Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “Let me go,” he said in a terrified voice, so pale that his fierce red whiskers looked more than ever idiotically stuck on.

  “I've got to go. It's late.”

  She obeyed and smiled.

  He almost sprang away, but stopped. Her smile held him, the humility and obedience of it, lured and scared him. “She'd be up to anything. That's a fact.” And yet. . . Why so ready to give in so suddenly? His slow brain sensed a trap. Still he could not tear himself away. “She knows a thing or two. By jove, a chance of a lifetime.”

  Fumbling his watch-chain with one hand, the loose change in his pocket with the other, he watched her, a foot advanced towards the hedge to plunge him head first into covert if she moved.

  She did not move. Stretched out on the grass with her head in her hands she gazed into the trees. Her dress, caught tightly around her legs, exposed her little slippers of blue satin, her ankles, a few inches of openwork stockings, and the firm line of her thighs and hips. Her breasts threw themselves upwards triumphantly, printing each tiny shudder of her breath upon the thin bodice. Her long hair, which she wore loosely on her neck, had come unfastened in her struggles and lay in ropes across her throat and bare arms. Threads of gold fire ran through it, radiant, shifting, impalpable, as though it was a mass of antennae she had put out to suck the vitality and warmth from the air. So too seemed her staring eyes—not observing, but drinking in from the sky the essence of its light.

  He perceived again how deceptive the slender fraility of her body and bloodless skin were. There was about her, just then, an awful receptivity which made her like an image of the earth itself, the passive, secretive earth which swallows all things and thirsts for more. She did not move, yet every fibre of her flesh seemed to quiver and pulsate like a live ember. Perhaps it was an illusion caused by the dapple of light reflected from the river across her face and arms or by the fit of the shivers which passed through him.

  But she was alluring and he was very young and very susceptible. He wanted to run, but his knees gave way and seated him on the grass beside her.

  “Saved you? What are you getting at? I haven't done anything except come here—as YOU said.”

  She turned on her side and rested her head in her crooked arm. “Do you ever read poetry?”

  “Hardly!”

  “Do you know a poem, I don't remember who wrote it, that says:

  Western wind when wilt thou blow, The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

  Do you?“

  “No.”

  “You've never been lonely, have you? You've never lain in bed at night and thought that there wasn't a single person in the world who loved you or you loved? That's what I was like till now.”

  “I thought your father never thought of anything else, James said so.”

  “Him! You don't know him. It's not me he loves. It's something else. It's something the sight of me helps him to remember or forget. I don't know which. But I know he'd do anything, even keep me locked up like a prisoner for the rest of my life, if it pleased him. It wouldn't matter if it pleased me. He'll never send me to England. He'll never send Miss Montaulk away. I was giving up hope when you came.”

  “Me!”

  Harriet put her hand on his. “Yes, you. I'd read about people in love—terribly in love. Tristram and Iseult, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, Emma Bovary. I thought about it and thought about it and nearly went off my head thinking about it. Because I could never imagine it happening to me—up there in the bush with nobody but a lot of barmy hatters and old men. And even they went for their lives when they saw me coming.” She laughed. “You should have seen them. It wasn't very flattering. I began to think I was the original ugly duckling. But I suppose if I'd been as beautiful as Venus they wouldn't have let me get within shouting distance—they're all so frightened of him.”

  She explored his arm under the cuffs. “You're so strong. Brave too. Like a knight—like Ingelarius who fought and killed Gontra for the honour of the Lady of Gastinois.”

  “Never heard of him,” he growled. That little extravagance cooled him down again. By jove, if her brother Geoffrey heard her say something like that it'd be all over the town in five minutes. By jove, a man'd be laughed out of the place.

  “Yes, it's in Brantôme. When I read it I wished I could find an Ingelarius. I knew there was one somewhere, but how was I to find you. I never saw a soul. So I made him bring me to Brisbane. He didn't want to. If he'd thought of it he would have built a tower and a keep. But that was hardly necessary with a hundred and fifty thousand acres of paddock and scrub around me. He could have kept me there till I dried up like Montaulk. I was desperate, I tell you.” Her mouth flattened on her teeth. “I could have killed him.”

