Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “You wouldn't,” Harriet said. “You didn't shut yourself up. You must have found something worth living for. I'm going to find it too.”

  “You can't find shadows. That's all there is.”

  “Love's not a shadow,” she said and pressed her hand hard into her breast.

  “That's true. Pain's real enough.”

  “Love I said. Love is not pain—it's joy.”

  “In books,” he said, “not in life. I loved my mother and my sister, and the gorse on the hills at Home in the springtime, and a girl—something like you she was.” He spread his hands. “A lot of joy that was to me when the time came to leave them and the years went past—five, ten, fifteen, twenty—and I knew I'd never set eyes on them again. And loving my daughter's a pretty bitter pill when I think she might be left without a penny in the world.” He paced the carpet again. “The plans I had for you! D'you think there's much joy watching them go by the board? To have had you married to an English gentleman—that would have shown these upstarts a thing or two, that would have been a real joy!”

  “Joy for you,” Harriet said. “What about me?”

  “For you too.”

  “Because it cleaned off some old score that never had anything to do with me, must it be my joy? Must I fall in love with somebody because it serves some end for you? No, Father, love's not like that. I might fall in love on my own account. What then? Suppose it was somebody you didn't like?”

  “You're angry,” he said, surprised. “Did I say something?”

  “You're so unjust,” Harriet said. “You make me out odious and selfish if I don't want to pay with my life for all you've suffered in the past. You treat me as if I was a sheep you'd bred for a purpose—your purpose. Oh, I know it doesn't sound very clear but that's how I feel.”

  He laughed. “It sounds very foolish.”

  “It isn't foolish. If I was to tell you I wanted to marry somebody now, somebody whose father you hated, you'd try to stop me even if it broke my heart. And if I ran away with him you'd curse me, wouldn't you, as if I'd done something monstrous when really it would be all your own doing. I. . .”

  “What're you harping on love for all the time?” he asked irritably. “You haven't gone and. . .”

  She tried to meet his eye but couldn't.

  “Oho! So you have, eh?” Another man might have entered the room and spoken. The haggard lines had vanished from his face, as though they had been drawn there in grease paint. The blood glowed up again under his scar. His head tipped alertly back and sideways, and the bag of dry skin tightened away under his jaw.

  Harriet wanted to speak out the truth, but his feet, crossing the carpet in four tremendous strides, frightened her. “No, no. I only meant James. You wouldn't let him marry Jennis Bowen.”

  “That Irish spawn. I should think not. So that's what's biting you, is it?” He grunted with relief and again tried to free his throat of the limp, string tie, but succeeded only in tightening it. “Calf love. You fill your heads with a lot of poppycock out of books.” He went to the window, threw it open, and took a deep breath.

  The rustle of leaves in the garden, the croaking of frogs along the river, the piping and flutter of birds settling for the night became audible, and the stagnant air of the room stirred against their faces. “Playing at life,” he said. “Well, I'll keep you playing as long as I can.”

  The gleam of sunset faded slowly from the windows and the dark face of the furniture. Harriet pressed closer to her breasts the burning thread from which she took courage and resolution again.

  Footsteps sounded on the veranda. Miss Montaulk. Her brisk rat-ta-tat on the door roused them from deep thought.

  Without waiting to be invited she came in, breathless, with a flurry of starched petticoats, which at once suffocated the fresh evening smells with the stuffy smell of dead flowers. In the middle of the room she stopped, one hand behind her back, her eyes, on which the last reflection of the red sky glittered, turning from Cabell to Harriet and back to Cabell. Against the dusk her face had a phosphorescent glow, as though illuminated from within by her malice, which conquered, in the flicker of a smile at Harriet, even her wish to look portentous.

  Harriet jumped up, clairvoyantly forewarned.

  “Stay where you are, you wicked girl,” Miss Montaulk said solemnly.

  “Your sins have found you out.”

