Before entering the ornamental tower where his father awaited him, George had composed his face to its usual expression of laziest indifference. His imperturbability always ‘had the effect of a goad upon his father’s temper. His face never changed colour when the old man’s was purple. His voice never lost its measured drawl.’
As Mr. Piper turned and faced him you would never [p 273] have traced the sonship in George. There was nothing in common between the sallow, indolent face of the younger man, and the spreading, heated face of the elder. George looked like any club-lounger—not unwilling to let it be seen that he is slightly bored, yet ready, with perfect acquiescence, to go through with an hour or a forenoon of the infliction of boredom, as conveyed by a father’s presence…. Mr. Piper watched him as he continued tranquilly to pare his nails, the baffled sense of helplessness that exasperated him at the outset of an interview with his son creeping over him as he watched. If George could only once have lost his head and sworn, or only once implored or threatened! But he never did. The apathy and unconcern of his attitude—the veiled disrespect it implied—spoke of an indifference that was worse than the most open revolt. But surely he would be made to feel now! Mr. Piper had never tried to reach ‘my gentleman’ through his ‘young woman’ yet…. A slight elevation of an unruffled brow just gave evidence that though his eyes were looking critically at his almond-shaped finger-nails, his ear took in the sense of his fathers words. Otherwise he might have served as a perfect model of intentness upon his hands, as the statue of the boy who to all eternity will be absorbed in the task of extracting a thorn from his foot.
Meanwhile Mr. Piper is in a state of acute excitement.
‘I’ll see and put a stop to it!’ he threatened. ‘I’ll take and pack her off, and you at the back of her, “my gentleman”!’ George knew that the use of this expression [p 274] signified especial bitterness on his father’s part. ‘I’ll have an end of this nonsense—a painted jade like her!’
‘Wait a minute, please,’ said George, shutting the knife with a little snap, and settling himself back upon the window-sill; ‘you are a little hard to follow, or I am slow at catching your meaning, perhaps. I understand that you had some object in sending for me. Are you explaining it to me now? I am quite prepared to listen, as you see.’
‘You’re very condescending, I’m sure,’ said Mr. Piper, with such withering sarcasm that George stroked his moustache and smiled. ‘You put yourself about for your father a deal too much, “my gentleman,” there’s no doubt of it.’ Then, with a sudden break in his voice: ‘No, George; it’s not much of a son you’ve been to me, and no one can say I’ve stood in your light. I’d like you to show me another young man who could carry on top ropes like you. There’s not many fathers ’ud have stood it. Most fathers ’ud made you turn to long ago.’
‘Do you want anything done for you?’ interrupted George, with the air of a man who is laying himself out to oblige—‘another tour of inspection in the north?’
Whenever Mr. Piper made allusion to George’s want of occupation, it was the young man’s policy to refer to this tour of inspection—a memorable tour, seeing that it had given him employment for at least three months….
If there was anything humiliating in being rated as an ‘able-bodied young man who wasn’t worth his salt,’ as a loafer who was hardly fit to ‘jackaroo’ on a station, as a ‘lazy lubber’ who would ‘go to the dogs if it weren’t [p 275] for his father,’ George never betrayed that he felt humiliated by so much as the twitching of an eyelid. Persistently stroking the ends of his moustache with an air of profound abstraction, he made it apparent, as soon as Mr. Piper stopped to take breath, that he was suppressing an inclination to yawn.
‘I dare say it’s all very true, governor,’ was all he said in reply. ‘It’s very nice and complimentary, I’m sure, and I ought to be very much obliged to you. But, à propos of your compliments, may I ask if it was only to treat me to them in full that you brought me up those confounded tower steps this morning? Because, in that case, I wouldn’t have minded waiting, you know. It’s hardly fair upon a man, is it, to put him to the treadmill before he’s well awake in the morning?’
‘If you were like other young men,’ retorted Mr. Piper, ‘you’d be up and down them steps twenty times a day’ (George shuddered); ‘but oh no! my gentleman can crawl on to the lawn and carry on with a——’
‘Stop there!’ cried George, in a tone that made his father silent through sheer astonishment (George had never been known to raise his voice before). ‘Do you know the relation in which Laura stands to me?’
He looked Mr. Piper full in the face as he said it, and seeing the ghastly change that came over the face as he looked, he felt that he had been over-hasty. For the glass through which Mr. Piper had made a feint of looking dropped from his quivering fingers and his lips worked in a distorted fashion over his discoloured teeth; the blood rushing away from his florid cheeks left them streaked with thready, sanguineous veins, mottling the ash-coloured patches; and rushed back again with a [p 276] force that seemed to swell the veins round his temples to bursting….
‘What’s the matter, father?’ said George at last, not with any of Louey’s vehement alarm, but eyeing him rather gravely and curiously. ‘Do you object to my looking upon Laura in the light of a—sister?’
‘Eh?’ said Mr. Piper. His power of articulation was slowly returning, but his breath as yet was only equal to the monosyllable.
‘Of a sister,’ repeated George slowly, ‘and a friend.’
