Inheritors Read online

  Inheritors

  Brian Penton

  1936

  For Cecil Mann

  At last the old man died

  And left his sons a legacy,

  Of hate and fear and broken pride,

  To wear beneath their finery:

  And the dream's lie, and the pain

  Of the seed that dies to be born again.

  —Andrew Pryor.

  The characters in this book are fictional. So are the institutions, mines, banks, etc., named and described.

  This is not to say that the book is a work of imagination. On the contrary. To acknowledge the memoirs, travel books, histories, letters, and manuscripts on which the author has drawn for the details of background and period would require a big volume. He would like to confess his indebtedness especially to Sir Timothy Coghlan's LABOUR AND INDUSTRY IN AUSTRALIA, to Professor Shann's ECONOMIC HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA, to Ann Williams' history of the Vigilantes of San Francisco, which opens up a little known by-blow of Australian affairs, and to the truly splendid pictures of life, industry, and the eccentrics of the outback to be found in the writings of C. E. W. Bean.

  Part I: The Family at Cabell's Reach

  Chapter One: The Old Man

  Under the ferocious heat of the Queensland midsummer afternoon the iron roof cracked and strained. The family sitting round the table in the big dining-room of Cabell's Reach stared down anxiously at their plates as though expecting the flimsy shell of rafters to splinter over their heads. About them lay the debris of festivities into which fear had intruded, petrifying them with their hands full of tinselled paper and the gewgaws vomited by bon-bons. Against the distress, anger, or resentment on their faces, these wilted proclamations of “Peace and Goodwill” and “Merrie Christmas” had the sardonic prominence of some monument of human aspiration and piety left standing in a landscape rifted by war.

  Derek Cabell, glaring at the bowed heads of his wife and children, brought his fist down on the arm of the chair again and cried, “Shams! Makebelieves! Lies, I tell you. Lies, lies, lies, like everything else in the country.” He sucked the breath back through his lips and held it for another long silence before he growled, “Christmas! In a hog-pen—in a den of thieves, upstarts, scum!”

  Emma, at the bottom of the table, pushed a wisp of hair from her damp face, glanced at him impatiently, a trifle defiantly, reached out to pull the fly-cover over the remains of the pudding, and edged into her chair again, primly upright with her hands in her lap. Beside her Larry, their eldest son, lanky, morose, dark, turned a cup of tea in his big hands, sunburnt, work-stained, with the tar caked under the nails. Next to Cabell, Larry's younger brother James fidgeted a finger under his high, stiff collar, opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it, brushed a speck of confetti from the lapel of his coat, and concentrated his disapproving stare on the wall.

  For half a minute longer the only movement at the table was from the youngest boy, Geoffrey. His plump hand stabbed a fork into pellets of bread and his washed-out little eyes flashed sly glances towards his father. The girl, Harriet, on her father's right, pressed herself back in her chair, with one hand on the edge of the table and the other at her throat. Her eyes were fixed on her father's hands, clutched round the arms of his chair, the knuckles shining whitely. In the grip of those hands she seemed to find the essence of some terrifying proposition. Her eyes widened looking at them, and the heat flush deepened on her face.

  Thus they awaited the next spasm of a familiar outburst—brought on them, as always, by some trifle, some chance word—the bitterness of which confirmed dim suspicions they did not want to have confirmed, rumours that threw the shadows of a dishonourable past across their young lives. Fights, bloodshed, trickeries, shameful liaisons, and all the inhumanities of a time when men had struggled for a foothold in the new land—out of this dark drama their parents had come, scarred and stained by it, twisted and embittered. Strange things were said of their father, Rusty Guts Cabell, who arrived in this valley in 1847, forty-one years ago, with a handful of sheep and cattle, slaughted the blacks, fought everybody, dug himself in—very strange things that threatened to burden them for life. But still stranger things loomed intimidatingly behind the personality of the old landtaker himself, behind his outbursts of irascible protestation. His shifty eyes, always sliding sideways to door and window as though he expected someone to come creeping on him, his secretive habits, the ugly marks on his face, but above all the eagerness to justify himself, which spoke through all his outcries against the country—these things hinted at alarming mysteries, mysteries he seemed always threatening to reveal, to concrete as inescapable facts, as disgraceful episodes in their own personal histories, that would shut them off for ever from their fellows and from all hope of fulfilling life's bright promises.

