Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  Yet Will hardly knew which to be most provoked with, Joe or Mr. Stancliffe, when Joe returned from the interview pale and trembling, his forehead beaded with sweat. Will was irritated by the magistrate’s ineptitude, yet felt he could hardly blame him for being short with Joe, for in his opinion Joe was enough to make an angel short-tempered nowadays.

  Will would have been glad to push Joe up in the world, give him more responsibility, perhaps even make him his partner; but Joe had made all this impossible by giving way so foolishly after Mr. Oldroyd’s death. He seemed quite broken up by it; his thin black curls began to go grey, his tall figure stooped, he forgot things and made mistakes, so that it was no longer safe to rely on his judgment. Anyone might think Joe was Mr. Oldroyd’s son instead of himself, Will sometimes thought irritably, as he watched Joe shambling about the mill with bent head and a dazed woebegone look in his eyes, feeling cloth mechanically and then knowing nothing about the piece when Will asked him—really it was maddening, both as an overlooker and a future brother-in-law. And when Will had told Joe of his intention to marry Mary, as Mary had begged him to do, the whole thing had fallen flat; Joe had said not a single word, but stood staring at him from dilated eyes like one gone mad. Will went on to say that he did not propose to have the wedding for another week or two; he was in mourning for his father and up to his eyes in work—and, he added to himself, as Mary was not with child there was no need for hurry. To this Joe replied in a hollow kind of tone: “Delay will be best,” and at once walked off across the yard—which was, after all, rather an irritating way of receiving such an advantageous proposal, thought Will crossly.

  For it was an advantageous proposal from the Bamforths’ point of view; this somehow became clearer and clearer with every day that passed after Mr. Oldroyd’s death. The murder had opened up a gulf between masters and men, which grew wider every day the murderers remained undiscovered. For four of those men were murderers, and nobody knew which four, so that all were under suspicion, and to marry into one of your workmen’s families seemed no longer a natural, but rather a dark and dangerous thing to do. Perhaps Joe felt this, and that was why he was constrained and uneasy about the affair, reflected Will, who was certain that Mr. Stancliffe would have thought the match unsuitable if he had heard of it, and knew that Brigg thought Will would be throwing himself away if he were ever really so silly as to marry the girl, which Brigg doubted greatly—but then Brigg, as Will was well aware, wanted him to marry his own pert lively daughter. When Will was in the Scape Scar cottage alone with Mary, with his love beside him, and the ginger cat purring by the hearth, Will felt he cared nothing for Brigg, Stancliffe or anybody else; his buisness troubles and his hate for the murderers seemed to roll out of his heart and leave it young and fresh and happy again, and his grief for his father became a pure loving grief which made him tender; he laid a hand on Mary’s hair and vowed to himself he would wed her and bring her home to Dean Head within the week. But as soon as he got away from her his troubles all came swooping down on him again; Mr. Stancliffe wanted him to dine at the Ire Bridge House to-morrow to investigate some new clue or other—the interior of Ire Bridge House was noticeably different from that of Scape Scar, Will found—and the day after, Brigg wanted him to go up to give his opinion about the milling of a piece of cloth, “and I’ll give you your father’s spurs back, if I can think on,” he always concluded, the spurs being still at Bin Royd; and then it was market day or Sunday, or the day for paying Enoch Smith, or one of the frames was wrong, or the water-wheel was clogged, or a man was away from his work, or a piece was wanted in a hurry, or Joe made some particularly irritating mistake; in a word, some business matter was always turning up which demanded Will’s special attention, and so the weeks went by and the marriage was not celebrated.

