The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (251 page)

She fell into a kind of nightmare doze, in which the bed rocked beneath her like a cradle. It rocked faster and faster, rolling her from side to side. She was not a real, a wholesome infant, but a grotesque changeling, leering up at the distraught mother who now peered in at her, shrieking, tearing her hair. Again the scream rent the silence, and Pheasant, with sweat starting on her face, sprang up in bed.

She was alone. The electric light shone brightly. Again came the loud peal—not a scream, but the ringing of the doorbell.

She leaped to the floor. The lock of the door had been broken many years. She began to drag at the washstand to barricade it.

Downstairs the sound had also penetrated Vaughan’s stupor. He lurched to the door, which Pheasant had locked behind her, and threw it open. Renny and Piers Whiteoak stood there,
their faces like two pale discs against the blackness. Renny at once stepped inside, but Piers remained in the porch.

“Is Pheasant here?” asked Renny.

“Yes.” He eyed them with solemnity.

Renny turned to his brother. “Come in, Piers.”

Vaughan led the way toward the dining room, but Piers stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Is she upstairs?” he asked in a thick voice, placing one hand on the newel post as though to steady himself.

Vaughan, somewhat sobered by the strangeness of the brothers’ aspect, remembered something.

“Yes, but you’re not going up to her. You’ll let her alone.”

“He won’t hurt her,” said Renny.

“He’s not to go up. I promised her.”

He took the youth’s arm, but Piers wrenched himself away.

“I order you!” shouted Vaughan. “Whose house is this? Whose daughter is she? She’s left you. Very well—let her stay. I want her.”

“She is my wife. I’m going to her.”

“What the hell’s the matter, anyway? I don’t know what it’s all about. She comes here—done up—frightened out of her wits—I remember now. Then you come like a pair of murderers.”

“I must see her.”

“You shall not see her.” Again he clutched Piers’s arm. The two struggled beneath the sinister head of the great moose, under the massive antlers of which their manhood seemed weak and futile.

In a moment Piers had freed himself and was springing up the stairs.

“Come into the dining room, Maurice,” said Renny, “and I’ll tell you what is wrong. Did she tell you nothing?”

Maurice followed him, growling: “A strange way to act in a man’s house at this hour.”

“Did she tell you nothing?” asked Renny, when they were in the dining room.

“I don’t remember what she said.” He picked up the decanter. “Have a drink.”

“No, nor you either.” He took the decanter from his friend and put it in the sideboard, decisively locking the door.

Vaughan regarded the action with dismal whimsicality. “What a to-do,” he said, “because the kids have had a row!”

Renny turned on him savagely. “Good God, Maurice, you don’t call this a row, do you?”

“Well, what’s the trouble, anyway?”

“The trouble is this: that brat of yours has wrecked poor young Piers’s life.”

“The hell she has! Who is the man?”

“His own brother—Eden.”

Vaughan groaned. “Where is he?”

“He made off in the car.”

“Why didn’t she go with him? Why did she come to me?”

“How can I tell? He probably didn’t ask her. Oh, the whole rotten business harks back to me! It’s my fault. I’d no right to let Eden loaf about all winter, writing poetry. It’s made a scoundrel of him!”

A wry smile flitted across Vaughan’s face at the unconscious humour of the remark.

“I shouldn’t blame myself too much if I were you. If writing poetry has made Eden into a scoundrel, he was probably well on the way beforehand. Possibly that’s why he turned to it.”

There was a deep understanding between these two. They had confided in each other as they had in no one else.

Renny, stirred by the disclosures of the night, burst out: “Maurice, in thought I am no better than Eden! I love his wife. She’s never out of my mind.”

Vaughan looked into the tormented eyes of his friend with commiseration.

“Do you, Renny? I had never thought of such a thing. She doesn’t seem to me your sort of girl at all.”

“That is the trouble. She isn’t. If she were, it would be easier to put the thought of her aside. She’s intellectual, she’s—”

“I should say she is cold.”

“You’re wrong. It is I, all my life, who have had a sort of cold sensuality—no tenderness went with my love for a woman. I don’t think I had any compassion. No, I’m sure I hadn’t.” He knit his brows as though recalling past affairs. “But I’m full of compassion for Alayne.”

