And now he stood at the kitchen window calmly and quietly, as though nothing had happened, while upstairs over his head Rachell’s footsteps went backwards and forwards. She was up there by herself laying out the body. He shivered a little. He hated to think of her performing that terrible task alone. But she would do it. She would not allow anyone else to help her. He understood how she felt. She was filled, as he was, by a passion of regret and remorse. This man had saved them and had wanted to be one with them and they, who owed everything to him, had not wanted him.
There was silence upstairs. He could imagine Ranulph lying in their four-poster beneath the picture of the Last Judgment with Rachell kneeling praying by his side and just for a moment, in spite of his grief, he wondered just how much these two had meant to each other. . . . Then, as he heard Rachell coming downstairs, he put the thought from him with shame. She came in and putting her arm through his looked with him at the scene outside. “How lovely,” she said, “and all ours for ever. . . . And your real life beginning at last. . . . And the children. . . . We’ll never know how much he did for them. . . . And then we didn’t want him here.”
“Thank God he didn’t know that,” said André.
“Of course he knew it,” said Rachell, “he knew everything. That’s what made him a little uncanny. I think it was because he always saw through us all that we didn’t really want him as one of the family. Families, however many friends they have, want their own inner privacy, don’t they? Just like individuals. Even a beloved outsider in their sanctuary seems to violate it. Father and mother and children. A fourth upsets the balance of the trinity, disturbs relationships. . . . Ranulph nearly upset yours and mine. . . . Families must work out their own salvation. We’ll work out ours.”
But André was not to be comforted. “The salvation that he brought to us,” he said.
“And to himself,” said Rachell. “Was there ever such a rank individualist as that man when he came to us? Yet in less than a year he had no thought but the salvation of a family and he died saving a child. . . . It was the Island did it.”
“The Island?” asked André.
Rachell slipped her arm round his neck. “You can’t be an individualist on our Island,” she said, “there’s so much magic packed into so small a space. With the sea flung round us and holding us so tightly we are all thrown into each other’s arms—souls and seasons and birds and flowers, and running water. People understand unity who live on an Island. And peace. Unity is such peace. Ranulph found peace on the Island I think.”
So she talked on and André was at last comforted. They sat together on the “jonquière” and watched the sun mount higher and higher until the patter of feet took them out to the courtyard. The children were returning laden with flowers. Bluebells and ladies-smocks and ragged robins and buttercups were cascading from their arms. Colette was almost staggering under her load.
“I thought they’d better all do something,” said Peronelle the practical, “so I offered twelve doubles out of the housekeeping money for the best bunch of flowers. . . . Colette’s won.”
Colette held up her great bunch towards the sky, offering it apparently to the sunshine, or to the unseen spirit of the place.
“Why!” said Peronelle suddenly, “we’d all forgotten—it’s Easter Day!”
Elizabeth Goudge, Island Magic
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