Penelope Brandling Part 3

"Perhaps they have returned already," he answered. "I hope so," and with the excuse of some notes to put in order in his study, he bid me good-night and hoped I should go to bed soon.

But shall I be able to sleep on such a night!

_April_ 21st.

I understand now. But, Good G.o.d, what new and frightful mysteries and doubts!

It was late when I went to bed last night; and, against all expectation, I fell into a heavy sleep. I was awakened out of dreams of shipwreck by a great light in my eyes. The moon had risen, almost full, and dispelled the clouds. And the storm was over. Indeed, I think it was the stillness, after so many days of raging noise, which had wakened me as much as the moonlight. I was alone; for Eustace, these weeks past, has slept in the closet next door, as he reads deep into the night and says my condition requires unbroken rest. It was so beautiful and peaceful, I seemed drawn into the light. I rose and stood in the big uncurtained window, which, with its black mullions casting their shadows on the floor, looked more than ever like a great gla.s.s cage. It was so lovely and mild that I threw back a lattice and looked out: the salt smell and the sea breeze left by the storm rushed up and met me. Beyond the trees the moonlight was striking upon the white of the breakers, for though the gale was over the sea was still pounding furiously upon the reefs.

My eyes had sought at first the moon, the moonlit offing; to my amazement, they fell the next instant on a great ship quite close to sh.o.r.e. She seemed in rapid movement, pitching and rolling with all her might; but after a moment I noticed that she did not move forward, but remained stationary above the same tree tops. She seemed enchanted, or rather she looked like some captive creature struggling desperately to get free. I was too much taken up by the strangeness of the sight to reflect that no sane crew would have anch.o.r.ed in such a spot, and no anchorage have held in the turmoil of such a sea. Moreover, I knew too little of such matters to guess that the ship must have run upon one of the reefs, and that every breaker must lift her up to crash and shiver herself upon its sawlike edge; indeed I had no notion of any danger; and when I saw lights on the ship, and others moving against her hull, my only thought was that I was watching the smugglers at their work. As I did so, a sudden doubt, of which I felt ashamed, leaped into my mind; and, feeling indignant with myself the while, I crept to the door of the dressing-room. Was Eustace there? I noiselessly turned the handle and pushed open the door. I cannot say what were my feelings, whether most of shame or of a kind of terror when, by the light of a lamp, I saw my husband kneeling by the side of his camp bed, with his head buried in the pillow, like a man in agony. He was completely dressed. On hearing the door open he started to his feet and cried in a terrible voice "What do you want with me?"

I was overwhelmed with shame at my evil thoughts.

"O Eustace," I answered foolishly, and without thinking of the bearing of my words, "the ship! I only wanted to call you to look at the ship."

He paid no attention to my presence.

"The ship! The ship!" he cries--"is she gone?" and rushes to the window.

The ship, sure enough, was gone. Where she had been her three great masts still projected from the water. Slowly they disappeared, and another sharp black point, which must have been her bowsprit as she heeled over, rose and sank in its turn.

How long we stood, Eustace and I, silently watching, I cannot tell.

"There were lights alongside," I exclaimed, "the uncles' boats must have been there. There has been time to save the crew. O Eustace, let us run down and help!"

But Eustace held me very tight. "Do not be a fool, Penelope. You will catch your death of cold and endanger the child. The people of the ship are saved or drowned by this time."

_June_ 12, 1773.

But a few months ago I wrote in this diary that no child of mine should ever be born into slavery and dishonour. Alas, poor foolish Penelope!

What ill-omened words were those! And yet I cannot believe that G.o.d would have visited their presumptuousness upon me with such horrid irony. May G.o.d, who knows all things, must know that those words were even more justified than I dreamed of at the time: the slavery and dishonour surpa.s.sing my most evil apprehensions. Indeed, may it not be that in taking away our child while yet unborn He did so in His mercy to it and to its wretched parents? Surely. And if my husband surprised me, some months back, by his indifference in the face of what we were about to gain, 'tis he, perhaps, who is surprised in his turn at the strange resignation with which I take my loss. For indeed, I am resigned, am acquiescent, and, below the regrets which come shuddering across me, I feel a marvellous peacefulness in the depths of my being. No! no child should ever be born in such a house, into such a life as this....

