The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  It was a fairly long row round the headland that separated one bay from the other, and they took it slowly, for they wanted it to be a little darker when they reached the seals. A few stars pricked out in the sky and starry drops fell like diamonds from the blades of the oars to the water. The last lights were fading from the western sky but as they came out beyond the headland and saw the faint shine of the coastline, and the islands rising silvery out of pools of diaphanous mist, they knew that the moon was rising and would soon flood the sky with light. “I think we should go in now,” whispered Lucy.

  Charles brought them round to the bay and then shipped his oars while Lucy cast out the floats. They could see the morlos, lulled by the same gentle breathing of the sea that peacefully rocked their boat, and they sat for a long time without movement or speech, anxious to become so much a part of the beauty about them that they would not disturb the morlos. This, they felt, was important. Creatures are not afraid of something that has for long shared their rhythm and their peace. “Now,” whispered Lucy at last. “You play the flute better than I do.”

  He began to play, hardly knowing when he started what he would play, but the right tune came. It was a Hebridean lament and he wondered for the moment what he was lamenting about on this night of joy. Then he remembered that the morlos had been banished from the warm life of men. It must always be in the cold sea now that they must fight for life, their only hiding-places the lonely caves that thrust in like fingers under the earth. Here they must lie in darkness and when they cried out to the men above them be heard only with fear. He would laugh at himself afterwards but while he played Charles almost believed the old story, and yearned after those seals as though they were his kith and kin.

  He ceased playing and listened, and from over the water was answered by a low fluting cry. It was so mysterious, so beautiful and yet so eerie that when Charles took Lucy’s hand he found it was cold and trembling. He was pleased to cherish it with his own superior warmth, but his heart was beating none too steadily. He laid Lucy’s hand gently down and took up his flute again. He played a few notes like a call and was answered. He did it again and again and each time like an echo his music came back to him, now here, now there, now near, now far. It was not easy to see, with the moon not fully risen yet and the faint haze of mist on the water, but they were aware of movement. Were they wanted? Was their companionship desired, even yearned for? Lucy, who had been so happy, felt heartbroken now. They were so close to the seals, they loved them so, yet could tell of their love only with these wordless cries, and heartbeats that could bring no comfort. Some great mystery united them and some other mystery divided them. Why is love not enough, she wondered. Why is love never enough to break down separation? If love could become strong enough for that then there would be no more weeping, no more death. Then would come the time for dancing. And there was already a dance. She had been aware of it twice now. One could dream that it might one day sweep over the whole universe in a thunder of rejoicing. “Play something merry,” she whispered to Charles. “Play a dance tune, but very softly so as not to frighten them.”

  He played the air of a country dance, one of the lilting tunes to which Lucy and William had danced on May morning. There was no reply to this but the moonlight was brighter and they could see that the morlos were on the move. It seemed to Lucy that in their own way and in their own manner they moved in the slow mazes of a dance.

  “Look at those two!” gasped Charles. “They are flying to us!”

  Lucy had heard of this marvel but never seen it before. The heads of the two seals were reared high up out of the water and they were moving so fast towards the boat that in the uncertain light they seemed flying. Then they disappeared and left Charles and Lucy wondering if they had really seen what they had seen, or merely dreamed it. They waited a little longer, but there was no more movement, no more music, and the moon grew bright and hard above the cliffs. It seemed all over and they turned the boat and rowed slowly away.

  They were just rounding the headland when it happened. A great head streaming with water came out of the sea beside the boat, and a face looked at them, old and furrowed and wise, with great eyes of love and sorrow and wet whiskers silvered by the moon. Then another head rose behind the boat and cried aloud to them. Then suddenly both were gone. They waited a long time but they did not come back.

  “They were saying goodbye to us,” Lucy said at last, and began to cry.

  “Do not weep, little love,” said Charles. “It was great, it was beauty, and it was true. And now it is over. Let us row home.”

  They beached the boat in the castle cove and walked home under the stars, hand in hand but in silence. Out at sea with the morlos they had been aware of being together in a world alien to their own, among beings whose ways were a mystery to them but yet whom they had loved, and left only with sadness, and it deepened their union with each other in a way that belonged to the spirit alone; but each step nearer home brought them closer to their own mystery, the human mystery and predicament of loving so much that the condemnation of separateness laid upon human creatures becomes too great a burden. There was no predicament for the morlos, but simplicity had gone from human loving. For the humankind, tangled in the complexities in which experience of good and evil had bound them, complexities that grew ever worse the longer men stayed upon this earth only to corrupt it, there was no more simplicity. The morlos mourning for their lost heritage did not know that man had lost his too.

