The tin works in which John’s money was invested paid up at the end of the year (one hundred and twenty-six pounds, seventeen shillings and eight-pence on this occasion), and Tregors rent came in on the same day. It seemed to Teresa that the heavens had opened up and showered uncounted gold upon her.
She went into Penzance next morning as fast as the bay mare could carry her and ordered a dress bordered with real lace and combining all the hues of the rainbow. She was off. Never having had any money she had not the slightest idea of its value and was mulcted accordingly. In the third year of widowhood she spent the last penny of her income.
The farm she left to Bohenna, the house to Martha, the children to look after themselves, and rode in to Penzance market and all over the hundred, to parish feasts, races and hurling matches, a notable figure with her flaming dresses, raven hair and huge earrings, laying the odds, singing songs and standing drinks in ale houses like any squire.
When John died she was at her zenith. The early bloom of her race began to fade soon after, accelerated by gross living. She still ate enormously, as though the hunger of twenty-two lean years was not yet appeased. She was like an animal at table, seizing bones in her hands and tearing the meat off with her teeth, grunting the while like a famished dog, or stuffing the pastries she bought in Penzance into her mouth two at a time. She hastened from girlish to buxom, from buxom to stout. The bay mare began to feel the increasing weight on the pillion. Bohenna was left at home and Teresa rode alone, sitting sideways on a pad, or a-straddle when no one was looking. Yet she was still comely in a large way and had admirers aplenty. Sundry impecunious gentlemen, hoping to mend their fortunes, paid court to the lavish widow, but Teresa saw through their blandishments, and after getting all possible sport out of them sent them packing.
With the curate-in-charge of St. Gwithian it was the other way about. Teresa made the running. She went to church in the first place because it struck her as an opportunity to flaunt her superior finery in public and make other women feel sick. She went a second time to gaze at the parson. This gentleman was an anemic young man with fair hair, pale blue eyes, long hands and a face refined through partial starvation. (The absentee beneficiary allowed him eighteen pounds a year.) Obeying the law of opposites, the heavy dark gypsy woman was vaguely attracted by him at once and the attraction strengthened.