III
April 10, 1773.
The spring gales have begun, and with them the "fishing" as it is called, has become constant. Rough weather, I suppose, is favourable to the smuggling operations, as it leaves this terrible coast in the hands of those who know every inch of its reefs and rocks and quicksands, and who possess the only safe landing-place for miles, the little cove beyond the churchyard in the glen.
Be this as it may, these expeditions have left the castle wonderfully peaceful; the sound of brawling no longer rises perpetually from the big hall and the courtyards. The uncles are away for days and nights at a time, taking with them every male creature about the place. Even Hubert, seized, as he says, by a fit of his master passion, has not appeared for days. The sluttish maids and the old rheumatic gardener are lodged in the outhouses, or are taking a holiday in the neighbouring villages; and the house has been, methinks, given over to ourselves and Mrs. Davies, who waits assiduously in her silent manner, and no doubt keeps the uncles informed of all our doings. It is three days that Eustace and I have been alone together. But the knowledge of what he will not confess, and of what I have not the courage to ask, sits between us at meals, makes us constrained during our walks, even like the presence of a living stranger.
April 20, 1773.
The gales have been getting worse and worse; and the sound of the sea, the wind in the trees and chimneys, has been filling the castle with lamentation. This evening, at the harpsichord, I could no longer hear, or at least no longer listen to, my own voice. I shut the instrument and sat idle by the fire, while every beam and rafter strained and groaned like the timbers of a ship in the storm. My husband also was quite unstrung. He walked up and down, without a word. Suddenly a thought entered my mind; it is extraordinary and inhuman that it should not have done so before.
"I hope Hubert and the uncles are not out to-night," I said.
Eustace stopped in his walking, straight before the fire and stared long into it.
"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 God, 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 glass 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 shore. 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 anchored 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 God would have visited their presumptuousness upon me with such horrid irony. May God, who knows all things, must know that those words were even more justified than I dreamed of at the time: the slavery and dishonour surpassing 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 surpassing, 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 God, 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 gratitude 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 balls 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 God 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 passed 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 glass 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 God! how every word of that last sentence beat itself out in my heart and throat!—and yet I heard the words pronounced 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,
"It is not a question whether you love me or not, Davies. You acknowledge that you were the spy of Mr. Hubert and his brothers. And if you were not spying for their benefit, why were you watching me as I came up the glen the day I was taken ill? Why did you go to the sea-wall to see in case I had left anything behind; and why did you treasure this handkerchief as a proof that I had been there?"
Mrs. Davies hesitated; but only, I believe, because she found it difficult to make her situation clear.
"Lady Brandling must try and understand," she answered. "I was not spying for Mr. Hubert. I have not spied for Mr. Hubert for a long while. I kept the handkerchief to show Lady Brandling that I knew what had made her faint that day. Also to show her that others did not know. Lady Brandling is safe. She must know that they do not yet know. If they know what Lady Brandling perhaps shall have seen, Lady Brandling and her husband are dead people, like the people in the ship; dead like Sir Thomas."
Dead like Sir Thomas! I repeated to myself. But I still kept my eyes fixed on hers in the glass, where she stood behind me, brush in hand.
"Davies," I said, "you must explain if I am to understand. You tell me you love me now though you did not love me at first. You tell me you were placed to spy over me by Mr. Hubert, and you tell me that you were not spying for him when you went to see whether I had left anything on the sea-wall. You have been good and kind beyond words during my sickness, and I desire to believe in you. But I dare not. Why should I believe that you have really changed so completely? Why should I believe that you are with me, and against them?"
Mrs. Davies's face changed strangely. It seemed to me to express deep perplexity and almost agonised helplessness. She twisted her fingers and raised her shoulders. She was wrestling with my unbelief. Suddenly she leaned over the dressing table close to me.
"Listen," she said. "I have learned things since then. Hubert told me lies, but I learned. I am against them because I know they tried to kill my son."
A look of incredulity must have passed over my face, for she added,
"Aye; they only tried to kill one of my sons, Hugh, who I thought had gone overboard, whom they thought they had drowned, but who has come and told me. But—" and she fixed her eyes on mine, "they did kill my other son; I know that now. My other son of the heart, not the belly. And that son, my Lady, was your brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Brandling."
