The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  “Yes, what am I to do? Oh, help me, help me, Mary!”

  “Of course, dear, of course I will.”

  Stifling her own alarm, Mary sat down at his side and took his hand in hers. It was plain he had had a severe shock. He admitted as much himself: the thing had come so suddenly. He told how, out of the dazzling sunshine he had stepped into the cool office at the consulate, had passed the time of day with a clerk, had been chatting with the fellow when the telegram was handed him.

  “This has just come for you, sir. I was about to send it on to your hotel.”

  Yes, he had not even stopped talking as he tore it open. The next moment the room had started to swing round him; he had been obliged to take a seat, every one staring at him, eyeing him askance. How he managed to get out of the place and home, he didn’t know. His mind seemed to have escaped control: felt like a child’s puzzle that had been rudely jolted into hundreds of pieces, and had now all to be re-set. “Which I don’t feel equal to, Mary—and that’s the truth. Something seems to have broken inside me.”

  Oh, how like a bad dream, the remainder of that day! For the practical side of the matter could not wait—not for a single hour. Richard half-way restored to composure, they had to set to work in cold blood to discuss the situation. It was clear to both that he must return to Melbourne with the least possible delay. Till then, he would not know how he stood. Things might not, urged Mary, be quite so black as they looked at first glance, Wilding’s absence yet prove capable of a rational explanation. But Richard, she could see, feared the worst. . . .had no real hope of this. (And in her heart even she thought the tone of Jerry’s message belied it. Oh, where would they have been, had she not had that private confab with Jerry the night before sailing!) No, the conclusion Richard had jumped to at first reading, he still maintained: after the fashion of many a dishonest broker, Wilding had sold the scrip he held from his clients and bolted with the proceeds. Now, the only question was: what was left; what could be saved from the wreck.—A mail steamer was due to leave Venice some time during the week; and on this Richard must, if humanly possible, secure a berth. And the rest of the day passed in running from wharf to agent, from consul to banker. The money question had also to be gone into: what he still had in hand; how much remained on his letters of credit; what balance lay in the London bank. Then they had to think of the furniture, the curios and pictures they had bought on their travels, and sent back to England. The London house would have to be got rid of; the servants paid off, and so on. Before evening Mary’s brain was reeling with all the details it was necessary for her to take in. But this rush and flurry was exactly what Richard needed. And she kept him at it, kept him on the go till late at night, with the result that he went to bed dog-tired—-too worn out to think.

  But he had hardly dozed off, when they were roused by Cuffy starting up in his sleep, screaming: “No, no!. . . .don’t hit him. . . .oh, doggy!”

  Hastily informed what had happened, Mahony struck a light and rose; and forgetting himself over a trouble even more pressing than his own, he lifted Cuffy out of bed and set him on his knee. There he talked to him as, thought Mary, only Richard could talk. He went through the scene of the afternoon, made the child, amid tears and frantic sobs, live through it afresh; then fell to work to dispel the brooding horror that lay over it. Such things as this were often to be met with in life; Cuffy must be a brave little man and face them squarely. Somehow, they all fitted into a great scheme on God’s part, which our poor brains were too puny to understand. To be pitied was not only poor doggy, whose struggles had soon ceased, but also the men who could act so cruelly towards their little brother—no less a brother because he had not the gift of speech. Cuffy must try to feel sorry for them, too; they had probably never had any one to teach them the difference between right and wrong. And he must make up for their want of love, by being doubly kind himself to all dumb creatures.—And so on and on, in a quiet, soothing voice, till the child’s terror was allayed and he slept, his arms clasped like a vice round his father’s neck.

  Forty-eight hours later Richard, with for luggage a single portmanteau, boarded the Overland Mail for Egypt—and thus ended a two days’ nightmare in which he had never ceased to torture himself with the bitterest reproaches. ‘‘It is all my fault. . . .my own fault. . . .I alone am to blame. If only I had not been so headstrong. . . .had listened to you!” The last glimpse Mary had of him showed him standing at the taffrail of the tender that carried passengers to the steamer; standing very erect, and even making a brave attempt to smile, as he waved his hat in farewell; for, when the time came, his chief thought was of her, and how he could ease the parting.

