‘It will make me free,’ said Rena, much in the same manner as she had spoken once before, ‘free to leave here, leave the Highlands.’ She took out her cigarettes and lit up.
When she spoke next she seemed to be addressing the blue weave of smoke ... anyway, she did not meet Pippa’s glance.
‘I won’t be dependent on anyone else to get me away. Not Crag. Not Glen.— By the way’ ... a brief laugh ... ‘that last fell through. I think you know, Pippa.’
‘Doctor Burt?’
‘Yes. In a very discreet way our young doctor began referring to this former love of his.’
‘Jennifer.’
‘Yes. Quite a touching little story. Young students together. No words ever spoken but the feeling there.’ Now Rena was back to form, her sharp astringent form.
Uncomfortably, Pippa inserted, ‘I don’t think you were really hurt, Rena.’
Rena narrowed her eyes on her cousin and said, ‘And why should you think that?’
‘No reason, except—’
‘Except?’ Rena demanded.
‘Except I don’t believe you ever loved him.’
‘Very intuitive, aren’t you? Well’ ... a deliberate yawn ... ‘you were right. He was attractive, of course, but Glen to me was primarily escape, escape from here. Oh, I know you think I could have gone whenever I liked, and I did go for periods, but because of Daddy I had to come back. And Preston Franklin’ ... she had the habit of calling her father by his full name ... ‘for all his regrets at having left Sydney, was still for some reason very much against returning again, from leaving here.’
‘Probably his state of health, his age,’ suggested Pippa.
‘Perhaps.’ A shrug. ‘All I know is he wouldn’t go. So I was tied down, too. But now...’ She exhaled, and once more gave that little scornful laugh.
‘Where will you go, Rena?’—Where will we go, was more what Pippa wanted to cry out, where can I take Davy?
‘Here ... there ... who knows? Oh, you’re worrying about the boy, aren’t you? Don’t fret, I won’t see you stuck. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Daddy hasn’t seen to that in the will. Did I tell you it’s to be read almost at once? In the morning, in fact.’
‘No, Rena, you didn’t.’
‘It appears Mr. Callow, our solicitor, is anxious to start the proceedings at once. Rather surprising. Usually the wheels of the law grind painfully slow, or so I’ve been told. Though probably he’s guessed my burning anxiety.’ Another little laugh. ‘Anxiety to leave.’
Rena got up and went to the window, looked out on the rolling, green, almost parklike qualities of the Highlands terrain, at the ordered perfection of it, then cried, ‘Oh, to leave here! To leave here. How I hate the place!’
Yet when she turned back a moment later her eyes were dull and her lips set.
Rena seeming to have control of her grief now, as soon as lunch was over Pippa walked through the planting to Ku to visit Davy.
But when she got there, there was no sign of her brother.
‘Mustering,’ grinned Crag Crag, who opened the door to her, ‘if you can call our small handful a mob. But the scrubber rushed the opportunity to bring the five of them back from the west paddock. He reckoned it would be good practice for later on.’
‘Should he?’ worried Pippa, making the mustering her first concern. ‘Should you have let him?’
‘He wanted to,’ said the brown man, ‘WANTED. I reckoned it would have done him more harm not allowing that want.’
‘Perhaps.’ Pippa thought of the guarded existence Davy had had in England and how it had done nothing for him. If Crag wished to work on the principle that since it had done no good this could do no worse, then she supposed she could let him. With a sigh she dismissed that concern to take out a second one.
‘You shouldn’t let him think like you do,’ she remonstrated.
‘About practising mustering for later on?’
Later on. She found she could not answer that for the rising lump in her throat, for the hopeless knowledge that Davy would never muster anywhere, but she did manage to murmur, ‘About visiting you at Falling Star, because a visit is what you sounded like, and of course, we won’t be going.’
He was packing his pipe, taking his usual time over it.
‘I’d like to talk to you about it,’ he said when he had done.
