The Weather at Tregulla by Stella Gibbons

Author:Stella Gibbons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2021-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

Childish and Silly Plot

Tregulla, of course, was a backwater; a hamlet where the pace of life was slow, set in a county thrust far out into the sounding Atlantic, flown over by seabirds and chosen as a dwelling place by seals, that is itself isolated from the rest of England. If news reached Tregulla and Selstow and Camelot as quickly as it reached any other parts, thanks to television and radio, news was seldom made in any region of the Duchy—except sometimes in the winter months when the terrible sea, awake and bellowing its thunders, ran a ship headlong onto its rocks.

Nevertheless, a cloud of local gossip, resembling in its minuteness and harmlessness a dance of midges, perpetually rose and fell in the mild air above the three small places.

Captain Beaumont soon discovered that people were talking about his daughter and young Willows. His informant was not, as might have been expected, Miss Keate, but Mrs. Monboddo.

“Is Una going to marry that boy?” she demanded one morning some weeks after Emmeline’s visit to Trelynn Manor. The car was standing still, at the side of a road high on the dry brown moor; there was no movement under the great sky, bare of cloud, except far off where the windows of cars passing along a main thoroughfare flashed for an instant in the sun. Mrs. Monboddo, remarking that there was a view from here, had stopped in order that they might enjoy the prospect of distant Brown Willy, and they had lit cigarettes.

“Of course not,” he said, startled, “why should she?”

“Girls do get married, Charlie. And she’s seeing a good deal of him, isn’t she?”

“Is she? I don’t think so—that is, I really don’t know.” In fact, he had been so relieved that Una seemed to be “settling down” that he had felt nothing more about her activities than a muted sense of relief.

“I thought she was so mad keen to leave home?” Mrs. Monboddo went on.

“Er—yes, she was. But she seems more settled now. She has these young friends and—”

“Not very desirable friends, are they? There are stories about them, in London.”

“That’s rather vague. I can’t say that I like the boy much; a gutless type, I should think, but the girl’s pretty—and sensible too. . . . What kind of stories?”

“They burnt a house down that someone lent them.”

“Burnt it down?”

“I forget who told me. Glenda, probably. But Rachel Trewin had heard it, too. Of course, she was rather concerned because apparently Barney’s smitten with the girl—what’s her name—Emily.”

“Emmeline,” Captain Beaumont corrected absently.

He was thinking that Evie would have known how to deal with the gossip, and these new friends of Una’s. She had looked so fragile, so ethereal and delicate, yet she had had a good head on her where questions of—er—love-making and that kind of thing were concerned. But I only understand ships, and men, the widower thought despondently.

Yet the knowledge that he did at least understand those provided a little comfort, and it was with

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