  Will found himself up at Bin Royd rather surprisingly often, considering how great a fool he considered Brigg to be. But there were reasons, reasons all arising in one way or another from his father’s death. To begin with, Will felt bound to Henry Brigg with the strong cord of a terrible experience gone through together; Brigg had seen his father’s murder, had been with Will when his father died. Nobody else in the world knew quite as much about that awful affair and how Will felt towards it, as Brigg did. It was a secret burden the two men shared together, and, heartily though Will despised Brigg, he almost always felt irresistibly drawn to go to him, speak to him, touch him, whenever the cloth-dresser’s plump little figure bounced into view. Then, too, all the Briggs were much enraged against the Luddites, and it gave Will a deep satisfaction to hear their violent talk, fed a secret need in him. Again, up at Bin Royd Will was very much admired. Henry Brigg’s little scribbling and fulling mill, which stood beside the upper waters of the tumbling Black Syke, was so small and so hopelessly old-fashioned that it really made Will smile; there was something amusingly traditional about it; Brigg had not even a dryhouse, but depended on the weather to dry his yarn and cloth for him, and was always looking at the sky and talking about “good drought”; one simply could not imagine him wrestling with frames or Luddites or any of these modern problems. Indeed Brigg was as much a farmer as a clothier; when one crossed from the mill to his old house with its mullioned windows one had to walk round pigs and ducks and hens; and the four apprentices who lived in the house helped to make hay in Brigg’s sloping green fields, or mended his walls, when work was slack in the mill. All this was silly and out of date, of course, and at times Will could scarcely conceal his scorn of it, but during the hot summer months this rural Bin Royd atmosphere was agreeable to him after the clatter of Syke Mill, where the frames were proving very noisy; as the autumn came on he liked Mrs. Brigg’s cooking, and he found it at all times highly agreeable to be regarded, as he was, by Brigg himself, by Mrs. Brigg (a tall silly faded woman with a passion for stories about royalties on which her husband loved to play coarse jokes), by Bessy and by all the apprentices as a handsome dashing modern young man, very much in the know, forging ahead, sure to have a great future, and so on. It was considered by the Brigg family a great condescension on Will’s part to come to such an out-of-the-way place as Bin Royd at all; and the moment he became visible at the turn of the (very muddy) lane up from Marthwaite, enormous roastings and bakings were rushed upon by the flustered Mrs. Brigg and the hearty Bessy.

  Towards this latter young woman, the only survivor of a large family of children, the rest of whom lay in Marthwaite churchyard, Will’s feelings were also mixed. Bessy was tall (though not such a maypole as her mother) and very sturdily built; her hands and arms were brown and strong as a man’s, her neck was a substantial golden column. She was dark, which was a blessing, for Will detested fair women; but her hair was not a soft cloud like Mary’s, nor her face gentle; she had glossy wiry curls, sparkling black eyes, large decided features; beneath her sallow skin raced the red blood of health, and this appeared in her strong red lips and coral gums. She showed them and her magnificent strong white teeth rather often, for she was always laughing—usually at some joke which the fastidious Will considered much too lewd for a respectable woman. Or rather, he had been wont so to consider Bessy’s jokes before his father’s death; now his character was hardening under the shock, the desire for vengeance and the stress of affairs; moreover he was so unconscionably lonely down at Dean Head that laughter, however poor the joke that caused it, seemed highly attractive. Mary never laughed, while nowadays Joe—Will moved his shoulders impatiently when he thought of Joe. The picture of Bessy in her bright cotton gown standing with head thrown back and arms akimbo, shaking her curls and exposing the red roof of her mouth as she gave out great gusts of loud hearty laughter at some improper pleasantry of her father’s upon the Prince Regent’s amours—this picture, while it repelled one side of Will’s nature, was not without attraction for another; so that he was liable to sudden changes of mood about the girl, as he was about her father.

