The Child From the Sea

by Elizabeth Goudge

  But Lord Taaffe, looking at the beautiful chased ring, protested. “Do you not know, sir, that this is a valuable ring? You cannot give this in exchange for a mere bottle of wine and a loaf of bread.”

  The old man did not actually laugh but his tender amusement took charge of his face in much the same way as his compassion had done a few moments before. The beholder was no longer aware of the face at all but only of the grace it mediated. “Young man, you are thinking that ring might buy me a warm cloak tomorrow when what I want is to eat and drink with you tonight. Only worldly men think of tomorrow. The ring has value, yes, for it speaks to me of the union between us and of my desire to prolong it. The tavern is behind you.”

  He was still amused but his authority was so great that Lord Taaffe, himself accustomed to command, was inside the tavern before he knew what he was doing. He felt a twist of anger when he saw the greed with which the tavern keeper snatched the ring, yet more vivid than the anger was the memory of the old man’s penetrating eyes, and he thought to himself, “He knew I was hungry as the devil.”

  Carrying the bread and wine hidden under his cloak he went back to his friend and they walked on together towards his lodging. It was as well it was not far for the old man was lame and could only walk slowly. Away from the tavern light, and looking down from his superior height, Lord Taaffe could hardly see him but was very much aware of him, since he radiated now a cheerful courage that was almost visible. Possibly it was painful for him to walk. If so the effect of his painfulness upon Lord Taaffe was the disappearance of the despair he had felt as he walked the streets alone. It could not live with the grace that now possessed him.

  They groped their way up the stairs to his attic room and he lit the candle he had hoped not to light and kindled the fire he had meant to do without. But he did both things with extraordinary joy and when he could once again see the old man’s face he knew where it had come from.

  “My lord,” said the old man with delight, “we have a banquet.”

  Looking at the bread and wine he carried, and remembering the banquets to which he had watched the rich men driving, Lord Taaffe flung back his head and roared with laughter. Then he set to work to make his guest as comfortable as he could. There were two battered chairs in his room, one rickety table, his bed in the corner and a cupboard in the wall that held the few things he needed. He pulled the table and chairs to the fire and cushioned the old man’s chair with his folded cloak, sat him in it and tucked the blanket from his bed about his guest’s shaking knees; for the old man’s joy had not altered the fact that he was cold and that the climb up the stairs had been long and steep. Then he took two cups for the wine and a wooden trencher for the bread from the cupboard and put them on the table. Never had the hospitable preparations of a host taken such a short time and never had he felt such delight in their performance; so much delight that he laughed again.

  “You call this lodging vile?” chuckled the old man. “You keep it clean as paradise and the view from the window could not be bettered in the heavenly mansions.”

  It was true. From the attic room they could look over the roofs and lights of Paris, with the great sky of stars arched over them, and in the old man’s company the stars no longer looked indifferent. From this height the misery and evil of the streets was hidden beneath a web of light, and trying to recall it to his memory Lord Taaffe found that he could do so only as a distant dream.

  “It cannot be right to be so forgetful of it,” he said aloud.

  “In the days of your prosperity you were not aware of the depth of other men’s evil and pain,” said his guest. “Now through the gift of hardship it has been revealed to you that you may succour them. But thank God for a temporary amnesty, for it is his will. He desires that you should mount into his heart when the day is over and see evil drowned in his prophetic light. My son, will you sit down and sup with me?” A few words spoken in a high comical voice, weak with age, but strength and wisdom filled the room and Lord Taaffe sat down with humility, as though in the presence of the King, and he had such a sense of being now no longer host but guest that he had to be reminded of his duties. “My lord, will you break the bread and pour the wine?”

  It seemed at first that he could not lift his hands to the task, for they lay heavy on his knees, then with awe he did so. The moment of meeting with the old man had been like the opening of a door; through it he had moved into a new dimension of life, where the world itself and all experience and action within it had sacramental value. It gave to each thing, a ring, a bottle of wine, a view from a window, an extraordinary preciousness and yet brought a sense of dream. For the value of these things was in their signification. They passed away as shadows do but reality remained. The ring had gone but this man was for ever his friend.

