The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  Polly had pink cheeks with it all, and even sought to excuse the meagre interest John had shown in his daughter. “Trotty was only a baby in arms when he saw her last. Besides, I think she reminded him too much of her dear mother. For I’m sure, though he doesn’t let it be seen, John still feels his loss.”

  “I wonder!” said Mahony slowly and with a strong downward inflection, as he turned indoors.

  On the eve of the polling Polly had the honour of accompanying her brother to a performance at the Theatre Royal. A ticket came for Richard, too; but, as usual, he was at the last moment called out. So Purdy took her on his arm and escorted her—not exactly comfortably; for, said Polly, no one who had not tried it, knew how hard it was to walk arm-in-arm with a lame person, especially if you did not want to hurt his feelings—Purdy took her to the theatre, helped her to unmuffle and to change her boots, and bore her company till her brother arrived. They had seats in the centre of the front row of the dress circle; all eyes were turned on them as they entered; and Polly’s appearance was the subject of audible and embarrassing comment.

  In every interval John was up and away, to shake a hand here, pass the time of day there; and watching him with affectionate pride, Polly wondered how Richard could ever have termed him “high-handed and difficult.” John had the knack, it seemed to her, of getting on with people of every class, and of always finding the right word to say. But as the evening advanced his seat remained empty even while the curtain was up, and she was glad when, between the fourth and fifth acts, her husband at last appeared.

  On his way to her Mahony ran into his brother-in-law, and John buttonholed him to discuss with him the prospects of the morrow. As they talked, their eyes rested on Polly’s glossy black chignon; on the nape of her white neck; on the beautiful, rounded young shoulders which, in obedience to the fashion, stood right out of her blue silk bodice. Mahony shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. He could not imagine Polly enjoying her exposed position, and disapproved strongly of John having left her. But for all answer to the hint he threw out John said slowly, and with a somewhat unctuous relish: “My sister has turned into a remarkably handsome woman!”—words which sent the lightning-thought through Mahony that, had Polly remained the insignificant little slip of a thing of earlier days, she would not have been asked to fill the prominent place she did this evening.

  John sent his adieux and excuses to Polly. He had done what was expected of him, in showing himself at a public entertainment, and a vast mass of correspondence lay unsorted on his desk. So Mahony moved forward alone.

  “Oh, Richard, there you are! Oh dear, what you’ve missed! I never thought there could be such acting.” And Polly turned her great dark eyes on her husband; they were moist from the noble sentiments of The True Briton.

  The day of the election broke, a gusty spring day cut up by stinging hail-showers, which beat like fusillades on the galvanised iron roofs. Between the showers, the sun shone in a gentian-blue sky, against which the little wooden houses showed up crassly white. Ballarat made holiday. Early as Mahony left home, he met a long line of conveyances heading townwards—spring carts, dogcarts, double and single buggies, in some of which, built to seat two only, five or six persons were huddled. These and similar vehicles drew up in rows outside the public-houses, where the lean, long-legged colonial horses stood jerking at their tethers; and they were still there, still jerking, when he passed again towards evening. On a huge poster the “Unicorn” offered to lunch free all those “thinking men” who registered their vote for “the one and only true democrat, the miners’ friend and tyrants’ foe, John Turnham.”

  In the hope of avoiding a crush Mahony drove straight to the polling-booth. But already all the loafers and roughs in the place seemed to be congregated round the entrance, after the polite custom of the country to chivy, or boo, or huzza those who went in. In waiting his turn, he had to listen to comments on his dress and person, to put up with vulgar allusions to blue pills and black draughts.

  Just as he was getting back into his buggy John rode up, flanked by a bodyguard of friends; John was galloping from booth to booth, to verify progress and put the thumbscrew on wobblers. He beamed—as well he might. He was certain to be one of the two members elected, and quite likely to top the poll by a respectable majority.

