The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Old Parson cheered up instantly. “My dear, it is not a he, it is a she,” he said in shocked tones, for nothing shocked him more than ignorance about bees. “It is a worker bee. I have told you before that workers are lady bees. The gentlemen, the drones, are inside the hives.” And he was off on a long slow dissertation on bees and had forgotten all about the pot of honey and the barley bread.

  But Lucy had not forgotten and after they had taken him back to his room and settled him again in his chair, and had run down to the brook to watch the mill wheel turning, she said to Justus, “The scapegoat.”

  They opened the gates and climbed up the steep wooded slope, carrying the honey and bread carefully. It was lovely in the wood with the cuckoo calling and Brandy Brook singing and chuckling down over the mossgrown stones, the ferns pushing up all along its banks. They reached the grey rock and went round behind it and saw a smaller stone, half-hidden by brambles, leaning against it. Between the two stones was a cavity and someone had hollowed out the earth inside it. This must be the place. Lucy knelt down and put the honey and bread carefully inside. Then running down to the brook they scrambled on beside it, the slopes of the cwm growing wilder and more brambly as they climbed. Presently they stopped, for Lucy had got herself entangled with brambles, and while she tugged impatiently at the thorny sprays Justus pulled off his shoes, scrambled down into the brook and stood looking down at the marvel of his feet magically changed by the water. Could they be his feet? It was very eerie and strange, and the queer feeling grew with the sparkle of thrusting sunlight on the water and the sound of the brook in his ears, banishing other sounds and enclosing him in a lonely watery world. He began to feel very odd and looked round for Lucy, but in his confusion he looked upstream, not towards the bank, and was transfixed with terror.

  It couldn’t be a man. He had never seen a man like that, yet it couldn’t be any other creature than a man. Then he knew what it was, a corpse that had been buried by mistake while it was still alive and had fought its way out of the grave, choking with dust and gasping for air, and had come to drink at the stream. It was drinking in choking gulps, crouched down on the bank and spooning the water up in skeleton hands. Rags clothed its nakedness and the wrinkled skin was nearly black. Justus’s mouth was open, trying to scream, for the thought of men buried alive was his special nightmare. But he could not. No sound would come. And he could not move either. Somewhere inside him he began to call, Lucy, Lucy, but she did not hear and she did not come. Then she did hear, though still he made no sound, and was beside him in the stream, her hand gripping his reassuringly. Her face was white but she was not as terrified as he was.

  “Crouch down,” she whispered. “Then he will not see us. He is the scapegoat.”

  They crouched down and the ferns hid them. Justus let out a shuddering sigh of relief. The scapegoat. Not a man who had been buried alive but Old Parson’s friend. But even so he was sufficiently terrible, and now he was standing up and perhaps he might see them, for they could see him quite plainly through the ferns. His grey beard was long and straggly and the brook water dripped from it, but only a few wisps of hair clung to his skull. There was no evil in the face but with the open gaping mouth, eyes swivelling from side to side as though he had heard something that had scared him, it was somehow dreadful. Neither child had as yet seen a prisoner being led to the gallows; if they had they might have recognized a man without hope whom terror and exhaustion had reduced to something scarcely human. They trembled, and though she did not know it Lucy had tears running down her cheeks. Then suddenly the man saw them and leaped aside and ran away through the wood. In a moment he had vanished, as though the earth in its pity had opened and swallowed him. Lucy pulled Justus up out of the water and hand in hand they plodded on, and now Justus as well as Lucy was crying. If the sun still shone they no longer noticed it, and they hardly knew where they were until they found themselves in the shallow valley behind the castle. Then Justus spoke. “I hope he will find the bread and honey.”

  “He ran that way,” said Lucy, and they began to cheer up, for they were in green meadows where their father’s cattle were feeding and in the distance was the bridge and the stream that Lucy saw from her bedroom window. They were nearly home now and their natural high spirits began to come back again.

  They reached the bridge at about the same time as the trotting horsemen but there was nowhere to hide, and in any case Lucy would not have hidden for she knew how to manage her father.