  One afternoon in mid-October, when at Brigg’s request Will had ridden up to Bin
Royd to give his opinion about a piece of cloth damaged on the stocks, he was accosted, as he came out of the little mill at Brigg’s side, by a groom in Mr. Stancliffe’s livery who offered him a note. Will, surprised but not interested overmuch, opened it and read what made his pulse quicken and his mind whirl: the magistrate had important news for him: there was every prospect that one of Mr. Oldroyd’s murderers would accept the two thousand pounds and the full pardon, and betray his companions, within the week: Mr. Stancliffe had had a preliminary visit from him the night before. Will must pardon him that he revealed no names as yet, but it was safer so; and he must ask that the news be kept a secret for the present. Will started, changed colour, exclaimed; the paper trembled between his shaking fingers. Brigg, who was watching him anxiously, quavered:

  “What is it, lad?”

  “Come within and I’ll tell you,” gasped Will. He spoke thus because of the groom and one or two men who were idling near by, but once they were safely within the house he could no longer contain himself, and allowed his fierce exultation to burst forth. “Stancliffe’s got the murderers!” he shouted, clapping Brigg vigorously on the shoulder. “I shall have their necks!”

  “Who are they?” cried Brigg, tremendously excited.

  Will, a little dashed, explained that Mr. Stancliffe had not as yet really secured the persons of the murderers, but hoped to do so by the end of the week. He also prudently refrained from explaining the method of the magistrate’s discovery. “But it’s safe enough,” he cried exultantly, “It’s safe enough! He’s got them this time! It’s a secret, mind,” he went on warningly. “Don’t say anything to the women. But he’s got them, you can take my word for it. I hope they’ll hang them at the corner of Syke Mill Lane,” he concluded fiercely, “By God, I do! I shall put in a petition for it.”

  “You’d best stay here to-night and drink a glass to Stancliffe’s health,” urged Brigg, his little eyes sparkling. “Now do.”

  Accordingly Will stayed. He was handsomely welcomed, as usual, by Mrs. Brigg and Bessy, while Brigg had up some special wine for him, and to an accompaniment of winks, nods and signs kept urging him to drink somebody’s health and confusion to the so-and-so’s. Will, thrown off his balance by the thought of his vengeance so near at hand, never failed to accept the toast; he grew excited, shouted and laughed; Bessy and her father and mother shouted and laughed too; and for that night Will liked them all well enough.

  But next morning he awoke very much at odds with himself and his hosts. He felt sourly conscious that he had drunk too much the night before, ranted in a silly self-revealing way against the Luddites and rolled his eyes altogether too often in Bessy’s direction. Moreover, he seemed to remember that when Brigg at length decided it was time for them to go to bed, there had been so many jokes about the disposition of Will’s person that even in his fuddled state he had blushed, and now he wondered how he could ever look Bessy in the face again. Nor did he feel anything but complete incredulity about Mr. Stancliffe’s discovery; it was sure to prove a mare’s nest, as usual. It was market day, and the waggons ought to be at that moment leaving Syke Mill for Annotsfield, but as he was not there to get them off, no doubt they would still be idling about in the yard. He dressed and rushed down the hill in a fury, found the horses harnessed but waiting in Syke Mill Yard just as he had expected, sent them off with a flea in the drivers’ ears, looked round the mill and gave Joe a long string of vehement instructions, then galloped off to Annotsfield feeling thoroughly morose. He was late at the market, which vexed him; the necessity for keeping a civil tongue in his head to his customers provoked him inwardly more than ever; it further infuriated him to find that Brigg’s interpretation of secrecy had evidently been to tell every man he met that something might shortly be expected from Mr. Stancliffe about the Oldroyd case. Several merchants and manufacturers of Will’s acquaintance congratulated him openly on bringing the murderers to justice at last; several more asked him eagerly who the guilty men were, and accepted his protestations of ignorance with an unbelieving nod and smile, as the prudent lie of a careful man; nor did it improve Will’s temper to reflect that all this was his own fault—he ought to have had more sense than to have betrayed the contents of Mr. Stancliffe’s note to such a fool as Brigg. All day long the little scribbling-miller hovered round him in the Cloth Hall, catching his eye, nodding wisely, smiling with immense significance and in general taking Will’s attention off his customers at the wrong moment in a quite maddening way. When, therefore, Will found Brigg—with his hat on the back of his head and his crimson checks hotter than ever, slightly drunk in fact—sitting next to him at the ordinary in the Pack Horse Inn in the afternoon, he could no longer control his impatience and irritation; and when Brigg shouted cheerily: “Shall we ride to Marthwaite together, lad?” the exasperated Will replied shortly:

  “No.”

