He was gone and she shut the door behind him. Turning round, she found that the two old dogs had followed her out into the hall. Their eyes were very bright and their tails were wagging.
— 3 —
The train stopped with a jolt and Sally woke up. Radford! She’d nearly got carried past. Her head was still aching and she felt half stupefied with sleep and fatigue. She grabbed her two suitcases off the rack and half fell out of the carriage, leaving her hat and gloves and handbag behind her. The cases were dreadfully heavy, and in her state of fatigue the air felt icy. She set them down in front of her and fastened up her fur coat that had come undone in the train, while her eyes swept anxiously up and down the platform. Where was Daddy? He’d promised to meet her. She wanted him dreadfully, as badly as Caroline had wanted George a week ago. But he wasn’t there. He hadn’t come. No one was there whom she knew. And Nanny, about whom she had been dreaming so happily three minutes ago, was dead. Sally, the grown-up and courageous, was suddenly all to pieces like a five-year-old. Her throat swelled with the tears she would not shed and she stood quite still, looking piteously about her, not knowing what to do, her curly head rumpled, her bare hands holding her coat closely about her throat against the cold.
David, arriving late in spite of having driven to the public danger all the way from Damerosehay, and striding down the platform also to the public danger, saw her before she saw him. He had never seen her look like that before, a piteous, frightened little girl. Something seemed suddenly to break in him, some hard shell of self-pity that had formed itself about his long misery, keeping it in, hindering its dispersal. In his thoughts of them both it had always been he who suffered, he who took, and she, always so happy and strong, who must eternally give. Now suddenly he saw that it wouldn’t be always like that. Even the strongest and happiest had their times of weakness and turned to those they usually supported for support, and got it. He was suddenly gloriously elated, released, glowing with relief and delight. Queer paradox! Happy because the beloved suffered.
“Sally!” he called, striding towards her. “Sally!”
She looked round, her white face going suddenly pink with delight. She took a step towards him and fell over one of the suitcases. He caught her arm, but the suitcase fell smack upon the platform.
“Sally, what is it?” he demanded. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” she laughed. “I’m tired, I think. And I fell asleep in the train and only just woke up in time to get out, and—where’s my hat?”
“Not present,” said David. “Nothing here but Sally and two suitcases.”
“It’s gone on,” said Sally, looking after the departing train. “My gloves too. And my handbag. Everything in it. Ration book and ticket and all.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said David, picking up the two cases. “Nothing matters, now you’re back. I’ll ring up about your bag when we get home. Are you properly awake now? I haven’t a hand left to hold you up with.”
“I’m awake,” she said, and followed him down the platform. But looking back at her he saw that she had gone white again, and was blinking as though the lamplight hurt her eyes. With her ruffled head she looked less like the young lion to which he was accustomed to liken her than a downy owl waked up too soon. These comparisons, he thought tenderly, were scarcely suitable under the circumstances. He ought to be likening her to some flower. But she wasn’t flowerlike, his dear young love. Even half dead with fatigue she was too vital and too loving to be likened to a flower.
At the barrier he dealt in a masterly manner with the ticket collector, defrauded of Sally’s ticket, and then tucked her up in a rug in his car.
“Daddy?” she asked anxiously.
“He’s all right. But the car’s conked out. The magneto. Lucky for me. I’ve shoved your suitcases in the back.”
“The case I kicked over has my Christmas presents in it,” said Sally sadly, as they slid down the street. “Some of them smashable. I wish I wasn’t such a clumsy idiot!”
David stopped beneath a lamppost, even as George had done with Caroline earlier in the month. The Eliot men were rather good at knowing what was expected of them. “Would you like to open it and make sure everything’s all right?”
“Yes, please, David. The blue one.”
He lifted it over and put it on her lap and she opened it. “I have one of those ships in a glass bottle for Ben,” she said, but he noticed that her fingers went quickly to quite a small package thickly wrapped in tissue paper, and felt it anxiously. She gave a cry of distress.
