The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  He smiled across the table at Lucy with an admiration so honest and delightful, and so obviously linking her to Charles in his thoughts, that suddenly she felt very close to her husband, warm and happy. Yet she was in confusion too, feeling that they must all see the ring between her breasts shining through her gown like a flame. The colour crept up her face but Mrs. Taylor’s kind smile steadied her. It told her that Mrs. Taylor knew quite well that she had a lover but was making no guesses as to who it could be.

  Once again the talk turned to the troubles of the time for it was hard for these people to discuss anything else. The new ways of thinking threatened not only the form of religious faith in which they had been trained but their material way of life too. All that had seemed stable as the ground beneath their feet was now under attack, and so rooted are human beings in the seeming security of custom that their quaking foundations had communicated tremor to the very world itself. About this table, as about so many all over the country at this time, there was talk of the Last Things. Though they hardly realized it they secretly found it easier to contemplate the last trump and the final judgment than having all their habits upset.

  Lucy and Dr. Taylor were more free from the prevailing anxiety than the rest, and both of them because they were in love. Lucy longed for no security except that of Charles’s love, and nothing frightened her except the non-appearance of his letters and the sea between them. Dr. Taylor had been with the army, he had seen his friends die and had buried them, and from the window of his prison he had seen fellow prisoners led out to execution and wondered when his own turn would come. In a puzzling letter written at this time he had spoken of a storm of “so impetuous a violence that it broke a cable and I lost my anchor, and but that he who steadies the raging of the sea, and the noise of his waves and the madness of the people, had provided a plank for me, I had been lost.” Only he could have explained his meaning but Lady Carbery wondered if the anchor of his first faith had been secured by nothing stronger than training and tradition, and if disaster had smashed that cable, leaving him anchorless in darkness. If so, as he came in desolation to its heart, he had not found it empty but discovered with the Psalmist that darkness is the garment of God. “He made darkness his secret place, his pavilion round about him was dark water, and thick clouds to cover him.” He was a man now so greatly in love with God that he could be entrusted with the ransom of souls; since he wanted so little for himself that he was prepared to pay the price. This was how Lady Carbery had come to think of this man who was slowly revealing to her, more by the thoughts of him that his presence aroused than by anything he said, the first contours of the hidden life.

  Two

  1

  The days went by and Lucy was as contented as a girl can be whose lover does not write to her. That the female passion for letter writing is seldom shared by the male of the species was something she had not discovered yet, so her comfort was merely in the thought that it was not possible for him to write, or that his letters had been intercepted and destroyed. At night when she tried to reach him she could not find him, could not know if he was ill or well, happy or miserable, and she was deeply unhappy. It was bitter to her to discover that embodied spirits are not so free as she had thought, that even when loving greatly they can be so ignorant, crass and floundering in their prison of flesh.

  But at Golden Grove the days could not fail to bring peace. She went riding with the Earl, or sat in the parlour with Lady Carbery and Mrs. Taylor, reading aloud to them as they stitched at their embroidery. She read aloud very badly but Lady Carbery thought she should learn, deficient as she was in ladylike accomplishments. When the hour of instruction was over she escaped gladly to the chief joys of this visit, playing with the children in the garden or talking to their father in the gazebo at the end of the terrace where he was writing a book.

  Of both these activities Lady Carbery disapproved. Until Lucy arrived the children had been well-mannered and quiet, a little depressed by their father’s learning and their mother’s piety but able to smile very sweetly when spoken to. But Lucy, her skirts tucked up, led them scampering round the garden in wild games of bear-leader and catch-who-can. Lady Carbery apologized to Mrs. Taylor for the children’s racket, and even more for the disturbance of their father’s peace. “This immortal book!” she mourned. “How is it to progress? Lucy is a naughty girl. I will get the Earl to speak to her.”