  “What are you two doing there?” demanded William, drawing rein on the bridge with Richard on his white pony just behind him. “This is not where you should be, I’ll be bound.” Where they should be he did not know but it was always safe to conclude that Lucy was where she should not be. And Justus went where Lucy led.

  “They should be with Nan-Nan in the garden,” said Richard haughtily. He was looking very beautiful, one gloved hand on his hip, the reins held nonchalantly in the other, his back very straight. Lucy, her hair dishevelled, the hem of her dress and her shoes and stockings soaking wet, knew that this was one of the times when she wished she could love Richard more than she did. Why should he give himself such insufferable airs just because he was naturally tidy and had been born first? But she could not quarrel with him for he had taken moderately well the fixing of three strong iron bars across her turret window, that had now put an end to his exits as well as hers. Pushing back her hair she smiled up at her father and brother, and her eyes were so intensely blue that it was as though a kingfisher flashed across the stream. William was undone. Groaning he stretched out his arms to her and she jumped up and was enthroned before him on his saddle.

  “Come on, you abominable little tadpole,” said Richard, and with Justus enthroned on the white pony with his brother the cavalcade paced slowly up the hill towards the castle. It towered up above them on its precipice of rock looking far taller and more impressive than it actually was, the tower seeming almost to touch the sky. It looked an impregnable fortress and Lucy had a sudden longing to be safely inside it. She had not known before what could happen to people who strayed homeless and alone in a world that looked so beautiful but could not be as lovely as it appeared, or the scapegoat would not look as he did.

  3

  The next day the Wogan boys, Rupert and John, rode over from Haverfordwest with their father and mother to spend the day at the castle; William and George Wogan, both justices of the peace, to discuss their mutual affairs together, the two ladies to gossip over their embroidery, the boys to spend the time with Richard. John was the same age as Richard and Rupert a little older. When evening came they were all to have supper together in the great hall and Lucy had been told she might sit up for it.

  It was warm and fine and all went well at first. The boys bathed down in the castle bay and then adjourned to the churchyard to play their special game of throwing a ball against the church wall and bouncing it back with their rackets, a fast and furious game they had devised themselves to improve their tennis. Parson Peregrine had no objection, indeed he allowed such games even on Sundays, and he frequently read aloud from James the First’s Book of Sports in church, as a counterblast against Puritanism. Lucy and Justus had both been allowed to sit on a tombstone and watch their elders, but were not permitted to take part in their sport. Justus, a born hero worshipper, was content to worship but Lucy was furious. With her skirt off she could play ball better than any of them and it maddened her to be relegated to a tombstone. Justus watched her a little nervously for her eyes were dangerously bright and she had a scarlet spot on each cheekbone. Though she sat so still, her hands linked round her knees, he knew very well that one of her rages was coming to the boil.

  The older boys grew hot and tired and flung themselves down among the moondaisies in the long grass, and scraps of their conversation floated to the two children on the tombstone.

  “My father says these damn Puritans should all have their ears cropped,�
�� said Rupert. “They turn the whole country into a moaning muckheap of snivelling devils who would abolish Sunday sports and music in the churches and even the wakes. They’ve no respect for holy things. If they had their way they’d drag the cross from the altar and the King from his throne.”

  “No!” said Richard hotly. “Stop him from being a tyrant, that is all. Stop him from levying unjust taxes without consent of parliament. He thinks he is God. He is not.”

  Rupert, a boy of choleric temper, was on his feet at once, as red in the face as Lucy. “Monarchy is divine,” he shouted at Richard, “and resistance to one’s lawful prince is an act of rebellion. I thought the Walters were loyal men.”

  “We are.”

  “Not you, you goddam traitor.”

  “Liar!” gasped Richard, as white with fury as Rupert was scarlet. “It’s no treason, if your prince steals your liberties, to resist him.”

  “I tell you it is,” retorted Rupert. “And who taught you your politics? Not your father, I’ll be bound. Nor Parson Peregrine.”

  “I think for myself,” said Richard. “Why should I believe what old Peregrine tells me? He’s an old fool. As for my father he does not care for politics one way or the other. He only cares for his horses and his ale.”

