Inheritance Feud

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

She met Theon as he came down the path from the door, while she was in the act of dismounting; thus unprepared, Clairette lapsed into the cheerful, unfortunate, aggressive manner she used with the visiting poor. "I was passing," she told him, and accorded him a vigorous handshake. It must be made evident from the beginning, she told herself, that she could view the situation in intelligent terms. Her small eyes flickered briefly towards the house-windows; there was no sign of the mistress.

Theon, who had had no idea who Clairette might be until informed, could have told her already that he would know her again; she stank. He muttered some courtesy, and did his best to entertain so unexpected and eccentric a visitor. He could not, however, apart from anything else, be cordial to Godfrey Devenham's half-sister; and when Clairette called a second time, made it clear to her that her visits were unwel come. To his extreme displeasure and discomfort, she received the rebuke with loud laughter, and a kind of coyness that made his skin rise.

Thereafter there was hardly a week when Theon was free of her. It would have seemed incredible to Hermione Deven ham, herself in former days so often flayed by her cousin's bitter tongue, that he should want to be rid of anyone and yet be unable to contrive it. To Hermione, the delicate, fragile image of the woman she had been reared to resemble would not endure the roughness of denial; a rejected female shrank, in confused virginity, back like a snail inside its shell. But on Theon's first tentative and, later, open rudeness Clairette thrived, robust as a mutton-chop; like some form of life that flourishes best under the knife, flame, or whip she would writhe, and presently give her loud laugh and come on again; she brushed herself against him frequently, so that, as he con fessed to Livia later, he was fain to have his clothes sponged down and hung out in the air. But nothing he could say or do would dissuade Miss Bowes, now consumed by the abiding fire of true love.

During the course of their acquaintance she obtained, by some means which evaded Kitty's vigilance, a copy of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. This brought about a re volution, or perhaps modification, in the thought-processes of Clairette herself; women were no longer born to be slaves, to marry or be old maids only. Every woman had a right to her chosen lover; Mary herself had demonstrated this. That Mary had borne her Godwin a child in the process did not concern Clairette meantime; she was obsessed by theories, never facts. She lectured Theon on the rights of woman till he was al most physically sick of her; if, he was beginning to think, laying the little b***h on her back would get rid of her, he'd do it, perhaps, and be quit of the affair. But he suspected that this would not, in female reckoning, be the end; and he had in any case no appetite for Clairette Bowes's seduction.

The family at Baron could not, by now, be ignorant of the rides Clairette continued to make each day; they had, she told Theon, got Godfrey to speak to her, and as a rule she could deny poor Godfrey nothing, but this time she'd told him, firmly, that her life was henceforth her own. "Mama is one of those females brought up in a sheltered, ignorant fashion, by an earlier generation, and has no notion of reality or breadth of thought," she told Theon, and he, caught be tween a yawn and a laugh, told her not to be a goose; she could have no idea, he said, what she was talking about. Had she not been as unattractive, and as persistent, he could, he was aware, have treated her as a brother might have done, and laughed her out of it; but Clairette was impossible, a being for whom there was an unprintable word in ancient Greek.

She was cruel also, and snobbish in her narrow way; once while she was there, Livia had come out, thinking there was nobody; she didn't as a rule show herself when anyone came. Theon himself had spoken naturally to her, and asked her something: Clairette had thrust in, addressed Livia like a servant, and sent her hurrying back to the house. Theon was deeply angry. The man Samson's appearance elicited no such direct response from Clairette; she saw him once or twice going about their daily concerns. Once, however, when she and Theon were alone again, she made it clear that Sam son's dark skin disgusted her. "Why that?" he said, wryly determined to let her trip her

self up over her often-expressed themes of equality and free dom for all men and, presumably, women. "He is a member of the human family of whom, you say, you have a high opinion." She was stuffed with Rousseau at the time. "Oh," pouted Clairette, "they're different, somehow. They're nearer the brute creation," and it was thereafter that Theon decided how greatly he loathed her; she had not even the courage of her blue-stocking convictions. Besides, she was Devenham's sister; and he had sworn re

venge on Devenham. The generous freedom of the dower house had made his own grudge deepen; to have to be be holden to a cripple for charity, as though he himself were a beggar! To have to mind his ways there had, by some means he had himself forgotten, come a trickle of informed comment about the two elders' Baron visit, and their com plaint about Livia. It was begging the question to say that Devenham had taken no action; he'd been given the right to. To wither his prosperity, deface his honour, drag his parvenu name in the dust; father his heirs, ruin his undeserved con tentment, his smug English security!

