The bay was farther away than she had thought, and ran deeper into the cliff than she had expected. It was shaped like a horseshoe, and as she ran in between the great rocks that guarded it at the narrow end, she understood why this little bay was dangerous, for the high tide watermark on them was well above her head. When she got inside, with the great cliffs towering above her, she felt as alone as though she were the only human being alive upon the Island. But it was a pleasant kind of loneliness, not the sort when one has been pushed out by someone else, but when one has chosen, one’s self, to be alone, the kind when one is less conscious of human creatures having gone away than of listening for the voices and the footsteps of faerie creatures trooping in.
Friendly faerie creatures. The bay was alive with peaceful friendliness. Yet at first she was too much awed by the beauty of this exquisite, haunted place to move or to touch, she could only stand quite still and breathe it in as she looked about her. The bay was very small and the cliffs so high that it seemed their rocky crests must touch the sky, and the light that shone from the west through the narrow opening of the horseshoe came as though flooding into a cavern. She had to tilt her head back before she could see the grey mass of the convent right up overhead, so high that it looked more as though it had been let down from heaven than built up from earth, with the Madonna in her niche, and below her the locked door opening upon a narrow sort of shelf in the cliff carpeted with green grass. Le Creux des Fâïes, where it was said the fairies feasted round a flat rock at the full of the moon, was to the left of the bay, the narrow entrance half blocked by a big boulder covered with bright green weed. Most of the floor of the bay was covered with fine silver sand and beautiful small stones tinted like opals, with bigger rocks draped with deep purple-brown weed where the rock pools were full of the frilly kind of sea anemones. All the pebbles seemed to Marguerite to have fat smiling faces, and the anemones had mad bright eyes above their frills. At the far end of the bay the sand ran upward into a hollow in the cliff, almost a second little bay to which the sea did not reach, and here it was carpeted with small colored shells as a wood is carpeted with flowers in springtime. And all the shells had mouths and all of them were singing, their myriad tiny voices making a music that one could hear and yet not hear, like the sound of bells that the wind is always catching away. There was not one of them that was bigger than the nail on a baby’s finger, and some of them were no larger than a pin’s head, but each was as intricately and perfectly fashioned as though it were a world all to itself. Some had the beautiful shape of wool upon the distaff, tapering to a fine point. Others were like rose petals delicately hollowed. Some were like the caps of elves, and others like drops of dew. And each cup or spiral had its own perfect veining of feather-light radiation, each line perfect in grace, drawn by a brush that had never faltered. And their pale flower tints were as varied as their shapes: lemon flushed with salmon pink, dove grey lined with mother-of-pearl, pale amethyst powdered with green points of fire, saffron and turquoise and rose, and smoky orange spotted with pale warm brown like the breast of a small bird. And there were no two of them just the same.
The seagull was sailing backward and forward all the time, seeming to gather all the light of the place with his shining wings and to trail it in long threads of silver after him as he flew this way and that, very high up between the rocks, as though weaving a pattern in the air, filament by filament of light from cliff to cliff. Marguerite stood quite still and watched him, her hands behind her back. There was a legend on the Island that souls in prayer can take the form of a bird and hover over those they pray for, and she wondered if it were true. The silver pattern that he had woven in the air seemed suspended from cliff to cliff over her head like an invisible protection, like one of those canopies powdered with stars that one sees in old pictures held over the heads of queens as they walk in procession.
It was this sense of protection that at last broke the spell of awe that had held her without movement for so long. With a cry of delight she ran and fell on her knees beside the little shells and picked them up one by one, holding them up toward the west so that the sun shone through them and lit their fragile shapes to dazzling fire. Then she picked them up by handfuls, letting them fall again through her brown fingers, as children scoop up water in their hands to see the bright drops fall.
Then it was the turn of the rock pools, and her bright eyes peeped through the wild tangle of her curls at the mad bright eyes of the anemones that she imagined she saw glinting above the frilly ruffs about their necks; living frills made of slender crimson threads that swayed and coiled and groped in the water with a quietude and a velvet suppleness of movement that the most perfect grace in the world cannot achieve in the upper air. Marguerite had never seen anemones with eyes before. She was quite sure that they were not mere bubbles but mad eyes that saw strange things.
She went from mystery to mystery, with more and more courage. She was a long time playing with the shells, and longer still looking at the rock pools, exploring each miniature ocean from horizon to horizon, but at last she was ready for the fairies’ cave. She did not feel at all afraid as she pushed past the green rock and went inside. Since she had run into this strange place through the horns of the horseshoe she had felt no fear, only awe. She had discovered a new country, but it was her own country. In this place where one was alone that one might listen, she felt at home as never before. In spite of its mystery it was so clean, so simple, and so safe. Nothing befouled the air one breathed, the music that was heard but yet not heard, like the sound of bells caught away by the wind, was without confusion, cold and clear like crystal, and overhead the protecting canopy made by the beating wings was so transparently woven that one could see the sky through it.
