Demelza Page 4

  Hers was the loveliness of gracious, aristocratic womanhood, used to leisure and bred to refinement. She came from uncounted generations of small landed gentlefolk. There had been a Chynoweth before Edward the Confessor, and, as well as the grace and breeding, she seemed to have in her a susceptibility to fatigue, as if the fine pure blood was flowing a little thin. Against her Demelza was the upstart: bred in drunkenness and filth, a waif in a parlor, an urchin climbing on the shoulders of chance to peer into the drawing rooms of her betters; lusty, crude, unsubtle, all her actions and feelings were a stage nearer nature. But each of them had something the other lacked.

  The Reverend Clarence Odgers, curate of Sawle-with-Grambler, was present in his horsehair wig; Mrs. Odgers, a tiny anxious woman who had somehow found room for ten children and spread not an inch in the doing, was talking humbly over the boiled pike on parish problems with William-Alfred’s wife, Dorothy Johns. A group of the younger people at the far end of the table were laughing together at Francis’s account of how John Treneglos for a bet had the previous week ridden his horse up the steps of Werry House and had fallen off into Lady Bodrugan’s lap, all among the dogs.

  “It’s a lie,” said John Treneglos robustly above the laughter, and glancing at Demelza to see if she had some attention for the story. “A brave and wicked lie. True I came unseated for a moment and Connie Bodrugan was there to offer me accommodation, but I was back on the nag in half a minute and was off down the steps before she’d time to finish her swearing.”

  “And a round cursing you’d get, if I know her ladyship,” said George Warleggan, fingering his beautiful stock, which failed to hide the shortness of his neck. “I’d not be astonished if you heard some new ones.”

  “Really, my dear,” said Patience Teague, pretending to be shocked, and looking up at George slantwise through her lashes. “Isn’t Lady Bodrugan rather an indelicate subject for such a pretty party?”

  There was laughter again, and Ruth Treneglos, from farther along the table, eyed her older sister keenly. Patience was coming out, breaking away as she had done from the dreary autocracy of their mother. Faith and Hope, the two eldest, were hopeless old maids, echoing Mrs. Teague like a Greek chorus; Joan, the middle sister, was going the same way.

  “Don’t some of our young people dress extravagant these days,” said Dorothy Johns in an undertone, breaking off her more substantial conversation to look at Ruth. “I’m sure young Mrs. Treneglos must cost her husband a handsome penny in silks. Fortunate that he is able to gratify her taste.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I entirely agree, ma’am,” Mrs. Odgers breathed anxiously, fingering her borrowed necklace. Mrs. Odgers spent all her time agreeing with someone. It was her mission in life. “And not as if she had been accustomed to such luxury at home, like. It seems no time at all since my husband christened her. My first came just after.”

  “She’s grown quite fat since I saw her last,” whispered Mrs. Teague to Faith Teague, while Prudie clattered the gooseberry pies behind her. “And I don’t like her dress, do you? Unbecoming for one so recently a matron. Worn with an eye for the men. You can see it.”

  “One can understand, of course,” said Faith Teague to Hope Teague, passing the ball obediently a step down table, “how she appeals to a certain type. She has that sort of full bloom that soon fades. Though I must say I’m quite surprised at Captain Poldark. But no doubt they were thrown together…”

  “What did Faith say?” said Joan Teague to Hope Teague, waiting her turn.

  “Well, she’s a fine little monkey,” said Aunt Agatha, who was near the head, to Demelza. “Let me hold her, bud. Ye’re not afraid I’ll drop her, are you? I’ve held and dandled many that’s dead and gone afore ever you was thought of. Chibby, chibby, chibby! There now, she’s smiling at me. Unless it’s wind. Reg’lar little Poldark she is. The very daps of her father.”

  “Mind,” said Demelza, “she may dribble on your fine gown.”

  “It will be a good omen if she do. Here, I have something for you, bud. Hold the brat a moment. Ah! I’ve got the screws today, and the damned jolting that old nag gave me didn’t help… There. That’s for the child.”

  “What is it?” Demelza asked after a moment.

