Pilgrim's Inn

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Aloud she said, “My dear, you’re very pretty.”

  Sally flushed scarlet and knocked over a small mahogany table. Lucilla loved her both for the flush and for the clumsiness; she disliked the hard-boiled young who took all praise as their due, and steered clear of the knickknacks of the old as though they despised them.

  “I don’t think I’ve hurt it,” said Sally, running an anxious finger round the rim of the little table as though it were the cheek of a child. “It’s lovely, with that bit of inlay in the center. Is it very old?”

  “Yes, it’s old. It belonged to my great-grandmother. Sit here by me, dear, and take your coat off. It’s warm in here, I know. I’m old and I have to have a fire when I expect you young people would rather be without it. David, take Sally’s coat. May I call you Sally? Ben, my darling, when you’ve handed the tea come and sit here by me and Sally.”

  David and Margaret, sitting together, talked to each other desultorily and watched the three by the fire with pleasure. “Someone fresh does Mother good,” murmured Margaret. “I thought they’d get on,” he answered. Lucilla was looking almost absurdly happy and Sally’s flush had left her face rosily lighted. David, looking at her, remembered a line in a poem that he loved. Her face had “put on the light of children praised.”

  Ben ate bread and honey and felt happy; he always did when he was with Grandmother or David. It was a funny thing, but though he so adored his mother he never felt at his happiest when he was with her. He always had the feeling that he was never being quite what she wanted him to be. Mother was rather a demanding sort of person, somehow; she always seemed asking of everyone and everything just a little more than they could give. Grandmother and David never seemed to want him to be anything but what he was; they seemed to like him like that. And as for Aunt Margaret, well, she was just dear funny old Aunt Margaret. And Sally was one of the most comforting people he had ever met. He didn’t like girls as a general rule, but she wasn’t like a girl. He supposed she’d be dreadfully insulted but she reminded him of the mother wolf in the Jungle Book, the one who had mothered Mowgli. He could see her with lots of little wolf cubs cuddled up to her, and Mowgli asleep in the curve of her tail. He laughed suddenly, happily, at the absurdity of his vision, his face alight with ripples of delight.

  “What’s the joke, old chap?” asked David.

  “Look at the Bastard,” said Ben. The answer was partly true, because before he had seen that sudden vision of Mowgli in the curve of Sally’s tail he had been smiling inside himself at the Bastard’s position. It was the Bastard’s habit to lie at Lucilla’s feet with his chin on her shoe as though he were keeping her tethered to the spot where he wished to have her. Today he had taken up his usual position, but he had stretched out a furry forepaw and laid it on Sally’s shoe, and his old moth-eaten ostrich feather of a tail was beating a slow affirmation upon the floor. “These two,” he seemed to be saying, “are mine, and beloved of me, and this hearth is mine, and here they shall remain, mistresses of my heart and hearth, while I have any say in the matter. Amen.”

  “Caught,” said David to Sally. “Tethered to Damerosehay forever now.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Sally. “This is the House of the Perfect Eaves.”

  “My dear!” cried Lucilla in delight. “So you had a grandmother who read you The Wind in the Willows when you were a little girl.”

  “My Scotch nanny read it to me,” said Sally. “I never had a grandmother. At least, I mean not to know. Both my grandmothers died when they were quite young.”

  “I grieve for them, dear,” said Lucilla. “I read somewhere, and it’s quite true, that to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.”

  “I’ve missed my grandmothers dreadfully,” said Sally.

  “In that case,” said Lucilla, laying her hand on Sally’s, “could you adopt me?”

  Sally went pink again, and her eyes were so bright in the firelight that Ben would have said there were tears in them had it not been his conviction that Sally was not the watery sort.

  “Aunt Margaret,” said David, “I very much doubt if we are wanted. Shall I help you wash up?”

  “Be careful of the trolley over the rugs, dear,” said Lucilla.

  Ten minutes later, when Margaret was washing the Worcester cups and saucers, and David, to her secret agony, discoursing on Ibsen and drying them with insufficient attention, Ben joined them and seized the tea towel from the rack.

  “I’ll dry, too,” he said. “Grandmother’s showing Sally the house.”

  “No!” ejaculated Margaret in distress. “Why did you let her, Ben? She’ll be tired to death. And catch cold too. All the upstairs windows are open.”

  “Grandmother never gets tired or catches cold when she’s doing what she wants to do,” said Ben comfortably.

  “Aunt Margaret,” said David, “go to the drawing room and put your feet up and read the Times. Ben and I are going to finish the washing up and peel the spuds for supper. Now don’t for heaven’s sake go out in the garden and weed. Put your feet up and rest.” He took the dishcloth gently but firmly from her. “We’ll put away the china too. We know where it goes.”

  David’s courteous gentleness was quite misleading. He was really as masterful as Lucilla himself. Margaret was obliged to obey, but though she sat in the drawing room with her feet up, the Times lay unopened on her knee while she listened anxiously for the crash of china. But Lucilla had decreed that at whatever danger to the china the grandsons must be trained to be good husbands. There was a crash. There! Several plates, by the sound of it. Now that the worst had happened and the strain of listening was over, Margaret was able to relax a little and open the Times. . . . But she only skimmed over the headlines. Presently she got up and crept out of the room as silently as she could, and through the garden door to the garden. Here, well out of sight of the kitchen window, she did a little weeding.

