Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “Don’t wait for me, Min.”

  Carmine looked at him in astonishment; his voice was sheepish, his aquiline face was embarrassed and had quite a human friendly air. “A girl!” thought Carmine, arid glanced about for her. She thought she saw a pair of bright black eyes fixed upon her brother eagerly, smiled a little, and said: “Very well, Matthew,” affectionately. Matthew positively blushed under her tone, and left her abruptly; and Carmine was free to hurry along the streets to meet her lover. It was much past nine, and Francis might well have given her up and gone home. Oh, if he had gone, and she could not see him!

  He had not gone, however, but was waiting for her at the Post Office, looking handsome and debonair and as though the world belonged to him, as usual. Carmine was so relieved to see him that she cried: “Oh, Francis!” and gave a small sob.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Francis quickly.

  She turned up her white wretched face to him, and he knew what was the matter.

  Immediately what had been a joyous and rapturous adventure to Francis became the most ghastly mess you could imagine. His father! His mother! His friends! Well, it was entirely his own fault, of course, and he must stand up to the consequences.

  “My mother will kill me when she knows,” whispered Carmine.

  “What are you talking about? There’s no need for her ever to know,” said Francis shortly. “I’ve never let anyone down yet, and I shan’t begin with you. You might have given me credit for that, Carmine.”

  In that moment Carmine hated him. To have him come to her rescue out of chivalry, to have to receive as a charity what she felt was hers by right; to have him feeling pleased with himself and be expected to be grateful—it was more than she could bear. Her sullen resentment flamed; she almost snarled, baring her white teeth, as she threw out at him:

  “Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, for my sake, Francis Oldroyd.”

  “Don’t be silly, Carmine,” said Francis sternly. Carmine, thought he; what a name! What a fool I’ve been! What a mess! He put his hand round her unresponsive arm and urged her away to a darker part of the street. “We must discuss the best way of doing it,” he said.

  “Doing what?” asked Carmine sullenly.

  “Getting married,” replied Francis. “I think we shall have to do it without telling anyone.” He imagined himself asking his father’s consent to such a match, and decided: “Yes. If we tell anyone they’ll only make difficulties and perhaps want us to put it off. We must do it first and ask their consent afterwards. Are you twenty-one?”

  “I shall be next month,” replied Carmine, in spite of herself a little mollified by these prompt measures.

  “Well—I must find o,ut how it’s done,” said Francis. He added thoughtfully, as they paced along: “I don’t think we’d better do it in Annotsfield.”

  “Why not?” demanded Carmine sharply.

  “Everyone would know me,” said Francis, thinking of the Annotsfield Registrar and the various clergymen of his acquaintance. “And then they’d tell my people.”

  “I don’t see where else we can do it,” said Carmine, sullen again.

  “Couldn’t you go to London, to that place where you were before?” suggested Francis.

  “To Uncle Henry?” cried Carmine, horrified. The next moment, however, she perceived the immense advantages of the scheme—to be out of her mother’s sight was worth anything. “Well—shall I try to go?” she said doubtfully. “I don’t know whether I can manage it, but I’ll try.”

  “Of course you can manage it,” said Francis. “You must. It will all be easy then. What sort of a man is your uncle?”

  “The finest man I know,” flashed Carmine.

  “Well, then,” argued Francis: “That’s the thing for you to do. Go to him, and we can be married in his parish or whatever it is. I won’t let you down.”

  “Don’t keep on saying that,” muttered Carmine angrily. She added: “I wish I’d never seen you.”

  Francis raised his eyebrows and was silent. He wished exactly the same thing, but a man did not say those things to a woman in Francis’s code, especially a woman who had given herself to him. “Well, it’s no use getting ratty with each other,” he said after a moment. “The thing to do is to get the ceremony over as soon as possible. When can you meet me again?”

