The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Travel was easy for the well-to-do. Instantly Lady Carbery was busy, horses were groomed and servants leaped to attention. William was summoned from Roch and Lady Carbery’s friend, Lady Lewis at Llanelly, was told to postpone her departure to her daughter’s lying-in at Richmond until Lucy could be brought to her to share her journey. She obeyed, only reminding Lady Carbery that though a first baby was generally late it could also be early, and the young lady must make haste. Great haste was made, Lady Carbery’s maid working half the night as well as by day altering a selection of her mistress’s dresses to fit Lucy, so that Lady Lewis should not be ashamed of her travelling companion. By the time William arrived, having left Dewi with Damaris, the last stitch had been set in place and he wondered why they had bothered to send for him at all. Why ask permission for a fait accompli?

  “Because though I knew you would not refuse it I would not go without it,” said Lucy. “Nor without your love to carry with me.”

  They were standing together in the little room near the front door, safe from interruption because no one ever used this room. The window looked out on the terrace and at the bottom of the steps a groom was holding William’s horse in readiness for his journey home to Roch, and somewhere out of sight the Golden Grove coach was waiting to take Lucy to Llanelly. The fine weather had broken and a curtain of drizzly rain was swaying over the park, slowly erasing all the colour and warmth of the past weeks. When it stopped its work then the skeleton shape of winter would be seen upon the trees. The walls of the little room were lined with books the Earl no longer wanted to read, and they seemed to know it for they smelt musty and sad, like old men who have outlived their usefulness, and their bindings seemed to have all faded to the same dun colour, the colour of William’s shabby coat. Lucy looked at her father and a sudden dizziness made her put her hand out to the windowsill to support herself. He had grown thin and in the grey light he looked like one of the books, a grey-faced man whom no one now wanted. “I will want you till I die,” she cried out impetuously. “And so will Dewi and Justus.”

  “It is not in nature that children should need their parents for long,” said William. “Some men have wives who stay by them, but not all. Why complain? All men are lonely and again it is the nature of things that loneliness should deepen with age.”

  Lucy flung her arms round his neck. “It is my duty to go to my mother for a while but I will come back to you at Roch.” And then her voice broke with the sharpness of her realization that she did not now want to come back either to Wales or William. She wanted to go on, not back, on to another country and another man. She clung to her father and sobbed in guilt and shame.

  “Stop crying, Bud,” commanded William, unwinding her arms from his neck. “You and I have had too many emotional farewells already and I cannot stand another. And speak the truth, if you please. Your mother is the excuse but you have a deeper motive. You have no need to ask for my love because you have possessed it entirely since the day you were born, and will not lose it while I live. But I was wrong to speak of loneliness as I did because as long as a man has a patch of earth to dig he is not lonely. You have no need to think of me as an unhappy man.”

  His voice died away as though over the rim of the world. She did not hear the door close but she heard him go down the steps. She was in the chair where he had been sitting when she came into the room, and was clutching the cushion in her arms, for it seemed to give out the faint scent of tobacco and leather and horses that was his especial smell. Her firstborn was entirely gone and the goodbye had been cold, loveless and horrible. For the moment that seemed almost the worst thing; not having a goodbye that she would be able to bear to remember. But presently a queer thought jerked itself into her mind. He does not get drunk any more, she thought. When did he stop? How strange that I did not notice when he stopped. And then the steely strength of his words crept into her and she quietened. He is greater than I knew, she thought, he has grown bigger all these hard years. He will dig, like he said, and grow into the earth like a tree, and live for the crops and the beasts. He will not forget me and I will not forget him.

  Three

  1

  “Spring!” said Lucy to herself. “It is really spring now.”

  She was in her grandmother’s garden listening for the sound that just now was for her the most longed-for, the clip-clop of Moses, the old nag which she and Justus, strolling along Cheapside together just before Christmas, had seen being led to the knacker’s yard and had bought for the few pence in Justus’s purse and her pearl earrings. Stumbling over the cobbles on his way to death, half-starved, Moses had reminded Lucy of the sin-eater and she had cried out in distress. The rascal who was dragging Moses along by his rope halter had known how to exploit a lady’s pity, and how to catch a glimpse of pearls through a tangle of untidy hair, and it had only taken ten minutes of bargaining for the old horse to become Lucy’s Christmas present to Justus. Well fed, groomed and adored Moses had renewed his youth, but still he reminded Lucy of the sin-eater. He had the patient yet apprehensive expression of a burden bearer who has not yet attained to sainthood.

  The April day was warm and scented with flowers, and the birds were singing in a tumult of delight. Suddenly it seemed to Lucy that she could not get her breath. It was spring again, the second spring since Charles had gone away, but she was no nearer to him for he had neither written to her nor sent for her to come to him. And yet that day at Golden Grove he had been so close. Surely it could not be that the man who had made her a woman could forget what he had done, could not know that it was winter for her until she was with him again?

  The sound of Moses in the lane relieved her pain in a little rush of tears, as quickly over as a spring shower, and a moment later she was riding pillion behind Justus and jogging to London upon an errand about which their mother knew nothing; for she had forbidden her lovely daughter to ride that terrible old horse.

