Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Larry went with one of these bands and did great damage to his father's property, but the soldiers drove them out of the valley at last, and one by one his mates left him till he found himself alone in Pyke's Crossing one night with a tired horse and a heart sick of its own futile reproaches. He blamed himself for the misery of the shearers he met every day tramping home without work or money. If he had not been a coward, how different the end of the strike might have been. He had Coyle's word for it.

  Larry would have derived no comfort from reflecting that there were thousands of other men in the strike, which had spread over an area bigger than Europe, and that they had all caved in before the power of squatters and police and soldiers when the time came. His mind was incapable of seeing the struggle as anything but a struggle between himself and his father, the apotheosis of all the evil which the word squatter meant to the bushman, between the contemptuous, tyrannical “aristocratic mug” in his father and that passionate feeling of injury and injustice nurtured by Gursey and Coyle, his dealings with his brothers, and his pity for his mother. When it came to the point he had been afraid of his father and had let his mates down. His personal integrity was deeply outraged, his pride was gone, and he thought everybody looked sideways at him.

  He went and got drunk. When he sobered up a month later he heard that Coyle had gone to jail for three years. He got drunk again till his credit ran out, then rode away westwards to the Never-Never.

  Part V: Love and Integrity

  Chapter One: Aurelia's Daughter

  And the irony of it was, Cabell gained on the strike. His wool was not worth much by the time the scabs got it off and he had to build new fences and a new shed, but the loss the McFarlanes suffered along with the other squatters gave him the chance, a few months later, to foreclose on their ninety thousand acres of good land and thirty-five thousand sheep. He was only sorry that old McFarlane was not alive to see him march into the homestead and take possession, but then there might have been no marching in, for that dour shell-back would not have yielded to the excitement of the times and overborrowed to build fancy washpools and an elegant house and send the children home to Edinburgh for their education.

  While this affair was maturing, Ludmilla returned to Ningpo to get ready for Julia and her mother, whose visit the strike had delayed, and Cabell and Ludmilla began sparring over the details of the arrangement they had made at the Governor's ball. Larsen resigned from the chairmanship of the mine, and Cabell became chairman PRO TEM. till the annual meeting of shareholders could put him into the chair in the regular way. The wedding they fixed for a week before the meeting.

  Ludmilla's plan was to send the couple to England for their honeymoon, she and Cabell to share expenses, and to settle on them the Ningpo property and all her shares in Waterfall, reserving only a small income for herself and Aurelia. Cabell was to have control of this property till they agreed that James was competent to look after it. On the same terms he was to settle a hundred thousand pounds' worth of the land he had bought in Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne.

  Cabell was very satisfied when the parleys were finished, considering that he still possessed the land he had given away as well as all that Ludmilla possessed—or would when she left for the Old Country and gave him a power-of-attorney over her goods. The idea that James would ever interfere in the control of this property he did not consider for a moment. James was “a prig and a fool and a milksop”; he would go to England and stay there like most other rich colonials who went abroad. Cabell wrote off a debt of fifty thousand pounds which Ludmilla had lent to help him out.

  Now he controlled half the best land in the valley and a rich goldmine. His dreams of money and power took a fresh lease of life. The panic of selling in Brisbane and down south had died away. Shares were rising, speculators nibbled at the real estate market, the defeat of the shearers cheered investors, bankers became more genial, and people decided that the boom was as solid as ever. He began to play the market again, but cautiously this time. Experience had taught him.

  Aurelia arrived with her daughter at last and Cabell waited impatiently for a call to present himself and James, but at the end of three days he lost patience and carried James off to meet his bride. James had dressed himself carefully, and Cabell was pleased with him. “There were Cabells a couple of generations before this Ningpo mob was thought of,” he growled as they rode up the drive to the homestead, a trifle peeved that he had to show how eager he was to have the marriage settled.

  Ludmilla came out on to the steps to receive them. “We're still in a mess unpacking,” she said, not very warmly.

  “We won't stay if you're busy. We were just passing.”

  “No-o,” Ludmilla said. “Come in and I'll get you some tea.” She frowned. “But Aurelia's indisposed, you see. You'll have to excuse her.”