  The man and woman reached home, the old safe hide-out among the roots of the trees, and the intensity of his sense of homecoming overwhelmed Charles. Here it was, the lost simplicity, not entirely lost after all but still to be found for the delving. Here was the deep well of water, and the fire and the bed of bracken beside it, and the girl who was his girl and must belong to no one but himself alone. All through these hours of enchantment his persona and his duty had seemed no more than echoes of thunder beyond a lost horizon, but now with his arms round Lucy even the echoes vanished. There was only silence.

  But he did not carry Lucy with him into its depth. Her childhood had not been the ceaselessly moving, over populated pageant that his had been and the few events that had struck hard upon her mind and heart had struck like a carver’s chisel, and she acted now out of a simplicity of grief and loyalty unknown to him, and without premeditation. She twisted out of his arms and standing back with her hands behind her delivered her blows. She spoke as a small child might have spoken, so that in spite of his anger and desperate hurt he could almost have laughed; she was so resolved.

  “I promised Nan-Nan I would not do it. I know how a bastard child suffers and I will not bring one into this world to die as Betsi died. Nor will I bring shame upon my father. I loved Nan-Nan and my father before I loved you. You have tonight to choose what you will do. If when I come in the morning I find you gone—” She stopped, for suddenly scalding tears were boiling up, almost choking her, but she fought them back and went on. “If you are gone I shall know I will never see you again. But if you are here I will know that I am to be your wife.”

  “You speak as though marriage between us were an easy thing,” he said bitterly.

  “No, it will be hard,” said Lucy, “for as soon as you have married me you will have to leave me. Then one of three things can happen. You may be killed in this war. Then I shall break my heart but the child, if there is a child, will not suffer as Betsi and Dewi did. Or you may be exiled and never come to the throne. Then I shall share poverty and exile with you and I shall not mind at all because we will be together. Or you may come to the throne and then you will have to decide what to do with me, and it will be hard for you but less hard for me because if my children are safe in honour I shall do exactly what you want. But it feels so distant, that third thing.”

  And suddenly she could not hold the tears back. It was the first thing now that seemed to her the most likely. So many princes died b
y violence. One after the other right back through history, the sword had got them. The fairytale in which they had been living had collapsed and vanished and it seemed that death and parting had taken its place. She turned and ran away up the steps, so quickly and so deafened and blinded by her storm of tears that she never heard the cry that Charles sent after her.

  3

  The sun was high when Lucy arrived the next morning and Charles was out in the garden, rooting up weeds by the savage handful to find some outlet for the fiery longing and impatience that were driving him nearly out of his wits. Lucy, who had run all the way up the hill, arrived breathless and as though carried by the wind of her eagerness. She had information to impart but having landed on Charles’s chest was too winded to get it out. It was he who spoke first, his earthy hands pressed against her shoulder blades. “We will get married as soon as possible,” he whispered into her right ear. “And to hell with what happens after.”

  If he expected gratitude for this humbling of a princely will he did not get it, for Lucy considered he was doing no more than his duty in the circumstances, and she never praised anyone for doing their obvious duty. “I knew you would say that,” she told him, leaning back against his hands to look him straight in the eyes. “I knew it soon after midnight, I think. I had not been able to sleep, I was so stiff and stretched with wondering if it was true that you loved me as a man should love a woman, not for yourself but for myself, and then suddenly I knew it was true, and I went to sleep as though knowing it were a mattress stuffed with real feathers.”

  It went through Charles’s mind that her present mattress, which she had given him, was stuffed with bracken. And what was she sleeping on meanwhile? A blanket on hard wood? “Do I love you for yourself and not myself?” he asked her. “Is love ever as selfless as that?”

  “Yours was last night.”

  Yes, that was true, he thought. Last night he had wanted for sheer love of her to do what would make her happy and had not remembered until now, when he felt the steel of her in his arms, that if he wished to have her he would have to do so in her way since her will was stronger than his.

  “Now listen,” said Lucy. “I have much to tell you.”

  “Come inside, down to our own place. Have you brought me anything to eat?”

  “No. There was no time. You must learn to do without food occasionally. You may be on the run one day and you should learn to starve.”

  They went down to the kitchen and sat on the floor beside the hearth. A glow of warmth still came from the ashes of the fire Charles had kept going through a sleepless night, and it comforted them like the glow of the new trust in each other they felt now that they had taken their decision.

  “My father was very angry when I got in last night,” said Lucy. “I was too late back, he said.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The truth. That I had borrowed Iolo’s boat to be with the seals. That is the sort of thing I would do and he accepted that. I will not tell lies to my father and so we must be married tomorrow.”

  “Is your father going away?”

  “He went early this morning to Haverfordwest for perhaps two or three nights. We have an old cousin who lives there and my father very often visits him, for he loves him, and last night a message came to say that he was dying and asking for my father.”

  “So we can get married without telling lies to your father. You will tell him afterwards?”

  “Of course. As soon as he gets back.”

  “Will your new Puritan parson agree to marry us?”

