07 Jalna by Mazo de La Roche

Author:Mazo de La Roche
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9781894852234
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

XVI “IN THE PLACE WHERE THE TREE FALLETH”

ALAYNE found Eden in the summerhouse, a vine-smothered, spiderish retreat, with a very literary-looking pipe in his mouth, his arms folded across his chest, and a thoughtful frown indenting his brow.

“May I come?” she breathed, fearing to disturb him, yet unable to endure the separation any longer.

He smiled an assent, gripping the pipe between his teeth.

“Have you begun the—you know what?”

“I do not know what.”

“The n-o-v-e-l,” she spelled.

He shook his head. “No; but I’ve written a corking thing. Come in and hear.”

“A poem! I am so glad you are really beginning to write again. It is the first, you know, since we have been married, and I was beginning to be afraid that instead of being an inspiration—”

“Well, listen to this and tell me whether I’m the better or worse for being married.”

“Before you begin, Eden, I should just like to remark the way the sunlight coming in through those vines dapples your hair and cheek with gold.”

“Yes, darling, and if you had been here all morning you might have remarked how the insect life took to me. They let themselves down from every corner and held a sort of County Fair on me, judging spider stallions, fat ladybugs’ race, and earwig baby show. In each case the first, second, third, and consolation prize was a bite of me.”

“You poor lamb,” said Alayne, settling herself on the bench beside him, her head on his shoulder. “How you suffer for your art!” She searched his face for the mark of a bite, and, really finding one on his temple, she kissed it tenderly.

“Now for the poem,” be exclaimed. He read it, and it gained not a little from his mellow voice and expressive, mobile face. Alayne was somewhat disconcerted to find that she had no longer the power to regard his writing judicially. She now saw it coloured by the atmosphere of Jalna, tempered by the contacts of their life together. She asked him to read it again, and this time she closed her eyes that she might not see him, but every line of his face and form was before her still, as though her gaze were fixed on him.

“It is splendid,” she said, and she took it from him and read it to herself. She was convinced that it was splendid, but her conviction did not have the same austere clarity that it had carried when she was in New York and he an unknown young poet in Canada.

After that Eden spent each morning in the summerhouse, not seeming to mind the increasing dampness and chill as the autumn drew on. The Whiteoaks seemed to be able to endure an unconscionable amount of either heat or cold. Alayne began to be accustomed to these extremes of temperature, to an evening spent before the blistering heat of the drawing-room fire, and a retiring to a bedroom so chill that her fingers grew numb before she was undressed.

From the summerhouse issued a stream of graceful, carelessly buoyant lyrics like young birds.

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