I am still shattered in body (I understand that for days recovery was given up as hopeless), and my mind seems misty, and like what a ghost's might be, after so many hours of unconsciousness, and of what, had it endured, would have been called death. But little by little shreds of recollection are coming back to me, and I will write them down. Some strangely sweet ones. The sense, even as life was slipping away, that all Eustace's love and tenderness had returned; that it was he (for no physician could be got, or was allowed, in this dreadful place) he himself who wrestled for me with death, and brought me back to life.

Moments return to my memory of surpa.s.sing, unspeakable sweetness, which penetrated through all pain: being lifted in his arms, handled like a child; seeing his eyes, which seemed to hold and surround me like his arms; and hearing his words as when he thanked G.o.d, over and over again, and almost like one demented, for having caused him to study medicine. I felt I was re-entering life upon the strong, full tide of incomparable love.

Let me not seem ungrateful, for I am not. Most strangely there has mingled in this great flood of life-giving tenderness the sense also of the affection of poor Mrs. Davies. I call her _poor_, because there is, I know not why, something oddly pathetic in her sudden devotion to me.

When I met her wild eyes grown quite tender and heard her crooning exclamations in her unintelligible language, I had, even in the midst of my own weakness, the sort of half pitying grat.i.tude which we feel for the love of an animal, of something strong and naturally savage, grown very gentle towards one.

_July_ 5, 1773.

Is that hideous thing true? Did it ever happen? Or is some shred of nightmare returning ever and again out of the black depths of my sickness? It comes and goes, and every time new doubts--hope it may be a dream, fear it may be reality--come with it.

It was three days after the shipwreck; the weather had calmed, and for the first time I ventured abroad into the park. That much and a little more is real, and bears in my mind the indescribable quality of certainty. I had wandered down the glen and through the churchyard, and I remember pausing before the great stone cross, covered with curious basket work patterns, and wondering whether when it was made--a thousand years ago--women about to be mothers had felt as great perplexity and loneliness as I, and at the same time, as great joy. I crossed the piece of boggy meadow, vivid green in the fitful sunshine, and climbed upon the sea-wall and sat down. I was tired; and the solitude, the sunshine, the faint silken rustle of the sea on the reefs, the salt smell--all filled me with a languid happiness quite unspeakable. All this I know, I am certain of, as the scratching of my pen; in fact, those moments on the sea-wall are, in a manner, the latest thing of which I have vivid certainty; all that came later--my illness, the news of my miscarriage, my recovery, and even this present moment, seeming comparatively unreal.

I do not know how long I may have sat there. I was listening to the sea, to the wind in my hair, and watching the foam running in little feathery b.a.l.l.s along the sand, when I heard voices, and saw three men wading among the rocks a little way off, as if in search of something. My eyes followed them lazily, and then I saw close under me, what I had taken at first for a heap of seaweed and sea refuse cast upon the sand, but which, as my eyes fixed it, became--or methought it became--something hideous and terrible; so that for very horror I could not shriek. And then, while my eyes were fixed on it, methought (for as I write it seems a dream) the three men waded over in its direction, and one silently pointed it out to the other. They came round, one turned a moment, and instead of a human face, I saw under his looped-up hat a loosely fitting black mask. Then they gathered round that thing the three of them, and touched it with a boat-hook, muttering to each other. Then one stooped down and did I know not what, stuffing, as he did so, something into the pockets of his coat, and then put out a hand to one of his companions, receiving back something narrow, which caught a glint of sun. They all three stooped together; methought the water against the sands and the pale foam heaps suddenly changed colour, but that must surely be my nightmare.

"Better like that," a voice said in English. Between them they raised the thing up and carried it through the shallow water to a boat moored by the rocks. And then my voice became loosened. I gave a cry, which seemed to echo all round, and I jumped down from the sea-wall, and flew across the meadow and tore up the glen, till I fell full length by the neglected pond with the broken leaden nymph. For as they took _it_ up, the thing had divided in two, and somehow I had known the one was a mother and the other a child; one was I, and the other I still carried within me. And the voice which had said "Better like that" was Hubert's.

