The Bird in the Tree

  “ ‘Human nature,’ he said to me, ‘is the most foolish and dastardly thing ever created by an otherwise intelligent creator. Give me birds,’ he said, ‘give me birds every time.’ At this I endeavoured to pull him up slightly, for his remark seemed to me to have about it a flavour of the blasphemous, but he refilled my slightly depleted glass and continued with his narration. ‘Human nature must always think the worst,’ he said. ‘My neighbours here have from the very day of my birth insisted upon thinking that I was the illegitimate son of Captain Christopher Martyn. In point of fact I am not his son at all, I am the perfectly legitimate child of Louis du Plessis-Pascau. But would my neighbours believe it? No. At last, partly in acquiescence to their insistence, partly because Captain Martyn had named me after my mother as the heir of Damerosehay, but chiefly because I was proud to bear his name, I changed my name to Martyn and referred to him always as my father.’

  “I expressed myself as astonished at my old friend’s remarks and begged to be told his correct history. The association of Captain Martyn and Aramante du Plessis-Pascau had, I knew, always been considered by the neighbourhood to be a most discreditable one and I told him I should be happy to have it proved otherwise. At this he handed me one of the very delicious Damerosehay apricots, and continued with his story.

  “ ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘was an English girl, an orphan, the niece of a doctor resident at Seacombe on the Estuary, in those days a very flourishing little seaport indeed. Her uncle had brought her up and she was therefore a resident of this district and remarkably devoted to it. At the age of sixteen she married, against her uncle’s wishes, Louis du Plessis-Pascau, the descendant of a French gentleman who had fled with his family to Seacombe at the time of the French Revolution, and with him she emigrated to Australia. Here she was exceedingly unhappy, for she was of the breed of those who sicken and droop away from the bit of earth where they have been born and bred. . . . Her soul, she said, was always in Hampshire. When she went away she left it behind her, but when she came back it flew to her breast like a homing bird, and then she was herself again. . . . Moreover her young husband was an improvident scamp and their poverty was soon very great. After only two years of married life he died, leaving her an expectant mother with hardly a penny in the world.’

  “I exclaimed in horror at such a calamity befalling the unfortunate young lady and he agreed that it had been indeed most deplorable, especially as she had been peculiarly friendless. ‘She had a very proud and independent disposition,’ he said, ‘she did not make friends easily and she would not ask help of the few acquaintances she had. What would have happened to her I do not know had she not met with Captain Martyn, whose Blue Bird sailed into the port of Sydney, where she was then living, just in the nick of time. Poor Captain Martyn was at that time smarting under a terrible indignity. His ship was an East Indiaman and in his previous voyage, his first as captain, his Blue Bird had been to the East Indies and back in record time. He was a young man and he thought he had deserved well of his company. Yet on returning to England he was commanded to convey, among other commodities, a cargo of donkeys from the Hard to Australia. I have been told that the embarkation of those donkeys caused such a day of riotous merriment as has not been known at the Hard before or since; but Captain Martyn himself was deeply wounded at what he considered an insult to his ship.

  “ ‘And so they met, this young man and woman, both labouring under a sense of injury, and found that they had besides much else in common. Both of them were orphans and both of them belonged to the same beloved patch of country. Aramante was a native of Seacombe and Captain Martyn of Fairhaven, where his uncle Richard Martyn, whose heir he was, had built for himself this fine house of Damerosehay. They made great friends, and Aramante confided in Christopher that she had an overwhelming longing to go home and bear her baby in Hampshire. They made great friends, I say, but with Christopher Martyn it was more than friendship; married man though he was he loved my mother as a man can love only once in a lifetime, that is to say with a devotion that every misfortune under the sun, even death itself, is powerless to quench.’

  “Here I thought it my duty to draw Jeremy’s attention to the fact that this devotion was most discreditable to Captain Martyn, considering that his affections should have been centred upon the lady with whom he was united in the connubial bond. But Jeremy, merely remarking that Captain Martyn’s wife was a faithless young creature incapable of retaining a good man’s affection, waved my remark aside as beside the point, noticed at last that my glass was again empty, refilled it and continued his tale.

