“Read me the story of The Lost Miner, Aunt Verity,” Geoffrey Charles said.
“I have read it to you once already.”
“Well, again, please. Just like you read it last time.”
Verity picked up the book and absently ruffled Geoffrey Charles’s curly head. Then a pang went through her that at the same time the next day, she would not be there to read to him.
The windows of the big parlor were open, and the July sun lay across the room. Elizabeth sat embroidering a waistcoat, with dusty sun bars touching color in her beige silk frock. Aunt Agatha, having no truck with fresh air, crouched before the small fire she insisted on their keeping and drowsed like a tired old cat, the Bible, it being Sunday, open loosely in her lap. She did not move at all, but occasionally her eyes would open sharply as if she had heard a mouse in the wainscot. Geoffrey Charles, in a velvet suit and long velvet trousers, was a weight on Verity’s knee where she sat by the window in the half shadow of a lace curtain. Francis was somewhere about the farm. In the two topped beech trees across the lawn pigeons were cooing.
Verity finished the story and slid Geoffrey Charles gently to the floor.
“There is mining in his blood, Elizabeth,” she said. “No other story will suit.”
Elizabeth smiled without looking up.
“When he grows up conditions may have changed.” Verity rose. “I do not think I will go to Evensong. I have a headache.”
“It will be with sitting in the sun. You sit too much in the sun, Verity.”
“I must go now and see about the wine. You can never trust Mary to look at it, for she falls into a daydream when she should not.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Geoffrey Charles. “Let me help you, eh?”
While she was busy in the kitchen Francis came in. That summer he had been trying to help about the farm. The work somehow did not suit him; it sat bleakly on his nature. Geoffrey Charles ran toward him but, seeing the expression on his father’s face, changed his mind and ran back to Verity.
Francis said, “Tabb is the only man left with any farming in him. Ellery is worse than useless. He was told to rebuild the hedge in the sheep field, and it has broke in a week. It has taken us best part of an hour to get the flock back. I’ll turn the fellow off.”
“Ellery has been a miner since he was nine.”
“That’s the whole trouble,” Francis said wryly. He looked at his hands, which were caked with dirt. “We do our best for these local people, but how can you expect miners to become hedgers and ditchers overnight?”
“Are the oats undamaged?”
“Yes, thanks be. By a mercy the first sheep turned down the lane instead of up.”
The oats were to be cut next week. She would not be there for it. She could hardly believe that.
“I shall not come to church this evening, Francis. I have a headache. I think it’s the warm weather.”
“I’m much of a mind to stay away myself,” he said.
“Oh, you can’t do that.” She tried to hide her alarm. “They’re expecting you.”
“Elizabeth can go by herself. She will stand for the family well enough.”
Verity bent over the boiling wine and skimmed it. “Mr. Odgers would be heartbroken. He was telling me only last week that he always chooses the shortest psalms and preaches a special sermon for Evensong to please you.”
Francis went out without replying, and Verity found that her hands were trembling. Geoffrey Charles’s chatter, which had broken out again when his father went, was a tinkling noise that came to her from a distance. She had chosen Sunday at four as the only time of the week when she could be sure of Francis’s being out. His movements those previous months had been unpredictable; to that conventional habit he had been faithful…
“Auntie Verity!” cried the boy. “Auntie Verity! Why don’t you?”
“I can’t listen to you now, sweetheart,” she said abruptly. “Please leave me alone.” She tried to take hold of herself, went into the next kitchen, where Mary Bartle was sitting, and spoke to her for a few minutes.
“Auntie Verity. Auntie Verity. Why aren’t any of you going to church this afternoon?”
“I am not. Your father and mother will be going.”
“But Father just said he was not.”
“Never mind. You stay and help Mary with the wine. Be careful you don’t get in her way.”
“But if—”
She turned quickly from the kitchen and, instead of walking through the house, went quickly across the courtyard with its disused fountain and came in at the big hall. She ran up the stairs. It might be the last time she would see Geoffrey Charles, but there was no chance of saying good-bye.
In her bedroom she went quickly to the window. From the corner of it, by pressing her face against the glass, she could just see the drive by which Francis and Elizabeth would walk to church—if they were going.
Very faintly in the distance the bells had begun to ring. Number three was slightly cracked and Francis always said it set his teeth on edge. Francis would take ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to put on clean linen. She expected that he and Elizabeth were debating whether he should go. Elizabeth would want him to go. Elizabeth must make him go.
She sat there stilly on the window seat, a curious chill creeping into her body from the touch of the glass. She couldn’t for a second take her eyes from that corner of the drive.
