The Wide House Page 4

  Panting, Janie lay back in her corner, glaring at her cousin with the maddest hatred. He smiled back at her easily, and shook his head, clucking again. “Truly, you must do something for that complexion, my girl. Yellowish-green doesn’t go well with hair the color of young carrots.”

  Janie opened her twisted mouth and emitted an oath, an ugly and obscene series of words. Stuart, in spite of himself and his amusement, was shocked. He put his hand over her mouth. She promptly bit it. He withdrew his hand with a howl, lifted it instinctively to strike her, and then, in the very downward swoop of that hand, he caught it back. He muttered something which only she heard. Then, suddenly black of face and narrowed of eye, he drew himself away from her, as far as possible, and stared before him.

  Janie burst into tears, loud and heart-breaking. Tussles were no new thing with her. She had often fought with her brothers and sisters, those who were nearest to her own age. She had invariably triumphed over them, frightened them, or reduced them to abject appeasement. She had never before encountered anyone who withdrew himself from her with such contempt as Stuart’s, and who heard her cries and sobs with such disgusted indifference. She cried louder. Stuart did not even shrug. He looked at Angus and Laurie.

  Bertie and Robbie, who had regarded the swift assaults that had taken place between their mother and their cousin with deep and absorbed interest, were not at all disturbed. They had often seen their mother strike their uncles and aunts with violence, whenever they disagreed with her, or tried to advise her.

  It was not at Bertie and Robbie that Stuart gazed, then. It was at Angus and Laurie. Angus had dwindled, so that his long lean length appeared much smaller than before. He had fallen back against the dusty leather seat of the coach, in an attitude of tragic collapse. His small dark face was ghastly, with a bone-like luminosity in the spectral dusky light that came through the windows. His gray eyes were half-closed. He seemed hardly to breathe. His hands lay beside him, palms upturned, and flaccid. He appeared barely conscious. From his nose twisted a thin rivulet of blood, of which he seemed completely unaware. Janie must have scratched him savagely upon his right check, for this was oozing slow red drops, and there was an ugly darkening spot on his right temple. Stuart, with strange and unfamiliar pity, guessed that it was Janie’s display of murderous hatred and madness which had caused this collapse of the poor lad, rather than her physical assaults upon him.

  Little Laurie, trembling, her lower lip caught sternly between her small white teeth, was kneeling beside her brother and attempting to stay the flow of blood from his nose with her tiny kerchief. Her beaver bonnet had fallen on her childish shoulders, and the setting sun, striking through a thick layer of gray clouds, lay like a coppery nimbus on her long golden hair. She was very quiet, and all her movements were old and tender and gentle. She wiped away Angus’ blood, pressed the stained kerchief firmly across the bridge of his nose, and held it there. Stuart was amazed, and achingly touched. When Angus sluggishly opened his eyes and looked dazedly at his little sister, she smiled at him eloquently and with courage, and bent and gently kissed his cheek. But not for a moment did she stop the strong pressing on the bridge of his nose. Angus sighed. He rolled a little towards the child, and closed his eyes again. Laurie murmured softly, over and over.

  My God, thought Stuart, with pity. The little darling, then, the little darling!

  He became aware that Janie’s sobs and groans were mounting in ferocity, that she had begun to writhe on the seat, that she was doing all she could to attract his bemused attention. He turned to her with a violent and threatening gesture. “Be still, you besom!” he shouted.

  Janie was so shocked at this very queer reaction to her rages and hysterics that she immediately and abruptly became silent. This, then, said her cunning mind, was no way to win Stuart. She sat up, meekly. She allowed real tears to drip pathetically over her cheeks, one of which was jerking spasmodically. She looked at Stuart, with imploring humility. She made her mouth shake. Her head drooped. She cried quietly. Stuart, in his turn, regarded her intently, his black eyes kindling and flashing, his mouth harsh and thin.

  She sobbed gently: “Stuart, my love, you don’t know what I’ve had to put up with, with that sneaking, snivelling hypocrite and liar! No one but God knows! What have I done that heaven should have punished me like this? It’s no wonder, God knows! that I forget myself. I’ve had thirteen years of him, turning his poor dead papa against me, sneaking behind my back to my own papa and mama with his lies, distressing me and humiliating me.”

