Joshua Haggard's daughter, Vol. 3 (of 3)

By M. E. Braddon

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Title: Joshua Haggard's daughter, Vol. 3 (of 3)

Author: M. E. Braddon


        
Release date: April 25, 2026 [eBook #78550]

Language: English

Original publication: London: John Maxwell and Co, 1876

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78550

Credits: Peter Becker, Dori Allard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSHUA HAGGARD'S DAUGHTER, VOL. 3 (OF 3) ***




Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores:
_italics_.




                       JOSHUA HAGGARD’S DAUGHTER


                                LONDON:
             ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.




                       JOSHUA HAGGARD’S DAUGHTER

                                A Novel

                           BY THE AUTHOR OF
                        ‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
                            ETC. ETC. ETC.

                           IN THREE VOLUMES
                               VOL. III.

                      [Illustration: (Colophon)]

                                LONDON
                         JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
                       4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
                                 1876

                        [_All rights reserved_]




                        CONTENTS OF VOL. III.

  CHAP.                                                           PAGE

     I. FULL OF SCORPIONS                                            1

    II. ‘FAREWELL, CONTENT’                                         21

   III. ‘WE TWO STOOD THERE WITH NEVER A THIRD’                     30

    IV. ‘IT IS A BASILISK UNTO MINE EYE’                            40

     V. ‘AND YET I FEEL I FEAR’                                     56

    VI. THE WANDERER’S RETURN                                       76

   VII. ‘WHERE IS THY BROTHER?’                                     90

  VIII. THE FACE IN OSWALD’S SKETCH-BOOK                           109

    IX. REPUDIATED                                                 127

     X. WHAT THE COWBOY COULD TELL                                 156

    XI. AT HIS DOOR                                                175

   XII. AN OPEN VERDICT                                            193

  XIII. JOSHUA STOPS HIS WATCH                                     211

   XIV. JOSHUA’S CONFESSION                                        236

    XV. CARRYING PEACE AND PARDON                                  254

   XVI. THE ODOUR OF ROSEMARY                                      261

  XVII. ‘BETWEEN TWO WORLDS’                                       275

        EPILOGUE                                                   295




                      JOSHUA HAGGARD’S DAUGHTER




                              CHAPTER I.

                          FULL OF SCORPIONS.


‘Will he come, will he come to see me?’

This was the question which Naomi asked herself when she arose
next morning, to see another peerless summer day smiling at her,
but to feel none of the joy of harvest; only a heart as dull and
desolate as if she had awakened to find herself amidst some dwindled
hope-forsaken band hemmed round by Arctic seas. What was summer to
her, or harvest, or all the common joys of life--joys that gladden
hearts which are _not_ broken?

All through the feverish wakeful night the same doubt had agitated
Naomi’s mind. Might not her lover have repented and returned to her?
So blessed a thing was just possible. He had loved her dearly once;
surely that old love could not die. He had often told her that love
was deathless. Fancy had gone astray, perhaps, and love had been true
all the time. Absence had taught him that she was still dear. O, how
tenderly she would have welcomed the returning prodigal, could she
but be sure of his repentance, sure that her love could even yet make
him happy! Thus argued hope; but despair took the other side. He had
come back in secret for some evil purpose. He had come back to see
Cynthia.

This day would show if he meant well or ill. If well, he would not
fear to show himself at Mr. Haggard’s house. He would come and make
peace with his betrothed. O, long hours of waiting, between morning
prayer and noontide--hours in which the simple household tasks were
performed, while the girl’s heart was given to alternate hope and
despair! Would he come? Would he prove true and good, despite of all
that had gone before!

Noon came, and dinner, and afternoon, and he did not appear. Hope
died in Naomi’s breast. She went about the house listlessly, yet
was too restless to sit long at her work. It happened to be a busy
afternoon in the drapery department, and aunt Judith was too well
employed behind the counter to observe her niece’s idle moving to
and fro, or else there would have been the small bitterness of that
maiden lady’s lectures superadded to the great bitterness of Naomi’s
despair.

Cynthia and Jim were in the garden. Those two were very friendly just
now. The poor little stepmother clung to the honest outspoken lad in
this time of cloud and brooding storm. Naomi’s coldness cut her to
the heart. She felt that there was a great gulf between her and her
husband. Of Judith’s dislike and distrust she was inwardly assured.

But Jim seemed fond of her, and he was of her husband’s flesh and
blood. The poor little timid soul went out to him in its loneliness.

‘Do you really like me, James?’ she asked to-day, as they were tying
up the carnations in the long garden border, Cynthia’s small face
shaded by a dimity sun-bonnet.

‘Liking isn’t the word, Cynthia,’ answered the boy. ‘I’m uncommonly
fond of you; and if you’d only show a little more spirit and make
aunt Judith give up the housekeeping, I should have a still better
opinion of you. Why should she stint us to one or two puddens a week,
and those as hard as brickbats; and a fruit pasty once in a blue
moon, when the garden’s running over with gooseberries and may-dukes?
It isn’t her place to order the puddens. It’s yours. It was all very
well to be trodden under her foot when we were orphans; but you’re
our mother now, and you ought to stand by us. Why don’t we have bacon
and fried potatoes for breakfast, like Christians? She’d let a whole
side go rusty before she’d give us the benefit of it. And my father
sits at the table and starves himself, and quotes William Law to show
that starvation is a Christian duty. I’ve no patience! I’m sure I
wonder I’ve grown up the fine young man I am upon such short commons.’

Jim came into the house half an hour later, and found Naomi in the
parlour. She was standing by the window idle, her work in her hands,
staring absently at the bend in the road yonder, by which Oswald
used to come on Herne the Hunter. Poor old faithful Herne! the tears
came into her eyes when she thought of him. He had been turned out to
grass, and she had seen him looking over gaps in the hedge, a haggard
unkempt beast. She had called him and coaxed him, and held out her
hand to invite his approach; and he had come with a shy sidelong gait
close up to her, and even sniffed at her in a friendly way, and then
shot off like a sky-rocket before she could caress his honest gray
nose.

Jim burst into the parlour like a whirlwind.

‘I thought you was fond of those crinkly harts-tongues I got for
you?’ he exclaimed, breathless with indignation.

‘So I am, Jim; very fond of them.’

‘Then you’d better get a bit of black stuff out of the shop and make
yourself a mourning-gown!’

‘Are they dead?’

‘They’re as near it as anything in the fern line can be--as yellow as
the inside of a poached egg, and half eaten by snails. How long is it
since you’ve been in the wilderness?’

‘I don’t know: a few days--a week, perhaps.’

‘You’re a nice young woman for an industrious brother to toil for!
The place is as dry as an ash-pit. What’s the use of my getting
you fine specimens, if this is the way you treat ’em? There’s the
parsley-fern crinkled up like a bit of whity-brown paper. Cynthia
and I have been giving the things a good dowsing; but they’ve been
shamefully neglected. I should have thought you could have found time
to look after them. _You’re_ not in the business,’ concluded Jim,
with a superior air.

‘Don’t be cross, Jim,’ faltered Naomi gently. ‘It was wrong of me to
neglect the ferns that you’ve taken such trouble to set for me; but
I have not done any gardening lately; I have not been feeling well
enough--’

And here Naomi burst into tears--Naomi, with whom tears were so rare.

Jim had his arms round her in a moment, and was hugging her like an
affectionate bruin.

‘There, there, there!’ he cried; ‘don’t fret. I oughtn’t to have been
so cross. You’ve had your troubles lately--father going and breaking
off your marriage without rhyme or reason. Nobody ever heard of
such tyranny. I’ll be sworn William Law, the father of Methodism, is
at the bottom of it. Suffering is good for us. It’s blessed to deny
ourselves. And my poor little sister mustn’t marry the man she loves!
Cheer up, Naomi; it will all come right in the end, I daresay, though
things are going crooked now. Don’t worry about the wilderness.
Cynthia and I are making things tidy--weeding and watering, and
training the creepers over the rockwork. You can come down and look
at us, if you like; it will cheer you up a bit.’

‘I’ll come presently, Jim dear,’ answered Naomi, drying her tears.

‘Be sure you do,’ said Jim; and then he hurried back to his work.

Naomi sat in the parlour for a quarter of an hour or so. She shed no
more tears, but sat with dry eyes looking straight before her.

Why had he come back? Not for her--O, not for her!

The day was nearly done. She could hear the rattling of teacups in
the pantry. Sally was getting her tray ready. That meant half-past
four o’clock. Naomi rose with a long heavy sigh, and went out into
the garden. It was to please her brother she went. There was no
pleasure or interest for her in earth or sky.

She walked slowly down the long straight garden path, where the
clove carnations and double stocks were in their glory, and through
the little orchard to the wilderness. Jim was hard at work--the
perspiration running down his forehead, his coat off, and his
shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbow--dividing great tufts of
primroses and overgrown hartstongue. Cynthia was on her knees
weeding, a pretty picture of youth and fairness in the yellow
sunlight.

Naomi stood and looked at her. What was the charm in her that had
lured her false lover? Could the eye of another woman see the bait
that had won weak and fickle man; the enchantment which had wrought
alike upon the strong man in his meridian of knowledge and wisdom and
the youth in his folly?

Yes, the charm revealed itself even to the cold eye of a resentful
rival. It was not so much absolute beauty which allured in this
nameless waif as a soft and gracious innocence, a flower-like
loveliness, that stole upon mind and heart unawares.

She charmed the senses, as roses and lilies do in the early morning
while the dew is still on them. She appealed to the eye and held it,
like some picture which, in a long gallery, stands out from all other
images, and transfixes the spectator. She stole upon the soul like
music heard afar off on a river, in the still summer night.

Nor was it this outward charm of perfect fairness and grace
only which attracted. The soft lovableness of her disposition
accorded with the tender grace of her beauty. She had the clinging
affectionateness of a soft and yielding nature; a humility of spirit
which made her ready to reverence the strong; a tenderness of heart
which inclined her to pity the weak. In one word she was lovable--a
woman created to be loved.

Naomi stood and looked at her, full of bitter thoughts. For the first
time in her life she envied the gifts of another. She felt all the
good things that Providence had given her of no account when weighed
against the bewitchment of fair looks and winning ways.

‘How wicked I am growing!’ she thought, shocked at her own bitterness.

‘There!’ exclaimed Jim, pulling down his shirt-sleeves; ‘I think I
have done a tidy afternoon’s work. You’ll have oceans of primroses
next year, sis.’

‘If they don’t all die,’ said Naomi, not hopefully. ‘Do you think
it’s quite the right time for moving them?’

‘Primroses!’ cried Jim. ‘As if you could hurt a primrose! I know what
I am about, sister. They wouldn’t take any harm by my moving if they
were the delicatest flowers in a hot-house.’

He pulled on his coat, put away trowel and rake, and came out of the
wild garden into the orchard. Cynthia rose too, with an absent-minded
sigh, and followed him.

‘Now look here, little stepmother,’ he said, in his patronising way;
‘you’d better go in and make yourself tidy for tea, while I show
Naomi what I have done to her primroses.’

Cynthia obeyed without a word, and left them. Jim tucked his
sister’s arm under his own, and began to perambulate the orchard.

‘What’s the matter, Jim?’

‘Cheer up, old woman; I’ve got some good news for you. I won’t see
you trampled upon, not if I can help it. I won’t have your early
affections blighted, and young Pentreath sent to the right-about, if
I can prevent it. Don’t be afraid, sis; I’ll stand by you.’

‘Jim, what do you mean?’ cried Naomi piteously.

‘I’ve got a letter for you.’

Naomi’s heart leapt with sudden overwhelming joy. Oswald had written.
Thank God, thank God! She was not utterly forgotten.

‘A letter, Jim?’ clasping his arm rapturously. ‘How did it come?’

‘How should it come? He brought it himself, of course.’

‘And gave it to you? You saw him? Dear, dear Jim, tell me all about
it. How is he looking, ill or well?’

‘White and fagged; as if he’d been going to the--well, you know--all
the time he’s been in London. I only just caught a glimpse of him
above the wall.’

‘And he gave you the letter--’

‘No, that’s the fun of it. He didn’t see me. It was just as I came
back to the wilderness after I left you in the parlour. Cynthia was
sitting reading on the bench yonder. Just as I came to the gate, I
saw a pale face look over the wall; and then a white hand went up
and threw something over. It fell among the ferns, not a yard from
stepmother. But she never saw it; that was the lark. Her nose was in
her book, poetry or some such trash. I gave a whistle, and off went
my gentleman like a shot--scared away.’

‘And what became of the letter?’

‘Why, I picked it up unbeknown to Cynthia, when her back was turned.
It’s wrapped round a stone. There’s no address on it--too artful for
that--but I knew the party it was meant for.’

‘Are you sure it’s for me?’ asked Naomi, trembling a little. That
exceeding great joy fainted in her heart. A letter unaddressed, and
thrown at Cynthia’s feet!

‘Of course it’s for you. Stepmother sat with her back to the wall,
and her head and shoulders smothered in that great sun-bonnet of
hers. He might easy take her for you.’

‘Give me the letter, dear,’ said Naomi, with suppressed eagerness.

He handed her a little parcel--a goodish-sized pebble packed neatly
in a sheet of letter-paper, and carefully sealed with the well-known
coat-of-arms which had hung a year ago from the Squire’s fob.

‘Ain’t you going to read it?’ demanded Jim, as his sister stood
looking at the packet.

‘Not just yet, dear. I had rather read it when I am quite alone.’

‘O my!’ ejaculated Jim. ‘For fear some of the love should run over,
like clouted cream that hasn’t set properly. What it is to be in
love! Well, sis, I’ll leave you to the enjoyment of your love-letter,
while I go and clean myself.’

He ran off, leaving Naomi alone in the orchard. Fear held her hand
for a moment, though hope whispered that this little packet was full
of comfort and sweetness. It had fallen at Cynthia’s feet, said
fear. Was it not possible that it had been meant for Cynthia?

She broke the seal and carefully unfolded the sheet of Bath post--the
fair wide paper which our forefathers used when letters were worth
having.

It was a letter of three pages, written by a hand which betrayed
its owner’s emotion. Naomi’s eyes shone with an angry light as they
hurried over the lines. There was a name written here and there--a
hateful name, that told her the letter was not for her--‘My Cynthia;’
‘My Cynthia--mine by that mutual love which is our mutual sorrow!’

‘Villain and traitor!’ cried Naomi, with a burst of passion which
transformed her.

Had he stood before her in that moment, and she armed, she could
have stabbed him. This Naomi, who could have laid down her life to
accomplish some good and great thing, was, for this one instant,
capable of murder.

Such cruel perfidy, such heartless treachery, such shameless
iniquity, outraged her sense of justice. It seemed to her as if
Heaven had created a monster.

She had not yet read the letter, but Cynthia’s name stood out from
the tremulous lines as if it had been written in fire. Slowly, with
her hand pressed against her burning forehead, in the effort to keep
brain and understanding clear, she addressed herself to the hateful
task.

She would know the lowest deep of man’s infamy: a lover who could
forsake his sworn love; a man, calling himself a gentleman, who could
try to seduce a good man’s wife.

The letter was incoherent, passionate--despair’s foolish appeal
against Fate:

  ‘I must see you once again--yes, dearest, at whatever hazard to
  you or me, at whatever cost. I have made up my mind to live and
  die far away from the dear place that holds you. The wide, bleak,
  barren sea shall roll between me and my beloved. I am going to
  America; that is far enough, surely! Death could part us no wider
  than the Atlantic. I shall look at that great sea, and think how
  the green waves roll up the golden sands of home and kiss your
  feet; how the white spray blows into your hair and caresses
  you like a cloud--and I am no Jove, to be in that cloud, love.
  I shall be severed from you for ever. But before I sail for the
  other side of the sea I must see you once more; yes, Cynthia, my
  Cynthia--mine by that mutual love which is our mutual sorrow--I
  must see you once more, clasp your hand and say farewell; bless
  you, and be blessed by you. Trust me, trust me, my beloved, with
  but one meeting. There shall no evil word be spoken; you shall
  not even hear me complain against Fate. I will only take your
  hand in mine and say good-bye. Vain blessing, you will say;
  but, dearest love, the memory of that moment will comfort me in
  weary days and nights to come. I would but know that you pity
  and forgive and pray for me; and that, if Fate had willed it so,
  you might have loved me. It will be like a parting between two
  friends when one is doomed to die. I shall think the executioner
  is waiting at the door, and the death-bell ready to toll. O dear
  love, by thy tender and pitying heart, I adjure thee, grant me
  this last prayer! Thy Werther, despairing unto death, pleads to
  thee!

  ‘I have come back to Devonshire for this only--to see you once
  more. I have taken my passage for New York. All is settled;
  nothing can alter my decision. I am not weak enough, or guilty
  enough, to remain within reach of you. I thought that in London
  I might forget; but your image followed me everywhere I went;
  in crowds or in solitudes, you were always near; nothing but a
  lifelong exile can cure my wound or expiate my guilt.

  ‘Let me see you, beloved one. I shall contrive to convey this
  letter to you by some means in the course of to-day. Meet me
  to-morrow afternoon; and to-morrow night, by the coach which
  starts from the First and Last at eight o’clock, I will leave
  Combhaven for ever. Your afternoons are always free; I shall wait
  for you, from two to four o’clock, on the common beyond Matcherly
  Wood, near the old shaft. It is rather far for you to come, but I
  think it is the safest place for our meeting. No one ever comes
  there but a stray cowboy in quest of his cattle.

  ‘Come, dearest; it is the only boon you can bestow upon one whose
  heart you have broken unawares.--Yours till death,

                                                            ‘OSWALD.’

This was the letter. Naomi read it slowly to the end, and then put it
in her pocket.

A shrill shriek from the house-door roused her from abstraction.

‘Naomi, are you coming?’ at the top of aunt Judith’s high-pitched
voice.

‘We never do have our teas like Christians nowadays!’ complained Miss
Haggard, as Naomi came into the parlour breathless. ‘Have you seen
another ghost, girl?’ she asked, staring at her niece. ‘You look as
white as a yard of calico. Here’s your father not home to his tea
again; that makes the third time this week.’

‘He is attending to his duty, no doubt, aunt.’

‘Who says he isn’t? But I wish he could contrive to combine duty with
punctuality at meals. I hate a disorderly table.’

Joshua came in just as they had finished their meal. His large cup of
tea had been put on one side for him, covered with a saucer. He sat
down in his arm-chair and drank his tea in silence. He was looking
exhausted and weary.

‘I am afraid you have had a hard afternoon’s work, Joshua,’ Cynthia
said, sitting down beside him timidly.

‘I have been in the house of death, my dear; that is always trying to
weak humanity. And I have walked a long way in the sun.’

Naomi sat by the window darning Jim’s stockings. Aunt Judith retired
to the drapery department. Joshua leant back in his chair, with
closed eyes. Cynthia took up a book; it was Milton’s _Paradise
Lost_, one of the few imaginative works of which Mr. Haggard did not
disapprove.

They sat thus for some time, in a silence only broken by the lowing
of distant cattle and the gentle lapping of summer waves upon the
pebbly beach. Then Jim looked in at the door and called Cynthia. She
rose quickly and went out to him, and Naomi was alone with her father.

This was the opportunity she had been waiting for. After reading
Oswald’s letter she had come to a desperate resolve. These lofty
natures have a touch of hardness in their composition sometimes. A
sense of immunity from sin and weakness makes them stony-hearted
judges of erring humanity. Oswald’s wrongdoing had awakened that
latent element of hardness in Naomi’s nature. She thought she was
only doing her duty in taking desperate measures. Or was it jealousy
which put on a mask and called itself justice? She took the letter
out of her pocket, and looked at her father. He was not asleep, only
resting with closed eyes.

‘Father,’ said Naomi, in a low voice, ‘here is a letter which has
come to me by accident, and which I think you ought to see. It is
from Oswald to your wife.’

She put the letter into his hand and left him. She dared not await
the issue of her act.




                             CHAPTER II.

                         ‘FAREWELL, CONTENT.’


Joshua read the letter slowly, every word going to his heart like
the thrust of a knife. He had been told that a man had addressed
a confession of guilty love to his wife, and the knowledge that
this thing had been had preyed upon him like a corroding poison.
But even in all he had suffered since Judith’s revelation he had
never realised the greatness of the wrong as he did now, with the
betrayer’s letter in his hand, the audacious confession deliberately
set down in black and white.

‘He dared to write this!’ he muttered. ‘He dared--to my wife! O God!
how low she must have fallen in his esteem before he wrote this
letter!’

Here was the cruellest sting. Could Oswald have penned this
passionate appeal had he not been sure of a hearing? Did not this
letter imply that he knew himself beloved? Ay, there were the
abhorrent words burning the paper: ‘That mutual love, which is our
mutual sorrow!’ This villain made very sure that he was loved. Must
he not have been so assured before he dared to ask an honest woman to
grant him a secret meeting?

Joshua Haggard sat with the letter in his hand, and a look in those
dark eyes of his--a lurid fire under black lowering brows--which
would have struck terror to the hearts of his admiring flock could
they have seen their shepherd in his lonely agony. What was he to
do--how find revenge great enough for this gigantic wrong? Revenge
was not the thought in his mind; retribution, justice rather, was
what he demanded. He felt himself like Orestes, privileged, nay
appointed, to slay. The furies might come afterwards, but in this
present hour it seemed to him that he might claim this man’s blood.

That gentlemanlike institution, the duel, was in full force in
Joshua’s day. It was but a year or so since a couple of English dukes
had tried to murder each other in a pit in Hyde Park. Had he been a
man of the world, nothing would have been clearer or more easy than
his course. But for the shepherd of souls, the preacher of peace,
to take up the sword! Would it not be the renunciation of those
principles for which he had lived? How often from his pulpit had he
anathematised the slayer of his brother, hurled his thunders against
that corrupt society in which murder could be deemed honourable!

He sat with the letter in his hand, and all was dark before him.
Could he ever trust his wife again?--believe in her purity, cherish
with a fond and almost fatherly pride that sweet and girlish
innocence, that utter ignorance of evil, the freshness and beauty of
life’s morning, which had first won his love? Never more--never more!
His Eve had gathered the fatal fruit; the serpent had lifted his
venomous crest from among the flowers; the glory of life’s paradise
had faded. Never more could he love, or worship, or trust. Henceforth
he must hold her loathly. If this letter had reached her, how would
she have received it? Would she have listened to the tempter’s
pleading? Would she have stolen in secret to meet him, to hear his
poisonous vows, to pity his weak unmanly lamentings?

