The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  Besides, it was Tilly’s turn now to talk. Tilly had brought a rare budget of gossip with her from the old home; and no one could give this in racier, more entertaining fashion than she. Mary listened and laughed, throwing in a reproving: “Now, really, Tilly!” at some of the speaker’s most daring shots; growing grave-eyed were the tragedies alluded to that underlay many a prosperous exterior.

  Not till all the old friends had been asked after, did she press nearer home. “And now, Tilly, how about yourself, my dear? Are you. . . .has it. . . .come! you know what I mean.”

  Tilly laughed out loud. “Indeed and it has, old girl!—and no apologies needed. Yes, love, the very best of husbands. But I was right as rain, Mary, in what I said beforehand—no spendthrift as I’m alive! Why, ’e even goes to the other extreme, love, and holds the purse-strings a bit tighter than yours truly ’as been used to. Though it’s not for me to complain, my dear, considering ’ow he handles money. I’m still a bit dazed by it myself. A born knack with the shekels, and that’s the truth! I declare to you, old Pa’s leavings have almost doubled in these six months. Purd’s got a sort of second-sight, which tells ’im to the minute what o’clock it is. All that was wrong with him, Mary, was never having enough of the needful to show what ’e was made of.”

  “Well, I am glad to hear that—I am indeed!”

  She went home full of the news. “We were both wrong, you see.”

  But it would not have been Richard if he hadn’t made ironical remarks. Wait till the bloom was off the grapes, said he, and then see how the land lay. For, if Purdy had started speculating already. . . .

  “Ah, but Tilly says he has a kind of sixth sense for the ups and downs of the market.”

  “Many a wife thinks the same, till the crash comes. But you know my opinion of the national vice.”

  “Well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself. I’ve asked them to dinner this evening.”

  “Oh, deuce take it! Have we really got to have them here?”

  “Now, Richard. . . .when Tilly’s in town for the first time since her wedding. Certainly we have. Besides, I know you’ll be interested to see what marriage has done for Purdy.”

  “Oh Lord, Mary! Am I not at my time of life allowed to know what interests me and what doesn’t?”

  “Well, I shan’t see Tilly again for ever so long. I do beg you to be nice to her, dear. . . .to both of them,” said Mary.

  And when the time came he was. . . .of course he was: with the near prospect of escape from people, Richard invariably found it easy to be charming to them. Another thing, she had pandered to his weak side by preparing a very choice little dinner; and she wore one of his favourite dresses—a black velvet gown, with jet trimmings, cut square at the neck.

  But without a doubt, the main reason for his amiability was the immense improvement that had taken place in Purdy: it was noticeable even as the latter entered the drawing-room. In appearance he would, it was true, never be very much, what with his limp, and so on; and his lack of distinction was doubly remarkable when Richard was present, who was so slender and aristocratic-looking. But his aggressiveness had gone; he was no longer up in arms against the world. Gone, too, was the dreadful boasting that had so set Richard against him; and he had quite given over telling tiresome stories. . . .thanks, thought Mary, to having married one of the most sensible of women. At the single threatened lapse into his old tone, she distinctly felt Tilly seek and find his foot beneath the table.

  “Didn’t I say she’d pull him into shape?” and: “Upon my word, wife, if ever there was an exploded notion, it is that the possession of this world’s goods makes for evil. Why; there was actually a trace of his old self about the fellow to-night.”

  The ormolu clock on the drawing-room mantelpiece had just chimed eleven. Mary was giving her toes a final toast before retiring, Richard securing the hasps and bolts of shutters and French windows.

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Mary; but with an absent air. She was thinking of Tilly—dear old Tilly—in whom the change had been no less marked. Looking very buxom and rather handsome in magenta velvet, Tilly had sat smiling broadly, but with less to say for herself than ever in her life before. Instead of paying attention to Richard, as she ought to have done, she had all the time been listening to Purdy, drinking in his words, and signing to Mary to listen, too, by many a private tilt of the brows. So palpably eager was she for him to shine that she had been unable to resist breaking in with a: “Oh, come now, Purd, take a leetle bit of the credit to yourself!—it was his doing really, Mary, and no one else’s, though ’e tries now to make out it was Blake’s.” And at Purdy’s: “Forgive my old woman’s dotage, you two. . . .it’s still kissing-time with us, you know!”—at this Tilly had smirked and blushed like a sixteen-year-old.

