Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge

Author:Elizabeth Goudge [Goudge, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Elizabeth Goudge, Christian faith, inspirational books, christian Fiction, Historical fiction, Christian books
Publisher: Hendrickson Publishers
Published: 2015-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV

1

It was a hateful wind. Marianne, lighting the lamp in her parlor and drawing the curtains to shut out the sight of the sickly grey evening, found no companionship in the sound of its voice in the forest, or in the voice of the creek racing along at the bottom of the garden. Surely it was flowing faster than usual tonight? It must be raining hard up in the mountains. She sighed, for if the current was too fast, William would have trouble with the barges. She wished he was safely home again. She was anxious about him, and she was lonely. A Maori woman, Kapua-Manga’s beautiful wife Hine-Moa, was sleeping with her in the house, and Tai Haruru was only a stone’s throw away, but they were not William.

She pulled her workbox toward her and took out her sewing. It was a quilt for the boy’s cot, a gay affair of birds and butterflies surrounding a nursery rhyme, worked on a pale blue ground. It reminded her of the sampler she had worked long ago, only then the embroidered border had surrounded three verses from the Forty-second Psalm. “Like as the hart desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. . . . One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the water pipes. All thy waves and storms are gone over me. . . . My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?” Why put in the bit about the water pipes, Sophie had asked when she was working the sampler, why not have just the first and third verses? But the bit about the water pipes had appealed to her. . . . She dropped her work and covered her face with her hands. She had passed through so many storms already, and still she was parched and unsatisfied. Everything she wanted seemed to elude her somehow. She had not even attained to the negative sort of peace that Tai Haruru had. And yet she was a splendid wife, a good manager, an upright Christian woman. Surely God was not treating her quite right. . . . But she was going to have a son. And it was wonderful of her to be having a son at her age. . . . She picked up her sewing again, worked for a little longer, then put out her lamp and went to bed.

She kept the candles burning in her bedroom and slept only fitfully, for she felt sick and feverish and the wind and rain disturbed her. And she was more anxious than ever about William and the wood, for she could hear that the creek was in spate now, fed by swollen streams up in the mountains. The sense of coming disaster pressed heavily upon her. Truly this was at times a nightmare country. She loved its space and beauty, but dreadful things could happen in it, things that would never happen on the Island at home.

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