The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  2

  “I have to ride to St. Davids today, sir,” Lucy said to her father at breakfast, “and so I fear you cannot borrow my mare.” She spoke in a queenly manner, tilting her chin, and William and Dewi exchanged glances. Bud was in one of her moods. “God-a-mercy,” said William. “Marry-come-up! The Princess Nest! Nevertheless I must have Your Highness’s mare for my nag is lame. Do you expect me to ride to Haverfordwest on one of the plough horses, or Dewi’s pony?”

  “No, sir. But I expect you to postpone your visit until tomorrow, when I shall be pleased for you to borrow my mare.”

  They were breakfasting outside their cottage very early on what would soon be a fine hot morning. Lucy was wearing a plain green gown, such as any countrywoman could have worn, but it was fresh and clean and a last late rose that had bloomed in the castle garden was pinned at the neck of the bodice, the creamy petals reflected under her tilted chin. How astonishing, thought William suddenly, to have a skin so satin smooth that it could reflect a flower. He could almost fancy that the slow movement of the sea was reflected in waves of light passing across his daughter’s face, as its colour was trapped in her eyes. She was his for the nonce but for how much longer? He took her hand, spreading out her thin brown fingers on his own hard and earth-encrusted palm. It gave him a shock to find it a woman’s hand, not a child’s. Bud was grown-up now, in her sixteenth year. Who had told him that there was no love so poignant as that of a doting father for a grown-up daughter? Whoever it was had spoken the truth, as his sudden anguish told him. The shadow of parting was on him and it seemed upon Lucy too, for her arrogance melted away and her hand closed upon his. Their eyes met. They looked at each other for a moment and then looked away.

  “Must you ride alone to St. Davids?” asked William gruffly. “When the nag is mended I could ride with you.”

  “I shall be safe,” said Lucy. “I have not been to St. Davids since I came home and I have a great longing on me to ride there alone.”

  “Then you shall,” said William, and he kissed her hand and put it back on her lap.

  3

  Why did I feel I must come today, Lucy wondered, as she rode quickly along the pilgrim way that she had last travelled more slowly with Old Parson. She was feeling wonderfully happy, so happy that even the remembrance of Parson Peregrine in jail had no power now to sadden her. That was wrong, she thought, but her happiness today was something that could not be gainsaid. She had brought it with her from last night’s sleep, from one of those deep dreams that cannot be recalled on waking because the conscious mind is not able to record the experience of them, only remind the dreamer that he has known something beyond waking knowledge. The flavour of such a dream, sometimes vile and terrifying, sometimes fresh and joyous, could linger all day. What had she known that now everything about her, fields, clouds, trees and birds, should seem to be flowing in and out of each other as though they danced together, as sunbeams and raindrops seem to do when a rainbow spreads across the sky? Something so real that the suffering of an old man she loved could become more dreamlike to her than this strange and lovely dance. Will all suffering seem a dream one day, she wondered? Will it be as they say it is when a woman bears a child, that she forgets for the joy? But why is a forgotten dream sending me to St. Davids? She remembered that the Valley of Roses was one of the shrines. In it one came near to mystery.

  The wind that for so many days had blown from the southeast was from the west today and riding along the cliffs its coolness tempered the heat. Lucy was still wearing the green dress, for her riding habit was too tight for a warm day, and a broad-brimmed straw hat to shield her from the sun was tied beneath her chin with scarlet ribbons. Her saddlebag had food in it, wrinkled apples and bara ceich, for she seldom found her appetite much diminished by hot weather. The people of St. Davids looked up at her and smiled as she rode through the village, for they found themselves, even the dourest of them, as much aware of her golden happiness as they would have been of the wealth of a royal lady, had such a one passed by scattering her largess. Even the saturnine hostler at the inn, whose dark and ancient face had never been known to smile, suffered a curious spasm of the features as he took her horse. It had passed in a moment but not before it had revealed to a startled Lucy that his dark cavern of a mouth had but two teeth in it.

  Somehow this intimation of mortality was sobering, and as she walked to the gatehouse she was for the first time aware that the rose she had picked last night in the castle garden was dying on her breast like a neglected child. She took it from her dress and held it against her face and its scent was still sweet and without reproach. The happiness drawn from beyond time can be precarious and she had almost lost it because earth, the green star, with its flowers and its creatures, lies so helplessly before human greed, and she was under the archway and standing at the brink of the Valley of Roses before she knew it.

  Then instantly it flooded back. Down there was the stream and in the cool water her flower would revive. She ran down the steps and soon was in the green grass below the bridge, and then pushing through the rushes to the stream. It was shallow, because there had been no rain for some while, but still clear and cool because it ran swiftly. In a moment Lucy had pulled off her hat and shoes and tossed them down with the saddlebag, gathered up her skirts and waded out to a large stone in the centre of the stream. Here she sat with the coolness lapping about her ankles and held her flower with its stalk in the water, drinking in life. She drank life too; from the great cathedral beyond the bridge, the tall motionless trees, the stillness and silence, broken only by the music of the running water and the chiming of the hour from the cathedral tower. Such music does not profane silence and presently she began to sing too.

