Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  The exploit, which Cabell had just pulled off when Miss Montaulk's letter arrived, earned him new respect and hatred, but its pleasure tasted unexpectedly stale. “What's it all for? Who will thank me?” he asked himself as the coach rattled him across the valley. The knowledge that he had done a dirty trick aggravated his sense of Harriet's treachery. Why did he make enemies if not in fighting for her? Surely the least she could give him was affection; but she had no heart, no pity. Nervously he reread Miss Montaulk's letter. It upset him, especially the story about the stabbing. “She's got bad blood in her. She'll stop at nothing.”

  But there were no hysterics when he arrived. Harriet had recovered from that. She greeted her father coldly but she greeted him, and she sat down to dinner with him and ate well. She even smiled at him once or twice with spiritless affability and submitted to being kissed before she went to bed.

  Cabell was not relieved. On the contrary, he would rather have had it out, whatever was stored behind her compressed mouth. There was something malign in her false geniality and in her eyes which called forth again the resemblance to her mother. He felt that they were watching all the time in the shadow of their sockets for an opening through which to strike a careful blow. What sort of a blow? Could she be making up her mind to repeat her performance in Brisbane? But Cash WAS gone now. Or was he? Plots to elope in the schooner and whatnot swirled in his brain.

  Miss Montaulk's eyes rolled at the idea.

  “I've got to have that letter. It will tell us everything.”

  Miss Montaulk considered. “There's one way. When she goes to the bath to-morrow morning lock her in and search her rooms.”

  “There'd be hell to pay.”

  “But you might save her from something worse than death!”

  Cabell knew it was a mad thing to do, that it would offend Harriet brutally, but he could not help himself. The fantasies he had built up around Harriet, and the inner knowledge that he was fighting with her to keep his faith and purpose in life, made his jealousy uncontrollable and gave it a fair face. He carried Miss Montaulk's plan out.

  After demanding peremptorily to be released Harriet ceased rattling the door handle and sat on the edge of the bath, silently weeping and raging by turns.

  For three hours Cabell and Miss Montaulk searched her rooms—among her clothes, in her books, under the carpets, but found nothing.

  Miss Montaulk egged him on. “She has it with her now. You must go in and take it from her.”

  “No, no, I couldn't do that.”

  “Think of her danger. Surely the end justifies the means.”

  Cabell went to the bathroom door. “I'm sorry to be doing this, Harriet, but I must have that letter you got from Cash. Where is it?”

  “You'll never get it,” Harriet said.

  He opened the door. Harriet was standing against the wall, her hair down and her dressing-gown wrapped tightly round her body. She looked frightened.

  “Give me the letter please, dear,” Cabell said, nervously breaking his nails. “I know more about the world and the scamps in it than you. Remember the unhappiness you brought on yourself before and let me guide you now.”

  Harriet's eyes blazed. “Drive you mean—or trick.”

  He seemed hardly to notice her reply. He was thinking how pretty she looked with her hair down in wavy, chestnut ropes and the thin column of her neck bare—how fragile. Not for a long time had he seen her so young and fresh. Tenderness swept his hesitation away. He tried to put his hand on her shoulder, but she drew back. “Little Harriet,” he said, “believe me, I'm only doing this because I love you more than anything else in the world.”

  Harriet pouted scornfully and drew her wrap tighter, sharply defining through the silk the curve of her hips.

  He turned his eye away. “So don't make me do things which will hurt us both. Give me the letter. I know you've got it with you.”

  “I'll never give it to you. I've told you once. Now let me go.” She tried to slip past between him and the bath, but he put an arm round her shoulders and held her.

  “You must give me the letter first.”

  “Oh, if you only knew what you're doing to me,” Harriet cried with sudden tears. “In a minute you'll make me do something dreadful.”

