All things reviewed, it had been Demelza’s evening. She had come through a searching test with quite remarkable success. The fact that the success was due partly to nausea at the dinner table and partly to five glasses of port at a crucial stage of the evening was known only to her and she kept it to herself.
As they said good night to their relatives two hours later and mounted the broad portrait-hung stairs, Ross was conscious of that new side of her nature that his wife had shown. All through the evening surprise had mingled with his inner amusement: Demelza’s charm, almost beauty, in her new and fashionable dress; the impression she had created; her quiet unassuming dignity over the dinner, when he had expected her to be nervous and stiff or boisterous and hungry. Demelza among the unexpected arrivals, giving as good as she got without compromising her dignity, singing those saucy songs in her low, husky voice with its soft native burr. Demelza flirting with John Treneglos under Ruth’s very nose—under Ross’s own too for that matter.
Demelza being kept with difficulty and tact away from the port when the visitors had gone. (While they were at limited loo, which the girl could not play, he had watched her edge around the room and pour herself out a couple of glasses on the sly.) Demelza mounting the broad stairs sedately beside him, erect and unruffled in her mauve and apple-green silk, from which emerged her strong slender neck and shoulders like the white inner heart of a flower.
Demelza more detached from him than he had ever known her. He had withdrawn from her, had seen her with a new eye. Against the background, which was strange to her but which for him had the most definite of associations and standards, she had proved herself and was not found wanting. He was not sorry he had come. He remembered Elizabeth’s words: “You must take her into society and bring her out.” Even that might not be impossible if she wished it. A new life might be opening for them both. He felt pleased and stimulated and proud of the developing character of his young wife.
His young wife hiccupped as they reached their bedroom. She too was feeling different from what she had ever felt before. She felt like a jug of fermenting cider, full of bubbles and air, light-headed, bilious, and as uninterested in sleep as Ross. She gazed around the handsome room with its cream-and-pink flock paper and its brocaded curtains.
“Ross,” she said. “I wish those birds was not so spotty. Mistle thrushes was never so spotty as they. If they wish to paint spots on birds on curtains, why don’t they paint the spots the right color? No bird ever had pink spots. Nor no bird was ever as spotty as they.”
She leaned against Ross, who leaned back against the door he had just closed and patted her cheek.
“You’re tipsy, child.”
“Indeed I’m not.” She regained her balance and walked with cool dignity across the room. She sat heavily in a chair before the fire and kicked off her shoes. Ross lit the rest of the candles from the one he carried and after an interval they burned up, lighting the room.
Demelza sat there, her arms behind her head, her toes stretched toward the fire while Ross slowly undressed. They exchanged a casual word from time to time, laughed together over Ross’s account of Treneglos’s antics with the spinning wheel. Demelza questioned him about Ruth, about the Teagues, about George Warleggan. Their voices were low and warm and confidential. It was the intimacy of pure companionship.
The house had fallen quiet about them. Although they were not sleepy, the pleasant warmth and comfort turned their senses imperceptibly toward sleep. Ross had a moment of unspoiled satisfaction. He received love and gave it in equal and generous measure. Their relationship at that moment had no flaw.
In Francis’s dressing gown he sat down on the stool beside her chair and stretched his hands toward the glow of the fire.
There was silence.
Presently out of the fount of Demelza’s content sprang an old resolve.
“Did I behave myself tonight, Ross?” she asked. “Did I behave as Mrs. Poldark should behave?”
“You misbehaved monstrously,” he said, “and were a triumph.”
“Don’t tease. You think I have been a good wife?”
“Moderately good. Quite moderately good.”
“Did I sing nice?”
“You were inspired.”
Silence fell again.
“Ross.”
“Yes, bud?”
“Bud again,” she said. “Tonight I have been called both Bud and Blossom. I hope in a few years’ time they will not start calling me Pod.”
He laughed, silently but long.
“Ross,” she said again, when he had at last done.
“Yes?”
“If I have been a good wife, then you must promise me somethin’.”
“Very well,” he said.
“You must promise me that sometime before—before Easter you will ride to Falmouth and seek Captain Blamey out and see if he still loves Verity.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“How am I to tell whom he loves?” Ross asked ironically. He was far too contented to argue with her.
“Ask him. You was his friend. He will not lie about a thing like that.”
“And then?”
“If he still loves her, we can arrange for them to meet.”
“And then?”
“Then we shan’t need to do any more.”
“You’re very persistent, are you not?”
“Only because you’re that stubborn.”
“We cannot arrange people’s lives for them.”
Demelza hiccupped.
“You have no heart,” she said. “That’s what I can’t fathom. You love me but you have no heart.”
“I’m deeply fond of Verity, but—”
“Ah, your buts! You’ve no faith, Ross. You men don’t understand. You don’t know the teeniest thing about Verity! That you don’t.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t need to. I know myself.”
“Conceive the fact that there may be women unlike you.”
“Tom—ti—pom!” said Demelza. “You don’t scare me wi’ your big words. I know Verity was not born to be an old maid, dryin’ up and shrivelin’ while she looks to someone else’s house an’ children. She’d rather take the risk of being wed to a man who couldn’t contain his liquor.” She bent forward and began to pull off her stockings.
He watched her. “You seem to have developed a whole philosophy since you married me, love.”
“No, I ain’t—haven’t,” said Demelza. “But I know what love is.”
The remark seemed to put the discussion on a different plane.
“Yes,” he agreed soberly. “So do I.”
A longer silence fell.
“If you love someone,” said Demelza, “tesn’t a few bruises on the back that are going to count. It’s whether that other one loves you in return. If he do, then he can only hurt your body. He can’t hurt your heart.”
She rolled her stockings into a ball and leaned back in the chair again, wiggling her toes toward the fire. Ross picked up the poker and turned over the ash and embers until they broke into a blaze.
“So you’ll go to Falmouth an’ see?” she asked.
“I’ll consider it,” said Ross. “I’ll consider it.”
Having come that far, she was too wise to press further. Another and less elevated lesson she had learned in married life was that if she wheedled long enough and discreetly enough, she quite often got her own way in the end.
With ears grown more sharp to the smaller sounds, it seemed to them that the silence of the house was less complete than it had been a while before. It had become the faint stirring silence of old timber and slate, old in the history of Poldarks and Trenwiths, people whose forgotten faces hung in the deserted hall, whose forgotten loves and hopes had drawn breath and flourished there. Jeffrey Trenwith, building the house in fire and faith; Claude, deeply involved in the Prayer Book Rebellion; Humphrey in his Elizabethan ruff; Charles Vivian Poldark, wounded and home from the sea; red-haired Anna-Maria; Presbyterian Joan; mixed policies and creeds; generations of children, instant with the joy of life, growing and learning and fading. The full silence of the old house was more potent than the empty silence of its youth. Panels still felt the brush of moldered silk, boards still creaked under the pressure of the forgotten foot. For a time something stepped between the man and the girl sitting at the fire. They felt it and it left them apart from each other and alone with their thoughts.
But even the strength of the past could not just then break their companionship for long. Somehow, and because of the nature of their being, the old peculiar silence ceased to be a barrier and became a medium. They had been overawed by time. Then time again became their friend.
“Are you asleep?” Ross said.
“No,” said Demelza.
Then she moved and put her finger on his arm.
He rose slowly and bent over her, took her face in his hands and kissed her on the eyes, the mouth, and the forehead. With a queer tigerish limpness she allowed him to do what he wanted.
And presently the white inner heart of the bud was free of its petals.
Only then did she put up her hands to his face and kiss him in return.