The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
The Rosemary Tree (eBook edition)
Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC
P. O. Box 3473
Peabody, Massachusetts 01961-3473
eISBN 978-1-61970-687-3
THE ROSEMARY TREE © 1956 by Elizabeth Goudge. Copyright renewed 1984 by Gerard Kealey.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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First eBook edition — February 2015
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Author
The Old Knight
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
FOR MARJORIE
THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Goudge, born at the turn of the 20th century in England, was a gifted writer whose own life is reflected in most of the stories she wrote. Her father was an Anglican rector who taught theological courses in various cathedral cities across the country, eventually accepting a Professorship of Divinity at Oxford. The many moves during her growing-up years provided settings and characters that she developed and described with great care and insight.
Elizabeth’s maternal grandparents lived in the Channel Islands, and she loved her visits there. Eventually several of her novels were set in that charming locale. Her mother, a semi-invalid for much of her life, urged Elizabeth to attend The Art College for training as a teacher, and she appreciated the various crafts she learned. She said it gave her the ability to observe things in minute detail and stimulated her imagination.
Elizabeth’s first writing attempts were three screenplays which were performed in London as a charity fund-raiser. She submitted them to a publisher who told her to go away and write a novel. “We are forever in his debt,” writes one of her biographers.
The Old Knight
His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth ’gainst time and age hath ever spurned,
But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing:
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen;
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.
His helmet now shall make a hive for bees;
And, lovers’ sonnets turned to holy psalms,
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, which are age’s alms:
But though from court to cottage he depart,
His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.
And when he saddest sits in homely cell,
He’ll teach his swains this carol for a song:
“Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well,
Curst be the souls that think her any wrong.”
Goddess, allow this aged man his right,
To be your beadsman now, that was your knight.
GEORGE PEELE
Chapter 1
1
Harriet at her window watched the gulls with delight. It meant bad weather at sea when they came up-river, and she had known when she woke this morning in the waiting stillness, and had seen the misted sky, that the only spell of fine weather was going to break in a gale; and she did not enjoy the March winds in this draughty, bone-searching house whose cold and damp had already crippled her. But she enjoyed the gulls, and would enjoy them more when she had found the right pair of spectacles. She had been reading her Bible when she first heard that strange, exciting cry, and her reading spectacles were no good for distance. She wasted a few precious moments finding her distant ones on the table beside her, knocking over the teacup on her breakfast tray as she did so, for her hands were knotted with arthritis, slow and fumbling. Daphne might have sharp words to say later about the dregs in the teacup staining the traycloth, and for a moment she flinched from the thought of them, but when she got the gulls into focus she forgot Daphne. She had never been able to remember other things when the gulls came inland.
Over the river they were weaving their patterns against the background of fields that lifted to the beech woods on the skyline, and the grey sky above. There were only pale colors in the world today. Yesterday, in the sunshine, the fields that had already fallen under the harrow for spring ploughing had shone like ridged crimson satin and the pastures had been emerald green. The hawthorns and nut trees in the spinneys, and the beech woods beyond, had been beautiful with the colors of the swelling buds. But today the colors were hidden and imprisoned, even as the sun was imprisoned. “For when there’s a grey wall between one and another who’s to say which is prisoner and which is free?” thought Harriet. “When the heart aches one for the other there’s little to choose between them.”
Her thoughts had been obsessed by prisons and prisoners these last few days. Since she had had to lead this shut-in invalid life she had found illness involved suffering almost as much from the tyranny of painful thoughts as from physical pain. Outside this lovely valley where she lived the world was a dreadful place and first one misery would possess her mind and then another. Crimes against children would take hold of her one day, and on another she would be grieving for the blind or mad. She lacked the physical strength to thrust tormenting thought from her even if she had wanted to, but she did not want to. The fortunate, she thought, and she counted herself fortunate, should not insulate themselves in their good fortune. If they could do nothing else they could pray, and she prayed as she was able, grieving over the childishness of her prayer but trying to make it real to herself by letting the travail of her mind bring forth one concrete fact at a time to pray about; one child in danger, some particular man in darkness, some particular prisoner facing the world again with fear and shame; God knew who they were even if she did not. That prisoner had been with her for three days and nights now, and the greyness of this day had made him more real to her than ever. Yet she liked these grey days. They had their own beauty. When the sun was out the world was a young knight riding out with armor flashing and pennon flying, but on a day like this it was an old beadsman turned to his prayers, wrapped in a dun cloak of stillness and silence.
