The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (489 page)

“Yes,” said Maurice dutifully. He had not been much moved when he had been told, more than a year ago, of the death of Maurice Vaughan, his mother’s father. Pheasant’s children had always called him Uncle Maurice because he had been married to Auntie Meg. He had never seemed in the least like a grandfather.

“It was very sad,” went on Pheasant. “He was ill such a short time. His heart, you remember.”

“Yes. I remember.” But he had forgotten.

“Auntie Meg has been very brave.”

“Yes. She would be brave.”

“Now we shall go!” Pheasant spoke cheerfully.

Maurice thought, “I’m glad that’s over.” He asked, “Couldn’t we go to Jalna first? I’d like to see Adeline.”

“No. Auntie Meg would feel hurt. Nook and Philip will want to come. Oh, Mooey, I do hope you will have some influence over Philip! He’s completely out of hand. There is no one here who can do anything with him.”

The two small boys now came running in. Philip at ten did indeed look a handful to manage. He looked courageous and self-willed; while Nook, with his gentle amber eyes and sensitive mouth, had an air of reserve and shyness. Pheasant looked the three over.

“You’re not a bit alike,” she declared. “Mooey, you are like me, I think. Philip is the image of Daddy. And Nooky,” putting an arm about him, “you are just yourself.”

Now they were in the car passing between fields of sunburnt stubble and orchards bright with apples. “This is home,” thought Maurice. “How strange it seems! This is my mother and these are my two brothers. My father has lost a leg and Uncle Maurice is dead. It’s as though we were a coloured glass window that had been broken and then put together in a new pattern.”

Philip would put his hand on the steering wheel. “Philip,
will
you stop! You’ll have us in the ditch,” Pheasant said, but she could not stop him. It ended by his keeping his hand there. “You see I can steer as well as anyone,” he said.

What a dusty car! thought Maurice. The windows grimy, mud dried on the wheels. Cousin Dermot would have refused to set his foot inside such a car. But it could go! In a few minutes they were at Vaughanlands, the low, verandahed house standing in its hollow almost hidden in greenery, in which the yellow note of fall was already struck. A bed of scarlet salvia and many-coloured dahlias made the background for a matronly figure in a mauve cotton dress.

She looked more familiar to Maurice than even his mother and his brothers had done. Among the curving masses of foliage, Meg Vaughan looked nobly in her place. Her hair had become almost white and this set off her fine complexion and the clear blue of her eyes. She clasped Maurice to her breast and exclaimed:

“Home at last! How you have grown, Mooey! Oh, what sad changes since you left! Your father a prisoner with a leg lost, your uncles gone from Jalna and our sad loss here.” Yet in spite of this sad recital there was a comfortable look about Meg. She did not make Maurice feel unhappy, as his mother had done.

Now his cousin Patience appeared on the scene, a slim edition of her mother but with grey eyes. Maurice held out his hand but Meg exclaimed, “what formality! You must kiss each other. To think, Pheasant, that they both are seventeen — and practically fatherless!”

“Mooey isn’t practically fatherless,” said Pheasant, almost fiercely. “Piers is likely to return quite soon. There is talk of an exchange of prisoners.”

Maurice saw the flash of antagonism between the two, but turned to Patience. He said, “How you’ve changed, Patty! You’re a woman grown.”

“You speak differently,” she returned. “I suppose you got it from Cousin Dermot. Is it Irish?”

“Heavens, no!” cried Meg. “An Irish gentleman doesn’t speak with a brogue.”

“I suppose you’ll despise our ways now,” Patience said, with a teasing look.

Maurice was embarrassed. He could only say, “Oh, no, I’ll not.”

“And you’re rich too,” she persisted, “and we are all so terribly poor.”

Maurice was scarlet. “Indeed, and I’m not.”

“Listen to the Irish of him!” laughed Patience. “Indeed and I’m not!”

Meg considered Maurice contemplatively. “what a pity,” she said, “that you don’t come into the money till you are twenty-one! You could do so much with it right now.”

“Yes, I suppose I could,” he agreed, still more confused.

“Isn’t it a strange thing —” Meg turned to Pheasant — “that Granny’s fortune was inherited by Finch, a boy of nineteen, and Cousin Dermot’s by Mooey, a boy of seventeen! It doesn’t seem fair.”

