The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (108 page)

“Late for tea, as usual, Philip,” she exclaimed, in a strong voice, with more than a hint of Irish accent.

“No, I’m not late, Mamma,” he returned, “I’ve been in for some time.”

“You are late,” she persisted. “You’re not ready. Look at your boots and your coat and your hands. Look at him, Molly! He’s a sight, isn’t he?”

“I like the way he looks,” said Mary contradictorily.

“Of course you do! You’re that sort of a woman.”

Philip handed the basket of fish to the maid.

“Here, Eliza,” he said, “take these to the cook.”

“Wait a minute, till I have a look at them,” put in his mother. She bent eagerly over the basket. “Fine catch, eh? I’ll have one for my supper, with lemon and parsley. Don’t forget about the lemon and parsley, Eliza.”

“No, ma’am.” The maid was about to descend the stairs to the basement kitchen when a side door giving on to the lawn opened and Philip’s two elder brothers came in and demanded to inspect the fish. Their mother took an arm of each and looked approvingly into their faces, flushed by exercise.

“Had a good game, eh? I could see you from my window. That’s the way to keep supple —” she pronounced it
soople —
“a good game of lawn tennis before tea.”

“I think,” said Nicholas, brushing back his thick greying hair, “that I’m getting a bit heavy for tennis. I get very hot. And I’m fifty-three, you know. I think I ought to go in for croquet or golf.”

His mother gave him a thump on the shoulder. “Get along with you! When you’re my age, you may talk of taking care of yourself.”

“I’ll never be what you are, Mamma. You’ll live to be a hundred.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.” And, still clinging to her elder sons, she led the way to the dining room.

A substantial tea was laid on the mahogany table. A plate of scones had been split, buttered, and spread with grape jelly. There was a silver dish of toasted crumpets, and a glistening section of honey in the comb. There were mounds of fresh white bread thickly buttered. The old lady’s eyes lighted and her strong lips parted in a smile that showed teeth that had once been fine, but were now loose and discoloured.

“Tea, Mary,” she demanded, “and let it be strong. Three lumps of sugar.”

Molly Whiteoak raised the heavy silver teapot, and her white forearm curving below the elbow sleeve of her dress held the eyes of her husband. He did not at once see the cup of tea that Ernest handed to him.

“Wake up, Philip,” said Nicholas. “What are you dreaming about?”

“What should he be dreaming of, but his daughter’s wedding?” said their mother. “It’s going to be a great occasion, I can tell you. Nothing so fine has happened to this family for many a day. Very different from your marriage, Nick, that cost you a pot of money and landed you in the divorce court.”

“All that was fifteen years ago, Mamma,” observed Nicholas tranquilly.

“H’m — well —” she returned, with a snort, “there have been marriages since” — and she mumbled under her breath — “no better.”

Philip’s bright blue eyes were staring at her challengingly. He said: —

“There’s been our marriage, Mamma. Molly’s and mine. If Meggie and Maurice are half as happy, they’ll be lucky.”

“I’m not talking about any flibbertigibbet happiness,” retorted old Adeline, hotly. “I’m talking about a marriage that is uniting two good families and two large estates. Meggie is doing well. I’m glad she is staying in the neighbourhood, too.”

“Yes,” said Ernest, dubiously helping himself to a crumpet, for he had inherited his mother’s love of food without her digestion, “it would have been sad to lose our only girl. How our family runs to males! Mamma was an only daughter in a family of boys. She had three sons and only one daughter. She had three grandsons and only one granddaughter.”

A shadow fell across Mary’s face, for she had buried a five-month-old daughter. She cast a reproachful look at Ernest, which he interpreted as a warning against eating the crumpet.

“H’m, well,” he muttered. “After a strenuous game of tennis, I don’t believe one crumpet will hurt me.”

“Don’t come to me for sympathy,” said his brother, “if you have wind on the stomach.”

Ernest returned crisply — “I should never expect sympathy from you.”

“Listen to the hardy athletes!” said Philip, spreading clotted cream on his scone and introducing it in one bite into his mouth.

