Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  Obliquely, in the hothouse intimacy of their lives, she had learnt a lot from Miss Montaulk—things, supplemented by the hints of novels (she had glanced into the Paul de Kocks Miss Montaulk stuffed behind sofa cushions), which alarmed her for a future where some mysterious evil awaited her.

  “Men. Ugh!” Miss Montaulk's eyes seemed to swell in her head. “I can hardly tell you what I've seen. Girls your age—nice girls all shut up in a room with the soldiers outside banging on the door. That was in the war of 1870. I was only a girl myself and some might have thought I was pretty.” She leered and wriggled, giving out that faint odour of corruption, like stale flowers, which always made Harriet hold her breath and turn her head away. “At last the door began to give and they looked in—big drunken soldiers with black beards. And the things they said! One of them reached through the broken panel and touched me. I feel it now—that hand. Fortunately an officer came along and we were saved.”

  “Would they have killed you?”

  “It would have been worse than that,” she whispered, her eyes dancing, glittering, “WORSE THAN DEATH.”

  Harriet shivered and wondered. Her thoughts were less distinct than her feelings, which concreted themselves in a dream that began soon after she discovered what “becoming a woman” meant. She dreamt that she woke up and found her father leaning over the bed. There was blood on his beard. She screamed and tried to get away, but Miss Montaulk held her down while her father kissed her. She tried to push his face away, and, when she awoke, so vivid was the feel of the clammy beard on her fingers that she had to get up and wash her hands before she could sleep again. Sometimes it was not her father who kissed her but one of the repulsive mad old shepherds.

  Since this dream had begun, her fantasies at the window had become less and less satisfying till to-night, in sudden disillusion, she saw how childish they were. “Yes, where could I run to?” she asked, and there was no answer. She put her hands over her face and began to cry softly. Long after the sticky tears had dried on her fingers she sat there with her face in her hands, afraid to look up and see the familiar hills and ringbarked trees mocking her. “I WILL run away. I will. I will,” she kept saying to herself, but only because there was nothing else to say. From the other end of the house came the buzz, like a wasp disturbed, of angry voices, ending on the clatter of an overturned chair, the slamming of a door, and her mother laughing.

  A clear picture of her mother, in the faded blue dress of an old fashion, full in the skirt and tight about the waist and fallen breasts, came to her. From some infantile memory of them she recovered a sensation of the reassuring strength in the brown hands holding her close to those skirts, clean smelling and capacious to hide behind. That was years ago before Miss Montaulk came to dress and bathe her and take command of her life. There had been a rift between them since. Harriet had learnt to speak French and Italian, play the piano, sing, paint watercolours, and eat little mouthfuls of food. She wore a different silk dress every day of the week, and when she went out in her gig walked across the dusty yard in mincing steps and carried a parasol to keep the sun off her complexion. Now her mother hardly ever glanced at her. When she did it was with such a strange look in her dark, deep-set eyes that Harriet was compelled to give back a stare of bewildered defiance. Yet how she yearned to be taken back into the security of her mother's arms, to be comforted by the low voice, in the sad tones of which spoke a heart wise from terrible experience. On the vague rumours of that experience, got mostly from James, she speculated now, not as at first with shame, but with admiration for the strength which had endured so much suffering. She thought of the convict ship, the jailyard, the whipping-post, and Black Jem, as James had pictured them with the brutal over-emphasis of his offended pride, and her own troubles seemed paltry. Her mother, who had come through these things, who could, as Harriet had often seen, silence her father's testy humours with a glance, appeared to her now a woman of superhuman power—the only being before whom she had seen her father's eye falter and turn away.

  Again she was tempted to go and throw her arms around her mother and put the shield of the still, wise face between herself and the rest of the world, but the impulse died among discouraging memories of that face watching her scornfully, as she drove out in her gig of an afternoon, from the window of the kitchen where Emma lived with shining pots, and black iron kettles singing over a torrid fire, and tables scrubbed as white as sand.

  Only once had she tried to break down the barriers. That was over a year ago, on the day her father returned from Brisbane with a necklace made of little nuggets of solid gold strung together with pearls between. He had frightened her as usual with the over-emotional intensity of his words, which always became more pressing the more they chilled her. She was just then struggling with the morbid, pernickety self-disgust of her adolescence. She turned her nausea upon him with a sudden loathing for the rank male smell of his clothes, his sour breath, and the astringent silky flesh on his ageing cheek. When he was gone all her bottled-up longing for somebody to caress and pity her and take off her mind the load of fears which were becoming unbearable to her loneliness drove her to the kitchen. Her mother was there occupied, as usual from early morning to late at night, over one of the thousand trivial tasks her restless energy created to exhaust itself upon.

  “Mother. . .” She hesitated before the old woman's unwelcoming stare, which fastened at once upon the necklace, where Cabell had doubled it in a heavy rope around the girl's thin neck. She began to whimper, “I'm frightened, Mother. . . I. . .”

  Emma watched her coldly. “Frightened? What of?”

  “I—I want. . .” But she did not know what she wanted or why she was frightened. Her whimpering turned to tears.

