Jalna: Books 1-4: The Building of Jalna / Morning at Jalna / Mary Wakefield / Young Renny (125 page)

Eden was unimpressed. He said, “I don’t want to.”

Renny and Meg exchanged glances. This lack of enthusiasm on the part of their speaker would never do. Renny said: —

“Now, look here, if you recite this piece properly I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will take you for a glorious ride on my colt. He’s perfectly safe now, but you mustn’t say anything about it. The whole thing is a profound secret.”

“All right,” said Eden at once. “How soon will you take me on Gallant?” The colt had been so named by a combination of his dam’s name, Saucy Gal, and his sire’s, Duke of Brabant.

“As soon as you have said the piece,” returned Renny, “and we’ve escaped with our lives.”

“Sh,” warned Meg.

Eden had a good memory. In a quarter of an hour he could recite the doggerel accurately.

Two days passed before the propitious moment came. Remembering the promised ride, Eden kept the secret. The Laceys and Mr. Fennel had come to tea, and a game of backgammon and two tables of whist had been arranged.

Admiral Lacey and Adeline were seated at the backgammon board in the middle of the room. The Admiral, a man of just over seventy and of a build so solid and a countenance so red that he looked a formidable opponent, faced her with friendly truculence. His wife, short, stout, and pink-faced, sat at a table of whist with Sir Edwin as her partner, and Augusta and Philip as opponents. At another table the two Miss Laceys, who were in their late forties and had fluffy hair turning grey and complexions like young girls, were engaged at play with Nicholas and Ernest. There had been a time when they had hoped very much to be engaged with them in the business of life, but the brothers had spent much of their time in London and had there met women more congenial to them, as they had thought, and certainly less restricted in their outlook. Now Nicholas, looking into Violet Lacey’s blue eyes, wondered if he would not have done well to marry her. On her part she still cared for him, but about his head glimmered a sinister halo of divorce. She doubted if she could face that. Still, the sight of his large handsome hands shuffling the cards moved her strangely. Her sister Ethel and Ernest kept up a flow of badinage of the sort fashionable in the nineties. At a third table Mary, Malahide, and Vera Lacey watched Mr. Fennel do a card trick prior to a game of bridge.

After a period of great heat there had been an electrical storm and the air was now unseasonably cool, so that the snapping of the wood fire was agreeable to the human occupants of the room, though not to Keno, the spaniel, who wished to lie on the rug in front of it, or to Boney, who eyed the blaze askance from his perch, at the same time keeping the eye next the company closed, as though in distaste for their frivolity.

Renny had not appeared for tea. Now he came in and went straight to Mary with an air of unusual deference.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Mother. I had to go to town and I got caught in the rain and was wet through. I’ve been changing.”

Mary, always ready to be friendly with her stepchildren, smiled at him. Meg appeared in the doorway with Eden by the hand. She had not yet quite resumed her place in the family. Now her coming was greeted by sympathetic smiles. She said sedately, after speaking to the guests: —

“Eden has come to say goodnight. Hurry up, dear, and get it over with.”

“But,” said the little boy excitedly, “I want to say my piece first.”

“What piece?” asked his father.

“My goodbye poem for Cousin Malahide.”

“A goodbye poem,” repeated Malahide. “That’s rather premature, isn’t it?”

“But I must say it!” insisted Eden. He placed himself in front of Malahide Court and recited in a clear treble: —

“O Malahide!
I can’t abide
They way you’ve spied,
The way you’ve lied.
You are a snide —
I wish you’d died
In Ballyside,
O Malahide!”

No one had initiative to stop him, while the subject of the poem, turning a sickly yellow, cast a look of bitter chagrin at Adeline.

She was the first to speak.

“Come here,” she said to the child.

Feeling important and pleased with himself, he marched to her side. She took his chin in her hand and started into his eyes.

“Who taught you that?” she demanded.

Well schooled, he returned — “I made it up.”

“A likely story! Made it up! I say — who taught you that verse?” She emphasized the last five words with five successive raps on the table.

Eden’s face quivered, but he persisted. “I made it up myself.”

“Please don’t mind,” said Malahide.

“I
will
mind! I’ll get to the bottom of this!”

“Plenty of time later,” said Philip, very red in the face.