  To Cabell, glancing from face to face, their silent opposition and dislike were as tangible as the dusty air in his lungs, as the glare of sunlight beating in through the rattans on the veranda. It exasperated and saddened him, made him want to take hold of them and shake them, made him droop his head and sigh.

  He laid his hand palm upwards on the table in a gesture of appeal and muttered argumentatively, “There are two sides to every story—if anybody took the trouble to trace it back.”

  But in the rigid mask he turned on them he left no chink through which they might have pried out the forgivable motives of his life. His left eye was blind and patched with a raw-hide leather patch, the right peered out through lids narrowed to a slit by forty-six years in the sun of a land where an iron roof ten miles away flashes back cruel thumbs of light to gouge the eyeballs. Forty-six years of the bullocking labour that makes a man drain even the muscles of his mouth for the extra ounce of energy to move a bogged dray-wheel, for the extra spark of endurance to survive some inhuman ordeal, had pressed his lips into a thin, tight line. A weal bitten into his cheek by a myall's spear dragged his mouth up at the left corner into a mirthless, supercilious smile. Healing dry and hard, the wound had left a furrow of red cicatrice to stand out, like a fresh raddle stain, against the pallor of his face and the inky blackness of his beard. No flesh remained to soften the gaunt cheek-bones or the line of his jaw. His neck rose out of his collar like a bone, bleached and stiff. And dominating every other feature—underlining, with its hawklike immensity and truculence, the calculating glance of his eye, the challenging twist of his mouth, the hostile jut of his chin—his beak of a nose curved its sharp bridge out and down, and its indrawn nostrils suggested strain, expectation, and ceaseless irritability.

  The father's words passed a slight stir round the table. Harriet turned her eyes away quickly. Larry grunted. Emma's impatience leaked into her fingers, become suddenly busy among the litter of food and plates on the table. Geoffrey slumped deeper into his chair behind his barrier of sly glances. But reaching James the stir became articulate. He licked his lips, pushed his chair back and said, “Well—if we've finished I'll go and write some letters.”

  He spoke out the brutal intolerance of their youth resenting the dead hand of the past and the law which visited the sins of the father upon his children.

  Turning in his chair to focus his one eye, Cabell found a jaw as obstinate as his own pushed out towards him.

  “No, we haven't finished, you puppy,” he snapped. “You'll please to hold your tongue and listen.”

  The boy tried to hide the nervousness of his hands in his vast cravat. “But we've heard it before,” he said doggedly, “and it's—it's. . .” But he baulked at telling the old man that his life, with its stories of violence and suffering, was unpleasant to the ears of a new generation, a new and gentler code of ethics and social decency. His eyes wavered and he finished, “. . . so hot sitting in here.”

&nbs
p; Cabell sniffed. “Too hot for your namby-pamby hide, is it? Well you'll get broken in. You'll sweat the starch out of that clerk's collar the same as I had to.”

  The fresh young face, with full red lower lip and clear eyes and rounded chin, seemed suddenly to hang at the end of a long vista of years—his own face before this country had clawed it. “Perhaps you don't believe I was ever the spit of you. Ask your mother here. Or that you'll ever be the spit of me now. Wait and see.” He found malicious satisfaction in the thought. This damned generation, with its fancy clothes and soft hands and everything made clear and easy for it, was beginning to put on airs and look down its nose. But it wasn't going to be all so clear and easy as that. They'd learn. Even saints learnt. Even kings. Life was bigger than men's little jumped-up notions of themselves. It could give. It could take away. It could make and break. So, musing on this, he had a moment's relief from the obscure annoyance which rose in him whenever he looked at their young faces. Yes, they would grow old too. “Chockablock with skite,” he growled. “I know. I was your age once. Think you know it all, that you'll be able to get through life better than anybody before. Think you'll come out at the other end without a spot on your dandy shirt or some mark like this about you.” He tapped the scar on his cheek. “Huh, you'll find out in good time. I was young once too.”