Nicholas and Ernest smiled good-humouredly. Philip, at forty-four, was very much the younger brother to them, and they could afford to be tolerant toward him, for his generosity never questioned the length of their visits in his home. They had had their share of their father’s fortune. His house and land, with a fair income, had been left to Philip, his youngest and favourite son. As long as their money had lasted, Canada had seen little of Ernest and Nicholas. London was their natural home, and they had only returned to Jalna when there was nothing else to do. Ernest still hoped, if some of his investments recovered, to spend at least a part of each year in England.

As for their mother, old Adeline, her feelings toward Philip baffled even herself. She loved him and sometimes almost hated him. She resented his being the master of Jalna, which, she felt, should have been left to her absolutely. How she would have brandished that ownership as a bludgeon and as a bait over the heads of her three sons! Unlike Nicholas and Ernest, she felt no tolerance toward Philip because of his hospitality. She was saving of her own fortune and established an air of mystery about it.

She resented Philip’s physical resemblance to her own Philip, the husband she had loved with all the force of her fiery nature. But perhaps it was less his resemblance than his differences to his father that irritated her. Captain Whiteoak had been a soldier, with a body as straight as a sword. Philip was an easygoing gentleman farmer with an incurably indolent slouch. Captain Whiteoak had rapped out his words with military explosiveness. Philip spoke indolently. Captain Whiteoak had been a martinet to his children. Philip indulged his children to the point of spoiling. Captain Whiteoak had thought a good deal of the importance of his position in the Province, for, though he had never gone into politics, his opinion had carried weight in public questions and it had been usually voiced with vigorous conviction. Philip did not care how unimportant he was.

Yet father and youngest son had one trait in common. That was their imperviousness to criticism. It was this trait that baffled Adeline. She stared fiercely at Philip in his ruffianly-looking fishing jacket, his dishevelled hair, and realized it was beyond her power to change him. He refused to tidy himself before coming to the tea table to please his old mother. Her cup trembled with anger as she raised it brimming to her lips, and some of the tea was slopped.

“Mamma,” Ernest said, nervously, “must you” — he hesitated.

“Must I what?” Her eyes moved from Philip’s face to his.

“Slop your tea?” He finished the question with an apologetic air.

“Yes, I must,” she retorted fiercely. “I must — I must — I must — and no wonder! If my son comes to table looking like a pig, is it any wonder I eat like one? I must get a trough. Philip and I will muzzle our food in a trough and grunt together, eh, Philip?”

“Yes, old lady,” agreed Philip. Not to be outdone in coarseness by his mother, he added — “Have some of the clotted cream. It takes a grand hold o’ the gob.”

Ernest and Nicholas chuckled, but Molly exclaimed: —

“Philip, you’re disgusting!”

There was a sound of horses’ hoofs on the drive and then a burst of young girls’ laughter in the hall. The door was thrown open and Philip’s daughter and her friend Vera Lacey came into the room. Vera, the young London relative of neighbours, was spending the year with her aunts. Her parents had sent her on this visit because of an undesirable love affair, and she had made up her mind to turn the punishment into a thoroughly good time. Her piquant face was powdered, in contrast to Meggie’s, which shone from heat and excitement. Meg cast herself on her father’s knee and threw her arms about his neck.

“M’m” … they cooed together, gazing into each other’s eyes.

“Isn’t Meggie a spoiled creature!” exclaimed Vera. “She should have my father for a while. She’d get no hugs from him.”

Mary Whiteoak threw an irritated glance at father and daughter. She had been Meg’s governess before she had married Philip, and the girl had the same power of tantalizing that had made the child a pupil to be dreaded. Mary said: —

“Your father’s tea will be getting cold, Meg. Aren’t you going to tell us what you bought? Did you have your fitting at the dressmaker’s?”

Meg ignored her and pressed little nibbling kisses against her father’s cheek.

Before the coming of the two girls Mary Whiteoak had appeared, in the company of the three middle-aged men and the old woman, as nothing more than a girl herself. Now, before the exuberance of their authentic girlhood, she paled into a fragile woman, worn by childbearing.

“Yes, yes,” urged old Mrs. Whiteoak, agreeing for once with her daughter-in-law, “leave off your snuggling, Meggie, and tell us about the town.”

Philip put his daughter from him and turned to his tea. “This wedding,” he said, “is going to put me on the rocks.”

“It was such fun!” cried Meg. “And what do you suppose Vera did? She went up to a customer in Murdocks’ and began to examine her dress, thinking she was a dummy! You should have seen the customer’s face!”