  “Dried rowanberries. Hang ’em on the cradle. Keep the fairies away…”

  “He hasn’t had the smallpox yet,” said Elizabeth to Dwight Enys, rubbing her hand gently over the curls of her small son, who was sitting so quietly on his chair beside her. “I have often wondered whether there is anything in this inoculation, whether it is injurious to a young child.”

  “No, not if it is carefully done,” said Enys, who had been put beside Elizabeth and was taking in little except her beauty. “But don’t employ a farmer to give the cowpox. Some reliable apothecary.”

  “Oh, we are fortunate to have a good one in the district. He’s not here today,” Elizabeth said.

  The meal came to an end at last, and since the day was so fine people strolled into the garden. As the company spread out Demelza edged her way toward Joan Pascoe.

  “Did you say you came from Falmouth, did I hear you say that, Miss Pascoe?”

  “Well, I was brought up there, Mrs. Poldark. But I live in Truro now.”

  Demelza moved her eyes to see if anyone was within hearing.

  “Do you chance to know a Captain Andrew Blamey, Miss Pascoe?”

  Joan Pascoe cooed to the baby.

  “I know of him, Mrs. Poldark. I have seen him once or twice.”

  “Is he still in Falmouth, I wonder?”

  “I believe he puts in there from time to time. He’s a seafaring man, you know.”

  “I’ve often thought I’d dearly like to go to Falmouth on a visit,” Demelza said dreamily. “It’s a handsome place they say. I wonder when is a good time to see all the ships in the harbor.”

  “Oh, after a gale, that is the best, when the vessels have run in for shelter. There is room enough for all to ride out the greatest storm.”

  “Yes, but I s’pose the packet service runs regular, in and out, just like clockwork. The Lisbon packet they say goes every Tuesday.”

  “Oh, no, I think you’re misinformed, ma’am. The Lisbon packet leaves from St. Just’s Pool every Friday evening in the winter and every Saturday morning in the summer months. The week’s end is the best time to see the regular services.”

  “Chibby, chibby, chibby,” said Demelza to Julia, copying Aunt Agatha and watching the effect. “Thank you, Miss Pascoe, for the information.”

  “My dear,” said Ruth Treneglos to her sister Patience, “who is this coming down the valley? Can it be a funeral procession? Old Agatha will certainly smell a bad omen here.”

  One or two of the others noticed that fresh visitors were on the way. Headed by a middle-aged man in a shiny black coat, the newcomers threaded their way through the trees on the other side of the stream.

  “My blessed parliament!” said Prudie, from the second parlor window. “It’s the maid’s father. ’E’s come on the wrong day. Didn’ ’ee tell him Wednesday, you black worm?”

  Jud looked startled and swallowed a big piece of currant tart. He coughed in annoyance. “Wednesday? O’ course I says Wednesday. What for should I tell him Tuesday when I was told to tell Wednesday? Tedn my doing. Tedn me you can blame. Shake yer broom ’andle in yer own face!”

  With a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach Demelza too had recognized the new arrivals. Her brain and her tongue froze. She could see disaster and could do nothing to meet it. Even Ross was not beside her at the moment but was tending to Great-Aunt Agatha’s comfort, opening the french windows for her to sit and view the scene.

  But Ross had not missed the procession.

  They had come in force: Tom Carne himself, big and profoundly solid in his newfound respectability; Aunt Chegwidden Carne, his second wife, bonneted and small-mouthed like
a little black hen, and behind them four tall gangling youths, a selection from among Demelza’s brothers.

  A silence had fallen on the company. Only the stream bubbled and a bullfinch chirped. The cavalcade reached the plank bridge and came across it with a clomp of hobnailed boots.

  Verity guessed the identity of the new arrivals and she left old Mrs. Treneglos and moved to Demelza’s side. She did not know how she could help Demelza unless it was merely by being there, but in so far as she could give a lead to Francis and Elizabeth, that she meant to do.

  Ross came quickly out of the house, and without appearing to hurry reached the bridge as Tom Carne came over.

  “How d’you do, Mr. Carne,” he said, holding out his hand. “I am grateful you were able to come.”

