Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  His dressing finished, he examined himself critically in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

  “Oh, my!” said a sarcastic voice from the window, where Old Nick hung in his cage.

  “Hold your tongue, you old scoundrel!” ejaculated William, and flung his discarded nightshirt over the top of the cage. From beneath its folds Old Nick continued to squawk derisively. He was just the same. He had not changed at all.

  The same could not be said of William, who at fifty-three, with his great girth and stooping shoulders, looked a good deal older than his actual age. Yet he was still an attractive-looking man with his fresh-colored genial face, kind blue eyes, and handsome grey Dundreary whiskers, that made some amends with their luxuriance for his now completely bald head. They might live in the wilds, but with the help of the fashion plates that still came to her from London, Marianne kept them all looking as up-to-date as she could. It was she who had insisted on the Dundreary whiskers, and the loose tweed coat and flat cap with a turned-tip brim that seemed to William, as he surveyed himself, to look slightly ridiculous above his farmer’s corduroys. But his loose blue tie was all right, because Véronique had knitted it for him, and everything Véronique did was always perfection in his eyes. He knotted it with great care, breathing heavily, so absorbed that he did not hear the door open, did not know she was there until she slipped her arms round his neck from behind.

  “Papa! Papa!” she cried excitedly.

  He swung round. “Why, you little monkey, I was going to wake you with a cup of tea.”

  “The cock woke me. ‘The cock that is the trumpet to the morn.’ We’ll make a cup of tea for Nat instead. Hurry up, Papa! Light the fire while I lay the table.”

  She was skimming about the kitchen, laying the table for breakfast, filling the kettle and putting it on the hob, shaking up the cushions on the settle and putting the room to rights with a hundred little deft touches. They had two maids, the daughters of Murray, one of their shepherds, but they lived up the valley and did not come until later in the morning, and Véronique did the before-breakfast work so that Marianne could lie longer in bed; Marianne was always very tired these days. Véronique did not fall much behind her mother in capability; but as she was unaware of her efficiency, it did not irritate.

  Her father, laying the fire with clumsiness and inattention, watched her out of the corner of his eye. She was grown up now, intellectually mature but emotionally rather undeveloped for her age, like all only children. She was tall and slim, in appearance almost ridiculously like Marguerite at her age, except that she retained that look of fragility that had worried William so much when she was a child. It worried him less now, for she had not had one single serious illness throughout the seventeen years of her life; he found more reason for anxiety in that look of unearthliness that was her distinguishing characteristic. He did not know quite what it was that gave her this nymphlike air, whether it was her swift movements, the almost luminous pallor of her skin, or the silvery fairness of her hair, but anyway it was there; something that his love must reckon with at the turning point of life. She belonged in those dream countries where they had wandered in her childhood, and in this exquisite upland valley where they lived now, but he knew instinctively that all would not be well with her in another place, and it was because of this knowledge that he was fighting now tooth and nail, as he had never fought before, to prevent Marianne from inaugurating a complete upheaval in their whole way of life.

  As he laid the fire, William groaned and sighed over his wife’s insatiable, restless ambition. They had, now, all that she had longed for when ten years ago they had set out almost penniless on the long journey from Nelson to this place. She had wanted to own land, flocks of sheep, a fine farmhouse, wealth; and she had all these things; only to find them apparently not as satisfactory as she had expected.

  For she was very busy nowadays pointing out to him without cessation, and with perfect truth, that the wool trade was not quite what it had been, and that they would be wise to sell their land and farm and engage in some more profitable trade before there was any serious fall in the price of wool. To this William replied steadily that fluctuations in the price of wool were only what was to be expected, that things were bound to look up again, that they had capital behind them and could weather a few lean years with ease. Marianne would respond by painting glowing pictures of all that they could do with their capital in another way of life. In the darkness of their fourposter at night she would whisper the two magic words “gold” and “steam,” and he would know that her eyes were sparkling with excitement. Gold had been discovered in New Zealand now, as well as in Australia, in the mountains of Central Otago and on the west coast. She did not need to tell him, she would whisper in the darkness, what that meant in terms of prosperity to a man possessed of push and initiative. “I’ve neither,” William would growl, aware even while he growled that that was of no consequence to a man whose wife had both. “I’ve nothing in common with most of these gold diggers,” he would go on. “Greedy upstarts. Not like the good old pioneering stock. I hate ’em.”