“The shops are amusing after London,” said Vera. “But let me tell you what Meggie did.”

Meg interrupted her, and the two went into peals of laughter. Exhilarated by their bursting health, Adeline helped herself to more jam and demanded another cup of tea.

“You should have seen my trousseau,” said old Mrs. Whiteoak. “There was elegance for you. I took it all the way from Ireland to India in eleven large trunks. My father hadn’t got it all paid for, they said, at the day of his death.”

Agreeable talk was at its height when the chenille curtains that hung at the folding doors which led into the library were pushed aside and Philip’s eldest son, Renny, surveyed the group about the table. He was two years Meg’s junior and was just entering manhood.

“Come in, come in,” said Ernest testily. “You are letting an abominable draught on the back of my neck. I have been overheated playing tennis.”

“Why is he always late for tea?” growled Nicholas.

“Please don’t bring that muddy dog with you!” cried his sister, and the two girls shrieked as the cocker spaniel padded about the table, his fringed tail waving.

With a grimace, half-deprecating, half-impudent, Renny disappeared behind the curtains, put his dog outside, and reappeared at the door leading from the hall.

He was a tall thin youth with a look of wiry strength, whose arrogant features already bore a striking resemblance to his grandmother’s. His skin, which in young boyhood had been creamy, was now becoming weather-beaten by exposure to sun and wind in all seasons. His vivid brown eyes flashed beneath brows so expressive that already a horizontal line across his forehead marked their animation. His hair, brown in shadow, flashed into burnished red when the light touched it. This rather extraordinary hair covered a head of definite, statuesque modeling of which Meg had once observed that if it came to beating it against a stone wall, the wall might get the worst of it. As growing boy and heir to Jalna he had been the object of so much criticism from his grandmother, parents, aunts, and uncles; his doings had been the focus of such constant speculation, encouragement, and reproof, that he carried himself with an air of wariness as though always prepared to face attack.

With his entrance the attention of the two girls was fixed on him, and Nicholas was forced to raise his voice and repeat to Meggie that he had had a letter from his sister and that she and her husband were sailing the following week for Canada.

“That will be nice,” said Meg, vaguely, then added, with more warmth, “I do wonder what they will bring me for a wedding present!”

“Some cast-off bit of jet or pinchbeck of your aunt’s,” said old Mrs. Whiteoak, scraping the jam pot.

Meg pushed out her pretty lips. “They ought to bring me something really handsome.”

“I am sure Augusta and Edwin will bring you a charming present,” said Ernest.

“I don’t see what makes you think so,” said his mother. “Their presents are always tarnished or stink of moth balls…. More tea, Molly! Have you gone to sleep behind the teapot? Ha — that’s right — plenty of sugar.”

Nicholas put in — “They are bringing something more interesting than a present for you, Meggie. They are bringing a wedding guest, your cousin, twice or thrice removed — Mr. Malahide Court.”

Meg stared. “I’ve never heard of him. What a name!”

Her grandmother glared across the table at her. “Don’t you dare to poke fun at that name, miss!”

“I wasn’t! I only said what a name!”

“You jeered! You know you did! I won’t have it! I was a Court and there’s no finer family living. And Malahide is a good old Court name. The Malahides married the Courts and lived in their castles when the Whiteoaks were yeomen, let me tell you! Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I am the granddaughter of an earl, hey? Have you forgotten that?

Grandmother was working herself into a temper. She rapped the table with her spoon to punctuate her sentences.

“Keep your hair on, Mamma,” soothed Philip. “We all know about our noble ancestors and realize that we’re only poor Colonials ourselves. There’s no need of getting upset about it.”

“Malahide Court,” said Ernest sententiously, “must be well past forty. I remember that he came to my school in England just as I was leaving.”

“What was he like?” asked Nicholas.

“A miserable little shaver.”

“Had he the Court nose?” demanded old Mrs. Whiteoak.

“H’m, well, I don’t remember that, but I know he was no beauty.”

“I am anxious to see him. I hope he will stop the summer.”

Philip raised his eyebrows. “Let us see him before we hope that, Mamma.”

Small feet were heard running in the hall and Mary’s face turned, all alight, toward the door. It opened and her elder son, Eden, pranced in.