Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  Nobody answered. This was something new in the story. James and Harriet sat thinking of it, of their mother, of Larry, and of the strange relations between the three of them which this helped to explain.

  “He was in no danger, you know,” the old man said, as if to exculpate himself against their silence. “The convict days were over. Everybody was too busy making money to think of looking for a man who'd made a break seven years before. Anyway, he wasn't caught. He humped his drum to the gold-fields and did well for himself. I began to get on my feet too. I could've gone back to England. I had enough. Emma would have listened to reason. She had her brat. I'd've left her the station. I just needed another couple of years and—but you've heard about that. McFarlane and the land, I mean. He pinched a lump off me and Flanagan, he was minister then, he backed him up because of the roan stallion. It looked like a drought coming on. I had to have the land—or give up going back Home again. So I went to court. Peppiott was my lawyer. They dragged up a lot of dirt, a lot of lies, and published them in the papers, and while I was waiting for the appeal to come on Gursey came back. He was looking pretty sick. I didn't have the heart to turn him out, and the dog betrayed me again. He had M'Govern trailing him. They'd met at the diggings and M'Govern had blackmailed him, so he came back here knowing M'Govern wouldn't drop off an easy thing. He hoped M'Govern would come and blackmail me too and I'd kill him. You see, he thought I'd do ANYTHING. Well,” he raised himself on his elbow again and whispered, “I DID.”

  In a tone of profound conviction James said at once, “I don't believe a word of it. He's making it up. His mind's wandering.”

  Julia bent her head and her slim shoulders shook. She was trying to suppress her laughter, but it broke out, girlish and pleasant to hear.

  James looked at her, pained, questioning.

  “All right. All right. I'll stop in a minute. I was just thinking—oh, forgive my frivolous mind—I was thinking of your next Foundation Day oration.”

  James opened his mouth to answer and swallowed some smoke and choked. She reached across the table and pounded him between the shoulder-blades, but he turned himself away pettishly and went on choking into his handkerchief till his collar came off the stud, his hair fell in lank, black locks over his eyes, his eyes bulged tearfully, and the colour streaked his cheeks as though Julia had been clawing him.

  The children along the wall stared in fright. They had never seen him with a hair out of place, so now he looked bedraggled, even demoralized; and the antics of their elders around their dying grandfather's bunk were, in general, extremely confusing.

  The old man was talking again. He had relaxed into the pillow as though he was done, but Julia's laughter had roused him. “Wait a minute. I was forgetting you.” He grinned towards Julia. “You and your smell. You see this M'Govern, this flogger and sixpenny bludger, he was nearly your father. In fact, so was a blackfellow.”

  James stopped wiping the sweat from his face, Julia stopped laughing, and they looked at each other, at the old man, uncomprehendingly.

  “Yes,” the old man said, “when this M'Govern came back after Gursey he got a job over at Ningpo and Ludmilla wanted to marry him to Aurelia. Ludmilla was cleaning the place up. It had been going to pieces for years, and then something brought it all to a head. Your mother, it was—a drooping sort of a girl. I didn't see what was wrong with her at first, but it was as plain as a pikestaff after. The old Colonel, you see, he wouldn't have a man around the place, in case one of them got sweet on the girls. Crown princes—nothing less was good enough, but crown princes didn't turn up. There was nothing but myalls on the place, and your mother—I suppose she got tired of waiting.”

  “Oh, Father,” Harriet said sharply. “How could you. Oh.”

  It was Julia's turn, looking from face to face, to say, “Oh, the brute. It can't be true.”

  The old man's voice soared laughing and cracked high up in a birdlike squeak of delight. “It's true, right enough. Why do you think Ludmilla helped me the time I was in trouble, on condition that I married James to you? 'So you'll help them to bury the past,' she says. Aye, it's buried all right. Too deep for you to wash off.”

  James looked at her, took four strides to the door, turned and looked at her again. As though she had confessed that what Cabell had said of her mother had happened to her—that was just how he looked. And Julia, for a moment, looked like one who has laughed at a joke and discovered too late that the joke was on herself. Her eyes asked for mercy and there was a fiendish mercilessness in James's.

  Suddenly a face was beaming at them from the doorway, a round, red face equipped with a professional obliquity to family crises. The nurse.

  “Everything all right?” she asked. Before she had quite said it James had seized her by the shoulder and pushed her on to the veranda. He slammed the door and went back to the table.

  At once, with the door shutting out the hot wind, the air seemed lighter and cooler. Julia laughed again, loudly this time and not so pleasantly.

  “It's sheer vindictiveness,” she said. “Look at him, the vindictive devil.”

  Strange to say, Cabell did not look at all vindictive but rather foolish as he tried to raise himself from the pillow again fighting, it seemed, against the weight of the sheet become too much for his exhausted body. A fit of coughing defeated him. He lay for a long time breathing quickly and hanging on to Harriet's hand as though he was afraid she would run away before he could finish.

