The Child From the Sea

  When she opened her eyes again she found herself looking at the tumbled ruin of the hearth, and the question she had not dared ask of anyone was answered. The heron was gone. Though she felt a pang of sorrow it passed quickly. The scent of the rosemary, the stormcock and the flaming sky had given her a new awareness. She could not put it into words, no one could, she could only say to herself that scent and music and light, intangible things, were symbols of spirit, and while the symbol of the world still circled round the symbolic sun, like the spirit of a man about the glory of his God, they were indestructible.

  She did not today go up to the dais to face what had once been the nursery and the bower and the great bedchamber, instead she went down the stone stairs to the great kitchen. It was hardly changed for it was so deep in the earth that neither guns nor fire had touched it. Grey ashes lay on the hearth and there was wood piled beside it. There were still a few pewter plates on the dresser, a dish of withered apples on the oak table and a couple of buckets beside the well. She sat on the floor beside the buckets, as she had done so often as a child, and for a long time looked down into the darkness of the water. As she watched, the rising sun sent an arrow of light through the slit of an eastern window and it fell into the depths of the water. The dark face, receiving the arrow, quivered very slightly, or seemed to do so, as a very sensitive human face will do when the heart of the man has to receive a hurt. For it was living water and somewhere down in the rock received its life from the depths. Here were the roots of being, the stone, the water and the fire.

  For there was now a fire on the hearth. It did not surprise her when she turned her head to see a glow of flame, or to see an old man bending over the fire that he had lit, feeding it with fir-cones from a basket, and dry bits of lichened stick. It would not have surprised her if he had turned out to be John Shepherd, so much was John in her thoughts in this place. But he was Old Parson. He looked back over his shoulder and smiled at her and she got up and went to kneel beside him and help him. Kneeling like a couple of children, feeding the fire, the barrier that had been between them since she had come back suddenly vanished.

  He had been a little afraid of her until now, unable to find the child he had loved in this tall maiden. And she had been awed by the change in him, by the deep lines scored in his face and by the frailty of his body. But chiefly she had been awed by a deeper change. He was happy, she realized, but it was a happiness remote from any she knew herself. Perhaps if she were to sin in a manner that seemed to her unforgivable, and yet were to find herself forgiven, and suffer in a manner that seemed unbearable and yet find herself surviving, she would know this sort of happiness. Like the living water it welled from unknown depths. But his fear and her awe vanished now. He had once been as young and ignorant as she was, she would one day know what he now knew, and his past and her future somehow came together in this timeless old kitchen. They sat before the fire and laughed together at the flowerlike prettiness of the burning cones.

  “I come here every day that I can,” Old Parson told her. “Not in the snow because of my rheumatism, and not when the dogs of storm are out for I cannot stand against the wind, but the other days. And whenever I come I light the fire to keep the castle warm for you.”

  “And I have not come until today,” said Lucy. “Why did you not tell me you were keeping it warm for me?”

  “You were not ready to come until today. I knew you would come when you were ready. Get up, child, I have something to show you.”

  It was the first time he had called her child since she had come back and in her relief she put her arms round his neck and hugged him as she had done so often in the old days. “Your face has the same feel to it,” he said with equal relief. “I always liked the feel of your face.”

  Would any man, even Charles, ever say anything nicer to her, she wondered, as she helped him to his feet. She doubted it.

  “I have something to show you,” he repeated, and he took her hand and led her to the little room with the spiral stone staircase where John Shepherd had lain after he had died, and that dreadful day when the sin-eater had taken the burden of another man’s sins on himself came back from the past and was once more a present anguish, so that pulling at Old Parson’s sleeve she asked urgently, “Is it true that one man can take upon himself the sin of another? Can he save him that way? Is it really true?”

  Old Parson did not know what scene she was remembering so vividly in this place but her question was one he was now able to answer. “Yes,” he said slowly. “If the sinner will accept salvation, it is true.”

  “How do you know?” asked Lucy.

  “I was told so,” said Old Parson.

  “Who told you?”

  “My friend who died. I did not hear him speak, since he is dead, but just as I woke one morning he told me without the use of words. He was well able to use such speech for on earth he had been dumb for years.” Lucy looked at Old Parson, astonished not only by the strangeness of what he said but also by the serene and confident way in which he said it. At the mill at Christmas he had still seemed the muddled old thing that he had always been, but now it seemed that a measure of mental clarity had come to him, if only fitfully.

  “Waking dreams can be true, Lucy,” he went on. “You can know when they are true by the joy they bring. That is the hall mark. Joy.”

  But Lucy’s mind had jumped back to a word that he had used. “Dumb?” she said. “Your friend was dumb?”

