Of course there were places in Truro down by the river where he could buy his pleasure – where he had been several times during his widowerhood – and these he patronized once or twice. But it was a dangerous game in a town of three thousand inhabitants; however disguised by heavy cloak, by taking off the clerical collar, by walking swiftly through the dark streets after nightfall. Someone might recognize him and report him to his wardens; someone might even rob him and then what redress? The woman herself might recognize him and attempt some sort of blackmail.
It was an increasingly difficult time for him.
His second problem was a matter of advancement, and could be discussed more appropriately with others. Eventually he took it to George.
He found Mr Warleggan in his counting house discussing some matter of credit with his uncle, Mr Cary Warleggan, and it was some half-hour before George was free to attend to him. Thereupon Osborne put his case.
Two weeks ago the Reverend Philip Webb, vicar of the parish of St Sawle-with-Grambler, had died of an impostume of the kidneys; and so the living had become vacant. This living Osborne desired for himself.
The living, Osborne pointed out, was worth £200 a year. Mr Webb, as they all knew, had lived in London and Marazion and had seldom visited the church, the Reverend Mr Odgers having been installed as a curate at £40 a year to conduct the business of the parish. Osborne felt that this was an excellent opportunity for him to add to his own income and had written to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, in whose gift it lay, applying for the living. He had also written to his uncle, Godolphin, who was an influence at court, to put in a word for him. What Osborne thought was that if George were to write to the Dean and Chapter also it might be just enough to sway their choice.
George considered this unemotionally while Ossie was speaking. It was a natural enough ambition and a natural enough request, yet he resented it. Although the marriage of Elizabeth’s cousin to this young man had been his idea and he had pushed it through in spite of various obstacles, not to mention Morwenna’s objections, yet he found himself holding the young man in some distaste. His manner of dressing was too flamboyant for a parson, his voice too assertive, too important; George remembered the long haggling they had had over terms. Ossie had to keep in mind – and didn’t seem sufficiently to realize – that although his marriage into the family linked the important name of Godolphin with that of Warleggan, he, financially, was small fry, as all the Whitworths – and indeed the Godolphins – were these days. A greater deference would have been suitable on the part of the younger man towards an older and much richer man who had befriended him.
Also Elizabeth, George knew, was not pleased with Morwenna’s looks; the girl had gone more sallow than ever and her eyes were specially dark these days as if brooding on an inner tragedy. Most girls when they had made a loveless but advantageous marriage quickly adapted themselves and made the best of things. So Morwenna should. George had no patience with her. But Elizabeth blamed Ossie. Elizabeth said Ossie was a nasty young man, not an ornament to the church at all. When challenged to go into detail she shrugged her pretty shoulders and said it was nothing definite she knew – for Morwenna would never say anything – it was just a general feeling that had been growing in her bones over the last year.
So, when Osborne had finished, George said nothing for a time but turned the money in his fob and stared through the lattice window.
Eventually he said: ‘I doubt that my influence with the Dean and Chapter is as great as you suppose.’
‘Not great,’ said Osborne practically. ‘But as the owner of the old Poldark estate at Trenwith you are the biggest landowner in the parish, and this will count with the Dean, I’m sure.’
George looked at the young man. Osborne never phrased his sentences well. ‘Not great.’ ‘The old Poldark estate.’ If he wrote in this fashion to the Dean it was not likely to commend him. Yet Ossie was now part of the family. George did not like to think he had made a bad choice. And if things went as they now appeared to be going, a fashionable friend in London, one specially with an entrée at court, such as Conan Godolphin had, could be of considerable value to a new Member of Parliament, groping his way at Westminster, not quite sure of his social position or friends.
‘I’ll write. You have the address?’
‘I just address my letters to the Dean and Chapter at Exeter. There’s no need for more.’
‘How is Morwenna?’
Ossie raised his eyebrows at the diversion. ‘I could wish her better. It will be good when it is out of the way.’
‘When is it to be?’
‘About another month, she thinks. But women so often make mistakes. George, when you write, will you point out to the Dean that from my residence in Truro it will be easier for me to oversee Odgers than ever it was for Webb to do so, and even to preach there occasionally when I stay at your house.’
George said: ‘Osborne, it is possible that I may be going to London later this year. When you next write to your uncle you might inform him that I shall expect to give myself the pleasure of waiting on him then.’
Ossie blinked, shaken out of his preoccupation by the steeliness of George Warleggan’s tone.
‘Of course, George. I’ll do that. Shall you be going for a prolonged stay?’
‘It depends. Nothing is decided.’
There was silence for a moment or two. Ossie got up to go.
‘The extra income would be more than useful now there is another mouth to feed.’
‘I believe little Odgers had not had his stipend raised for more than ten years,’ George said.
‘What? Oh, no. Well . . . It is a matter I should be prepared to consider – though in the country he is on very little expense, I would have thought.’
George rose also and glanced back into his office, where two clerks were working, but he did not speak.