‘If it’s minding Davy for me up there until things are finished here, thank you for the offer, and thank you at the same time for all you’ve done already in minding him, but no.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ he said rather indistinctly, the pipe in a corner of his mouth.
She did not ask him what it was then, for there would be no need to mind Davy; anyway, quite soon, the legal matters would be wound up and she would take over again herself. She told Crag what Rena had said about the will reading. She proffered Rena’s guess that there might be a little windfall for Uncle Preston’s niece. ‘That certainly would be wonderful,’ she admitted, ‘at least it would get us back to England.’
‘And the scrubber miss his second spring?’
‘Well, we can’t stay here,’ she pointed out. ‘Rena intends getting rid of the house ... or rather I gathered that.’
‘Whose house?’ A smoke weave must have spiralled up at him, for he had narrowed his eyes on her.
‘Hers, of course,’ Pippa said irritably, ‘Rena’s.’
‘I see.’ Still the narrowed eyes. ‘And this will reading, when is it?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘I’d go if I were you, Pippa.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said sensitively. ‘It would seem—seem—well, as though I was grasping at anything that Uncle might have left me.’
He smiled a little crookedly at her. ‘Left to you, eh? No, that’s not what I meant, girl. You just go—for Rena.’
‘For Rena?’ she asked, puzzled.
‘‘For Rena,’ he nodded.
‘But—’
‘And Pippa—’ He paused.
‘Yes?’
‘Come back here after it’s over and let me show you a way out.’
‘A way out? Really, you do say the oddest things.—How long will Davy be?’
‘It depends on how the muster goes.’ He lost his serious air and grinned again. He stood up, impelled her upward with him. ‘Come and we’ll see how our young stockman is doing.’
Davy had completed the chore and was sitting, cowboy-wise, on the fence circling the corral, and regarding his ‘muster’ the while he chewed on a stem of bittersweet, held much in the manner that Crag held his pipe. Crag ... Crag ... what a hero he had made of that man! Uneasily Pippa thought of the wrench it would be when the two friends had to part, yet part they must. Uncle Preston was dead and Rena would be leaving Uplands, her cousins leaving as well. Besides this Crag had spoken many times on how he had outstayed himself here at Ku and how Falling Star needed him. Yes, it could not be long now.
Davy’s smile at seeing his sister was quickly wiped off as a thought occurred to him. He said fearfully, ‘You didn’t come to take me back, did you, Pippa?’
‘Not yet, darling, but soon, of course.’
Davy only listened to the first part. He said importantly to the brown man, ‘I had a little trouble at the gate, but otherwise all went well. I reckon I’ll be of real help to you up at—’
‘Davy!’ Pippa inserted sharply, but just as sharply Crag came in:
‘You didn’t drive home that bottom bolt quite enough, scrubber, you always want to make sure of these things,’ then, as Davy hurried across to the gate to fix it, he said in a low tone to Pippa: ‘No.’
She knew he was remonstrating with her for cutting into Davy’s dreams and she retorted bitterly, ‘He mustn’t build up like this.’
‘Giving in that you could be right about that, though I still won’t go along with it, at least wait for a while, girl.’
‘Wait? For what?’
He was attending to his eternal pipe. ‘Wai
t for the will,’ he said.
‘It won’t make any difference. Even if Uncle Preston has ... if what Rena said is true... if there is something, I won’t be spending it on taking Davy up to—’
‘All the same, wait,’ he said. ‘And Pippa, go with her to the reading. She’ll need you, I think.’
‘How do you come to think these things?’ she asked curiously and a little tauntingly. ‘Do you have some special knowledge?’
‘Only of what I would have done had I been Preston Franklin,’ he replied cryptically.
She looked at him a long moment, not understanding. But she did not feel like pursuing the subject so instead she called good-bye to Davy. Only that he looked so ecstatically happy, and Davy’s happiness must always come first, she might have resented her brother’s casual wave in return.
