Ross didn’t say much; every one of the workers knew the state of things in the mine, but every one no doubt hoped this would just make the difference. He did not disillusion them, for that would come soon enough.
On the way up again he said to Henshawe: ‘I agree. It is not unimpressive.’
‘You said all along you had the feeling to go deeper.’
‘Yes, but not for tin, man, not for tin. Anyway it may still be the merest pocket.’
As they reached the top and the now apparently bright day greeted them, he added: ‘I’m glad Ellery found it. He and his partner are good men. We can get what little they have time to bring up stamped and dressed, and it will make a difference to their last earnings.’
‘They’ll take it some hard to be deprived of the chance to work a few weeks more. They would have given up more easier if there had been no such find. What we need’s a breathing space to see what this means.’
‘I agree, but where’s it to come from? Who’s to pay? I tell you frankly I haven’t twenty pounds in the world.’
Henshawe said: ‘I’d never much faith in you seeking the lodes at a greater depth. It’s not been my experience in this district – they die on you. But this has a keenly look to me. And it’s queer; copper under tin you expect – but not tin under copper.’
‘Well, there’s four days still to go. They’d be advised to work hard until Saturday.’
Ross did not tell Demelza of the discovery. There was no virtue in raising false hopes. But the whisper spread behind his back, and in no time she had heard of it and wanted to know what it meant.
‘It means nothing,’ Ross said. ‘At best it would be a minor lottery prize. A few months ago we could have worked it as a side product; no one objects to an additional mineral, and the receipts from it would have kept us struggling a while longer. But there is nothing more to it than that. It will be a blow to many families when the mine closes, and I suppose it is not unnatural that they should be hoping for the impossible.’
‘So was I,’ said Demelza, and after that nothing more was said.
Nothing more until Thursday evening, when Captain Henshawe called. He found them both at home, so the conversation took place before Demelza.
‘I’ve just been down again, sur. They’ve opened of her up a tidy bit since Tuesday. More and more it look to me like a lode of value and not just a freak bunch. The stuff that’s come up, as you know, is as rich as you’d want. It go more and more against the grain to let her fill with water at the present stage.’
Ross frowned his discomfort. ‘It goes against the grain to let her fill with water at any stage. Let someone only provide the coal to keep the pump working . . .’
‘That’s what I been thinking,’ said Henshawe apologetically.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I been thinking that if I’m eagerer than you I’m also the more able to back my judgment. Leisure is doing a fine job for me and I’ve made savings. Not all that big, but I could see us through a month or more. I could put down a hundred pound if need be. It seems only right, and I’d be willing to do that.’
Ross stared at him. ‘You would?’
‘Yes, I would.’
Ross had known Henshawe for twelve years, since he was made mine captain at Grambler. He was an honest man and a clever one. His education, he sometimes said, had cost his father a penny a week for eight months. He had raised himself – at one time before the depression came – to a position of consulting manager to five mines solely on the strength of his own ability and acumen. His friendship with Ross had grown closer ever since the opening of Wheal Grace. But Ross had no fear that Henshawe was making this offer as a gesture of friendship or on a charitable impulse of the moment. Unlike certain other people who might be brought to mind, Henshawe had never disguised the fact that he felt his first duty to be to his own wife and family. He would perhaps have given five pounds to save a friend from prison; but nothing would have induced him to risk a further hundred pounds of hard-gleaned capital in a mining venture which had already absorbed so much unless . . .
Ross met Demelza’s eyes across the room. He knew what she was thinking.
‘Are you wholly satisfied, then, that this thing is worth pursuing? After all the other failures you feel so sure of this . . .’
‘Not sure, sur. But I thought to proceed slowly. In another week we shall know far more. If ’tis disappointing we can still close and I shall have lost twenty or twenty-five pound. If it go on as I think it will go on, I’ll back it for a month longer. But we must move tomorrow. I thought with your permission I’d send over to Trevaunance or Basset’s Cove for coal to carry on. ’Twill only just reach us in time.’
‘Send over by all means,’ said Ross, but neither his face nor his voice was easy to read. He was carefully combating a feeling within him which he was afraid to recognize as hope.
On the same day towards the evening George Warleggan went to see his father and mother at Cardew and told them that Elizabeth Poldark had promised to be his wife.
Chapter Two
In all prospering human affairs there is a streak of hazard, a blending of good fortune with good judgment which gives the lucky man a sense of having earned his deserts and gives the deserving, if he is modest, an awareness of his luck.
That George Warleggan was able to break such startling news to his family came in part from events over which he had no control and in part from that sharp sense of timing which had stood him in good stead before as a man of affairs.
They met at Cusgarne on the Thursday afternoon, and Thursday was the last and most trying day of four which had been trying for Elizabeth.
First there had been the unpleasant scene with George Tabb, who had been a faithful servant of the Poldarks all his life. As the last manservant, he had felt himself able to claim certain privileges even before Francis died; and since then he had become subtly less easy to handle. On Monday a trial of strength, and Elizabeth came out of it bitterly aware that she had let things slide too long. Now she must either accept his defiance or discharge her two remaining servants and take new ones who would not possibly get through the same amount of work.
