Whiteoaks of Jalna/Chapter 20
Wakefield scented excitement in the air from the moment when he first opened his eyes. There was something in the way the window curtains fluttered in the breeze that made him think of the bellying of sails. There was something unusual in the smell of the air, as though it had come from a long way off, a different country, full of strange adventure. A tiny cockerel, just learning to crow, had somehow escaped from the poultry house and found his way to the lawn. Every few minutes he raised himself on tiptoe, flapped his wings, and essayed a plaintive, yet boastful, crow.
Wakefield, lying across the sill in his pyjamas, watched him with eyes still soft with sleep, but already lighting into mischief. The shoulder of his pyjamas was ripped, and a tear in the seat fluttered as the breeze ran along his back. Since Meg had married, his clothes were not kept in very good order, but that gave him no concern; to improve his mind, to broaden his experience, were of more importance to him than mere sartorial perfection. The sun warming a bare shoulder, the fluttering of a torn pyjama suit, were more stimulating than tame tidiness. He noticed that one feather of the half-grown tail of the cockerel was awry, and he had a fellow-feeling for him. He watched him strutting about, between crows picking up nice morsels from the lawn. Before each peck there was a short, gay period of scratching. Wakefield felt that he would like to get his breakfast in such a way. He had a vision of himself energetically pawing the ground, turning up buttery morsels of toast, or, better still, chocolate creams wrapped in silver paper.
He thought he would see what time it was. He did not wish to spend too much of his day in meditation. He went to the dressing-table where, among Renny's rather meagre toilet articles, lived the alarm-clock. It was a temperamental clock, though it bore across its forehead the words "Big Ben." It lost twenty minutes every day, and might have been counted a sluggard but for the fact that its alarm had to be set half an hour later than the time when one wished to be called, so urgent was it in its desire to go off. How many a time the little boy had wakened at night to see Renny half-undressed, his face close to the face of Big Ben, with a look as of determination to keep the upper hand in the constant duel between them! It was twenty minutes to ten. There would be little left of breakfast to tempt one of wayward appetite. He opened Renny's top drawer, and there, among the neat rows of ties and mounds of handkerchiefs, he discovered a small tin box marked Chest and Lung Tablets. These were richly flavoured with liquorice and, while not large in bulk, might be counted on to stay one until something more intriguing than half-cold porridge and tepid tea turned up.
He laid one on his tongue and, when he had got into his clothes, dropped a few more into a pocket of his knickers. His ablutions were a miracle of producing the most pleasing effect with the least effort. However, he spent a good deal of time on his hair, for he had found that its sleekness invariably produced a favourable impression on his elders, with the exception of Piers, who took delight in rubbing it the wrong way.
He was about to go downstairs when he heard the peculiar bubbly cooing by which young Maurice was wont to express his pleasure in the morn. He glided to the door of Pheasant's room and looked in. No one was there save the infant, sitting on a quilt on the floor, sucking something out of his bottle. When he saw Wakefield he kicked convulsively and took the bottle from his lips, a waggish smile widening his mouth, showing all his pearl-like teeth.
"Nug-nug! Ee-ee! Nug-nug!"
"Hello, Mooey!" returned Wakefield, kindly. "Glad to see your old uncle, aren't you?"
"Nug-nug! Brrrr!" bubbled Mooey, and replaced the nipple in his mouth. He sucked energetically, the muscles in his lip quivering, his eyes turned slightly toward his nose.
Wakefield took him under the arms and raised him to his feet. Mooey stamped his bare soles energetically on the quilt, but the bottle fell from his grasp and a shadow troubled his pink brow. His motto was "One thing at a time and that done thoroughly." This promenading in the middle of a drink confused him.
"Ba!" he declared, trying to see his uncle's face. "Bub-bub-bub!"
Wakefield walked him the length of the room between his knees. "Nice walk," he said, dictatorially. "Bad old bottle."
But Mooey was of a different opinion. There, on the quilt, lay his bottle, still half-full of delicious sweetened water, and here was he, leagues away, held by two vice-like hands, while tweed-knickered legs and leather brogues imprisoned him on either side.