  Justus had filled out in the last year and his back was broad. He would not grow taller, he would always be a strong stocky man without grace of body but with so much grace of spirit that he would never seem an unattrac­tive one. Leaning her cheek against his back Lucy sighed and was at peace. Though not himself demonstrative he allowed his sister to express affection. Women were demonstrative, that was a fact of nature, and he had early decided that rebellion against facts of nature is useless and a waste of time.

  “Is our mother worse?” he asked gently, for he knew she had been crying.

  “Not worse,” said Lucy, “but not better. I do not think our mother has ever been really ill. She had a fever to start with and then she kept it with her for company.”

  “Lucy!” chided Justus. “Our mother has looked very unwell to me.”

  “Unwell, yes,” said Lucy. “Nothing is well with a woman who has parted from her husband. Have you not noticed that? If she has had him for a long time she is lonely, even if she did not like him, and an illness, even if she does not like that either, fills up the empty space.”

  “She may be worrying about you,” said the charitable Justus. “Does she know?”

  “About Charles? Yes, and so does my grandmother. I could not tell my father and brothers and not tell them.”

  “Are they glad, or not?” asked Justus. He wanted to know because he himself was not.

  “When I told them it was as though I had stunned them,” said Lucy. “Then my mother was so excited that she made herself quite ill. Now I think she is pleased and she builds castles in the air like a child, talking of all the wonderful things that will happen to us when Charles is king. But my grandmother was awake all night, I think, after I had told her, for in the morning she looked so old. She asked to see my marriage lines and she wished me joy. But she has not spoken of it again. They both know that Charles does not wish me to speak of our marriage outside the family. You and Richard remember that?”

  “We promised our silence,” said Justus.
“I will not break my promise and I do not see that Richard has anything to gain at present by breaking his.”

  This comment on their brother’s character Lucy heard in silence. Richard was now a very prosperous young man, an able and trusted secretary of his influential employer, but it was hard to love a man who would never commit himself. Even his loyalty to his mother, Lucy suspected, was conditional and his service to Parliament certainly was. The King was now a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle and he had the sympathy of a great many of his subjects. Below the apparently strong surface of parliamentary power there was anger and discontent, and occasional demonstrations for the King in the London streets. The smell of war was in the air again. The matter was not yet decided and nor was Richard’s mode of dress; it still kept the balance between the two parties. But he was a kindly brother in his prosperity and he had taken considerable trouble to find out for Lucy and Justus in which prison ship Parson Peregrine was confined. It was not possible to get permission to go on board, but Lucy hoped that from a boat on the river she and Justus might catch a sight of the old man and that he too might see them and know himself loved.

  The hulks were not far from the docks though on the other side of the river. They left Moses in the stable of an innkeeper of whom Richard had told them and walked to the nearest steps. There was a good deal of shipping on the water and they could not at once get hold of a waterman. Lucy did not mind for she loved ships of every kind, from a Welsh coracle to a man-of-war, and she almost forgot the sadness of their errand in her delight in the sights and smells and sounds all about her. The world of ships was a man’s world and the buccaneer in her was at home in it.

  “Look at that one!” she cried to Justus. “Look at the figure-head. Why, it is a sea-horse! The proudest little sea-horse I ever saw. It is a Dutch ship from Rotterdam. From Aunt Gosfright.”

  Justus laughed. “Just a little merchantman. Look, they are unlading now. And what makes you speak of Aunt Gosfright? You never liked her.”

  “I have thought of her a good deal lately,” said Lucy. “She has been ill, you know. Justus, that is a lovely ship. I would like to sail in her.”

  “I would be proud to have you on board, madam.”

  Justus had seen a free waterman at last and had raced off to get hold of him, and Lucy found to her surprise that she was talking not to her brother but to a young man who stood solidly planted beside her as though he had been growing there for a long while. She liked him instantly for that was the way that Justus stood, thoroughly rooted in his own peace. He spoke English well, giving to it that special charm that any language has when a foreigner speaks it, lighting up the music of it with the freshness of contrasting stress and intonation.

  “You see my ship’s name painted on the hull?” he asked. “I will turn it into English for you, though if you have noticed the figurehead it is not necessary. The Sea-Horse. A good little ship and the motion is easy when she jumps the waves. Will you sail with me?”

  He was saying any nonsense that came into his head, merely to keep this pretty girl beside him for a few moments longer, and falling into his mood she answered laughing, “When do you sail, sir?” But he found himself answering quite seriously, “I have business in the city. But any day after next Wednesday when the wind is favourable I shall be sailing back to Rotterdam.”

  Justus had captured a boat and was dodging through the crowd towards them. “Lucy!” he called. “Lucy!”

  “May I know your name, sir, please?” she asked.

  “Captain Axel, madam.”

  She gave him her hand impulsively and then turned and ran to Justus. He helped her into the boat with chilly courtesy. Few things upset his equable temper but one of the few was the headlong way in which Lucy struck up sudden friendships. Anxiety mixed with unrecognized jealousy emerged as irritation. “What did that fellow say to you?” he asked when they were out on the water.