  — 2 —

  Lucilla, upstairs with Sally, heard the crash too. “David and Ben must be doing the washing up to help Margaret,” she said equably. “Separately they’re to be trusted, for they both love beautiful things, but not together. They are fond of each other and talk about things that interest them both, and of course that doesn’t do if you’re washing up.”

  “They are very alike,” said Sally, as they turned to leave Lucilla’s beautiful bedroom.

  “Yes, dear,” said Lucilla. “I have always thought so, but you are the first person to remark on the likeness to me. You must like them both to notice it.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Sally simply. “I like you all. I like this house.”

  “It will be David’s,” said Lucilla. “I like to think of him living here with his wife and children.” As she spoke she looked a little anxiously at Sally, watching for a sign that her words might have touched some secret spring of joy in her, for she was a little fearful now lest the conviction that had come to her that Sally and David had been made for each other should not be shared by Sally and David. But the girl by her side did not smile or flush, and her face, as she said a mute good-by to the beauty of Lucilla’s room, had a sudden look of weariness, as though a secret burden that she carried were pressing more heavily than usual. Lucilla felt cold all over with a horrid apprehension. If there was one thing she hated more than another it was having to be seriously angry with David. She had hoped never to have to be angry again, for she was too old now to bear the strain of falling out with her dearest on earth. . . . Yet she would be if he were to hurt this child.

  “We call this the chapel room,” she said, opening another door. “Ben and Tommy used to sleep here when they were little boys.”

  The small room looking on the garden had two striking and beautiful stained-glass windows, one showing Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child to safety over the turbulent waters, and the other jubilant beasts running through a forest while
happy birds sang in the branches above. “ ‘A melodious noise of birds among the branches, a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts,’ ” quoted Lucilla. “This house has its history, dear, and those windows are bound up with it. You must ask David to tell you the story. It was he who found it all out.”

  Sally was thinking that this picture was like that other picture that she had seen somewhere, and seen again in Knyghtwood. “It is so very lovely,” she said. “They both are—but especially that one of the wood. What is it about woods that— somehow—makes one a little afraid—and yet one loves them so—they pull at one like nothing else—not even the mountains.”

  “To me, dear, a wood is a foreshadowing of the fact of paradise. The trees, the flowers, the birds and animals, they all seem at their happiest in a wood, as though they were redeemed already. Then in a wood they have so much to say. A bird singing to you in a wood, a deer turning his head to look at you and then disappearing through the trees, they lure you on and on, you want to go always a little further—to something—some clearing in the wood. It’s a queer thing, but when I think of the men and women of genius, artists and saints, I seem to see their figures moving always against the background of a wood.”

  Sally laughed happily, glad of this oneness with Lucilla. “Is that because they go always a little further than the rest of us, follow the white deer a bit further on? Like those men in Hassan—‘We are they who go always a little further.’ ”

  “In that clearing in the wood the shadows are so clear,” said Lucilla. “They see the clear outlines and come back and paint them for us, and then it is easier for us to believe in the substance. ‘All truth is shadow except the last truth. But all truth is substance in its own place, though it be but a shadow in another place. And the shadow is a true shadow, and the substance is a true substance.’ ”

  “I like that,” said Sally. “It leads one on and on. Who said that?”

  “Isaac Pennington. How I do run on, dear! It’s old age. And I want to show you the linen cupboard. And David’s room.”

  “Won’t he mind?” asked Sally shyly.

  “No, dear. He’s one of those rare men who can be relied on to be tidy.”

  In David’s austere room Sally stood in frozen stillness and looked at his few treasures: the view of the wide sea marshes beyond the window, his books, the galloping sea-green horse, and Van Gogh’s picture of the tossing lark. Lucilla wondered anxiously what it said to her of the free spirit of this man, a thing that could not be captured and coerced by the will of another but was very ready to accept any self-chosen discipline. She could not certainly know, yet from the very stillness and silence of the girl beside her she drew reassurance. There was pain in it, but acceptance; where Sally loved she would never seek to possess.

  “Do you ever read Meredith, Sally?” she asked abruptly, for the silence suddenly pressed upon her as though with Sally’s own pain and she had to end it. “But I don’t suppose you do. He’s of my generation, not yours.”

  “Daddy loves him and he’s read me bits,” said Sally, and she looked from Van Gogh’s picture to Lucilla and smiled. “Didn’t he say that the lark expresses it for all of us—our love of earth?”

  “Yes,” said Lucilla.

  “ ’Tis love of earth that he instills,

  And ever winging up and up,

  Our valley is his golden cup,

  And he the wine which overflows

  To lift us with him as he goes.

  “The voice of one for millions,

  In whom the millions rejoice

  For giving their one spirit voice.

  “Well, dear, perhaps we’d better be going downstairs again. David has to take you and Ben back to the Herb of Grace and then be home in time for supper. You’ll come and see me again, Sally?”