  He looked shocked.

  Harriet laughed gaily. “Oh, don't worry. He's very much alive. He'd like to eat you—if he dared. But he doesn't. Didn't you see the other day when he came into the room? He wanted to say something, but he was frightened of you. He must be.”

  “You haven't been telling him anything?”

  “Don't be silly. As if he didn't know everything without me telling him. I can tell from the way he looked. He only had to see me looking at you—it must have been plain enough.”

  “What're you getting at? What was plain?”

  She was surprised. “Why, that I'd found my Ingelarius.” She smiled. “I knew from the first moment I saw you that I needn't look any farther. I was like that poem of Tennyson:

  My whole soul waiting silently, All naked in the sultry sky, Droops blinded with his shining eye: I WILL POSSESS HIM OR WILL DIE.“

  She repeated the last line to herself with a slow, and to Doug's ear, deadly emphasis, “I WILL POSSESS HIM OR WILL DIE. Yes, that's what I was like. How I waited and waited—for a sign. I'd say you were cruel only now that you've given it I can't remember how terrible it was.”

  “Gave you what? What sign?”

  “You came here. Wasn't that a sign?” she said, surprised again. “A sign of courage for one thing. I'd have waited till I was an old maid before anybody else had the courage to stand up against him. Not only against him—against all the rest of them. They're afraid of their own shadows. You wouldn't catch them climbing a fence to see a girl they loved, even if she had a different kind of father from mine. They'd rather go without love—if it wasn't the nicest kind of love, as in a coloured picture.”

  “There's nothing really improper about it—just sitting here,” he said quickly, to excuse himself to that world which her words brought to mind with such dreadful clarity.

  “Oh, what if there is? I'd rather be the worst woman in the world than like. . .” She frowned and considered a moment. “Your mother wants me to marry you, doesn't she?”

  “Eh? I—really I don't. . .”

  “Oh, yes, she does. Your father too. But of course it's impossible. That is, the way they want it. He'd never, never consent. And anyway, I wouldn't. If it was anything arranged by them—why,” She looked at him searchingly as a doubt began to intrude upon her self-centred and fantastic preconceptions, “why I'd suspect even you at once.”

  “You mean. . .” He sat bolt upright. “He wouldn't let you marry me? No matter what my father did for him?”

  “He hates your father.”

  “And you? What about you?”

  She looked at the tall stems of shivery-grass which trembled in unfelt currents of air, plucked one, and held it up. “I feel like that sometimes. I'm frightened. Even now I'm frightened all at once, even with you.” She searched his face again, peering into every feature. “If I could only be absolutely sure. . .”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That you wanted me. Do you? Oh, I know you came. But now I'm frightened again. How CAN you want me—ugly me? Do you?”

  It was his cue. He braced himself, then caught her eye and weakened. “Well—er—yes. . .”

  “Ah!” She bent and kissed his hand. “The
n we can do anything. I'll think of a way.” She smiled, a trifle grimly. “And won't your nice mother be upset and all her nice friends. I'd love to see their faces when. . .”

  He freed his hand and stood up. “I'm really—I've got to go. . .” He was not sure what he was saying but he was sure that she was mad and that his life, his future, his good name depended on the speed with which he got over the fence and to his horse and far away. “Thank God I didn't touch her. She can't hold anything over me.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you'd better go.” She turned to the house, listening. “I think I can hear someone.”

  He dashed into cover behind the tree and peered out. “Jesus, it's your father and Geoffrey. Will they come here?”

  But they went into the house and a door slammed on the uproar of voices, Geoffrey's thinly whining, Cabell's threatening.

  He looked round for his hat, but Miss Montaulk calling, “Harriet! Harriet! Your papa wants you,” sent him hatless into the bougainvillea.

  Harriet ran after him. “Don't come here again,” she said, “or to the house either. They mustn't suspect. I'll find a way.”

