Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  She left the children with him and went on alone to that part of the house which had been her prison. The roof was rusty, the windows along the veranda were broken, the curtains hung in rags, the blinds were faded dirty white; but inside everything was as she had left it. The carpets, the crude imitation tapestries on the wall, the big gilt mirrors, the sofas and arm-chairs, and piano—nothing was touched except by moths and rats. A sharp pang went through her, not for the past, but for the old man who had preserved these last grains of a dream. “Now, isn't that just like Father, the sentimental old silly,” she thought and sniffed, but her throat tightened as she opened the piano and saw the keys again, the unforgettable keys of many hours' practising—the D flat with a little chip off the edge, the A slightly lower than the rest, the F slightly yellower. She felt a desire to talk to these keys to which she had confided so often, which had given her something that survived all disappointments and fed a fond hope for the future.

  She blew a cloud of dust off the stool and sat down. The keys squeaked as she touched them and the rusty wires hissed at her as though reluctant to be disturbed. Some of them did not answer, and others spoke with the same faded, startling unlikeness to her memory of them as the old man on the veranda. Without premeditation she began to sing a song she had not sung for eighteen years:

  Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiss, was ich leide. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt Weiss, was ich leide. Allein und abgetrennt Von aller Freude Seh ich ans Firmament Nach jener Seite. Ach! der mich liebt und kennt Ist in der Weite.

  It was her father's favourite song, a lonely man's song. How inexpressibly sad it sounded on these jangling, hoarse wires. As she sat with her hands resting on the keyboard she thought of the last time she played it—that evening she made up her mind that she would run away from him and he came in with blood on his beard and tried to tell her a story about the past, something he wanted sympathy for, and she had kept him off, afraid to feel sorry, afraid of being engulfed in pity for him. Well, she was afraid of him no longer, nor had been since the night she ran away. Then, when she was most ruthless, she began to understand and pity him most, with the only true understanding and pity, of the strong, the fulfilled, for the uncompleted. It was not perhaps a very tender feeling, rather impatient, with a little scorn in it, like the feeling Emma had had for him in the early days.

  The opening door creaked and she jumped. James looked in. “I'm sorry to interrupt your sentimental reveries, my dear,” he said with a smile which showed that he for one was not taken in by such humbug, “but you're disturbing Father's sleep. He's wakened up twice.”

  “All right.” Harriet looked around the dark room for the last time and joined James at the door.

  “I'll be pulling this place down—well, some day,” James said. “If there's anything you'd like in here as a keepsake I'll send it to you.”

  “Oh no,” Harriet said. “I don't keep a junk store.”

  “Surely you'd like something to remember Father by,” James said disapprovingly.

  Harriet laughed. “I can't see us forgetting him in a hurry.”

  “Indeed no,” James said, but he did not think it was quite the thing to laugh.

  Just before dawn next morning he knocked on her door. He looked hurt. “You'd better come,” he said. “Father's asking for you. Of course he doesn't understand what he's saying half the time.”

  She slipped a dressing-gown on and joined him in the passage. As they went along the veranda he said, “He's been bellowing for the last halfhour. He's worn out the little strength he had. Now you'll be satisfied perhaps.”

  The old man was propped up in bed with pillows. The tired nurse rose from beside the bunk as they entered and said, “Here she is. Now be quiet.”

  Harriet took her chair. “Here I am, Father. Do you want me?”

  He put a hand out towards the sound of her voice but could not reach so far. She pressed it. “Harriet, is that you?” His voice was weak but crisper, as though he knew what he was saying.

  “Yes, Father. Jimmy wired me that you were sick. I came at once.”

  “You did, eh?” He mused, as if feeling his way in an unfamiliar place that was yet strangely familiar, like a man coming back into a room he had not seen for many years and having to learn anew old and wellknown things. But where's. . . where's. . .“

  “Jack?”

  “Jack who?”

  “Jack my husband? Jack Cash?”

  “Ah yes, Cash.” He nodded. “Dead, eh?”

