Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “She’s upset about Jonathan,” explained Martha, regarding them with arms akimbo. “He’s seemed a bit poorly like, this last week—and it’s a pity about his leg.”

  At this Will felt Mary tremble against him. “We’ll have a surgeon, and get it put right,” he murmured soothingly. “It’s all right, lass, it’ll be all right now. I’ll see you right,” he repeated, wretchedly conscious that so long as they two were apart, it could never be “right” for either of them. “By God! What a fool I was!” he burst out with Oldroyd vehemence.

  “Aye, and you are yet,” said Martha sourly, “upsetting her like this.” She put a hand on Mary’s shoulder and tried to draw her away, but Mary clung the closer.

  “Let her be,” said Will, vexed. “You needn’t grudge us a minute after all these years.”

  “Oh?” said Martha in a sarcastic tone. “All these years, eh? And whose fault is that, pray?”

  “I know whose fault it is, right enough,” said Will, beginning to lose his temper again. “But it’s none of your business.”

  “Oh, isn’t it?” said Martha. “Let me tell you this, Will Oldroyd; your Mary hasn’t had a roof over her head all these years except what I’ve given her.”

  “It’s true, Will,” murmured Mary against his shoulder.

  “Damn you! I’ll pay you for it,” shouted Will.

  Martha’s fair face crimsoned. “That you never shall,” she cried. “Mary’s sister to the best man that ever lived in the Ire Valley, and she’s welcome to owt I’ve got, and so is the lad. But this is my house,” she added with dignity, “and I’ll thank you to clear out of it, Mester All-these-years Oldroyd. You’ve a house and a wife of your own, haven’t you? Well, you can go home to them.”

  Will swore; but Martha’s loud commonsense had broken the spell of passion between himself and Mary; Mary’s tears had almost ceased, and Will, though he was no less wretched at the prospect, now felt the inevitability of their parting. Mary turned her face up to his; every little line which time had etched there, Will not watching, smote upon his heart. He gave her lips a last despairing kiss.

  “Good-bye, lass,” he muttered hoarsely. “I reckon Martha’s right, and I’d best not come here again.”

  “Good-bye, Will,” murmured Mary. Her voice was faint, and her body suddenly grew limp in his arms. Will, staggering between pails and clothes-baskets, set her down in a chair beside the hearth. She had not fainted, but her strength was gone from her, and she drooped over the arm of the chair, moaning softly.

  “Be off with you now,” said Martha in a loud whisper, giving Will a push. “Before she comes round, like.”

  With a despairing exclamation Will picked up his whip and went. At the door he turned for a last look at his love, but Martha was bending over her, so that he could not see her face. Somehow this disappointment was the last straw, and tears were rolling down Will’s face as he staggered out into the blazing sunshine and mounted his mare. The ginger cat opened its eyes and regarded him sardonically. “Damn you!” said Will, his mouth working. He would have liked to flick the cat savagely with his whip, but remembered just in time to wonder what Jonathan would think of such an action. And at the thought of Jonathan, Will’s heart quite failed him—Jonathan, who had lived twelve years with a woman who hated Will Oldroyd and regarded him as Joe’s murderer. “Oh, damn the whole Ire Valley!” cried Will, now frankly weeping. He had not even the spirit to urge his mare to a speed which would soothe his grief, but rode along almost at a walking-pace, with his head bowed on his breast. When he reached Scape Scar Lane he dismounted, and stood for a long time leaning his head on his arms against the saddle.

  At last Marthwaite Church clock startled him by announcing that it was seven o’clock; what were they doing in the mill all this time without him, he wondered. He mounted at once and went into Marthwaite, had a drink at the Red Lion to restore his daunted courage, and rode swiftly down to Syke Mill.

  Brigg was playing about in the yard as usual, and came skipping up to meet him.

  “You do look hot, father,” he observed, gazing with childish curiosity into Will’s flushed face.

  “I daresay,” said Will grimly, dismounting. “Have you learned your spellings?”