  “ ‘Captain Martyn,’ he said, ‘realizing my mother’s poverty-stricken condition, offered to take her back to England on his ship as his guest. He was returning at once, bound for Seacombe with a cargo of grain and several passengers. He was very honest with her. He told her that he loved her but could not marry her. He told her that though there would be other passengers on board there was no woman among them. He told her exactly what the risks would be; possible risk to her life if her child should be born too soon with only the rough ship’s doctor to attend her; certain risk to her reputation. My mother accepted these risks. She was very strong and a good sailor, and she was never one to care what others said of her so long as she herself knew her innocence. My mother was a very brave as well as a very beautiful woman, very confident, self-reliant and determined. She accepted Captain Martyn’s offer. She was lodged in his own cabin, all the passengers’ cabins being already taken, together with the blue bird in its cage, while he slung a hammock with his first officer.

  “ ‘All went well until they were two days out from home, when they were caught in that famous but terrible storm. You have read about it and heard many a tale of it. Few ships survived it. My mother was a brave woman yet till the end of her life she could never speak of that storm without feeling again the fear and horror of it; the great green sliding hills of sea, the slow climb of the ship up their sides, the shuddering sickening fall into the valleys beyond, the scream of the wind, the gradual splintering and disintegration of the ship under the battering of the waves, the terrible fetid atmosphere below decks with every port closed; and my mother near her time and sorely afraid for the safety of her child. Several times, she said, during that terrible two days and a night, Christopher Martyn came down to see her where she lay in his cabin, terrified, his blue bird in its cage swinging from the ceiling, chirruping contentedly as though the wind rocked it in its native forest. The last time he came to her he held her hands for a moment and told her not to be afraid, she and her child were safe in his care and no harm should come to them. Although she knew that one man had little power against the elements yet, she said, she was comforted and strengthened. She did not see him again until they were wrecked upon the marshes. It was not until afterwards that she heard how as he went up on deck after his visit to her a wave had hurled him against the bulwark, injuring him severely. But he would not go below. He had himself lashed to the broken main-mast that he might hold his men together and direct their work upon the ship up till the last moment. He almost did that. It was not until a short half-hour before the end that a falling spar knocked him unconscious. You will say, perhaps, that it was a rather theatrical bit of bravado; yet I think it was typical of the man; he hated to submit to weakness, either moral or physical. Even on the day of his death he was to the best of his ability acting the part of a healthy man.’

  “I told my host that I thought the Captain had here got hold of truth. I reminded him that the ancient Greeks in their religious drama acted what they wished to happen, a good harvest, for instance, or protection from storm. The sincere acting of a desired event can sometimes actually create it.

  “ ‘Ah,’ said Jeremy. ‘If one has sufficient faith. That is mankind’s trouble; lack of faith. If we had faith as a grain of mustard seed there would be no limit to our power of creation. We could make of this world an earthly paradise.’

 
“He became a little absent-minded, thinking over past days, and I had to recall him to himself by saying how curious it was that Captain Martyn should have been wrecked so close to his uncle’s house of Damerosehay.

  “ ‘Most providential,’ said Jeremy. ‘My mother and Captain Martyn and the blue bird in its cage were carried here, and next day I was born, as my mother had wished, in her own beloved county of Hampshire. In this house I first saw the light, here have I lived and here, please God, I will die, and be buried in my garden where my birds will sing over me and the sunshine strike down through the good earth to warm my old bones. This spot of earth is to me as near Paradise as makes no difference.’

  “Again I had to recall him to the matter in hand but once I had done so he became very much in earnest, pushing his glass aside, though it was not yet empty, Jeremy being singularly unappreciative of his own good port, and leaning towards me over the table.

