Ross Poldark
During the last month Elizabeth had known all kinds of new sensations. The birth of her child had been the supreme experience of her life, and looking down now at the crown of Geoffrey Charles's fluffy pale head so close to her own white skin, she was filled with a frightening sense of pride and power and fulfillment. In the instant of his birth her existence was changed; she had accepted, had seized upon a life-long commission of motherhood, a proud and all-absorbing task beside which ordinary duties became void.
After a long period of great weakness, she had suddenly begun to pick up, and during the last week had felt as well as ever in her life. But she was dreamy, indolent, happy to lie a little longer and think about her son and gaze at him and let him sleep in the crook of her arm. It would have distressed her very much to feel that by staying in bed she was putting more responsibility on Verity, but she could not yet summon up the resolve to break the spell of invalidism and move about as before. She could not bear the separation from her son.
This evening she lay in bed and listened to the sound of movement about the old house. During her illness, with her very quick ears she had come to identify every noise; each door made a different sound when opened: the treble and bass creak of unoiled hinges, the click and scrape of different latches, the loose board here and the uncarpeted patch there, so that she could follow the movements of everyone in the west part of the house.
Mrs. Tabb brought her supper, a slice of capon's breast, a coddled egg, and a glass of warm milk, and about nine Verity came in and sat for ten minutes. Verity had got over her disappointment very well, Elizabeth thought. A little quieter, a little more preoccupied with the life of the household. She had wonderful strength of mind and self-reliance. Elizabeth was grateful for her courage. She thought, quite wrongly, that she had very little herself, and admired it in Verity.
Father had opened his eyes once or twice, Verity said, and had been persuaded to swallow a mouthful of brandy. He did not seem to recognize anyone, but he was sleeping more easily and she had hopes. She was going to sit up in case he wanted anything. She would be able to doze in his armchair.
At ten Mrs. Chynoweth came upstairs and insisted on saying good night to her daughter. She talked in so determined a voice about poor Charles that she woke her grandson; then she stayed on talking while he was fed, a thing Elizabeth hated. But at last she was gone and the child asleep, and Elizabeth stretched her limbs in the bed and listened happily to Francis moving about in the room next to hers. Soon he would come in to say good night and then there would be a great stretch of darkness and peace until the early morning.
He came in, stepping with exaggerated care and pausing a moment to peer at the sleeping child, then he sat on the edge of the bed and took Elizabeth's hand.
“My poor wife, neglected as usual,” he said. “Your father has been talking for hours without a break on his grievances against Fox and Sheridan, while you have been up here alone missing all the delights of conversation.”
In his banter there was a certain amount of true feeling—he had been a little annoyed that she had come to bed so early—but at the sight of her his grudge vanished and his love returned.
For some minutes they talked in low tones, then he leaned forward to kiss her. She offered him her lips unthinkingly, and it was only when his arms went about her that she realized that tonight the friendly little salute would not do.
After a minute he sat back, smiled at her in rather a puzzled way.
“Is something wrong?”
She made a gesture towards the cot. “You’ll surely wake him, Francis.”
“Oh, he's new fed. He sleeps heavy then. You’ve told me so yourself.”
She said: “How is your father? Is he any better? Some how one does not feel—”
He shrugged, feeling himself put in the wrong. He was not happy at his father's collapse; he was not indifferent to the outcome; but that was something quite separate. The two conditions existed at the same time. Today he had carried her downstairs, lifting the weight of her, sorry that she was not heavier but happy to feel the substance under her frailty. From that moment the scent of her seemed to cling in his nostrils. Pretending to busy himself with the guests, he had really had eyes for no one else.
She said: “I’m not well tonight. Your father's illness upset me very much.”
He struggled with his feelings, trying to be reasonable. Like all proud men, he hated to be rebuffed in this way. It made him feel like a lascivious schoolboy. “Sometime,” he said, “will you feel well again?”
“That's not fair, Francis. It isn’t my choosing that I’m not very strong.”
“Nor mine.” Recollection of his restraint during these months bubbled up in him. That and other things. “I notice you didn’t frown or look faint at Ross this afternoon.”
Indignation flickered in her eyes. From the very beginning the things Ross had said to her had found excuse and justification in her mind. She had seen nothing of him and was sorry for him; during the months while her baby was coming she had thought a good deal of Ross, of his loneliness, of his pale eyes and wild scarred face. Like all human beings she could not refrain from idly comparing what she had with what she might have had.
“Please leave him out of this,” she said.
“How can I?” he rejoined, “when you will not.”
“What d’you mean? Ross is nothing to me.”
“Perhaps you’re beginning to regret it.”
“I think you must be drunk, Francis, to speak to me like this.”
“A splendid fuss you made of him this afternoon. ‘Ross, sit here beside me.’ ‘Ross, is my baby not pretty?’ ‘Ross, take a piece of that cake.’ Dear, dear, what a to-do.”
She said, almost too angry to speak: “You’re being utterly childish.”
Francis got up. “Ross, I am sure, would not be childish.”
She said, deliberately trying to hurt him back: “No, I’m sure he would not.”
