Gentian Hill

by Elizabeth Goudge

"Mr. Roger Mallock is a clergyman of the Church of England," said Mrs. Loraine with the same severity, "and the Catholics of the neighborhood are not invited there very often. But I did go once. It is very beautiful inside. There is a minstrel’s gallery, dear, a paneled dining parlor, and very beautiful ceilings of Italian work, one of them showing the goddess Flora in a bower of flowers. And I believe now, dear, there is wallpaper in one of the rooms that was taken from some captured French vessel. It represents the landing of Captain Cook upon some outlandish island, and is entirely covered with palm trees and naked savages."

  "Oh!" gasped Stella ecstatically.

  "I believe it to be highly immodest, dear," said Mrs. Loraine drily. "Though doubtless quite in keeping with the goddess Flora. And the gilded coach and six."

  Her sweet lips folded themselves into a straight line, and Stella thought briefly how odd it was that thinking differently about God tended to make even the nicest people not very sympathetic towards each other.

  The chaise drew up in front of the almshouses. There were seven of them and they were nearly two hundred years old. The Mallocks were comparative newcomers at the Court, they had only lived there for just over 150 years. The Careys had lived there before them and a Sir George Carey had built the almshouses in his old age, when it had suddenly occurred to him that up till now he had not perhaps been as good as he might have been.

  They had two rooms each and were all under one roof, but each had its own separate herb garden in front enclosed within a stone wall. The inhabitants could be either men or women. The lord of the manor gave them each a shilling a week with a new gown and a new white shirt or shift yearly at Christmas.

  The old woman whom they were visiting was Wilmotta Bogan, always called Granny Bogan. She had come down in the world-come down a good long way, it was said-and become at last a weeding woman, and for the last two years had pulled weeds in the gardens of the gentry until she got too old to stoop, and Madam Mallock had taken pity on her, and installed her in one of the almshouses. She had weeded sometimes for Mrs. Loraine, and Mrs. Loraine did not forget her now, even though she was not really very fond of the old woman.

  "You must not mind what Granny says, dear," she whispered to Stella as they got out of the chaise. "Nor the way she looks at you. She can say surprising things. She’s odd.

  And as she does not care for children, she may be a little short with you."

  They went up the narrow path through Granny Bogan’s herb garden, their full skirts sweeping against the herbs, and sending up gusts of fragrance into the sunshine. Mother Sprigg was something of an herbalist, and Stella noticed at once that Granny Bogan must be, too, for she had the nine mystic herbs growing in her garden: hellebore, rosemary, lavender, sage, comfrey, rue, wormwood, marjoram, and vervain. `She had other things too, verbena mint, and camomile, and some plants whose names Stella did not know, but the nine held pride of place. Each little house had a small low oak door set in the thickness of the old stone wall, with a narrow diamond-paned window of ancient green glass to each side of it and two above. Granny Bogan’s door was set ajar and through the crack issued steam, an aromatic scent, and a low crooning. Mrs. Loraine knocked a little timidly, and then whispered to Stella, "Now, we must just wait until Granny is ready."

  They waited for ten minutes, and then the crooning ceased, light steps were heard pattering across a stone floor, and the door opened. Stella, preparing as a child does to look up into the face of a grownup, found herself to her delighted surprise looking straight into the bright eyes of a little old woman no taller than herself, whom she was sure she had seen before somewhere. Yet it did not seem quite correct to call Granny

  Bogan old, even though she had the wrinkled parchment skin and nutcracker nose and chin of her eighty years, for her beady black eyes were so bright, her back so straight, and her tiny figure so trim that she looked more like a child than an old woman. She wore a full-skirted gown of dark brown frieze wool, and white apron, mob-cap, and a scarlet shawl crossed across her chest, and was most exquisitely neat and clean. But the impact of her personality was startling, so caustic and so sharp that the unprepared were likely to recoil when her gimlet eyes bored into them, and her cackle of derisive laughter announced without words her opinion of what she had seen. But Mrs. Loraine and Stella both stood firm, Mrs. Loraine inured by previous experience, and Stella because in her different way-the way not of knowledge but of instinct-could see almost as clearly as Granny Bogan, and knew at once that this alarming old woman was not really as alarming as she looked. She had known too much in her life, undoubtedly, but the evil she had put away from her at most tremendous cost and now was free of it. Stella looked at Granny Bogan and then curtsied to her, aware of her reverence, though not understanding the reason for it.