  Young once! The rush of memories jostling his senses dazed him. He felt cold English sea mists blowing in his eyes—saw the yellow burst of broom on Dorset hills in May—himself as ardent with unadventured hopes. . . Then he was lying on a roadside watching convicts in dirty yellow jackets tramp through a haze of red dust—he was shouting at a roomful of men with unfriendly faces—fighting for his life—driving sheep, driving bullocks, driving men—always angry and fighting and driving. The vision of nearly sixty years flashed by in less than the instant it took him to run his finger down the furrow on his cheek, and left him clutching the overhang of the table-cloth, with his heart leaping in his chest, as though he had just crossed a precipice and only now seen the risk he had run. He had to clear his throat to say, with slow conviction, “You're lucky if you don't end up on the gallows. Just damned lucky—that's all.”

  In outraged silence they considered this verdict on his life. It wrung from James the courage to protest, “But many men HAVE lived upright lives and died honest.”

  “Not many round these parts,” Cabell answered. “I've seen it from the start. I've seen Pat Dennis in chains and now his sons could buy me five times over. I knew the McFarlanes' old man when he was nearly on his uppers, and Sir Michael Flanagan when he had hardly two pennies to rub together. You don't think they lined their pockets by observing the Commandments, do you?”

  James flushed. “Sir Michael Flanagan is—well, I like him.”

  “You do? Never heard you knew him; did he tell you what he did to me?”

  James swallowed, flushed deeper, and talked at his plate. “You told us that—about the land and. . . all that. But. . . perhaps there was some mistake. . . misunderstanding. Anyway, it was years ago, before I was born, or Harriet, or Geoffrey. We don't think. . .” He tried awkwardly to find some place for his hands on the table, finally thrusting them away in his pocket.

  The old man drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair and cleared his throat impatiently as he always did when somebody else talked too long. “Well?”

  “We don't think anything that happened so long ago concerns us. Not properly speaking. Really, sir, it's not just—nor proper. You can't ask us to go about and not talk to anybody who quarrelled with you before we were born. You quarrelled with so many, sir. We think. . .”

  “To the devil with what you think,” Cabell roared. “I'm telling you now for good and all, Flanagan's a Dublin rat and a shyster. I won't have his name spoken in this house again, see.”

  The water drip, drip, dripping into the earthenware jar of the filter on the veranda, the scraping of the yellow bone studs in the starched front of Cabell's shirt as he breathed, counted off twenty slow seconds while the eyes round the table fixed expectantly on James. Then Geoffrey chuckled. His little eyes, sideways on his brother, glinted with delight.

  “It's not old Flanagan you like so much, eh, Jimmie? Tell the truth, you humbug.”

  James glared. “Hold your tongue, you.”

  Cabell shifted his eye questioningly between them, caught the flutter of Harriet's finger across her lips, James's answering frown. Secret signs. Conspiracies in his own family “Here, what's this?”

  “Some joke of Geoffrey's. Nothing.”

  Geoffrey smiled. “What about you sitting out on the veranda with her at the Todhunters' eh? That wasn't nothing.”

  “That's a lie.”

  “Sitting with who?” Cabell demanded. “Out with it, boy”

  “Jennis Bowen,” Geoffrey said.

  “Oh, Geoffrey!” Harriet cried. “You sneak!”

  Cabell gave his daughter a worried glance, then demanded of the table at large, “Well, who's Jennis Bowen?”

  “The Bowens of Penine Downs, of course,” Geoffrey told him.

  “Flanagan's granddaughter.”

  James began to rise.

  “Sit down. Explain yourself,” Cabell said.

  James glanced guiltily at the others. “It's nothing, sir. Really it's nothing at all. Can't a chap talk to a girl and. . .” But he stopped and burst out rebelliously, “Of course I sat with her. Why shouldn't I? I said I liked Sir Michael and I do. And I like her. I intend to ask her to marry me as soon as I. . .”

  Cabell rose. “A conspiracy right under my nose. And with Flanagan! The fellow who robbed me of my land. God Almighty, what next?”