“Smashed?” asked David sympathetically.
“Yes,” she said.
“Not Ben’s bottle? It looks too small for that.”
“No—it’s—yours.”
She was far too tired to hide her distress or her love or anything whatever. David cast a brief mental glance of sheer astonishment back at the man who a short while ago had doubted if he loved Sally enough to ask her to marry him, and then gently took the parcel out of her hands and unwrapped it. A few fragments of exquisite glass fell apart on the paper, like dropped lily petals, but the curved handle of blue-green was unbroken. It was a lovely little lion, the lion of Venice.
“Sally!” cried David. “A lion. A perfect little lion. Look, he’s not hurt at all. Sally, darling, it’s yourself you’ve given me. Sally! . . . Here, let’s get out of this!”
He shut the suitcase and put it behind, wrapped up his lion and stowed it in the little recess in the dashboard, and raced them out of Radford. Out in the country he stopped the car and hugged her. “Sally, could you marry me? I’ve wanted you for a long time now. Please, Sally. Not fit to black your shoes. But please, Sally.”
Sally saw no necessity for answering. Anyway, she couldn’t. She was crying with the utmost joy and luxuriance, nestled against him like a five-year-old. Ten minutes later they drove on again, laughing and talking softly. With the resilience of youth and strength Sally had shed her fatigue, her headache, and her pathos as though they had never been. She was her usual warm, glowing, sturdy self, though not quite her usual self, David noted; the last few minutes had brought a new enrichment, a sparkling light upon her such as comes when a parched garden has been made new with rain, but the rain has passed.
“Sally, forgive me,” he pleaded.
“What for?” asked Sally.
“For a great many things.”
“I don’t know what they are,” said Sally. And indeed she did not know. She would never know when she needed to forgive him, because whatever he did it would always seem right to her. He thought to himself with a sudden quirk of humor that it was as well for his immortal soul that Lucilla’s devotion was not of this type.
“Why are you smiling, David?”
“I was thinking of Grandmother.”
“David!” whispered Sally. “Let’s not go back to the Herb of Grace! Let’s go home!”
“Home?”
“To Damerosehay. To Grandmother. I’ve got my night things in my bag. I’d like to spend the night at home. Daddy won’t mind. We can ring him up,”
“Bless you,” said David, and swung off down the rutted lane that led to the road through the marshes, the road by which all the Eliots always returned to their home. As they turned the corner between the two cornfields, the strange wild one in the marsh to the right and the cultivated one to their left, the sea wind met them. The sea was a distant line of silver under the rising moon and the stars were already in the sky. It was a place of memories for David. . . . Here, once, he had met Nadine, returning home. . . . He greeted her, in his thoughts, and thanked her, and then bent his whole strength to make this home-coming one of great happiness for the girl beside him.
“I tell you what, Sally,” he said gaily. “Let’s get solemnly engaged in the oak wood. It ought, really, to be in Knyghtwood, the place where we met each other and you thought o
f Pisanello’s picture. But I love the old oak wood.”
“I do too,” said Sally. “I always feel as though it were part of Knyghtwood. I suppose all woods everywhere are really just different bits of the one wood, pushing up through the earth like the different bits of the sky that shine through the clouds are the same sky. And the oak wood is your special bit of wood, the heart of it for you. David, it’s lovely tonight! Look at the old castle, like a strong old animal crouching down there, guarding the marshes, and the Island all ebony and silver.”
“Peaceful tonight,” said David. “It can be wildly stormy sometimes, you know. Not sheltered like the Herb of Grace. Will you mind that?”
“No. Damerosehay has such strong walls. And there’s the oak wood between us and the sea.”
They were in the oak wood. The old twisted trees gathered them in as they had gathered so many Eliots returning home, as they would gather these two, and their children, for years to come. The car glided silently over the moss-grown drive, then stopped.
