The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “Too many people know about you, son. I have myself been looking at the register in the church and I may not have been the only one to do so. You have written Charles Stuart very firmly under the name of Tomos Barlow. I honour you for it but I will not be responsible for your continued safety in a part of the world that is now in the hands of your enemies.”

  “I cannot go tomorrow,” said Charles, “and I will not.” He spoke with a touch of arrogance and William frowned. “I will not be responsible for your safety,” he repeated.

  “One more day,” pleaded Lucy.

  William shrugged his shoulders.

  “I will stay two more days,” Charles decided. “Only two. Will that satisfy you, sir?”

  “Son, son!” said poor William, all his previous comfort gone from him, “I have little satisfaction in any of this business. Your will is your own, and royal. I can only obey.”

  They went silently up the stairs and found the great hall now booming in the wind and the rain falling in fierce slanting spears. It hurt Lucy to see her father and brothers huddle their cloaks about them and with the sleepy Dewi carried pickaback on Richard’s shoulders go from their home into the stormy darkness. It was as though they went out of her life. But in five minutes she was in bliss again, as she and Charles ran laughing downstairs to the kitchen. Their bed must be made in front of the fire tonight for the great bedchamber would be awash with rain.

  4

  The next day was walled about with rain and Charles and Lucy felt as protected by it as by the spears of a friendly army. After a morning visit from Justus no human being came near them, but Justus had been welcome in that he brought food and wine, and cloaks to protect them from the weather; for well he knew that Lucy would not stay indoors in a storm. He also brought the unwelcome news that William was making arrangements for his son-in-law to start his journey back to England on the day after tomorrow, and that was not so good. Yet when Justus disappeared again into the rain he seemed to take the unwelcome tidings with him, while the food and wine remained.

  Until now Charles had looked upon bad weather as something to be endured until the sun shone again but today Lucy taught him to glory in it. The boom of the wind thrilled and awed her, as though some great master were playing the organ, and the elemental power of water, so dreadful when it was unleashed, was yet glorious to her because it was as much the source of life as the sun itself. “It is as though the sea were pouring in,” she whispered happily to Charles, as they stood at the top of the kitchen steps and watched the rain drench into the roofless hall. It cascaded down the wide steps to the garden but not so much down the kitchen steps where the entry was narrow. “Our home is down at the bottom of the sea,” she said contentedly. “It is Cantre’r Gwaelod. We live in Cantre’r Gwaelod.”

  “Explain to me,” said Charles.

  They went back to the kitchen again and sitting in front of the fire she told him about the town under the sea. “When I was a little girl I used to think I had come from there. When I was small I did not think I was really the child of my parents. I thought I had run away from one of the houses in Cantre’r Gwaelod, where people still lived, and that the sea had washed me up in castle bay, and I used to picture myself crawling up the sand on all fours like a crab because I was too small to walk, and that my father had found me there and carried me home in his arms. I thought that is why I love the sea so much and why I always have a feeling that I must return to the sea. Do you think that souls come back to this world again? Do you think I was once a little girl living in Cantre’r Gwaelod before the sea swallowed it?”

  “I could believe any such tale about you,” said Charles. “For you are an enchantress. And I like those old tales of earth men who fall in love with water maidens. Water is mysterious, and first love is so mysterious it is like rainbows in waterfalls, and the wonder world of jewelled fish and forests of swaying flowers that one sees down at the bottom of the sea. If I could have chosen my first love I would have chosen a maiden from the sea.”

  “And I would have chosen an earth prince with sunburnt dusky skin and eyes like agate, and a laugh that makes me think of cornfields when Sirius dances in the sky, rich and golden corn. Was Sirius the star that shone when you were born?”

  They went on talking nonsense until Charles said, “I am hungry. Are you?”

  “You had a large breakfast,” said Lucy, “and you cannot eat more till you have been out on the cliffs and down to the cove with me. Then we will come home and eat the pastan that Damaris made and drink the wine and make music.”

