Read Online Demelza by Winston Graham - Free Book Online Page B

with proper training she would go far. The chances were that neither opportunity nor training would come her way and that she would end up as a drab lurking at street corners or hang from a gibbet for stealing a gentleman's watch.
    But other notions flickered through the head of a man sitting near. The gaunt Mark Daniel, tall and long-backed and powerful, was thirty, and never in his life had he seen anything to compare with this girl. She was so slender, so sleek, so glistening, so dainty, the way she stood on her toes, the way she bent her neck, her soft sibilant singing, the ochreous candle-reflecting glint of her dark eyes. To him there was nothing facile in her demureness. The smoky light showed up the soft young curve of her cheeks, the cheap gaudy costumes were exotic and unreal. She looked different from all other women, as if she came from a purer finer breed. He sat there unspeaking through the play and the singing which followed, his black Celtic eyes never leaving her when she was to be seen and staring vacantly at the back cloth when she had gone behind it.
    After the play was over and drinks had gone all round, Will Nanfan got out his fiddle, Nick Vigus his flute and Pally Rogers his serpent. The benches were pushed back to the walls and dancing begun. These were not graceful restrained minuets but the full-blooded dances of the English countryside. They danced 'Cuckolds All Awry,' 'All in a Garden Green' and 'An Old Man's a Bedful of Bones.' Then someone proposed 'The Cushion Dance.' A young man began by dancing round the room with a cushion, until after a while he stopped and sang 'This dance I will no farther go,' to which the three musicians replied in chorus, 'I pray ee, good sir, why say so?' Then the dancer sang, 'Because Betty Prowse will not come to,' and the musicians shouted back, 'She must come to whether she will or no.' Then the man laid his cushion before the girl, she knelt on his cushion and he kissed her. After that they had to circle the room hand in hand singing, 'Prinkum, prankum, is a fine dance, an' shall us go dance it over again.' Then it was the girl's turn.
    All went well and fun was fast until the old people were drawn in. Then Zacky Martin, intent on mischief, called out Aunt Betsy Triggs. Aunt Betsy, known for a comic when she got going, danced round with Zacky with a great flutter of skirts as if she was sixteen, not sixty-five. When it came to her turn to go alone she made a war dance of it, and at length she stopped at the end of the room. There was a great roar of laughter, for only one man was sitting there.
    'This dance I will no farther go,' she screeched. 'I pray ee, good ma'am, why say so?' shouted everybody in reply. 'Because Jud Paynter will not come to!' said Aunt Betsy. Another roar and then everybody chorused: 'He must come to, whether he will or no!'
    There was a sudden scuffle and shouts of laughter as several men pounced on Jud just as he was going to sneak away. Protesting and struggling he was brought to the cushion; he would not kneel so they sat him on it. Then Aunt Betsy flung her arms round his neck and kissed him lavishly - so lavishly that he overbalanced and they both went rolling on the floor together, boots and skirts flying. After more uproar they got to their feet and circled the room together, Jud sheepishly joining in the rest, his bloodshot bulldog eyes half peevish, half wily. It was now his choice. Even with Prudie watching it was still his choice, and she could do nothing, it being only a game.
    When he was left alone he plodded slowly round, trying to remember what he had to sing. At last he stopped.
    'Here I stays!' he said.
    There was more laughter, so much that people could hardly answer him. 'I pr-pray ee, good sir, why say so?'
    'Cos I wants Char Nanfan, that's why, see?' Jud glared round as if expecting opposition, showing his two great teeth.
    Will Nanfan's second wife was one of the comeliest women in the room, with her great fair plaits