And then Davies made a strange imperious gesture, and I must needs listen to her talk. I have since pieced it together out of her odd enigmatic sentences. My late brother-in-law, after years of passive connivance in their doings, which paid for his debaucheries in foreign lands, became restive, or was suspected by his uncles, and condemned by them to death as a danger to their evil association. Sir Thomas was decoyed home, and, according to their habit in case of mutiny, taken out, a prisoner, to the deepest part of the channel, and drowned. The report was spread that he had been killed in a drunken brawl at Bristol, a show of legal proceedings was instituted by his uncle in that city (naturally to no effect, there being no murderer there to discover), and a corpse brought back by them for solemn burial at St. Salvat's. But instead of being interred in the family vault, the body of the false Sir Thomas was destroyed by the burning of the Chapel during his wake. The suspicions of Mrs. Davies appeared to have been awakened by this fact, and by the additional one that she was not allowed to see the corpse of her beloved foster-son. Her own son Hugh, Sir Thomas's foster brother, disappeared about this time; and Hubert appears to have made the distracted mother believe that her own boy was the murderer of Sir Thomas, and had met with death at his hands; the whole unlikely story being further garnished for the poor credulous woman with a doubt that the murder of her foster-son had been, in some manner, the result of a conspiracy to bring about the succession of my husband. All this she seems to have believed at the time of our coming, and for this reason to have lent herself most willingly to spy upon my husband and me, in hopes of getting the proofs of his guilt. But her suspicions gradually changed, and her whole attitude in the matter was utterly reversed when, a few days before the wreck of the great Indiaman and my adventure on the sea-wall, her son, whom she believed dead, had stolen back in disguise and told her of an expedition in which the uncles had carried a man to the high seas, gagged and bound, and drowned him: a man who was not one of their crew and whose stature and the colour of whose hair answered to those of the nominal master of St. Salvat's. Her son, in an altercation over some booty, had let out his suspicion to my uncles, and had escaped death only by timely flight masked under accidental drowning from a fishing boat. Since this revelation Davies's devotion to the dead Sir Thomas had transferred itself to Eustace and me, and her one thought had become revenge against the men who had killed her darling.
Davies told me all this, as I said, in short, enigmatic sentences; and I scarcely know whether her tale seemed to me more inevitably true or more utterly false in its hideous complication of unlikely horrors. When she had done:
"Davies," I ask her solemnly, "you have been a spy, you have, by your saying, been the accomplice of the most horrid criminals that ever disgraced the world. Why should I believe one word of what you tell me?"
Davies hesitated as before, then looked me full in the face "If Lady Brandling cannot believe what it is needful that she should believe, let her ask her husband whether I am telling her a lie. Lady Brandling's husband knows, and he is afraid of telling her because he is afraid of them." Davies had been kneeling by the dressing-table, as if to make herself heard to me without speaking above a whisper.
I mustered all my courage, for these last words touched me closer, filled me with a far more real and nearer horror than all her hideous tales.
"Davies," I said, "kindly finish brushing my hair. When it is brushed I can do it up myself; and you may go and wash that handkerchief."
The old woman rose from her knees without a word, and finished brushing my hair very carefully. Then she handed me the hairpins and combs ceremoniously. As she did so she murmured beneath her breath:
"Lady Brandling is a courageous lady. I love Lady Brandling for her courage." She curtsied and withdrew. When the door was well closed on her I felt I could bear the strain no more; I leaned my head on the dressing table and burst into a flood of silent tears.
At that moment Eustace came in. "Good God!" he said, "what is the matter?" taking my hand and trying to raise me up.
But I hid my face. "Oh, Eustace," I answered, "when I think of our child!"
But what I was saying, God help me, was not true.
October 1, 1773.
What frightful suspicions are these which I have allowed to creep insidiously into my mind! Did he or did he not know? Does he know yet? Every time we meet I feel my eyes seeking his face, scanning his features, and furtively trying to read their meaning, alas! alas! as if he were a stranger. And I spend my days piecing together bits of the past, and every day they make a different and more perplexing pattern. I remember his change of manner on receiving the news of his brother's death, and the gloom which hung over him during our journey and after our arrival here. I thought then that it was the unexpected return to the scenes of his unhappy childhood; and that his constraint and silence with me were due to his difficulty in dealing with the shocking state of things he found awaiting him. It seemed natural enough that Eustace, a thinker, a dreamer even, should feel harassed at his inability to clean out this den of iniquity. But why have remained here? Good God, is my husband a mere pensioner of all this hideousness, as his wretched brother seems to have been? And even for that miserable debauched creature the day came when he turned against his masters, and faced death, perhaps like a gentleman. Death.... How unjust I am grown to Eustace! I ought to try and put myself in his place, and see things as he would see them, not with the horrified eyes of a stranger. Like me, he may have believed at first that St. Salvat's was merely a nest of smugglers.... Or he may have had only vague fears of worse, haunting him like bad dreams of his childhood....
