Warleggan
Page 3
France was at war with Austria. Only three weeks ago the revolutionary pot had at last boiled over. The paper said M. Robespierre had opposed the move and had resigned his post as Public Prosecutor, but the others were mad keen for war and already a great army had invaded Belgium. A clash with the Austrian troops might be expected at any time. What of our own position? It was well for Mr Pitt to forecast fifteen years’ peace, as he had done in March; prophecies cost nothing; but when they were accompanied by further cuts in our tiny army and skeleton navy, the danger to our safety and survival was plain.
Ross was so far gone that he did not hear Demelza’s first words, and she had to repeat them before he looked up.
As he rose he was conscious that his wife’s charm and attraction had not been lessened by three years of trial and near poverty. At times it got itself hidden under the everyday mask of work and the routine of living, but this made its emergence all the more startling. At such moments he recognized with instant attention the quality in her that made her attractive to so many men.
As he went to the door to open it for her, he said: ‘D’you ever now have any fears about going into society – as you did in the old days? I never know now whether you’re nervous or not.’
‘For the first ten minutes my knees knock,’ she said. ‘But luckily ’tis the part of me best covered.’
He laughed. ‘I know what will cure it.’
‘What?’
‘Port.’
‘Yes, quite often, yes. But other things too.’
‘Such as?’
She lifted her bare shoulders in a slight movement of doubt. ‘Knowing other people have a confidence in me.’
‘The other people including me?’
‘Chiefly you.’
He bent slowly and kissed her neck in the soft part where neck and shoulder join. ‘Might I prefer you that confidence now?’
‘Thank you, Ross.’
He kissed her again, and she put up a hand to smooth back his hair by the ear.
‘You still have some feeling for me?’
He looked at her in astonishment, staring deeply into her eyes. ‘Good God, you should know that!’
‘Yes, Ross, but there is feeling and feeling. It is the one and not the other that I am asking about.’
‘Would you want to involve me in a philosophical argument with all your beaux waiting to flirt with you downstairs?’
‘They are not my beaux. And I do not think it would be a – what you said argument.’ She put her hand on the door.
He said: ‘Demelza.’
‘Yes.’
‘If there are two feelings, then I don’t think you can put them in separate compartments ever, because one is a part of the other and inseparable. You should know that I love you. What other reassurance do you ask?’
She smiled obliquely but with a new warmth. ‘Only that I should be told it.’
‘So now you’ve been told it. Does that make such a difference?’
‘Yes, that makes such a difference.’
‘I’ll keep a note of it for Wednesdays and Saturdays in future.’
‘Sundays is a better day. The thing will sound right on a Sunday.’
So they went down in a cheerful enough mood and found all their neighbours there, the younger Trenegloses, the Bodrugans, Dr and Mrs Choake, and of course the Penvenens.
And George Warleggan.
It was a blunder of the first magnitude on the Trevaun-ances’ part to have invited him and Ross to the same party; but now it had happened, it had to be gone through with. Rumour had magnified the fight between them last year into vast and murderous proportions; and their presence here together tonight added a spice to the meal for those who had no particular concern for the outcome.
But George offered no provocation and for a time avoided all contact with the Poldarks. Whatever else being thrown over the stairs did, it gave one a physical respect for one’s enemy.
At dinner Ross found himself near the top of the table with Constance Lady Bodrugan on his right hand, Elizabeth on his left, and Caroline Penvenen directly opposite.
He had heard so much of Caroline that it would have been strange if she had tallied with his expectations. He thought her not so beautiful as Elizabeth nor so charming as Demelza; but her clear-eyed, quick-thoughted vitality instantly took a man’s attention. The emeralds about her milky-coloured throat precisely suited her; they changed suddenly like their wearer in different lights, were now cool and unfathomed, now sharp and glinting. He had no difficulty in understanding Unwin Trevaunance’s feelings, always supposing him to be susceptible to other influences than gold. One wondered at their relationship, because it seemed strained tonight. Caroline treated him with bare courtesy, and one imagined that after marriage things would be different. A man did not have that leonine head and jutting bottom lip for nothing.