  “ ‘When my mother was up and about again,’ he said, ‘she made a decision which, some would say, ruined her whole life. That’s as may be. If life goes on beyond death then her decision must have greatly enriched that part of it which she lives now; if it doesn’t then she was of all women the most foolish. Christopher Martyn had been injured not only physically but mentally. The Martyns were a tragic family. The seeds of mental illness were in them. Christopher was a highly-strung man, far too highly-strung for a seaman. The whole stress and strain of the storm, as well as the blow on his head, brought to life in him those seeds which otherwise might have remained dormant. The old man, his uncle, summoned doctors from London and Christopher’s wife from Portsmouth. The doctors shook their heads gravely over his condition and his wife, after an afternoon spent in his company, went back to Portsmouth and most sensibly eloped with a healthy and wealthy young ensign in the Guards. My mother, then, calmly and quietly as was her wont, took a good look at the situation. Here in this house with her and her baby were an old man, frail and feeble, and a young one smitten with what promised to be incurable illness, and both of them devoid of helpful relations. Who was to look after them? Christopher Martyn, you understand, was suffering and melancholic, with a clouded mind, but he was in no sense a madman. There was no need for him to be, in the terrible phrase, ‘put away,’ if proper care could be given him. A mental asylum, even one provided for the well-to-do, was in those days a terrible place, regarded with shrinking horror by both the sick and the sane. My mother decided that her friend should not go there while the breath of life was in her. She believed that he had saved both herself and her child, and my mother was always very faithful in friendship and very aware of its obligations. She suggested to the old man that she should be nurse and housekeeper to them both, an offer that he gratefully accepted. You will realize the greatness of my mother’s sacrifice when you remember that she was a young and beautiful woman and that at this time she did not love Christopher Martyn; she was merely doing what she thought to be her duty.’

  “ ‘It was unfortunate for my mother that the old man only lived a year after she made her home at Damerosehay. To a certain extent his presence had protected her from gossip; at his death it broke loose in a venomous flood. She could have lived it down, of course, if she had yielded to the entreaties of her own relatives and left Christopher Martyn after his uncle’s death. But this she would not do. While he lived, she said, she would not leave him, and people might think what they would; she cared nothing for what they thought. She was arrogant about it, proud and high-handed. She antagonized the few friends and relatives who still believed in her, and they too left her. What the loneliness of her life must have been, shut up in this house with a sick man and a little child, and she young and high-spirited and beautiful, it is difficult to conceive.’

  “ ‘Christopher Martyn lived for twenty years, suffering in mind and body to an extent which one does not like to think of, his life only made endurable by his great love for my mother and for Damerosehay, and by his skill with brush and pencil. He would spend hours over his drawings, and very terrifying I thought most of them were, though full of mystical feeling, yet he got great comfort out of them in his ceaseless childlike grieving over his lost ship and the blue bird that had escaped from its cage in the confusion of the tragic arrival at Damerosehay. He must have been a fine artist and craftsman in his younger days. . . . That clock which you see there he designed himself when he was staying at the Hard while the Blue Bird was a-building. I am leaving it to my gardener Obadiah, who dotes upon it. . . . I was very fond of Christopher Martyn. I could not have been fonder had he actually been, as gossip declared him to be, my father. No amount of illness, mental or physical, can ever really obscure a great and gentle spirit. As for my mother, her feeling for him grew with the years from friendship to a love as great as his for her. It was, I think, perpetually nourished by her service to him. When he died then for her the light passed from this world.’

  “ ‘Yet she rejoiced in his freedom and she did not weep. We buried him at sea, as he had desired, and on the evening of his burial we saw a bright blue bird winging its way up into the golden sunset sky. It tossed in delight, as a lark does, and sang and sang and sang. Several times since, though you do not believe me, I have seen that bird.’

  “ ‘My mother lived for another twenty-five years, and she seldom left Damerosehay. Though she was still a comparatively young woman when Captain Martyn died yet she had spent her strength for him and centred her life upon him for so long that she could not now break away into independent living of her own. She was most truly, to use an old-fashioned word, his relict. Now that she had not got him to wait upon she gave her whole time and attention to his home. The beautifying of Damerosehay was her great absorption. The carving that had been saved from the Blue Bird had been put together as an overmantel for the parlour under the guidance of Captain Martyn himself, but there were many other things that she did to make the house more lovely. Among other additions she made a little chapel which I think she thought of as a monument to Christopher, because it grieved her that his burial at sea had left her with no grave to tend; when she herself came to die she told me to put upon her headstone the texts she would have liked to have put upon his. She took great pleasure in the designing of the windows for the chapel; Saint Christopher carrying the child to safety across the wild waters, as once the Blue Bird had carried me, and that other picture of the glorious freedom from death and suffering which she believed would one day be gained not by men and women only but by the whole natural world as well. “A melodious noise of birds among the branches, a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts.” And she planted fruit trees in the garden, and many shrubs and bushes that would increase the joy of the wild birds whose sanctuary it was, and she repaired the crumbling garden walls and set in them those wrought-iron gates that you admire so much. Sometimes, in my comings and goings, I protested at such expenditure for an unknown posterity, for I was unmarried and who would eventually inherit the place I could not conceive. But she said she knew that she and Christopher would have successors at Damerosehay, men and women and children who would love the place as they had done, finding in it the same sanctuary from sorrow and drawing from it the same strength to endure. For them, she said, she laboured. Well, I think she was wrong there. I have been improvident. In my desire to make of Damerosehay a place from which succour flows out to a suffering world I have given away far too much money, and now the place falls to rack and ruin about me. I am an old man, and near my death, with a childless cousin for my nearest relative. Damerosehay, too, is surely near its end.’

