The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  She lay down on her bed for a while and with all the resolution she could summon drove her frantic mind away from the scaffold to the bridge above the stream where her parents had clung together, and from there along the way to Golden Grove and up the steps to the terrace where the damask rose grew. She looked for it in vain among the green leaves, but just as her thoughts grew frantic once more the leaves murmured to her of the cave where she had found it within herself.

  “Go in. Go down the stony passage that leads to the cave at the heart of the world that is also your own heart. He is there, as well as at the heart of all earth’s flowers, and he is the peace of the world, and the joy of the world, and all that is. The love of lovers is one of the reflections, and there are many trembling in the troubled waters of our living, trembling for a moment and then broken and lost. But he is not lost. And what he is, no man knows.”

  She opened her eyes. The murmur of leaves had become another voice. There had been no words that her physical ears could hear yet she knew what had been said to her. Was Old Sage rewarded for his long silence by a new and heavenly power of speech? She got up and washed her face and brushed her hair and went downstairs, and talked so calmly to Margaret and Peter that they marvelled at her.

  “She is all emotion on the surface but underneath she is cold,” Margaret said to her husband in bed that night. The solid, kindly burgomaster cleared his throat to disagree but found as always that the words that would express his thoughts were not to be found. Nor were his thoughts themselves easy to catch hold of unless they concerned his weaving business and the price of wool. He had many thoughts but they swam like small fishes in the dark water of the tank of his mind, coming up so suddenly and briefly that no sooner did he dive for a shining tail than it had vanished. He did however wonder how Lucy was getting on in the darkness of her own curtained bed. Was she asleep? But he had no time to wonder more. That was another of his difficulties, wonder always plunged him into instant slumber.

  Lucy was discovering that those who are allowed the one must have the other also and the turnover from light to darkness can be immediate and inexorable. She lay in her bed longing for the comfort of the voice again but there was only thick dark silence. She longed for sleep but when it came at last it brought no release, only fear as she waited for the moment when she must step out upon the scaffold. The fear was not so much of the death but of stumbling and losing the dignity of her courage. It was difficult to see where her feet must be placed in this darkness. There was a vast crowd out there, quite silent. Yet it was not night for them, it was broad daylight, and they all had eyes, and in a moment the eyes would devour her blinded face. Yet she must step forward with confidence, out and forward as though to the arms of a lover and she must not stumble.

  Then suddenly it was all different for she was climbing a ladder. She was on the wrong scaffold. The eyes were waiting just the same but it was the wrong scaffold. Whose scaffold was this? The question was so insistent, and the fear that came upon her so appalling, that her feet could not find the next rung of the ladder. She stumbled and fell and the darkness from past and future came roaring over her head as she fell into the abyss. It was empty. Darkness and nothingness. Darkness that fell like a curtain.

  Then she was awake and aware of her body again, drenched with sweat, and she could see the outline of two wooden posts and the small patch of light that lay upon wooden planks. Whose scaffold was this, and where was her son? Had they torn him out of her womb and was that why her body was so cold and trembling? Yet when she searched for him he was still with her in her heavy body and she could feel his life under her shaking hands. And there was that light that lay upon the boards of the scaffold. What was it doing there? There should be blood upon the floor of a scaffold, not silver moonlight. She stretched out a hand and felt the velvet of the bed curtains and saw again the two posts at the foot of the bed.

  The nightmare was over and she quieted herself. It was her mind she must take care of now. She must not remember that what had been done to one king could be done to another, or to his son. She fixed her eyes on the moonlight for light was what she must think of in the weeks that were coming. Light and peace. The peace of the voice. The peace that she and Charles had agreed was so important on the evening when they had sat on the sand-dunes in the sunset. She said the word aloud to herself as the best talisman she knew against nightmare. Peace.

  In the weeks that followed she broke down only once and that was when she heard how Charles had received the news of his father’s death. He had burst into agonized sobbing, gone to his room and stayed there alone for hours, remaining afterwards bewildered and dazed with grief. Then he had put on the purple of royal mourning and in apartments hung with black had set himself to the burden of correspondence. That was how Lucy had to picture him through the weeks while she waited for her baby; in that stuffy black room, his clenched hand holding the long quill pen, while obsequious courtiers were thick as crows about him and messengers came and went.

  For this thing that had been done had horrified not only The Hague but the whole of Europe and letters of condolence poured in upon the new King. The Czar of Russia did more than condole, he banished every Englishman from his dominions instantly, for if this was the way that Englishmen treated their rulers such barbarians could no longer be tolerated upon the sacred soil of Russia.

  Lying awake one night Lucy wondered what Charles thought about when he lay awake. Did he have nightmares? Did he remember that blank sheet of paper signed with his name? Nothing, it would seem, had been written on it. That act of courage had been in vain. Nevertheless he had sent the paper. He had done it.

  And did he think of the great Earl of Strafford, the scapegoat who had not saved his king after all? He had laid down his life for him but it had been in vain. All in the end had been failure. Nevertheless he had laid down his life. He had done it.

