Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  He grabbed at his beard. “What's the matter?”

  “There's blood on it!”

  He glanced into the mirror on the wall. “Confound it. I thought I'd got it clean.” He rubbed a handkerchief across his face. “There, is that better?”

  But she was sidling away from him, pale with an inexplicit fear that was the fear of her dream returning irresistibly upon her.

  “Why, Harriet child, nothing to be upset about. I couldn't help it.” He drove her back to the piano stool. “It was his fault. I couldn't stand there and let him belt me, could I?”

  She saw he had been fighting. This reasonable explanation for the blood on his beard calmed her, and she breathed freely again, gazing at the carpet.

  “Could I?” he repeated, and when she did not agree he burst out, “Damn it, you ALL seem to think I'm some kind of a monster. Even you!” Her silence, parrying his appeal as though she feared that a word, a gesture, of denial would involve her in some unwholesome compact of emotion, loosed a torrent of reproach. “Even you, Harriet. You believe them when they say I'd do anything. Somebody's been telling you lies about me. Your mother? James, eh?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no.”

  “Lies,” he growled. “Lies, lies, lies. All lies. They say I tried to steal land off McFarlane, duffed horses, robbed Miss Ludmilla, cheated Sambo. And now she says I. . .” He wiped his hand across his lips and went tramping round the room.

  Harriet did not look up.

  This unjust judgment of silence infuriated him. He stopped in front of her. “You all look down on me—you and James and all the rest. Huh. You don't know what it was like here forty years ago. Say a man held a gun at YOUR head. What would YOU do? Sit there and let him pull the trigger? And say you didn't? Would it be. . .”

  She preserved a dead face, trying not even to hear him.

  He gestured helplessly. How could one explain and justify to the blind and unjust. “You couldn't understand,” he said quietly. “You'd have to trace it all back to the beginning.”

  He walked over to the table, sat down, and wedged his face between his hands. “I was as clean skinned and innocent as you in the beginning,” he muttered, gazing over her head at the square plaque of darkness and the stars sweeping away beyond.

  There was a jingle of tiny, muted bells. A moth was fluttering under the frosted shade of the lamp at his elbow. Bells. . . the clang of ships' bells coming out of the sea mist, himself a boy with his face pressed against the cold window to watch the beacon glow on Tenterburn Hill and the ghostly topsails of a ship fighting away from the Cliffs—church bells on Sunday morning and the rustle of starched dresses in High Street, the lavender smell of his mother's gloves—the bell calling him once more to the ordeal of a meal-table shared with quarrelsome brothers and a father crude and violent and contemptuous. . .

  The jingling ceased in an upflaring of the steady light and a sizzle of burnt wings. He started, looked at the lamp, and sighed. “Yes,” he said, “I was young like you. Then I did something. If you understood everything—the years, struggling, thinking, waiting. . .” His teeth clicked.

  He looked at her, but the stubborn uncompassion of her eyes held him off. “You!” he said bitterly. “Where would you be?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Father,” Harriet said, flashing her rings at him. “I don't want to understand. It's not fair. I want to go away. Send me away from here. Why do you always promise and never send me away. Send me to England.”

  “Harriet! Child! Dear!” He jumped up, went to the piano and put an arm round her shoulder. “Why, you're shaking like a leaf. Did I scare you?”

  “Scared—no. I'm angry,” Harriet said. “It's monstrous.”

  “Monstrous? Why, child, what d'you mean?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” Harriet said and her lips began to tremble. “It's the way you want everything. Oh, I can't explain.”

  “Me want everything! But only for you, darling. In a year's time—two years—I'll be as rich as Carnegie. You'll be an heiress to millions. They'll all want to marry you—fine young men, like I was. Believe me, dear, I was—young, handsome, in Owerbury. . .”

  She struggled against his arm, crushing the breath out of her, then gave up struggling and went lax against him. In a flat voice she said, “You'll never send me away. You'll keep me locked up till I'm old and ugly like Montaulk. Never seeing anything but sheep—like a prisoner. . .” “Good heavens, girl, what're you saying? After all, you're barely eighteen.”

  “Yes, and I've never been out of the valley—not even to Brisbane.” She freed herself and went to the window.