The cave was a small one, spread with a clean white floor of shells ground to powder by the action of the waves. In the center was the low, flat stone where the sarregousets feasted when the moon was full, and right at the back of the cave was a fissure in the rock leading to the fairies’ fireplace where they cooked their feast over a fire of vraic, a seaweed that when dried burns with as lovely a flame as applewood. Above was the chimney up which the sea went dashing on stormy days, to issue at the top in the white blown spray that the peasants called the fairies’ smoke.
Marguerite tiptoed round the flat stone, and then, greatly daring, she crept right inside the chimney at the back and peeped up. It sloped inward, and far up she could see a patch of daylight. The sides were smooth and slippery with the perpetual surging of the water; but feeling with her plump hands, she found what felt like steps. The sarregousets must have made them, she thought, to run up and down when they swept the chimney, and a thrill of delicious awe went through her as she put her fingers where they must put their tiny pointed feet.
Then she withdrew her curly head and stepped delicately over the fine white floor and sat down on the flat stone. There was mica in the granite, and it glittered in the dim pale green light with streaks of gold. The only footsteps to be seen on the sand were her own; she could not see any fairy footsteps because the sea swept into this cave at every stormy high tide and the white floor was smoothed out as by a broom. Marguerite shivered deliciously as she sat there on the stone. The peasants had more stories to tell about this cave than about any other haunted spot upon the Island, and though Sophie and Octavius and Marianne declared their stories to be all moonshine, Marguerite was not so sure. What did human beings know about anything? Their own existence was still a mystery to them, and of the existences beyond their own they knew about as much as field mice know of the world above the heads of the bending ears of corn. When a great gust of wind suddenly swept the corn aside and they caught the shadow of a glimpse of some strange sight of the upper air, some rose-tinted cloud or bird’s wing tipped with gold, Marguerite imagined that they must feel much as she did every time she saw Notre Dame du Castel upon its rock, or as she had felt when she had run into La Baie des Petits Fleurs.
The convent and this haunted fairy place must have a good deal in common, she thought, for they both seemed to lift one up into a cleaner, colder air. She wondered what it could be that they had in common, for she had been taught to believe that Paradise and Fairyland are not the same.
It suddenly occurred to her to wonder if she ought to go back to Mamma. She seemed to have been here for only a few minutes, but Mamma was an easily worried person and she might be getting in a fuss. Marguerite jumped to her feet, full of self-reproach, for she realized that ever since she had run into the bay she had completely forgotten Mamma’s existence. Papa’s too. They had just been wiped out of her mind. Full of penitence, she pushed her way past the big green rock at the mouth of the cave, ran a few steps across the sand and shingle, and found the world wrapped in mist, and sea water lapping at her feet. Possessed by the magic of this place, she must have been oblivious to the passing of time, and the tide had come right in. From the place where she stood, away into the mist the sea stretched like soft grey silk. She looked toward the rocks where she had entered the bay, the narrow part of the horseshoe, barely visible now through the mist, and saw that the sea had reached the high watermark that was above her head. She could not swim very well. Marianne could swim like a fish, but she was not very proficient yet. She knew that she would not be able to swim through the November sea back to La Baie des Saints.
She stood very still, her hands tightly clasped, and watched the beautiful half moons of water that kept casting themselves at her feet and then withdrawing again, sucking back the pebbles with them. They wanted to pull her back too, she thought, and take her away down to the caverns of the sea where she did not want to go. She stood motionless, watching them, and just for a moment she was very afraid. All color had been drained away now from the bay. All the world was grey.
Then suddenly the practical common sense combined with the mystical certainty of God’s nearness that were her special heritage returned to her, setting her free for action that did not admit of the possibility of failure. “I must get out of this,” she thought. And then, “The white gull was protecting me when he wove that pattern in the air.” She looked upward and saw that he had flown away, but she did not doubt that the transparent silver canopy was still woven from cliff to cliff.
She must find those steps cut in the rock that the monks had used when they went fishing, and that the Abbess had used when she went to Le Petit Aiguillon. But she could not find them. The great granite cliffs rose sheer from the little bay, and she could find no foothold in them anywhere. Then she remembered the fairies’ chimney. She remembered her father saying that the legends of the old saints and the Island fairy stories were so inextricably mixed that one could not now disentangle one from the other. Perhaps it was not the fairies who had cut those steps in the chimney, but the monks.
She ran back to the cave, crept in the chimney and felt the steps again. Yes, they were real steps, and it would be possible, though very difficult, to climb them, and that chimney was quite wide enough for the passage of one small body at a time. The Norman monks had been little men, she had been told, dark little men, not so very unlike the fairies themselves.
She took her cloak and bonnet and shoes and stockings off and threw them away, for she knew that bare toes, though they may get scratched and bruised, cling best to bare rock, and then she began to climb.
“Thank God I took my pantalettes off,” she thought devoutly, and then she banished irrelevant thought, for the climb needed every scrap of will and attention and courage that she had.