  It was beginning to rain, so when they had arranged their next meeting they parted—without a kiss. If Francis had kissed her she would have screamed, thought Carmine as she made her way up Booth Bank, but all the same she thought it cruel of him to omit this caress. At the corner of the Mellors’ street she was overtaken by Matthew, who came running up, very excited, and began a feverish account of what Eva had said to him and he had said to Eva, why they had quarrelled last time they met and why he had wanted to take Carmine to the meeting and what effect it had had on Eva, and how they were friends now and he was going there on Sunday and his mother was sure to disapprove but he didn’t care—a tangled host of happy personalities to which Carmine listened with a sore heart. If she were to confide the details of her love affair to Matthew, she mused bitterly, he would simply go off and murder Francis at once—or at any rate try to do so, for Francis would not be an easy person to murder. Her drooping spirit revived a little as she reflected that Francis was after all a man to be proud of; nobody could say she had given herself to a ninny. By tacit consent neither she nor Matthew mentioned the fact of their separate return to Janie, who questioned her son eagerly about his speech and its success.

  At the first favourable opportunity Carmine threw out casually that she wished she were in London with her uncle again, and in the next few days made it clear to her mother that she seriously wished to return to Henry. Janie was naturally very angry at this chopping and changing.

  “I shall not write to your uncle,” she said with angry firmness. “And I forbid you to write, Carmine. You’ve shown yourself ungrateful and unworthy of your uncle’s kindness.” (At this Carmine winced; what word would her mother find to describe her if she knew the truth?) “I shall not trouble him about you any more.”

  “I don’t see what Min wants to go for; she’s earning an honest living here,” Matthew supported her.

  “Nor I don’t,” said Charley wistfully.

  “No doubt he is long since settled with another housekeeper,” concluded Janie.

  “Let him say so, then,” said David in his mild equable tones. “There’s no harm in Carmine writing to ask if he’s settled, surely. She only wants to work for him, after all. He can say no if he likes. If you write, mother, it’s asking a favour; but if Carmine writes herself, it’s not.”

  “You know nothing about it, David,” Janie told him sharply. “I forbid Carmine to write.”

  So determined and so fierce indeed was Janie—for she felt that her pride would be in the dust before Henry if she allowed this frivolous application to be made to him—that Carmine began to despair of getting to London. And yet she must, she must; Francis urged her to it, and she herself felt that she could not endure her mother’s glance much longer. She gathered her courage and wrote a desperate little note to Henry, begging him, if he had any affection at all for her mother, if he wished to save Janie from a blow which would crush her, to allow his niece to come to him again. In a postscript she asked him to use her office address The day between the despatch of this letter and the receipt of her uncle’s reply seemed like a year of torment to Carmine; she was white and haggard, and trembled like a leaf, when at length she held his letter in her hands. My dear Carmine, wrote Henry: I shall be delighted to have you here again. But I think I must have your assurance that your mother is not reluctant for you to come. I don‘t press for your confidence in any way, but I think I must have that. As soon as you can give it me, come. I will have your room prepared for you. When Carmine reached home that night, she looked so ill that her mother commented unfavourably on her appearance. This was the last straw; Carmine took a desperate resolution.

&nb
sp; On the following Sunday she carried it out. Saying that she needed some fresh air, she dragged her father out with her by tram to the edge of Marthwaite Moor, and then walked him briskly along the road till they had passed most of the Sunday afternoon holiday makers and came to a quiet stretch. Then she put her hand within the crook of his arm, and said in a pleading tone:

  “Father, I must go to London.”

  “Why must you, lovey?” said Charley, looking crestfallen. “We missed you sadly before.”

  “I must go,” repeated Carmine, nerving herself to take the plunge, “because I want to get married.”

  Her father started back and stared at her. “Get married?” he said in a voice sharp with suspicion. “Well, and can’t you get married just as well i’ Annotsfield?”

  “No, I can’t,” said Carmine sullenly.

  “Why not?” demanded Charley. “Is it some London chap, and you’re ashamed to let him see your family? Eh?”

