Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  “Me?”

  “Yes, twenty-five thousand quids' worth of Waterfall shares to put in your stocking.” He gave her the papers. “Not so little either, but a drop in the ocean of what I'll leave you.”

  “Oh, but didn't—could he afford it?” Harriet said, changing her sentence in the middle.

  “Don't worry about that. He's well lined his pockets. I'll soon be paying twenty-five thousand into his account at the Queensland Incorporated, and I've got another thirty thousand worth of shares and land to realize on for him.”

  “But didn't he. . .” She twisted the paper in her hands and stopped again.

  Cabell rose. “Come now. Enough of Cash. I'm going over to Ningpo. Get your hat and we'll ride down the river.”

  “Oh, but didn't he send any message?”

  “What message should he send?”

  “Didn't he say anything—anything at all? About his present, I mean.”

  “He said it was to be a wedding-present. Something of the sort.”

  “I'll never need it then.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I'll never be married.”

  He laughed. “What d'you think I'm going to do with you? Shut you up with the nuns. Now, no nonsense, girl. You'll be married when we find you a decent young fellow. I was thinking,” he looked at her slyly, “I might take you Home myself in a couple of years' time, if everything goes well. I'd buy Owerbury. It must be crippled with debt. And settle you in there with your husband. Now, how does that sound?”

  “I wouldn't go.”

  “Rubbish. Of course you'd go. Last year you said. . .”

  “I don't care what I said last year. I was mad. I don't want to marry any of your young men. I won't. You can't make me. You can stop me having the man I want but you can't force me to marry one I don't want.”

  “Who the hell do you want to marry? Or don't you want to marry? Or what the devil do you want?”

  “I want to marry the man I love. Not the man you know I CAN'T love.”

  “Oho. And who's the man you love?”

  Harriet looked at the dead centre of his eye. It was not like Cash's eye—it quailed under her gaze and pleaded for mercy. “Jack Cash,” she said.

  “So!” he said. “I was right then. You were carrying on in there—like—like Florence Nightingle, eh? A little ministering angel, eh? Like a bitch!”

  Tears ran down Harriet's cheeks into the corners of her mouth, but she kept her voice firm. “Say what you wish. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I love Cash. I've always loved him. I always will.”

  Cabell grinned, but his voice was not as steady as Harriet's. “Always, eh? But you flung yourself at Peppiott's head just the same. A fine story I can tell you about him. He's going to marry Flanagan's granddaughter.”

  “I was ready to fling myself at any man's head,” Harriet retorted, “if only he could rescue me from you.” She dried her eyes on her sleeve. “Oh, you needn't worry. I'll never try again. You've finished me as you've finished James. It's what you wanted, I suppose, for some beastly reason. But you can't kill me and keep my love at the same time, don't you understand? I'll never care anything for you any more. I hate you.”

  “Harriet! You're angry. You don't know what you're saying.”

  “I'm not angry,” Harriet said. “I don't think I'll ever feel even anger again,” and she covered her face in her hands and ran out of the room.

  When that fit was over she reviewed the situation once more. Why did Cash give her this money? She would never need it—he knew that. For a wedding-present? Oh, the fool—didn't he have any eyes? Or was could it be a sign? She laughed at herself. A fine sign from a man already miles at sea. No, enough of looking for signs and enough of snivelling. Cash was gone—months ago. He might as well be dead. That was a fact and you couldn't alter facts. She must give up fighting, resign herself. James had done it and so, by clearing out, had Larry. Poor James! What would he feel when he heard about Jennis? Or did one really outlive this dull, burning pain?