"Ha-ha-ha-ha!" he cried, but his "ha" was of lamentation, not mirth.
"Hush," said Wakefield, sternly, "or you'll have your mother fussing about! What's the matter with you? Why don't you step out and learn to walk when I'm taking all this trouble with you? Do you know what's likely to get you, if you're naughty? Well, a big wolf is, and gobble you right up."
Happily Mooey was unable to take in the import of this dire possibility, but when he threw back his head, and looked up into Wakefield's face, he saw something in that smooth, alive visage that brought tears welling into his eyes, and made him raise his voice in a despairing wail. Wakefield propelled him to the door and balanced himself on one leg while he shut it with his foot. He then returned him to his quilt, on which he dropped him so precipitately that the infant's faculties were occupied, for the moment, in recovering his balance.
Wakefield picked up the bottle and shook it. He removed the nipple and tasted the insipid fluid. At this sight, an expression so outraged came into Mooey's wet eyes that Wakefield was moved to reassure him.
"Can't you trust your uncle?" he asked. "You're very much mistaken if you think I want any of this beastly stuff. And if you weren't such a little fathead you'd never let them put you off with it! Now I'm going to give you something really nice. And it's good for you, too, 'specially as you sound sort of wheezy."
Mooey made noises indicative of a broken spirit, and watched Wakefield fascinated as he took two of the Chest and Lung Tablets from his pocket and dropped them into the bottle. He placed his palm on the opening and shook the bottle vigorously. It took the tablets some time to dissolve, but at last the water took on a dark, rather poisonous colour, and Wakefield assumed that sufficient of the medicinal quality of the tablets had been absorbed. He replaced the nipple and put the bottle into the outstretched hands of his nephew.
"There you are, my boy!" he said, heartily, and a benevolent smile curved his lips as he observed the gusto with which Mooey returned to his drink.
He was not a Boy Scout. He had not the physical strength to take part in their enterprises. However, he liked the idea of beginning each day with a kind act. He was one whom it would be impossible to hamper by sectarianism, but who, nevertheless, was willing to take something of good from any creed.
He descended the stairs lightly.
In the hall below he was interested to see that Rags had just let someone in at the front door. It was Mr. Patton, Grandmother's lawyer. He carried his brief-bag, and, as Rags divested him of his coat, he gave Wakefield a pleasant but rather nervous smile.
"Good-morning," he said, "and how are you?"
"Thank you, sir," answered Wakefield, "I'm as well as can be expected, after all I've gone through."
He had heard Aunt Augusta make this same remark to Mrs. Fennel the day before, and he saw no reason why a remark so fraught with mournful dignity should not serve for any member of the family.
Mr. Patton looked at him sharply. "H'm," he said, dryly. "I suppose so. Well, well."
Aunt Augusta appeared in the doorway of the sitting-room. She held out her hand to Mr. Patton, and Wakefield saw that almost all the family was gathered in the sitting-room. Uncle Nicholas sat in an armchair in a corner, filling his pipe; Uncle Ernest was by a window, nervously rubbing the nails of one hand against the palm of the other. Piers and Renny stood together talking, and Mr. Patton was barely inside when Meg and Maurice arrived. Meg was carrying her infant daughter, Patience. Wakefield was consumed by curiosity. He was also humiliated to find that a family conclave had reached such a point as this without his knowledge.
Finch came along the hall, rather more sheepish than usual, and he too made toward the door of the sitting-room. Wakefield caught his arm.
"What is it?" he asked, eagerly. "What are they up to?"
"The will. Patton's going to read the will."
"The will? Oh! Then we'll know who's going to be the heir, shan't we?"
"Shut up," whispered Finch, and pushed past him.
But Wake was not to be put off so easily. He followed Finch into the sitting-room and drew up a chair beside Mr. Patton where he sat at the square table, with some papers spread before him.
Mr. Patton looked at him over his glasses.
"I don't think the child should be allowed to stay," said Aunt Augusta.
"Of course he shouldn't," agreed Piers.
"Wake, darling," said Meg, joggling Patience on her knee, "run along and feed your rabbits."