  Lucy’s breath was for a moment caught in a tight knot in her breast. How Richard to dare speak like that about their father! She gasped and the knot released itself in a spring that sent her catapulting from the tombstone to land on Richard like an avenging fury. He rolled over on the grass, pummelled by her fists, but only for a moment for he heard Rupert’s laughter and flinging her away from him he jumped up and went for Rupert, who hit back with far greater skill and strength. Lucy, too mad with rage to be capable of any proper family feeling, and aided by Justus according to his lesser capabilities, continued to go for Richard. John Wogan, an agile boy whose political feelings were no stronger than those attributed to William Walter, leapt to the aid of Richard simply because he was outnumbered. The affair had passed through the first glorious stage of shouts and thuds and battle cries and had sunk to the sobbing of exhausted breath and the bubbling of bleeding noses, when two fathers stepped over the wall and Parson Peregrine strolled along from the lych-gate, his fingers still marking the place in the book he had been reading. He had come not so much to separate the combatants, which messy business he now left to the begetters of the abominable children, but to express his own sense of personal outrage. “Am I to have no peace?” he demanded. “Morning by morning I am forced to instruct these sons of Belial; must my afternoons also be rendered hideous by their brawls?”

  He was not heard in the hubbub of parental pacification, and returned the way he had come. By the time he reached the lych-gate he was deep in his book again and by the time he was once more with Ptolemy and his armchair he had forgotten he had been out. Meanwhile, the combatants having been disentangled, questioned and cursed, a gloomy procession made its way back to the castle. That this scrimmage was a matter for gloom they all knew, for it threatened the evening’s entertainment; that it was one of many such sparks all over the country, that would presently run together in a bitter conflagration, they refused to recognize, for the beginnings of tragedy, like the first warnings of pain, are always thrust out of sight; man’s hope that what is pushed down into the dark will die there being as perennial as it is doomed.

  Back in the castle cuts and bruises were attended to and punishment meted out. John and Rupert were sent home in disgrace in the care of a groom, to be dealt with by their father later, Richard was whipped and sent to his turret room and Lucy and Justus banished to the nursery. No child was to partake of supper. It was the parents only who feasted at the high table on capon and a leg of mutton, with a fine tart to follow, all washed down with claret and home brewed wine made from the wild raspberries that grew in the Prescelly mountains.

  When the aroma of roasted meat stole through the nursery door Lucy, sitting on the floor with her head leaning against Nan-Nan’s knees, could not forbear to weep a little. It was not for the food that she wept but because she was not sharing in the beauty of the occasion. She could not see the wax candles burning in the silver-branched candlesticks, and the best porcelain wine jugs patterned with flowers. And presently they would put fresh logs on the fire, as the evening chill came in from the sea with the rising tide, and her father would play the lute and Madam Wogan would sing in her deep contralto voice, and the other two would listen, the dogs lying at their feet.

  “Cariad,” murmured Nan-Nan. “Pity it is that you are not there, but with Nan-Nan you are, who loves you. And these two children love you. Specially that Dewi. Look at him, gazing at you with those great eyes of his. Dewi, asleep you should be. And you too, Betsi my fairy girl.”

  Dewi and Betsi could still manage to get into the two large wooden cradles that had been made for Walter twins a hundred years ago, and were placed near the fourposter in the corner of the nursery where Nan-Nan slept. They were sitting up in their frilled nightgowns, peeping out from within the wooden hoods that had wreathes of little birds carved about them, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, with no desire whatever to go to sleep. Justus was not present for he had elected to keep Richard company. His noble name of Justus was one that he tried to live up to and as he had taken Lucy’s side in the great fight he had to be with Richard now. Lucy missed him, even with Nan-Nan’s hand on her hair, and with that scent of baked meat creeping under the door her stomach as well as her heart ached with emptiness. “Did not the servants bring you any supper, Nan-Nan?” she asked.

  “Fetched it myself I did while you were in the washplace,” said Nan-Nan. “I shall eat it later. Dewi and Betsi, pity it is you will not do as Nan-Nan tells you and close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  “Sing to them, Nan-Nan,” said Lucy and nestled closer.

