Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  He was married at the end of the winter and the happy couple left at once for England.

  Chapter Two: Poor Sick Little Harriet

  Cabell permitted himself to feel satisfied. James was married, Ludmilla was gone, he was chairman of the mine, the McFarlanes were getting ready to leave the valley, his ventures on the market were prosperous, Emma his old enemy had given up fighting, Larry had disappeared into the west whence men did not generally return, and Harriet, his dear little Harriet, had changed into the gentle, loving, dependent daughter he had always wanted her to be.

  Poor Harriet. She had swallowed a great deal of port wine and iron, but it did not seem to set her up as the doctor promised. Then under Miss Montaulk's treatment she had swallowed a great deal of cod-liver oil with no better results. She continued pale and ready to weep at the first hard word. Compared with the rapt vivid creature she had been in Brisbane she looked as bleak as the charred remains of last night's splendid fire. She sat about the house, round-shouldered and listless, staring sightlessly at the floor for hours on end. Not boredom oppressed her now, as once it had done, but an inexhaustible flow of fresh thoughts, for no matter how long she dwelt on it the memory of her fiasco in Brisbane, of Doug Peppiott's horror and anger and abuse, of James's high-minded indignation never lost its edge. She must go over it again and again, from the first time she met Doug till she ran across the ballroom with everybody gaping and, when she was gone, whispering about the depraved things she had done.

  As she lay in bed on the night the shed was burnt she heard her father say to her mother, “It's your blood in him coming out, your dirty, gipsy, jailyard blood,” and she told herself, “Yes, yes, that's true. It's in me too, her wicked blood. Perhaps I'll do something worse and be sent to jail.” A dreary kind of humility replaced the pride in these stigmata with which she used to assert herself against the good ladies of Brisbane. “My mother and my grandmother and my grandfather and all my mother's ancestors were depraved people. Doug couldn't have loved me any more than he could have loved a blackgin.”

  Cabell of course was full of tender, anxious sympathy. To tempt her appetite he had fish and turtle steaks brought in blocks of ice from the coast; succeeded, after years of opposition from Emma, in engaging a Chinese cook for the homestead, and immediately scared three of them away with his ravings when they could not make Harriet eat. Two or three times a month he brought a doctor from Brisbane and for some time kept a trained nurse in the house to take her temperature every few hours and report every day upon the smallest variations in her health. All the time he was running in and out of her rooms asking how she felt, did she want anything, would she like the blind down, up, the window open, shut, had she taken her medicine, had she drunk her port wine, putting a hassock under her feet, a cushion under her head, sniffing for draughts, bringing a fan, a shawl, fussing, petting and waiting on her hand and foot. How pale and delicate she was—as his mother had been, like a ghost. He insisted on it: she was ill, very ill. She mustn't excite herself, mustn't read too much, mustn't think, mustn't do anything except lie there—and be ill. In his room he tramped up and down half the night worrying because she had not eaten enough at dinner, because he had heard her tossing sleeplessly on her bed when he tiptoed to her door, or because Miss Montaulk told him that she had been crying again. Poor little Harriet. Poor sick little Harriet.

  Worrying, fussing, tiptoeing, and muttering over her sad state—he had never been so content. The wretched look which came into her eyes when he told her that he would give half his fortune to see her as happy as she had been in Brisbane and she remembered again that she had betrayed him in front of his enemies—how it cut him to the heart and how its abject appeal for forgiveness delighted him. What a pitiable sight to see her melt into tears and what a joy to see her hang on his words of comfort and his promise of happiness in the future. No more bad temper, no more shrinking away, no more distrust, opposition, and ingratitude.

