He was teasing me as he used to before my father’s death, and I assured myself it was only teasing; but that incident seemed to mark a change in our relationship. I was over the first shock; there was no need to treat me with such delicate care. I knew then that Roc would always be a gambler no matter how I tried to persuade him against it, and I experienced once more those faint twinges of apprehension.
Now that the results of the shock were diminishing, I began to think of the future, and there were occasions when I was uneasy. This happened first during the night when I awoke suddenly from a hazy dream in which I knew myself to be in some unspecified danger. I lay in the darkness, aware of Roc beside me, sleeping deeply, and I thought: What is happening to me? Two months ago I did not know this man. My home was the studio on the island with my father, and now another artist works in the studio and I have no father. I had a husband. But what did I know of him? —except that I was in love with him. Wasn’t mat enough? Ours was a deeply passionate relationship and I could at times become so completely absorbed in our need of each other that this seemed all I asked. But that was only a part of marriage. I considered the marriage of my parents and remembered how they had relied on each other and felt that all was well as long as the other was close by.
And here I was waking in the night after a nightmare which hung about me seeming like a vague warning.
That night I really looked the truth in the eye, which was that I knew very little of the man I had married or of the sort of life to which he was taking me.
I made up my mind that I must have a talk with him, and j when we drove into the mountains next day I decided to do so. The fears of the night had departed and somehow seemed | ridiculous by day, yet I told myself it was absurd that I should know so little of his background.
We found a small hotel where we stopped to have lunch. I was thoughtful as we ate, and when Roc asked the reason, I blurted out: ” I want to know more about Pendorric and your family.”
” I’m ready for the barrage. Start firing.”
” First the place itself. Let me try to see it and then you fill it with the people.”
He leaned his elbows on the table and narrowed his eyes as though he were looking at something far away, which he could not see very clearly.
” The house first,” he said. ” It’s about four hundred years old in some parts. Some of it has been restored. In fact there was a house there in the Dark Ages I believe—so the story goes…. We’re built on the cliff rook some five hundred yards from the sea; I believe we were much farther from it in the beginning but the sea has a habit of encroaching, you know, and in hundreds of years it advances. We’re built of grey Cornish granite calculated to stand against the southwest gales; as a matter of fact over the front archway—one of the oldest parts of the house—there’s a motto in Cornish cut into the stone. Translated into English it is: ” When we build we believe we build for ever. ” I remember my father’s lifting me up to read that and telling me that we Pendorrics were as much a part of the house as that old archway and that Pendorrics would never rest in their graves if the time came when the family left me place.”
” How wonderful to belong to such a family!”
” You do now.”
” But as a kind of outsider … as all the people who married into the family must be.”
” You’ll soon become one of us. It’s always been so with Pendorric brides. In a short time they’re upholding the family more enthusiastically than those who started life with the name Pendorric.”
“Are you a sort of squire in the neighbourhood?”
” Squires went out of fashion years ago. We own most of the farms in the district, and customs die harder in Cornwall than anywhere else in England. We cling to old traditions and superstitions. I’m sure that a practical young woman like yourself is going to be very impatient with some of the stories you hear ; but bear with us—we’re the fey Cornish, remember, and you married into us.”
” I’m sure I shan’t complain. Tell me some more.”
“Well, there’s the house—a solid rectangle facing north, south, east and west. Northwards we look over the hills to the farmlands—south we face straight out to sea, and east and west give you magnificent views of a coastline that is one of the most beautiful in England and the most treacherous. When the tide goes out you’ll see the rocks like sharks’ teeth, and you can imagine what happens to boats that find their way on to those. Oh, and I forgot to mention there’s one view we don’t much like from the east window. It’s known to us in the family as Polhorgan’s Folly. A house which looks like a replica of our own.
We loathe it. We detest it. We nightly pray that it will be blown into the sea. “
” You don’t mean that, of course.”
” Don’t I?” His eyes flashed, but they were laughing at me. ” Of course you don’t. You’d be horrified if it were.”
” There’s actually no fear of it. It has stood there for fifty years—an absolute sham—trying to pretend to those visitors who stare up at it from the beach below that it is Pendorric of glorious fame.”
“But who built it?”
He was looking at me and there was something malicious in his gaze which alarmed me faintly because for a second it seemed as though it was directed at me; but then I realised that it was dislike of the owner of Polhorgan’s Folly which inspired it.
” A certain Josiah Fleet, better known as Lord Polhorgan. He came there fifty years ago from the Midlands, where he had made a fortune from some commodity—I’ve forgotten what. He liked our coast, he liked our climate, and decided to build himself a mansion. He did, and spent a month or so there each year, until eventually he settled in altogether and took his name from the cove below him.”
” You certainly don’t like him much. Or are you exaggerating?”
Roc shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps. It’s really the natural enmity between the nouveaux poor and the nouveaux rich.”
” Are we very poor?”
” By the standards of my Lord Polhorgan … yes. I suppose what annoys us is that sixty years ago we were the lords of the manor and he was trudging the streets of Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester—I can never remember which—barefooted. Industry and natural cunning made him a millionaire. Sloth and natural indolence brought us to our genteel poverty, when we wonder from week to week whether we shall have to call in the National Trust to take over our home and allow us to live in it and show it at half-a-crown a time to the curious public who want to know how the aristocracy once lived.”
” I believe you’re bitter.”
“And you’re critical. You’re on the side of industry and natural cunning. Oh, Favel, what a perfect union! You see, you’re all that I’m not. You’re going to keep me in order marvellously!”
” You’re laughing at me again.”
He gripped my hand so hard that I winced. ” It’s my nature, darling, to laugh at everything, and sometimes the more serious I am the more I laugh.”
” I don’t think you would ever allow anyone to keep you in order.”
” Well, you chose me, darling, and if I was what you wanted when you made the choice you’d hardly want to change me, would you?”
” I hope,” I said seriously, ” that we shan’t change, that we shall always be as happy as we have been up till now. “
For a moment there was the utmost tenderness in his expression, then he was laughing again.
” I told you,” he said, ” I’ve made a very good match.” I was suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps his family, who I imagined loved Pendorric as much as he did, would be disappointed that he had married a girl with no money, but I was touched and very happy because he had married me who could bring him nothing. I felt my nightmare evaporating and I wondered on what it could possibly have been founded.