  Carne eyed him for a second. It was more than four years since they had met, and then they had smashed up a room before one of them ended in the stream. Two years of reformation had changed the older man; his eyes were clearer and his clothing good and respectable. But he still had the same intolerant stare. Ross too had changed in the interval, grown away from his disappointment; the content and happiness he had found with Demelza had softened his intolerance, had cloaked his restless spirit in a new restraint.

  Carne, finding no sarcasm, let his hand be taken. Aunt Chegwidden Carne, not in the least overawed, came next, shook his hand, moved on to greet Demelza. As Carne made no attempt to introduce the four gangling youths, Ross bowed gravely to them and they, taking their cue from the eldest, touched their forelocks in response. He found a strange comfort in the fact that none of them was the least like Demelza.

  “We been waiting at the church, maid,” Carne said grimly to his daughter. “Ye said four o’clock and we was there by then. Ye’d no manner of right to do it afore. We was besting whether to go ’ome again.”

  “I said tomorrow at four,” Demelza answered him sharply.

  “Aye. So yer man said. But ’twas our right to be ’ere the day of the baptizing, an’ he said the baptizing was for today. Yer own flesh an’ blood ’as more call to be beside you at a baptizing than all these ’ere dandical folk.”

  A terrific bitterness welled up in Demelza’s heart. That man, who had beaten all affection out of her in the old days, to whom she had sent a forgiving invitation, had deliberately come on another day and was going to shatter her party. All her efforts were in vain, and Ross would be the laughingstock of the district. Already, without looking, she could see the laughter on the faces of Ruth Treneglos and Mrs. Teague. She could have torn tufts from his thick black beard (showing streaks of gray beneath the nose and under the curve of the bottom lip); she could have clawed at his sober, too-respectable jacket or plastered his thick red-veined nose with earth from her flower beds. With a fixed smile hiding the desolation of her heart, she greeted her stepmother and her four brothers: Luke, Samuel, William, and Bobby, names and faces she had loved in that far-off nightmare life that no longer belonged to her.

  And they, at any rate, were overawed, not least by their sister, whom they remembered a managing drudge and found a well-dressed young woman with a new way of looking and speaking. They grouped around her at a respectful distance, answering gruffly her metallic little questions, while Ross, with all that grace and dignity of which he was capable when he chose, was escorting Tom Carne and Aunt Chegwidden around the garden, inexorably introducing them to the others. There was a steely politeness in his manner that bolted down the reactions of those who were not used to exchanging compliments with the vulgar classes.

  As they went, Tom Carne’s eyes grew no more respectful at the show of fashion but harder and more wrathful at the levity those people seemed to consider suitable for a solemn day, and Aunt Chegwidden’s mouth pinched itself in like a darned buttonhole as she took in Elizabeth’s flamboyant crimson, Ruth Treneglos’s tight low-cut bodice, and Mrs. Teague’s rows of pearls and richly frizzed wig.

  At last it was over and talk broke out again, though on a subdued note. A tiny wind was getting up, moving among the guests and lifting a ribbon here and a tailcoat there.

  Ross motioned to Jinny to carry around port and brandy.

  The more everyone drank the more they would talk, and the more they talked the less of a fiasco it would all be.

  Carne waved away the tray.

  “I have no truck wi’ such things,” he said. “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning that they follow strong drink, that continue until night till wine do inflame them! I’ve finished wi’ wickedness and bottledom and set my feet ’pon a rock of righteousness and salvation. Let me see the child, dattur.”

  Stiffly, grimly, Demelza held Julia out for inspection.

  “My first was bigger than this,” said Mrs. Chegwidden Carne, breathing hard over the baby. “Warn’t he, Tom? Twelve month old he’ll be in August. A ’andsome little fellow he be, though ’tis my own.”

  “What’s amiss wi’ ’er forehead?” Carne asked. “Have ’ee dropped ’ur?”

  “It was in the birth,” Demelza said angrily.

  Julia began to cry.

  Carne rasped his chin. “I trust ye picked her godparents safe and sure. ’Twas my notion to be one myself.”

  Near the stream the Teague girls tittered among themselves, but Mrs. Teague was on her dignity, drawing down her eyelids in their side-slant shutter fashion.