“Yes, yes,” agreed Admiral Lacey, “let us go on with the game, Mrs. Whiteoak.”

“I will not have my kinsman insulted and let it pass!”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Lacey soothingly, “that none of us understood it, in the least.”

Adeline turned her head from one to another of the assembly. “Is there anyone here,” she demanded, “who is so
imbecile
so not to understand the meaning of that recitation?”

Both the Miss Laceys chimed in together — “I didn’t understand a word of it! Really I didn’t!”

“Childish nonsense,” said the Admiral.

“Childish devilment,” declared Adeline. “I’ll get to the bottom of it. I won’t have Malahide insulted.” An ominous colour suffused her face.

Nicholas sat tugging at his grey moustache. Ernest and Ethel Lacey dared not look into each other’s eyes. He pressed her foot under the table. Augusta boomed: —

“The child is the mouthpiece of others.”

“Quite so,” agreed Sir Edwin.

“Mouthpiece or not,” said Adeline, “I’ll have it out of him!”

Eden wriggled his chin out of her hand and fled to his mother.

“I did make it up,” he insisted proudly. “Every word of it. Shall I say it again?”

“Yes,” said his grandmother, “I want to hear it again.”

Mr. Fennel had, with admirable coolness, worked at his card trick all this while. Malahide kept his eyes on the cards as though his life depended on the working out of the trick. Meg, seated on the piano stool, was as impassive as the Dresden-china shepherdess on the mantelpiece. Not so Renny. An uncontrollable grin stretched his features. He was standing beside the parrot’s perch and, half in nervousness, half in malice, tweaked a feather from its tail.

With a torrent of curses in Hindoo it spread its wings and flew to the backgammon board, scattering the neatly placed men in all directions.

Adeline stretched out a long arm and pulled Eden from his mother’s lap.

“Now,” she commanded, “say your piece again, child!”

“Mamma —” began Augusta.

“Hold your tongue, Augusta,” said her mother.

“Steady on, Mamma,” growled Nicholas. “We can have that later.”

“Yes,” said Violet Lacey, “we’d love to hear it later on, dear Mrs. Whiteoak.”

“No need to wait. I remember the first line myself: ‘O Malahide —’ Now go on, Eden.” She had soothed the parrot and he sat preening himself on her shoulder.

Eden, with more than a hint of mischief on his face, declaimed: —

“O Malahide!
I can’t abide
They way you’ve spied,
The way you’ve lied.
You are a snide….”

Uncontrolled laughter broke from Nicholas and Ernest. Renny, with a sudden flourish of his hand toward Malahide, concluded, in a derisive tone: —

“I wish you’d died
In Ballyside,
O Malahide!”

Philip said — “Renny, take Eden away. I’ll see to him later.”

Renny shouldered the small boy and glided out of the room.

“Somebody bring Malahide a drink,” ordered Adeline. “He looks queasy.”

Ernest got up with alacrity.

“Could I have a drop of something too?” asked the Admiral.

“We’ll all have something,” said Nicholas.

Malahide was restored somewhat by the sherry. The greenish shade left his skin and it resumed its normal ivory tint. He gathered his forces and smiled wanly at Adeline. Her choleric colour had faded and she was now enjoying herself. She leant forward and started sympathetically at Malahide.

“I was never so ashamed,” she said. “As I’ve heard the peasants in Ireland say — ‘You might light a candle from the same in me eye.’ But, never fear, Malahide, our young man will smart for this. I know well that its root lay in him and I’ll not bear that he should intimidate any guest of mine.”

“Well, after all,” said Mary, in impulsive defence of her stepson, “it’s only natural that Renny should retaliate.”

Philip beamed at her.

“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Lacey inquisitively.

“It is better left unexplained,” said Augusta.

“We’ll have him flogged,” said Adeline. “You must lay your stick about him, Philip.”

“Impossible!” said Philip. “I must just ask Cousin Malahide to forgive him, if he can.”

Malahide raised his head. “I have already done that, Philip. But what I shall never forget is the superb manner with which the little boy spoke his lines — unsettling as they were to me. His poise is perfect.”

“Ay, he’s a clever young rascal,” said Adeline.

Mary was delighted by Malahide’s praise of her child.