“Now then, Mrs. Eliot, hold out your hand, please.”
Sally held it out and he slipped Lucilla’s ring upon it. Sally was speechless. They kissed each other lightly, gently, without passion, but they kept nothing back. David, though sadness for the last time throbbed in him somewhere, knew it was all right.
CHAPTER
17
— 1 —
Jill and the twins had made themselves responsible for the holly for the Christmas decorations, and a few days before Christmas, armed with a huge basket, and with Mary in attendance, they entered Knyghtwood punctually at two o’clock. The weather was still astonishingly mild. Now and then sudden storms of wind and rain swept in from the sea, but they passed again, and the sun shone and the sky was blue, and the birds were surprised into trying out a phrase or two of their spring song. It was, as always, enchanting in Knyghtwood.
“But there must be no lingering,” said Jill firmly. “From what you say we’ve a long way to go and you must be back to your teas. If you think we’ll find the best holly in this far place you know of we’ll go straight there and not stop to pick anything on the way. Then if there’s nothing in this place of yours we’ll pick the holly in the wood on our way back. What’s here is not so bad.”
The twins looked with contempt upon the holly trees they were passing. It wasn’t a good year for holly and the berries were rather few and far between.
“There’s lots of berries in the Place Beyond,” said José.
“You can’t know for certain, ducks,” said Jill. “You’ve only been there the once, so you say, with Miss Adair, and that was a long time ago.”
“We didn’t go with Sally,” corrected Jerry. “José and me and Mary went alone to our place. Sally stayed behind in her place.”
“Her place?” queried Jill.
“She saw David there,” said José. “She had candle eyes after she’d been in her place with David, and Mummy and Annie-Laurie had candle eyes when they came back from the wood with the water cress that wasn’t.”
The sharpness of them, thought Jill. Not a thing could you keep from them.
“Will there be candles lit again in the wood as it’s nearly Christmas?” asked Jerry.
“No, dear,” said Jill. “There are never candles in the wood. There are lighted candles on Christmas trees, and in people’s eyes when they’re happy, but not in woods.”
“There were the first day we came. We saw them when we went away.”
“The sunset behind the trees, perhaps,” said Jill. “Grand sunset it was that evening, I remember. I passed the remark to Auntie Rose at the time. Haven’t I a place of my own in this wood?”
“Near ours,” said José, and slipped her hand into Jill’s.
Jill held the small hand firmly. A few weeks ago José would not, gratuitously, have made that small gesture of love. For months now, ceaselessly, Jill had been giving all that she had and was to those hardhearted young scallywags, and now, at last, they were throwing to her now and then the first few flowers of their spring.
“There’s the owl,” said Jerry.
Jill looked up and saw the beloved creamy form blundering along through the trees in front of them. Yet he only seemed to be blundering; he never bumped into anything. “Now what’s he doing, out and about at this time of day?” she wondered. “It’s mostly only morning and night we see him. He must be staying up late for a Christmas party.”
“Rat and Mole are going too,” said José.
And, sure enough, the owl kept flying on just ahead of them, as though they all had an appointment in the same place.
“The Person with the Horns will be going,” said Jerry. “And perhaps the Person with the Pipes—though I’m not sure.”
“No, not him,” said José. “He’s in bed for the rest of the winter. Like the squirrels.”
“Well, the rabbits, anyway,” said Jerry, “and the field mice and the birds and the toads and the frogs. And the badger.”