  “Wishing for a song yourself you are,” said Nan-Nan, but she fell in with the suggestion since she could see that the twins’ wakefulness was purposeful. They adored being sung to. She moved herself and Lucy and her low nursing chair nearer to the cradles, so that she could rock them, and in a voice that was still sweet and true sang one of the old songs of Wales, one that the harpers sang in the mountains of Plynlimon, the enchanting country called by the ancients Eelineth, where the great rivers of Wales arise in their beauty and where she had been born. Peace rose up in Lucy, deep down as though the quietness inside her and Eelineth were one place. The beauty she could not see in the hall became a part of Eelineth, and so did the garden outside the open window. The castle thrush was singing on top of the hawthorn tree behind the arbour and his song rang through Eelineth. The twins were soon asleep. Betsi, the more timid child, lay on her side with her thumb in her mouth, cuddled into her pillow as though she sought a refuge there, but Dewi lay spread-eagled on his back, one arm flung out in a lordly manner. Their eyelashes looked very long and dark on their flushed cheeks. The singing finished, Nan-Nan and Lucy kneeled down at the side of the cradles and worshipped. Nan-Nan’s grey skirt made a silver cloud about her as she knelt, and her face was grave and attentive, for she was one of those to whom the hour of Eelineth brings knowledge of the future.

  “Dewi will stand by you and yours till the end of your days,” she told Lucy. “Happy he’ll be, for a king will love him.”

  “And Betsi?” asked Lucy.

  “Belonging to the falling dew and the song of the thrush she is,” said Nan-Nan and as though to forestall questioning arose and moved away from the cradles, drawing Lucy with her. “Those poor boys, pity it is for them with their bruises. Taking Richard and Justus a bit of comfort we should be. Come now.”

  She picked up a covered basket from the floor and opened the door quietly, for in crossing behind the screen at the back of the dais to the great bedchamber they must be careful not to disturb the ladies and gentlemen at their supper. No one saw them and Lucy caught just a glimpse of the beauty of candlelight a
nd gleaming silver, and her mother in her best crimson gown and wedding pearls, before she and Nan-Nan vanished into the bedchamber and shut the door behind them. In the boys’ turret room Richard was lying on his front, Justus on his back, and they were very sorry for themselves, especially Justus, not so much because he had been trampled on in the fight as because Richard had not wanted his company.

  “See now, boys bach,” said Nan-Nan briskly, “see what Nan-Nan has brought you.” She took the napkin from the basket and inside was the most ravishing supper, cold capon, bara ceich and a small tart, all in little dishes, and a bottle of raspberry wine and a cup of horn to drink it from. “Eat slowly now,” said Nan-Nan, “there’s not much there for three. Take turns with the cup for the wine.”

  Both boys now felt very much better and Justus rolled out of his own bed and sat on Richard’s with Lucy beside him.

  “But it’s your supper, Nan-Nan,” protested Lucy.

  “Old people do not feel hungry, cariad,” explained Nan-Nan. “A drink of buttermilk before I go to my bed is more to my taste than pastry which I cannot digest at all. Now, boys, you must understand that I do not approve of your wicked ways. Ashamed of you I am, and of you too, Lucy. Setting an example of politeness you should be instead of scratching and spitting like a wild cat among the mountains. But you’ve suffered, poor children, and I cannot find it in my heart that you should go hungry to your beds. No more, Justus, no more of the wine. That’s enough now. There’s my good children.”

  Never before had their nurselings heard her make such a long speech. She was sitting on Justus’s bed, her hands folded in her lap, and her gentle words that touched them softly as moths’ wings, yet touched them unforgettably. The little room, facing west, was filled with golden light and when Nan-Nan was silent they could hear through the open window the wash of the sea. All along the coast now the tide was coming in, moving with smooth and gentle power over the rocks, casting half-moons of water higher and higher up the sands, swirling in and out of the caves. The stranded seaweed floated free upon the green tide and the pools brimmed, and there was a great fulfilment. Nan-Nan tucked the boys up in bed and kissed them, and for once Richard did not mind being kissed but flung his arms round her neck as he had been wont to do when he was small. They were half asleep almost before she and Lucy had left the room, and Nan-Nan thought Lucy was, too, as she tucked the covers in about her, but suddenly the child began to cry.