Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [300]
‘You have hit me meanin’ exactly. Thim buttons stuck in me throat more than anythin’ else I can call to mind. They were worth money, but it was more than that – a man has his self-respect to think of. I always suspected Haines of stealin’ them an’ I got proof of it one day when we were ashore cuttin’ stakes. I offered to fight Haines for them, but Wilson took the quarrel on himself an’ so me chance was lost.’
Sullivan paused in his task of drying Paris’s shoulders and neck, and gave a smile of considerable sweetness. ‘He would have beat me anyway,’ he said. ‘The long an’ short of it is that I niver got me buttons back. Then Haines was killed an’ as time went by they went out of me mind. Then yesterday, as they were drivin’ us through the bush to where the boats were waitin’, I tripped over me own feet an’ fell down the side of a stream, nearly in the water. There I was, lyin’ on me face in the mud with all the wind gone out of me sails and the corporal cursin’ at me from the bank. An’ it was then I seen it, not six inches from me eyes. It was crusted over with clay, but I knew it.’
He bent down quickly and fumbled a moment at the string of his moccasin. When he straightened up his face wore its usual serious, slightly melancholy expression. On his right palm, held out to view, a smooth round metal button the size of a shilling gleamed yellow in the flat, shadowless light of the cabin. ‘I give it a bit of a polishin’,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t understand how it had come about at first, not for the life of me, then I bethought meself – that must have been the very spot where Haines met his end at the hands of the Indians. It must have dropped from him somehow an’ the Blessed Virgin tripped up me feet at the very place.’
He was still standing there, with the miraculous find shining softly on his palm, when they heard sounds beyond the door. Sullivan brought his hands quickly to his sides. A moment later the door opened and Erasmus stepped over the threshold. ‘You can suspend your ministrations for a while,’ he said curtly to Sullivan. ‘I want a few words with Mr Paris.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sullivan, however, did not leave quite at once, but turned first to Paris and said, ‘Will there be anythin’ more I can do for you?’
‘No, thank you, nothing.’
‘In that case,’ Sullivan said, ‘I’ll take meself off.’
Erasmus watched him leave. ‘There is a brazen fellow,’ he said. ‘He had the impudence to ask me the whereabouts of his fiddle. That is a gallows-bird, if ever I saw one.’
‘If you think that, you cannot ever have seen one.’ Paris was propped up in his bunk now and able to get a steady view of his cousin’s face, which was white and strained-looking. ‘To what do I owe this visit?’ he asked. ‘I must tell you, cousin, it is not welcome to me.’
‘I do not care if it is welcome or not,’ Erasmus said. ‘You have forfeited your rights in such matters.’ On this, however, he paused. He was conscious his cousin’s question was one that could not be answered altogether frankly. After dismissing Barton in the early hours of the morning he had slept deeply – his first good sleep for days. But he had woken once again to desolation. There are forms of triumph or fulfilment, and these not always virtuous, that require no witness, they are sufficient in themselves and can be enjoyed in the quietness of the soul; but the sense of being an instrument of justice was not, it seemed, of this order, not for Erasmus at least; he had felt the need to see it registered on a human face, and there was only one that would do: in all the world there was only Paris that could make the triumph of justice real to him. ‘I have been learning something of this settlement of yours,’ he said at last. ‘I am told that it was founded on the best philosophical principles.’
Paris saw the mockery of this move the tense lines of his cousin’s mouth and realized that Erasmus had come to bait him. Despite his weakness and the pain of his leg, the old combative urge rose in him, the refusal of intellect – or pride – to