“Does she love you?”

“Yes.”

“What about Eden?”

“She had a romantic devotion to him, but it’s over.”

“Does she know about this?” Maurice lifted his head in the direction of the room above.

“Yes. I only had a glimpse of her in the hall—the house was in an uproar. She had a strange, exalted look as though nothing mattered now.”

“I see. What is Piers going to do?”

“Piers is a splendid fellow—tough as an oak. He said to me, ‘She’s mine; nothing can change that. I’m going to fetch her home.’ But I should pity Eden if he got his hands on him.”

“They are coming down. Heavens, they were quiet enough! Must I speak to them?”

“No, let the poor young beggars alone.”

The two came slowly down the stairs. Like people leaving the scene of a catastrophe, they carried in their eyes the terror of what they had beheld. Their faces were rigid. Piers’s mouth was drawn to one side in an expression of disgust. It was like a mask of tragedy. They stood in the wide doorway of the dining room as in a picture framed. Maurice and Renny smiled at them awkwardly, trying to put a decent face on the affair.

“Going, eh?” Maurice said. “Have something first, Piers.” He made a movement toward the sideboard.

“Thanks,” returned Piers in a lifeless voice. He entered the dining room.

“Where’s that key, Renny?”

Renny produced the key; a tantalus was brought forth, and a drink poured for Piers. Maurice, with Renny’s eye on him, did not take one himself.

Piers gulped down the spirits, the glass rattling grotesquely against his teeth. Under the ashen tan of his face, colour crept back. No one spoke, but the three men stared with gloomy intensity at Pheasant, still framed in the doorway. The magnetic currents between the members of the group seemed palpably to vibrate across the atmosphere of the room. Then Pheasant, putting up her hands, as though to push their peering faces back from her, exclaimed: “Don’t stand staring at me like that! One would think you’d never seen me before.”

“You look awfully done,” said Maurice. “I think you ought to have a mouthful of something to brace you. A little Scotch and water, eh?”

“I might if I were asked,” she returned, with a pathetic attempt at bravado. She took the glass in a steady little hand, and drank.

“I shall come along later,” said Renny to Piers. ‘I’m going to stop a while with Maurice.” But he continued to stare at Pheasant.

“I know I’m a scarlet woman, but I think you’re very cruel. Your eyes are like a brand, Renny Whiteoak.”

“Pheasant, I was not even thinking of you. My—my mind was quite somewhere else.”

Piers turned on Maurice in a sudden rage. “It’s all your fault!” he broke out, vehemently. “You never gave the poor child a chance. She was as ignorant as any little immigrant when I married her.”

“She doesn’t seem to have learned any good from you,” retorted Vaughan.

“She has learned all of decency that she knows. Was she ever sent to school?”

“She had two governesses.”

“Yes. They both left inside of six months, because they couldn’t live in the house with you.”

“Oh, I suppose it is my fault that she inherits her mother’s instinct,” returned Maurice, bitterly. “And Renny has just been telling me that it is his fault that Eden is a scoundrel. We’ve taken on a lot of responsibility.”

“You are talking like fools,” said Renny.

“Please do not quarrel about me,” put in Pheasant. “I think I’m going to faint or something.”

“Better take her out in the air,” said Renny. “The liquor was too strong for her.”

“Come along,” said Piers, and took her arm.

The touch of his hand had an instant effect on Pheasant. A deep blush suffused her face and neck; she swayed toward him, raising her eyes to his with a look of tragic humility.

Outside, the coolness of the dawn refreshed her. He released her arm, and preceded her through the grove and down into the ravine. They walked in silence, she seeming no more than his shadow, following him through every divergence of the path, hesitating when he hesitated. Centuries before, two such figures might have been seen traversing this same ravine, a young Indian and his squaw, moving as his silent shadow in the first light of morning, primitive figures so much akin to the forest life about them that the awakening birds did not cease twittering as they passed. On the bridge above the stream he stopped. Below lay the pool where they had first seen their love reflected as an opening flower. They looked down into it now, no longer able to share the feelings its mirrored loveliness excited in them. A primrose light suffused the sky and in a deeper tone lay cupped in the pool, around the brink of which things tender and green strove with gentle urgency to catch the sun’s first rays.