“I hope Mooey’s money lasts longer than Finch’s did,” said Pheasant. “It was shameful the way Finch’s money disappeared.”

“Shameful!” Meg’s eyes became prominent. “what do you mean,
shameful
? I certainly never had ...” Suddenly she remembered that Finch had paid off the mortgage on Vaughanlands. It had been only a loan but the interest had been paid more and more irregularly, till at last it was quite forgotten. Meg concluded: “Anything Finch did for us he did because he
wanted
to.”

“Of course,” said Pheasant. “I always thought Finch acted as though he wanted to get rid of everything Gran left him.”

“And now,” put in Patience, “he has got rid of his wife.”

“With all her wealth!” mourned Meg.

“I’m afraid,” said Pheasant, “that Mooey will think we are very cynical.”

“You may be cynical,” retorted Meg, “but I have only the welfare of the family at heart and always have had and always shall.”

As she stood planted firmly, in front of the rich foliage of late summer, she looked the very spirit of benevolence and there was no one there to contradict her. Patience regarded her with amused devotion; Pheasant, in controlled irritation; Maurice, in admiration; Nooky, in wonder; Philip, speculating as to whether she would give him anything. She gave him a kiss and exclaimed:

“He grows more like Piers every day! He’s the one perfect Whiteoak among all the children. Poor Alayne, I feel sorry for her, with that boy of hers!”

Pheasant gave a sigh. “Well,” she said, “we must be off. The uncles will be anxious to see Mooey.”

“Give them my love — the old dears! You’ll see a great change in them, Mooey. I doubt if they’ll survive till all my brothers are home again.”

“I don’t think they’ve changed much,” said Pheasant stoutly. “I think it is remarkable how little they’ve changed.”

“Remarkable — for ninety — yes. Quite remarkable for ninety.”

“Gran lived to be a hundred.”

“Men don’t endure like women. Heavens, if a man had gone through what I have! Well, he just couldn’t do it.”

Again no one contradicted her.

On the way to Jalna, Pheasant exclaimed, “She may have gone through a lot but — what care she takes of herself! And Patience is just the same. They do nothing to help, though we’re at our wits’ end at Jalna.”

“Patience is a lazy lump,” said Philip.

The car was entering the driveway of Jalna. The spruces and hemlocks stood close and dark. To Maurice it seemed not so much an entrance as a defence. The trees reared themselves to conceal the house, to protect the family. Not only the evergreen trees, but the great weeping birch on the lawn, and the oaks and the maples. The Virginia Creeper, nearing its hundredth year, now had difficulty in finding fresh space for its growth. Long tendrils were festooned from the eaves and dangled from the porch, swayed by every breeze, seeming in their avidity to reach for support down to the very humans who passed under. But, at one corner of the house, the vine had been cut away in order to make some repairs, and in that place the rosy red of the old bricks was prominent and bathed, as it were consciously, in the sunshine. Two old gentlemen were seated on chairs near to the birch tree. These were the two great-uncles, Nicholas and Ernest Whiteoak. Nicholas had a plaid travelling rug over his knees. He was somewhat sunk in his chair, his massive head well-thatched by iron-grey hair looking a little large for the body which, in the last four years, that is the years of the war, had considerably shrunk. But his shoulders still were broad though bent, his face because of its strong and handsome bony structure was still impressive, and his hands, which were his one remaining vanity and which he had inherited from his mother, looked the hands of a much younger man. His voice too had power, as he now called out:

“Hullo, hullo, hullo, Mooey! Come and kiss your old uncle! Come and kiss him quick!”

Now this was the expression which his mother, Adeline Whiteoak, had often used in her very old age and it annoyed his brother to hear it on Nicholas’ lips. Did Nick imagine that, by repeating expressions so peculiarly hers, he could live to be a hundred, as she had? Ernest could not help feeling annoyed but he smiled eagerly, as he held out both hands to Maurice, and murmured:

“Dear boy, how you’ve grown! And how like your mother you are, though you have blue eyes.”

Nicholas was rumbling on, still uttering expressions used by old Adeline, “Bring all the boys here, Pheasant. I like the young folk about me.”