  Till now Mary had kept up; had had, indeed, not a moment to think of herself, so busy had she been consoling, supporting, encouraging. But now that everything was over and she sat alone in the hotel bedroom, all she had gone through, all the conflicting emotions of these two past days—not the least of which were self-reproaches every whit as bitter as Richard’s own—took toll of her. Behind locked doors she broke down and wept bitterly.

  The thought of her coming loneliness appalled her. For over twenty years she had never been absent from Richard for more than a few weeks at a time. . . .had never been parted from him by more than a couple of hundred miles. Now, this violent abrupt separation, with all the seas between, made her feel as if she had been roughly torn in two. For months and months to come she would have no one to lean on, no one to consult—oh, what if one of the children should fall ill and Richard not be there? She also shrank, with the timidity of unuse, from the prospect of having to emerge from her womanly seclusion and rub shoulders with the world. Her work had invariably been carried on in the background. When it came to a personal contact with business and business people, Richard had always been there, to step forward and bear the brunt. Now she, who had travelled but the briefest of distances unescorted, was called on to undertake by herself, not only the far journey across the Continent, but the infinitely more trying one of a two to three months’ sea-voyage round the Cape. And until she got on board! To be faced, before that, were railway officials, porters, house-agents, shipping companies, bankers; the drawing of cheques and the paying of bills; the dismissing of servants; the packing and transport of baggage and furniture, the embarking, the long, long voyage with but one nurse for the children, and nobody at all to look after her. But hardest of anything was the knowledge that she would have to remain in her present state of ignorance and uncertainty, knowing nothing of what had actually happened, or of how Richard was bearing up, and whether he was well or ill, until she herself landed in Melbourne more than six months hence.

  But the barest hint of illness in connection with Richard was enough to make her mind swerve, with a sudden jerk, from herself and her own troubles, to him. Desperately as she would miss him, and need him, yet she had small doubt—something within told her so—that, when she stood face to face with things, she would contrive to get on somehow. But he!—how would he ever manage without her?. . . .to serve him and to soothe him, and to listen to his outpourings—away from her, he quite literally would not have a soul to speak to. She saw him on the outward voyage, eternally pacing the deck, a prey to blackest anxiety—and the last thought of self went under, in a fierce uprush of pity for him, so solitary, so self-centred, so self-tormented. Oh, that he might be spared the worst! He was old for his age; much too old to have to begin life afresh—life which, with every caprice satisfied, had yet become so hard for him: an hourly tussle with flimsy, immaterial phantoms, whose existence other people never so much as dreamed of. And to know him pinched for money again, going short, denying himself, fretting over the straits to which he had brought her and the children. . . .no! Mary felt there was nothing, absolutely nothing she would not do, to help him, to spare him.

  Well!. . . .sitting crying wasn’t the way to begin. That was a fool’s job. She must just set her teeth and make the best of
things—separation, uncertainty, responsibility—endeavouring, when it came to business, to stand her ground, even though she was but an inexperienced woman. And as a first step she got up, dried her eyes, and bathed her face. After which she had trunks and saratogas brought out, and fell to packing.

  But more and more, as the day wore on, did a single thought take possession of her—and, in this thought, Mary came as near as she ever would, to a conscious reflection on the aim and end of existence. It began with her suddenly becoming aware how she longed to hug her babies to her again, and how much she had missed them; a feeling until now resolutely repressed. . . .for Richard’s sake. Now, as, in imagination, she gathered her little ones to her heart—and gathered Richard with them, he, too, just an adored and absent child—it came over her like a flash that, amid life’s ups and downs, to be able to keep one’s little flock about one, to know one’s dearest human relationships safe and unharmed, was, in good truth, all that signified. Compared with this, hardships and misfortune weighed no more than feathers in the balance.

  “As long as we can be together. . . .as long as I have him and my children. . . .nothing really matters. I can bear anything. . . .put up with anything. . . .if only they are spared me!”

