The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (236 page)

One of Eden’s cigarette stubs had burned a hole in the quilt.

Lying awake long afterward, while Eden slept peacefully beside her, Alayne wondered if she could be the same girl who had laboured over her father’s book and paid decorous
little visits to her aunts up the Hudson. She wondered, with a feeling of apprehension, when Eden was going to bestir himself to get a position. After the affair of the apples he spent more and more time in the summerhouse, for he had begun another long narrative poem. Proof sheets of his new book had arrived from New York, and they demanded their share of his time.

Alayne, who was supposed to be the inspiration of this fresh wellspring of poetry, found that during the fierce hours of composition the most helpful thing she could do for the young poet was to keep as far away from him as possible. She explored every field and grove of Jalna, followed the stream in all its turnings, and pressed her way through thicket and bramble to the deepest part of the ravine. She came to love the great unwieldy place, of which the only part kept in order was the farm run by Piers. Sometimes Finch or Wakefield accompanied her, but more often she was alone.

On one of the last days of autumn she came upon Pheasant, sitting with a book in the orchard. It was one of those days so still that the very moving of the sphere seemed audible. The sun was a faint blur of red in the hazy heaven, and in the north the smoke of a distant forest fire made a sullen gesture. This conflagration far away seemed to be consuming the very corpse of summer, which, being dead indeed, felt no pain in the final effacement.

Pheasant was sitting with her back against the bole of a gnarled old apple tree, the apples of which had not been gathered but were lying scattered on the grass about her. The ciderish smell of their decay was more noticeable here than the acrid smell of smoke. The young girl had thrown down her book and, with head tilted back and eyes closed, was more than half asleep. Alayne stood beside her, looking down
at her, but Pheasant did not stir, exposing her face to the gaze of the almost stranger with the wistful unconcern of those who slumber. It seemed to Alayne that she had never before really seen this child—for she was little more than a child. With her cropped brown head, softly parted lips, and childish hands with their limply upturned palms, she was a different being from the secretive, pale girl always on her guard whom Alayne met at table and in the drawing-room at cards. Then she seemed quite able to take care of herself, even faintly hostile in her attitude. Now, in this relaxed and passive pose, she seemed to ask for compassion and tenderness.

As Alayne was about to turn away, Pheasant opened her eyes, and, finding Alayne’s eyes looking down into them with an expression of friendliness, she smiled as though she could not help herself.

“Hullo,” she said, with boyish brevity. “You caught me asleep.”

“I hope I did not waken you.”

“Oh, I was only cat-napping. This air makes you drowsy.”

“May I sit down beside you?” Alayne asked, with a sudden desire to get better acquainted with the young girl.

“Of course.” Her tone was indifferent, but not unfriendly. She picked up her hat, which was half full of mushrooms, and displayed them. “I was gathering these,” she said, “for Piers’s breakfast. He can eat this many all himself.”

“But aren’t you afraid you will pick poison ones? I should be.”

Pheasant smiled scornfully. “I’ve been gathering mushrooms all my life. These are all alike. The orchard kind. Except this dear little pink one. I shall give it to Wake. It’s got
a funny smoky taste and he likes it.” She twirled the pink mushroom in her slim brown fingers. “In the pine woods I get lots of morels. Piers likes them, too, only not so well. Piers thinks it’s wonderful the way I can always find them. He has them for breakfast almost every morning.”

Everything was in terms of Piers. Alayne asked:

“What is your book? Not so interesting as the mushrooms?”

“It’s very good. It belongs to Piers. One of Jules Verne’s.”

Alayne had hoped that they might talk about the book, but she had read nothing of Jules Verne. She asked instead:

“Have you known Piers many years? I suppose you have, for you were neighbours, weren’t you?”

Pheasant stiffened. She did not answer for a moment, but bent forward plucking at the coarse orchard grass. Then she said in a low voice, “I suppose Eden has told you about me.”

“Nothing except that you were a neighbour’s daughter.”

“Come, now. Don’t hedge. The others did, then. Meg—Gran—Uncle Nick?”

“No one,” answered Alayne firmly, “has told me anything about you.”

“Humph. They’re a funny lot. I made sure they’d tell you first thing.” She mused a moment, biting a blade of grass, and then added: “I suppose they didn’t want to tell you anything so shocking. You’re so frightfully proper, and all that.”

