The Sea Priestess

by Dion Fortune

  CHAPTER XXVI

  ROUND about eight Mrs Treth came into the room. I saw by her eyes she had been crying, but suspected nothing. She told me that Morgan wanted me to go home now, and that she would write to me. There was nothing else to do but go. Mrs Treth gave me my breakfast, and I got my car and drove off. I noticed that Morgan's little black sports car was not in the garage. Going round the hairpin bend one does not usually take one's eyes off the road, but I risked it, and looked up at the cave where I had kept vigil, and was startled to see that a mass of rock had fallen, leaving a white scar on the grey weathered surface; and I knew that Morgan had fired the shot and that the door of the cave of vigil was closed for ever. But still I suspected nothing. As I passed the farm Treth came out and insisted on shaking me solemnly by the hand. As it was only a few days from Christmas I thought he had his eye on a Christmas-box. Then I drove home. They were suprised to see me back so early, but very glad, as Scottie had gone down with the flu. I sat down at his desk to tackle the morning mail, and his secretary, with embarrassed apologies, laid a letter before me which had been opened by mistake, not being marked personal. It was from Morgan. "By the time you get this," she wrote, "I shall be gone. Never mind where. You will never see me again. You must make up your mind to that. I am sorry, for I am very fond of you. "The work I had to do has been done; and I would like you to know that it was by your help I did it. "I took a big risk with you, Wilfred, but if I have done my work rightly, you will not be broken. I have arranged for my star sapphires to be given as a wedding present to your bride when you marry. "All my property is now in a trust, of which you and Treth are the two trustees. You will find him very shrewd and absolutely trustworthy. At my death it is to be divided equally between you. Until such time as you can legally presume my death you are to pay over the income from my estate to my bank, keeping one tenth for yourselves. The farm I have made over to the Treths and the fort to the National Trust. All my manuscripts and books are yours by deed of gift, the manuscripts are in cases at the farm. "I have had a very perfect friendship with you, Wilfred, my friend; I have never known any man to give so unreservedly. The name of friend is not one I use lightly, but give it to you. "Myself I could not give to you, for it was not in my power. Remember old Atlantis and how they trained them there. "Good-bye till we meet again, which will not be on this side of the Gates of Death." It did not matter how much work there was to do at the office, I got out my car and drove straight back to the fort. Or rather I set out to drive straight back. I thought the sky looked a bit odd as I came out of the town, and as I crossed the bridge into the marshes a flurry of snow came up and caked on the wind-screen, and before I knew where I was I was butting into the teeth of a blizzard. I could hardly see the end of the radiator, and I was driving on a ten-foot dyke. However, there was a kind of grass kerb at either side, and when I felt my tyres scraping along it, I straightened her out. The Treths did not appear surprised to see me back. I wanted Treth to come straight out with me to the fort, and rated him like a pickpocket when he wouldn't, till Mrs Treth threw her apron over her head and came out to me in the snow and made me come into her kitchen and sit by the fire till I quieted down. They told me that it had been pretty nearly as much of a shock to them as it had to me. Morgan had always said that this was the way she would go when her rime came, but they had never suspected that her time was now till they arrived in the morning and found a note on the kitchen table. I asked Treth whether he thought she had gone in off the point or had shut herself up in the cave. He said he had no idea. I wanted him to climb up and see if the wire and battery were outside on the cliff path, but he said they wouldn't be; for if Morgan had fired the charge from inside, they would be inside with her, and if she had fired it from outside, she might have pulled the wire out of the debris and taken it away. So we should be none the wiser, and to climb down that path in this howling gale was to risk one's life. If Morgan were in that cave, she couldn't possibly be alive, and in any case, all her arrangements had been made most carefully so as to prevent any disturbance or inquiry over her passing, and he for his part meant to respect her wishes, and he hoped I would do the same. Then with a sudden start I remembered that Morgan's car was gone from the garage, and asked them if they had heard her go by in the night? But they said no, she had not gone by. The car had been removed some days before. She had done that, she said in her note, so that if any questions should be asked, they would be cleared. And she had left them a second note, to show in case anybody raised trouble for them, in which she said that she had made an early start, and all letters were to be sent to her London flat. I asked Treth when he had seen the car last, and he admitted that he had not seen it all that week, not having had any occasion to go to the garage. I asked him whether, as he slept at the back of the house, he could be sure of hearing Morgan if she had driven past with the engine off, letting the slope of the road take her; and whether he had examined the road for wheel-marks before the snow came? He shook his head. "She's dead to