  But Mrs. Taylor prevented this with the nearest thing to a flash of anger that her gentle nature could produce. “Playing with my children comforts Lucy,” she said, “and talking to my husband is a strength to her. She needs both at this time.”

  “Is Lucy unhappy?” wondered Lady Carbery.

  “She is in love in wartime,” said Mrs. Taylor.

  “Has she told you so?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Taylor.

  Not for the first time Lady Carbery was astonished by her guest. Apparently devoted to her husband she yet displayed no wifely zeal either in defending him from intrusion on the one hand or in persuading him to work less arduously on the other. It could not be that she was indifferent to his welfare. Could it be that she took a deeper view of it than is usual with wives? Lady Carbery had thought lately, as Dr. Taylor led her more deeply into the life of the spirit, that she would have delighted to be the wife of a priest. Now she changed her mind. Lord Carbery was always delighted to be defended from intrusion and encouraged in the life of dignified leisure that was so suitable to his age and temperament.

  It was not at first entirely for her own sake that Lucy had dared to sit quietly down on the steps of the gazebo, to wait until the tall quill pen had come to a good stopping place. She was prepared to wait half an hour but it stopped in mid-sentence, for Dr. Taylor was a priest first and a writer second.

  “Can I be of service to you?” he asked politely.

  “When you were in prison could you talk to other prisoners?” she asked abruptly. “Were there other priests there with you?”

  “I was always alone in my cell,” he said, “but we were allowed to be together in the prison yard once a day for a short period of exercise. We tramped round and round like squirrels in a cage under the eye of our guard but we could exchange a few words. As far as I know there was only one priest besides myself among us.”

  “Did he tell you his name?”

  “Yes. Nathaniel Peregrine.”

  “So he is still there. He was our vicar at Roch. Did he tell you how he came to be in prison?”

  “Yes. He told me. But he is no longer in Cardigan Castle. He was sent to another prison.”

  Lucy sensed that much was not being told her and she said, with a flash of autocratic authority that in another context would have amused Dr. Taylor immensely, “I wish to be told how he was and where they sent him. I do not wish to be spared.”

  “I was on terms of friendship with the officer in charge of the prisoners,” said Dr. Taylor. “He was the son of an old friend. That is one of the strange quirks of civil war, Lucy. You can suddenly find that the enemy confronting you is well known to you. It can present puzzles to loyalty and it did so with this young man, but he came down upon the side of friendship and I probably owe it to his pleading, as well as to that of Lord Carbery, that my imprisonment was so short. But while I was still waiting for release I persuaded my friend to let me minister as priest to those under sentence of death. For a few days, until the authorities could be persuaded to commute his sentence to a further term of imprisonment, Nathaniel Peregrine was one of these.”

  “Why?” demanded Lucy indignantly. “He tried to defend his church from sacrilegious handling. That was all.”

  “He fired from his window at a Puritan gentleman of some importance. I had hard work to persuade the authorities that the fact that the shot merely pierced the man’s hat was not an accident but a matter of deliberate aim and fine marksmanship. You see, Lucy, our friend, even in his suf
fering, remained a man of choleric temper and his endurance in prison was too much mixed with heroic anger to do him good. But to me he talked quietly and I was able to persuade his enemies of the truth of what he said to me.”

  “You said he suffered,” murmured Lucy.

  “His broken arm was never properly cared for and his rheumatism was not improved by the dampness of our prison, but his spirit remained unbroken and his anger was never in connection with himself. Injustice as such aroused it, the treatment he saw meted out to other men. He had no fear of death but he wished he might live a little longer, he told me, so that he might attain humility and finish the book he was writing.” Dr. Taylor smiled at Lucy. “You would be surprised how much we writers are prepared to suffer in order to complete a book. The travail of creation of course exaggerates the importance of our work while we are engaged in it; we know better when the opus is finished and the lion is perceived to be only a broken-backed mouse. I understood him, and so I pleaded for his life. But where they have sent him I do not believe even he, with all his courage and concentration, will be able to finish his book.” His hands had been lying loosely on his knees and Lucy saw them suddenly tighten. “I did no good service by saving his life,” he finished.