  Wrapped in their cloaks they fought their way to the cliff’s edge and stood clinging together, leaning against the wind. All along the coast the waves were roaring in, line upon line of galloping horses with flying white manes. They were very powerful yet when they sprang upon the silent, motionless enemy they could make no progress. Every rock, every island, the whole great rampart of stone that defended the inland treasure of fields and valleys stood firm as iron. The islands were almost hidden at times by the tossing manes and moonwhite bodies of the leaping horses, but they always fell back shattered. Their courage and beauty could gain no victory over the old crouching rocks.

  “The sea was here first,” Lucy called exultingly to Charles through the roar of the wind. “It was all the pasture of the white horses before the earth pushed up. And so it will be again.”

  He smiled but did not speak. He thought she was identifying the peerless white horses with goodness and truth, and the black rocks with evil, but with nature one could not press these parallels. The black rocks protected not only the fields and valleys but human life and love. They protected Lucy and himself. Nature was too wild a thing to let man bend her about in a chaplet of his own fantasy.

  They went to the cove and here they looked not down at the waves but straight at them as they leaped and reared and crashed on the shore, flinging their great half-moon curves of shattered whiteness racing over the sand towards the human creatures, as though they flung a silver net to entrap them and drag them back to the sea from whence Lucy believed she had come.

  But the human creatures did not want to go. They ran back laughing out of reach of the silver net, only to run back again to watch the next wave sailing in and try to see through the spray and rain a glimpse of the incredible blue-green of its arching throat. It was the blue of the sky and the green of the spring trees washed together. It was the colour of the green flash that is seen when the sun goes down below the rim of the sea. It was perhaps the colour that the dying speak of when they murmur of “the green peace.”

  They went back to the castle and feasted on the pastan and drank mulled wine, and for the rest of the day they were warm and contented in front of the fire, making music sometimes, and telling each other stories of their childhood. The tales were so utterly different, coming as they did from such contrasted lives, that they sounded like fairy stories to the one who listened. They spoke only of amusing things and often their laughter echoed in the kitchen’s vaulted roof. Lucy loved the tales of Charles’s tiny mother and her love of dogs and monkeys and dwarfs, and all creatures that were small and odd and different, as she was herself. “Jeffrey Hudson was my mother’s favourite dwarf,” said Charles. “Poor Jeffrey! We have lost him now. He shot a gentleman who insulted him and had to fly overseas. My mother cried when he went, he was so gentle and he never murdered people he liked. He was only nine years old when my mother first had him, and eighteen inches high. He came in a pie.”

  “A pie?” gasped Lucy. “I thought we said we would only tell each other true tales.”

  “This is a true tale. My lord of Buckingham, the father of those two boys who were with us in your unicorn wood, gave a banquet for my father and mother and a huge pie was brought in and set down upon the table, and when the crust was removed out came Jeffrey. But I never liked my mother’s dwarfs so much as her Negro servants. I have always been very consc
ious that I alone of our family have this dark skin that comes from my mother’s Spanish blood. ‘He is so ugly that I am ashamed of him,’ she said when I was small. And so I have a fellow feeling for the Africans and I liked their dark sad faces. They had lived so near the sun in lands where the sun’s heat can kill that they had the shadow of death upon their faces. At least when I was a child I thought that was why they were so sad. Perhaps they had other reasons.”

  “They were homesick,” said Lucy compassionately. “And there was the wind and the rain. What was that song Will Shakespeare wrote? Hey ho the wind and the rain.”

  Charles sang it to her with the distant music of the storm as accompaniment. The dying cadences still echoed in their ears when they fell asleep that night beside the fire, but when Lucy woke in the dead of night there was no sound, and she saw a star in the window.

  The next day was so different it was hard to think they lived it out in the same world. There was no rain to protect them, no bombardment of the wind. For all its length the day was grey, cool and quiet, and the rain-washed distances opened out to long perspectives of sea, sky and mountains, speaking of parting and of time.