And the grey days made the perfect setting for the brilliance and freedom of the gulls. Her eyes followed their flight, the long sweeping curves, the slow beat of the great wings, and then a more gentle rise and fall as though the still air had unseen waves whose rhythm rocked them. There was a great spaciousness about their movements. Both the sea and the sky were theirs. They were content now in this valley between the hills because their wings could carry them where they would whenever they wished. Birds were more satisfactory symbols of the heavenly spirits, Harriet thought, than any of those sentimental angels that one saw in the children’s picture books. There was nothing so swift and free as a bird. Yet crippled though she was she felt nothing but joy in watching them. S
The clock on her mantelpiece chimed the half-hour and her joy was lost in sudden anxiety. Half-past eight and no sign of John bringing the car round. The children would be late for school again and would be scolded, and Margary would miss the beginning of the arithmetic class and be more wretchedly bogged down than ever in the miseries of subtraction. Pat and Winkle would be all right because Pat’s scornfulness and Winkle’s placidity usually insulated them against scoldings, but their all-rightness was apt by contrast to make Margary the more aware of her chronic state of misfortune and that was bad for her. Harriet listened anxiously, then relaxed as the familiar sounds of backfiring came from the battered garage by the lilac bush. The poor old car bounced out and forward, two wheels on the flower bed, and bumped into the scraper by the front door.
John drove as badly as a man can and once he had got the car as far as the house Daphne allowed him no further part in getting the children to school. Unless prevented by unavoidable crisis she drove them there herself and fetched them again in the afternoon. The nearest school that she considered worthy of her children was at Silverbridge, a small country town three miles down the river, and that meant twelve miles driving daily and a greater expenditure of time and strength and gasoline than she could afford. Harriet sighed over Daphne’s pride, that would not even consider the village school, her unpunctuality and extravagance, and then smiled delightedly as Daphne herself came out of the front door below her window in her shabby, beautifully cut tweeds, ran down the steps, and got into the car. At this distance she looked the lovely girl she had been, not the worn, impatient woman she had become; more lithe and gay than her small daughters, hurrying after her with their unbecoming grey felt uniform hats askew, dropping schoolbooks on the steps as they ran and then stooping to pick them up so that their stiff grey skirts, now too short, stuck out vertically and showed their underclothes. Yet the posterior view of all three was engaging in this position, Winkle’s being particularly so. “But those skirts must be let down,” thought Harriet, regarding Winkle’s pink knickers, and the fat legs that bulged from beneath them. “It’s hardly respectable; not with Daphne never seeming to get them into knickers that match their skirts.”
To her horror, and self-scorn, Harriet found that she had tears in her eyes. Until a couple of years ago, when the arthritis had to a certain extent crippled her hands, she had done all the vicarage sewing. Four years ago she had been able to stand long enough to do the washing and ironing as well. Seven years ago she had done nearly all the work of the house, and been able to hide the difficulty with which she did it with complete success. Ten years ago, when Daphne had married her cousin John Wentworth and she had come to be their housekeeper at the vicarage, she had felt only a few aches and twinges to which she paid no attention and had believed herself capable of another fifteen years’ hard work. She had been sixty-five then and had felt fifty. Now she was seventy-five and felt ninety. Though the years of steadily increasing pain had seemed long as she endured them, in retrospect they seemed to have passed quickly. She had become imprisoned in this uselessness almost overnight, it seemed, and now she must bear it as best she could. She told herself she could have put up with it better if John and Daphne had done as she had begged them and sent her to some institution, but they wouldn’t do that. She had been nanny to John and his stepbrothers in the old manor house up on the hill a mile away, and his bleak childhood had been redeemed from disaster by her love. He said he could not face life without her. They all said they could not do without her. In the paradoxical nature of things if she could have believed them she would have been a much happier woman, but not the woman whom they could not do without.