  A gust of wind opened the door and brought back the smell of burning gum-leaves. “Something's burning,” Cabell muttered from the pillow. “Burning, burning. . .” and repeated it several times, trying to get a grip on an elusive idea. “Ah yes, the house burnt down, the old house. That's it—I was telling you how M'Govern—They wanted to marry him to Aurelia—yes. He told me, but I couldn't believe it. They were such a stuck-up lot. But he swore, said he didn't want to blackmail me, or even Gursey. I didn't trust him. He said he only wanted one thing—if I'd chuck Gursey out again, in case he went whiddling to the colonel. Ludmilla was passing him off on the old fool as a squatter. But how was I to know. Gursey had money on him. He might only have wanted to get Gursey away so as to murder and rob him—and after everything that had happened I couldn't allow that. And the story was true all the time. He was going to marry Aurelia. The parson was already on the way. Ludmilla had arranged it all. Any port in a storm—or perhaps she even believed herself he was a squatter who'd lost his land. Well, we all looked pretty rough I guess. . .” Cabell put his hand over the empty red socket of his left eye from which the patch had fallen. “It was all true enough, but I found it out too late. We had a fight, M'Govern and me, and he blinded me with his stock-whip. I was as stone blind as I am now for a couple of months, helpless as a kitten, and that altered everything. He'd been scared of me before, but now I was at his mercy and he was a born bully. He couldn't resist it. Chucked Ningpo and came here. Thought he had a softer racket too, I suppose. Ludmilla used to make him wear a stiff collar over there and grease his hair. So he began bleeding me. I was nearly on my feet then, I told you—everything hanging in the balance, waiting for the appeal. I couldn't afford any more dirt. He threatened to tell the police about Gursey. You could get a stiff term for inciting a man to escape and harbouring him. Wanted all my money to keep his mouth shut—everything I'd saved for England. And then one night. . . over there it was.” He pointed across the room. “No, in the old house. There was a fire-place where we used to hang the billy in the early days. He was bending down to light his pipe. I could see it as plain as if my eyes weren't bandaged. A hundred times I'd watched him do it down in Moreton Bay, bending over to put a twig in the embers, and his big fat neck ruckled up on the shirt-band. I leant over and dug my fingers into it and pushed his face on the fire. . . and your ma, she came in and finished him with an axe. . .”

  They sat on the edge of their chairs straining towards his failing voice, but they hardly noticed that he had stopped speaking, abso
rbed into the picture he had created. For many seconds, fed by the acrid smell of burning, the noises of terrified animals, it hung upon their minds, developing its appalling details of its own volition, like a dream. One of the children whimpered and they all three started and looked at each other, then at the children, asleep on the floor.

  “You see how it happened, don't you?” the old man said. He spoke anxiously again, as if he had been getting up the courage to ask that question and was afraid what they would answer. “It couldn't have happened otherwise, could it?”

  Harriet pressed his hand. “No, Father. I don't see how it could have been otherwise.”

  “Ah!” He let himself gently on to the pillow again. “Ah!”

  James's chair creaked and he rose. Automatically feeling to make sure that his tie was set in the precise middle of the collar he found that the collar was gaping and the tie under his ear. He looked at them with an expression of shocked and disapproving alarm, as though they had caught him in shameful undress, and hastily fiddled to adjust himself. With his eyes on the ceiling he wrenched the lugs of the sweated collar together, grimacing, panting, jerking his legs. The stud gave a little click, described a shining arc across the light, and disappeared into the darkness of the veranda. James dropped his arms to his side and gazed after it for a moment or two of dejected relaxation. Then he pulled himself up and went out to look for it, discouraged but persistent.

  The old man's breathing quickened, his fingers slipped from Harriet's hand. She pressed them, but they did not respond. He was asleep.

  She got up from the bunk and awakened the children. They rubbed their eyes and followed her to bed, pausing at the door to look back and wonder again at the mysterious drama which had passed here and left their aunt still primly, coolly sitting in her chair with her hands folded in her lap and the dew on her upper lip, like little bubbles in the glass she was made of, while their uncle crawled about the veranda on his hands and knees, mumbling to himself.

  When Harriet returned in ten minutes Julia was gone from the room and James was standing on the steps talking to the manager in a subdued voice. She sat down beside the bunk, unrolled a piece of black silk, and threaded her needle. But she put it aside soon and sat watching the ruby line of fire along the hills. She could hear James's voice now and then. “. . . very low. His mind's wandering, you know.”

  “A wonderful old gentleman,” the manager said heartily.

  “Wonderful,” James agreed. “Wonderful.” After a pause he repeated it slowly, as though it was a formula his brain must but would not learn, “A. . . wonderful. . . old. . . gentleman.”

  Harriet smiled to herself. There was, perhaps, a little malice in that smile.

  Then she put her head on the bunk and began to weep.