  Harriet reached to support herself and took hold of the whatnot at the head of the sofa, a flimsy affair of bamboo loaded with Doulton bowls, Chelsea figures, and Satsuma teasets. A faint musical rattle of delicate china moved the silence.

  “What's wrong?” Cabell said. “You're shaking.”

  Miss Montaulk grinned, savouring her power to prolong pain, then whipped her hand from behind her back and presented to them, at arm's length, a grey sphere of something, unidentifiable in the dusk till Cabell had peered at it a second or two.

  “A hat?” he said. “What about it?”

  “A MAN'S hat!” Miss Montaulk said with appalled emphasis. “I found it in the garden. Ask her. Perhaps she can explain how it got there.”

  Harriet said nothing. At first glimpse of the hat the tinkling of china ceased and her face set against them.

  It was Cabell who brushed the proferred exhibit aside. “I suppose it belongs to the gardener.”

  “Gardeners don't usually wear hats with satin linings.” Miss Montaulk pushed it into his hand. “Look.”

  In the faded light he examined it—a fragment of a personality forlorn in dismemberment yet somehow audacious in its persisting odour of expensive pomade reeking through Miss Montaulk's stale smell and his own dry frowst of an old man. In his gnarled hands its rakish contours were undeniably revealed as a dashing mode, an element of youthful and self-conscious arrogance.

  “Whose is it?”

  Miss Montaulk hunched her shoulders. “I found it under the laurels. Harriet was there. To-day and yesterday—every day this week till sunset. The grass had been trampled flat. It's been LAIN on,” she whispered.

  “You don't mean that somebody's been in?”

  “Yes, they climbed the fence and met her under the laurels.” Miss Montaulk folded her hands across her stomach, her upper lip across the lower, and nodded. “The gardener was working in the plantation. He saw a man run out of the lane half an hour ago—WITHOUT a hat.”

  “Harriet, is that true?” Cabell said softly.

  She looked at them haughtily and answered nothing.

  “I'm asking you is it true?” he thundered. “Eh? So it is. You've been meeting some hooligan, have you? It wasn't James biting you after all, eh? Answer me, damn you.”

  But the white irradiance of her dress sank away from him under the rising darkness, leaving her as elusive and unassailable as a ghost.

  “Don't stand there. Light the lamp,” he shouted at Miss Montaulk. “I'll get to the bottom of this.”

  He threw the hat on to the sofa and lit a match himself. The lamp guttered under its canopy of frosted glass but its light helped only to confound him. He blinked helplessly at his table, on which the litter of papers recalled the tangle of his affairs demanding an urgent and singleminded attention, at Harriet whose face, still shadowed, seemed proof against all light, against any appeal, strategy, or force he could use. As the only thing in the room amenable to his will, he turned on Miss Montaulk. “You get to hell out of here, you simpering old scarecrow,” he yelled, and assisted her departure with a shove which spreadeagled her on the door. She pulled it open and fled into the passage, where she stumbled, squealing, over something.

  Cabell returned to Harriet. “Now the truth. Who owns that hat?”

  It hung over the arm of the sofa, rakishly across the pricked ear of a grinning, bearded satyr embossed on the wood with ironic little eyes of mother-of-pearl.

  “I know nothing about it,” Harriet said coolly.

  “You know nothing—nothing,” he mimicked furiously. “Well what were you doing in the garden? Explain me th
at.” He shook two fists in her face, and for want of anything better laid them on his own throat, tearing at the bedraggled tie until the veins swelled up blue and knotted under his ear. It snapped suddenly and his fist swept down within an inch of her face, but she did not move.

  “You didn't forbid me to use the garden,” she said.

  “I didn't forbid you anything, confound it,” he said. “Anybody'd think I kept a whip up my sleeve. But a man—some blackguard he must be, sneaking over back fences like that. By God I'll break his legs.”

  “I know nothing about any man,” she repeated in a dead voice, which seemed to come through layers of defunct space he could no more hope to penetrate than the space around the moon.