‘I should like to know that,’ he said to himself; ‘I should like to
know how she would have answered this letter.’

And then it occurred to him that he might easily put her to the test.
The seal had been broken, but the paper round it was untorn. It would
be easy to reseal the letter, making the second seal just a little
larger than the first; and Cynthia would not examine the outside of
the letter too closely.

He lighted a candle and resealed the violated letter; then paused
for a moment or so, wondering how he should get it conveyed to
his wife. ‘She shall find it somewhere,’ he thought. ‘Her guilty
conscience will tell her it is from her lover. He may have written
to her before, perhaps. God only knows the greatness of her sin--God
who made us, and knows the blackness of our unregenerate hearts. And
I thought that there could be one exempt--one free from humanity’s
universal taint. Fool, fool, fool!’

He went slowly up-stairs to the bedchamber, the airy orderly room,
with its substantial old-fashioned furniture and look of homely
comfort--the room that had once been his father’s. There hung the
old grocer’s turnip-shaped silver watch on the mahogany stand upon
the mantelpiece, ticking with as lusty a beat as when its sturdy
proprietor carried it in his ample drab-cloth fob. There were the
samplers which testified to the industry and skill of Joshua’s mother
and Joshua’s wife--the pyramidal apple-trees innocent of leaves, the
angular figures of Adam and Eve in the garden, with a curly serpent
standing on tip-tail between them. The evening sun shone into the
room, and glorified the gaudy sunflowers on the chintz bed-furniture,
and glittered on the brazen handles of Joshua’s escritoire. A bowl of
freshly-gathered roses and carnations on the table perfumed all the
room. Joshua knew whose busy hand had plucked the flowers, and the
sight of them smote him with an aching pain. O, wounded heart, for
which every new thought was a new torture!

The escritoire stood open, and there was the _Sorrows of Werther_,
lying where he had placed it after his long night of waking. There
had been no need for Cynthia to hide the book any more. It had told
its story.

Joshua’s sombre glance lighted on the volume. ‘Accursed book that
taught them to sin!’ he exclaimed; ‘they might never have fathomed
the wickedness of their own hearts but for thee.’

This was hard upon the innocent and noble Charlotte, the misguided
but generous Werther.

A thought full of bitterness and anger came into Joshua’s mind as he
looked at _Werther_. He would put Oswald’s letter between the leaves
of that detested book. She would find it there, he felt assured; the
book was her own love-story, it talked to her of her lover. He could
fancy her hanging over the pages, sucking poisonous sweetness from
every line. Werther and Oswald were, in Joshua’s mind, one.

He put the letter in the book, and was going slowly down-stairs, when
he stopped, with his hand upon the banisters, and pondered for a
minute or so.

The thought came over him that he could not pray with his household,
or teach or exhort them to-night. It was as if an evil spirit were at
his shoulder forbidding him that holy and familiar exercise. He felt
that it would have been a kind of profanation to lay his hand upon
the Bible, that anchor of his life, which had never before seemed
insufficient mooring for his wind-driven bark.

‘Not to-night,’ he muttered to himself--‘not to-night.’

He called over the stairs to his daughter, who had just come in from
the garden.

‘Tell your aunt to read a chapter and a psalm, Naomi,’ he said; ‘I am
too ill to come down-stairs again to-night.’

Naomi hurried to him, full of apprehension.

‘Dearest father, what is the matter? Can I do anything? can I get you
anything?’

Conscience smote her. Why had she afflicted him by the sight of that
wicked letter? It would have been better to have taken it to Cynthia,
and spoken words of Christian reproof and warning. Why had she made
him, her dearest upon earth, to suffer?

‘No, my dear, you can do nothing. It is the mind that is ill at ease,
not the body. My soul is too dark to hold communion with her God. The
blow has been heavy.’

‘Dear father, it was so wicked of me to show you the letter--an evil
revengeful act. And, after all, the sin may not be so deep as it
seems to us. They are but children--weak, foolish, easily led astray.
Let us pity and forgive them.’

‘I may come--some day, when I am old and doting--to pity her. I can
never forgive him.’

He put his daughter aside, went into his bedroom, and shut the door.
Naomi dared not follow him. She went slowly down-stairs, greatly
troubled.

It is one thing to launch the thunderbolt, and another to survey the
ruin the bolt has made.

                  *       *       *       *       *

Joshua Haggard turned his face to the wall, and gave himself up to
darkest thoughts. He rose soon after daybreak, and his first look was
directed to _Werther_. The letter was gone. Yes; there was nothing
now between the pages but a few faded rose-leaves and withered fern
tendrils, which marked a favourite passage here and there.

He looked from the book to his wife, lying with her face turned from
the light, and one round white arm, dimpled like a young child’s,
thrown above her head. Was she sleeping placidly with that guilty
secret in her breast, or only pretending to sleep? He could not tell.

‘She is all dissimulation,’ he thought, ‘fairest seeming, sweetest
show--bitter as ashes within!’




                             CHAPTER III.

               ‘WE TWO STOOD THERE WITH NEVER A THIRD.’


In the sultry August afternoon--earth glorious in the full power of
the sunshine--Oswald Pentreath went up to Matcherly Common. It was a
long walk and a hot one, but in this land of beauty there were many
welcome spots of shade--cool lanes shadowed by tangled greenery,
natural arcades of oak and hawthorn, wild apple and elderberry, from
which he could look out on the glittering sea, almost intolerable in
its sunlit splendour. There was the wood to cross; a deep and cool
retreat, where interwoven boughs made summer days seem a perpetual
evensong. Only here and there stole a shaft of vivid light through
the beechen branches; while now and then the ruddy fur of a squirrel
shot like a flash of colour through the gloom.

Oswald walked slowly, his hands clasped behind his back, giving
himself up to the soft influence of the scene and hour, and thinking
of Cynthia.

Would she grant his prayer? Would she meet him? Love and hope said
yes; and the thought of the meeting was rapture, though despair lay
beyond it. He was to die to-night--or at least all of him that made
life worth having--but he was to be happy first; happy for the brief
span of time in which he could hold her in his arms and press one
kiss upon her innocent brow, and bless her and leave her.

The thought that his letter might reach the wrong hands had not
occurred to him. He had seen Cynthia sitting in the wilderness, and
had thrown his letter almost at her feet; Jim’s approach had made him
retreat suddenly, but it had never struck him that Cynthia might not
see the letter, and that Jim might.

The common was on high ground rising above the wood--a broad tract
of undulating land clothed with furze, and with a pool of water here
and there, just like that stretch of heath, far away, where Joshua
Haggard had found his second wife. The mines, whose deserted shafts
disfigured this billowy expanse of golden bloom, had not been worked
since Watt first applied steam to mining. They had yielded well
enough in their day, had made some men rich and ruined others; and
there stood the dilapidated engine-houses with their tall chimneys,
wide apart across the common, like sentinel towers on the coast of a
golden sea.

Cynthia was there. Oswald found her sitting on a yellow bank at
the base of the abandoned shaft, sitting with a book open in her
lap, trying to read. She started up, as he came towards her, with a
frightened look, as if his coming had been a surprise to her, and
stood before him very pale, with clasped hands.

‘Dearest, best, how shall I thank you!’ he cried, taking her hands
and kissing them in a rapture of gratitude.

‘Do not thank me at all, Oswald; indeed, I am afraid I have done very
wrong in coming; you ought not to have asked me, you ought never to
have come back to Combhaven, unless it was in your heart to be true
to Naomi. O Oswald, why can you not love her as she deserves to be
loved, as you did once love her? She is so good, so noble, like my
dear husband in all high thoughts. Why cannot your heart come back to
her? Why should we all be miserable because you are inconstant?’

The poor little soul had come here to say this. She had come with a
clear and honest purpose in her mind--come to bring the wanderer back
to the path of duty.

‘Can a man help his fate?’ said Oswald gloomily. ‘It is my fate to
love you. I shall love you till I die. But don’t be frightened,
Cynthia; I will be the cause of misery to none of you. I am going to
America; my mind is quite made up on that point.’

‘And you will break Naomi’s heart. If you could see the change in her
since you left us you could not help being sorry.’

‘I am sorry. My soul is sick with sorrow. But my heart cannot go
back to Naomi. It never was hers. I never knew what love meant till
I loved you. I made the fatal error of mistaking affection for love.
I am sorry for her; sorry that I have wronged so noble a creature;
sorry for the loss of that peaceful life which I once thought to
share with her. But I cannot go back. You might as well ask me to be
a child again. The star of my manhood shone upon me when I saw you.’

‘I wish I were wiser,’ said Cynthia sadly; ‘I wish I could speak as I
feel I ought to speak; I might convince you then, perhaps.’

‘Not if you had the eloquence of Brougham and the wisdom of Bacon.
Naomi and I are parted for ever, dearest, and at her own desire.
It is best that it should be so. Providence has been good to me in
loosening a bond that would have made two lives miserable.’

And then he said no more about Naomi, but began to talk of himself,
and love, and fate, and parting, and despair. Foolish words that have
been said so often, empty breath for the most part, bearing no result
upon this earth save idle sorrow and wasted tears, yet which mean so
much for the speaker and the one who listens. Cynthia had come there
to hear no such passionate complaints and protestations. She had come
intent upon delivering her pious lecture, talking to him of grace
and redemption, and the sacred stream which washes away all sin,
and winning him back to duty and Naomi. Yet she lingered and heard
him. It was the last time. They were parting for ever. Who should
blame them for this one half-hour, which would stand hereafter like a
chasm in the life of each, dividing youth and passion from sober age
and duty? It could matter to no one that they had met thus, and thus
parted.

‘You will try to lead a good life?’ pleaded Cynthia, when Oswald had
told his pitiful story--told how he had honestly striven to forget
her, and had failed; ‘you will cling to the cross? O, let me think
when you are far away, across that wide cruel sea, that your soul
is safe, that you are one of the elect, that I shall meet you where
the seas are jasper, and the glory of the Lamb lights the shining
streets! You will try to be good, Oswald? Promise me that!’

‘I would wear raiment of camel’s-hair and a hempen girdle for your
sake, dearest.’

‘You will go to chapel--church is so cold and dull; it has no
awakening power, it does not call the lost home? You will seek out
some stirring preacher like Joshua, and let him lead you to the
sheltering rock, and you will drink the living water and be saved?’

Oswald looked down at the fair young face lifted to his with such
utter earnestness, not one thought of earth in the pleading soul;
only thorough and implicit belief in something higher and better than
earth, a prize to be struggled for and won. In that Greek race in
which the runners carried lighted lamps in their hands, they were the
winners who reached the goal with their lamps still burning. So in
the Christian race, the light once quenched there is but little hope
for the runner. It might be safely said of Cynthia, as she looked up
at her lover with innocent eyes, charging him to be thoughtful for
eternity, that her lamp still burned with purest light.

Oswald looked down at her through a mist of tears.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘for your sake I will try to make myself fit for
heaven. I have been careless of these things. I meant to let Naomi
make me a Christian, but she was to have had all the trouble. But for
your sake, to meet you hereafter in a fairer world, to see this dear
face again shining amidst the angel-faces, I will struggle, I will
strive to make my life worthier and better.’

‘God bless and comfort you, and establish you in well-doing!’ said
Cynthia. ‘And now good-bye. I must not stay a moment longer; I have
been too long already.’

She looked at her watch. Four o’clock, and she had three miles to
walk before five. There would be much astonishment and questioning if
she was not punctual in her appearance at the tea-table.

‘You will let me walk through the wood with you?’

‘No; what would be the use? I have said all I had to say. It would
only make us more unhappy.’

‘It would give us one more hour together,’ said Oswald; ‘an hour in
paradise.’

‘The Christian’s paradise is to be reached by thornier paths than
those through Matcherly Wood,’ answered Cynthia, with a reproving
air. ‘Good-bye, Oswald.’

Her earnestness dominated him, weak and childish as she looked,
with the fair hair clustering in baby curls under the shady
cottage-bonnet. Very soft and gentle, but very firm at the same time,
she seemed, in her simple straightforwardness of purpose; and Oswald
obeyed her.

‘Since it must be so, then, good-bye,’ he said gloomily. ‘I promised
that I would be content with a brief farewell, such as condemned
criminals have. You have given me a little sermon into the bargain. I
ought to be more than satisfied. Farewell, my best beloved; the seas
will roll between us soon, and there will be nothing left for me but
the picture and memory of to-day; nothing but the dreams that haunt
my pillow--the sweet unreal presence of her I love.’

He took her to his breast, she having no more force to resist those
circling arms than a lily to recoil from the hand that gathers it;
took her gently and solemnly to his heart, and pressed his lips
on her forehead. It was a long and fervent kiss; but if there was
passion in it, that passion was no base or sensual feeling; only the
passion of a great love and a deep despair.

‘Bless you, my darling!’ he cried. ‘God bless you and guard you, and
make all days and paths pleasant and peaceful for you when I am far
away!’

And so they parted--for ever. Unhappily, there was one who saw the
lingering meeting, the fond embrace, the fervent kiss, but could not
hear the words that went with them.




                             CHAPTER IV.

                  ‘IT IS A BASILISK UNTO MINE EYE.’


Tranquil and monotonous days hung like a cloud upon the little
household of Combhaven. The daily round of labour, of eating and
drinking in a spare and Spartan fashion, of praying and preaching,
went on with pitiless regularity; but of household joys there were
none, of family love but little. A gloomy change had come over
Joshua Haggard. He was still the enthusiastic apostle of Primitive
Methodism; a man ready to go out and preach the Gospel in wild and
barbarous places, to be the bearer of glad tidings to those who
despised and rejected such messengers, to be hooted by a brutal
rabble, if need were, and driven from village to village at peril
of his life, and to escape from his persecutors by the skin of
his teeth, as John Wesley did, more than once, in his long and
difficult career. He was ready to endure all things. Day by day his
discourses grew more fervid, but, alas, more darkly fraught with a
message which was not glad tidings--the message of an offended and
an avenging God. Christ, the Saviour, was almost excluded from the
preacher’s exhortations. When he talked of man’s Redeemer it was as
of one who turned His face from a sinful world, in which there were
very few to be saved. If he had lived in that awful time before the
Deluge, when all the earth was peopled with reprobates, he could
hardly have been more despairing of humanity’s ultimate destiny.

His flock were in nowise offended by this gloomy view of their
spiritual condition, although it implied so mean an opinion of their
personal merits and conduct. The more vehemently threatening Joshua
Haggard’s sermons became, the more eagerly the sinners crowded to
hear him. It was as if they liked to hear themselves upbraided and
denounced. Perhaps everybody saw the barbed shaft fly straight to
the gold of a neighbour’s heart, and did not feel it rankling in
his own. When Joshua talked of the frivolity and extravagance of an
unregenerate race, Mrs. Pycroft thought of Mrs. Spradgers’s last new
bonnet, which was clearly a superfluous and culpable outlay; such
bonnet not being due to Mrs. Spradgers, from an economic point of
view, until Advent Sunday, whereas the lady had flaunted it before
the disapproving eyes of the flock early in October. If Joshua
denounced sensuality and the vile indulgence of earthly desires, Mrs.
Pentelow’s thoughts flew at once to the Polwhele family, who were
known to have hot suppers--squab-pies and other savoury meats--every
night in the week. You could see the grease oozing out of their
complexions on warm Sunday afternoons, as if digestion as well as
respiration were a function of the skin.

From the day when he gave up humanity for lost, and plainly told them
so, Joshua’s popularity increased in a marked degree. The darker his
doctrines grew, the better his congregation liked to hear him. It was
not milk for babes which they wanted, but strong meat for men of iron
thews and sinews, and women with vigorous constitutions and masculine
strength of mind. They liked to hear that the devil was among them,
at their shoulders, prompting them to evil, fighting for the mastery
of their souls.

‘I can see him, I can feel his presence,’ cried Joshua, in a passion
of despairing ecstasy. ‘He is among us; his sulphurous breath burns
me with a foretaste of eternal fire; his whisper hisses in my ear as
the serpent’s hiss stole into the ear of Eve. He will not loose his
hold. He is fighting for the possession of my soul; he is striving
to drag me down into the pit. What shall I do to be saved? How shall
I win the fight against so omnipotent an adversary--omnipotent to
destroy, omnipotent to enthral and enchain souls? He wants to people
hell, my brethren. He is not content with his victory over willing
sinners; the profligates and harlots are too pitiful a prey for him!
He wants to have the virtuous man in his net. He would have liked to
get John Wesley, or George Whitfield, or William Law. He tried for
them, as he is trying for us. He is a fallen angel himself, and it
pleases him to entrap men of high estate--to take the Christian in
his toils--to make the white scarlet, and the wool like unto blood.’

Naomi heard and shuddered. Was this her father, who had once preached
infinite faith in God’s mercy, in Christ’s redeeming grace? He talked
now as if mankind were abandoned as a prey to the Evil One, with no
guardian and champion to protect and save, no all-merciful Judge to
adjust the balance; as if humanity, forgotten by God, were left to
struggle single-handed against the devices of the great Enemy. Of
our ever-interceding Redeemer, of guardian angels and ministering
spirits, and saints who had fought and conquered, Joshua now rarely
spoke. He described a world given over to the Prince of Darkness.

Nor was this the only change which Naomi beheld with remorseful
grief, believing herself in somewise to blame for this gloomy
transformation. In his home as well as in his pulpit the minister
was a new man. It was not in his nature to become a domestic tyrant.
He interfered with no one’s liberty or comfort; but he sat in his
domestic circle like a statue, he banished all cheerfulness by his
silent presence, he breathed an atmosphere of gloom.

Even Judith regretted this alteration in her brother’s temper,
though she had been apt in happier days to think him far too easy
and indulgent a father. She, like Naomi, had her moments of remorse,
thinking the change her work. Better perhaps if she had held her
tongue about that foolish young man, and let time and Providence cure
him of his folly. Naomi’s marriage would have been a feather in the
family cap; and although Miss Haggard had been disposed to begrudge
her niece this exaltation, it was a trial to receive the condolences
of friends whose affected sympathy thinly disguised their inward
satisfaction. Yes, taking all things into consideration, Judith was
sorry she had not held her peace. She had acted for the best, of
course--when had she ever done otherwise?--but the worst had come of
it instead of the best.

Cynthia bore her cross and made no murmur, and had neither kindness
nor pity for any one except James Haggard, who thought it a hard
thing that his pretty young stepmother should lead so dreary a life.
She had not even the business and the delightful consciousness of
increasing profits to console her, nor the power to restore exhausted
nature with a surreptitious handful of figs or pudding-raisins when
the dinner had been more than usually Spartan. James was sorry for
the ‘poor little woman,’ as he called her, and was kind to her
always, for which grace she rewarded him with heartfelt affection.

But her husband--the teacher, master, and friend, whom she had loved
so dearly, reverenced so deeply, and to whom, even when weak enough
to pity and return Oswald’s romantic passion, she had always rendered
homage and affection--had withdrawn his favour from her; he loved her
no longer; he was doubtless sorry that he had linked himself to so
weak and useless a creature.

‘What am I in his life?’ she asked herself, in deepest despondency.
‘I cannot even keep his house for him; others do that. I sit by his
fireside a useless intruder. He will not let me share in his higher
life; if I ask him about the books he reads, or talk to him about
our religion, I can see a disdainful sneer upon his lip. Sometimes I
think that he is getting to hate me.’

This thought was poison. Cynthia searched her life to see in what
article of it she had offended her husband, and could discover no
cause for his anger. That she had erred in letting Oswald love her,
in letting her heart go out to him, she knew, and had repented of
her sin with many tears; and, having bidden the sinner an eternal
farewell, deemed that error a thing of the past, repented of, and
in somewise atoned. She did not believe that jealousy was the cause
of her husband’s estrangement. Jealousy was allied to love, and her
great fear was that Joshua hated her. She did not know that there
is a kind of jealousy, and that which has its root in the deepest
love, which puts on the garb of hate, and has not seldom culminated
in murder--such jealousy as made Othello strike Desdemona before the
Venetian emissaries, the passion of strong natures.

She endured her husband’s unkindness with a sweet submission which
might have softened a sterner temper than Joshua’s, and would
assuredly have melted him but for the corroding influence of a
sleepless jealousy--jealousy of the past, jealousy of a ghost--for
the departed Oswald was nothing more than a shade.

Joshua had said no word to his daughter about Oswald’s letter. All
through that day on which Cynthia went to Matcherly Common, Naomi had
been full of anxiety and fear. How would her father act? Would his
anger against Oswald take any violent shape? That was assuredly a
contingency to be dreaded, an evil she had not foreseen when she gave
Joshua the letter. But passion is fatally blind. The harm being done,
she could see the possible danger plainly enough.

All through the long summer day she was restless and watchful,
fearing she knew not what, or rather not daring to tell herself what
she feared. The morning went by very quietly: Cynthia sitting in the
parlour, sewing; Naomi busy about her usual household labours. She
went in and out of the parlour a good many times, and always found
Cynthia in the same attitude, working assiduously.

Had Joshua spoken to his wife about the letter?

Yes; Naomi thought he had. There was one bright spot of colour on
Cynthia’s pale cheek that told of agitation studiously suppressed.
Once when Naomi spoke to her she answered absently. She must know
something about the letter, Naomi thought.

After dinner Cynthia went up to her bedroom, and came down in five
minutes with her bonnet on. It was a busy afternoon in the shop.
Aunt Judith and Jim had returned to their duties, and Joshua had gone
out. There was only Naomi in the parlour when Cynthia came down ready
for her walk.

‘I am going for a long walk, Naomi,’ she said. ‘I shall be home by
tea-time.’

There was no fear of Naomi offering to accompany her stepmother. They
had not walked together since Oswald Pentreath’s departure. Day by
day the gulf had been widening.

This walk of Cynthia’s set Naomi wondering. Could she be gone to
meet Oswald? That seemed of all things most unlikely. Joshua had the
letter; it was Joshua who would keep the appointment. And then, O
God! who would tell what might be the issue of the meeting!

Naomi went about the house and the garden like a wandering spirit
for the next hour, and then it seemed to her that this suspense was
beyond endurance; she must follow her father to the old shaft--she
made very sure that he had gone there--she must be on the spot or
near it, whatever harm was to come. O, why had she given him that
shameful letter? Blind and wicked rage which prompted so wild an act!