  Brigg, who was now attending a dame’s school in Marthwaite and did not like it, with a reluctant squirm admitted he hadn’t. But he pleaded in extenuation that there was nobody to hear him say the spellings; his mother was tired with the heat of the day, and was lying down on her bed. (Will, wincing, remembered Bessy’s condition.) His grandfather kept falling asleep when Brigg talked to him. Brigg pointed across the yard to the door of New House, where old Henry Brigg sat nodding in an armchair. So he couldn’t learn his spellings, concluded Brigg triumphantly, his brown eyes sparkling; now could he?

  “Well, we’ll see,” replied Will in the guarded manner of parents taken at a disadvantage. “Perhaps I’ll hear you myself.”

  Brigg seemed at first uncertain whether to be delighted or alarmed at this prospect, but eventually became pleased, and skipping round Will as he walked across the yard, repeated: “When will you hear me, father? When will you hear me?” like a gnat buzzing in Will’s ears, until they reached the far mill door, where he paused. “Mother says I’m not to go in,” he said in a tone of disappointment. Will exclaimed crossly at this reminder of Bessy’s whim, but he was not sorry to be rid of the importunate Brigg, and went into the mill with what briskness he could command. Various messages and notes awaited him; one of them required his presence in the slubbing room, and he attended to that first—as he pushed open the door, the note in his hand, he admitted mournfully to himself that he could not keep away from his eldest son. The boy was working in a corner by a window; Will casually turned in that direction and walked past him. Had not Martha said he had been ailing lately? The mill children always looked tired in the evening of their long day’s work, but to-night Jonathan seemed to Will to look especially white and fatigued, and there were dark patches beneath his eyes, which lacked their usual intelligent lustre. As Will walked away he heard the slubber whose billy-frame Jonathan was feeding with cardings mutter: “Close it, thou little devil!” Will felt a pang of pity for the child; he was committing a fault which had considerable consequences, for by laying the ends of wool obliquely instead of straight he caused a “flying” in the slubbing which greatly deteriorated its quality; but it was an easy matter to make this slip, especially when you had been hard at work all day. Will reflected that all the time he had been riding up to the Moorcock, talking to Mary, riding down again and drinking at the Red Lion, Jonathan had stood piecing cardings, and his heart was sore within him. He walked slowly on, but his ears were cocked to hear what went on behind his back. Jonathan’s piecing was still causing the slubber dissatisfaction. “Damn thee, close it!” exclaimed the man. There was a heavy thud; Will swung round to see Jonathan lying on the ground, and the slubber standing over him with the billy-rod in his hand.

  “By God!” cried Will, and instantly sprang forward and struck the man with his clenched first on the side of the head. He put into the blow all the grief and the exasperation which his own treatment of Mary caused him, and the man went down and lay sprawling. “I’ll teach thee to strike children in my mill!” roared Will, standing over him. “Get out of the mill and be off with thee.”

  The man, whose face was cut, scrambled up resentfully. “Well, he were spoiling t’slubbings!” he shouted, pointing an angry finger at Jonathan, who was slowly getting to his feet. “You’d have summat to say if t’slubbings were spoiled, I reckon. It’s non my fault childer has to work so long they can’t piece straight.”

  “Get out of my mill!” shouted Will in a blazing rage. He could see that the other men were sniggering and the little pieceners regarding him with horrified awe; he was also aware that what the slubber said was true. He pointed fiercely at the door. “Get out of my mill,” he repeated in a fury, “and go home.”

  “I shall go where I like,�
�� retorted the man, dabbing at his bleeding cheek. “It’s nowt to do wi’ you where I go.”

  At this Will took a step toward him with so much menace in his eye that the man retreated, and after some nods and winks to his companions indicating what he thought of Will’s temper, passed through the door. Will watched him out, then swung round; everybody at once began to work very hard except Jonathan, who stood by the slubbing-billy dazed.

  “Have I to go home too?” he murmured.

