Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  Chapter IV

  The Three Children

  1

  Life at New House now became very different. No longer did Will feel about his home a content which was calm and cool because he did not really greatly care. No! He now cared profoundly, and so he was sometimes happy, sometimes miserable, and sometimes furious, but never merely calm. (The Ire Valley folk preferred him like this; they said among themselves that Will Oldroyd was getting quite human since his second marriage.) Will often asked himself why he had been such a fool as to break up all his placid peace, and introduce into his life such elements of discord. He as often reflected, with a cynical humour, that it served him right for deserting Mary before; and at the bottom of his heart he did not regret his action in marrying her.

  There were ways in which Mary exasperated her husband. He was not pleased, for instance, to find the loud naive Martha Ackroyd constantly sitting at his board when he came home, though in the circumstances he could not decently object to her. After a time this irritation subsided however, for Martha, lonely without Mary and Jonathan, took a cousin to herself as husband; Will made her a very handsome present, and New House saw her no more. But there still remained in Mary traits vexatious to Will. She could not cook as well as Bessy; never once did Will eat in his own house what Bessy had taught him to regard as a good meal. With a shrug of his shoulders he at length resigned himself to it—and to finding his house not as well kept as it had been by his first wife. Will himself was the soul of cleanliness and tidiness, and hated to see dust in a corner, or pots left unwashed, or sideboards in. a muddle. With Mary as his wife he had to see these rather often; in her twelve years of hard toil at the Moorcock she had lost the finer touches of housewifery, and her maids took advantage of her. Then, too, at first after her marriage she looked very much out of place amid the comparative splendours of New House; her new clothes seemed to hang uncouthly upon her, she looked uncomfortable in them, like a serving girl dressed up. In the course of time her clothes came to fit more naturally, but she never acquired the manner suitable to the wife of Mr. William Oldroyd, and consequently there was little company at New House. Many respectable Ire Valley wives would not visit a woman who had, as they now understood, lacked the necessary wedding ring for so many years; those who out of complaisance to their husband’s trade with Will consented to call, were disconcerted by Mary’s timid and frightened air and her utter incapacity to attempt the pretence of being a lady, and rarely came again. There was, for example, one disastrous afternoon when James Smith, who, tired of coping with his brother’s savage ambition, had retired on his share of the Smith fortunes and lived at leisure in Annotsfield, brought his smart new wife to call on Mrs. Oldroyd—Will laughed and swore to himself whenever he thought of it, and was not surprised that Mrs. James did not continue the acquaintance.

  But after all, Will always concluded, what did it matter? If Mary had defects she had qualities too. She was gentleness itself to poor maundering old Henry Brigg, who, now very crotchety and always more or less ailing, could hardly bear her out of his sight. She was full of kindness for young Brigg, who in return had a very faithful affection for his stepmother. As for Will himself, he loved Mary; not quite with his young man’s ardour, for in the years they had grown apart, but still with a deep passion. She was the woman for him; when he held her in his arms he was profoundly satisfied, as he had never been satisfied by Bessy; when he was riding back from Annotsfield market he grew happy as he drew near her warm loving welcome; even in the midst of important business he found himself thinking of her with a yearning ache in his heart. Yes, in spite of her provoking lack of sophistication, Will loved her; old Brigg relied upon her, young Brigg confided in her; alone in the household Jonathan frowned upon his mother.

  Jonathan was, of course, the storm-centre of the New House situation. His very name exasperated Will; he felt a fool shouting such cumbersome syllables about the mill, yet the natural diminutive, Joe, was for well-known reasons impossible. Brigg, however, one day solved this problem by shouting in some eager game: “Come on, Joth!” This abbreviation seemed silly to Will, but not so silly as the boy’s real name, and as Jonathan did not openly object, though his eyebrows arched and his fine nostrils quivered, when Will after some hesitation tried it, the diminutive came into general use, and after a while even Mary employed it. For his part Jonathan heard his real name abandoned with a kind of bitter satisfaction; let it go, that name, as all his old life had gone. It struck him to the heart the first time Mary used the new name; what, she too! His mother to give up t. e name which she had spoken lovingly so many hundreds of times in their twelve years together, in favour of this vulgar, barbarian shortening! But it was all of a piece; she had sacrificed his happiness to the Oldroyds, his name might as well follow. Soon she would forget that he had ever any other name—they were good at forgetting in New House, mused Jonathan scornfully; they forgot more readily than the ginger cat. That animal would not settle in its new home, but returned always to the Moorcock; yet Mary had forgotten her son’s name and Will had forgotten Bessy. As Bessy’s cause was so lost and forgotten, it was natural that Jonathan, that lover of the injured and oppressed, should take it up. He saw Bessy as a noble woman who had given her life to save her child, and Will’s open delight in Mary, with his first wife scarcely cold in her grave, struck Jonathan as peculiarly callous and revolting—in fact, just what he would have expected from his father.

