“You are — or you would not show such evident glee at her precocity.”
“Glee — what a beastly word!”
“It seems to express the tone of your laughter.”
He stared at her baffled, then took a quick turn across the gravel drive, the child in his arms. He did not know what to say.
She thought — “I am being detestable. But I can’t help it. He doesn’t know how Adeline worries me. He wouldn’t understand. If only she would love me as she loves him. But she is antagonistic towards me.”
Alma Patch, the anemic village girl who came daily to look after Adeline, now appeared.
“Baby’s dinner is ready,” she announced in her accustomed timid whisper. Renny’s presence always frightened her. Now she stood blinking her pale eyelashes and staring at his shoes.
He set down the child, who ran and thrust her white fist into Alma’s freckled hand. Then she broke from her and threw both arms about her mother’s knees and hugged them.
When Alayne was alone with Renny she leant against his shoulder and her hand slid inside his coat. She felt the muscular roundness of his chest and his strong heartbeats. Her lips trembled.
“I’m such an unsatisfactory mother. I haven’t the animal magnetism or whatever it is that makes one’s offspring love one.”
“Adeline adores you. Look at the way she ran to you.”
“Yes … I know.” But the image of her child faded from her mind. It was obliterated by Renny’s nearness, the smell of his tweeds, of his flesh, the feel of his heartbeats.
He laid his face against the smooth pale gold bands of her hair. But he drew suddenly away.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Your hair!” he exclaimed. “I see a white one — right on the top.”
“I know. I saw it days ago.”
He looked aghast. “But you’re not going white, are you? At thirty-eight?”
She laughed. “What a catastrophe! But I don’t think so. My mother found grey hairs at twenty.”
He looked relieved. “Let me pull it out.”
It was characteristic of a strain of stubborn New England Puritanism in Alayne that she would not pull out this grey hair. She backed from his predatory hand. “No, no, let it be! Why should you want to pull it out?”
“Because I don’t like it.”
“Well, I do.” She really hated the white hair but she resented his flurry over it.
“You like it because your mother had one at twenty. I can imagine your father saying — ‘Really, my dear, this is a most interesting hirsute phenomenon. I must immediately write an obscure thesis on it!’”
She returned tartly — “You ought to understand ancestor worship. You are eternally quoting your grandmother and your aunt.”
Showing his teeth he pounced on her, held her tightly while he tweaked the hair from her head. She gave a little cry and he held up his trophy triumphant.
“I think you are horrid,” she exclaimed but in her heart she was glad the hair was out. It was as though with it some of her irritation had been uprooted. She winced but she smiled.
“Do throw it away,” she said.
He looked at her, scandalized. “For birds to weave in their nest! You know that’s bad luck, don’t you?”
“Don’t tell me that you believe in such a ridiculous superstition!”
“Gran always said —”
“There you go — ‘Gran’!”
“She said it meant death.”
Alayne laughed. “Well, I can think of people whose hairs I should like to cast to the birds.”
“I shan’t risk it.” He struck a match and touched the blanched hair with its flame. She looked on amused yet with a ridiculous feeling of sadness as this minute part of her shrivelled and turned to a puff of ash. She said suddenly:
“You do love me, don’t you?”
“What a question!”
“But you do? “ Her eyes filled with tears. “I want you to say you do.”
“Otherwise I might have given your hair to the birds.” He put his arm about her, then gave an exclamation of pain. “I believe I shall have to see the doctor,” he said. “I’ve hurt myself.”
Instantly her brows puckered in anxiety. “But when? Where? Why haven’t you told me?”
“It’s my shoulder. I was lifting something.”
She gave an exhalation of relief. A wrenched shoulder was not likely to be serious. She said, with more irritation than sympathy — “I have never known anyone who so often gets hurt. You are too impetuous really. You throw yourself into things so. What were you lifting?”
He returned, frowning — “I don’t throw myself into things. It’s nothing serious. I’ll get Piers to drive me over to the doctor’s.”
“But not before dinner.” They had dinner at one.
He agreed to wait till after dinner because Alayne disliked the hours of meals upset, but he had little appetite. He returned from the doctor’s with his arm in a sling. He had broken his collarbone.
THAT EVENING CLARA Lebraux divested of her daffodil-strewn apron, sat on a rather uncomfortable rustic seat before the door of her own house and inhaled with deep enjoyment the smoke from a Russian cigarette. Her enjoyment of the cigarette had an edge all the more keen because of her deep unhappiness. She stared into the twilight of the trees beyond her small garden and reviewed her life. It was divided into three parts — her girlhood in Newfoundland, her married life in Quebec, and the years since coming to the vicinity of Jalna. Her father had made money in the fisheries. He and his family had lived extravagantly. Clara had married young and enjoyed a kind of bickering happiness for twelve years, clinging more and more to her child as she cared less for her husband. She had lived the open air life that suited her, tobogganing, snowshoeing, in the winter; sailing her yacht on the St. Lawrence in the summer. Then, when Pauline had been a long-legged child of fourteen, Clara’s father had lost his money and, in the same year, Antoine Lebraux had developed the disease which had proved fatal. From that time Clara had never known what it was to be free from anxiety and care. Her brother had moved to Ontario. She and Lebraux with their child had followed him and bought a small farm with the object of rearing silver foxes. In the long illness and death of her husband Clara had found a friend in Renny Whiteoak. He had been friend and protector to Pauline and her. Clara remembered how in her husband’s terrible illness she had depended more and more on Renny, how, after Antoine’s death, love had come to her. But not in place of friendship. They were good friends always, he never suspecting her love — not till that night last September when, in the twilit wood that now opened before her, they had found each other as lovers. They had come together in friendship and in passion. The harvest moon had burned in the dusky sky above them. She wanted him, had been wanting him for years and hiding her desire. She had exulted in giving herself to him. They had seemed small under the great harvest moon, but not insignificant. Their love had had an exultant meaning under the night sky. All through the autumn they had met, but not since then. She understood that she was no longer necessary to him in that way and she acquiesced. She was more primitive than passionate. Nothing could take from her what she had had. Now that the warm weather had come she sat smoking every evening staring into the wood, wondering if he might come to her.
Pauline,