Ross Poldark

by Winston Graham

  “Why should that be?”

  “I don’t know. She is devoted to the child, and he fond of him. Yet in a way—they say children cement a marriage. Yet it seems to me that they have not got on so well since Geoffrey Charles was born.”

  “There are no more coming?” Ross asked.

  “None yet. Elizabeth has been ailing these last months.”

  There was silence for some time.

  “Ross, I have been looking through the old library. In the part that has not been cleared there are bits and pieces of lumber which might be of use to you. And why do you not bring out your mother's spinet? It would go in that corner very nice and would enhance the room.”

  “It's out of repair and there is no one here to play it.”

  “It could be put in repair. And Prudie tells me that Demelza is always strumming on it. Besides, you may have children.”

  Ross looked up quickly.

  “Yes. Maybe I will think it over.”

  Demelza came in at seven, full of the new catch which had been taken.

  “The shoal was brought inshore on the tide and folk was going out knee-deep and catching ’em in buckets. Then they came in still farther and were wriggling ’pon the sand. It is not so big a harvest as the last; still, I am sorry there is no moon, for then we might have been enticed to go an’ watch them again.”

  She seemed, Ross thought, at last less constricted, and he was thankful for the improvement. His discomfort during the last few days had been acute, and twice he had been on the point of saying something before them both, but now he was glad he had not. If they would but settle themselves like two cats in a basket, without outside interference, all might yet be well.

  There was one question he intended to ask Demelza, but forgot to do so until they were in bed and Demelza, he thought, asleep. He made a note of it for some other date and was himself dozing off when the girl stirred beside him and sat up. He knew then at once that she had not been asleep.

  “Ross,” she said in a low voice, “tell me about Verity, would you? About Verity and Captain—Captain What's-his-name. What was it that ’appened? Did they quarrel, and why was it the—the others brokeen up?”

  “I told you,” Ross said. “Francis and her father disapproved. Go to sleep, child.”

  “No, no. Please. Ross, I want to know. I been thinking. You never told me what truly happened.”

  Ross put out an arm and pulled her down close beside him. “It's of no moment. I thought you were not interested in my family.”

  “I am in this. This is different. Tell me.”

  Ross sighed and yawned. “It doesn’t please me to pander to your whims at this time of night. You are more inconsequent even than most women. It happened this way, love: Francis met Captain Blamey at Truro and invited him to Elizabeth's wedding. There he met Verity and an attachment sprang up—”

  He did not enjoy resurrecting the dismal story. It was over and buried; nobody showed up well in it, and the re telling evoked memories of all the unhappiness and anger and self-criticism of those days. The episode had never been spoken of since: all that idiotic business of the duel, played out without any proper civilized sanctions in the heat of a common brawl… The party he had been going to at Ruth Teague's… One thing hung on another; and all that period of unhappiness and misunderstanding hung together. It was his marriage which had cut the strands and seemed to have given him a fresh, clean start.

  “… so that brought it all to an end,” he said. “Captain Blamey went off and we’ve heard nothing of him since.”

  There was a long silence, and he thought perhaps she had quietly fallen asleep while he spoke.

  But then she stirred. “Oh, Ross, the very shame on you—” This in a troubled voice.

  “Um?” he said, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  She slipped away from his arm and sat up abruptly in the bed.

  “Ross, how could you!”

  “I want no riddles,” he said. “Are you dreaming or talking sense?”

  “You let ’em part like that. Verity goin’ home to Trenwith. It would break ’er heart.”

  He began to grow angry. “D’you think I relished the adventure? You know what I feel for Verity. It was no pleasure to see her love affair go to pieces like my own.”

  “Nay, but you should’ve stopped un! You should have sided wi’ her instead of wi’ them.”

  “I sided with nobody! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go to sleep.”