  The quiet was with them even in the first moment of waking, so that they turned into each other’s arms not with the laughing delight of the morning before but silently, trying, since silence alone seemed possible, to give each other strength through the mere fact of it. There is no emptiness in silence, they thought. Neither a windless dawn nor the silence when one can find no words to speak are empty. Outside is the growing light, the air becoming warmer, and when one cannot speak silence need not be empty of love. So, wordlessly, they strengthened each other and then went about the business of the day, lighting the fire, getting their breakfast and washing the plates and dishes with the water that Charles drew from the well.

  But the same thoughts persisted and presently Charles said, “There is something that John Donne wrote. I may not remember it quite rightly but I think it went like this. He said that two lutes, being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other laid upon a table at a fit distance, the second will, like echo to a trumpet, warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune, yet many, he said, will not believe that there is any such thing as the sympathy of souls. We will be like that, Lucy. Even though many miles part us we will learn to call music from each other.”

  Lucy pondered this. “What sort of music?”

  “Remembrance and trust. We will remember our love and trust each other. It may be a short time that we are parted, it may be a long time, but I will never forget you and I will send for you to be with me as soon as I can.”

  “However short the time is it will seem long,” said Lucy. She seemed in no danger of weeping but she was quieter than he had ever known her and there was a heavy dullness upon her. He realized that she was bewildered. This parting which was creeping nearer seemed an impossible thing. They had been able to forget it yesterday but they could not today. She folded up the blankets and found that the housekeeping tasks were ended. There was nothing more that she could do so she had better say something. She struggled with herself and managed a few sentences. “My grandmother took me to St. Paul’s Cathedral and the choir sang a hymn John Donne had written. And we saw his effigy. He did not look a happy man. But then he was supposed to be dead. He had his graveclothes on.”

  Suddenly Charles laughed, for her precise and dismal tones became her so badly that they were an absurdity. “And we are alive!” he cried to her. “Alive and in the same world.”

  “The same green star,” said Lucy, and her cheerfulness leaped up again. “Green fields and green woods, and sometimes the sea is green as spring wheat. If you have to go beyond the sea then when it is green I will run across it to you and come into your dreams.”

  “We will go and work in the green garden,” said Charles. “I would like to see it tidied up a bit more before I leave.”

  He had found rusty gardening tools in the arbour and was delighted, for he had inherited a love of gardens from his mother. Wet though it was in the garden they attacked the briars and weeds with a will. They were disturbed only twice, by Damaris bringing them custard tarts and cold chicken, and later by Justus who came to tell them that arrangements for tomorrow morning were complete; William would be at the end of the lane at six o’clock with horses for the journey. Justus would not stay. He looked at them with shy compassion and went away again.

  When the evening turned chill they made a good fire and ate the chicken and tarts and drank the last of the wine, and then healthy tiredness, food and drink and warmth brought comfort. The thought of the parting had been leaping on them in all the intervals of the day, as toothache leaps, gripping harshly then relaxing only to grip again. But now it was as though they had taken laudanum. The pain was there all the time but they could talk of how Charles would try and get letters to her now and then, and she to him, and at what hour each day they would think of each other and of how they would always remember the home in the castle when they woke in the night. And presently Charles said to her, “I have one more song for you. John Donne wrote it. I found out things about him and read things that he wrote because my grandfather was fond of him. It was my grandfather who made him Dean of St. Paul’s. He had a young wife whom he loved and once when he had to go on a long journey and leave her behind he wrote this song for her. I would write it down if we had paper and pen, but we have not, so I will sing it, and then I will say the words over and over till you know them by heart.” He wanted her to think cheerfully about him. He did not want her to weep.

  Lucy rather thought she would not be able to bear it if Charles sang, yet when he had fetched the guitar, and tuned the strings and began to sing in the firelight she was comforted. Music was timeless as wonder. It could for the short while it lasted even transform the sorrow of which it spoke.

