Towers in the Mist

by Elizabeth Goudge

  But after a few days these transports died down and he became curiously aloof, even pathetic and bewildered, as though he had mislaid something and could not find it. His family was inclined to think that he grieved for his lost lamb Baa, but he said no, it wasn’t Baa who was lost; asked who it was he seemed unable to say. Joyeuce and Dorothy were constantly finding him hiding by himself behind the embroidered curtains of the big bed, or inside the cupboard where the raisins were kept, not eating the raisins or unpicking the embroidery but just hugging Tinker and doing nothing. . . . Tinker, too, seemed depressed. . . . His whiskers drooped and he let the mice accumulate about the place in a shocking manner.

  Now and then Diccon would come to Joyeuce to be cuddled but when enthroned upon her lap he seemed to find it curiously unsatisfactory. He would pound her with his fists, as though trying to make her a different shape, and when her figure remained hopelessly virginal he would give her up in despair and try Dorothy. . . . But she did not give satisfaction either. . . . “Too ’ard,” he would tell her, “too ’eavy,” and sliding down he would seize Tinker by the tail and trot mournfully off to the dark place under the stairs, where they would hear him sobbing.

  Yet it was quite impossible to offer comfort, for if anyone tried to remove them from their hiding place Diccon made rude noises in his throat and Tinker spat. There was nothing to be done except to mourn for the merry elf who had vanished in Saint Giles’ Fair and to try to coax this new sad little boy into some likeness of him.

  So it was no wonder that Joyeuce’s mood was autumnal and her chief happiness a looking back. The present, tarnished by the unappreciativeness of her family, was not hospitable to happy thoughts, and to a future shorn of Nicolas it was better to pay no attention.

  For to think of a time when there would be no Nicolas just across the way was to invite despair. She saw little of him now, but still, he was there. She often saw him jauntily crossing the quadrangle to the Cathedral, and sometimes at night, when the children were asleep, she would creep out of bed and peep through her curtains at the light in his window and picture him poring studiously over some great learned book, becoming with every moment wiser and wiser, far too wise for an ignorant girl like herself. . . . If Nicolas, noisily playing club kayles with some boon companions, could have seen her kneeling on the floor in her white frilly night rail, her pale gold hair silvered by the moonlight and all other expression burned out of her face by a white-hot flame of longing, he would have lingered in his room for only as long as it took to pitch the boon companions into one corner of the room and the club-kayles ninepins into the other. . . . In the twink­ling of an eye he would have been under her window, his hands creeping up the wall again, his love for her as hot as it had been on that memorable midsummer eve.

  2.

  But he could not see and it was upon a very lonely Joyeuce that the blow fell in the dark days of December. It had rained all through November, a steady drenching that seemed to go on day and night, that turned the lazy river into a turbulent flood and filled all the little streams in the valley to overflowing. The citizens of Oxford grew anxious, for the beautiful waterway that was their chief pride and glory could be at times their greatest enemy. . . . For after the river had been in flood, disease always fell upon the city. . . . When a pause came in the downpour, they would put their cloaks about them and steal out of the city gates and look apprehensively at the gray water pouring under the bridges, and at night they would lie awake listening to the patter of the rain on their windowpanes and the drip and gurgle of it in the gutters. And at last the dreaded moment came. During a black night of rain the river overflowed its banks and slid over the green meadows to join the streams beneath the willow trees. When dawn broke, a fine dawn of frail sunlight and blue mist, the towers and spires of the city were reflected in a silver sheet of water and the swans flew low to watch the lovely ghosts of themselves that fled beneath them over the flooded meadows. . . . A lovely sight, but most ominous. . . . In less than a week the low-lying houses had flood water in their kitchens and even the cloisters of Magdalen were swamped. And then, after a week of sunshine, the river drew back its waters, leaving behind a legacy of mud, damp and disease.

