Inheritors

by Неизвестный

  “There, she doesn't want to marry.”

  There was no need for her to forbid him to question her. His simple man's romantic conception of a lady ensured that he would take whatever she said at its face value. A lady—a rare creature. What that he had learnt from the caprices of girls who welcomed sailors home or helped a bushman to knock a cheque down could help him to elucidate a puzzle as far removed from his experience as an angel from gross flesh! Soft and childish and innocent one minute, wilful and resolute the next, now hostile, now friendly, now cold, now passionate, and always surrounded by a dazzling aura of mystery—what was a man to make of it? He had long wondered about ladies—señoritas with white faces and black eyes looking down from grilled windows, always cool, always untroubled in a land of incessant heat and trouble; English ladies walking among the crowds in Hyde Park with undiminishable dignity. What were they—women or what? And their remoteness, their incomprehensibility, lent them, beyond the promise of their careful beauty, the same irresistible fascination which drew him to places with strange names and baited the future of his episodic life with an assurance, ever renewed and ever belied, of lasting romantic excitement.

  “There, she doesn't want to marry. That settles it.” He turned the cold cigar in his mouth. “She's young enough to be your daughter anyway, you fool. A fine one to lecture anybody on infatuation you are. That cove up on the Mary River blackbirding coons for love of a tart he'd never spoken to, he'd got nothing on you. It must be old age creeping on, and softening of the brain. You married to a piano-playing, French-speaking lady! Come on now, own up—is that what you had in mind? Is that what you've been choking yourself in boiled shirts for, and acting in front of mirrors to look like Lord Alford, and learning up long words? Lucky for you, Jack Cash, you didn't put your foot in it!” He jeered for half an hour with the careful over-emphasis of a man who has just almost made a fool of himself until, having reminded himself of the days when “you hadn't a seat in your pants down in Surry Hills,” when “you were a bum in New York,” when “you lay in Cartagena jail and passed the time catching your lice,” the distance between Jack Cash and Harriet Cabell seemed so nearly astronomical that grieving about it was absurd. “That schooner's more in your line,” he told himself, and recovery set in at once with a vision of escape from boiled shirts, board meetings, worry about stock markets and wearing efforts to call a spade anything except a spade, into blue seas and lands of new adventure. He felt, contemplating such vast freedom with a stir of his old hunger for the fresh scenes and action which were his assurance of being, even a relief that he had been saved from a difficult and dangerous role. “I've kept my head out of the bail for thirty years. What would I be doing with a wife now?” And not only a wife but a lady! “Boiled shirts, chimney-pot hats, and watching your step every inch of the way till your dying day. No, that's not your lay, my lad.” Yet, as he squinted at her from the corner of his eyes, he could not quite smother a regret that he must pass by this adventure, the greatest perhaps with which life had tempted him.

  Harriet was annoyed with herself because she knew that she had told him a lie, realizing for the first time how important it was to her that the truth should be kept intact between them. She wanted then, badly wanted, to tell him everything—how she meant fear instead of hate when she spoke of the people in Brisbane and how she longed above anything else to be married and respected and safe—but when she raised her eyes and met his she could not say it, she felt ashamed. How could she tell him that after all her boasts, after what she had said about James? How could she confess that she would be grateful even to a Lord Tomnoddy for marrying her? She threw the half-sewn shirt on the bed. What right had he got to talk about “Lord Tomnoddies” anyway? “That's the second cigar this morning,” she said severely. “You know what the doctor told you.”

  “Damn the doctor,” Cash said. He felt easier then and laughed, and Harriet laughed too. “What nice wrinkles at the corners of his eyes: he'd never hold anything against you.” She jumped up and got the matches from the table. “Here, let me light it, and we won't tell the doctor—this time.”

  Cash winked. “And we won't let on it's no use him coming here making eyes at you because you hate all men and you're going in for an old maid.”

  Harriet patted his pillow. “I didn't mean exactly that.”

  “No?”

  “I like some people very much. Bill Lavery the coachman and Sambo—oh, and a lot of people like that.”

  “They're the best kind of people there are.”

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “That's true. Why?”