  For once Mahony did not grumble at his outlying patients; was only too thankful to turn his back on the town. It was pandemonium. Bands of music, one shriller and more discordant than the next, marched up and down the main streets—from the fifes and drums of the Fire Brigade, to the kerosene-tins and penny-whistles of mere determined noise-makers. Straggling processions, with banners that bore the distorted features of one or other of the candidates, made driving difficult; and, to add to the confusion, the schoolchildren were let loose, to overrun the place and fly advertisement balloons round every corner.— And so it went on till far into the night, the dark hours being varied by torchlight processions, fireworks, free fights and orgies of drunkenness.

  The results of the polling were promised for two o’clock the following day.

  When, something after this hour Mahony reached home, he found Polly and the gentle, ox-eyed Jinny Beamish, who was the present occupant of the spare room, pacing up and down before the house. According to Jerry news might be expected now at any minute. And when he had lunched and changed his coat, Mahony, bitten by the general excitement, made his way down to the junction of Sturt Street and the Flat.

  A great crowd blocked the approaches to the hustings. Here were the four candidates, who, in attending the issue, strove to look decently unconcerned. John had struck a quasi-Napoleonic attitude: his right elbow propped in the cup of his left hand, he held his drooped chin between thumb and forefinger, leaving it to his glancing black eyes to reveal how entirely alive he was to the gravity of the moment. Standing on the fringe of the crowd, Mahony listened to the piebald jokes and rude wit with which the people beguiled the interim; and tried to endure with equanimity the jostling, the profane language and offensive odours, by which he was assailed. Half an hour elapsed before the returning officer climbed the ladder at the back of the platform, and came forward to announce the result of the voting: Mr. John Millibank Turnham topped the poll with a majority of four hundred and fifty-two. The crowd, which at sight of the clerk had abruptly ceased its fooling, drowned his further statements in a roar of mingled cheers and boos. The cheers had it; hats were tossed into the air, and loud cries for a speech arose. John’s advance to grip the railing led to a fresh outburst, in which the weakening opposition was quashed by the singing of: “When Johnny comes marching home!” and “Cheer, boys, cheer, for home and mother country!”—an incongruity of sentiment that made Mahony smile. And John, having repeatedly bowed his thanks from side to side, joined in and sang with the rest.

  The opening of his speech was inaudible to Mahony. Just behind him stood one of his brother-in-law’s most arrant opponents, a butcher by trade, and directly John began to hold forth this man produced a cornet-à-piston and started to blow it. In vain did Mahony expostulate: he seemed to have got into a very wasps’-nest of hostility; for the player’s friends took up the cudgels and baited him in a language he would have been sorry to imitate, the butcher blaring away unmoved, with the fierce solemnity of face the cornet demands. Mahony lost his temper; his tormentors retaliated; and for a moment it looked as though there would be trouble. Then a number of John’s supporters, enraged by the bellowing of the instrument, bore down and forcibly removed the musician and his clique, Mahony along with them.

  Having indignantly explained, and shaken coat and collar to rights, he returned to his place on the edge of the crowd. The speaker’s deep voice had gone steadily on during the disturbance. Indeed John might have been born to the hustings. Interruptions did not put him out; he was brilliant at repartee; and all the stock gestures of the public speaker came at his call: the pounding o
f the bowl of one hand with the closed fist of the other; the dramatic wave of the arm with which he plumbed the depths or invited defiance; the jaunty standing-at-ease, arms akimbo; the earnest bend from the waist when he took his hearers into his confidence. At this moment he was gripping the rail of the platform as though he intended to vault it, and asserting: “Our first cry, then, is for men to people the country; our next, for independence, to work out our own salvation. Yes, my friends, the glorious future of this young and prosperous colony, which was once and most auspiciously known as Australia Felix—blest, thrice-blest Australia!—rests with ourselves alone. We who inhabit here can best judge of her requirements, and we refuse to see her hampered in her progress by the shackles of an ancient tradition. What suits our hoary mother-country— God bless and keep her and keep us loyal to her!—is but dry husks for us. England knows nothing of our most pressing needs. I ask you to consider how, previous to 1855, that pretty pair of mandarins, Lord John Russell and Earl Grey, boggled and botched the crucial question of unlocking the lands—even yet, gentlemen, the result of their muddling lies heavy on us. And the Land Question, though first in importance, is but one, as you know, of many”—and here John, playing on the tips of five wide-stretched fingers, counted them off. He wound up with a flaming plea for the creation and protection of purely national industries. “For what, I would ask you, is the true meaning of democracy in a country such as ours? What is, for us, the democratic principle? The answer, my friends, is conservatism; yes, I repeat it—conservatism!” . . . . and thus to a final peroration.