  Diggory brought them the bad news when they were at breakfast. “The sweating sickness has broken out,” he said, “down in the houses outside South Gate.” He spoke nonchalantly but as he set down a jug of milk his hand shook so that it was spilled upon the table. Joyeuce, Grace and Canon Leigh went white as their ruffs, and Great-Aunt, munching minced beef at the open window above their heads, dropped her knife with a crash upon the floor. Only the children, who could not remember the last terrible outbreak of sickness, ate on in comparative unconcern, though the eyes of the twins were rounder than usual as they looked at each other, and they squeaked into their mugs of milk with a rather apprehensive note.

  But Joyeuce remembered that last outbreak. She remembered how hundreds of people had sickened in one night, and how hundreds had died. She remembered the deserted streets and the silent houses where the curtains were all drawn as though the houses had shut their eyes for sorrow. She remembered the tolling of the bells, and the sickening sound of cart wheels clattering over the cobbles in the early morning, and the cry that accompanied it, “Bring out your dead.”

  For herself Joyeuce had no dread of death, for she was one of those anxious pilgrims who look towards it as to a resting place where there is no more need for endurance, but she had a morbid horror of it as of a robber who might take from her those whom she loved, leaving her alone in a world where no sun shone. . . . It had already taken her mother. . . . In an agony her thoughts flew to Diccon, and then to Nicolas. Diccon, busily shoving bread and milk into his red mouth, with the morning sun bringing out the ruddy lights in his dark curls, looked a far too brightly burning creature to be easily quenched, but she had not got Nicolas before her to console her with the sight of his lustiness, and she thought with foreboding of that evening in the Tavern garden when she had thought how easily the pulse of his life could be stopped, by a slip on the stairs, a flash of lightning, or the thrust of an angry sword. . . . But she had not thought of sickness.

  For days she kept an anxious eye on Diccon, and peeped with a beating heart through the windows to catch a glimpse of Nicolas’s figure hurrying, late as usual, to lectures or Chapel. She watched her father, too, and felt the forehead of Grace and the children fourteen times a day if once, and she concocted a huge brew of her famous century and wormwood medicine and forced it down the throats of her unwilling family at the rising and the setting of the sun. And she was rewarded, for they remained in the rudest health, and the sweating sickness, so Diggory told her, was not spreading. It would, the citizens thought, be only a slight visitation this time.

  She was feeling almost lighthearted when she came in one evening from a shopping expedition, just at dusk, to stow away some velvet she had bought in the oak chest in the parlor where they kept their needlework. The children had gone out with Mistress Flowerdew, their mother’s friend, and she would have a quiet time all to herself in which to sit and sew and dream before the fire.

  She pushed open the door with a sigh of relief, already savoring her hour of peace. The log fire was flickering softly, its golden reflection bright on the paneled wood of the walls, but the corners of the room were full of shadows and the blue dusk that hung outside the window gave no light.

  So she did not see the dark figure sitting in the big chair by the fire, and when a voice said softly, “Joyeuce,” she started and her heart began thumping against her stitchets so that she put up her hand to still it.

  “Nicolas?” she whispered.

  “It’s Giles,” he said.

  Joyeuce slipped off her cloak and came over to the fire, standing before it with slender hands outspread to the blaze, and looked down in astonishment at the comely figure of her eldest brother. . . . For he came to see them so seldom now. . . . They ha
d been great friends, he and she, when they were younger, and in bad times she had leaned her whole weight upon him, but now they had grown apart. With the world at his feet, and his brilliant brain as a sword in his hand to subdue it, his home had faded into insignificance and Joyeuce’s problems, that had once been his too, had been forgotten. Joyeuce had borne no malice. It was natural that at the outset a man’s work should absorb him to the exclusion of all else, for without the strength of single-mindedness how can he find a footing in the battle of livelihood, and the battle is to the strong. Moreover she had discovered that in the long run we bear our own burdens. Others, as they pass us, can put a hand beneath them for a moment only, but they do not stop for long, and at the turn of the road the whole weight is back on our shoulders again. Giles had once helped to bear the weight of the family pack but it was her burden, not his, and she had not reproached him when he slithered thankfully from beneath its weight. . . . Though she had missed his help.