  “But siding wi’ nobody was siding wi’ them. Don’t you see? You should have stopped the duel and stood up to them instead of letting ’em ride roughshod over all. If you’d helped Verity, then they needn’t ever of parted, and—and—”

  “No doubt,” said Ross, “the matter seems simple enough to you. But since you know none of the people and weren’t there at the time, your judgment may conceivably be at fault.”

  Sarcasm on his part was something she couldn’t yet quite cope with. She groped for his hand and found it and put it against her cheek.

  “Don’t get teasy with me, Ross, I did want to know. And you d’ look at it like a man would and I d’ look at it like a woman. That's the difference. I can see what Verity would feel. I know what she would feel. To love someone and be loved by someone. And then to be quite alone—”

  Ross's hand, from being quiescent, began slowly to stroke her face.

  “Did I say you were the most inconsequent of women? It was an understatement. When I suggest Verity coming here you almost weep. And for half a week and more since she came you have been as stiff as an old gander. Now you choose this unseasonable hour to take Verity's side in a long-buried contention and to lecture me on my short comings. Go to sleep before I box your ears!”

  Demelza pressed his hand against her mouth. “You have never hit me when I deserved it, so I am not scared now when I do not.”

  “That is the difference between dealing with a man and dealing with a woman.”

  “But a man,” Demelza said, “even a kind one, can sometimes be cruel wi’out knowing it.”

  “And a woman,” Ross said, pulling her down again, “never knows when a subject must be dropped.”

  She lay quiet against him, knowing a last word but not saying it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  l

  VERITY HAD KNOWN THAT NIGHT, FROM THE BOWL OF FRESHLY PICKED HAZEL leaves in her bedroom, that she had, with her halting self-exposure of the morning, at last got past Demelza's defences. But in reaching this tentative view she was underrating Demelza. The girl might lack subtlety, but there was nothing grudging in her decisions when she came to them. Nor did she lack the courage to own herself wrong.

  Verity found herself suddenly in demand. Nothing more was said, but stiffness ripened into friendship in a day. Ross, unaware of causes, watched and wondered. Mealtimes, instead of being the chief ordeals of the day, were flowering with talk. The need for finding topics had quite gone. If Verity or Ross spoke of someone Demelza didn’t know, she at once overflowed with questions and they told her. If someone very local was mentioned, Demelza, unasked, would explain to Verity. There was, too, more laughter than there had been at Nampara for years; sometimes it seemed not so much at the wit of the conversation as born of a relief common to them all. They laughed at Jud's bald crown and his bloodshot bulldog eyes, at Prudie's red nose and carpet slippers, at Tabitha Bethia's mangy coat and at the clumsy friendliness of the enormous Garrick. They laughed at each other and with each other, and sometimes at nothing at all.

  In between times, usually when Ross was not there, Demelza and Verity would discuss improvements in the house or search the library and the unused rooms for odd bits of damask or velveteen to decorate or recover pieces of furniture. At first Verity had been chary of putting a strain on their new-grown friendship by offering suggestions, but when she found they were solicited, she entered into the spirit of the thing. At the beginning of the second week Ross came home and found the spinet back in the
corner it had occupied in his mother's day, and the two women busy with its inside trying to repair it. Verity looked up, a faint pink flush on her sallow cheeks, and pushing a wisp of hair out of her eye, she explained breathlessly that they had found a nest of young mice under the bass strings.

  “We were both too softhearted to kill them, so I brushed them into a pail and Demelza carried them out to the waste land on the other side of the stream.”

  “Like what you turn up under the plough,” said Demelza, appearing, more tousled, from behind. “Little meaders. Bald an’ pink an’ scraggy and too small to run.”

  “Encouraging vermin,” Ross said. “Who brought this spinet in here?”

  “We did,” said Verity. “Demelza did all the lifting.”

  “Dolts that you are,” said Ross. “Why didn’t you send for Jud and Cobbledick?”

  “Oh, Jud,” said Demelza. “He's not so strong as we, is he, Verity?”