  For ever? He wondered about the eternal life of the soul and abruptly, jerkily, he tried to put into words the misery that had come upon him in the street. To no other man could he have spoken of it. “The lurkers under doorways, the criminals, the utterly depraved. How can one reconcile them with the love of God? They are lost souls.”

  The old man smiled and the room was full of his tender amusement. “There are no lost souls.”

  “But our religion teaches us to believe in hell.”

  “Correctly. Have you not yet been in hell? It is a common human experience but mercifully, like all experiences of sinful men, temporary.”

  “Those men in the streets,” said Lord Taaffe, patiently bringing his friend back to the point that was sticking in his soul. “If they die in their sins will not their hell continue?”

  “My son, the whole creation rests in God and is purged in the flame of his being. Can any sane man picture a continuing hell within the being of God?”

  “Many men do,” persisted Lord Taaffe, “and retain their sanity.”

  “Hardly in the eyes of God,” said the old man drily. “But no doubt God’s idea of sanity and man’s differs at times. Evil, even the evil in the soul of the worst man you know, dies in God. Not the soul but the evil. How long the dying may take, how it may come about, God alone knows. But evil dies and the death of evil is the only death. There is no other. That is why the adversary is busy in the streets. His time is short.”

  But Lord Taaffe was not satisfied. “What if a soul in the last resort should prefer evil to the love of God? May a soul choose to share the death of evil?”

  Great grief filled the room. “I cannot conceive such a thing,” murmured the old man. “I cannot conceive how a soul who has caught only the faintest echo of God’s voice, calling to his child, could still reject his love. Absorption into God or absorption into nothingness, there may be that choice, I do not know. But what I have told you I know. But no man can convince another of his own truth, only tell it.”

  “I have distressed you,” said Lord Taaffe and he was grieved at what he had done. He and his small attic room had been host to one after the other of the great graces; compassion, courage, joy, strength and wisdom; the attributes of God. But now there was this grief. Yet grief too was an attribute of God, for Christ had wept.

  “No, my son,” said the old man cheerfully. “I merely for one moment uncovered a perpetual grief to share it with you, for such sharing brings comfort. The hardening of men’s hearts against the love of God in man, their failure to listen or to look either in compassion when men suffer or in worship when spring comes again, these things wound me as though blood flowed from the heart. The spirit can bleed as well as the body.” He looked thoughtfully at the wine in his cup and smiled as though he were already entirely comforted, and something that was not grief began to grow in the room with enormous power. “This wine, this symbol of God’s life poured out for us, what is it but grief transmuted into love? Or love into grief. Love and grief are not divisible while sin and its suffering are with us still. When evil is destroyed then who can say what love will be like? The glory is not
yet revealed.”

  “So little is revealed,” said Lord Taaffe.

  “That you must accept,” said the old man with a touch of sternness. “If it seems to you that revelation tarries you must remember that man, and not God, made time.”

  Had he for a moment felt rebellion, wondered Lord Taaffe? The sensation had passed quickly as the power grew. For one piercing moment love possessed him utterly, love of a quality which he had never known. It had the purity of flame but also a great homeliness. He felt such an extraordinary unity with his guest that each might have been within the heart of the other. Earlier in the evening he had felt alienated from the heart of God and the old man had said that his chief hunger was for God. While the moment lasted he knew that man’s home is in the heart of every other man and that home and God are also indivisible. The piercing experience passed but the knowledge remained. “My alienation is ended and your hunger satisfied,” he said to his guest.

  The old man nodded and smiled and began to struggle to his feet. Lord Taaffe felt a pang of dismay that his guest should wish to leave him but he realized that he was right. The greatest moments in life are, and should be, brief. Man in his earthly weakness, like a seedling plant, cannot stand too much light. He helped his guest to his feet and taking his warm cloak from the chair put it about the old man’s shoulders. To his joy and relief but a little to his surprise, the gift was accepted with humble gratitude. “Thank you, my lord,” was all he said.

