Jinny Carter stirred in her bed. She had been dreaming, half dreaming that she was baking stargazey pie, and all the fishes had suddenly blinked their eyes and changed into babies and begun to cry. She was wide-awake, but the cry was still in her ears. She sat up and listened for her own baby in its wooden box that Jim had made, but there was no sound at all. It must have been her imagination working on the beat of the rain against the tight-closed shutters, on the howl of the gale as it whirled past the cottages and roared inland.
Why had Jim left his comfortable bed and gone out into the wild night just in the hope of picking up some bit of wreckage? She had asked him not to go, but he had taken no notice. That was the way: always she asked him not to go, and always he made an excuse and went. Two or three nights every week he would be absent—to return in the small hours with a pheasant or a plump partridge under his arm.
He had changed a good deal the previous few months. It had really begun in January. One week he had been away from the mine and laid up, cough, cough, cough. The next he had gone out two nights with Nick Vigus and returned with food for her that the loss of his earnings would have made impossible. It was no good to tell him she would rather do without the food any number of times over than that he should be caught breaking the law. He didn’t see it that way and was hurt and disappointed if she didn’t seem delighted.
She slid out of bed with a shiver and went to the shutters. She made no effort to open them, or the rain would have burst full into the room, but through a crack where the rain was trickling she could tell that the night was as dark as ever.
She fancied there was a noise in the room below. All the woodwork in the cottage creaked and stirred under the strain. She would be glad when Jim was back.
She almost would have been glad if Benjy had cried, for then there would have been the excuse to take him into her own bed for comfort and to feel the clutch of his tiny predatory hands. But the child slept.
She slipped back into bed and pulled the blanket up to her nose. Jim’s bad habits were really all Nick Vigus’s fault. He was the bad influence, with his evil baby face. He put things to Jim that Jim would never have thought of, ideas about property and the right to take food for one’s belly that was not one’s own. Of course Nick used such arguments only as an excuse for any of his sly doings that took him outside the law. But Jim accepted them seriously, that was the trouble. He would never have thought of robbing to feed himself, but he was beginning to feel himself in the right in stealing to feed his family.
A heavy squall buffeted against the shutter; it was as if an enormous man was leaning against the house and trying to push it over. She dozed for a minute, dreaming of a happy life when the food was plentiful for all and children grew up laughing, without the need to work as soon as they could walk. Then she started into wakefulness, aware that there was a light somewhere. She saw three or four nicks coming through the floor and felt a warm pleasure that Jim was home. She thought of going down to see what news he brought to be back so early, but the warmth of her bed and the draftiness of the room robbed her of the will. She dozed again and then was wakened by the noise of something falling in the room below.
Jim had perhaps brought back some prize and was stacking it in a corner. That was why he had returned so soon. Strange there was no one with him, no voices of Nick or her father. Perhaps they had stayed on. But the best chance of salvage would come with the morning light. She hoped they had all been careful. It was less than two years since Bob Tregea had been drowned trying to get a line out to a ship—and left a widow and young children.
Jim did not call up to her. Of course he would think her asleep. She opened her mouth to call down, and as she did so suddenly wondered with an unpleasant prickly sensation around her heart if the man below really was Jim.
Some heavy movement had induced the doubt. Jim was so light on his feet. She sat up in bed and listened.
If it was Jim, then he was searching for something, clumsily, drunkenly. But Jim had touched no more than a mug of light ale since he was married. She waited, and an idea that had blown from somewhere into her mind suddenly germinated and grew.
There was only one man, it seemed to her, who would come in like that while Jim was away, who would move about so clumsily, who might at any moment come creeping up the ladder—and he had disappeared months before, was thought dead. Nothing had been seen of him for so long that the cloud in her mind had gone.
She crouched there and listened to the gale and to the movements of the visitor. She didn’t move an inch for fear of making a noise. It was as if her stomach and her lungs were slowly becoming frozen. She waited. Perhaps if there was no sound he would go away. Perhaps he would not come up, to find her there alone. Perhaps very soon Jim would really be back.