They were hardly seated when Sir John said: ‘You have met Miss Penvenen, Ross? Caroline, this is Captain Pol-dark,’ and Ross studied her wide-awake grey-green eyes.
Miss Penvenen inclined her head in acknowledgment. ‘We met for the first time this evening, John; though in truth I have seen Captain Poldark before – in somewhat different case.’
‘When was that?’ asked Ross.
‘Oh, you could not be expected to notice me. It was at your trial at Bodmin when you were charged, you will remember, with plundering two ships. I was one of the audience.’
‘I remember well enough,’ said Ross. ‘But audience suggests entertainment, and I can’t suppose the entertainment was very good.’
‘I have known worse. You see, in a play one knows virtue is going to be triumphant; but in real life one trembles on the brink of iniquity and fears for the outcome.’
‘I think you must have been at the wrong trial, Miss Penvenen. There was precious little virtue in my case and no triumph in my acquittals unless it was a triumph for the wrongheadedness of the jury. Your sympathy should have been with the judge.’
Caroline’s eyes flashed. ‘Oh, it was, I assure you. I noticed how sad he looked when he could not punish you at all.’
During the first part of the dinner Ross talked to Elizabeth. Her pleasure was no less than his and was plain to Demelza who, near the foot of the table, found herself between Sir Hugh Bodrugan, who always had such a marked and possessive partiality for her company, and Captain McNeil of the Scots Greys. McNeil was that officer who had been in the district once before, some years ago, stationed here with a company of dragoons to watch over the unrest in the mining districts and to put down the smuggling.
Whatever anyone else might feel about the disposition of the table, Malcolm McNeil had no complaints. He only wished Sir Hugh wouldn’t be so monopolistic. Again and again he tried to gain Mrs Poldark’s attention, and again and again the hairy baronet grabbed it back. His first real opportunity came when Sir Hugh had to carve another piece off the joint for Mrs Frensham, Sir John’s sister, and McNeil at once asked Demelza if he might presently do the same for her.
‘Thank you, no,’ said Demelza. ‘’Tis quite surprising seeing you here, Captain McNeil. I thought you was gone back to Scotland and the clans.’
‘Oh, I have been back in the meantime,’ he assured her, screwing in his great moustache at her admiringly. ‘And overseas. And in London and Windsor. But I grew an affection for this piece of country – and some of the people – and when the occasion came to revisit it and them . . .’
‘With your dragoons?’
‘No dragoons this time.’
‘Not one?’
‘Only myself, Mrs Poldark. I’m sorry to disappoint ye. I was ill with a fever, and afterwards, meeting Sir John in London, was invited to take my sick leave here.’
Demelza glanced at him amiably. ‘You don’t look a sick man, Captain McNeil.’
‘Nor am I now, ma’am. Let me fill your glass. Is it canary ye have been drinking?’
‘I know only three flavours, and it is none of those three.’
‘Not looking for smugglers?’
‘No, no, Mrs Poldark; not this time. Why, are there some still? I thought my last visit had quite put them down.’
‘And so it did. We was all downcast after you had gone.’
The Scotsman glanced at her with a twinkle. ‘That is a remark capable of two interpretations.’
Demelza looked up the table and saw Ross smiling at Elizabeth. ‘I didn’t think, Captain McNeil, that you could have supposed me a smuggler.’
McNeil’s chuckle, restrained as it was by his standards, was enough to silence the rest of the table for a second or two.
Mrs Frensham said, smiling: ‘If that pleasantry will bear repetition, I think you should not keep it to yourselves.’
Demelza said: ‘Oh, it was not a jest on my side, ma’am. Captain McNeil was assuring me that he had not come down this time to catch smugglers, and I told him I did not know what else he could expect to catch in these parts.’
