Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  “He started off with a handful of sheep he stole,” Mrs Bowen said shrilly. “He nearly went to jail. And now they put on airs.”

  “DUMMODO SIT DIVES BARBARUS IPSE PLACET,” Sylvester Dennis remarked cynically.

  Through the clairvoyance of his fellowship with them Doug divined accurately what they were saying. He reddened and sweated. “Don't look at me like that.”

  “What's the matter?” Harriet hung on to him more tightly and looked at him more distractedly than ever. “Why are you angry?”

  “People. You're not in the backblocks.” He pushed her away again.

  People! Harriet looked quickly around at the fine, nice, depreciative ladies and gentlemen whose sneers could stand even her father at bay. Their glittering array in jewels and fashionable clothes, their easy, confident voices, the solidarity expressed in the smiles and nods they exchanged, and their cold, critical eyes made Harriet think, “Perhaps I am only countrified and silly after all.” She demanded reassurance. “You do love me, don't you, Doug?”

  He whirled her across the floor till she was breathless and the floor and the faces lurched giddily in her eyes. She steadied against him, dropping her dress to take hold of the lapel of his coat.

  “Let go,” he snapped. “Leggo. Leggo.” His heavy lips curled back from his teeth and his spoilt, good-looking face ruckled up as though he was going to cry. It was an unobtrusive struggle as he prised her fingers off and pushed her to the length of his long arms, but it seemed to him that all the ladies around the wall simpered and whispered more animatedly and even the footmen in plush breeks raised their eyebrows. He was in a wretched state of nerves when the music did at last paused to rest the dancers, stranding him, by malicious chance, near Mrs Bowen and her friends. They chattered among themselves. Doug tried to look dignified and unaware as he walked Harriet from the floor, but his nerve went and he scampered the last few steps to an empty alcove.

  “What's the matter?” Harriet said. “You seem so. . .”

  He turned on her. “They're talking about you.”

  “Oh, don't worry about them. It's because Father upset them to-night. They're jealous of him too.”

  “The swine. Doesn't he know how to behave? It's me his rotten tongue injures. Me!”

  “How?”

  “Never mind.”

  Harriet shook her head sadly. “Don't say hard things, please. He doesn't concern us.”

  Spoilt anger contracted his face again. “Doesn't he? My father spends his life toadying to him.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. They poison everything with their greed. Even love—if you let them.” She went up close to him. “But that doesn't matter to us. Let them scheme and let all the rest say what they like. . .” She broke off to look through the arch of the alcove at the dancers clustered in little immaculate groups, fanning themselves and waiting for the music to start again. “Oh, I know—they're hateful, terrible,” and impulsively she said, “Take me away, Doug. Please. A long way away.”

  “Take you where?”

  “Anywhere. I don't care.”

  His eyes focused sharply.

  “I told you I'd find a way. I have. I sold my jewels.”

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face, watching her over his hand. “What on earth for?”

  “You had no money. You told me once. So I sold them for two thousand pounds. Here”—she put her hand into her bodice and pulled out a wad of bank notes and offered them—“you take it. Now we can go away—to England if you want.”

  He looked at the notes and looked at her and lowered his handkerchief from his flaccid mouth. “You MUST be off your head,” he said with dispassionate conviction. “You want to run away?”

  “Yes, yes. Here, take it.”

  He took the wad and examined it.

  “There, nothing matters now. We can go. I've planned it all out. I've packed my bag. We can slip out through the garden after this dance and get a hansom and get my clothes. Then we can get your clothes. The boat for Sydney sails at midnight. They'll never catch us.”

  His face, heavy with the stupidity of the thoroughly ordinary man, which she had mistaken for the visor of some profound masculine assurance and power, began to twitch like the hide of a horse tormented with flies. “So that's what you were hinting at. You want to run away with me because you think your old man won't let us marry.” His conceit got the better of him. He threw back his head and laughed.

  “Oh!” The whole cast of Harriet's uplifted, hysterical face changed. Her mouth tightened, her cheeks flattened, and her eyes retreated into dark shadows. Her little trick of dropping her head when alarmed caused this change, which made visible her spirit coiling away from him in secret, intent hostility. “Don't laugh at me, Doug. Don't you dare.”

