Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “And what about the murderers?” demanded Will thickly. “Damn them!”

  “To tell you the truth,” said Brigg in a tone of apology: “With one thing and another, Will, I forgot all about them. All I know is, there were four. Your father may have recognised them, you know, poor man.”

  “But I can’t bear this,” thought Will vehemently. “I must see father.” He stroke forward and seized the handle of the bedroom door, and, undeterred by Brigg’s exclamation of protest, pushed the door open vigorously. He nearly fell into the arms of a powerful-looking bald hooknosed man who was just coming out with a paper in his hand; this was Mr. Stancliffe. The Ire Bridge magistrate scowled severely at the intruder, either not knowing him or not recognising him in the dim light furnished by two cheap brown candles on a table; but Will’s eyes went past him to the bed where, between the doctor and a man Will took to be the Annotsfield justice, Mr. Oldroyd lay, very quiet and still. “Father!” said Will, feeling his throat contract.

  “Will, Will! Is that you, my boy?” said his father weakly.

  Will, thrusting aside doctor and magistrate unceremoniously, strode to the bedside. In the flickering light his father’s face looked bleached and pinched, the nose seemed sharper, the cheek-bones more pronounced. His flaming hair, which was tumbled on the pillow, seemed somehow to have lost all its vitality and gloss, and appeared like a tangle of wool. His eyes were still blue and bright, but they had a look of childish anxiety and appeal in them which wrung Will’s heart. Mr. Oldroyd was usually so very full of life and strength, so particularly able to enforce his wishes, that to see him lying there helpless and anxious was unbearably pathetic to his son. “Father!” said Will again. Tears rose to his eyes and choked his speech; his mouth twisted, he felt that in a minute he should cry like any girl. Making a great effort, he managed to utter in a trembling voice: “This is a bad do, father.”

  “Aye, it is that!” agreed his father with a heartfelt sigh. “It’ll be a long time before I’m about again—if ever I do get about again at all. What’s your opinion, doctor?”

  “Indeed, Mr. Oldroyd,” said the doctor solemnly: “I consider you are in a very dangerous state.”

  “Fool,” thought Will. “He might have said something cheerful.” Aloud he cried heartily: “Oh, we’ll soon have you about again, father, never fear.”

  Mr. Oldroyd, however, seemed not reassured; he moved his head once or twice feebly from side to side, and threw out in a thin tone: “These are awful times.”

  “Well, Mr. Oldroyd, we’ll leave you now to your son’s care,” boomed the Ire Bridge magistrate in his sonorous gentlemanly tones: “And I wish you a speedy recovery. Rest assured we shall do all in our power to catch the miscreants who attacked you.” He bowed; Mr. Oldroyd drooped his lion’s head slightly over the sheet to acknowledge the courtesy—a pathetic effort which brought Will’s tears nearer—the three strangers went out, and father and son were left alone.

  Will sat down by the bed, his hands hanging between his knees, and there was a silence.

  “Father,” blurted out Will presently: “I’m sorry if I grieved you, to day.”

  “Nay, it’s all right,” replied Mr. Oldroyd in a far-off tone. “I don’t rightly remember what it was all about, now.”

  Will felt that he might almost say the same. His emotions during the last half-hour had been so violent, his distress so acute, that there was barely room left in his heart for love for Mary. All he could feel just now was love for his father, a deep, enduring, solid love which had, after all, already lasted twenty years, and which would last, he felt, as long as he himself lasted. He was his father’s son; they were Oldroyds, they must stick together, they must go on. How dared those damned Luddites try to kill his father! By God, he’d show them who they were trying to down!

  “Did you see any of the men who fired at you, father?” he asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” replied Mr. Oldroyd with interest. “Brigg says there were four, but I didn’t see any of them. But we shall find them.”

  “We’ll find them all right,” said Will grimly.

  There was a long pause. The flame of one candle slightly flickered, then stood erect and still again. The eyes of father and son rested on it musingly.