  As though he feared she would elude him where she stood, melt from his anger and his longing into the black darkness which lapped against the circle of the lamp, he took her face firmly between his two hands and drew her into the light. For a long while he studied her, turning her head from side to side to drive away the shadows lurking in the sockets of her eyes and concealing the two fixed, glimmering points of her pupils, in the depths of which, as in the hazy depths of the sea, moved shapes that could never be driven or coaxed out into the light of the day. “Ach, you slut,” he said, and pushed her from him. “The dead spit of your mother. Sly as a dingo.”

  She staggered, clutched the whatnot, and fell in a deafening crash of egg-shell china.

  She was on her feet at once.

  In silence they stared at the debris of a laborious collection, as if amazed at the variety of useless objects which had been hidden away in the shelves—cups and saucers, willow pattern plates, toby jugs, bowls depicting hunting scenes and merry English Christmases, crackleware teapots, plaited glass amulets from the islands, lumps of coral, pieces of jade, Chinese house gods, crystal goblets, etched decanters, storks and barnyard fowls blown in wafer glass. Somewhere in a far corner of the room a piece of crockery gyrated madly, faster and faster, settling at last with a musical ring on the polished boards. The sound had the pathetic finality of a fragile thing fighting a hopeless battle against a blind, brute force, a blind, brute fate.

  The opening of the door roused them. Geoffrey was looking in. The expression of innocent preoccupation on his face, disclaiming any knowledge of unusual goings-on in a room from which voices and the sounds of violence had just emerged to echo round the garden and scare the birds off their perches, was an assurance of deceit. But Cabell was in no mood to speculate on the motives of a son whose reality he had always been able to bribe away with a handful of small change. “What d'you want? Get out of here.”

  “I want my hat,” Geoffrey said mildly.

  “Your what?”

  “Hat,” Geoffrey repeated, his eyes searching the room with an astounding uninterest in the disorder, and lighting at last on the wretched thing, aslant across the mocking, satyr face. “Ah, there it is. Could've sworn I saw her lugging it in here.” He swaggered across the room and picked it up, apt pupil of a man who lived on his wits and hide.

  “That's not your hat,” Cabell said.

  “What?” Geoffrey was amazed. He examined the lining. “Yes, it is. Brewster and Co., High Holborn, London. Look. Of course it's mine.” He put it on. Jauntily it sloped towards his left ear, capping perfectly the tight trousers, loud waistcoat, patent-leather shoes, and the flower in his buttonhole—the finishing touch to a gay, knowing, smart young dog.

  “What's it doing in the garden then? You came in with me.”

  “A man puts his hat down for a minute and that old tabby runs off with it,” Geoffrey said indignantly. “I was looking for Harriet. YOU wanted her. I thought she might be over in the plantation, so I hopped the fence and went up the lane. When I came back there was Montaulk scooting up the garden with my cady, the old battle-axe. Why, what's the matter?” He affected surprise, then injury. “A man tries to help and all a man gets is. . .” Mumbling he shuffled crabwise from the room and slammed the door.

  “Hmn.” Cabell closed his mouth with the back of his hand, then picked up the whatnot and began piling bowls and saucers into its shelves. “Made a bit of a mess here,” he growled. “All this stuff—no damned use either.”

  Harriet moved towards the door.

  “Here, wait a minute. No good going off in a huff. I'm sorry. My tongue ran away with me again.” He straightened his back and gestured towards the table. “Got plenty to worry about. You might try and have a bit of understanding. At my age a blow like that knocks you off your feet.”

  Harriet fled from the sight of his rumpled aged figure groping blindly among the broken china and from the sense of her own wrong against him.

  But he reached the door first. “Don't be impatient with your father, dear. I'll make it up to you. I'll buy you something.”

  “I don't want anything. Let me go please, Father.” She felt that if she had to stay there any longer looking at him she would break down and confess, and that would be the end of everything.

