The Child From the Sea

  “He lodges just round the corner,” she told Lucy. “A very old gentleman, a little touched in the head but quite harmless, and the children love him. They go into his courtyard and he tells them stories. No, he is not a native of The Hague. He comes from Antwerp.”

  “Antwerp,” murmured Lucy, and remembered the little house. It was strange to think that she had once been happy. The days of dull despair in which she lived now seemed to have lasted for ever. Her heart ached for Jackie and her body ached as she drove it through the slow mechanical motions of each day. Her mind was dark, emptied of faith, and it was only when Anne or Mary was with her that she knew she was alive. She still knew that this was Anne whom she must love and her little daughter whom she must protect. The thought of Mary walking away hand in hand with a stranger frightened her, reminding her of Jackie walking away hand in hand with Thomas Ross. She had not seen Jackie again and she would not see Mary again if she did not go after her and fetch her back.

  When Anne had gone back to the kitchen she got up and went outside and began walking shakily in the direction taken by Mary and the man. She would have run if she could but she could no longer run. It was not far to the corner, and a few more steps brought her into the lane that turned uphill at right angles to the canal. A door in the wall was ajar, she pushed it and saw inside a small courtyard with a well and a fig tree, and sitting on the low parapet of the well was the man talking to a group of children, of whom Mary was one. She went in and he made room for her beside him but did not stop talking to the children. He did not look at her, he merely made room for her as though she was expected. His whole mind was concentrated on the children as he told them about King Solomon talking to the butterflies.

  Lucy sat with her hands folded in her lap and the shadows of the fig leaves flickered over her blue skirt as though wings moved. Butterflies. A boy and girl watched them in the churchyard at Broad Clyst, but the frail things hovered over a dark sea, a wave came up and they were drowned in darkness. She was too. It was dark as night. Then she was conscious of a silence that was filling with light and knew that the dawn of a new day was coming. Patches of blue showed through the leaves that filled the window and it was morning. The shadows of the fig leaves moved on her blue skirt and she knew where she was.

  The courtyard was empty now of all the children save Mary, who was playing with her dolls, deep in one of those mysterious dramas that lonely children play out with such absorption and delight. Her murmuring voice was just audible, but not always like itself, for though she was the sole actress she was playing different parts. It seemed to her mother that she moved in light, and that the courtyard was full of it. It came from someone beside her, Lucy thought, but when she turned her head there was no one there except the old man. He looked round and smiled and she had seen him before, in the kitchen at Roch in her dream.

  “It has taken me longer than usual to find you,” he said.

  “Have you found me before?” she asked in surprise. She was feeling strangely alive. The courtyard was full of life and she was breathing it in.

  “No, not you in what you feel to be your individual being. I go where I am needed but the many to whom I am sent have become one person to me, my Lord. He says go here and go there, and I go about the world and wait and watch, and he comes. Very often he wants so little, perhaps only a loaf of bread and a glass of wine and a few words clearly spoken. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

  “My maid told me you live in Antwerp.”

  “I have a small house there that a grateful patient left me. I was an apothecary once. I live there when I am not needed elsewhere, and when I am away those who need my house are brought to it. My Lord is very economical. Nothing goes to waste in his hands. People think me a crazy old man. Is that what you think?”

  “No,” said Lucy, “for I lived for a while in your house. At least I think so. Has it a map upon the parlour wall?”

  “Yes, a good map. I consult it before I go upon my journeys.”

  “There was no craziness in that house. Only sanity and peace. We behaved sanely there. We loved and understood each other. My brother asked me, if I ever met you, to thank you for that house.” So much life had come to her that she was talking as easily as though she were no longer a sick woman. “You came to me in a dream,” she told him. “How could you do that? For you are a man of flesh and blood, are you not?”

  He laughed. “Yes. My name is Jacob. But why should a man of flesh and blood not visit you in dream? In deep sleep mind touches mind. I have no recollection of you but we do not always remember what we do in sleep. Of what did we speak, you and I?”

  “Of forgiveness. You said that only in the flame had you forgiven your enemy.”

  “Now that is strange,” said Jacob. “Strange, for I have a memory of death at the stake. I remember how they piled the faggots round me, blocking out the sunlight, and how fear came with that loss of light; and I have never been a man to be afraid.”

  “So we come back?” asked Lucy. Though her hand was on the thread she wanted reassurance.

  “I think it probable. It is a matter of choice, perhaps, but a choice made often, for look at your little girl at her game. There are many heroes and heroines in a child’s private play but only the one player. They may know the way it is. I remember, I think, a life of pride and power that crumbled in the flame. Pride of the intellect, the power of wealth and station. Beyond the flames I was without them, almost a nothingness, since even the beliefs for which I died were proved wrong by the great simplicity I found there.”

  “Yet you died for them,” said Lucy.

  “Yes. Perhaps that is why they let me come back, a poor and simple man, my only gift a skill in tending suffering bodies, my only life my Lord, my only faith a belief in the necessity for love. And now, in what do I serve you? Take my hand and tell me, for you and I have only a short while together.”

  She took his hand and said, “I am in a daze of nothingness. I do not know where to go or what to do.”