“Am I?” returned Alayne, rather nettled.

“Well, aren’t you?”

“I had not thought about it.”

“It was one of the first things I noticed about you.”

“I hope it hasn’t turned you against me,” said Alayne, lightly.

Pheasant reflected, and said she did not think so.

“Then what is it?” persisted Alayne, her tone still light, but her face becoming very serious.

Pheasant picked up one of the misshapen apples of the old tree and balanced it on her palm.

“Oh, you’re different; that’s the principal thing. You don’t seem to know anything about real life.”

Alayne could have laughed aloud at the answer, that this ignorant little country girl should doubt her experience of life. Yet it was true enough that she did not know life as they in this backwater knew it, where no outside contacts modified the pungent vitality of their relations with each other.

She sat a moment in thought and then she said, gently:

“You are mistaken if you think that I should be easily upset by anything you would care to tell me. Not that I want to urge your confidence.”

“Oh, it’s not a matter of confidence,” exclaimed Pheasant. “Everybody in the world knows it but you, and of course you’ll hear it sooner or later, so I may as well tell you.”

She laid the apple on the grass, and, clasping her ankles in her brown hands, sat upright, with the air of a precocious child, and announced: “I’m illegitimate—what Gran in her old-fashioned way calls a bastard. There you are.” A bright colour dyed her cheeks, but she flung out the words with pathetic bravado.

“I am sorry,” murmured Alayne, “but you do not suppose that that will affect my feelings for you, do you?”

“It does most people’s.” The answer came in a low husky voice, and she went on hurriedly: “My father was the only child of an English colonel. His parents doted on him. He was the delight of their old age. My mother was a common country girl and she left me on their doorstep with a note, exactly the way they do in books. They took me in and kept me, but
it broke the old people’s hearts. They died not long after. My father—”

“Did you live with him?” Alayne tried to make it easier for her by a tone of unconcern, but her eyes were filled with tears of pity for the child who in such quaint phraseology— “the delight of their old age,” indeed—told of the tragedy of her birth.

“Yes, till I was married. He just endured me. But I expect the sight of me was a constant reminder—of what he’d lost, I mean.”

“Lost?”

“Yes, Meg Whiteoak. He’d been engaged to her, and she broke it off when I appeared on the scene. That’s why she has that glassy stare for me. All the Whiteoaks were against the marriage, of course. It was adding insult to injury, you see.”

“Oh, my dear.”

The significance of looks and chance phrases that had puzzled her became apparent. She was pierced by a vivid pain at the thought of all the unmerited suffering of Pheasant.

“You have had rather a hard time, but surely that is all over. Meg cannot go on blaming you for what is not your fault, and I think the others are fond of you.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“I should be if you would let me.” Her hand moved across the grass to Pheasant’s. Their fingers intertwined.

“All right. But I warn you, I’m not a bit proper.”

“Perhaps I am not so proper as you think.” Their fingers were still warmly clutched. “By the way, why doesn’t Piers like me? I feel that it will not be altogether simple to be your friend when he is so—well, distant.”

“He is jealous of you—for my sake, I think. I just think that, mind you; he’s never said so. But I think he finds it
pretty beastly that you should be thought so much of and me so little, and that you should be made so welcome and me so unwelcome, when after all we’re just two girls, except that you’re rich and I’m poor, and you’re legitimate and I’m up against the bar sinister, and Piers has always taken such an interest in the place and worked on it, and Eden only cares for poetry and having his own way.”

Alayne was scarlet. Out of the tangle of words one phrase menaced her. She said, with a little gasp: “Whatever made you think I was rich? My dear child, I am poor—poor. My father was a college professor. You know they are poor enough, in all conscience.”

“You may be what you call poor, but you’re rich to us,” answered Pheasant, sulkily.

“Now listen,” continued Alayne, sternly. “My father left me five thousand dollars insurance, and a bungalow which I sold for fourteen thousand, which makes nineteen thousand dollars. That is absolutely all. So you see how rich I am.”

“It sounds a lot,” said Pheasant, stolidly, and their hands parted and they both industriously plucked at the grass.