  “A calculated insult,” she said, “to bring in a man and a woman of that type and to introduce them. It is an affront set upon us by Ross and his kitchen slut. It was against my judgment that I ever came!”

  But her youngest daughter knew better. It was no part of any plan but was a mischance she might put to good use. She took a glass from Jinny’s tray and sidled behind her sister’s back up to George Warleggan.

  “Do you not think,” she whispered, “that we are remiss in straying so far from our host and hostess? I have been to few christenings so I do not know the etiquette, but manners would suggest…”

  George glanced into the slightly oriental green eyes. He had always held the Teagues in private contempt, an exaggerated form of the mixed respect and patronage he felt for the Poldarks and the Chynoweths and all those gentlefolk whose talent for commerce was in inverse rate to the length of their pedigrees. They might affect to despise him, but he knew that some of them in their hearts already feared him. The Teagues were almost beneath his notice, maleless, twittering, living on three percents and a few acres of land. But since her marriage Ruth had developed so rapidly that he knew he must reassess her. She, like Ross among the Poldarks, was of harder metal.

  “Such modesty is to be expected in one so charming, ma’am,” he said, “but I know no more of christenings than you. Do you not think it safest to consult one’s own interests and follow where they lead?”

  A burst of laughter behind them greeted the end of an anecdote Francis had been telling John Treneglos and Patience Teague.

  Ruth said in an exaggerated whisper, “I think you should behave more seemly, Francis, if we are not to have a reprimand. The old man is looking our way.”

  Francis said, “We are safe yet. The wild boar always raises its hackles before it comes to the charge.” There was another laugh. “You, girl,” he said to Jinny as she passed near. “Is that more of the canary you have? I will take another glass. You’re a nice little thing; where did Captain Poldark find you?”

  The stress was almost unconscious, but Ruth’s laugh left no doubt of the way she took it. Jinny flushed up to the roots of her hair.

  “I’m Jinny Carter, sur. Jinny Martin that was.”

  “Yes, yes.” Francis’s expression changed slightly. “I remember now. You worked at Grambler for a time. How is your husband?”

  Jinny’s face cleared. “Nicely, sur, thank you, so far as…so far as…”

  “So far as you know. I trust the time will pass quickly for you both.”

 
“Thank you, sur.” Jinny curtsied, still red, and moved on.

  “You are taking small interest in your goddaughter, Francis,” Ruth said, anxious to turn him away from his squirish mood. “The infant is getting well quizzed in your absence. I’m sure she would appreciate a sup of canary.”

  “They say all the vulgars are brought up on gin,” said Patience Teague. “And look no worse for it. I was reading but the other day how many, I forget how many, million gallons of gin was drunk last year.”

  “Not all by babies, Sister,” said Treneglos.

  “Well, no doubt they will sometimes take ale for a change,” said Patience.

  That had all been watched, though not heard, by Tom Carne. He turned his sharp obstinate eyes on Mrs. Carne.

  “Thur’s ungodliness ’ere, Wife,” he said through his beard. “’Tis no proper place for a cheeil. ’Tis no fitty company to attend on a baptizing. I suspicioned no less. Women wi’ their wanton clothes and young princox strutting between ’em, drinkin’ and jesting. ’Tis worse’n ye see in Truro.”

  His wife hunched up her shoulders. Her conviction was of longer standing and was by nature less belligerent. “We must pray for ’em, Tom. Pray for ’em all, and your own darter among ’em. Maybe there’ll come a day when they’ll see the light.”

  Julia would not be quieted, so Demelza seized the excuse to take her indoors. She was in a despairing mood.

  She knew that however the day might turn, it was a black failure to her. Full-flavored meat for the gossips. Well, let it come. There was nothing more she could do. She had tried to be one of them and failed. She would never try again. Let them all go home, ride off at once, so that she might have done with everything. Only that she might be left alone.

  A few moments after she had gone, Ruth succeeded in edging her friends within earshot of Tom Carne.

  “For my part,” she said, “I have no care for liquor unless it be brandy or port; I like a good heavy drink, soft to the taste and no bite until it is well down. Don’t you agree, Francis?”