  Granny Bogan bobbed to the quality, led them in, and dusted a chair for Mrs. Loraine, but the humility of her actions was not echoed in her demeanor. Standing before her visitor, her little claws of hands folded at her waist, her face alight with mockery, it was the dignified Mrs. Loraine who appeared very slightly at a disadvantage. A very pungent steam was issuing from the kettle on the fire and she sneezed.

  "Bless you, Ma’am," Granny Bogan congratulated her. "That’s one devil gone out."

  Mrs. Loraine laughed. "Sit down, Granny," she said.

  Granny Bogan sat down on the second of her two chairs and watched while Stella took out the flannel petticoat and the packets of tea, peppermint, and sugar.

  "Thank you, Ma’am," she said briskly, and put them away in the cupboard in the wall beside the fireplace. She sounded ‘grateful but not obsequiously so. If the gentry liked to bestow charity upon the poor, let them. It pleased them and did no harm. But Granny Bogan liked Mrs. Loraine; she might cackle with laughter at the little hypocrisies and self deceptions with which all but the most valiant must protect themselves from too much self-knowledge, but she was always well aware of hidden loveliness, too; and there was a genuine softening of her sharp bright eyes as she sat down again and enquired after her guest’s rheumatism. A discussion of that complaint followed and Stella, sitting on a three-legged stool, looked about her.

  The small low-ceilinged, stone-flagged room was as clean as a new pin. A bright wood tire burned on the hearth, and, in the large iron kettle that hung over it from a chain, some strange concoction was brewing. On a rag rug before the hearth sat a black cat who took not the slightest notice of any of them. The furniture consisted of a dresser, an old oak chest that served also as a table, the two chairs, and the stool. So many bunches of herbs hung from the beams overhead that one could scarcely see the ceiling at all, and pots of scarlet geraniums stood on the sills of the two small windows.

  But it was the things on the dresser that fascinated Stella. Besides the few pots and pans and some bits of bright china, there were glass jars filled with strange-looking liquids, bundles of odd-looking roots, a snake skin, and several bright-colored tins that she was quite sure contained treasures too precious to be exposed to the sight. But she was careful not to stare too hard. She had not needed Mrs. Loraine to teach her that, however devouring one’s curiosity, it is not good manners to stare too hard at other people’s possessions.

  "A stolen potato carried in the pocket would cure you, Mai’am," Granny Bogan was saying.

  Mrs. Loraine laughed. "I don’t steal, Granny."

  Granny Bogan produced a withered object from her own pocket. "I took a pocketful the last time I weeded at the Court," she said. "I’ve still half a dozen left. Take it, Ma’arn. And I’ll give you a bottle of my vervain mixture. A teaspoonful in a wineglass of water, night and morning."

  Mrs. Loraine blushed a little, but she accepted the potato and a little bottle filled from one of the jars on the dresser. "How Dr. Crane would laugh at me!" she said to Stella.

  "No," said Stella. "He uses vervain himself. He says it’s the holy herb of the druids. He uses hellebore too. The Greeks used it."

  Granny Bogan turned to her eager
ly. "You know Dr. Crane, child?"

  "Yes, Ma’am," said Stella. "I live at Gentian Hill."

  "He’s a good man. I-Ie helped me once when I was in trouble. But for him, I’d have lost my greatest treasure."

  "What is that, Ma’am?" asked Stella eagerly.

  But Granny Bogan, opening one of the tins on the dresser with her back turned, appeared not to have heard her. Turning around, she held out a little muslin bag with some dried leaves inside. "Take it, child," she said. "You see far, but there may come times when you’ll need to see further yet, into the future, maybe, or into your lover’s heart. Then on the night of the full moon, soak a few of those leaves in the water from a fairy well and bathe your eyes, and in your sleep you’ll see what you will see. But you must love with a single heart."

