Part 6 (1/2)

Meanwhile Livia was deciding that she certainly had made a mistake, unless she could, after all, succeed in getting her own way; and to do that she would have to take things into her own hands, much more positively than she had yet done. She would walk with him when it was fine, because there was nothing else to do. Once they walked out to the surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a s...o...b..ll rolled over and over in the snow. It was comprehensive and unreasoning, and it forgot the small grievance out of which it rose, in a sense of the vast grievance into which it had swollen. To Roserra such moods, which were now becoming frequent, were unintelligible, and he suffered from them like one who has to find his way through a camp of his enemies in the dark.

When they got back to the house, Livia would silently take up a book and sit motionless for hours, turning over the pages without raising her eyes, or showing a consciousness of his presence. He pretended to do the same, but his eyes wandered continually, and he had to read every page twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was in this p.r.i.c.kly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of waiting, and doing nothing, became an oppression. And his silence, and what she supposed to be his indifference, grew upon her like a heavy weight, until the silent woman, who sat there reading sullenly, felt the impulse to rise and fling away the book, and shriek aloud.

Livia did not say that she wished to go away from Arles, anywhere from Arles, but the desire spoke in all her silences. She made no complaint, but Roserra saw an unfriendliness growing up in her eyes which terrified him. She held him, as she had held him since their first meeting, by a kind of magnetism which he had come to realise was neither love nor sympathy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul for more than half a lifetime, waited upon it delicately, served it with its favourite food; and now something stronger had come forward and said: No more. What was it? He had no wish to speculate; it mattered little whether it was what people called his higher nature, or what they called his lower nature, which had brought him to this result. At least he had some recompense.

When he told Livia that he had decided to go back to Ma.r.s.eilles ('Arles does not suit you,' he said; 'you have not been well since we came here') Livia flung herself into his arms with an uncontrollable delight.

On the night before they left, he sat for a long time, alone, under the Allee des Tombeaux. When he came back, Livia was watching for him from the window. She ran to the door and opened it.

It was midday when they reached Ma.r.s.eilles. The sun burned on the blue water, which lay hot, motionless, and glittering. There was not a breath of wind, and the dust shone on the roads like a thick white layer of powder. The light beat downwards from the blue sky, and upwards from the white dust of the roads. The heat was enveloping; it wrapped one from head to foot like the caress of a hot furnace. Roserra pressed his hands to his forehead, as he leaned with Livia over the terrace above the sea; his head throbbed, it was an effort even to breathe. He remembered the grey coolness of the Allee des Tombeaux, where the old men sat among the tombs. A nausea, a suffocating nausea, rose up within him as he felt the heat and glare of this vulgar, exuberant paradise of sn.o.bs and tourists.

He sickened with revolt before this over-fed nature, sweating the fat of life. He looked at Livia; she stood there, perfectly cool under her sunshade, turning to watch a carriage that came towards them in a cloud of dust. She was once more in her element, she was quite happy; she had plunged back into the warmth of life out of that penetential chillness of Arles; and it was with real friendliness that she turned to Roserra, as she saw his eyes fixed upon her.

SEAWARD LACKLAND.

Seaward Lackland was born on a day of storm, when his father was out at sea in his fis.h.i.+ng-boat; and the mother vowed that if her husband came home alive the boy should be dedicated to the Lord. Isaac Lackland was the only one of his mates who came home alive out of the storm; and the boy got the queer name of Seaward because his mother had looked out to sea, as soon as she had strength enough to be propped up in bed, praying for her husband every minute of the time until he came back. She could see the sea through the little leaded windows of the cottage which stood right on the edge of the cliff above Carbis Bay. The child's earliest recollection was of the shape and colour of the waves, between the diamond leadings, as he was held up to the window in his mother's arms.

It was like looking at pictures in frames, he thought afterwards.

The child was dedicated to the Lord. Isaac knelt down by the bedside and prayed over him as Mary held him in her arms, and when he got up from his knees he said: 'Mary, if the boy lives, please G.o.d, he shall have his schooling; and I wouldn't say but he might make a fine preacher of the Gospel.'

'It was little schooling Peter ever had,' said his wife.

'Peter was wanted in the boat; this youngster can wait.'

'Oh, Isaac, do you think he'll go to America, when he's grown up, like Peter?'

'No, Mary, he'll not go farther than Land's End by land, or Mount's Bay by sea, if what I feel is the truth. We've given him to the Lord, and I say the Lord will lend him to us.'

Mary said under her breath, 'Oh, please, Lord Jesus,' several times over, with her eyes tight shut, as she did when she seemed to pray best.