  But it was no good to run down gold, for Marianne only produced steam. The country was being opened up now not only by roads but by railways, and a group of Dunedin merchants had lately formed the Union Steamship Company to cater for the coastal and intercolonial trade. There was even talk of laying a deep-sea cable to Australia, connecting them with the cable service to Europe and America. Of the two, Marianne was perhaps more attracted to steam than to gold. It had always thrilled her, just as it had always repelled William. They sometimes argued about it, as they had done in the old days on the Island, by the hour together. But the present-day arguments were not so enjoyable as the old ones had been. William saw steam as a threat to Véronique’s happiness and hated it more than ever, and Marianne was embittered by his stick-in-the-mud attitude to modern discovery. With all these exciting new ventures crying out for development, how could William, how could any man, choose to stay incarcerated in a lonely valley at the back of beyond and keep sheep? Oh, if she were only a man!

  At this point William would break in upon her reverie to ask what could be given them by greater wealth that they had not got already?

  Then she would tell him. . . . A town house in one of the fashionable South Island ports, a carriage and pair, dinner parties, card parties, and balls.

  “For Véronique,” she would say. “She is beautiful and should marry well. She must be given her chance.”

  “She’s young yet,” William always temporized. “Wait a little. She’s not very strong.”

  “She’s perfectly strong,” Marianne would reply. “Has she ever ailed at all?”

  “No,” William would agree. “Never. But I do not want her to marry just yet.”

  “You’re jealous,” Marianne would flash out when especially goaded. “You want to keep her for yourself.”

  “No,” William would reply with a huge patience. “I want only her happiness.”

  But last night, for the first time, his patience had given out, and he had flashed back at her, “You know, my girl, you want that town house not for Véronique but for yourself.”

  Marianne had not lost her temper at what she considered the rank injustice of this remark, she had relapsed into one of her hurt silences, and then into sleep, while William had lain awake for hours and cursed himself for wounding her so deeply.

  He sighed again, fumbling with the tinderbox and pondering the problem of his wife’s temperament. Poor girl, it seemed unfair that she should fight so hard for what she wanted and then when she had won the fight it was not she who enjoyed the spoils but himself and Véronique. It was they who loved this place, not she. It was most damnably unfair.

  William was a just man and gave the credit of his success where it belonged, to Marianne. It was true he had worked hard, deucedly hard, but it had been under her orders and inspired by her creative en
ergy, and with one eye somewhat uneasily closed to her business methods. For they had not attained to their present prosperity by overscrupulousness. When it had been possible for Marianne to grab she had grabbed, and what she had once grabbed she did not let go. Since their adventures at the pa, and the parting from Tai Haruru, she had been a gentler woman, but she had not become a less acquisitive one. He tried not to think that her acquisitiveness had become a little vulgar during these last ten years, and it never even occurred to him to wonder if the loss of Tai Haruru’s influence had anything to do with that. He had never realized that Marianne’s attitude toward his friend had undergone a change. For she never spoke of Tai Haruru, even as he never spoke of Marguerite.