She knew exactly how the bell ringers would look, sweating there in the enclosed space of the tower. She knew how each one of the choir would look, fumbling in the pews for their psalters, exchanging whispers, talking more openly when she did not come. Mr. Odgers would be bustling about in his surplice, poor, thin, harassed little fellow. They would all miss her, not merely that night, but in the future. And surely all the people whom she visited, the sick and the crippled, and the women struggling, overburdened with their families…
She felt the same about her own family. Had times been good she would have left with a much freer heart. Elizabeth was not strong, and it would mean another woman to help Mrs. Tabb. More expense when every shilling counted. And no one could do just what she had done, holding all the strings of the house economically together, keeping a tight but friendly hold.
Well, what other way was open? She couldn’t expect Andrew to wait longer. She had not seen him in the three months since the ball, all word having gone through Demelza. She had already put off her flight once because of Geoffrey Charles’s illness. It was almost as bad still, but leave she must or stay forever.
Her heart gave a leap. Elizabeth was walking down the drive, tall and slender and so graceful in her silk frock and straw hat and cream parasol. Surely she could not be going alone.
Francis came into view…
She got up from the window. Her cheek had stuck to the glass and it tingled sharply with returning blood. She looked unsteadily around the room. She knelt and from under the bed drew out her bag. Geoffrey Charles would still be running about, but she knew how to avoid him.
With the bag, she came to the door and stared back around the room. The sun was shining aslant the tall old window. She slipped quickly out and leaned back against the door trying to get her breath. Then she set off toward the back stairs.
• • •
Having given way to Elizabeth and made the effort to go to church, Francis had felt a slow change of mood. The country farmer-squire life he led left him bored and frustrated almost to death. He longed for the days he had lost. But occasionally, since all things are relative, his boredom waned and he forgot his frustration. It was all the more strange since he had been so angry over the sheep, but the afternoon was so perfect that it left no room in a man’s soul for discontent. Walking there with the sun-warmed air on his face, he had come up against the fact that it was good just to be alive.
There was perhaps a certain pleasure in finding most of the congregation waiting outside for them, ready to bob or touch their hats as they came by. After grubbing about the farm all week, they were curiously grateful for the buttress to their self-esteems.
Even the informal sight of Jud Paynter sitting on one of the distant gravestones drinking a mug of ale was not to be caviled at.
The church was warm but did not smell so strongly as usual of mildew and worm and stale breath. The thin little curate bobbing about like an earwig was not an active irritation, and Joe Permewan, rasping away at the bass viol as if it were a tree trunk, was worth liking as well as laughing at. Joe, they all knew, was no angel and got drunk Saturday nights, but he always sawed his way back to salvation on a Sunday morning.
They had said the psalms and read the lessons and echoed the prayers, and Francis had been gently dozing off to sleep when the sudden bang of the church door roused him. A new worshipper had come in.
Jud had been to France for a couple of nights and had been merrying himself on the share out. Sobriety never turned him to his Maker, but as always when the drink was in him, he felt the urge to reform. And to reform not only himself but all men. He felt the fraternal pull. That afternoon he had wandered from the kiddlywinks and was in fresh fields.
As Mr. Odgers gave out the psalm he came slowly down the aisle, fingering his cap and blinking in the semidarkness. He took a seat and dropped his cap, then he bent to pick it up and knocked over the stick of old Mrs. Carkeek sitting next to him. After the clatter had died, he pulled out a large red rag and began to mop his fringe.
“Some hot,” he said to Mrs. Carkeek, thinking to be polite.
She took no notice but stood up and began to sing.
In fact, everyone was singing, and the people in the gallery by the chancel steps were making the most noise of all and playing instruments just like a party. Jud sat where he was, mopping himself and staring around the church. It was all very new to him. He looked on it in a detached and wavering light.
Presently the psalm was done and everybody sat down. Jud was still staring at the choir.
“What’re all they women doin’ up there?” he muttered, leaning over and breathing liquorously on Mrs. Carkeek.
“Shh, shh. ’Tis the choir,” she whispered back.
“What, they, the choir? Be they nearer heaven than we folk?”
Jud brooded a minute. He was feeling kindly but not as kindly as all that. “Mary Ann Tregaskis. What she done to be nearer heaven than we?”
“Shh! Shh!” said several people around him.
He had not noticed that Mr. Odgers had come to be standing in the pulpit.
Jud blew his nose and put the rag away in his pocket. He turned his attention to Mrs. Carkeek, who was sitting primly fingering her cotton gloves.
“’Ow’s your old cow?” he whispered. “Calved yet, have she?”
Mrs. Carkeek seemed to find a flaw in one of the gloves and gave it all her attention.