Wakefield did not demur, but he hitched his chair a little nearer the table and pushed Aunt Augusta's bottle of smelling-salts within reach of Mr. Patton, in case of need.
"Put that child out," growled Nicholas from his corner, pointing at Wake with his pipe.
"I don't see" began Renny, but Piers took the little boy by the arm and put him into the hall.
He stood there ruffled, like a young robin pushed from the nest, looking at the door so inexorably shut against him. He heard someone hurrying down the stairs and saw that it was Pheasant.
"Oh," she said, as she saw the closed door, "I am late! I had to run upstairs to Mooey. I wonder what I'd better do."
"Go and fetch Mooey," advised Wakefield, glumly. "P'r'aps they'll let you in if you've a kid in your arms. Meggie's got her baby."
Pheasant stared. "How funny! I've heard of women taking babies to police courts to influence the jury. Maybe she thinks. . . ."
"There's only the family in there," said Wakefield, "and I think it was filthy to put me out."
"Did they? I wonder if they'll want me! Piers didn't say to come, but then he didn't say not to come. I wonder. . . ."
Wakefield could not conscientiously encourage her.
"I think you'd better not go in, my girl," he advised. "You're safer out here with me."
"If they think I'm after the old money!" she cried angrily.
"I bet I get it," he said, boastfully.
"I bet you don't!"
He put his eye to the keyhole. He could see nothing but Mr. Patton's hands fumbling among papers. A good deal of coughing came from within. The family seemed to be collectively clearing its throat. Then Mr. Patton began to speak in a mumbling, unintelligible voice.
Wakefield looked around to where Pheasant had been standing. She was just disappearing up on the landing. He thought he would go out for a breath of fresh air while the will was being read.
"I wonder how long it will take," he said to Rags, who had just missed seeing him with his eye to the keyhole.
"It'll take some time," replied Rags, dusting the mirror of the hatrack, topped by a carved fox's head; and he added sarcastically: "I expect you'll 'ave time to order yerself a new touring car, in cise you're the old lidy's heir."
"There isn't any 'in case,'" said Wakefield, on a sudden impulse. "I am."
"Of course you are!" jeered Rags. "Sime as I won the Calcutter Sweepstikes! We'll go around the world on a tour together."
"It's all very well to laugh," returned Wakefield, gravely, "but it's the truth! She told me so herself, not long before she died."
Rags gaped at him, duster in hand. He could not help being impressed. "Well, if wot you s'y is true, them in there will get the surprise of their lives."
"Yes," agreed Wakefield, "and they'll feel meaner after shutting me out and all."
"I wish I knew if you're telling the truth."
"You'll know soon enough."
Wakefield went out into the morning. He sauntered along the flower border, brilliant with marigolds, zinnias, and asters. Bright cobwebs veiled the cedar hedge where the sun had not yet struck. A birch-tree was letting fall little yellow leaves into the moist green of the lawn.
What should he do to pass the time until the reading of the will was over? This was an important hour in his life, he felt, and should be spent in no trivial fashion. He began to feel qualms of hunger, but the thought of re-entering the house was intolerable to him. The blue and gold of the morning, the little breezes that skipped about like young lambs, the spaciousness of open air, were necessary to his mood. He strolled, hands in pockets, to the back of the house, and there came upon a tub set beneath an eave, full of rain-water. He squatted beside it, peering at his reflection, darkly bright in the water. So looked the heir to the Whiteoak millions! He lengthened his face, trying to make his nose into a Court nose, and when it began to ache from the strain he eased it with a hideous grimace or two.
The sight of these grimaces reflected made him burst out laughing, and the tiny cockerel, which had followed him, responded with a boastful crow.
"What have you to crow about?" asked Wakefield. "If you were me, you might crow. What are you heir to, I'd like to know? A dirty old nest, and a worm or two. Do you know what I am? I'm heir to the Whiteoak millions, and it'll pay you to crow when I tell you to, and not before!"
The cockerel looked at him so hard that it turned its head almost upside down. Its bright amber eye glittered with greed.