  Emma wiped her hands on her apron and came around the table, and almost shyly put her hand on the girl's shoulder, but at the same moment a heavy step sounded in the passage and Miss Montaulk appeared.

  “Harriet! Whatever are you doing in this place? Your father would be so. . . Why, what's happened?”

  “Nothing's happened,” Emma said harshly. “Except the girl's greensick. Take her away and give her a dose of calomel.”

  Harriet opened her eyes and stared through the window at the thickening darkness to blot out this memory of a fiasco. No, there was nobody to help her, to like her, or to understand.

  Miss Montaulk was lighting the lamp and preparing the room for Cabell's evening visit. As the lamp burned up Harriet saw the reflection of her own face shining on the window-pane once more, vividly now. Her eyes, softened by tears, stared sadly back at her. Her disordered hair fell in curls around her cheeks, warm against the blackness of the night. Her dress had slipped down from one shoulder and the light falling upon it was like a radiance of her own skin. She shrugged the dress off the other shoulder, revealing the white spread of her wide, young breast, turned her head critically from side to side, patted the curls back into place, and smiled.

  It was at a memory of her brother James that she smiled. The day he arrived home on his last vacation he had come to the window and called her. He was excited. “Is SHE there?” he asked.

  “No—why, Jimmy, what's happened to you?” A year's growth in James, a budding moustache of black down, a change from untidy clothes to a tailored suit, high white collar, and bulging cravat did not fix her immediate awareness of his change from youth, skulking nervously at the window, to manhood, flushed and triumphant and pleased with itself.

  “Jimmy, you look like—like something out of a book.” She had never seen such a man before, so well-dressed, so dashing.

  He covered his moustache shyly with his hand, then laughed. “Harriet, I've got something to tell you.” He looked at her doubtfully. “You'll keep a secret, won't you?”

  “Who should I tell?”

  “I wouldn't want HIM to know. Not yet. Later. . .” He pushed out his jaw, which was beginning to show a line as hard as Cabell's. “I don't care later. He can go to the Dickens.”

&
nbsp; “He's going to make you an engineer and work at the mine. Has he told you yet?”

  “Yes, he told me, but. . .” James frowned. “I don't want to be an engineer. I want to study law and go in for politics and have a station of my own and breed horses. That's what I'm going to do. I AM.”

  She was impressed again by the quality of his new manliness. The recklessness of the young boy, who used to alarm them by staying away from meals and defying his father, was still a twinkle of light in the depths of his violet eyes, a wild simmer of excitement in his laughter and in his nervous hands, but his eyes had steadied and his voice was deeper and subdued and his hands gestured and folded themselves gracefully instead of wandering aimlessly about his person like lost animals. Harriet no longer felt superior, as before she had always been, looking down on him from the window and her precocious foreknowledge of life as Miss Montaulk's pupil.

  “Will you?” she said. “Oh, Jimmy, won't he be angry?”

  “He'll be angry all right,” James glanced round with a fugitive return to the skulking indecision of boyhood. But his defiance recovered itself at once. “But that's nothing. That's only a flea-bite. Wait till I tell him that I'm going to marry. . .”

  “Marry?” she said sharply.

  He blushed to the ears. “Aw, Harriet, wait till you see her. You've never seen anything so beautiful, so. . .”

  “I've never seen anything at all,” Harriet snapped, “except Papa and Mama and old Montaulk and sheep and. . .” She paused, a lump of selfpity in her throat. Then all at once she realized that this it was which had changed James, this fabulous experience of love she had read about in books, which haunted her own life in the elliptical gossip of Miss Montaulk and her father's talk of the future.

  She grimaced, horrified now, slightly disgusted by the hot eagerness of his words, remembering how, when driving once with Miss Montaulk, covertly under the brim of her hat she had seen a bull and a cow. “Filthy! Abominable!” Miss Montaulk had said when they were past. “To think that men are like that too!”

  James reached up and touched her arm. “I met her at Doug Peppiott's father's. He had a house in Sydney for the races and she was down with her mother. She's so beautiful—it's like being drunk to look at her.” Harriet drew her arm away. “Who is she?”

  “Her name's Jennis—Jennis Bowen. Her father used to own Penine Downs. He's dead now. Sir Michael Flanagan's her grandfather.” Harriet smiled scornfully. “You booby. Do you think Papa would let you marry Sir Michael Flanagan's granddaughter? Why, he's always talking about him. They had a quarrel.”

  James thrust his hands in his pockets and kicked up a tuft of grass. “I know. It was about some land. That's when all that came out about Mother and Black Jem and all. Everybody remembers it. It's awful. You can hardly hold your head up in Brisbane. You never know when somebody's going to come out with something else about him, something. . .” He glanced up under his black eyebrows, “SOMETHING YOU'D NEVER LIVE DOWN.”

  In troubled silence they speculated upon the secrets, the potentialities of their father's face, on which the scars were like hieroglyphs with some bizarre meaning if one could read them. “What d'you mean, Jimmy?” Harriet asked nervously.

  “Oh—” James drove the phantoms of the ugly past behind him, “I don't know. I don't care. It's got nothing to do with us. We're not responsible. We weren't born. What's it matter what he did or who he quarrelled with? It's none of our business. I don't care if he had a court case with Sir Michael. That's over twenty-three or more years ago. I'm going to marry Jennis Bowen and do what I like. I don't want anything from him. . .”