  “I don't know why. Perhaps because they're such damn fools. Sambo got a mouth-organ and an electric belt for curing his rheumatism out of his share of the mine and he's satisfied, but your old man's not satisfied with only owning nearly half of it. When you can't be satisfied with what you've got you're a nuisance to everybody and a bigger fool than the fool.” He was talking to himself, not to Harriet, but she glanced at him, sensing double meanings, took up his shirt and sewed again, frowning.

  He came to the end of a long heavy pondering with a sigh. “Oh, well, I'll soon be sound and on my way again.”

  “Oh, doctor said you couldn't move for three weeks,” she said quickly.

  “Be patient.”

  “It's not that. I'm glad. I mean—it's so dull here.”

  “You'll remember me, then?”

  “I might manage. If I try hard till I see you again.”

  “That'll be a long time. I'll have a grey head—if it's not been turned into Dyak currency.”

  “Oh?”

  “I'm going away,” Cash said. “I've had my eye on a schooner in Sydney for the last two years. Damn it, I should've made a break before. It's easy to give Jimmy advice.”

  “Oh, you're going away,” Harriet said. “Oh, I see.” But she did not see anything except the empty sweep of paddocks and her father riding home across them in the dusty afternoon sun. Soon he would send for her and she would have to go and listen to his day's list of complaints, she thought, impatience breaking upon her long forbearance, a reawakened scepticism deprecating in advance the promises he would repeat, “like a parrot.” Oh, she was tired of his talk, she realized, tired of his specious promises which meant nothing at all, perhaps. All her life she had been listening to them, ever since Miss Todd came, and thinking of her first governess, who used to say, “In six months' time we'll be picking buttercups in England,” a flash of understanding illuminated that dumpy lady's sudden, mysterious collapse. Of course, she had lost faith in Cabell's promises, his tireless “Two years from now you'll take Harriet home to Owerbury.” Lost faith in his promises and taken to drink. She remembered the red face, tear-stained, pressed against hers, murmuring, “He promised me. I trusted him.” “More fool her,” Harriet thought, “and more fool me too, I suppose.” She turned away from the window and sewed again. “That will be nice for you, won't it? You like adventures,” she said. She thought of those adventures, endowing them with more courage and romance than perhaps they had, of the air of freedom he breathed into her narrow life, of the rocklike assurance which surrounded him and gave her, in his presence, a feeling of absolute trust. Why, had she not been building herself up on that trust these last weeks? she asked. And when he was gone—what then? Whom could she trust as she trusted him. Nobody. Not a soul.

  Cash laughed. “Oh, adventures are all right, as long as I can scare young ladies with them after.”

  She looked at him quickly, looked away, and drooped over her sewing. A question was dinning in her mind—a hideous question. Oh, yes, it was hideous.

  Cash stared at the ceiling. “You like adventures, don't you?” He tried to recapture that liking, but it would not come. He saw only the fly-spotted ceilings of a hundred brothels, smelt the stink of mildewed blankets in leaky fo'c'sles, the back streets of towns with splendid names, tasted bad food, bad drink, sweat in the mouth, and an accumulated and longsuppressed disillusion. He was
alarmed. Age? No, only convalescence.

  Anyway, just to prove that the future was not as bad as it looked he began to whistle.

  Harriet looked at him reproachfully.

  Thereafter she spent less time by his bed, hardly spoke, and seemed depressed and nervous. “Her old man must be giving her hell for sitting in here,” Cash decided and hurried his departure. In less than three weeks he was gone.

  Cabell was relieved to see the last of him. It was he who got hell. He hardly dared open his mouth, Harriet's temper was so touchy. God and damnation, was it possible the girl had fallen in love with Cash now? “I'll get rid of the fellow!” But he did not mean it. Cash was too useful. . .

  In his mail, these days voluminous with business letters, begging letters, prospectuses, reports, he found an envelope postmarked Dorchester. It was from his nephew David, his brother David's son. “A puffed-up turkeycock of a fellow that!”

  DEAR SIR

  I took the liberty to open your letter, and observing from its contents that you are not aware of my Aunt, your sister's death two years ago, on the eve of her seventieth birthday, I hasten to inform you of that melancholy event.