  Cabell was startled by this sudden rebellion of a girl who had been so gentle, so unresisting, so like his mother, he had always thought. Now, as she stood by the window watching him sideways with the shadows in her long eyes he saw, for an instant, a resemblance to Emma, but pushed the idea away. “You're a bit overwrought,” he said. “Perhaps a change would do you good. As a matter of fact I was thinking I might take a house in Brisbane. . .”

  She looked at her reflection in the mirror and shrugged.

  Part III: The Nice People

  Chapter One: James Hoists His Colours

  Everything came to a head between Cabell and James after Geoffrey let the cat out of the bag at the Christmas dinner of 1889. Or rather James had his chance to bring it to a head. He puttered aimlessly about the place, pouring out his grievances to Harriet, or in one of his old hideouts along the river framing over and over the arguments with which he was going to shout his father down and prove how futile it was to make an engineer out of him or to try to prevent him from marrying Jennis Bowen.

  But these powerful reasons and angry words, which welled up so fluently when he was alone that he had to talk them aloud to the trees, seemed feeble when Cabell was near and he felt, like a palpable chill, his father's blank indifference. Cabell often took him aside now and talked to him, but just as he might have talked to a clerk. “You get finished with your studying quick. By that time I'll be ready to use you.” He talked too of Ludmilla and Larsen and of the way he would drive them out of HIS mine. James listened and despaired. How could he hope to prevail where so many had been beaten. Again, as in childhood, he looked at the battered face and read there how his father had suffered and fought, committed crimes perhaps, and emerged from all ordeals with energy and purpose unspent.

  He went to Harriet. “I'm going away to-morrow.”

  “What, you've had it out with him? Oh, Jimmy!” She took his arm and huddled against him. “What did he say?”

  “I didn't have it out—no. What's the use. He only yells.” “But you're not going back to Sydney! You're going to do what you said and marry Jennis.”

  James scowled. “Yes, I will. And I won't study till he's ready to use me. I'm damned if I will.”

  “Ah Jimmy!” She turned up to him eyes bright with admiration and the appeal of her own hopes. “But what will you do? He won't give you any money!”

  “I don't suppose so,” James said, worried. Then he threw himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands. “Damn him!”

  “Then you'll have to go and tell Sir Michael everything straight away,” Harriet said briskly. “Tell him what an unreasonable man Papa is. He'll help you. He said he would, didn't he? He said he'd help you to learn the law and go in for politics.”

  “Yes, he said so.”

  “That's all right then. You'll get a position and be able to marry Jennis.”

  “Oh, I suppose so.”

  “You only suppose so. But haven't you made up your mind? Oh,” she cried, “if I was a man and I wanted to marry a girl and Papa said I couldn't I'd—I'd buy some sheep and go out into the bush and start a station and get rich. Why, like Papa did!”

  James smiled sourly. “That was all right for him. Look at the kind of man he is. He never thinks of anything but sheep and gold-dust. Besides, there wasn't anything else then. Now it's different. There are more nice people now. Like
Doug Peppiott's father and Sir Michael Flanagan and all the people they have at their houses. You haven't got to show you're a man by fighting and swearing and talking about sheep. You don't understand. You haven't been in Brisbane and Sydney. It's civilized there.”

  “I wouldn't care,” Harriet said, “if I was in love. I wouldn't care about anything.”

  “Rot! You don't know what you're talking about.” Then he glanced up quickly and said, “And you don't want to go talking like that in front of people in Brisbane when you go.”

  “Why?”

  “A girl oughtn't to—that's why. It's only a certain kind of girl talks like that.”

  “I must be a certain kind of girl then.”

  “You don't know what you're saying,” James grumbled. “And I jolly well hope you don't go on talking like that in front of nice people. It's bad enough having Geoffrey down there running about the town.”

  Harriet laughed and put her arms around him. “I won't run about the town. I'll sit at home waiting for someone to come and propose to me. And if they love me enough I don't care where they take me or how much money they've got.”

  “A fat lot of need YOU'LL have to worry about money,” James said resentfully.