you, sir, anyway," said he. "Better leave it be." "How do you know?" said I. "Because it is what we have been expecting. It was what she always intended. Me and my missus was young when we came to her, and we have grown old, but she hasn't. She always told us she would go this way when the work was done that she had to do. Anyway, you had better leave it be, sir, for if she is alive, she would never forgive us for interfering." I wondered if she were lying injured in the cave, but he shook his head. "Nay," he said, "I set that shot for her, and I'm an old quarryman. She's not lying there injured. She's lying there buried. But to my mind it is more like she went in off the point, for she always had a feeling for the sea." "Or gave us all the slip and went off in her car," said I. "I'd leave it be if I was you, sir," said Treth. After a bit more persuasion I turned the car round and drove back to Dickford. If Morgan were alive and did not choose to have anything more to do with me, she was as good as dead to me. But somehow, I did not feel she was alive. I have always believed that she never returned when she walked out on to the point. But then, who fired the shot? And why the curious financial arrangements of the trust? Treth and I have never been called on to give an account of our stewardship, so whether Morgan died that night, or whether she still walks the ways of men in all her beauty and strange power makes no odds. I learnt a lot about death when I lost Morgan. It has always puzzled me why folk bother to prove survival; for if your loved ones cannot come to you, what good does it do you to know that they survive? For my part I would sooner understand the whence and whither of the soul in its aeonial evolution. "Behold, we arise with the dawn of time from the grey and misty sea, and with the dusk we sink in the western ocean. And the lives of a man are strung like pearls on the thread of his spirit." Those words of the Priest of the Moon kept recurring to my mind as I drove back across the marshes. The snow had let up for the moment, but looked like more to come, and a howling gale did its best to push me off the dyke. I have had some penitential drives in my time, but never such another as that, in the oncoming dusk and snow over those bleak saltings. I was too dazed to do any real thinking. I couldn't believe that Morgan was dead, and yet I was pretty sure she wasn't alive, and my brain was just going round inside my head, and how I ever got to my journey's end alive myself I do not know. I don't know how much of Morgan's letter Scottie's secretary had read before she discovered that it did not concern the firm, but she looked very surprised to see me back so soon. Then she brought me a large cup of strong tea, of which I was very glad. I also found she had tackled the correspondence on her own initiative, and had all the letters ready for me to sign, which was just as well, for signing them was about as much as I was capable of doing. It was an amazing thing to me that the asthma did not take me by the throat then and there, but I think it was just about as stunned as I was. They wouldn't let me see Scottie for fear of infection, but I gathered that he was pretty bad. Thank God all the quarterly accounting had been done the previous week, and we had a few days breathing-space over the holidays. On Ch
ristmas Eve I drove out to the farm to take the Troths a turkey. It was a pretty ghastly drive, and I wished I hadn't undertaken it, for all the time I kept on having to remind myself that I should not be going on to the fort and seeing Morgan. Ovid is quite right when he says that the only remedy for love is to clear out. But the turkey was a promise, and they would have been let down over their Christmas dinner if I had failed them. Treth came out to me when I pulled up at the farm, and asked me if I would run him out to the fort as there had bee. the devil's own blow and he was a bit uneasy as to how things might be out there; he knew as well as I did that the end wall wasn't all it might be after the last storm, and Morgan had refused to have any repairs done to it. Although he did not admit it, I could see that he funked going out there alone. I think the same thing was in both our minds as we drove up the familiar way. Was Morgan sleeping her last sleep in the cave, or had she walked out into the sea from the point? And if so, were the cod and the conger at work on her strange beauty or had she gone living to the sea-gods, as tradition averred the priestesses did? There were a lot of unsolved problems in this business that have always remained unsolved so far as I am concerned at any rate. Was Morgan a fraud all along, and had she slipped away in her car after misleading the Treths? And if so, what was her motive? Was she sincere but self-deluded, going to her death in all good faith? Or was she right in her faith and was her life-work crowned with success? I suppose one chooses one's explanation according to taste; and although one's theory may explain nothing about Morgan, it tells a good deal about oneself. As soon as we got round the hairpin bend we saw that all the cairns were down, and the pylon too. After all, they were held by nothing but their own weight, and it had been blowing a full gale out here. The fort looked all right from the landward side, but when we tried to open the big gates we could not manage it, so we knew that something must be down on the other side that was blocking them. Treth did a hair-raising fly-crawl round the end of the rocks, and presently I heard him shoving lumber about on the other side of