“Reckon ’er’s going to be one of the awkward ones. Reckon ye did no good by yerself, buyin’ of ’er from old Uncle Ben. Slippery ole twitch, he be, and in the choir at that…”
Suddenly a voice spoke loudly, as it were just above his head. It quite startled him, seeing that everyone else seemed afraid of speaking a word.
“My text is from Proverbs twenty-three, verse thirty-one. ‘Look not thou upon the wine when it is red. At the last it stingeth like an adder and biteth like a serpent.’”
Jud raised his head and saw Mr. Odgers in a sort of wooden box with a sheaf of papers in his hands and an old pair of spectacles on his nose.
“My friends,” said Mr. Odgers, looking around, “I have chosen the text for this week after due thought and anxious prayer. My reason for so doing is that on Thursday next we celebrate Sawle Feast. As you all know, this holiday has long been the occasion not merely for harmless healthy jollification but for excessive indulgence in drink…”
“Ear ear,” said Jud, not quite to himself.
Mr. Odgers broke off and looked down severely at the bald old man sitting just below him. After staring for a moment and hearing nothing more, he went on. “For excessive indulgence in drink. It is my plea this evening to the members of the congregation that on Thursday next they should set a shining example in the parish. We have to remember, dear friends, that this feast day is no time for drunkenness and debauchery; for it was instituted to commemorate the landing of our patron saint, St. Sawle, from Ireland, who came to convert the heathens of west Cornwall. It was in the fourth century that he floated over from Ireland on a millstone and—”
“On a what?” Jud asked.
“On a millstone,” Mr. Odgers said, forgetting himself. “It is a historical fact that he landed—”
“Well, I only axed!” whispered Jud in irritation to the man behind, who had tapped him on the shoulder.
“Sanctus Sawlus,” said Mr. Odgers. “That is the motto of our church, and it should be a motto and a precept for our daily lives. One that we bear with us as St. Sawle brought it to our shores—”
“On a millstone,” muttered Jud to Mrs. Carkeek. “Who ever ’eard of a man floating on a millstone. Giss along! Tedn sense, tedn reasonable, tedn right, tedn proper, tedn true!”
“You will see that we have with us today,” said Mr. Odgers, rashly accepting the challenge, “one who habitually looks upon the wine when it is red. So the Devil enters into him and leads him into a house of God to flaunt his wickedness in our faces—”
“’Ere,” said Jud unsteadily. “I aren’t no different not from them up there. What you got in the choir, eh? Naught but drunkers and whores’ birds! Look at old Uncle Ben Tregeagle with ’is ringlets, settin’ up there all righteous. And he’d do down a poor old widow woman by sellin’ ’er a cow what he know is going to misfire.”
The man behind grasped his arm. “Here, you come on out.”
Jud thrust him back in his seat with the flat of his hand.
“I aren’t doing no harm! Tes that little owl up there as be doing the harm. ’Im an’ his whores’ birds. Tellin’ a wicked ole yarn about a man floating on a millstone…
“Come along, Paynter,” said Francis, who had been urged by Elizabeth. “Air your grievances outside. If you come disturbing us in church you are likely to end up in jail.”
Jud’s bloodshot eyes traveled over Francis. Injured, he said, “What for do ye turn me out, eh? I’m a fisherman now, not nobody’s servant, an’ I know millstones no more float than fly.”
Francis took his arm. “Come along, man.”
Jud detached his arm. “I’ll go,” he said with dignity. He added loudly, “Tes a poor murky way ye take to repentance by followin’ the likes of he. Ye’ll go to the furnace, sure as me name’s Jud Paynter. The flesh’ll sweal off of yer bones. A fine lot of dripping ye’ll make. Especially old Mrs. Grubb there, ’oo’s takin’ up two seats wi’ her fat! And Char Nanfan in the choir expectin’ of ’er third!”
Two large men began to lead him up the aisle.
“’Ullo, Mrs. Metz. Buried any more husbands, ’ave ’ee? Why and there’s Johnnie Kimber as stole a pig. And little Betty Coad. Well, well. Not wed yet, Betty? Tes ’igh time…”
They got him to the door. Then he shook himself free and sent out a last blast.
“Twon’t always be the same as this, friends. There’s doings in France, friends. There’s riots and bloody murder! They’ve broke open the prison an’ the Governor’s ’ead they’ve stuck on a pole! There’ll be bonfires for some folk here afore ever they die! I tell ’ee—”
The door slammed behind him and only distant shouting could be heard as he was led to the lych-gate.
People slowly began to settle down again. Francis, half annoyed, half amused, picked up a couple of prayer books and returned to his pew.
“Well,” said Mr. Odgers, mopping his brow, “as I was saying, quite apart from the—er—legend or—er—miracle of St. Sawle…”