§ 1
The months which followed were summer indeed. To the end of his life
Daniel would always see summer as a blue sky vaulting a blue sea, in
which pink and purple islands swam under the sun. It was a summer of
drought, of the burning of the hayfields, the powdering of the roads, of
the kindling of a purple fire of foxgloves at the Orgeries and at
Château des Quénévés. The wells dried up, including the shallow well at
Moie Fano, and every evening and every morning Dan toiled with buckets
on a wooden yoke to the Pêche à Agneau, where the water supply was good
and lasted through the summer. It was an irksome task, but he did it
gladly as his only domestic duty. Rose proved herself rather
unexpectedly a good housewife. After all, she had cooked and kept house
for her father at St. André, which meant not only household experience,
but experience of a fisherman’s household. She knew how to cook every
kind of fish and shellfish, how to bake bread of a heavy sort, how to
support the small, island dearths of salt or yeast, and she never
expected meat except on Sundays.
Both she and Daniel worked hard enough. She had the three rooms of the
little house to care for and keep clean, she had the meals to cook, all
the washing to do, and also the husbandry of the tiny garden with its
supply of herbs and vegetables. Dan bought her a few hens from La Belle
Hautgarde, and taught her how to look after them, which she did very
proudly, the eggs being a luxury which few Sark homes of that size could
boast.
His own time was spent almost entirely in the boats. The season was a
good one, and from the middle of May onwards there were visitors to be
taken fishing and rowing and sailing, as well as the care of many
lobster pots. The Le Couteurs had forgiven him for the loss of the
_Baleine_, though their sense of humour had flourished embarrassingly on
his misadventure long after their sense of outrage had died away. His
marriage and establishment had paid off their grudge against his
strangerhood, and they were glad of his help in the summer business of
making money. They found him generally efficient, always willing, and
his English speech and custom, though obnoxious to themselves, were
useful when dealing with the visitors.
His duties did not allow him much time with Rose, but he had all the
winter to look forward to, and meanwhile he had his Sundays free, for
the laws of the island forbade boating and fishing on Sundays. Touched
into humility and gratitude by a happiness which he felt to be as
undeserved as it was unexpected, he had, on leaving the Pêche à Agneau,
gone back to some of the “good ways” he had learned in the Ouse Valley.
On early Sunday mornings he would be the island of Sark at the altar, as
long months ago he used to be the village of Bullockdean. He knew that
by so doing he took away some of the good impression he had made on the
Le Couteurs. But in spite of Helier de Cartaret’s Prayer Book he could
not quite rid his mind of the idea that English was the proper language
for devotion. He taught Rose to say Our Father in English, and they
said it together every night, kneeling beside the bed.
Daniel’s happiness in Rose was still as fresh and rich as when he had
first met it in the darkness at Moie Fano. Indeed, as familiarity and
companionship deepened, if they could not widen, his knowledge of her,
his love and joy and satisfaction grew. Her most noticeable quality was
her yielding gentleness, which he had saved her from making the
instrument of her misfortune, and now under the guiding of his hands was
being made the instrument of happiness and goodness for them both. She
adapted herself to her new life apparently without effort. She shed from
her the life of the town work-girl with its crowds and excitements as
easily as she had shed her town clothes--she seemed to have no regrets
or even memories. Dan was her whole guidance and concern, and just as
she had followed him without a qualm into the dangers of an unknown sea,
so without qualm she followed him into an unknown life, as devoid of
doubts as she would be devoid of reproaches if he failed her.
He sometimes wondered how he had ever feared that her mind was tainted
by her experiences in St. Helier. She had merely been under a bad
influence, that was all, yielding herself to the guidance of a stronger
mind as she would always do. No doubt his darling little Rose lacked
what was called “moral courage,” but that only doubled the sweetness of
his protection, since it must be not only of her body but of her soul.
She was his in a dependence which few women can have on a man, and that
dependence called out of him all that was strongest in love and
cherishing.
Nevertheless, as day by day he came to know her better, he discovered
that at the bottom of her heart she carried a tiny life of her own--a
little seed of personality, the essential Rose. She would make him
confidences as to her likes and dislikes and ideas--they would talk
together about the big strange things that inwardly perplexed them both,
though outwardly they took them for granted. Perhaps they neither of
them had much wisdom, nor enough curiosity, but this occasional glimpse
of the “separateness” in her served to make the sense of “togetherness”
more complete--the more he saw his little Rose standing apart from him
in her own soul and life, the more she seemed a part of him, of his
being. The more she was herself, the more completely she seemed his,
rather than in her gentleness and yielding. So he loved her seed of
separate life, and, like the rest of her, it flourished under his care.
§ 2
When winter came it was very unlike the winter that had been last year.
Or rather its essence was the same, but its effect and influence were
altogether different. The storms that battered the cliffs were no longer
a distress and a terror, but a mere noise outside, that made the quiet
and warmth at home stand out more comfortably by contrast. The fogs,
too, were no sad pall weighing upon the island, but a soft white blanket
wrapping Daniel and Rose into a loving loneliness. It was just as on the
evening after their marriage, when outside had been the dead, blind face
of Sark, cold in the haunted twilight, in the light more dreadful than
darkness, and inside had been warmth and tenderness and love and the
kind spirit of man. During those nights of storm and fog, when the fire
burned brightly in the kitchen, and the supper was laid under the lamp,
Dan would see the cottage at Moie Fano as a lighthouse on a rock, as the
Corbière or the Casquets or Platte Fougère, a house of light set in the
midst of darkness.