  Harriet dead! Harriet seventy years old! Incredible. He had to stop reading the letter to imagine Harriet, his applecheeked sister, as an old woman. Time stands still in the exile's homeland. The mist, the wave breaking on the beach, a man bent over a torn fishing-net, a spray of pear blossom scattering on the wind—all this has been enchanted by his last glimpse of it as he looks back, fixed for ever in memory where seasons do not change nor men and women grow old. Harriet dead! Well, well, well! He read on:

  My Aunt often spoke of you and would have been very pleased to have your news. She left us your portrait sent from Sydney and this has been put in the Album beside the portraits of my uncles.

  My wife and myself hope that you will not allow the regrettable death of Aunt Harriet to interfere with your plans for sending your daughter to Owerbury. We should be only too pleased to take her under our care and to introduce her to such amenities as a quiet country life, varied by an occasional visit to London, affords.

  Hoping to hear more from you on this matter,

  I am, sir,

  Yours sincerely,

  DAVID CABELL.

  Cabell snorted. “Let that fop look after my daughter? Never.” But he showed Harriet the letter, hoping to reopen through it their sessions of quiet communion. “You'll soon be gone, soon be married,” he said, slipping his arm round her waist.

  “What, to some Lord Tomnoddy?”

  “To some gentleman—some man of your own class.”

  “My own class, what's that?”

  “Why, an English gentleman, of course. Something a cut above Australia.”

  “It's not my class then. It can't be.”

  “What're you getting at?”

  “I mean I don't want to marry a Lord Tomnoddy.”

  “Who d'you want to marry?” he asked sharply.

  “Oh, I don't know. I don't want to talk about it.” She wriggled away from him.

  “You've changed a bit in the last few weeks.”

  “Yes, thank God.”

  “Huh,” he growled, taking himself off in a pet. “We'll see about that.”

  Chapter Three: Splendid Fellow Cash

  The new year came—Cabell's greatest year when he ruled over the valley's best land, saw a fierce, quick panic end the boom and the fortunes of many old enemies in Brisbane, and began the reconstruction that was to make Waterfall one of Australia's wealthiest goldmines.

  Under easy-going old Larsen development had been slow. He had built a confused pickle of works around the mountain and was satisfied when only fifty per cent of the gold went out into the river with the yellow flood of tailings. But Cabell lay awake at night thinking of the gold he lost and small boys and Chinamen found gilding the roots of grass along the riverbank. He brought chemists and metallurgists from Germany and America and soon had a method of treating the stone which gave five instead of three ounces and lowered the cost of production from an ounce to half an ounce per ton. He built new works, new batteries, new dams to store water during the dry season so that the digging, crushing, sluicing, baking, and smelting of his gold need never cease. When the new works were opened Waterfall's output would rise from five thousand to eight thousand five hundred ounces per week or one million eight hundred thousand pounds' worth of gold per year. Now he saw a dream come true. The mountain was covered with burrowing men, drays and wagons carting the stone, with chimneys, furnace sheds, chutes, truck-lines, boilerrooms, and cranes, and he was master of it all.

  The huddle of shacks and matchboard shops solidified into a town where people would be born, grow old, and die. The court-house and the post office changed their slabs for stone. Pepper-trees were planted in the street to give shade to the next generation. Ludmilla had bought a library for the school of arts, Larsen built an Oddfellows' hall. A cemetery straggled across the ridge from Larsen's Bakehouse. The old Stock Exchange became a kirk and manse, and next door the O'Connors built a Roman Catholic church three feet higher, so David Kyle, the Mayor, renamed the main street William of Orange Place; but it continued to be called Monaghan Street in honour of the marker and floor-sweeper in Shaftoe's old billiard-saloon—a sad fellow whose wife was now Mrs Mavrodelos, Ike the hawker's wife, and mother of a multiplying litter of yellow children with eyes like little black flies. It was a red town with red-skinned people breathing red air through which, from year's end to year's end, you could look straight into the eye of the sun. The heat was like a barber's towel over your face.

