The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (337 page)

He went up to his room and changed into another suit, after having scrubbed his face and hands till they were red and flattened his hair with a damp brush. This was done in order that she should today have no complaint that he brought the smell of the stable with him.

She was pouring tea when he went into the dining room, sitting at her end of the table with a book she had been reading open beside her. Piers and Pheasant were talking with rather ostentatious good spirits to each other. Mooey had been brought to the table and was perched on the large volume of British Poets on which Wakefield had been used to sit. As he ate his bread and butter his eyes were fixed on Alayne with a wondering look as though he expected her at any moment to attack him. As his parents were present to protect him he would not have been altogether sorry to see her make some such demonstration. He smiled up at Wakefield, who sat beside him, and whispered—“I’m not f’ightened of Auntie Alayne.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Wakefield, patting his head. “So long as you do just what Uncle Wakefield tells you, nothing can harm you.” Renny grinned at the children, then went and sat near Alayne. She had given Wragge a few roses for the table, which he, in a conciliatory mood, had placed in a vase beside her plate. As he entered the room with a fresh pot of tea for Renny he cast his eyes on the roses and then
on Alayne, emphasising the fact that they were his gift to her.

She looked up from her book and smiled at Renny—a somewhat forced smile—then lowered her eyes again, abstractedly eating a small iced cake while she read. With her book, her roses, and her cake she was separated from the other members of the family in a kind of frosty seclusion. At tea Renny liked a pot to himself, which Wragge always ostentatiously placed beside him. He was very hungry after the lunch at the fox farm, accustomed as he was to a solid one o’clock dinner. He ate in silence for a time, feeling himself in rather an uncomfortable position midway between the opposing factions at the table. Vaguely he wondered what he could do to please Alayne, to show her that the words she had cast at him that morning had not rankled. He discovered the roses and drew the vase across the table to him. Glancing at Alayne from under his thick dark lashes to make sure that she was observing him, he sniffed each rose in turn, thrusting his handsome bony nose into the heart of each like some enormous predatory bee.

“These smell awfully nice,” he said. “Out of our own garden?”

“Yes,” she returned, closing her book on her finger. “You had better put them in the centre of the table. I don’t know why Wragge should have set them by my place.”

Piers and Pheasant had ceased their animated talk long enough to listen to this exchange of words. Now they began to talk again, their eyes dancing. They paid no attention to their child, who sat gazing in astonishment at the large piece of cake Wakefield had put on his plate while he still held another piece in his hand.

Alayne returned to her book and Renny set the vase of roses carefully in the middle of the table. His first effort had
failed. Wragge had come into the room and was gazing at him with an adoring expression. He came and bent over him, whispering:

“Is your tea all right, sir?”

“Oh, yes, it’s quite all right.” He looked up into Rags’s pale eyes as though for inspiration.

It might be well, he thought, to show Alayne that he was definitely on her side regarding Mooey’s misbehaviour of the morning. He fixed his nephew with his gaze and said:

“What’s this I hear about you? Going into Auntie Alayne’s room and flinging her powder about. Let me catch you in there again and I’ll warm you so that you’ll not want to sit down for a week.”

Mooey’s eyes overflowed with tears. He laid down the cake he had been eating beside the piece he had not yet begun, and clutched his head in both his sticky hands. He made his mouth square and emitted a wail. Piers shook his finger at him.

“None of that!” he said. “Sit up and take your medicine. Take that cake off his plate, Wake.”

Mooey gulped back his woe and wiped his eyes on a corner of his bib.

“It’s pretty hard,” exclaimed Pheasant, “always to restrain a small child so that he’ll never get into the least little bit of mischief!”

“You must manage it somehow,” said Renny

“If only Alayne would keep her door shut! Mooey can’t manage doorknobs yet.”

“Alayne can’t keep her door shut. She doesn’t want it shut. She likes the air to stir through it.”

“But she’s always complaining of draughts!”

“A draught in the sitting-room and a draught in her bedroom are two very different things.”

