Ross Poldark

by Winston Graham

  “There are no seconds,” said Charles. “There's no suitable arrangements.”

  “Formality! One needs no formality when stalking a crow.”

  They went outside. It was easy to see that Francis was determined to have his satisfaction. Blamey, white about the nostrils, stood apart, as if the business didn’t concern him. Verity made a last appeal to her brother, but he snapped at her that some solution to her infatuation must be found and he had chosen this one.

  Jud was outside so there was no need to call him. He was visibly interested and impressed by the responsibility thrust on him. He had only seen such a thing once before and that thirty years ago. Francis told him to act as referee and to count out fifteen paces for them; Jud glanced at Ross, who shrugged.

  “Yes, sur, fifteen did ye say.”

  They were in the open space of grass before the house. Verity had refused to go indoors. She held to the back of the garden seat.

  The men stood back to back, Francis an inch or more the taller, his fair hair glinting in the sun.

  “Ready, sur?”

  “Aye.”

  Ross made a movement forward but checked himself. The headstrong fool must have his way.

  “Then go. One, two, three, fower, five, six—”

  As Jud counted the two men paced away from each other, and a swallow dipped and swerved between them.

  At the word fifteen they turned. Francis fired first and hit Blamey in the hand. Blamey dropped his pistol. He bent and picked it up with his left hand and fired back. Francis put up a hand to his neck and fell to the ground.

  4

  Ross's thought as he went forward was, I should have stopped them. What will this mean to Elizabeth if Francis…?

  He turned Francis over upon his back and ripped away the ruffles of his shirt. The ball had gone into the base of the neck by the shoulder but had not come out again. Ross lifted him and carried him into the house.

  “My God!” said Charles, following helplessly with the others. “The boy's dead… My boy—”

  “Nonsense,” Ross said. “Jud, take Mr. Francis's horse and ride for Dr. Choake. Say there has been a shooting accident. Not the truth, mind.”

  “Is the hurt serious?” Captain Blamey said, with a handkerchief about his hand. “I—”

  “Get out of here!” said Charles, empurpled. “How dare you come into the house again!”

  “Don’t crowd about him,” Ross urged, having laid Francis on the sofa. “Prudie, get me some clean rags and a bowl of hot water.”

  “Let me help,” said Verity. “Let me help. I can do something. I can—”

  “No, no. Leave him be.”

  There was silence for some moments until Prudie returned in haste with the bowl. Ross had kept the wound from bleeding excessively until now by pressing on it with his own coloured kerchief. Now he lifted this and pressed a damp cloth in its place. Francis winced and groaned.

  “He’ll be all right,” said Ross. “Only give him room to breathe.”

  Captain Blamey picked up his hat and left the room.

  Outside he sat a moment on the seat beside the front door and put his head in his hands.

  “God's blood, that gave me a fright,” said Charles, wiping his face and neck and under his wig. “I thought the boy was gone. A mercy the fellow didn’t shoot with his right hand.”

  “Perhaps then he would have missed more cleanly,” Ross said.

  Francis turned and muttered and opened his eyes. It took some moments for full consciousness to return. The rancour had left his eyes.

  “Has the fellow gone?”

  “Yes,” said Ross.

  Francis grinned wryly. “I winged him. It was your pesty duelling arms, Ross. Their sighting must be awry. Ach! Well, this will save the leeches for a week or two.”

  Outside in the garden Verity had rejoined Andrew Blamey.

  He had withdrawn completely within himself. In the space of fifteen minutes their relationship had been irrevocably changed.

  “I must go,” he said, and they both at once noticed the pronoun. “It's better before he comes round.”

  “Oh, my dear, if you could have—shot wide—or not at all—”

  He shook his head, oppressed with the complex struggles of his own nature and with the futility of trying to explain.

  She said: “This—I know it was his seeking all this quarrel. But he is my brother. It makes it so impossible for me—”

  He struggled to find the hope to argue. “In time it will cool, Verity. Our feelings can’t change.”