  “Well, perhaps you'd like to go to the Governor's ball, eh? Peppiott said something. I said I'd think about it. They'll all be there, all 'that mob.' Yes, it's about time you showed yourself off somewhere. It's true I'm a selfish old man. But before you go, Harriet”—he turned her round—“you forgive me, don't you?”

  “Oh, yes, yes. My head aches. Please let me go.”

  She sped down the passage and up the stairs. Through the banisters she caught a glimpse of his face uplifted, his scraggy neck, his hands hanging at his sides. She threw herself on her bed and wept. “Oh, if only Doug would come now and carry me a long, long way away without any argument or questions—cut all these threads. . .” Then she became still, sniffing a little, thinking. “But how? They might kill each other.” She lay there for half an hour turning wild plans over in her head.

  She was washing tear marks off her face when Geoffrey knocked and slid through the half-open door with a blackmailer's furtive but relentless determination.

  He listened with one ear against the panel to the buzz of voices downstairs. “They're safe. He's blowing the tripes out of her. Wouldn't do for them to see us laying our heads together, y'know.” He seated himself on the bed and thumbed the arm-holes of his waistcoat. “Pretty smart, eh? Left the old box of tricks standing, what?”

  “I suppose you were listening at the keyhole,” Harriet said contemptuously.

  “When I see a wench in trouble I stick at nothing, especially when she's a man's sister and caught red-handed you might say.”

  “I wasn't caught at anything. It was all a misunderstanding.”

  Geoffrey winked. “Of course. And two and two make five and pigs fly. But let us talk about something more interesting. My hundred quid—did you ask him?”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “No?” Geoffrey was incredulous. “Well that's cold gruel for you. But you will? Now you've got him on toast? I need your help, Sis, y'know, JUST AS MUCH AS YOU NEED MINE.”

  “Yes, I do need your help,” Harriet said, “I will get your money. But you must do something. You must sell my jewels for me?”

  “Sell your jewels? What for?”

  “It's the only way you'll get your money. I won't ask Father for a penny.”

  “But he's lousy with it.”

  “Never mind. Will you do it?”

  “I'll want fifty extra.”

  “Very well, but I've got to have the money before the Governor's ball.”

  “I'll see a bloke about it to-morrow,” Geoffrey promised. “Anything to oblige a bloke's sister.”

  Chapter Ten: A Sad Tale

  They went to the ball. Harriet was dazzled. The light blazing down from chandeliers upon the jewels and dresses of the women, the elegant, low-cut white waistcoats and white ties of the men, the music, the excited chatter, the Chinese lanterns in the garden—in all her fancies of brilliant life she had never imagined anything like it. For a moment it frightened out of her head the plans she had hung upon this night.

&
nbsp; It was the social event of the year. To that select few it brought together—squatters from the west, planters from the north, leading lights of law and medicine who passed for learned men in the antipodes, wealthy merchants, and especially their wives and daughters—it was, more than a social event, the fulfilment of an aspiration, an ideal. The representative of Her Majesty, upon whose head lay the halo of a very trying demi-godliness, received them as his own kind on terms of perfect, if strenuous, equality. To those who suffered obscure heartburnings about the past the touch of His Excellency's fingers had the soothing force of an episcopal laying on of hands. To those whose imported ormolu cabinet concealed the skeleton of an old landtaker who had amassed property but never learnt to write his name, the stairs up which they climbed towards his Excellency, waiting with tactfully familiar smile at the top, were the last difficult ascent from purgatory. In those like Cabell, who were deeply weathered by a raw life but nevertheless had kept intact some inner, imaginative tie with the Old Country, it awakened bitter-sweet memories of a lost world.

  “Where're your jewels?” he demanded after a glance round the room, where many heads turned to stare at the extraordinary picture they made in the doorway—his grey face with the purple scar and the eye-patch of rough leather, lowering eyebrows and peppered beard, Harriet pale and nervous in white tulle with a pink tunic, pink slippers, a single pink rose in her hair, and a band of black velvet round her throat emphasizing the heavy blackness of her eyebrows and the deep, black setting of her eyes.