  “Where did they send him?” Lucy asked sharply. She was caught up in a state of confused rage, hardly knowing with whom she was so angry; with men in general for their idiocy in going to war at all, and their cruelty to each other once they had gone there, or with Dr. Taylor for blaming himself because his merciful action had failed to help his friend. “Was it your fault if doing right went wrong?” she demanded. “And where did they send him?”

  “To one of the hulks. One of the prison ships on the Thames to which they are now sending recalcitrant priests.”

  By the flat deadness of his voice she knew without being told that conditions on the hulks would be worse than other prisons. She was appalled but the rage was dying away and she could try and find words to comfort Dr. Taylor. “Could a man find humility in hulks? And God? If Parson Peregrine does that he will be comforted and not grieve so much if he cannot finish his book.”

  Dr. Taylor smiled at her optimism. Not even the most imaginative can conjure up the reality of hulks. Then he remembered his own experience in a lesser trial. “It is possible,” he said. “I have just written something about comfort in tribulation. I will read it to you. ‘He who promised his spirit to assist his servants in their troubles will not, because they are in trouble, take away the comforter from them; who cannot be a comforter but while he carries our sadness, and relieves our sorrows, and turns our persecutions into joys, and crowns and sceptres.’ ”

  The children came running to call Lucy to play with them and they said no more that day, but on other days she told him of some of the things that had happened to her in what seemed so vast a period of time, and he listened with so much attention that it would appear he thought her ups and downs very important and sixteen years a long time to have been alive. She told him she thought she had come from the sea and he agreed that indeed she had. “The sea is a picture of the divine mystery from which we came and that laps for ever on the shores of our being, and sounds about us when the storms come. The mystery is within us also and in all that lives, even in the bodies of the small fishes in the sea-pools, the mystery of the being of God. There is no creature that breathes but the breathing is the rhythm of his love, no flower that glows with any other light but his, no voice that speaks in kindness but the cadence of the compassion is his own.”

  Shyly she told him about her last visit to Golden Grove and how she had seen the golden-hearted rose and how it had seemed to glow inside her in the cave. “There the small child touched the deeps of prayer,” he said. “The adoration, and then the experience of divine rescue.”

  “But I am not a religious kind of person,” she told him, “and I do not know how to pray.”

  “You will know when the storms come. It is then that God goes out of his way to meet his children. Until that time comes keep in memory that which you have found to be within you, and without you in the world’s glow. When the clock strikes, or however else you shall measure the day, it is good to turn to God, that the returns of devotion may be the measure of your time. And do so also in the breaches of your sleep. You do not even need to speak. To turn is enough.”

  “Are you writing these things in your book?”

  “I have not yet progressed very far in my book. But I am sure that as I progress I shall remember my talks with you.”

  “What will you call your book?”

  “I think I shall call it Holy Living and Holy Dying.”

  “What is holiness?”

  “Lucy, what questions you ask me! To grow in holiness is to grow in the power of turning from yourself to God and his children. When there is no more turning back to yourself, that wounding of the soul of the world, then you are whole.”

  “Yet I would like to have some words when I turn. Could you write some for me? Only a few, please.”

  He picked up his pen and wrote, and handed her the paper and she read what he had written. “Keep me, O Lord, for I am thine by creation; guide me for I am thine by purchase; thou hast redeemed me by the blood of thy son and loved me with the love of the Father, for I am thy child by adoption and grace; but let thy mercy pardon my sins and thy care watch over me. Holy is our God. Holy is the almighty. Holy is the immortal. Holy God have mercy upon me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “It will be a secret thing, this life of turning.”

