Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  There was a long empty darkness.

  After what seemed an eternity of night a sudden glare seared Jonathan’s eyelids. He struggled agonisingly to open his eyes, and in the light of a lamp held high saw somebody’s hand and the austere face of Dr. Singleton.

  “It’s the lame young man who spoke at the racecourse,” said Dr. Singleton gravely.

  “Poor lad! Poor lad!” exclaimed Oastler, for it was he who held the lamp. Declining to ride, declining even an umbrella since his subjects had none, he was hastening to the front of the column after a brief delay in York spent in arranging for waggons equipped with food to follow and collect the stragglers. “Do you mount, Singleton,” he went on, “and I’ll lift him up.” He took Jonathan by the waist, and with immense heaves of his powerful shoulders hoisted him up to the minister’s saddle. A lean sinewy arm clutched Jonathan’s waist, his head fell against a man’s bony shoulder.

  After this Jonathan knew but little of what went on; he seemed sunk in a dark pit from which he only occasionally emerged. He knew when he was moved into a waggon and laid on straw; he knew and feared the jerk which shook him when the waggon stopped or started. Presently it seemed to be daylight, and he felt very cold; then it was much stronger daylight, and he was burning hot; the rain had stopped, and a voice suddenly exclaimed in a tone of horrified compassion: “Eh! It’s young Mester Joth.” The same voice went on—so loud, so brazen it would crack the heavens, thought Jonathan—to explain that he was Mester Oldroyd’s son, of Syke Mill just below Marthwaite; “Eh! I don’t know what I shall say to him, I’m sure,” went on the voice, distressed. “He’ll have summat to say about this job, will Mester Oldroyd; he will that.” Then something seemed to descend between Jonathan and the voice, cutting it quite off; the next thing he knew was a tinkling, ringing sound; somebody had taken off his inner coat, and the two gold pieces were rolling on the floor. Then somebody was trying to force brandy between his lips; he moved his head away irritably, and groaned; did they not know he was a total abstainer these two years past? Then there was a fearful, searing pain which almost made him scream; his boots were being removed, and the skin of his soles peeled off with them. And then Jonathan had an exquisite experience; a woman’s cool, fragrant hand was laid on his forehead, a woman’s soft voice—not his mother’s voice, not a young girl’s voice, the voice of a cultured and experienced woman—murmured:

  “Poor boy! Poor boy!”

  The voice really seemed to grieve; Jonathan, opening his eyes to see who this might be who pitied him, found himself gazing at the pale distinguished face, the light brown ringlets, the large grey eyes of Miss Helena Singleton. On the instant he conceived for her a terrific, a reverential adoration. She bent over him to draw the bedclothes about his shoulders; he moved his cracked and burning lips in an attempt to kiss her cool white hand.

  3

  Meanwhile, as Wednesday wore on, at New House they became nearly distracted with anxiety. They hoped for Joth in the early morning, thinking he might have taken the night coach; then they decided he was coming by the morning coach, and would be home by noon. When he did not come then, Will began secretly to make calculations of miles and hours, and considered whether to send Brigg down to Annotsfield for news. Brigg, however, was having a grand cleaning of the dyehouse with a young son of Thorpe’s to help, and showed no disposition to leave it. About four in the afternoon a fagged-looking man or two at last turned up at Syke Mill and made the sheepish observation that they supposed it was no use starting work that day. Master Joth, they volunteered, had made a champion speech at York, and had last been seen on the racecourse in company with the Reverend Dr. Singleton. Will, greatly relieved, went across to New House to tell Mary this, and found her by Henry Brigg’s bedside; the old man was still ailing.

  “It seems Jonathan’s been distinguishing himself at York,” announced Will drily, uncertain whether to be glad or sorry.

  Mary, clasping her hands, looked at him in silent joy as he gave her this scanty news, but old Henry Brigg, raising his shrunken face from his pillows, demanded querulously: “Is the boy home yet?”

  “No, not yet,” said Will in a humouring tone, as though he expected Jonathan every minute.

  Jonathan, however, did not come, and when Will had heard for the tenth or twelfth time that Master Joth had made a champion speech at York and stood on a table with Dr. Singleton, he stamped with fury, and asked the returning men whether they called that keeping an eye on the lad as he had asked them to do. Couldn’t they have set him on his way home, at least? The men—with whom Jonathan, ironically enough, was not a great favourite; he seemed to them remote, supercilious and alarming—replied apologetically that when they saw him with Dr. Singleton they thought he was all right; and one of the later comers informed Will that some of those who had attended the meeting were having another meeting and a jollification, in Annotsfield that night. Will pretended to Mary and to himself that Jonathan had stayed in town for this, but he did not believe it, nor did his wife, and as the hours went on and their son did not appear, their anxiety grew overwhelming, and old Henry Brigg’s repeated queries whether Joth had come home or not yet became a torment to them both. When, therefore, while Will and Brigg were at supper and Mary was rocking herself in silent anguish by the fire, Will was called to the house door and confronted by a slubber with a frightened face, he jumped at once to the conclusion that Jonathan was dead.