Or perhaps he was still down there by the rocks watching the efforts made to save men he had never seen before, while at home his wife lay like a stone in bed and a half-starved lustful madman lumbered about the room below.
And the child began to cry.
The fumbling below stopped. Jinny tried to get out of bed, but she had lost every bone in her body; she couldn’t move and she couldn’t swallow. The child stopped, began again more confidently, a thin wail competing against the buffeting of the wind.
She was out of bed at last, had picked him up, almost dropping him from her fumbling hasty hands.
The light below quivered and winked. There was a creak on the ladder.
She no longer had words to pray, nor resources to turn and hide. She stood at the side of the bed, her back against the wall, the child stirring feebly in her tightened arms, while the trap door slowly lifted.
She knew then, as soon as she saw the hand grasping the knotted wood of the floor, that her instinct had not been mistaken, that she had to face something she had never known before.
• • •
By the light of the candle he carried, it was possible to see the changes that months of living in lonely caves had brought. The flesh had shrunk from face and arms. He was in rags and barefoot, his beard and hair straggling and wet as if he had come from some underwater cave. Yet it was the same Reuben Clemmow she had always known, with the pale self-centered eyes and the uncertain mouth and the white creases in the sun-reddened face.
She fought down a wave of illness and stared at him.
“Where’s my fry pan?” he said. “Stole my fry pan.”
The child in her arms wriggled and gasped for breath and began to cry again.
Reuben climbed up the steps, and the trap door slammed back into place. For the first time he saw the bundle she clutched. Recognition of her was slow in dawning. When it came, all the rest came with it, remembrance of the injury done him, of why he was forced to shun people and frequent his cottage only at night, of the ten-month-old wound still festering in his side, of his lust for her, of his hatred for the man who had given her the squealing infant: Ross Poldark.
“Lily,” he muttered. “White lily…sin—”
He had been so long apart from people that he had lost the faculty of making them understand. Speech was for him alone.
He straightened himself awkwardly, for the muscles had contracted about the wound.
Jinny was praying again.
He took a step forward. “Pure Lily—” he said, and then something in the girl’s attitude sent his brain clicking over upon an old forgotten rhythm of his childhood. “Why standest thou so far off an’ hidest thy face in the needful time o’ trouble. The ungodly for ’is own lust doth persecute; let ’im be taken in the crafty wiliness that they ’ave imagined. For the ungodly’th made a boast of his heart’s desire, an’ speaketh good of the covetous.” He took out his knife, an old trapper’s knife, with the blade worn down to about four inches from years of sharpening and use. In the months of isolation desire for her had become confused with revenge. In lust there is always conquest and destruction.
The candle began to tremble and he put it on the floor, where the draft blew the light in gusts about the room and sweated tallow on the boards. “He sittest lurkin’ in the thievish corners o’ the streets, and privily in ’is lurkin’ dens doth ’e murder the innocent.”
Jinny lost her head and began to scream. Her voice went up and up.
As he took another step forward, she forced her legs to move. She was halfway across the bed when Reuben caught her and stabbed at the child. She partly parried the blow, but the knife came away red.
The girl’s scream changed its note, became more animal in sound. Reuben stared at the knife with passionate interest, then recovered himself as she reached the trap door. She turned as he came rushing up. He stabbed at her and felt the knife go into her. Then inside him all that had been tense and hard and burning suddenly ran away through his veins. He dropped the knife and watched her fall.
An extra gust of wind blew the candle out.
He shouted and groped for the trap door. His foot slipped on something greasy and his hand touched a woman’s hair. He recoiled and screamed, banged on the boarding of the room, but he was shut in forever with the horror he had created.
He pulled himself upward by the bed, blundered across the room, and found the shutters of the window. Shouting, he fought with them but could not find the bolt. Then he thrust forward his whole weight and the fastenings gave way before him. With a sense of breaking from a prison, he fell forward out of the window, out of the prison, out of life, upon the cobbles below.