  “The words ‘in vain’ are not known to us here. Nor is failure, nor success. But the life laid down is known to us. And love in its true profundity is known. And the maintaining of faith is known. These are for us the sun and moon and stars.”

  It was the voice again with its peace. Lucy smiled, turned her pillow over and lying down again tried to imagine how it would be when among all the important messengers to the palace there would come a humble servant with a letter from Rotterdam sealed with the crest of a master weaver. Charles would lift his head suddenly and break the seal with eagerness, and then his dark face would light up with a delighted boyish grin before he folded the letter and slipped it inside his doublet, and said not a word to a soul. And then perhaps he would come and see her.

  He did not come but he sent Lord Wilmot with a letter of love and congratulation and a diamond star in a silver box. Kneeling on one knee beside the bed where Lucy was enthroned with her baby Lord Wilmot had pinned the star on Jackie’s robe. “His Majesty bade me tell you, Mrs. Barlow, that one day when this child is grown he will himself place the Star of the Garter on his son’s breast. This trinket, which is for you to wear now, is in earnest of that.”

  His mission accomplished Lord Wilmot had stayed for a while laughing and chatting with Lucy, had drunk the glass of wine Margaret Gosfright brought him, then had bowed and gone away. Lucy had wished he could have stayed longer for he was merry and gentle and she knew that of all his courtiers he was the one whom Charles liked best. After he had gone away the longing for Charles became and remained almost intolerable.

  5

  “For we are two and should be three,” she said to her son, as the remembering brought her round full circle to the now of this April afternoon, with the bells of Rotterdam tolling out five o’clock over the roofs of the city and the sun so far declined to the west that the shadows of the houses fell across the canal outside her window, dimming the brightness of the water to the glimmer of moonstone.

  Charles was King of England. How would this affect herself and Jackie? T
o get back the throne of England it was possible that he might stick at nothing. If this marriage got in his way would he repudiate it? She did not believe he would but she had faced the possibility and taken her decision. Jackie must know the truth about himself. She would tell him as soon as he was of an age to understand that he was his father’s legal son, and he would have his secret sense of integrity even as she had hers.

  There was a knocking at the front door below her window and then the sounds of arrival. Aunt Margaret and her husband were hospitable and liked to entertain their friends, of whom many belonged to the community of Scottish weavers who had settled at Rotterdam and who did business with Peter Gosfright. Lucy, as friendly and hospitable as her aunt, enjoyed these sounds of arrival and upstairs with her baby would tune in to the tremors of welcome, kindness and pleasure that would thrill through the old house on these occasions. It had a large heart and liked to entertain and was well able to communicate its pleasure in what was happening downstairs to Lucy upstairs.

  Who had just come in? Lucy listened and the first thing she knew was that the house itself was so thrilling with excitement that it almost sang out the news. Magi, it said, magi. Three men from afar come to worship. No, not Scots weavers! These men talked like kings. Could she not hear how the voices rang out with the authority of trumpets? Yes, that was Aunt Margaret twittering. How she twittered! Yes, that was Uncle Peter gratified but excessively anxious. Had he enough wine? The horses? What state was his stable in? The door of the bedchamber burst open and the intimations of the house were drowned by the twittering of a thousand sparrows as Aunt Margaret flew in. Stout though she was her feet hardly touched the floor.

  “Lucy! The King! And two others with him. Lord Wilmot who was here before and Colonel Robert Sidney. Three of them. And you in that shabby wrapper and your hair like a bird’s nest. Get up at once and put your gown on. Give me the child. Give me the child, I say. Be quick, Lucy!”

  Lucy was sitting up very calmly with her baby in her arms. “It does not matter what I look like,” she said serenely to her distracted aunt. “Jackie is looking like a king’s son.”

  Margaret calmed down and looked. Yes, Lucy was right. Jackie was at all times impervious to the noise and disturbance of the world. It did not concern him yet. It was still only the perimeter of the magic circle of warmth and love that contained only himself and his mother. His flushed cheek was on her breast, the golden fluff of hair was like a small flame burning on his forehead and he had placed his hand over his nose again as though to ward off intrusion.

  A man came leaping up the stairs two at a time and stood in the doorway. Lucy looked up and smiled at him. She had forgotten how tall he was. But then so much had happened to them both since they had last been together that it was no wonder if there was a little forgetfulness. The purple of royal mourning suited his new, tragic dignity. She saw at once that it was as she had feared and he was changed. He was not the old Charles but a king, a man sanctified and set apart. And there was no light in his eyes. And then suddenly as she looked at him the light came and he smiled like an urchin boy. Then he bowed to Aunt Margaret and held the door open for her exit, closing it behind her so quickly that it caught the tail of her gown and he had to open it again to free her.

  But at last they were alone and he was kneeling by the bed, astonished beyond measure. “A son,” he said. Jackie opened his eyes and considered the newcomer. Then he removed his hand from his nose and curled its minute tendrils about his father’s long finger. Jackie’s magic circle had enlarged itself. Now they were three.

