The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  “His eyes almost jumped out of his head when I said it, Mary. The fellow had evidently put me down for sixty or thereabouts,” he came back on the incident that night. “It made me feel I must be beginning to look a very old man.”

  “Not old, Richard. Only rather delicate. And the people here are all so rosy and sturdy that they don’t understand any one being pale and thin.”

  “Well, I’m positive he thought me a contemporary, if not just of old B.’s, at least of his own.”

  What he did not mention to Mary was the impression he saw he left Bealby under, that lack of success had been the reason of his quitting Australia. Were he only more skilled at blowing his own trumpet! Actually the old fool seemed to think he, Mahony, would be bettering himself by settling in Leicester!

  “Well, sir, I can promise you, you will find an old-established, first-class practice, such as this, a very different thing from those you have been used to. England, doctor, old England! There’s no place like it.” At which Mahony, who had himself, aloud and in secret, rung changes on this theme, regarded the speaker— his paunch, due to insufficient exercise; his sheeplike, inexperienced old face; his dark little living-room, and darker still, mysterious, provincial manner—looked, and knew that he did not, in the very least, mean the same thing any more.

  “Come, give over, Mary!” said Mother affectionately.

  Mother sat by the fire in the twilight, her hands folded placidly in her lap. She was neither a sewer nor a knitter. If not nimbly trotting about the house, in aid of the rheumaticky old servant, she liked best to sit still and do nothing; which Richard said made her a most soothing companion. Her words were addressed to Mary, who was rattling a sewing-machine as if her life depended on it. They also referred to a remark passed in a pause of her handle-twirling. This had constituted a criticism of Richard—or as much of a criticism as Mary could rise to. Which, here, she felt quite safe in making, so surely did she know Richard nested in Mother’s heart.

  That afternoon—it was December, and night now soon after three o’clock—he had—and not for the first time—stepped over the low railing that separated the garden-plots to say: “Come, Lisby, let us go a-gallivanting!” Nothing loath, Lisby, also not for the first time, laid aside her needle, tied on bonnet and tippet, and off they went arm-in-arm, to prowl round the lighted shops of the town.

  Mary’s objection was: “But if he’s wanted, mother! I shouldn’t know where to send for him.”

  “My dear, Eliza would find him for you in less than half an hour.—Besides, Mary, it’s very unlikely anyone would want him in such a hurry as all that.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. It’s me that’s silly. But you see, in Ballarat he never dreamt of going out without leaving word just where he was to be found. Indeed, he seldom went out for pleasure at all. He was much too busy.”

  Mother did not put the question that would have leapt, under similar conditions, to Lisby’s lips: “Then, why, in the name of fortune, did he leave it?” She only said: “You must have patience, my dear.”

  “Oh, it’s not me—it’s him I’m afraid of. Patience is one of the things Richard hasn’t got.”

  There was a brief silence. Then: “You have a very good husband, Mary. Value him, my dear, at his true worth.—Nay, child, let the lamp be. Can’t you sit idle for half an hour?”

  She stirred the fire to a blaze which lit up their faces, and the many-folded drapery of their gowns.

  “I know that, mother. But he doesn’t get easier to manage as he grows older. In some ways Richard is most difficult—very, very queer.”

  “And pray, doesn’t the old tree get knobby and gnarled?. . . .Take a hint from your mother, my dear—for though, Mary, you’ve been so long away from me, I know my own flesh and blood as no one else can. Be glad, child, not sorry, if Richard has his little faults and failings—even if you can’t understand ’em. They help to bind him. For his roots in this world don’t go deep, Mary. He doesn’t set proper store on the prizes other men hanker after—money and position and influence, and such like.” She paused again, to add: “It’s a real misfortune, my dear, you have no children.”

  “Yes, and me so fond of them, too. But I’m not sure about Richard. He’s got used, now, to being without them, to having only himself to consider. I’m afraid he’d find them in the way.”

  “And yet it was of Richard I was thinking,” said the old lady gently.

  “You say he’s hard to manage, Mary,” she went on. “But la! child, what does that matter? He’s kind, generous, straight as a die—I’m sure I’m right in believing he’s never done a mean action in his life?”

  “Never! It isn’t in him.”

  “Well, then!” said Mother: and her cheerful old tone was like a verbal poke in the ribs. “He might be easier to manage, Mary—and thoughtless. . . .or stingy. . . .or attentive to other women. You little know what you’re spared, child, in not having that to endure. There are some poor wives would think you like the princess in the fairytale, who couldn’t sleep for the pea.” She fell into a reverie over this, sat looking into the heart of the fire. “Men?—ah, my dear! to me even the best of ’em seem only like so many children. We have to be mothers to ’em as well as wives, Mary; watch over them the same as over those we’ve borne; and feel thankful if their nature is sound, behind all the little surface tricks and naughtinesses. Men may err and stray, my dear, but they must always find us here to come back to, and find us forgiving and unchanged.—But tut, tut, what a sermon your old mother’s preaching you! As if you weren’t the happiest of wives,” and she laid her soft old hand on Mary’s. “I got led into it, I suppose, because of the strong tie between us: you’re more like me, Mary, than any of the rest. Another thing, too: I’m a very old woman, my dear, and shan’t live to see the end of the day’s business. So always remember, love, Mother’s advice to you was this: not to worry over small things—the big ones will need all your strength. And you can’t do Richard’s experiencing for him, Mary, however much you’d like to spare him the knocks and jars of it.—But I do declare, here they come. Now what will they say to finding us gossiping in the dark?”