“He is really amazing,” she said eagerly. “The things he says! You’d hardly believe.”

“He’s too precocious,” said Philip, yet pleased, in spite of himself.

The Admiral said — “Now, when I was his age, I used to stand up in front of a roomful of people and recite, ‘My Name is Norval,’ at the top of my lungs.”

The men were replaced on the backgammon board; the cards dealt. Boney uttered sounds of content and Keno scratched the hearth rug into a more agreeable disposition for his fire-baked body. Another rainstorm dashed against the pane, and the roof spread itself hospitably over all beneath it.

G
ARDEN
P
ARTY

T
HE RESULT OF THIS
disturbance was to divide the family into two parties. One was for Malahide’s remaining there, the other against it. On the one side were the Buckleys, who very much preferred leaving him at Jalna, for they feared that, if he returned with them to England, he might settle down in their house for the winter. A business affair of Ernest’s was important enough, in his eyes at any rate, to recall him to London, and he was leaving with his sister and brother-in-law. Nicholas, who was remaining, looked on Malahide as rather an amusing addition to the family party, and a unique companion for Adeline. He enjoyed hearing them talk together. Adeline herself, having cast her protective power over Malahide, would not lightly withdraw it, and the fact that she wanted him to stay made opposition to this infuriating to her. On the other side were ranged Philip, Mary, Meg, and Renny, a solid family within the family, the two younger members of which were ruthless in their determination to oust the intruder.

No coldness or indifference on their part had any effect on Malahide, neither could Philip be brought to the point of telling him directly to get out. Philip strolled about with his dogs at his heels or fished or oversaw his stables or farm, tolerant and good-humoured toward both parties, but not to be driven by either of them into a definite step.

It was decided that some sort of entertainment should be given as a send-off for the Buckleys, and also to show that the family was not subdued by the breaking of Meg’s engagement to Maurice. Meg was to appear in public self-contained, and in appearance, heart-whole.

Augusta chose a garden party as the form of entertainment most pleasing to her. Heavy rains had made the lawns and borders green and luxuriant. The house, inside and out, was looking its best, the whole an ideal setting for a large gathering.

The family was heart and soul in preparation for the fête. Mary saw to the putting in perfect order of the house. The windows were polished, the mahogany and walnut of the furniture brought to a satin shine. She and Ernest conferred over the arrangement of flowers, choosing pink and crimson roses and pink carnations for the drawing room, yellow and cream dahlias for the dining room and library, while tall delphiniums and variegated phlox ornamented the striped marquee erected on the lawn. The rest of the family were more interested in the arrangements for refreshments, both solid and liquid, and the band which was to be stationed behind the shrubbery.

The state of the weather caused some anxiety, for it showed itself capricious during all the week preceding the party and, on the very morning, sparkled and showered alternately. But at noon the sun came out hotly, the lawn was dried, and the scene looked all the gayer for the washing.

It had been difficult for Meg to choose which dress of her trousseau she would wear. Each one had been so carefully considered as a part of her wedding trip. She would have preferred to buy a new dress for this occasion, but Philip would not hear of it. He had been put to too much unnecessary expense as it was.

She stood irresolute between a pink-flowered organdie and a pale green tulle when she heard Renny passing her door. She called him in.

“Which shall I wear?” she asked, her lips trembling as she put the question, for, at the moment, she felt that she could not bear to face all those people.

He looked dubiously at the dresses spread on the bed.

She said — “Mother says the pale green will look more elegant, but Vera is for the pink. She thinks I’ll feel more confident in it.”

“Put on the pink,” he said, at once. “You’ll feel more cheerful. It’s just like Mother to choose green.”

“All right. But really Mother is being quite agreeable, considering that she isn’t getting me off her hands, as I suppose she’s been hoping to all this while.”

“H’m.” He put his arm around her. “Well, never mind, Meggie. I wasn’t wanting to get you off my hands, at any rate.”

She pressed her face against his shoulder. How comforting to have such a brother, she thought.

He said suddenly — “Look here, Meggie, we haven’t done a thing to Malahide this week!”

“Not since I put salt instead of sugar in his tea. And he drank it without a word.”

He dismissed such schoolgirl tricks with a shrug.