2
The car moved down the steep, moss-grown drive and disappeared from sight in the lane that wound through the village and then along by the river to Silverbridge. John stood waving to the children until he could no longer see them, and then with his hands in his pockets and his pipe drooping from the side of his mouth he gazed dejectedly at the view, his long thin figure sagging a little. He hated to see them going off to that apparently most desirable school where he had a feeling that Pat and Margary were not happy, though they had not told him so, and Winkle perhaps would not be when she was older. It was a small and most select school, for young children only, and rather celebrated in the neighborhood because it had been run by the same charming old lady for many years, but he was not at all sure it was a good school. Daphne said it was and with no evidence to the contrary it was only his instinct that contradicted her. The children would have been happy at the village school taught by good old Miss Baker, or at the Silverbridge convent school that was equally disliked by Daphne because such a mixture of children went there, but where they were stank in his nostrils. Yes, stank. He repeated the ugly word forcibly in his mind, and then, with that uncertainty and self-distrust that followed immediately upon all his decisions, he retracted it. After all, what did he know about it? He’d only been to the place two or three times. Daphne, who went every day, said it was all right. She should know. Obviously, mothers were more knowledgeable about little girls than fathers could hope to be. Especially when the father was a man such as himself; a negligible failure.
He took his pipe from his mouth and stared at the empty bowl. Sundays excepted he had given up smoking for economy’s sake, for Pat was to go to boarding school in the autumn and he suspected that she had first-class brains. He wanted to save every penny he could to give her her chance later on. But in moments of perplexity he sometimes found solace in sucking his empty pipe. That is, when he knew he was alone. He was alone now, and in that fact too there was solace.
He straightened himself and became aware of the gulls, and instantly delight leaped up in him, a flame of pure joy that burned against the habitual sadness of his thoughts much as the brilliant white of the gulls’ wings shone against the sunless landscape. Seen from this distance the flight of the gulls was perfection of beauty, and his joy that leaped to meet it was equally perfect. Meeting, the two were one and his joy was taken from him, the pain of its loss as sharp as the joy had been. It had been that way with him all his life, at sight or sound of beauty. The joy, and then the total loss. The beauty that robbed him was, he supposed, always stronger than he, for he was a weak man. Strong men perhaps could retain the gift and give the beauty to the world again in verse or music; and from that too some other fellow would with his joy snatch beauty. What a divine traffic! Yet he did not regret his total loss. It was his own particular mode of giving.
Aware of a sense of companionship so delicate that it was no intrusion upon his loneliness he looked round and up and saw Harriet’s smiling face at the window. He had not said good morning to her yet. He laughed, leapt up the steps to the front door and went quickly, with a shambling but boyish stride, through the cold echoing hall, up the dark staircase and across the large, draughty landing to her room. In his eagerness he hardly stopped to wonder, as he normally did whenever he entered his home, why the builders of Victorian vicarages had so concentrated upon darkness, draughts and unwanted space. Harriet’s face had been like the whiteness of the gulls against the somber fields; the darkness and cold had become a mere background. He tapped lightly on her door and went in.
“How are you, Harriet?” he asked a little anxiously. “How’s the beastly pain? Did you sleep well?”
“What a man you are for asking unnecessary questions,” said Harriet with annoyance. “Can’t you see I’m as flourishing as a spoilt old woman can be? Sit down and eat a bit of toast and marmalade. It’s likely you read your letters at breakfast and forgot your food.”
He laughed, sat down opposite her and helped himself to a piece of toast to please her. She smiled at him, sorry for her irritation. The one thing that tried her patience was family fuss about her state of health. Commiseration, monotonous daily enquiries, anxiety, drove her quite distracted. Of course she had pain, and of course it kept
She smiled at John, who so far as she knew had never congratulated himself upon anything whatever, and wondered to what extent his lifelong sense of failure was his greatest asset. She could not know. No one could know, least of all John. All she could know was the love it had called out in her from the day she had arrived at Belmaray Manor, and found the little boy of three years old sobbing in a dark corner of the nursery in a welter of spilt water, broken glass and wilting yellow petals. He had been struggling after a floral decoration of dandelions in his toothglass to welcome the new nanny, but had dropped it. Looking at him now she marvelled how little he had changed in forty-one years. He was stooped and careworn, his sandy hair greying and receding at the temples, his mouth always a little open from chronic catarrh, his face overweighted by his beak of a nose, but his eager impulsive movements, ending generally in disaster and combining so oddly with the Wentworth charm and distinction, his smile and anxious clear blue eyes, were exactly the same as when she had first known him.