  Harriet had been deeply impressed by the change which the beauty of a mere girl had worked in her brother, making him look forward to a fight with his father and a new, independent life. At first she had not been able to think of it because she could not think of him kissing the girl without feeling her own flesh creep and tingle, and could not recall his excited rapture without recalling also the excitement of the bull on heat. But now, looking at her image in the window-pane, struck, in the sudden dissolution of her fancies, by the reality of her own personal being, and understanding that through this alone, not through any chance or miracle or the kindness of any one in her little world, was she likely to be rescued from the mad fatality of her father's will, she thought about the metamorphosis of James without shrinking and with such an immediate perception of all it involved that she seemed to have been thinking of it for a long time. Perhaps it was that very thinking, at work in some corner of her mind, which had destroyed her fancies and shown her that her only power was in her own body and herself.

  The discovery presented itself far less explicitly—merely as a simple question, “Will any one ever fall madly in love with ME? Madly enough not to be afraid of—anything?” And doubt of her ability to inspire in any man the tempest of feeling that had overwhelmed James when he talked of Jennis Bowen made her lean forward and examine fearfully her reflection in the glass. Oh, if only her mouth were smaller and her eyes wider and her nose a little less sharp and there were a bit more colour in her cheeks! Yes, she must be terribly, terribly ugly, for had not James said, “By George, Harriet, you don't know what beauty is until you see her. All other girls look like wet hens.”

  Chin in hand she considered this gloomily for some time, then tossed her head. “Well, there are other men,” she thought. “They mightn't think so.”

  What men?

  The question plunged her chin into her hand again. The McFarlanes? Those tow-headed, bandy dullards! The Jardines? Why, she never saw them! Who else? There was nobody else, except her brothers and the shearers once a year—and oh, yes, Mr Cash.

  Her forehead puckered. Thinking of Cash she forgot herself and her problems, for Cash was a problem in himself. Did she like him? She didn't know. He was so full of bluster and laughter and noise, she was a bit scared of him sometimes. Then he had that irritating way of talking to her as if she were a child who couldn't understand. And he was different from anybody she had ever seen. In what way different she could not say—that was the puzzle about him. But different in the same way that a person in a book was different from a person in life—clearer, more real, more solid (of a piece, she thought, like ivory which was ivory all through, whereas there was nothing in the middle of a bone but some spongy stuff, and that's what most people seemed like, people like Mr Shaftoe or Miss Montaulk), and always fresh and—yes, exciting. He told them stories about shipwrecks, and fights, and running guns to Venezuela in a revolution, and blackbirding, and the time when a schooner he was on caught fire and when he went down to loose the kanakas somebody accidentally closed the hatch so that he couldn't get out and the kanakas went mad and began to trample each other in the dark, smoky hold. Even horrible things sounded funny when he told about them not like the stories her father told, which always depressed or frightened her. She decided that it was because Cash never felt any regrets about anything, and so it sounded all right, whereas her father always looked guilty and made you uneasy about him. Everybody liked Cash. Larry came to dinner to hear him, Emma laughed a little, and even Cabell, she noticed, took his advice and depended on him a lot. That made Harriet think of him as the only person beside her mother who was not afraid of Cabell. Still she couldn't be sure about liking him herself: he was so big and unusual in the little monotonous world her father had built up around her. She did like the laughter wrinkles round the corners of his eyes though, she thought, and catching herself thinking so she made a face. “Pooh, as if he'd do! He's old,” and she dismissed him from her mind.

  Who else then? Somebody like James—handsome and young and brave. No, there was nobody. And it came to her, as the essence of her misery, that there would never be any man except her father, jealously watching over her and excluding every one else because every one was frightened of him.

  A shadow on the pane lifted her chin from her hands. She glanced up and saw the wraith of her father staring at her. He had come in quie
tly and tiptoed across the carpet. She pulled the dress over her shoulders and rose to face him.

  “Did I startle you, dear?” he said anxiously. “I'm sorry.” She did not reply. Her breath moved the hand at the neck of her dress, and the bracelets and rings he had loaded on her sparkled in the light. Her fingers were too thin and she kept working the rings back on with her thumb.

  “Poor child. Your nerves must be on edge. It's the heat.”

  “No,” she said quickly, snatching the breath to repudiate his sympathy as though afraid it would commit her to a deeper liaison. “I'm perfectly well. Perfectly well indeed.” She did not look at him directly but watched his feet come slowly across the space between them, knowing that in three seconds he would take her face in his hands, turn it up, and kiss her. She could not bear to look up and see his one intent eye, his beard, his scar, his twisted mouth—ogresque in a memory, vivid and terrifying since early childhood, of his face as he bent over her.

  He stroked her hair, traced the line of her jaw with a rough forefinger, and raised her face. His lips brushed her forehead.

  Harriet opened her eyes and glanced at him quickly. Then her eyes fixed on his beard and widened. “Oh.” Her breath, held against the rank smell of his body, escaped in a startled gasp.