Sir Hugh Bodrugan rumbled: ‘Damme, I differ as to the jest.’
Mrs Frensham said: ‘Captain McNeil has been convalescent. His purposes here, he assures me, are wholly innocent; otherwise we should have put a guard over him and locked him in his room.’
‘I truly believe, ma’am, you should do so at once,’ said Demelza, at which Sir Hugh and the Captain laughed again.
At the other end of the table Sir John Trevaunance, with a not unobvious purpose in mind, had made a derogatory remark about young Dwight Enys. Ellery had died that morning, and Sir John was of the opinion that the scandal should receive public attention. Ellery, a hale and hearty man of sixty . . . Enys had so probed into the jaw that the wound had never healed. His old friend Dr Choake would bear him out . . . Ignorance and neglect. But Sir John found the move a mistaken one, because not only did Caroline speak quickly in Dr Enys’s defence but she found an ally in Ross Poldark, and the baronet, to his annoyance, and still more to Unwin’s, found himself between two fires. Ross had thought Caroline pert on their first introduction; but now for the moment they were in accord, and it was noticeable at the end of the argument that Caroline’s eyes travelled over him approvingly.
Elizabeth said in an undertone to Ross: ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
‘Very striking. Beauty’s a maker of taste.’
‘Is it true, do you think, that what the eye doesn’t admire the heart doesn’t desire?’
‘Oh, without doubt. Do you know anything to disprove it? Well, it has been so with me. As you should know.’
‘I know very little of you, Ross. How often have we met in five years? A dozen times?’
Ross was silent. ‘I was not thinking of the last five years. But perhaps you’re right. I am inclined to agree, I know very little of you either. And you’ve changed so much – inwardly I mean . . .’
‘Have I? Tell me in what way the deterioration is most noticeable.’
‘That’s asking a reassurance, isn’t it? You may have it. It’s a different Elizabeth, that’s all. The opposite of deterioration. But startling at times. I understand now how young you were when you promised to marry me.’
Elizabeth put her hand out to her wine glass but only fingered the stem. ‘I should have been old enough to know my own mind.’
Something in the way she spoke surprised him. The sudden feeling in her voice was like self-contempt. It swung their talk right away from the polite, slightly flirtatious conversation that had been passing between them.
He looked at her, trying to weigh this up, said cautiously to provide her with the normal escape: ‘Well, let us agree you were young . . . And then you thought I was dead.’
Elizabeth glanced down the table to where Francis was talking to Ruth Treneglos. The emotion had perhaps caught her unawares too. Or perhaps she decided she had escaped too often. In a perfectly cool, young voice she said: ‘I never really believed you were dead. I thought I loved Francis better.’
‘You thought you loved him . . .’
She nodded her head. ‘And then I discovered my mistake.’
‘When?’
‘Quite soon.’
His rational mind still refused to accept this sudden conversation at its full value, but somewhere inside him his heart was beating, as if the intelligence reached him through another channel. Twenty-odd people at this table, his own wife talking to the cavalry officer with the big moustache, Sir Hugh at her other hand waiting to break in; George Warleggan, for the most part silent and intent but his gaze every now and then flickering up from his food or from his partners to rest upon Elizabeth’s hair or mouth or hands. Incredible that Elizabeth should choose this moment to make such a confession, after nine years. Incredible that it should be true . . .
‘These damned mongrels that roam about,’ said Lady Bodrugan feelingly, ‘breeding and interbreeding; they make it uncommon hard to keep one’s stock pure. You’re that much luckier, John, dealing only in cattle. What did you say your dog was, miss?’
‘A pug,’ said Caroline. ‘With beautiful black curly hair and a gold-brown face no bigger than the centre of this plate. Unwin regards him with the utmost respect and affection, don’t you, dear.’
‘Respect, yes,’ said Unwin, ‘for his teeth are devilish sharp.’
Ross said to Elizabeth: ‘This is some pleasant joke you are trying on me?’