Such thoughts had often come to Theon since the time he was alone, staring out sightlessly beyond the brazen sky and sea of the Antipodes, thinking of Baron.

About that time Samson, who had been away for a few days to purchase necessaries in town, returned, with braggart stories of himself in the whorehouses.

He sat by the fire quaffing small-ale, regaling Theon, who never took him at such times with full seriousness, with ribald tales impossible of reality, or at least well larded with lies. To Samson he himself was Casanova, Hercules, the god of love and his own namesake. The w****s, he stated as he always did, had shown him to one another, marvelling at the great size and potency of his parts. "And to think the French would have taken them!" Samson reminded himself happily. was, at such times, the small boy he had once been; much He about him was indestructibly childlike, despite the subject. He continued to relate, with the artless pleasure of his Irish an cestors and of a long line of n***o forebears from the Ivory Coast, other adventures he said had been his while he was away. Theon continued smiling, but had ceased fully to listen. What Samson kept inside his breeches, even if it were all only half true, should quell Clairette if such an outcome were ever possible.

He tensed suddenly. Why not? he thought, and began to grin, so that Samson thought it was with pleasure at his tales. By evening, the plan Theon had felt growing in his head was almost perfected. It would take time, more than a day or two, perhaps even a week or two; but, in the meantime, he himself could become almost resigned to the inevitable sessions with Clairette.

"You quote the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft; you say all women should take a lover. Yet you yourself would never have the courage so to flout your upbringing. You are a coward, for all your fine words."

Clairette maintained her catlike rubbing against his sleeve; she enjoyed the contact. "I'd take you," she told him, using the boldness of an emancipated woman; the world was chang ing, soon women like herself would be pioneers, and not "Would you?" he said, smiling and half aiding her. "Where and how?" It was like, he thought, some sickly game played by children, for their diversion; how he wished she would go!

"You could show me a time and place." The secretive eyes gazed possessively at him. How handsome he looked, in his familiar shabby cloak! Dear Theon, he always wore it. A time and place; not here, where at any moment somebody might come down the path, that dreadful blackamoor or even somebody looking for her from Baron. So Mary Wollstone craft would have spoken, calm and unafraid, to her lover; how else were poor women to indicate an understanding of such matters? At the same time, a tingling excitement was mount ing in Clairette's veins; Mr. Setoun, let alone Mr. McIntyre, had been far from eliciting it. But Theon Doon, seated there in pale wrapped mystery and asking her to be his lover! This was life as it should be lived, grasped at with both hands. What did Mama and Godfrey matter? They'd done it them selves, hadn't they? Ah, to love like the great lovers of the world, like Abélard and Héloïse, Catallus and Lesbia When the conditions he outlined were made clear to her, however, she pouted. To go to the old hayshed, up there on the hill, by night, and lie down like a milkmaid? To do that, and keep silent, as he said, and afterwards go back to Baron by the side postern, like a servant-girl on an assignation? For the first time, Clairette wondered if the Wollstonecraft pre cepts were entirly consonant with dignity; her lip trembled.

"If it's so dark, how will I know-" There were only the stars to light the night sky now, no moon; she mustn't bring a lantern, of course, for fear of being stopped. But all the same

She heard Theon answer smoothly. "I will wear my white wig, so that you'll see it, and this cloak. You know the cloak, don't you?" He smiled, and she could have sworn his bright eyes watched her; the expression in them was, she suddenly thought, like a triumphing devil's. She shivered, and heard him laugh.

"Won't that suffice? I declare, you are only half in earnest about wanting a lover."

"I am not-I am not!" She clung to his cloak, twining her fingers in it like a child in search of familiar certainty. She raised her face to him. "You will-truly-be there?"

He mocked her. "I will wager you a sixpence that when I

come tomorrow night, and put out my hand into the hay, I

find it empty. You will not have the courage to come." That fired her, and she remembered the dark would be the same to him as day. They would love, then, together to morrow. Tomorrow would begin a new life.