A Difficult Young Man (8 page)

Up at Westhill Dominic was for a while at peace with himself. It was the autumn, in those parts an even lovelier time of year than the spring. The voice of a woman calling from one of the little farms on the hilltops, to her son working down in the paddock, has a bell-like sound in the clear air, and the mountains towards Lilydale and Gippsland are as serene as those in the background of a painting by Giorgione. The smoke of the gum logs, rising in a thin blue line from the chimneys, scents the whole countryside, as Provence in the winter smells of burning pinewood. Daisy, with her round-eyed worship of her handsome and wicked cousin, who however treated her with that extreme gentleness, combined with a touch of priggishness as he corrected her seat on a pony, which Dominic so often showed to children, was the most soothing companion he could have. She restored his self-respect and his innocence.

In the meantime the dividing up proceeded at Beaumanoir. Baba was annoyed that Steven, the eldest son, had all the traditional family possessions, the portraits and the furniture from Waterpark. The furniture at Westhill, except for these heirlooms, could legally have been divided, but the family though greedy were not inhuman, and were content to leave it there rather than remove the beds on which we slept. But Baba had seen there what she thought was valuable furniture, and came up with the intention of acquiring some of it. She made this reconnaisance on her own, without warning anyone. It so happened that the only good furniture at Westhill, including the portrait of the duque de Teba, had come to Laura from our grandmother Byngham. Baba arrived one afternoon when only Sarah was at home. She went round making a mental inventory, and in her bossy manner asked Sarah why these things had not been sent down to Beaumanoir to be divided up or sold, and implied that Steven was cheating his brothers and sisters.

Sarah with lively vituperation, which Baba thought an outrage from someone with no money, explained that all this furniture was Byngham and not Langton property, and made Baba look a fool. At that moment Dominic came in with Daisy. They had been out riding and picnicking since breakfast time. Perhaps because the intensity of his feeling when he was angry exhausted it, he never bore malice. Just as before he had reproved
Baba, he now reproved Sarah for speaking to her in that tone, and turning to her with every sign of affectionate welcome, invited her to stay the night. This infuriated her, that anyone should think she needed protection from the contemptible Sarah, especially by the more contemptible Dominic. She snorted and left the house, having first learned that Dominic was spending the whole of every day riding round the countryside alone with Daisy.

As soon as she returned to Melbourne she rang up Diana, and said that if she did not want Daisy
to have the same experience as her maids, she had better remove her at once from Westhill, where that fool Sarah was practically throwing her into Dominic's arms.

Diana did not know whether to dramatize the situation and rush off at once by the night train to save her daughter, or whether to dismiss Baba's warning as a piece of bourgeois stupidity. Her life was directed by whims and suggestions which were an impalpable cushion between herself and any reality in which they might have originated. She did not really believe that Daisy was in any moral danger from Dominic, but decided to pretend she did as it would be an excuse for herself and Wolfie to spend two or three days at Westhill. She would not save her daughter from ruin until the following day as there was a chicken for dinner. Then as they missed the midday train, they did not arrive until the late afternoon. The Langtons were very fond of their children, and like the sacred pelican,
frequently bled themselves on their behalf, though with Diana this bleeding was purely emotional. As they drove from Dandenong, quite forgetting the object of her journey, she was looking forward to being greeted with demonstrative affection by Daisy, but when they alighted from their hired wagonette at Westhill, the place appeared to be deserted, and Diana, deprived of her anticipated display of maternal emotion, was cross. When Sarah, returning from the farmyard with a basket of eggs, came round the corner of the house, Diana remembered why she had come, and demanded anxiously where was Daisy? Sarah said she was out riding with Dominic, and that they spent every day out riding together.

‘Are you a complete fool?' exclaimed Diana. ‘After Baba's maids.'

Sarah went for her like an angry hen, but in the middle of the discussion Daisy and Dominic came up the drive, walking their horses for the last hundred yards, as we were made to do. When they saw the Flugels they rode up to them, instead of turning into the stable yard.

