The Inheritors

The Inheritors

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Hueffer
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Title: The Inheritors
Author: Joseph Conrad Ford M. Hueffer
Release Date: February 3, 2005 [EBook #14888]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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INHERITORS ***

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THE INHERITORS
An Extravagant Story

By
JOSEPH CONRAD & FORD M. HUEFFER
_"Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day. Let us eat, drink and sleep,
for to-morrow we die."_
MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
New York
MCMI
_London, William Heinemann._ 1901, by MCCLURE, PHILLIPS &
CO.
_The Trow Printing Company New York_
To BORYS & CHRISTINA

THE INHERITORS
CHAPTER ONE
"Ideas," she said. "Oh, as for ideas--"
"Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas--?"
We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder.
The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints'
effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks
of bird-dropping.
"There," I said, pointing toward it, "doesn't that suggest something to
you?"
She made a motion with her head--half negative, half contemptuous.

"But," I stuttered, "the associations--the ideas--the historical ideas--"
She said nothing.
"You Americans," I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she
were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of
the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident
of superseding one fatally.
In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the
superiority--superiority of rank, intellectual or social. In this
conversation she, if she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged
temperamental superiority, seemed at least to claim it, to have no doubt
as to its ultimate according. I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud
of my conversational powers.
I had looked at her before; now I cast a sideways, critical glance at her.
I came out of my moodiness to wonder what type this was. She had
good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes. And something besides--a
something--a something that was not an attribute of her beauty. The
modelling of her face was so perfect and so delicate as to produce an
effect of transparency, yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her
glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her hair was fair and
gleaming, her cheeks coloured as if a warm light had fallen on them
from somewhere. She was familiar till it occurred to you that she was
strange.
"Which way are you going?" she asked.
"I am going to walk to Dover," I answered.
"And I may come with you?"
I looked at her--intent on divining her in that one glance. It was of
course impossible. "There will be time for analysis," I thought.
"The roads are free to all," I said. "You are not an American?"

She shook her head. No. She was not an Australian either, she came
from none of the British colonies.
"You are not English," I affirmed. "You speak too well." I was piqued.
She did not answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In the cathedral
she had smiled at the verger's commendation of particularly
abominable restorations, and that smile had drawn me toward her, had
emboldened me to offer deferential and condemnatory remarks as to
the plaster-of-Paris mouldings. You know how one addresses a young
lady who is obviously capable of taking care of herself. That was how I
had come across her. She had smiled at the gabble of the cathedral
guide as he showed the obsessed troop, of which we had formed units,
the place of martyrdom of Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had just
that quality of superseder's contempt. It had pleased me then; but, now
that she smiled thus past me--it was not quite at me--in the crooked
highways of the town, I was irritated. After all, I was somebody; I was
not a cathedral verger. I had a fancy for myself in those days--a fancy
that solitude and brooding had crystallised into a habit of mind. I was a
writer with high--with the highest--ideals. I had withdrawn myself from
the world, lived isolated, hidden in the countryside, lived as hermits do,
on the hope of one day doing something--of putting greatness on paper.
She suddenly fathomed my thoughts: "You write," she affirmed. I
asked how she knew, wondered what she had read of mine--there was
so little.
"Are you a popular author?" she asked.