  “No, no, father!” protested Carmine in a passion of love for him. She was so distressed that he should have such an idea that without thinking she went on emphatically: “He isn’t a London man at all.”

  “Then why can’t he wed you i’ Annotsfield?” cried Charley, his moustache quivering. “There’s summat strange i’ this, Carmine. What’s it all about?”

  “Oh, father!” wept Carmine, giving way completely, “Don’t you see—don’t you understand? I must get married, I must. And if I don’t go to London, I can’t.”

  “What’s this you’re telling me, Carmine?” cried Charley in an agony. “Are you telling me a daughter of mine must be wed, to save her name?”

  “Father!” wept Carmine.

  “By God!” shouted Charley, “I’ll wring his neck, I’ll kick his face off! Who is he? Tell me who the man is, tell me, I say!” He took his daughter by the shoulders and shook her, and Carmine, utterly unnerved, sobbed:

  “It’s Francis Oldroyd.”

  “What, Brigg’s son?” shouted Charley.

  “Yes,” sobbed Carmine.

  Her father threw her from him, so that she fell on the peat bank at the side of the road, and cried: “Aye, it’s just what might have been expected from his son, damn him. They’re a black-hearted selfish set of scoundrels, them Oldroyds. They don’t care owt for either God or man.” He stamped about the road, shouting and swearing.

  “It’s no use you going on like that, father,” said Carmine sullenly. “Francis isn’t like that, and it was as much my fault as his.”

  “How can you say that?” cried Charley. “Do you want to break my heart altogether, Carmine? And I was that proud of you!”

  “I knew what he was after, and I still kept on going with him,” said Carmine. “So it was my own fault, partly.”

  “Carmine, Carmine!” her father reproached her, now frankly weeping. “How could you?”

  “I was in love with him,” muttered Carmine, hanging her head.

  Suddenly Charley’s hand flew to his mouth in a movement of terror. His face turned as white as chalk, and his eyes were dilated with anguish. “Your mother!” he whispered. “Carmine! It’ll kill her!”

  “I know,” whispered Carmine in return.

  They stared at each other in an agony.

  “That’s why I want to go to London,” said Carmine, whispering still, as if Janie away down in Annotsfield could hear her. “I shall get married there, and she need never know.”

  “Oh, he’s willing to marry you, is he?” said Charley grimly.

  “Yes, father,” said Carmine. She tried to put all her complex distress about Francis out of her mind, so that Charley would think they still loved each other. “He wants us to be married without telling anybody, so that it’ll be too late-for his father to interfere.”

  “Does he know you’re Janie Oldroyd’s daughter?” demanded Charley.

  Carmine shook her head. “I don’t think he’d know who Janie Oldroyd is,” she said. “They don’t seem to talk about our side of the family much, at Emsley Hall.”

  “I’ll bet they don’t,” said Charley.

  He seemed calmer now, and Carmine rose and came to his side; some walkers passed them by and gave them a curious glance; they remembered the necessity for keeping up appearances, and began to stroll slowly along the road towards the Moorcock. In response to Charley’s questions Carmine told him how she had met Francis, and what he said about the difficulties of marrying at Annotsfield; she also showed Henry’s letter.

  “Well, he’s a good man, is your Uncle Henry,” said Charley thoughtfully, turning over the note: “He messed up the weavers’ strike, and did his best to win your mother away from me, and I’ve always held it against him since; but it were him taught me to read.”

  “Father!” murmured Carmine sorrowfully, taking his arm.

  “I think it’ll be best to tell your mother there’s some young man in London you’re fretting for,” mused Charley. “We can say you quarrelled with him before, you know, and now you want to make it up. Your mother must never know the truth.”

  “Never!” agreed Carmine emphatically.

  “But an Oldroyd!” grieved Charley. “An Oldroyd! Brigg’s son! How I used to hate that man! Nay, I hate him yet.”

