The Miller's Dance Read Online Free PDF

intermit tent consideration and negle c t of varying generations of Trenwiths and Poldarks who, according to their temperaments or fortunes, had used their home with greater or lesser loving care; but the gardens for the larger part of the three hundred years had received the minimum or attention. This was partly because on a poor, sandy and windswept soil gardening was an ill -rewarded occupation, partly be cause none or the Trenwiths or Poldarks had been notably interested in flowers or shrubs and could find other uses for their usually limited funds. Only, paradoxically, when the house for the first rime moved out of the direct care of the family was money and time and attention spent. This was when Geoffrey Charles's young and beautiful widowe d mother had married George Warl eggan, the blacksmith's grandson and a new power in the mercantile world of the county. With Geoffrey Charles still a little boy, George had foreseen Trenwith as his own and his wife's country home for at least the next fifteen years, and not only had restored and refurbished the house with extravagance and excellent taste (chiefly his wife's) but had had the old stagnant pond cleared and made into an ornamental lake, and the gardens laid out and tended like a park.
    For a few years Tren with had glowed under this unex pected attention, and the gardens, though ravaged by winds, had surprisingly repaid the care and time spent on them with flushes of brilliance and vigorous growth in the hot sun. But high noon had lasted too short a time: in five years Elizabeth was dead in childbirth and George, just become a knight bachelor, could no longer bear the sight of the house; it was occupied by Elizabeth's parents until they died, then the best of the new furniture was moved to George's other home at Cardew, and Trenwith left to the untender mercies of the Harry brothers and their one slatternly wife, who lived in the lodge house and intimidated the neighbourhood with their brutish ways. Geoffrey Charles Poldark, the rightful owner, was now twenty-seven, but a capta in in the Monmouthshires, the 4 3rd, of the crack Light Division, fighting in Spain, and had not been to Cornwall for five years.
    So the house for that length of time, which was since old Mr Chynoweth had died, had lain entirely empty, visited perhaps once a quarter by Sir George just to keep the Harrys up to scratch.
    But visiting it occasionally - at first quite openly - Clowance Poldark came. She loved the house and admired her cousin, what little she had seen of him, and being a girl without reservations or second thoughts she saw no reason at all why she shouldn't visit the house just whenever she chose - with or without the knowledge of the odious Harrys. Once indeed by the purest accident she had encountered Sir George himself. He had snarled at her - as being the interfering daughter of his worst enemy - but she had refused to be dragooned or intimidated into leaving - and there was not much physical force that even George could sanction for use on a pretty girl of sixteen with bare feet and fine skin and a luscious bosom; so she had stayed to leave him some flowers and departed in her own time.
    But since Stephen Carrington came out of the sea to lure her with his strong arms and compulsive maleness, her visits had become clandestine, secretive, and therefore to her — however necessary - shameful, for she had an instinctive distaste for the least subterfuge. Worse still, it was at her instigation that the secrecy was maintained. He cared nothing for gossip and would have been happy to be seen with her anywhere in the world.
    They met upstairs, in Geoffrey Charles's old bedroom, the one he had occupied as a little boy, the turret room, up the three steps and overlooking the courtyard. Some of Geoffrey Charles's old paintings and drawings still hung on the walls, curling and spotted with damp. The bed and chairs were draped in dust sheets, the faded curtains hung askew in the ebbing