  Next day he left for Brisbane—two hundred and fifty jolting dusty miles by coach and another hundred in a tiny oven of a railway carriage, which he shared with a couple of drunken squatters from the Outside. They had a barrel of beer in the compartment and wanted him to drink with them.

  “First time been Brisbane twelve years,” one of them confided, thrusting a tankard under James's nose. “No women, no nothing but sheep and gins. Out Never-Never. Got fifteen thousan' quid blow in. Goin' have bender. Me 'n' mate. You come along young plo'.” The train lurched and he spilled half the contents of the tankard into James's immaculate lap.

  James removed himself to the other end of the carriage and carefully sponged the spots off his clothes, thinking, “Twelve years and nothing but sheep. I couldn't. No, I COULDN'T. I might get just like HIM.” He took a room at the Royal Hotel in Queen Street, cleaned and dressed himself carefully, and set out for Sir Michael Flanagan's house on Bowen Terrace. The streets were full of well-dressed men and women, cabs and carriages and smart gigs. He looked nervously sideways at a reflection of himself in a shop window, appraising his clothes. Yes, they compared, he thought, pleased with himself, and covertly adjusted the set of his coat. Men passing waved to him and ladies bowed. He began to feel a little more confident. These people liked him. He was one of them. They would help him because of that and because they were generous. So everything would surely turn out all right.

  A voice hailed him from the kerb. “Hey, young fella me lad!” It was Doug Peppiott, lounging in a flash-looking run-about with a pair of beautiful grey horses straining at the reins, which he held in his yellow-gloved hands so as to show off the fine arch of the horses' necks. James hurried over and greeted him.

  “Steady!” Peppiott said. “You'll scare the nags. They're a bit hot standing.”

  “What a match!” James said. “Where did you get them?”

  “Picked 'em up off old Lord Bacon when we were down Sydney, Christmas. He wanted to give 'em to me, but the Pater wouldn't stand for it. Not a bad old boy. Cottoned on to me like a long lost.” He gave the end of his red moustaches a flourish. “Matter of fact, he's going to give me some tickets for soup when I go Home to Oxford later in the year.” “You're going to Oxford?”

  “Pater's idea. Just as soon stay and buy a place and start breeding nags myself. But it ought to be fun knocking about with the Johnnies for a couple of years.” He glanced at James to see how he was taking this, and was pleased to see him taking it very badly. “Better than making stinks and mud-pies in a goldmine, eh?”

  James frowned at him. He was bigger than James, with a full, florid, good-looking face, belittling grey eyes, and a drawling, scornful voice. A typical good fellow, a well-flushed, breezy young man about town—first-class polo player, dashing fellow on the cricket field (he had knocked up fifty against a visiting English team), generous spender, leader of wild pranks in town (he threw a piano downstairs in the Royal Hotel one night when somebody complained about the noise he was making), sentimental baritone balladist in great demand at “evenings,” and hero to his mother and to the ladies of Frogs' Hollow. In his spacious gestures and easy smiles spoke that assurance of a fortunate destiny for which James had always envied and, furtively, hated him. Since James's first year at school when Peppiott had hounded a merciless pack after him with the story of Cabell's early days he had become, in James's eyes, a symbol for all those who had no skeletons in the cupboard and therefore could afford to judge and despise others. How he had always wanted to be like Doug Peppiott—and how his heart seethed with spite against him. But he bit his tongue whenever it tried to speak out because he was afraid of the pack which Peppiott was born to lead. To stand in well with them, to be accepted as one of them, was all he desired. If someone had told him that as he stood there envying Peppiott, Peppiott was envying him for having a father who, all agreed, would soon be one of the richest men in Australia, James would not have believed it. Peppiott looked bigger and handsomer and more self-assured than ever as he gazed down from the runabout with the two proud-looking horses fretting against his strong hands, and James felt shabby and small. To make up for his sense of this he said manfully, “I'm not going into the mine. I've made up my mind.”

  Peppiott laughed. “We know all about that. I ran into Geoff down in Queenie's last night and he told us what your old man said about Flanagan and his granddaughter. He must be a bit of a doer, your old man. Is it true he makes the miners strip starbolic naked in front of him to show they ain't pinching any of his gold?”