Elizabeth smiled with a sudden brittle brilliance. ‘Oh, it’s a joke indeed. But it is against myself, Ross. Didn’t you know? I wonder you never guessed.’
‘Guessed . . .’
‘Well, if you did not guess, it might have been more gallant of you to have met this barefaced confession halfway. Is it such an astonishment that a woman who changed her mind once could change it twice? . . . Well, yes, perhaps it is, for it has always been an astonishment and a humiliation to me . . .’
After what seemed a long time Ross said: ‘That first Easter I came to you after you married – you told me then plain enough that you loved only Francis and had no thoughts for anyone else.’
‘Was that when I should have told you? Only a few months after my marriage, and with Geoffrey Charles already alive in me?’
Something was taken away from Ross and another dish put in its place. Whatever the object of the party, Sir John was not sparing his cellar, and talk at the table was louder than it had been. Yet Ross had to struggle with himself not to push his chair back and get away. That Elizabeth should have chosen this moment . . . Unless it was that only the presence of other people had given her the courage to tell him point-blank what she had long wanted him to know . . . And where a few minutes ago he had made no sense of what she said, now he saw it as sensible enough. Every second that passed fitted it more inescapably into the pattern of the last nine years.
‘And Francis?’ he said. ‘Does he know?’
‘I’ve said already too much, Ross. My tongue. A sudden impulse – it had best be forgotten. Or if not forgotten, disregarded. What were we talking of before this?’
Three places down the table, Francis’s slightly raffish face, in which the vivid lines of youth were losing themselves in a too early deterioration . . . As if conscious just then of something toward, he glanced up at Ross, wrinkled one eyebrow and winked.
Francis had known. Ross saw that now. Francis had known so long that his early outbreaks of disillusion and disappointment were far behind him. His own jealousy long spent, and perhaps his love with it, he felt no discomfort at seeing Ross and Elizabeth together. His quarrels in earlier years, the enigmas of his behaviour, were all explained. And now so far as he was concerned it was all past – part of an era best forgotten, in this new time of tolerance and good will.
Perhaps, Ross thought, that was why Elizabeth had now ventured to tell him; because her feeling was spent and she believed Ross’s to be; she’d offered it as an explanation, an apology of things past, som
ething due to him now that danger no longer existed for any of them in the confession.
Elizabeth had turned to answer some question put by the man on the other side of her, and it was a moment or two before Ross was able to see her face again. Even then she didn’t meet his eyes, but he knew instantly by something in her expression – if he had not in fact known all along – that for her the question was not in the very least a dead one and she did not suppose it to be so for him.
After the ladies had left, there was half an hour with the port, and then the sexes were reshuffled for tea and coffee.
Ross had one other meeting with Caroline Penvenen. He was passing a small withdrawing-room when he heard angry words and recognized the voice as Unwin Trevaunance’s. He had only gone a few more paces when he heard the door bang sharply and quick footsteps caught him up at the door of the main drawing-room. He stepped back to let Caroline go in before him. She smiled at him rather breathlessly, her eyes still glinting with a disappearing emotion.
As he seemed about to move away, she said: ‘Might I have your company for a moment or two?’
‘For as long as you wish it.’
She stood beside him, scanning the people with narrowed eyes. He was aware now how tall she was and how graceful.
‘I’m gratified you are loyal to your friends, Captain Poldark.’
‘Loyal? I hope so. But do you mean . . .’
‘I mean to Dr Enys. Because I must tell you that when I met him first he was most loyal to you.’
‘When was that?’
‘Before your trial, of course. He was quite hot-blooded in your defence.’
In the general run of life people shied away from mentioning his trial to Ross. His was not a face that encouraged liberties. But this girl seem to suffer no hesitation. She spoke either from a complete lack of perception and sensitiveness or else out of her own particular conception of honesty which admitted no taboos. Since she seemed to wish to be friendly, he took the charitable view.