  She did not answer but sat with lowered head.

  He stared at her hard for some seconds. “Perhaps Francis was right. There has been only trouble. Perhaps I shouldn’t ever have thought of you—have looked at you.”

  She said: “No, Francis wasn’t right. But after this… there can never be any reconciling.”

  After a minute he got up.

  “Your hand,” she said. “Let me tie it.”

  “It's only a scratch. A pity his aim wasn’t better.”

  “Can you ride? Your fingers—”

  “Yes, I can ride.”

  She watched him walk round the house. He held his shoulders like an old man.

  He came back mounted.

  “Goodbye, my love. If there's nothing else, give me leave to keep the memory.”

  She watched him cross the stream and ride slowly up the valley until the image in her eyes was suddenly misted and smeared.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE WHOLE PARTY WAS BACK AT TRENWITH. FRANCIS, TEMPORARILY PATCHED, had ridden his horse home, and now Choake was with him, making a showy job of the dressing. Charles, belching wind and the remnants of his anger, had stumped off to his own room to take a vomit and rest until supper.

  Elizabeth had almost fainted at the sight of her husband. But recovering herself, she had flown up and downstairs to hasten Mrs. Tabb and Bartle in supplying Dr. Choake's needs and in tending to the wounded man's comfort. As would be the case all through her life, she had a store of nervous energy, unavailable at ordinary times but able to serve her in sudden need. It was a fundamental reserve which a stronger person might never know.

  And Verity had gone to her room…

  She felt herself detached from this household of which she had been a part for twenty-five years. She was among strangers. More than that, they were hostile strangers. They had drawn away from her, and she from them, for lack of understanding. In an afternoon she had shrunk inside herself; there would grow up a core of friendlessness and isolation.

  She pushed the bolt across the door and sat abruptly in the first chair. Her romance was over; even though she rebelled against the fact, she knew that it was so. She felt faint and sick, and desperately tired of being alive. If death could come quietly and peacefully, she would accept it, would sink into it as one sank into a bed wanting only sleep and self-forgetfulness.

  Her eyes moved round the room. Every article in it was familiar with the extreme unseeing intimacy of everyday association.

  Through the long sash window and the narrow window in the alcove she had looked with the changing eyes of childhood and youth. She had looked out on the herb garden and the yew hedge and the three bent sycamores in all the seasons of the year and in all the moods of her own growth. She had seen frost draw its foliate patterns on the panes, raindrops run down them like tears on old cheeks, the first spring sun shine dustily through them on the turkey rug and the stained oak boards.

  The old French clock on the carved pine chimneypiece, with its painted and gilt figures, like a courtesan from the days of Louis XIV, had been in the room all Verity's life. Its thin metallic bell had been announcing the hours for more than fifty years. When it was made, Charles was a thin strip of a boy, not a breathless empurpled old man breaking up his daughter's romance. They had been together, child and clock, girl and clock, woman and clock, through illness and nightmare and fairy stories and daydreams, through all the monotony and the sple
ndour of life.

  Her eyes went on, to the glass-topped display table with the carved legs, to the two pink satin bedroom chairs, the cane rocking-chair, the stumpy brass candlesticks with the candles rising in steps, the pincushion, the embroidered workbasket, the two-handled washing urn. Even the decorations of the room, the long damask curtains, the flock wallpaper with its faded crimson flowers on an ivory ground, the white plaster roses of the cornice and ceiling, had become peculiarly and completely her own.

  She knew that here in the privacy of her own room, where no man except her brother and her father ever came, she could give way, could lie on the bed and weep, could abandon herself to sorrow. But she sat on the chair and didn’t move at all.

  There were no tears in her. The wound went too deep, or she was not so constituted to give way to it. Hers would be the perpetual ache of loss and loneliness, slowly dulled with time until it became a part of her character, a faint sourness tinged with withered pride.