  “Let Mary take you home now. In the morning I will come and talk with you and we will enquire of my Lord what it is that you should do.”

  He came the next morning, a weak old man who walked slowly, but once again he brought life with him and she found she had strength enough to talk to him. By telling her a little of himself the day before he had made it easy for her to tell him much of herself today, and she was astonished at the intimate things she told him. When she had finished he was silent for a time and she had the feeling that he had gone away and left her. But he was still beside her. He had travelled within himself, she realized, a journey of enquiry into the deeps. What image had he placed within himself? Perhaps none. Perhaps his prayer was imageless. Where he had gone was no golden hearted rose, only the silence.

  He came back to her and said she should go to Paris, and her whole soul rose up in passionate denial. “I cannot. Jackie is in Paris and I shall not be allowed to see him as soon as this.”

  “Certainly not. It would distress the child.”

  “But how can I live in Paris and not try to see him? I could not bear it.”

  “All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.”

  “I would never get there. I should die on the journey.”

  “If you fear you will die on the journey that you will surely do. The choice is yours.” He looked at her with very bright eyes and the room was full of laughter. “On a sea journey do you propose to die? A sea journey? What a waste.”

  She laughed and the sound of her laughter was strange to her; she had not heard it for so long. Then she asked, “But why must I go to Paris?”

  “To make amends.”

  “To whom?”

  “To someone whom you have wounded. Do you wish to die leaving a wound you could have healed still bleed
ing?”

  “I did not know I had wounded anyone,” murmured Lucy. “I did not know I could be so cruel.”

  “All hell is in each one of us,” Jacob told her gently.

  “Who is this person?” Lucy asked. “I cannot remember anyone in Paris to whom I have been cruel.”

  “I do not know who it is. It was not told me.”

  “Then I am going to Paris on a wild goose chase.”

  “People of the world frequently describe the ventures of faith in such terms,” the old man agreed.

  He got up to go and it seemed to Lucy that his going would be the worst thing that could happen. “Stay a little longer,” she implored him. But he smilingly shook his head. “I shall see you again?” she asked. He did not answer and she could not interpret the benediction of light that was upon his face. Then he was gone and she missed him so much that the next day she and Mary went round the corner to the fig tree courtyard to take him some of Anne’s little cakes in a basket. He was not there. The landlady said he had left The Hague for Antwerp early that morning.

  Eighteen

  1

  Lucy could give Anne no reasons for wanting to return to a city she had always hated, but Anne was sure it was to be near Jackie. She would not be allowed to see him and the nearness would only increase her grief. Poor Anne could see nothing but misery at the end of this journey but she could only do as she was told and pack the luggage. And once they were out at sea her spirits rose. Like Lucy she loved travel and unlike Lucy she also loved Paris.

  They arrived there in serene autumn weather and went straight to the house of some English exiles whom Lucy had known when she was at the Louvre, and were given two rooms on the top floor of their small crooked house. Mrs. Moore, aware of Lucy’s reputation, had been at first uncertain if she wanted them, for she was a respectable woman, but she and her husband were poor as well as respectable, and badly in debt, and Mrs. Barlow was able to pay well for her rooms.

  And so once more Lucy hung her mirror and her father’s miniature on the wall, and put the sea-shell that Justus had given her on the table beside her bed, and set to work to make home. How many homes had she made by this time, she wondered? She seemed to have lost count but she took infinite trouble over this one because she believed it was the last and she wanted Mary to remember it as a pretty home as well as a happy one. It was not difficult because the house was in a quiet street and lime trees grew beside the cobbled way. The windows looked out into the branches and they were bird-haunted and the leaves golden.

  There was a small church upon the other side of the street, old and dark, with a deep-toned bell. One went down three steps into it and it was like going down into a cave. An old priest said his mass there and a few people came at the summons of the bell, old and poor persons who wavered with weak footsteps, for this was not a fashionable part of Paris and the ancient church was not attractive to the younger folk.

  Lucy never went to mass for she knew Dr. Cosin would not approve, but whenever she felt strong enough she and Mary crossed the street and sat together at the back of the church. At first it seemed pitch-dark inside and then the few votive candles, lit by the poor, began to shine out and illumine the reds and blues and golds of the statues of the saints. They were crude statues but the darkness hid their crudeness while the candles illumined their gold. Mary was fascinated by this little church and Lucy loved it too. It was a holy place and held a silence so deep that when she shut her eyes she thought she was in one of the churches of Cantre’r Gwaelod, the lost land that had sunk below the sea off the coast of Pembrokeshire. Something remotely resembling happiness came to her in that church, and in the rooms that looked out into the gold leaves of the lime trees, a shadow of the happiness she had known in the house at Antwerp.

  The owner of that house was always in her thoughts and seemed to be the mediator of happiness, as he had been the mediator of that upsurge of life in her body that had enabled her to come here. Yet she came no nearer to meeting the person, man or woman, whom she had unknowingly wounded and whose hurt she had come to heal. She never crossed the street without looking about her, half expecting to see this person, but she could speak to no one of the purpose of her visit. Both Mrs. Moore and Anne would think her mind had been affected by her illness. Well, perhaps it had. Perhaps the old man’s mind had been affected by his great age. Perhaps he and she were both a little mad. If they were not she would meet the one she had hurt, if they were it was no matter. She had found a peaceful haven and she could hardly believe it was Paris that had given it to her, and she was not far from Jackie.

