Inheritance Feud

Chapter 33

Chapter 33

But Theon was alive. He moved against her breast and flung a hand out with a jerky, uncertain gesture, and tried to speak and to raise his eyes to her. It was, in some way, like the movement of a blind and fluttering thing, a maimed moth, a wingless bird, a mole trapped in daylight. For Mor ven was blind, though they would not yet know it, nor would he himself till he lay in prison, in a darkness unendingly dark, know it. For now they would take him, and her, in the end, on a cart to the town jail and carry him inside. Then they would say to Livia, as they had said to her mother also when she stood weeping for a man whose blood stained her skirts, and whose child moved already in her womb,

"You can't go with him, lass. Get you along home." And she stood outside the gate with the wind whipping her blood-stained skirts, and townsfolk beginning to stare at her.

Livia did not know where she went after that at first. The time between leaving Theon and turning, again, out of town was confused in her later memory, a limitless space of bleak ness, wind, the dark and the rain. Soaked and footsore, she had found herself at last at the Mains road-end again, with, rearing ghostlike beyond out of the dawn, Baron. It would be about time for her to begin, in the ordinary way, to light fires and carry water at the Mains. She shivered, and looked helplessly from the road to the house, then turned and, for no reason which her mind could ascertain, trudged up the slope towards Baron gate and went in.

The great house was already awake in the dawn; in the servants' attics a few lights showed. This place, which Theon had loved as he would never love any woman, was stirring into life with as much fickleness as a woman would do, who'd for gotten him. Livia stood there watching the ordained, orderly progress of a day-by-day world forever removed from her, a rich, secure world served by footmen and grooms, housemaids and the upper hierarchy, who still slept. Somewhere, Miss Hermione also would be sleeping, in a bed with satin curtains and her new husband by her. Livia kept her mind on Miss Hermione, her feeling for the other girl nothing but love now, kindness and a sort of interdependence: they had both of them been necessary to Theon.

Miss Hermione was secure, at any rate. She'd give birth to Theon's son at last on feather-down. He would be reared Livia's mind did not encompass anything but the son who had been Theon's wish like a prince. A prince to inherit. Already she thought of the child's father, as irrevocably dead, as having to die. If it didn't happen of his wound in prison, they'd hang Theon.

Standing there, she felt her own child move in her womb. It was a week yet till the birth, or should be, but already he was stirring restively; he'd be, no doubt, in the event, an active wretch, taking all of her strength in the bearing and the old woman at the Mains-she was yellow as a guinea these nursing of him. What was to become of her meantime? That days-wouldn't keep her in the house five minutes, once she knew. There wasn't, for all the personal property Livia had left there an old pair of shoes and her shawl, and comb, and two shifts which might have been useful-any reason to go back. But where else to go to?

It was then she remembered Abel Judd, and what he'd said to her that time about coming to him at the Fleece, if she ever had to. Then, she thought wryly, it hadn't seemed likely; per haps by now he'd have changed his mind. Men did; but, may be, she should risk it. She was a good worker, she knew; she would, in any case, give value for shelter and a bite of food; scrub and sand the floors, wash and polish the ale-mugs, launder Abel's linen. All of it, and more, if only he'd take her in at least till Theon's baby was able to walk. After that, they'd follow the road, the two of them, if they had to.

The remote future had never seemed real to Livia. All of it, future and past, merged in a sum total of experience in her veins; for the first time in long, she thought now of her mother. Once long ago she'd taken the road, without her man, and his death-blood on her skirts, and had given birth to her child in the end with less hope than there seemed to be now, with the prospect at least of Abel's roof over her own head. All of it gave Livia fresh heart as she turned and, with out even glancing over the Mains hedge, walked straight past the house and back again to the road, and the way she had come.