But as I write, I know it must have been a vision of my sickness.

"Eustace," I asked, "how did it begin? Did I dream--or did you find me lying by the fountain on the terrace--the fountain of your poor water snake?"

"Forget it, dearest," Eustace said, very quietly and sweetly, and with the old gentle truthfulness in his eyes. "You must have over-walked that hot morning and got a sunstroke or fainted with fatigue. We did find you by the fountain--that is to say, our good Mrs. Davies did." And Davies merely nodded.

_July_ 15, 1773.

Shall I ever know whether it really happened? Methinks that had I certainty I could face, stand up to, it. But to go on sinking and weltering in this hideous doubt!

_August_ 1, 1773.

The certainty has come; and G.o.d in Heaven, what undreamed certainties besides! I did not really want it, though I told myself I did. For I felt that Mrs. Davies knew, that she was watching her opportunity to tell me; and I, a coward, evading what I must some day learn. At last it has come.

It was this morning. This morning! It seems weeks and months ago--a whole lifetime pa.s.sed since! She was brushing my hair, one of the many services required by my weakness, and which she performs with wonderful tenderness. We saw one another's face, but only reflected in the mirror; and I recognised when she was going to speak.

"Lady Brandling," she said in her odd Welsh way--"Lady Brandling fell ill because she saw some things from the sea-wall."

I knew what she meant--for are not my own thoughts for ever going over that same ground? But the sense of being surrounded by enemies, the whole horrid mystery about this accursed place, have taught me caution and even cunning. Davies has been as a mother to me in my illness; but I remembered my first impression of her unfriendliness towards Eustace and me, and of her being put to spy upon us. So I affected not to understand; and indeed, her singular mixture of English and Welsh, her outlandish modes of address, gave some countenance to the pretence.

"What do you mean, Davies?" I asked, but without looking up in the gla.s.s for fear of meeting her eyes there. "What has the sea-wall to do with my illness? It was not there you found me when I fainted. You told me it was by the fountain."

The old woman took a paper from her stays, and out of it a muddy piece of linen which she spread out on the dressing-table in front of me. It was a handkerchief of mine; and I understood that she had found it, treasured it as a sign of what I had witnessed. The place, the moment, might mean my death-warrant; for what I thought I saw had been really seen.

"It was on the sea-wall the morning that Lady Brandling fainted in the shrubbery," she answered. And I felt that her eyes were on my face, asking what I had seen that day.

I made a prodigious effort over myself.

"And why have you kept it in that state instead of washing it? Did you--was it picked up then or only now? _I suppose some one else found it?"_

Merciful G.o.d! how every word of that last sentence beat itself out in my heart and throat!--and yet I heard the words p.r.o.nounced lightly, indifferently.

"I picked it up myself, my lady," answered Mrs. Davies. "I went down to the sea-wall after I had put Lady Brandling to bed. I thought she might have left something there. I thought I should like to go there before the others came. I thought Lady Brandling had seen something. I want Lady Brandling to tell me truly if she saw something on the sea-wall."

I felt it was a struggle, perhaps a struggle for life and death between her and me. I took a comb in my hand, to press it and steady me; and I looked up in the mirror and faced Davies's eyes, ready, I knew, to fix themselves on mine. "Perhaps I may answer your question later, Davies,"

I said. "But first you must answer mine: am I right in thinking that you were set to spy upon my husband and me from the moment we first came to St. Salvat's?"

A great change came over Davies's face. Whatever her intentions, she had not expected this, and did not know how to meet it. I felt that, were her intentions evil, I now held her in my hands, powerless for the time being.

But to my infinite surprise, and after only a short silence, she looked into my eyes quite simply and answered without hesitating.

"Lady Brandling is right. I was set to spy on Lady Brandling at the beginning. I did not love Lady Brandling at the beginning; her husband was taking the place of Sir Thomas. But I love Lady Brandling now."

I could have sworn that it was true, for she has shown it throughout my illness. But I kept my counsel and answered very coldly,