  “A change of heart,” he called it, sensing the profound collapse of that hard, inner core of her wilful spirit which had been the backbone of her integrity, of her struggle against his efforts to fulfil through her longings defeated by life. Now when he talked for hours about sending her home to Owerbury to marry and become a great lady she did not look at him sceptically, or frown and say that he wanted to use her only for some selfish purpose, or that she did not wish to marry the young man with the Byronic side-levers and the fine, dark face who would take her walking across the yellow moors in May as once, long, long ago, he had walked with a girl. When he described how she would lord it over his family, show off her jewels, and “make that mob in Brisbane bite themselves with envy,” she did not protest that she had other ideas for herself. Pliant, submissive, she listened while he planned her life with a wild outpouring of day-dreams which satisfied him only to be spoken.

  This was what he had always wanted of her, her submissive presence around which he could erect fantasies of that “handsome young man's” love in the lilac arbour of Owerbury come true and of his triumphant return to the family that had cast him out; but this she had always denied him by demanding action, the enemy of his fantasia. Now she demanded nothing and let him dissolve her in his day-dreams, which dissolved also the harsh realities of his own being until, through a curious dissociation of his personality, emerged that part of him which a hard life had frustrated, injured, and repressed. In a room filled with the scent of heliotrope, which he liked her to use because it reminded him of his mother, this young Englishman lived and breathed again. Ludicrous sessions of selfhypnosis they were, when the phantoms of desire and memory seemed more real than the real things in the room, and he even talked in a stilted way which belonged to that period of his life—ludicrous and rather terrible, for there were the germs of madness in it.

  Harriet had dimly understood how he extracted the force to live from the ideas he built around her future and had resented it, perceiving that these ideas were illusions from which she could expect nothing while they put on her the heavy charge of fidelity to him before herself, so that if she asked for anything which broke the illusion he accused her of ingratitude. But now she listened with a different mind, a mind which was losing its self-respect. She was badly scared. She saw herself hedged in by smirking, gossiping people. She wanted to placate these people, to be forgiven. They had magical powers; if they said a thing was nice it became nice whatever it had been before, and if they said that she was nice all the whorishness in her, all the nasty, gipsy, jailyard blood would be gone. So she listened to her father's promises that some great gentleman would marry her and that every Mrs Bowen and Mrs Peppiott would envy her place in the world, and she tried hard to believe it. Thus she had come to desire the very thing which, in the first flush of her naïve and youthful frankness discovering the meanness and lies and petty vanities of society, she had revolted against—the cloak of money, or a title, or a high position to cover the un-nice past and the unnice little secrets in oneself. The desire was eating into her, slowly corrupting the passion which had vitalized her before, till she was ready to give herself up to any man, old, repulsive, she did not care what, as long as he could spread the cloak of that social lie over her and protect her from the universal contempt which James had so eloquently described. As for love, her old romantic ideal and criterion, she thought of it with shame and disgust, as if it was some sort of filthy disease she had had. Her emotions did a complete aboutface. She began to hate her mother, who was declining rapidly into decrepit senility, and soothed herself with snobbish reflections, worthy of Mrs Peppiott, on her relationship to the Lords of Felsie. Where the process would have stopped God knows Cabell would have gone on play-acting the little comedy of the young man and the young girl in the lilac arbour to his dying day, and the only satisfaction Harriet could have had was an old maid's sad, sentimental satisfaction in an illusion. But fate was kind to her. One afternoon James and Cabell carried Cash home with a broken leg, a broken arm, two broken ribs, and
concussion.

  His horse had dragged him half a mile through the scrub before James caught it, and he was alive only by the grace of his good luck and constitution, but just alive, it seemed for two months while Harriet spent several hours each day at his bedside sponging his face with vinegar and fanning the flies away. She did this in her role of a humble person which about this time had led her to seek consolation in certain pious works belonging to Miss Montaulk where she read of saints who had shriven their sinful souls with menial offices for the sick. Fugitively she even thought of becoming a nun or going on a pilgrimage, but decided that looking after Cash was a good substitute. “It's nearly the same as abasing yourself like St Seraphina. He's such a frightfully common man. He goes with barmaids.” This was supposed to evoke a feeling of merit, to soothe and elevate her tireless conscience, but it produced suddenly a reaction of most unsaintly anger, a salutary anger which put colour into her cheeks and light into her dull eyes. “He is the most disreputable man in Brisbane and even he looks down on me.” How dared he! Why, the beam in his eye was much, MUCH bigger than the mote in hers! The feeling that you have been unjustly put upon, that you are really not the worst but only the second worst person in the world is a grain for pride. Thinking angrily of her right to be annoyed with such a hypocrite and preparing haughty speeches with which to crush him as soon as he was fit to be crushed, Harriet thought less of her own depravity and that unassailable abstraction of virtue, the Nice People of Brisbane.