  In the braying and hurrahing that followed—the din was heightened by some worthy mounting a barrel to move that “this yere Johnny Turnham” was not a fit person to represent “the constitooency,” by the barrel being dragged from under him, and the speaker rolled in the mud; while this went on Mahony stood silent, and he was still standing meditatively pulling his whiskers when a sudden call for a doctor reached his ear. He pushed his way to the front.

  How the accident happened no one knew. John had descended from the platform to a verandah, where countless hands were stretched out to shake his. A pile of shutters was leaning against the wall, and in some unexplained fashion these had fallen, striking John a blow that knocked him down. When Mahony got to him he was on his feet again, wiping a drop of blood from his left temple. He looked pale, but pooh-poohed injury or the idea of interfering with his audience’s design; and Mahony saw him shouldered and borne off.

  That evening there was a lengthy banquet, in which all the notables of the place took part. Mahony’s seat was some way off John’s; he had to lean forward, did he wish to see his brother-in-law.

  Towards eleven o’clock, just as he was wondering if he could slip out unobserved, a hand was laid on his arm. John stood behind him, white to the lips. “Can I have a word with you upstairs?”

  Here he confessed to a knife-like pain in his left side; the brunt of the blow, it seemed, had met him slantways between rib and hip. A cursory examination made Mahony look grave.

  “You must come back with me, John, and let me see to you properly.”

  Having expressed the chief guest’s regrets to the company, he ordered a horse and trap, and helping John into it drove him home. And that night John lay in their bed, letting out the groans he had suppressed during the evening; while Polly snatched forty winks beside Jinny Beamish, and Mahony got what sleep he could on the parlour sofa.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There for some weeks John was a prisoner, with a fractured rib encased in strips of plaster. “In your element again, old girl!” Mahony chaffed his wife, when he met her bearing invalid trays.

  “Oh, it doesn’t all fall on me, Richard. Jinny’s a great help—sitting with John and keeping him company.”

  Mahony could see it for himself. Oftenest when he entered the room it was Jinny’s black-robed figure—she was in mourning for her parents; for Mrs. Beamish had sunk under the twofold strain of failure and disgrace, and the day after her death it had been necessary to cut old Beamish down from a nail—oftenest it was Jinny he found sitting behind a curtain of the tester-bed, watching while John slept, ready to read to him or to listen to his talk when he awoke. This service set Polly free to devote herself to the extra cooking; and John was content. “A most modest and unassuming young woman,” ran his verdict on Jinny.

  Polly reported it to her husband in high glee. “Who could ever have believed two sisters would turn out so differently? Tilly to get so. . . .so. . . .well, you know what I mean. . . .and Jinny to improve as she has done. Have you noticed, Richard, she hardly ever—really quite seldom now—drops an h? It must all have been due to Tilly serving in that low bar.”

  By the time John was so far recovered as to exchange bed for sofa, it had come to be exclusively Jinny who carried in to him the dainties Polly prepared—the wife as usual was content to do the dirty work! John declared Miss Jinny had the foot of a fay; also that his meals tasted best at her hands. Jinny even succeeded in making Trotty fond of her; and the love of the fat, shy child was not readily won. Entering the parlour one evening Mahony surprised quite a family scene: John, stretched on the sofa, was stringing cats’-cradles, Jinny sat beside him with Trotty on her knee.