  He stopped laughing and shuffled back a pace. “Good Lord,” he said, seeing the matter in another light, “you worked all this out yourself.” It was a fresh proof of her shameless, reckless wilfulness—or her madness. Then dimly he began to understand that he had nothing to be conceited about, that all this was not done for love of him, that he just happened to be the first man who came along and she had seized him and used him for her own purposes. Her white, tight face and hidden eyes, concealing God knew what else, scared him again. “Now don't be silly, Harriet. Don't start making a scene. I only laughed because. . .”

  “I told you I'd find a way. It's the only way. If we don't go now I don't know what will happen to me.”

  The music started up and the dancers moved off, stirring eddies in the torpid, perfumed air. He took her arm. “Come and dance. We'll talk about it after.”

  “No, no, Doug. There's no time. If Father gets hold of me he won't let me out of his sight again all night. Besides—Mr Cash might tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That we're going to run away.”

  “You didn't tell Cash that?”

  “No, but he knows. Geoffrey must have told him. You see, Geoffrey sold the jewels for me and he must have guessed.”

  Doug gripped her arm. “You little. . . You've told everybody. You're trying to blackmail me.”

  “Oh, no, Doug. I didn't.”

  “You knew Geoffrey would.”

  Harriet's eyes sank back into their shadows. “What if he does? We'll be gone.”

  “Haven't you any shame? God Almighty, think of people. What'll they be saying? And I've got to marry you.”

  Harriet said nothing.

  He groaned. “You've ruined my life. They'll never stop talking.”

  “But we won't be here,” she insisted doggedly. “We'll start a new life.” Her mouth was wry and quivering. “Don't you see? It's the only way for us. If you won't—I'll go and throw myself in the river.”

  “Ah, you bitch. You spiteful bitch. I believe you would. Just to make them talk and talk and talk.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, Doug, how can you say that? Don't you love me any more?”

  “Love you? Jesus! Love you? Of course I don't. Get it into your thick head. I don't give a damn for you. I would've been in England now if it wasn't for you and your father's dirty money. Oh, I'll marry you. Don't worry. You won't need to run away for that. Next time your father wants a favour they'll fix it up between them, and I'll be the mug. But don't think you'll be on a bed of roses. Just wait. I'll teach you better ways, you—you whore.” In the climax of his fury he lifted his fist and threw the wad of notes at her face. It struck her cheek and ricochetted off, through the arch, into the ballroom.

  The dance had ended and the floor was empty now. The notes, tied with a red ribbon, lay there, presenting to the world evidence of a bizarre drama proceeding in the alcove. A hush in the chatter on the other side of the arch told them that the world had observed and was amazed.

  Sobered, horrified, Doug took a step towards the room to retrieve the packet but turned back as Harriet burst into tears. “N-n-n-no,” he stuttered, and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don't make a scene
. Shhhh! What's the matter? I didn't mean it. For Christ's sake. Look at me, I do love you. Yes, anything you like. Only stop that row. . .”

  But the tears flowed irresistibly, dry, racking, and noisy.

  “Oh, you—you—” He shook her, giving her grief a ridiculous sound of strangulation.

  “Oh, pardon me.” A sweet voice in the doorway spun him on his heel. It was Mrs Bowen, proffering the bundle of notes. “Am I intruding? I think this belongs to you? No?”

  Faces, malevolent in their astonishment and inquisitiveness, gloated over her shoulder. Doug, wiping his tear-wet hand on the leg of his trousers, glared for a moment before his reflexes got to work and plunged him feebly out of the alcove, out of the ballroom, with the vague, comforting thought that, somewhere near, the dark river waited to swallow his dishonour and absolve him from the ordeal of ever meeting those eyes again. On the steps he passed Cabell, whose stern gaze, following his flight, sent him on more precipitately than ever.

  Harriet ran after him, but at the arch she stopped, confronted by a bright, hard, simpering world she had forgotten. She glanced around the circle of faces, half-averted, noting here an open mouth, there a grin, here a stare of mystification. Bedraggled with grief she slunk back into the half-light of the alcove. At once they turned their backs and the chatter started, with artificial gusto, again.

  A hand on her arm made Harriet turn a defiant face streaked with tears. Mrs Bowen was at her elbow. She was holding the notes between thumb and forefinger. Her eyes pried at Harriet, seeming to say, “I can see you're in some awful disgrace, young lady. Be sure I'll find out what it is.”

  “Dear Miss Cabell,” she began in her fussy, shrill voice, but before she got another word out a hand, sweeping up from Harriet's skirt, slapped her smartly across the face.