  She left them sitting on the veranda for a long time, so long that they became uneasy, feeling an atmosphere, nervous and unwelcoming, in the house. Suddenly a querulous voice spoke within, and they heard Ludmilla answer soothingly. A woman laughed. A door banged. Ludmilla's footsteps returned along the passage.

  Cabell cleared his throat and commenced to talk about the bad shearing done on some sheep that were grazing around the house.

  Ludmilla appeared. She too seemed uneasy. She gave James a severe look before she said, “Julia will be here in a moment. Of course, we weren't expecting you.”

  She sat down at the wicker tea-table and the maid brought the tea. Cabell repeated what he had said about the sheep, and while they were talking about the shearers and the recent troubles the fly-proof door opened again and Julia stepped on to the veranda.

  Cabell and James rose and Ludmilla, blushing and awkward all at once, introduced them and fiddled with a bow at the neck of her dress, which looked like a sugar-bag beside her niece's beautiful tea-gown. Julia bowed in an off-hand way, a decidedly off-hand way, as though they were old acquaintances or nobody in particular, like servants, and took a seat near the railings.

  “A deuced boneshaking torture that coach ride from the Crossing,” Cabell muttered. “I don't wonder your mother's done up.”

  “Oh, that's nothing,” Julia laughed. It sounded a shockingly hard laugh.

  Ludmilla became interested in the inside of her cup, as though she had lost her grip on the situation for a moment, and Cabell, rebuffed, threw back his head, and with the shameless unreticence of the old looked Julia up and down.

  Serenely unconcerned she turned away to the canary tweet-tweeting in its cage on the veranda post.

  She was tall, “a bit underfleshed like her mother,” he thought, but handsome in a glassy way. Her lips were thin and wellshaped and beautifully balanced by her thin, straight nose, thin sloping eyebrows, and fine, long, grey eyes. “A thoroughbred,” Cabell decided, and turned to look at James, who sat on the edge of his chair with his hardhitter between his knees, his toes turned in, and a gawky shyness on his face. “What's the matter with the fool?” Cabell wondered, annoyed to have his son cutting such a wretched figure beside Julia's calm detachment.

  James himself could not have said what was wrong, but one look at Julia had made him wish himself a thousand miles away. As Ludmilla introduced them Julia had passed him a quick glance in which, it seemed to James, she had said quite plainly, “So you're the 'fine stamp of a lad' I've been brought here to marry!” commenting upon him with the faintest twitch of a smile at the corner of her lips.

  By a stroke of intuition he had penetrated Julia's thoughts accurately. In her eagerness to paint Julia's future in the brightest colours Ludmilla had rather overstressed the manly charms and virtues of James. Not that Julia was disillusioned now. She could have preserved few illusions with a mother like Aurelia. When Ludmilla had said, routed like James by her air of a grand lady, “Oh, I hope you won't be disappointed,” Julia had replied, raising her eyebrows with surprise, as though such a considerate thought was unexpected, “The fatted calf is not disappointed if you kil
l it with a woodchopper instead of a jewelled scimitar, Auntie dear.”

  “Oh, but no,” Ludmilla had protested. “If you don't like him you don't have to marry him. Choose for yourself.”

  “Beggars can't be choosers,” Julia replied uncompromisingly, while belittling her bitterness with that ambiguous little smile. “Only don't expect me to lose my head over this paragon on sight, will you, Auntie?” And with a toss of her head, which had learnt to hold itself so proudly under a heavier burden than Ludmilla proposed to lay upon it, she discouraged her aunt from prying any further in search of whatever private wishes or whims she might guard under her astringent, equable and always slightly sarcastic surface. Before that dignity and sarcasm Ludmilla quailed whenever she thought of bringing the subject up again so as to assure Julia that she did not want to FORCE her into an unsuitable marriage. As though Julia could be forced into anything! As though anything she did could be unsuitable! That was to be thoroughly understood between them. To suggest otherwise would, Ludmilla felt, be a terrible breach of good taste.