The choice was temporarily but uneasily shelved. Then Mr Nathaniel Pearce arrived fresh from his gout, with new problems to face, the results of negotiations to report, and new decisions to be made for which only Elizabeth could be responsible. A tithe of £1 6s 8d per year on the seines of certain of the fishing boats in Sawle was payable to the Poldarks, and in the case of most boats this was long overdue. For the last four years catches had been poor. Should the fishermen be pressed for the money? Whose was the greater need now? A long-standing complaint from Garth, Mr Penvenen’s agent, on the condition of the bridge over the stream behind Grambler village where the two estates ran together. Repair was Poldark responsibility, but now Mr Penvenen, newly returned from London, offered to pay one quarter of the cost of a new bridge if Mrs Poldark would meet the rest. Would she meet the rest? What about the pastureland to the west of the house? Ross advised her to have it ploughed; for now that war had come, corn growing would be likely to pay handsome dividends. But already it was late to do anything this year, and it would mean engaging and paying farm hands. Finally there was the making of a complicated dispute with some tinners who were claiming their age-old right under the Stannary Law to enter enclosed ground and prospect for tin.
She slept badly that night, and so in the morning in the very first light was the less strong to meet the news that it brought. A man from Cusgarne to say her mother had had an apoplexy and would she come at once. Elizabeth was in Kenwyn by eleven and found her mother paralysed in one arm and hardly able to speak. Over a silent meal with her father she faced up to the inescapable. There was now no choice for her. Already there was one bedridden woman at Trenwith, tended on unsatisfactorily by the village girl Elizabeth had been able to engage. The Chynoweths would bring a little money but trouble and difficulties out of proportion. Elizabeth l
ooked into the future and saw it as one in which sickness and age and responsibility were her only companions.
Into this picture came George Warleggan, saying he had only just heard of her mother’s illness and that he had come straight up from the bank, apologizing that he should be a little untidy, solicitous for Mr and Mrs Chynoweth, and more than solicitous for Mrs Poldark.
She told him all there was to tell, and without emotion told him what she proposed to do. While they were talking, her father shuffled out of the room, a man who for thirty years had accepted his directives from his wife and now without her was helmless, drifting as the first wind took him.
They talked on for a time. George seemed reluctant to go. He was watching Elizabeth with his attentive eyes. At length he said:
‘Do you know what I wish?’
‘No.’
‘I wish, my dear Elizabeth, that you would allow me to make all the arrangements necessary, and that you would permit me to engage a separate establishment for your mother at Trenwith, so that no further burden would fall on you.’
‘I couldn’t let you do that.’
‘Why not? You’re so frail, Elizabeth. I fear for you. One does not expect the lily to stand the storms of winter. It needs protection. You need protection. I can only offer it you in this way.’
She glanced at him through her lashes, her face pale and withdrawn but not unfriendly.
‘You’re truly kind. But I’m stronger than I look. Now – just now – and perhaps for a few years, I shall have to be. I regret it – you don’t know how much I regret it – but it has to be. One must take what life sends.’
‘But one must not take what I send, eh? Is that it?’
She smiled at him. ‘I have already taken so much.’
‘Oh,’ he made a gesture, ‘a little for my godson, and that very reluctantly; certain concessions in the matter of Francis’s debts. But nothing for yourself. And now nothing for your mother. I should like to do it for your mother’s sake.’
Always in the past he had found this the surest avenue to Elizabeth’s sympathies, and it was so now.
‘Oh, you know how very deeply I have appreciated what you’ve done for her in the past, George. Your kindness makes me ashamed to refuse you anything. But what you suggest—’
He said: ‘If there was one thing you did not refuse me, it would solve everything.’
‘What is that?’ she asked, looking at him; and instantly knew.
‘Yourself,’ he said.
She turned a little away from him, with a sudden sensation of finding herself on the edge of a precipice. It was a precipice she had quietly known of for a long time but disregarded because she felt her balance so sure. There was no danger – except perhaps in allowing him to think there might be. Now suddenly the equilibrium was changed.
‘Before you say anything,’ he went on, ‘let me add something to that one word. Although I’ve never spoken of it, you will be aware, I dare suppose, that I have loved you for ten years, ever since we first met. In that time I have served you only as I could, by paying back half Francis’s card debts with my cousin Sanson, by waiving the interest on his ordinary debts to our bank, by allowing no thought of retaliation to be considered when he – persistently insulted me. All this I did willingly and would have done twice as much if the opportunity’d been present – as you also know. Since Francis’s death I have served you in any way you would allow me, and will continue to without thought of anything I may gain by it.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m more than grateful – more than grateful.’
‘But now I ask you to marry me. As I said, I love you. I don’t think you love me. But I think you like and respect me; and I think – indeed I’m sure that in time such liking would become something more than liking, something closer than a common interest.’ He hunched his shoulders and stared at her. She had not moved any farther away, and he could see her face. He thought there was a slight flush under her pale composure. He flattered himself that, considering all that hung on the outcome, he was putting his case well. ‘I can’t bring you breeding, my dear. But I can bring you a certain kind of gentility which is the more punctilious because it is only one generation deep. And so far as material considerations go—’
‘Please,’ she said.