‘Did I want to make my father’s life miserable, or to bring evil upon
Oswald?’ she cried. ‘Yes, I was wicked enough for anything yesterday;
I was mad with anger and jealousy.’

She put on her bonnet, and went out, unseen even by Sally, who was
washing in the cool brick-floored back kitchen. The sun was blazing
upon the neat little town. The white houses were of a dazzling
brightness, the sweet-williams and red roses shone like spots of
fire, the ruddy glow of the forge looked pale against the sun-glory.
Naomi took no heed of the heat; she walked rapidly to the end of the
lane that led to Matcherly, and then ran along the shaded narrow way
till she came to the edge of the wood. Here she paused for a little,
breathless and exhausted. They would be coming homewards by this
time, she thought--Cynthia and Oswald, and he who had gone to watch
their meeting--or to disturb it. She might come face to face with her
false lover. Her heart beat wildly at the thought.

There was one central path through the wood, a clearly defined
cattle track, which she felt assured would be taken by any one going
in the direction of the old shaft. It was easy to skirt this broad
grassy track by a narrow footway that wound through the underwood,
and among the smooth silvery beech boles and the rugged greenish-gray
oak trunks. The path ran like a thread through the bracken. By this
narrow way Naomi went swiftly, till she came to the rising ground
that sloped upwards to Matcherly Common. Here she chose her post of
espial behind a sturdy old oak, bearded with gray lichen and half
strangled with ivy--a Methuselah of trees, from which Time had lopped
limb after limb, but which still held numerous arms aloft, like a
woodland Briareus, and seemed to threaten or denounce surrounding
Nature. So one might fancy some prophetic Druid transformed into a
tree, dumbly prophesying evil to come upon the earth.

Sheltered by this broad trunk, which stood waist high in hawthorn and
bracken, Naomi waited to see her father and Oswald pass by, and to be
assured that all was well with them. They would hardly fail to return
by the cattle track; it was the only direct path to Combhaven,
and on either side the underwood was too thick and wild for the
perambulation of anything but the furred and feathered inhabitants of
the forest.

She waited for what seemed a long and weary time; then, a little
after four o’clock, she saw Cynthia go by, walking slowly. She was
very pale, and the white wan cheeks bore the trace of tears; but she
had a resigned look, as of one whose soul is not lost to peace.

‘She has been to meet him,’ thought Naomi. ‘And yet she does not look
like a shameless sinner.’ Then she began to pray that Joshua might
not have seen that clandestine unholy meeting--that he might have
been spared the temptation to any evil act.

The time she had to wait for her father’s coming hung heavily, so
great had become that burden of nameless dread. Yet it was but half
an hour after Cynthia had gone by that her husband came slowly along
the forest glade, and passed within a yard of the tree behind which
his daughter was watching.

She rose as he approached, and stood leaning against the bulky old
trunk, gazing at her father’s face as she had never looked before
at anything under God’s heaven. Never had any other spectacle
so thrilled, so frozen her being as this one view of a familiar
countenance. To have looked in the face of the dead would have been
less awful.

White to the lips, and with big drops of sweat upon brow and cheek,
the mouth rigid, the dark eyes almost hidden under the lowering
brows--Joshua, the Christian preacher, the man sure of election and
grace, passed under the flickering lights and shadows, like some
horrible vision of sin and vengeance--passed, and was gone. Naomi
leaned against the tree, her hands clasped, her eyes gazing at the
empty air, the shaft of afternoon sunlight upon which a million
atoms, each a life, danced and sparkled; yet still seeing that
blanched and awful face--the face of a man who had come straight from
some hideous death-scene; the face of a man burdened with the secret
of a crime.

‘O God!’ cried Naomi, with an overmastering despair, ‘why didst Thou
create us, predestined sinners, judged, doomed before we were born!
The best of us, the most earnest, the truest, the noblest, given
over a prey to the Evil One! My father, even my father, lowest,
blackest of sinners!’

She stood in the same attitude, supported by the mossy trunk; stood
as in a trance, and saw the sunlight dip lower behind the black
branches and change from gold to rose, from rose to crimson, from
deepest red to tenderest purple. She watched these changes in a kind
of semi-consciousness and a strange feeling of uncertainty as to
her own identity; this Naomi Haggard leaning against a tree seeming
to her--the actual entity--to be a forlorn and stricken creature
sorely to be pitied. She pitied herself and was sorry for herself
with a half-scornful compassion. And so she waited, in a dreamy
watchfulness, till nature gave way, and she sank, worn out, into a
heap at the foot of the tree.

Here, faint and exhausted, but not unconscious, she still watched,
till thick night came down upon the wood, and she heard the owls
hooting and saw the rabbits running within a few feet of her
resting-place. Only when the darkness closed round her did she rise
and go home, too familiar with the wood to lose her way even amidst
the shadows of night. She went homeward slowly, caring little who
might question or wonder at her absence.

And in all the time of her watch she had not seen Oswald Pentreath go
by.




                              CHAPTER V.

                       ‘AND YET I FEEL I FEAR.’


Under that quiet surface which life wore in Joshua Haggard’s
household there were troubled waters.

Naomi had never forgotten the awful look in her father’s face that
afternoon in the wood. It haunted her in all places and at all
seasons. The impression it had made upon her mind would not pass
away. What it meant she knew not--dared not shape the thought in her
mind; but she was very sure that it meant evil of some kind--evil to
her father’s soul, wrong to Oswald.

If she could have known for certain that Oswald had carried out the
intention set forth in his fatal letter to Cynthia, she would have
been, comparatively speaking, at ease and happy. But of this she
knew nothing. Whether he had really gone to America, how and when he
had left Combhaven, of these things she was ignorant. Cynthia might
know, perhaps; but not even to set these anxious fears at rest
could Naomi stoop so low as to seek for any information about her
lover from the woman for whose sake she had been abandoned. No; if
Cynthia knew anything for certain, the knowledge must remain locked
in her breast. Save in the merest outward and ceremonial form, a
bare civility in every-day intercourse, there could be no contact
between Naomi and her stepmother. The gulf that sundered these two
was impassable.

Oswald’s letter had stated that he meant to leave Combhaven by the
night coach. He had not gone by that coach, for James Haggard, who
was fond of an evening stroll when the shutters were up, and who
took a lively interest in other people’s business, had watched the
departure of the coach on that particular evening, and entertained
his family at the silent supper-table with a detailed account of that
exciting event in the every-day life of his town.

‘There was only one inside, and that was old Mrs. Skevinew, who is
going to Exeter to see her married daughter,’ said Jim; ‘she had
three bandboxes, two umbrellas, a pair of pattens, and a pair of the
new-fashioned clogs--she bought ’em of aunt Judith the day before
yesterday--a hamper of peas, a green goose, a basket of eggs, a tin
of clouted cream, a red-cotton handkerchief full of bullaces, two
pasties done up in brown paper, and a pig’s head. Won’t her friends
be glad to see her?’

‘Who were the outsides?’ asked Judith.

Jim ran over the names, checking them off on his fingers.

‘Was there no one else in the coach?’ asked Naomi, looking at her
father, who sat in his usual place with bent brows, neither eating
nor drinking.

‘No one.’

He had not gone by that coach, then, thought Naomi. But presently it
occurred to her that Mr. Pentreath’s return to Combhaven having been
a secret and underhand proceeding, he would hardly care to leave the
place under the broad glare of his townspeople’s eye. The departure
of the coach from the First and Last Inn was a public event. To
leave by that vehicle at that point of departure, and not be seen,
came hardly within the limits of possibility, unless a man had got
himself hidden away in the boot before the spectators assembled. No,
if Oswald had determined to travel by that coach, he had doubtless
walked on to some quiet spot, to be taken up as the mail passed.

This reflection quieted Naomi’s fears in some measure, yet did not
set her heart at ease. Her father’s face haunted her like some unholy
image sent by Satan to suggest evil. What had passed between Joshua
and that weak sinner--what violence of upbraiding had the minister
used against his wife’s lover? That there had been an angry meeting
of some kind Naomi did not doubt. Only a wild indulgence of evil
passion, only an utter abandonment of himself to man’s omnipresent
tempter, could have conjured up such a look in Joshua Haggard’s face.
The dark mind of the spirit of evil was there reflected. The lurid
gleam in those darkly brooding eyes was the red glare caught from the
open doors of hell.

There had been hard words spoken, words of hatred and fury, perchance
even some act of open violence--a blow struck by that strong hand of
Joshua’s, who might have spurned the sinner as if he had been the
tempter himself in his base form of serpent. But it was over, and
Joshua had doubtless begun to repent of his violence; and Oswald was
on his way to a distant world, to begin a new and wiser life.

‘God keep him and guard him and lead him aright,’ thought Naomi,
‘and make him a good and great man. I could bear the pang of parting
with him, could I feel secure about his happy future here and in the
better world.’

O empty life from which he had vanished for ever! O dreary days which
hung upon this young spirit like a burden, and weighed her down to
the dust! Yes, verily, to the dust; so that, in her utter weariness,
she felt as if it would be a good and pleasant end of all things to
lie down in some lonely corner of the land--lie face downward among
the fern and wild flowers, and wait for death. Surely the dark angel
would take pity upon her joyless fate, and come and fold her in his
sheltering wings, and comfort and cure her.

‘There is no other comfort, no other cure,’ she said, forgetting all
the old pious lessons in her despair, forgetting even to do good to
others in the sharpness of her pain.

She sought for consolation from no one--not even from honest Jim, who
was distressed at seeing such blank hopeless faces in his home, and
was eager, after his rough and ready fashion, to administer comfort.

‘Come, Naomi, cheer up and be bright, like a sensible girl,’ he
would say. ‘There’s as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it,
and though you’ve missed landing a fine salmon through father’s
foolishness, you’ll have your net full by and by, I’ll warrant.
A good-looking straight-built lass like you will never want a
sweetheart.’

‘Jim, if you talk to me like that I shall hate you!’ cried Naomi. ‘I
shall go single to my grave, and you know it; or if you can think
otherwise of me, you’re not worthy to be my brother.’

‘Hoity-toity!’ cried Jim, ‘what fine notions run in our family!
Here’s father refusing the lord of the manor for his son-in-law, and
you talking of dying an old maid because your first affections have
been blighted. Why, if my first love takes a wrong direction, I
shall turn my heart into the right road, as easily as I guide gray
Dobbin down a lane where he doesn’t want to go. Just a shake of the
reins or a touch of the whip, and off we start.’

Crushed by this weariness of life, Naomi strove notwithstanding to
do her duty. Even aunt Judith found no room for complaint with Naomi
or Cynthia, unless haggard eyes and pale faces, and low voices with
no joyous ring in them, were sufficient ground for upbraiding. The
household work was faithfully performed. The starching and ironing,
the dusting and beeswaxing, the sewing and darning were duly done.
Cynthia had finished her dozen of shirts, without a gusset set
awry, a seam puckered, or one deviation from a right line in the
pearl-like stitching of collars and wristbands; and now she had
taken to knitting Joshua’s gray-woollen stockings, which was a
pleasantly dreamy occupation calling for very little exercise of the
intellectual faculties till one came to the heel. She used to sit
in the garden or the wilderness in the calm September afternoons,
with a grave quiet face bent over her flashing needles--a face
that told of an abiding sorrow. The Miss Weblings would scarcely
have recognised their sunny-faced little maid in the serious young
matron, with a complexion almost as white as her cap. Joshua rarely
saw that patient figure sitting in his place on the grass-plat, for
he had been growing more and more indefatigable in his visitations
among the scattered members of his flock, walking great distances to
lonely homesteads or labourers’ cottages, or, when not thus occupied,
spending his afternoons in solitary wanderings by the wild sea-shore,
holding commune with his troubled soul.

Save at family prayer and at meals he was now seldom seen in his own
house, while he had almost wholly deserted the shop. Aunt Judith
bewailed this falling away from the good old habits which had made
Haggard’s the leading commercial institution in Combhaven. The
salvation of one’s soul was a vital transaction, doubtless; but a
man secure of his calling and election in eternity could well afford
to attend to his temporal business, instead of wandering about in
desolate places like John the Baptist, without having any one to
baptise.

‘He might as well live on the top of a pillar like St. Simon
What’s-his-name, and have his meals sent up to him by a ladder,’ said
Judith contemptuously, ‘if his mind is never in his business. We’re
always running out of things now, for want of proper attention to the
stock.’

To Naomi it was a small thing that her father should be indifferent
to loss and gain, and turn his back upon the trade by which
his father and grandfather had maintained their importance and
respectability in the little town. The change she saw in him was
more alarming than this neglect of daily duties--a change which she
associated involuntarily with that bitter day on which she had seen
his gloomy murderer’s face pass by her in the woodland dimness.

In the autumn evenings, when she could escape from the joyless house,
Naomi felt herself drawn, as by a magnet, to Pentreath Wood. It was
not that she found peace there, or consolation. She loved the shadowy
scene as a place in which she could feed her grief, and haunted it
as an inconsolable mourner haunts the burial-ground where lies her
dead. How desolate the place seemed in the season of earth’s decay,
all the winding ways deeply strewn with the red-brown leaves, soft
and soddened in the hollows where the autumn rains lay longest; frogs
croaking in the marshy places, and a dead snake lying here and there
among the brambles!

It was not often that Naomi went within sight of the deserted house,
where the old servants lived on in a lazy seclusion, waiting their
master’s bidding; almost as slumberous a household as that which
slept for a hundred years in the old fairy story, only that here
there was no lovely princess shining like a jewel in the innermost
chamber of the castle. Here were only empty rooms and dust and
loneliness.

One evening early in October, Naomi roamed a little farther than she
had intended, and found that, to reach home in decent time, she must
go by the nearest way, which was across the park, and out into the
road by the park-gate. This would take her very near the house.

It was a fine bright evening. The sun had set redly behind the trees
before she had entered the wood, and now the moon had risen and
was shining over the great sea yonder--a lovely evening, mild and
peaceful. She was loth to go back to the lighted room at home, and
her father’s evening lecture, now always of so gloomy a character as
to minister to her despair rather than to lift up her soul from its
depth of sorrow.

The hall-door stood open, and a light burned dimly within. Old
Nicholas, the butler, was sitting in the porch. He recognised Naomi
as she skirted the outer garden, and got up quickly and came after
her.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Haggard, but seeing you go by just now, I
made bold to follow you. Have you heard any news of the young Squire?
I’ve wanted to ask sometimes when I’ve been up at the shop, to get my
bit of tea and sugar; but your father wasn’t about, and I don’t like
to ask your aunt--she’s apt to be snappy.’

‘No, Nicholas, we have had no news. You would be more likely to hear
of your master than we.’

‘Deary, now! I knew there was something wrong when he came down here
so sudden, and told me I was to say nothing about it, and he was
going off to Ameriky, and I was to keep the place in order agen Mr.
Arnold came home, and then he was to be the master here. A power of
changes to happen in such a short time, ain’t it, miss? I feel as
if the world was topsy-turvy, somehow. The poor old master gone! He
was dreadful near, to be sure; but I’d got used to him, and I misses
his fidgety pinching ways, looking after every candle-end, and such
a nose of his own if he suspected we was frying a bit of bacon for
supper. Well, he’s gone where scraping and saving won’t help him,
poor gentleman. There’s no candle-ends in the heavenly Jerusalem.’

Nicholas sighed despondently, as if he doubted whether an immortal
home in which cheese-paring could not be practised would satisfy his
departed master.

‘And you haven’t heard nothing, miss?’

‘Nothing,’ answered Naomi. ‘But there is hardly time for any one to
have had a letter yet, is there, Nicholas?’

‘I can’t say, miss. Perhaps not. It were the beginning of August when
he went away, warn’t it? and here we are in October. I suppose there
wouldn’t be time; and yet I begin to feel oneasy in my mind about
him. There was something queer about his going away, you see.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Naomi, looking at him intently.

‘Well, you see, he says to me, “Nicholas, you get they two big trunks
down to the coach this evening, and that there bag.” The trunks
was what he’d packed his clothes and books in, and suchlike, that
morning, purpose to take them with him to Ameriky. “I shall walk on
ahead, and let the coach pick me up this side of Henbury turnpike,”
he says. “But you get they trunks safe in the boot,” says he. So the
gardener and me puts ’em in a barrer and wheels ’em down, and gets
’em safe packed into the boot afore seven o’clock.’

‘Well, what then?’ asked Naomi, with suppressed eagerness.

‘What then, Miss Haggard? Why, they trunks and that there bag is in
the young Squire’s room now--come back, like a bad penny!’

‘Come back?’

‘Yes. The coach never picked him up this side of Henbury turnpike.
The coachman never set eyes upon him all along the road. When he got
to Exeter, there was no one to take to they trunks, no directions
left about ’em, so he just brought ’em back; and if the young Squire
be gone to Ameriky, he be gone without his luggage. Lord, miss, how
you do trimble! I hope there’s nothing wrong, but it comes over me
sometimes that things ain’t altogether right.’

‘He may have changed his mind at the last,’ said Naomi falteringly.
‘He may not have gone to America.’

‘Perhaps not, miss; but wherever he’s gone, he’s gone without his
luggage--even the carpet-bag, with his razors and night-clothes.’

‘He may have had other luggage in London.’

‘He had a black portmanteau at the inn where he’d been stopping in
London, but it wasn’t a big one. It wouldn’t have been luggage enough
for Ameriky, or anywhere else in foreign parts. And then the books
and things that he was so fond of, and his writing-desk, and most of
his clothes--all in they big boxes. It’s odd he didn’t send for ’em.’

‘He may not want them.’

‘But it’s queer for him not to want ’em all this time. And if that
there coach didn’t pick him up--and we know it didn’t--how did he
get away? Nobody saw him leave, nobody heard of him. Lord-a-mercy,
miss, how white you be! I didn’t ought to say suchlike things, but
it weighs so heavy on my mind, it’s a comfort to talk about it. The
London lawyer he sends me down my wages monthly, and board-wages for
me and the others indoors. We might live on the fat of the land if we
chose, only our constitutions have got used to pinching, and we likes
it. We couldn’t have a better place; only they two trunks weighs
upon my mind, and I sha’n’t feel easy till I’ve had a letter from my
master.’

What comfort could Naomi give him--she whose thoughts were full of
fear? She went home and found the family circle waiting for her. It
was past the customary prayer-time by ten minutes or so.

‘Rambling again, Naomi!’ said her father severely; and then opened
his Bible and began to read a chapter of Jeremiah, which he
afterwards expounded, dwelling darkly on all that was darkest in the
text. The prayer that followed was rather a cry of self-abasement
and desolation than a supplicatory address, curiously different
from that simple and single-minded appeal which the Divine Teacher
dictated to His disciples. Joshua asked for no common wants of common
life, he pleaded not to be forgiven as freely as he forgave; but he
grovelled in the dust before an angry God, and heaped ashes upon his
head, and abased himself with humility which touched the confines of
fanaticism.

‘What kept you out so long, sis?’ asked James, when they were seated
at supper.

‘Nicholas, the butler at the Grange, stopped me to ask about his
master. He is very anxious about him.’

‘Why?’ asked her father sharply.

‘Because he has been away so long, and has not written.’

Cynthia lifted her languid eyes, large with sudden terror.

‘How could any one get a letter? He has not been gone three months.
And even if there were time enough, why should he write to Nicholas?’
said Joshua.

‘Nicholas is anxious about him, in any case,’ answered Naomi.

She said nothing about the luggage left behind, which was the chief
cause of the old servant’s uneasiness.

‘Well, all I can say is, that a young man with such a property as
that was a fool to go to America,’ remarked Jim conclusively.

It was a generally accepted fact by this time that the young Squire
had gone to America, and there were various versions of his motive
for this exile. The male gossips inclined to the idea that he and
Naomi had quarrelled, and that this lovers’ quarrel had been the
cause of his departure; the female portion of the community pinned
their faith upon the young man’s fickleness. He had repented of his
engagement to the grocer’s daughter, and had gone away to avoid its
fulfilment.

‘It was all very fine while his father was living, and likely to
live to a hundred, and he hadn’t a five-pound note,’ said Mrs.
Spradgers. ‘He knew that Mr. Haggard was a warm man, and he might do
worse than marry Naomi; but it was quite another thing when the old
gentleman went off, and the property turned out better than young Mr.
Pentreath had ever expected. It’s only natural he should look higher.
Circumstances alter cases.’

The year wore to its close, and yet there came no tidings of the
young Squire. There was, perhaps, no reason why he should trouble
himself to write to any one at Combhaven, argued Naomi, trying to
shake off that burden of unquiet thoughts which oppressed her.
He could hardly be expected to write to his old servants; he had
provided for their comfort through his London solicitor. His rents
were collected by a local agent and paid to the same man of business.
There was no one at Combhaven who had any right to expect letters
from him. He had broken away from his old moorings, and begun a new
life in a new country. He was happy, perhaps, amused and interested
by the novelty of his surroundings--occupied, adventurous, a
light-hearted traveller, while her thoughts of him were so full of
gloom.

‘Why cannot I banish him from my mind altogether?’ she asked herself.
‘It is a sin to dwell thus persistently upon an earthly loss. “If
thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” He came between me and
heaven--for I loved him too well. Even now that he is far away the
thought of him binds me down to earth. Why cannot I forget him?’

There was another question in her mind which hardly shaped itself in
direct words: ‘Why cannot I forget my father’s face that day in the
wood?’

The new year began, and there was no change in the quiet household,
save a change in Cynthia which had been so gently wrought that it was
invisible to the eyes that saw her daily. The minister’s young wife
had faded and drooped since that troubled summer time of the year
just gone. The slender figure had lost its graceful curves, the white
arm was no longer round and full, the oval of the cheek had fallen,
and the blue-veined lids drooped languidly over the gentle eyes, in
which there was a look that seemed to plead for pity or forgiveness.

Joshua’s popularity was at its height this winter. Those stirring
sermons--those eloquent theological fulminations--acted on his
hearers as a stimulant and a tonic. People flocked to hear him
from distant villages. He was proud of his popularity, lifted up
and exalted by the idea that he was bringing sinners home to God,
fighting hand to hand with the devil and all his angels. He lived
apart from his own household, a stranger among them, though sitting
by the same fireside. It was as if they were people of old time
giving shelter to a prophet. They scarcely dared speak to him, but
approached him with an awful respect. It was an understood thing
that he had no more to do with the business which had in years past
occupied half his time and some portion of his care. James now took
the helm in the commercial vessel, and felt that he was of the stuff
that makes great captains. Joshua seemed hardly aware of the change
that had come over his life. He was a dreamer, and lived in a world
of dreams.

