Ross Poldark (45 page)

“Oh, I couldn’t tell him yet. He's—strange that way. If he thought I was sickly, he’d make me sit still all day and twiddle my toes.”

The brightest light had drained from the sky, leaving the clouds flushed with a rich plum-coloured afterglow. All the sparse countryside stood out in the warm light, the goats pasturing in numbers on the moorland, the scanty ricks of gathered corn, the wooden huts of the mines, the grey slate and cob cottages; the girls’ faces under their wide hats were lit with it, the horses’ noses gleamed.

The breeze had dropped and the evening was silent except for the sound of their own passing: the clicking of the horses’ teeth upon the bits, the creak of saddle leather, the clop, clop of hoofs. A bit of a crescent moon hung in the sky, and Demelza bowed to it. Verity turned and looked back. Jud was a quarter of a mile away and Ramoth had stopped to crop a hedge. Jud was singing: “And for to fetch the summer home, the summer and the May -o.”

They came to Bargus. Here in this corner of the dark and barren heath murderers and suicides were buried. The rope on the gibbet swung empty, and had done for a number of months, but the place was unhallowed and they were both glad to be past it before dusk began to fall.

Now they were on familiar ground the horses wanted to break into a trot, but the girls held them in so that Jud should not be left too far behind.

“I’m a bit afeared,” Demelza said, speaking it seemed half to herself but aloud.

Verity looked at her and knew that it was not of ghosts or footpads she was thinking.

“I quite understand, my dear. But after all it will soon be over and—”

“Oh, not that,” Demelza said. “Tesn’t for me I’m afeared but for Ross. You see, he's not liked me for very long. Now I shall be ugly for months and months. Maybe when he sees me waddlin’ about the house like an old duck he’ll forget he ever liked me.”

“You needn’t be afraid of that. Ross never forgets anything. I think”—Verity stared into the gathering dusk—“think it is a characteristic of our family.”

The last three miles were done in silence. The young moon was following the sun down. Soon it disappeared, leaving a ghostly smear of itself in the sky. Demelza watched the small bats hover and flicker in their path.

There was a sense of comfort in passing through the coppice about Wheal Maiden and turning into their own valley. Right and left were the new-built ricks of their own, two of wheat, one of oats; deep gold and pale gold they had been in this morning's sun. At the end of the valley the lights of Nampara were gleaming.

Ross stood on the doorstep waiting to lift them down and welcome them in.

“Where's Jud?” he asked. “Has he—?”

“Up there,” said Demelza. “Only just up there. He's washing his face in the stream.”

A
UTUMN LINGERED ON AS IF FOND OF ITS OWN PERFECTION. THE NOVEMBER gales did not develop, and leaves of the tall elms were drifting down the stream, yellow and brown and withered crimson, until Christmas. And life at Nampara drifted down the stream with the same undisturbed calm. They lived together, those dissimilar lovers, in harmony and good will, working and sleeping and eating, loving and laughing and agreeing, creating about themselves a fine shell of preoccupation which the outside world made no serious attempt to breach. The routine of their lives was part of their daily contentment.

Jinny Carter came to the home with a blue-eyed ginger-haired infant in a carrier over her shoulder. She worked well if silently, and the child was no trouble. They arrived each morning at seven, and at seven in the evening Jinny was to be seen with her bundle walking steadily back over the hill to Mellin. News of Jim was scanty. One day Jinny showed Ross an ill-spelt message she had received, written by someone in the same cell as Jim, telling her Jim was well enough and sending her his love. Ross knew that Jinny was living on her mother and sending her earnings to Jim as often as she could find a means. One never knew how much the gaoler pocketed; and it had taken all Mrs. Zacky's persuasion, and the claims of mother hood, to keep Jinny from walking the twenty-six miles to Bodmin, sleeping under a hedge, and walking back the following day.

Ross thought that after Christmas he would make the journey himself.

Demelza, freed of much drudgery but still eternally busy, found more time for her spinet playing. She could by now conjure some pleasant sounds from the instrument, and a few simple tunes that she knew well enough to sing she found she could also play. Ross said next year the spinet should be tuned and she should have lessons.

There was a surprise for the Nampara household on the twenty-first of December, when the boy Bartle arrived with a note from Francis, inviting Ross and Demelza to spend Christmas at Trenwith.

“There will be nobody but ourselves,” Francis wrote, “that is, our household. Cousin W. A. is in Oxford, and Mr. and Mrs. Chynoweth are spending Christmas with her cousin, the Dean of Bodmin. I feel it a pity that our two houses should not similarly acknowledge their blood relationship. Also we have heard much from Verity of your wife (our new cousin) and would like to have her acquaintance. Come over in the afternoon of Christmas Eve and stay a few days.”

Ross thought hard over the message before passing it on. The wording of the note was friendly and did not give the impression of having been incited by someone else, whether Verity or Elizabeth. He didn’t wish to widen any breach which might still exist, and it seemed a pity to reject a move of friendship which was genuinely made, especially from the man who had been his boyhood friend.

Demelza's views were naturally different. Elizabeth was behind it; Elizabeth had invited them in order to examine her, Demelza, to see how she had developed as Ross's wife, to get Ross into an atmosphere where he would see what a mistake he had made in marrying a low-class girl, and humiliate her by a display of fine manners.

By this time, however, Ross had begun to see real advantages in going. He was not in the least ashamed of Demelza. The Trenwith Poldarks had never been sticklers for the
agréments
, and Demelza had a curious charm that all the tuition in the world could not bring. Knowing Elizabeth better, he had no thought that she would stoop to such a trivial act of enmity, and he wanted her to see that he had been content with no common substitute.

Demelza did not find this reassuring.