There were days on which they did not even go so far as the Pêche à
Agneau, but they never felt dull in each other’s company, or alone when
they were together. Daniel helped Rose with the work of the house, even
now and then with the cooking, for he took an unmanly pleasure in
messing about with pots and pans. He became cobbler and mended their
shoes, he became tinker and mended their kettle, he became plumber and
fixed a pipe to drain off the rain-water from the roof into a butt, so
that they should be better watered next summer, he became carpenter and
delighted Rose’s heart with shelves and brackets.
Sometimes of an evening a Helier or a Philip or a Eugene Le Couteur
would call round for him on his way to the Bel-Air. But Daniel no longer
cared for the Bel-Air, or for drinks English or Norman. He wanted to
stop at home with his wife, to help her lay and clear the supper, and
afterwards to sit and watch her while she sewed--garments for her own
little Helier who was to be born in the spring.
“We will certainly call him Helier,” she said, “after my father.”
“Helier Sheather doesn’t sound right, somehow.”
“Helier Le Couteur sounds very well,” said Rose.
And Daniel knew that he was not called Sheather any more. Indeed he had
never really been Sheather in Sark. Before he married he had just been
“the English Le Couteur,” and now he was Le Couteur un-Englished....
Well, it was what he had been prepared for, and when his child was born
the Le Couteurs would indeed have his mother back again.
He looked eagerly forward to that day in the spring which would make him
a father. Rose was determined that she must have a son, but Daniel would
have been equally glad of a daughter--he would have been free to give
his daughter an English name, but a son must inevitably add to the mass
of Heliers or Philips or Peters in the island. Not that there was any
particular reason why he should want an English name. He and Rose no
longer spoke English together--it had always been difficult for her, and
she soon picked up the native French, which was not so different from
the French of Jersey, and which by this time he spoke quite readily.
After all, it had been his language as a child, and its sweet roughness
seemed the right expression of his love and the concerns of his
household.
All that he had of English was his prayers and his books. Daniel had
brought Rose to share his taste for reading, and in those long evenings
they read together--mild stuff which the vicar lent them. Rose loved the
mild stuff, and would weep over what she understood of “Cometh up as a
Flower,” or “The Silence of Dean Maitland”; to both of them whatever
they read was intensely real, and they took their fiction with a
seriousness that would have amazed its authors.
They would read sitting at the table side by side, the book spread under
the lamp, while first Daniel would read in the slow plodding English of
his custom, and then Rose would read, more quickly and eagerly, but
getting herself into sorry tangles over some of the words, and
occasionally having to apply to him for the sense. Afterwards, while
they were undressing, they would talk over what they had read and
pre-cast the next day’s portion. If the story turned out badly Rose
would cry, the luxurious tears of the happy, while Dan would comfort and
even, on emergency, supply a new end to the tale, in which “they all
lived happy ever after” in defiance of the author.
His happiness was beginning to assume an added sweetness of
sobriety--the slightly restless quality of the first months was gone,
and in its place was a quality of warm stillness, which steeped his
whole being. The disquiets of the outer world and of his old life could
not reach him. At Christmas he had not been hurt by the neglect of his
family, represented only by a card, nor by another of Ernley’s cynical
letters, hinting at more indiscretions at the George and disillusions at
the Crown. He had all the natural selfishness of the happy man--even the
thought of Belle could not stir in him any real anxiety. He had told
Rose about Belle and of the earthquake of his love for her--he told Rose
everything, dropping the secrets of his heart into the warm shallow pool
of her confidence which scarcely eddied round them. She had no jealousy
of Belle, and not much interest in her. Daniel, for her, existed almost
entirely in the present moment, and unlike so many women she scarcely
thought of the years that had been before he met her, nor looked for
their scars.
He did not see this attitude as a defect--indeed, coming so simply and
naturally as it did, he came to judge it as the only natural attitude.
After all, what did it matter, what he had done and suffered before he
met her? That part of his life was over, a mere prelude to this. Let him
put it out of his mind since he could never put it into hers.
He loved her utterly now, with body and soul. It seemed as if he had
always known and loved her--this little stranger whom he had not met a
year ago. As she drew near her time, an unexpected weakness developed in
her, and the doctor, anxiously summoned, said that she must rest. Still
free from the boats, Daniel did all the work of the little
house--sweeping, dusting and cooking. In the evenings he made her go to
bed early, and brought the lamp to her bedside, to read to her till she
slept. When March came with the first mild days of spring, he carried
her down the cliff slope into a little sheltered hollow among the rocks
of Mont Razeur, and she lay there beside him in the basking warmth,
holding his hand among the sweetness of the spring grass, gazing
idolatrously at his seaward-turned face, dark between her and the dazzle
of the water. One day she waved an arm towards the dim whale-shape of
Jersey.
“We come from there together, you and I.”
“You are not sorry you came?”
“No, I never was sorry, except when I thought you would send me back.”
“Perhaps I will send you back some day,” he teased.
“Oh no, you would never send me back. You love me too much.”
“I love you! What an idea!”
“I think you love me very much--I think you would be very unhappy if I
die.”
“Die!--Rose! Darling Rose--don’t talk of dying.”
“One must talk of it sometimes.”
“But not to-day--when everything is warm and lovely because spring is
here. You are not afraid of dying when the baby comes--are you, little
Rose?” he cried anxiously.
“Oh, no--I only talk of it. But I like to think that when I die you will
come with me, and we will go out together, as we did in the little boat,
and I shall watch your face and know I cannot be afraid.”
“When you die it will not only be me whom you will want in the little
boat. There will be others--our children.”
“Yes, there will be Helier--and Helier’s sister--and perhaps others. But
I shall always love you best.”
“I wish I felt so sure.”
“You can be sure. I could never love a son or a daughter as I love you.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me that. If I should try to tell you I should feel afraid.”
“But why?”
She would not answer, and thinking that perhaps the conversation was
growing too tense and disturbing, he began to talk of the coming season
and of the things they would do in the boats.