  Brigg’s face fell into a ludicrous expression of dismay. “Why not?” he enquired timidly.

  “I’m not going that way,” said Will on the spur of the moment—and it suddenly struck him, with an effect of immense relief, that he really need not go that way; he could ride out of Annotsfield by the high moorland road, turn off by that path just below the Moorcock Inn to Scape Scar, and see Mary on his way down to Dean Head. Mary! A burden seemed to roll off him at her mere name; his fretted nerves felt soothed at once. He despatched the waggon back to Syke Mill, bade the men tell Joe to lock up and go home, and set off. For the first few miles he had company, but the latter part would be wild, desolate, lonely; not the sort of ride to choose for a dark October night with Luddites about as one of the manufacturers he had ridden with pointed out when they parted. “Pshaw!” said Will, moving his strong young shoulders. “Luddites! They daren’t show their face! And they wouldn’t touch me anyhow,” he added with an unintentional effect of pathos. He gave the mare a prick of his spurs—“Brigg still has the silver ones, confound him!” he thought irrelevantly—and rode on.

  Mary! As he pushed on through the chill October darkness, found the path and forced the reluctant mare down it, Mary’s name was music to his soul. Ah, but it was her lovely voice which was music; would that he could hear it now, murmuring “Will!” He ached and burned to feel her soft cheek beneath his lips, or the richer curve of her young breast. “Damn!” cried Will abruptly, as the mare stumbled and threw him over her head. He fell with some force on the stony path, but his head luckily plunged into the heather, so that though his face was scratched and his ankle wrenched, he took no great harm. He got up—the mare stood quietly by, aghast at her misbehaviour and slightly trembling—groped for the bridle and his hat, moved his foot about and found it was not seriously hurt, laughed grimly at the ending which life had put to his lover’s dream, then with an exasperated sniff decided he had better walk, and led the animal slowly along. The path was certainly very uneven; his ankle ached badly before he came at last to the Scape Scar cottages. It seemed so long to him since he left Annotsfield that he almost expected Joe to be at Scape Scar before him, and was surprised to see no light in the house. There was a fire, however; he peered in through the window and saw his love sitting beside its low flickering flame. With a lover’s eye he drank in the beauty of her face and form; the lovely throat rising from the pink neckerchief he had given her, the soft submission of her pose. She was gazing into the fire—seeing him there perhaps, thought Will. His pulses stirred; he moved to the door and rapped sharply.

  He was unprepared for her swift rush to open it, and her soft anguished cry: “Who’s there? Eh! Who is it?”

  “It’s me—Will,” he said, rather abashed, unable to advance because of the mare’s bridle, which he held in his left hand.

  “Will?” cried Mary piercingly, her hand to her heart. “What’s wrong? Where’s Joe?”

  “Nay, lass,” said Will in an affectionate but rather rebuking tone: “Don’t make such a moither. There’s nothing wrong that I know of, and I should think Joe’s on his way home from the mill by
this time.”

  “Hasn’t tha come from mill?” said Mary in a quieter tone, though still breathing heavily.

  “Nay, I’ve come round by the moor road from Annotsfield market,” said Will, “on purpose to see you. And a nice welcome I’m to have of it, seemingly.”

  Mary’s answer to this was to throw her arms about his neck and kiss his cheek. Will, whose lame ankle made his balance precarious, shifted a little under her weight, and the mare, whose nerves were not quite recovered from Will’s fall, danced. Mary started and trembled beneath Will’s arm.