Legend of the Seventh Virgin (16 page)

Some weeks after Kim’s departure I met Johnny St. Larnston near the Pengaster farm. I had been to see Granny, to take her a basket of food, and I was preoccupied because — although she had talked animatedly about the day she had spent at the vet’s house, where she had been invited for Christmas Day — she looked thin and her eyes seemed less bright than usual. I noticed, too, that she still coughed too much.

My anxiety was due to the fact that I came from a house of sickness, I told myself. Because the Reverend Charles was ill, I was expecting everyone of his age to be threatened.

Granny had told me how much at home Joe was at the vet’s house and how they treated him like one of the family. It was an excellent state of affairs for although the vet had four daughters he had no son, so he was pleased to have a boy like Joe to help him.

I was a little melancholy when I left the cottage; there were so many shadows threatening my life; the sickness in the house which I had come to regard as home; the apprehension over Granny’s health; Joe, too, in a way, sitting at the vet’s table instead of that of Dr. Hilliard.

“Hello!” Johnny was sitting on the stile which led to the Pengaster fields. He leaped down and fitted his step to mine. “I’ve been hoping we should meet.”

“Is that so?”

“Allow me to carry your basket.”

“There’s no need. It’s empty.”

“And where are you going, my pretty maid?”

“You seem to have a fondness for nursery rhymes. Is that because you have not yet grown up?”

“‘My face is my fortune, sir, she said,’” he quoted. “It’s true, Miss … er … Carlyon. But watch that sharp tongue of yours. By the way, why Carlyon? Why not St. Ives, Marazion. Carlyon! But it suits you, you know.”

I quickened my steps. “I am really in a hurry.”

“A pity. I was hoping we should be able to renew our acquaintance. I should have seen you before, don’t doubt it. But I have been away and am only just back.”

“You will soon be returning, I daresay.”

“Do you mean you hope? Oh, Kerensa, why won’t you be friends with me? I want to be, you know.”

“You go the wrong way about making friends, perhaps.”

“Then you must show me the right way.”

He gripped my arm and pulled me round to face him. There was a light in his eyes which alarmed me. I thought of the way he had looked for Hetty Pengaster in church and how I had seen him on the stile. He had probably been coming from some rendezvous with her.

I twisted my arm free. “Let me alone,” I said. “And not just now … always. I am not Hetty Pengaster.”

He was startled; there was no doubt of that because I escaped with ease. I ran and when I looked over my shoulder he was still standing staring after me.

By the end of January the Reverend Charles became so ill that he was given sedatives by the doctor, which resulted in long hours of sleep. Mellyora and I would sit quietly talking as we sewed or perhaps read, and every now and then one of us would rise to look into the sickroom. David Killigrew was with us every moment he could spare and we both agreed that his presence soothed us. Sometimes Mrs. Yeo brought us food and she would always cast a fond eye on the young man. I had heard her declare to Belter that when this unhappy business was over her first task would be to build up the young parson. Bess or Kit would come in to make up the fire, and the glances they bestowed on him and Mellyora were significant to me, though perhaps not to him or to Mellyora. The latter’s thoughts were occupied with her father.

A melancholy peace pervaded the house. Inevitable death was with us, but that had to pass; and then when it was over, we would grow away from it and nothing would be changed, inasmuch as those who now served one person would serve another.

Mellyora and David. It would be inevitable. Mellyora would settle down in time; she would cease to have dreams about a knight whose devotion had been given to another lady.

I looked up and caught David’s eyes on me. He smiled when he realized that I had caught him. There was something revealing in that glance. Had I been mistaken?

I was disturbed. That was not how things were expected to work out.

During the next few days I knew that what I had suspected was a certainty.

I was sure after that conversation. It was not exactly a proposal of marriage because David was not the sort of man to propose marriage until he was in a position to afford to keep a wife. As a curate with an aged mother to support, he was not. But if, as he must believe since everyone else did, he acquired the St. Larnston living, that would be a different matter.

He and I were sitting by the fire alone, for Mellyora was at her father’s bedside.

He said to me: “You regard this as your home, Miss Carlee?”

I agreed.

“I have heard how you came here.”

I knew that was inevitable. As a subject of gossip it had ceased to be interesting, except of course when there was a newcomer who had not heard it before.

“I admire you for what you’ve done,” he went on. “I think that you are most … most wonderful. I imagine that you hope never to leave the parsonage.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. He had made me wonder what I did hope for. To live at the parsonage had not been my dream. The night when I had dressed in red velvet and, masked, walked up the wide staircase to be received by Lady St. Larnston had been more like a dream coming true than living at the parsonage had ever been.

