“I didn't want to wear them,” she said quickly.
“What d'you think I bought them for? All these ninnies eyeing you off.”
But before he could say more Peppiott bustled across the parquetry and welcomed them. “How auspicious. We were just talking about you. His Excellency is all agog.”
“Talk of the devil, eh?” Cabell said, out of feelings painfully mixed, pleasure in the spectacle of the ball and people watching him with sidelong, respectful! eyes—one of his fancies come true—and the worried thought that in two days' time, to-morrow perhaps, he might be bankrupt.
“Devil! No, angel,” Peppiott said fatuously, touching Harriet's hand with the rat's hair of his moustache. “A veritable angel!”
Cabell snorted and gave Harriet his arm, and they followed Peppiott across the floor to where Lord Alford was standing among a number of ladies and gentlemen looking on at the dance and lankly, wearily attending to a plump little woman whose widow's weeds were decorated like a Christmas-tree with chains, cameos, brooches, gold bows, and lockets. Mrs Bowen, he recognized. Seeing him she ceased talking and her face took on an expression of injury and scorn.
Peppiott presented them. “His Excellency was acquainted with your brother, the Colonel.” He cringed between them and talked for all to hear. In view of an event which he hoped was maturing to a happy conclusion he was anxious, with everybody here who mattered, to bring to light certain creditable facts about the high connexions of this man who looked so sinister and had such a disreputable record. “Isn't that so, Excellency?” he prompted when Alford, not responding, continued to stare at Cabell with a look of doubt, while pensively stroking the silky, brown dragoon whiskers which hung, like unravelled ropes' ends, over his chin. Clearly that old eager face had taken the wind out of his sails. Under his scrutiny it became even more barbarously unlike what he had expected in a brother of the foppish Colonel Victor Cabell, of the Hussars. Just so Cabell read his face, and nervously rubbed his hands together, shrinking slightly from his tall, stiff erectness as if he wished to withdraw into the shell of his starched shirt. He glanced quickly, furtively, to right and left, saw Mrs Bowen again and behind her Flanagan, with the cross of his knighthood dangling from his collar, wondered how many more were here who remembered back twenty-six years and what they'd been saying about him. Yes, there was Dennis's grandson, peering haughtily across a flat, Irish nose. “You can't alter the brand of five centuries in the bog with five years at Harrow, you puppy.” And as it came back to him how they had had him down then, he thought again how they would have him down to-morrow unless this damnable share business righted itself. That put him on his mettle again. He straightened his back, bowed, and turned to go.
Alford came out of his trance. “Of course. Of course. The old Colonel. Devil of a fellow. I knew him.”
“Devil of a fool,” Cabell shot back.
The awkward silence put on him the onus of justifying this rude retort. “Fell off a horse and broke his neck,” he said, as if defining an ultimate human degradation.
Alford succeeded at last in twisting his whiskers to a point. For a moment they elevated themselves gracefully, then exploded apart, tickling his nostrils and causing him to vent a prodigious damp sneeze.
It was the great preoccupation of his life to make those grand moustaches stand up in martial points, but he never did quite succeed. While engaged in momentous public business, such as turning the sod of a new railway, laying a foundation-stone, opening Parliament, or presiding over the Executive Council, he would suspend proceedings to make a last, desperate assault on them, holding his breath as, with sad cockeyes, he watched them come slowly apart. A baffling figure of a man this spindle-backed aristocrat upon whom his guests looked with mingled contempt and abject reverence. He was known to wear stays and pass the time playing the piano with one finger, embroidering tea-cosies, and reading the sermons of Dr Spurgeon. He was known also to have got himself into hot water with the Queen for leading a harum-scarum night ride of her guardsmen across Kent, breaking the legs of six horses and the necks of two men, and, when shipped off to the Sudan, to have caused a mob of dervishes to abandon stores, arms, and horses by creeping into their camp at night and singing “God Save the Queen” in his high, cracked voice. He performed his official duties with the utmost punctilio, but frequently went straight from a church service or a meeting of the Council to an illegal prize fight on the river-bank at South Brisbane. In conversation he had no mean between talking like an imbecile and talking like an official document, but on rare occasions he did stutter out a sensible observation and at once got very red and tried to hide himself by spreading his whiskers over his face.