  Meanwhile Richard was saying from the hearthrug, where he stood nursing his coat-tails: “. . . .an interesting chat after you had left the room, my dear. I was hearing all about the Mitcham case from within—the big mining suit, you know, that has created such a scandal in Ballarat. . . .you must remember old Grenville of Canterbury Station, his deafness and his expletives, and those enormous black cigars—he always had one stuck in the corner of his mouth when he drove his four-in-hand to town.”

  “Of course I do. A very kind old gentleman I thought him.”

  “Yes. . . .he had rather a way with the ladies.—Well, as I was saying, this fellow Blake Purdy swears by was one of the partners in the company formed after old G. had sold his mine—at a dead loss, mind you, and on the express advice of his confidential manager, who, directly after, became a promoter of the new company. When the output suddenly redoubled and the shares began to soar, old Grenville, naturally enough, thought he had been done, and sued them for fraud. The jury could not agree. Now, there’s rumour of a settlement. If it takes place, it is calculated that the shares will rise in value by two to three hundred per cent. Purdy stands to make his fortune—thanks to having some one at his elbow who is in the swim.”

  But Mary pursed her lips and looked dubious. “Well, I don’t know, Richard. . . .I must say it sounds to me rather shady.”

  “Hm. . . .well, myself I prefer to keep clear of that sort of thing. All the same, Mary, I couldn’t help thinking what a terrible slowcoach old Simmonds is, compared with these modern brokers one hears of. One never gets any inside information from him—for the very good reason that he doesn’t know it himself.”

  “But so honest and trustworthy!”

  “Oh, yes, there’s that about it,” said Richard, a trifle morosely Mary thought.

  “And what do you say to the house? Wasn’t it a funny thing Purdy tumbling across some one, like that?” she hastened to add, in an attempt to divert his mind from old Simmonds’s shortcomings.

  “A stroke of luck of the first order!”

  For amongst other news Purdy had had a titbit for them. Only that very day, it seemed, in the coffee-room of the hotel, he had run up against a squatter from Darumbooli who was on the look-out for a furnished house, standing in its own grounds and not too far from the sea, where he could settle wife and daughters while the latter attended a finishing school. Purdy had at once thought of “Ultima Thule” and extolled its beauties: its lawns and shrubberies and fruit gardens, its proximity to the sea. The squatter had pricked up his ears and, if they agreed, would come out to see it early next morning.

  Whereupon the last trace of Mahony’s starchedness had melted, in a glow of gratitude and content.

  “Upon my word, Mary, it sounds the very thing, at last!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That night he could not sleep. To begin with, he had been unused of late to an evening’s talk: bits and scraps of it went on buzzing round his brain, long after he lay abed. Then, something he had eaten had disagreed with him: Cook’s short-crust must have been too rich, or the pears over-ripe. He
tossed and turned, to the disturbance of poor Mary; tried lying high, lying low, counting sheep and other silly tricks, all to no purpose: before an hour had passed, the black thoughts of the night—those sinister imaginings born of darkness and immobility—had him in their grip.