Besides, this frightful trade in drowned men and their goods has, from what Davies tells me, been for centuries the chief employment of this dreadful coast. Whole villages, and several of the first families of the country, practised it turn about with smuggling. Davies was ready with a string of names, she expressed no special horror and her conscience perhaps represents that of these people; an unlawful trade, but not without its side of peril, commending it to barbarous minds like highway robbery or the exploits of buccaneers, whom popular ballads treat as heroes.
But why have I recourse to such explanations? Men, even men as noble as my husband, are marvellously swayed by all manner of notions of honour, false and barbarous, often causing them to commit crimes in order to screen those of their blood or of their class. Some words of Hubert's keep recurring in my memory, to the effect that all the Brandlings were given up to what the villain called pilchard fishing, and none more devotedly than Eustace's own father. I remember and now understand the tone in which he added "all of us Brandlings except this superfine gentleman here." Those words meant that however great his horror of it all, Eustace could not break loose from that complicity of silence. For to expose the matter would be condemning all his kinsmen to a shameful death, to the public gallows; it would be uncovering the dishonour of his dead brother, of his father, and all his race.... What right have I to ask my husband to do what no other man would do in his place?
But perhaps he does not know, or is not certain yet.... To what a size have I allowed my horrid suspicions to grow! Behold me finding excuses for an offence which very likely has never been committed; and while seemingly condoning, condemning my husband in my mind, without giving him a chance of self-defence! What a confusion of disloyalty and duplicity my fears have bred in my soul! Anything is better than this; I owe it to Eustace to tell him my suspicions, and I will tell him.
November 2, 1773.
I have spoken. O marvellous, most unexpected reward of frankness and loyalty, however tardy! The nightmare has vanished, leaving paradise in my soul. For inconceivable as it seems, this day, on which I learned that we are prisoners, already condemned most likely, and at best doomed to die before very long, this day has been of unmixed, overflowing joy, such as I never knew or dreamed of.
Eustace, beloved, that ever I could have doubted you! And yet that very doubt, that sin against our love is what has brought me such blissful certainty. And even the shameful question, asked with burning cheeks, "Did you know all?" has been redeemed, transfigured, and will remain for ever in my soul like the initial bars of some ineffably tender and triumphant piece of music.
Let me go over it once more, our conversation, Love; feel it all over again, feel it for ever and ever.
When I had spoken those words, Eustace, you took my hand, and looked long into my face.
"My poor Penelope," you said, "what dreadful thoughts my cowardice and want of faith have brought upon you! Why did I not recognise that your soul was strong enough to bear the truth? You ought to have learned it from me, as soon as I myself felt certain of it, instead of my running the risk of your discovering it all alone, you poor, poor little child!"
Were ever those small words spoken so greatly? Has any man been such a man in his gentleness and humility? And then you went on, beloved, and I write down your words in order to feel them once more sinking into my heart.
"But Penelope," you said, "'twas not mere unmanly shirking, though there may have been some of that mixed with it. My fault lies chiefly in not having been able to do without you, dearest, not having left you safe with your mother while I came over to this accursed place; and in putting the suspicions I had behind me in order to bring you here. Nothing can wipe out that, and I am paying the just price of my weakness, and seeing you pay it!... But once here, Penelope, and once certain of the worst, it was impossible for me to tell you the truth. Impossible, because I knew that if you knew what I had learned, it would be far more difficult for me to get you away, to get you to leave me behind in this hideous place. Do you remember when I proposed sending you to Bath for our child's birth? It seemed the last chance of saving you, and you resisted and thought me cruel and unloving! How could I say 'Go! because your life may any day be forfeited like mine, and go alone! because—well—because I am a hostage, a man condemned to death if he stir, a prisoner as much as if I were chained to the walls of this house.' Had I said that, you would have refused to go, Penelope. But now, my dear...." And you bent down and kissed me very mournfully.
"But now, Eustace," I answered, and I heard that my voice was solemn, "but now I can stay with you, because I know as much as you do, and they will soon know that I do so, even if they do not know yet. I may stay with you, because I am a prisoner like you, and condemned like you. We can live, because we have to die—together."
Eustace, you folded me in your arms and I felt you sob. But I loosened your hands and kissed them one by one, and said, "Nay, Eustace, why should you grieve? Do we not love each other? Are we not together, quite together, and together for always?"
We are standing by the big window in my room, and as we clasped one another, our eyes, following each other's, rested on the sea above the tree tops. It was a silvery band under a misty silver sunset; very sweet and solemn. Our souls, methought, were sailing in its endless peacefulness. For the first time, I was aware of what love is; I seemed to understand what poetry is about and what music means; death, which hung over us, was shrunk to its true paltriness, and the eternity of life somehow revealed all in one moment. I have known happiness. I thank God, and beloved, I thank thee also.