An English pheasant, one of some imported by Renny, moved sedately among the young rushes, its plumage shining like a coat of mail. Careless, irresponsible bird, Piers thought, and for one wild instant he wished that she were one with the bird—that no man might recognize a woman in her but himself; that he might keep her hidden and love her secretly, untortured by the fear and loathing he now felt.

Pheasant saw, drowned in that pool, all the careless irresponsibility of the past, the weakness, the indolence, that had made her a victim of Eden’s dalliance. If Piers loathed her, how much more she loathed the image of Eden’s face, which faintly smiled at her from the changeful mirror of the pool! Just to live, to make up to Piers by her devotion for what he had suffered—to win from his eyes love again instead of that look of fear which he had turned on her when he entered the
bedroom! She had expected rage—fury. And he had looked at her in an agony of fear. But he had taken her back! They were going home to Jalna. She longed for the thick walls of the house as a broken-winged bird for its nest.

“Come,” he said, as though awakening from a dream, and moved on up the path that led from the ravine to the lawn.

The turkeys were crossing the lawn, led by the cock, whose blazing wattles swung arrogantly in the first sunrays. His wives, with burnished breasts and beaming eyes, followed close behind, craning their necks, alternately lifting and dragging their slender feet, echoing his bold gobble with plaintive pipings. The hens paused to look with curiosity at the boy and girl who emerged from the ravine, but the cock, absorbed by his own ego, circled before them, swelling himself rigidly, dropping his wings, urging into his wattles a still more burning red.

Down the wet roof Finch’s pigeons were strutting, sliding, rooketty-cooing, peering over the eaves at the two who slowly mounted the steps.

Inside, the house lay in silence except for the heavy snoring of Grandmother in her bedroom off the lower hall. It was as if some strange beast had a lair beneath the stairs, and was growling a challenge to the sun.

They passed the closed doors of the hall above and went into their own room. Pheasant dropped into a chair by the window, but Piers, with a businesslike air, began collecting various articles—his brushes, his shaving things, the clothes which he wore about the farm. She watched his movements with the unquestioning submissiveness of a child. One thought sustained her: “How glad I am that I am here with Piers, and not flying with Eden as he wanted me to!”

When he had got together what he wanted, he took the key from the door and inserted it on the outside. He said, without looking at her:

“Here you stay, till I can stand the sight of your face again.”

He went out, locking the door behind him. He climbed the long stairs to the attic, and, throwing his things on the bed in Finch’s room, began to change his clothes for the day’s work. In the passage he had met Alayne, looking like a ghost. They had passed without speaking.

F
IDDLER’S
H
UT

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
Mr. Wragge was an object of great interest one morning to a group of Jersey calves as he crossed their pasture. They ceased gambolling, butting, and licking each other, to regard him with steadfast scrutiny out of liquid dark eyes. He was in his shirt sleeves, his coat being thrown over one arm, for the day was hot; his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he carried, balanced on one hand, a tray covered with a white cloth. He was smoking, as usual, and his expression was one of deep concern.

When he reached a stile at the far end of the paddock, he set the tray on the top, climbed over, then, balancing the tray at a still more dangerous angle, proceeded on his way. It now lay through an old uncared-for apple orchard, the great trees of which were green with moss, half smothered in wild grapevines and Virginia creeper, and their boughs, like heavy wings, swept to the long coarse grass. Following a winding path, he passed a spring, where long ago a primitive well had been made by the simple process of sinking a wooden box. The lid of this was now gone, the wood decayed, and it was used by birds as a drinking fountain and bath. The liquid
gurgle of the spring as it entered the well made a pleasant undertone to the song of birds with which the air was merry.

Embowered in vines, almost hidden by flowering dogwood, stood the hut where Fiddler Jock, by the consent of Captain Philip Whiteoak, had lived in solitude, the story of whose death young Finch had told Alayne on their first walk together.

Here Meg Whiteoak had been living for three weeks.

Before approaching the threshold, Mr. Wragge again set down the tray, put on his coat, straightened his hat, threw away his cigarette, and intensified his expression of concern.