  Sweetest love, I do not go

  For weariness of thee,

  Nor in hope the world can show

  A fitter love for me;

  But since that I

  At the last must part, ’tis best,

  Thus to use myself in jest

  By feigned deaths to die.

  Yesternight the sun went hence,

  And yet is here today;

  He hath no desire nor sense,

  Nor half so short a way;

  Then fear not me,

  But believe that I shall make

  Speedier journeys, since I take

  More wings and spurs than he.

  When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind,

  But sigh’st my soul away;

  When thou weep’st, unkindly kind,

  My life’s blood doth decay.

  It cannot be

  That thou lovest me as thou say’st,

  If in thine my love thou waste,

  That art the best of me.

  Let not thy divining heart

  Forethink me any ill;

  Destiny may take thy part,

  And may thy fears fulfil.

  But think that we

  Are but turn’d aside to sleep.

  They who one another keep

  Alive, ne’er parted be.

  He put the guitar aside and taught her the words. She was quiet to learn and could soon repeat them to him. “You understand what he means?” Charles asked. “If we do not think happily and hopefully of each other we may hurt each other.”

  Lucy nodded and then smiled. Such a way of thinking suited her natural optimism. “Yet it is so hard not to be afraid for one another,” she murmured.

  “Fear and unhappiness chase each other round and round in a circle. From now until I go we are going to be happy. And afterwards.”

  They sat late by the fire, talking and building castles in the air and trying to believe in them. But when they at last went
to bed it was not easy to sleep. They had no clock and Lucy had to watch for the changing of the light and listen for the sound of the cocks crowing, for they must get up at five o’clock.

  At the appointed hour she woke him and he looked up into her face and said, “They who one another keep alive, ne’er parted be.” She smiled and he saw to his intense relief that she was still tearless. They got up and dressed and had breakfast, and then went through the sleeping garden and up the lane to the road. They stood waiting hand in hand, two silent children, and presently they heard the horses.

  William had planned as well as he could. It had been useless to hope for a boat at Solva, for the wind was contrary, but he had spent the two past days in riding to Carmarthen, where he had Royalist friends, and with their help had found a boat ready to sail to Devon as soon as the wind was favourable, and prepared for a consideration to carry his son-in-law Tomos Barlow to safety. It had taken almost the last of his ready money but that he would never tell Charles. He looked grim, worn and tired, but he had determined that he and Richard should ride with Charles and never leave him until they saw the ship sail away down the tideway.

  Justus, who had ridden Lucy’s mare up the hill for Charles, dismounted and Charles mounted in his place. It seemed all to happen very quickly. Lucy was conscious for a moment of being in Charles’s arms, gripped hard and then quickly released, and striving for speech and finding no word of love to say, no response even in her limp body, and then all she heard was the sound of the horses trotting quickly away. The clear morning seemed dim and there was a hard pain round her chest as though an iron band were tightening there. She began to murmur little endearments and then realized it was too late, Charles could not hear them. And she had not, as far as she could remember, even kissed him. She could not weep because of the iron band and all she wanted was to get back to the kitchen, and the blankets before the fire, and lie with her face in Charles’s pillow. She turned to fly there but something held her, a rough hand holding hers and refusing to let go. It was Justus holding her hand. She gazed at him stupidly. Justus. Tousle-headed and owl-eyed, for sympathy had kept him awake all night, he looked at her with bewilderment and dumb sympathy, and she was back in the church at Covent Garden and they were going hand in hand to tell Old Sage that Nan-Nan had died. Suddenly she realized Justus. He had been no one’s best beloved. His mother had scarcely loved him at all, William only second to herself. He had been left behind when she went to join William and Dewi. He was plain and homely and perhaps he would never be loved very greatly or noticed very much. All the loves of Lucy’s life had been, and always would be, three parts maternal, for maternity was the strongest passion in her. The germ of her love for Charles had been pity for a small boy who had nightmares.