  On the whole, though, the child did not warm to her father.

  “Aunty, kin dat man take me away f’om you?”

  “That man? Why, Trotty darling, he’s your father!” said Polly, shocked.

  “Kin ’e take me away f’om you and Uncle Papa?”

  “He could if he wanted to. But I’m sure he doesn’t,” answered her aunt, deftly turning a well-rolled sheet of pastry.

  And righting her dolly, which she had been dragging upside down, Trotty let slip her fears with the sovereign ease of childhood.

  From the kitchen Polly could hear the boom of John’s deep bass: it made nothing of the lath-and-plaster walls. Of course, shut up as he was, he had to talk to somebody, poor fellow; and Richard was too busy to spare him more than half an hour of an evening. Jinny was a good listener. Through the crack of the door, Polly could see her sitting humbly drinking in John’s words, and even looking rather pretty, in her fair, full womanliness.

  “Oh, Polly!” she burst out one day, after being held thus spellbound. “Oh, my dear, what a splendid man your brother is! I feel sometimes I could sink through the floor with shame at my ignorance, when ’e talks to me so.”

  But as time went on Mahony noticed that his wife grew decidedly thoughtful; and if John continued to sing Jinny’s praises, he heard nothing more of it. He had an acute suspicion what troubled Polly; but did not try to force her confidence.

  Then one afternoon, on his getting home, she came into the surgery looking very perturbed, and could hardly find words to break a certain piece of news to him. It appeared that not an hour previously, Jinny, flushed and tearful; had lain on her neck, confessing her feelings for John and hinting at the belief that they were returned.

  “Well, I think you might have been prepared for something of this sort, Polly,” he said with a shrug, when he had heard her out. “Convalescence is notoriously dangerous for fanning the affections.”

  “Oh, but I never dreamt of such a thing, Richard! Jinny is a dear good girl and all that, but she is not John’s equal. And that he can even think of putting her in poor Emma’s place!—What shall I say to him?”

  “Say nothing at all. Your brother John is not the man to put up with interference.”

  “He longs so for a real home again, Polly darling,” said Jinny, wiping her eyes. “And how ’appy it will make me to fulfil ’is wish! Don’t let me feel unwelcome and an intruder, dear. I know I’m not nearly good enough for ’im, and ’e could ’ave had the choice of ever such handsome women. But ’e ’as promised to be patient with me, and to teach me everything I ought to know.”

  Polly’s dismay at the turn of events yielde
d to a womanly sympathy with her friend. “It’s just like poor little Agnes and Mr. Henry over again,” was her private thought. For she could not picture John stooping to guide and instruct.

  But she had been touched on a tender spot—that of ambitious pride for those related to her—and she made what Mahony called “a real Turnham attempt” to stand up to John. Against her husband’s express advice.

  “For if your brother chooses to contract a mésalliance of this kind, it’s nobody’s business but his own. Upon my word though, Polly, if you don’t take care, this house will get a bad name over the matches that are made in it. You had better have your spare room boarded up, my dear.”

  Mahony was feeling particularly rasped by John’s hoity-toity behaviour in this connection. Having been nursed back to health, John went about with his chin in the air, and hardly condescended to allude to his engagement—let alone talk it over with his relatives. So Mahony retired into himself—after all, the world of John’s mind was so dissimilar to his own that he did not even care to know what went on in it. “The fellow has been caught on the hop by a buxom form and a languishing eye,” was how he dismissed the matter in thought.

  “I raise my wife to my own station, Mary. And you will greatly oblige me by showing Jane every possible attention,” was the only satisfaction Polly could get from John, made in his driest tone.

  Before the engagement was a week old Tilly reappeared—she was to be married from their house on the hither side of Christmas. At first she was too full of herself and her own affairs to let either Polly or Jinny get a word in. Just to think of it! That old cabbage-grower, Devine, had gone and bought the block of land next the one Mr. O. was building on. She’d lay a bet he would put up a house the dead spit of theirs. Did ever anyone hear such cheek?