  Mrs Bowen gave a startled yelp and dropped the notes. The chatter ceased and the gaping, mystified, derisive, and scandalized looks of the guests turned on them again.

  Incredulously Harriet watched the white print of her hand emerge from the burning red of Mrs Bowen's cheek. Then the cheek turned white and the mark of the hand rose in livid red.

  Harriet began to moan gently like a child, glancing right and left across the room. Her father had just come in with Ludmilla. He was smiling. She stepped back and blundered into Sylvester Dennis. He shuffled quickly out of the way and looked at her over the shoulder of Dr Barnett, who was talking in a determinedly loud voice about nobody knew what.

  People craned their necks to discover the origin of that unmistakable clap of hand against face.

  Harriet stumbled forward a few paces, then she saw Cash hurrying down the room, covered her face with her hands, and ran blindly into his arms.

  Chapter Fourteen: Pariah

  Needless to say, Dough did not drown himself, but he sincerely wished he had when Cabell arrived at the Peppiott house next morning and demanded his body for a public flaying. The sound of Cabell's riding-whip lashing the French polish off the table in Peppiott's library astounded the neighbours for an hour. “I'll have no truck with you any longer,” Cabell shouted as he went, “and I'll put you out of business if it's the last thing I do.”

  Now Mrs Peppiott's tongue got to work. It seemed that the rumours about a match-making were too, too ridiculous for words. A Peppiott marry one of that brood! The truth of the matter, though it went against her grain to say such things of any women, was that “that girl”—well, you know what her mother was! She had just flung herself at Douglas's head, the poor boy. Wrote him letters trying to make assignations with him and he, like any honourable man, tried to draw a decent veil. And the well-thumbed note was handed round and gloated over till it fell to pieces. Doug emerged as an accredited moral martyr. Nevertheless he soon vanished to a station in the torrid west to work out his destiny as a jackeroo.

  There was a second faction in this whispering, recruited not from the friends of Cabell which would have made a very thin, red line, but from those who felt that Mrs Peppiott was extracting too much lustre from the affair. The leader was Mrs Bowen who hated Mrs Peppiott so much that she forgave Harriet for slapping her face and, through some queer mental process, even came to believe that no such thing had happened. “It's all that gossiping woman's invention. Of course she has to try to cover up her young profligate's tracks. Well, we all know what HIS grandmother was. Highest moral principles! What about the time the housekeeper grabbed the tails of his coat and pulled it off his back when he was scrambling over the fence!”

  This certainly helped to keep the smugness of the Peppiotts in bounds but did not do much for poor Harriet's reputation.

  James arrived back in the middle of the bother.

  Cabell took careful stock of him for the first time—his long face with premature wrinkles of worry round the mouth, his nervous eyes which never returned his father's gaze for long, his sensitive mouth with the heavy, sensual lower lip of the Cabells, white hands, and unobtrusively dandified clothes, and though annoyed at what he saw, muttering, “You look like a new-chum,” he thought to himself, “A stuck-up young prig. Doesn't want to dirty his hands with work. He'll give no trouble.”

  More kindly than he had ever spoken to James before, he said, “You've done well at the University. I'm pleased with you. Now I want you to do something for me.”

  James looked at him doubtfully. He had obeyed his father's telegram, ordering him to return, with severe misgivings. “He's not going to boss me about. I won't stand for it.” But somehow, having lost the battle once put James at an awful disadvantage. What was the use fighting with him? He was sure to win.

  “I want you to marry Miss Ludmilla's niece.” He waved James silent. “Aurelia Considine's daughter, she is, and a good-looking girl. She's just come back from England a topnotch lady. Ludmilla and her sister are people of consequence. Not like this ragtag and bobtail plutocracy. Your own kind.”

  “But Miss Ludmilla. . .?”

  “Yes, yes, she wants it too. Had her eye on you a long time and thinks you're a good stamp of a lad. So she should. You're a Cabell, aren't you? The dead spit of one.”