Then in the rain-water Wakefield discovered a blackbeetle half-drowned, lying on its back, only a feeble kicking of the legs showing it to be still alive. He picked a blade of grass and with it steered the beetle round the tub. A dear little boat making a tour of the world. He made it call at various ports—Gibraltar, Suez, Ceylon, Penang. How he loved these names in his geography lessons with Mr. Fennel! Lucky, lucky beetle!
Alas! Just as they reached Shanghai, it sank. Rather ungrateful of it. Not many Canadian beetles had a chance to go to Shanghai!
He peered down at it, lying on its back in the depths of the tub. It must be rescued. He pushed up his sleeve and put his slender brown arm into the water, found the beetle, and laid it right side up in the sunshine. He lay down beside it, watching with satisfaction the slow but sure return to life. It was his second kind act that morning.
A slender, pale worm was descending on a gossamer thread out of the sky. The lightest breeze swung it, now above the tub of rain-water, now above the grass. Unperturbed, it continued its descent, the silver thread lengthening, let out from some invisible reel. A robin ran across the yard, a peewee said "peewee" from a maple tree.
The worm had arrived. An undulation passed through its slender body; it moved delicately beneath a towering blade of grass. But Wakefield was not to discover its destination or why it had descended to this sphere from another. A swaggering black ant fell on it, worried it, choked it, slew it. He was such an important, toplofty fellow that he was quite above conveying the body to the anthill. Apparently he put his feelers to his mouth and whistled, for a company of little ants appeared from nowhere, snatched it, fought over it, dragged it, trailing palely, through the grass-blades, out of sight. Wakefield was not the only spectator of the tragedy, for a strange fellow in a fuzzy yellow waistcoat and a saffron-coloured stern appeared on the rim of a burdock leaf, and stared goggle-eyed, now and again wringing his antennæ.
Wakefield did not like the looks of him. He plucked the burdock leaf and turned it upside down on top of him.
"Here endeth," he said, "the second lesson."
The peewee chanted "peewee"; the cockerel crowed.
Wakefield threw him a Chest and Lung Tablet.
"Perhaps this will help your voice," he said. "I've never heard anything so squeaky. Suck it slowly."
The cockerel bolted it, and liked the liquorice flavour so well that it came close, on the look-out for another. It was then that it espied the blackbeetle, making cumbersome attempts to reshoulder the responsibilities of life. The cockerel cocked an eye, pecked, gulped. There was no beetle in sight.
Wakefield rose, dusted his bare knees, and uttered a sigh of bliss. A third kind act, providing the cockerel with a beetle! His cup was full.
But not his stomach! It seemed hard that he, heir to the Whiteoak millions, should go empty.
He crouched before a window of the basement kitchen and peered into the twilight depths below. He could see Mrs. Wragge kneading dough, her red fists pounding it so vigorously that one could not help wondering whether it might not hurt the dough. Bessie, the kitchenmaid, was paring vegetables in a corner, her hair in her eyes. Rags, cigarette in mouth, was cleaning knives, dipping the cork first in a little puddle of water on the knife-board, then in a small mound of Bath brick, before he angrily furbished the blades. Rags was always angry when he was in the basement. No matter how cool his temper might be above, it rose to boiling point as he clattered down the stairs. No, Wakefield did not want his breakfast from that galley!
He ran across the fields, climbed the sagging rail fence, and was on the road. Soon he was opposite the door of the blacksmith shop, between its tall elms. John Chalk, the smith, was shoeing a grey farm horse. He glanced at Wake from under his shaggy brows, and went on hammering the shoe.
When he dropped the hoof, and straightened his back, Wakefield remarked: "My pony's cast that last shoe you put on her."
"That's queer," said Chalk. "Are you sure it was that one? She'd no right to cast that one so soon."
Wake looked at him dubiously. "Hadn't she? I had my doubts of it when you put it on. I thought it was a very queer-looking job."
Chalk glared. "I like your cheek! There was never a shoe better put on than that shoe, and I'd like you to know it!"
Wakefield folded his arms. "I don't want," he said, "to take my custom from you."
"You and your custom!" bawled the blacksmith. "You and your one little pony that I could pick up under my arm like a sheep! Take it away, and be darned to you. I guess I can make ends meet without it!" He wiped his brow with a blackened hand.