the gate, and in a few minutes he got it open just wide enough for me to squeeze through sideways, and I saw what had happened. The end wall had come down as I had prophesied, its underpinning having been pulled out and never repaired, and the waves had made a clean sweep of everything. The courtyard was knee-deep in sea-wrack and fucus. Everything I had done in the way of ornamentation had gone as if it had never been, and the fort was practically as it was when I first saw it. I went into the big room to see what was left of my pictures, but the place was a wreck--all the plaster off the walls; the ceiling down; the windows out; all the furniture smashed to bits at the far end, and nothing intact save my two dolphins, still in situ in the fireplace, surveying the wreck quite unperturbed. Treth and I looked at each other, and without a word we went up to Morgan's bedroom, but as we opened the door we recoiled, for the floor had fallen in, and the end wall had fallen out, and blue water was under our feet. Treth waited in the courtyard while I went out on to the point. There was a pretty heavy sea hammering at it after the storm; the balustrading had gone, every scrap of it; just here and there was the socket of an upright to show that anything had ever been. I went out along the crest of the slabs, a precarious scramble without the balustrading, and got out on to the extreme end where the surf was roaring and crashing and frothing like suds all over the rocks. As my ears became accustomed to the din I could hear the high shrill crying of the gulls above it, and I remembered the old legend that the souls of the drowned mariners became sea-birds, and wondered whether Morgan was there, changed from woman to bird of the sea, but lost to me for ever. I thought of the poor moon-calf, sacrificed for the building of the temple, who had gone to his death with a smile on his face as a sacrifice should, and of the poor old father who had loved even that parody of humanity. Then I thought of Morgan as I had last seen her, disappearing into the glitter and the mist, and I spoke to the sea and told it that it could have me too if it wanted me. I waited a bit, but nothing happened, and I turned round and came back. Treth was gone from the courtyard, and I stood for a moment or two and looked round. The place felt as empty as an unused coffin. Then I knew that Morgan was gone from this world and that her experiment had succeeded. When I got back to the car I found Treth busy loading the dolphins into it. "I reckon her would have liked 'ee to have 'cm," he said. "They bain't no use to the Trust." We drove back in silence, neither offering any comment on what we had seen, but I think we both thought the same thing. In some curious way the trip to the fort had settled our minds. We had accepted the situation. We were no longer in the midst of it, but had begun to put it behind us. I presented the turkey to Mrs Treth, had a cup of tea with them, and started for home. And then as I went over the marshes in the winter dusk there came to me a vision sudden and blinding as the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus, and I saw the Priest of the Moon standing before me in the way. Too dazed to pull up, I drove right over the place where he had appeared. I was too shattered, too absorbed in my grief for Morgan, to wonder what his appearance meant. When I got back to Dickford the bells were ringing for the Christmas Eve service. We have very fine bells at the parish church, the only ones that beat them being those of the cathedral. I pulled up the car in a narrow lane behind the north porch and listened to the organ playing the Christmas hymns; and why I do not know, but my mind went back to the vigil in the cave when I had heard the calving cow out in the marshes and known that she was Hathor. And I thought of a curious little statuette I had seen of Isis suckling Horus; and that the Great Deep whence life arose is also called Marah, the Bitter One; and that Our Lady is called Stella Maris, Star of the Sea; and I remembered the saying of the Priest of the Moon that all the gods are one god, and all the goddesses one goddess, and wondered what it meant. This was the last I was to see for some time of the dark side of the moon. Everything relating to Morgan and the sea-magic closed down as if it had never been. Then I drove on, and seeing our office still lit up, turned in there, and found Scottie's secretary doing a final clear-up before the holidays; and remembering what a decent kid she had been all through the difficulties, I went off to the sweet-shop and got her a box of chocolates as a Christmas present. Exchanging the compliments of the season with the damsel behind the counter, who looked longingly at her bunch of mistletoe, the memory came into my mind of the synthetic charmer who had been the downfall of my old dominie and who had presided behind that very counter, and I wondered how well her peroxide charms had worn, and whether her lover had stuck to her, or, more problematical, whether she had stuck to him. Then I ran the car into the garage, and leaving the dolphins to their own devices overnight, for they were weighty, took my parcel back to the office, and made a solemn presentation to Scottie's blushing secretary, whose name I did not know. After that I went home and Sally put what was left of me to bed; next day, being a Christian family, we saluted the happy morn with the Hell and Hades of a row because I wouldn't get up and go to early service, my sister being quite determined that even if I didn't get up, I shouldn't sleep.