The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (291 page)

Ernest raised his long face from gnawing his forefinger. “It seems to me,” he faltered, “that I’ve never known Mama brighter than she was that last day.”

Meg exclaimed, ironically: “If you call it bright, giving away her most valuable ring, on a mere whim!”

“For the Lord’s sake,” shouted Piers, “try to get your mind off that ring! One would think it represented a fortune!”

“It quite probably does,” returned his sister suavely. “What can you know of the value of jewels—you, a crude boy who has been nowhere, seen nothing?”

Piers’s eyes grew prominent. “I should like to know what you’ve seen and done?” he inquired, sarcastically. “You spent nearly twenty years trying to make up your mind to marry your next-door neighbour,”

Meg burst into tears, and the baby, hearing her mother cry, put her kid slippers in the air and wept with all her might.

Above the noise Maurice called to Piers: “I won’t have you insulting my wife!”

“Make her let my wife alone then!” retorted Piers. Augusta boomed: “Is it our duty, I wonder, to make an appeal? To settle the matter in court?”

“What’s that you say?” asked Nicholas. “I can’t hear you for the noise those girls are making!”

“I said I wondered if we should go to law about it.”

The sound of crying ceased as suddenly as it had begun. All the heads in the room—they seemed to Finch, sitting guiltily on his ottoman, to have swollen to the size of balloons—turned, as though drawn by a magnet, facing Renny. It was one of those volcanic moments when the entire family shouldered all responsibility upon him. The faces, which had been distorted with emotion, gradually smoothed out as though each had inhaled some numbing incense, and an almost ceremonial hush fell on the room. Renny, the chieftain, was to speak. Goaded, harried, he was to give expression to the sentiments of the clan.

He stood, his hands resting on the table, his red hair raised into a crest as though distraught, and said, in his rather metallic voice: “We shall do no such thing! We’ll settle our affairs in our own way without any intervention from outsiders. I had rather give up Jalna than take Gran’s will into court! As to her sanity—sane or insane, her money was hers to do what she liked with! I believe she was perfectly sane. I think I never knew a better brain than hers. All her life she knew what she wanted to do—and did it. And if this last act of hers is a bitter pill for some of us, all we can do is to swallow it, and not get cockeyed fighting over it. Imagine the newspaper articles! ’Descendants of Centenarian at War over Will’! How should we like that?”

“Horrible’.”said Ernest.

“No, no, no. It would never do,” muttered Nicholas, indistinctly.

“Newspapers—outsiders gossiping!” Augusta gasped. “I never could bear that!”

“But still—” wavered Meg.

Piers said: “You are the one most concerned, Renny. If you’re willing to take it lying down—”

Nicholas heaved himself about in his chair and looked sombrely at Piers. “I can’t see why you persist in regarding Renny as the one chiefly concerned. It’s very irritating. It’s impertinent.”

Renny broke in: “That’s beside the point, Uncle Nick! The point is that we can’t go to law over Gran’s will, isn’t it?”

Nicholas gave a proud and melancholy assent. No, they could not go to law. The wall about them must be kept intact. Their isolation must not be thrown down like a glove, to challenge notoriety. Bitter as the disappointment was, it must be borne. The Whiteoaks would not supply a heading
for a column in any of the tawdry newspapers of the day. Gossip for the neighbourhood! Their affairs settled by a court! They were a law unto themselves.

The temporary breach in their protective wall closed up, knitting them together, uniting them against interference. Renny had spoken, and a sigh of acquiescence, even of relief, rose from the tribe. Not one of them—not, in his heart of hearts, even Piers—wanted to go to law over the will. That would have been to acknowledge weakness, to have offered submission to a decree from outside Jalna.

Even Maurice Vaughan felt the hypnotic spell of the family. Impossible to fight against it. Knuckle under and bear with them, that was all one could do. They raised Cain, and then they took hands and danced in a circle around the Cain they had raised. They sowed the wind and reaped the whirl-wind, but they wanted no outside labour to help garner that harvest… Maurice took his baby daughter and dandled her. She was the image of her mother. He wondered if she would have her mother’s nature. Well, she might do worse. Meggie was almost perfect. He was lucky to have got her. And the baby, too!

Piers was standing with his back to the mantel, looking at Finch with narrowed eyes. ‘There’s one thing I think we should find out,” he said.

