Goldcrest

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Twice Miriam had a passionate involve ment with an assistant minister, and in each case the candidate in question had made off shortly to other parishes, leaving Miriam encumbered by much knitting to be finished for the poor and a list of visiting-rounds for jelly and soup. She had begun the visits gladly, in the days when, on initial journeys, Mr. Setoun or Mr. McIntyre might be beside her, steadying her arm and showing her the way; now, she could hardly give the patronage up. She might, accordingly, have shrunk un remembered into the average spinster of her unhappy kind, with the passions of hell broiling beneath an exterior unchang ing, calmly mittened, through half a lifetime. But before that, she saw Si Kasparian.

She had of course seen him before, notably the time he came to Malvie on the first day they'd all arrived; his un altered appearance now gave him an elfin, magical quality for Miriam. Any blind man, moreover, was unfortunate; and how brave this blind man was! He'd dared, without assistance or guidance of any kind from the dark acolyte be hind him, the whole expanse of Tessa's Chinese carpet, peopled on every square with Tessa's critical, unkind county guests (they had often over the years snubbed Miriam also). 

Si Kasparian had held, despite the moneyed pomp and blue blooded certainty of the guests, the stage at its centre. While remote from the Noble Savage-Miriam these days had time for much reading-he maintained an air of breeding as well as tragedy, and Miriam's heart, as from one solitary to another, yearned towards his. By the time she discovered he kept a mistress it was of no lasting importance; in the fantasy Miriam already nourished in the narrow caverns of her half-instructed mind, Livia played no part.

She went as soon as possible to call on Si Kasparian at the Mains, riding her grey pony, and choosing a moment when she knew Tessa and her mother were separately occupied. Socially, she knew they would say, Si Kasparian Doon was not acceptable, and in any case it was not correct for Miriam, a young unmarried lady, to visit him. Such taboos hedged con ventional society about that it was more like living in a savage tribe than an informed Christian country, Miriam assured herself; and rode on.

She met Si Kasparian as he came down the path from the door, while she was in the act of dismounting; thus unprepared, Miriam lapsed into the cheerful, unfortunate, aggressive manner she used with the visiting poor. "I was passing," she told him, and accorded him a vigorous handshake. It must be made evident from the beginning, she told herself, that she could view the situation in intelligent terms. Her small eyes flickered briefly towards the house-windows; there was no sign of the mistress.

Si Kasparian, who had had no idea who Miriam might be until informed, could have told her already that he would know her again; she stank. He muttered some courtesy, and did his best to entertain so unexpected and eccentric a visitor. He could not, however, apart from anything else, be cordial to Godfrey Devenham's half-sister; and when Miriam called a second time, made it clear to her that her visits were unwel come. To his extreme displeasure and discomfort, she received the rebuke with loud laughter, and a kind of coyness that made his skin rise.

Thereafter there was hardly a week when Si Kasparian was free of her. It would have seemed incredible to Tessa Deven ham, herself in former days so often flayed by her cousin's bitter tongue, that he should want to be rid of anyone and yet be unable to contrive it. To Tessa, the delicate, fragile image of the woman she had been reared to resemble would not endure the roughness of denial; a rejected female shrank, in confused virginity, back like a snail inside its shell.

 But on Si Kasparian's first tentative and, later, open rudeness Miriam thrived, robust as a mutton-chop; like some form of life that flourishes best under the knife, flame, or whip she would writhe, and presently give her loud laugh and come on again; she brushed herself against him frequently, so that, as he con fessed to Livia later, he was fain to have his clothes sponged down and hung out in the air. But nothing he could say or do would dissuade Miss Bowes, now consumed by the abiding fire of true love.

During the course of their acquaintance she obtained, by some means which evaded Kitty's vigilance, a copy of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. This brought about a re volution, or perhaps modification, in the thought-processes of Miriam herself; women were no longer born to be slaves, to marry or be old maids only. Every woman had a right to her chosen lover; Mary herself had demonstrated this. 

That Mary had borne her Godwin a child in the process did not concern Miriam meantime; she was obsessed by theories, never facts. She lectured Si Kasparian on the rights of woman till he was al most physically sick of her; if, he was beginning to think, laying the little b***h on her back would get rid of her, he'd do it, perhaps, and be quit of the affair. But he suspected that this would not, in female reckoning, be the end; and he had in any case no appetite for Miriam Bowes's seduction.

The family at Malvie could not, by now, be ignorant of the rides Miriam continued to make each day; they had, she told Si Kasparian, got Godfrey to speak to her, and as a rule she could deny poor Godfrey nothing, but this time she'd told him, firmly, that her life was henceforth her own. 

"Mama is one of those females brought up in a sheltered, ignorant fashion, by an earlier generation, and has no notion of reality or breadth of thought," she told Si Kasparian, and he, caught be tween a yawn and a laugh, told her not to be a goose; she could have no idea, he said, what she was talking about.