“No, Ross.” She shook her head. “You go if you must. Not me. I aren’t their sort. I’ll be all right here.”

“Naturally,” said Ross, “we both stay or we both go. Bartle is still waiting, and I must give him a wedding present. While I go upstairs for my purse, make up your mind to be a dutiful cousin.”

Demelza looked mutinous. “I don’t want to be a dutiful cousin.”

“A dutiful wife, then.”

“But it would be something awful, Ross. Here I am Mistress Poldark. I can wind up the clock when I like. I can tease you and pull your hair, and shout and
sing if I want, an’ play on the old spinet. I share your bed, and in the mornings when I wake I puff out my chest and think big thoughts. But there—they are not all like Verity, you told me so yourself. They would quiz me and say ‘dear, dear’ and send me out to eat with Bartle and his new wife.”

Ross looked at her sidelong. “They are so much better than you, you think?”

“No, I did not say so.”

“You think I ought to be ashamed of you?”

In argument Ross always carried guns too big for her. She saw, she felt, but she could not reason it out to prove him wrong.

“Oh, Ross, they are your own kind,” she said. “I am not.”

“Your mother bore you in the same way as theirs,” Ross said. “We all have similar motions, appetites, humours. My present humour is to take you to Trenwith for Christmas. It is little more than six months since you swore a solemn oath to obey me. What have you to say to that?”

“Nothing, Ross. Except that I don’t want to go to Trenwith.”

He laughed. Arguments between them usually ended in laughter nowadays; it was a signal grace leavening their companionship.

He went to the table. “I’ll write a short note thanking them and saying we’ll reply tomorrow.”

The next day Demelza reluctantly gave way, as she usually did on important matters. Ross wrote to say they would come on Christmas Eve and spend Christmas Day at Trenwith. But unfortunately business at the mine would compel him to return that evening.

The invitation was accepted, so no offence could be taken; but if there had been anything halfhearted about it they would not be outstaying their welcome. Demelza would have a chance of meeting them as an equal, but the strain of best behaviour would not be prolonged.

Demelza had agreed because although Ross's arguments could not convince her, his persuasions she could seldom withstand. But she would much rather have gone to the mine barber and had six teeth pulled.

She was not really afraid of Francis or the old aunt; ever a quick learner, she had been gaining confidence all through the autumn. The bogy was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth. On the eve of Christmas their foot steps beat out the name as they cut up across the fields behind the house and took the path along the cliffs.

Demelza glanced sidelong at her husband, who walked beside her with his long easy stride from which the last suggestion of a limp had now gone. She
never really knew his thoughts; his deeper reflections were masked behind that strange unquiet face with its faint pale scar on one cheek like the brand mark of a spiritual injury he had suffered. She only knew that at present he was happy and that she was the condition of his happiness. She knew they were happy together, but she did not know how long such content could last; and she felt it in her heart that to consort with the woman he had once loved so deeply was flying in the face of fate.

The awful thought was that so much might depend on
her
behaviour during the next two days.

It was a bright day with a cold wind off the land. The sea was flat and green with a heavy ground swell. The long, even ridge of a wave would move slowly in, and then as it met the stiff south-easterly breeze its long top would begin to ruffle like the short feathers of an eider duck, growing more and more ruffled until the whole long ridge toppled slowly over and the wintry sun made a dozen rainbows in the mist flying up from its breaking.

All the way to Sawle Cove they were delayed by Garrick, who thought that Demelza could not be going out without him and was convinced that if he persisted long enough her better nature would come to see the matter as he did. Every few yards a sharp word of command would send his big lumpy body to the earth, where he would lie in complete and submissive collapse and only one reproachful bloodshot eye to prove that life still lingered; but a few more dozen paces would show that he was up and following them with slinking ungainly tread. Fortunately they met Mark Daniel, who was returning by the path they had come. Mark Daniel was standing no nonsense and was last seen marching in the direction of Nampara holding Garrick by one lopsided ear.

They crossed the sand and shingle of Sawle Cove, meeting one or two people who wished them an affable good day, and climbed the cliff hill at the other side. Before striking inland they paused for breath and to watch a flight of gannets diving for fish just off the shore. The gannets manoeuvred beyond the surf, their great stretch of white wings, brown-tipped, balancing them against the press of the wind; then they would dive plummet fashion, disappearing with a splash, to come up once in ten or twenty times with a small lance struggling in their long curved beaks.

“If I was a sand eel,” said Demelza, “I should fair hate the sight of a gannet. See ’em fold their wings as they go in. When they come up without anything, don’t they look innocent, as if they hadn’t really meant it.”

“We could do with some rain now,” Ross said, staring at the sky. “The springs are low.”

“Someday before I die, Ross, I should dearly like to go a journey on a ship. To France and Cherbourg and Madrid, and perhaps to America. I expect there are all sorts of funny birds out in the sea bigger than gannets. Why do you never talk about America, Ross?”

“The past is no good to anyone. It is only the present and the future that matter.”

“Father knew a man who’d been to America. But he never talked of nothing else. Twas half a fairy story, I b’lieve.”

“Francis was lucky,” Ross said. “He spent a whole summer travelling Italy and the Continent. I thought I should like to travel. Then the war came and I went to America. When I returned, I wanted only my own corner of England. It's strange.”

“Someday I should like to visit France.”

“We could pay a visit to Roscoff or Cherbourg any time in one of the St. Ann's cutters. I have done it as a boy.”

“I should rather go in a big ship,” Demelza said. “An’ not with the fear of being fired on by the revenue men.”

They went on their way.

Verity was at the door of Trenwith House waiting to greet them. She ran forward to kiss Ross and then Demelza. Demelza held her tight for a moment, then took a deep breath and went in.