  They went down the stairs together and Lord Taaffe opened the door. “I will see you to your lodging,” he said.

  “My son, it is not necessary. Our shared meal has put new life in me. I shall think of you often and always to bless you. In some future time, with increased knowledge, we shall again speak together. Peace be with you, my lord.”

  He had gone and the door was shut. Lord Taaffe, looking at it with bewilderment, did not feel that it had been shut in his face. He had not heard it shut and in the darkness at the foot of the stairs he had not seen his guest leave him. It was as though he had vanished. But he felt no sorrow for peace was taking possession of him.

  He went back to his room and began setting it to rights and preparing for bed. Just once he asked himself a question, “Who was he?” And he remembered that night at Saint-Germain when the King had been in sorrow and Robert Sidney, to divert him, had spoken about the odd corners of London and the strange fantastic creatures to be found there. He had described meeting with an old man whom he had called Socrates. Did one in truth, when walking the streets, sometimes meet the Great Ones?

  4

  The winter clamped down upon Paris with iron cruelty. The rich grumbled, pulled their cloaks about them and drank more wine, the poor said nothing but by day drew upon their reserves of courage and by night huddled together for warmth. The poor, thought Lord Taaffe, are in the human family what the wrens are in the family of birds; they cock up their cheeky tails like a flag, and when they can no longer bear the cold they flock together into a hidden corner and cling so close that they become indistinguishable; just a pile of skeleton leaves blown into a heap by the winds of adversity. I am glad I am now one of them, he thought as he tramped to his work in the early morning. For he had found a job of work to do. He cared for the horses at the tavern where he had bought the bread and wine, sharing the labour with an ostler who was too old to work alone any longer.

  It had not been his intention that Lord Taaffe should become a common labourer but passing the tavern one day, his mind full of the old man, he had found himself inside enjoying a drink he could not afford, and discovering the tavern keeper’s need had been astonished to hear himself offering his help. Going outside again, astonished at what he had done, he had found himself filled with an amusement that was not his own, and had laughed aloud.

  The tavern was a poor place and he was paid a mere pittance, but it helped him to continue in his attic room. He would have had sufficient food to keep body and soul together had he not helped the poor in the streets and spent money on the battered horses who came into his care for a short while in the tavern stable. There was so little he could do for the horses; only salves for their sores and a good bran mash, and a few moments of loving horse talk in the waste of their lives. It broke his heart to part with them. And it broke his heart that look as he might in the streets he never once caught a glimpse of the old man.

  Nevertheless his friend was continually with him in the renewal of his mind. His lodging no longer seemed to him vile and he returned to it at night with a sense of homecoming. The room was full of peace and the nights being for the most part clear and frosty the great sky of stars seemed to grow continually more beautiful.

  When he walked through the streets it was no longer as an aristocratic observer but as yet another poor man tramping to his work. He made friends among those he had helped, and when he stopped to speak to them he would beat his arms across his chest for warmth because like them he had no cloak. Being now one of them he was less aware of evil in the streets; when some whiff of darkness came to him from a passer-by he looked at him as a man looks at a lump of coal, knowing it has a life-giving flame at the heart. “The heart” was a phrase very much in his mind these days. It came to mean to him the innermost core of a man where God is patiently at work making the place into a home; for himself and for other men. “The creator of the universe tunnels in us like a blind mole,” was his irreverent comment.

  Sensitive with his new awareness, every human creature smiting at his heart, he went to see Lucy. The effect on him was catastrophic. Never had she seemed more beautiful or more desirable, and her affection and concern woke up in him a corresponding longing to be loved and cared for. He wanted her to take him in her arms and comfort him for the poverty, hunger and cold. He was a man of strength and independence. What had become of these qualities? He had never supposed for one moment that either could ever fail him and he was suddenly angry both with Lucy and the old man; and also with the King who had gone to Scotland without him and left him at the mercy of this girl. Like everyone else he was hard at work blaming those he loved best for the weakness of his own nature, and his rapped out answers to her anxious enquiries stung Lucy to a corresponding annoyance.