So the year began, and it was early spring again, and Naomi felt that
her youth was gone, and that the years could bring her nothing but
age and death. They would come and go, and make no difference in her
life. They held no promise, they knew no hope.




                             CHAPTER VI.

                        THE WANDERER’S RETURN.


It was March--just a year since the old Squire had been stricken with
his fatal illness. The daffodils were blooming in sunny places; there
was a faint tinge of green upon the hedgerows.

Naomi was sitting alone in the twilit parlour in the calm gray
evening. She had done all her daily duties, and could afford to
rest from her toil. She looked at the familiar scene--the glimpse
of sea, the curve of the road winding up the hill towards Pentreath
Grange--with sad hopeless eyes. No bright harbinger of joy would ever
come to her by yonder road, down which she had seen the Squire’s
funeral train slowly descending with wind-tossed plumes and scarves
less than a year ago.

‘I had such a strange sense of loss that day,’ she thought,
remembering the dismal procession, and her own feelings as she
watched its approach. ‘I seemed to know that the end of my happiness
had come; that change, or sorrow, or death was near.’

Twilight deepened, and the scene took a shadowy look. Who was this
walking down the hill at a leisurely pace, with a careless easy gait
which seemed familiar? Nay, it was familiar, for it set Naomi’s heart
beating vehemently; it made her cold and faint. This was no peasant
returning from his work. She knew how the Combhaven population
carried themselves. This tall slim figure, so straight, and yet so
easy of motion, was no son of the soil, no hard-handed agricultural
labourer, no fisherman smelling of tar and sea-weed, with wet raiment
all glistening and scaly.

She stood up, and opened the window--stood with the chill March
breeze blowing upon her terror-stricken face. This time she felt
verily as if she were seeing a ghost.

‘He has come back,’ she thought. ‘He is not dead. O foolish fear! O
wretched doubt of the best and truest upon earth! He is safe; and has
come back again. I shall see him once again, living and happy. My
God, I thank Thee!’

The figure came nearer. Yes, it was Oswald Pentreath. She saw the
well-remembered face in the dim light. How well he looked! how
strong, how brave! Travel and strange countries had improved him.
His chest had expanded, he walked with a firmer step, held his head
higher. And he was coming to her father’s house, boldly, with no
stealthy approach. He came as a man who had done no evil, and had no
cause for fear.

‘He is cured of his folly; he is my true and noble lover once again.
O God, Thou art full of mercy; Thy love aboundeth.’

The familiar figure was close at hand. There was nothing but the
narrow front garden between him and Naomi; yet now there was a
strangeness--her heart grew lead. The young man looked up at the
house inquiringly, like a stranger who reconnoitres an unfamiliar
place. He glanced up and down the street--quite empty of humanity
at this moment, the solitary young woman with a basket, who had
constituted its traffic a minute ago, having just gone indoors--then
looked again at the house, and became conscious of Naomi’s pale face
at the window.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he began courteously. ‘Is this Mr. Haggard’s?’

Life-long sorrows are not so keen as a sudden stab like this--an
arrow that pierces the heart and kills its hope for ever. It was
not Oswald’s voice. There was a likeness in the tone, that family
resemblance so often to be found in the voices of kindred; but these
tones were more decided, rougher. They lacked the poetic languor, the
gentle sweetness of Oswald’s utterance. This speaker was one who had
commanded men on the high seas; not the musing idler who had wasted
half his life lying listlessly in summer woods, or wandering with his
rod beside autumn’s swollen streams.

It was not Oswald. For the space of half a minute the surging blood
in Naomi’s brain almost blinded her. For an instant or so reason
faltered, and she was on the verge of unconsciousness. Then the
strong young soul resumed her power, and she comprehended that this
was no shade from Avernus, but her lost lover’s brother, the Squire’s
runaway son.

‘Yes,’ she answered, with a steady voice, ‘this is Mr. Haggard’s
house. Do you want to see my father?’

‘Ah, then you are Naomi,’ cried the stranger eagerly. ‘I think I
would rather talk to you than to your father; you can tell me more. I
have only just come home, and I am very unhappy about my brother. May
I come in, please?’

How friendly, how dear his voice sounded in its resemblance to the
voice of Oswald! The familiar tones comforted Naomi somehow, after
that bitter disappointment just now. Her heart was lifted up from its
despair. Arnold had come home--Arnold would find out all about his
brother.

At that thought a sudden dread came upon her, like a vision of doom.

If there were any guilty mystery in Oswald’s fate, would not his
brother bring the deed to light? Her shapeless fears rose up like
gorgons and confronted her.

She opened the door for Arnold, and stood dumbly as he came in and
held out his hand to her.

‘How deadly cold your hand is!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m afraid I startled
you coming so suddenly. People say I am very like my brother. And I
daresay you are anxious about Oswald.’

He had gone into the parlour with her, and seated himself with a
familiar friendliness close to the chair into which Naomi had sunk.

‘Yes; I have been very anxious,’ she said faintly.

‘I can see that. Please God, there is no real cause for fear, though
old Nicholas has frightened me a little by his raven-like talk.
The last letter I had from my brother was written in London on the
fourteenth of July. He urged me to come home, and told me he had
some thoughts of going to America; and that if he went I was to take
care of the estate in his absence, and to consider myself master,
and so on, in his generous reckless way--as ready to give up all
his privileges as Esau was to swop his birthright against a dish of
lobscouse. This letter has been following me from port to port, and
I only got it nine or ten weeks ago at Shanghai, where my ship was
waiting for a cargo. I went straight to Oswald’s London agent when I
left the docks; but he could tell me nothing, except that my brother
had made all arrangements for a long absence from England. He was
to have sailed for New York on the fourteenth of August. But a thing
that puzzled this lawyer fellow a little was that Oswald should have
drawn no money since he left home. “He may have taken plenty with
him,” said I--for you see Oswald was brought up to make a little
money go a long way, or to do without it altogether mostly. “So he
may,” said the lawyer; “but I find that young men generally do draw
a good deal of money when they’ve got any sources to draw upon--and
even, sometimes, when they have not. It’s a way they have.” This made
me rather uneasy, and I came down here as fast as those blundering
coaches, which hardly do six knots an hour, could bring me. And
the old house looked so lonely and dismal without Oswald, that the
mere sight of it made me miserable; and then old Nicholas’s raven
croakings made me worse; so I came straight off to you for comfort.’

‘I can tell you nothing,’ answered Naomi, with a sigh.

‘Nicholas told me you had received no letter. That’s strange,
certainly. He would have written to you before any one, I should
think.’

‘No, I had no right to expect any letter from him. I expected none.’

‘What--not as his betrothed wife?’

‘Our engagement was broken off some time before he went. Did you not
know?’

‘Not a word. His last mention of you was full of affection--not in
his latest letter, by the way, but in the one which told me of my
father’s death. I was to come home, and be very fond of you, and we
were all to be happy together.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Naomi, with a pang of bitterest remembrance. How
often had Oswald talked to her of union and love and happiness--sweet
domestic joys which Arnold was to share!

‘But why was your engagement broken off?’ asked the sailor bluntly.
‘Did you quarrel?’

‘Quarrel? No.’

‘He must have behaved very ill, then.’

‘No, no. It was my father’s wish. I obeyed my father in setting
Oswald free. And he accepted his liberty--he was grateful for his
release. Love does not always last a lifetime: there is a difference,
you see. I think that he once loved me, but--’

Here the tears rained down upon her trembling hands. Arnold drew
nearer to her, and gently pressed one of those cold hands with a
brotherly kindness.

‘My poor girl--my sister that was to have been! He behaved badly, I’m
afraid. There was something wild and mysterious in his last letter;
and then that sudden resolve to go to America! I ought to have seen
that things had gone wrong with him. Poor Oswald! And I expected to
see him so happy with you.’

‘Providence willed it otherwise. I was too happy with him, I
think--too much absorbed in the joys of this world.’

‘Why should we not be happy in this world? God would never have
made so fair a world for a scene of suffering. You can’t imagine,
you stay-at-home people, how beautiful this earth is. The birds and
animals and reptiles and insects are happy. All free creation enjoys
itself, from its birth to its death. Why should man be wretched, or
the source of misery in others? Why should Providence be offended
because you and my brother loved each other and were happy?’

Naomi could not answer. It was an article of her religion that Heaven
disapproved of too much earthly bliss.

‘But you must have known where he was going--he told you his plans,
surely?’ asked Arnold.

‘No, I knew nothing of his intentions--directly,’ answered Naomi, a
faint blush dyeing her pallid cheek.

‘Did you not see him when he came back to the Grange in the beginning
of August? He came to bid you good-bye, I suppose?’

‘No, I did not see him.’

‘Then why did he come back to Combhaven at all? I can hear of nothing
that he did in the way of business, except to pack those trunks,
which he left behind him after all his trouble. What was the motive
of his return?’

‘Indeed, I cannot tell you,’ faltered Naomi, sorely distressed.

Arnold looked troubled. He rose and walked up and down the narrow
parlour, as he had walked his quarter-deck in many an hour of doubt
and difficulty.

‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘It is the strangest business
altogether. Why did he come back and pack his trunks, and have them
taken to the coach, and why did he not appear to claim them? If he
did not leave by the coach, how did he get away?’

‘There are vessels that sail between Rockmouth and Bristol, are there
not?’ suggested Naomi. ‘He may have gone that way.’

‘A slow roundabout way for him to choose, after making up his mind to
go by the coach. I begin to feel as anxious as Nicholas. O my dearest
Oswald, where are you, and why this mystery? God grant that he is
safe and happy somewhere! God grant there has been no foul play!’

At these words Naomi’s face took a deathlike hue. But the room was
too dark for Arnold to see the change.

‘If harm of any kind has happened to him, Heaven help the wrongdoers,
for they shall have no mercy from me! I’ll hunt them down. But no,
I won’t think it. I won’t believe that he has come to an untimely
end--the brother who carried me in his arms, and was so gentle and
loving, and whom I loved, God knows, with all my heart, though I left
him! How I have looked forward to our reunion, and counted upon it,
and built upon it in all these years! And I come back to find him far
away, and his fate a mystery.’

He threw himself into a chair and sobbed aloud, honest manly tears
coming from a loyal heart.

It was Naomi’s turn to be comforter. She bent over him, and laid her
hand lightly on his shoulder.

‘Pray do not say that evil has befallen him,’ she said. ‘He may have
changed his mind as to his way of travelling at the last; who can
tell what trifling thing may have influenced him?’

‘What did he do with himself all that day?’ asked Arnold. ‘Nicholas
tells me that he left the Grange before one o’clock, and the coach
was not to pick him up till after eight in the evening. Where was
he? With whom did he spend his time? He seems to have no friends in
Combhaven but you and your family. And he was not with you?’

‘No.’

‘Cannot you help me to find out where he was?’

‘No, I cannot.’

‘That’s a pity. If I could only find out the people who saw the last
of him here, they might enlighten me as to his intentions. I must see
what I can do elsewhere. I came to you naturally for help; but then I
did not know your engagement was broken off.’

Sally brought in the lighted candles, and started at sight of the
sea-captain.

‘Don’t be frightened, Sally,’ said Naomi; ‘this is Captain Pentreath,
the Squire’s brother.’

‘Lor’ sakes!’ faltered the handmaiden, ‘I took he for the young
Squire’s ghost.’

‘Is your father at home?’ asked Arnold presently; ‘I should like to
see him.’

‘No, it is his class-night; he will not be home for nearly an hour.
And I know he could tell you nothing more than I have told you,’
added Naomi.

‘Perhaps not, but he might advise me; I have heard that he is
a superior man. I should like to see him: I’ll call to-morrow.
Good-night, Naomi--I may call you Naomi, I hope, for my brother’s
sake? He told me to think of you as a sister.’

‘I should like you to think me so still, if you can,’ Naomi answered
gently.

And then he pressed her hand, and was gone.

There was some kind of comfort in the sailor’s friendliness, in this
brave, strong, manly figure suddenly introduced into the dull scene
of a sorrow-shadowed life. He was so like Oswald, and yet so unlike.
And he loved his brother so dearly. Oswald’s fate would be no longer
a mystery. All those unspoken fears, which had preyed upon her like a
consuming disease, would be proved vain and foolish. He was safe, he
was happy in some strange land. There needed only a little energy and
cleverness to find out all about him, and Arnold would supply both.

Then there flashed upon her the memory of that awful moment in the
wood, when she saw her father go by with a look upon his face that
seemed to her like the brand of Cain, full of awful meaning.




                             CHAPTER VII.

                       ‘WHERE IS THY BROTHER?’


‘Father,’ said Naomi at supper-time, ‘Captain Pentreath has come
home, and wants to see you to-morrow.’

‘Captain Pentreath!’ echoed Joshua, staring at her blankly; ‘who’s
he?’

‘Oswald’s brother.’

‘O, Arnold, the younger son, the boy who ran away to sea? He’s come
home, has he, to take possession of the estate? That’s a good thing.’

‘Not to take possession, father; to take care of the old place,
perhaps. He has no right to take possession in his brother’s
lifetime.’

‘Not unless he had stayed away seven years without being heard of,’
interjected Jim, the English mind having a firm grip upon this idea
of seven years.

‘Why should any one suppose him dead?’ asked Naomi, with a look
that was half indignant, half apprehensive; ‘he has only been away a
little more than six months. His brother has come home to look for
him. He is determined to find him.’

‘What’s the use of looking for him at Combhaven, when everybody knows
he’s gone to America?’ cried Jim.

‘I mean that Captain Pentreath is going to find out all about his
brother--when and how he left England.’

‘Poor worm!’ exclaimed Joshua, with lofty scorn. ‘His brother’s fate
is in the hands of God. As if he could make or mend it!’

‘But he has a right to know, father, and it is natural he should be
anxious.’

‘That shows he belongs to the unregenerate,’ said Jim, glad to have a
fling at the creed which had been forced upon him before he was able
to form his own estimate of its merits, like vaccination. ‘If he were
sure of his own election, he needn’t care a toss what became of his
brother--’

‘In time, perhaps not,’ said Joshua, with an awful look; ‘but how
dreadful to know him lost in eternity! Better to remain for ever
ignorant of the fate of those we love than to be sure of their
condemnation.’

‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’ said Naomi, for the first time in
her life daring to lift up her voice against her father. ‘Who can be
sure of another’s condemnation? It is blasphemy to say such a thing.’

‘What new Daniel is this?’ exclaimed Joshua scornfully. ‘Is my
daughter going to be my teacher? I tell you, Naomi, there are some
sins which cannot be repented of. There is a guiltiness which seals
the sinner’s doom, and sends him self-convicted to receive his
Maker’s sentence.’

‘I have no fear that Oswald would be such a sinner,’ answered Naomi,
meeting her father’s dark look with defiant eyes. ‘Weak, erring, led
astray by one more erring than himself--yes, he might be these; but
not a deliberate offender, not obstinately guilty.’

What was this new feeling which made her talk to her father as if she
was arguing with an adversary? She felt a thrill of horror at her own
audacity. But she was not mistress of herself when her father spoke
harsh words of Oswald Pentreath. Reason grew clouded and the voice of
passion cried aloud in defence of her lost lover. He was weak, and
she would not let the strong man spurn him. He was absent, and she
would not hear him condemned.

Cynthia sat silent, and heard them talk of the man who had loved her
too well, whose only sin was to have let his heart go out to her as a
young bird flies from its nest into the glad new world. He had loved
her, and that love had darkened his life. She could see him looking
down at her, as on that last day, passion-pale breathing his eternal
farewell. What a dream it had been--so fair, so sweet, so unreal! She
had suffered herself to be beloved, and to love again, and in this
dreaming half-unconscious state had tasted an ineffable happiness.
She did not regret this lost dream-world; she would not have recalled
its vanished sweetness; she was honestly repentant of her sin against
the husband she honoured; but the past was ineffaceable--a part of
her being.

     ‘I cannot but remember such things were
      That were most precious to me.’

Though full of anxious thoughts, Arnold Pentreath brought brightness
and pleasant days to the old Grange and all who came within his
influence. His candid intelligent face, the frank heartiness of his
manners, with just a dash of the seaman’s bluntness, and that firm
straightforwardness which comes from the habit of commanding others
and restraining oneself--all these things gave him immediate mastery
over the simple folks at Combhaven. The old servants worshipped
him. In boyhood he had been the more daring and mischievous of
the two brothers, and naturally the more popular. He had defied
his old father, and had won golden opinions from the household by
his juvenile mutinies. He came back a man, broad-shouldered and
strongly built, bronzed by tropical suns and hard weather, but all
the handsomer, in the eyes of a sea-loving population, for his
sunburnt cheek and the stubborn crispness of his hair. He was fonder
of his fellow-men than Oswald had been, and, instead of dreaming
over _Childe Harold_ in Pentreath Wood, was out and about all day,
tramping along the lanes, making acquaintance with every hind who
worked upon his land, tossing cottage children in his strong arms,
with a kindly word for every one he met.

He had not been three days at the Grange before the fact of his
return was known far and wide, and brought all manner of applicants
to the old house to ask favours which no agent would grant. He heard
all complaints with an equable good-nature, and lent his attention to
the smallest detail: the slates blown off the homestead in ‘they high
winds--now do ’ee see what ’ee can do for us, Squire.’ The granary
thatch which had ‘cotched fire’ in such a mysterious way after
last midsummer’s thunderstorm, that old Farmer Westall was firmly
convinced it was the work of Nancy Dowben, the witch.

‘For she be a witch, Squire,’ said the farmer, ‘that’s well
beknownst. And I do say as it ain’t right a spiteful old ’ooman like
she should be allowed to have the handling of forked lightning.’

‘Well, farmer, if it was witchcraft fired the barn, you can’t expect
me to pay for new thatching it?’ argued Arnold.

‘But look ’ee now, Squire. It was the ould gentleman, your feyther,
brought it on us. All they witches bore an evil eye towards him. He
were so hard upon ’em, and that screwy, never a drop of milk or a
fagot to give ’em.’

‘Wasn’t it you, now, that refused old Nancy the fagots, Farmer
Westall?’ suggested Arnold.

‘Well, now, you’re a bit of a conjuror yourself, Squire. There was
one day as the ould ’ooman come for some wood to bile her kittle, and
I wasn’t in the best of tempers, for our ould sow had etten up seven
pegs, and I thowt it was some o’ Nancy’s work; so I calls out, “Now
jist look yere, Nancy; you had a fagot yesterday, and another the day
afore that, and I didn’t make that stack o’ wood o’ purpose for you,
old lady.” So she gives a sniff and a grunt, and off she goes; and
it wasn’t a week from that when the lightning caught the thatch of
my biggest barn. And I’m a man with a long fambly, Squire, and I’ve
had the roof covered up anyhow some old boards and a bit of tarpaulin
ever since, because Bill Stowell, the thatcher, asks a mort o’ money
before he’ll make a good job of it.’

‘We’ll see what can be done, farmer. Perhaps I might go halves in
the expense, if the barn was roofed in to my satisfaction. I’m only a
steward, you see--a kind of deputy for my brother.’

Farmer Westall sighed and looked glum. Old Nicholas, the butler, had
infected most of his acquaintance with his own dismal ideas about the
absent lord of the manor. It was a general opinion that the vessel in
which Oswald had sailed for America had gone to the bottom.

‘There are some folks that’ll never get no luck out o’ the sea,’
said the voice of public opinion as represented by the fishermen of
Combhaven. ‘Remember that storm, and the way the Dolphin went to
pieces. The two sailors was saved easy enough, but the Squire would
have been drownded or knocked to pieces on they rocks but for Joshua
Haggard. And what were the use of saving him? He never did no good
to the Haggards; and here he is gone down to the bottom, as sure
as fate. It was what were meant from the fust, and there’s never
no good in flying in the face of Providence. You may save a ship’s
cargo--that’s man’s business--and an honest way of purvidin’ for a
fambly; but they as is aboard the ship is in the care o’ Providence,
and it’s clean blasphemy to risk your life in fishing of ’em out of
the water!’

Captain Pentreath had exhausted his resources, and had found no clue
to his brother’s proceedings after that August noontide in which he
had left the Grange, with the avowed intention of going to Exeter--on
his way to London--by the evening coach. Arnold had gone back to
London, and had seen the solicitor again, and had made his inquiries
in every likely and unlikely direction, but he had learned nothing.
The London lawyer did not know the name of the vessel in which Oswald
had booked his passage to New York. His client had told him nothing,
except that he had made up his mind to go to America, and that he
wanted his affairs administered in his absence. The household at the
Grange was to suffer no alteration, and when Arnold came he was to be
master.

‘Until your return!’ the lawyer had said to him.

‘My return is an event of the remote future,’ Oswald had replied; ‘I
may never return.’

Arnold went to Liverpool, and the result of his researches there
convinced him that Oswald had not left that port in any vessel
bound for America, unless he had sailed under an assumed name.
From Liverpool he went to Cork--from Cork he went by water to
Bristol--from Bristol westward to Plymouth; and the most searching
inquiries at these places resulted as his inquiries had resulted
at Liverpool. There was no trace of Oswald Pentreath’s passage to
America to be found in any shipping office. He went back to the
Grange sorely depressed, for his brother’s fate was beginning to
assume a hue of mystery which gave room for the darkest fears.

His conversation with Joshua Haggard had told him nothing more than
he had already learned from Naomi. The minister had received him with
a chilling reserve. The frank outspoken sailor wondered that his
brother could have written to him so warmly in praise of such a man.

He called on Joshua again on the day after his return from his round
of inquiry.

‘This is a bad business, Mr. Haggard,’ he began, plunging at once
into the subject nearest his heart; ‘I have found out enough to feel
very sure that my brother has not gone to America.’

Joshua’s grave countenance betrayed no surprise. ‘Why, the fellow is
not a man but a machine!’ Arnold thought indignantly.

‘You don’t seem to understand what a serious question this is,’ said
Arnold. ‘If my brother did not go to America last August, what has
become of him?’

‘That is a question which I cannot be expected to answer, Captain
Pentreath. We are all in God’s hands. In life or in death He deals
with us as seemeth best to Him. He may have appointed your brother
for an evil end. You had best be content to leave all to Him.’