  With all these bitter thoughts seething in the boy’s head it was no wonder that Will was wont to accuse him of mooning about the place like a sick donkey. The boy had good food and good clothes, and went to the dame’s school in Marthwaite whenever there wasn’t anything pressing for him to do at the mill, complained his father, so why on earth couldn’t he look cheerful? To this Mary, fearful of a clash between her loved ones, replied by hinting at Joth’s lame leg—it might be paining him. This always silenced Will, for he knew himself guilty, by his desertion of Mary, of that stunted leg and Joth’s thin, under-nourished frame. Very soon after his second marriage Will sent for a surgeon from Annotsfield, and the leg was subjected to various painful and complicated treatments. But it did not improve, and Will, coming impetuously one day to the conclusion that the doctor was a fool and doing his son no good, dismissed him. This made Jonathan, who thought the doctor a learned man and his father an ignorant boor, very angry; moreover, he thought that Will’s concern for his leg was the purest hypocrisy, when his father was at that moment engaged in bending the arms and legs of other children of tender years, in his own carding and slubbing rooms. When Will came home jubilant, and said they should have to run the mill till ten o’clock that night, so throng were they, Jonathan always thought of the extra hours the pieceners would have to put in, and scowled and winced. This again of course made his father furious, though Will did not in the least understand what Jonathan’s angry look implied, except that it was something derogatory to Syke Mill. But then nobody in the whole Ire Valley seemed to understand what Jonathan meant, either about the cloth trade, mused Jonathan sadly, or anything else; either Jonathan was very much out of joint with the universe, or the times were. Lonely and unhappy, the boy was not sure which it was, and he sometimes worried himself sick trying to discover. Proud and reserved by nature, he did not find it easy to make confidences and in any case he had nobody to confide in; his mother the regarded as having gone over to the enemy, and Jonathan was much too scrupulous ever to say a word against his father to jolly little Brigg. So he walked apart, hunched himself unsociably over his Bible—it was the only book New House boasted—or brooded alone on the banks of the Ire over the sorrows of the world.

  Brigg could hardly say when he first became aware that Joth was his father’s eldest son. The knowledge came upon him gradually and harmlessly, so that when one of the men in the mill one day maliciously told him the story, Brigg was able to retort with contempt: “I knew that long ago,” and go off whistling. Will hearing of this episode from Thorpe, wh
o was now head of the slubbing room and very much in Will’s confidence, was minded to rush down in a fury and turn the tale-bearer out of Syke Mill at once; but he reflected, and with a kind of hard justice natural to the Oldroyds, decided that he could not punish another man for what was his own fault, yet would not let the incident pass unavenged. He therefore terrified the offender almost out of his wits by saying to him publicly, in front of the whole room: “So you take an interest in Master Joth’s father, do ye?” and then, after an awful instant, laughed in the man’s flushed gaping face, turned on his heel and strolled off coolly. He was much admired in Syke Mill for this open acknowledgement of his son; and to show what they felt about it the men made rather a point of referring to Will as “your father” to Joth. The boy himself, after some days’ anguished wrestling on the subject, decided that as his mother’s shame and his own were thus known and canvassed, it would be unmanly to attempt any dissimulation, so he took to calling Will “father,” as Mary had long been begging him to do. He pronounced this title, however, with such an air of grave reproach that Will said his look was enough to turn the milk sour—living with Joth was like living with a thundercloud, grumbled Will, and even Brigg, who loved his stepbrother heartily and had many kindnesses from his hands, could not but giggle at this comparison and admit its justice.

  It was not surprising, therefore, that Sunday was regarded as the most peaceful day of the week at New House, not so much because the mill usually did not run then, as because Joth was absent all the day at Scape Scar Chapel. He left early in the morning with some bread and meat tied up in a handkerchief, attended two services and a class, and did not return till quite late in the evening. At first Jonathan actually dragged Mary up to Scape Scar with him every Sunday, leaving Will fuming; but when it presently became certain that Mary was with child, Will put his foot down and forbade her to climb the hill any more. Joth did not approve of the forthcoming addition to the family; he looked down his nose very much when it was mentioned and made it clear by his manner that he thought his father and mother too old to be having a child—a suggestion which made Will stamp with rage. Will himself, however, viewed the prospect of another child with some alarm; the two he had were nuisance enough, he really boggled at the thought of a third. And what on earth would this one be like? Another Jonathan? Will very heartily hoped not. At night when he and Mary were alone, he was wont to tease her by a mock despair on the subject.

  “Let’s have a red-haired one this time, lass,” he urged her. “And a daughter for choice. I don’t want another like Joth, not at any price.”

  2

  When Mary’s time came he got exactly and precisely his wish; the child was a lovely girl, with the bright Oldroyd hair, blue eyes and a brilliantly fair complexion. Mary had a difficult delivery, and Will was so upset that he fumed and swore and stamped all up and down the mill (to the contempt of Jonathan, who, with Brigg, had been forbidden the house, and had not heard his mother’s screams); but the moment he looked upon the child something seemed to turn over in Will’s heart, the sentiments of paternity which the circumstances of his life had repressed gushed forth in an overwhelming flood, and Mary’s welfare sank to second place with him. Through the months of the little Sophia’s happy, healthy infancy, Will was always hanging over her cradle; he marvelled at her rose-leaf hands, her soft cool cheeks, those lovely starry eyes, the delicious movements of her round fair limbs, as though he had never seen a baby before. In a word, he doted on her.