"Well," said Wake, "if it only was one pony you might be snifty! But it'll likely be a whole string of racehorses before long. You see, I'm the heir to the—my grandmama's money."
"A likely story," jeered Chalk. "The old lady'ud never leave it to a little whippersnapper like you!"
"That's just why she did it. She knew I needed it—what with my weak heart and all. I've known it for a long time, but the family's just finding it out this morning."
Chalk regarded him with mingled admiration and disapproval. "Well, if that's true, and you've got the old lady's money, I pity them, for of all the high-cockalorum, head-up-and-tail-over-the-dashboard young rascals I ever set eyes on, you're the worst." He began to hammer so loudly on his anvil that further conversation was impossible. Though fast friends, their intercourse was often stormy.
He let the smith feel the weight of his gaze for a few moments, before he moved on with dignity along the straggling street. At the Wigles' cottage he stopped. Muriel, as usual, was swinging on the gate. He brought it to a standstill so abruptly that the little girl fell off. Before she could begin to cry, Wakefield took her by the hand and said: "Come along, Muriel. I'm going to take you with me for a treat."
The door of the cottage opened and Mrs. Wigle stuck out her head.
"Muriel!" she called. "Don't you dare leave the yard! Come back here this instant moment!"
"But he'th taking me out for a treat!" whined Muriel. "I want to go out for a treat!"
"Treat nothing," retorted her mother. "The last time he took you out for a treat you came home in rags and tatters. Treats may be fun for him, but he ain't going to take my daughter to 'em!"
Wakefield listened to this tirade with a reproachful air.
"Mrs. Wigle," he said, "it wasn't my fault that Muriel fell in the stream, and the old sheep tossed her about, and the burrs got in her hair. I did what I could to save her. But I'd forgotten the sheep's name, and she won't come for any other name but her own. You see, all our animals have names, we make such pets of them."
Mrs. Wigle came down the path, her arms rolled in her apron. She looked somewhat mollified.
"Where did you plan to take her this morning?" she asked.
"Only to Mrs. Brawn's shop to buy her something nice to eat."
"Well, fetch her straight back here afterward. And there's one thing I wish you'd tell me. Have you ever heard your brother say aught about mending my roof? It leaks into the best room like all possessed every time it rains."
Wakefield knitted his slender black brows. "I've never heard him say a single word about it, Mrs. Wigle. He doesn't seem to mind what roof leaks so long as the stable roof doesn't. But I'll tell you what I'll do—I'll mend your roof myself!"
"Bless the child! As though you could mend my roof!"
"I mean, I'll have it mended for you. You see, I've inherited all my grandmama's money, and I'll be wanting to do all sorts of nice things for ladies that have been kind to me. Come along, Muriel."
Mrs. Wigle was dazed before the splendour of it. A little boy with all that fortune! Beautiful to see him holding her Muriel by the hand. She followed them, rolling her arms tightly in her apron, into Mrs. Brawn's shop. She did not give him time to tell his news to fat Mrs. Brawn. She poured it out for him, and the two women stood, wrapped in admiration, while he scrutinized the contents of the window.
"I was so excited," he murmured, half to himself, "that I couldn't eat my breakfast. 'Air,' I said, 'I've got to have air.' . . . I think I'll have two currant buns, a little dish of custard cakes, and three bottles of Orange Crush. Muriel, what would you like?"
He stood before the counter, slender, fragile, the toe of one crossed foot resting on the floor, his dark head bent above the bottle from which the lovely drink ebbed through two straws into his throat. Before him stood the unopened bottles, the custard cakes, a currant bun. He held the other bun, soft, sticky, warm from the oven. At his shoulder was the tow head of Muriel, her eyes raised adoringly to his face, as she munched a bun. She would have followed him to the ends of the earth.
Above his head the voices of the two women babbled on, discussing his wonderful prospects. Mrs. Brawn cared nothing that he owed her twenty cents and was fast running up his account. Mrs. Wigle forgot her leaky roof. She rolled and unrolled her hands in her apron. From the stove in the back room was wafted the insidious smell of burning cakes. Wakefield's head was full of beautiful thoughts—like whirling golden coins.