‘Oh, I know you would not marry me for my money or my possessions. If you did that, you wouldn’t be the person I know you to be. But at the risk of offending you I want to tell you what I can offer.’
She tightened her lips, a little more tense, as if ready for another protest. The window through which she looked was full of trees and hedges, overgrown, overbranched, blowing in the wind.
He said: ‘When I marry, my father has promised that he and my mother will vacate Cardew. That means I shall be able to take my wife to a house four times as big as Trenwith, everything in it almost new, twenty servants, in a park of five hundred acres. You’ve seen it. You know. If you marry me, Trenwith could be repaired and refurnished, kept as a second home where your father and mother could live with adequate servants, and where we could visit them as often as you chose. I already have my own carriage, you could have one also if you wanted it, or two or six if it pleased you. I could take you to London and Bath and introduce you into society there. Local society is already a thought provincial for me. I have undertaken to educate Geoffrey Charles. But as my son he would be differently placed from what he is now. I am heir to all Warleggan interests. So would he be. We’re still young, Elizabeth, you and I. There’s very little we could not achieve if we put our minds to it. For ten years you’ve lived in a cage. Give me permission to turn the key.’
‘And the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and saith unto him: “All these things will I give thee . . .”’ It had been one of the lessons read last Sunday in Sawle Church, where Elizabeth sat alone with Geoffrey Charles in the family pew.
She picked up her bag from the table, fumbled in it without knowing what she wanted. She hadn’t spoken and now he was waiting. The light was already poor in the room, as poor in its way as the worn furniture; but some reflection from the mirror above the sofa lit up his heavy, intent, constrained face. She knew that every moment he waited his hopes of a favourable answer would rise. To her own astonishment, she realized that a favourable answer was no longer impossible for her. It was as if life were mesmerizing her into acceptance of a situation which at one time, and not so long ago, would never have been allowed to come into being. There was still enough critical detachment in her to notice the occasional gaucheries of his proposal; yet reason told her there was not one single statement he had made which was exaggerated or untrue. He could offer her all that. He, George Warleggan, very close to her now, known so long that easy familiarity led to an underrating of his achievements and his charm; but in fact formidable, wealthy, powerful in the county for good or ill, still young, not bad-looking, a person already become a personage, one of the few who counted and who would count still more as time went by; he was offering her all this as the price of marriage: her son lacking for nothing, all her problems solved. All except one, a new one, the problem of George.
‘Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Can I suppose that—’
She stopped him with a gesture, instantly, suddenly flushing into a rare colour and brilliance of expression. ‘No, please, I don’t want you to think . . .’
And there in her refusal she halted. Upstairs was her mother, crippled and fretful, and her father, indecisive and endlessly complaining. She had ridden over in the rain and tonight or tomorrow she must ride back to Trenwith, which would greet her unlighted and unheated and with all its problems still to solve. And years of loneliness and sick-nursing lay ahead. And on the other side was light and warmth and companionship and care.
‘Oh, George—’ she said, and put up her hands to her flushed face. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
Instantly he was beside her,
one arm gently round her shoulders, aware of a startling triumph that he’d not dared to expect, but aware of how nearly it still trembled in the balance.
‘Say nothing more now, my dear,’ he urged. ‘Nothing at all, please.’
‘I am so depressed. Please don’t ask for an answer now.’
‘I ask you for nothing. Only give me permission to give.’
‘But if you give—’
‘Don’t say any more, Elizabeth.’
‘But I must. It’s the – loneliness . . . What I’d not imagined – the lack of a person, a partner. But to pretend now, or to let you think . . .’
‘I think nothing for the present. But I hope. Loneliness is not one-sided, Elizabeth. A man can feel it too, especially when he has loved anyone as long and as hopelessly as I have you.’
So they stayed for a time. And while she held her head down as if in defeat, he held his high in victory and looked over her bright hair at the wild, untended garden and the rain. He watched the water trickling in grey loops down the glass.
Though intention had not been in it, he suddenly found the prospect before him dazzlingly good – first because it gave him this woman whom he had loved and wanted for so long, second because by the same stroke it dealt what he knew would be the deadliest of blows at his bitterest enemy. It was not given to many men, he felt, to achieve so much by a single coup.
Chapter Three
The tin lode did not peter out. In a week they found that ore-bearing rock existed in a great mass at this point. No one knew how far it yet extended, but Ross began to feel himself infected with some of the general excitement. In another week they were raising the ore in quantity; and even allowing for the difficulties of dressing, there was the prospect of a return.
To keep down expenditure, all work on the copper lodes – such as they were – was suspended, and for the same reason other trying decisions had to be made. They were working an underhand stope, and already there was a worked-out open space above them. Very soon it would be dangerous to go on without timbermen and props for support. Already it was uneconomic, for no lode is constant in size and quality; and instead of eating at it in this unscientific way, they should have been making a series of right-angled shafts and levels to cut the lode at different depths and to create reserves of explored ground. That was the methodical way; but lack of capital forced them to live from hand to mouth.
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