  “Secrets and yet shared,” he told her. “You will share this with every man and woman who has ever tried, however feebly, to love God and his neighbour.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes shining, but her mind had suddenly gone elsewhere. Dr. Taylor smiled, for that this was a girl in love he knew very well. Now, he thought, she would forget instantly all that he had told her. But in this he wronged her for she never forgot.

  2

  The next day the letter came. The postboy was heard winding his horn as he came cantering through the park and a faint tremor seemed to pass through the house from top to bottom, for in time of war especially life or death was in the postman’s bag. Every heart from that of the Earl to the youngest little maidservant, whose lover was in the army, either missed a few beats in dread or quickened in expectation. But the great folk in the front of the house kept an unruffled surface; though the Earl strolled out from the library to remind his wife of some small matter and Dr. Taylor came in from the gazebo to find a book he had mislaid.

  Lucy did not count herself one of the great folk and she joined the children in their headlong rush to the terrace. But she did not at once run down the steps as they did, she halted at the top suddenly aware that Charles was near her. For the first time in all the months of parting she felt him near. And he was coming closer. It was not he who rode the cantering white pony but the postboy had a summons for her. She did not use her reason, she did not stop to think that any letter from Charles would not be sent to her at Golden Grove, but as soon as the postboy emerged from the trees jumped down the steps, pushed through the children and ran to him. He had been about to ride round the house to the side door where letters were delivered, but he reined up at sight of her and gave the precious packet into her hands.

  She had no recollection of going back up the steps. The next thing she knew she was standing with the others in the hall and the Earl was unfastening the packet with dreadful deliberation.

  “The letters would have been brought to us, Lucy. You are very impulsive, my dear.” It was Lady Carbery speaking with gentle reproof. Lucy trembled but looking round she was aware of the amusement in Dr. Taylor’s eyes and was steadied. But there was no letter for her and with his own unopened Dr. Taylor put his hand through her arm and led her out to the terrace. “I did not really expect a letter,” she told him.

  “We al
ways expect a letter,” he answered. “It is the human condition to be always listening for the voice when we cannot see the face. But they are never as far away as we think they are, merely on another path through the same wood, and all the paths wind inward at the end.”

  “Lucy, I have a letter from your grandmother. Will you please come to me in the parlour.” It was Lady Carbery calling from the door behind them, Lucy dropped a curtsey to Dr. Taylor before she obeyed and his answering smile was sympathetic, for he knew that it was not her grandmother’s voice she wanted to hear.

  It was however the right grandmother, it was Elenor Gwinne, writing to inform the family at Golden Grove that her daughter Elizabeth was unwell. “The apothecary thinks gravely of her illness,” Lady Carbery read aloud to Lucy, “though he does not put a name to it. He is, I think, unable to do so, and the treatment he prescribes, rest and warmth and light diet, I was putting into practice before he came. But to a household of women the mere presence of a man in the house is of itself remedial and Elizabeth is always slightly better for his visits. But she frets for Lucy. The final decision in that tedious lawsuit was that William should have the custody of his children, and it has given Lucy entirely to her father who was always her favourite parent, and is a source of great bitterness to Elizabeth. She is too proud to ask William if her daughter may visit her, or to allow me to do so. I therefore without her knowledge write to you, for I think it probable that you see the little family at Roch from time to time and might be able to persuade William to allow Lucy to visit her mother.”

  “Madam, I will myself persuade my father,” said Lucy. “I am a woman now and make my own decisions. He knows that. He loves me and he will not withstand my knowledge of what I must do.”

  Lady Carbery felt put in her place and was astonished at the flash of fire in Lucy’s blue eyes. It was directed, she believed, against herself; the girl would allow no go-between in anything that concerned herself and her father. Lucy had intended no discourtesy but resolution was flaming through her whole body, for behind the immediate summons there was another. Charles wanted her, she believed. He wanted her and London was nearer to him than Roch. Under cover of the dark so many ships sailed down the Thames to France and the Low Countries. Her flashing thoughts carried her no further than that. Just to be a little nearer was great gain.