He got no further, for at that moment a tap sounded on the folding doors, they were drawn apart, and the dining room was discovered, with the table set for dinner.

Rags said, addressing Augusta: “The dinner has been ready for some time, your ladyship. You seemed so occupied that I thought I ’ad better not disturb you before.” His eyes flew about the room, his impudent nose quivered, scenting trouble.

Augusta rose and passed her hands down her sides, smoothing her dress. She said to Renny: “Shall you ask your sister and her husband to dinner?”

He thought: “She’s punishing me for what Piers said about her and the uncles stopping here so long. She won’t take it on herself to invite Meg and Maurice to dinner. Lord, as though there weren’t enough trouble!” Well, he would not give her the satisfaction of appearing to notice anything. He said: “Of course you two will stay to dinner.”

“There’s Baby,” said Meg.

“Tuck her up on the sofa. She’s all but asleep.”

“Oh, I don’t think I had better!” Her tears overflowed again.

Nicholas hobbled up, stiff after sitting so long in one position, and tucked his hand under her arm. “Come, come, Meggie, stop your grizzling and have a good dinner,” he rumbled. “‘More was lost at Mohacs Field.’”

Even with old Adeline gone, they retained the air of a procession as they moved into the dining room. Nicholas first, holding by the arm plump-cheeked Meg; next Ernest, struggling against self-pity, comforted by Augusta at his side, full of pity for him. Then Piers, Finch, and Wakefield. Finch looked as though he did not see where he was going, and when Piers jostled against him in the doorway he all but toppled over. Maurice and Renny came last.

Maurice said, grinning: “So you’re to have the old painted bedstead! What are you going to do with it?”

“Get into it and stay there, if this sort of thing keeps up,” returned the master of Jalna.

He sat down at the head of his table and cast his sharp glance over the clan. Still a goodly number, even though Gran and Eden were missing. After a while young Mooey
would be big enough to come to table… But Pheasant was not there. He frowned. Just then she entered timidly, and slid into her place between Piers and Finch.

“Where have you been hiding all morning ?” asked Renny.

“Oh, I thought I was superfluous,” she answered, trying to appear sophisticated, entirely grown up, and not at all nervous.

Piers pressed his ankle against hers. She trembled. Was it possible that he was signalling her—telling her that Mooey was the heir? Her eyes slid toward his face. No jubilation there. A grim, half-jocular look about the firm, healthy lips. Poor little Mooey had not got the money Then who had? Her gaze, sheltered by long lashes, sought one face after another, and found no answer. Had there been a mistake? Was there perhaps no fortune after all? Under cover of the voices of Maurice and Renny, discussing the points of a two-year-old with determined cheerfulness, she whispered to Finch on her left: “For goodness’ sake, tell me, who is the lucky one?”

His voice tame in a sepulchral whisper:

“Me!”

She whispered back: “There may be thousands who would believe you, but I can’t.”

“It’s true.”

“It is not!”

Yet, looking into his eyes, she saw that it was. She began to laugh, silently, yet hysterically, shaking from head to foot. It was too much for Finch; he, too, shook with soundless mirth, very near to tears. The eyes of all at the table were turned on them in shocked disapproval or disgust. Finch—an indecent young ruffian. Pheasant—a hussy.

Augusta saved the moment from tragedy by declaring, sonorously: “They’re mad! They must be mad.”

The meal proceeded. With decisive movements of his thin muscular hands Renny cut from the joint portions to the taste of each member of the circle—for Nicholas, it must be very rare, with a rim of fat; for Ernest, well done, not a vestige of fat; for Augusta, well done and fat. For all, generous pieces of Yorkshire pudding. For Wake alone fat, when he hated fat! “See that he eats it, Aunt!” And— “Wakefield, you must or you won’t grow strong!” Then the usual slumping on his spine until Meg transferred the despised morsel from his plate to hers.

To a family of weaker fibre such a scene as the one just passed in the sitting room might have ended all appetite for dinner. It was not so with the family at Jalna. The extravagant and wasteful energy of their emotions now required fresh fuel. They ate swiftly and with relish, only in an unusual silence, for they were still oppressed by that empty chair between Nicholas and Ernest, and into their silence was flung, every now and again, the sharp memory of the harsh old voice, crying: “Gravy! I want more gravy! Dish gravy, please, on this bit of bread!”