  “Will,” said Mr. Oldroyd at length in a weak voice: “You must see Mr. Butterworth next Tuesday about that spoiled broadcloth. And if I die, mind you don’t give up them frames.”

  “I won’t,” said Will, sticking out his jaw.

  6

  At the Coach and Horses Inn the collier was growing merrier. He became very affectionate with all the company, and unfortunately took a particular fancy to Joe. “Tha’s a gradely lad!” he exclaimed, standing in front of Joe and wobbling his head at him in drunken admiration. “Eh! Tha’s a gradely lad.” He staggered and almost fell, supported himself by throwing his arm round Joe’s shoulders, and exclaimed fondly: “Would tha like to see me dansh? Would tha?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” said Joe, with a distressed smile, trying to shake off the collier’s embrace. “Be off with thee!”

  The collier laughed drunkenly, and cast his other arm about Joe’s neck. “I’m a gradely dansher, love,” he said in a pleading tone, as though to a woman.

  Naturally the company enjoyed this heartily, and they were still laughing when the landlord put a startled face round the door of the room.

  “Lads!” he said. “There’s a man here from Annotsfield says William Oldroyd o’ Marthwaite’s been shot at by Luddites.”

  “Tha never says! By gum!” exclaimed the men, startled from their joke.

  “It’s too good to be true!” cried Walker thickly.

  “Have they—hit him?” queried Joe, from a dry throat.

  “Aye! He’s like to die, they say,” replied the landlord, with relish.

  There was a pause to take in this sensation.

  “Would tha like to see me dansh, love?” broke in the collier.

  “Aye! I’ll see thee dance!” cried Joe wildly. “Bring me some moie ale, landlord, and I’ll whistle for this lad here.”

  The ale was brought and drunk, and Joe began to whistle. The collier was, as he had claimed, a fine dancer, and soon the room was full and men stood pushing by the door to see the fun. For Joe had never whistled as well as he did that night; everything was dark about him, everything was strange and mad; green tree trunks waved and receded dizzily, the rough stone of the Syke Wood wall rasped his fingers, the brass rings of Mellor’s pistol and the blue gleams of the new frames’ shear blades alternately dazzled his eyes; Walker’s face, his sleek black hair dishevelled, his usually white face flushed, his red lips moist and drooping, vanished and reappeared oddly and grew more drunken every time; and still Joe called for more ale and again more, and still he whistled.

  Suddenly he stopped.

  “Go on, lad, go on!” shouted the men in chorus, stamping their feet in applause.

  Joe pursed his lips, but no sound came from them; he rose, and tossing his arms despairingly, went out into the night.

  Chapter IV

  Discovery

  1

  Mr. Oldroyd died thirty-eight hours later, in the early morning. Will, who did not expect this event, regarding the doctor as an ignorant fool and paying no attention to his prophecies, was merely irritated when a servant broke into his room at the Red Lion in the early dawn, with the message that he must come at once if he wished to see his father alive. Half asleep and wholly incredulous, he paused to throw on some clothes before stumbling along to the room where Mr. Oldroyd lay, then tripped over the threshold and cursed it heartily, and was about to say something very sarcastic and sneering to the several persons present, when the weak fluttering breathing of the figure on the bed suddenly ceased, and the doctor said solemnly: “He’s gone.” Will simply did not believe him; he bent over the lifeless body and said, “Father! Father!” several times, in increasing exasperation with Mr. Oldroyd for not replying promptly. He even slightly shook
his father’s arm; and then suddenly became aware that Mr. Oldroyd was indeed gone beyond his reach. “Why, he’s dead!” he cried in horror. The shock struck him almost out of his senses; he gasped, waved his arms about, exclaimed in a high uncertain tone, took his father’s hand again to make sure of the dreadful fact, stood back convinced, and found the tears raining down his cheeks as though he were the veriest girl. Henry Brigg, coming forward from a corner by the window, put his arm kindly about Will’s shoulders and led him away to his own room; Will sat down on his bed and wept like a child, while Brigg, patting his shoulder, made soothing sympathetic noises. “By God!” cried Will suddenly through his grief: “I’ll have their necks!” The thought of the four murderers—of whom as yet nothing had been discovered—maddened him; that they should have brought upon him this sorrow of his father’s death, this disaster which was irreparable, against which it was useless to kick, useless to oppose the strong Oldroyd will, aroused in him such a fury of thwarted egoism that it was a pleasure to him to imagine himself strangling them with his own hands. “I’ll have their necks!” he repeated in a thick savage tone, beating upon the bed with clenched fists—and with the phrase his youth went; he was no longer a lad but a man. He sat up.

