Legend of the Seventh Virgin Read Online Free PDF

and tell you all. He saw me; he fancied me; I was a St. Larnston girl, and I was bespoke. He must have made inquiries and found I was to marry Pedro. I remember how he cornered me. There’s a little walled garden close to the house.”
    I nodded.
    “I were silly. Went to see one of the maids that was in the kitchens. He caught me in that garden, and that was when he fancied me. Promised a job for Pedro that’d be safer and better paid than working in the mine — if I’d be sensible. Pedro never knew. And I stood out against him. I loved Pedro; I was going to marry Pedro; and there weren’t going to be nobody for me but Pedro.”
    “And then … ?”
    “Things started going wrong for Pedro. The St. Larnston mine was being worked then, and we was in his power. I thought he’d forget me. But he didn’t. The more I stood out, the more he wanted me. Pedro never knew. That was the miracle. So one night … before we was married I went along to him, for I said that if it could be secret and he’d let Pedro alone … it would be better than the way it were.”
    “Granny!”
    “It shocks you, lovey. I’m glad. But I’m going to make you see I had to do it. I’ve thought of it since and I know I was right. It was like what I told you … making your own future. Mine was with Pedro. I wanted us to be together always in the cottage and our children round us … boys looking like Pedro, girls like me. And I thought what’s once if it’ll buy that future for us? And I was right, for it would have been the end of Pedro. You don’t know what he were like, that long-ago Sir Justin. He didn’t have no feelings for the likes of we. We were like the pheasants they be shooting now … bred up for his sport. He’d have killed Pedro in time; he’d have put him on the dangerous work. I had to make him leave us alone because I could see that this were like a sport to him. So I went to him first.”
    “I hate the St. Larnstons,” I said.
    “Times change, Kerensa, and people change with them. Times is cruel hard but not quite so cruel hard as they were when I was your age. And when your children come, then times’ll be a little easier for them. It’s the way of things.”
    “Granny, what happened then?”
    “It weren’t the end. Once weren’t enough. He liked me too well. This black hair of mine that Pedro loved so much … he liked it, too. There was a blight on my first year of marriage, Kerensa. It should have been so fine and grand, but I had to go to him, you see … and if Pedro had known, he would have killed him — for passion ran high in his dear heart.”
    “You were frightened, Granny.”
    She frowned as though trying to remember. “It were a sort of wild gamble. And it went on for nigh on a year, when I found I was to have a child … and I didn’t know whose. Kerensa, I wouldn’t have his child, I wouldn’t. I saw it all through the years … looking like him … and deceiving Pedro. It would be like a stain that would never be washed out. I couldn’t do it. So … I didn’t have the child, Kerensa. I was very ill. I came near to dying, but I didn’t have the child; and that were the end as far as he were concerned. He forgot me then. I tried to make up to Pedro. He said I was the gentlest woman in the world with him, though I could be fierce enough with everyone else. It pleased him, Kerensa. It made him happy. And sometimes I think the reason I was so gentle with him and did all I could to please him, was because I’d wronged him; and that seemed strange to me. Like good out of evil. That made me understand a lot about life; that was the beginning of my being able to help others. So, Kerensa, you should never regret any experience, good or evil; for there’s some good in what’s bad just as there be bad in good … sure as I sit here in the woods beside you. Two years later, your mother was born — our daughter, Pedro’s and mine; and her birth nearly killed me and I couldn’t have no more. It