“Alayne and I — at Jalna!” His eyebrows, his nostrils, the lines from nostril to corner of mouth were bent to his horror at the idea.
“Surely,” returned his sister, “surely Alayne does not consider herself so much better than I am —”
He interrupted — “It’s not that. It’s the thought of paying guests — or whatever you call them — at Jalna. I’d starve first.”
“Well, I don’t see any sense in it.”
“Meggie — you do! You’d never ask me to do such a thing. Why, Gran would turn over in her grave!”
“I dare say she would. She’s the sort of dead person who would turn over in their grave. But she’d just have to get used to the new order of things as we all do.”
A retort was on his lips, but a shooting pain through his shoulder made him wince.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I heaved the porch at the tea shop and gave my shoulder a crick.”
“Poor dear!”
“It’s nothing serious.”
“But I hate you to be hurt. How is Mrs. Lebraux getting on?”
“Not too badly. Everything looks nice.”
“Doesn’t it? And such good tea! I was passing the other day and she called me in to have a cup. She absolutely refused to let me pay for it.”
“As though she’d let you pay for it! She likes you, Meg, and you’ve always been nice to her. She’s had a hard time of it since Lebraux died — and before, God knows!”
“I admire her,” said Meg fervently, all the more fervently because Renny’s wife had always been very cool toward Clara Lebraux.
He produced the boxes of sweets. “I’ve brought you and the kid these. One each. The daffodils on the top are rather nice, aren’t they?”
“Charming!” Meg’s eyes glowed as she opened the box. She had no modern ideas about keeping slim. She bit eagerly into a piece of maple cream fudge. “I have never been without sweets since the tea-room opened and as I eat almost nothing at table they are really good for me…. Ah, there is Patience! Come, darling, and see what Uncle Renny has brought us.”
Patience came in through the low open window, straddling the sill with her bare brown legs. She was a charming child with her father’s wide grey eyes and her mother’s sweet pouting smile. She knew exactly what she wanted and almost always managed to get it. Dimples dented her cheeks when her favourite uncle put his offering into her hands. She hugged the box to her.
“Oo,” she exclaimed, “just what I love! And one for Mums too! You are a darling!”
“Be careful how you squeeze him!” warned Meg. “He’s hurt his shoulder.”
“How?”
“Lifting the side of a house,” he grinned.
“You are a tease!” She threw herself on him.
With these two he was happy. He settled himself in a stuffed chintz chair and lighted a cigarette with Patience on his knee. He suddenly thought of himself as extraordinarily blessed. He thought of Clara and Pauline Lebraux, of his long friendship and protective care for them. He thought of young Wakefield, to whom he had been as a father and mother. Soon Wake’s marriage to Pauline would weld the link stronger. He thought of Piers and Pheasant and their three boys. A vision of his two old uncles in their house in Devon hid all else for a moment from his eyes — dear old boys, he hoped they would come over for a visit this summer. He thought of his brother Finch, six months married, living with his bride in Paris, getting on well in concert work — a young fool in other ways, but most affectionate. His thoughts reached out to those distant parts drawing, in dark invisible strength, the images of his own flesh and blood nearer. Then his mind turned to Jalna and his own wife and child. He thought of Alayne and of their troubled, passionate life together, like a spring bubbling out of the dark earth, unable to give a tranquil reflection of its surroundings. Then the face of his child obtruded itself, vivid, dark-eyed, scarlet-lipped, and his own lips softened into tenderness.
Meg and Patience had been watching him.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Meg.
“You’re such a dear old funny-face!” cried Patience.
He gathered her to him with his sound arm and hugged her. “I was thinking of my dinner,” he said.
All the way home, across the fields and down through the ravine, his thoughts were on his wife and child. Like some primitive ancestor he quickened his steps, as though anxious lest some harm had befallen them in his absence. He paused just once to examine the trunk of a great pine tree from which a branch had been cut the autumn before. Over this scar the resinous lifeblood of the tree had collected in amber-coloured coagulations and, in one place, had formed into an elongated thread reaching almost to the ground. Renny bent his head and sniffed the pungent smell. He laid his hand on the trunk of the tree.
RENNY’S WIFE, ALAYNE, was arranging some sprays of wild cherry blossom in a black glass vase in the drawing room. To her they seemed the very soul of spring, flowering in exquisite whiteness after the long bitter winter. She touched them tenderly for fear one petal might be bruised, and when a flower did fall, she carefully laid it on the water where it floated, with upturned face, like a tiny water lily. She had charming hands. She handled the sprays of bloom capably and, when she had arranged them to her liking, she stepped back a pace to see the effect. She was not satisfied. This room, with its heavy damask hangings and richly toned carpet, was not one that showed flowers to their advantage, least of all the fragile blossoms of the wild cherry. She rejoiced in the delicate lines of the Chippendale furniture and sometimes amused herself by imagining the background she would create for it, if she were given a free hand. But Renny thought it perfect as it was. The point where their taste differed most was the wallpaper with its massive gilt scrolls that had decked those walls for eighty years, and looked good for another eighty.
Alayne shivered a little, for she had put on a thinner dress today and the room was cool. The dress was a flowered grey-and-blue foulard made with little ruchings. As she caught her reflection in a mirror she thought that both colour and style were kind to her.
She had put little Adeline also into a thinner frock and she wondered if she had perhaps been too precipitate. There might be a cool breeze on the porch where the child played. There was no need to wonder where she played, for every now and again she made a noisy outcry in one of her games. Alayne went to the door and looked down on her.
She had got a saddle that had belonged to her great-grandmother, a side saddle of old-fashioned design, and she was poised on it in an attitude both vigorous and graceful. She grasped a crop in her small hand and with it belaboured an imaginary mount which apparently shied at the jump at which she was putting him.
Alayne stood, unseen by her, delighting in her strength and vivacity. Yet this very strength and this very animation stood between her and her child. Adeline was so different from what she had been as a little girl. She could remember her early childhood better than most, for she had been much alone with her parents and all her little sayings had been treasured and repeated to her, as her baby clothes had been carefully laid away as she outgrew them. Almost once a year she had been taken to the photographer and a most satisfactory portrait made. There was little Alayne at two, wearing a heavy-looking hat tied with a huge bow under her chin and standing solemnly on the seat of a padded chair. There was little Alayne at four, standing in a doorway with a butterfly bow on her fair hair. There she was at seven, holding flowers