  Chapter Five: James Invents a Father

  James would have been extremely annoyed and a little puzzled to know that his sister pitied him, for James was thoroughly taken in by his public pretence of dignified, perhaps a trifle smug, contentment. As he saw himself he was very happy to be fulfilling his duties to his father and, on this ground, was stoically prepared to fulfil his duties to Julia too. Passengers on ships and guests in hotels thought that the young Mr and Mrs Cabell were an ideally assorted couple, rather undemonstrative for newly-weds, but that was in the best taste. They did detect occasionally a slight taste of vinegar in the young wife's conversation, a spark of unquenched fire in her eye, but her husband never seemed to notice it and, if he did, never let it ruffle his genteel temper. A strong fellow that—he could afford to let her chafe at the bit for a while as young wives often do: his firm hand would break her in. So James took in society as well as himself, as well as Harriet, for the poor devil was far from resigned, far from content in the narrow path of filial duty along which Cabell was trotting him. In the depths of James's heart the devils still danced. Would they ever dance themselves out? That was the question. Not if James could help it.

  His mouth, once a happy, generous mouth had set tighter, and his eyes, bridged by a deep wrinkle between the eyebrows, had the dull, worried, preoccupied gaze of a man who feels a cancer growing in his vitals and cannot, does not wish to locate it. Lines were deepening on his forehead and about his mouth. On his twenty-sixth birthday he was solemn, wooden, seigniorial. Certainly not a man to pity, not a man who would wake up at night from painful dreams to pity himself. Yet he often but only at night, when the thought that he might have married a woman he loved instead of tying himself for a lifetime to this sarcastic vixen Julia, and that his father had used him without caring a tinker's cuss what became of him, broke through his guard. In the daytime that guard was impregnable. His devils were locked up, his mask was down, and he moved discreetly, indecipherably among his fellows, reassured by their respect and the high esteem in which filial duty and self-abnegation were universally held. In the day-time James was satisfied with himself and before long, no doubt, would be satisfied with himself at night too. The only thorn in his satisfaction was Julia's tongue. Even his daytime armour could not quite protect him from that.

  Julia was not a bitch—yet; but she was in a fair way to become one. The wedding over, her scandalous mother out of sight, and a new life opening before her, she had been happy and prepared to fall in love with James. She was young, as attractive as Jennis Bowen, with a sight more intelligence and spirit. She had passion too, a queer, romantic, tender passion which had already begun to reach out towards him. She was, he would have been astonished to discover, grateful for the tactful way he had done his love-making and looked upon him as a deliverer now that all the awkward moments were passed. If only he would make an effort to be cheerful and human she would uncover a personality very different from the one which terrified him so. It was up to James, but James was not up to the job.

  On the morning after the wedding at Ningpo, when the coach was carrying them out of the valley on the first lap of their honeymoon, Julia sighed and said, “Thank heavens, that's over. Weddings are detestable, aren't they? Now for the next stage.”

  She did not mean that she would thank heaven when the equally detestable honeymoon was over but that was how James understood her. He did not reply but stared gloomily at the dawn breaking over miles and miles of flooded country-side. It was the worst season to travel. The roads were almost impassable, bridges shaky, hills scoured, and mud knee deep He was to be shut up in this jolting, stuffy box of a coach with Julia for three, perhaps six, days, and all because his father refused to wait another month to become chairman of the mine. In the grey light Julia saw him frown and loose a dejected breath as he wondered how many times he would have to crawl out into the rain to help the coach over a bog and what Julia's comments on his bedraggled appearance would be.<
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  Julia felt snubbed, but she would not let herself be discouraged. She suspected that James and she had a great deal in common; that he was just as glad as she to see the last of the valley and the people in it. His terrible father—how he bullied James and how, she guessed, James disliked him. And that extraordinary old mother, with her lurking eyes, who had never spoken one word to her—an old convict woman with stripes on her back, her own mother had told her. She had watched James in this family circle and knew that he felt as ashamed before her as she had felt before him. If they could show their cards and confess that neither had more reason than the other to be ashamed surely they could clear the air. He was so stand-offish! Why, he had kissed her only once, when the wedding service forced him to, and then his lips had scarcely brushed against hers.

  “I mean it's a relief to be away from one's relatives,” Julia said, feeling her way cautiously. “They're such a bore. You've no idea what a nuisance Mother was when we travelled.”