  “Aye, to be sure,” Brigg was saying soothingly. “To be sure you will. But you’d best get dressed now, lad,” he went on: “There’ll be a deal to see about with one thing and another.”

  Will had never heard a truer word. Within five minutes there came a tapping at the door, and the doctor desired to have a word with the dead man’s son; and from that time onwards till the year’s end and beyond, Will was never free from an oppressive burden of affairs caused by his father’s murder. There were, immediately, questions of the coffin, the grave, the funeral and Mr. Oldroyd’s will to be gone into; it appeared that the funeral was not a mere private matter, of interest to Will alone; the whole of the Ire Valley, most of Annotsfield, and a great part of the rest of the West Riding desired to show their sympathy with the Oldroyds, and their abhorrence of the Luddites’ detestable deed. The Marthwaite churchyard, where Mr. Oldroyd was laid beside his wife, was crowded, and the Marthwaite street was lined with mourners; while the number of people to whom Will had to offer refreshments after the burial was quite absurdly large—his father would have something to say about that, thought Will grimly, and then remembered with a pang that Mr. Oldroyd would never get into a fury about anything any more. Then when these sad ceremonies were over, there were arrangements for discovering the murderers to be considered with Mr. Stancliffe and the military; and after these were set on foot and Will tried to get back to work, he found that such a simple matter as his taking over all his father’s possessions—which were left to him absolutely—necessitated many visits to his Annotsfield attorney and much waste of precious time. Mr. Oldroyd’s affairs, too, though by no means desperate, were rather involved and even a little alarming; there were mortgages here and borrowings there—in a word, the purchase of the frames had been a bold bid for fortune, attended by the kind of risks such bids usually bring in their train. The further Will went into matters the more difficulties he found, and the more hatred he felt for the four Luddites who had brought these difficulties upon him. And this feeling was strengthened whenever he passed the fatal corner of Syke Mill Lane, and he passed it at least twice every day. Sometimes he rode by feeling sickened, with averted eyes, sometimes he gazed at it fiercely and long, sometimes he dismounted, and resting his hand on the Syke Wood wall, brooded there with bent head, imagining the murder over and over again till he almost felt he had been present at the scene. But he never passed the place without thinking in some way of his father’s death, and so his bitterness against the murderers daily grew, until at last it became an implacable resentment, a hard stone in one corner of his heart. “I’ll have their necks!” he repeated savagely to himself each time he turned down the lane; and at his very next free moment rode off down to Ire Bridge House, to ask if Mr. Stancliffe had yet discovered anything, and to be rude when, as usual, the magistrate told him that nothing new had transpired.

  And the more Will hated the Luddites the more firmly he set his jaw in the determination to carry on Syke Mill and so defy them; he regarded his promise to his father about the frames as a solemn oath to a dying man, and told Henry Brigg so on the numerous occasions when Brigg urged him to give up Syke Mill and go in with him at Bin Royd. Will said the same thing to Enoch Smith, who came to Syke Mill to see him and with blunt friendliness offered to take the frames back as they stood and sell them to someone else, if Will was finding a difficulty in paying for them. Will, however, shook his head and suggested paying in monthly portions.

  “I shan’t give up the frames,” he said doggedly: “I shan’t for the Luddites, Enoch, and I shan’t for you. I promised my father to work them, and so I shall.”

  At this a slow sarcastic smile spread over Enoch’s face, and he remarked jeeringly: “Not you!”

  “What do you mean?” cried Will hotly. “I shall work them.”

