“Renny,” he said, with his mouth full, “I do want to see your wounds!”
“Now,” said Meg, “you may leave the table. You’re a naughty boy.”
He flushed and began reluctantly to drag himself out of his chair.
“Please don’t send him away,” exclaimed Renny; “not at my first meal at home.”
“But he’s making me feel faint.”
“Nonsense, Meggie, — you’re made of better stuff than that.”
“Very well. If Renny wants you to stay. But see that you behave.”
Wakefield’s little voice penetrated. “Baby wants to go to Uncle Ernest.” He struggled from Lady Buckley’s lap.
Ernest was flattered. He took the child on his knee and mounded his own fork with mashed potato for him.
“More g’avy,” demanded Baby.
Ernest plastered gravy on the potato. The little mouth opened wide. The fork was inserted. Baby beamed at everyone.
“Gad!” ejaculated Nicholas. “I’d almost forgotten the champagne!”
He rose and limped to a side table where the bottles were cooling on ice. “This is my contribution to the feast. Renny, we’re going to drink to your health, my boy.”
They did. All the family stood about him, wishing him prosperity and a long and happy life. He was moved. His eyes glistened and his mouth softened to an expression of protective tenderness. There they were — his own flesh and blood — clustered about him, wishing him well, drawn close to him in the bond of kinship, from the old, old grandmother down to the baby, Wakefield. The years of separation, of confusion, were over. Now there would be peace for the rest of their days. The roof bent over them. The walls closed about. He had taken his place as the head of the family. He would be a father to these boys. As he raised his own glass to his lips he had a physical sensation of the tightening bonds between himself and each of the others about the table, as though his very sinews were taut in the dark close bonds.
Old Adeline left her place and came in the voluminous folds of her dress to his side. She took him in her arms.
“Ha!” she exclaimed, kissing him almost vehemently on the mouth. “I’ve lost my son … Philip is gone … but I’ve got you!” She hugged him close. “Lord, how hard you are! You give me strength…. This old body of mine hasn’t lived in vain! The lot of you … you’d never have been … if it wasn’t for me!”
Still clinging to Renny she looked triumphantly about. “Augusta, Nicholas, and Ernest…. Not a child among ’em! Well — I’m rotting old timber but you’re young and tough, Renny. Bless you!”
“Champagne,” whispered Ernest to Meg, “always goes straight to Mamma’s head.”
II
Father and Daughter
Pheasant was thinking, to the rhythm of swinging legs that dangled from the broad damp bough of an old apple tree: “This is a wonderful year for me. In a month I shall be thirteen — in my teens — and in an hour I shall see Maurice. I don’t know which amazes me most.”
Her expression, always rather startled, became amazed, by her own will. She sent up her eyebrows, parted her lips and breathed pantingly. As though amazement was transmitted through her into the old tree, a tremor ran through it and it scant pinkish-white blossoms filled the air with a startled scent. Her thin legs, in the brown lisle thread stockings, swung in a kind of syncopated rhythm, as though beyond her control. She thought: “In a few minutes I shall go in and brush my hair and clean my nails and put lots of scent on my handkerchief.”
The apple tree stood by itself in a small irregular field by the side of the creek. She always thought of it as her own tree, for none but she paid any attention to it. The apples it produced were small and warped and rough-skinned but to her taste had the sweetest flavour of all. If she shut her eyes and tasted carefully it was almost like a pear but far better. The trouble was that the old pony, which pastured in this field, was just as fond of the apples as she was. He would stand beneath it, waiting for them to fall, or stretch his rough-maned neck to tear them from the bough.
He ambled toward the tree now and rolled his full, blue-black eyes at Pheasant with the look of a conspirator, as though they were both thieves. Yet the apples were still no more than ideas in the heads of the buds.
“Hello, you old rogue,” said Pheasant. “You don’t know who’s coming home today!”
The pony blew out his lips and the faintest whicker stirred his insides. Little drops of moisture hung on the hairs about his mouth. She put down a foot and scratched his back with it.
“It’s Maurice who’s coming,” she said. “I suppose you know more about him than I do. I wish you could speak, Sandy. You could tell me a lot.”
The pony was twenty-eight years old and had belonged to Maurice when he was a small boy. Pheasant in her turn had ridden him about the fields but he was fat and lazy and would not move out of a protesting jog-trot. Now Pheasant pictured him young and feeling his oats, with little Maurice on his back, galloping along the country road where there were no motor cars, Maurice laughing and happy.
Sandy moved from under her foot and began to crop the scant young grass. He gave a look askance at her when she caught him by the forelock and told him: “Your master’s coming home! Do you hear! Your master and my father.”
There was a strange lightness inside her, half fear and half joy. She had lived so solitary that the thought of sharing the house with a large, almost strange man, changed the very aspect of the spring day for her. Colours were deeper, more intense, there was mystery in the murmuring of the creek. Father — father — father — it kept saying. Yet she had never called him anything but Maurice. Mrs. Clinch, the housekeeper, was getting old. She was hard of hearing and suffered from lumbago. She had lived in the Vaughans’ house for forty years and seemed as permanent as the very walls to the little girl. Mrs. Clinch looked on Pheasant as a disgrace to the name of Vaughan and, while to the outer world she carried herself proudly, she never came suddenly on the child without a shock to her innermost self, and the thought: “This is the skeleton in our cupboard and it’s my duty to care for it….” If only she might have had a properly born, greatly welcomed child to look after!
She was kind to Pheasant, without tenderness. Her idea of a child’s goodness was that it should be keeping still. Pheasant’s idea of getting on with Mrs. Clinch was to stop doing whatever she happened to be doing, when Mrs. Clinch appeared, and stand quite still. The housekeeper would scrutinize her, appear satisfied and return to her little sitting room off the kitchen. She had a rocking chair there that gave a sharp crack each time it swung backward. When Pheasant heard this noise she knew she would be unobserved for the next hour.
Till she was eight Pheasant had spent much of her time in keeping away from Mrs. Clinch and in watching Maurice, unseen. She would follow him through the fields, hiding behind blackberry bushes or among the tall corn, sometimes in the house, always in the room he had just left. Everything he did fascinated her. She would stand with her eye to the crack of the bathroom door watching him shave, watching the deft lathering of his face, the controlled sweep of the razor, the smooth-skinned face that emerged. She would spy on him as he cleaned his gun, read his paper, or mixed himself a drink, always trying to imagine what it would be like if he was fond of her and wanted her near him. Pheasant knew that in some mysterious way she had spoiled Maurice’s life. She was sorry for him and wished she could think of something to do to make up for this.
Now this morning she stood in the dining room taking in the unaccustomed brightness of the room. During Maurice’s absence the blinds had always been drawn except when Mrs. Clinch had opened up the room for airing and cleaning. The sideboard had been bare, the table covered by a sheet. It had been a