  When he spoke thus softly his voice was so like Mary’s that it plucked at Will’s heart-strings. He was just about to say “Yes,” when he remembered the state he had left Mary in; she would not thank him for sending the boy home before she had recovered from her tears. So instead he said grimly: “You can go out and hear young Master Brigg his words.” At this compliment to his learning Jonathan actually looked pleased, and he limped quickly off between the machines. Will turned to the overlooker and became very busy with him about the note he held in his hand.

  Half an hour later, as Will was crossing the yard, he saw Jonathan and Brigg sitting together on the bank of the Ire. Jonathan held a book in his hand, and was apparently asking Brigg very earnest questions, to which Brigg, rolling cheerfully on his back and biting the end of a long grass, returned frivolous replies. The spectacle gave Will a painful satisfaction.

  3

  It was not really as surprising as Mary, Martha Ackroyd and Will all found it, that Will had remained in ignorance of his son’s existence for so many years. The arrest and trial of Mellor and his friends had discredited the Luddites utterly; the conditional pardon which was proclaimed after the execution sent scores of men hurrying gladly to the magistrates to be “untwissed,” relieved of their illegal oaths, and the desire of every soul in the Ire Valley was to be thought innocent of Luddism. Consequently, the Moorcock, known to be the former headquarters of the movement, was so shunned that the Ackroyds were brought to the verge of ruin. For years no man from Scape Scar or the Ire Valley dare set foot in it; the very path across the moor from Scape Scar grew overgrown. The Ackroyds fell back on the produce of the few scanty acres of pasture behind the inn which had been reclaimed from the moor, and the casual calls of strangers crossing the heights from Lancashire; the place slipped into shabbiness and thus became even less attractive than before.

  This state of affairs, which kept the Moorcock and its inhabitants remote from local gossip for some years, and thus helped to prevent Mary’s situation from coming to Will’s knowledge, during that period filled the Bamforths’ lives with a misery at times almost too bitter to be borne. Old Ackroyd, who had a very natural grudge against the Luddites for spoiling his living, hated the sight of Mary and Jonathan; and scarcely a day passed without some wrangle on the subject between himself and Martha. Terrified by the fate of the Luddites, the Ackroyds and Mary had a vague but strong notion that if Mary made any claim on Will which was disagreeable to him, he would have her put into prison as a Luddite, and perhaps the Ackroyds as well for aiding and abetting her; and so old Ackroyd never quite brought himself to turn Mary out. But he threatened to do so whenever he happened to feel irritated about his lost trade, and taunted her with feeding her bastard on other folk’s bread. As a child Jonathan often had the experience of clinging to his mother’s hand while she, weeping, cried, “I’ll go! I’ll go!” and stumbled, blinded with tears, towards the door. At first, when he was very young, Jonathan was frightened at the thought of thus leaving home, and dragged back upon her hand; but as he grew older and understood their position in the inn, he wanted to go, he urged her forward, he suffered an anguish of humiliation when Mary, her impulse towards independence over, remembered her child and her helplessness and sank down on a chair, defeated, imploring, making promises to work very hard if only they could stay. Once, indeed, the pair actually left the inn after one of these scenes, and got half a mile down the road before Martha overtook them and begged them to come back. “Nay, I’d best go this time, Martha,” wept Mary, turning away her head. But Martha knelt down in the road and put her arms round Jonathan, and said in a loving voice: “Tha doesn’t want to leave thy Auntie Martha, does tha, Jonathan?” Jonathan, suffering in every corner of his proud childish heart, between grief for his mother and reluctance to hurt the kind Martha simply did not know what to say, and bursting into tears, sobbed wildly. Martha thereupon looked reproachfully at Mary. “There, tha sees!” she exclaimed. “Tha shouldn’t upset child so, Mary.” And somehow or other they presently all trailed back to the inn together, to the disgust of old Ackroyd, and the bitter humiliation of Jonathan. That evening the very crust of bread in front of him was snatched from Jonathan’s plate, and the child sat trembling, white with fear and rage, while old Ackroyd stormed above his head, telling him he ought to be in the poorhouse with George Mellor’s brats. Presently the publican stamped off to see to his cow, quiet descended on the kitchen, and Martha urged Jonathan to eat up his nice piece quickly. She was cross when Jonathan could not swallow it down, and accused him of being perverse and obstinate; but Mary understood what he was feeling, and made excuses for him, and loved him with special tenderness when she put him to bed that night, to make up for the wretchedness of the day. When, much later, having finished at last her tasks, Mary laid herself down to rest in the little attic they shared together, thinking Jonathan asleep, she allowed herself the relief of tears. But Jonathan was awake, brooding; at the sound of her gentle sobs his heart swelled with anguish/he started up and threw his arms about her neck, and begged her passionately not to cry, not to cry! He would be a man soon, and then they would see! His thin little body positively trembled in her arms, so vehement was he, and Mary put aside her own grief to soothe and comfort him.