After the sneeze he looked shaken, defeated. He blew his nose and sighed. “He had a packet of fun while it lasted, the old dog,” he said.
“A fool and his fun are soon parted,” Cabell said severely, “and his family left to foot the bill.”
“Demmit, you don't expect us all to leave England, home, and beauty and become pioneers, do you?”
There was a titter, slightly disapproving, but indulgent since the remark seemed to be at Cabell's expense rather than colonials in general.
“Demned hard life,” Alford complained. “Demned heroic, of course.”
Cabell bowed again. “In its unspectacular way, your Excellency. There were no tigers, as I remember your father,” he nodded to Peppiott, “telling me some forty-five years ago when I was a limejuicer and Sir Michael Flanagan here was. . .” the company, horrified at a threat in his eye, held its breath, “. . . a mere young, ambitious man.”
Lord Alford put his eyeglass in and turned on his style of an official pronunciamento, “Let me assure you, sir, Her Majesty is as fully cognizant of the difficulties and heroism of her early colonists in this state as of those which history will record in any part of her Empire. . .”
“It shows the greatest generosity to have kicked us out in our youth and to hail us as heroes in our old age, my lord,” Cabell said when the applause died down. “I am told the sun never sets on Her Majesty's Empire. When it is setting on one of those heroes you mention it must be something to know that he gave his hot blood to achieve the ideal of some gentleman in Whitehall. A perpetually youthful empire confided for safe-keeping to such gallant fellows as my brother! He would not begrudge them their medals and pensions.”
Peppiott remained cringing between them with a frozen gesture of dismay, waiting for the roof to fall in. But Alford applauded enthusiastically. “A demned fine sentiment, sir.” They looked doubtfully at his face, but it was opaque—with stupidity or diplomacy. You could never tell which.
“Hear! Hear!” Flanagan gasped suddenly, richly from the bottom of his morass.
Cabell gave him a baleful stare. In the politician's blue eyes, like two little bits of glass dropped into a basin of soft pudding mixture, there was a malign twinkle which he knew well. Or at least he told himself there was, thinking, “If I fall that dingo will be the first on top of me.” “Yes, there's surely some truth in the saying that we left our country for our country's good,” he said. “Sir Michael will vouch for it.” Mrs Bowen's chains rattled.
“Yes, indeed, ma'am,” Cabell said brutally, “and you'd have thought so yourself, too, if you had seen us then—the morning I first set eyes on your mother. She was a Mrs Duffy at the time. You remember the day, Flanagan? Not a stone's throw from here. She was sitting on a horse calmly watching the flogger taking the skin off some ruffian's back. Remarkable how even a woman became hardened to sights that would have made you swoon, ma'am. Some servant of hers she'd brought in strapped to her stirrup-iron. His name I don't remember. Ah, yes.” He smiled at her with the bitter sneer in the corner of his mouth, where the scar dragged it up. “We were on our way to a grog shop kept by an old lag. What was his name again?” He looked the group over and settled his eye on young Dennis, bulging crimson out of his collar and looking fit for murder. “Dennis. Patrick Dennis. Yes. I remember you remarki
ng that the lady had ten thousand sheep, Flanagan—and was a woman at that!”
His voice, loud and jeering, rose clearly above the music and the patter of the dancers' slippers, and ceased in murmur of deprecating “hemhems.” Lord Alford smiled naively round the semicircle of glum or startled faces. That smile was malignant if it was not inane.
Mrs Bowen's kindly eyes shone in tears of vexation. “You give Lord Alford a very false, coarse impression of our country,” she said in a husky voice.
They looked at her and half-smiled, but drew together with a subdued protest as Cabell said, “You've got a short memory, ma'am, if you think it was always as gentlemanlike as this.” He nodded at the dancers. “There's a few there whose fathers and grandfathers could have told a coarser tale than mine.”