  Anne could not understand that she did not seem to be asking to visit Jackie, did not even seem to be fretting for him. She did not see Lucy crying at night because she longed for him so much, what she saw was the outer serenity of Lucy’s consummated acceptance of the fact that she would not see her son again. Physically he was so close that when a windless blue sky arched over Paris she could be sure it arched over Versailles too, and when the gold leaves of the lime trees floated past her window on a west wind she pictured other leaves floating down to small boys playing in a garden, and they caught them in their hands and laughed. Once Mary did the same thing. She put her hand out of the open window and caught a floating leaf. It was, she told her mother, a golden bird, and they laughed together.

  Lucy was very intent these days on making Mary laugh. Because the little girl was always so good and sensible, and not very pretty, she had been put in the shade by the beautiful tempestuous Jackie, and because she was also selfless she had not minded. Lucy woke up to the fact that her daughter had the serious demeanour of the mother of a family, and a power of accepting responsibility which no six-year-old should have been allowed to develop. She was horrified and the last of her strength was given to loving Mary, devising ways to make her laugh and making new clothes for her dollies. Her mind turned in upon Mary and she almost forgot the purpose for which she had come to Paris.

  The time came when she no longer went out. The stairs had defeated her and presently her only movement was from her bed to the sofa by the window. Anne sent for an apothecary who said she was in a decline and there was nothing he could do. A decline was a diagnosis that covered a multitude of diseases then unknown. That Lucy had fought off the inevitable end of pernicious anaemia for so long was either a miracle, or a fulfilling of equally unknown laws concerning the dominance of certain types of mind over certain types of bodies.

  One day when Mary was downstairs with Mrs. Moore Lucy told Anne that she was dying, a fact which Anne had realized long ago. In their different ways they were both matter-of-fact women and they set to work instantly to plan for Mary. “I do not want her to go to my Aunt Margaret,” said Lucy. “She would not be sufficiently loved and my aunt would not speak well of me to her. It does not matter, but I would like Mary to remember me with love.”

  “It matters very much,” said Anne, “and I have thought of this. I shall never leave Mary while I live but I cannot give her a home and so I shall take both of us to England and we shall live with your Aunt Anne. Mrs. Byshfield loves Mary and she likes me and she will be glad to have us, and Mr. Justus Walter will be near at hand. And when the King goes back to his own Lord Taaffe will go with him and then Mary will live with her father. I shall go with her, of course, as her maid, and when Mary marries I will be her housekeeper.”

  Lucy laughed and cried together. “You have it all arranged, Anne.”

  “It is always as well to be prepared for things in advance,” said Anne. What she did not say was that weeks ago she had written to Mrs. Byshfield, telling her that Lucy was ill, and had given her this address. Mrs. Byshfield, she had thought, should also be prepared in advance. Like Lucy she was torn between tears and laughter. There was grief because Lucy was leaving her, but joy that there was so much to do; for Lucy herself now and for her child later. She gave no sign of either. She was calmly and quietly competent. br />
  “There is nothing you want?” she asked Lucy. “No one you want to see?” Lucy smiled and shook her head. “Jackie I must not see. Justus I cannot see. I need only you and Mary.”

  But when Anne had left her she cried because she would not see Dr. Cosin again. Ever since she had come to Paris it had been an unceasing ache to think he was here, so near her, and she could not see him. She knew him well enough to know that he would come at once if she sent for him to help her in her dying; all the more readily because the sinner that he now would believe her to be would be in dire need of help. And that was where the difficulty lay. He would ask her of her sins and he would not be content to leave one stone unturned, and she could tell him nothing without betraying Anne. She knew that anything she told him would never be revealed, but he himself would know and it seemed a part of her love for Anne, and of her suffering accepted for Anne’s sake, a part also of her loathing of treachery, that she should never tell anyone what Anne had done to her. So she must die without seeing Dr. Cosin again, and he would, till his own death, think her a depraved woman. It was a hard thing for her to have to accept, even though she knew it did not matter. And she was of course a great sinner. Who was not? One knew it as one came near to death.

  2

  Mrs. Moore, though gossip was the dearest love of her heart after God and her husband, had at first told no one that the sick lodger in her house was Mrs. Barlow. Her fellow exiles of the devout sort would have been horrified that she had taken such a woman under her roof; they did not know how serious her debts were nor how generous the sum that Lucy paid for her rooms. But when she found that Lucy was dying the situation was changed. For one thing she was a good woman and her heart softened towards a young mother who must leave her child, and also she could now present herself to her friends as a woman of compassion, which indeed she was. Before and after the Sunday services at the Louvre female heads came together, gossip hummed and Mrs. Moore found herself on a pedestal. It had been a wonderful Christian act to open her home to the King’s discarded mistress and endeavour to bring her to repentance in her last hour. Someone, she never knew who, told Dr. Cosin what a wonderful woman she was.