  Their approach was stealthy. For he had gone to bed in high feather at the prospect of at last securing a tenant. Weeks had dragged by, and the house was still unlet. He fumed as often as he thought of it. To put a house like his on the market and get no offers for it! Sell?. . . .yes; he could have sold three times over. But the idea of renting a place ready furnished seemed not to enter the colonial mind. Now, however, if Purdy was to be trusted. . . .A rich squatter, too. . . .willing no doubt to pay a good price for a good thing—though this condition was not, God be thanked, the sine qua non it would once have been. Still, money was money; you could not have too much of it. . . .especially here. Give a man means and you gave him friends and favours, and a rank second to none. To take a petty instance: what had money not done for the very person they had had before their eyes that evening? From the seedy little down-at-heel of a year back, Purdy had been metamorphosed into. . . .well, at least rendered presentable enough to bid to your table. Money had restored his shrunken self-respect. It had also brought out in him talents which not his oldest friends had guessed at. That Purdy, of all people, should prove a dabster in the share-market!—exchange to such good purpose bar-parlour for “Corner.” No doubt the years he had spent hobnobbing with every variety of individual had sharpened his wits. You saw something of that in the shrewd choice he had made of a broker. For, three parts of the game, did you enter the big gamble, depended on having a wide-awake adviser at your elbow. And this man Blake, of whom they had heard so much that night, did actually seem to be one in a thousand.

  One in a thousand. . . .one in a thousand. . . .a thousand. . . .Mahony was on the point of dropping off, to the rhythm of these words, when a vague uneasiness began to stir in him; more exactly, when he became abruptly aware that, deep down in him, a nagging anxiety had for some time been at work. Coming to with a jerk, he sent his thoughts back over the evening. What was it?. . . .what had happened to prick him, when all had seemed to go so smoothly? He groped and groped. Then. . . .ha!. . . .he had it. Simmonds. The name whizzed into his mind like a dart; like a dart stuck there, and was not to be plucked out. And no sooner had he found this clue than, with a rush, a swarm of vexatious thoughts and impressions was upon him. His apparent good spirits were all humbug; at heart he had been depressed by the tale of Purdy’s successes. They had made him feel a back number, an old fossil, who had to learn from some one he had always looked down on as his inferior, what was actually happening in the financial world. And for this he held Simmonds to blame. What was the use of a confidential agent who did not keep you up to the mark?—Not that he wanted to speculate; or at least not as the word was here understood. But he wished to feel that he could have done so, and with as much aplomb as anybody, did the fit take him. And brooding over the chances he had no doubt missed and even at this moment might be missing: at a picture of himself lying high and dry, while one and another—mere whipper-snappers like Purdy—floated easily out to fortune, an acute irritation mastered him.

  He turned his pillow, and, even as he did so, told himself that the fault had been not Simmonds’s, but his own: Yes, the truth was, he had had no ambition. Otherwise, why have laid his affairs in the hands of such a humdrum?—and, what was worse, have left them there. Honest?—yes: but so was many a noodle honest: and in these new countries honesty alone, unbacked by any more worldly qualities, stood not an earthly chance. And again a vision danced before his closed lids. He saw the thousands he had failed to make—thousands that grew to hundreds of thousands as he watched—fluttering just beyond his grasp, though within easy reach of others. And now, to sting him, the earlier bitterness returned. . . .in the form of a galling envy. To see Purdy, the foolish harum-scarum, the confessed failure, the mean little commis voyageur—to see such a one about to pass, surpass him, in means and influence: this was surely one of the bitterest mouthfuls he had ever had to swallow.

  And here, seizing its chance, a further fear insinuated itself. What if it should not end with this? Simmonds being what he was, might he not fail in other ways as well?—let what he already held slip through his fingers, and he, Mahony, wake one morning to find himself a poor man? A shiver ran down his spine at the thought, and he made a feverish movement: he would have liked to throw off the bedclothes, and go hotfoot to call Simmonds to account. Since he was condemned to lie like a log, his imagination did the work for him, running riot in a series of pictures. . . .till cold drops stood out on his forehead.

  Sitting up he fumbled for a handkerchief. The change of position brought him a moment’s calmness. Good Lord, what was he doing. . . .working himself into such a state. It was like those bad old times when he had had to worry himself half to death about money. . . .or the lack of it. He drank a glass of water, and rolled over on his other side.