I

PAUL MELROSE, aged almost twenty, had ridden over early from Maddon by way of the town. By now, it was afternoon. He drew in at last where the gaunt, empty half-ruin of the smithy cottage stood, untenanted since Aaron Judd had left it some years back and gone, after all, to make his home with his remaining son Abel at the Fleece. Paul stared about him for some moments with the direct, square-set grey gaze which resembled his father's; and presently dismounted and, carefully stowing away in his greatcoat pocket a package he had brought, tied the horse's reins to the doorpost of the old smithy, and wandered into the yard. Nothing met him there but blowing straw, a sense of abandoned desolation, and a view of the sea. Paul stood awhile to look at this last un accustomed sight, thinking less of himself meantime than of his disgraced, long-absent kinsman Theon Doon.

The sea alone made one remember Theon; Paul, recalling him from his own childhood, always connected his half forgotten memory with boats. Once Theon had taken Paul out, in the days before his elder brother Peter had been killed and Papa was less watchful of his safety; they'd had a clear run on the inland tide and had surveyed Man, brooding and near, so that its secret places and inland bays, and sharp rocks, were visible. Paul cherished the remembrance of that day, which had been the last time in fact he'd seen Theon; later, he'd heard of the killing of the customs-officer, and that Mor ven himself lay in prison awaiting trial. The result of that could hardly be in doubt; again, Paul remembered his father, coming into the hall at Maddon afterwards still clad in his riding-cloak, his lined face grave.

"They will hang Theon Doon, I doubt not." But they hadn't; and whatever folk might say of Sir Sander's own activities in that matter, and the high-placed palms he'd greased, he'd got Theon sentenced instead to transportation, seven years to Botany Bay. That the sentence had been so short had been due to Theon's blindness result ing from the fight. One couldn't be too hard on a blind man; although Lord Braxfield, the hanging judge, Papa had said, had it been he who conducted the trial in Edinburgh, would have finished Theon off, blind or not. The poor devil of a customs-officer had left a wife and children; one had, Papa said, to think of those.

No one since then had heard anything of Theon in Aust ralia. It was hoped, Paul knew, that he would settle down out there, as many transported men did, and grow rich, instead of coming home. And old Aaron Judd, when at last he died, had left Theon most of his money; a surprisingly large amount, Papa said, but the blacksmith had lived frugally and, besides, had had a hand in most of the contraband-running Theon favoured. Honour among thieves, Papa had called it; no doubt old Aaron had looked on Theon as a son, as much almost as Bart Judd who'd been killed. Abel, the well-doing dest son at the Fleece, had interited almost nothing; Paul had seen him again only today.

The young man jerked his thoughts away from that recol lection, and of the other strange character who'd sat in the taproom, like a visitant from another world. His own orderly collection of tame, humdrum, everyday things, the things which made up his daily existence at Maddon, asserted them selves; since Peter had been killed it had become evident what his own life must be. Paul's stepmother, who had been Cecily Bowes, had borne her lord a yearly brood of daughters only; so many to find portions for, said poor Papa, and looked to Paul, as the young man knew well, to set himself to learn the things it would be necessary for him later, as head of the Melrose family, to know. He must begin to take an interest in the title and estates which he would one day inherit; he must not-Paul would see the old magistrate's face dark.n, remembering golden Peter, killed out hunting, breaking his neck by a fall from his horse at a wall-he must not run risks. Paul stroked his docile mount's obedient neck now; Papa would never permit him to ride anything but a gelding.

He sighed a little; Papa likewise, fearing what might happen to his only remaining son, had only allowed Paul to go last year on the Little Tour, not the Grand; to have to be content with a modified circuit of Holland and Germany, and parts of France, had not, the young man knew well, given him the polish he himself would have liked to acquire.

 Naturally shy, and acutely conscious of himself, still, as a bumpkin, the thought of today's visit to Baron was agony to him, although he tried to tell himself it was only to deliver a package to Cousin Hermione, a sovereign cure for headaches his stepmama could vouch for and had had made up specially, only today, by the apothecary at Grattan Juxta. But Cousin Hermione was so finely dressed nowadays, and kept such elegant company, that it was difficult to think of her as the sweet young girl he and Peter had both, in their different ways, loved. If only he himself could have gone to Florence, Rome and Venice as he had desired, and seen the palaces and famous paintings, and the sun on the Grand Canal of an evening, he would perhaps have been able to converse in a suitable fashion with Cousin Hermione as she was now, when she wasn't prostrated by one of her headaches.