  “No! He's in Sydney at home.”

  “I thought they'd hanged him. No, no, that's right. I remember now. I remember.” He pushed her hand away. “So you came for the funeral, eh?”

  “Oh, I couldn't imagine you dead, Father. But oh,” she ran her hand over his shrivelled arm, “how thin you are!”

  “Stop snivelling. I get enough crocodile tears from James.”

  James cleared his throat.

  The old man lay snarling and muttering, “Tried to keep me away from the dinner-table one night because some toff was here. Had me bathed too. Wasn't clean enough for his fancy nose. ME—I—I could've been—been—finer gentleman only—things happened. . .” His head sank into the pillows and he drowsed away.

  “You'd better go back to bed and finish your sleep,” James said.

  But as soon as she moved the old man awakened and called out peevishly, “Sneaking off again?” He caught the sleeve of her dressinggown, felt for her hand, and went to sleep again.

  “You'll excuse me,” James said. “I haven't had any sleep for a week,” and stiffly withdrew.

  When the old man woke up again he was much recovered and he went on recovering, miraculously. It might have been the shock of falling on his head, of hearing Harriet's voice again, or the music, or maybe it was just the last automatic shudder of decaying cells, but once again the pattern of his life reassembled from the dull fragments.

  “Oh, we've heard all this a thousand times before, Father,” James said impatiently. “We understand it well enough, but it's all done with now.”

  “There are some things you've never heard,” Cabell said ominously.

  “And we don't want to hear them,” James said. “We don't want to have our noses rubbed in sordid details.”

  “Hear that? Sordid details. Oh, I know it well. Tried to keep me away from the dinner-table when his fine friends were here, didn't you? Tried to disown me. Well, I disown you.”

  “Now, now, Father, behave,” Harriet said. “James has done his best for you—everything you asked.”

  “He's a puppy.”

  “Don't be silly, Father. He loves you as I do.”

  James exploded. “Good heavens, Harriet, is it necessary for YOU to tell him that. I'VE given up my whole life to him.”

  But somehow it was necessary, and contrary to all justice and gratitude the old man seemed to love his errant, prodigal daughter more than his faithful, dutiful son. Many times in the following two months he would have tried to get lawyers in to make a will disinheriting James of the Reach if Harriet had not wheedled and bullied him out of it. James was not grateful. “Sly, false, hypocritical,” he thought Harriet was as he watched her sitting at his father's feet on the veranda, stroking his hand and saying, “Yes, yes, Father, of course I understand. Because I made all those Nice People hate me, too. But I don't care. I'm glad. They'd only have liked me if I'd been a stuffed dummy in a glass case.”

  “That's a fact. That's what that monkey, James, my brother was—a stuffed dummy. If I'd been like him I'd've been living at Owerbury now and none of this would have happened. That's right,” he patted her hand, “you understand.”

  “And I hated them once as you did. Oh, how I hated them. If I'd been a man I could have done terrible things—as you did.”

  “Yes, I did some pretty terrible things.”

  “Once you said it was only luck if one didn't do terrible things. That's true, too. I understand that now. I'd've done terrible things if it hadn't been for
luck.”

  “There's a lot of luck in it, child. That's a fact.”

  “But you must stop worrying about what happened, Father. It was bound to be just like that in the beginning. If you were young now it would be different.”

  “Isn't that what I'm always telling them? He thinks we could've opened up a blackfellows' country with kid gloves on.”

  “Yes, yes,” she soothed him, “but it is opened up now and you mustn't be unreasonable about James and his kid gloves.”

  But the old man would not be reconciled. “They chucked me in a bath. . .”

  “Come, Father, come, don't start again. Besides, others will understand even better than we do. My boys don't want to wear kid gloves and they'll know what it was like for you—I'll see they do.” She brought her eldest boy, Derek, with the grave face and outsized nose, replica of Cabell's. “He's just like what you must have been, Father. He's going to become a musician, a great musician.”

