Gentian Hill Read online

  GENTIAN HILL

  ELIZABETH

  GOUDGE

  GENTIAN

  HILL

  COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY ELIZABETH GOUDGE

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must

  not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  FOR HELEN

  Note

  This story is a retelling of the legend of St. Michael’s Chapel at Torquay. Built in the thirteenth century, it was in existence until not so many years ago, and until the beginning of the nineteenth century any foreign vessels dropping anchor in Torbay, and possessing Roman Catholic crews, sent them on pilgrimages to the Chapel. The legend as it has come down to us is as Dr. Crane tells it in Book I, Chapter 10; its elaboration is my own invention, though the story has come to me so vividly from this bit of country where I live that I have hard work to believe it is not true.

  The village where Stella lives is now called Marldon, derived from Mergheldon, the Hill where the Gentians grow, and as I have been guilty of taking some liberties with it, I have called it Gentian Hill. I have given it a vicar at a time when it did not possess one, but was served from the parish church of Paignton. The Chaplain of Torre Abbey is also an imaginary character. Weekaborough Farm is an invention, though I have imagined it standing roughly where Lower Westerland Farm is now.

  It is quite true that a living child, clasped in her dead mother’s arms, was taken from the water after the wreck of the Amphion. The wreck of the Venerable is also historical. The tower room at Cockington existed at this date as I have described it, and at one time was probably used as a priest’s hiding place.

  CONTENTS

  Book I

  THE FARM

  Book II

  THE SEA

  Book III

  THE CHAPEL

  Book I

  THE FARM

  CHAPTER I

  1

  On a clear August evening, borne upon the light breath of a fair wind, the fleet was entering Torbay. The sight was so lovely that the men and women in the fishing villages grouped about the bay gazed in wonder and stilled the busyness of their lives for a moment to stand and watch, shielding their eyes with their hands, trying in their own way, consciously or unconsciously, to imprint this picture upon their memory so deeply that it should be for them a treasure while life should last.

  Since England had been at war with Napoleonic France, the fleet was often in Torbay. Admiral Hardy in the Victory had known the bay well. Admiral Rodney had sailed from Torbay to the Battle of the Saints. Three times in one year the Earl of St. Vincent had anchored in the bay, and Nelson had visited him here. Yet none of these stately comings and goings had had quite the unearthly beauty of this quiet, unobtrusive arrival of two ships of the line and four frigates, just at the penultimate moment of the most glorious sunset of the year.

  The last light of the sun was streaming over the rampart of green hills to the west, brimming the leafy valleys with liquid gold, then emptying itself in a sort of abandonment of glory into the vast domed space of sky and sea beyond. There were ripples on the water, and a fragile pattern of cirrus clouds above, and these caught the light in vivid points of fire that were delicate as filigree upon the fine metal of the gold-washed sea and sky. There was no sound anywhere. Voices were stilled upon sea and shore, and the white gulls with their gold-tipped wings floated silently. The half-moons of golden water, swung and withdrawn so rhythmically by the ebbing tide, creamed soundlessly upon the golden sand, and the tiny sound of the ripples lapping against the jetties and the hulls of fishing boats was lost in the great silence. Into this vast peace--this clear light-sailed the great ships, and for the one unforgettable moment seemed to gather beauty to them as the sun gathers the dew.

  Each oak hull, so cumbrous yet so beautiful in motion, was aglow from the ruddy gleam of the copper sheathing just above the water line to the lemon yellow of the lower gun decks. The painted poops, the gilded stern works and figure-heads, and the glazed cabin ports winked and sparkled; yet the bright hulls were almost eclipsed by the soaring beauty of the raking masts and the swell of the great sails that caught the gold light in their curves as delicately as flowers do, yet had so terrible a strength. Flags fluttered from each foremast, mainmast, and mizzen, and in the wake of each ship the white foam shone like snow.

