Goldcrest

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Had she not been as unattractive, and as persistent, he could, he was aware, have treated her as a brother might have done, and laughed her out of it; but Miriam was impossible, a being for whom there was an unprintable word in ancient Greek.

She was cruel also, and snobbish in her narrow way; once while she was there, Livia had come out, thinking there was nobody; she didn't as a rule show herself when anyone came. Si Kasparian himself had spoken naturally to her, and asked her something; Miriam had thrust in, addressed Livia like a servant, and sent her hurrying back to the house. 

Si Kasparian was deeply angry. The man Samson's appearance elicited no 214such direct response from Miriam; she saw him once or twice going about their daily concerns. Once, however, when she and Si Kasparian were alone again, she made it clear that Sam son's dark skin disgusted her.

"Why that?" he said, wryly determined to let her trip her self up over her often-expressed themes of equality and free dom for all men and, presumably, women. "He is a member of the human family of whom, you say, you have a high opinion." She was stuffed with Rousseau at the time.

"Oh," pouted Miriam, "they're different, somehow. They're nearer the brute creation," and it was thereafter that Si Kasparian decided how greatly he loathed her; she had not even the courage of her blue-stocking convictions.

Besides, she was Devenham's sister; and he had sworn re venge on Devenham. The generous freedom of the dower house had made his own grudge deepen; to have to be be holden to a cripple for charity, as though he himself were a beggar! To have to mind his ways-there had, by some means he had himself forgotten, come a trickle of informed comment about the two elders' Malvie visit, and their com plaint about Livia. 

It was begging the question to say that Devenham had taken no action; he'd been given the right to. To wither his prosperity, deface his honour, drag his parvenu name in the dust; father his heirs, ruin his undeserved con tentment, his smug English security!

Such thoughts had often come to Si Kasparian since the time he was alone, staring out sightlessly beyond the brazen sky and sea of the Antipodes, thinking of Malvie.

About that time Samson, who had been away for a few days to purchase necessaries in town, returned, with braggart stories of himself in the whorehouses.

He sat by the fire quaffing small-ale, regaling Si Kasparian, who took him at such times with full seriousness, with ribald tales impossible of reality, or at least well larded with lies. To he himself was Casanova, Hercules, the god of love and his own namesake. 

The w****s, he stated as he always did, had shown him to one another, marvelling at the great size and potency of his parts. "And to think the French would have taken them!" Samson reminded himself happily. He was, at such times, the small boy he had once been; much about him was indestructibly childlike, despite the subject. 

He continued to relate, with the artless pleasure of his Irish ancestors and of a long line of n***o forebears from the Ivory Coast, other adventures he said had been his while he was away. Si Kasparian continued smiling, but had ceased fully to listen. What Samson kept inside his brecches, even if it were all only half true, should quell Miriam if such an outcome were ever possible.

He tensed suddenly. Why not? he thought, and began to grin, so that Samson thought it was with pleasure at his tales. By evening, the plan Si Kasparian had felt growing in his head was almost perfected. It would take time, more than a day or two, perhaps even a week or two; but, in the meantime, he himself could become almost resigned to the inevitable sessions with Miriam.

"You quote the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft; you say all women should take a lover. Yet you yourself would never have the courage so to flout your upbringing. You are a coward, for all your fine words."

Miriam maintained her catlike rubbing against his sleeve; she enjoyed the contact. "I'd take you," she told him, using the boldness of an emancipated woman; the world was chang ing, soon women like herself would be pioneers, and not "Would you?" he said, smiling and half aiding her. "Where and how?" It was like, he thought, some sickly game played by children, for their diversion; how he wished she would go!

"You could show me a time and place." The secretive eyes gazed possessively at him. How handsome he looked, in his familiar shabby cloak! Dear Si Kasparian, he always wore it. A time and place; not here, where at any moment somebody might come down the path, that dreadful blackamoor or even somebody looking for her from Malvie. 

So Mary Wollstone craft would have spoken, calm and unafraid, to her lover; how else were poor women to indicate an understanding of such matters? At the same time, a tingling excitement was mount ing in Miriam's veins; Mr. Setoun, let alone Mr. McIntyre, had been far from eliciting it. 

But Si Kasparian Doon, seated there in pale wrapped mystery and asking her to be his lover! This was life as it should be lived, grasped at with both hands. What did Mama and Godfrey matter? They'd done it them selves, hadn't they? Ah, to love like the great lovers of the world, like Abélard and Héloïse, Catallus and Lesbia

When the conditions he outlined were made clear to her, however, she pouted. To go to the old hayshed, up there on the hill, by night, and lie down like a milkmaid? To do that, and keep silent, as he said, and afterwards go back to Malvie by the side postern, like a servant-girl on an assignation? For the first time, Miriam wondered if the Wollstonecraft pre cepts were entirly consonant with dignity; her lip trembled.