LITMIR.BIZ

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unhappy memories of Adeline’s engagement to the Irishman. Renny took some credit to himself that it had been broken off.

      At that moment the Rector entered the room. He had a genial greeting for the two visitors and a look that was half-admiring, half-reproachful for his wife. They had been elderly widow and widower when they had married. He still had not grown accustomed to encountering her and her relatives always about the house, and he deplored her habit of frequent little lunches from trays.

      “She never eats a proper meal,” he said to Renny.

      “She never has. Yet she thrives. See how plump she is, while I, who eat like a horse at table, am thin as a rail.”

      “What is a rail?” asked Mary.

      “A rail,” observed the Rector, “is a kind of water bird — rather rangy and thin.” He went and opened a window, exclaiming, “How stuffy it is in here!” During the years after the death of his first wife he had lived in a pleasurable draft from open windows; now in his second marriage he was always complaining of the stuffiness of the rooms.

      This open window affected Meg and Renny not at all, but it was right at Mary’s back. She grew colder and colder. Shivering, she watched her aunt empty the teapot, demolish the last currant from the fruit loaf; heard her uncle and the Rector discussing the lateness of the season; she thought of the different houses she had visited that morning and longed for home.

      At last they were on their way there. Holding tightly to Renny’s hand, getting out of the path of motor cars, every yard of the way familiar to her, her blood moved more quickly, her spirits rose. She inquired:

      “Uncle Renny, why do some ladies get fat?”

      “It’s the life they lead.”

      “Does the life they lead make them get fat in different parts of them?”

      “It certainly does.”

      “Auntie Meg is fat all over.”

      “She certainly is.”

      “But Patience is fat only in her tummy. Why?”

      “Ask your mother.”

      “Don’t you know?”

      “It’s none of my business.”

      “Do you always mind your own business?”

      “I try.” After a little he said, “I hope you’re not tired or cold or hungry.”

      “Oh, no. I’m all right.” But he could feel that she was lagging.

      “Good girl,” he said, and to encourage her began to sing, in a not particularly tuneful voice, an old song he had learned from his maternal grandfather, a Scottish doctor:

      Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,

      And hame came he,

      And there he spied a saddle-horse

      Whaur nae horse should be.

      “And hoo came this horse here?

      And whase can he be?

      And hoo came this horse here

      Wi’oot the leave o’ me?”

      “Horse?” quoth she.

      “Aye, horse,” quoth he …

      “Tis but a bonny milch coo

      My mither sent to me.”

      “Milch coo!” quoth he.

      “Aye, milch coo,” quoth she …

      “But saddles upon much coos

      Never did I see.”

      By the time he had finished the song they had arrived at his brother’s house. The wicket gate stood invitingly open, the fox terrier Biddy came in rapture to meet them, and Piers Whiteoak opened the door.

      “We’re holding back lunch for you,” he said to Renny. “I suppose you’ll stay. Have you any idea what time it is?”

      “To tell the truth I haven’t. Mary and I have been on a tour. Tell Daddy about it, Mary.”

      Seated on Piers’s knee, the warmth from his robust body reaching out to comfort her little thin one, the beam from his fresh-coloured face encouraging her, she could think of nothing to say but — “We saw all the family.”

      “Well,” said Piers, “there’s nothing very new about that, is there?”

      “Oh, but we saw them in a different way,” said Renny. “In the past we took it for granted that our kindred was the most important thing in the world for us. Now the youngsters must be taught.”

      “What about Archer?” asked Piers.

      “That boy’s an oddity — but, beneath his oddities, he’s a Whiteoak all right.”

      Piers grunted. He took off his daughter’s shoes and socks and held her little cold feet in his warm hands. “So you visited all the family houses,” he said to her.

      “Yes, every one.”

      “And which do you like best? I mean including our own home.”

      Certainly Piers expected her to choose her own, but at once she answered — “Jalna.”

      Renny gave a delighted grin. “There,” he exclaimed, “she chooses Jalna! I’ve explained to her about its centenary. Now, Mary” — he looked at her intently out of his dark eyes — “tell us why you like Jalna best.”

      Without hesitation, she answered, “Because it has television.”

      Crestfallen, the brothers stared at her in silence a moment, then broke into a shout of laughter.

      Piers’s wife, Pheasant, setting a platter of lamb chops on the table, heard this last. “There’s a modern child for you,” she said, and added wistfully — “When I was a child, how romantic Jalna seemed to me! All the family who lived there were glamorous.”

      “Even me?” Piers asked flirtatiously.

      “Even you.”

      After twenty-seven years of marriage, they still were lover-like.

      While they were enjoying the lamb chops a persistent ringing came from the telephone. Piers answered it and, returning to the table, said, “It was from Jalna. Alayne, wanting to know if you were here and why you had not sent word. She sounded a bit annoyed.”

      “By George, I forgot.”

      For a moment Renny was subdued, but soon his naturally good spirits were restored. He liked being with Pheasant and Piers. The brothers had many interests in common: the livestock, the farm with its orchards and small fruits. Since Renny’s unprecedented success with the racehorse, East Wind, Piers had troubled his head less and less about being in debt to him for the rent of the farmlands. Renny was a generous elder brother. If he had money on hand for his needs, he gave little thought to what was owing him. On the other hand he had not been scrupulous, when he was hard up, in days past, about acquiring the wherewithal from his wife’s private means or from his brother Finch who had inherited a fortune from his grandmother.

      Seated beside her brown-eyed, brown-haired mother, Mary dallied with the hot food on her plate. So long had she gone hungry, she had lost appetite. Now that she was warm and no longer straining to keep up with Renny’s strides on the wet paths, the windy road, she could look back on the tour with pride and even pleasure.

      “You should have heard us singing as we came down the road,” Renny was saying. “Do you remember that old song, Piers?” and he sang:

      Oh, hame came oor guid man at eve,

      And hame came he,

      And there he spied a saddle-horse

      Whaur nae horse should be.

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