  James tried to glare, but Peppiott's sarcastic eyes were too much for him. “I'm not going into the mine,” he snapped. “Geoffrey doesn't know what he's talking about.”

  Peppiott chuckled. “You want to be careful,” he said, “or your old man'll be towelling you up as he did your brother Lar. . .” He stopped, confused, and turning, James found that Peppiott senior had come up while they were talking and was now frowning at his son.

  James's only desire was to get away from them, but Peppiott senior seized his hand and pump-handled it. “James! What a pleasure.” He pronounced it pless-shaw, unctuously, crouching slightly as though to drop these two little drops of oil on to the back of James's hand. He was tall and thin with a long, thin face set in rat-skin dundrearies. His head was long and narrow, like a melon, and he wore his sparse patent-leather hair brushed straight back and parted in the middle. He lifted a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles to the bridge of his sharp nose, then let them swing on their ribbon. “No i-deah you were down, my dear fellow. On your way somewhere? Let us drop you.”

  “There isn't any room with these high-flyers,” Doug grumbled. “He'd rather walk.”

  “Walk in this heat? What rot. You move over.” He moved over and Peppiott bundled James in and wedged his thin buttocks down between them.

  The horses pranced and shied and swung out into the traffic. “I hear a rumour that your father is taking old Judge Bullenough's house at New Farm. Is it true?” Peppiott senior asked.

  “I did hear something,” James mumbled.

  “It would please me,” Peppiott said, “if it gave me an opportunity to renew my acquaintance with your father. I knew him years ago. A re-MARK-able man. He deserved to get on. I suppose he will bring your sister down for a little amusement?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Ah. We must see that she is not disappointed.”

  “Mother coming too?” Doug put in.

  Father and son exchanged looks. “Mind where you're driving you dam' fool,” Peppiott said, spitting drops of venom, not oil, into his son's ear. Angry and embarrassed James lifted himself half out of the seat. “You can put me down here,” he said. “It's not far to walk.”

  But Peppiott held him back. “No, just a moment
, James. I have something to ask you—if you don't think it would be impertinent of an old man who has seen you grow up and come to look on you as—well, you've been about with Douglas so much that it is almost as if you were my own son.”

  James blushed. “Not at all, sir. Anything. . .”

  “It was about Jennis Bowen, my dear boy. Douglas tells me that you've quarrelled with your father.”

  “As a matter of fact—yes.”

  Peppiott put his spectacles on and turned to look at James. “Ah, James, I'm sorry to hear it. Very sorry indeed. Of course, crabbed age and youth, as the Bard says. . . But your father had great provocation, my boy. I suppose it's on account of the land Sir Michael. . .”

  “Yes, he's still pretty mad about that,” James said. “In fact, he's pigheaded.”

  Peppiott tut-tutted. “Adamant, you say? Quite adamant?”

  “Quite.”

  Peppiott patted his knee. “Needless to say I'm extremely sorry for your sake, James, but I cannot help thinking it is for the best. Your father is a—sage man. You must let him guide you. Be sure he sees through Flanagan. I believe Sir Michael asked you to make overtures to your father? Is it true?”

  “He asked me to let Father know that he was sorry for what had happened.”

  “He specially asked you to say that?”

  “Yes, he was genuinely sorry. He didn't have anything else in mind, I'm certain of it,” James said quickly. “He liked me, and he said. . .” Peppiott laughed drily. “I daresay he was sorry. And you told your father.”

  “I tried to, but he wouldn't listen.”

  “Ah!” Peppiott rubbed his hands together. “Ah! It was only to be expected. Flanagan did him a great wrong.”

  James was put out to hear Peppiott defending his father like this and casting doubts on Flanagan's motives. “I don't know,” he said, “but it seems to me that what happened all that time ago shouldn't interfere with. . .”

  “My dear James!” Peppiott pressed his fingers in a limp, dry hand. “Take my word for it, what Flanagan did was unforgivable. Perhaps if your father had taken my advice—I was his solicitor at the time, you know—the matter would have turned out more agreeably, but. . .” He sighed. “A very self-willed man. A very re-MARK-able man.”