  Her hoarse voice was very plaintive and beguiling. She reached out timidly and laid her hand on his arm. It stiffened under her touch. But he did not shrug her off.

  She clasped her hands together, and implored the wooden roof of the coach, the whites of her eyes shining malignantly in the dusk. A subdued but patient frenzy had her.

  “Such a liar, Stuart! You can’t imagine. It’s beyond you. A pious liar, always slipping off to his kirk with his prayer-books under his arm of a Sunday! Always praying and snivelling, and slipping about with his sly eyes, turning my nearest and dearest away from me with his false meeknesses and his whines.” She turned to her pet, Bertie.

  “My darling lad, tell your cousin this is true, that—that serpent of a brother of yours has made my life wretched, and a burden, with his tales and his lies and his impudence! Tell your dear cousin, Bertie!”

  Bertie had been grinning widely as he listened to his mother. “He does contradict,” he admitted, with a broader grin.

  “Contradict!” cried Janie, in simulated and frenzied grief. She put her hand to her heart and panted. “It is more than female sensibility can endure! Before Heaven, I swear it! I, who have been the best of mothers to my orphaned bairns, who have prayed all alone for them, with my heart breaking in my breast, humbly seeking out how best I might protect them from a cruel and unfeeling world, and then only to discover that I have nourished a viper in my bosom!”

  Her hoarse and croaking voice thickened with the rough accent of her forebears, and hearing that accent, which unwillingly brought the young Janie to his memory, and the dusky hills of home, Stuart felt his disgust and anger abating. He was annoyed at this. He wanted to hate Janie, but when he heard her speaking he smelled again the smoking peat fires of his youth, saw the darkening evening sky with its single white jewel of a star, the long lonely stretches of moor, silent under glimmering purple shadows, and heard the sound of cow-bells, melancholy in the twilight, and the laughter of those homeward bound from the fields. It was nostalgia that softened him towards Janie, and he sighed a little.

  Janie heard that sigh, and her shrivelled heart leapt. She glanced at him cunningly from beneath her sparse and yellowish lashes.

  “Still,” said Stuart, trying to speak roughly, “you were too hard on the lad, even if what you say is truth.”

  Janie wept. “You may be sure it is true, Stuart. I forgot myself. I always had a high spirit, God forgive me, and I can’t control myself when I hear lies. ‘Speak the truth and shame the devil,’ my dear papa used to say. I hate a liar, Stuart. I love truth. It is a weakness in me, I admit. I go quite frantic in the presence of a liar. ‘Janie will speak truth, always, no matter the consequence,’ my dearest mama always said. ‘Even if you kill the lass, she will stand before you and look you boldly in the eye. She’ll have no lies about her.’ O Mama, Mama!” sobbed Janie, uncontrollably, clasping her hands to her breast in a most touching gesture, and rolling her eyes upwards again. “To think your child has come to this, in a strange land, among strangers, practically orphaned, driven from her home to seek a new home for her helpless little ones, unbefriended and neglected, widowed and helpless!”

  “Well, well, then,” said Stuart, patting Janie’s hand. “It’s a hard way you’ve travelled, it seems. There, now, cease your blubbering, my pet, and here is my handkerchief for your tears. You’ve quite ruined your own.”

  His one desire, now, was to soften or prevent any private punish
ment which might be inflicted upon those two poor children. If he were to remain obdurate and contemptuous and cold, Janie would visit her hatred and frustration upon Angus and Laurie. Of this, Stuart had no doubt.

  “You’ve practically murdered the lad, Janie,” he said, moving closer to his cousin, and, with false tenderness, wiping away her tears. “It’s hard lines for you, I know, coming like this. But you’ve got to promise to be easier on the little wretch. Come on now, promise. If I hear of any more of your tantrums, I’ll turn you out in the snow, so help me God.” He added, rallyingly: “Look at the lad: he’s bloodied like a fox after the hounds have been at him. They hang women for that in this country, Janie.”

