Jalna: Books 1-4: The Building of Jalna / Morning at Jalna / Mary Wakefield / Young Renny Read Free Page B

—
    “Now, put on your peignoir and let’s have something to eat.”
    He stood watching her with an air half-possessive, half-coaxing, while she drew on a violet velvet dressing gown and divested her wrists of her bracelets. As she seated herself at the table she gave a little laugh of complete satisfaction. Her eyes swept across the viands.
    “How hungry I am!” she declared. “And how good everything looks! I must have some of that cheese. I adore it!”
    “There you go again!” he said, cutting a wedge from the cheese for her. “You adore
food
! You adore
me
! What’s the difference?”
    “I said nothing whatever about adoring
you
,” she returned, putting her teeth into the cheese. She laughed like a greedy young girl. It was part of her charm, he thought, that she could sit there eating greedily and still look alluring. She appeared unself-conscious but her passionate love for him, her desire to express it, to put her nature beneath him, even while, in her femininity, she triumphed over him, made her slightest gesture, her half-glance, symbolic. He sat watching her, feeling that in some strange way the fact that she was eating greedily, that her arms were too thin, that her stays had been too tight, only increased her desirability.
    At last she rose and came to him. My God, he thought, did ever a woman move as she moves! She can never grow old!
    She came to him and sank into his arms. She lay along his body as though her will were to obliterate herself in him, willfully to become no more than a creature he had created by his passion. She tried to time her breathing with his, so that their two hearts should do even this in unison. He bent his face to hers, and their lips met. She turned her face swiftly away. Then, turning it again, with closed eyes, toward him, she kissed him in rapture.
    But the next morning she felt a sadness in her. They were leaving London. When might she see it again? Perhaps never, with all the dangers of travel between. What would happen to them in the New World? What strange distant place lay awaiting them?
    It was a journey of many hours from London to the cathedral town of Penchester. When Adeline alighted from the train she was very tired. Dark shadows made her eyes sombre. She looked ill. But the Dean’s carriage was waiting to meet them, with its comfortable cushioned seats and its lamps shining bright in the dusk. The streets were quiet, so they bowled along easily. Soon the towering shape of the Cathedral rose against the luminous west. Its windows still held a glimmer from the sunken sun. It looked ethereal, yet as though it would last forever. Adeline leant forward to gaze at it through the carriage window. She wanted to imprintits image on her mind, to take with her to Quebec. She felt that not even the Dean understood and loved the Cathedral as she did. And the sweet little streets that clustered about it — so dim, so orderly, so melting into the tradition of the past!
    And the Dean’s house itself! Adeline wished she owned it as she descended from the carriage. It looked so sedate, so warm-coloured, so welcoming. She might indeed have been the mistress, to judge by her luggage that cumbered the hall, her husband’s voice that rapped out orders to the servants, her infant that made the echoes ring with its crying, her parrot which rent the air with erotic endearments when it heard her voice. Augusta and the Dean seemed mere nobodies in their own house. Adeline flew to the parrot, chained to its perch in the drawing-room.
    “Boney, my sweet, I’m back!” she cried, advancing her lovely aquiline face to the bird’s beak.
    “Ah, Pearl of the Harem!” he screamed, in Hindu. “Dilkhoosa! Nur Mahal! Mera lal!” He nibbled her nostril. His dark tongue quivered against her lips.
    “Where did he learn all that?” asked the Dean.
    Adeline turned her bold gaze on him. “From the Rajah,” she returned. “The Rajah who gave him to me.”
    “It hardly seems nice,”