Jeremy Poldark Read Online Free Page B

substance of permanent things.
Ross thought, there are no permanent things, only fleeting moments of warmth
and companionship, precious stationary seconds in a flicker of troubled days.
    The
clouds broke in a shower and drove them in, and they stood a minute in the
window of the parlour watching the big drops pattering on the leaves of the
lilac tree, staining them dark. When rain came suddenly Demelza still, had the
instinct to go and see if Julia were sleeping outside. She thought of saying
this to Ross but checked herself. The child's name was hardly ever mentioned.
Sometimes she suspected that Julia was a bar between them, that though he tried
his utmost not to, the memory of her courting infection to help at Trenwith
still rankled.
    She
said: "Is it not time you went to see Mr. Notary Pearce again?"
    He
grunted. " The man frets me. The less I see of him the better."
    She
said quietly: "It is my life, you know, as well as I yours that's at
hazard."
    He
put his arm, round her. "Tut, tut. If anything happens to me you will have
much still to live for. This house, and land will be yours. You will become
principal shareholder in Wheal Leisure Mine. You will have a duty to people and
to the countryside "
    She,
stopped him. "Nay, Ross, I shall have nothing. , I shall be a beggar
again. I shall be an unfledged" miner's wench.
    You'll
be a handsome young woman in your first twenties with a small estate and a load
of debts. The best of your life will be ahead of you "
    I
live only through you. You made me what I am. You think me into being handsome,
you think me into being a squire's wife,"
    Stuff.
You'd surely marry again. ' If I were gone there'd be men humming round here
from all over the county. It isn't flattery but the sober truth. You could take
your pick of a
    dozen----
    'I
should never marry again Never!"
    His
hand tightened on her. " How thin you are still’
    I'm
not. You ought to know I'm not.’
    ‘Well,
slim then. Your waist used to have a more com
    fortable
feel."
    Only
after Julia was born. That was different then."
    There,
the name was, out now.
    "Yes,"
he said.
    There
was silence for a minute or two. His eyes were lidded and she could not read
his expression.
    She
said : "Ross." "Yes?"
    "Perhaps
in time it will seem different. Perhaps we shall have other children."
    He
moved away from her. " I do not think any child would be grateful for
having a gallows bird for a father... I wonder if dinner is ready."
     
    When
Dwight parted from Demelza he rode down the steep narrow track to Sawle
village, into the bubble of the stream and the clatter of the tin stamps. It
was a short enough time since he had come to this district, a callow young
physician with radical ideas about medicine; but it seemed a decade in his
life: In that time he had earned the confidence and affection of the people he
worked among, had inexcusably broken his Hippocratic oath, and since then had
painfully re-established himself-entirely in the eyes of the countryside, who
laid the blame on the girl, very partially in his own, which at all times were
self-critical and self-exacting.
    He
had learned a great deal: that humanity was infinitely variable and infinitely
contradictory, so that all treatment consisted of patient experiment and trial
and error; that the surgeon and the physician were often mete onlookers at
battles fought under their eyes; that no outward aid was one quarter as
powerful as the ordinary recuperative power of the body, and that drugs and
potions were sometimes as likely to hinder as to help.
    If
he had been a self-satisfied man he might have found some comfort in having
come this far, for many of the surgeons and apothecaries he met had learned
nothing like this in a lifetime and were never likely to. He avoided members of
his own profession, for he found himself constantly at loggerheads with them.
His only comfort was that they were often as much at variance among themselves,
having only one element in common, an absolute