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  When, for the third time, Richard Mahony set foot in Australia, it was to find that the fortune with which that country but some six years back had so airily invested him no longer existed. He was a ruined man; and at the age of forty-nine, with a wife and children dependent on him, must needs start life over again.

  Twice in the past he had plucked up his roots from this soil, to which neither gratitude nor affection bound him. Now, fresh from foreign travel, from a wider knowledge of the beauties of the old world, he felt doubly alien; and, with his eyes still full of greenery and lushness, he could see less beauty than ever in its dun and arid landscape.—It was left to a later generation to discover this: to those who, with their mother’s milk, drank in a love of sunlight and space; of inimitable blue distances and gentian-blue skies. To them, the country’s very shortcomings were, in time, to grow dear: the scanty, ragged foliage; the unearthly stillness of the bush; the long, red roads, running inflexible as ruled lines towards a steadily receding horizon. . . .and engendering in him who travelled them a lifelong impatience with hedge-bound twists and turns. To their eyes, too, quickened by emotion, it was left to descry the colours in the apparent colourlessness: the upturned earth that showed red, white, puce, gamboge; the blue in the grey of the new leafage; the geranium red of young scrub; the purple-blue depths of the shadows. To know, too, in exile, a rank nostalgia for the scent of the aromatic foliage; for the honey fragrance of the wattle; the perfume that rises hot and heavy as steam from vast paddocks of sweet, flowering lucerne—even for the sting and tang of countless miles of bush ablaze.

  Of ties such as these, which end by drawing a man home, Richard Mahony knew nothing. He returned to the colony at heart the stranger he had always been.

  Landing in Melbourne one cold spring day in the early seventies, he tossed his belongings into a hansom, and without pausing to reflect drove straight to his old club at the top of Collins Street. But his stay there was short. For no sooner did he learn the full extent of his losses, than he was ripe to detect a marked reserve, not to say coolness, in the manner of his former friends and acquaintances. More than one, he fancied, deliberately shunned him. Bitterly he regretted his overhasty intrusion on this, the most exclusive club in the city; to which wealth alone was the passport. (He had forgotten, over his great wanderings, how small a world he had here come back to. Within the narrow clique of Melbourne society, anything that happened to one of its members was quickly known to all; and the news of his crash had plainly preceded him.) Well! if this was a foretaste of what he had to expect—snubs and slights from men who would once have been honoured by his notice—the sooner he got out of people’s way the better. And bundling his clothes back into his trunk, he drove off again, choosing, characteristically enough, not a quiet hotel in a good neighbourhood, but a second-class boarding-house on the farther side of the Victoria Parade. Here, there was no earthly chance of meeting any one he knew. Or, for that matter, of meeting any one at all! For these outlying streets, planned originally for a traffic without compare—the seething mob of men, horses, vehicles that had once flowed, like a living river, to the goldfields—now lay as bare as they had then been thronged. By day an occasional spindly buggy might amble along their vast width, or a solitary bullock-wagon take its tortoise way; but after dark, feebly lit by ill-trimmed lamps set at enormous distances one from another, they turned into mere desolate, wind-swept spaces. On which no creature moved but himself.

  It was here that he took his decisions, laid his plans. His days resembled a blurred nightmare, in which he sped from one dingy office to the next, or sat through interviews with lawyers and bankers—humiliating interviews, in the course of which his unbusiness-like conduct, his want of nous in money matters was mercilessly dragged to light. But in the evening he was free: and then he would pace by the hour round these deserted streets, with the collar of his greatcoat turned up to his ears, his hands clasped at his back, his head bent against the icy south winds; or, caught by a stinging hail-shower, would seek shelter under the lee of an old, half dismantled “Horse, Cow and Pig-Market,” of which the wild wind rattled and shook the loose timbers as if to carry them sky-high.

