The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (328 page)

“God in Heaven!” chattered Leigh, turning ghastly. “She is drowned!”

Beside themselves with fright they ran up and down the shore looking for her, shouting her name. “Sarah! Sarah! Oh, my darling!”

Between their shouts they heard a faint answer. They flew shoreward from where the sound came. They found her in a large tranquil pool, made tepid by the sun, swimming round and round.

“I knew I could do it,” she said, “if only you would let me be.”

Mole! Mouse! Ignoble Fish! Crafty Crab! They hurled these names at her.

They lay on hot slabs of rock to dry themselves.

“But I cannot lie down with nothing under me,” objected Sarah.

“Darling,” cried Arthur, “that rock is as hot as blazes! You couldn’t possibly take cold.”

“I’d like my shawl, please,” returned his wife.

“I’ll get it,” said Finch. He made the ascent to the top of the cliff and found the shawl. He stood motionless, for a moment, holding the shawl in his arms then he buried his face against it, kissing it.

“That was nice of you,” said Sarah, when he had spread it on a rock for her. And he knew, by the fleeting malice of her smile, that she had seen him on the cliff-top.

When it was too cold to bathe they built a fire of driftwood in a sheltered coign of the cliff and boiled a kettle for tea. It was at these times only that Sarah attempted to give any assistance. She would stand sheltering the fire from the wind with her shawl until it began to crackle and the flames lick about the kettle. They would sit smoking, while Leigh talked happily, watching the sun sink into the sea, cloud-flakes, like a flock of butterflies, drifting above it.

As the sultry days passed their gaiety was tempered by pensiveness which grew into a faint melancholy, making them sit silent in each other’s company feeling troubled, they knew not why.

Toward the end of the month they were caught in a sudden squall. It was a Sunday, and there were many people abroad. In order to escape these they walked to a point more distant than any they had reached before. They sat on the brow of a cliff enjoying the new view of headland beyond rocky headland stretching northward. Vast cloud formations were reared like cities gilded and glorified by the sun’s splendour, then were disintegrated, dissolved before their eyes, leaving the sky a tranquil arch of unbroken blue.

The sun went down, a flaming red sphere whose colour was reflected in a thousand varying tints by clouds and wisps of vapour, by long, slow-moving waves, by swift ripples that
crisped along the sand, by the ripples set in the sand itself, by pools left by the tide, by streamers and thick clumps of seaweed, by the jagged surface of the cliffs, by the rounded smoothness of pebbles, by the delicate hollows of shells, by the wings of birds, by the fleeces of sheep, by the faces of the girl and boys on the cliff. From the moment when the sun’s lower rim had touched the horizon he had transformed the world into an embroidered tapestry for his couch.

The squall, the driving rain, were on them before they had time to do more than collect their belongings and run to the shelter of a hedge. They huddled together while wind and rain beat on them. Nearby a flock of sheep took shelter.

When the worst was over they set out on the walk back, wet but rather exhilarated by the experience. The twilight was silvered by rain. Dense clumps of furze loomed black as pools before them. They ran down the long slopes of the downs with Sarah between them. She ran, as she walked, with a peculiar gliding motion that left her upper part immobile. Finch had the fancy that she was on wheels and that he and Arthur were drawing her. His nerves were intensely alive.

As they were passing through a gap in a high hedge, they made out the figures of two people who had found shelter there. They did not seem to be in a hurry to leave the shelter. The woman lay with her head toward the hedge, and the man, raised on his elbow, beside her. They were oblivious of the three who were passing. Finch saw the bulk of the man’s shoulders and the movement of his arm as he caressed the woman. They were shadows thrown against a wall of rain. The woman half sat up. The man’s head, bent above her, was as motionless as the head of a gargoyle on a church tower. She sank back.

“Heavens, what a night!” exclaimed Leigh, when they had passed through the gap. “What a night, and what a place for love!”

“I can think of worse nights—and worse places,” said Sarah.

“I wish we were back at Penholme. It’s a long way yet.”

“Have you my shawl safe, Arthur?”

“I have it, and it’s as safe as anything is.”

He spoke crisply, feeling suddenly irritated by her, irritated by Finch, by the rain that was trickling down his neck.