  Tenderness swept him again. He drew her closer, comfortingly. What tiny bones, what thin shoulders. Like a warm little bird quivering with fright in the hand. “You're hurt, I know. But I've got to do it. You're hardly more than a helpless child and there are evil things in the world it's my duty to protect you from, even if I make you hate me. I must do it because I love you. I'd suffer the torments of the damned to keep you fresh and innocent and young, and if a fellow like Cash insulted you I'd hang to pay him back.”

  Harriet wriggled out of his arm. A faint perfume of powder and scented soap enveloped him. As she struggled the dressing-gown fell open at the neck and he saw, lying on her breast where her hand held it, a fold of paper.

  Instantly his emotions changed from melting tenderness to anger. The lid came down over his eye, his jaw clamped, and the colour faded around the purple welt across his cheek. He pushed her roughly against the wall. “So you carry it there, eh? The paper his dirty paws have been mauling. Here, hand it here at once or I'll—I'll. . .”

  Harriet edged along the wall to put the bath between them. “Don't dare,” she said in a shaky voice. “I'm my own mistress. I've a right. . .”

  He leapt at her and they wrestled, Harriet holding the gown close to her throat while Cabell tried to pull her hands away. Suddenly she gave a terrified whimper and cried, “Here, take it,” whipped the letter from her breast, and threw it on the floor.

  Miss Montaulk ran in from the doorway and picked it up.

  For a moment longer father and daughter gazed at each other, then Cabell's eye drooped and he shuffled away. At the door he looked back, gestured. “Damn it all, Harriet, I'm your father.”

  “Certainly,” Miss Montaulk said. “Certainly.”

  Harriet slammed the door.

  Chapter Eight: Flanagan Again

  Cabell was ashamed of what he had done but that made him only more insistent that he had done what was right. If he was in the wrong Harriet was in the right, which was impossible, for Harriet wanted to leave him for Cash, and Cash, as every one knew, was a tramp. So Harriet must be wrong, and right and honour must be all on his side. He, not Harriet, was the one to forgive, and HIS love was so selfless that he had forgiven her already. But Cash. . .

  Here was a man who owed him everything, yet he used the money and hospitality Cabell had given him to poison Harriet's mind. Why, even as he wrote this letter he was asking fresh favours and receiving them—“and no doubt laughing at me all the time, the crook!” What could be bad enough for a man like that? “He ought to be crushed like a bug.” But it was one thing to argue the moral duty and imagine the joy of crushing Cash but quite another to do the crushing. The most obvious way to get at him was through his money, but Cash was cunning. His lawyer, Cabell's co-trustee, was devoted to Cash that way, and as for strangling him, he was already safe at sea. “Lucky again,” Cabell reflected when several hours of hard thought failed to turn up any other means of making Cash suffer; but Cash's luck, as Cash himself often said, did not work in straight lines.

  Cabell went to the mine for a week to escape Harriet's angry silences and console himself with the spectacle of his new works now almost complete. He was sitting in the office poring over reports from the chemists and engineers one evening when his clerk came in and told him that a gentleman, just arrived from Brisbane on the afternoon coach, wanted to see him.

  “Send him in.”

  Cabell glanced up at the bulky shadow in the doorway, and his mouth came open as Flanagan, staggering under his fat as though a gale was blowing against him, entered and waved a gracious greeting.

  He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down. The dust of the journey was still thick on him, except where a hasty pot of beer had was
hed a half-moon of dirt from his upper lip.

  “Well!” Cabell said, shocked.

  Flanagan's impudent blue eyes, watering from the grit under their lids, were like two little pieces of ice melting slowly in the furnace of his face. “I guessed I'd find ye hereabouts. Sittin' on yer mountain of gold.”

  “What d'you want?” Cabell demanded.

  “Och now, ye were always an impatient fellow, Cabell. Give a man time to collect himself. It must be thirty years close on since I set eyes on ye face to face.”

  “I remember it,” Cabell said.

  “There, there,” Flanagan rumbled soothingly. “Let bygones be bygones. I'm willing to.”

  “You!”

  “Sure. Haven't I let meself be rolled and bumped half out of me skin to come four hundred miles to see ye.”