  He was gone, ripping his cuff on a loose paling, swishing in the long grass of the lane.

  Harriet detached from the fence a small piece of thread torn from his sleeve, kissed it, put it away in her bodice, and softly singing to herself, but with a ruckle of thought between her eyebrows, returned to the house.

  Chapter Nine: A Noble Brother

  Miss Montaulk was coming across the lawn to look for her.

  “So there you are. Your papa wants you in the library at once. He's very upset.” She paused and eyed the flush on Harriet's cheeks and the disorder of her hair. “Whatever have you been doing, girl?”

  Harriet passed without speaking and went into the house.

  Miss Montaulk followed, but at the veranda she changed her mind and waddled back to the garden, peeping under bushes and sniffing noisely through her splayed nostrils of a moral bulldog.

  Geoffrey was lurking in the passage near Cabell's door. Dazed by sunlight Harriet stumbled into him before she saw the smudge of his pasty face.

  He grabbed her arm. “Harriet, where the Dickens were you? I've searched the bally house. The old man's got a maggot—yelling for you like Mary's little lamb. Done in some dough by the looks of it. The old muck worm—serves him right!”

  Harriet went on up the stairs, but Geoffrey ran ahead and blocked her way. “Just a minute, old girl. I'm in a hole. I wouldn't ask you, only the old man's clean off his nut. I thought he was going to fetch me a crack a minute ago. All I want—you can soft sawder him out of a million if you want, and I've got to have a hundred before to-morrow afternoon.” “Ask him yourself.”

  “Aw, you know what he's like. Expects me to live on the smell of an oil rag lately. Fact is, I've had a run of stinking luck. It might be awkward at the bank. Go on, Sis, he's corn in Egypt to you. Work the oracle for an old pal.” He winked long and slyly so that for some seconds only one little black aperture of an eye remained in the white slab of his face, as featureless as a bladder of lard. “By the way, I know somebody who's dead nuts on you.”

  She started. “Who? What do you know?”

  He winked again. “Wouldn't YOU like to know. A real, live Lochinvar. Ha ha. Saw him nearly dong a bloke in Queenie's the other night for saying something about you.”

  Harriet's face lighted. “You mean he hit somebody? For me?”

  “He didn't have to. He just took a look at the bloke and made him say, 'Miss Cabell's the only real and proper lady in this town and I'm not a fit dog to lick her boots.' The bloke didn't make any bones about it. Cash looked nasty.”

  “Cash!” Harriet said, disappointed.

  “There you are. I told you, Sis. I could've made you promise to put the bleeders in the old man first. Aw, Sis. . .”

  The opening of the library door cut him short. He drew away out of sight as Cabell looked up and said, “Ah, there you are, dear. Come down. I want to talk to you.”

  He waited at the door and shut it behind her. His hair was tangled, his face grey. On the floor lay his coat with the sleeves inside out and his collar where he had ripped it off and thrown it down. He put his arm round her waist and pushed her across the room, littered with papers from drawers torn out of his desk and piled higgledy-piggledy against the wall.

  Harriet sat down under the window and he sat down beside her. He looked at her for a while, gravely, then said: “You love your father, don't you, Harriet?”

  She kept her eyes on the floor. One glance had been enough to tell her that some trouble had descended on him out of the blue, and that he was about to attack her with one of his violent appeals for love and sympathy which were like a tidal wave of a greedy sea in which she was doomed to perish if she did not fight. For an instant she was shocked by the haggard lines—deeper than the scar—which had appeared all at once on his face, but she screwed her pity back and tried to evoke from the involuted rose of the carpet a picture of Doug Peppiott lying beside her on the grass less than fifteen minutes ago. Against her flesh she imagined she could feel the wisp of thread he had left behind, a token of his love and daring to which she clung with one fist doubled on her breast.