  “Lucy! Lucy!”

  At first the voice distantly calling her name seemed a part of the music, a part of herself, making no more demanding claim upon her than the remembered dream had done, the response of total joy within herself. Then the voice called again, coming nearer, and the joy streamed out from her in the manner of sunlight pouring through a rent in a cloud, taking all that she was with it and leaving her for a split second still as the stone she sat on. Then she turned her head and saw him running and stumbling through the grass beside the stream, laughing and calling her name. There was no longer any question in her mind about running to meet her glory. All that she was had run already and if she did not go to him now she would have lost not only him but herself. She jumped from her stone to the bank, leaped again and was in his arms.

  “You jump like a green frog,” he gasped when he could speak for laughing. For there was no fear in this meeting, no awe or uncertainty, nothing but a joy so extraordinary that their mutual possession of it seemed to them almost ridiculous. Lucy lifted her face from his shoulder to wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes and found that the dance had begun again, only now the dancers were not nebulous but as vividly alive as characters in an immortal fairytale. Her rose, that she had forgotten to take from the stream, went dancing by on the water with its refreshed petals rounded like the sails of a small ship. The tall trees that a short while ago had been motionless and weary with August heat were now alight with green fire, swaying in the dance, and all the birds in them, looking down at the lovers with eyes bright as diamonds, clapped their wings, then rose up like the sons of the morning and sang for joy. A swan came down the stream and he had a gold crown on his head and was singing. But it was not his own death song. He sang of the death of fear.

  Charles was also changed. Prince Kilhwch, who had ridden alone in magnificence, had vanished, for like all the great ones he had put on disguise for the wooing of his love. He was a mendicant now, and a suppliant. His doublet was stained with seawater, his hair tangled, his dark sunburned face ornamented with a black eye and still wet with the water with which he had been trying to remove its dirt. He had been bending over the stream, cupping the cool water in his hands and splashing it into his hot
face, when he had turned his head and seen a girl sitting on the stone. Even seen through the glinting water, at a distance, there could be no doubt that she was the girl. Who else could be the only human being except himself alive in this dream at the world’s end? For that was how it had seemed to him as he cried her name aloud and stumbled over the grass towards her. It had been a difficult journey, and a frightening one, but now it had ended; at the world’s end or at its beginning, he did not know which.

  They sat down in the grass by the stream and he told her of his adventures, and now they seemed not frightening but funny, so that they both laughed as he told of them. He had left his horse at a stable in Bideford, found a ship bound for Milford Haven, paid his money in advance as requested, been given a good meal and slept the sleep of exhaustion through the night as the ship ran fast before a fair wind. But Milford, like Pembroke, was in Puritan hands, and the military had been everywhere, he had been stared at and had felt afraid to go into the town and try to hire a horse to carry him to Roch lest he should be recognized by some officer who had seen him before. Instead he had wandered round the docks, asking questions of the seamen, until he found a small boat bound for Solva Bay.

  Her sailors were rough men but they took him on board in comradely fashion, and finding he knew how to handle a ship let him have his fill of work as the little boat pitched and tossed along the coast to Solva. He had promised payment on landing, pleased that they had trusted him, but when at the quayside he felt for his wallet it had gone. He had slept rather too well on the journey from Bideford to Milford Haven. Then they had turned threatening and abusive, but his wits told him what to do and as they gathered round, closing in on him, he offered to fight the mate in payment. Their anger turned to laughter and appreciation and on the quayside he fought the mate, not with much skill but with pluck and determination and the advantage of height and agility. It was not a fight to the finish but it won their hearts. They let him go with a black eye and many bruises and a few friendly kicks to speed him on his way. He had made his way to St. Davids and remembering what she had said about the coolness of the water in the Valley of Roses he had gone straight to the stream to wash himself.

  “And what now?” he asked Lucy. “I promised you we should be together at Roch and I have come to keep my promise while I can.”

  “I shall love you for ever and ever for keeping your promise,” said Lucy. “I should have loved you for ever in any case but now it is for ever and ever. What now? I have food in my saddlebag and we will eat it. Then we spend the happiest day of our lives here at St. Davids. Then I take you home.”

  “What will your father say?”

  “I hope nothing. I will keep you hidden if I can for he would not like you coming here. When I said home I did not mean the cottage where he and I and Dewi are living now, I meant my real home, the castle. The kitchen down among the roots is still habitable. If we are lucky you can live there for days and no one will know. There’s my saddlebag in the grass.”

  He fetched it and the homely fare tasted like the food of the gods. But half-way through Lucy snatched it away. “In another three hours you will be hungry again. You eat like a wolf and there will be nothing else until we get home.”

  “Until we get home,” repeated Charles slowly. He had heard the four words spoken so often and they had always been pleasant words but not magic until now. Down among the roots, she had said, and his inward eye saw tree roots spreading out in protection, and hidden among them the warm secluded dwelling-place of two small furry animals, with nuts stored in plenty and a bed of dry moss. A slowly spreading grin warmed his sombre face to delight. That would be home indeed. Not a procession of palaces but just the one hidden and private place. “You look like a tinker,” said Lucy.