  “For no benefit to me, I'll be sworn.”

  “The answer's yes and no,” Flanagan said. “A matter of give and take.” He sank, gasping, into his quagmire for a moment, then pulled himself out with a hand on the edge of the table. “I've got a little proposition to make ye. . .”

  “Save your breath,” Cabell said. “I want nothing to do with you. I know you're in a bad way, and if you expect help from me you're a fool.” He stood up. “Now be on your way. If I'd known it was you, you'd not have got in here.”

  “You'd've been the fool then,” Flanagan said softly, not moving. “You'd've lost fifty thousand pounds.”

  “Uh?”

  Flanagan smiled, but the cleaned circle on his upper lip made it look like a malignant grin. “Come now, man, don't be jumping round like a Jack-in-the-box and you and me old friends and might've been connected by marriage. Ah, that was a hard thing ye done there, Cabell. I doubt if Jimmy'll ever forgive ye, especially if ye bear down hard on the poor girl now and drive her to destitution.”

  “What the devil are you talking about? What's the point?”

  “The point is simple,” Flanagan said. “I'm up the spout and I need thirty thousand pounds to get out again.”

  His cool impudence made Cabell sit down and take a long breath before he replied, “Do you think I'd give you the smell of my breath if it was to buy you out of hell?”

  “All things considered,” Flanagan said complacently, “I'm sure you would.”

  “Look here, Flanagan, d'you remember the time I came to see you in Brisbane when you were a minister and McFarlane was stealing land from me, and you kept me kicking my heels outside your door for days on end and then refused to help me and dragged my name in the mud when I went to court. I was a young man in those days, Flanagan, at the turning-point of my life, and you brought more misery on me than I could ever repay.”

  “I seem to remember something about it,” Flanagan said. “But what's the misery you're yelling about. You've got on, and here's the McFarlanes and me. . .”

  “Yes,” Cabell said. His face relaxed as he looked over Flanagan's head at the scene beyond the office window. Dusk was falling on Monaghan Street. The pubs were roaring full—the day shift fighting in to slake its thirst, the night shift fighting out after its last drink. Away across the ridge the stampers marched, like an endless army plodding by. As the quick darkness came down Flanagan sank deeper and deeper into his bog till there was only a black round hole from which emerged tentatively his expiring breath, but Cabell's face grew clearer and uglier with a fiery radiance reflected from the furnaces which glowed on the pitchy mountain-side as though the miners had opened a tunnel straight to the earth's incandescent heart. “Yes, things have changed a bit,” Cabell said. “YOU'RE sitting on the wrong side of the table to-day.”

  “Well now,” Flanagan said, “I wouldn't be so sure of that—I mean about who's sitting on what side of the table.”

  “No?” Cabell chuckled.

  Flanagan chuckled too. That merry sound coming from the depths of his black pit was disquieting, as though a man should laugh up from the bottom of a well when you'd pushed him in.

  Cabell's eye turned with the furnace light prinking it.

  “You've forgotten your fifty thousand pounds,” Flanagan said, “haven't ye?”

  “Fifty thousand pounds?” Cabell racked his brains again. He had no fifty thousand pounds in danger. Every penny of his money was tied up snugly against the storm. “What's your bluff?”

  “What's yours? I just happen to know you've got fifty thousand pounds in the Queensland Incorporated under Cash's name.”

  “Oh? What of it?”

  The clerk came in quietly and lit the lamp. Its yellow glow revealed Flanagan on dry land again, dripping moisture, his face streaked with red mud, and panting hard as he clung to the arms of his chair. “There now. Who's on what side of the table? Ha ha.”

  “If you've got something to say, say it.”

  “I've got a lot to say—but what for?”

  “I'll pay what it's worth.”

  Flanagan pulled a paper from his pocket. “Ye'll sign my guarantee?”

  “Be damned.”

  “Ye'd rather lose your fifty thousand?”

  Cabell understood at last. “You don't mean to say. . .”