  And so as time went on misery bound them together with the indissoluble, torturing bonds of pity; they were all in all to each other, they loved each other with a deeply, intensely, agonisingly protective love.

  When Jonathan was six or so things became rather better. For one thing the Luddite scare had at last died down, and custom began to come again, though sparsely, to the inn; for another old Ackroyd fell ill, and presently died. But though there was then a blessed relief from odious, stormy scenes, there was still Martha’s generosity to bear; her hospitality, though hearty, was not delicate, and the proud Jonathan winced under it. Oh, how passionately, how terribly he longed for the day to come when his mother need not take charity any more! When he should support her by the labour of his own hands! At night when he lay with his head on her breast in the little attic, and in those rare but happy daytime hours when they sat out upon the purple moor together, Jonathan always spoke of what he was going to do for his mother when he was grown into a man. It was his nightly dream, his morning vision. He would take her away from the Moorcock, they would live together in a house by themselves, nobody should ever give them anything, his mother would never have to weep or thank people again, she should not have to work hard any more; he would support her, he, Jonathan, her loving son. As soon as he understood that children worked in mills he began to pester Mary to get him a place as a piecener, and when she put him off and delayed, loth to bind him to that fearful slavery, he simply took the matter into his own hands, walked down to the Ire Bridge one day and got a place for himself at Wood’s. He chose that place because it was where the Luddites had worked; but it was much changed since those days, thought Jonathan, it was not noble any more. That, of course, thought Jonathan, was due to the rapid growth of this dreadful factory system, which crowded all the workers into mills to tend machines instead of leaving them to work comfortable at home. Still he was proud of working in a mill; proud to bring home his two or three shillings at the end of each week and pour them into his mother’s lap; he endured the long, long hours in the mill, the close air, the scraps of food snatched in the intervals of tending his machines, the deadly fatigue, proudly, joyously; was he not earning for his mother?

  It was from Martha, of course, that Jonathan got his notio
ns about the Luddites; she was always ready to talk about his uncle Joe, and she found Jonathan a sympathetic listener, for the child’s imagination was fired by the story. To think that they had actually met, those noble Luddites, in the parlour of the Moorcock! When he was supposed to be cleaning this parlour, sweeping it out or making up the fire to help his mother, he would often pause, lean against his broom-handle and dream. Those Luddites had actually dared to rise up against the mill-owners, great powerful men who left one’s mother in poverty and distress, defy them, go to death rather than give way to them. Jonathan would like to do something noble, like the Luddites, something fine and daring, something for his fellow-men, something for all mothers whose life was one long endless drudgery, for all children who had no time to learn, no time to play, no name. His uncle Joe had loved reading, just as Jonathan did; Jonathan would like to do something fine, as he had done. Not that Jonathan slurred over the murder of Mr. Oldroyd, not at all; murder was very wrong, he was quite clear on that point, but to him it seemed that the guilt lay upon those who had so oppressed those simple and innocent men (as they were so fond of reading they must be good) as to drive them into murder. And so Jonathan, who knew his mother injured and oppressed, learned to regard the Luddites as oppressed and injured too; and he saw the Oldroyds as wicked oppressors, cruel hard men who bestrode the land and did as they liked with everyone; tramplers of the poor; fierce, vehement, rough, tyrannical; men who murdered one’s uncle, wronged one’s mother and left her to live on charity.