‘Hullo, mummy!' cried Daisy, and she greeted Diana with all the affection she could require, and Dominic looked so cheerful and wholesome, that again Diana put Baba's warning out of her head as sheer squalid nonsense. She took Daisy into the house, leaving Dominic with Wolfie, whom she had told to give him a serious talking to. Wolfie, being pompous,
enjoyed the prospect, and was not going to be deprived of the pleasure of administering a rebuke by the fact, evident from Diana's complete change of manner, that there was no occasion for it. He began by asking:

‘Why did you take my daughter into the forest?' Although he had been twenty years in Australia, he still had a German accent, being so absorbed in his music that he could not give his full attention to the English language, and his conversation sounded rather like a Wagnerian libretto. He had anyhow a Teutonic heaviness of touch, and it is possible that with his poor command of English he used crude expressions which were wildly offensive to Dominic. If ever the latter had felt that he was a harmless member of society, it was during these few weeks at Westhill. Wolfie's insinuations were revolting to him. All his sense of responsibility and his ideas of chivalry would have made it impossible for him to treat with anything but the greatest delicacy a young girl placed in his charge, though they might not keep him from the rollicking invitations of farm girls. These ideas are old-fashioned but they were prevalent at the time. When he gathered from Wolfie what people thought of him, his soul was eclipsed by its blackest emanations. Wolfie seeing Dominic droop before his eyes, looking no doubt as he did as we drove back from Alice's funeral, was very pleased with his powers of rebuke, and
went in to Diana and said with satisfaction:

‘I have spoken to him.'

‘Oh, that's all nonsense,' said Diana carelessly. Then she heard a sound of galloping, and through the window she saw Dominic on Tamburlaine tearing off down the drive, and my pony which Daisy had been riding, and which she had asked him to take round to the stables, running loose on the croquet lawn.

‘What's Dominic doing?' she asked sharply. ‘He's let the pony loose. It's marking the lawn. Wolfie, go and take it round to the stable.'

‘I do not like horses,' said Wolfie.

Diana shrugged her shoulders, and went out and caught the pony. Tom Schmidt was in the stable yard and she asked him where Dominic had gone.

‘I don't know, Mrs Von,' said Tom, using the name the local people gave Diana behind her back, and sometimes in careless moments to her face. ‘He was leading Cortez round when suddenly he let him go, and dashed off as if something had bit him. I seen his face and he looked terrible like. Tamburlaine didn't ought to be taken out again today neither, and it'll soon be dark.'

‘You must go after him and bring him back,' said Diana. She was certain that Wolfie's ‘talk' had caused this sudden flight, and that if Dominic, as was most likely, did something unpredictable, there would be tiresome family rows.

‘I can't do that, Mrs Von,' said Tom. ‘I don't know which way he's gone. There's not a horse here that could
catch up with Tamburlaine. He'll come back when he's worked the demons out of himself. But he didn't ought to have taken Tamburlaine out again. Tamburlaine's a nice kind horse and ought to be treated proper.'

Supper was an unpleasant meal. Diana, whose idiocies were all extraneous, and who when she really thought that something unfortunate had happened could give it serious attention, was listening all the time for Dominic's return. Sarah was annoyed with the Flugels for descending on her without warning, and had seen to it that the food was nastier than usual. Diana had scolded Wolfie for speaking tactlessly to Dominic, and from this Sarah learned that he was responsible and she nagged at them both all through the meal, although Wolfie said: ‘It is good for women to be silent.' The light from the kerosene lamp shone down on the skeletons of the tinned herrings they had eaten, and when Maggie came in to remove them, and to put a watery blancmange and some stewed cherry-plums on the table, Diana exclaimed: ‘Oh, God, I can't stand this!' and went out on to the lawn, and stood in the silent night, listening. At Westhill there was always the shadow of Bobby, thrown and killed at the door, which made its presence felt when any of the children were late out riding. It was absolutely forbidden to any of us to ride after dark, and if one of us had ridden our pony into the flagged hall, as used to be done in our parents' youth, there would have been as much
superstitious horror, as if in some old castle the raven croaked which foretold the death of the heir. It was near this door that Diana now stood. She was both anxious about Dominic and worried about the blame which would fall on Wolfie if anything had happened to him. No one would think it pardonable to install your daughter in someone else's house—and since Alice's death Westhill had become the exclusive property of Steven—and then arrive uninvited yourself, accuse your host's son of seducing her and drive him to some reckless and possibly disastrous action. The situation was too serious to fuss now about Sarah's recriminations, or who was to blame.