They stared at each other.
“Well, that's pretty straight, isn’t it?” he said, and left her.
He flung into his own room, slamming the door without regard to the sick man or the sleeping child. Then he undressed anyhow, leaving his clothes on the floor, and got into bed.
He lay with his hands behind his head and eyes open for an hour or more before he went to sleep. He was consumed with disappointment and jealousy. All the love and desire in him had turned to bitterness and aridity and desolation.
There was no one to tell him that he was wrong in being jealous of Ross. There was no one to tell him that another and more powerful rival had recently arisen.
There was no one to warn him about Geoffrey Charles.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
IN THE GROWTH OF DEMELZA'S INTELLIGENCE ONE ROOM AT NAMPARA PLAYED a distinctive part. That room was the library.
It had taken her a long time to overcome her distrust of the gaunt and dusty lumber room, a distrust which derived from the one night she had spent in, or beside, the great box bed. She had found afterwards that the second door in that bedroom led through into the library, and some of the fear of that first hour stuck to the room beyond the second door.
But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction, and once inside the room she was never tired of returning to it. Since his return Ross had shunned the place because every article in it brought back memories of his childhood and of his mother and father and their voices and thoughts and forgotten hopes. For Demelza there were no memories, only discoveries.
Half the articles she had never seen before. For some of them even her ingenious brain could not invent a use, and so long as she could not read, the piled yellow papers and the little signs and labels scrawled and tied on certain articles were no help.
There was the figurehead of the Mary Buckingham, which had come ashore, Jud told her, in 1760, three days after Ross was born. She liked tracing the carving of this with her finger.
There was the engraved sea chest from the little fore-and-aft schooner which had broken its back on Damsel Point, drifted upon Hendrawna Beach and darkened the sands and sand hills with coal dust for weeks afterwards. There were samples of tin and copper ore, many of them lacking labels and all useless anyhow. There were spare strips of canvas for patching sails, and four ironbound chests at whose contents she could only guess. There was a grandfather's clock with some of its inside missing—she spent hours over this with the weights and wheels, trying to discover how it could have worked.
There was a coat of mail armour, terribly rusty and antique, two rag dolls and a homemade rocking horse, six or seven useless muskets, a spinet which had once belonged to Grace, two French snuffboxes and a music box, a roll of moth-eaten tapestry from some other ship, a miner's pick and shovel, a storm lantern, a half keg of blasting powder, a sketch map pinned on the wall of the extent of Grambler workings in 1765.
Of all the discoveries, the most exciting to her were the spinet and the music box. One day, after an hour's tinkering, she persuaded the music box to work, and it played two thin trembling minuets. In excitement and triumph she danced all round the instrument on one leg, and Garrick, thinking this a new game, jumped round too and bit a piece out of her skirt. Then when the music was over she hurriedly went and hid in a corner lest someone should have heard it and come and find them there. A greater discovery was the spinet, but this had the drawback that she could not make it play a tune. Once or twice when she was sure there was no one about she ventured to try, and the sounds fascinated her even when they were discordant. She found herself perversely taken with such sounds and wanting to hear them again and again. One day she discovered that the farther her fingers moved to the right the thinner became the sound, and this seemed to give the puzzle away. She felt it would be much simpler to conjure tunes out of this than to make sense of the horrible spidery trails that people called writing.
2
Charles Poldark made an obstinate recovery from his heart attack, but was confined to the house for the rest of the winter. He still put on weight. Soon it was all he could do to struggle downstairs in the afternoon and sit panting and eruptive and purple before the parlour fire. There he would remain scarcely speaking for hours, while Aunt Agatha worked the spinning wheel or read the Bible to herself in an audible undertone. Sometimes in the evenings he would talk to Francis, asking him questions about the mine, or he would tap a mild accompaniment on the arm of his chair when Elizabeth played an air on the harp. He seldom spoke to Verity except to complain that something was not to his liking, and usually dozed off and snored in his chair before he would allow himself to be supported up to bed.
Jinny Carter's child was born in March. Like Elizabeth's child, it was a boy; and he was christened, by permission, Benjamin Ross.
A fortnight after the christening Ross had an unexpected visitor; Eli Clemmow had walked in the rain all the way from Truro. Ross had not seen him for ten years, but he instantly recognized his loping walk.
Unlike his elder brother, Eli was built on a narrow economical scale, with a suggestion of the Mongol in his features. When he spoke he slopped and slurred with his teeth as if his lips were waves washing over half-tide rocks.
To begin with he was ingratiating, asking about his brother's disappearance, enquiring if no trace at all had been found. Then he was complacent, mentioning with satisfaction the good position he had got. Personal servant to a lawyer; a pound a month and all found; snug little room, light work, drop of toddy every Saturday night. Later, when he brought up the question of his brother's belongings, and Ross said candidly that he was welcome to what he found in the cottage but doubted if there was anything worth the effort of carrying away, Eli's eyes betrayed the malice which had all the time been hiding away behind his obsequious manner.
“No doubt,” he said, sucking with his lips, “all the neighbours will have took anything of value.”
