She detected in Elizabeth’s eyes for the first time a flicker of sympathy – though it might have been there before, it had not shown. The meeting ended in a deadlock but with just a gleam of hope.
Not so her interview with George that evening. In twelve months they had had few direct personal conversations with each other, and this was like no other that had preceded it. Although Elizabeth was present she took virtually no part. He did not storm, he was not even angry – she would almost have preferred it had he been so. He just casually, politely but authoritatively, swept her objection aside. He might have been her father announcing that he had found her a place in a school and she was to start next month. That she preferred to stay at home and play with the baby was understandable enough, but that was not how the world went on. It was necessary to grow up.
She found herself arguing against something that in George’s eyes had already happened. She had been given in marriage. Her place in the school was booked. Tears, fears, some distress was natural. It would pass. Mr Osborne Whitworth was calling at four tomorrow and would take tea with her alone.
Panic nearly led her into complete defiance; but on the brink she was intimidated by George’s authority. He was thirty-five, rich, influential and an altogether formidable personality. She was only just eighteen, scared of him, and a long way from home. She tried instead to hedge. She knew, she said, nothing yet of what her mother would say, and after all it was her mother whose word carried the most weight with her. In any case, whatever her mother said, she needed time. She needed a month, two months, three months perhaps. Time to adjust herself to thoughts of marriage. Time for this, that and the other: she invented excuses, some of them reasonable, others that would not bear examination.
George did not bother to examine them. He was content enough that he had made the first breach, that she had made the first concession. Thereafter it would all follow as it had been planned. His only concession to the objections was to call the Rev. Mr Whitworth into his office for five minutes when he came to take tea the following day and to warn him that his bride-to-be was a little high-strung and should be given time to adjust herself.
Ossie was not nervous. Neither was he at all high-strung. A sturdy young man, with heavy legs that might have belonged to a sailor, he was well aware of his good looks, his good birth, his good voice and his wide knowledge of the most fashionable clothes for men. His appointment to the church had only marginally curbed the last of these attributes, and not at all the first three. His experience of women had been not unextensive but had been mainly confined to the jelly houses of Oxford and to his first wife, on whom he had bestowed his attentions twice weekly until she died of it. Since Truro was a small place and his face and his cloth already too well known, he had need of another wife for more personal reasons than the care of his two motherless children.
From the start he had found Morwenna a pleasant person to lead out on to the floor for a gavotte, and to sit in a drawing-room with and be handed cakes. He did not in fact care all that much for her face – though he admitted that her modest expression was very suitable for a cleric’s wife. But her body was a different matter. For some days now he had been thinking carefully of the swell of her breasts under the prim grey muslin blouse, of the slimness of her waist, of her long young legs, of her surprisingly small, slippered feet. He had an odd partiality for women’s feet. The thought of the possession of all this, the exclusive and personal possession of all this, had recently interfered with the concentration of his prayers. But of course he had not allowed such thoughts to gain any hold until he was sure also of the personal possession of £3000.
He felt now that marriage to this young woman at an early date was necessary to clear his mind of the sick fancies circulating there.
But the meeting with his affianced bride did not go off quite so well as he had expected it to. Once he had her alone, which privilege was allowed him immediately after tea, he continued his monopoly of the conversation, at first on a casual note, telling her in detail of a hand of whist he had played the night before. If his partner had not led the king of spades on the second round he would scarce have known which way to look for it, but thereafter, by drawing trumps, they had made twelve tricks between them – and their opponents had held ace, king of hearts and ace of diamonds. He had cleared £18 on the evening, and none so down in the mouth as Willie Hick, who never could bear to be the loser!
Ossie laughed long at the memory and, to be polite, Morwenna briefly joined in. Did Miss Chynoweth play whist, he asked? Miss Chynoweth did not. This depressed him a moment, but then, recollecting the object of his call, he resumed on a lower and more romantic note. He told Morwenna that she must overcome her surprise that he had noted her in the way he had, but that in fact ever since he set eyes on her at the Cardew ball he had been determined to make her his own. Unlike Sam Carne, Osborne Whitworth seldom introduced God into his daily conversation, but at this point he stated that he felt God had guided him to accept Mr Warleggan’s invitation to the ball when all his normal instincts, as a recently bereaved husband and father, had urged him to refuse. ‘Desolate as I then was,’ he said, ‘I felt you had been sent into my life to comfort me, to console me, to be my new helpmeet and my wife, and to be the mother, the new mother, for Sarah and Anne. It was a happy day for me when I found my sentiments returned. You will find the vicarage warm and comfortable. A little neglected – there is dry rot in two rooms and one of the chimneys needs renewal – but now we shall soon put that right.’
While saying this he had been standing with his back to the fire, hands behind his back and the tails of his cut-away silk coat hanging forward over his arms. His violet gloves were on the table beside him. Morwenna struggled to find something to say. Her impulse was to burst into tears and run from the room; but she had been treated so much as a child in her arguments with George and Elizabeth that she would not now on any account act like one. Instead, without looking at him, she muttered something to the effect that she was not at all sure that his sentiments were returned. It was the nearest she could get, she found, to an outright rejection. Being a modest girl, in whom further modesty had been instilled as a Christian virtue by both her father and her mother, she found herself complimented against her will by his proposal; and although she was adamantly against it, she racked her brains as to how she could convince Ossie that she was not for him, without hurting his feelings.
