The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (411 page)

The two women watched his slender figure, so quickly absorbed into the twilight. A shadowy moon appeared above the trees and a smell of wet earth rose from the fields.

Clara, sitting on the step, lighted a cigarette, its flare discovering her blunt blonde features set in an expression of affectionate concern. Pauline swayed softly in a hammock in the shelter of the verandah. She curled herself up and put an arm across her eyes. She waited for Clara to speak.

Clara did so in her usual matter-of-fact tone. “What’s up, darling? Anything you can tell me?”

Pauline’s answer startled her. “Yes, Mummie. So much that I don’t know where to begin.”

“Nothing worrying, I hope?”

“I’m afraid you will not be very happy about it.”

So many vicissitudes had come to Clara Lebraux that her spirit was alert with its answer of defence. Now, in a veiled tone, she said:

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Pauline. I’m ready to face most things, you know.”

Pauline lay curled up, as though she would make herself physically remote from Clara’s anxious maternity. She answered, almost coldly:

“Wakefield and I — he came to tell me that he doesn’t want to be engaged any more. He is going to enter a monastery.”

“Oh, my darling!” The exclamation was sharp with anger against Wakefield and fierce with pity for Pauline. “How could he? How dare he? That church … all my married life…. He can’t do such a cruel thing to you! Why didn’t you tell me while he was here?”

“I wanted to be alone with you.”

Clara threw away her cigarette and her hand groped toward Pauline in the dusk. Pauline took it in both of hers.

Clara said — “You know that I wouldn’t have made a scene. But I should have talked sound sense to him. He’s a romantic boy and he is simply carried away by the vision of a mediaeval life. But to have him treat you like this! I won’t bear it!”

Pauline interrupted — “It doesn’t matter nearly so much as you think.”

“Not matter! Why, darling — what are you saying?”

Pauline’s body swayed with the deep breath she drew.

“Mummie, I have never really loved Wakefield. I’ve tried to and often thought I had succeeded — and I do love him but — not in the way you want to love the man you’re going to marry. There is only one way for that, isn’t there?”

Clara came to the side of the hammock and took Pauline in her arms.

“No, no, there are different ways. Many different ways. That’s the wonderful and strange thing about it. There are different ways.”

Pauline said stubbornly — “There is only one way for me, and I’ve never loved Wakefield like that. Perhaps it was wrong for me to be willing to marry him but I was willing.”

She gave a strange little laugh. “I took a lot of pleasure in preparing for it but it was a kind of game of pretence. It was as though I was pretending it was someone else I was marrying.”

Clara shrank from something in her voice. She was afraid that Pauline was going to say something that would be even more painful than what had gone before.

Pauline was helpless against a desire for further self-disclosure. What she had so assiduously guarded she longed to bring into the light, even though she knew what it would cost them both. She said almost defiantly:

“I don’t suppose you’ve even guessed the real truth. You’ve had no idea, have you, that I’ve really loved another man?”

Even in that dim light she saw the whiteness of Clara’s face, how all its wholesome sunburnt colour fled from it, leaving it white and drawn. They had been isolated too much together, the understanding between them was too deep to make the speaking of his name necessary. Clara turned and went to the edge of the verandah. She said, in a heavy, choking voice:

“You have felt this way about him for a long time, I suppose.”

“For years.”

The words were dragged from Clara against her will. “Does he know?”

The jealousy which Pauline had felt for Clara now rose from its smouldering to a cruel flame.

“Yes,” she breathed, and kept her face turned from her mother.

Clara asked — “What does he feel?” A cold sweat broke out on her lips. She was so afraid of what Pauline’s answer would he. She felt herself unable to bear it. She sat down again on the steps and buried her head in her arms.

She is afraid, thought Pauline, she is terribly afraid that he has made love to me too. It would be unbearable to her to think he had kissed me. But if only I had something worth confessing, I should be glad! I don’t think I could stop myself from telling her.

She said, almost humbly — “He loves me as a child, nothing more.”