  “That man!” cried Lucy in scorn. “I would sooner be married by the devil himself. No. If we cannot be married by Parson Peregrine then Old Parson shall marry us. You do not know about him. I will tell you.”

  She told him and they made their plans, very seriously and soberly, and Lucy had no doubt at all of the legality of what they were doing. They had passed the age of fourteen, the age of consent, and would be married by a real priest in a real church, with a real notary present. Charles, while he was being watched, would sign the church register and the marriage certificate with the name of Tomos Barlow, but later he would write his own name beneath that of Tomos. Today they had their preparations to make. Charles must ride to St. Davids to make arrangements with the notary who lived there. He could be a troublesome man, Lucy had heard, because he sometimes drank more than was good for him, but she hoped that a couple of gold pieces from the purse her step-grandfather had given her would make him not too difficult to deal with. And he must bring his clerk with him, Lucy impressed upon Charles, because she had heard there must be two witnesses present at a marriage. They would be married very early in the morning so that no one should see them. She concocted the story that must be told to the notary. Lucy and Tomos had been promised to each other from childhood by the wish of their respective parents as well as their own, and now that Tomos had escaped from prison Lucy could not face another parting from him unless they were married. Her father was away but when he came back he would understand her feelings and not be angry.

  Charles thought it sounded a childish sort of story and remembered that the lies of those unaccustomed to dishonesty are invariably puerile; he hoped the notary would be drunk enough to swallow it. And he also doubted the legality of what they proposed to do but he did not tell her so; if it turned out later that there had been a hitch somewhere then they would be married again.

  “You must tell exactly the same story to your Old Parson,” he said to Lucy.

  “No!” she cried in sudden distress. “I must tell the truth to Old Parson!”

  “Are you mad, Lucy? He gets confused in his head, you said, and he might give me away to the other parson, the Puritan.”

  She was silent, for he was right. She had a sensation of panic, and then of helplessness, as though the dark web was starting to tangle about her. She jumped up quickly to get rid of it. They were doing what was right, she insisted to herself, and sometimes to do right one had to do a little wrong. She had heard people say that. One had sometimes to tell a lie for kindness’ sake, and it would be kinder to Old Parson not to tell him the truth. But she was not entirely happy and she thought that Charles was not, for he pulled her to him and kissed her hard and a little desperately, as though to reassure them both.

  “I will go and saddle the mare for you,” she said. “Meet me in half an hour in that thicket of trees beyond the bridge.”

  She did not have to wait long for him but when he came he looked serious. “Two of the village men saw me and shouted after me to know who I was,” he told her. “I did as you said I should do, said nothing and grinned like a village idiot. I had better not come back from St. Davids till after dusk.”

  “I will be waiting at the castle for you,” she answered.

  She watched him ride away and then went straight to the mill to find Old Parson. She was met by Damaris, who told her that the old man was better now but not himself. Lucy found him sitting at the door of his little room, where it was shady and he could hear the hum of his bees, and when they had talked for a few minutes she realized that his new clarity had for the moment deserted him. He was very muddled indeed and at first she thought that would make her task easier, for when he was muddled he was usually obedient. But he was not entirely so this morning. She was able to convince him of the truth of the story of Tomos, but she could not convince him that it was right that he should marry her when her father was away. “I will have no hand in it if your father is not present,” he said over and over again. Nor would he marry her without the consent of the present parish priest. “You will go now, maid, and ask Parson Gryg for his permission.”

  To pacify him she did so. And perhaps, she thought, that was legal and right. The burnt-out parsonage had not been rebuilt yet and the new parson lived at a cottage a half mile from the church. As she walked there she had to rearrange the story of Tomos for he coul
d not now be a Royalist. He must be a Puritan or he might be denounced. She had quite a likely story fixed up by the time she found herself sitting opposite Parson Gryg in his kitchen, but she found his grey eyes penetrating and increasingly she hated her own lies. The mocking spirit had been muttering inside her all the morning, and he now reared his head and suggested nastily that if she had let Charles have her without her marriage lines she might have been less dishonest in the long run. But then what of her promise to Nan-Nan? she asked him. If she had broken that it would have been the worst dishonesty of all. And she had been brought up to keep the ten commandments. How could she, he asked? The third and the ninth both referred to lying, so if she kept seven she would break three and nine. With a sense of hopelessness she pushed him down out of hearing and managed with great skill and charm to convey to Parson Gryg, without actually saying so in words, that the marriage was not to take place immediately. It was just that Old Parson wanted the permission of the parish priest before they went further with their plans. Parson Gryg gave it, but he was surprised, he said, though gratified, to find the Walter family allying themselves with the Puritan persuasion.

  “When you love someone politics, and different thoughts about religion, do not matter,” Lucy explained.

  “At your age it is natural to think so,” Parson Gryg answered, “and it is my hope, Mistress Lucy, that you will reap only happiness from your decision.”