It didn’t work. Ossie so far unbent from his position as master of their future destinies as to take her hand and kiss it. ‘It is a natural feeling, Miss Chynoweth – Morwenna – it is a natural feeling. All women – all good women, that is – come to marriage with some hesitation and shyness. But the sentiment will be returned, I do assure you. Not only am I a clerk in holy orders, I am a man of feeling. You have nothing to fear from me. Our love will grow together. I shall tend it and see that it grows.’
Morwenna withdrew her hand. During this avowal she had glanced up at her suitor’s face and seen a momentary expression in his eyes that a more experienced woman would have recognized as lust. She saw it only briefly and as something rather startling and dislikeable. Stumbling and embarrassed, she began again. Part hostile towards him, part apologetic, she told him that she did not in fact return his sentiments at all, and that she feared she might never do so. Then, seeing his face again and aware that she had at least partly conveyed her meaning to him through the thick haze of his conceit, she timidly compromised and said that more than anything she needed time. It was the old plea, that which she had put forward to George. Time, to her, meant everything. She felt if the momentum of the marriage arrangement could only be arrested, then it might creak to a halt in due course of its own accord. To put off, in her weak position, to postpone was all.
So Osborne went away, a dissatisfied and somewhat offended man. He did not, of course, take the refusal too seriously; he only blamed George and Elizabeth for not having sufficiently prepared the ground. He knew that it would
all come right in the end. But he was aware, dimly aware, that there was a core of resolve in this slim, shy girl, and that it had to be tactfully overcome before a wedding day could be fixed. For the moment he would have to be content with his sick fancies.
Thereafter another terrible week for Morwenna. A letter came from her mother to Elizabeth saying how delighted she was at the news. The two elder Chynoweths, appraised of the situation late in the day – as they were about most things – approved the match and added their congratulations on its arrangement. The only grain of comfort was that her mother wrote in her letter that she had not received her usual letter from her daughter that week and was awaiting it.
The decision to let her return to Trenwith with Mr and Mrs Jonathan Chynoweth and Geoffrey Charles was taken late one evening. Elizabeth said to George: ‘Why not let her go? Perhaps she has been too close-confined here since Christmas. It cannot surely affect the match for a few weeks. After all Osborne has only been a widower since the beginning of December.’ And George had agreed. He did not want to drive the girl into some act of outright despair; absence from William Osborne might make the heart grow fonder. But in fact he was thinking more of Osborne’s heart than the girl’s. He perceived that the bait of £3000 was becoming no less important because it could not yet be swallowed; and he also saw that Mr Whitworth’s eyes followed the girl about wherever she went. For his own part, Conan Godolphin, Ossie’s uncle, had been in the news at court, so George was more than ever attached to the match. On neither side was it likely to cool, or be allowed to cool by the other.
Back in Trenwith, away from the now oppressive presence of George and Elizabeth, Morwenna felt as if she were starting a new life – or at least re-entering an old one. Freedom to breathe, freedom to think again without thinking of her suitor, freedom to ride and walk and read and talk: for the moment she was able to banish the threat of a loveless marriage, to banish the threat even of making a decision. Here she wrote a long letter to her mother explaining everything – or nearly everything – and asking that she might come home for a week before anything was finally decided.
She kept carefully to the grounds of Trenwith, avoiding any contact or thought of contact with a young man whom she knew she should not see again. Any decision about Osborne Whitworth must be made without regard to a chance friendship which had grown up here in the autumn months of last year – for she knew that, whatever else, that held no future for her. Geoffrey Charles, of course, as soon as he returned was clamant to go and seek out Drake; but she made one excuse after another to put him off, and then on the third day fate came to her aid, for the boy jumped off his pony and cut his ankle badly on a stone.
Thereafter she walked and rode alone for a space. She went about her ordinary business, teaching Geoffrey Charles, sitting reading to him, visiting Aunt Agatha – a little more often as a result of her meeting with Ross – seeing to her aunt and uncle, sitting alone after they had gone to bed wondering what she should do with her life and fearing a tap at the window, a low whistle in the dark.
It came on Sunday about the usual time. She saw him first walking up the drive – in broad daylight – without any kind of concealment, walking up in his Sunday clothes, his dark barragan trousers, his green velvet jacket, his pink striped neckcloth. He came on, tall, shabby, lithe, walking straight up to the front door as if he had been invited.
Heart thumping, mouth dry, she met him at the door. She was anxious lest he should pull at the bell and draw a servant, now far more concerned that this visit should be a secret than she had ever been before. He had come to the side door most of those dark afternoons of November and December; he had come at Geoffrey Charles’s invitation; he was of a low class but respectable; if Geoffrey Charles chose to invite him there was really no reason why he should not do so; his relationship with Demelza Poldark made him at once both more and less persona grata. Any blame attaching to her, Morwenna, in the friendship could charitably be put down to inexperience on her part.