Jill paid little attention to this. The twins had many fantastic creatures as companions of their daily life, and she did not even try to keep track of the invisible persons who had nursery tea with them, went out for walks with them, splashed about in the bath with them, and slept under their beds. Occasionally these persons were troublesome. The one with the pipes, for instance, thought that on a fine day lessons were sheer waste of time, and when the twins rebelled against the processes of education he would lend them his moral support to an extent that made their yells and kickings far harder to subdue than if he’d kept out of it. . . . Jill was glad to hear he was now in bed. . . . Rat and Mole too were extraordinarily troublesome. They wouldn’t eat milk puddings. And as, in some way that Jill didn’t attempt to understand, their spiritual union with Jerry and José was very close indeed, when they were present the twins wouldn’t eat it either. But the Person with the Horns exercised an influence that was entirely good; and for this reason, though unfortunately he put in an appearance less frequently than the other persons, he was more real to Jill than the others. Also, of course, there were already two portraits of him in the house, Ben’s in the drawing room and the one on the chapel wall, besides the little carving in the alcove. The twins had never told Jill that the Person with the Horns and the white deer were the same, but Jill had no doubt of it.
“There go the rabbits and the birds,” said José. “Look!”
Jill looked and saw the white scuts of two rabbits darting along just ahead of them. It was true that the birds seemed flying about a good deal, and mostly in the same direction.
They very soon passed the oak tree that was Nadine’s place; it wasn’t very deep in. And they crossed over the first little bridge to Ben’s Brockis Island, and the second little bridge to the deeper bit of the wood beyond. And they came to the stream that was Sally’s place, with the break in the bog-myrtle bushes to the left that led to Annie-Laurie’s place, and then they were in a part of the wood where none of the others had ever yet been. Even Jill, though she had run about Knyghtwood often as a little girl, had not been as far as this for many years, and she looked about her with the interest of a traveler in a strange country.
Once the stream was left behind the character of the wood changed. It became deeper and more mysterious. There were no more birches, wild crab apples, and hawthorns. The oak trees still persisted, but they were much larger, and among them were those splendid knights of the forest, the armored beeches. The hollies, old as the conquest, grew to a great height here; they had more berries on them, and their polished leaves sparkled with reflected light. The ground was thick with akermast. Here in this deeper part of the wood there were none of the fragile winter flowers that had so delighted Nadine; but the splendid lichens, from which in old days the country people had been used to make their medicines, grew abundantly, and purple light gathered about the oaks. There still seemed an unusual number of
animals and birds about, and they still seemed to be going in the same direction. A glorious flash of color suddenly sped by them. “A yaffingale!” cried Jill in delight.
The woodpecker had flown between two giant beeches that leaned together to form an archway. Jill and the children followed. Within the archway the character of the wood seemed once more to change very slightly. The trees grew much closer together, and it was darker and held a greater stillness. Jill, perhaps, might have felt a little uneasy lest they lose their way, only she found now that they were following a path through the wood. She did not know where the path had begun, or how they had come to find themselves upon it, but here it was, a mere thread of a path, but easy to follow.
“I know now,” she said suddenly to the twins and Mary, who were running on ahead of her. “I came this way once when I was a little thing. It leads to the old buck pen where they used to feed the deer in the wintertime. Long ago, that was. There aren’t any deer now.”
A little later she was not so sure. They had come to a brilliant holly bush beside the path, with opposite it a clump of ferns growing beside a mossy rock, and stooping to tie up her shoelace she fancied she saw dainty hoofprints upon the path. Country-bred girl that she was, she saw that they were not prints she was familiar with. She bent to examine them, her heart beating a little. They were so light, so exquisite, and the moisture that had soaked into them from the ground caught the light with so silvery a gleam, that they might have been flowers lying there. They had a joyous look. Jill felt quite sure that the creature who had made them had not been walking sedately but leaping eagerly. Yet how very light he must have been to make these fragile prints.
She stood still looking at them, trying to recapture that long-ago day of her childhood when she had followed this path to the buck pen. She remembered that she had found it, but oddly enough she couldn’t remember what had happened to her then. At least, nothing that she could put into words. It hadn’t been the sort of thing that happened in other places and its utter unlikeness had made comparison impossible, and so the words used to describe other experiences weren’t any use to describe this one. There was a dazzle of light in her eyes from those bright prints on the ground, and she closed them.