Ross Poldark (24 page)

And Verity had gone to her room…

She felt herself detached from this household of which she had been a part for twenty-five years. She was among strangers. More than that, they were hostile strangers. They had drawn away from her, and she from them, for lack of understanding. In an afternoon she had shrunk inside herself; there would grow up a core of friendlessness and isolation.

She pushed the bolt across the door and sat abruptly in the first chair. Her romance was over; even though she rebelled against the fact, she knew that it was so. She felt faint and sick, and desperately tired of being alive. If death could come quietly and peacefully, she would accept it, would sink into it as one sank into a bed wanting only sleep and self-forgetfulness.

Her eyes moved round the room. Every article in it was familiar with the extreme unseeing intimacy of everyday association.

Through the long sash window and the narrow window in the alcove she had looked with the changing eyes of childhood and youth. She had looked out on the herb garden and the yew hedge and the three bent sycamores in all the seasons of the year and in all the moods of her own growth. She had seen frost draw its foliate patterns on the panes, raindrops run down them like tears on old
cheeks, the first spring sun shine dustily through them on the turkey rug and the stained oak boards.

The old French clock on the carved pine chimneypiece, with its painted and gilt figures, like a courtesan from the days of Louis XIV, had been in the room all Verity's life. Its thin metallic bell had been announcing the hours for more than fifty years. When it was made, Charles was a thin strip of a boy, not a breathless empurpled old man breaking up his daughter's romance. They had been together, child and clock, girl and clock, woman and clock, through illness and nightmare and fairy stories and daydreams, through all the monotony and the splendour of life.

Her eyes went on, to the glass-topped display table with the carved legs, to the two pink satin bedroom chairs, the cane rocking-chair, the stumpy brass candlesticks with the candles rising in steps, the pincushion, the embroidered workbasket, the two-handled washing urn. Even the decorations of the room, the long damask curtains, the flock wallpaper with its faded crimson flowers on an ivory ground, the white plaster roses of the cornice and ceiling, had become peculiarly and completely her own.

She knew that here in the privacy of her own room, where no man except her brother and her father ever came, she could give way, could lie on the bed and weep, could abandon herself to sorrow. But she sat on the chair and didn’t move at all.

There were no tears in her. The wound went too deep, or she was not so constituted to give way to it. Hers would be the perpetual ache of loss and loneliness, slowly dulled with time until it became a part of her character, a faint sourness tinged with withered pride.

Andrew would be back in Falmouth by now, back in the lodgings she had heard of but never seen. Through his quiet talk she had seen the bleakness of his life ashore, the two rooms in the lodging house by the quay, the drab woman who looked after him.

She had thought to change all that. They had planned to rent a cottage overlooking the bay, a place with a few trees and a small garden running down to the shingle beach. Though he had scarcely ever spoken of his first marriage, she had understood enough to be certain that much of the fault of the failure lay with her—however inexcusable on his side the end might have been. She had felt that she could make up for that first failure. With her busy hands and managing ability and with their mutual love she would have made for him a home such as he had not had before.

Instead this room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade. The gilt mirror in the corner would bear its dispassionate testimony.
All these ornaments and furnishings would be her companions through the years to come. And she realized that she would come to hate them, if she didn’t already hate them, as one hates the witnesses of one's humiliation and futility.

She made a halfhearted attempt to shake herself out of this mood. Her father and her brother had acted in good faith, true to their upbringing and principles. If as a result she remained at their beck and call until she was old, it was not fair to blame them for the whole. They thought they had saved her from herself. Her life in Trenwith would be more peaceful, more sheltered than as the wife of a social outcast. She was among relatives and friends. The long summer days were full of interest about the farm: the sowing, the haymaking, the harvesting; butter and cheeses to superintend, syrups and conserves to make. The winter ones were full too. Needlework in the evening, making curtains and samplers and stockings, spinning wool and flax with Aunt Agatha, brewing simples; playing at quadrille when there were guests, or helping Mr. Odgers to train the choir at Sawle Church, dosing the servants with possets when they were ill.

This winter too there would be a newcomer in the house. If she had gone, Elizabeth would have been doubly lost; Francis would have found the well-run routine of the house suddenly out of joint, Charles would have no one to arrange his cushions or see that his silver tankard was polished before each meal. For these and a hundred other small needs the household depended on her, and if they did not repay her with overt thanks, they showed her a tacit affection and friendship she couldn’t disregard.

And if she had not found these duties irksome in the past, was it not just the first flush of disappointment which said they must be so in the future?

So she might argue, but Andrew said no. Andrew sitting now with his head in his hands in the dismal lodgings in Falmouth, Andrew next week in the Bay of Biscay, Andrew tramping the streets of Lisbon by night, or next month back in his lodgings, Andrew eating and drinking and sleeping and waking and
bang
, said no. He had taken a place in her heart, or taken a
part
of her heart, and nothing would be the same again.

Last year she had drifted on a tide of custom and habit. She might have so drifted, without protest, into a con tented and unambitious middle age. But this year, from now on, she must swim against the stream, not finding stimulus in the struggle but only bitterness and regret and frustration.

She sat there in the room by herself until darkness came and the shadows of the room closed about her like comforting arms.

W
HEAL LEISURE WAS NOT STARTED THAT SUMMER.

After some hesitancy Ross invited Francis to join them. Francis refused rather brusquely; but something more imponderable than this held up the project. The price of copper in the open market fell to £80 a ton. To begin a new seeking venture at such a time would be asking for failure.