  Six

  1

  Charles was not able to leave her that night. The other wise men, having paid their respects, went away but Charles remained. Who could have believed having a baby was such a miracle! Other people had them, indeed having babies was such a constant preoccupation of the human race that the world was cluttered with them, and their cries of joy or demand intermingled with the chirps of sparrows under the eaves to make the background music of almost every home in the world. Yet it seemed a miracle that had not happened before.

  “Such a small home,” Charles murmured as night turned towards dawn. He was thinking of the interior of the fourposter; for the pale light was not strong enough yet to show him the lineaments of the room. For the twentieth time that night he turned over to look through the parted curtains at the cradle beside the bed where his son was sleeping. He could see the top of a baby’s head and the outstretched fingers of the hand that Jackie had placed over his nose. They were ridiculous. How could fingers be so small and yet be fingers? And who could have believed that being a father was like this? This awe and sense of fulfilment. This awareness of the extension of one’s own being, reaching forward and back through time. And the extraordinary deepening of the love that bound one to the woman, so that they and their love seemed fused into one Godlike unity. Like God? Yes, for they had created a world. What was a baby but a new world? It was all there in that scrap in the cradle; a whole complex universe of beauty and delight, thought, will and action. Did other men feel like this, all the millions of men who had begotten children? Had his father felt as he did now at his own birth? His father! Suddenly, with that stab of now familiar pain somewhere at the back of his head it was all sweeping over him again, and he turned over into Lucy’s arms in a storm of sobbing.

  She took it with quiet and strong compassion, for the long strange night together had seemed to hold the whole range of human experience. The few hours of sleeping and waking, of ecstasy, joy and now sorrow, had lasted for a hundred years and yet flown like a few moments. What was this queer thing, time? No one knew. Just as no one knew the meaning of human life or love or death.

  Charles’s grief spent itself and she made no comment upon it. He did not need that she should. Presently he said, “I must go back to The Hague today. There is so much to do. The worry and the business are endless. You will come with Jackie to the farm as soon as you can?” And she replied, “We will come.”

  2

  The days at the farm were happy days. The sea air and the peaceful rhythm of life made Lucy feel stronger, though she was never again to get back the health and vigour she had known before her baby’s birth. Jackie, lying in his cradle beside his mother in the sunny garden, grew and flourished amazingly and Lucy, in the painstaking letters that she wrote regularly to her mother and grandmother, did her best to communicate something of the wonder of him, but she was not good with her pen and the very vastness of her happiness made it impossible to describe.

  She wrote too to Betje, who had now married her Frenchman Louis Fragonard and gone to Paris with him; for he had tired of cooking for the insensitive palates of the Dutch and was now in the kitchen of no less a person than Cardinal Mazarin himself. This great prelate, the virtual ruler of France, had a stomach sensitivized by the strain of his responsibility and Betje in consequence was something of a grass-widow and had opened a little milliner’s shop in a street not far from the Cardinal’s palace. “If Jackie and I ever come to Paris,” Lucy wrote to her, “it is with you that we shall lodge.”

  Charles came out to Scheveningen whenever he could and he and Lucy carried Jackie out to the sand-dunes or down to the edge of the sea, taking it in turn to hold the baby. And at night in the cupboard-bed the cradle was in their dreams, and to be awakened at first dawn by Jackie’s imperious cries was no hardship but a continual miracle.

  Charles spoke little to Lucy about the worries that beset him for with her he wanted to forget them, but she did know that he was torn in pieces by the divisions within his Council. The older men, led by the faithful Hyde, believed that he could only be restored to his throne by the Marquis of Montrose and the Scottish Royalists, the Duke of Ormonde, and the Irish Catholics, but the Duke of Buckingham and the other young men in the Council pressed him to close at once with the powerful party of the Scottish Covenanters, whose emissaries had been for some while at The Hague. T
hey demanded that he should sign the Covenant but the great marquis, before leaving The Hague for Denmark to raise troops for Charles, had implored him to do no such thing. And to make confusion worse the English Parliament had sent as their ambassador to The Hague one of the lawyers who had drawn up the charges against the late King, and a party of Royalists had quietly entered his house, murdered him and gone quietly away again. Charles had had no hand in the murder but the Dutch States General were too enraged to give him further financial help and he was not made for the corrosions of poverty.

  Lucy loved her husband too much to be unaware of the change in him, for he was altering almost as fast as his son. The deepening dignity and resolution she loved but there was something that disturbed her, and that was his own opinion of himself. He was wearing his sacred kingship like a halo about his head and her intuition told her that no man is in more danger than when he is self-haloed. That His Sacred Majesty must be restored to his throne was already an idée fixe and what if restoration were long delayed? What effect would that have upon him? But at that point a shadow would come over Lucy’s mind and she would turn quickly away to the joy of the moment. It was sufficient. Each hour together was a brimming cup of gold.