Renny's Daughter. Mazo de la Roche
your sister and you bring into the house are nasty. There was that enormous worm that wove its cocoon in a window curtain and in the spring a moth came out and laid eggs and the eggs turned into grubs. There was the nest of young skunks! There are the dancing mice and the toad!”
“No one,” declared Gemmel hotly, “could reasonably complain of any of those excepting the skunks and we got rid of them.”
“But not of their odour.” With disgust he watched the tortoise creeping toward him. He drew up his feet. “Take it away,” he ordered.
“Oh, how funny,” she laughed. “What a picture!”
He kicked at the tortoise, rolling it over on its back. Althea came into the room carrying a dandelion in her fingers. She gave a cry of dismay and dropped to her knees beside the tortoise whose legs weakly sought a foothold in the air.
“Poor darling!” she cried and righted it. “Oh, Eugene, how could you be so cruel?” She stared with hate at her brother-in-law who returned the look with no lessening of that quality.
“I didn’t hurt it.”
“You did! He’s lame.”
“Nonsense.”
Althea offered the dandelion and the tortoise, ending his long fast, opened his mouth wide and, with a hissing sound, drew in the blossom. The three watched him, fascinated. Then, quite uninjured by the kick, he resumed his purposeful walk.
“I want you,” said Eugene Clapperton steadily, “to take him upstairs and keep him there. I want you to keep all your pets in your own room.”
She answered, in a shaking voice, “I will. And myself, too.” She snatched the tortoise, his flannel wrapping, his box, and fled.
There was a silence after she left, embarrassed and angry on the husband’s part, amused and angry on the wife’s. After a little he said:
“That girl irritates me so I say more than I should. She’s enough to drive a man crazy.”
“You knew what she was when I married you.”
He returned bitterly, — “It’s no fun marrying your wife’s relations. In your case, two queer sisters.”
“One of them is gone. Some day Althea will marry.”
He gave a derisive laugh. “I’d like to know who would marry her.”
“Oh, she’s had her chances! She’s not like me — jumping at her first offer.”
He answered angrily, — “I have been indulgence itself to you, haven’t I?”
She looked at him in cold silence.
“Haven’t I?” he repeated. “I did a lot for you before we were married and I’ve done a good deal since. I gave up building my dream village for you and I’ve regretted it.”
“Is that what you were muttering about to Mrs. Piers?”
“Muttering, eh? Muttering!”
“Well, you weren’t talking in an ordinary tone.”
“I daren’t choose my way of talking,” he said harshly, “in my own house!”
“I’m sorry, Eugene,” she returned coaxingly. “I should have said you spoke in a low tone. I caught a few words that made me guess you’d brought up the question of the village again.”
“I was only telling Mrs. Piers how I regret the project. You should not have made me give it up.”
“But, my dear, you asked me what I should most like for a wedding present and I said at once I’d like to know that never, never would any more small houses disfigure the property. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And you gave me your word to stop building, didn’t you?”
“I was a fool, if ever there was one. That village had been my dream. Besides there was money in it. A good deal of money. It would have been a benefit to the community.”
She laughed derisively. “A benefit! All the neighbourhood would hate you for it.”
“The neighbours don’t care much for me, as it is. I’ve never fitted in. Nowadays I don’t fit into my own house. That tortoise is more at home here than I am. That great brute of a dog growls at me every time he sees me. Why Althea should want to keep a Great Dane I can’t imagine.”
“She has always liked animals better than people.”
“She certainly likes him better than she likes me.”
His wife came and sat on the arm of his chair. She stroked the back of his neck. “Poor old Tiddledy-winks,” she said, using her ridiculous pet name for him.
His hand was against the fullness of her breast, her heartbeats thudded in his ear, beating coherence out of his thought, filling his mind with sensual longings. “Oh, Gem,” he breathed, “I wish you’d have a baby. Things would be different somehow, if you had a baby.”
“You’re baby enough for me.” She held his head closer. He was soothed and mollified.
They sat quietly for some time.
Upstairs the dog began to bark. Eugene Clapperton said peevishly:
“I’ve never before had a dog in the house. I’ve never liked them. Every time I meet Renny Whiteoak I’m annoyed by the dogs that surround him.”
“Yes,” said Gem, “a bulldog, a bob-tailed sheep-dog, and a Cairn terrier. They’re sweet.”
“Not to me. They’re a nuisance from the day they’re born till they die. Why is that brute upstairs making so much noise?”
“Althea is getting ready to take him for a walk. He’s excited.”
“He has a brutally coarse bark, that’s all I can say.”
The barking grew louder and louder as the two descended the stairs. It was deafening as they passed through the hall. Althea looked shyly in at the Clappertons and said something but it could not be heard. Now the barking was outdoors. Now there was silence.
“This is how we should be all the time,” said Eugene Clapperton. “Alone together.”
She got up and moved restlessly about the room.
“I was a very foolish man,” he could not help saying, “to make you such a promise.”
“Well, it’s made and must be kept.” Now she had put on what he called her “sulky face,” but whatever expression she wore it was fascinating to him.
“I might remark,” he said, “that you promised to obey me when we were married. Have you kept your promise?”
“Oh, that!” she exclaimed contemptuously.
One of their long, wrangling discussions began. An unseen listener might have thought they did it to pass the time, so persistent, so purposeless, was the pattern their argument took. Althea and her dog returned from their walk and went quietly upstairs. Then the winter twilight fell and Gem turned on the lights. There was a special light under the painting of the shipwreck. The lurid sky, the white-crested waves now dominated the room. Eugene Clapperton absorbed the scene with satisfaction. It gave him who had spent all his working life in offices, a sense of peace and manly power. Nothing would induce him to part with the painting. The artist, a Victorian painter whose name did not live after him, meant little to Eugene Clapperton. It was the picture that mattered. He had bought it in an auction sale of household furnishings and, from the moment of its purchase, it had become an important thing in his life.
The lights had been on only a short while when a ring at the doorbell brought the Polish displaced person who acted as maid hurrying from the kitchen. In a moment she announced Renny Whiteoak. Eugene Clapperton, pleased by this interruption