She went back into the house, into the drawing-room where she could hear Wolfie playing ‘Forest Murmurs.' Sarah was standing by the mantelpiece fidgeting with the ornaments and muttering to herself.

‘Wolfie! Do stop that noise,' said Diana irritably.

Wolfie was astounded. ‘You call my music noise?' he said.

‘Don't you understand,' asked Diana with controlled exasperation, ‘that Dominic may be dead by now?'

‘And you will have killed him!' said Sarah viciously. ‘You are wicked people. It's the judgment of God. He took Bobby to warn you. Now He's taken Dominic. Why don't you get on a horse and go and look for him, and take some of the fat off you?' she shouted at Wolfie.

‘I do not like horses,' said Wolfie, with great
dignity.

‘Don't be idiotic, Sarah,' said Diana. ‘Which way do you think he went?'

‘How do I know? I didn't drive him out of his own home with filthy talk.'

‘Tom will have to go,' said Diana, and she went out again, down to his room over the stable. He had gone to bed, but he got up, and seeing how late it was and thinking it possible that Dominic was thrown and injured, he agreed with reluctant docility to go to look for him.

‘If he was thrown Tamburlaine would come home,' said Diana.

‘Not Tamburlaine, he wouldn't,' said Tom. ‘He'd stay beside him. He's a lovely horse.'

Back in the drawing-room Diana found Wolfie sitting sulkily with his hands in his lap, and the air thick with hostility.

‘What am I to do, if I cannot play?' asked Wolfie, after ten minutes' display of injured patience. ‘It is useless. I may go to bed, yes?'

‘You might wait till Tom comes back,' said Diana.

‘What use do I do by staying up?' asked Wolfie fretfully, flinging out his hands.

‘At least you save yourself from appearing irresponsible.'

‘It is not nice for me,' said Wolfie sadly.

‘It's very nice for Dominic, I suppose,' snapped Sarah, ‘lying somewhere with a broken leg. I'll harness
Cortez in the pony cart and go to look for him myself.'

‘It is impossible to please a woman,' declared Wolfie.

‘The best way you can please a woman is by being a man,' said Sarah, whose conversation, even in her bouts of moral indignation, was sprinkled with
double entendre
of which one felt she was only half unconscious, and who, although without humour, when she was attacking someone could display a certain amount of savage wit.

‘It's no good doing anything until Tom comes back,' said Diana.

For awhile the three of them sat without speaking, listening for any sound that might indicate Dominic's return, but as is usual at Westhill when the weather is fine, there was no break in the stillness of the country night.

It was after eleven o'clock when they heard Tom coming up the long stone passage to the drawing-room. He walked with the slow gait of a tired rustic, and they thought it was because he had brought bad news, but he only stood at the door and said:

‘Sorry, Mrs Von, there's no sign of him. I've been to Harkaway, Narre North and over beyond Muddy Creek towards Paradise. There's not much use riding about any more.'

‘You must go down to the farm and wake up the Burns,' said Diana. ‘Everyone must go and search.'

‘The Burns won't like that, Mrs Von,' said Tom.
‘They have to get up at five to milk the cows.'

‘O God!' said Diana, beginning to revert to her natural air of drama. ‘Is a few hours' sleep more important than a boy's life? Come on, Sarah. We'll go. Harness Cortez in the pony cart,' she said to Tom.

‘I let him out in the paddock.'

‘Is there a horse I can ride?'

‘There's Punch, but he's in the paddock too.'

‘Well, we'll have to catch him.'

Sarah went out and came back wearing a black bonnet and an old tight-fitting jacket. Diana tied a scarf round her head. Wolfie said:

‘If I may not play, perhaps I may now go to bed?'

‘Yes, and take your doll with you,' said Sarah.

‘It is not good to speak to me so,' he replied.