  Cabell ran his hands over the boy's smooth face. The boy tried hard not to flinch from the fingers, like dry bones. But his grandfather was not pleased. “What's the use talking. Pious claptrap. I WAS like that—once. . . ”

  After Harriet left him that afternoon he sat facing the red deformed egg of the sun setting in dust, and talked excitedly to himself, now in a furtive whisper, now angrily, now in a sad tone as though renouncing something precious, while under the veranda, where glaring toadstools sprouted from the stumps, crouched Harriet's smallest boy, listening, wanting to run away, yet too scared, too fascinated by the crazy voice to move. The voice stopped abruptly and the boy crept out and saw the old man sitting up rigid in his chair, the copper light of the sun full on his face, the long purple cicatrice, the ravaged eyes, the upper lip curled back on bare gums, and the jaw like two pieces of iron clamped together. He would never forget that face, never. Under the drift of pleasant domestic and national legends it would remain indelibly clear, demanding some explanation which pleasant legends do not give.

  Chapter Ten: Sad Tale Concluded

  Harriet was dressing for dinner when the child ran in and said that something had happened to the old man. The nurse and James were there before her. He was having some kind of fit. Soon it passed and they got him back to bed and sat around waiting for him to come to.

  Very cautiously the doctor said that it was the end, but nobody believed him. James, Harriet, and the nurse all looked tired and resigned.

  The room was like an oven. A fire had broken out in the ranges and a shift of the light breeze carried the smoke and the heat down on the homestead. The fire glowing in the trees along the hills looked pretty at a distance, almost comforting, like the scattered lights of a town. Out in the darkness the cattle huddled together and cried with fear, that peculiar cry which begins with short, irritated bellowings and ends with a loud roar sinking and rising between a murmur and a weird, cracked scream. The birds were restless, even the fowls in the yard, which clucked and cocka-doodled without respite. The horses in the stable turned round and round on the cobbles and challenged the nervous night with their whinnyings. The three children sat on the floor along the wall, forgotten, tamed by their first sight of a bushfire and a man dying, very white in the yellow lamplight under their freckles.

  Julia came to the door and looked in at the old man, who lay under the sheet breathing in dry gasps. She was dressed as carefully as usual in a white evening frock cut away at the neck and the back, and the beads of sweat along her upper lip and her forehead, which sparkled in the light, only made her look cooler, as though she was wrapped up from the suffocating air in a thin silver gauze.

  “What's the doctor say now?” she asked.

  “He says it's grave, very grave,” James answered in a hushed voice.

  “You mean he's going to die at last?”

  “Julia!”

  “Oh, you make me ill, James. You know perfectly well that I know you've got a house booked at Southport at this moment and that you've been re-booking it from month to month for the last three months.”

  “Naturally I've hoped that Father would be well enough. . .”

  “Oh!” She turned her back on him and stared out at the darkness, but the smoke, thickening so that the lamp on the table burned with a halo, sent her in choking. When she got her breath again she said, “Well, do what you like, but I'm not going to wait any longer. I'm going to pack and get away from this heat to-night. You two can stay and amuse yourselves.”

  James looked pointedly at the nurse before replying. She took the hint, murmured something about dinner, and went out.

  “'Amuse' is hardly the word to use in a room where death is hovering,” James said.

  “I don't believe he'll die,” Julia said. “He'll lie there, the old beast, till we're all half-fried, and then get up and drag his horrid old corpse around the house for another five years.”

  They all moved their eyes to the face on the bed, each trying to estimate how much longer the will in that gaunt jaw could go on fighting, and as they watched the sneering grin slowly widened and let the light shine on the wet gums. There was such malice in the smile that Julia, whom the old man's wildest shinnanikan never unpoised, put her hand over her mouth and said “Oh!”

  The head lifted from the pillows a few inches and fell back again, and the only sound was Cabell's quickening breathing. He made another effort and got on his elbow, clutching the sheet close to his throat with his free hand and shivering. “You don't think I'm going to die, you hussy? Well, you're frank. And now, I reckon, it might be time to be frank with you. I've been thinking of it a long while—since you had me chucked in the bath. I smelt, you said. That's a fact. But you smell too, with a smell you'll never wash off. Your mother. . .”