  “You love your father, don't you, Harriet?” he repeated, and went on quickly, “Why do I ask? I know you do. Hate begets hate. Love begets love. I've hated men all my life in this plague spot and you're the only one I've ever loved.” He fingered the string of black tie which had remained about his neck when he tore the collar from under it, rose, and walked the length of the carpet with his hands behind his back. “Harriet, say I was to tell you I'd lost a pile of money, that most likely I'd lost everything—what would you do?”

  She glanced up and looked away at once from his bare throat, thin and scraggy with age.

  “Would you want to leave me?”

  The injustice, the cunning of the question, made her frown. “Have you lost money?”

  “Maybe I have. But say I was to lose everything—the valley and all—but nobody knew about it yet, so there was time for you to be hooked up with one of these nincompoops like Peppiott before it all came properly to light. That's what's in their minds, I don't doubt. And they've got money. They could give you everything I've given you. Would you?”

  “For money?” Harriet said scornfully. “No.”

  “Ah, I knew it.” He stopped and laid his hand on her head. “I knew I could trust you.”

  “But isn't there anything except money?” she said. “I wouldn't marry for money, but if I loved. . .”

  “Yes—love. Precious little of it I've had these many years, and now it's likely to be all I have left because,” He sat down and took her hand, “by this time next week I mayn't have a red cent in the world.”

  “But that can't be. The mine?”

  “Yes, yes, It's possible. Something happened. There's been a collapse in the Argentine and Baring's went bust. . .” He explained it to her briefly, how the apparently inexhaustible springs of money flowing in from abroad had suddenly dried up and how, vaguely understanding the tentative thing their booming land and share values were resting on, people were stupefied for a moment, then panic-stricken and began to sell, sell, sell. Shares tumbled, Waterfall with the rest. At first Cabell did not see the trap he was caught in. He refused to part with his Waterfalls. He believed in their value. Nothing could shake his conviction. It was only a small panic. Everything would be right. At any moment Larsen would find out the solution needed in the vats to extract unheard of quantities of gold and Waterfalls would be worth fifteen—twenty pounds each. Meanwhile, Waterfalls went down and down. When they reached five pounds the bank called for more margin for his loans, which amounted to nearly five hundred thousand pounds, and at the same time cut the margin they were allowing him from seventy-five to fifty per cent. His Waterfalls were worth six hundred and seventy-five thousand and the bank held also a mortgage for fifty thousand over the Reach, which gave them
security for twenty thousand less than his loans. He tried to sell some of the land he had bought in the city and in Melbourne and Sydney, but everybody else seemed to have land for sale. He offered a block for which he had paid fifty thousand pounds a month ago and refused sixty-five thousand last week. Even at a quarter of that it was not saleable now. At boom values his assets in land were worth three hundred thousand pounds, his shares and debentures of the Land Investment Company and its bank one hundred and fifty thousand. The bank accepted these deeds and shares, devalued sixty per cent, as collateral for his loans, along with the Waterfall shares, which were still falling. When the shares were four pounds the bank called him to a grave conference. He must reduce his loans by half. His land was unsaleable, his land shares were unsaleable and meanwhile the bank had devalued both another twenty per cent, the Reach was mortgaged to the hilt, he had borrowed everything Cash had to lend and called in every loan he had made. There was nothing left for it except to sell. He put ninety thousand of his precious Waterfalls on the market and got barely three hundred thousand. That had happened to-day. If Waterfalls slumped below three pounds he was done for.

  His meek resignation to a blow which had come so suddenly that even yet, though he talked of it, he could hardly believe it, deserted him. “Done for. Yes, it is impossible. If there's a God in heaven. To lose a lifetime's work in a few hours! At least,” he added quietly, letting his hands hang limp between his knees, “it sounds impossible. But it's not. It's life—which only gives so as to take away, only jockeys you up with hopes so as to disappoint you, makes you proud so it can make you eat dirt after, sends you to live on a mountain of gold so you'll see others fattening on it when you've worked your hands to the bone opening the way for them. That's the lousy thing life is. But you'll know nothing about it. I'll save enough for that. If need be I'd shut you up in a convent.”