  “Not so strong as you are,” said Verity. “Your wife is self-willed, Ross.”

  “You waste your breath in telling me the obvious,” he replied, but went away content. Verity looked far better than a week ago. Demelza now was doing what he asked in good measure. It was what he had hoped for.

  2

  That night Ross woke just before dawn and found Demelza sitting up in bed. It was one of the rare wet spells of that splendid summer and autumn, and he could hear the rain splashing and bubbling on the windows.

  “What is it?” he asked sleepily. “Something wrong?”

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. “That's all.”

  “You won’t sleep sitting up like that. Have you a pain?”

  “Me? No. I been thinking.”

  “A bad habit. Take a nip of brandy and you’ll settle off.”

  “I been thinking, Ross. Where is Captain Blamey now, Ross? Is ’e still over to Falmouth?”

  “How do I know? I’ve not seen him these three years. Why must you plague me with these questions in the middle of the night?”

  “Ross.” She turned towards him eagerly in the half darkness. “I want ee to do something for me. I want you to go to Falmouth an’ see if he's still there and see if he's still in love with Verity—”

  He half lifted his head in astonishment.

  “Begin all that again? Raise it afresh when she's just beginning to forget. I’d as soon raise the devil!”

  “She hasn’t forgotten nothing, Ross. She hasn’t got over it. ’Tis there at the back just the same, like a sore place that won’t heal.”

  “Keep your hands out of that,” he warned soberly. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  “It does concern me. I am grown fond of Verity—”

  “Then show your fondness by not meddling. You don’t understand the needless pain you would cause.”

  “Not if it brought them together, Ross.”

  “And what of the objections which broke up the attachment before? Have they vanished into thin air?”

  “One of ’em has.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Verity's father.”

  “Well, by God!” Ross relaxed on his pillow and tried not to laugh at her impudence. “It may have occurred to you that I was not speaking of the objectors.”

  “About him drinkin’? I know it's bad. But you said he's given up.”

  “For the time. No doubt he has taken to it again. I should not blame him if he had.”

  “Then why not go an’ see? Please, Ross. To please me.”

  “To please nobody,” he said with irritation. “Verity would be the last person to wish it. The attachment is best broken. How should I feel if they came together through my contrivance and he treated her as he did his first wife?”

  “He would not if he loved her. And Verity d’ still love him. It would not stop me lovin’ you if you had killed somebody.”

  “Um? Well, I’ve killed several as it happens. And as good men as myself, no doubt. But not a woman and in a drunken fit.”

  “I should not care if you had, so long as you loved me. An’ Verity would take the risk, just as she would’ve done three years back if people ’adn’t interfered. I can’t bear, Ross, to feel she's so unhappy, down underneath, when we might do something to help. You wanted to help her. We could find out, Ross, wi’out telling her anything about it. Then we could decide, like.”

  “Once and for all,” he said wearily, “I’ll have nothing to do with the idea. You can’t play fire-in-my-glove with people's lives. I’m too fond of Verity to wish to bring her all that pain back again.”

  She breathed a long breath into the darkness, and there was silence for some moments. “You can’t,” she said, “be very fond of Verity if you’re afraid even to go to Falmouth and ask.”

  His anger bubbled over. “Damn you for an ignorant brat! We’ll be arguing here till daylight. Am I to have no peace from your nagging?” He took her by the shoulders and pulled her back upon the pillow. She gave a gasp and was still.

  Silence fell. The dripping window squares were just visible. After a while, uneasy at her quietness, he turned and looked at her face in the half dark. It looked pale, and she was biting her bottom lip.

  “What's the matter?” he said. “What is to do now?”

  “I believe,” she said, “after all—I have a little pain.”

  He sat up. “Why didn’t you tell me! Instead of sitting there prattling. Where is the pain?”

  “In—my innerds. I don’t rightly know. I feel a small bit queer. ’Tis nothing to alarm yourself.”