  “That the bank's bust? Yes. If the Government moves three hundred thousand of its balance and there's a run, as there might be any minute, the bank's done for. And the Government will move its balance within forty-eight hours.”

  Cabell whistled.

  “And that's where I'm as good as a fairy godmother to ye,” Flanagan said. “I can get ye that money out.”

  “You can save it?”

  “Sure,” Flanagan said. “For a friend.”

  Cabell got up and pulled the blinds down thoughtfully, went to the door and looked into the outer office. The clerks were putting on their hats to go home. He closed the door, returned to the table, sat down, and pondered. It was strange to see what life had done to these two men, who had been young together in Moreton Bay fifty years before. The crude young Dublin tough it had fattened and softened into a good imitation of a gentleman; the nervous young English gentleman it had coarsened into a tough. “Listen, Flanagan,” Cabell said, “I'll see you through your trouble.”

  “Good for ye. I knew ye'd be sensible. And I'll see ye through yours.”

  “Never mind that. You'll forget that you've ever told me a word, see? Whatever happens you'll keep your mouth shut, or I'll have you sold up on the spot.”

  “But the fifty thousand?”

  “I told you to forget it.”

  “But you'll lose every penny, man, I'm telling ye.”

  “That's my affair,” Cabell said. “Now let us see what security you've got.”

  Flanagan's urbanity of a man for whom the world holds no more surprises deserted him. His eyes burst the scummy surface of the morass like two bubbles. “Here, sign this quick,” he said, pushing his paper under Cabell's nose, “before you're took off to the asylum. . .”

  Cabell returned to the Reach, and for three days waited eagerly for the coach to bring his letters and papers from Brisbane. On the fourth day a terrific storm drenched the valley, and the coach did not come again. News filtered through of floods on the land and storms at sea. Half of Brisbane was washed away—millions of pounds' worth of property destroyed, hundreds drowned. He sent Sambo to Pyke's Crossing for his mail, but Sambo had to turn back. Another fortnight passed before a reasonable account of the great flood of Ninety-three reached the valley. Victoria Bridge was gone, miles of houses and buildings put up in the boom time were destroyed, the city which he had seen grow from a collection of humpies was a waste of waters.

  The news depressed Cabell. Even the reflection that this would be a terrible blow to “that mob” and that his own fortune was safe did not cheer him as he read of the destruction in Brisbane, of English investors taking their money away, of hungry men marching in the big cities, of old squatting families, older in Australia than his own, losing their properties. It seemed to be the end of an idea of nationhood which had taken hold of everybody during the last decad
es when Australia was called “The Land of Promise,” “The New America,” when railways and roads spread thousands of miles into the wilderness, cities grew, population doubled itself, and wealth flowed from mines and stations and factories. He never talked of that idea, as Dr Barnett was so fond of doing, but, in spite of himself perhaps, he had given the best years of his life to it. He was one of the landtakers who had made the country habitable for human beings. He had cut the first roads, helped to improve the breed of the sheep which carried the country on its back, developed fresh resources of its wealth in Waterfall. True, what he had given was only the by-blow of his money-grubbing, but it set him above all other money-grubbers of the Peppiott kind. Though he revolted against this conception of his purpose and would continue to revolt till his dying day, still he knew that whatever dignity and significance his life had must depend upon the dignity and significance of the country he had made. So if after all Australia was to come to nothing, what was left in his life except a long, sordid, and not always honest struggle for money? What was it all for? All the hardships, disappointments, hatreds, and crimes? He had lived to see his enemies broken—Emma dying, Flanagan crawling for help, the smirking, gossiping mob in Brisbane brought down: was that his fulfilment? No, no, there was no flavour in triumph he found, for triumph emptied the springs of hate. Was it the glory of wealth and power? When those who had called him “a voluntary jailbird” were dead? Was it for his family—for James and Geoffrey and Larry? “They hate me like a black snake.” Only one thing was left to ennoble the shifts and brutalities of his long struggle—his love for Harriet.