  “Oh, aye!” agreed Enoch: “I reckon you’ll work them all right, lad. But not for your father’s sake.”

  “Why, then?” demanded Will in the new haughty manner he had acquired from Mr. Stancliffe.

  “Because you want to yourself,” said Enoch. “You’re an Oldroyd, I reckon.” He looked Will in the eyes, smiled with a kind of cynical admiration, and nudged his ribs with a very sharp elbow.

  Will gave a short hard laugh, and neither admitted nor denied the charge. He had always been eager to get on, certainly, but it was his father’s murder which had put the edge on his ambitions; he was not going to be thwarted, he was not going to be beaten, by any damned Luddites in the country, and so they should soon know. Those customers at Annotsfield market, therefore, who for the dead man’s sake bought cloth of his son, were not disappointed in its quality, while those who, though sympathising with his position, were not averse from profiting a little by the lad’s inexperience, soon found that they had no lad, but a hard, able, skilled man to deal with, and arranged their behaviour accordingly. Will’s banker, too, a cousin of the merchant Butterworth, who at their first interview presented a rather chilling front to the young clothier, in a week or two agreed to let him have the money he needed for Enoch Smith on easy terms. The result was that whereas at first everyone in the Ire Valley pitied that poor young Oldroyd who had lost his father and would certainly lose all he had as well, in a few months they all admired that clever Oldroyd lad who was holding his own and doing well in the very teeth of the Luddites—not that the Luddites showed any teeth just now, to be sure; they were as quiet as a cat in a shower.

  For it was not due to lack of energy on Mr. Stancliffe’s part that the identity of the murderers remained so long unknown. The death of Mr. Oldroyd had stirred the magistrate to the greatest activity. (“Shutting the stable door when the horse is gone,” said Will bitterly.) More and more soldiers were brought upon the scene, till the whole valley was overrun with them; a volunteer police was organised; every lane in the valley was so thoroughly patrolled, both night and day, that it was impossible the Luddites should hold further meetings. Moreover, when spring had become summer and the murderers were still undiscovered, Mr. Stancliffe went to London on the matter, and shortly after his return, it was announced in all the newspapers that the Government offered a reward of two thousand pounds and a full pardon to anyone not the actual murderer who should give information leading to a conviction. Even Will was rather staggered and impressed by this amount, and thought that now at last the scoundrels were within his grasp; but summer faded into autumn, and still the reward was unclaimed and the murderers unknown. Mr. Stancliffe also had several of the suspected Luddites of the valley brought before him and questioned; George Mellor was thus taken to Ire Bridge House several times, but it appeared (to Will’s disappointment) that he knew nothing of the murder: he had been in Annotsfield on the day in question, taking his stepfather’s watch to mend, and coul
d bring witnesses to support this statement. Mr. Stancliffe, a gentleman with a great sense both of public duty and his own dignity, was so much provoked by his failure to find the murderers that he presently began to take up the most unlikely people; he positively subjected Enoch Smith to a long catechism about his movements on the fatal Wednesday. Enoch, who was at that very time himself enjoying military protection of his person against the Luddites, took a delight in making his answers sound as suspicious as possible, so that the magistrate’s eyes gleamed, and then proved that he was in his foundry at the hour of the murder by the testimony of some thirty witnesses, including a sergeant of the King’s Bays and a squad of his men. Annoyed, but not deterred, Mr. Stancliffe next had Joe Bamforth brought before him—as though Joe knew a word about it, thought Will irritably as he watched him set off for Ire Bridge House. Not to mention Joe’s well-known attachment to the Oldroyds, which would have convinced any man with a grain of sense in his head that he could not have murdered Will’s father, Joe had been visiting the Thorpes—whose youngest boy had rather sadly died that very day—and was thus a good two miles from Syke Mill at the fatal hour. So much Mary had told Will—not that he regarded it as in the least necessary for Joe to produce an alibi, of course not; really Mr. Stancliffe’s belated zeal was so misplaced as to be almost more irritating than lethargy.