  Of the large fortune he had amassed—the fortune so happily invested, so carefully husbanded—he had been able to recover a bare three thousand pounds. The unprincipled scoundrel in whose charge he had left it—on Purdy’s equally unprincipled advice—had fleeced him of all else. On this pitiful sum, and a handful of second-rate shares which might bring him in the equivalent of what he had formerly spent in the year on books, or Mary on her servants and the running of the nurseries, he had now to start life anew: to provide a home, to feed, clothe, educate his children, pay his way. One thing was clear: he must set up his plate again with all dispatch; resume the profession he had once been so heartily glad to retire from. And his first bitterness and resentment over, he was only too thankful to have this to fall back on.

  The moot question was, where to make the start; and in the course of the several anxious debates he had with himself on this subject, he became ever more relieved that Mary was not with him. Her absence gave him a freer hand. For, if he knew her, she would be all in favour of his settling up-country, dead against his trying to get a footing in Melbourne. Now he was as ready as any man could be, to atone to her for the straits to which he had brought her. But—he must be allowed to meet the emergency in his own way. It might not be the wisest or the best way; but it was the only one he felt equal to.

  Bury himself alive up-country, he could and would not!. . . .not if she talked till all was blue. He saw her points, of course: they were like herself. . . .entirely practical. There were, she would argue, for every opening in Melbourne ten to be found in the bush, where doctors were scarce, and twice and three times the money to be made there. Living-expenses would be less, nor would he need to keep up any style. Which was true enough. . . .as far as it went. What, womanlike, she would overlook, or treat as of slight importance, was the fact that he had also his professional pride to consider. He with his past to condemn himself to the backwoods! Frankly, he thought he would be doing not only himself, but his children after him, an injury, did he agree to anything of the kind. No! he was too good for the bush.

  But the truth had still another facet. Constrained, at his age, to buckle to again, he could only, he believed, find the necessary courage under conditions that were not too direly repellent. And since, strive as he might, he could not break down Mary’s imagined disapproval, he threw himself headlong into the attempt to get things settled—irrevocably settled—before she arrived; took to scouring the city and its environs, tramping the inner and outer suburbs,
walking the soles off his boots and himself to a shadow, to find a likely place. Ruefully he turned his back on the sea at St. Kilda and Elsternwick, the pleasant spot of earth in which he once believed he had found a resting place; gave the green gardens of Toorak a wide berth—no room there for an elderly interloper!—and, stifling his distaste, explored the outer darkness of Footscray, Essendon, Moonee Ponds. But it was always the same. If he found what he thought a suitable opening, there was certain not to be a house within cooee fit for them to live in.

  What finally decided him on the pretty little suburb of Hawthorn—after he had thoroughly prowled and nosed round, to make sure he would have the field to himself—was not alone the good country air, but the fact that, at the junction of two main streets—or what would some day be main streets, the place being still in the making—he lit on a capital building lot, for sale dirt-cheap. For a doctor no finer position could be imagined—and in fancy he ran up the house that was to stand there. Of brick, two storeys high, towering above its neighbours, it would face both ways, be visible to all corners. The purchase of the land was easily effected—truth to tell, only too easily! He rather let himself be blarneyed into it. The house formed the stumbling-block. He sped from firm to firm; none would touch the job under a couple of thousand. In vain he tried to cut down his requirements. Less than two sitting-rooms they could not possibly do with, besides a surgery and a waiting-room. Four bedrooms, a dressing-room or two, a couple of bathrooms were equally necessary; while no house of this size but had verandah and balcony to keep the sun off, and to serve as an outdoor playroom for the children.

  There was nothing for it, in the long run, but to put his pride in his pocket and take the advice given him on every hand: to build, as ninety-nine out of a hundred did here, through one of the numerous Building Societies that existed to aid those short of ready money. But it was a bitter pill for a man of his former wealth to swallow. Nor did it, on closer acquaintance, prove by any means the simple affair he had been led to believe. In the beginning, a thousand was the utmost he felt justified in laying down. But when he saw all that was involved he contrived, after much anxious deliberation, to stretch the thousand to twelve hundred, taking out a mortgage at ten per cent, with regular repayment of capital.