  The moment passed, the streaming light was withdrawn behind the hills, and the colors flared for a final moment of glory, then dimmed. Gently, with slight headway on, the great ships passed, each to her anchorage, and were presently at rest. Evening fell, there were lights here and there upon the ships, scattered lights on the shore, faint lights in the sky, and still the silence was unbroken and the peace profound. Those on shore saw phantom ships upon the sea now, and those on board saw phantom white villages gleaming along the shore, and after the habit of human kind each man yearned to be where the other was, and saw in the place where he was not his heart’s desire. Mr. Midshipman Anthony Louis Mary O’Connell, on board the leading frigate, was no exception to the rule. At the moment he was enduring the punishment meted out to midshipmen who sleep on watch. He was lashed in the weather rigging, his arms and legs widely stretched, his head burning, his body shivering from the bucketful of cold water that had been emptied over him, every nerve in him stretched to what felt like the breaking point – not only by the pain but by his sense of injustice. Spread-eagling was the correct punishment for the offense he had committed, and he would have endured it better had there not been added to it the "grampussing," the sousing with a bucket of cold water; for that, though also a recognized punishment for falling asleep upon watch, was not meant to be employed in conjunction with the other. Either spread-eagling, or grampussing, but not both, was the rule of the navy. But upon this ship there was no justice. It was a bad ship. There were not many bad ships in the British navy, but there were some, and this was one of them. In fact, in the opinion of Mr. Midshipman O’Connell, it was not a ship at all, but the deepest pit of hell. It had the devil for captain, fiends for officers, and an army of rats for seamen. He tried to ease his position a little, and a pain like red-hot fire shot up his spine into the back of his head. He groaned and cursed softly but fluently. He had been in the navy for exactly eight weeks, and in all the misery of those weeks he counted only one thing upon the credit side; he had learned a vocabulary which for richness, flexibility, scope, and power surpassed anything hitherto dreamed of by him. He had always liked words, and they were now the only comfort that he had.

  Nothing in the Fifteen years of Anthony Louis Mary O’Connell’s life until he entered the navy had prepared him for the hell he had had to endure these last two months. He had been brought up in the cultured and queenly city of Bath by an aristocratic and autocratic Irish grandmother, a devout Catholic, a lady of impeccable taste, not wealthy but moving in a society where a fashionable wig was held of no account if the mind beneath it was mediocre, and where the dinner guest with a violin under his arm was more welcome than one with a pocketful of gold. Lady O’Connell had known

  Dr. Johnson. She had drunk a dish of tea with Mrs. Delany and been on terms of intimate friendship with Fanny Burney. Anthony, the only child of her only child-another Anthony who had married a French wife, lived with her in France, and died with her at the beginning of the Terror-was to Lady O’Connell the reason for existence. It was the very intensity of her devotion that had made her give him a softness of upbringing that was about the cruelest thing she could have given him. The boy was like his father-sensitive, clever, and highly impressionable. The elder Anthony had been sent to Harrow, fallen under the influence of a brilliant agnostic master, and lost his Catholic faith. He had gone to Oxford and developed so line a palate for expensive wines, and so passionate a devo
tion to the cards, that the competency left him by his dead father melted into thin air almost at once. Sent upon the Grand Tour by an obliging uncle, he had lost his heart to a French girl, deserted his mother and her country for his wife and her country, and eventually, by a foolhardy act of courage, had quite unnecessarily lost his life.

  When her baby grandson was brought to Lady O’Connell by royalist refugees, she vowed that nothing of this should happen to the second Anthony. The evil influences of school and university should not be allowed to touch him. She had him educated at home by private tutors, and she watched every friendship, every contact, with a jealous eye, and

  smashed it as soon as she fancied any danger in it. In some ways, Anthony’s education was not altogether disastrous, for he was well taught, he had an eager mind, and was not

  lazy, and so managed to learn a good deal without the stimulus of competition. He was musical, and his grandmother’s friends were men and women from whom it was possible

  to catch much loveliness of mind and manners. But nothing at all in his early training fitted him in the very least for what befell him when Lady O’Connell died.