  Book III

  Divergence

  Chapter I

  Divergence

  1

  Sophia thrived, and grew into an active little girl; and her blue eyes began to take a very definite view of the New House world.

  It was not, perhaps, the kindliest possible view, for Sophia was under no illusions about her relations; they seemed to her a dull and undistinguished lot. There was her father: a stern elderly man, rather heavy in body, with hair growing out of his ears, of whom everyone was afraid except Sophia (and even she a little). He was, of course, the best cloth manufacturer in the Ire Valley, with the best mill, the first to be lighted by gas in the valley, equipped with the best machinery: so much Sophia took for granted. He also brought her presents every market day from Annotsfield, which was agreeable, and if anybody forbade her to do anything, she had only to run to her father and he would arrange things so that she could do it. But she was not really, not at the bottom of her heart, very fond of him; she respected him because from time to time he whipped her violently for naughtiness to her mother; she liked to ride on his shoulder, to be swung about in his strong arms, to receive tit-bits from his plate at table, to be displayed to admiring callers at the mill as her father’s clever little daughter, to know herself the queen of his heart. But it was only rarely that she had any deep feeling for him. When he was all dressed for market, very much washed and shaved, with his silver spurs and his watch and his signet ring and his fine new whip and his best coat, and sat astride his big new horse, looking very rich and commanding, then Sophia loved him, and ran about him as he rode off-getting much too close to the horse’s feet in her mother’s opinion, but never receiving any hurt, trust Sophia the lover of horses for that!—jumping up and down ecstatically, her blue eyes sparkling with admiration. But in his mill coat she did not like him nearly so well; she hated him to tell her she resembled his mother, and if he revealed any knowledge of the intimacies of a little girl’s clothes and personal life, she simply loathed him. In a word, Sophia did not like Will when he was homely with her; to her mind fathers should be majestic, godlike creatures, and any lapse from this ideal on her father’s part irritated Sophia intensely.

  After her father there came her mother, and then her two brothers, Joth and Brigg. Oh! Of course there was old Grandpapa Brigg upstairs, poor old thing; but he was dying; he hardly counted, sometimes Sophia forgot him for days together. She knew he loved to see her, but he was so nasty to look at, she was sure father wouldn’t want her to go into his room; father would say so if he were here, protested Sophia, weeping and dragging back on the perplexed Mary’s hand. Sometimes, however, Joth would overhear one of these little scuffles, and then he came and took his little sister’s hand with a stern look and led her into the dying man’s room; Sophia at once became quite quiet and nice, and prattled charmingly. Yes, there was of course old Grandpapa Brigg, but he hardly counted; after father in the family came mother. Sophia was probably fonder of her mother than she would care to admit. Outwardly her manner to Mary was rough and careless; Mary’s mind and hands were much slower than her daughter’s, and Sophia found this very provoking. But it was impossible for anyone, and certainly for a bright forward child like Sophia, to live with Mary and not perceive the truth, the gentleness and the beauty of her character; so Sophia, though she was rude and naughty to her mother, sometimes even stamping at her and shouting, “Don’t you see?” in uncontrollable impatience, was yet very touchy if anyone else ventured to criticise her, and once threw a bowl of milk at a maid who muttered something sneering about one of Mary’s timid orders.

  For Sophia had the Oldroyd temper in a quite alarming degree; she was wilful and high-spirited by nature, and made much more so by her father’s unwise spoiling of her. Everyone in Syke Mill knew that it was ill to thwart her; she was over free with her hands, the men said crossly, and they were rather sarcastic to her when Will was not by. On the other hand, she had a singular passion for maimed and damaged animals and insects; she would spend long minutes trying to rescue a silly fly which was dashing itself against the window-pane, or righting a fluffy caterpillar which had fallen upside down. Sometimes she screamed at them in pure rage at their stupidity in avoiding her when she was only trying to help them, but she usually completed their rescue and watched their subsequent careers with real tenderness. She kept a tame white mouse in a box of Brigg’s contriving; Sophia’s mouse was a most important personage in the Oldroyd household, and woe betide anyone who used him inconside
rately. Brigg happening, one evening when all the family was sitting together, to jar the animal’s cage with his arm—he was at all times rather a clumsy fellow—Sophia rushed at him, and with clenched teeth and fury in every line of her small face, struck him as hard as she could on the forearm, repeatedly. Poor Brigg was so taken aback and upset by blows from his darling little Sophia that he looked almost ready to cry, blushed to the ears and exclaimed “Sophy!” in reproachful wonder: whereupon Sophia, deeply ashamed of herself, fled under the table and wept bitterly. This disturbed Will, who looked up from his paper to ask crossly what they were doing to the child; and eventually the injured Brigg had to descend to hands and knees, pet her and caress her, and coax her to come out and sit on his knee by the promise of a lump of sugar. Joth of course disapproved of this; he told Brigg severely that he spoiled Sophia almost as much as their father did.

  “Well, if I do?” said Brigg cheerfully, burying his chin in Sophia’s fuzzy mop of red-gold hair.