  Andrew would be back in Falmouth by now, back in the lodgings she had heard of but never seen. Through his quiet talk she had seen the bleakness of his life ashore, the two rooms in the lodging house by the quay, the drab woman who looked after him.

  She had thought to change all that. They had planned to rent a cottage overlooking the bay, a place with a few trees and a small garden running down to the shingle beach. Though he had scarcely ever spoken of his first marriage, she had understood enough to be certain that much of the fault of the failure lay with her—however inexcusable on his side the end might have been. She had felt that she could make up for that first failure. With her busy hands and managing ability and with their mutual love she would have made for him a home such as he had not had before.

  Instead this room, which had seen her grow to maturity, would see her dry up and fade. The gilt mirror in the corner would bear its dispassionate testimony. All these ornaments and furnishings would be her companions through the years to come. And she realized that she would come to hate them, if she didn’t already hate them, as one hates the witnesses of one's humiliation and futility.

  She made a halfhearted attempt to shake herself out of this mood. Her father and her brother had acted in good faith, true to their upbringing and principles. If as a result she remained at their beck and call until she was old, it was not fair to blame them for the whole. They thought they had saved her from herself. Her life in Trenwith would be more peaceful, more sheltered than as the wife of a social outcast. She was among relatives and friends. The long summer days were full of interest about the farm: the sowing, the haymaking, the harvesting; butter and cheeses to superintend, syrups and conserves to make. The winter ones were full too. Needlework in the evening, making curtains and samplers and stockings, spinning wool and flax with Aunt Agatha, brewing simples; playing at quadrille when there were guests, or helping Mr. Odgers to train the choir at Sawle Church, dosing the servants with possets when they were ill.

  This winter too there would be a newcomer in the house. If she had gone, Elizabeth would have been doubly lost; Francis would have found the well-run routine of the house suddenly out of joint, Charles would have no one to arrange his cushions or see that his silver tankard was polished before each meal. For these and a hundred other small needs the household depended on her, and if they did not repay her with overt thanks, they showed her a tacit affection and friendship she couldn’t disregard.

  And if she had not found these duties irksome in the past, was it not just the first flush of disappointment which said they must be so in the future?

  So she might argue, but Andrew said no. Andrew sitting now with his head in his hands in the dismal lodgings in Falmouth, Andrew next week in the Bay of Biscay, Andrew tramping the streets of Lisbon by night, or next month back in his lodgings, Andrew eating and drinking and sleeping and waking and bang, said no. He had taken a place in her heart, or taken a part of her heart, and nothing would be the same again.

  Last year she had drifted on a tide of custom and habit. She might have so drifted, without protest, into a con tented and unambitious middle age. But this year, from now on, she must swim against the stream, not finding stimulus in the struggle but only bitterness and regret and frustration.

  She sat there in the room by herself until darkness came and the shadows of the room closed about her like comforting arms.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  l

  WHEAL LEISURE WAS NOT STARTED THAT SUMMER.

  After some hesitancy Ross invited Francis to join them. Francis refused rather brusquely; but something more imponderable than this held up the project. The price of copper in the open market fell to £80 a ton. To begin a new seeking venture at such a time would be asking for failure.

  Francis mended rapidly from his neck wound, but Ross's part in Verity's love affair still rankled with him and his father. Rumour had it that Poldark and his young wife had been spending money at an extravagant rate, and now that Elizabeth did not go out much Francis went every where with George Warleggan.

  Ross saw little of Verity, for during the rest of the summer she scarcely left Trenwith. He wrote to Mrs. Teague apologizing for his default, “owing to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances.” There was very little else he could say. He did not receive a reply. Later he learned that the “small party” was Ruth's birthday party, at which he was to have been the guest of honour. It was by then too late to implement his apology and the damage was done.

  After the postponement of the Wheal Leisure venture Jim Carter left his employment. He was not the sort of young man to be a farm labourer all his life, and Grambler reclaimed him.