Francis mended rapidly from his neck wound, but Ross's part in Verity's love affair still rankled with him and his father. Rumour had it that Poldark and his young wife had been spending money at an extravagant rate, and now that Elizabeth did not go out much Francis went every where with George Warleggan.

Ross saw little of Verity, for during the rest of the summer she scarcely left Trenwith. He wrote to Mrs. Teague apologizing for his default, “owing to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances.” There was very little else he could say. He did not receive a reply. Later he learned that the “small party” was Ruth's birthday party, at which he was to have been the guest of honour. It was by then too late to implement his apology and the damage was done.

After the postponement of the Wheal Leisure venture Jim Carter left his employment. He was not the sort of young man to be a farm labourer all his life, and Grambler reclaimed him.

He came to Ross one evening in August after they had spent all day cutting a field of barley, and explained that Jinny would not be able to work at Grambler after Christmas—at least not for the time—and they could not afford to be without her earnings. So, as he had never felt better in his life, he had taken a tribute on the forty-fathom level.

“I’m proper sorry to be leaving, sir,” he said. “But it's a good pitch. I know that. Wi’ luck I shall make thirty or thirty-five shillings a month, and that's what
we’ve got to think on. If we could stay on at the cottage, we’d like to pay rent for it.”

“So you shall,” said Ross, “when I think you can afford it. Don’t be so generous with your money till you see if it goes round.”

“No, sir,” said Jim inarticulately. “Twasn’t exactly that—”

“I know, boy; I’m not blind. Nor, by the way, am I deaf. I heard it whispered that you had been out poaching the other night with Nick Vigus.”

Jim went crimson. He stammered and seemed about to deny it, then abruptly said, “Yes.”

“It's a dangerous pastime,” Ross said. “Whose land did you go on?”

“Treneglos.”

Ross suppressed a smile. His warning was, in fact, deadly serious, and he had no wish to weaken it.

“Keep away from Nick Vigus, Jim. He’ll lead you into trouble before you know it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What does Jinny say?”

“The same as you, sir. I… promised her not to go again.”

“Then keep your promise.”

“Twas for ’er that I went. I thought something tasty—”

“How is she?”

“Proper, sir, thank you. We’re that happy, just the two of us, that I wish, in a manner o’ speaking, that there weren’t going to be another. Still, Jinny's happy about that too. It isn’t she that's afraid.”

Subtle changes were continuing to take place in the relationship between Demelza Carne and the rest of the Nampara household. Her mind having outstripped the Paynters, she turned elsewhere for information, and this brought her more into contact with Ross, who found some pleasure in helping her. He wanted to laugh at her remarks much more often than he allowed himself.

At the end of August, during the week the corn was being ricked, Prudie slipped and hurt her leg and had to lie up.

For four days Demelza flew about the house, and although Ross was not in to see what she did, the midday meal was always brought out on time and the larger evening meal was always ready when they came wearily home. Demelza
did not cling to her newfound authority when Prudie got up, but their relationship was never again that of housekeeper and scullery maid. The only comment on the change came from Jud, who told his wife that she was getting as soft as an old mare.

Ross did not speak to Demelza about her efforts on those four days, but when he was next in Truro, he bought her one of the scarlet cloaks which were so fashionable in the mining villages of West Cornwall. When she saw it, she was speechless—an unusual symptom—and bore it off to her bedroom to try it on. Later he caught her looking at him in a peculiar manner; it was as if she felt it only right and proper for her to be aware of his likes and wants—that was what she was here for; but for him to know hers was not quite in the bargain.

In place of Jim, Ross took an elderly man called Jack Cobbledick. He was a saturnine man, slow of thought and speech, with a ginger-grey drooping moustache, through which he strained all his food, and a long heavy-legged gait, as if he was always mentally striding through tall grass. Demelza nearly got into trouble several times when walking across the yard lifting her own long legs in imitation.

In September, when the pilchard season was at its height, Ross rode into Sawle now and then to see the fish brought in or to buy a half hogshead for salting down when the quality was good. In this he found Demelza, with her experience of catering for a large and poor family, a better judge than himself, so she sometimes rode behind him on his horse or walked on half an hour in advance. Sometimes Jud would drive over with a couple of oxen yoked to a rickety cart and buy up a load of the broken and damaged fish for half a guinea to dig into the land as manure.

From the church of Sawle you went down Stippy-Stappy Lane, and at the bottom was a narrow humped bridge and a green square surrounded by sheds and cottages which was the nucleus of the village of Sawle. From here it was a few yards to the high bar of shingle and the shallow inlet of the bay.

Just clear of the bar were two gaunt fish-packing houses, and about these the summer industry of the village centred. Here the fish were picked over and packed into cellars for a month or so until the oil and blood had drained off them and they could be preserved and exported in hogsheads to the Mediterranean.

Elizabeth's child was born at the end of October. It was a difficult and protracted birth, but she stood the strain well and would have rallied more quickly had
not Dr. Choake decided to bleed her the day afterwards. As a result of that she spent twenty-four hours going off into dead faints which alarmed everyone and from which it needed any number of burnt feathers held under the nose to revive her.

Charles was delighted at the event, and the news that it was a boy roused him from his after-dinner stupor.

“Splendid!” he said to Francis. “Well done, my boy. I’m proud of you. So we have a grandson, eh? Damme, that's just what I wanted.”