Clinging like a little ape with bare prehensile fingers and toes, she crept up and up. Anyone else might have turned sick with terror at the thought of the hideous fall that would be the result of just once missing her footing; but Marguerite knew that God would not let her fall. But plump as she was she got very out of breath, and her clothes were much too voluminous for comfort, and the sweat trickled down her back in the most uncomfortable way. Yet she giggled now and then, for now that her fear had left her she was finding the adventure fun. The pity of it was that William was not here to share it with her. Something had pressed against her side. It was the wooden mouse in her pocket. She was glad William’s mouse was here.
The patch of sky over her head grew wider, the grey light showered down and she lifted her face to it with joy. Just a few more steps, a last clinging of fingers and toes, a last panting effort, and her curly head came out of the top of the chimney like a fuzzy sweep’s brush. She gazed bewildered at the wilderness of toppling granite rocks shrouded in mist that was all she could see. She was still so far below the convent, and so close under it, that she could not even see it. Which way now? She climbed right out of the chimney and looked about her. She was standing on a ledge of rock like the flat top of a wide wall, with the precipice falling almost sheer beneath her to the sea, and upon the sides of the steep turrets of rock all about her, their summits lost in mist, there seemed no foothold.
Yet she explored patiently and without fear, for she knew the steps must be somewhere.
She found them again behind an outcrop of rock shaped like a sea lion couchant upon the wall, and they wound up and around one of the turrets, worn, slippery steps that sometimes had a balustrade of rock to cling to upon the outer side and sometimes had not. But Marguerite tackled them without hesitation, not afraid at all, but wishing very much that she were not so tired, and not so cold and shivery with the wet mist.
Afterward it seemed to everyone an absolute miracle that she had survived that dangerous climb. It would have taxed the skill of an experienced climber, and she was only a child. Her courage and strength were a nine days’ wonder on the Island.
And certainly she was a sturdy little thing, and brave. And also the sea mist all about her was growing steadily thicker, so that she was equally unaware of the awfulness of the drop beneath her and of the interminable way that she had to go. She just went patiently and doggedly on, convinced of her own safety, convinced that she would get to the top if she went on sticking to it.
But it was a very weary, draggle-tailed child who finally reached the stretch of green turf before the convent door and fell in a wet heap upon it. She was so exhausted that she could scarcely breathe. Her body was ice-cold, but her fingers and knees and toes were burning and painful from the scraping of the hard rock. Her pretty blue dress was torn and drenched with the mist, and her hair, that a sea mist always made curlier than ever, was a dank tangle of ringlets all round her white face. But oh, the blessed ease of lying still upon the wet green grass, the sweet smell of it, the joy of having finally accomplished something very difficult, a triumphant joy that almost banished pain. This was the first time in her short happy life that she had attempted and brought to a successful conclusion a supremely hard piece of work, and so it was the first time she had tasted this particular joy. It was about the best happiness she had ever known, equaled only by the joy of mutual giving and taking when she and William had hugged each other. And her faith had been vindicated, too. It was the first time in her life that she had put her faith in God’s protection to the test, and it had not failed her. Perhaps, after all, that was the best joy of the three.
She sat up and looked about her. She was completely enclosed by a wall of vapor. Mists came up very suddenly at this time of the year, turning the blue of a happy day to the grey of a sorrowful one with alarming rapidity, but she had never known a mist come up quite so quickly and thoroughly as this one had. She could not even see the great convent towering up above her. She could see nothing but a patch of green grass, a locked door in a stone wall, and above it the statue of the Madonna. She and the Madonna were quite alone together in a sort of little room hollowed out of the mist. It was queer and very strange.
She got up and stood in her favorite attitude, hands clasped behind her, looking at the old door beneath its stone archway, with four stone steps leading up to it, the treads worn down in the middle by th
e passing of many feet centuries ago. For it must have been a long while back that the courage to negotiate the climb to the beach had deserted the inmates of Notre Dame du Castel. It looked as though the door had not been opened for years. Ivy was growing over it, and long thorny sprays of bramble set with crimson leaves.
She looked up at the Madonna. The statue seemed now almost more than life size, a tall, magnificent figure, sturdy as a peasant woman but with the carriage of a queen. A great cloak wrapped her from head to feet, the hood pulled far over her eyes to shield them from the western sun. But nothing protected the child upon her arm. The folds of her cloak had fallen back from about him and he faced the Atlantic Ocean with bared head and tiny hand held up in blessing. The warm protection of God was about his human mother, but he himself had none. The statue was so worn by the buffetings of wind and rain that the features of mother and child were almost worn away, but the watchful strength of the mother was still there clearly in the stone, and the eager, selfless courage of the child.
The peasant nurse who had watched over the babyhood both of Marianne and Marguerite, and who had declared Marianne to be a changeling, had been a Catholic. Marguerite, lying in her cot, had often watched her sitting before the nursery fire in her white mobcap, her black quilted petticoat turned back over her knees, rocking herself and praying. Looking up now at the Madonna, she could hear again phrases of the murmured prayers. . . . Our Lady of the Castle. Marie Watch-All. Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. O Virgo Virginum. Blessed art thou among women. For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. The thing which you behold is a divine mystery. Hail, Mary, full of grace. . . .