Ah, how her shadow hung on them! How the yellow light, sifting through the blinds, threw a sort of halo about her chair! Once Ernest’s cat crept from his knee to the empty chair, but no sooner was she seated there than Nicholas’s terrier leaped to drag her down, as though he knew that empty seat was sacred.

Renny fed his spaniels with scraps from his plate. He shot swift glances at the plates of his aunt and uncles. He urged their replenishment, but they steadfastly refused. He set his teeth. They were remembering, he was sure, what
Piers had said; out of hurt pride they were refusing second helpings.

When a steamed blackberry pudding came, with its syrupy purple sauce, deep melancholy settled on them. It was the first pudding of this kind they had had since her death. How she would have loved it! How her nose and chin and cap would have pressed forward to meet it as it advanced toward her! How she would have mashed the pudding into its sauce, and dribbled the sauce on her chin! Ernest almost found himself saying aloud: “Mama, must you do that?”

They ate the pudding in heavy silence. Finch and Pheasant were barely able to restrain their insane laughter. Wakefield’s eyes were bright with admiration as they rested on the tall silver fruit dish in the middle of the table. From its base sprung a massive silver grapevine, beneath the shelter of which stood a silver doe and her fawn. It was heaped with glowing peaches and ripe pears. Aunt Augusta had had it brought out on the day of the funeral, and it had remained. Wakefield wished it might remain forever. He wished he might have been placed opposite it instead of at the far end, so that the nearness of the darling little fawn might take his mind off the terrible silence. He knew now quite definitely that he had not inherited Grandmother’s money, and he did not so very much mind. He had had a nice morning pretending that he was the heir, and he did not see why the others could not accept their disappointment as he did… Funny to think of Finch… Would Finch take Gran’s room now and sleep in the painted bed? He pictured Finch propped on the pillows with Boney perching at the head. Finch, in a nightcap and teeth like Grandmother’s! Wake was rather frightened by this picture. He put his head to one side and reassured himself by the sight of Finch looking wretched, beyond the
fruit dish. A queer greyish colour over Finch’s face made him remember something. He puckered his forehead, winked fast, and then broke the silence.

“Renny,” he questioned, with great distinctness, “was Finch born with a caul?”

The steaming cup of tea halfway to the lips of the master of Jalna was suspended; his eyebrows shot upward in astonishment.

“A
caul
!” he snapped. “A
caul!
What the devil—what put that into your head?”

Meg broke in. “I think it is too bad of you, Renny, to swear at Wake! He was only asking a natural question!”

“A
natural
question! Well, if you call cauls natural, I’ll be—”

“There you go again!”

“No, I don’t.”

“Only because I stopped you! Really, you can’t
speak
without swearing!”

Piers asked: “But was he?”

“Was who?”

“Finch. Born with a caul.”

“Yes, he was,” answered Meg, stroking Wakefield’s hair.

“Extraordinary!” said Nicholas, wiping his moustache and staring at Finch. “I had never heard of one in the family.”

Meg said: “His mother kept it in a little box, but after she died it disappeared.”

Ernest observed: “It is supposed to be a good omen. To bring luck.”

Piers laughed. “Aha! Now we’ve hit it! Good luck! It’s the caul that did it!” He laughed into Finch’s face. “Why didn’t you let us know about it before? We might have been
on our guard. Gosh, you’re a dirty dog, Finch, to go sneaking around with a caul on your head, rounding up all the ducats in the family!”

Finch pushed back his chair and rose, shaking with rage. “Come outside with me!” he said, chokingly. “Only come outside with me! I’ll show you who’s a dirty dog—I’ll—
”

“Sit down!” ordered Renny.

Nicholas thundered: “Have you no sense of decency, you young ruffian?”

Everyone began to talk at once. Wakefield listened, astonished yet not ill-pleased, as one who had sown the seed of a daisy and raised a fierce, thorny cactus. A caul. To think that one little word like that should raise this storm.

Finch sat down and rested his head on his hand.

Ernest looked across at him not unkindly “You need never be afraid of the water,” he said. “One who is born with a caul is never drowned,”

Augusta asked of Wakefield: “But, my dear, however did you hear of such a thing?”

“Finch told me himself I wish I’d got one!”