Books 9-12: Finch's Fortune The Master of Jalna Whiteoak Harvest Wakefield's Course by Mazo de la Roche

Author:Mazo de la Roche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9781459723078
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2013-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

XXXI

EBB AND FLOW OF THE TIDE

IF love was making a man of Wakefield, it was making a child of Finch. To Wakefield it was the opening of a window, letting in light and the stir of life. To Finch it was the closing of a door, shutting out the tumult and pain of living, making him an ecstatic prisoner. He could not bear to be away from Sarah, for then his happiness became shadowed by doubt. There came a fire in his head and an ache in his breast—and he longed wildly for the time when he would be able to work again. But when he was with her his spirit pressed, as it were, into her breast and abode there.

Sarah was as ununderstandable to the family at Jalna as ever, but they could not see her without being aware of an incandescence from within that lighted her every gesture. On the days when Finch did not go to her house she came to Jalna, her car gliding along the drive between the evergreens, while her pug gazed with tip-tilted nose through the window.

She brought little presents to Ernest and Nicholas, who roused themselves from their brooding to receive her. But, even while they were playfully gracious over their gifts, they looked on her with distrust, remembering bitterly her claim on Jalna. They were more than ever anxious that her marriage to Finch should take place as quickly as possible.

Between her and Alayne there existed an intimacy that could not be called friendship, yet was a source of acute interest to both. Alayne had known Finch since he was a schoolboy, and Sarah listened with avid interest to every incident of his boyhood which Alayne could recall. Any of these that related to suffering, she drank in with a strange triumphant smile. “We both had an unhappy adolescence!” she would exclaim.

Alayne, in her turn, sought in Sarah’s mind some understanding of Renny which, she felt, Sarah possessed. It was as though Renny and Sarah had some quality in common which they wilfully concealed, and Alayne, if she could not discover it in him, might find it lurking in Sarah. No such definite thought was in Alayne’s mind, but she faintly discovered in both the adumbrations of a calculated passion so alien to herself as to repel her. Around this passion Sarah’s outer being irradiated palely like the faint nimbus of a star. Sometimes Alayne almost feared her and she wondered if perhaps she had not done wrong in throwing her and Finch together.

To Wakefield and Pauline, Sarah was a bright and lovely being. Her Paris gowns, her white, exquisite skin, the glossy convolutions of her black braids, filled them with wonder and admiration. Her voice, her smile, fascinated them. Pauline would say of her—“If I were a man, there is the sort of woman I should love!” And Wakefield would return— “And if I didn’t adore you, I should fall for Sarah!”

Renny watched his young brothers in love with tolerant amusement.

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