  James blushed. It was the first time he had heard his father speak to him as a son he was pleased to have. If Cabell had applied all his cunning to the problem he could not have dealt a more deadly blow to the heart of James's rebellion, which had begun to build its fantasies of grievances years ago when James was a boy playing truant from school and missing meals with the half-conscious purpose of provoking some notice, even unfavourable notice, from an indifferent father. As he grew older and saw Harriet being spoiled and himself used to spoil her, these fantasies developed into elaborate dreams of selfassertion and revenge. Sometimes he saw himself as a great politician like Flanagan, sitting at his table in the ministry listening to a plea from his father, as Cabell had often pictured the scene between himself and Flanagan when Flanagan took his land away, and harshly refusing to do what his father wanted, heaping on him bitter reproaches for all the wrongs he had done his son. At other times he came home rich and powerful and found his father old and poor and with noble magnanimity forgave him everything and lifted him up and comforted him.

  As James looked at his father now he almost felt as though one of those fantasies had come true. Cabell was sitting at his table in the study with his head in his hands. The pouches were heavy under his eyes and the arms sticking out of his shirt-cuffs looked withered and weak. He seemed crushed. A lot of grey hairs had come out in his beard and his shaggy eyebrows since last James saw him.

  His unexpected warmth released a strange swell of emotion in James's throat. For a moment he could not speak.

  Cabell roused himself. “The fact of the matter is, Ludmilla's getting on. She wants us to take over her interest in the mine and look after it.”

  If he had said “me” instead of “us” James might have been offended and the delicate woof of their relations set spinning in another pattern, but again the subtle, if unconscious, cunning of Cabell, in talking as
if they were men and partners together, disarmed him.

  “As far as that goes, I'm getting on myself,” Cabell said with a sigh. “Oh no, sir. You're good for another twenty years.”

  “Eh? You think so? Don't notice any grey hairs?” Cabell was pleased. “No, sir,” James lied.

  A troubled expression crossed Cabell's face. “Time tells, lad. There's your mother—a brave woman, but she's breaking up. Nobody can stand the kicks for ever. Your brother Larry's playing the devil. And young Geoffrey's going to the dogs with racehorses and drink. And now your sister. . .” He sighed again. “God knows, James, I hardly expect that one of you won't want to betray and pester me.”

  “I'll do my best, sir,” James said, moved deeply now by his father's confidences, which singled him out from a family of broken reeds to help carry heavy burdens.

  Cabell rose stiffly, his old joints creaking, and enveloped James in his sour fust. “That's a good lad,” he said, wringing James's hand. “We'll fix things to suit everybody. If you marry Julia Considine I'll tell you what I'll do—I'll send you for a trip round the world. Stay away as long as you like. I won't be asking you to put your nose to the grindstone right off. Go and enjoy yourself. I'll be here to keep an eye on things a few years yet.”

  Noble Father! James felt a different man when he came out of the study—as indeed he was. And yet—there was Jennis Bowen. James loved Jennis, though not perhaps with the same impetuosity as before he had that conversation with Cash. Cash had dropped a little drop of poison into James's sensitive mind. He told James that he had inherited some wild and reckless quality from his gipsy mother, that he was as his father must have been before he became what he was—a violent old man with a battered face who had done things James was ashamed of. James laughed at the idea now, but it kept popping out in his mind at all sorts of odd moments, as he was dozing off to sleep, or reading a book, or in the middle of a conversation, so that he was always worriedly asking himself, “Can it be true? Could I do those things? Could I disgrace myself as he has done?” and though he always answered, “No, of course not,” he began to develop an exaggerated fear of his own potentialities for evil and a potent sense of guilt every time he detected in himself, as he often did, emotions which the nice kind of people, who were unlike his father or his mother, did not seem to have. One of these emotions was his desire for Jennis, which filled his brain with memories of her soft, full breast, and soft, white neck, and her soft, acquiescent hand lying in his. These thoughts, and the struggle he put up against them, and the fear and guilt they filled him with, accounted for the new hard lines of worry and repression around his mouth. He tried to smother his feelings, which he thought must be abnormal, and did succeed up to a point, for he had strength like his father and turned this strength in upon himself; but he still loved Jennis and wanted to marry her, more than ever because he felt guilty about his feeling, for nice people seemed to believe that marriage made such feelings right. How he was going to marry her James did not know, for that brought up again the problem of going out into the bush to make a fortune for himself, so James had just gone on hoping for a reconciliation between Cabell and Flanagan; but no reconciliation had happened, and now his father wanted him to marry Julia Considine. James began to feel resentful and rebellious again. The old man had been very decent about it, but dash it all, why should he marry a girl he'd never seen? And what for? To please Ludmilla and let his father get control of the mine, because that was all it amounted to. And James admitted doubt about his father's sudden friendliness. “In the end Harriet will get everything just the same.”