“We don’t encourage thieves,” Ross observed. “If you want to make remarks of that kind, make them to the people you accuse.”
“Well,” said Eli, blinking, “I shouldn’t be saying more’n I’ve the right if I said Brother ’ad been drove out of his home by lying tongues.”
“Your brother left his home because he couldn’t learn to control his appetites.”
“And did ’e do anything?”
“Anything?”
“Anything wrong.”
“We were able to prevent that.”
“Yes, but he was drove out of his ’ome fur doing nothing at all, and mebbe starved to death. Even the law don’t say ye can punish a man before ’e do do a wrong.”
“He was not driven from his home, man.”
Eli fingered his cap. “Of course ’tis common knowledge that ye’ve always had a down on we. You and father. Your father had Reuben put in the stocks for next to nought. ’Tis ’ard not to remember that.”
“You’re fortunate,” Ross said, “not to receive something else to remember. I give you five minutes to be off my land.”
Eli swallowed something and sucked again. “Why, sur, ye just said I could go down fur to take anything of Brother's away that's worth the carrying. Ye’ve just said so. That be common justice.”
“I don’t interfere with the lives of my tenants unless they interfere with mine. Go to the cottage and take what you choose. Then go back to Truro and stay there, for you’re not welcome in this district.”
Eli Clemmow's eyes gleamed and he seemed about to say more, but he changed his mind and left the house without a word.
So it came about that Jinny Carter, nursing her baby by the upstairs window, saw the man come over the hill in the rain with his slow dipping stride and go into the next cottage. He was inside for about half an hour, and then she saw him leave with one or two articles under his arm.
What she did not see was the thoughtful expression on his sly Mongolian face. To one of Eli's peculiar perceptions it was clear that the cottage had been inhabited by someone less than a week ago.
3
That night the wind got up with violence and blew unabated through the following day. The next night about nine news came that a ship was in the bay and drifting ashore between Nampara and Sawle.
Demelza had spent most of the afternoon as she was coming to spend many afternoons when heavy rain stopped all but the most urgent outdoor work. Had Prudie been of an industrious turn of mind she would have taught the girl something more than the neat but primitive sewing she now understood; and there was weaving and spinning to learn, the drying and dipping of rushes for making rushlights. But these things were beyond Prudie's idea of housecraft. When work was inescapable she did it, but any excuse was good enough to sit down and take off her slippers and brew a dish of tea. So soon after dinner Demelza had sneaked off to the library.
And this afternoon by the purest chance she made the greatest discovery of all. Just as a premature dusk was falling she found that one of the big chests was not really locked but only held by a trick clasp. She lifted the lid and found the box full of clothing. There were dresses and scarves, three-cornered hats and fur-lined gloves, a periwig and red and blue stockings, a pair of lady's green lace slippers with blue heels. There was a muslin neck scarf and an ostrich feather. There was a bottle with liquid that smelt of gin, the only intoxicant she knew, and another half full of scent.
Although she had already stayed longer than usual, she could not bring herself to leave, and went over and over the velvet and the lace and the silk, stroking it and shaking out the crumbs of dry lavender. She couldn’t put down the slippers with the lace and the blue heels; they were too dainty to be real. The ostrich feather she sniffed and pressed against her cheek. Then she tried it round her neck and put on a fur hat and pirouetted up and down on her toes, pretending to be a great lady, with Garrick crawling at her heels.
With darkness closing in on her she lived in a dream, until she woke and found she could no longer see and was alone in the som
bre room with the draught blowing cold and rain seeping through the shutters.
Frightened, she rushed to the box, pushed in every thing she could find and shut the lid, and slipped through the big bedroom and thence to the kitchen.
Prudie had had to light the candles, and delivered an ill-tempered lecture, which Demelza, not yet anxious to go to bed, adroitly steered round until it became a continuation of the story of Prudie's life. Hence the girl had only just gone upstairs and was not asleep when Jim Carter and Nick Vigus called in to say there was a ship in distress. When Ross, disturbed from his book, made ready to go with them he found Demelza, a kerchief about her hair and two old sacks on her shoulders, waiting to ask that she might go too.
“You’re better in bed,” Ross said. “But as you please if you want the wetting.”
They set out, Jud carrying a strong rope in case there should be a chance of giving help.
The night was so black as to be sightless. Out of the shelter of the house the wind struck a blow that was not temporary but enduring. They tried to overcome it, taking steps forward that should have been an advance. One of the storm lanterns went out, the other swayed and flickered, thrusting out a hoop of light which danced along with them clownlike and showed their heavy boots squelching across the dripping grass. Once or twice the force of the wind was so great that they were all brought to a stop, and Demelza, struggling voicelessly beside them, had to clutch Jim Carter's arm to hold her ground.
As they neared the cliff top the rain came again, drenching them in a few seconds, splashing, into their mouths and eyes. They had to turn their backs and crouch behind a hedge until it was over.
There were people at the edge of the cliff. Lanterns winked here and there like glowworms. Below them, about a hundred feet down, more lights gleamed. They went down a narrow path until they came to a group of people on a broad ledge all staring out to sea.