At the first gate a dog barked savagely and Copley reared, but I made peace with the mongrel and we plodded together up the squelching track to the front door of the farm. I knocked and waited. My heart was thumping. Water dripped off my hat, off the thatch above the door, off Copley’s saddle, off the mongrel’s slimy muzzle.
A woman came to the door wiping her floury hands. It was exactly what she had done last time I had called.
“Mistress Maris? You remember me? I came to see you a year last May. I have caned to see Sue. My name is Maugan KiUigrew.”
I forgot that the last time I had not told her that. But the name seemed to convey nothing to her.
“Sue? She’s not here. She’s in Paul.”
“In Paul? Near Penzance?”
“Yes.”
Mrs Maris was of a sudden involved in keeping the mongrel out of the house. It had tried to slip in unobserved but she saw it and blocked it first with her foot and then with her hand. There was a struggle, and then she grabbed the animal by the tail and turned it and thrust it out. It slunk off down the path, and Mrs Maris, breathing hard, straightened up to regard me again. She did not ask me in.
“Why has she gone to Paul?” I asked.
“Why not? That’s where she lives now. She’s wed. Did you not know?”
So I saw the inside of the Maris farm after all. She was not unkind when she saw I was in and took me in and gave me a cup of buttermilk.
It was a small poor room with a low ceiling heavy-beamed so that one could barely stand upright, and on this dark day and with the small windows overgrown it was twilight at noon.
“Aye,” she said, “it was last Wednesday. A week since today, so perhaps it’s not surprising that everyone does not yet know. The betrothal was very short. She was wed at St Clement, down the valley from here. You take the turning by the old stables that Richard Robartes has just now bought and follow the trees down the hill. Her uncle, my man, stood for her, since her mother has but recently herself wed again and could not travel. I loaned her my own gown that I’d had since
I better days. The silk was turned yellow a smaU degree, but it fitted her, and it became her well. Mrs Glubb who’s quick with her fingers, made her cap and gloves. It was all done very handsome as you’ve a right to suppose.”
There were signs of a faded gentility about the room: goblets on an oak dresser, a cupboard cloth of Venice work, brass pans well scoured and polished, two brazil armchairs.
“I saw how it was directly he came to call. And I saw it was a chance for her. She was always a bright child, quick as silver, sharp as a needle, and lively company, and she’ll make a good wife. When she came home from Tolverne she was listless and lacking spirit; but when he called all that was changed. I saw how it was going to be, and how fortunate she was.”
I sipped the buttermilk but could hardly get my throat to swallow.
“Oh, it is a good match for her. Mind, he’s not so young as he was, but there’s money and land and connections. He’s not one of these shiftless paupers who eke out their living as best they may. And he’s a godly man, not a drunkard or a dicer, as many are. As I said to her: you’re alone in the world now your mother’s wed again, and you’ve no dowry nor no hope of one. Here’s the chance of a fine house though I’ve not seen it and a horse to ride; and he says he keeps five servants he never came but with one beside him; and a fine old name like Reskymer. Mind, no one ever pressed her. When my man thought she was over-long in answering he said, does she know what she’s about keeping him waiting like this? There’s many a maid would leap at the chance. But I said, go to, it is part of a woman’s way to hesitate; it does not do to be too eager, lest you be taken for granted ever after. A matter of a few days’ patience. And sure enough it was.”
A heavy patch of damp on two of the low beams, the room smelt of mildew and rot; afterwards that smell would recall to me the darkness in my soul.
“I believe he’s a Reskymer of Merthen, a cousin of the main family, that is. There’s always been Reskymers in the church. He says he met Susanna at the Arundells two years back when she was fourteen. He was then a widower by some ten years but he had no thought for Sue, thinking her then a child. Since then he has seen her three times; but the last of these, chancing to call at Tolverne in May, he was much struck by her beauty and called there again last month only to find her gone. So he pursued her here, and so it fell out. If you have a thought to see them they live in the rectory at Paul, near Penzance, which I’m told is a handsome house quite worthy of his position and name.”
I could not sit here for ever. If I could get out into the rain again, mount the pony, just the effort and the buffeting of the wind …
“Thank you, ma’am. If you write to Susanna, give her my respectful regard.”
Copley welcomed me with a snort and a shake of his bridle. The mongrel dog was sniffing at a piece of bone on the edge of a muddy pool of water. A man was in sight coming over the fields driving a pair of oxen before him. The rain blew in fresh clouds over the dripping trees. Nothing in the landscape had changed. Only I had changed. And I had changed for ever.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER ONE
There is no proportion in memory. Months of happiness or misery can suffer an ellipsis which no effort may fill; yet moments or single days linger in the mind from a choice that seems not one’s own and have an endurance beyond their worth. So it is in my recollection of the next twelve months. Selection is as difficult as sequence because one’s memory has already acted.
I know there has never in my life been a time of greater misery and resentment. A young man of finer fibre might have permitted himself to feel only sorrow, but I have never been one to take adversity well. One always feels most for the first illusion lost, but this was more than illusion; it was the linch-pin of my faith in life. Belief in Sue Farnaby and our love for each other had become for me in a few short months the constant around which everything else revolved. That destroyed, there was no centre for any loving kindness to attach to. I was lost, groping in the dark of my own nature, clumsy with pain, and liable to break anything with which I came in contact.
The attitude of many people at Arwenack changed towards me during that year, and this can only have been reflecting the change that was in me. I quarrelled violently with Belemus when he returned, and we fought it out in the wood behind the house. I was uncouth and unpleasant to my halfbrothers and sisters. If my grandmother had been about there is no doubt I should have been sent away again to Truro, but the damp weather did not suit her and she spent most of each day in her chamber coughing.
Yet I fared altogether better with my father. I was inches taller than he now and tireless, filling out a little but still very thin. He set me to work about the house or in the fields or to ride with him on one of his dubious outings, and my new mood only made him smile derisively. He never asked about the change or why all the world had suddenly become my enemy; Dorothy Killigrew of course did, but I returned her evasive answers and presently she gave up.