  Scarcely, however, had his head touched the pillow when he was off again, stabbed by yet another nightmare thought. What if it should be a case of fraud on Simmonds’s part? Might not the lethargy, the stolid honesty be but a pose?—the cloak to cover a rascally activity? Like the confidential agent whose double-dealing they had heard of that night, it would be child’s play for Simmonds, just because he appeared so straight and aboveboard, to fleece his clients—or at least such among them as gave him the open chances he, Mahony, had. Careless, distraught, interested in everything rather than in money, he had ambled along unthinking as a babe, leaving Simmonds to his own devices for months, nay, years, at a time. Now, he could not wait for daylight to get his affairs back into his own hands. If only he were not too late!—And thus on and on, ever deeper into the night, his suspicions growing steadily more sinister, till there was no crime of which he was not ready to suspect his man of business. A dozen times he had trapped him, unmasked him, brought him to justice, before he fell into a feverish doze, in which not Simmonds but himself was the fugitive, hunted by two monstrous shadow policemen who believed him criminal before the law. Waking with a terrific start he pulled himself together, only at once to sink back in dream. This time, he was being led by Purdy and some one strangely resembling that bottle-nosed Robinson who had played him a dirty trick over an English practice, to a cemetery, where stood a tombstone bearing Simmonds’s name. Why, good Lord! the fellow’s dead. . . .dead?. . . .and what of me? “Who’s got my money? Where is it? Where am I?” cried Mahony aloud—and woke at the sound of his own voice to see pale lines of light creeping in at the sides of the windows. His pulse was bounding, Mary sleepily murmuring: “Oh dear, oh dear, what is the matter?”—Rising, he opened a window and stuck his hot head out in the morning air.

  At breakfast-time he emerged pale and peevish, to a day that proved hardly less wearing than the night had been. One, too, that called for a clear brain and prompt decisions. For the owner of Darumbooli, Baillie by name, put in an appearance as arranged—an elderly Scot, tanned, sun-wrinkled, grey-whiskered, with a bluff yet urbane manner—a self-made man, it was plain, and wholly unlettered, but frank, generous, honourable: one of nature’s gentlemen, in short, and of a type Mahony invariably found it easy to do business with. Better still, he turned out to be one of your genuine garden-lovers: as the pair of them walked the grounds of “Ultima Thule,” none of the details and improvements Mahony felt proudest of but was observed and bespoken: the white-strawberry bed, the oleander grove, the fernery, the exquisitely smooth buffalo-grass lawns on which sprays were kept playing. A good garden was, it seemed, a desideratum with Baillie. And he fell in love with Mahony’s at first sight.

  But. . . .yes, yes! now came the fly in the ointment. . . .he wished not to rent but to buy: had never, he averred, had any idea of renting a house: it was entirely “that fellow Smith’s mistake” (“all Purdy’s muddle!”). The schooling pr
oved another bit of fiction. His daughters were past their school years; of an age to be launched in society. Darumbooli was up for sale—Baillie had already refused a bid of ninety thousand—and planned from now on to settle in Melbourne.

  Having thus cleared the air and added that, only the day before, he had seen a house at Toorak which, though not a patch on this, would serve his purpose, he offered a sum for “Ultima Thule,” just as it stood, with all its contents, which sent Mahony’s eyebrows half-way up his forehead.

  Mary was speechless when she heard the upshot of the interview; when, too, she saw that Richard’s mind—that mind which seemed unable to hold fast to any mortal thing for long together—was more than three parts made up to accept Baillie’s offer. And too discomfited to meet this Irish fluidity with her usual wily caution, she no sooner found her voice than she cried: “Oh, Richard, no!—that we can’t do. . . .we really can’t! Think of all the things we got specially out from home. . . .the French tapestry. . . .the carpets. . . .and. . . .and everything!”

  Tch! now he had this to go through. . . .on top of his bad night, and his own burning irresolution. His nerves felt like the frayed ends of a rope. But as usual opposition spurred him on.

  “But, my dear, with such a sum at our disposal, we shall be able to furnish our next house ten times as well. Look here, Mary, I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll bring every atom of stuff out with us, from London or Paris: the very newest of everything—there won’t be a house in the colony like it.”