  “They are respected members of a reputable trade,” he told her.

  “I respect you,” she said, suddenly sobered. “I could not love a man I did not respect.”

  “You said you would love me for ever and ever but if one day you can no longer respect me, what then?”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “You must know that I will never change and of that you must always feel certain, even if one day you feel that you can no longer respect me. But I do not see how respect, once given, can ever be lost. If you have ever seen the true metal in a man or woman you must believe that it is still there, however tarnished it becomes. Tarnish hides but it does not destroy. But truth is the glory of love, Charles, and unless we remain true to each other we shall lose our peace.”

  “How do you know these things?” he asked her.

  “I do not know them by myself, how could I? I am told.”

  “The maintaining of truth is so hard,” he said.

  “There is very little peace in the world,” she replied.

  The world! A cold wind seemed to blow down the Valley of Roses and he got up quickly, pulling her with him, for he did not want to remember what men called the real world but only to experience this one. And was not this one as real as the other? It had seemed slipping and he pulled its protection quickly about them both again. “Show me this place,” he commanded her.

  “You must come as a pilgrim,” she told him. “King Henry did, the second Henry who loved Fair Rosamund. He landed at Solva, as you have done, on his way home from Ireland, and he came dressed as a pilgrim and leaning on a staff.” Suddenly she laughed delightedly for here was a second royal pilgrimage on a second day of great happiness, and a second prince in love with a Welsh girl. Treading in former footsteps gave one a feeling of reassurance and stability. “And you landed on the shore of Milford Haven as Henry the Seventh did when he came from Brittany to win the crown of England. He was born in Pembrokeshire. Did you know? You have done all things just as you should.”

  “Only by chance,” laughed Charles. “But I knew the luck would be incredible. Did Henry the Second cross the stream by this bridge?”

  “Not this one. When he came the stream was spanned by a marble slab, wonderfully polished by the feet of all the pilgrims. It was called Lachavan, the talking stone, because once when a corpse was being carried over it the stone cried out and cracked itself with its cry.”

  “I will have nothing to do with corpses or cryings,” said Charles firmly. “No bad luck shall touch you and me. We will not cross this bridge. We will jump the stream.”

  “It is wide here,” Lucy warned him.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Me? Afraid? No!”

  “Then take my hand.”

  They threw her hat and saddlebag across the stream, moved back and took hands, ran and jumped. Impeded by her skirts, even though she gathered them up in her free hand, she would have fallen short, but Charles leaped with the strength of some great long-legged hound and though her arm nearly came out of its socket he brought her flying through the air to safety. They fell flat on the grass on the farther side, laughing and triumphant. Now they were secure in good fortune. Now nothing could ever go wrong.

  Lucy picked herself up and tied her hat on. “This is where Henry was met by all the cathedral dignitaries walking in procession,” she said.

  “They are not meeting me, God be thanked,” said Charles. “They are not even in existence. No one exists here today but you and me.”

  As the hours passed it seemed true. They walked round the cool, echoing cathedral as they had walked round Exeter Cathedral, hand in hand and quite alone, visiting the altar tomb of Henry the Seventh’s father and the tomb of Rhys ap Griffiths, and kneeling together at St. Davids shrine. Then they visited the ruined palace and sat and talked among the flowers that carpeted the old banqueting hall. And they went down into the vaults below to find the wishing well. To make a wish it was necessary to drop a pin into the water and Lucy, always careless about her clothes, had that morning pinned up a torn petticoat hem rather than bother to mend it, and she produced two pins. They leaned over the well side
by side dropping the pins, and wished in silence. Their wishes were substantially the same. “To maintain truth,” was Lucy’s, and “To love this woman, and no other, all my life long,” was Charles’s confident and hopeful desire.

  “In all the years, so many hundreds of wishes and so many hundreds of pins,” whispered Lucy, staring down into the black water. Then she raised her head and cried aloud, “Charles!” and he cried, “Lucy!” There was a strange echo down in the vaults and the two names echoed on and on, seeming to chase each other. Then they cried both together and in the echoing triumphant shout the two were not distinguishable.

  They climbed out of the Valley of Roses and went down to St. Bride’s Bay and sat among the rocks with the sea wind in their faces, and paddled in the pools, and Charles saw his girl with the wind blowing her hair about her face and the sea water green about her ankles. She told him about St. David’s birthplace up on the cliffs, where a well had gushed forth, and stones risen up to protect the blessed mother, and about the chapels along the coast where passing sailors left votive offerings. She talked enchantingly of what she loved and enjoyed and not of what wounded or saddened her; these things were many but she did not speak of them. Yet Charles was aware of them and aware of the selflessness of her occasional little brooding silences. That they were selfless, and as natural to her as her merry talk, he knew because they lay so gently on his mind. He was also almost dumbfounded by the knowledge that she was flowering into all he had believed her to be. His sudden journey in search of her had had about it the elements of an act of faith and to find faith justified always seems too good to be true.