  The shoppers’ steps echoed down the quiet street—really sounding like one rather heavy footfall—and turned in at the gate. And then there were voices and laughter and the sound of rustling paper and snipped string in the little room, where Mary lit the lamp, and Lisby displayed her presents—sweetmeats, a piece of music she had coveted, a pair of puce-covered gloves, a new net for her chignon—while Mother tried to prevent the great round pork pie Mahony deposited on her lap, from sliding into the grate.

  “You dear naughty spendthrift of a man! Why, the girl’s head will be turned.”

  “Come, mother, let me give her a little pleasure.”

  “You give yourself more, or I’m much mistaken.”

  “Pooh! Such trifles! I shouldn’t otherwise know what to do with my small change,” retorted Mahony. And Mary laughed and said: “Wait, mother, till the practice really begins to move, and then you’ll see!”

  This nudged Mahony’s memory. “Has any one been?”

  “They hadn’t when I came over. And Mary Ann has not knocked at the wall.—Oh yes, the boy called with an account from Mr. Bealby.”

  The news of the empty afternoon, together with Mary’s colonialism, grated on Mahony. “Do knight him, my dear, while you’re about it,” he said snappishly.

  “Oh well, Bealby then. Though, I really can’t see what it matters. And out there, if I hadn’t said Mr. Chambers, Mr. Tangye, you would have been the one to suffer.”

  “And I can assure you, my dears, Bealby won’t think any the worse of you for turning him into a gentleman,” soothed Mother.

  “Oh! but Richard is very correct—aren’t you, dear?”

  Here Lisby had also to put in her spoke.

  “And Bellvy
Castle, pray?—what of Bellvy Castle? Has still no groom come riding post-haste to summon you?”

  Heartily tired of this jest, which he himself had innocently started, Mahony picked up a book and stuck his nose in it. “No, nor ever will.”

  “Come, Lisby,” said Mother, “the kettle’s boiling its head off.—Richard, my dear, draw up your chair; you must be cold and famished.—Nay, Mary, I’ll not let you go home. We’re going to drink a cosy cup together. And afterwards Richard shall tell us more adventures of the early days. I’ve looked forward to it all the afternoon. It’s as good as any book.”

  Mahony had more than once said to his wife: “Before I knew your mother, Mary, I used to think you the warmest-hearted creature under the sun. But now that I know her, love, and can draw comparisons, I declare you sometimes seem to me quite a hard and reasonable young woman.”

  And then he would fall to musing on the subject of wisdom inborn and acquired. Here was this little old lady, who knew nothing of the world, had never, indeed, travelled fifty miles from her native place, and yet was richer in wisdom—intuitive wisdom, the wisdom of the heart—than any second mortal he had met. He could not picture to himself the situation, however tangled, that Mary’s mother would fail to see through, and, seeing, to judge soundly and with loving-kindness. Yes, his acquaintance with and affection for her was the one thing that helped him over the blank disappointment of these early weeks.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The surgery was a small, darkish room on the ground floor, a step or two below street level; and the window behind which Mahony spent the greater part of his first English winter was screened from the curiosity of passers-by, by an attorney’s brown gauze shade. Across this blind he saw people move like shadows; or like bodies immersed in water, only the tops of whose crowns shewed above the surface. There went the hooded tray and crooked arm of the tinkling muffin-man; and the wares of the buy-a-brooms. There, also, to the deep notes of his bigger bell and his insistent: “To all whom it may concern!” passed the shiny black hat of the town crier. Regularly, too, at dusk, through fog or silvery rain, the lamp-lighter’s ladder and torch rose into Mahony’s field of vision, flicking alive the little gas flame that set his own brass plates a-glitter.