Her first son had been drowned at sea, her second had run away from home and gone to America; and she hardly dared think of what would happen to this one. But they had done what they could. Would not G.o.d watch over him, and would he not be kind to her because she had given up some of her rights in the child?

The child grew strong and gentle; he learned quickly what he was taught, and when he had learned it he would set himself to think out what it really meant, and why it meant that and not something else. He was always good to his mother, and as soon as he had learned to read he would read to her out of a few books which she cared for, the Bible chiefly, and Bogatzky's 'Golden Treasury,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

Through reading it over and over to his mother, he got to know a good part of the Bible by heart, and he was always asking what this and that puzzling pa.s.sage meant exactly, and, when he got no satisfying answer, trying to puzzle out a meaning for himself.

Every day he went in to the Wesleyan day-school at St. Ives, and as he walked there and back along the cliff-path, generally alone, all sorts of whimsical ideas turned over in his head, ideas that came to him out of books, and out of what people said, and out of the queer world in which he found himself, half land and half water. It was always changing about him and yet always there, in the same place, with its regular and yet unaccountable tides and harvests. Sometimes there was a storm at sea and all the boats did not come back, and the people he had talked with yesterday had gone, like the stone he kicked over the cliff in walking, or he saw them carried up the beach with covered faces. Death is always about the life of fishermen, and he saw it more visibly and a thing more natural and expected than it must seem to most children.

He had always loved the sea, and it was his greatest delight to be taken out when the pilchards were in the bay, and to sit in the boat watching the silver shoals as they crowded into the straining net. He waited for the cry of 'Heva!' from the watchman on the hill, and often sat beside him, or stared out to sea through his long telescope, longing to be the first to catch the moving glitter of silver. He talked with the men 'like a grown-up chap' they said, and they talked with him as if he were a man, telling him stories, not the stories they would have told children, but things out of their own lives, and ideas that came into their heads as they lay out at sea all night in the drift-boats.

There was one old man with whom the boy liked best to talk, because he had been a sailor in his youth and had gone through all the seas and landed at many ports, and had been s.h.i.+pwrecked on a wild island and lived for a year among savages, and he was not like the other men, who had always been fishers, and thought Plymouth probably as good as London. Old Minshull seemed to the boy a very clever as well as a far-travelled person, and he discussed some of his difficulties with him and got help, he thought, from the old man.

His difficulties were chiefly religious ones. He knew much more about the Bible than about the world, and his imagination was constantly at work on those absorbing stories in Kings and Judges, and all sorts of cloudy pictures which he made up for himself out of obscure hints in the Prophets and the Apocalypse. The old Cornishman knew his Bible pretty well, but not so well as the boy; and the boy would bring the book out on the cliff and read over some of the confusing things; murders, with G.o.d's approval, it seemed, and treacheries which set nations free, and are called 'blessed,' and the sins of the saints; and then mysterious curses and unintelligible idolatries, and the Scarlet Woman and Jonah's whale. He liked best the Old Testament, and had formed a clear idea of G.o.d the Father as a perfectly just but constantly avenging deity; it pained him if he could not bring everything into agreement with this idea; and in the New Testament he was often perplexed by what Jesus seemed to do and undo in the divine affairs. The old sailor turned over all these matters in his head; they were new to him, but he faced them, and he was sometimes able to suggest just the common-sense way out of the difficulty.

When Mary Lackland thought the boy old enough to understand the full meaning of it, she told him how, on the day of his birth, he had been dedicated to G.o.d, and she told him that he was never to forget this, but to think much of G.o.d's claims upon him, and to be certain of a special divine guardians.h.i.+p. He listened gravely, and promised. From that time he began to look on G.o.d, not with less awe, but with a more intimate sense of his continual presence, and a kind of filial feeling grew up in him quite simply, a love of G.o.d, which came as a great reality into his life. He felt that he must never dishonour this divine father, either by anything he did or by the way in which he thought of him even. Did not G.o.d, in a sense, depend on him as a father depends on his son, to keep his honour spotless, to be more jealous of that honour than of his own? That, or something like it, only half-defined to himself, was what he felt about G.o.d, to whom his whole life had been dedicated.

When he had finished his schooling, the boy joined his father in the boats, first, only by day, in the pilchard fishery, and then in the drift-boats that went far out, at night, in the herring season. His father was a silent man and rarely spoke to him; the other men half feared and half despised him, because he would not drink or play cards with them, and seemed to be generally either reading or thinking. He thought a great deal in those long nights, and when he was eighteen he began to be seriously alarmed because, so far as he knew, he was not converted.

He knew that he tried to do what was right, that he kept all the commandments, prayed night and morning, and that he had this instinctive love of G.o.d; but, according to the Methodists, all that was not enough.