  2

  The kindling of the fire upon his hearth warmed the cockles of William’s heart and he sat back, hands on knees, smiling at the flames. The house at the settlement, built for Marguerite and never fulfilling its purpose, he had never cared for, but this house, made for Véronique and enshrining her, he most intensely loved. It was a good home, however it had been come by, and now that distance lent enchantment to the view, he could smile at the way it had been come by. That Israelitish journey in the wagon piled high with luggage, Old Nick in his cage swearing on the summit! Lord, what a nightmare! It had been the distance they had had to travel that had made it so appalling, for compared with the journey from the pa it had been quite a civilized progression. South Island, undisturbed by native troubles, had at that date developed far ahead of North Island. The discovery of gold in Australia had set the first struggling colonists well upon their feet. The thousands of Australian gold seekers had had to be fed, and the New Zealand farmers had reaped a rich harvest by sending over wheat, potatoes, livestock and other farm products. There had been good roads and prosperous farms along the way where now and then they could get a good rest and sleep upon a feather bed instead of in the open. They had made friends at these farms with whom they could have thrown in their lot had they wished, but Marianne’s ambition had been set upon the even better prospects of the sheep runs farther south, and she had made up her mind to satisfy it or perish in the attempt. So they had gone on and on, traversing at last nearly the whole length of the island. It had seemed an endless journey. He and Nat had been hard put to it to endure sometimes, and it had been a marvel to him that Marianne had weathered it at all without collapse. Yet she had neither collapsed nor complained.

  If arduous, the journey had been beautiful, and Véronique, too young at that time to be incommoded by the bumping of the wagon that shook her parents and Nat nearly to pieces, remembered it even now with ecstasy. They had seen the blue rivers and blond grass of the great plains, and later the lagoons he had promised her she should see had been upon the one side of them while upon the other the ramparts of the mountains had risen up to touch the sky. And later still they had turned up into the foothills and there had been flowers in the grass and birds singing, just as he had promised her. Where was the farmhouse in the valley ringed round with mountains? she had begun to ask at this point. And William had broken out into a cold sweat, cursing the accurate memory of childhood. If that upland valley that he had described to her were not to be found, if the dream were not to become fact, he would be for ever discredited in the eyes of his one and only love.

  They had found it. Because the search had been conditioned by the dream, they had found it. It had been because of the dream that, one hot afternoon, he had resolutely led the wagon up into the foothills when Marianne had been for keeping on through the plain. It had been because of the dream that when they had come at sunset to a parting of the ways with upon one side a decent road winding pleasantly away through gentle woods, and on ahead a steep, forbidding rocky ravine, with a mere travesty of a cart track leading apparently abruptly up into nowhere, he had chosen the cart track. “No, William!” Marianne had protested. “For goodness sake, William! Night’s coming on, and along that decent road we might find bed and lodging, but up here—William, turn round at once! William, do as I tell you! William!”

  But where Véronique’s happiness was concerned, William could be obstinate as the devil. Gently encouraging the straining horses, he and Nat had led them on and up, the wagon bumping wildly over the boulders in the track, oblivious of Marianne’s furious protests and Old Nick’s squawks, hearing only Véronique’s peals of happy laughter at each fresh bump and lurch. Ahead of them, at the top of the gorge, an archway of rock had framed a dazzle of sunset sky bright with promise.

  But when they had passed through the archway, Marianne’s protests had changed to exclamations of astonished wonder, and Véronique’s joyful squeaks had died away altogether into the silence of sheer, round-eyed ecstasy. The upland valley had looked so exquisitely beautiful at that evening hour, a green cup brimming with golden light, and so safe in its setting of opal-colored mountains. There had been nothing forbidding about these hills. Their lower slopes had been gentle, clothed with short, sweet turf where a few sheep had been feeding, luxuriant ferns marking the courses of the streams, and at this hour even the ravines and precipices above, mounting up and up toward the snows, had lost their fierceness and taken to themselves the color of dreams. Quite close to them they had seen a tumble-down wooden house surrounded by farm buildings, with a tangled garden sloping to a stream and a fair prospect to the south, while to the north a group of Lombardy poplars, planted perhaps by the man who had built the house, for trees were not indigenous to this country, gave protection from cold winds. There had been no sign of life about the house, and nothing to be heard except the tinkle of sheep bells and the voice of a hidden waterfall. The weary horses had dropped their heads to crop the green grass, and the two men, the woman, and the child had looked round upon each other and smiled.