  “For a long while I believed that I had cut out his tongue myself,” said Old Parson. “But I could never remember how it was that I did it. Or whether perhaps I had not done it with my own hands but had been the cause of its being done. Sometimes I would remember one dreadful thing and sometimes another but I could never fit them together to tell me how it happened. I ran away, you know, but it did me no good because the sin came too, fastened to my heels like a shadow, and a man cannot get rid of his shadow. It would crawl up my back sometimes, I would feel it crawling and go cold, and then it would fall over my face and all the world would go black. But it would not show its face to me, and so I thought I could not be forgiven. And then the man at St. Davids said I could and I believed him. But I did not know why. And then my friend died and told me why. The man who is the cause of the suffering can be saved by the man who bears it, he told me, if the tortured man for love’s sake takes the sin upon himself together with the pain. That’s the way it is, he told me. It is quite simple, if the sinner for love’s sake will accept his salvation.”

  “How do the dead speak?” asked Lucy. “What voice do they have?”

  Old Parson pondered this. “I think their voice is the utterance of what they are,” he said at last. “They may say nothing. They may merely forgive. But if it is knowledge you need then what they know can touch your mind like fingers on a keyboard. Then your mind may perhaps give you words and a voice, but perhaps not. It is no matter if you have the knowledge.” He had stumbled in his speech as though still unaccustomed to his new clarity, though with conviction, but now his mood suddenly changed. “Look, Lucy. There is the thing I wanted to show you. Look.”

  Lucy had been so intent on what he had been saying that she had not looked about her, but now her eyes followed his and there on the sixth step of the spiral staircase, just before it curved out of sight, like a statue in a niche, was the stone heron. She gasped and her face was as radiant as though she looked into heaven. Old Parson, watching her, smiled. He had waited long for this moment and it was not disappointing him. No one who prepared a surprise for Lucy would ever be disappointed by her reaction, for if her power of appraising the material value of a gift was nil her power of looking through it to the heart of the giver was great. For her all the symbols were translucent. She gave Old Parson a quick joyous hug but words were for the moment beyond her. Then she went to the foot of the steps and stood looking at the heron.

  He was not what he had been for
the tip of his beak had broken off and his wings were chipped. Yet it seemed to Lucy fitting. The castle was not what it had been, and nor were any of them, and here their spirit was bound to be broken too. But his long neck was as proudly curved as ever and his expression as tolerant. He had seen much. He would see more. What he thought of it all he did not say, but if his beak was closed so were his wings and he would not desert them. Lucy gently stroked the curve of his silent beak, but she did not go too near the broken tip. As a small girl, when William had lifted her up to stroke the heron, she had always had a feeling that he might mistake her finger for a fish.

  “You have brought me right home,” she said to Old Parson. “I might never have been away.”

  3

  Later, after she had left the old man at the mill and was climbing down through the wood beside Brandy Brook, Lucy remembered what he had said about the speech of the dead. “What they know can touch your mind like light fingers on a keyboard. Then your mind may perhaps give you words and a voice, but perhaps not. It is no matter if you have the knowledge.”

  That was what had happened to her in the church at Broad Clyst. So Old Sage was dead too. He had spoken of peace. What had he said? “All true glory, while it remains true, holds it. It is the maintaining of truth that is so hard.” It was strange that Old Parson’s friend as well as hers should have been dumb.

  The fishermen’s hamlet curved like a horseshoe about the rocks and pebbles of Brandy Bay, the curve of the horseshoe broken at its apex by a rough stone bridge beneath which the brook foamed steeply down to the beach. People did not come here to spend a pleasant afternoon. Those who had made it their home liked it, but those who did not live here and had not been accepted by the tough spirit of the place were frightened by it. There was hardly any sand and the shelving beach was bony and inhospitable, the fishing boats lying upon it like stranded whales. Rough flights of stone steps led up from the beach to the rocks where the stone-walled cottages had been built. They were roofed with stone tiles, for no thatch would have stayed on when the gales came from the west, and their windows were tiny in the thickness of the walls. They had no gardens to speak of, though a few tamarisk trees and fuchsia bushes grew here and there, but behind them the stunted trees of the wood’s ending rose steeply, and hidden in the wood in springtime were primroses and violets.

  So steep was this wood that Lucy, climbing down beside the brook through the thinning trees, had the smoke from the cottage chimneys rising up into her face. She ran across the bridge and came to the door of their cottage. How quickly human beings can make a home, she thought. All they need is a roof of their own over their heads, preferably sound though that is not essential, a fire of their own to sit by and a family of their own to love. She and William and Dewi were a family and they lived and loved in this cottage with no prying eyes upon them. Broad Clyst had never felt like home to Lucy. The castle had been home and now this.

  She went inside and closed the door and the room seemed for a moment almost dark. Then as her eyes grew accustomed to the dim glow of the firelight, and the sea light that came through the two small windows, she saw again the small oak settle, the table and stools and her few pots and pans and dishes. Friends and neighbours had given them these things and they were precious as gold and silver. There were no rooms upstairs, only a loft in the roof, but two little rooms opened out of the living room. William had one and she and Dewi had the other. She peeped into both rooms and saw unmade beds and disorder that was incredible when one considered how few possessions William and Dewi had to be disorderly with. She smiled tolerantly, for she had not been there to wake them up this morning and they had had to rekindle the turf fire, get their breakfast and go to their work, William to his land and Dewi to his lessons with Parson Peregrine, with no help from her. But they had not forgotten her for a pail of water stood by the fire and the bara ceich and the jug of buttermilk had been left ready for her on the table.