  Mention of Aurelia jolted him. It was the last subject he wanted to discuss: for one thing it usually stimulated Julia's tongue to sharp, oblique reprisals; and for another it reminded him that marriage had added the bibulous old harridan to his load of family disgrace. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “you told me—she gets dizzy in coaches.”

  “She gets dizzy anywhere,” Julia admitted nobly.

  “Some people are like that,” James said quickly. “I knew a man—it's bile.”

  Julia laughed and laid her hand on James's knee. “You're a dear to pretend, James, but now we can be honest, can't we, and make a mutual confession?”

  “A mutual confession?” James tried to look politely surprised but only looked horrified.

  “Oh well, you know what I mean. We didn't make our parents, so it's perfectly ridiculous to pretend that we're responsible for their odd ways.”

  James sensed a treacherous thrust maturing behind Julia's suspicious open-heartedness, and stiffened himself to receive it.

  “It's not my fault Mother drinks like a fish and behaves like a you-know-what.”

  “Indeed!” James said feebly, “your mother is a most excellent woman.”

  “A most excellent fiddlesticks, James. She's an old rake, and that's putting it mildly. She's always drunk, she flirts outrageously, she takes off her clothes in public if you don't watch her, and there isn't a respectable hotel in any French or English watering place she hasn't been asked to leave.”

  James crumbled. “Good Lord, Julia, what are you saying?”

  “The simple truth, my dear. See, I've owned up.”

  “I don't believe it,” James said and the words comforted him. Yes, it was unbelievable—just another of Julia's dirty tricks to make him squirm. A week ago he could set the skeletons in Julia's cupboard against the skeletons in his own, but now they were all in his own! “Really,” he said, getting his spine up again with an effort, “I admire your mother. Woman of the world—little eccentric—sad bereavement—but dash it all Julia, it's not nice talking like that about our—your relatives.”

  Julia's eyes widened. For a moment she thought that James must be a tremendous simpleton, but she saw what heavy weather he made defending her mother and credited him with generous feelings on her account. “That's nice of you, dear,” she said, with a tender smile, “but there's no need for us to feel like that about each other if we're honest in the beginning. Now, I don't care a hang about Mother's eccentricities, as you're sweet enough to call them, if you won't look as if you've got all the sins in the NEWGATE CALENDAR on your conscience every time somebody talks about YOUR father or mother. . .”

  James's spine stiffened without an effort this time, as though Julia had stuck one of her hat-pins into him. “My father is a very excellent man, and my mother. . .” he began, but broke down.

  “Oh, I don't mean to say—I mean, I liked your mother, James, I really did. There's something about her. . .” Then Julia broke down too. This was not at all what she wanted to say. She wanted to be honest and she wanted James to be honest, so what was the use beginning with an obvious lie.

  It was such an obvious lie that it maddened James. “That's not true. You looked down on my mother,” he said, blushing. “You know what she was. But let me tell you. . .” he took a deep breath, “my mother is a fine woman just the same and my father is a gentleman. And my I know you're thinking about the disgusting business in Brisbane last year (Julia was thinking no such thing. She had never heard a word about Doug Peppiott and had hardly noticed Harriet), but it's no concern of yours. And anyway. . .” He floundered, gulped, “I don't wish to discuss the matter further.”

  Julia had no more wish to discuss it either. She saw that she had put her foot in badly and was vexed with herself and with James. She retreated into her elegant shell, though not so far that James would have failed to coax her out if he had tried. But a coach jolting over washed-out roads is not a place to nurture sweet temper in a man who believes that he has a grievance. James's belief that he had been cruelly put upon seethed stronger and hotter at each bone-rattling pothole. Fat, damp, hungry flies buzzed and bit, the slush washed up through the floor of the coach, breathing the steamy air was like trying to chew hot cotton-wool. He was aware that he cut an absurd figure as he tried to sit upright and dignified in the extreme corner of the seat, gasping, sweating, his hat jerking over his nose every time the coach swayed and plunged, but look dignified he must: it was the only defence against the arrows in Julia's eyes. There happened to be no arrows in Julia's eyes just then, but James did not look at them too closely.