  He watched the firelight painting mid-winter roses on the green dress she wore, and looked appreciatively at her tall slender figure, robbed of all angularity by the kindly dusk, at her pale pointed face under the honey-colored hair and the slim hands that looked almost transparent as she held them before the fire.

  “You are so pretty, Joyeuce,” he said softly. “You are so like Mother.”

  There was a hungry note in his voice that took her back instantly to the old days of their grief, and one hand went up to her throat as though it were choking her again.

  “If only I could be,” she cried, stricken by her own sense of inade­quacy, and then, aware of some crying need in him, “Are you wanting Mother very badly, Giles?”

  Giles did not answer, for the weakness of human longing was a thing he was too proud to own to, but he moved his hands a little restlessly on the arms of the big chair.

  Joyeuce slipped down to sit on the floor at his feet, her arm across his knees. Words never came to her easily. It was only by movement and gesture that she could comfort. But she was half-afraid that Giles might repulse her, for he did not always like demonstrations of affection, and her arm on his knees trembled a little.

  “Silly Puss!” said Giles, going back to the name he had called her by in their childhood, and he stroked her cheek softly with a clumsy forefinger. “Do you remember the day we dressed up as demons, with horns and tails, and frightened Dorothy into screaming hysterics?”

  Joyeuce began to laugh and a lovely happiness seemed wrapping itself warmly about her. She forgot she was the overburdened mistress of a household and was suddenly a child. The lovely security of childhood was hers again, and the brave certainty of happiness that had been hers in the days before sorrow or pain had touched her. She talked and laughed and told old tales with a gaiety that surprised her even while she was possessed by it, and Giles with a word here and there, a touch on her cheek, and sudden flashes of memory that were almost inspiration, seemed leading her further and further back into the far country where they had once lived as children but had forgotten. “News of a far country,” Nicolas had said, as they gazed at the fairy ring traced on the grass on Midsummer Eve, “and we cannot read it.” But it seemed that Giles tonight could read it and without words could communicate what he had read to Joyeuce, for both of them, for half an hour, knew perfect happiness.

  The banging of the front door seemed for a moment something that suddenly shut them out into darkness. Joyeuce started and scrambled to her feet again. The room was almost dark and Giles’s face was blurred and dim. “Time to get supper,” she said. “Come and help me, Giles.”

  Giles shifted in his chair and she held out her hands to help him to his feet. “Lazybones!” she laughed.

  And then her laughter died, for Giles’s arms lay heavy on hers and when she had pulled him to his feet, he swayed. “Are you all right, Giles?” she asked sharply.

  “A headache,” mumbled Giles. “It went while you were talking. It’s back again now.”

  In a sudden panic she flung her arms tightly round him, hiding her face against his shoulder, trying to recapture for a moment the happiness that had passed. But the door opened and the light that her father carried seemed a message from the outer world that made her lift her head and open her eyes, turning towards him. She saw him raise his light high, looking at her with amused tenderness, and then his eyes shifted to Giles’s face, bent above hers, and she saw him go white to the lips with terror just as Giles’s figure sagged suddenly in her arms.

  3.

  Somehow they had not expected this, though, as Great-Aunt repeatedly remarked to all who would listen, from the days of Pharaoh onward it has always been the eldest son, the best-beloved, whom the plague strikes. But Giles had always seemed so princely, so arrogant, so vital, that it had been impossible to think that death could touch him. Only Faithful, shaking his great head, was not surprised. . . . He had always said that Giles worked much too hard.