  She never delivered these speeches. When he was well enough to recognize her and understand that she had been sitting beside his bed through half the summer, he was so grateful that she hadn't the heart.

  “You shouldn't be doing this,” he said. There was scarcely a whisper of his voice left.

  “Why not?”

  “It's nurse's work.”

  “Haven't I done it well enough?”

  “It's not that. It's not proper for you—a lady.” Harriet blushed. “You shouldn't be thinking of that lot down there,” he said after a long pause.

  “Who's thinking of what?” she bridled. “And anyway, how could you tell a lady from a—a Queenie?”

  He fell back on the pillow and groaned and sweated.

  She was sorry she had spoken sharply, he was so ill, but she tried not to show it as she bathed his face and neck. He looked at her, closed his eyes, and groaned again. Here was genuine humility. “I can't understand your father letting you. You ought to be practising at the piano or something.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” she said, but she was pleased.

  The nurse who had looked after Harriet when she returned from Brisbane was looking after Cash, but she did not get along with Miss Montaulk, and as soon as he was on the mend she packed up and left. Miss Montaulk, now official housekeeper at the Reach, took over the nursing, but Cash did not get along with her either, so most of the nursing fell to Harriet. Luckily Cabell was away in Brisbane.

  Imperceptibly her days filled with somebody else's problems. She had to watch the clock and see that he had his powders at the right time, and keep watch on him for the doctor who came from Waterfall every second day, and quarrel with Miss Montaulk over the food she sent in. Then she had to be sure that he slept at the right time, that he did not talk too much, that the mosquito-nets were drawn properly at night and the room aired. By slow degrees she became extremely officious over Cash, who protested more, as his strength improved, that she should leave Ah Lung, the new house-servant, to look after him and return to her own sublimer affairs. She always won the quarrels which followed these protests, and enjoyed winning them. Her domineering will came to life again and belief in herself fed on his helpless dependence. Each day brought its little victory and each little victory gave her confidence against the gloomy thoughts that fumed around her pillow at night. To make this giant of a man who had been everywhere and seen everything, who was so important among the greatest people in Brisbane, submit to having his hair brushed or being fed with a spoon, to see him looking at her afterwards like a guilty lapdog, started a feeling of conceit which revealed, more than all her tears, how bitterly hurt she had been. The stages by which she had raised Cash from absolute pariahdom to a position of such glory in the land were unconscious, but his price kept on going up and up as it raised her own. She remembered how people like Peppiott senior ran after him for advice and assistance and how her father had always depended on him; she forgot Queenie. He looked up to that was enough. And when he protested, called her a lady, said he wasn't worth all her trouble, she could trust him. Yes, absolutely. He wouldn't lie to her, or whisper and smirk behind her back, or like James, feeling forlorn on the eve of his wedding, come to her and apologize for the hard things he had said merely, as she knew, because he wanted sympathy in return.

  So Cabell, returning from Brisbane, found her less sallow and miserable and attentive, and was put out. She was continually running away to see if Miss Montaulk had remembered to take Cash's temperature or bring his tea or mix his medicine.

  “That's no business of yours. That's a Chow's work.”

  “Florence Nightingale did it,” she said, and with such defiance, when he was used to seeing her hang her head dumbly, that he found nothing more to say, but he thought a lot and as a result privately damned Cash for bringing his broken limbs to the Reach.