Finch thought of the two by the hedge. They must be soaked through, but they would be unaware of the discomfort. They were lying there wounded, shot through by the fire of love. The man’s head had been still as the upraised head of a snake about to sting. The woman had been supine as a snake basking in the sun. They were natural, that’s what they were. People weren’t intended to go into houses, to hide themselves away from the rain and the blown spray of the sea. He gloried in it wetting his cheeks, plastering his hair on his forehead. For the first time in his life he gloried in his maleness, feeling it strong and untamed and bitter within him. He gloried in the feel of Sarah’s fingers caught in his, clinging to him for support and guidance, in the jolt of their bodies together as they passed over a rough bit of ground. He felt a creeping antipathy for Arthur. It crept through him like a slow fire through grass, sending a choking feeling like smoke through his being. He would like to order Arthur to go on alone, to leave Sarah and himself together. They would crouch somewhere together, watching the stormclouds disperse and the young moon show through. They would search for the reflection of its crescent in each other’s eyes... He would kiss the raindrops from her face. He would know
what it was like to be kissed by her... Heavy hatred for Arthur surged through him. He was afraid of himself. Afraid of what the storm and the sight of those two in the hedge had done to his mind... He remembered Arthur’s saying—“You are both Courts. You have the same ancestors behind you.” That must be the explanation of something wild in them both... If only he might talk to Sarah alone!

He was not watching where he was going. He stepped into the opening of a burrow, hidden in grass, and fell headlong, almost dragging the others with him. When he gathered himself up he found that his ankle was strained. He could walk no farther. He sat down on a low crumbling wall and nursed his ankle. The rain was ceasing and the faces of Sarah and Arthur were pale discs in the glimmering moonlight.

“You must stay here while I go and fetch a car,” Arthur said in a flat voice. He felt no sympathy for Finch’s suffering, only irritation. The three had been isolated too long in each other’s company.

“Sarah will wait with you.” He was glad to leave Sarah behind, to put down the heavy basket on the wall beside her. He set off gloomily toward the blurred lights of the town below.

They listened to the soft suck of his retreating steps. Sarah took her shawl from the basket and wrapped it round her. Finch forgot the ache in his ankle. Her nearness, the consciousness that they were shut in by the walls of the night, was a pain that obliterated all others.

She said: “This is like it used to be—in the garden.”

“It’s not at all like it was there.”

“Why isn’t it?

“Because now I’m mad about you.”

“And you weren’t then?”

“I don’t know Perhaps I was. But I didn’t realise it. Now it’s too late.”

“I’ve loved you all along. From the first day you played my accompaniments.”

“Sarah!” His voice broke. He tried to see her face. “You loved me, and married Arthur!”

“You did not ask me.”

“You didn’t give me time.”

“You never made a sign. You say yourself that this is different—that you don’t know what your feelings were then.”

“But you! You knew yours!”

“What could I do?”

“Couldn’t you have made a sign? Don’t women let men know? Never once—never once did you give me any intimation that you cared for me!”

“I met you almost every night in the garden. You knew I was deceiving my aunt.”

“But a word—a look! You were as cold as ice! I don’t believe you love me! You just want to torture me.” He buried his face in his hands.

“I love you more than you love me.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “What do you know of love? Marrying one man—loving another!”

“What do you know? It’s new to you. It’s partly the night. The storm. Those lovers we saw. You’re excited.”

“You’re as cold as ice. As cruel. And what a shame for Arthur—if what you say is true!”

“He need not know”

“He will know. He’s too sensitive not to find you out. Even now—he’s not happy.”

“Did he tell you so?”

“No, but I feel it.”

“He will be happy again when we are away from you.”

“Yet it was Arthur who insisted on my coming! And you let me come... loving me!”

“You said just now that you do not believe I love you.”

“I was wrong! You do love me, Sarah! Oh, my darling, beautiful Sarah! Tell me you love me!”

She put her arms about him. In the darkness they kissed. A mighty primeval urge rose to them from the earth. The triumphant beating of their hearts almost stifled them. A great wave thundered on the beach and filled the night with its murmuring.