  Sally was humbly astonished at the anxiety in Lucilla’s voice, astonished too at the sudden love that had locked them together. They were both tall women, and standing facing each other they found they were both of the same height. Impulsively they kissed each other. “There are not many girls,” said Lucilla, “who can make friends with an old woman in such a way that she does not feel that she is old.”

  “You aren’t old,” said Sally, with no flattery, merely stating a fact. “You love life.”

  “So do you, my dear. And so, I think, you’ve never been young in the crude, possessive sense. The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.”

  — 3 —

  Lucilla that evening arose from the supper table with something of an air. “Margaret and I will leave you to your wine,” she said grandly to her son and grandson. David had arrived at Damerosehay upon this visit with quite an interesting assortment of bottles in the back of the car. He had a way with bottles; he just conjured them up. It was almost like the good old days, thought Lucilla, as she rustled from the dining room (she had her best petticoat on in honor of the bottles), with Margaret striding humbly in her wake. It was years since she had been able to leave the men to their wine, and she did so enjoy the little interval of feminine peace in the drawing room after dinner, when one could relax and be a bit depressed if one wanted to be. Lucilla had been trained in the tradition that lays upon the woman the duty of amusing the men in their moments of leisure, and not one of her sons or her grandsons had ever known her to preside at her dining table or her fireside in other than a cheerful spirit. . . . But she had liked the little interval in between in which to pull herself together and take a fresh hold upon her cheerfulness, and left to nothing more exciting than synthetic orange juice the men were back much too soon.

  “Help yourself to port, Uncle Hilary,” said David.

  “Where’d you get it?” asked Hilary, helping himself to a modest half glass with a kindling eye. Water, with a bottle of ginger pop at Christmas, was all the liquid that ever appeared upon the vicarage table, such was Hilary’s dread of the intrusion of luxury into his personal life, but he liked a glass of port when dining out. It was different, dining out. Appreciativeness was one of the duties of a guest.

  “A friend at court,” said David, and filled Hilary’s glass to the brim. “How are you, Uncle Hilary?”

  “Very well, thanks,” said Hilary cheerfully.

  David doubted it. Hilary was looking very old, balder than ever, stouter than ever, with the lines of pain deeper in his face. Yet the atmosphere of peace that he always carried about with him was also deepened. Alone with Hilary, the house as stilled and quiet as the spirit of the man beside him, David suddenly relaxed. The tight band of iron that always seemed clamped about his head eased a little. His voice, which for so long had seemed the voice of a hated stranger, uttering cruelties and irritations springing from some deep cavern of the mind that had passed beyond his control, was his own again. His limbs were his, too, and not the tightly wired wooden legs of some marionette. He pressed his hand hard against the wood of the table and found it blessedly real. That hideous feeling of isolation, of being cut off from all real contact with anybody or anything, which of all the effects of nervous illness was almost the hardest to bear, momentarily vanished. The horrors were bound to return, of course, but the intervals of blessed peace were getting longer. They came very readily now in the presence of a selfless quietude such as Hilary’s . . . or Sally’s. . . . She was such a child, that Sally, and yet she had the same restfulness that had been the gift of long life to old Hilary. Neither of them made any demands. Unconsciously he let out a sigh of relief as the blessed ease encompassed him.

  “It had to come, David,” said Hilary.

  “What?”

  “A bit of a crack-up on your part. I got it badly after the last war. It passes—if you can remember, while the horrors are on, that it does pass. You’re lucky it’s no worse.”

  “Damned lucky,” David agreed fervently. “Might have gone com
pletely crackers. Anything but that.”

  “Anything on your mind at the moment?” asked Hilary.

  David laughed. Hilary had a reputation in the family for density, owing to the fact that as he never gave advice unless asked for it, no one knew that he had perceived that about which he kept his mouth shut. But David knew better. Not much escaped old Hilary. And his advice, if one did ask for it, was sound with the soundness of a sweet-kerneled nut.

  “Nothing personal,” said David. “It’s about the family at the Herb of Grace. They’ve got a man and girl there doing the chores.”

  “Yes. I’ve come across them. An Irishman and his daughter.”

  “He isn’t an Irishman and she isn’t his daughter.”

  “You don’t surprise me. Neither the accent nor the relationship seemed to me to ring true.”

  “A few years ago Annie-Laurie (her name is Doris something or other, I can’t remember what) was tried for murder.”

  “Bless my soul,” said Hilary. But he said it fairly calmly. It was his habit to take all things calmly until he had looked into them. Then if he found it necessary to get the wind up, he got it up, but if not, no. “And acquitted, obviously, or she wouldn’t be at the Herb of Grace now. . . . And deservedly acquitted,” he added firmly. “I like that girl.”

  “Those who followed the trial had their doubts,” said David gloomily. “They considered that she had a very merciful jury and a very brilliant advocate.”

  “She pleaded not guilty, of course?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whom was she accused of murdering?”

  “Her husband. . . . And there she is at the Herb of Grace with Nadine and the children. . . . And Sally Adair.”

  “And doing them nothing but good,” said Hilary decidedly. “I repeat, I like that girl. I like Malony too. Go on. Get the whole thing off your chest.”