By a slight movement they left him standing at bay before them, an outlandish figure with a slip of a girl at his side. Harriet, feeling their hostility, drew closer and slipped her hand under his arm again. She knew what was biting him, what fear of imminent failure and shame, what freshened pang of the past's futile guilt and disgust. Never before had she understood so well how lonely he was with his memories and irreconcilable heart, torn by impossible longings, by foolish pride, by hatred of the man life had made him and arrogant satisfaction in the brutalities of that crude fellow. Understanding, she felt ashamed of herself. For it was her deceitfulness which brought him here among old enemies, when he was least in the mood to face them, so that she might kill the last hope he had. He seemed pathetically gullible to her then, an ineffectual, a pitiable old man. She felt angry with him for being so, as though he did it on purpose to make her feel sorry for what she was about to do. “Father!” she whispered, “Don't! Please!” and looked around at the dancers in the hope of finding someone to come and take him off her hands. She had seen Cash as they entered, leading a lady out on to the floor, and now he passed, waltzing like a bear—an unfamiliar Cash, in evening clothes like a performing bulldog dressed up in velveteen pants. He read the anxious look in her eye, and the next time round led his partner up to the group. It was Miss Ludmilla—could not very well have been anybody worse in Cabell's present frame of mind. “The bitch who stole my mine.” He saw her and sent her a sour greeting.
Dr Barnett was expostulating with him. “We weren't all jail litter, you know, sir. There were some gentlemen who tried to keep the torch burning. Up on the Downs my father used to ride a hundred miles two or three times a year to drink sherry and sing the Gaudeamus with friends who could turn a Latin rhyme as easily as they could turn a steer.”
“Or flog a convict servant,” Cabell said dryly. “Or order him to be flogged if they didn't care to dirty their own gentlemanly, white hands. It's not what men were but what they became, Dr Barnett, with all due respect to your father.”
“My father, and many another like him remained an English gentleman to his dying day,” Dr Barnett replied in his thin, cultivated voice. “He was such a stickler for tradition he'd put a frock-coat and stock on every night for dinner, even if he had to take them off afterwards to fight a bushfire. You might almost say he was more English than the English.” Lord Alford unexpectedly applauded. “More English than the English! Demned fine sentiment. True too. Chap feels like a low cockney among you sometimes. Such ladylike ladies and such devilish gentlemanly fellows—hang it, you're paragons.” The vacuous amiability of his weak, green eyes, twinkling under hairless brows, acquitted him of any irony.
They laughed at him to relieve a tense situation.
“There were frock-coats and stocks enough,” Cabell mumbled. “A man might go mad, like Brummell, and wear a cravat in the back streets of Caen to convince himself that he was still cutting a figure. I've heard he did. My father knew him well.”
“Mr Cabell, sir,” Dr Barnett said severely, “are you speaking with a DOUBLE ENTENTE?”
“Oh, I didn't know your father,” Cabell said. “He was no doubt as good as his velvet stock. I'm thinking of other men. 'For example,” he glanced at Ludmilla, “there was a colonel. . . Well, a man of consequence. He came out under some cloud and went into the bush. Built himself a Tudor mansion out of slabs and bark and mud, and soon believed he was still in England. I suppose he had to believe it had never happened—whatever it was that brought him out. Anyway, there he was, a stickler for tradition with his frock-coat and his cravat and a lot of other fandangles beside, a hundred miles from nowhere, and his two girls (they had the proper roses in their cheeks when they came), and his wife, a fine woman, pining for the sound of a human voice. But he wouldn't have a man on the place. Nothing less than a duke was good enough to marry them he thought, and there were damnably few dukes in the Never-Never. It was pretty terrible to watch that old fool pretending he was in his deer park at home, that nothing had changed, no bridges been burnt, and he might be called any minute to hop in his carriage and go up to kiss the Queen's hand. And all the time the three women playing up to him, stiff as boards, but losing the roses bit by bit and never hearing anything but his barmy rant or seeing a soul but wild blacks.”
“Poor girls!” Mrs Bowen murmured impulsively. “What a sad tale!” Then realizing who told it she sniffed scornfully.
“A most sad tale,” Ludmilla said in a mocking voice.
Cabell bowed and she made him an old-fashioned curtsy in reply.