  She had visualized all the dangers she could possibly think of for Anthony except that one danger of her own death before he had reached maturity. She was a healthy woman, and never thought of death. She had imagined she would live till ninety, like her mother before her. Instead, she had died suddenly at the age of seventy, and the guardianship of Anthony had devolved upon her nephew by marriage, Captain Rupert O’Connell, the son of the obliging uncle who had sent the elder Anthony upon the Grand Tour-a man on whom she had set eyes only once or twice in her life.

  To do Captain O’Connell justice, he did the best that he could for the almost penniless Anthony. He took him on board his own ship and made a midshipman of him, thereby putting him in a fair way to earn his livelihood, with eventual promotion and honor if he had it in him to attain to them. Having thus established Anthony, he took no further notice of him, though in that perhaps he was wise, for any show of favoritism would only have made the boy’s lot more wretched than ever.

  And his lot was so wretched that it could hardly have been worse. Persecution was the fate of any greenhorn of a newly joined midshipman, but the fact that Anthony was the nephew of a hated captain was a good excuse for giving him an extra dose; the brutalities of the captain could be revenged on Anthony. And then there was his seasickness, which he could not manage to surmount. And there was the ridiculous array of his Christian names, including the Mary that was borne by all the Catholic O’Connells in honor of Our Lady. He had tried in vain to keep them hidden. And there was the rosary that he had been taught to wear always round his neck, and stubbornly refused to abandon; not that it had really meant anything to him until now, but he was damned if he was going to take it off and chuck it overboard because of the taunts of a handful of dirty – mouthed, hard-fisted brutes who had no conception at all of the obligations of gentlemen to the traditions of their race.

  And lastly there was the misfortune of his age. Had he been younger, he would have been one of the "younkers," little boys of eleven and upwards who slung their hammocks in the gun room, messed by themselves with the gunner to cater for them and keep their clothes in order, were taught by a schoolmaster or the chaplain, and enjoyed a certain amount of shelter and protection. But he was just too old to be a "younker," he was the youngest of the "oldsters" and must mess and sleep with the senior midshipmen and the masters' mates in a pestilential den below the waterline, in the after cockpit. The things that he saw, heard, and endured in the after cockpit were enough to turn the reason of a boy In whom vice and brutality had until now been nothing but names whose exact meaning he had not bothered about.

  Yet he endured somehow. There was a stubbornness in him that he had not known he possessed and was thankful to discover, for he knew that he was not naturally courageous. He held on to decency as a drowning man holds to a spar, and vowed that he would hold while he could. When he couldn’t, what then? But he did not consider that question often, for he had learned in the first weeks not to let his thoughts race on ahead, not to panic, simply to endure. What happens when a man can no longer endure is not that man’s responsibility. It would have been easier if he could have got some proper sleep, something better than the feverish snatches that were all that the din and stench of the after cockpit allowed. He had slept on watch at last, and so here he was, lashed in the weather rigging.

  The punishment lasted for two hours, but he could swear that he had been here for four. The pain in his back and head was such that he shut his eyes lest he should be sick; he had discovered that you were less likely to be sick if you didn’t watch the motion of the ship. He lost consciousness for a moment or two perhaps, and returned from it to that state of seminightmare with which he was now so familiar, in which the horrors he had seen passed and repassed against the darkness of his closed eyelids. The day the whole ship’s company had been lined up to see a poor fellow Hogged at the gangway, and he had died. The wretched sailors, racing mast against mast when sail had to be made or shortened, with the captain cursing at them from below because the best they could do was not good enough; and then the Hogging of the last man down. The day when one man, in terror of the flogging, lost his footing and fell. These pictures, actually seen, and others that were painted for him by his too active imagination. He had not yet been in action and shrank from it with dread. He thought he would show himself then for what he was, a coward. He imagined and pictured all the ways in which he might be put to the test, and fail. All his life he had been afraid of so many things-of noise and pain, of death, and above all of being shut up or imprisoned in any way. It was partly this claustrophobia that made him hate life at sea so much. The ship was like a prison and the after cockpit a prison cell. One could not get out. And this was his life, now, forever-this imprisonment and fear and pain. Much better to die. Open your eyes, you fool .... But he couldn’t. They seemed stuck .... Open them, you fool.

