Legend of the Seventh Virgin Read Online Free PDF Page A

away from the cottage.
    Granny said: “You mustn’t fret yourself, girl. It’s his way and he’ll always grieve when animals suffer.”
    “Granny, I wish … I wish he could be a doctor and look after people. Would it cost a lot of money to make him a doctor?”
    “Do you think it’s what he’d want, m’dear?”
    “He wants to cure everything. Why not people? He’d get money for it and people would respect him.”
    “Perhaps he don’t care what people think like you do, Kerensa.”
    “He’s got to care!” I said.
    “He will, if it’s meant.”
    “You said nothing was meant. You said people make their own future.”
    “Each makes his own, lovey. ’Tis for him to make what he will, same as ’tis for you to.”
    “He lies there on the talfat most of the day … with his animals.”
    “Leave him be, lovey,” said Granny. “He’ll make his own life the way he wants.”
    But I wasn’t going to leave him be! I was going to make him understand how he had to break out of this life into which he had been born. We were too good for it — all of us. Granny, Joe, and me. I wondered why Granny hadn’t seen it, how she could be content to live her life as she had.
    Gathering herbs always soothed me. Granny would explain where we had to go to find what we wanted; then she would tell me about the healing properties of each one. But on that day, as we picked, every now and then I would hear the distant sounds of the guns.
    When we were tired, she said we should sit down under the trees and I persuaded her to talk of the past.
    When Granny talked she seemed to put a spell on me, so that I felt I was there where it was all happening; I even felt that I was Granny herself, being wooed by Pedro Bee, the young miner who was different from all the others. He used to sing lovely songs to her which she didn’t understand because they were in Spanish.
    “But ’tain’t always necessary to hear words to know,” she told me. “Oh, he were not much liked in these parts, being a foreigner and all. There wasn’t enough work for Cornish-men some of them did say — let alone foreigners coming to take the manshuns out of their mouths. But my Pedro, he laughed at ’un. He did say that once he’d seen me that was enough. He was going to stay, for where I be that was where he belonged to be.”
    “Granny, you loved him, truly loved him.”
    “He was the man for me and I wanted no other — nor ever have.”
    “So you never had another lover?”
    Granny’s face was set in an expression I had never seen there before. She had turned her head slightly in the direction of the Abbas and seemed as though she were actually listening for the guns.
    “Your grandfather was not a mild man,” she said. “He’d have killed the one who wronged him as lief as look at ’un. That were the man ’e were.”
    “Did he ever kill anyone, Granny?”
    “No, but he might have … he would have … if he’d known.”
    “Known what, Granny?”
    She didn’t answer, but her face was like a mask that she’d put on so that no one should see what was beneath.
    I lay against her, looking up at the trees. The firs would stay green all through the winter but the leaves on the others were already russet brown. The cold weather would soon be with us.
    Granny said after a long pause: “But it was so long ago.”
    “That you had another lover?”
    “He weren’t no lover, I’ll tell ’ee. Perhaps I should tell ’ee — for a warning. ’Tis well to know the way the world wags for others, for maybe it’ll wag that way for you. This other one were Justin St. Larnston … not this Sir Justin. His father.”
    I sat bolt upright, my eyes wide.
    “You, Granny, and Sir Justin St. Larnston!”
    “This one’s father. There wasn’t much difference in them. He was a wicked one.”
    “Then why …”
    “For Pedro’s sake.”
    “But …”
    “’Tis like you to come to a judgment afore you’ve heard the facts, child. Now I’m started, I must go