  "Thank you, Ma’am," said Stella, taking the little bag. “Is it the herb of grace? Is it true?"

  "How did you know, child?"

  "My mother at Weekaborough Farm grows it, and uses it to bathe sore eyes. But I don’t think anybody at the farm ever uses it to see into the future."

  "There’s not many knows its real use," said Granny Bogan, "and you must use the water from a fairy well at the new moon, and you must love your man with a single heart.

  There’s many a lass thinks she loves a man, when all the time it’s herself that she’s loving, herself decked out in the finery he can give her, with a ring upon her finger, and a body sleek as a tabby cat’s with his cherishing, and-" Mrs. Loraine arosehastily, and said she thought they ought to be going.

  "Such a lass would see nothing if she bathed her eyes all night," went on Granny Bogan. "Must you be going, Ma’am? ‘ I’m thanking you kindly, I’m sure, for the comforts, and don’t you be letting the potato out of your pocket. And as for you, child, come again and come alone."

  "Stella cannot be running about the countryside by herself, Granny," said Mrs. Loraine decidedly. "She’s just a child."

  "She’ll soon be a woman," said Granny Bogan. "Look at the rounded little breasts she has already, and the look about the eyes that tells you-"

  Mrs. Loraine swept Stella out of the cottage and down through the herb garden in some agitation. She blamed herself severely. That Granny, who as a rule disliked the young, should have taken this embarrassing fancy to Stella was most distressing.

  "She’s a queer old woman, dear. Forget her," she said as the chaise drove off. "And if I were you, I should throw away the packet of rue." ·

  "Are you going to throw away the stolen potato, Ma’am?" asked Stella sweetly.

  Mrs. Loraine had a sense of humor. They looked at each other and laughed. The days were not as yet entirely enlightened. Even the educated had not as yet lost their faith

  in fairy lore.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  It was not until Midsummer Day, falling this year upon a Friday, when she was once more with Mrs. Loraine, that Stella woke up in the first light of dawn and knew that she was going again to Cockington, and going alone. She dressed quickly in her lavender print gown, put on her cloak, and crept noiselessly downstairs. She felt no pricking of her conscience, for she had never promised Mrs. Loraine she would not go to Cockington, and her adventurousness had accustomed her to early morning escapades. But she missed Hodge, for this was the first upon which she had set out without him. Araminta had locked the front door and taken the key to bed with her, but she unlatched the hall window and climbed through it into the bed of canterbury bells below. The garden was delicious, scented with dew-drenched stocks and gillyflowers, and because the birds were hardly awake yet, she could hear the sea.

  She ran across the road to the holy well, sat down on the low parapet, clipped her hands in the water, and bathed her face. The water was ice-cold, and the clear drops that fell from her lingers were like diamonds. The sheep in Torre churchyard were not awake yet; she could see their huddled shapes among the gravestones, and could hardly tell which were graves and which were sheep. The trees were shrouded in a gray mist, but the tower of the church, and St. Michael’s chapel upon its pinnacle of rock, soared free of it and seemed to catch the flames of the coming sunshine upon their summits. Apart from the sighing of the sea, the world was so silent that she could hear the drops tinkling into the water from her fingers, and the fall of a rose petal from the bush beside the well. A wild rapture went through her. She remembered how, as a small child, she used to fling herself into Father Sprigg’s arms, or dive into the sweet hay. She wanted to do something like that now, to throw herself into this beauty of midsummer dawn, and be lost in it. As she couldn’t do that, she got up and ran down Robbers’ Lane like a mad thing, her cloak streaming behind her, her curls disordered, the wind of her going whipping her wet face. She ran until she reached Yappacombe Meadow and then, finding she could run no more, she sat down on the stile to get her breath, looking out over the grass and thyme that stretched between the lane and the sea.