  “No—no,” said the man at once, reading his face, “It’s non so bad as that, Mester Oldroyd. He’s nobbut a bit poorly, like, wi’ fever, wi’ being in t’wet and that, and his feet are a bit mashed up. Dr. Singleton’s tekken him in—t’minister at Eastgate Wesleyan. There’s nobbut brother and sister, so they’ve plenty o’ room. Miss Singleton said I were to tell his mother,” he added with conscientious precision: “That they would give him every care and she was not to be anxious.”

  “Is Joth dead?” cried out a piercing old voice at this point.

  Will turned to see old Henry Brigg, rather a dreadful object, toothless and withered as he was, in his cap and nightgown, clinging to the rail at the head of the stairs. Unfortunately Mary had overheard his cry, and screaming “Jonathan!” she rushed out of the room with an anguished query on her face. In soothing her Will forgot old Mr. Brigg for a minute, and when he remembered him again the old man had sunk down on the top step, and was leaning against the banister, white and gasping and threshing his arms about. Will shouted for Brigg to come and help get his grandfather to bed, and the pair carried the old man into his room and laid him on his pillows. He was now quite quiet, but looked livid and exhausted.

  “He’s done for himself this time,” murmured Will grimly to his son. “Fetch your mother and get the brandy.”

  Brigg, who had been very silent, almost sullen, since Joth’s departure, obeyed without making any reply.

  Early next morning Will, after a troublous night with old Mr. Brigg, whose condition the Marthwaite apothecary pronounced very serious, rode down to the Singletons’ quiet house in Eastgate. He was received by Dr. Singleton and his sister in a room lined with books; the minister, rising from a paper-strewn desk, gave Will a brief account of the circumstances of the York meeting and Joth’s illness, which it appeared was congestion of the lungs; then Miss Singleton took him upstairs and left him alone with his son. Joth, who was lying on his side, very still, had a rather flushed air and so did not look very ill to Will’s eyes; moreover, at first he knew his father, addressing him in so much his usual tone of defiant dutifulness that Will was quite reassured. But almost at once Joth closed his eyes and began a long incoherent rambling mutter; when Will, distressed, spoke his name to recall him, he opened his eyes suddenly, but now they were glittering and dilated, and held no recognition. He gazed at Will suspiciously, as though he were a complete stranger, then sank back again into the stupor from which his father’s entrance had aroused him. Will sighed heavily, and wondered what he should find to say to Jonathan’s mother, and
why the boy was so perverse. Fancy him attempting to walk to York and back with that lame leg! As Will stood up to leave it struck him that he had never kissed this son of his in his life; he bent and kissed Jonathan’s hot forehead, and as he did so perceived the crowning instance of his perversity—the two sovereigns, lying on a small round table holding medicines at the bedside. This was really too much, and Will, having tip-toed down the stairs and encountered the Singletons waiting for him in the hall, threw out in a perplexed and exasperated tone:

  “I don’t know what on earth Joth wanted to walk to York and back for, I’m sure. He had money in his pocket, ample for food and a coach. I gave him money before he started, and I see it’s still there, unbroken.”

  The Singletons exchanged a glance which showed that they had discussed the subject before in private; Will saw it, and said shortly:

  “It was a silly thing for him to do.”

  “It was a noble thing to do,” said Miss Singleton in her quiet pure tones.

  Will felt provoked both by the speech and the speaker. He was inclined to despise all unmarried women of more than twenty-five years of age, as having failed in the purpose for which they were born; he judged Miss Singleton to be at least thirty, and was not disposed to take any nonsense from her. As she stood there, looking confoundedly calm and cool in her neat dark townswoman’s dress, with her hands clasped primly in front of her, and her grey eyes looking sternly and fearlessly into Will’s, he recognised in her, with irritation, something of the same quality that there was in Joth—you couldn’t do anything with such people, he thought, they had no ordinary sense, it was impossible to understand them, they were altogether too good. There was something exasperating in the very parting of her light hair; it was too smooth, too neat, too correct to be born. No wonder she hadn’t married, jeered Will to himself, and aloud he said:

  “The meeting itself was to my mind a piece of criminal folly.”

  “There we must disagree,” remarked Dr. Singleton with some emphasis. “But however,” he went on in a gentler tone, with an air of waving the subject away as beyond Will’s intelligence, “our great object at present must be to restore your son to health, Mr. Oldroyd.”