‘Do you mean that if my brother has come to an evil end I am to let
his murderer go scot-free?’ cried Arnold indignantly. ‘Do you think
that I shall fold my hands and wait for Providence to avenge my
brother? Why, if I did, God would have the right to ask of me as he
did of Cain, “Where is thy brother?” You do not know how dearly we
two loved each other, Mr. Haggard.’

‘“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,”’ quoted Joshua solemnly; ‘be
sure that if your brother has been murdered, an idea I do not for a
moment entertain, his assassin has suffered or will suffer as heavy a
punishment as any vengeance of yours could inflict.’

‘May God make conscience an undying worm to feed upon his soul!’
said Arnold. ‘But it shall be my business to bring his body to the
gallows.’

Joshua heard him in silence. He sat with folded hands, and a
countenance as mysterious in its solemn thoughtfulness as the head of
Memnon.

‘Come, Mr. Haggard, you must be able to give me some help in this
matter, if you choose,’ urged Arnold passionately; ‘my brother
was your daughter’s lover--her affianced husband, till you, for
some motive of your own, forbade their marriage. There is a story
underlying that act of yours--a story that might cast some light upon
my poor brother’s fate. You must have had strong reasons for such a
step. A man of your principles would hardly be governed by caprice.
Tell me honestly what that reason was. Remember I have a right to
ask.’

‘I can give you no details upon that point,’ answered Joshua, after
some moments of profound thought, ‘but I will tell you broadly that
I had reason to disapprove of your brother’s conduct in relation to
another woman. I had reason to know that his heart had gone away from
my daughter. He would have kept his promise, and married her, and
would have believed that he was acting as a man of honour; but he
would have lied at God’s altar, and his marriage would have offended
Heaven.’

‘You believe that my brother’s heart had gone astray?’

‘I know it.’

‘Then, for Heaven’s sake, tell me all you know. This love-affair
may throw light upon his after conduct--may give us the clue to his
present whereabouts. There would be a false delicacy--an absolute
cruelty--in hiding anything from me--from me, his brother, who am
distracted by the most hideous apprehensions.’

‘I can tell you nothing more,’ answered Joshua, with a stern
resoluteness which chilled Arnold to the heart. ‘I am withholding no
knowledge which could help you in the smallest degree. Your brother
sinned--and is gone. You must be content to know no more than that.’

‘I will not be content!’ cried the sailor vehemently. ‘You are
juggling with me--you, a preacher of God’s Word, who ought to be
truthful as the day! But I forgot--the prophets were dark of speech,
and God taught His chosen people by dreams and allegories, and you
seek to imitate those mysterious ways. Have you no human pity--as
a man and a Christian--for a brother’s grief for a lost brother?
You could tell me something that would make this mystery clear; and
you lock your lips, and abandon me to the agony of uncertainty. My
brother respected, admired--nay, loved you, Mr. Haggard.’

This wrung a sigh from a breast which Arnold had deemed marble.

‘I tell you I am withholding nothing that could give you comfort,’
said Joshua, looking downward with gloomy brow. ‘I deplore your
brother’s fate, and the mystery which surrounds it. Yet for your
sake--for the sake of my daughter who loved him--I say, May the veil
never be lifted!’

‘Why?’

‘Because I fear he came to a bad end.’

‘You must have some reason for that fear. You know something!’
exclaimed Arnold breathlessly.

‘I am guided by my knowledge of his character--of his condition of
mind last summer.’

‘You think he destroyed himself?’

‘I do.’

Arnold bowed his face upon his clasped hands; his strong frame was
shaken by the agony of that moment. To have stayed away from his
brother all the days of his youth--to come home full of hope and
pleasure--and to be told this! The cup was bitter.

When Arnold looked up, Joshua Haggard was gone.

He stayed in the empty room, looking out into the windy street--where
one old woman was tightening a three-cornered shawl across her skinny
shoulders--with eyes that saw not, and thinking over Joshua’s words.

What did they mean? How much, or how little? Was this idea of
Oswald’s suicide a mere speculation on the minister’s part, or had he
sound evidence on which to found his conclusions?

‘It is too bad of him to leave me in the dark,’ mused Arnold. ‘I
have a right to know everything that can be said or thought about my
brother. He is a hard-hearted scoundrel. These over-pious men are
adamant. And yet he saved my brother’s life at the risk of his own.
Oswald told me the story, and the fishermen here are never tired of
talking about it. Don’t let me forget that. The man is better than
his speech. And he tells me he is keeping nothing back. But to think
that my brother took his own life--that he was wretched enough to
find the coward’s last release from difficulty! I will not believe
it.’

He rose to depart; but before he got to the door, Naomi came in, and
they stood face to face, both startled, both agitated by this sudden
meeting, natural as it was.

‘O Naomi, I want you,’ cried the sailor, taking both her hands, and
looking into the pale face with beseeching earnestness. ‘I want you
to advise, to comfort, to enlighten me. I have been talking to your
father, and he has almost broken my heart. Tell me, for pity’s sake,
the truth, dear, as sister to brother. Say that you do not believe
Oswald killed himself.’

‘Killed himself?’ she echoed, growing very white. ‘No. Who says
so--who thinks so?’

‘Your father.’

‘My father says that--my father believes that?’

‘Yes, dear. He told me so five minutes ago. Only say that you don’t
believe it.’

‘I do not!’ she answered, with flashing eyes. ‘I know that he was
unhappy, but I cannot believe--I will not believe--that he could be
so weak--so guilty. No, there was no such thought in his mind. He had
made his plans for beginning a new life; he had taken his passage for
America.’

‘You know that from himself?’ cried Arnold eagerly.

Naomi bowed her head in assent.

‘God bless you, sister!’ said the sailor. ‘You have comforted me
more than I can say. You knew him--you loved him.’

‘With all my heart and soul--too much for duty, or peace, or
righteousness.’

‘And you think he really did go to America?’

Naomi’s troubled face took a still deeper shadow.

‘I know he meant to go.’

‘Yet it was strange that he should not have left by the coach, after
telling Nicholas that he meant to go that way. Very strange that he
should leave those trunks behind him after packing them.’

‘He may have changed his mind at the last. He was troubled in mind,
and might be careless about things which people in an ordinary state
of mind would consider important.’

‘True, my dear. How clearly you see everything! Yes, that was so.
And he sailed from some small port, perhaps--or from the other
side of the Channel, Havre or Brest. The fact that I cannot trace
him signifies nothing. We will wait and hope, Naomi; hope for your
husband and my brother’s return.’

‘For our brother’s return,’ answered Naomi, with a tender gravity.
‘He can never again be more to me than a brother: and to the end of
my life I shall love him with a sister’s love.’

‘Poor fellow!’ said Arnold dreamily; ‘he threw away a jewel above all
price when he lost you.’




                            CHAPTER VIII.

                  THE FACE IN OSWALD’S SKETCH-BOOK.


That idea of his brother’s suicide took no strong hold upon Arnold
after his conversation with Naomi; but he could not put the
possibility out of his mind altogether. That his brother had suffered
some disappointment--that a cloud of some kind had darkened his
life--he was ready to believe. Oswald’s latest letter had betrayed
a mind ill at ease; that sudden determination to leave his country,
while independence was still a new thing for him, and with every
advantage in life that could make a young man happy, argued the
existence of some deep-rooted sorrow, a misery that made familiar
scenes hateful, and exile a welcome means of escape from the haunting
memories that follow a fatal passion.

But, having resolved upon exile, could Oswald have been so weak or so
wicked as to seek the darker and more desperate Lethe of the suicide?
Arnold argued that his brother was too good and brave a man to
contemplate, much less to commit, such a crime. But then Arnold had
not read _Werther_, the apotheosis of suicide.

He went back to the Grange, after his interview with Naomi, more
than ever at sea as to his brother’s fate, more than ever resolved
to unravel the mystery. His first act was to make an inquiry which
had some bearing upon the suicide question. Instead of entering the
Grange by the hall-door, he went under the old stone archway that
led into the quadrangle, from which the kitchens and stables alike
opened, being tolerably certain of finding Nicholas the butler
sunning himself on the solid old bench beside the kitchen-door.

There sat the old man, bare-headed, basking in the spring sunshine.
It did not last very long, the sunshine of these April afternoons;
but while it lasted there was warmth and a balmy sweetness in the
air, and a yellow light that made all things lovely. The wallflowers
blended their rich red and gold with the cool grays and purples of
the old stone archway, the dark-brown shadows on stable-doors and
deep-set windows, the vermilion lights upon the tiled roofs. The
stonecrop on the gables, the sage-green houseleeks nestling round
the disused chimney-stacks, the fleecy clouds sailing high in a
bright blue sky, were all beautiful to contemplate, but such familiar
objects to the drowsy eye of old Nicholas, stretching out his feeble
legs in the warmth as he stretched them towards the kitchen-hearth
indoors, that he was scarcely conscious of their existence. If he
had an idea at all about the old quadrangle, it was that all ‘they’
wallflowers, and houseleek, and stonecrop, and rubbish ought to
be swept away, and the whole place renovated with a coat of clean
whitewash.

He was puffing slowly at his afternoon pipe when Arnold came up; but
at the sight of his master he rose and did obeisance.

‘Sit down, Nicholas, and go on with your pipe,’ said the sailor, in a
friendly voice; ‘I want a little quiet talk with you.’

The butler obeyed, and Arnold seated himself on the bench by his
side, and took out a short German pipe, which he carried in his
pocket, and began to smoke. It was in the days when a German pipe
was a mark of a traveller, when for a gentleman to smoke a pipe of
any kind implied a republican turn of mind.

Captain Pentreath looked round the quadrangle. There was no one
within earshot. The stable-boy was throwing a pail of water at
Herne’s hind legs at the furthest end of the yard--a liberty which
the animal bore with the resignation engendered of custom. Two
fantail pigeons were puffing out their chests and spreading out their
fans on the deep red tiles yonder; and a most vagabond collection
of poultry was disporting itself on a golden mountain of straw in a
distant corner--a mountain which would have made the old Squire wild
with agony had he seen such a wasteful expenditure of litter; but
Herne’s bed nowadays was a Sybarite’s couch, Arnold having taken his
brother’s horse under his own especial protection.

‘You remember the day my brother went away the last time, Nicholas;
the day you got his trunks taken down to the coach-office?’

‘Yes, Captain; as well as if it was yesterday.’

‘Did you see him just before he left the house?’

‘Yes; he called me into the hall as he was going out to give me his
last orders about they trunks.’

‘Do you know if he carried pistols? There was a pair used to hang
over the mantelpiece in his bedroom. I’ve noticed the mark of them on
the wall where the panelling has changed colour. Do you know if he
took them with him?’

‘Yes, Captain. I saw the butt-end of a pistol poking out of his
breast-pocket. He wore a frock-coat buttoned up tight, and there was
just the end of the pistol showing. They was pretty little pistols,
as small as tyes, and he was uncommon proud of ’em. They’d belonged
to his great uncle, the Colonel, you see; and was furrin made. “You
beant going to carry they pistols, be ye, Squire,” said I, for I
thought it was dangerous. But he said he wanted to take the pistols
away with him, and he’d forgot to pack ’em in his box. “And perhaps
it’s as well,” he says; “for it beant wise to go on a coach journey
without firearms;” and I says, “Lawks, master Oswald,” for I forgets
myself sometimes with un, and thinks he’s still a bye, “you ain’t
afeard o’ highwaymen in these days, be ye, with the reform bill
a-comin’ to make things pleasant to everybody?” But he on’y larfed,
and shuk his head, and went out without another wurred.’

‘With a pair of pistols in his breast-pocket,’ thought Arnold, much
disturbed by this information, for it seemed to jump with Joshua
Haggard’s idea of self-slaughter. He asked no further questions
of old Nicholas, but went slowly to his own room--the large airy
bedchamber, with windows facing seaward, which had been Oswald’s--and
sat down at his brother’s writing-table, to meditate upon the mystery
that veiled the absentee’s fate.

That there was a mystery of some kind Arnold was fully assured. It
was now high time that somebody in England should have heard from
the wanderer. The brothers had corresponded more or less regularly
in all the years of their separation, and Oswald had always been the
best correspondent. The landsman had made excuses for the rover when
Arnold’s letters were in arrear, and had written by every mail, so
that Captain Pentreath often found a packet of letters waiting for
him when his ship came into port, full of pleasant gossip about the
old home which he dearly loved, although he loved the sea better.
That Oswald should be away nearly a year, living, and in his right
mind, and in all that time make no communication with his brother,
seemed improbable to the verge of impossibility.

‘Where did he go when he left the Grange that August day?’ pondered
Arnold. ‘Some one must have seen him; some one must know something
about him. The woman he loved--for whose sake he jilted that noble
girl--she could give me the clue to the mystery, perhaps, if I only
knew where to find her.’

Who was she? Who was the object of that fatal passion which had
darkened Oswald’s life just when it seemed happiest? Arnold wondered
exceedingly. Some one his brother had known in London, perhaps; for
it could hardly be any one at Combhaven without every one in the
place knowing all about it; and the people who talked to Arnold about
his brother were clearly quite in the dark as to the reason of his
falling away from his allegiance to Naomi. No, it could be no one
at home, or he would have heard of it at the street-corners; and
yet it was evident to him that Joshua Haggard knew more about the
circumstances of Oswald’s sin or folly than he cared to tell. He
had known enough to feel justified in breaking off his daughter’s
engagement--a strong measure, assuredly, where Naomi had so much to
gain by the intended marriage. How had Oswald’s conduct in London
reached the Methodist minister’s knowledge? That was puzzling. But
even the remotest village has generally some channel of communication
with the great city--some curious rustic, who has a brother or cousin
living within sound of Bow bells, and is occasionally gratified by
his city friend with a dish of scandal. No latest rumour, or darkest
insinuation about courts or princes, so interesting to Mr. Chawbacon
as the news of his brother parishioner’s doings ‘up in London.’

There stood Oswald’s two big trunks in the deep recess by the
chimney, one on the top of the other, just as they had been placed
when the coach brought them back from Exeter. Might not one of these
hold a clue to their owner’s intentions when he left his home?
Arnold had his sea-going tool-chest close at hand. He had a good deal
of mechanical skill, and had always rigged up his own cabin, with the
book-shelves and three-cornered brackets and small conveniences that
give a comfortable and civilised air to an apartment which, to the
landsman’s eye, looks like an exaggerated rabbit-hutch.

Arnold had picked the lock of the topmost trunk before he had time
to reason upon his idea. It was an old leather-covered trunk of his
father’s; black with age, and iron-clamped at the corners, and so
heavy in itself that it was a matter of comparative indifference to
the person who carried it whether it was full or empty. Arnold lifted
the lid with a curiously nervous feeling, as if some sudden and
appalling revelation were lurking immediately beneath it.

This uppermost trunk contained Oswald’s modest collection of
books--the well-thumbed Shakespeare and Byron, the queer little
duodecimo _Tom Jones_ and _Joseph Andrews_. Arnold took them up one
by one, and looked at them tenderly. He too was a worshipper of that
poetic star so lately set, and carried _Childe Harold_ and _Don
Juan_ in his sea-chest, and had sat dreaming over their pages many a
night, with no other light to read by than the broad tropical moon;
he too was a lover of Shakespeare and Fielding. He turned over the
leaves of that battered old Byron meditatively, and it seemed to him
that the volume opened at the saddest passages, as if the reader had
dwelt with morbid fondness upon the complainings of a kindred despair.

Below the books there was an old leather writing-desk, and below that
nothing but clothes and boots, packed with a careless roughness,
which indicated haste or preoccupation of mind on the part of the
packer. In all the contents Arnold saw nothing that tended to his
enlightenment, and he began to replace the things, putting them in
carefully, with an orderly closeness of arrangement which reduced
their bulk considerably.

He put in the books one by one, and had nearly finished his task,
when his attention was caught by a shabby little volume without any
title on the back, which had hitherto escaped his notice. It was
bound in red morocco, and had grown dingy from much usage.

Arnold opened the book. It was a manuscript book, containing entries
in Oswald’s penmanship, alternated with pencil-sketches, and here
and there a few verses, with much interlineation and alteration, to
denote the throes of composition.

‘This must tell me something,’ thought the sailor.

The pencil revealed the tastes of the owner of the little volume.
The first pages were full of marine sketches, pencil dottings of
familiar bits of coast. They brought back the memory of Arnold’s
boyhood--those old days when his chief delight was to get on board
one of the fishermen’s boats, and to be out at sea from dawn to
sunset; or, better still, from sunset to sunrise. He had offended his
father many a time by these unauthorised excursions; and his final
offence had been an absence of three days and nights at the beginning
of the pilchard season. He had come home and begged pardon for his
wrongdoing; but the Squire, who had suffered some pangs of paternal
anxiety for the first time in his life, resented this trifling
with his finer feelings, and gave the truant a ferocious flogging.
Whereupon the sea-loving scapegrace made up his bundle, and set out
after dark to walk to Bristol.

It was fifteen years since he had seen these picturesque bits of
coast--Clovelly and Hartland Point, and the remoter glories of Bude
and Tintagel. Yes, every angle of cliff, every jagged rock, brought
back the fervour and freshness of his boyhood, the days when his love
of the sea was a worship, and not merely a professional ardour.

There was the Dolphin, pitching and rolling in heavy seas, or
mirrored in summer lakes of sultry calm. There were a good many
attempts at versification in this earlier part of the book, all
savouring of Byron; addresses to ‘My Barque;’ invocations to storm
and ocean, all unfinished.

Here, about midway in the volume, comes a woman’s face--Naomi
Haggard. Yes, although the likeness is by no means perfect, there
is no mistaking the noble brow, the dark deep eyes with their look
of thought, the masses of dark hair. This face was repeated many
times--the heavy eyelids drooping, the full eyes lifted--in profile,
three-quarter, full front; and now the poetic effusions took a
bolder flight, and it was no longer the sea, but his mistress, the
lover apostrophised. ‘To N.’ the verses were sometimes headed, or
‘Midnight, after leaving N.’ First love rang the changes in tenderest
gushes of sentiment. All the old platitudes, the stock comparisons,
were brought out, and the conventional Pegasus was duly exercised.
He was not a winged horse, to soar over the topmost pinnacle of
Parnassus, but a quiet cob rather, warranted easy to ride and drive,
a steed that took his rider over familiar ground at a gentle trot,
and never showed the slightest inclination to bolt with him.

The middle of the book was entirely filled with sketches of Naomi and
verses to Naomi, and here and there a faint murmur against Naomi’s
coldness jotted down in prose. Then came a change: Naomi disappeared
altogether; there were no more poetic efforts, but page after page
closely written--a journal, evidently, kept from day to day. The
earliest date was in the March of the previous year.

And now appeared a face which was unknown to Arnold; a girlish face,
in a Puritan cap, delicately traced, as if the lightest touch of the
draftsman’s pencil had not been fine enough to mark the ethereal
character of his subject. Sweet face--now grave, now pensive, now
touched with a vague melancholy, now with deepest sadness in the
tender uplifted eyes--eyes that seemed to pity and deplore.

‘This is the woman he loved,’ thought Arnold. He turned to the diary,
and read a page at random. It was dated April 12, ten days before the
Squire’s death.

  ‘She is here still. It is a new life which I lead while she is
  near me. Nothing can come of it but sorrow and parting; yet the
  lightest sound of her footstep thrills me with joy, an accidental
  touch from her little hand sets all my pulses throbbing. I cannot
  be unhappy in her presence--yet despair sweeps over my soul ever
  and anon, like a cloud across a sunlit landscape. My loved one,
  my dearest! why did we not meet sooner, or why meet at all? Two
  lives are sacrificed to a caprice of destiny--a cruel, hard, and
  inexplicable fatality, which rolls on like an iron wheel, and
  grinds men’s hearts into the dust. I am almost an unbeliever when
  I think how Nature meant my sweet love for me, and me for her,
  and how Fate has come between and sundered us!’

  ‘Poor Naomi! How true and good she is! How noble, single-minded,
  frank, unsuspecting. There shall be no more reviling of
  destiny. I will struggle with this wicked passion--struggle and
  conquer--or if I fail, end all!’

‘Or if I fail, end all,’ Arnold repeated musingly.

  ‘Yes, my Naomi, I will remember the days when you were all the
  world to me--when I had no sweeter hope than a placid life
  spent in your company, when that calm friendship and reverent
  admiration which I felt for you seemed to me all that is best and
  noblest in love. For the sake of those days I will conquer myself
  and be true to you; and if there can be no more happiness for me,
  there shall at least be peace and quiet days and a conscience at
  ease. Perhaps, after all, those things constitute real happiness,
  and this fever-dream of passion is but a mock beatitude, like the
  wild brief joys of delirium, the flashes of unreasoning delight
  that fire the maniac’s brain for a moment, to leave him lost
  in deepest gloom. O no, I do _not_ believe that passion means
  happiness, any more than storm and lightning mean fine weather.
  Both are grand, both are beautiful; and they leave ruin and death
  behind them.’

  ‘When honour ceases to be my guide, let me perish.’

  ‘Death hovers near us, and our thoughts are full of sadness. A
  few days, a few hours may bring the inevitable end. Where she is,
  there is always sunshine. Her presence soothes me like tenderest
  music--like the songs my mother sang beside my cradle!

  ‘God help me, for my heart is breaking!’

Arnold read on for an hour. The journal continued in the same
strain, with much repetition of motive--going over the same ground
very often, as the writer argued with himself, and made good
resolves, which were evidently broken as soon as made. It was the old
story of a fatal unconquerable passion. Sometimes the sorrow deepened
to despair, and Arnold read with a sinking of the heart, feeling that
a man who could write thus might not be very far from the suicide’s
state of mind.

The name of the object of such an unhappy love was not once written,
and there was a general vagueness in the journal which left Arnold
considerably in the dark. He only knew that the woman his brother
loved had been one who lived near him--with whom he was almost daily
associated--some one belonging to Combhaven. Who could she be? Arnold
was very sure that he had never seen the original of those delicate
pencillings in his brother’s book. Oswald’s likenesses of Naomi were
good enough to prove that there must be some degree of likeness in
the other portraits--unless, indeed, these were not portraits, only
the semblance of some airy nothing that lived but in the draftsman’s
fancy.

No, the same face appeared too often not to be real. The face and the
confession of a fatal love came too near each other in the book for
Arnold to doubt that the sketches were faithful portraits.

