Young Renny. Mazo de la Roche
holding herself together, determined, if possible, to get the post, to make friends with these children.
From the moment when Philip had brought them, one by either hand, into the room, she had found them a formidable pair. Meg, with her round, inscrutable face, her critical stare. Renny, with his look of a small wild thing captured. Meg had been ten then, with a mop of unkempt golden brown hair, the frill of a drawer leg showing beneath her frock; he eight, positively unwashed, his red hair growing to his collar, his brilliant brown eyes and extreme thinness giving him a fierce, half-starved air. “What they need,” Mary had thought, “is a woman’s tenderness.” But they had not responded to hers. They had been intractable, mischievous, difficult, from the first. She could not make them into the semblance of the well-behaved children she had last taught in a Warwickshire rectory.
She had read poetry to them, she had played the piano and sung to them, hoping to soften them, but they would escape to the orchards, the ravine, the woods, and peer out at her suspiciously, as though she were a being from another world.
But before long she had been too much in love with Philip to worry over the delinquencies of his children. For six months she had had him to herself before his mother and older brothers, made suspicious by a remark in a letter from him, had hastened from England to put a spoke in her wheel. But they had not been able to do it. Philip had been as stubborn in his love for her as he was in all else. They had married within the year.
Now he and his brothers were on their way to Vaughanlands. It was not yet half-past eight. It was characteristic of them that, though they were accustomed to a solid breakfast, they gave no thought to food when business such as this was on hand. They rode abreast, Nicholas and Ernest on dark bay geldings, Philip on a bright chestnut mare with a white blaze on her face. The two elder were dressed with care in London-made riding clothes. Ernest had placed a flower in his buttonhole, but had later taken it out as unsuitable to the occasion. Philip rode bareheaded, in his disreputable fishing suit. Keno trotted close to the heels of the mare.
Robert Vaughan saw the three horsemen approach along his drive. They rode abreast and the sleek flanks of their horses now and again touched, giving the animals that sense of companionship they loved. Robert Vaughan looked out on them as one of his ancestors may have looked from his bleak house on the Welsh borders at a band of galloping marauders. But he came to meet them with a firm step.
In the dining room, where an untouched breakfast was laid, Philip broke out: —
“Well, this is a hell of a mess your son has got into! By God, I’d like to have brought a horsewhip with me!”
“I don’t wonder you are upset,” said Robert Vaughan. “It has been a terrible blow to me.”
“Upset!” exclaimed Nicholas. “Upset! That’s putting it mildly.”
“How did you find it out?”
“That worm Binns told me,” answered Philip. “You didn’t expect him to hold his tongue, did you?”
“Where escapades materialize into squalling infants, they can’t be concealed,” said Ernest. “The whole affair is a dreadful insult to my niece.”
Philip added loudly — “Yes — an insult to Meggie! Where is he? I must see him!”
“He has gone off to the wood,” said Robert Vaughan. “He is completely crushed, poor boy!”
“Poor boy!” shouted Philip. “What about my poor girl?”
“Yes,” growled Nicholas. “what about her? She’s shamed before the countryside. An innocent young girl — and a Whiteoak.”
He had added fuel to the flame.
Ernest’s voice was thick with rage when he said: —
“Not a woman of our family was ever treated like this before. Maurice has behaved like a scoundrel.”
“I know it. I know it,” Robert Vaughan agreed distractedly. “But you know what a loose girl can do with a young man.”
“If he is weak enough,” said Nicholas.
“Where were your eyes?” demanded Philip. “The trouble is that you have utterly spoiled Maurice.”
“Do you know everything your son does?” asked Robert Vaughan, goaded to anger.
“I’d like to see him make a mother of a village girl and get away with it! If he did what Maurice has done I’d break every bone in his body!”
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t! You’d —”
“You say I lie?”
“No, no, but —”
“If my son, I repeat —”
“But listen, Philip —”
Ernest put in — “Mr. Vaughan expects us to be calm.”
“Picture yourself in our place,” said Nicholas.
“How can he?” exclaimed Philip. “He has no daughter!”
“No niece,” added Ernest.
“He has a son,” said Nicholas, “who has ruined Meggie’s life. Humiliated us all.”
Robert Vaughan looked about to faint again.
“Is there no possibility,” he asked, “of hiding this from Meg? A home can be found for the child at a safe distance from here. Maurice tells me Elvira and her aunt have given up their cottage and are going to relations somewhere.”
“I’ll wager,” said Nicholas, “that the woman is the girl’s mother and no aunt. I’ve heard things about her.”
Philip moved to Robert Vaughan’s side. “Do you imagine,” he said, “that I will let my young daughter marry a man who has made a mother of a village slut?”
“If my father were living,” declared Ernest, “nothing short of a horsewhipping for Maurice would have satisfied him.”
Philip turned a dark red. “Fetch the boy in here! I have something to say to him!”
They raged about Robert Vaughan, they in their prime, he beginning to feel the weight of his years, till he staggered and took hold of the back of a chair to steady himself. He managed to say: —
“I’m afraid I can’t talk any longer about it. It’s been a terrible morning. If it’s all over — if nothing can be done — but — I can’t stand any more.” He looked ghastly.
“If only Noah Binns did not know of it!” said Ernest.
“We could never hush it up,” said Nicholas, “Not with the servants here in the secret.”
“The whole affair,” Philip added, “makes me sick.”
“It makes me sick too,” Nicholas growled. “And what I don’t understand is how things could have reached such a point and neither Robert nor Mrs. Vaughan suspected anything.”
“Were you never able to conceal your doings from your parents?” retorted Robert Vaughan.
“Not to that extent.”
“No,” agreed Ernest, “and we never took up with village girls … excepting Philip once — and he was stopped in time.”
Philip looked resentfully at Ernest. He went to the sideboard and poured a drink for Robert Vaughan. He saw the table laid for three.
“I apologize,” he said, “for keeping you and Mrs. Vaughan so long from your breakfast.”
Robert Vaughan gulped down the brandy. “Help yourselves,” he said, “I’m sure you need something.”
The three brothers moved in unison to the sideboard. A more temperate atmosphere prevailed. Talking the affair over more quietly, they agreed that such things had happened before; that marriages with inauspicious beginnings