  She had her breakfast and then went singing about her work, sweeping the floors, washing the dishes, making the beds and preparing a rabbit stew for dinner. By the time the stew was on it was so warm that she could open the door and sit there with her darning as though it were April, calling out greetings to the other women who came to their doors to knock the dust out of their brooms, or spread their washing to dry on the tamarisk tree and fuchsia bushes. She greeted the men too, coming in from a night’s fishing or sitting in the lee of upturned boats mending their nets, and they wished her good-day with smiling respect. They liked her. She was the girl from the castle yet she had been able to make herself one of them without condescension. It had not been difficult for she loved people so much that her pride of birth, which she had in full measure, was never a personal pride. She could have as easily fallen in love with one of the young fishermen as with Charles, and whatever trouble it might have brought her she would have been as loyal to one as the other.

  A familiar little cry came from a tamarisk tree that grew near the door. It was the cock chaffinch, mistaking the warmth of the day for spring and mating time. Long ago Nan-Nan had taught her the words of his song. “Sweet, sweet! O bring my pretty love to meet me here!” he sang. “Meet me here!” She bent her head over her darning and began to cry. Mostly it was only at night that she cried, her face buried in the pillow so that she should not wake Dewi, but the chaffinch had too suddenly assaulted her control. She wanted Charles so appallingly. She had made the discovery that to lose one’s heart suddenly and entirely, and then to have what should have been an unfolding and progression of love suddenly cut short, was a sort of death. But Charles was alive, the sort of death was not real death. What if it had been? There would have been no happy moments and she could not have endured to sit and listen to the cock chaffinch, not even with tears. There was far more command than entreaty in the way he sang and he was so sure of being obeyed that she began to smile.

  The singing ceased and she could distinctly hear some young creature bounding down through the wood. For a mad moment she wondered if it was Charles, but he would not have been so sure-footed, and would not have known the airy leap that could bring a headlong runner from the wood path to the bridge as though he flew. She heard the soft thud of arrival, and there was Dewi, home from his lessons with Parson Peregrine an hour too soon. “Where is our father?” he demanded.

  “They are harrowing the mill field. No! Stop! Tell me first why you have run away from Parson Peregrine.”

  “I have not run away,” said Dewi indignantly. “He kicked me out.”

  “ What for? Did he cane you first?”

  “No, you horrid girl,” said Dewi with fury. Lucy, now that she was the mistress of the household, was tending towards authoritative airs, not permissible in a mere sister, and he was in no mood to put up with them. “I am going to my father. It is men’s business. You would be scared.” And he leaped around with the swiftness of a puppy pouncing on its tail and would have gone but for Lucy’s hand suddenly twisting in the slack of his doublet. If he could be quick so could she. With a wrist of iron she spun him round to face her, pressed tight against her knees with her hands linked behind his back.

  “You will tell me what has happened, Dewi Walter, or I will pull your hair out.” The tears of the lovelorn maid had evaporated from her hot angry cheeks and in her burning curiosity she had for the moment forgotten that Charles existed. “Scared? When have you known me to be scared? What has happened?”

  Having succeeded in making her angry Dewi’s own rage vanished and he began to tease instead, leaning back against the grip of her hands, his dimples showing and his head on one side. In this mood he could be maddening.

  “The post came. We heard him down by the bridge and he cantered all the way up the hill. When Parson Peregrine had read the letter he kicked me out and went to the church to get a musket.”

  “You lie, Dewi!” said Lucy. “There are no firearms in the vestry now. They were taken out when
the castle was garrisoned.”

  “Parson Peregrine hid one or two,” said Dewi. “He told me so. For now.”

  “For now?” gasped Lucy. “Dewi, what was in the letter?”

  “I am telling my father,” said Dewi. In her anxiety she had relaxed her hold and with a sudden twist he escaped from her and ran off across the bridge. Quick as lightning she ran after him, but in the scramble up through the wood her skirts impeded her and she did not catch up with him until he reached the road and the bridge above. They ran across the bridge to where the mill field rose up steeply from the St. Davids road. Here William and the old horse were toiling up and down with the harrow, preparing for the spring sowing. “Father! Sir!” yelled Dewi.

  “What now?” demanded William, but he went on to the top of the slope and turned the horse before he stopped, for just now the harrowing of this field was more important to him than anything else upon earth. His children panted up to him.

  “Parson Peregrine has had another letter,” gasped Dewi. “He is to be evicted if he does not change his ways.”

  “God-a-mercy!” ejaculated William. “Llewellyn!” An old man popped up from behind the hedge and William commanded him to take over the horse and harrow and made off down the hill. “If you are going to the parsonage I am coming too,” called Lucy as she and Dewi ran after him.