  About this surgery hung a disagreeable, penetrating smell—a kind of blend of the countless drugs that had been housed and mixed there for over half a century—and, air as you might, it was not to be got rid of. It gave even Mary, who was not sensitive to smells, the headache. Otherwise, during Richard’s absences she might have used this room, which held a comfortable armchair. As it was, she found herself fairly crowded out. The passage was so narrow that two people were a tight fit in it; and, were more than two in waiting, they had to be furnished with seats in the little parlour to the back, pokier, this, than even the surgery, and very dark—Richard called it the “Black Hole”—giving as it did on a walled-in yard no bigger than a roofless prison cell. Altogether, the accommodation was so cramped that it was like living in a mouse-trap. Still, it would have been folly in the beginning to separate house from practice, when the two had hung together for so long. Time enough later on to make changes. Mary’s own idea was to turn the first-floor bedroom into a drawing-room. Richard talked of moving; of knocking two houses into one; even of building for himself. In the meantime he had taken the house on a short lease, preferring to pay a higher rent for a few years than to bind himself for the mystic seven. And so it was mainly in the bedroom that Mary spent her first winter; sewing, sheerly to kill time, garments she did not need, or which she might just as well have “given out.” Sitting bent over her needle in the half daylight, she could sometimes almost have smiled did she think of the sacrifices they had made—all for this. But for the most part she felt troubled and anxious. Richard had tied himself down for three years; but not a month had passed before her constant, nagging worry was: how long will he hold out?

  Mahony, too, was offended by the atmosphere of his room: though not so much by the drugs, to which his nose was seasoned, as by the all-pervading reek of stale tobacco. This hung about and persisted—though a carpenter speedily prised open the hermetically sealed window—and only became bearable when a good fire burned and the room was thoroughly warm. Cooled off, it had a cold, flat, stagnant smell that turned you sick. His old forerunner must have kept his pipe going like a furnace; have wadded it, too, with the rankest of weeds. Even had the practice been shaping satisfactorily this smell might have ended by driving him from the room; which would also have meant from the house. As things stood, however, it was not worth his while to think of moving. Before a month was up he suspected what two months showed, and three made plain as the nose on his face: the whole affair had been of the nature of a gross take-in.

  There he sat, with the last numbers of the medical journals, new books on medicine before him, and was too unsettled to read, or, if he did, to make sense of what he read. The mischief was not only that the practice didn’t move properly: what came was of entirely the wrong sort. He had not had half a dozen calls to good houses since starting. The patients who had thus far consulted him were the servant-girls and petty tradesmen of the neighbourhood.

  In fits of exasperation, he knew what it was to feel convinced that the entries in the books laid before him at purchase, the rosy tales of Brocklebank’s receipts, had been invented for his decoying. If not, what in the name of fortune had become of the practice? In calmer moments, he absolved those about him from the charge of wilful fraud: they had acted according to their lights—that was all. That their way of looking at things was not his, was constantly being brought home to him anew. And how, indeed, could he expect them, who had passed their whole lives fixed as vegetables on the selfsame spot, to know his touchstone for a practice? For example, the visit, famous in local history, paid by old Brocklebank to Bellevue Castle. On closer scrutiny this dwindled into the bandaging of a turned ankle, an ankle belonging to one of the under-servants who had slipped on a greasy cobble while at market. Never had old B. set foot in the Castle: or, at most—little more than a servant himself—had entered it but by the back door. Chagrin was not the only feeling this incident roused in Mahony: he found insufferable the obsequious attitude of mind it spoke to in those concerned. Long residence in a land where every honest man was the equal of his neighbour had unfitted him for the genuflexions of the English middle-classes before the footstools of the great. But he had given up trying to make himself or his views intelligible. For all that those about him understood, he might as well have been speaking Chinese; while any reference to the position and income he had turned his back on, called to their eyes a look of doubt, and even disbelief. They considered him a supremely lucky man to have stepped into old Brocklebank’s shoes; and at his door alone would the blame be laid, if he failed to succeed.

  And failing he was! So far, he had booked the magnificent sum of slightly over a couple of pounds weekly. Two pounds! It reminded him of his first struggle-and-starve campaign on taking up practice after his marriage. Only under one condition could he have faced the present situation with equanimity; and that, paradoxically enough, was, if he had not seen the colour of the money, and it had stood on account to some of the big houses round about. As it was, it dribbled in, a few shillings here, a few there; which meant that his spending had also to be done in driblets—a habit it was easier to lose than to recapture. Yes! if the handful of shares he had left invested in the colony were not bringing in what they did, he and Mary would at this moment have been reduced to living on their capital.

  Talking of Mary: her position here was another bite he could not swallow. It had really not been fair of him to foist this kind of thing on Mary. To begin with, the house—possibly the neighbourhood, too, dark, crowded, airless—did not suit her. She looked pale and thin, and had never quite lost the cough she had arrived with. How could she, indeed, when she sat for hours at a stretch stooped over her needle? She had no society worth t
he name—never a drive, a party, a bazaar. Her sole diversion was tending her mother; undertaking the countless odd jobs the old lady and her rheumaticky maidservant had need of. In one way, of course, this was right and proper; and he did not begrudge her to the mother from whom she had so long been parted. His grudge was aimed at another quarter. Soon after Christmas Lisby had made good her escape, and was now established as resident mistress at a Young Ladies’ Seminary, near Leeds. Which wormed, in spite of himself.