“Of course you are unsure. There are matters in life which require a great deal of thought. I myself have been reviewing my own life. You see, Miss Carlee, a man in my present position cannot afford to marry; but if that position should change …”

He paused and I thought: He is asking me to marry him when the Reverend is dead and he has stepped into his shoes. He felt ashamed that he should be thinking of a future for which he must wait until another was dead.

“I think,” he went on, “that you would make an excellent parson’s wife, Miss Carlee.”

I laughed. “I? I do not think so.”

“But why not?”

“Everything would be wrong. My background, for one thing.”

He snapped his fingers. “You are yourself. That is all that matters.”

“My character.”

“What is wrong with that?”

“It is hardly serious and pious.”

“My dear Miss Carlee, you underrate yourself.”

“You little know me.” I laughed again. When had I ever underrated myself? Had I not always felt a power in myself that I believed would carry me wherever I wanted to go? I was as arrogant in my way as Lady St. Larnston was in hers. Truly, I thought, love is blind; for it was becoming increasingly clear to me that David Killigrew was falling in love with me.

“I am sure,” he went on, “that you would succeed with anything you undertook. Besides …”

He did not finish for Mellyora came out then; her face was drawn and anxious.

“I think he is worse,” she said.

It was Easter time and the church was decorated with daffodils when the Reverend Charles Martin died. Ours was a house of mourning, and Mellyora was inconsolable, for although we had known for so long that death was inevitable, when it came it was still a blow. Mellyora spent the day in her room and would see no one; then she asked for me. I sat with her and she talked of him, how good he had been to her, how lost she felt without him; she recalled instance after instance of his kindness, of his love and care; then she would weep quietly and I wept with her, for I had been fond of him, and I hated to see Mellyora so distressed.

The day of the funeral came and the tolling of the bell seemed to fill the house. Mellyora looked beautiful in her black clothes with the veil over her face; black was less becoming to my dark looks and the dress I wore under the black coat was too loose for me.

The prancing horses, the waving black plumes, the mutes, the solemnity of the burial service, the standing round that grave where I had stood with Mellyora when she had told me that she had had a sister named Kerensa, this was somber and melancholy.

Yet, even worse, was coming back to the parsonage which seemed empty because that quiet man, of whom I had seen very little, was gone.

The mourners came back to the parsonage, Lady St. Larnston and Justin among them; they made our drawing room, in which ham sandwiches and wine were served, seem small and simple — although I had thought it very grand when I had first seen it. Justin spent most of the time with Mellyora. He was gentle, courteous, and he seemed genuinely concerned. David was at my side. I believed that very soon he would definitely ask me to marry him; and I wondered what I could say, knowing as I did that others expected him to marry Mellyora. While the mourners ate their sandwiches and drank the wine which Belter had been called in to serve, I was seeing myself as mistress of this house, Mrs. Yeo and Belter taking their orders from me. A far cry, one might say, from the girl who had set herself up on the hiring stand at Trelinket Fair. A long way indeed. In the village they would always remember. “Parson’s wife, she came from the cottages she did.” They would envy me and never quite accept me. But should I care?

And yet … I had dreamed a dream. This would not be its fulfillment. I did not care for David Killigrew as I did for Kim; and I was not even sure that I wanted to be with Kim who was so far from the Abbas.

When the mourners had left, Mellyora went to her room. Dr. Hilliard, who had made up his mind that I was a sensible young woman, called and asked to see me.

“Miss Martin is very distraught,” he said. “I am giving you a mild sedative for her, but I don’t want her to have it unless she needs it. She looks exhausted. But if she should be unable to sleep, give it to her.” He smiled at me in his rather brusque way. He respected me. I began to dream then that I was able to talk to him, to interest him in Joe. I hated to find that my dreams even for others did not come true.

I went into Mellyora’s room that night and found her sitting at the bedroom window looking out over the lawn to the graveyard.

“You’ll catch cold,” I said. “Come to bed.”

She shook her head, so I put a shawl about her shoulders and drawing up a chair sat beside her.

“Oh, Kerensa, everything will be different now. Don’t you feel it?”

“It must be so.”

“I feel as though I am in a sort of limbo … floating between two lives. The old life is over; the new one is about to begin.”

“For us both,” I said.

She gripped my hand. “Yes, change for me means change for you. It seems now, Kerensa, that your life is entwined with mine.”

I wondered what she would do now. I believed I could stay on at the parsonage if I wished. But what of Mellyora? What happened to the daughters of parsons? If they had no money they became governesses to children; they became companions to elderly ladies. What would Mellyora’s fate be? And mine?

She did not seem to be concerned with her own future; her thoughts were still with her father.

“He is lying out there,” she said, “with my mother and the baby … little Kerensa. I wonder if his spirit has flown to Heaven yet.”

“You shouldn’t sit there brooding. Nothing can bring him back, and remember he would not have wanted you to be unhappy. His great aim was to make
you
happy always.”