  He was out of bed and groping for a bottle of brandy. After a moment he came back with a mug.

  “Drink this. Drink it down, right down. It will warm you if nothing more.”

  “I’m not cold, Ross,” she said primly. She shuddered. “Ugh, ’tis stronger than I d’ like it. More water would have made it very palatable, I b’lieve.”

  “You talk too much,” he said. “It is enough to give anyone a pain. Damn me if I don’t think it was moving that spinet.” Alarm grew in him. “Have you no sense in your head?”

  “I felt nothin’ of it at the time.”

  “You will feel something from me if I know you have so much as touched the thing again. Where is the pain? Let me see.”

  “No, Ross. Tis nothin’ I tell you. Not there, not there. Higher up. Leave me be. Get you back into bed and let us try to go to sleep.”

  “It will soon be time to rise,” he said, but slowly doing as she suggested. They lay quiet for a while, watching the slow lightening of the room. Then she moved over into his arms.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes, better. The brandy has lit a beacon inside me. Soon, mebbe, I shall be drunk and start tormentin’ you.”

  “That would be no change. I wonder if you ate some thing bad. We cured the bacon ourselves, and the—”

  “I think perhaps it was the spinet after all. But I’m well enough now. And sleepy—”

  “Not too sleepy to hear what I have to say. I don’t expect you to coddle yourself for anyone's satisfaction. But next time you have one of your moods and desire to do some fancy thing, remember that you have a selfish man to consider whose happiness is part of your own.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll truly remember, Ross.”

  “The promise comes too easy. You’ll forget it. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Ross.”

  “Well, then, I will promise you something. We spoke of chastisements the other night. Out of my love for you, and out of my own pure selfishness, I promise to beat you soundly the next time you do anything so foolish.”

  “But I won’t do it again. I said I would not.”

  “Well, my promise stands too. It may be an added safeguard.” He kissed her.

  She opened her eyes. “Do you want me to go to sleep?”

  “Of course. And at once.”

  “Very well.”

  Silence fell within the room. Rain continued to beat on the knotted glass.

&nb
sp; 3

  Verity's fortnight came to an end and she was persuaded to remain a third week. She seemed to have cast off the duties of Trenwith and to be finding her enjoyment here as he had hoped. Her gain in health was obvious. Mrs. Tabb would have to manage for another week. Trenwith could go hang.

  During this week Ross was away two days in Truro for the first copper auction at which Wheal Leisure was represented. The copper they had to sell was divided into two lots, and both were bought by an agent for the South Wales Copper Smelting Co. at a total price of five hundred and ten guineas.

  The next day Verity said to him:

  “This money, when it is paid, Ross. I am very ignorant, but will some of it be yours? Will you have a little spare money then? Ten or twenty guineas perhaps?”

  He stared at her. “Do you wish to buy lottery tickets?”

  “The lottery is your own home,” she said. “You have done wonders since you came back, with bits from the library, old pieces of cloth and the like, but apart from these curtains, I see very little that you’ve actually bought.”

  He stared round the parlour. There was a tactfully disguised shabbiness about it.

  “Don’t think I’m criticizing,” Verity said. “I know how short of money you have been. I merely wondered if you could spare a little to renew things now. It would not be badly spent.”

  The copper company would pay in their draft at the end of the month; the venturers’ meeting would follow; the profit would certainly be shared out: it was the way of such concerns.

  “Yes,” he said. “Personally I have no taste for fancy stuff, but perhaps we could ride in while you are still here and you could advise us on our purchases. That is, if you’re well enough to make the distance.”

  Verity looked out of the window.

  “It had occurred to me, Ross, that Demelza and I could ride in alone. We should not then take up your time.”

  “What, ride to Truro unescorted!” he exclaimed. “I shouldn’t be easy for a moment.”

  “Oh, Jud could escort us as far as the town, if you could spare him. Then he could wait somewhere and return with us.”