  Here she saw another young creature in as rapturous a condition as herself, a hare disporting itself not a stone’s throw from her. It seemed quite crazy. It pirouetted upon a hind leg, its ears flapping like Hags, it cavorted from side to side, leaped four feet in the air, came down again and turned a somersault, raced ’round and ’round in circles, topped dead, rose up again like an arrow, and started the performance all over again. Stella laughed till her sides ached. She had seen hares go mad before, but not as mad as this, and not in june, only in March. Wliat was it doing now? It had turned a final somersault and disappeared in a thicket of hawthorn.

  Stella fell off the stile and raced across the meadow towards the thicket, oblivious of the dew that soaked her shoes and draggled her skirt. She reached the thicket, but the hare had gone down under the roots. of a tree to where the goblins lived, or into the air to join the larks that were already singing high up in the thinning haze of blue. Stella was quite willing to believe either. She could find no trace of him at all, but retracing her steps across the meadow, she found something else-a fairy ring upon the grass, traced about a gray rock, and in the center of it, growing close to the boulder, was a patch of gentian. She had not known that gentians grew so close to the sea. She did not pick any, for they evidently belonged to the fairies. Standing in the ring she had three wishes, and then she climbed back over the stile and ran on down the lane to Cockington.

  The sun had fully risen by the time she reached the park, and the world that until now had been so still and shrouded suddenly awoke to music and movement. A breeze had come in from the sea and the heavy elm and chestnut boughs swayed above the rippling, dancing flowers and grasses of the park. The birds sang riotously and the sound of tumbling water from a stream that ran through the park was loud and joyful. Water, wind, and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.

  The wind died as quickly as it had arisen, the birds went about their business, and the sound of the water was no more than the quiet ringing of a fairy bell. The grass was still again and the deer moved quietly from sun to shadow, heads down as they cropped the grass. There was a low chuckle behind her and Stella swung ’round with a thrill of fear, expecting to see she knew not what-Puck, or one of those strange green goblins with conical wooden hats like tiny haystacks perched on the back of their heads; she had seen them often as a child, and though they had never attempted to do her any harm she had always run away at sight of them. But it was Granny Bogan, wearing the battered rust-colored sun-bonnet and the earth-colored cloak that had been her weeding woman’s uniform, and holding a large basket. Her appearance among the clumps of valerian and meadowsweet that bordered the stream was so sudden that Stella wondered for the moment if she was really human. The goblins had had just those gemlike sharp bright
eyes.

  "Washing your face in the dew, my maid?" asked Granny.

  "I’ve washed it already at the holy well, Ma’am," said Stella, curtseying.

  "St. Elfride cures boils, but not pimples.’ said Granny. "Fairy dew is best for pimples."

  “But I’ve not got boils or pimples," objected Stella.

  "Prevention is better than cure," said Granny, "and where will you find the man to kiss a pimply face?"

  Stella, for the sake of peace, plunged her hands in the grass and rubbed them over her face until her cheeks were rosy.

  “That’s better," said Granny. "It’s roses he’ll want to kiss when he comes home again, not pimples. Rosalind’s roses."

  "Rosalind?" asked Stella, bewildered. "But Rosalind died years ago."

  "She never dies," said Granny. "There’s always the young one waiting for her lover, learning patience through the slow days, and he away in the world tasting the bitterness of it, struggling with the wild beasts like David, the shepherd boy. That’s as it should be. He must get his sinews strong upon him for his man’s love and labor. And always the holy hermit prays like Moses upon the hilltop or high in the watchtower, and the devil take him if he lets his arms drop, for then the maid forsakes her patience and the lad his fortitude, and if they come together then it’s woe betide them, for their children will be squint-eyed and knock-kneed, and there’ll be rats in the hayrick and mildew in the wheat.’

  Granny Bogan uttered this dreadful prophecy like a sort of incantation, and all the time she was darting up and down beside the stream like a dragonfly, filling her basket with valerian. ·

  "What do you use valerian for, Granny?" asked Stella, helping her.

  "Valerian?" repeated Granny. "I don’t hold with these fancy names. Herbalists. call it capon’s tail or all-heal. You apply the leaves, my honey, to fresh wounds, and they heal in the twinkling of an eye."

  They had followed the stream right up to the walls of Cockington church, where it swerved aside and disappeared into the woods beyond.