  Occasionally Sambo drove a mob of cattle up to the slaughter-yard and goggled at the mountain from which they had blasted away the sugarloaf top.

  “Stone the crows!”

  “Weren't you the bloke that discovered the first nugget?” they asked him in Danny's bar.

  “Whatya talking about? I was the bloke that shot the blacks on this here identical spot and incinerated them single-handed!”

  When Cabell was in town they hoisted a flag over the Assay Office, where he ate and slept among piled ingots of gold worth four hundred pounds each.

  Cash wrote from Brisbane, where he had returned from convalescing in the south. He had an urgent matter to discuss but did not feel up to a two-hundred-mile jolting in the coach. Would Cabell meet him at the Royal Hotel?

  Cabell went to the meeting prepared to knock Cash down as soon as he began to propose that Cabell should let him marry Harriet. With the barest civility he greeted Cash in the lounge. “Good day. How's your arm?”

  “Right as a trivet.”

  “Huh.”

  “I reckon that whack on the head did me good. Nothing like a couple of months in bed to remind a man that he's got legs and arms and make him want to use them.”

  “And nothing like a pretty nurse to make a man forget he's fifty years old, eh?”

  Cash laughed, but soon stopped laughing and shook his head. “I'm not likely to forget that.”

  They found a retired corner among the potted palms and sat down. Cabell took a cigar from his case and bit the end, eyeing Cash closely all the time as if he expected the fellow to spring on him. The spring had gone out of Cash. Illness had taken weight off him. The vigorous little animal of a mouth had given up burrowing through his beard and lay discouraged and bloodless in its crevice.

  It was Cabell who sprang. “I'm going to take Harriet back to England.” Cash looked up quickly. “You're going back to England?”

  “Why not? Emma's on her last legs. As soon as she's gone and I get things running properly here there's no reason why I shouldn't take a trip. I'll go back and buy Owerbury and see Harriet settled there with a husband.”

  “Have you told Harriet?”

  “What d'you mean?”

  “Don't do it, Cabell.”

  “Upon my word, Cash. . .”

  “Don't do it. A girl's got a right to her own life and to picking a husband fo
r herself—if she wants one. You can't expect them to be cooks and bottle-washers to their fathers for ever. Send her to England if you want, but don't go with her. Let her get herself a man and a bit of peace. She certainly needs that.”

  “Upon my word, Cash, you've got a hide. What's your interest in Harriet's future?”

  “A lot.”

  He put the cigar between his teeth and showed his teeth gripped on it. “The interest of being a good friend—to her and to you too,” Cash said quietly. “Now quit looking at me like that, Cabell. It's not the first time I've told you you're a fool—to yourself more than anybody else in the long run. You won't keep Harriet down. Not with all the snooping duennas in the world. She's got as much lead in her pencil as you. You'll only break her heart or your own.”

  “By God, Cash, you speak with feeling!”

  “Sure. I got a lot of feeling for Miss Harriet. A fine girl.” He lit a match and put it to the end of Cabell's cigar, blew it out, turned the charred stick thoughtfully in his big fingers, sighed. “A man could settle down and be pretty content with her.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Are you trying to tell me you're the man?”

  “Me! Miss Harriet marry me! You're off your rocker. Harriet's a lady and me—I'm a hobo, and an old one at that.”

  Cabell fanned a rift in the smoke and tried to see what those mica shields hid.

  “A hobo,” Cash repeated, “dyed in the wool and bred in the bone.” He stirred, stretched his shoulders, grinned. “And that's what I brought you down to talk about. The long and short of it's this, Cabell, sticking round here's getting on my nerves. I want to push off. You're too big to need me any more, so let us wash it up. What d'you say?”

  “Where're you pushing off to?”

  Cash could not help laughing at the obstinate doubt in his eye. “Not to England. I'm not going to set up for a Marquis of Milparinka and run off with the heiress from the colonies. I'm going up north to have a look at the cannibals with the only wife I'll ever have. See, isn't she a beaut?” He opened his wallet and took out a photograph. It was of a big white schooner lying over on her beam ends with Sydney Heads in the background. “I bought her last month, and as soon as she's ready for the sea and you say the word I'm off.”