  The crafty Janie, still weeping, then displayed her admirable talent for acting. She used no finesse. Dazedly, she allowed her eyes to widen in complete amazement as she turned them upon the suffering Angus and Laurie. She stared violently. She put her hand again to her breast, and said, in a suffocating murmur: “No! No! I cannot believe it! Oh, dear Heaven, it was not I who did that! Tell me I did not!” and she grasped Stuart feverishly by the arm and sank against him, all tears and anguish, and implored him with her green eyes, which were now glaring in cleverly simulated horror and anguish. “Oh, how can I be forgiven? Stuart, my love, help me, help me!” She burst into loud and broken sobs quite piteous to hear, and so moved was she by her acting that she actually turned quite white under her sallowness, and her face quivered and jerked. “My temper, my odious temper! To think that I have so vilely attacked my puir bairn, by puir wee wean!” She put her hands over her eyes and groaned hoarsely. “Oh, tell me I did not do this!”

  Much as Stuart enjoyed this little scene, and silently congratulated Janie on an excellent performance, he was embarrassed before the dancing eyes of Bertie and the cool, watchful distaste of Robbie. He wanted to say to her: “Come now, enough of that, my lass. You are making a fool of yourself.” But he dared not. He said, therefore, very gravely: “You did, indeed, my girl. And it’s ashamed of you I am. There, now, save your tears for your children, and comfort them.”

  Though he knew the speed with which Janie usually acted, he was yet startled when she flung herself bodily from the seat and fell before her abused children on her knees, taking care, meanwhile, that her frock and cape had time to drape gracefully about her, and that her tight red curls should fall back upon her small sloping shoulders in a beguiling fashion. (Very touching, observed Stuart to himself.) She flung wide her arms to Angus and Laurie. She sobbed loudly. Then she seized Angus in her grasp and dragged him forcefully to her breast. She clutched him frantically, pressing his bruised and bleeding head to her shoulders, patting him, kissing him wildly, murmuring, groaning, sobbing with utmost despair and contrition, flinging back her curls, imploring Heaven for forgiveness with streaming eyes, crying out incoherently.

  Again Stuart glanced at Robbie and Bertie. Bertie was giggling silently. Robbie raised his thin black slashes of brows, and shrugged. But little Laurie had shrunk as far as possible from her distraught mother, had curled herself into a small ball in the corner of the seat. There she crouched, visibly trembling, her tiny face white as linen, her blue eyes shining deeply in the dusk. She appeared quite ill, her golden hair disordered over her shoulders and neck.

  Ah, my little darling, darling, thought Stuart again, with deep compassion.

  He turned his attention again to Janie and Angus. The boy lay supine in his mother’s frenzied arms. He allowed her to minister to him in her rough and febrile way. He endured her kisses.

  Then, to Stuart’s supreme astonishment, the boy broke out into the wildest sobs and cries, and began to return his mother’s embraces with despairing abandon.

  “Oh, Mama, Mama!” he cried. “Oh, Mama!”

  CHAPTER 5

  Though Janie had known that America was a “braw land,” and considerably larger than England and Scotland combined, she was dismayed at its apparently endless reaches as day after day passed in various coaches, and amid varying discomforts. The insular mind could not grasp far horizons, eternally changing, and boundless.

  By the fifth day of miserable travelling, she had begun to despise all Americans, who were, most certainly, not gentlemen. As for their ladies, they were dun and dull, prim of mouth and thinly raucous of voice, bearing all discomforts with pious resignation. They would sit with their mitted hands in their laps, their black or brown bonnets stiffly upright on their heads, their pale tight faces very set and grim, while their husbands, obviously finding the company of their consorts suffocating, resorted steadily to the bottle in every tavern and hotel at which the stages passed. Eventually, however, coming with delighted surprise upon the colorful and lusty Janie, with her false meekness and her sparkling long green eyes, they drank less and peeped at her, fascinated. They made timid and awkward overtures to her, in spite of the presence of the four children and the amused Stuart.

  She was all tenderness and softness and solicitude with her children now, understanding that Stuart was pleased by this. When Angus timidly “contradicted” her (and he could never seem to refrain), she would say, sweetly and archly, lifting a gloved finger at him: “Now, my lovey, perhaps Mama is mistaken, but it is very naughty of her little lad to say so.” When she would find Laurie staring at her fixedly, in her strange unchildish way, she would not shout at her, as usual: “Ye wee toad, I’ll clout ye for your impudence!” She would merely smile at Laurie tenderly, and ask her if her head ached.