  “He invited me to sail with him to Rotterdam,” said Lucy. “And I asked his name and when he sailed.”

  “What for?” demanded Justus and a sense of dread made his heart lurch. He loved his sister so much that though he was now at the age to have his eye taken by other pretty girls he was hardly aware of their existence. “And have you forgotten what we are supposed to be doing at this moment?”

  Lucy’s heart also lurched, not in dread but in self-reproach. When would she learn to keep her mind centred upon one person at a time? This was Parson Peregrine’s day and neither the captain of the Sea-Horse, nor Justus, nor even Charles himself must usurp it.

  “We have not a chance of catching sight of old Peregrine,” said Justus. He was no longer annoyed, for his rare irritations were always short-lived, he was merely stating a fact. “And I do not know what good you think we are doing by coming at all.”

  “When people are in tribulation I try and come as near to them as I can,” said Lucy.

  “What is the use of that if they do not know you are there?” asked Justus.

  “They may feel happier because I am near.”

  “You think a lot of yourself, surely?”

  “No, but he loved me when I was a child and he does still. I know when I am loved.”

  “Do you now?” said Justus, smiling. “That is pleasant for you.”

  “It is,” said Lucy.

  A sudden chuckle from the waterman reminded them of his presence. “Them’s the hulks,” he told them. They looked round and saw the prison ships blocked starkly against the blue and silver of river and sky, and they seemed to Lucy and Justus a blasphemy sprawled upon it. They looked in silence for a moment and then Justus said to the boatman, “We want to come as near as we can to the third in line. We have a friend there.”

  The waterman nodded. They had his sympathy and his muttered maledic­tions upon prisons of any sort or kind, the Tower, the Fleet, the hulks, the whole stinking lot, was a brief comfort so strengthening is it to realize afresh the right thinking of the men of labour and poverty who are the foundations of the commonweal. Like a darting moorhen their boat shot this way and that through the intervening shipping until with a quick twist the waterman had it right under the hull of the third ship. Its dark shape rose above them growing in height like a mounting wave, and Lucy was suddenly cold with horror. She had wanted to come near, she had said in the immunity of distance. But now she was too close to be immune. She knew as yet next to nothing, in her own body and mind, about the horror of human suffering, and now here it was looming over her in stifling darkness. It was partly the smell of it that made the hulk so dreadful and gave it this density. The small port-holes were open and gave forth the stench of human misery.

  “Watch them as they pass!” commanded Justus angrily and sharply. “Turn your face to them. He might, perhaps, see you. Turn your face up, I tell you. Watch them.”

  The boat was slipping slowly along the hull. She controlled her trembling and with all her heart and soul she watched the port-holes and drew their dreadful breath into her lungs. She was aware of human life and endurance within the darkness but she could distinguish no lineaments of it. It seemed a faceless thing. The misery of men was so vast that it could bear no single face, only the face of humanity itself, the face of Christ that is marred more than that of any man. Searching the dark eyes of the port-holes in vain, she could feel nothing but fear and hopelessness, and when the boat had drawn away a little, and rocking gently on the water they looked back at the ship, she hardly understood Justus when he said, “You were quite right to come, Lucy. Those portholes look blind but they are not and there is light in the eyesockets. Stand up and wave. And do not look so sad. Stand up and laugh with the man who is there.” She let him pull her to her feet and hold her steady in the rocking boat, and she smiled obediently as she waved, and so did Justus, and the waterman did the same, though he thought the couple crazy. And inside the darkness a tremor of happiness shivered from prow to stern of the pri
son ship, and one old man, though the tears were running down his face, was laughing, so joyous is it to know that you are not forgotten. But this he could not tell them, and by the time they got back to the quay Lucy and Justus could have wept because they would never know if they had done anything or nothing for Parson Peregrine.

  Lucy, going first up the stone steps against the river wall, was too bewildered with sorrow to look where she was going when she reached the top and it was not until she had bumped into the burly man coming quickly towards her, and he had gripped her arm to keep her from falling, that she gasped, “Uncle Barlow! I thought you were in Ireland with Lord Glamorgan.”

  “Not so loud, my girl!” he said. “Is it Lucy? It must be, since that is Justus. He is not changed so much. But you, Lucy! Who would have thought you would have turned out so pretty? Who is the lucky man? Begod, if I were only younger and not married to your poor aunt! Would you have liked to be Mrs. Barlow?”

  “I like to be your niece,” said Lucy politely. “Where is my poor aunt?”

  “With friends in Fishguard. I visited her before I came to London with Lord Glamorgan.”

  Justus had joined them now. “You had a pleasant journey?” he asked.

  “Pleasant!” ejaculated Uncle Barlow with sarcasm. “Just the two of us, with my lord travelling as my servant and in as vile a temper as ever I have known him. Pleasant, by cock! Tell your grandmother, if you two children are with her now, that I will give myself the honour of waiting on her in a day or two.”