‘I have been to the parish church every Sunday since I came home, and
I have seen no face that bears the faintest resemblance to this,’
thought Arnold, sorely perplexed.

Naomi could perchance have enlightened him. Naomi must have known to
whom her lover’s heart had gone forth when she lost him; but it would
have been direst cruelty to ask Naomi such a question.

‘And if I knew all, would it tell me my brother’s fate?’ Arnold
wondered sorrowfully; for since he had seen Oswald’s diary it seemed
to him that self-destruction was no improbable end for the writer.

‘When a man once gets out of the right line, who can tell how far he
may stray?’ thought the sailor.




                             CHAPTER IX.

                             REPUDIATED.


Captain Pentreath went back to London on business of his own. He
had to wind up his affairs with the shipowners who had employed him
from the beginning of his career; and this was no easy matter, for
the owners had rarely had so good a captain, and were disinclined to
lose him. Arnold had made up his mind that his place was on shore for
some time to come. His brother had left him the stewardship of his
estate, and he meant to be faithful to that trust till Oswald came
back to claim his own, if it pleased God to bring him safely back by
and by--a result for which Arnold most fervently prayed. The neglect
into which all things had fallen appealed strongly to the Captain’s
love of order; there was a pleasure for him in making crooked things
straight. He assumed the command at Combhaven with as much decision
as if he had been on board ship; and people obeyed him as well as
his sailors had done; and it is to be remarked that the most popular
commander is the captain who is best obeyed.

Business kept him in London some time; but when he went back to
Combhaven he was a free man, and his career as land steward lay
before him--till Oswald’s return. Hope had argued the question with
fear, until Arnold had taught himself to believe that the idea of
Oswald’s suicide was a morbid delusion of Joshua Haggard’s, and that,
sooner or later, the welcome letter would come, from some remote spot
of earth, to say that the young Squire had forgotten his griefs, and
was happy, and homeward bound.

It was May when Captain Pentreath returned to the Grange in this
more hopeful state of mind. The Exeter coach came in to Combhaven at
five o’clock in the afternoon, and after a hasty dinner Arnold went
straight to the minister’s house. He had made no friendships in his
native place, and it seemed to him that Naomi Haggard was the nearest
and dearest to him in his home. Had Oswald remained true, she would
have been his sister. He felt all a brother’s tenderness for her
already.

‘She shall be my sister,’ he told himself; ‘my friend and counsellor.
Both our lives have been made lonely.’

Mr. Haggard’s family had just finished tea when Arnold was ushered
into the parlour. Sally had been carrying out the tea-board when
she heard his knock, and had been so flurried by such an unusual
circumstance as to be scarcely able to deposit her burden on the
kitchen-table without loss or damage. When she opened the door and
saw Captain Pentreath, she gave utterance to one of those suppressed
screams with which she always greeted his likeness to his brother.
‘It was like seeing the young Squire come back again, broader
chested and nobler looking,’ she told Jim, with whom she was on more
confidential terms than with any other member of the household. Aunt
Judith had gone back to the shop; Naomi sat reading by the open
window; Joshua was in his arm-chair, his head thrown back upon the
cushion, his eyes half closed, resting after one of those pilgrimages
over hill and dale which had of late sorely exhausted him. His
whole life was much more exhausting than it had been, the candle
was being burned more fiercely. Traces of fatigue showed plainly in
the sharpened lines of his face, in the pallor of his skin, and the
shadows about his eyes.

There was no one else in the room.

Joshua Haggard opened his eyes and started up. He looked at Arnold
curiously for a moment or so, as if he scarcely knew him--like a man
not quite released from the thraldom of a dream.

‘I am afraid I’ve disturbed you in a comfortable nap, Mr. Haggard,’
said Arnold.

‘No, I was hardly asleep--only resting.’

‘You look as if you had much need of rest.’

‘Do I?’ asked the minister musingly. ‘Well, the scabbard must wear
out in time, I suppose. It matters little, if the sword is only
bright till the last.’

‘You don’t ask me if I have found out anything about my brother in
London,’ said Arnold.

‘Because I don’t expect to hear that you have. I have told you my
opinion,’ replied Joshua gloomily.

‘It is an opinion which I will never entertain until it is forced
upon me by positive proof. My watchword is hope--yes, Naomi, hope,’
he added, turning to Joshua’s daughter, who was looking at him
gravely, with no answering ray of hope in her sad eyes.

He held out his hand to her, and they shook hands warmly, like
brother and sister. Joshua sank back into his chair, and took up
an open volume from the table, and resumed his reading, as if to
indicate that he had no more to say to his visitor.

This reception was so cold as to be scarcely civil; but Arnold was
not going to take offence easily. He wanted to know more of Naomi. In
his mind she was the only person who could thoroughly sympathise with
him in his longing for the absent, or in his grief for the lost. She
alone in Combhaven had fondly loved his brother.

He began to talk of indifferent subjects, trying to infuse a little
cheerfulness into the conversation; but there was a leaden gloom in
the atmosphere of the minister’s parlour which Arnold had no power
to brighten. Naomi listened and replied with grave attention.

She was gentle and friendly, but he could not win a smile from her.
She seemed weighed down by an unconquerable melancholy.

‘Do they ever smile, I wonder?’ thought Arnold. ‘Or has the household
always this funereal air? Is it grief for my absent brother that
makes her so sad? I should have given her credit for strength of
mind to surmount such a grief, or at least to hide it. And the
parson--well, I suppose that gloomy cast of countenance is simply
professional.’

Despite Naomi’s lack of cheerfulness, Captain Pentreath was
interested in her. That melancholy look lent a poetic air to her
beauty. He felt that she was a woman of deepest feelings, one who
would love but once and love for ever. Even Oswald’s inconstancy had
not weakened her affection. He would have given much to be alone with
her again for a little while, to have talked freely with her, heart
to heart. He felt as if he could have spoken about his brother, and
his brother’s errors, without wounding her. But that figure of the
minister sitting between him and the light oppressed him like a
waking nightmare. There came an awkward silence presently, and Arnold
felt he had no more to say, and must needs take his leave.

He had just risen to depart when the door opened, and a girl with
fair hair, pale face, and Puritan cap, came into the room.

At sight of him she gave a faint cry and put her hand to her heart,
and then, with a great effort of self-restraint, made him a grave
curtsy, and crossed the room to an empty chair near Joshua.

‘My God!’ cried Arnold, turning very pale.

The sudden apparition wrung the exclamation from him before he had
time to summon up his self-command. This was the face he had seen in
his brother’s journal. This was Joshua’s young wife, of whose girlish
beauty he had heard people talk, but whom he had never seen till this
moment, for she had been ailing of late, and had kept much in her own
room. And this was Oswald’s fatal love--a love so wildly foolish, so
deeply dishonourable, that it might well work the ruin of him who
harboured it.

Joshua looked up as the door opened, and heard Cynthia’s cry and
Arnold’s ejaculation, and saw the pale startled look of the one, the
utter amazement of the other.

‘He will be like his brother, perhaps,’ he thought gloomily, and
an angry shadow stole over his dark face. He looked at his wife as
she seated herself quietly near him. She was very white and her
lips trembled. This sudden appearance of Oswald Pentreath’s brother
affected her as if she had seen a ghost.

Arnold took a hurried leave of the minister and his daughter, made
a grave bow to Cynthia, and was gone. He could not have conversed
calmly after the revelation which had surprised and shocked him. It
was an awful thing to know that his brother had been guilty enough to
fix his affections here.

Did Joshua know or suspect the truth? Yes, Arnold thought, he did
suspect, and this suspicion was the cause of his coldness about
Oswald, and that gloomy tone which suggested animosity.

Having discovered the fatal siren who had beguiled his brother from
the paths of peace, Arnold’s next desire was to be able to question
her about his brother’s fate. Who so likely to be in the secret of
Oswald’s intentions at the time he left Combhaven as the woman he
loved? Doubtless he had contrived to see her during his last brief
residence at the Grange, and he had told her what he meant to do with
his life.

The difficulty was for Arnold to obtain an interview with Joshua’s
wife without doing harm of some kind. Joshua was unfriendly and
repellent in his manner, very ready to suspect evil, no doubt, of
any one bearing the name of Pentreath. Arnold had also to consider
Naomi’s feelings. It was just possible that she was ignorant of her
stepmother’s part in the tragedy of her life.

Accident brought about a meeting which could have been only contrived
with difficulty. Arnold had been out for a long rambling ride on
Herne on the third day after his return to the Grange, and coming
slowly homeward in the afternoon sunlight, he overtook Cynthia
Haggard walking alone in one of the green lanes just outside
Combhaven. She was walking very slowly, with bent head and listless
step, like one whose thoughts are far away from the scenes that
surround her.

The full western sunlight shone through the young oak leaves, the
hawthorns were fleecy masses of white blossom, and filled the air
with perfume, the sea glittered above the waving line of the hedge,
and through the deep cleft in the rich red bank the little town of
Combhaven showed its tiled roofs and many gables, its mellow thatches
and cool gray slates, and shining ochre walls that seemed made of
sunlight.

Arnold slipped quietly from his horse and put the bridle over his
arm. Herne, having been as fiendish in behaviour as in name during
the first half of his day’s work, was now in a calm and philosophic
mood, and cropped the young ferns contently.

‘Mrs. Haggard, may I have a few words with you?’ Arnold asked gently.

Cynthia had looked up startled at the sound of the horse’s hoofs. She
dropped a curtsy, and answered nervously,

‘If you please, sir.’

‘You wonder what I can have to say to you, perhaps?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And yet you must know that my mind is full of anxiety about my
brother.’

Her cheek crimsoned, and then paled.

‘I am--we are all anxious,’ she said. ‘It is so strange that he has
not written to you. He was not likely to write to any one else--but
to you, his brother, of whom he was so fond.’

‘You have heard him talk about me, then?’ inquired Arnold.

‘Very often. He looked forward so anxiously to your return.’

‘Would to God I had come sooner! I might have kept him at home,
perhaps. Come, Mrs. Haggard, be candid with me. This mystery about my
brother is making me very wretched. Cannot you help me? You may know
something, perhaps, which no one else knows--something which might
enlighten me as to his intentions when he left home. For Heaven’s
sake, be truthful with me. Do not be afraid to trust me. I know the
trouble that made my brother leave his country. A diary of his fell
into my hands a little while ago, with the story of his unhappy love
written in it. I know that it was for your sake he became an exile. I
implore you to tell me all you can that may help me to discover his
fate.’

Cynthia trembled, and grew deadly pale, yet looked at her questioner
steadily. There was innocence in the look, Arnold thought. This was
no guilty wife--but, not the less, a most unhappy woman.

‘I know that he was going to America,’ answered Cynthia, ‘and I know
no more than that.’

‘Did you see him on that last day?’

‘I did. Pray do not tell Naomi or any one else. No one knows of our
meeting. It was a secret. He wished to say good-bye to me before he
went.’

‘Were you the last person who saw him?’

‘I think so. When he left me he was going to the coach.’

‘Are you sure he meant to go by the coach?’

‘He told me so.’

Arnold’s countenance fell. This gave a darker aspect to the affair.

‘What time in the day did you see him?’

‘About four o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘And where did you meet?’

‘Will you promise to tell no one?’

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘On Matcherly Common, by the old shaft.’

‘I know the place. We have played there many a time when we were
children. Are you sure that no one knew of your meeting?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘And that no one met you, or watched you, that afternoon?’

‘I saw no one. I do not believe that any one saw me.’

‘My brother told you he meant to leave by the coach; yet he did
not leave by it. You saw him at four o’clock that last afternoon,
and I cannot hear of any one who saw him after that hour. It is
strange--alarming even--is it not?’

‘Very strange. But I trust in God that he is safe; though we do not
know where he is.’

‘That’s an easy way of putting it,’ said Arnold, with a shade of
bitterness.

‘No one can be more sorry for him than I am,’ answered Cynthia, with
a sudden sob. ‘It is my sin to be so sorry.’

‘Poor child! Forgive me for speaking harshly. I fancy sometimes that
every one except myself is indifferent to my brother’s fate. Your
husband thinks he committed suicide; but I can’t and won’t believe
that. You don’t believe it, do you?’ he asked, turning upon her
quickly.

‘O, no, no, no!’ she cried, with a startled look of pain, as if the
idea were new to her. ‘He would never do that. He would never be so
wild--so guilty--as to shoot himself, like Werther.’

‘Who is Werther?’

‘A man in a book your brother read to us; but it was a real person,
who was very unhappy, and who shot himself. He did not seem to know
that suicide was a sin. But I cannot believe that Oswald would be
so rash. O, no, no, God forbid that he should be tempted to such a
dreadful deed! I cannot think it. He was very calm when we bade each
other good-bye. He blessed me, and promised to take more heed of
serious things in days to come than he had done in days past.’

‘And there was no wildness in his manner? He did not talk like a
desperate man?’

‘No, indeed.’

‘I thank you for having been truthful and frank. It is a sad story.
Would to God that he had been constant and faithful to that noble
girl, your stepdaughter!’

He could not spare her this implied reproach. His brother’s fate
seemed ever so much darker to him after what he had just heard. And
for all this sorrow and uncertainty, the fair young creature standing
by his side was in some measure to blame. Even that last secret
meeting might have been in some wise the turning-point of his destiny.

‘Had you been in the habit of meeting my brother secretly?’ he asked
presently. ‘Had you met him often before that day?’

‘Never in my life before,’ answered Cynthia, with an indignant look;
‘I should not have gone then, even though he made my going a last
favour, if I had not had a purpose in seeing him. I thought I might
win him back to Naomi. I knew he had once loved her dearly; and I
thought perhaps it needed but a few words to awaken the old love in
his heart.’

‘And do you think you were the best preacher to preach that sermon?’
asked Arnold. ‘Well, you acted for the best, I daresay; and again
I thank you for your candour. But I am no nearer the secret of my
brother’s fate than I was an hour ago. Good-bye!’

He raised his hat and left her with a somewhat formal salutation,
not offering her his hand. There was resentment in his heart against
this fair-faced wife who had spoiled Naomi’s life and his own. He
led Herne to the end of the lane, and there mounted him, and trotted
quickly home, the sagacious animal scenting the oats and clover in
his now luxurious stable.

Cynthia walked slowly on, crying a little in a languid helpless way,
like one who was accustomed to solitude and tears. The sharp sound
of Herne’s hoofs died away in the distance. A lark was singing loud
and shrill in the high blue sky, and there was a drowsy bee among the
hawthorns, but all the rest of Nature was silent. Suddenly there
broke upon that summer stillness a loud rustling of boughs, and a man
sprang through a gap in the hedge and confronted her.

She looked up, full of sudden fear, expecting to see some unknown
ruffian bent on robbery or murder; but the dark and angry face
looking into hers was the face of her husband.

‘Joshua! How you frightened me!’

‘No doubt. Women who meet their lovers in secret are easily startled.’

‘My lover! Joshua, are you mad? I have been talking to Captain
Pentreath, who overtook me by chance a little while ago.’

‘By chance! Do you think I am going to believe that story? Woman,
I know you too well. Satan set you in my path for my undoing--to
the peril and loss of my soul; for my ruin and destruction here and
hereafter. Fool, fool, fool!’--this with a cry of anguish, striking
his forehead with his clenched fists--‘I ought to have known it was a
snare--the fair strange face under the burning summer sky; the gipsy
waif, homeless, nameless, a stranger to Christ and salvation! Spawn
of Beelzebub, why did I not recognise you?’

‘Joshua, for pity’s sake! I am your true wife; I have honoured and
obeyed you--’

‘Honoured! Was it to honour me you lured that young man to his doom?
Was it for my honour you met him and kissed him? Yes; I saw him
holding you in his arms under God’s all-seeing eye; clasping you to
his breast, as I held you that accursed night when I thought myself
the happiest among men, because I had won you for my own. Won you!
O thou incarnate falsehood! fair as an angel to the eye, foul as
sin to the heart that knows thee! And having tempted one brother
to death and doom eternal, you are spreading your nets for the
other. You would have him, too. You are like her that waiteth at the
street-corner, “in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and
dark night. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers
of death. Yea, verily, her feet go down to death; her steps take hold
on hell.” Away with you, fair devil!’

His arm was raised to strike; but she fell on her knees, and thus by
a happy chance escaped the degrading blow, and saved her husband that
last shame.

‘Joshua, what madness has seized you? I never wronged you willingly,
as God knows. If I did do you wrong, it is because human nature is
weak, and God does not always stand by us. He lets us stand alone a
little while in order to show us how weak we are without Him, how
soon we stumble and fall when that heavenly hand is withdrawn. Yes,
husband, I have been a sinner. God hid His face for a time. Oswald
loved me, and I loved him, and forgot my wickedness in the sweetness
of being beloved by him. It was like a dream. But when he spoke of
his love my heart awakened, and I was your true wife. I have said
no word to him--never, from first to last--that I dare not repeat
to you, or that I am ashamed to remember. I am your true wife, and
honour and revere you now as I did that first day when you took me to
the only decent home I had ever known. Have I forgotten what I owe
you, Joshua? O no, no, no! I am not so base, nor so ungrateful.’

‘Your speech is like your face,’ said Joshua, with set
teeth--‘passing fair, passing fair. But I know you, pretty one! Yes;
look up, eyes, blue as God’s summer sky--look up in sad innocent
wonder! A lie, a lie, nothing but a lie! Satan has made you so:
he painted your cheeks, and limned your smile and every delicate
feature, that you might lure good men to death and hell. Can he work
without his instruments, do you think? He does not walk this earth in
palpable shape, lest we should know him and avoid him; but he puts on
such a pretty garb as yours, and counts his worshippers by the score.
Every priestess such as you brings a crowd to his altar. But I have
done with you. I have rent the net; I will have no further dealings
with you; I will see your false face no more!’

‘Joshua, have pity!’

‘“Can a man take fire in his bosom and not be burned?”’

‘Joshua!’

‘“He that doeth it destroyeth his own soul. A wound and dishonour
shall he get; and his reproach shall not be wiped away.”’

‘Joshua, can you believe that there was any harm, any wrong against
you, in my meeting with Captain Pentreath just now?’ cried Cynthia,
still at her husband’s feet, looking up at him in an agony of
supplication, trying to grasp those strong cruel hands that thrust
her from him.

‘I know that you are false to the core. I know that Satan made you
to lead me down to the pit. What do I know about you and Captain
Pentreath? Very little. I was just in time for the fag-end of your
interview. I came across the field, and saw you through a break in
the hedge. You were standing in close converse with him, just as you
were with his brother--’

‘Ah,’ cried Cynthia, startled, ‘you were there that day--you saw us.
You said so just now.’

‘The kisses were over, I daresay,’ continued Joshua, too much beside
himself to heed this interruption. ‘The kisses were done with before
I came. He heard my step, perhaps, and so left you with a formal
salutation, as if you were strangers parting. Hypocrites, liars
both--children of the accursed! But I have done with you. I turn
my face away from Satan and his witchcraft, and I will make my
peace with God before I die. Go back--go back to your tents, to the
children of Baal! Go back to your juggleries and mummeries, and leave
me to repent of my folly--to put on sackcloth and ashes--to go up
alone among the hills, like Elijah in the mountains, to wait for the
advent of my God!’

‘Joshua, for mercy’s sake be calm; speak to me quietly, that I may
know what you really mean. I have no wish but to obey you. If you
say that I am to go away from you--to go back and be a servant, and
work for my daily bread as I did before I was your wife--I shall go,
and make no complaint. But I am your true and obedient wife all the
same. Do not doubt that. I will obey you when you are cruel, just as
I obeyed you when you were kind, and I shall never murmur.’

‘Fair of speech, and fair of face,’ muttered Joshua. ‘Yes, Lucifer,
her master, was beautiful as the morning star.’

‘Do you mean to turn me out of doors, Joshua? Do you mean that your
home is to be mine no longer?’

‘I do. You have brought misery and shame into my house. You have
poisoned my cup, turned my daily bread to ashes. I would fain be rid
of you for ever. I cannot serve God while you are near me. Satan is
too strong for me while he works under such a mask.’

‘And you wish us to part,’ she said deliberately, ‘for ever?’

‘Yes; I love my imperishable soul better than that viler human heart
which cleaves to you. In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving
in marriage. In heaven I shall forget the anguish of an unsatisfied
love.’

‘Joshua, I am your servant, to obey you in this as in all things.
You have but to say you wish me gone, and I shall go. When you cease
to pity, God will forgive and take pity on me, because He does not
make our burdens too heavy for us. Do you remember that night in the
pine-wood, Joshua, when you took me to your heart and told me that I
was precious in your sight? I said then that I was not good enough to
be your wife; that it would be happiness for me to be your servant,
and wait upon you and work for you, and gather words of wisdom from
your lips. But you would have it otherwise. I was wiser in this, you
see; for now you are weary of me, and want to send me away. Let it be
so, then; I will forget that I am your wife, and remember only that I
am your servant, and bound to obey in all things. I am your servant,
and you have dismissed me. I can go back to Penmoyle and work for my
living--far away, where I shall not disgrace you. Good-bye, sir.’

She took his hand and kissed it, still on her knees. He shuddered at
the contact of those rosebud lips, but never looked at her. His eyes
were fixed on the distant sea-line--wide-open eyes gazing blankly at
the blue bright light.

‘Am I really to go, Joshua?’ Cynthia asked meekly, after a brief
silence, in which the hum of insects, the sharp whirring sound of the
grasshopper, filled the air.

He passed his hand across his brow wearily.

‘Get thee behind me, Satan. Yes, go, go, go! I can never scale the
walls of God’s eternal city while this weight of earthly passion
cleaves to me. Go far out of my reach, lest I should slay you; and
think of your dead lover, and repent your sin.’

‘What! he _is_ dead, then--and you know it?’ she exclaimed, with a
bitter cry.

‘Yes,’ answered Joshua, flinging her away from him into the dust; ‘go
and weep and howl for him. It was your sin that slew him!’

She lay for a little while where he had thrown her, on the sun-baked
grass of the bank, amongst the ferns and wild flowers--not quite
unconscious, but with a brain in which strange and familiar images
whirled wildly as in a demon dance. Then came a few moments in which
all was blank--moments of blessed repose; and then she staggered to
her feet, and looked round her. The lane was empty. Joshua had said
his last word, and was gone.