  In the four and a half days they took to reach the railhead he got out into the mud and rain twenty-eight times to plod up a hill or help the coachman and outsides with a fallen horse or put his shoulder to the wheel. It was a beginning to test the fortitude of the most devoted honeymooners. They spent six more days in trains and hotels before they reached the seclusion of their staterooms on the s.s. AUSTRAL, and by that time the habit of addressing each other as though they were in a public restaurant had settled on them.

  Julia did not give up hope. She knew she was beautiful and believed that what she had failed to do with gentle, tactful words she would do with gentle, tactful deeds when the time came. The time came at last, for James's duties as a husband could be shirked no longer, and, alas for duty. . . he failed miserably.

  He was awkward, resentful, and cold, and he made Julia cold and awkward and, at last, resentful too. Poor James, he felt ashamed. He could not understand the blight which had descended on him. He could only soothe himself by saying, “If it was Jennis it wouldn't be like this,” and the image of Jennis rose before him, alluring, profoundly disturbing. Through these first days it haunted and tortured him with a fierce, lusting fire at the centre of his vitals which left him gutted and dead within. To the vision of the wife he had lost he could not help comparing the wife he had got, and as the one was a vision and the other flesh, peaked from seasickness and sleepless nights, the comparison was hopelessly to Julia's disadvantage. Her mouth was too small; her eyes too narrow; her voice too hard; she was too tall, too pale, and too damned conceited. Poor James. . . if the placid Jennis Bowen, in her quiet dreams of lovers kissing the palm of her hand, ever found the spleen to wish James some evil for deserting her, she had her wish now.

  James cursed everybody except himself—Cabell, his sister, Ludmilla, Aurelia, Julia. It was all his father's doing: for the sake of money he had sacrificed James to this ignominy and loss. And who was to benefit? Harriet, of course. SHE could do what she liked—cut up rough with any man to God knew what limits and be forgiven—but he'd only loved one woman and they had all plotted to take her away from him. “It's filthy. It's unjust. But I'll get even with them.” How? Even to him these threats sounded feeble. “I wish to Christ I'd made a break when I wanted to.” But the time for that courageous gesture was gone and James guessed, for an instant, that his potency had gone irretrievably with it. If he had had the courage to stand up to
his father, to stand up to the Doug Peppiotts of society without money to shield him, would he not have been more of a man? It was a horrible, worse, a futile thought on this side of the decision he had made four years ago. He repudiated it. “No, a man's got duties to look to. Social and family duties. That's the test of manliness—duty. I've got a duty to my father.” And his rage against Cabell, which had turned to rage against himself, melted into the sentimental thought, “Poor old Dad. He's had a hard time. A man's got to lend him a hand now when he needs it.”

  This was the fourth night at sea, the fourth night after James's fiasco. For three nights Julia had watched the wedge of light under the door between their cabins, heard James undressing, and longed for another chance to take him in her arms. For three nights she had seen the light go out and heard him scramble into bed. Her hands tightened on her breasts, warm through the silk of her night-dress but suddenly cold and congealed within. The stick! The idiot! The milksop! Had he really only married her because his father told him to? She had guessed it from the beginning: it was true.

  On this fourth night, prepared to make another effort in the cause of duty James came to his cabin, undressed, folded his pants, shirt, and underclothes neatly and put them away in the wardrobe, hung his coat after carefully scratching a spot of paint off the sleeve, washed, cleaned his teeth, his nails, brushed his sleek black hair, put on his dressinggown, and after an automatic glance round the cabin to see that everything was in its right place, listened at the door. Julia was in bed. He turned the knob: the door was locked.

  Next morning Julia greeted him on deck with the old familiar smile. He realized, seeing it again, that she had not looked at him with that amused, superior veiling of her eyes for some time. (“Suppose she's been too seasick.”) “Don't scowl at me in public,” Julia said. “You forget that we're supposed to be an ideal couple on its honeymoon.”