swelling into bud, though it was still only February.

One morning Augusta took her brother into the privacy of her own sitting room, and said: —

“I do not think, Philip, that you have had your proper share of our parents’ belongings.”

Philip’s blue eyes widened in pleasurable anticipation. “Were you thinking of giving me something, Augusta?” he asked.

“Yes, if you feel you can safely take fine furniture with you. I should hate to think that precious possessions which our family long cherished might be handled roughly.”

“They won’t,” he eagerly assured her. “They will be strongly crated and I’ll personally oversee the loading on to the ship and off it. We are sailing by fast clipper which, I am told, is almost as quick and much cleaner and more comfortable than by steamship.”

She sighed. “Oh, I do wish you weren’t going! It seems so hard to have you return from India, only to lose you again. And I do so dread the voyage for the dear baby.”

“Augusta,” he said earnestly, “if you’d like to keep the baby for a time —”

“No, no. It would never do. Baby Augusta does not take to me. She cries too much. It upsets Frederick. She shall come to visit me when she is older …”

“She is a spoilt little creature,” said Philip. He frowned, then brightened. “The house Uncle Nicholas left me is well-built, in the French style, I am told. I want to furnish it well,” he said. “We brought some things from India, as you know. Adeline has a really picturesque bedstead and inlaid cabinets. We have some fine rugs. Oh, we shall get on! Don’t worry.”

“But I do worry. I want you to take your place in Quebec as people of consequence and you cannot do that in a sparsely furnished house.”

“Oh, we shall get on. I fancy that there aren’t many officers of Hussars in the town and Adeline is the granddaughter of a marquis, as you know.”

“Yes. She is distinguished-looking, too. Did she show you the pearl brooch and bracelet I gave her?”

“She did indeed and I’m delighted.”

“Now I am going to give you the furniture I had from our home. It is mostly real Chippendale and would grace any drawing-room. But I do not need it. This house was filled with furniture when Frederick brought me to it. I have no children to save it for. Will you like to have it, Philip dear?”

“I shall like it tremendously,” Philip exclaimed. “It’s very handsome of you, Augusta.”

Adeline was charmed by Augusta’s generosity. Her spirits were high. Her talk, her laughter, the sound of her eager footsteps, filled the house. Philip did not know what it was to desire peace and quiet. But how earnestly the Dean and Augusta wished for it! By the time the visitors had departed with their mountain of luggage (the noise of the furniture being crated had nearly driven the Dean mad), their crying child and its ayah who kept the kitchen in a ferment with her demands of strange food, and their noisy and often blasphemous parrot, the sedate couple were exhausted. Their sincerest wish was to see the last of their relatives and never again
to have a prolonged visit from them.

Philip and Adeline, on their part, had felt a cooling in the atmosphere and resented it. They were setting out to visit Adeline’s people in Ireland.

“There you will find,” she exclaimed, throwing herself back against the cushions of the carriage, “Irish hospitality, generous hearts, and true affection!”

N
OT IN ALL
the long voyage from India had Adeline suffered as she suffered in crossing the Irish Sea. The waves were short, choppy, violent. Never were they satisfied to torment the ship from one quarter alone. They raged on her from the northeast, veered and harried her from the southeast, then with a roar sprang on her from the west. Sometimes, it seemed to Adeline, the ship did not move at all, would never move again but just wallow in the grey misery of those ragged waters till the day of doom. The ayah’s face was enough to frighten one, it was so green. Gussie, who had not been seasick on her first voyage, now was deadly so. It was maddening to see Philip, pink and white as ever, his firm cheeks moist from spray, actually enjoying the tumult of the sea. Still he was able to look after her and that was a comfort. In fact he gave a sense of support to all who where near him.