  He came to Ross one evening in August after they had spent all day cutting a field of barley, and explained that Jinny would not be able to work at Grambler after Christmas—at least not for the time—and they could not afford to be without her earnings. So, as he had never felt better in his life, he had taken a tribute on the forty-fathom level.

  “I’m proper sorry to be leaving, sir,” he said. “But it's a good pitch. I know that. Wi’ luck I shall make thirty or thirty-five shillings a month, and that's what we’ve got to think on. If we could stay on at the cottage, we’d like to pay rent for it.”

  “So you shall,” said Ross, “when I think you can afford it. Don’t be so generous with your money till you see if it goes round.”

  “No, sir,” said Jim inarticulately. “Twasn’t exactly that—”

  “I know, boy; I’m not blind. Nor, by the way, am I deaf. I heard it whispered that you had been out poaching the other night with Nick Vigus.”

  Jim went crimson. He stammered and seemed about to deny it, then abruptly said, “Yes.”

  “It's a dangerous pastime,” Ross said. “Whose land did you go on?”

  “Treneglos.”

  Ross suppressed a smile. His warning was, in fact, deadly serious, and he had no wish to weaken it.

  “Keep away from Nick Vigus, Jim. He’ll lead you into trouble before you know it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What does Jinny say?”

  “The same as you, sir. I… promised her not to go again.”

  “Then keep your promise.”

  “Twas for ’er that I went. I thought something tasty—”

  “How is she?”

  “Proper, sir, thank you. We’re that happy, just the two of us, that I wish, in a manner o’ speaking, that there weren’t going to be another. Still, Jinny's happy about that too. It isn’t she that's afraid.”

  2

  Subtle changes were continuing to take place in the relationship between Demelza Carne and the rest of the Nampara household. Her mind having outstripped the Paynters, she turned elsewhere for information, and this brought her more into contact with Ross, who found some pleasure in helping her. He wanted to laugh at her remarks much more often than he allowed himself.

  At the end of August, during the week the corn was being ricked, Prudie slipped and hurt her leg and had to lie up.

/>   For four days Demelza flew about the house, and although Ross was not in to see what she did, the midday meal was always brought out on time and the larger evening meal was always ready when they came wearily home. Demelza did not cling to her newfound authority when Prudie got up, but their relationship was never again that of housekeeper and scullery maid. The only comment on the change came from Jud, who told his wife that she was getting as soft as an old mare.

  Ross did not speak to Demelza about her efforts on those four days, but when he was next in Truro, he bought her one of the scarlet cloaks which were so fashionable in the mining villages of West Cornwall. When she saw it, she was speechless—an unusual symptom—and bore it off to her bedroom to try it on. Later he caught her looking at him in a peculiar manner; it was as if she felt it only right and proper for her to be aware of his likes and wants—that was what she was here for; but for him to know hers was not quite in the bargain.

  In place of Jim, Ross took an elderly man called Jack Cobbledick. He was a saturnine man, slow of thought and speech, with a ginger-grey drooping moustache, through which he strained all his food, and a long heavy-legged gait, as if he was always mentally striding through tall grass. Demelza nearly got into trouble several times when walking across the yard lifting her own long legs in imitation.

  In September, when the pilchard season was at its height, Ross rode into Sawle now and then to see the fish brought in or to buy a half hogshead for salting down when the quality was good. In this he found Demelza, with her experience of catering for a large and poor family, a better judge than himself, so she sometimes rode behind him on his horse or walked on half an hour in advance. Sometimes Jud would drive over with a couple of oxen yoked to a rickety cart and buy up a load of the broken and damaged fish for half a guinea to dig into the land as manure.

  From the church of Sawle you went down Stippy-Stappy Lane, and at the bottom was a narrow humped bridge and a green square surrounded by sheds and cottages which was the nucleus of the village of Sawle. From here it was a few yards to the high bar of shingle and the shallow inlet of the bay.