His great-uncles had many questions to ask about Dermot Court and more especially about his last illness. Maurice could not recall those days without a feeling of great sadness. He wished he need not talk about them. The three boys had dropped to the grass but Pheasant still stood. Now she looked at her wrist watch, exclaiming:

“How the day is going! And I have about fifty baskets of early apples to grade and pack. You two small boys must come and help. Mooey, when the uncles have finished their talk with you, you must go into the house and see Auntie Alayne and Adeline.”

“This lawn,” observed Ernest, “badly needs mowing. I have never before seen it in such a state. The south lawn is no better than hay. It will take a scythe to prepare for the mower. I wonder if you would undertake to mow this front lawn, Mooey?”

“Oh, yes,” agreed Maurice, doubtfully.

Pheasant supplied the heartiness. “Of course, he will — he’ll love to. Come along, boys!”

Nook and Philip dragged themselves to their feet and limply followed her. A quarter hour had scarcely passed when Philip rejoined the group on the lawn.

“I thought you were helping your mother,” said Nicholas sternly.

“I couldn’t do it properly,” he returned, and lay down. The front door of the house now opened and Adeline Whiteoak came out to the porch. She wore riding breeches and a white shirt. For a moment she hesitated, looking at Maurice, then ran down the steps and came to him.

“Hullo!” she said. “So you’re back.”

Maurice took the hand she held out.

“Dear boy, kiss your cousin!” urged Ernest. The two young faces bumped softly together. “How firm her cheek is!” thought Maurice. “And as smooth as satin.”

Nicholas and Ernest looked at each other as though to say, “what a pretty pair!”

“Mummy had to take Archie to the doctor,” Adeline said. “It’s his tonsils. Roma went too because she needs new shoes. But they’ll not be long. Are you glad to be home again?”

“Yes, indeed,” he answered politely.

Ernest said to Nicholas, “He has true Irish politeness. He speaks like Dermot.”

“How long are you staying?” asked Adeline. “Always?”

“Till I’m twenty-one.”

“Are you glad?”

“Yes, indeed.”

He was a puzzling boy, she thought. You could not tell whether or not he meant what he said.

“Rags has homemade grape wine for us,” she went on. “Will you come in and have some?”

“Thank you. I’d like to,” he answered, with a little bow.

“Uncles, will you have some?” she leant over them, solicitously.

They gratefully declined but Philip sprang up. “I’ll have some,” he said.

“Wait till you’re asked,” returned Adeline severely. She led the way into the house. On the table in the dining room stood a squat bottle of grape juice and a plate of small biscuits. Presiding over these was Wragge, the houseman. He was a cockney who had been batman to Renny Whiteoak in the first Great War, had returned with him to Jalna, had become the devoted though critical servant of the family, further entrenching himself by marrying the cook. Again he had followed the master of Jalna to war, helped to save his life at Dunkirk, had later that year been himself severely wounded and in 1941 been discharged from the army and returned to civilian life. His wife, the cook, had always been fat while he was thin. Now she was enormously fat while he was thin to emaciation. She suffered considerably from arthritis, and he more than a little from his old wound. Her temper had always been quick. His was the sort that smouldered and sputtered. Now both were highly explosive. Still she was thankful to have him back in the basement kitchen and he was thankful each morning to discover her mountainous body beside him when he woke. He would put his arm about it, clinging to it as a shipwrecked man to a raft.

Together they did the greater part of the work in the house that was far from convenient to work in, where there were two old gentlemen who had, from infancy, been waited on and who expected summoning bells to be answered with celerity. To Alayne, Renny’s wife, fell the task of bed-making and dusting, of getting three children off to school in term time, of mending, of darning, of making the little girls do some share of the work, of supervising their studies.

Early in the war Pheasant and her two boys had come to live at Jalna, their house being let. At the time it had been considered a good arrangement but it had not worked out well — two women with different ideas of how a house should be run — too many children — too much noise for the uncles. At the end of six months Pheasant’s tenants departed and she thankfully returned with her boys to her own home, a general thanksgiving arising at the same time from Jalna.

Now Wragge came forward, beaming, to greet young Maurice.

“Welcome ’ome, sir. This is an ’appy day for the family, sir. Not only to see you return but to see you return with a fortune.”

Maurice shook hands with him. “Thank you, Rags,” he said, rather embarrassed.

“I remember,” said Wragge, “when you were born, as if it was yesterday.

I remember when you was a little codger and your father used to carry you about on his shoulder. A great pity about your father, isn’t it, sir?”