Inheritance Feud

Chapter 44

Chapter 44

He had breakfasted, hungrily and well, on Abel's ham and eggs and coffee; and shaved with the hot water the awkward maidservant brought. Afterwards, when not the maid but a talkative urchin came to carry away the shaving-bowl, Mor ven, feeling better, reached out a hand and ruffled the boy's thick hair, and asked his name idly. He'd be about seven years old.

"William, sir," said the boy, fascinated by the sight of the brown man rather than the blind, whose disability he hadn't noticed. He had heard of n*****s, but had never seen one before. "Are you from Africa?"

"No, further off," said Theon. The question had amused him and released, with the well-being the food and the shave had brought, a sense of power. The joy of returning life, hardly circumscribed by blindness-had his will not hardened to meet it, and his fingers and ears grown cunning?-filled him with the awareness of being in his own country again, with Baron a stone's throw off, or little more. He tossed the child sixpence.

"Have you any other name, my urchin?" He heard the boy catch the coin, and bite it providently with his teeth; the amusement grew in him. "William Judd, sir," the name's owner said.

"Indeed?" Had Abel lost no time in extracting an earnest from his widow? Old Aaron, if he had known of that, would be surprised. Aaron had always said Abel would never father a child; he'd had an injury to the testicles in boyhood. Every one knew of that. The puzzle grew in Theon's mind, and he detained the boy a moment. "Who is your mother?" he asked him.

"Mistress Judd," said Wiliam, wriggling to be gone. He was disappointed in the question; this customer had looked as if he would have other things to say than most folk had. It was like the kirk elders, who'd come by now and again with their long faces and black coats, and lay a damp hand on his hair and bid him mind his letters and his Bible, for he had a kind father now to tend him. William disliked letters and the Bible bored him. He repressed a derisive noise; Abel, or pos sibly his mother, would beat him, he knew, if he caused

trouble with the customers, and this one had a coach. But the gentleman who'd given him sixpence and who had a face like one of carved stone saints they hadn't managed to hack off the wall in church, as it was part of the pillar, kept asking questions. William was certain now there was something queer about his eyes; they looked at and yet through one. The man asked what his mother's name had been before she mar ried. William was looking round for a way of escape; just then he saw the maid Tib come out wiping her hands on her apron. She might have been sent to look for him. He shouted, and at once Tib called, as he'd hoped she would do, "William! You're to come in, your father says, at once; who told you to wait about there? They can't keep him abed, and it's best to let him help," she said cheerfully to Theon, in the way Grattan maids had of caring for no man's rank, even should he be the Provost. And thinking of that, there'd been a terrible to-do a week or two back at Maddon Magna, where the Provost's brother-in-law there, a sour-faced elder named Priddy, had lost his position, and had been fined and publicly disgraced, for pestering young girls at Emmett's orphanage. Imagine it! Mistress Judd, she'd smiled when she heard, and said, "Ay, I know," but that was all.

She was about to lead William away by the hand now,

dragging back again, as he kept doing, to look at the gentle

man about to step again into his coach; the horses had been

fed and watered, and wouldn't need changing as they said

they weren't going far. But the blackfellow stepped in the

way, and Tib drew a breath like a squeal; what did that one

want? "Doon asked you for a name," he said to the boy.

"You did not give it." Tib giggled; she was enjoying the episode. Perhaps Samson, as she'd heard the other call him, would be along one day for ale; that'd bring customers in, for a sight... She heard William call out the name Theon had waited to hear; as children do, he made a song of it, repeating it again and again as he followed Tib across the sunlit cobbles. He was no longer unwilling to go in.

"Livia," he was saying. "Livia."

And the name Theon had waited to hear echoed about the yard of the Fleece, which he could no longer see; but joy lit up his face so that it would have seemed to William, had he been looking, that the stone saint saw celestial visions.

But Theon Doon said nothing, and stepped, still smiling, into the coach. After he had heard the coach drive away Abel went up

stairs again; Livia had got up already and was dressing, seated now in stays and undergown, brushing her hair. The swishing sound filled the room with rhythm and scent; the loose hair lay about her shoulders, black and thick. He went to the window, no longer trusting himself to look at Livia with her hair loose, and her taut fine body with arms upraised, brushing at it. He stared out of the window; one couldn't see the yard from here, only the corner where the alleyway jutted.

"You were up early," she said to him. "Was it a customer?" "Ay." He ought to tell her, he knew, who it had been. Per haps in a moment he'd do so; but now, as if for the last time, he was conscious of the comfort and cleanly intimacy of the room behind him, and of his wife seated therein. If he told her, would things ever be the same again? Yet she'd be bound to know soon; he'd be back, would Theon.

"Livia-" He turned to look at her; she'd twisted up her shining hair now in a knot; presently she'd put a little cap on it, then shrug into her overgown and apron. Neat and clean, she always looked, a worthy helpmeet, a good worker, Livia;

but it hadn't been only that. "Did Tib do all they wanted? I thought I'd come down and see."

"Ay." Why couldn't he tell her? But the words wouldn't come easily. This plan of Theon's that he'd heard the other day; this storing up in warehouses in Leith instead of under stones and about the moor, and employing packmen; it was risky, maybe. They'd all get rich, Tom Neilson said. But he himself had doubts-Ah, that! It wasn't that that exercised him now; it was that he, a stoutening middle-aged publican with a bald head, was in agony lest his wife leave him for Theon Doon. It wasn't loving a woman, he knew, to force her to stay if she'd sooner not. But for all they'd built here together

A sound came in the doorway; William. He'd left it too late. He turned away, knowing he couldn't prevent whatever might happen now. It had always been like that, and he was one of those who couldn't stop the world from going its way. Poor Abel, they'd always called him; his father and everyone. He knew. Poor Abel. And now

"A man gave me sixpence," said William. "His name was Doon."

Afterwards she said to Abel, "You knew, didn't you, love, that he was coming back? You knew the other night." And shebent to tidy the place at the mirror, and he couldn't see her face. "Ay." There seemed no more to say. The name she'd used

had been from habit. "You didn't tell me," she said now, as if to herself. Then, "Has he changed much, now he's blind?"

He said suddenly, bitterly, "Theon won't ever change in a hundred years," and turned and pushed his way, blind as Theon, out of the room, past William who was still turning his sixpence about in his hands, and downstairs. Later he heard Livia come down as usual and the sounds of the house

work commence, as if nothing had happened.