  With a struggle, Mr. Midshipman O’Connell opened his eyes, gazed, blinked, caught his breath, and gazed again. Drowned in his misery he had not known that the ship had entered the bay. He had opened his eyes just at the moment when men on shore, looking out to sea, had seen the ships caught up in the golden moment of perfection; he, looking toward the land, saw a scene that he would not forget while memory remained for him.

  He saw the hills sweeping around the bay and the wooded valleys brimming with gold. He saw the sheeted gold of the sky behind the hills and the streaming light. And just opposite, he saw a fishing village built beyond the golden water in a green cup in the hills; a small place, peaceful and perfect. He supposed this was the village they called Torquay. Beyond a half-moon of sand was a green field, then a low stone wall. Behind the wall, half a dozen white-walled cottages stood in gardens full of flowers, the smoke curling lazily up from their chimneys. To the right of the cottages, a stream flowed beneath a low stone bridge, crossed the meadow, and lost itself in the sea. Anthony guessed that the white-walled house next to the bridge was an inn, for he could just make out the swinging signboard. just beyond the bridge and the inn, to the right, was the slipway of a shipbuilding yard, and then the harbor with a row of neat little houses beyond it. There were a few fishing boats and one larger ship anchored in the harbor, and around and over them the gulls were wheeling.

  Anthony stared, his eyes aching, his heart beating. Would they be allowed to land? He knew that except in exceptional circumstances sailors were not allowed to go ashore when a ship weighed anchor in harbor; the risk of desertion was too great. But he was a midshipman, an officer. Surely the officers would be allowed shore leave. He began to imagine to himself what it would be like .... He was in the liberty boat, gliding nearer and nearer to that loveliness. He was climbing up the flight of steps against the harbor wall. He was on firm land again, free at last of seasickness. He was crossing the bridge, drinking a glass of milk at the inn, walking in
one of the flower-filled gardens. He was following the stream up into the wooded valley behind the village, where it was cool and quiet, following the stream to the house up there-the old thatched house overgrown with ivy-in a valley musical with the sound of running water, with the purple hill behind it, and then inside the house.

  A sharp pain shot through his right thigh. It was only a good-natured slap dealt him by the young lieutenant who had come to take him down, and who was unfastening the ropes around his legs, but it happened to light on one of the many bruises with which his body was covered. ‘“Come along down, Mary, my girl, you’ve had your two hours."

  "Sir!" gasped Anthony. "Will we go ashore, I mean the officers?"

  "Damn your eyes, and who may you mean by the officers? Not you, Mary. Not little girls who sleep on watch. And next time you start nodding, you know what it will mean-laid on a gun and given a dozen with the colt."

  The lieutenant assisted Mr. Midshipman O’Connell from the rigging, dropped him, not unkindly, face downward on the deck, and departed on his own affairs. Mr. Midshipman O’Connell stayed where he was for a while, sick and dizzy. He heard eight bells ringing and knew he had missed supper, but the state of his inside being what it was, and the ship’s food being what it was, he did not feel this to be a disaster. But he badly wanted a drink. There was drinking water down in the after cockpit, if he could get there. Eight bells. He had to turn in now, until midnight, when he had the middle watch. It was hell in the cockpit, but there was water there – grog too, if he was lucky – and if they left him alone, he could lie still in his hammock. He dragged himself to his hands and knees and crawled a little way, then pulled himself to his feet with the help of a handy stancheon, and at last got down to the orlop deck and along to the after cockpit and the midshipmen’s mess.