  But William and Marianne had not smiled for long. Leaving Nat with Véronique in the wagon, they had gone forward on foot to prospect. The tangled garden had looked enchanting from a distance, but on a close view they had found it choked with weeds, and they had reached the door of the tumble-down house only circuitously, because of the manure heap that had blocked the way. Their knock on the door had produced no answer, and William’s heart had begun to fail him. Not so Marianne’s. Though she had protested so fiercely at the appalling cart track up which William had bumped the wagon, yet at sight of the valley she had immediately changed her mind. . . . Never in all her life had she set eyes upon such perfect grazing country. A sheep farmer possessed of a clever wife could scarcely fail to make his fortune in this place. . . . Pushing William aside, she had lifted the latch of the door and flung it open, revealing a dirty, disordered kitchen and a big man with a matted black beard lying unconscious in the middle of the floor in a pool of blood. With an exclamation of horror William had stretched out a hand to pull Marianne back. But she had already stepped over the sill and gone in.

  “Only drunk,” she had said coolly. “He hit his head against that table as he fell.” And then, standing in the center of the disordered kitchen, looking distastefully down at the man lying at her feet, she had slowly and deliberately removed her bonnet. “Come along, William,” she had said. “We must get him to bed before Véronique sees him.”

  The next year had been a period of existence to which nowadays William’s thoughts returned reluctantly, but to which he suspected that Marianne’s flew back with self-congratulatory pleasure, so resoundingly successful had been the labors undertaken by that incomparable woman from the moment when she had taken her bonnet off in Alec Magee’s kitchen to the moment, twelve months later, when she had outraged Victorian convention by giving herself the satisfaction of attending his funeral.

  He had not been a bad man, merely a weak one disintegrated by loneliness, and by the fear of the death that was even then throwing its shadow over him. From the moment when he had regained consciousness in his attic bedroom, to find himself being expertly cared for by Marianne’s capability and William’s pitiful kindness, he had been like a ch
ild in their hands. He had been able to do what he had been longing to do ever since he had known that he was a dying man—let go. He wanted only kindness and care, and that they had given him. For the rest they had been able to do what they liked—with his house, his farm, his land, his sheep, his shepherds, and the little bit of money hoarded in an old calico bag under the mattress of his bed.

  And Marianne had done it with an efficiency and speed that had surpassed anything that even she had accomplished before. With Nat’s help she had got the house to rights in less than a week, and in less than a fortnight she had goaded William into establishing similar order on the farm. In three weeks she had put the fear of God into the shepherds to such an extent that they had not dared to presume on either her ignorance or William’s; and at the end of a month they could not have done so even had they dared, for she had known almost as much about their trade as they did.

  Magee’s farm was not the only one in the valley. There were a few others, widely scattered, and at the far end of the valley there was even a little village, with a church, a store, and a schoolhouse where Véronique had gone to school. The other farmers were for the most part Scotch gentlefolk, and their gently nurtured children had been just the companions she had needed. While she had been still a little girl Nat or William had driven her to school every day in the farm gig, but as she grew older she had trotted thither on her pony, fearless and happy. There had never been anything in the valley to make her afraid, and from the very first moment that she had entered it she had never known fear. Even during the first year, while Alec Magee still lived, she had not been afraid, for he had loved her and always been gentle with her, and when the time had come for him to die, she had been sent to stay with the schoolmaster and his wife, that fine and upright couple Andrew and Janet Ogilvie, whose eldest child John was her greatest friend. And they, too, had loved her, and she had loved them with an unswerving devotion that had grown with her growth and was at the present time causing poor Marianne pangs of most painful jealousy. . . . She could not bear those Ogilvies.