Alayne sat listening with the feelings of one engaged in a lawsuit who sits silent, made to writhe alternately by the attorneys for and against. She had come to tea scarcely knowing how to face Renny. She had brought her book to the table as a protection. Now Renny’s attitude of aggressiveness on her behalf gave her an agreeable sense of power. For the first time she felt the possibility of influence over him. If only she had him to herself! But how little likelihood there was of that since even now he was fretting at the small-ness of the family! While he was in his present mood it might be timely to introduce the subject of a nurse for Mooey.

She said, looking down the table at Pheasant and speaking gently—“I know it is quite impossible to keep babies out of mischief. Don’t you think it would be better if you had a nurse for Mooey? It would give you so much more freedom. Mrs. Patch has a young niece who might easily be got to come by the day.”

“I can’t afford a nurse for him. Pheasant has nothing else to do, and Bessie takes him off her hands sometimes,” said Piers.

“One could see this morning,” returned Alayne, still looking at Pheasant, “how well Bessie looks after him. He might easily have got into danger.”

“I quite agree,” said Renny. “We’ll engage the Patch girl, and I’ll pay her wages.”

This was not at all what Alayne had intended. It was not fair. Already he was doing far more than was necessary for Pheasant and Piers. Alayne sometimes wondered if they or he realised what the cost of keeping three people amounted to in a year. In spite of her effort to control it, her face fell, the corners of her mouth went down. Piers’s eyes were on
her. He smiled triumphantly as though at a victory beyond mere matter of money and said:

“Thanks awfully old man! There’s no doubt that it will be a relief for Pheasant, and we shall all feel reasonably sure that the kid won’t be upsetting Alayne. For my part I think it would be much better if he didn’t come to the table.”

“He shall come to breakfast and tea but not to dinner or supper,” said Renny dictatorially.

Mooey did not like this discussion about his meals. He laid his forehead against the edge of the table and wept. Piers got up, threw him across his shoulder as though he were a parcel, and carried him out.

Before she followed him Pheasant said:

“Thank you very much, Renny. It will be nice having a nurse. I’m not going to be excessively grateful though, because I think you are doing it much more for Alayne than for me.”

They were alone, except for Wakefield. How often it seemed to Alayne that they were alone except for him. He had grown quieter of late. He was growing taller too, and he often had a brooding, half-sulky air. Then, again, he would be his mischievous precocious self.

Renny turned sideways in his chair and crossed his legs, regarding her with a pleased air. “I’ve got something nice for you to do,” he said. Wakefield also turned sideways in his chair, crossed his legs, and folded his arms. Alayne drew the vase of roses from the centre of the table toward herself, withdrawing her hand just at the spot where the roses and their foliage would intervene between her face and Wake’s. This was an unpremeditated gesture. It was simply that she must do something, though it were merely symbolic, to shut him off from herself and Renny.

“What is it?” she asked, trying to look pleasantly eager.

“I’ve arranged for you to read French with the little Lebraux girl. You see, she has no one to speak it with now”

“But why should I? I suppose she reads French better than I do already And I speak it very little.”

“Then it will be a help to you as well”

“But I don’t want to do it!” The thought of reading or speaking French to a child whose native tongue it was, bored and intimidated her. She would not have minded teaching a child ignorant of the language, but that the child should Know it better than she, should perhaps go home to criticise her accent to her mother, was not to be endured.

“Don’t be silly! I’ve promised for you.”

“It is impossible.”

In exasperation he poured down a cup of scalding tea. That’s because you dislike Clara Lebraux.”

“So her name is Clara!”

“Why not?” He had nothing to conceal, but the colour of his face deepened at the implication of intimacy in her tone.

“No reason at all. It is a name I’ve never cared for. And I do not feel attracted to Mrs. Lebraux. But that has nothing to do with my refusal to read French with her child.” Her voice wavered. She picked up a morsel of bread and began to pulverise it between her finger and thumb. “Renny, can’t you understand? It would be embarrassing for me to attempt to teach that girl!”

“Not to
teach!
To
read
with. There’s a vast difference.”

“I am sorry, but I can’t make the effort.”

“Not to please me?”

“To please you!” she repeated, raising two blazing eyes to his face. “Why should it be so necessary to your pleasure?”