As she walked back through the planting to Uplands she wondered why Crag had asked her to be with Rena tomorrow. She could not go, of course, unless Rena asked her, then if she did ask, should she? After all, it was strictly Rena’s affair.
But when Rena suggested it that night, she heard herself agreeing to accompany her cousin, and she was angry because it seemed that, like Davy, she was being directed by Crag Crag, and one in the family was enough.
But when Mr. Callow untied the Last Will and Testament of Preston Franklin next morning and read quietly and unemotionally in a dry solicitor voice, she was glad she was with Rena if only to sit there silently beside her. How, she wondered, had Crag Crag known?
For Rena inherited nothing, yet not because the Franklin estate had dwindled down to that extent but because she was excluded.
Mr. Callow put down the papers at last.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we will dispute this will.’
‘There would not be the slightest doubt,’ Mr. Callow went on precisely, ‘that your late father’s last testament would be proclaimed null and void. The time factor alone between its alteration and his passing would assure that. But even failing this, though I repeat that I have no doubt as to the outcome of an appeal, the appropriate authorities would insist on a re-distribution, and you, as his sole surviving—’
‘No!’ Rena came in sharply and emphatically. ‘No.’ She had sat silent until then.
‘You are thinking,’ interpreted Mr. Callow sympathetically, ‘that we would be contesting it on the grounds of your father’s mental state at the time of his altering it. You do not want that. I assure you, Miss Franklin, that such a step was not in my mind. It certainly offers a sure way out, but I would have to admit that on the day Mr. Franklin called me to Uplands to attend to this’ ... he tapped the sheaf of papers ... ‘that he was more alert than I have ever known him. I did attempt to reason with him. After all, what he wanted was quite preposterous. But never have I seen Preston Franklin so adamant, so certain of himself. His income had been receding for some years. Undoubtedly he spoke to you about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘But there would still have been a comfortable sum for you, and with the house—’
‘Yes. The house.’ Rena looked directly at the solicitor. ‘To whom was it sold?’
He hesitated. ‘Not sold, Miss Franklin.’
‘Then—then given?’ But before the solicitor could tell her, Rena said, ‘Hardy?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the rest of Father’s goods and chattels and money? To Hardy, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he know yet?’
‘No. I thought it better to tell you first, get you over the initial shock. Of course there won’t be any trouble. I know ... we all know Domrey. All this is going to upset him much more than it upsets you. He’ll be more than anxious to have things fixed up as they should be and as soon as possible. As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking over that mental state again, Miss Franklin. Although to my mind your father had never been more mentally stable, doesn’t that prove instability when an only and beloved child is deprived? What I mean to say is—’
‘No!’ Rena protested again. But this time she even banged the table with her slender white hand to drive home her refusal.
‘How much is there?’ she asked after a rather startled pause. ‘I mean how much—for me?’
Mr. Callow glanced down to his desk. He looked unhappy. ‘As I said, the income had plummeted for quite some time.’
‘How much?’
‘Then without the house,’ continued the solicitor, ‘and without the grounds—’
‘I’m asking you how much?’
A pause. Then: ‘Actually only anything in your own name.’
‘I see.’ Rena sat very still. Her face was expressionless.
‘Of course,’ Mr. Callow hastened to repeat himself, ‘it’s all too ridiculous to take seriously.’
‘My father’s last will and testament, Mr. Callow!’ Rena rose, and after a moment’s hesitation, Pippa rose, too.
Mr. Callow got up.
‘You will get in touch with me, Miss Franklin,’ he appealed. ‘You will go home now and recover from this initial shock.’
‘Whose home?’ Rena answered, and Pippa remembered Crag asking her the same thing.
‘My dear girl, there will be a way out, a way suitable for all concerned. Domrey Hardy—’
‘Are you coming, Pippa?’ Already Rena was at the door and pushing it open. With a nod to the solicitor she ran down the building steps to her car. ‘At least,’ she said, opening it up, ‘this is mine, it’s in my name. The other one, Father’s, will be—his.’
‘Rena—’
‘Please, Pippa, not now.’