Finch tore himself from Sarah’s arms. “We must not,” he gasped. “Arthur... my best friend... never again... We must forget all this—never let him guess—that I—that you—”

Sarah folded her arms under her shawl. She gave her small, mysterious smile.

M
RS.
C
OURT
surveyed them critically. “Arthur is the only one,” she said, “who looks the better for the stay by the sea. But probably it was that dosing of codliver oil I gave him that put flesh on him. Finch’s cheeks look more hollow than ever. As for Mouse, she looks exactly the same. Let her bask in the sun or live in a hole, she’s always the same—Mouse and Mole!”

The young people stood looking down at her, the youths rather shamefaced before her scrutiny, her niece as aloof as ever.

“Did you play your fiddle much, Mouse?”

“I did not play it once.”

“Not once! I told you how it would be!” She turned triumphantly to her contemporaries. “She cannot play unless I accompany her. I inspire her. Isn’t that so, Mouse?”

Sarah nodded, curling her lip in her malicious child’s smile.

“And Finch depresses you—isn’t that so?”

“Yes, Aunt.”

Mrs. Court was delighted. She sat down in order that she might beat a tattoo with her heels.

“It was the house, not Finch, that depressed Sarah,” said Arthur. “If you had seen the house, you would not have wondered that she could not play in it. But it didn’t affect Finch. His music is its own roof and walls. He used to play to us in the evenings while we sat by the fire.” He told them then how they had changed the aspect of the house in the first hour of arrival and of how they had forgotten the original position of things when they set about restoring it at the last.

“You can picture Finch and me,” he laughed, “running distractedly about with antimacassars in our hands trying them first one place, then another, discovering that they looked natural no place. There was a door-mat with ‘Watch and Pray’ on it and we tried it in seventeen doorways before we found the right one.”

“And which was the right one?” demanded Augusta.

“Ah, Lady Buckley, don’t ask me. Let me tell you about the aspidistras! There was a large one in a glazed pot in each of the principal rooms. Finch agreed to take them all into his bedroom. I don’t know what he did to them but they grew so that, when we carried them out they would scarcely pass through the door. His room looked like a jungle.”

“In my house,” observed Mrs. Court, “I have three aspidistras, nine begonias, and fifteen cactuses.”

” Cacti!” boomed Augusta.

“I call ’em cactuses. Funguses, cactuses. I never did like la-di-da pronunciations.”

“What is the plural,” asked Ernest, “of candelabrum? I mean the sensible, unaffected plural.”

“Brums,” answered Mrs. Court, curtly, but she eyed him with suspicion.

Soon she carried off Sarah and Arthur to another room where she could question them without interruption.

“Well,” said Nicholas, when the door had closed behind them, “I can’t imagine what young Leigh saw in that girl.”

“She is certainly a very strange girl,” agreed Ernest. “She says almost nothing, yet one feels she thinks too much. She seems to be amiable, but one wonders what is behind it all. One feels baffled.”

“Perhaps that is what attracted Arthur Leigh,” said Augusta. “Many men admire deep women. My husband invariably admired a deep woman.”

Her two brothers stared at her incredulously.

“Well,” said Nicholas, “he wasn’t very deep himself.”

“Not deep?” cried Augusta. “Why, he was as deep as the sea!”

“How do you mean, deep as the sea? Do you mean deep intellectually or just devious?”

Augusta answered firmly—“I mean both.”

“I always thought,” put in Ernest, “that Buckley was one of the most transparent fellows I ever knew.”

“So he was,” agreed Augusta. “Transparent where he should be transparent. Deep where he should be deep.”

“And devious where he should be devious, I suppose,” continued Nicholas.

“He could see as far through a stone wall as anyone,” said Augusta, with a hint of chill in her voice. Her tone implied that he had seen through both Nicholas and Ernest.

Finch asked—“Have you heard from home while I have been away?”

“Yes,” answered Nicholas, “and not good news. Meggie has not been well. It will be necessary for her to have an operation, the doctor says.”

Finch was aghast. “An operation! But wh—what’s the matter? I hadn’t heard of anything wrong with Meggie.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s anything very serious. Something that has been troubling her since Patience was born. But it will be worrying for them.”