  “He at last drained his glass and was silent. Outside the uncurtained windows the long June evening was still luminous, for Jeremy dines early. We heard the swans passing overhead and somewhere in the garden there was a blackbird singing. I thanked my old friend for his story. I was, I said, glad to hear the truth of these things, and happy to know them so creditable to all concerned. Then seeing him disinclined for further c
ompany I bade him good night and went home.”

  — 3 —

  Finding the right entry and deciphering the delicate pointed handwriting had taken a long time. Two o’clock chimed from the clock on the mantelpiece when David at last put down the old parson’s diaries. The fire was just a few pale feathers of ashes and the lamp was dim. David lay back in Lucilla’s chair, his hands behind his head, and looked up at the darkness of the carved overmantel. The Bastard was still at his feet, still holding him down in his place, his soft snores the only sound in the room.

  So now all that he would ever know of his predecessors at Damerosehay was known to him. Christopher Martyn. Aramante du Plessis-Pascau. Jeremy Martyn. His grandmother Lucilla Eliot. They seemed to him closely linked to each other and all four of them so close to him that he could have put out his hand and touched them. There are relationships of place as well as of blood, and it was Damerosehay that linked those four together. Each owner of it was in a sense the child of the previous owner because he or she had lived in and loved this place. And, as Lucilla had said, children are the children of the mind and soul as well as of the body. There was a relationship between Lucilla in her life of service to her children and her grandchildren that reached back through old Jeremy with his generosity to Aramante and Christopher in their heroism. Their actions had bred in them a certain attitude of mind that linked them together far more closely than any tie of blood could have done. But what of David Eliot whom Lucilla had so hoped would follow her at Damerosehay? He felt himself their child, their direct descendant, yet his honesty of mind drove him to ask himself what right he had to claim that relationship. Would he, in their place, have acted as they had done? Was he capable of their sacrifices? What sacrifices had he ever made? He knew quite well that in giving up Damerosehay for Nadine, a sacrifice on which he had rather prided himself, he was not suffering one quarter as much as he would suffer if he gave up Nadine for Damerosehay. He suddenly knew, too, now that he had read those diaries, that Lucilla’s conception of truth was a truer one than his with which he had justified his decision to marry Nadine. Lucilla’s idea of truth as a creative thing had been Christopher Martyn’s when with a shattered body lashed to the mast he had created for the encouragement of his men the illusion that he still was what he should have been, a captain in competent charge of his ship; it had been Aramante’s when in her service to Christopher she had acted a devotion she had not at first felt. It would be his and Nadine’s if they hid their love for each other from all knowledge but their own and acted in the world’s sight the parts of dutiful aunt and nephew. And then, searing him, came Hilary’s scorn. What of faithfulness to promises, without which the future must be chaos, Hilary had said; and what of the children? Lucilla had kept her promises, she had considered the children; Aramante had considered even children of the future at Damerosehay of whose existence she could have no certain knowledge. Children are the future and always, it seemed, those whose kinship he desired worked for the future rather than for the passing satisfaction of the present. Evidently they believed in it. They believed it could be worked for and created. They pushed their belief in it on and on even beyond the confines of death and their sacrifices were the obvious result of their belief. They were foolish for this world but wise for the world to come. He envied them their faith. Was it possible, that it could be got the other way round, and that faith in immortality could follow upon sacrifices made for it?