  The same evening that Giles had been taken ill Faithful came quietly in through the front door and announced that he had come to stop, and from that moment he and Grace took over the entire management of the distracted household. Grace cooked, washed, ironed and organized with the quiet efficiency of genius, and Faithful ran errands and minded the children with such utter self-effacement that it never even occurred to anybody, not even to himself, that he was heartbroken.

  Joyeuce and Canon Leigh hardly ever left the boys’ room, where Giles lay in the four-poster with the crimson curtains, Will and Thomas having been banished to their father’s room. They and Dorothy fought on hour after hour for Giles’s life, frenziedly carrying out the instructions of a physician who had been full of foreboding from the first. “No stamina,” he kept complaining, “no stamina at all.” How they hated that physician as he stood there in his fine furred gown, stroking his long smooth beard and sniffing at an orange stuck full of cloves that he might not catch the infection. What was the use of his being a physician if he could not heal Giles? They saw him go with hatred, and yet they counted the hours till he should come again, for surely, surely he must be able to do something? But he, it seemed, with all his knowledge and skill, was as powerless as they were, and hour after hour the agony of their helplessness bit more deeply. Of what use to love, demanded Joyeuce of her tortured self, when one can give to the beloved neither relief from pain nor salvation from death, when one can do nothing but add to the weight of his suffering by the sight of one’s own. The awful loneliness of pain terrified her. Though she was as physically near to Giles as she had been in the little parlor yet spiritually she seemed a hundred miles away from him. Because he was sick and she was well there seemed a great gulf between them. They looked at each other helplessly across it, he crying out for help and she longing to give it, but they could not now reach each other.

  Giles died on a night of glittering starlight, a strangely warm and balmy night for December, with a soft wind blowing from the southwest and a placid bright-faced moon hanging low over the Cathedral spire. Joyeuce and her father, one on each side of the unconscious Giles, needed no light except the moonlight and starlight that flooded in through the uncurtained window. There was no sound in the night but the voice of Great Tom as he tolled the hour—nine—ten—eleven.

  Joyeuce sat in a high-backed chair, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on her father where he knelt praying on the further side of the bed. Earlier in the night she had been kneeling, too, until suddenly her knees had doubled up beneath her and her father had come round and lifted her into the chair. She leaned back in it now, her body too exhausted to move but her mind intensely and horribly active, and tried to keep her eyes fixed on her father’s face, its stern peacefulness the only thing in the room that she could bear to look at. Sometimes, against her will, her eyes shifted a little to the left and she saw that horrible tapestry of Absalom in the oak tree and seemed to hear a voice crying out in her father’s tones, “My son, my son! W
ould God I had died for thee, my son, my son!” And then she would know what he was feeling behind that mask of resignation and would grip her hands together that she too might not cry out. And sometimes she would look at Giles, lying with a set face that still seemed to hold something of the rebellion that had been his while he was still conscious. For Giles had not wanted to die. He had not been afraid but he had been furious. His hot, angry eyes, seeking for the rescue that no one brought him, would, Joyeuce thought, haunt her until she died. Remembering them, she could not now look at Giles for more than a moment; her glance always sped back to her father’s face and clung there, her immature faith sheltering desperately beneath his that was so strong. Sometimes, feeling her eyes upon him, her father would look up and smile at her, and repeat words for her comfort, words that seemed to her to come from a long way off and to mean nothing at all, even though she tried obediently to listen to them. “In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die,” he would say, “and their departure is taken for misery, and their going forth from us utter destruction: but they are in peace.” And then, trying to comfort himself and Joyeuce because Giles was dying so young, with all his glorious promise unfulfilled in this world, he would murmur, “For honorable age is not that which standeth in length of time, not that is measured by number of years. But wisdom is the gray hair unto men, and an unspotted life is old age. He pleased God and was beloved of Him: so that living among sinners he was translated. Yea, speedily was he taken away, lest that wickedness should alter his understanding, or deceit beguile his soul. He being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time. For his soul pleased the Lord, therefore hasted He to take him away from among the wicked.”