She stood looking round her in the westering sunshine, pondering what
she ought to do. Not for an instant did she contemplate rebellion
against her husband’s decree. He had bidden her to leave him, and she
would go away, meekly, uncomplainingly, as Hagar went out into the
wilderness.

‘Ah me,’ she said to herself piteously, comparing herself with Hagar,
‘I have no Ishmael to be my comfort and hope.’

It never occurred to her to go back to her husband’s house, and
claim the place which was hers by right, and which no act of hers
had forfeited. She did not even contemplate going back to claim her
own--the clothes and books and small possessions dear to womanhood
which she had acquired since her marriage. Empty-handed and penniless
as when Joshua found her sitting by the water-pool on the distant
Cornish waste, she left the scene of her brief and hapless married
life. She had neither purse nor scrip--not so much as a few shillings
to help her on her way. But she turned her pale face steadily to
the west, and set out to walk to Penmoyle. In all this wide world
she had no other friends than the spinster sisters whom she could
turn to for a refuge in her desolation, and even from them she could
not feel quite sure of a kind reception. They had offered her their
friendship, telling her on the day she left them to appeal to them in
any hour of need. But how would they receive her when she told them
that Joshua had cast her off--they who reverenced Joshua as a saint
and prophet?

To them she must needs turn in her distress, having no other earthly
haven. She had served them faithfully in the past, and had won their
favour; and she was willing to serve them in the future for her
daily bread, and nightly shelter, and the privilege of worshipping
her God in the faith Joshua had taught her. She thought of the
white-haired old minister, with his gentle old-world manners and his
ready kindness. She remembered how his praise had thrilled her at the
thought that Joshua would hear of her well-doing and be glad. And
now all was over. Joshua hated her; Joshua spurned her as a vile and
guilty creature. No man’s praise, no woman’s favour, could ever lift
her up in his esteem any more. She was degraded and cast off for ever.

Well, she could be a servant again, and toil for her bread and serve
her God in patience so long as life’s burden was laid upon her. It
seemed to her that the road along which she had to carry her burden
was not interminable. A little way off there came a region of mist
and cloud, entering which she would be at peace, and would lay down
her load, and rest her weary head upon the sweetest pillow, and let
her tired eyelids close amidst a divine sunshine, a light as of
the resurrection morning, when the glad sunbeams danced upon the
hill-tops.

It was a long way from Combhaven to that little village high up among
the rolling Cornish tors. Cynthia could not calculate the number of
miles; but she had an idea that Penmoyle was very far away--many
days’ journey at the rate at which she could walk, which was slow,
for her cough and low fever had left her weak.

‘Luckily I know how to sleep under a haystack, and I am not ashamed
to beg my bread when I see a kind face at a cottage-door,’ she said
to herself.

She had her silver watch and chain, which she thought she might sell
in one of the towns she had to pass through; and there was the gold
keeper above her wedding-ring--this too she might dispose of, if hard
pressed by want; but if people were kind she could get on without
money, so little would serve to keep body and soul together.

So she set out on her journey, a new Hagar, but with no sweet child
companion to make the desert blossom like the rose.




                              CHAPTER X.

                     WHAT THE COWBOY COULD TELL.


After his interview with Cynthia Haggard, Captain Pentreath reasoned
himself into an easier state of mind about his missing brother. His
sanguine nature leaned towards the brighter view of the question.
Oswald had been calm and resigned when he parted with the object of
his fatal love; he had gone away to begin a new life, had cast off
the fetters of passion, and gone forth a free man.

‘I shall hear from him in due time. All will be well,’ said Arnold.

Having made up his mind deliberately to go on hoping, and, indeed,
entertaining the conviction that the riddle of his brother’s destiny
would be solved in time, Arnold Pentreath considered it his duty to
inspire Naomi with the same hopeful view. It afflicted him to see her
pale sad face, to watch her slow listless movements. It became his
most ardent desire to cheer and console her.

With this end he went very often to the minister’s house, and sat in
the quiet old parlour where Oswald had spent so many hours of his
life, and talked to Naomi while she sewed. There was no one to object
to his visits. Aunt Judith was in the shop; Joshua was away, no one
knew whither. It was his habit now to come home wearied at nightfall,
save on those evenings when he had class-meetings, or Bible-meetings,
or some kind of service in his chapel.

Cynthia was gone, and Joshua had accounted briefly for her absence by
stating that she had gone to see her friends at Penmoyle.

‘You had better send her trunk on by the coach,’ said Joshua to Naomi.

‘But why did she go so suddenly, father?’ Naomi asked, puzzled by
this disruption of the household.

‘Because it was her whim to go, and it was not my pleasure to say her
nay.’

‘Has she gone by the coach?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And when is she to come back?’

‘When I please to bid her come.’

Naomi sighed, and obeyed her father’s order. Alas for this change,
which made her father a person to be obeyed with fear and trembling
rather than with faith and love! Naomi had not forgiven Cynthia
for all the misery she had wrought; but this sudden disappearance
of her father’s wife oppressed her with a sense of injustice and
wrong done by Joshua. With what cruelty had he driven that meek and
sorrowful offender away from him? His daughter had noted his conduct
to his wife, and had seen his harshness, his coldness, his growing
aversion--the chilling mask which passionate love puts on when
jealousy gnaws the heart.

Cynthia was gone, and Naomi’s life was now quite lonely. She was glad
of Arnold’s visit, and took some comfort from his hopeful talk about
the absent master of the Grange.

‘He will come back to his home and to you, Naomi,’ said the Captain.
‘Come back a new man, and an honest one, proud to redeem his faith.’

‘Were he to come back to-morrow I should give him a sister’s loving
welcome,’ answered Naomi, ‘but never more than a sister’s love. He
has broken my heart once--I won’t let him break it again.’

‘But if he were honestly repentant and sincere, Naomi?’

‘He might believe himself sincere. I could not trust him with my
peace. Do not think that I am angry with him. I am only sorry that
he should ever have been so mistaken as to believe in the reality of
his love for me. He never knew what love meant till he gave his heart
where it should not have been given.’

‘Well, Naomi, perhaps you are wise. The vessel that fails to answer
to her helm in the hour of danger is hardly a ship to be trusted.
Then we will think of Oswald as an absent brother only, and look
forward hopefully to his return.’

‘God knows I try to hope for it,’ said Naomi, with a sigh.

‘Why should he not be really your brother--brother in fact as well
as in name?’ pleaded Arnold, taking her unresisting hands. ‘Make him
your brother, Naomi, by making me your husband. We have not known
each other very long, but our mutual sorrow has brought us nearer
together than years of common acquaintance could have done. I have
looked into your heart, Naomi, and I know its worth. Let me take my
brother’s place, dear; I shall never wander; my love shall know no
change. It is founded on a rock--for it was my esteem for your noble
nature which first taught me to love you.’

Naomi withdrew her hands from his, and stood up, looking at him
seriously, with eyes full of tears.

‘Never again let this be spoken of between us, Arnold,’ she said. ‘It
can never be.’

‘Why not?’

‘There is a reason which you must never know.’

‘But I am not to be satisfied like that, Naomi. There is no reason
that I can recognise, unless you say that you do not love me--can
never teach yourself to love me.’

‘I will say that, then--I can never love you.’

‘And your eyes are brimming with tears, and your lips tremble as you
say the words. It is not true, Naomi; it is a lie--a lie against the
might of love. You love me as I love you, and we were meant for each
other and for happiness. Why should you or I be miserable all our
lives because a foolish young man has run away from felicity? Naomi,
dearest love, make my life happy.’

‘You are good, and I honour you; you are like Oswald, and my heart
yearns towards you,’ answered the girl falteringly, for it seemed
to her at this moment as if the picture of a new life were suddenly
unfolded before her eyes, and the vision was marvellously bright;
‘but I can never be more than your friend and sister.’

‘I see. You love the truant still. Did I not say so?’

‘His memory is very dear to me.’

Arnold said no more. Those eloquent eyes, those tremulous lips, had
told him he was beloved, and yet this love was denied him. What was
he to think? He was hardly inclined to despair, or to accept this
answer of Naomi’s as final. She had some mistaken notion of fidelity
to a departed love doubtless; she would sacrifice a lover in the
present--a real and living affection--for the sake of that inconstant
lover in the past.

‘Patience,’ thought Arnold; ‘I shall be able to talk her out of her
folly sooner or later.’

Meanwhile he was content to be accepted on the friendly and brotherly
footing. He contrived to see Naomi very often. He found his way even
into the wilderness, that burial-ground of dead joys and bitter
memories. He met her in all her walks. It was difficult for her not
to think that her lost lover had come back to her with a nobler mind
and larger ideas. Here she found no languid indolence, no placid
unconcern for the welfare of others, so long as summer skies were
blue, and one could lie at ease under the beeches reading Byron.
Arnold was full of care for the labourers on his patrimonial estate,
full of sympathy and kindness for the struggling tenant farmers and
their industrious wives, for the young men who desired a little more
enlightenment and education than their fathers had deemed needful
for the fulness of life’s measure. With Arnold benevolent deeds were
not castles in the air, Utopian schemes to be set on foot in some
convenient hour of the future, but duties to be done at once, now,
while it was yet day.

Arnold was glad of so intelligent a sympathiser with his cares as
steward of his brother’s fortune. Naomi was always ready to help him
with counsel and experience. She had visited among the labouring
poor, and knew their needs and shortcomings--knew where disease found
them weakest, how fever crept into their dwellings.

‘I can’t think what I should do without you,’ said Arnold; and it
was a new happiness to Naomi to feel that she had been useful. Life
at home was so empty and barren, her duties mechanically performed,
her service unrecognised. The change in her father had made the very
atmosphere of home gloomy and oppressive.

Cynthia had been away nearly a month, and there had been no tidings
of her. This seemed strange to all the household, but as Joshua
expressed neither wonder nor anxiety, it was supposed that his wife’s
absence was understood and approved by him.

‘Poor weak-minded mortal,’ sighed aunt Judith, after discussing the
question with her niece at their lonely tea-table; ‘the first time I
saw that pink and white piece of prettiness step across the threshold
I knew what he was laying up for himself. A man of his years can’t
set his heart upon a wax doll without paying the penalty; above
all when it’s a doll that has neither parents, nor a good stock of
house-linen, nor decent bringing up. _I_ knew what was coming,’ cried
aunt Judith, with a laugh of exultant irony, ‘and my only wonder is
that things haven’t turned out much worse.’

‘Poor thing!’ sighed Naomi, thinking with some touch of compunction
of the pale sad face from which she had averted her eyes so coldly of
late. ‘Do you think father sent her away?’

‘If he did he’d have done no more than was right,’ said aunt Judith.
‘And if he’d done it when I first tried to open his eyes about her
he’d have shown himself a wiser man. But whether she got tired of her
life here and went off of her own free will, or whether your father
sent her, matters very little to us. She’s gone,’ concluded the
spinster decisively, ‘and I hope it’s not unchristianlike to wish
she may never come back.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

Having put the idea of his brother’s suicide out of his mind, Arnold
had not attached any dark meaning to his interview with Cynthia. Her
statement seemed to him natural and credible, and rather calculated
to reassure than to alarm. Oswald had been calm and resigned. He had
stated his intention of going to a new world, to begin a new life.
What ground was there for supposing that a man in this frame of mind
had been so false to manhood as to take his own life? Arnold sent to
an Exeter bookseller for the _Sorrows of Werther_, and read the story
carefully; but not being of so sentimental a turn as his brother, and
not being in love with another man’s wife, he had found the reading
rather a laborious business, and Werther a weak-minded youth with a
fatal habit of prosing about his own emotions.

‘God forbid that my brother should ever follow the example of
such a booby!’ said Arnold, when he had seen Werther laid in
his unconsecrated grave, in the memorable blue coat and yellow
waistcoat, with Charlotte’s pink breast-knot in his pocket; ‘I should
have as much contempt for his want of sense as regret for his want of
religion.’

Arnold had not yet gone to look at the spot where Oswald had parted
from Mrs. Haggard. He remembered the scene well enough in days gone
by; the lonely common with its hillocks and hollows and marshy spots,
over which the swift-winged plover skimmed lightly, vanishing with a
shrill cry into blue distance. The scene was so familiar to him that
it had no special significance; it never struck him that just that
one spot of all others, that little bit of sunburnt common by the
abandoned mine, might be fatal--that here yawned a natural grave,
ready for the end of a tragedy.

He went up to an old farmhouse one afternoon, to settle a question
of roofing and thatching which had been for some time in discussion.
It was the last house on the way to Matcherly Common, a house that
stood on the edge of the wood, or almost in the wood. The latticed
casements looked down a beechen glade. It was a place of silence and
soft cool shadows, a welcome retreat on a summer’s day like this on
which Arnold rode over to settle matters with Farmer Westall about
his granary roofs.

Herne had been made happy in a spacious stable where the good old
white wagon-horses dozed over their hay and clover, and where the
thud of a ponderous tail whisked round for the slaughter of a
forest-fly and the slow munching of fodder were the only sounds
that broke the slumberous stillness. Captain Pentreath had made
his inspection of the premises, and was drinking a glass of Mrs.
Westall’s famous perry before departing, when the farmer mentioned a
subject which always found Arnold an attentive listener.

‘You haven’t heerd anything of your brother, I suppose, Captain?’

‘Not a line. But I don’t despair of getting news of him before long.
He’s not been gone a twelvemonth yet, you see, Mr. Westall, and a
year is a short time when a man has to cross the sea. He may have
changed his mind about America, and gone to New South Wales, and
that’s half a year’s voyage to begin with.’

‘That’s where the convicks go, ain’t it, Captain? The young Squire
’ud never go theer, surely.’

‘There’s no knowing how far a man may go when he’s once made up his
mind to turn rover,’ said Arnold cheerily.

‘Ah,’ sighed the farmer, ‘this here world of ours be a strange un;
there’s things in it that puzzles my poor old wits a’most as much as
that theer thatch catchin’ fire the identical day arter I refused
aunt Nancy the faggit.’

There was a lurking significance in this remark that caught Arnold’s
attention.

‘You have heard something about my brother!’ he cried; ‘you can tell
me something! For God’s sake keep nothing from me; it is a matter of
life or death.’

‘The by’s a truth-spoken by,’ said the farmer, ‘or I shouldn’t ha’
listened to un.’

‘What boy?’

‘It isn’t because a by earns his bit o’ mate minding cows that he
hasn’t got a soul to be saved,’ continued the farmer, as deliberately
as if pursuing a philosophical argument; ‘and I can’t say as ever I
found out this here lad in a lie.’

‘Will you tell me what you mean, how this bears upon my brother?’
cried Arnold, breathless with impatience.

‘My wife and me have sat under Mr. Haggard for the last ten years.
He was the first to tell us our souls were in danger o’ everlasting
fire, and he’s gone on warning of us ever since. ’Tain’t likely I’m
going to speak agen him.’

‘Speak plainly at any rate,’ exclaimed Arnold, ‘if you mean anything.
And from your manner it’s clear you mean something. What has this boy
of yours to do with my brother’s fate?’

‘It ain’t what he has to do, but what he can tell. It was a hot
summer day, you may remember, that day as the young Squire were last
seen at Combhaven--harvest time, and reg’lar harvest weather. This
lad o’ mine, Tim, was out in the forest mindin’ cows. But perhaps
you’d sooner hear it from the lad’s own lips?’ suggested the farmer.

‘I don’t care how I hear it, so long as I hear it quickly!’

‘Well, I’ll call the by; he’s close handy, diggin’ taties.’

‘Let’s go to him,’ said Arnold, taking up his whip and gloves.

The farmer wished to bring the boy to the parlour, as a mode of
proceeding more consistent with the respect due to his landlord,
but the Captain was too eager to endure ceremony. He hurried to the
straggling old kitchen-garden at the back of the house, where ancient
espaliers which had long outgrown their sustaining framework spread
wide their arms against the blue June sky.

Here, digging up the smooth golden-skinned potatoes, they found the
farmer’s cowboy, a frank-looking blue-eyed lad, over whose sunburnt
forehead trickled the dew of toil.

‘Now look ’ee here, Tim,’ said the farmer; ‘I want ’ee to tell the
Captain what it was you saw and heerd that day in Matcherly Wood,
when th’ young Squire passed ’ee by.’

The boy wiped his forehead upon his shirt-sleeve, shifted his spade
from one hand to the other, and after some moments of obvious
embarrassment found a voice.

‘I were mindin’ cattle in the forest, you see, sir, and theer were
one cow wi’ a white face, she were a new un that master had boughten
at Barnstaple last market-day, and she were strange, poor thing, and
strayed away ever so far up towards the common; and I was goin’ arter
her, when who should I see but the minister on afore me, goin’ right
up to the common.’

‘Do you mean Mr. Haggard?’

‘Surely. And he went on ahead o’ me, till he come right out o’ the
wood, just wheer the old shaft be; and he looked about un a bit,
when he got clear o’ the trees, and then went into the engine-house.
I watched a bit, wonderin’ what he were up to; and then I see un
standin’ just inside the doorway, where there’s a lot o’ fallen
stones and rubbish, and tansy growin’ as tall as young trees, and he
stood there lookin’ out, yet keepin’ of hisself hidden like, as if
he were watchin’ for somebody. And just then I catched sight o’ the
white-faced cow, ever so far across the common, and I ran arter her.’

‘Strange, warn’t it?’ said the farmer. ‘But there’s more to tell.’

‘I cotched the old cow, and I was takin’ of her back to the wood,
when I comes right up agen the young Squire. I was a bit scared at
seein’ he, for I’d heerd tell as he were away from Combhaven. He
didn’t take no notice o’ me, but went on, swingin’ his stick round,
and singin’ to hisself, soft like. Well, I thowt no more about un,
and I was here and theer with they cows, and they would stray up
towards the common, though there warn’t much but tansy for they
to eat up theer; and I were up close to the common about an hour
arterwards, when I heerd a shot fired and then another, so close
together they might a been one a’most.’

A white blankness spread itself over Arnold’s face--the vacant horror
of despair. It was some moments before he could speak.

‘You ran to see what those shots meant?’ he cried.

‘I couldn’t tell wheer they come from, not for sartain; but I thowt
it was somewheer near the old shaft, and I went up theer arter a bit,
but theer was nowt to be seen, and no one about. I went into the
engine-house, but the minister was gone.’

‘Why has this been kept from me?’ asked Arnold. ‘Why, in Heaven’s
name, didn’t you let me know this sooner, Westall? You know how
anxious I have been about my brother.’

‘I only heerd of it t’other day, when I overheerd Timothy talkin’ to
our Prudence, the dairymaid. He was tellin’ her about the shot.’

‘Don’t you think it was your duty to have told your master, boy?’
asked Arnold.

‘I didn’t think it was any harm. It might ha’ been some one firin’
at a rabbit or a gull. There’s plenty o’ say-gulls flies across
Matcherly Common.’

‘You saw no more--you heard no more?’

‘No, there was nowt arter that. It were milkin’ time, and I had to
take the cows home.’

‘Now look here, Westall,’ said Captain Pentreath, taking the farmer
aside. ‘Those shots may mean nothing, or they may mean a great deal.
I know my brother was up yonder, by the old shaft, that August day.
I know he had an enemy, and was watched and followed. I have no
evidence that he was ever seen alive after that day. Till to-day
I’ve hugged myself with the hope that he is living in some distant
country, and that I shall hear of him in due time. I begin to think
that hope is a delusion, and that he never left this neighbourhood.
If he has been murdered, it is my business to bring his murderer to
the gallows. But I must first find his murdered body. Will you help
me? You’ve plenty of farm-labourers in your service. Will you help me
to search Matcherly Common, and the mine below it?’




                             CHAPTER XI.

                             AT HIS DOOR.


Naomi thought long and deeply of that last interview with Arnold
Pentreath. She was in nowise inclined to admit to herself that the
sea-captain could now, or in any time to come, take the place of
his missing brother--that the heart which had been so freely and
so entirely given to Oswald could ever belong to another. Yet,
while looking upon this change of feeling as impossible, Naomi was
conscious that Arnold had begun to exercise a powerful influence upon
her mind, and that his most unexpected avowal of affection for her
had moved her deeply.

He was like his brother and he loved his brother. These two
circumstances were alone sufficient to insure her regard. And now
he had paid her the highest tribute that man can offer to woman. He
had given her his loyal and kindly heart--that heart whose wide
benevolence she had seen in many an unconsidered act of his life; he
had tendered her his happiness, his future; and she had found only
one cold answer to his prayer: ‘It cannot be.’

‘If I loved him better than I ever loved Oswald my answer must have
been the same,’ she said to herself in those long hours of sorrowful
meditation which made up the larger half of her joyless life. ‘While
the dark cloud rests upon Oswald’s fate I can have but one answer for
any lover--you, Arnold, of all others. How do I know that I have the
right to stand up with unbowed head, among honest men and women, when
my heart is tortured by the thought that my father--he who preaches
the Gospel and exhorts other men to repentance--may be the vilest
sinner of all?’

This was the gist of Naomi’s meditations. She had tried to put
that awful fear away from her, but it was rooted in her heart. As
weeks and months went by and brought no news of Oswald, the fear
grew stronger; and with the fear came remorse, a slow and consuming
anguish. Had she been but patient, had she borne her own burden in
silence and kept the secret of that cruel letter, this horror need
never have been. She had put the scorpion into her father’s hand--the
scorpion which had stung that once noble nature to madness.

‘O my father, my lost and erring father,’ she cried, in an hour
when her fear became almost conviction, ‘would to God that I could
bear the burden of your sin! ’Twas I who tempted you; it was my
vile jealousy that urged you to despair and guilt. Let the avenging
rod fall heaviest on me. O God, pity and pardon him, Thou who hast
promised pardon and pity for the darkest sin!’

That there might be pardon even for this last and most hideous
sin of blood-guiltiness, Naomi firmly believed; but could there
be forgiveness for a sinner who added the sin of hypocrisy to his
darker crime, and held his head high among men when it should have
been bowed in the dust under the burden of his shame? Could there be
pardon for a sinner who kept the secret of his guilt, and pretended
to lead other men along the shining path to heaven? No, assuredly.
That smooth-faced hypocrisy--the sin for which man’s Teacher and
Redeemer reserved His most scathing denunciations--must treble the
infamy of the darker guilt it masked, and render pardon impossible.
To the sinner who repenteth pity and peace had been freely offered;
but what mercy was ever promised to the Pharisee who, under the
semblance of exceptional piety, concealed a deeper infamy than the
worst act of the despised publican?

