The Seaboard Parish, Complete

That she might look at will through every pore.”

I had, however, arranged with the rest of the company, that the moment we reached the cliff over the shore, and turned to the left to cross the isthmus, the conversation should no longer be about the things around us; and especially I warned my wife and Wynnie that no exclamation of surprise or delight should break from them before Connie’s eyes were uncovered. I had said nothing to either of them about the difficulties of the way, that, seeing us take them as ordinary things, they might take them so too, and not be uneasy.

We never stopped till we reached the foot of the peninsula, née island, upon which the keep of Tintagel stands. There we set Connie down, to take breath and ease our arms before we began the arduous way.

“Now, now!” said Connie eagerly, lifting her hands in the belief that we were on the point of undoing the bandage from her eyes.

“No, no, my love, not yet,” I said, and she lay still again, only she looked more eager than before.

“I am afraid I have tired out you and Mr. Percivale, papa,” she said.

Percivale laughed so amusedly, that she rejoined roguishly—

“O yes! I know every gentleman is a Hercules—at least, he chooses to be considered one! But, notwithstanding my firm faith in the fact, I have a little womanly conscience left that is hard to hoodwink.”

There was a speech for my wee Connie to make! The best answer and the best revenge was to lift her and go on. This we did, trying as well as we might to prevent the difference of level between us from tilting the litter too much for her comfort.

“Where are you going, papa?” she said once, but without a sign of fear in her voice, as a little slip I made lowered my end of the litter suddenly. “You must be going up a steep place. Don’t hurt yourself, dear papa.”

We had changed our positions, and were now carrying her, head foremost, up the hill. Percivale led, and I followed. Now I could see every change on her lovely face, and it made me strong to endure; for I did find it hard work, I confess, to get to the top. It lay like a little sunny pool, on which all the cloudy thoughts that moved in some unseen heaven cast exquisitely delicate changes of light and shade as they floated over it. Percivale strode on as if he bore a feather behind him. I did wish we were at the top, for my arms began to feel like iron-cables, stiff and stark—only I was afraid of my fingers giving way. My heart was beating uncomfortably too. But Percivale, I felt almost inclined to quarrel with him before it was over, he strode on so unconcernedly, turning every corner of the zigzag where I expected him to propose a halt, and striding on again, as if there could be no pretence for any change of procedure. But I held out, strengthened by the play on my daughter’s face, delicate as the play on an opal—one that inclines more to the milk than the fire.

When at length we turned in through the gothic door in the battlemented wall, and set our lovely burden down upon the grass—

“Percivale,” I said, forgetting the proprieties in the affected humour of being angry with him, so glad was I that we had her at length on the mount of glory, “why did you go on walking like a castle, and pay no heed to me?”

“You didn’t speak, did you, Mr. Walton,” he returned, with just a shadow of solicitude in the question.

“No. Of course not,” I rejoined.

“O, then,” he returned, in a tone of relief, “how could I? You were my captain: how could I give in so long as you were holding on?”

I am afraid the Percivale, without the Mister, came again and again after this, though I pulled myself up for it as often as I caught myself.

“Now, papa!” said Connie from the grass.

“Not yet, my dear. Wait till your mamma and Wynnie come. Let us go and meet them, Mr. Percivale.”

“O yes, do, papa. Leave me alone here without knowing where I am or what kind of a place I am in. I should like to know how it feels. I have never been alone in all my life.”

“Very well, my dear,” I said; and Percivale and I left her alone in the ruins.

We found Ethelwyn toiling up with Wynnie helping her all she could.

“Dear Harry,” she said, “how could you think of bringing Connie up such an awful place? I wonder you dared to do it.”

“It’s done you see, wife,” I answered, “thanks to Mr. Percivale, who has nearly torn the breath out of me. But now we must get you up, and you will say that to see Connie’s delight, not to mention your own, is quite wages for the labour.”

“Isn’t she afraid to find herself so high up?”

“She knows nothing about it yet.”

“You do not mean you have left the child there with her eyes tied up.”

“To be sure. We could not uncover them before you came. It would spoil half the pleasure.”

“Do let us make haste then. It is surely dangerous to leave her so.”