The significance of other allusions was now made plain to Alayne. She frowned as she asked: “What put such an idea into your head, Pheasant? Surely the rest of the family are not suffering from that hallucination.”

“We all thought you were frightfully well off. I don’t know exactly how it came about—someone said—Gran said—no, Meg said it was—” She stopped short, suddenly pulled up by a tardy caution.

“Who said what?” insisted Alayne.

“I think it was Uncle Nick who said—”

“Said what?”

“That it, was a good thing that Eden—oh, bother, I can’t remember what he said. What does it matter, anyhow?”

Alayne had to subdue a feeling of helpless anger before she answered, quietly: “It does not matter. But I want you not to have the notion that I am rich. It is ridiculous. It puts me in a false position. You knew that I worked for my living before I married Eden. Why did you think I did that?”

“We knew it was publishing books. It didn’t seem like work.”

“My child, I was not publishing. I only read manuscripts for the publisher. Do you see the difference?”

Pheasant stared at her uncomprehendingly, and Alayne, moved by a sudden impulse, put her arm about her and kissed her. “How silly of me to mind! May we be friends, then?”

Pheasant’s body relaxed against her with the abandon of a child’s. “It’s lovely of you,” she breathed, “not to mind about my—”

Alayne stopped her words with a kiss. “As though that were possible! And I hope Piers will feel less unfriendly to me when he knows everything.”

Pheasant was watching over Alayne’s shoulder two figures that were approaching along the orchard path.

“It’s Renny,” she said, “and Maurice. I wonder what they’re up to. Renny’s got an axe.”

The men were talking and laughing rather loudly over some joke, and did not see the girls at once. Alayne sat up and stroked her hair.

“I’ll bet it is some war joke,” whispered Pheasant. “They’re always at it when they’re together.” Pheasant took up an apple and rolled it in their direction. “Hullo, Maurice, why such hilarity?”

The two came up, Maurice removing his tweed cap. Renny, already bareheaded, nodded, the reminiscent grin fading from his face.

“Alayne,” he said, “this is Maurice Vaughan, our nearest neighbour.”

They shook hands, and Alayne, remembering having heard a reference to the fact that Vaughan drank a good deal, thought he showed it in his heavy eyes and relaxed mouth. He gave Pheasant a grudging smile, and then turned to Renny.

“Is this the tree?” he asked.

“Yes,” returned Renny, surveying it critically.

“What are you going to do?” asked Alayne.

“Cut it down. It’s very old, and it’s rotting. It must make room for a new one.”

Alayne was filled with dismay. To her the old apple tree was beautiful, standing strong and yet twisted with age in the golden October sunshine. From it seemed to emanate the spirit of all the seasons the tree had known, with their scents of fragile apple blossoms and April rains, of moist orchard earth and mellowing fruit. A lifetime of experience was recorded on its rugged trunk, the bark of which enfolded it in mossy layers, where a myriad tiny insects had their being.

She asked, trying not to look too upset, for she was never certain when the Whiteoaks would be amused at what they thought soft-heartedness or affectation, “Must it come down? I was just thinking what a grand old tree it is. And it seems to have borne a good many apples.”

“It’s diseased,” returned Renny. “Look at the shape of the apples. This orchard needs going over rather badly.”

“But this is only one tree and it is such a beautiful shape.”

“You must go over to the old orchard. You will find dozens like this there.” He pulled off his coat and began to roll up the sleeves from his lean, muscular arms. Alayne fancied that an added energy was given to his movements by her opposition.

She said nothing more, but with a growing feeling of antagonism watched him pick up the axe and place the first blow against the stalwart trunk. She imagined the consternation among the insect life on the tree at that first shuddering shock, comparable to an earthquake on our own sphere. The tree itself stood with a detached air, only the slightest quiver stirring its glossy leaves. Another and another blow fell, and a wedge-shaped chip, fresh with sap, sprang out onto the grass. Renny swung the axe with ease, it and his arms moving in rhythmic accord. Another chip fell, and another, and the tree sent up a groaning sound, as the blows at last penetrated its vitals.

“Oh, oh! Let me get my things,” cried Pheasant, and would have darted forward to rescue her hat and mushrooms had not Vaughan caught her by the wrist and jerked her out of the way.