But Pippa could not contain herself. ‘It’s so unlike Uncle Preston,’ she disbelieved.
‘How little you knew him. It’s Father exactly. In the same position I probably would have done the same myself.’
‘What position?’
But Rena would not answer that.
‘Don’t you see what he was trying to do?’ she said presently. ‘Cunning old fox. Cunning old man. Only that old man won’t win after all. How far can I get away from—’
‘Not far,’ judged Pippa reluctantly. ‘It’s not new, and these days—’
But Rena was not listening to her. She was repeating to herself ‘... he knew ... Father knew ... but he won’t win ...’
‘Rena,’ cut in Pippa a little desperately, for all at once she was thinking of Davy, ‘what can you do?’
Rena took her eyes off the road a moment to look fully at her cousin. ‘You really mean what can you do, don’t you? I’m sorry, Pippa, sorry to have built you up like that, sorry to have mentioned a bequest, but I really did think...’ She laughed wryly. ‘How wrong I was!’
‘It doesn’t matter about the bequest. I only want to know where I stand.’
‘Nowhere, like I do. I’m sorry, Pippa’ ... she said again ... ‘but I won’t be able to help you at all. You can see how I’m placed myself. I advise you to get the boy, go to Sydney and find a job. There’s a surplus of employment there, and you’re quite a smart girl.’
‘I see,’ said Pippa hollowly. Then she asked: ‘And you?’
‘Don’t you worry about me.’ Rena’s eyes were narrowed. ‘I think I may have a solution. And it doesn’t include any will-disputing moves, either, or any interviews with the inheritor.’ She laughed shortly.
When she drew the car up at the door she just left it there, and ran, without another word for her cousin, into the house.
Pippa did not follow her. What could she say to Rena? Besides, she shivered, she had worries now of her own.
Instinctively she found herself walking across to Ku. Go to Sydney. Find a job. Rena had advised that, and it seemed the only course. But what if Davy were really ill ... when he was really ill...
She had not realized she had arrived at the planting until a hand reached out from one of the pines.
Crag looked down.
He did not take the hand away even after she had let him lead her to a tumbled log, instead he left it there to
help her steady herself, and yet, she knew with surprise, I have never felt steadier in my life, even though I don’t know what I’m going to do with that life, with Davy’s little life, how I’m going to get through all this, still, holding on to Crag, I feel steady.
After several moments he took his hand away and reached for his pipe. He packed and lit it. Then he said: ‘You know?’
‘The will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I know. But’ ... curiously ... ‘how did you?’
‘I told you, Pippa, it was what I would have done.’
‘But why? Why?’
He looked at her in wonder. ‘You haven’t worked that out yet? No’... a shake of his head ... ‘you haven’t. Well, it doesn’t matter just now. What matters is us.’
‘Us?’ she asked, bewildered.
‘You. The Scrubber.’ A pause. ‘Me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I told you I had a way out, remember, and I reckon you’re needing it.’
‘I could,’ she replied desperately, ‘write to Aunt Helen to get us back to England again,’ She was remembering the small house, the week-to-week existence, she was knowing how distressed Aunt Helen would be to write back that raising the fares would be beyond her means.
He must have heard her doubt, for he did not even consider the thought.
He said bluntly, without any preamble: ‘This is the way out, girl. I said it before on the train coming down to Tombonda, but you thought I was joking ... or showing a damn nerve.
‘Well, I was showing a nerve, perhaps, but never joking. I knew what I was asking and I know now.
‘Will you marry me, Pippa?’
There was very little wind today, barely enough to stir the pine tops into a sibilant whisper. No ocean in the planting this time, thought Pippa abstractedly, no sound of the sea. The deep leaves had drawn a veil around them. Within that veil she sat and looked at Crag, but understanding what she had just heard. She said so.
‘Marriage,’ he told her almost gruffly, ‘the ceremony or contract by which a man and woman become husband and wife.’
A Thousand Candles Page 9