“Not in the least; but she must be getting tired of the darkness. Take my arm now.”

“Don’t you think Mrs. Walton had better take my arm,” said Percivale, “and then you can put your hand on her back, and help her a little that way.”

We tried the plan, found it a good one, and soon reached the top. The moment our eyes fell upon Connie, we could see that she had found the place neither fearful nor lonely. The sweetest ghost of a smile hovered on her pale face, which shone in the shadow of the old gateway of the keep, with light from within her own sunny soul. She lay in such still expectation, that you would have thought she had just fallen asleep after receiving an answer to a prayer, reminding me of a little-known sonnet of Wordsworth’s, in which he describes as the type of Death—

“the face of one
Sleeping alone within a mossy cave
With her face up to heaven; that seemed to have
Pleasing remembrance of a thought foregone;
A lovely beauty in a summer grave.”

    [Footnote: Miscellaneous Sonnets, part i.28.]
But she heard our steps, and her face awoke.

“Is mamma come?”

“Yes, my darling. I am here,” said her mother. “How do you feel?”

“Perfectly well, mamma, thank you. Now, papa!”

“One moment more, my love. Now, Percivale.”

We carried her to the spot we had agreed upon, and while we held her a little inclined that she might see the better, her mother undid the bandage from her head.

“Hold your hands over her eyes, a little way from them,” I said to her as she untied the handkerchief, “that the light may reach them by degrees, and not blind her.”

Ethelwyn did so for a few moments, then removed them. Still for a moment or two more, it was plain from her look of utter bewilderment, that all was a confused mass of light and colour. Then she gave a little cry, and to my astonishment, almost fear, half rose to a sitting posture. One moment more and she laid herself gently back, and wept and sobbed.

And now I may admit my reader to a share, though at best but a dim reflex in my poor words, of the glory that made her weep.

Through the gothic-arched door in the battlemented wall, which stood on the very edge of the precipitous descent, so that nothing of the descent was seen, and the door was as a framework to the picture, Connie saw a great gulf at her feet, full to the brim of a splendour of light and colour. Before her rose the great ruins of rock and castle, the ruin of rock with castle; rough stone below, clear green happy grass above, even to the verge of the abrupt and awful precipice; over it the summer sky so clear that it must have been clarified by sorrow and thought; at the foot of the rocks, hundreds of feet below, the blue waters breaking in white upon the dark gray sands; all full of the gladness of the sun overflowing in speechless delight, and reflected in fresh gladness from stone and water and flower, like new springs of light rippling forth from the earth itself to swell the universal tide of glory—all this seen through the narrow gothic archway of a door in a wall—up—down—on either hand. But the main marvel was the look sheer below into the abyss full of light and air and colour, its sides lined with rock and grass, and its bottom lined with blue ripples and sand. Was it any wonder that my Connie should cry aloud when the vision dawned upon her, and then weep to ease a heart ready to burst with delight? “O Lord God,” I said, almost involuntarily, “thou art very rich. Thou art the one poet, the one maker. We worship thee. Make but our souls as full of glory in thy sight as this chasm is to our eyes glorious with the forms which thou hast cloven and carved out of nothingness, and we shall be worthy to worship thee, O Lord, our God.” For I was carried beyond myself with delight, and with sympathy with Connie’s delight and with the calm worship of gladness in my wife’s countenance. But when my eye fell on Wynnie, I saw a trouble mingled with her admiration, a self-accusation, I think, that she did not and could not enjoy it more; and when I turned from her, there were the eyes of Percivale fixed on me in wonderment; and for the moment I felt as David must have felt when, in his dance of undignified delight that he had got the ark home again, he saw the contemptuous eyes of Michal fixed on him from the window. But I could not leave it so. I said to him—coldly I daresay:

“Excuse me, Mr. Percivale; I forgot for the moment that I was not amongst my own family.”

Percivale took his hat off.

“Forgive my seeming rudeness, Mr. Walton. I was half-envying and half-wondering. You would not be surprised at my unconscious behaviour if you had seen as much of the wrong side of the stuff as I have seen in London.”

I had some idea of what he meant; but this was no time to enter upon a discussion. I could only say—

“My heart was full, Mr. Percivale, and I let it overflow.”