  Her lusty delight in life survived steadily through all the punishing days, and as she was possessed by a deep curiosity about all things, she was rarely afflicted with ennui. Nor did the journey exhaust her, for despite her tininess and thinness of body she had been blessed by the finest of constitutions. Even her attacks of “bile” seemed to testify to a hardy endowment, and though her complexion suffered and became extremely yellowish, and her suppressed temper rose to heights of gall, her endurance was remarkable. While other ladies became faint and exhausted, and had to discontinue the journey temporarily, or became quite green when the gentlemen resorted to cheroots and pipes and whiskey, Janie thrived on it all. Stuart’s admiration grew.

  In the meanwhile, the landscape which had begun by being dreary, dull and dead, running with brown March mud and streaked by oily leaden water, became increasingly desolate beyond the windows of the coaches. Now the flat land was black and stricken, as they travelled north, smoking with gusts of dry and whirling snow. The foothills, too, were black as coal, low and empty, with here and there a dusky pine struggling to live and stand upright against gray and gaseous skies. The farmhouses huddled near the highway as if for protection, their wooden walls seeming to tremble in the harsh and howling winds. Their smoke lay flat and long along their eaves, boiling mournfully from the chimneys. The coaches passed frozen pools and little lakes, the black water just beginning to seep through the gray ice. Woods, twisted and sinewy, bare of every leaf, sluggishly rolled behind them. Also, the air was becoming steadily colder, so that the occupants of the coaches shivered, and the ladies clamored for hot bricks at the hotels, with which to alleviate their suffering. The roads were rougher now, full of frozen ruts or thick oozing mud, and the children, who had crossed the Atlantic without sickness, now retched miserably in their corners. The vehicles tossed and heaved, accompanied by the shoutings and curses of the drivers, and sometimes not more than ten miles would be covered in a day. Bad as the days were, the nights were worse, moonless and starless, filled with a leaden and crepuscular shadow, and often the travellers lost all track of time and came to believe that they had been tossing like this for ever in deep gloom and chill and misery.

  The country became wilder as it touched the borders of Pennsylvania. Now, in the dun and dreary light of day, the travellers could see the distant striding of black, snow-veined mountains, over which boiled purplish or ashen clouds. The road rose higher, so that some of the travellers were terrified at the glimpses below of far narrow valleys twisting between the m
ountains, of spectral icy lakes glimmering in the quicksilver and fugitive light of the infrequent sun. Sometimes, at sunset, a mauve and misty shadow fell over the gigantic and desolate landscape, giving it an eery and terrible air of doom and solitary immensity, while the dull crimson western skies outlined the mountains like an awful fire. Now there were no signs of any habitations at all, only this stark and terrible grandeur of frozen white earth and tremendous black mountains and gray dead rivers, and, at sunset, this frightful cosmic conflagration which reduced the world to pale, purplish fog and formless chaos.

  Janie, who was rarely aware of anything beyond the warm and cosy and immediate moment, now fell silent, staring out at the landscape with a look of fear on her pinched and shrewish face. The insular soul of the lowlander was filled with horror, nameless and shivering. Remembering the low soft hills of home, she was terrified at this gigantic grandeur. Her voice was very muffled when she said to Stuart, beside her:

  “It fair takes my breath.”

  Stuart glanced through the window, and said with the patronage of the seasoned traveller: “Oh, this is nothing at all. Mere foothills. I’ve seen the Rockies, when I went to California a year ago. I’ve done a bit of pioneering, myself.”

  “So big, so braw,” said Janie, unconsciously using the idioms of her Scottish father. “My God,” she added, “is there no end to this land?”

  “My darling, you’ve seen only the fringe,” said Stuart, indulgently. “The damn country’s as wide as the Atlantic. You’ve no idea.”

  He thought to inspire Janie’s amazement and interest, but she only shivered, huddling in her sables. She sighed, and moved as if her breath had been taken from her. The bloody light of the sunset outlined her narrow profile, with its large, predatory nose and wide thin mouth with its expression of cruelty. She murmured: “At home, the fields are white with daisies, and the lambs are on the hills.”