‘I’m writing to Lord Falmouth too,’ Ossie said. ‘Although he has no direct interest he is generally so influential. I also considered approaching your friend Sir Francis Basset, although I have not actually had an opportunity of meeting him. At the Enys’s wedding—’
‘I think both those gentlemen will be too preoccupied over the next weeks to have the time to pay attention to your request,’ George said shortly. ‘You are better to save your ink.’
‘D’you mean over this by-election? Have you heard whom Lord Falmouth is favouring?’
‘None of us will know until much nearer the time,’ George said.
II
That night Ossie made a very distressing discovery.
After Morwenna had gone to bed he went up to the lumber room to find an old sermon which he thought would serve as a basis for the one he had to deliver on Sunday. He found it and was about to leave the room when a gleam of light showed that there was a flaw in the wooden partition dividing this room from the one where Rowella slept. He tiptoed across and peered through, but the blue flock paper on the other side blocked his view. Taking a pin out of the sheets of the sermon, he inserted it and very carefully made a hole. Through it he saw Rowella in a white nightdress brushing her long lank hair.
Hastily dropping the pin, he tiptoed from the lumber room and crept down to his study, where he sat for a long time turning over the pages of his sermon without reading it.
III
Wednesday was the day on which Ross made a weekly inspection of Wheal Grace, along with Captain Henshawe. Since the accident of May ’93 he had never left anything to chance or to the reports of other people.
This morning before they went down they had been introducing a surface change at the mine. Tin ore was loaded on to mules for carting away to the stamps, and it had long been the custom in the industry to fill one large sack with the orebearing ground, which was lifted on the shoulders of one man by two others, and the one man then carried it and threw it across the back of the mule. But these sacks when filled weighed about 360 lb., and twenty-five such mules were loaded in such a way, often twice
a day. Ross had known men crippled as a result of bearing this weight, and proposed that the new sacks when bought should be half the size and the old ones as they wore out abandoned.
To his own surprise he met with opposition from the carriers themselves, who were proud of their strength and suspicious that if the new sacks were introduced more men would be employed to earn less. It took Henshawe and himself the best part of two hours to convince them that the change would be for their own good. So it was past eleven before the inspection of the mine got under way and nearly twelve before they reached the tunnel that Sam Carne and Peter Hoskin were driving south on the 40-fathom level.
Ross said: ‘Neither of them working today?’
‘Carne asked for the day off to visit his brother who has injured both legs in a fall, so Hoskin is helping with the south adit.’
‘Sam’s work is good? He does not let his religion interfere? . . . Well, no, give them their due, they never do that. How much further have they gone?’
‘Twenty-two yards when I measured last week. They’re in hard ground and making little progress.’
Bent double, hat candles flickering in the dubious air, they crawled to the end of the tunnel, where a shattered end and a pile of rubble showed the extent of the digging.
Ross squatted down, staring at the rock, rubbed it here and there with a wet finger. ‘There’s mineral veins enough here and spots of ore.’
‘There’s been that all along. You can see the stockwork farther back.’
‘Problem is you could open this up twenty feet west and twenty feet east and still miss a lode channel by a fathom or so. Think you it’s worth going on with?’
‘Well, we can’t be too far now from the old runs of Wheal Maiden, sur. Since that was worked by your father, and profitable for a time, we can’t be too far from some of those old lodes.’
‘Well, yes, that was why we drove in this direction in the first place. But were any of the Maiden lodes as deep as forty fathoms?’
‘Tis doubtful. And Maiden being on a hill . . .’
‘Quite . . . This is hard, bitter ground. I don’t like these vugs. I don’t want to risk another fall.’
‘Oh, there’s small risk of that. You could chop a church out here and twould hold.’
‘Is there anything better we can put them on if we take them off this?’
‘Only shoring up Gradient Alley behind Trevethan and Martin.’
‘Then leave them be for another month or so. I take it there’s no risk of unwatering Maiden?’
‘God forbid! Tis little likely. She was always a dry mine.’
They made their way back slowly the way they had come, and began to climb up the stepped, slanting ladders. A pinpoint of light slowly enlarged itself until it was a great mouth in the darkness; then they were out into the startling brilliance of a rainy day.
Ross stood talking with Henshawe for a few minutes more, noticing as he spoke that a horse was tethered near his house. A visitor? He narrowed his eyes but could not recognize the horse. Its colour was pale roan and it was finely groomed. Some new acquisition of Caroline’s? Sir Hugh Bodrugan out courting again?
From here the fine rain was blowing across the beach like smoke. The waves were lifeless, the landscape without colour or form. Two of the three tin stamps in this valley were working; ears were so accustomed to the clatter and rhythmic thump that one had to make a conscious effort to hear them; the hay in the Long Field was thin this year. He must keep in touch with Basset about these farming experiments. That was if Basset wished to continue the friendship after his refusal of the nomination. It had gone off yesterday.
He had talked the matter over with Demelza first, and, true to his prediction to Dwight, her reaction had been unexpected. She had been against his accepting the offer. Although he had already wholly made up his mind to refuse, her definite stand against it had, naturally if irrationally, irritated him.
He had said: ‘You were so disappointed that I turned down a seat on the bench, which is a small thing, but you applaud my wish not to attempt to become a Member of Parliament, which is a great.’