  James hurried to the bunk. “Is this the moment, Father? In your condition you'd best be trying to sleep.”

  “Get to the devil. Bring Harriet here.”

  “I'm here, Father.” She crossed to the bunk and touched him.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You're all going to listen to me now if it's the last time you do.”

  James rushed at Julia and took her by the arm. “Leave the room, Julia. Leave it at once. I forbid you to stay and hear—hear lies.”

  Julia lifted her arm from his hand and put the table between them. She smiled, pulled up a chair, and seated herself. Perhaps she would have liked to run away but did not want the old man to know that he could frighten her or perhaps it pleased her to cross James. She folded her hands in her lap and said, “Go on, Father. We're listening, but you'll have to think hard to find anything to say about Mother that will shock me.”

  James stopped spluttering at her across the table and said appealingly, “Don't incite him, Julia, for God's sake. He might say something that we—you would never live down.”

  But the old man, groping for Harriet's hand, seemed to have forgotten them. The malice had gone from his face, sunk in the pillows again, and when he began to speak it was in a whisper barely to be heard above the commotion from the stables and the fowlyard. The weak voice, punctuated by his gaspings for breath, sounded to the children against the wall absurdly inadequate to cause such a flurry in a great, schoolmasterly man like their uncle.

  “I'm going back I don't know how many years,” the old man was saying to Harriet. “I had a skin like your young colt and I had to sink or swim. I had a handful of sheep, and the overseer on the place where I was working for tucker was stealing them, a brute by the name of M'Govern, an old flogger, strong as a lion. But I had hands like James there, and couldn't tell B from a bull-foot any better, but Gursey helped me and we got away. He had six months to do before he got his ticket-ofleave—Gursey. But I swear I didn't force him to make a break for it. That was M'Govern. He thought I was putting my head down with Gursey and he was scared of Gursey. So he looked for an excuse to get him out of the way. He was going to send him to Brisbane to have him flogged and I saved him—helped him to clear out. It would've been the end of him, that floggi
ng.”

  It was the old, old story of Cabell's beginning in the colony sixty years ago. James had heard it a hundred times: how the convict Gursey escaped and helped Cabell to find his stolen sheep and brought him to the valley; how later he went away and returned towards the end of his life and tried, in some mysterious way, to blackmail Cabell, but settled down at last and stayed at the Reach till he died. James became calmer. The old man's mind must have wandered: there was nothing about Julia's mother in this story, which was prompted by a bad conscience about the convict who had lost his ticket-of-leave.

  “You've told us all this before, Father,” he interrupted the old man. “It wasn't your fault the fellow got himself into trouble.”

  “It wasn't my fault—you see that, don't you?” the old man said anxiously, turning his face. “I didn't make him escape just to help me save a few measly sheep—even if they were everything I had—my last razoo, mind you—my last hope of getting Home.”

  “Yes, yes,” James said. “We see that quite well, Father. We've assured you time out of number.”

  “Well, HE didn't see it,” Cabell grumbled. “Or wouldn't. 'You'd do anything,' he said, 'ANYTHING.' And—my God, I was hardly teethed, and he'd been learning the ropes in jailyards half his life.” He turned his face again, waiting for someone to reassure him.

  “Oh, quite! Quite!” James said impatiently.

  Cabell fixed his sightless eye in James's direction and frowned, but turned back to Harriet and went on quickly, “We got away with the sheep and came up here. There was a price on his head. But he was safe here, and he could have stayed as long as he liked—to his dying day, only. . . well, your mother came along and he let me marry her. He knew she was an old lag and he didn't let on. It was pure spite—or perhaps they made it up between them. He told me after I'd got the buckle on, and I kicked him out. It was his own fault. Eh?”

  Nobody answered. This was something new in the story. James and Harriet sat thinking of it, of their mother, of Larry, and of the strange relations between the three of them which this helped to explain.