The Four Swans by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online

was idly stirring the fire. Horace, Caroline’s little pug and the agent of their first meeting, had been banished from the room and taken far enough away for his protests not to be heard. In the early months he had shown an intense jealousy of Dwight, but with patience Dwight had won him round, and in the latter weeks he, had come to accept the inevitable, that there was going to be another claimant for his mistress’s attentions.
    They had come home, for there seemed nowhere better to go. It. had been their common home since Dwight returned’ an emaciated wreck from the prison camp of Quimper. Caroline had insisted that he stay where she could best look after him. In these months, while flouting the overt conventions, they had observed a separateness of establishment which would have satisfied the most prudish of their neighbours.
    It had not altogether been moral considerations which had influenced them. Dwight’s life had flickered and wavered like a candle with a thief in it; to introduce the demands of passion might have seen it flicker out.
    Caroline said: `Well, my dear, so we are here together at last, unified and sanctified by the church. D’you know, I find it very difficult to detect any difference.’
    Dwight laughed. - `Nor I. It’s hard not to feel adulterous. Perhaps it’s because we have waited so long.’
    `Too long.’
    `Too long. But the delay has been outside our control.’
    `Not in the first place. The fault was mine.’
    `It was no one’s fault. At least it has come right in the end.’
    He put down the poker, turned and looked at her, then came to sit on the bed beside her, put his hand on her knee.
    She said: ‘D’you know, I heard of a doctor who was so earnest in his study of anatomy that he took a skeleton away on his honeymoon and the wife woke to find him fingering the bones in the bed beside her.’
    Dwight smiled again. `No bones. Not at least for the first two days.’
    She kissed him. He put his hands to her hair, pressing it back from either cheek.
    She said: ‘Perhaps we should have waited longer until you were quite recovered.’.
    He said: `Perhaps we should not have waited so long:’
    The fire was flickering brightly, sending nodding shadows about the room.
    She said: `Alas, my body has no surprises for you. At least so far as the upper half is concerned, you have examined it, thoroughly in the harsh light of day. Perhaps it is fortunate that I never had a pain below the navel.’
    `Caroline, you talk too much.’
    `I know. I always shall. It is a fault you have married.’ `I must find ways of stopping it?
    `Are there ways?’
    `I believe so.’
    She kissed him again. `Then try.’

CHAPTER
THREE
    I
     
    Except in one particular Sam Carne was a happy man. A few years ago, while still in the arms of Satan, he had been half persuaded, half bullied by his bullying father into attending a Methodist prayer meeting. There his heart had suddenly warmed within, him, he had wrought deeply and agonizingly with his, spirit and had come to experience the joy of sins forgiven: thereupon he had embraced the living Christ and his life, had been utterly transformed. Now, having moved far from his home in search of work at the mine of his brother-in-law, Captain Ross Poldark, and having found the neighbourhood of Nampara a dry and barren wilderness in which regular meetings had been discontinued and all but a very few had long since fallen back into carnal and sinful ways, he had in less than two years reformed the Society, inspirited the few faithful, wrestled with Satan in the souls of many, of the weak and erring, and had attracted several newcomers, all of, whom had been prayed for, had discovered for themselves the precious promise of Jehovah, and had in, due time been sanctified and cleansed.
    It was a notable achievement, but it did not end there. Acting without the sanction of the leaders of the Movement, he had caused to be raised on the edge of Poldark land a new Preaching House