A curl had fallen across her forehead as she wrinkled it.
‘Ross, you must not expect always reason from me. Often it is what I feel, not what I think, and that sways me. But I’m not one for words.’
‘Try,’ he said. ‘I have found you very much one for words most times.’
‘Well, it is like this, Ross. I think you live on a knife edge.’
‘A knife. Whatever do you mean?’
‘A knife. The knife is what you think you ought to do, what your – your conscience or your spirit or your mind thinks you ought to do. And if you move away from that, stray from that – what’s the word? – then you cut yourself.’
‘Pray go on. I am wholly fascinated.’
‘No, you must not laugh. You asked me to say what I meant, and I’m trying. As a justice you would have been on the bench and sat in judgement – isn’t that right? – and helped with local laws. That I thought you could do – should do – and if you failed sometimes you yet would not have to bend. And it is the duty of a gentleman to help in this way. Isn’t it? I would still like you to be that. But in Parliament, if what you say is true, would you not often, quite often, be asked to bend? . . .’ She impatiently pushed back her hair. ‘By bend I don’t mean bow; I mean bend from what you think you ought to do.’
‘Deviate,’ Ross said.
‘Yes. Is that it? Yes, deviate.’
‘You make me sound very stern and noble.’
‘I wish I could say it better. Not stern. Not noble. Though you can be those. But you oftentimes make me feel you’re like a judge in court. And who’s in the dock? You.’
Ross laughed. ‘And who better to be there?’
Demelza said: ‘Most men as they grow into middle life, it appears to me, get more and more self-satisfied. But you every year get more and more unself-satisfied.’
‘And is that your reason?’
‘My reason is I want you to be happy, Ross, and doing things you enjoy doing – and working hard and living hard. What I don’t want is to see you trying to do things you can’t do and having to do things you don’t agree with – and cutting yourself to pieces because of what you think is failure.’
‘Give me a coat of armour and I’ll be all right, eh?’
‘Give you a coat of that sort of armour and I’d say accept!’
He had finished the conversation off by adding in some exasperation: ‘Well, my dear, your summary of my virtues and failings may be quite correct; but in honesty I must confess it is not for any of your reasons, nor really for any of the reasons I have yet stated that I’m sure I’m right to refuse. The real crux of it is that I am not willing to be anyone’s tame lapdog. I don’t belong in the world of pretty behaviour and genteel fashion. For most of the time I’m happy enough, as you know, to observe the courtesies – and as I grow older and more of a family man and more prosperous, the impulse to – to kick against the traces becomes less and less. But – I reserve the right. I want to reserve the right. What I did last year in France is little different from what I did a few years before in England; but for one I am named a hero and for the other a renegade! Put me on a bench dispensing laws or in a parliament making them and I should feel the biggest hypocrite on earth!’
When he drew near the house he thought he remembered seeing the roan horse once before – last week – and he was correct.
As he went in Lieutenant Armitage rose. ‘Why, Ross, I hoped to see you but feared I would not. I must leave shortly.’
They shook hands and made polite conversation. Demelza, looking slightly flushed – a circumstance so rare that Ross couldn’t fail to notice it – said:
‘Lieutenant Armitage has brought me over a plant from his uncle’s garden. A rare new plant which he says should go against the library wall. It’s a mag – what did you say?’
‘Not strictly from my uncle’s garden,’ s
aid Hugh Armitage. ‘He ordered three and they came in pots and I persuaded him to part with one as a gift to the wife of the man who saved his nephew from a hellish captivity. I was talking to your wife of them when we met at Tehidy last week. They are best against a wall, being rather tender and coming from Carolina in the Americas.’
Ross said: ‘Any new plant to Dezmelza is like a new friend, to be cosseted and cared for. But why must you go? Stay to dinner. It has been a long ride.’
‘I have been invited to dine with the Teagues. I said I would be there by two.’
‘Mrs Teague still has four unmarried daughters to dispose of,’ Ross said.
Armitage smiled. ‘So I have been told. But I think she’ll be disappointed if she entertains hopes of that sort. Having just escaped from one prison I’m the less likely just yet to want to enter another.’
‘A sour view of marriage,’ Demelza said, smiling too.
‘Ah, Mrs Poldark, I take a sour view of marriage only because I see so many of my friends bound in unions they find tedious and restricting. I don’t take a sour view of love. For the overwhelming love of an Heloise, a Chloe, an Isolde, I would if need be jettison everything, even life. For life is a trumpery thing at best, isn’t it? A few movements, a few words, between dark and dark. But in true love you keep company with the gods.’
Demelza had coloured again. Ross said: ‘I don’t think Mrs Teague will be thinking along those lines.’
‘Well,’ Hugh Armitage said, ‘I shall hope at least for a passable dinner.’
They went chatting to the door, examined again the fleshy, dark green, heavy-leafed plant standing in its cloam pot beside the step, admired his horse, promised they would come and see him some time when he could get his uncle free of this election nonsense, watched him mount and clatter over the bridge and wave at a turn of the valley.
The Four Swans Page 11