The Angry Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

in and they ate it together.
    Through the meal they talked of the casual homely things: Jinny Scoble had another daughter whom she had called Betty. Jack Cobbledick had hurt his foot on a harrow and was laid up in bed. The two pigs, Ebb and Flow, in the normal progression of nature, had had to be disposed of, but two more, from Flow's first litter, had taken their place, had been given the same names, and the children were becoming reconciled. Jud Paynte r had got so drunk last week that he had fallen into one of his own graves and had had to be hauled out. Ezekiel Scawen had passed his eighty-fourth birthday and claimed not to have had a tooth in his head for sixty years; the Daniels had made him a cake. Tholly Tregirls had had a brush with the preventive men but had got away without being recognized. Verity had written last week and said the measles were very bad in Falmouth -
    'Dwight,' said Ross, who had been doing most of the eating and little of the talking, 'Caroline's baby. What is wrong with it?'
    'Sarah? What d'you mean?'
    'Is that what she's called? Of course, I remember now, you wrote me. Is she deficient? Mentally, I mean.'
    'No, Ross, no, There is no reason to suppose so! But Caroline had a bad time and the baby was small. She is still small and rather frail. But why did you suppose ...?'
    'That dangerous donkey in cleric's clothes, Osborne Whitworth, said as much in the coach from St Austell today. He suggested the child was witless and dribbled from its mouth all day.'
    'All babies dribble, Ross. Like old men. But I don't think Sarah is worse than any other. It must have been spoken out of malice.'
    Thank God for that. And the marriage between those two - does it prosper?'
    Demelza raised her eyebrows. 'Should it not?' 'Well, I have had fears sometim es. They are such total opposite s in everything they think and do.' 'They love each other, Ross.' 'Yes. One hopes it is a sufficient cement.'
    After that Jane Gimlett came in to take away the supper things and they moved into the old parlour, which looked and smelt and felt the same to Ross as it had done since childhood. He noted, however, the recovered chair, the two new vases, with flowers in them: bluebells, tulips, wallf lowers. In those years when Deme lza had been growing out of servitude and childhood to become his companion and then his wife, almost the first evidence of the changing relationship had been the appearance of flowers in this room. He remembered with great vividness the day after he had first slept with he r Elizabeth had called, and Deme lza had come in in the middle of the conversation, barelegged, rough clothed, unkempt, with a sheaf of bluebells on her arm. And she had offered them to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, probably sensing something, had refused them. She had said they would fade on the way home. And after she had gone Deme lza had come to sit at his feet, an instinctive movement as it were to claim him.
    Well ... life had changed a little since then. Demelza had changed since then.
    He lit his pipe with some difficulty from the small smouldering fire; drew at the smoke, sat back. 'You're thinner,' he said. 'I am? Maybe a little.' 'Arc you fretting for Hugh?'
    She stared at the fire. 'No, Ross. But perhaps a little for my husband."
    'I'm sorry. I should not have said that.'
    'You should have said it if it was in your thoughts.'
    "Then it should not have been in my thoughts.'
    'Perhaps sometimes we can't help those. But I hope all this time in London you have not been thinking I have been grieving for someone else.'
    'No.. .No.'
    'You don't sound very certain.'
    'No. What I have thought, ever since last September, is how difficult it is to fight a shade.'
    The candlelight flickered with air from the open window.
    'You don't need to fight anyone, Ross.'
    He looked down at his pipe. 'Compete with.'
    'Nor compete with. For a time ... Hugh came into my life - I can't tell you why - and into my heart, where before there had only ever been