  “It's no conspiracy,” James protested. “I've been intending to tell you since I came home. About the mine too. Really. . .” He gestured apologetically. “I can't go on studying mines, sir. I've got no aptitude. Sir Michael has promised—suggested—if I study law. . . He says he would use his influence to get me into politics. He is sorry for that quarrel. Genuinely sorry. He would push me out of friendliness for you.”

  “Shut your mouth.” The old man cleared a space before him with a sweep of his arm. “You've been intriguing with Flanagan, eh?”

  “I haven't been intriguing with anybody,” James said sulkily. “Jack Bowen is studying at the University. I met him there.”

  “He'd've been digging peat in Irish bogs if his grandfather hadn't stolen the price of a fare to Australia. Studying—bah! To become another politician and parasite like his grandfather, I suppose. Politics! Rubbish, boy! What this country needs is engineers, not log-rollers.”

  “Jack Bowen is a gentleman,” James said bravely.

  “A gentleman whose grandmother came out with her convict husband and had him flogged to death.”

  There was a nervous shuffling round the table. It voiced itself in James's grimace and cry, “For heaven's sake, sir, can't we forget all that? We—we want to start a fresh leaf. That's all over and done with.”

  “Hmn, well.” Cabell glanced furtively down the table to his wife, and rubbed his beard. “Yes, yes. But they're not good friends for you, that mob,” he said hastily, “putting crazy notions in your head. You go straight ahead studying the mine business and we won't say any more about Flanagan. Understand?”

  “But sir. . .”

  “Don't argue. You don't understand. The teat's hardly out of your mouth. But you ought to have the nous to see that there are millions in that mountain—millions!” A curious elation came into his voice, a kind of ecstasy. “Before many more Christmas Days are gone it will be mine. Enough to buy a Carnegie out, to make a king crawl after you.”

  “But sir. . .” James looked at his father and protests, arguments, appeals melted in his throat, the passion of his own desires in his heart, as he realized once more how completely the old man's wilfulness and greed blinded and deafened him to all arguments and appeals and all desires except his own tremendous lust to get and to hold.

  “But we've got t
o hurry,” he was muttering. “Don't you see how they're raking the stuff out as fast as they can. Listen!” He grabbed James's arm. “Hear them?”

  Faintly across the valley came, from time to time, the rumble of distant explosions.

  “Even to-day—Christmas Day—they waste no time. They rob me day and night.”

  “And enrich you too,” James said, more to protest against his father's insane phantom-mongering, greed, and hatred, to the service of which his life was being enslaved, than to state a fact.

  “A paltry seventh share. When it's all mine by rights. I came here first, didn't I? I made this valley so men could live in it? On that very mountain I shot down a tribe of blacks.” He dug his fingers into James's arm. “But I'll get rid of them—if I have to gamble everything I own.”

  Emma's face, tattooed with brown wrinkles, stiffened. “Gamble the Reach? You couldn't be so mad.”

  Cabell glanced at her, at Larry, sitting with his elbows on the table, and his sullen face, propped in his hand, staring down at his cup. “By God I would.” And as a sort of challenge he said, “I'd do anything. ANYTHING. Haven't you said it often enough, you two.”

  Harriet covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. “Oh, what a family! Is there never to be anything except strife amongst us? Even on Christmas Day?”

  In dismay, anxiously, Cabell gazed at the crown of her head where the rift of parting split the shining masses of brown hair, reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You don't understand, child. One of these days you'll be worth your weight in gold a hundred times. Then you'll know.”

  Under his hand, his eye brooding over her, she shuddered—and under the eyes of her mother and her brothers watching her jealously.

  Chapter Two: Brand

  Harriet was nineteen then. She was delicate, with a pale, transparent skin and no blood in her lips. In the crude old house, hewn from the bush with axe and paling knife, its walls buckled by the heat, its rats and cockroaches, its smell of sheep and dust and sweating men, her peculiar beauty was as strange as the English flowers that blossomed with sickly haste in the garden. Cabell had planted them there, against the background of grey scrub and grey immense distances, coaxed them out of the unfriendly soil, with the absorption of a man who tries to evoke dreams of an unattainable beloved from a stick of opium. Just so had he tended his daughter, till she bloomed with an exotic delicacy and refinement which fulfilled some frustrated longing of his own.