  “Your father's angry,” Cash said. He knew that when he saw Cabell staring at the chair where Harriet now sat all day and her fan on the table among the medicine bottles. “He's right, too.”

  “Oh, well,” she said. She had put on weight and the dark rings had gone from her eyes. Her mind was easier too—not happy by any means but less active. After a day's working and wrangling and wondering whether the jelly would set in time for his dinner she went straight to sleep without remembering that it was at this hour seven months, two weeks, and three days ago that she did the dreadful thing which had outraged the Nice People and branded her for life. She did not think about it, but she had not forgotten.

  Cash gazed for some time at the white line of parting on her head bent over her needle. She was mending the shirt he had worn on the day of the accident. “You'll be getting ready to go to England now?” Harriet said nothing.

  “Your father says it's only a matter of months now—as soon as he gets a letter. You'll be glad, I daresay.”

  “Glad? Yes—well, yes.”

  “He thinks it's time you were married. Some handsome young chap, he says—some Lord Tomnoddy.” He got some of his old banter into his voice, but became confused suddenly and reached for the cigar-box on the table.

  Harriet frowned at him. He withdrew his hand quickly. “I've only had one to-day,” he grumbled.

  “Why a Lord Tomnoddy?” she said.

  “A gentleman, I mean.”

  “What do you think I ought to marry—a tinker?”

  “Good God, Miss Harriet, don't be angry. I was only talking.”

  Her eyes filled. “I suppose that's the only kind of gentleman who would marry me—a fool.”

  He tried to laugh but he looked very miserable under his turban of bandages with his face ossified in plaster.

  “Oh, you know what I mean. You know what happened. I disgraced myself for ever.”

  He turned his head away and watched her out of the corner of his plated eyes. “You're not still thinking of the fellow down there?”

  She looked as if she was hesitating whether to jump up and leave the room or slap his face, then her eyes hardened as though the tears had frozen to a thin layer of ice upon them. “Yes, I think of him, but not the way you mean!”

  Her mouth widened and her eyes sank deeper into their sockets, and Cash noticed that her mouth and eyes had changed since he saw them last in Brisbane. The eyes had lost the sharp, cold clarity of iris and white, as though something had touched and smudged them. The lips had lost or gained something too. The sensuous, soft pout was gone. They lay flat against her teeth and the muscles at the corners of her mouth quivered a
s though she was trying to stop herself from speaking. But the words forced themselves out, hardly audible at first, then in a strident flood, “I've thought of him and them night and day, and I hate them, hate them, hate them,” she said. “I hate everything about them—their white hands, their voices, their clothes, the way they smile, the way they eat, the way they walk. I hate their shoes that never get dusty. I hate their faces that never get red and wet from the heat and their heads that never get a hair out of place. I hate the way they call sweat 'perspiration,' and a smell 'an odour'—and all that. I hate their goodness and I hate—oh, how I hate—the way they know they're good.” Her voice trembled and she raised it to steady it. “How would one of them ever marry me? My mother was Emma Surface, the convict, and my grandmother was a gipsy, and I'm like my mother. What I did proves it—I'm—I'm a slut.”

  Without moving his eyes from her Cash groped for a cigar from the table, put it in his mouth, and drew energetically. A puzzled expression settled on his face. He took the cigar from his teeth and looked at it sharply, reached for the matches and got it alight. But he seemed puzzled still.

  Harriet's needle prick-pricked the silence. She glanced at him suspiciously. “I know what you're thinking—that it's sour grapes. Don't you dare!” She pushed her needle at him. “I hate all men. I hate everybody. I don't want to marry.”

  Cash let the tasteless cigar go out. The smoke lay in a stagnant fuzz on his chest, and when he nodded two or three times clung to his beard, seeping through the tight curls as though he had dipped his chin in a dish of wax. He raised his head as she spoke, and now he lowered it into the pillow again as though he would never lift it any more.