It seemed to Clara that her heart was eager for suffering that night. Every remark that Pauline made, even one like the last which should have been a relief, cut her cruelly. She said:

“You have been unlucky in your love, Pauline. It’s very hard for you, my darling. I don’t know what to say to help you. I simply don’t know what to say. It’s so unbearable to me to see you suffer.”

Pauline’s disclosure had given her relief. She felt a new compassion for her mother and a sense, already cloistered, of watching the world from a different plane. She scarcely realized what significance her next words would have for Clara. She spoke them almost indifferently.

“There is no need to worry any more about me, Mummie. I’m going into a convent. I’ve made up my mind to do that. So there’s no use in saying things against it.”

Clara put up her hand, as though against a blow. Her jaw dropped and she stared fixedly at Pauline out of her round boyish eyes.

“You’re not in earnest, really,” she gasped. “You don’t know what you’re saying — all this has upset you so. But you mustn’t say it, darling — it frightens me too much.”

“But I am in earnest. I’m not upset…. I tell you I shall be a thousand times happier in a convent than married to Wake —”

Clara interrupted fiercely — “If you don’t want to marry — I shall be the last one to urge you. But why the convent? You have no vocation, I’m sure of that. There’s so much in the world for us to do together. Think of me, Pauline! Don’t leave me! Why — if I lose you —”

She began to cry frantically, with hoarse, tearing sobs. She clutched Pauline to her, hurting her in the vehement embrace by which she seemed to feel that she could restrain her.

But it was of no use. The child who had been so malleable in her hands was as resolute as though her decision was the outcome of long months of thought, instead of the outcome of a swift recoil. They crept to bed in the grey drawn, like two boats seeking harbour after a night of buffeting.

Pauline slept dreamlessly as an exhausted child, but Clara lay awake thinking of how Pauline’s love for Renny had flourished, side by side with her own, and been undiscovered by her. She brooded passionately on the brief fructifying of her own desire. All was gone from her forever, she thought, her child, her lover, her very life.

R
ENNY AND
C
LARA AND
P
AULINE

S
EVERAL DAYS PASSED
before Renny was seen by either Clara or Pauline. Wakefield wrote to them both long letters full of poignant feeling and touched by a tender regret for the happiness they had known together. After reading hers Pauline burned it, but Clara laid hers away in a little box to keep. Her feeling of bitterness against Wakefield was gone. With her usual resignation to the inevitable she now accepted the new design of her life with outward composure. She spent most of her time in the tea shop, and at night she felt tired out and went to bed early.

One morning, when the newly budded boughs were being tossed by a fresh wind on which floated downy particles from birds’ nests in process of building, Clara did not go to the tea shop but remained at home for necessary household tasks. She and Pauline were talking with an attempt at unconcerned cheerfulness when they saw Renny dismounting from a roan mare at the gate. They both became motionless as though they had been moved by some secret spring that now ceased to act. They looked out of the window at horse and man as though to imprint the image on their minds. Clara noted with sensuous pleasure the harmonizing colour of the mare’s sleek hide, Renny’s mellowed riding boots, the heather-toned tweed of his clothes, the russet of his hair and his weather-beaten face. Pauline was conscious only of the approach of the exciting and powerful personality that had dominated her adolescence.

He fastened his horse to the fence and knocked formally at the door as he always did. They looked at each other but neither moved. Pauline glanced mechanically toward a mirror above the sideboard and raised her hand to smooth her hair. It was unruly, vigorous hair that had always framed her face in a dark halo. She had a startling vision of her head close-cropped and shrouded in a black veil.

She stood, a strange smile lighting her face, as Clara admitted Renny. She knew at once, by his expression of profound melancholy, that Wakefield had told him what she was about to do. She said, almost lightly:

“You know about me, don’t you?”

He took her hand and held it tightly, looking down at its slender length, its pale deep-set nails. Already it looked to him like a nun’s hand.

“I’m baffled,” he said huskily. “I’m simply baffled by it all. I’ve read of suicide pacts but this beats any suicide pact.”