  “Aye,” agreed Will shortly. Damn them both, he thought to himself as he bowed coldly and took his leave; and damn their prim genteel house, their books and their messy papers, as well. He did not perceive the full extent of the Singletons’ feelings towards him, but he felt that they were being damned high with him, and somewhere at the bottom of his mind lurked the wish that he had put on his best coat. “They’re the sort of people Joth likes,” he told Mary shortly in response to her anxious questions when he got home. “I don’t care for them myself. But the lad’s safe with them.”

  The impression of dislike was mutual. To such high-minded, puritanic and humanitarian Christians as Dr. Singleton and his sister—total abstainers since the inauguration of the new movement in Preston two years ago, and persons who regarded any mention of carnal love as an abomination—Will appeared as a very gross and undesirable person. To them he was one of those coarse, uncultured country manufacturers whose cruelty to the children they employed stank in the nostrils and made such pilgrimages as the one to York a moral duty. As if that were not enough, too, Will had an illegitimate son, and was singularly shameless, according to their ideas, in admitting it—he spoke of Jonathan as “my son” and referred to the boy’s mother, quite openly. After exchanging a few sentences with her brother on these disapproving lines, Helena went to the sick room and gazed intently at the dozing Jonathan. She looked at his fine austere face, she looked at the two gold coins, she remembered the raw and bleeding feet she had wept over as she bandaged them, she thought of Will Oldroyd’s large gross personality, which offended her fastidious taste; she considered her brother’s account of Jonathan’s speech from the beer table at York, and the Syke Mill man’s unconscious commentary of the New House situation. And she felt she understood Jonathan, and the martyrdom of his life, through and through; sensitive and fastidious, of the most scrupulous moral integrity herself, she felt she understood what Jonathan’s life at New House would mean to a sensitive, fastidious and upright young man. “Poor boy!” she murmured again, and yearned over him.

  Jonathan abruptly opened his eyes and gazed at her. Helena became conscious that she had been gazing at the young man with something too much of particularity; she coloured faintly, and said with her simple directness: “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Oldroyd?”

  A frown contracted Jonathan’s features, and the vein down the centre of his forehead pulsed. “My name isn’t Oldroyd,” he whispered with a fierce intensity.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Helena simply. “What shall I call you?”

  But Jonathan was already away and muttering. He rolled his head restlessly from side to side and threw out a long string of disconnected words, to which, however, Helena thought she now had the clue. She bent over him.

  “You want the sovereigns to be given to your father?” she said.

  Jonathan opened his eyes and looked at her with a relief which to Helena was pathetic because it was so surprised. He nodded painfully. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “He’s not used to anyone understanding him,” thought Helena, with a contraction of the heart. “Poor boy!” She looked into his eyes and said clearly: “I understand. I understand,” she repeated, “and I will see that it is done.”

  An immense gratitude shone in Jonathan’s eyes before the light of intelligence again went out.

  On the fifth day after his reception into the Singletons’ house the crisis of Jonathan’s pneumonia was successfully passed, and during the next few weeks he became gradually conscious of an agreeable convalescence among the kind of people, as his father had truly prophesied, that he liked. There were books in the house, there were London newspapers, there was much political and religious conversation, there was a general assumption that labour for the welfare of others was a universal duty, and education, knowledge, a priceless boon. After Dr. Singleton had had one or two talks with him, too, there arose another assumption, and a very agreeable one; namely that Jonathan was an exceedingly clever young man who was rather wasted out in Marthwaite, that he had talents which must be employed. Would he, in the autumn when he would be quite recovered, take a class at the Annotsfield Young Men’s Improvement Society just newly started? Would he—this when Dr. Singleton had identified him with the writer of the letter in the Mercury— write an article for the new paper, The Factory Child’s Friend? Jonathan, sitting up in bed bright-eyed and happy, could and did, and his talents were rated higher than before. What a pity Marthwaite was too far for him to attend Eastgate on Sunday! “Oh, but it isn’t, it isn’t!” pleaded Jonathan eagerly. “Such a few miles—I can easily walk.” A shudder of horrified pity shook Miss Singleton at the thought of Jonathan walking anywhere again. “Perhaps if you are to help my brother with the Improvement Society … Saturday … stay the night,” she murmured. Jonathan was too delicate to accept an invitation so indefinite, but his eyes looked his passionate wish to do so. He began to study for the Improvement Society class, and drew up, in his fine pointed writing, an astonishingly good syllabus for a year’s course. A whole new world of interests and ambitions thus opened about him. His room was bright and pleasant, and the brother and sister formed the kindly habit of making it the centre of the household; Dr. Singleton came there from his visiting and told Jonathan instructive anecdotes, Miss Singleton sat there of an afternoon with her sewing, and talked to Jonathan about literature. They both found Jonathan an exceedingly interesting and striking young man—indeed it was impossible not to find him so—and Jonathan bloomed in the sunshine of their approbation.