“It’s not. But I hope I have some compassion in me... Give me one sensible reason why you won’t do this and I’ll try to understand.”

“I have explained.”

“If anyone else offered such an excuse I can imagine what you’d say!”

“Can you?” She turned her head aside indifferently.

“Yes. You’d say they were being self-conscious and self-centred.”

She directed a hurt and angry look at Wakefield, then rose from the table. “Not before an outsider, please,” she muttered, and left the room.

Renny took out his cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lighted it. He smoked in silence, his face twisted into a peculiar grimace which, if it had been observed by one of his kin, would have been translated by them as expressing a mood of defiance and chagrin. No one saw it. Wakefield was sitting with his elbow on the table, his head resting on his hand. The last of three sighs drawn from the depths of his being disturbed Renny’s reflections. He shot an enquiring glance at the boy, noticed the despondent droop of the smooth dark head and the thinness of the childish wrist.

“What’s the matter, kid?” he asked gently.

“Nothing.” The word was scarcely audible.

“Aren’t you feeling well? Are you tired?” A tone of anxiety at once came into the elder’s voice. Behind the sheltering hand he saw the boy’s mouth trembling.

“Come here,” he said, and pushed his chair back from the table. Wakefield came round to him with averted face. Renny pulled him to his knee. “Tell me,” he repeated, “aren’t you well? Is it your heart?” He put his arm about
him and pressed his thin muscular hand above the weak organ as though he would impart some of his vitality to it.

Wakefield shook his head. Then he said, twisting a button on Renny’s coat:

“It’s Alayne. She doesn’t like me any more. Just before she went she called me an outsider. Did you hear her?”

Renny gave an embarrassed laugh. “That meant nothing! Married people call others outsiders sometimes—I can’t just explain why.”

“Well—if you can’t explain—it’s just as though you call me an outsider too.”

Renny answered impatiently—“When married people make love or quarrel they generally like to be unobserved.”

“You didn’t mind my being here! And it wasn’t only what she said; it was what she did. She pulled the bouquet so that it shut me out. She didn’t think I noticed, but I did. She’d like to shut me out altogether, and there’s no use in your saying she wouldn’t, Renny.” He began to cry softly, producing a ball of a handkerchief and rubbing his eyes with it.

Renny burst into noisy laughter. “Why, you damned little idiot, you know very well that a dozen wives couldn’t come between you and me!” He hugged Wake to him and kissed him repeatedly. Wakefield’s crying, from being soft, rose to almost hysterical sobs.

Alayne had left her book in the room and, thinking that by now Renny would have gone, she was returning for it. However, when she reached the door and saw the brothers, she quickly passed on toward the drawing-room.

“Alayne!” Renny called. “Come here!”

She returned to the doorway and looked in at them, with a self-controlled expression on her pale face.

“You have hurt Wake’s feelings by calling him an outsider. I explained that to him. Now he says that you moved the flowers so that they would shut him off from us!” He gave her an entreating look as though to say—“I can’t have him worried! You must bear with his whims and with my love for him.”

She saw the look and read in it only a repetition of his willingness to impose a disagreeable obligation on her that he might gratify someone who roused the protective instinct in him. The sight of Wakefield clinging about his neck, Wakefield’s, shuddering sobs, Renny’s look of entreaty, filled her with cold anger. What Renny wanted her to do, she felt, was to come in and pet and reassure the boy. She could not do that, something reticent in her forbade the demonstration. She felt that even to deny that she had moved the flowers for a purpose was a debasement of her dignity.

After an inward struggle she said—“I had no idea that I would hurt Wakefield’s feelings. I’m sorry, if I did... But I can’t help thinking it is a pity he hears so much of the grown-up talk. He’s too introspective. He’s becoming neurotic, I’m afraid... And isn’t a boy of thirteen too big to be kissed?” She spoke in jerky, uneven sentences.

“I’m not thirteen! I shan’t be thirteen till next week,” objected Wakefield, in a choking voice.

Renny said—“His father was dead before he was born. His mother died when he was born. He’s always been— well—I’ve often wondered if I should rear him. You can scarcely blame me—”