Pauline answered, still wearing the smile — “It may be suicide socially but that is all. I think we shall be much happier — at any rate I shall — where we are going. Please don’t say anything against it, Renny! Mother and I have had it all out and I can’t bear any more.”

Renny dropped her hand and looked at Clara who returned his look stoically.

“It’s quite true,” she said; “there’s no use in trying to dissuade her.”

“When are you going?” he asked Pauline. “Wherever it is, let me tell you that I consider this temporary in both your cases. You’ve gone neurotic and I’m convinced that inside six months you will both be back with your people.”

She moved her head from side to side in grave negation. Her eyes were full of tears.

Seeing her, as he thought, weakening, he exclaimed:

“Have you no pity for your mother? She will be left alone.”

Pauline could not speak. She swiftly left the room and they heard her sobbing as she ran up the stairs. Renny turned an incredulous face to Clara.

“I can’t bring myself to believe it,” he said. “Wake and Pauline! It was a good match…. I was very glad of it.”

He was aware of something different in her attitude toward him. She was looking at him curiously, speculatively, as the male whom Pauline loved. He had become two men to her — this man and the lover from whom she was parting. The knowledge that he thought of Pauline only as a child was a relief so poignant that it gave her courage to face all other evils. If she had felt that those hands had touched Pauline, those lips had met hers, in ever so tentative an amatory caress, she could never forgive him — not from jealousy but for the hurt he had given her child. In Clara sexual love was overshadowed by maternal. In Alayne passion dominated maternity, while in Pheasant the two were equally balanced.

“Where will she go?” he asked.

“To a convent in Quebec where an aunt of her father’s is Mother Superior. She will be very kind to Pauline.”

He made a grimace of distaste, then said abruptly — “That priest of Wake’s is a nice man and a very sensible one. He was so thoroughly understanding. He came the next day to see my horses and you should have seen Wake’s face when he discovered us in a loose box holding a confab — not about him but about a brood mare.”

“That was good,” answered Clara, and she looked at him compassionately.

Then, with an effort of lightness, she offered him a cigarette and his accustomed chair. She said:

“All this has to be gone through. I expect that in a year we shall look back on these scenes with equanimity. It’s when you brood on things that they are so awful.”

He looked into her round face of which the bony structure was becoming visible and the blackness beneath the eyes looked as though it had been hammered there. He laid a hand on her knee. “I should never have consented to your going away. I need you too badly as a friend…. But now I believe it’s the best thing for all of us.” A quiver passed over his face.

Clara broke out bitterly — “I bring unhappiness to everyone! Let us hope that I’ll be a ray of sunshine in my brother’s house.”

“It’s foolish to talk like that. No one can ever know what you’ve been to me — and coming to this house as I have — and watching Pauline grow up.”

Her self-control failed her. “Pauline has told me.” Her face reddened.

He looked at her blankly. “Told you what?”

She would have given much to take back her words. Now she did not answer him but sat staring at the polished leather of his riding boots.

In acute embarrassment he muttered — “She is a child.”

He remembered the scene in this very room when during a heavy storm, Pauline had thrown herself into his arms and formed with her lips the words — “Kiss me.” His heart was wrung for her as he answered:

“She is too sensitive for life. Perhaps where she is going will be best for her.”

Clara said — “I suppose Alayne — your wife — was upset. Still, I was only saying goodbye to you.”

He answered stiffly — “It was terrible for her. I have never known her so — well, she’s ill. You only have to look at her to see that.”

“Do you think you should have come here this morning?”

“She couldn’t possibly know. Besides she must understand that I have business arrangements to make with you and this affair of the youngsters’ to talk over.”

“I will have a sale.”

He looked about the room, at the blinds he had helped to put up, the pictures he had hung. He said:

“It was fun, settling you here.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “lots of fun.”

“The time has gone quickly.”

“I can scarcely believe in it all. So much has happened!”

“Yes. It seems only yesterday that my uncles went to England. Now we are expecting them home in a fortnight. They’ll stop the summer, I hope.”

“And Finch and his wife, are they coming?”