  So with a little trick of turning everything into a jest and, when pressed too hard, of blanking her eyes and mind and stupidly misconstruing, which forced poor Ludmilla into the most awkward explanations, Julia kept her aunt, as she kept everybody, at a distance. After three days of this and Julia's elegance, fresh from the English dressmaker and the English finishing school, Ludmilla was beginning to feel dowdy and inferior and even, forgetting what good intentions she had in view, as though her plans were a sharp piece of business at Julia's expense. She would have changed them if she could have done so without explaining that she was ashamed of herself and if she had not already gone too far with Cabell. But on one point she was decided: however much Cabell and James had to suffer for it Julia should not feel at any disadvantage as Aurelia's daughter, because what hurt Julia's feelings, Ludmilla had discovered, came back upon her with interest.

  That was the reason why she had sent no word to the Reach and had received them so coldly, for Aurelia's indisposition was only an amiable state of boozy befuddlement. Impossible to let them see Aurelia, equally impossible to take Aurelia's bottle away or shut her up in her room till she was sober. Julia's austerity and innocent aplomb admitted not the slightest doubt of any but the most ladylike habits in her mother. When she said, in her casual, bantering way, “Oh, coaches always make Mamma dizzy, you know,” Ludmilla had to agree. She gushed sympathy over her sister while Julia watched them with amusement, perversely pricking her own and Ludmilla's pretence now and then with equivocal remarks about the “peculiar odour” in the room, fastidiously wrinkling her nose while Ludmilla sniffed and denied that there was any smell, and Aurelia thickened the air with the breath of whisky. Very soon Ludmilla was hiding empty bottles so that Julia should not be cruelly disillusioned, but so expert was Julia at this little game that Ludmilla could never be sure whether Julia was taken in or was laughing at her, and by turns felt guilty and foolish.

  So while Cabell noisily sucked his tea up, and Julia fed a piece of sugar to the canary, and James's cup stood untouched on the table, Ludmilla fidgeted with the lid of the teapot, kept one ear cocked for sounds within the house, and wished that Cabell would come to the end of his longwinded story about the days when his wagon cut the first track from Pyke's Crossing and would take himself off.

  He finished at last, put his cup down, and looked at the sun. “Time we were making tracks.” He stretched his legs and rose.

  But it was too late. Shuffling footsteps in the passage preceeded an explosive opening of the door and Aurelia catapulted on to the veranda, corkscrewed towards them, missed a step, and in the hands of the good angel which looks after drunks settled more or less gracefully into a chair.

  James and Ludmilla jumped up, but Julia seemed to see nothing remarkable in the way her mother appeared on the scene, merely glanced round and went on feeding the canary.

  “Aurelia!” Ludmilla said crossly, but at once squeezed out a smile and asked, “Do you feel better then, dear?”

  “No, I feel worse,” Aurelia said. “What do you expect when you keep me cooped up in this place while you creep off and entertain company.” Her voice drooped and tears filled her eyes, magnifying the raw-red rims and the mesh of bloodshot veins. “I'm very sick, you know,” she informed Cabell. “Very poorly. Ever since my poor husband died.”

  Cabell looked the amazement he felt. Was this Aurelia, the slight, silent girl whose hidden glances had been her only tragic speech? Even twenty years seemed hardly enough to account for this fat, this sodden, debauched face, with the jowls that hung down like drops of wax on the end of a candle. Slumped in her chair she looked like something that had been floating about in the sea for some time—waterlogged. Moisture oozed from her, in tears, in sweat from the wrinkled bags of fat round her neck and from the backs of her fat hands.

  Cabell mumbled an apology for disturbing her, Ludmilla struggled with her tongue, trying to cough out words like a cat trying to be sick, James's eyes rolled from face to face, Julia, coaxing the canary to sing with pursed up lips, detached herself from them, as though she was a tactful visitor who wished to spare their feelings.

  A loud, guttural, indecent hiccup broke the silence. Aurelia patted her mouth and began to complain again. “Aren't you going to introduce your friends? Or are you trying to disown me like this—oh, ungrateful girl. I hope you haven't got any children,” she said to Cabell. “I don't know what they're coming to. We were brought up to honour our parents, but SHE only sneers. No sympathy for her poor mother. Would you believe it?”

