The day was warm, and growing warmer, but here all was cool. Ahead, the trees thinned out. The path was already thinning out, itself. And then the path came to a hollow, and that was the end of the path. It was less a pool than an eddy, less an eddy than a backwater. Flocculent bits of decayed leaves and such floated, dotting the surface and subsurface of the dark water. Ahead, some good way ahead, there was the shine of the unobstructed sun upon the water. The river, then.
Lurley’s Bend, then.
He sat down and took out his binoculars. And he waited.
The quality of the light, the quantity of the light, was never the same two seconds in a row. The trees and the bushes wavered in the slow, soft wind; and the light, filtering between and amongst them, wavered with them. Sometimes the air was bright, then it went into flux and turned green. Now one corner was yellow from the sun, and now another. In a way, it was like being under water. And he fell into a sort of revery, in which he was, in deed and fact, underneath the waters. He rose and fell with the waves. And then, from somewhere in the dim and aqueous distances, came the daughter of the wave, the child of the unda, of the undulating wave, there came the undine herself. And she—
He had the glasses to his eyes before he realized what he was doing.
The movement was too abrupt. Perhaps the glasses flashed. Far way as the woman was, still, she had noticed. Something, at least, she must have noticed. As swiftly as she had come out of the waters, even more swiftly did she return to them.
But the glimpse, brief as it had been, had been enough.
There were two or three with their heads together, at the curve of the road. That is, one man, one woman, and one child, straining on her toes. They drew apart as the horse ambled up. One of them was his guide. His face went almost weak and loose with the relief on seeing Eszterhazy. “Ah, thank God, Your Honor, well, the horse, and now, although tis nowhere near time," he babbled.
“Well enough, Augsto,” said Eszterhazy. “Look here.” They looked. “The fact is,” he began. "A touch of the sun, you see. Only a touch. No more, but my skin, well, I am a city fellow. I am aliaid I don’t tan, I may burn. I was wondering. A salve? An ointment? Is a shop around, where such things are sold? An apothecary?” They shook their heads, Noo. . . . Nothing like that. . . . Not round here. . . And it was the woman’s face which first lighted with a sudden thought. As he had known it would.
“Ah, Sir! Ah— The midwife!”
“To be sure, Mamma, the midwife!” the girl echoed. And even Augsto had understood, and, happy that all was well and that the new matter was merely something which could be settled by the administrations of one well- known and familiar, added his own exclamations of, “The midwife, to be sure, Your Honor, the midwife! She does make all salves and such, as well as her tending to the women in their time! And il your Honor will be so kind as to allow. I’ll—”
But His Honor declined to be so kind as to allow it. He insisted on being given directions. And, indeed, it was not very far. The woman was tending to her sunflowers, already beginning to droop their heads, so heavy with seed; she was barefoot and had her outer skirt tucked up, showing a perfectly respectable profusion of petticoats. She looked up, bobbed him a courtsey, and waited for him to dismount and enter the yard. A woman with a seamed face, and pale blue eyes. She waited for him to speak.
“I am His Highness’s guest,” he said. She gave a nod of knowing much—and, indeed, he wondered how much she might really know. He repeated his story, she looked at him, somewhat doubtfully. Then, “If you will step inside, Sir,” she said.
The house was as neat as anyone had any right to expect, and smelled of herbs and of flowers and of something cooking on the stove. . .a chicken in paprika sauce, probably. “Well, Sir,” she said, still looking at him with the same doubtful expression, “The best thing for sunburn, you know, is simply oil and vinegar, mixed.”
“I don’t wish to smell like a salad,” he said, entirely honestly.
She gave a sudden snort of laughter. Obviously she was in no great awe of him. This might be all to the good. On the other hand—
“Perhaps you have a salve,” he suggested.
She nodded, slowly. “I have a number. I suppose the best thing might be the zinc oxide, although—”
Despite himself, he was star- tied, he had expected, perhaps, something along the lines of, say, swallow’s fat, mixed with the juice of cornflowers plucked in the light (or the dark) of the moon.
“Zinc oxide! What do you know about zinc oxide?”
Th e look she gave him was heavy with reproof. "I have the diploma of the Provincial School for Midwifery and Nursing, Sir. The late Prince Von Vlox sent me there, he paid my expenses, so that his people should have good care. I know a good deal about zinc oxide, Sir: and a great deal more, besides. ...”
At once he said, "Then you know who or what was born in these parts about fifteen or sixteen years ago, and is now frightening the present Prince Von Vlox’s people into imbecility—don’t you think it is time for you to come out in the open with it?”
She threw back her head. If he had expected her—and, half, he had—to break into tears, to sigh or sob or cross herself, well, he was mistaken, to that extent. The pale blue eyes were quite steady. “So, it is her, then,” she said, calmly. “I half-thought it might be. I have been thinking. Thinking. Even just now, as you came up, I was thinking. But no clear answer came to me. —But, Sir, have some mercy on her: it is no matter of ’what,’ it is a matter of a human child, begotten in secret, to be sure, and bom in even more secrecy ... a child sadly afflicted . . . but a child, a human child all the same. . .’’
"Forgive me that lapse,” he said. “Of course you are entirely right. Go on, then. Go on.”
Less may be hidden from the midwife than from most, but it can happen, and not seldom does it happen, that even from the widwife a thing may be hidden until the last moment. “I did not want you to see me,” the woman had said, tight-lipped, sweat already beginning to break out upon her face. And then the first cry broke. And then the waters broke. And then all such thoughts as secrecy .fell into the shadows where all but the essentials fall. And the woman herself began to writhe, as though she herself were a broken thing.
“But for all of that, it was a normal labor,” the midwife said. "The labor was normal. ...”
And Eszterhazy said, “The child, though. ...”
“The flesh of the lower limbs was fused. In appearance, there was but one lower limb. Ah, God, how she did indeed break down at that. I told her, ‘Helena, this may very probably be cured through surgery,’ but she knew nothing of such things. And she was in agony for her child and said it was a punishment for sin, for her sin in getting the child—”
He said, “Ah. ...”
The woman shrugged. “I do not sit in judgment. I do not make reports. I did not even tell the priest, he is a monk, if he had been a married priest, well In fact, I told no one. Until now.” He tried to imagine what it must have been like, trying to keep such a secret for such a length of time— Not the midwife: ihe mother. “Surely the child’s mother must have guessed, lltough,” he said. “How could she have escaped hearing? How far into the woods do they live, that tlie mother hasn’t heard these stories, these few past months?” Said the midwife: “That is it, you see. She died, the mother, I mean, Helena, 1 mean. She died only a few past months ago.”
It took a few seconds for the meaning of it all to be clear to Fszterhazy. Then he said, softly, "Oh, my God. ...”
To have lived a life, even a life of only fifteen or sixteen years, a life of concealment, even if not complete concealment, to have spent those years pretending to be a cripple in a chair. . . .a chair from which one never moved during daylight hours. . .clad in a dress so long that no one would see ... or guess ... or even suspect. ... A life largely confined to oneself and one’s mother: and then, of a sudden stroke: half the world gone out. After a life of being warned, and warned, and warned, “No one must know. . . No one must ever know-”