‘Your sister!’ said Mr. Piper, as soon as he could speak distinctly. ‘That’s as you choose to take it. She’s none o’ mine, thank God! But you take and make her more than your sister, and see how soon you’ll come to repent it. It’s down in my will. I’ve sworn it. Dead or alive, I won’t have the jade in my family! If you’ve got a fancy for her, you may take her, but never come anigh Piper’s Hill again!’
‘You mistake the position of affairs,’ said George calmly. ‘Laura wouldn’t have me if I wanted!’
‘Ho, ho!’ Mr. Piper’s laugh was more insulting than mirthful. ‘That’s why she comes and hugs you on the lawn of a morning, is it?’
The interview ended with an intimation that Mr. Piper will not have Laura as a daughter-in-law ‘at any price,’ and that if George choose to marry her it must be as a pauper, and unrelieved of his heavy burden of turf debts. Piper’s stormy, almost speechless [p 277] anger, like his craving for sympathy and approval, are alike often exceedingly pathetic. His personality, though less delicately drawn than that of his niece, Sara Cavendish, is a striking figure throughout the book. A good delineation of an old man is sufficiently rare in fiction to make that of Uncle Piper notable. Tasma has not equalled this performance in any of her other works. Josiah Carp, the Melbourne merchant in In Her Earliest Youth, and Sir Matthew Bogg, another of the same class, in the short story Monsieur Caloche, are shown only in a satirical and repulsive light, which necessarily makes them appear somewhat unreal.
As a vivid study, combined with excellent comedy, the portrait of Sara Cavendish would not have been unworthy of Thackeray. The selfishness concealed by her demure exterior and great beauty, and the absurdly excessive estimate of her virtues made by the Reverend Francis Lydiat, are a warning to all susceptible young men. Lydiat was a passenger by the ship which carried Sara and her parents to Australia. When he [p 278] gave his weekly sermons during the voyage, Miss Cavendish was always present, and looked at him with her large eyes to such purpose that they ‘seemed to be absorbing his meaning into the soul of their possessor.’
But there was nothing ethereal in Sara’s thoughts. ‘She had a fancy for imagining becoming dresses. She would build up a delightful wardrobe in the air, entering into as many details of her airy outfit as though it could be instantly materialised. And she liked to imagine a becoming background for her own beautiful person, in which a husband with the essentials of good birth and unlimited money, and the desirable qualifications of an air of distinction and great devotion to her, filled a reasonable space.’ Lydiat had often seen her lost in daydreams such as it would have seemed to him almost a sacrilege to disturb, ‘though it is probable that the only notion he would have been guilty of upsetting had reference to the shape of an imaginary velvet train.’
The insight and completeness with which [p 279] Sara’s character is depicted in the course of the story make it impossible that the reader should entirely dislike her as a mere sample of the calculating coquette. She is one of that large class of women, with a limited capacity for affection, whose natures expand only in an atmosphere of luxury. ‘Don’t be shocked,’ she says to her sister in reference to the unsuccessful suit of her clerical lover; ‘I never intended to be a poor man’s wife.’ As a contrast to the cold personality of the beautiful Sara, the author gives a charming picture of the elder sister’s affection and thoughtfulness for others.
Margaret Cavendish and Eila Frost, in Not Counting the Cost, are good women of a perfectly possible and natural kind, and it is surprising to think that the same hand which drew them also found patience to draw the unhappy, metaphysical heroines of In Her Earliest Youth and The Knight of the White Feather. Tasma is seldom so pleasing as when describing the characters of children, of whom several figure prominently in her novels. There is a delightful picture of [p 280] romping childhood at the opening of Not Counting the Cost. The scene is a farm in the shadow of Mount Wellington, near Hobart, the city where the author spent many of her own early years. ‘Chubby,’ the eight-year-old uncle of the heroine of In Her Earliest Youth, and Louey Piper are lovable creations, though, it must be said, more quaint than natural. One remembers the expansive dignity of the former on his first meeting with Pauline’s lover, George Drafton. ‘How do you do, little man?’ says the latter condescendingly. ‘How do you do, sir?’ replies the little man stiffly, raising his garden hat. ‘You are an acquaintance of Paul—of Miss Vyner’s, I believe. I have the honour to be her maternal uncle.’ No wonder George bursts into a loud guffaw, notwithstanding the tragic intensity of his love protestations of five minutes before!
Louey Piper’s relations with her father are idyllic. She is more necessary to him than Eppie to Silas Marner; she is a continual negotiator of peace in his divided house, and [p 281] ‘in this she could not have displayed more courtier-like sagacity had she been an old-world changeling with centuries of experience respecting rich fathers of uncertain testamentary inclinations.’ In her limited knowledge of things outside Piper’s Hill, ‘street-crossings and railway-platforms presented themselves to her in the light of shocking and mysterious man-traps…. The wistful, yearning look that gave her eyes so touching an expression in the setting of her small freckled face never gave place to such a fulness of satisfaction as when her father, her brother, and her sister were all, as it were, under her eye, and safe to remain indoors for the night.’