Hester Waring's Marriage Read Free Page B

more truthfully have added that in this club, where no women were ever admitted, and would therefore not be offended by having to associate with an ex-felon, they were prepared to tolerate Dilhorne in the hope that they might share in his rapidly growing wealth. A pity to cut one’s self off from profit, after all.
    Fred was unwise. ‘You have invited this…felon…to join the club! Pray, why was my opinion not asked?’ There was an unpleasant silence since no one cared to answer him. Fred was tolerated these days, not liked. He flushed angrily.
    â€˜I don’t care to sit down with transported scum who arrived here in chains,’ he said at last, ‘however rich he might be, and however much some of you may wish to make money out of him. I tell you, either he goes, or I go.’
    Tom leaned even farther back in his chair. He was always impervious to insult. He looked at Burrell, then at Fred, and murmured, ‘I have no intention of leaving.’
    Burrell’s response was to stare coldly at poor Fred. ‘And I have no intention of asking Mr Dilhorne to leave, and I believe the committee is of the same opinion. He is here at our invitation. I ask you to change your mind, Waring, and be civil to him. Otherwise, it is you who must leave.’
    Fred’s pallor was extreme. He had put himself into a position from which there was no retreat. In his early days in the colony he had been a great friend of Burrell’s and several other members of the club. But his drinking, his losses at cards, his inability to pay what he had lost, coupled with his own descent into a barely clean raffishness, and his open sexual looseness, had lost him most of the friends whom he had once possessed.
    He rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘I told you I’d not sit down with Dilhorne,’ he replied, ‘and I meant it.’
    He staggered from the room, ending up at Madame Phoebe’s gaming hell and night house, and was later deposited, dead drunk, on Mrs Cooke’s doorstep for Hester to haul him painfully upstairs, to clean him up as best she could, and somehow get him into bed.
    Later he told her, in detail, of how Dilhorne had done for him at the club, as in business. He had lost his clerkship because of his inattention to his duties, but chose to blame Tom rather than his own carelessness. He never entered the club again: it was his last link with respectability and his own folly had severed it.
    Then there were his gambling debts. He borrowed from a friend who sold his IOUs to Tom. Another friend’s debts went the same way. Fred found himself owing money to the man he detested most in the world.
    Even before his quarrel with the committee over Tom, he had pointed him out to Hester as the author of his misfortunes in language so lurid that Hester had shuddered at it, as well as at her father’s persecutor. His subsequent descent into ruin he firmly and unjustly blamed on the man he saw as its author, and he taught Hester to hate and fear him.
    Hester rose and looked out the window at the garden below where Kate Smith, the little daughter of Mrs Cooke’s neighbour, was playing.
    Her memories of her father were always of what he had become in the colony. She could hardly remember what he had been like before he reached Sydney. Dimly she seemed to recall a big, jolly man who had been idly kind to her, although his true affections were always centred on her brother.
    And her mother? Somehow she had never seemed to have had a mother at all, and once they had reached Sydney, Mrs Waring had taken one look at it, and gone straight into a decline which ended in her early death.
    To be fair to her mother, the town which they had reached nearly eight years ago after a long and miserable sea journey was very little like the town which Governor Macquarie was now so urgently building. Most of the houses had been wooden shacks; to land here must have seemed to her mother like arriving in a