  “But Aurelia, you remember Mr Cabell.”

  “Mr Cabell?” Aurelia blinked. “Of course.” She lowered her eyes to his legs, stiffly astride in his usual stance of a horseman balancing himself on the unstable earth, and an absurdly depraved look, which turned out the damp, red inside of her lips, crossed her face. “Oh, my! Mr Cabell, fancy meeting you again. You were such a naughty man. What excuses you used to make up to come here, until Father chased you away with a whip. And such looks you gave me. Oh, I knew. I knew,” she giggled.

  “Aurelia! Don't be so foolish.”

  Aurelia oozed gently again. “There she goes. She won't let me open my mouth—the harsh, cruel, uncharitable. . .” Her voice drivelled away into snuffling, incoherent reproaches.

  James's eye turned irresistibly to Julia, still playing happily with the canary, and he blushed to the ears for shame, not shame of Julia but of himself, such as one feels when the juggler makes a mess of his trick in a crowded theatre. He felt he had no right to be there, was guilty of a sneaking insult to Julia for which she would never forgive him.

  How he got off the veranda and on to his horse he could never remember, except that in the process he bumped against the table and upset his cup of tea on to Ludmilla's lap.

  “It's nothing. It's nothing,” she screamed when he went down on his knees to wipe the tea off her skirt. “Go along. Your father's waiting for you.” And as he persisted she kicked him on the shin.

  Next day Cabell received a note from Ludmilla:

  I suppose you think you stole some kind of a march on me yesterday, coming when you weren't expected and Aurelia was DRUNK (She had underlined the word so violently that the pen had torn the paper.) But if that's how you feel we had better call the bargain off. Anyway, James is not going to marry Aurelia. I shall take her off Home with me when I go, and they need never see her again. The poor thing is sick. That's how her misfortune came on her. If you wish it we'll call next Wednesday for dinner. But your wife must be there, so that Julia can see for herself that James has no room to laugh up his sleeve. I absolutely INSIST on this. Otherwise I shall cancel everything.

  They went to the Reach on Wednesday, without Aurelia, and Emma sat down with them to the agonizing meal. Agonizing to Ludmilla because she was torn between wondering what, behind her indifference, Julia thought of Emma's sad, wizened face, and a disappointment that Emma was not worse, made no disgus
ting or absurd show of herself to balance the scene with Aurelia. Agonizing to James because he was ashamed of his mother and felt that Julia knew he was ashamed and was laughing at him for it, so that he felt ashamed of his shame. Agonizing to Cabell because he could see Ludmilla was angry and feared for his schemes. Agonizing to Harriet because of Julia's cool, unharassed beauty, set off in a simple white muslin frock and big sun-bonnet, which must, she thought, reflect a pure and noble mind that would be horrified to know what sort of a girl Harriet was. Agonizing to Emma because she saw in Julia the woman she had hoped that Larry, HER Larry, would marry. And agonizing finally to Julia, though she showed no sign of it, because she had to choose between letting them shovel her on to a man who would marry her only to please his father, apparently, and continuing to walk the earth for an indefinite time to come with a drunk and flirtatious old woman tacked on.

  So it was a joyless meal, heavy with unspoken thoughts. On the way home Julia asked, “When is it scheduled for the young man to pop the question, Auntie? I'm suffocating with excitement.” “Oh, it's not like that,” Ludmilla disclaimed quickly. “If you don't like him you only have to say so. Perhaps when you get to know each other. . .”

  “We know the worst about each other. That's something.”

  The ice was broken. There were picnics, a visit to the mine, a cattle muster. . . Julia was mildly interested, thawed a little.

  James set his jaw, did his duty, proposed, and was accepted. He told himself that he was very pleased to be doing his duty, making up for the unhappiness Harriet had caused his father, but comparisons between Julia, hard, sarcastic, detached, and Jennis, so pliant, so loving, so tender, were not always to be suppressed and they made duty very hard. The harder it was the more virtuous James felt, the more superior to his errant sister, and the more confident of his power to stifle sooner or later the devils which danced in his heart.