Now it was no longer so. Osborne Whitworth’s proposal had jolted her out of her young girl’s day-dreams, her excuse for irresponsibility. In three months she had grown up.
‘Drake!’ she said, and cleared her throat. ‘We did not expect you tonight!’
He looked at her face eagerly, attentively, his own face alight with pleasure, but curious, searching, wanting to renew his recollection of her, only half taking in her unwelcoming expression.
‘Miss Morwenna . . .’
‘Have you come to see Geoffrey Charles?’ she asked. ‘Unfortunately he has cut his ankle bad. I do not think—’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘They telled me. That’s why I come.’
She knew that she should shut the door on him but lacked the courage to do it without a few words of excuse. Then a noise from the direction of the stables made her aware again of how visible they were here, and she drew back and let him in, shut the big door, stood with her back against the door.
‘Miss Morwenna, tis a brave sight to see ye. Is the boy abed? Can I go up?’
‘I do not think . . .’
He stopped. ‘What do you not think?’
She stumbled over the words, not meeting his gaze. ‘Of course he would like to see you, but I know his mother would not approve . . . Since we went away . . .’
His own face had fallen. He was still watching her closely. ‘But she an’t back yet.’
‘No . . . no . . . Go on up.’
She followed him up the stairs, along the narrow dark passage to the turret room. When he saw who came in, Geoffrey Charles let out a whoop of delight and put his arms round Drake and gave him a great hug. So they sat for half an hour, talking, chattering, laughing and forgetting the unforgettable, ignoring what could not be ignored. In this company Morwenna’s studied calm, her controlled detachment did not survive long. Soon she was laughing and talking with the other two. The release, the relief, was the breath of life to her.
Geoffrey Charles showed Drake his new drawings, and Drake told them about how they were beginning to clear the land at Wheal Maiden to put up a new meeting house there. ‘Ye know, by that chimney on the hill afore ye go down to Nampara proper.’ Most of the time he appeared to be talking to Geoffrey Charles, but most of the time his eyes strayed to Morwenna’s face, searching and searching. And most of the time she kept her eyes averted; but just once and again she glanced up, and then they looked at each other. And they looked at each other.
Talking of what had gone was good, but shadows crept on to the edges of their sentences as Geoffrey Charles made plans for the coming summer. Drake was to show him where the toads lived over at Marasanvose, so that he could bring some back with him and keep them in the stables. Drake must take them both again to the Abbey caves. Drake must show them his own cottage and the plans for the new library at Nampara. And he, Geoffrey Charles, would show Drake where the choughs nested on the cliff edge, also the rocks where samphire grew and was gathered by the village children and where two had fallen to their deaths.
At length Drake rose to go. Geoffrey Charles’s wound had been well bound by Dr Choake and he was not supposed to leave his room for another week, so they could make no plans to meet out of doors, but Drake promised he would come again on Sunday next at the same time. If Mr and Mrs Warleggan returned before then word would be sent to him not to come. Geoffrey Charles kept him another ten minutes and still called repeatedly after him as he left the room.
‘I’ll see you out,’ Morwenna said.
So they went downstairs together and in silence. There had been flecks of snow in the wind again today, and the sky was as grey as their thoughts. For all laughter had gone from them when they left the room. As they reached the hall Drake said: ‘Can ee spare me a minute?’
She nodded and led the way through the big parlour to the little sitting room beyond. It was the shabby little room where they had met all through the winter, and it had become almost a private sitting room for the girl and the boy since she
came to the house. It was one on which George had not yet turned his renovating attention. The dusty curtains were of a heavy blue velvet and pulled together on rings gone rusty with the salt air. The old turkey carpet showed its threads by the door and in front of the fireplace. The furniture was the jetsam of other rooms, a table or a chair put here when it was replaced elsewhere. Yet it was comfortable; a bright fire burned; a newspaper lay open on the table beside ink and quill; pairs of stockings of Geoffrey Charles’s hung over a chair back waiting to be darned; miniatures of Morwenna’s father and mother stood on the mantelshelf.
He said: ‘You don’t want for me to come here no longer?’
He was standing with his back to the door as if guarding it. She went across and crouched by the fire.
‘That would be better for us both,’ she said.
‘Why? What’s changed? What’s changed ee, Morwenna?’
She stirred the fire with an iron poker too big for the grate. ‘Nothing has changed. It is just better that we should no longer meet.’
‘And – and Geoffrey Charles? Am I to see naught of he?’
‘I will . . . explain to him that it is better this way. I think soon, perhaps, he will be going away to school, and then it will be easy to forget.’
‘Twill not be easy fur me to forget.’
‘No.’ She nodded, still crouching, her back curved like a bow and as taut. ‘It will not be easy for you.’
‘And you? For you, Morwenna. What ’bout that?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It will be easy for me. I shall go away too.’
He came slowly over and stood by the mantelshelf, awkward, clumsy, his carefree, independent, boy’s face constricted into new lines. ‘That edn true. Tell me it edn true.’
The Black Moon Page 25