  “But, father, you won mother and he didn’t,” urged Carmine consolingly.

  “Ah, well,” said her father with a heavy sigh. He seemed to muse a little, and then said sadly: “I reckon I shall never like your Francis much, Carmine.”

  The idea of Francis mixing with her family had not occurred to Carmine before; now that it did so it was so disheartening that she threw it aside, saying hastily: “Never mind that now, father; the great thing is for me to get to London.” Charley nodded his agreement, and Carmine began to prime him with details for Janie about her imaginary quarrel with the imaginary young man in London, which she took recklessly from Matthew’s story of the previous night.

  When Charley told his wife this tale, which he did with all the artifice at his command, Janie of course believed it, for she had never told a lie herself and could not imagine anybody else telling one. But she was wounded, deeply wounded, to find that Carmine had confided in her father rather than in her mother. “But why didn’t she tell me?” enquired Janie repeatedly, in a bewildered tone. “Surely a girl confides her love affairs to her mother?”

  “She values your good opinion so highly, she can’t bear to lose it by telling you about her little whimsies,” suggested Charley consolingly.

  “I’d rather she’d have told me,” said poor Janie, and she went to Carmine in a very subdued manner, saying: “It hurts me so much to think of you being afraid of me, Carmine.”

  At this Carmine wept; her mother wept too, and they were, Janie thought, quite re-united. But Carmine did not betray her real secret; she knew too well what Janie would think of that.

  A letter was written to Henry, who replied with tact and discretion; and Carmine, almost sick with suspense, at length departed to London by the morning train.

  5

  Brigg had been in bed for the last few weeks, in order that the doctor might make certain daily observations, and although he still kept a firm hand on the Syke Mill reins, a great deal of the ordinary routine work of management fell upon his son. Francis was, rather to Brigg’s surprise, proving himself capable of dealing with it in a fairly sensible manner; the boy had seemed much older lately, Brigg thought. Charlotte also thought her son looking older; as they sat at dinner together now she decided that his russet eyebrows looked thicker and darker, his shoulders squarer, his face more decided, his bearing altogether more that of a man and less that of a light-hearted boy. Bat perhaps he was tired after his journey—he had just come back from London. She suggested this.

  “Tired?” repeated Francis scornfully. “No, of course not. How do you think father seems to-day?”

  “Well——” hesitated Charlotte.

  “Because I’ve something to tell him which may give him a bit of a shock,” said Francis.
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  “Business?” queried Charlotte.

  Francis ignored this. “Couldn’t we have coffee in father’s room?” he suggested.

  His tone brooked no denial, and Charlotte, thinking: “He’s getting as masterful as Brigg,” gave the necessary order.

  “This is an unexpected pleasure,” said Brigg rather drily as mother and son entered his room followed by the man with the coffee tray. Brigg was sitting up in bed in a fine silk dressing-gown, and looked handsome as ever, but rather worn and sallow for so comparatively young a man.

  “He can’t be more than fifty-two or three,” thought Francis, fixing his father with a speculative eye and wondering how best to break his news. He decided on the mode most natural to him, namely the straightforward curt.

  “Father,” he said, “I have some news for you which may give you rather a shock.”

  Brigg gripped the bedclothes firmly and seemed to turn sallower than ever, but he said calmly: “Is it about the mill?”

  “No,” said Francis. Brigg gave a sigh of relief. “It’s about me,” continued Francis bluntly. “I was married to-day in London.”

  “Good God!” cried Brigg, starting up. “Married!”

  “Yes,” said Francis, “married.”

  “Francis!” exclaimed his mother. She seemed to shrink into herself and become physically smaller, so that the broad black velvet band she wore looked too large for her throat. She whispered: “Is it some actress, Frankie?”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Francis in a tone of disgust. “She’s an Annotsfield girl. You don’t know her.”

  “It’s the one Katie saw you with at the theatre!” cried his mother accusingly.