  “I tell you I have mislaid my cloak,” he said.

  “How can you mislay a thing like a cloak?” she asked, persevering with a sore subject in the maddening way of women. “You cannot mislay a cloak.”

  “Surely I know what I have done with my own cloak.”

  “But that is just what you do not know. Theo, you have always told me you have plenty of money, but have you?”

  “Do you suppose I would lie to you?”

  “But Theo, you are getting so thin.”

  “I am a lean man. I always have been.”

  “Being lean is one thing and being thin is another, and I know the difference.”

  “Women know everything,” said Lord Taaffe.

  Betje, her suspicions as much aroused as Lucy’s but wiser and more practical in her ways of expressing them, entered with a silent tongue and a pleasant little meal upon a tray. The Celtic tempers died down again and Jackie, who had been in bed and asleep behind the half-open door in the next room, immediately awoke. He liked food and could smell it even in the depths of slumber. “Gum,” he called. The exact meaning of this word was not clear but it appeared to express grace before meat. His elders turned and saw His Highness, clothed in the royal nightgown, peeping round the door, his round face rosy with sleep but his eyes bright as diamonds. “Gum,” he repeated joyfully.

  He should have been put back to bed instantly but who could refuse such a child? He ran to his mother and was enthroned upon her lap. From this eminence he commanded her attention and she did not notice the exaggerated slowness with which Lord Taaffe ate his meal. When they said goodbye all was harmony between them but out in the street going home he cursed himself for his unkindness. How co
uld he have been so cruel to his darling girl?

  For the next few days he was tormented by the thought of his cruelty. Physical weakness and exhaustion were things he was not accustomed to; he was unaware that they expand failings into gigantic sins and worries into griefs too heavy to be borne. The longing to go back and comfort Lucy for his unkindness was at war with a warning voice that ejaculated Fool, fool, inside his head. The voice was as maddening as the sound of someone hammering a nail in crooked, the longing was a great rush of warm water trying to sweep him off his feet, and succeeding on the third day.

  Betje through the window of her little shop above the bakery saw him coming and abandoning her customers came out to the landing to meet him. Through the open door he could see that she had Jackie with her and wondered if Lucy was out on an errand. Then Betje broke into urgent speech. “Oh, my lord, I am glad you have come! I do not know what to do with Lucy. I do not know how to comfort her.”

  “Did I wound her so deeply? The damn’ fool!”

  “Nothing to do with you, my lord. It is her father. He has died. I have never seen anyone take on so and yet she has not seen the old man for years. She did not sleep at night and she has not eaten all day. Now she is crying and it might be her firstborn child that she has lost. Do go up, my lord, and see if you can comfort her. She will do herself an injury.”

  “The Welsh are a very emotional people,” Lord Taaffe explained, but his own Irish tears were springing and his heart turned over. He knew a little how Lucy loved her father and he went up the remaining flight of stairs three at a time.

  For one mad moment Lucy thought it was Charles coming to her, but Charles who did all things with grace would have touched her with gentleness. Lord Taaffe’s large hands turned her over as though she were a sack of coal and sat her up on the bed with a bump. The shock checked the tearing sobbing that had gone on for so long and frightened Betje. He sat beside her with his arms about her and she leaned against him and began to cry more naturally. Presently she did not cry at all and in her exhaustion was conscious of very little except the strength of this man. To come from her grief to his arms was like coming in from a storm to the shelter of some fortress. Presently, when she was entirely quieted, he dropped her on her pillows and went to fetch some food for her. Betje, her timing in regard to food always reliable, was already half-way up the stairs with a bowl of gruel. He took it back to Lucy and fed her with the same practical ability with which he nourished ailing horses.