“Why don't you finish it?” she said. “It surely didn't end there with the ladies sitting up stiff and withering slowly away.”
“No, it didn't. That's true.”
“Well, what became of them, pray?”
“Yes, confound it, you can't leave the ladies sitting up,” Alford said, in high fettle again at getting one side of his moustache twisted.
“The first,” Cabell said, with a glance at Ludmilla's sunbitten face, “she married when the old fellow blew his brains out and the mother, fine lady, died of a broken heart. The other. . .”
“Well?” Ludmilla prompted.
“Well, she was a pretty, soft bit of a girl and she turned into a regular, tight-fisted old maid. Might have made some man a good wife, too. If you'd known her then and saw her to-day you'd understand how much wearing a stock every night at dinner means after a few years in this country. It doesn't mean more than stage scenery or the bit of hair a man hangs on to in mind of the sweetheart he's lost.”
“Oh, la, Mr Cabell,” Ludmilla laughed “you're an indifferent bad storyteller. You leave out all the other characters.”
“There were few others in that place.”
“Aye, but those few wicked and greedy enough, I warrant, to excuse even a pretty, soft bit of a girl becoming tight-fisted in defence of her own.”
Cabell shrugged, grunted.
Mrs Peppiott smirked into the long pause, wagging a roguish forefinger at Cabell, in an effort to make peace. “You're too downright hard on us, Mr Cabell. Mr Trollope was kinder. He praised us most lavish, and he'd just come from the Old Country with a fresh eye. The scenery, he said, was more romantic than he'd visited, even on the Rhine. Have you read him?”
“I fear not, ma'am,” Cabell said in a tired voice. The fight was gone out of him. His face looked pinched and grey.
Lord Alford put the finishing touch to his whiskers and stared at the company with smug satisfaction. “Demned useful country for writers,” he said. “When they don't know what to do with a character they ship him off to Australia. The country must be full of Micawbers and Lady Masons if these scribbling johnnies. . .” He broke off and snatched his eyes away to stare down his nose while his whiskers writhed and fell heavily across his chin. His face stretched, his mouth opened, and he sneezed three times.
Discreetly they averted their eyes while he blew his nose. The dance was ending. People crowded past towards the veranda where one could catch a breath of cool air. The group around Alford gratefully seized an excuse to break up.
Cabell bowed to the Governor and turned to go, but Ludmilla caught his arm. “A moment,” she said quickly. “I wante
d to see you.” He turned back.
“No, not here. Give me your arm and take me where I can breathe.”
He looked round for Harriet but Cash had come up to talk with her. The crowd, pushing towards the door, swept them away.
“I have a story to tell, too,” Ludmilla was saying. “Even more curious than yours about the soft, pretty girl. It concerns a man who was a millionaire yesterday and to-morrow—a bankrupt, perhaps?”
“Eh?”
“You're interested? Find me a quiet place and I'll tell you.”
Chapter Eleven: A Puzzle for Cash
Cash pushed a shoulder between Mrs Peppiott and Harriet, and steered Harriet away with a firm hand.
She protested, looking back for her father, but he made a bee-line through the crush, half-dragging her behind. Out on the veranda he found an unoccupied lounge and bumped her on to it.
“Oh, Mr Cash!” she said, rubbing a red thumb-print on her white arm. “Can't rescue a wench from a dragon without leaving a bit of a bruise,” he replied irritably.
It was unusual for Cash to be in a bad temper. Harriet looked at him curiously. His big, brown face was gloomy and reproachful. It annoyed her more. “Well, I'm not one of your—creatures.”
“My creatures?”
“Whatever her name is. That red-headed person.”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course.” He snapped his fingers as though a riddle had been solved for him, brightened, then gloomed again at her thoughtfully. “No, you're not a Queenie. You're a lady—that is, a blamed puzzle.”
She tossed her head. “I thought nothing was a puzzle to you?”
“I thought so myself. I suppose I'd never met a real, live lady before.”
“I'm sorry I can't return the compliment.”
His red mouth, dead in the crevice of his beard, turned its corners down and he nodded slowly on a just retort. “I guess you're right there, Miss Harriet. I wasn't born and bred in a long coat.”
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