These thoughts were in Naomi’s mind as she sat in her narrow deal
pew, in the soft June twilight, listening to her father’s preaching.
The chapel was full to suffocation, for this was one of those
meetings which the people of Combhaven particularly affected; a
service in which Joshua Haggard was expected to surpass himself,
and in which Satan--so often and so directly appealed to as to seem
an actual member of the congregation--was to be worsted and driven
forth in confusion by the minister’s eloquence. Some even went so far
as to call these evening services ‘devil-hunts.’ The part which the
congregation took in them was not altogether negative or quiescent.
There were times when eager spirits assumed an active share in the
proceedings--when from smothered sighs, and head-shakings, and hollow
groans, as of inward and bodily disorder, the convulsed auditor was
moved to speech, and poured forth his Satanic experiences before
a hushed and awe-struck congregation. Joshua did not encourage or
favour these lay utterances, and his powerful influence and vigorous
eloquence did much to hold his flock in check; but he could not
always dam the flood of inspiration.

‘You’re a powerful praycher, Muster Haggard,’ observed a
weather-beaten old fisherman, whose rambling discourse Joshua strove
to arrest, ‘but when a hignorant man feels he’s gotten the Holy
Sperrit inside un, he ain’t goin’ to be cut short before he’s had
his say. Edication goes for nothin’ with the Sperrit. He don’t mind
grammar.’

Upon this particular evening the flock had been content to express
its feelings by means of groans and sighs, and brief ejaculations of
a self-abasing character. Joshua stood in his square deal pulpit,
with an open Bible on the green-baize cushion, and preached of erring
humanity and man’s darling sins. His sermons were always extempore,
and had of late been obviously without plan or method--a change for
the worse, which Naomi was conscious of, but which had scarcely been
perceived by the flock, that congregation being satisfied with strong
language and a flow of rugged eloquence, without looking too nicely
for logical precision or directness. Joshua turned the leaves of his
Bible, and seemed to draw new ideas from the page he glanced at.

He had been preaching longer than usual, though his sermons were apt
to be long, and the twilight deepened as he stood in his pulpit,
leaning forward with his elbow on the desk, and the other hand
nervously turning the leaves of the Bible, which there was now
scarcely light enough for him to see. He looked pale as ashes in that
gray light, but his large dark eyes gleamed with a sombre fire as
they wandered round the upturned faces of his flock. Sometimes his
eyes lingered wistfully on the pew where Naomi sat, and on Cynthia’s
empty place.

‘Yes, my brethren,’ he cried; ‘yes, fellow-sinners, each has his
darling sin. The world sees it not, knows it not. The world honours
us--we bask in its smiles and favour. Men point to us as ensamples of
godly life. Yet the darling sin is there, in our heart of hearts;
we hug it close--we hide it from every human eye. But in the still
night-watches it comes forth like a serpent out of his hole, and
rears its venomous crest, and stings us with the horror of our guilt.
We call ourselves soldiers and servants of God, yet know that our
real master and captain is the devil. Yes, my brethren, the great
recruiting sergeant has enlisted us. We have taken the devil’s
shilling; the image and superscription upon the coin is the image and
superscription of Satan.

‘Alas, my fellow-sinners! know you how swift a thing it is to fall?
The fall of Lucifer himself was but the act and passage of a moment.
There was no long deliberation--there was no broad gap of time
between heaven and hell. In one hour an angel of light standing
near the throne--in the next revolted, fallen, banished, the prince
and leader of devils. So too with us the fall is swift, the fall is
sudden. We are chosen and elected, called to grace--all our old sins
forgiven. This regeneration is the work of a moment. We look back
and remember the hour in which the light came down upon us, as at
Pentecost. But we may extinguish this light in blackest darkness--we
may lose this divine heritage, forfeit our citizenship in the eternal
city; and this extinction, this loss, may be the work of a moment.’

Groans both loud and deep, plaintive feminine sighs, disjointed
ejaculations of ‘Alas!’ and ‘Too true!’ spoke the convictions of the
assembled sinners.

‘O my brethren, wretched sinners, grovelling in the dust and ashes
of this little world, if at this moment the last trump should sound,
and the heavens be rent asunder, and the great Judge appear shining
in His unspeakable splendour, calling men to judgment, how many among
us could answer to that awful summons without fear and trembling, and
the knowledge that eternal death was our just doom? How many would
He find in this crowded chapel fit to stand before Him? how many of
those blessed ones for whom judgment would mean reward everlasting?
Would He find twenty, do you think, or ten, or five? Alas, my
fellow-sinners, would He find one?’

He lifted his arms aloft at this solemn question, looking up as
if he verily saw that appalling day--the great white throne, the
company of angels, the throng of saints and martyrs, the Divine Judge
Himself, in their dazzling glory.

‘O, come not yet, awful Judge!’ he cried; ‘we are not ready. Leave us
a little more time to wrestle with Satan, to repent our iniquities,
to loosen the bondage of this earthly tabernacle, before we stand
naked at Thy throne. Who among all these is prepared to meet Thy
summons? Who does not tremble as I do at the thought of Thine anger?’

‘Ay, tremble, sinner; quail before the God you have blasphemed!’
cried a resonant voice at the end of the chapel. ‘Tremble, hypocrite;
for the sins of those whom you pretend to teach are white as snow
beside the blackness of your guilt!’

There was a sudden commotion in the crowded chapel; every one turned
towards the door at the end of the building, from which direction the
voice came.

Naomi’s heart sank with an appalling dread. Too well she knew that
voice, though she had never before heard it raised in those tones of
withering denunciation.

‘A worthy teacher,’ cried Arnold Pentreath, facing the excited
congregation, who were all standing up in their pews and staring at
him, as he stood conspicuous among the crowd at the door; ‘a teacher
to call sinners to repentance--a fit exponent of gospel truth--a man
whose soul is steeped in hypocrisy, whose hands are stained with
blood!’

There rose a chorus of exclamations; and then one of the stanchest of
Joshua’s followers, a brawny farmer, opened the door of his pew and
pushed his way out into the narrow aisle.

‘Now look ’ee yere, Cap’n Pentreath,’ he said; ‘I ain’t goin’ to
stand by and yere Muster Haggard abused. You’ll just hold your
tongue; and if you’re gone mazed, you’ll take your madness out o’
this yere chapel.’

On this there rose a general cry of reprobation at the Captain’s
unseemly conduct, Joshua Haggard standing up in his pulpit all the
while, looking down at his bewildered flock; firm as a rock, but pale
to the lips.

‘Come out, come out, all of you, and see the witness I bring against
him. You think I accuse him without grounds for my accusation. I
have my evidence close by--damning evidence. Let him confront it
if he can. Do you know that this man--your teacher and guide--is a
murderer, a secret assassin?’

‘It’s a lie!’ roared the man who had last spoken; ‘it’s a lie, and
I’d ram your lying words down your throat if I could get at ’ee!’

‘It’s the truth, and he knows it. Look at him. He doesn’t deny it,
you see. Look at your teacher--he is dumb. His eloquence fails him
for the first time in his life. He does not fear to insult his God
by his lying oracles, but he shrinks from the face of the man he has
injured. Come out, Joshua Haggard, and meet your accuser. He is at
the door. He is waiting--O, so patiently!--till you come and look him
in the face.’

Naomi could just distinguish the sailor’s white face in the dim
light. He stood above the crowd, raised on the step of the door,
the entrance of Little Bethel being somewhat higher than the chapel
itself.

All was over, then. The worst an avenging God could bring to pass
had come. Her father was known to others as that which she had in
so many an hour of agony suspected him to be. He was known as a
murderer. By some means or other the secret had been made known.
God’s ways are wonderful and mysterious. She had always thought that
it would be so. Her lost lover’s blood cried aloud for vengeance, and
the great Avenger had heard the cry.

At last Joshua spoke, and that firm full voice in which he had so
often swayed and moved his flock silenced all ejaculations. Every eye
was now turned towards the preacher, and all waited his indignant
denial of the charge brought against him.

‘I am accused of murder,’ said Joshua calmly and deliberately, ‘and
we are told the witness of my crime is at the door. Let us go forth
and meet him. Those who know me best here know whether God ever meant
me to be the shedder of my brother’s blood. He maketh one vessel
to honour, and another to dishonour. My position hitherto has been
honour, and you who know me can say whether I have been deserving of
any other lot.’

‘There is not a better man in the country,’ cried the farmer who had
first taken upon himself to be Joshua’s champion.

‘Nor a more pious--nor a more charitable,’ clamoured many voices.

‘God, who knows all things,’ cried Joshua, lifting up his voice with
a sudden burst of passion, ‘knows that whatever I have taught in
this tabernacle of His I have taught from my heart of hearts. I have
travailed for this people. I have loved them and striven for them. I
have not cheated them with pleasant words, though my heart yearned
towards them. Where others have chastised with whips I have chastised
with scorpions; but I have preached the Gospel with a single mind. I
have had no thought save to teach and to save. O Lord, if I have been
the vilest of sinners, at least in this Thy house I have been a true
and faithful servant!’

‘Ay, and so ye have, Muster Haggard,’ chimed in a chorus of women.

‘And now let me go forth to meet my accuser,’ said Joshua, opening
the door of his pulpit and slowly descending the stair.

Naomi had come out into the aisle. She threw herself in his way as
he passed, and linked her arm through his; and thus linked they came
along the narrow space together, the congregation falling back a
little to let them pass.

Joshua did not repulse his daughter. He suffered her to hold his
arm, seeming scarcely conscious of the contact. His dark deep-set
eyes looked straight before him under bent brows; his firm lips were
closely set. He looked a man who was ready to confront Satan himself
in bodily form.

‘Come,’ cried Arnold, beside himself with suppressed passion, ‘your
accuser is not loud or clamorous. He will wait quietly till you go to
him. It is I that am impatient to set you face to face.’

Joshua and his daughter were at the door by this time. They came
close to Arnold. Naomi almost touched him as the crowd swayed against
her. She looked at him with an expression which he never forgot.

‘O Arnold, what have you done?’ she said piteously, in a low voice.

‘My duty to my brother.’

They were outside the chapel in the next moment, in the clear summer
evening. The stars were shining in the pale gray; the great green
hills stood up against the cool night sky. All wore its accustomed
look of rustic peace. And just in front of the chapel-door four
men were standing with a litter, on which there lay a quiet figure
covered with tarpaulin.

‘Come and look at my witness,’ said Arnold, seizing Joshua by the arm
and dragging him towards the litter, and bending over it to lift the
edge of the covering which shrouded that motionless form.

‘Stop,’ cried Joshua, with a shuddering movement, ‘you need not lift
it; I can guess. It is death you would have me look on.’

‘Yes, death--the body of the man you murdered; my dead brother, whom
you slandered in his unhallowed grave, telling me that he had died
the death of the suicide. Hark ye, neighbours,’ cried Arnold, turning
to the awe-stricken crowd; ‘it is my brother--Oswald Pentreath--who
lies here, shot through the heart by yonder villain nearly a year
ago. God only knows if there is evidence enough to bring him to the
gallows; but God knows, and I know, that he did the deed. Before
you all I accuse him--your preacher, your pastor, your example of
righteousness--he is my brother’s murderer. The corpse lies here,
silent witness of the crime. He--your preacher yonder--was seen
waiting for my brother close to the spot where that corpse was found,
shots were heard by the witness who saw him, and my brother was never
seen after those shots were fired--never seen; he was lying at the
bottom of the old shaft, murdered, and flung there to rot forgotten
and unknown. And the murderer looked me in the face, and told me
my brother was a coward and had slain himself. If earthly justice
cannot touch him, if human ingenuity cannot bring this crime home to
his door, may God’s justice punish him as never man was punished by
mortal avenger! May Heaven make his lot more bitter than the hardest
doom man’s inhumanity ever devised for his fellow-man’s torture!’

‘Take your corpse to the dead-house,’ cried Joshua, with a
contemptuous calmness, as if those passionate threats of Arnold’s
passed him by like the wind, ‘and make your complaint to the coroner.
It is his business to find out the cause of your brother’s death.
All here know that I saved Oswald Pentreath’s life at the peril of my
own. That is my answer to your charge.’

‘Ay, that we do!’ cried ever so many voices, and the crowd turned
angrily upon Joshua’s accuser. ‘We all remember how he saved the
young Squire that stormy day four year ago--risked his life as if it
weren’t worth a groat, and brought him in alive off the rock when
ne’er another would ha’ done it. Doant ’ee be afraid, Muster Haggard.
Let un try to lay a finger on ’ee!’

‘Come home, father, come home,’ whispered Naomi, white as death, and
trembling so that she could hardly stand, yet with firmness to make
her careful for the father who had always been first in her love and
reverence--who was first to-night even, when her lover’s corpse lay
there before her under its dark pall, awful, unsightly, a thing to be
thought of with horror.

She held her father by the arm and led him away from that
dreadful spot, scarcely able to walk herself, and yet supporting
and sustaining him. The crowd followed, as if to protect their
minister--followed and congregated round the garden-rails as Joshua
went into his house; and Arnold was left alone with his dead and the
little group of farm-labourers who had helped him in his hideous
discovery.




                             CHAPTER XII.

                           AN OPEN VERDICT.


The claims of the business had kept Judith Haggard away from the
prayer-meeting at Little Bethel. She now came out to the door,
surprised and alarmed by the appearance of the eager assembly at her
brother’s heels--still more alarmed by Naomi’s pallid face, as the
girl led her father into the dimly-lighted passage.

‘Why, what in mercy’s name is the matter, girl?’ cried Judith; ‘has
your father had a stroke that you hold him like that, as if he
couldn’t stand without your help--and what brings all the town after
him?’

Joshua’s fixed eyes and rigid countenance--awfully calm, with a
blankness of expression which was like death itself--might have
justified the idea that he had lately been struck down by some
mortal illness, and was but just emerged from a state of helpless
unconsciousness.

‘No, Judith,’ he answered, with something of his old firmness; ‘the
visitation is not such as you think, and yet the hand of God is
heavy upon me. A calamity has befallen me which you could never have
foreseen, bringing shame upon my name and race, making all the days
that I have lived here in honour of no avail. Arnold Pentreath has
found his brother’s body, and accuses me of being his murderer.’

‘You!’ shrieked Judith, ‘you a murderer!--you murder the young
Squire, when you were all but drowned in the work of saving his
worthless life! If Arnold Pentreath can bring that charge against
you, he is a worse man than I should have thought him, knowing the
badness of his blood as I do, and expecting as little as I do from
any of his worthless race.’

‘He has so accused me.’

‘But why? On what grounds? Why suppose that his brother was murdered?’

‘His body has been found--in the old shaft.’

‘His body has been found--but that doesn’t prove that he was
murdered. He may have fallen into the shaft.’

‘Spare us your arguments to-night,’ said Joshua, with a weary air.
‘We shall know more to-morrow. I am tired and sick at heart, and want
rest. I am in God’s hands, and He will deal with me as seemeth best
to Him. Yes, in the hands of God--not in the hands of men.’

He left them without another word, and went slowly up-stairs to
his own room. The crowd had withdrawn quietly by this time, some
hastening back to the spot where they had left Arnold and his ghastly
burden--others dropping in at the First and Last to discuss the event
that had convulsed their peaceful settlement. All were of one mind
about Joshua Haggard, and agreed that the accusation brought against
him was as wild and foolish as it was infamous.

‘I allus said it ’ud be so,’ growled old Jabez Long, the fisherman,
from his favourite seat in the chimney-corner, where he hung over
the smouldering logs even at midsummer. ‘I allus said harm ’ud come
of pullin’ yon puir chap out o’ the say. There’s never no good comes
o’ savin’ a drownding man. Chuck un back into the water. That’s
wisdom--t’other’s foolishness. Why, ye see this yere chap can’t bide
quiet in his grave till he’s done Joshua Haggard a hinjury. He rises
up agen his deliverer like the onclane sperits that come out o’ the
tombs.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

There was an inquest held next day in the long low-ceiled
justice-room at the First and Last. The body of Oswald Pentreath lay
at the Grange, and there awaited the visitation of coroner and jury.
It lay in the long white drawing-room--that stately saloon which
in its air of disuse and solitude had always something of the look
of death. Here to-day lay the master of the house--in the dress he
had worn when he left it--a ghastly form, only recognisable by the
garments that clothed it, and the colour of the soft golden-brown
hair. A pocket-book stuffed with banknotes and the old Squire’s watch
and seals had been found upon the body, a proof that the assassin’s
motive had not been plunder.

Brief was the visitation of the jury to that awful chamber. They had
heard the evidence of Arnold Pentreath and the farm-labourers who
had assisted in the finding of the body. The search had been long
and careful. Guided by the statements of Farmer Westall’s cowboy,
Arnold had gone straight to the old shaft. He had first searched the
ground near the pit, and a few yards from the engine-house, under a
furze-bush, he had found one of his brother’s pistols discharged. The
second pistol had been nowhere forthcoming. Then by means of ropes
and ladders, and with due precautions against the effect of noxious
gases in the disused mine, Arnold and two of the men had gone down
the shaft. Their quest was soon ended. Oswald Pentreath lay at the
bottom of the shaft with a bullet through his heart. To bring the
body out of the mine was a labour of no small difficulty; but time,
the men’s sturdy willingness to help, and Arnold’s inexhaustible
energy, conquered all obstacles, and by the time the earliest star
was shining in the calm evening sky, Captain Pentreath was alone in
the engine-house, keeping guard over his unburied dead, while the men
went to the farmhouse to fetch a litter on which to carry the corpse
to the Grange.

That dismal walk through wood and lane had taken a long time.
The church-clock was striking ten as the procession entered the
straggling village street. The windows of Little Bethel shone dimly,
and Joshua’s voice was raised in vehement exhortation.

It was the sound of that voice--the impulse of a moment--which led
Arnold to enter the chapel, and denounce the man of whose guilt he
had no shadow of doubt.

Old Nicholas, the butler, had been one of the witnesses called to
identify the body of his late master. He remembered the clothes
Oswald Pentreath wore that last day--and he had helped him to put
on that coat--and he could swear to the pistol that had been found
under the furze-bush. He insisted upon telling the whole story of his
master’s departure, and his own fears and wonderment when the trunks
were brought back from Exeter. The Combhaven coroner was a patient
gentleman, accustomed to a long-tongued race, and listened quietly
to the butler’s statement. Here was a mystery to be unravelled, and
there was no knowing whence the first gleam of light might come.

But when Arnold’s evidence took the form of an accusation against
Joshua Haggard, the coroner stopped him peremptorily.

‘I cannot listen to any such speculation, Mr. Pentreath, to the
discredit of a man in Mr. Haggard’s position.’

‘They are no speculations,’ answered Arnold hotly. ‘They are
convictions. Hear what the next witness has to say, and then you
will see what reason I have for accusing Joshua Haggard of my
brother’s murder--though you can never know all the ground I have for
certainty--the looks, the words by which that assassin has betrayed
his guilt. Why, I ought to have known it the first time he talked to
me of my brother! It was clear enough, if I had had eyes to see, or a
mind to understand.’

The coroner protested against the irrelevance of such assertions; and
then Timothy the cowboy was called, and told over again the story of
that August afternoon on which he had seen Joshua Haggard go up to
Matcherly Common.

That picture of the man standing by the door of the engine-house
as if watching for some one impressed and puzzled the jury, but it
could not shake them in their conviction that Joshua Haggard was a
good man--a man who had taught and reproved them for many years, and
who had always dealt honourably with them in temporal matters--a man
whose weights were true as the sundial on the church-tower, and whose
goods were of the best quality. That such a man could commit a base
and cowardly crime savoured of impossibility. Witchcraft alone could
account for such a monstrous thing.

‘He couldn’t ha’ done it unless he wur bewitched,’ said one of the
deliberants when the jury took counsel together.

‘Who knows if that young wife of his didn’t bewitch him,’ argued
another. ‘There’s many ’as marked a change in him from the time she
came among us. His thoughts seemed to be roving like, half his time,
and he stared at you, skeared like, if you spoke to him sudden, and
he got careless about his business. You never found him behind his
counter.’

‘Joshua Haggard is not the man to hurt a wurrum,’ said a third
juryman. ‘He used to come and sit beside my puir old missus when she
was down with her last illness, and read to her by the hour together,
and she looked up to him as if he’d been a saint. I’ll agree to no
verdick that throws any blame on Muster Haggard.’

‘Who wants to bring a verdick agen Muster Haggard? But we mun come to
some sort o’ verdick, maunt we?’

‘Make it accidental death, can’t ’ee?’

‘But he couldn’t a got throwd down the shaft by accident.’

‘He might have fell in, mightn’t he?’

‘Ah, but who was it shot him?’

‘He might ha’ shot hisself fust, and just had strength enough left to
throw hisself down th’ old shaft.’

The discussion waxed warm after this, but the jurymen were finally
agreed that Oswald Pentreath had been murdered by some person or
persons unknown.

Arnold went to the coroner directly the inquest was over, and asked
for a warrant to arrest Joshua Haggard.

‘My dear sir, it is quite out of the question. There is no evidence
upon which I can issue a warrant.’

‘Not the fact that the man was seen there, hiding in the
engine-house, waiting for my unhappy brother. Is that no evidence?’
cried Arnold indignantly.

‘There is no evidence that he was hiding--there is no evidence that
he was waiting for your brother. The mere fact of his being seen at
that place a short time before the firing of the shots amounts to
nothing, even if we could be sure those shots the cowboy heard were
the shots that killed your poor brother. Joshua Haggard is a mystic,
a fanatic, a man who spends half his life wandering in solitary
places. I have often met him on the hills and commons. There is
nothing strange in the fact of his being seen up yonder that day.
Then again, there is an absence of all motive.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Arnold eagerly. ‘There was a motive, and
a strong one; but there are reasons why I could not speak of this
motive just now in open court. It involves error--though not actual
guilt--on my brother’s part.’

He told the coroner the story of Oswald’s attachment to Mrs. Haggard,
and the meeting between them that afternoon.

‘We have no evidence that Mr. Haggard knew of that meeting,’ said Mr.
Penruddock, who was much disinclined to make himself odious to all
chapel-going people by an unwise arrest of Joshua Haggard.

‘We have the evidence of his presence at that spot--at that hour.’

Arnold argued the matter, but in vain, and left Mr. Penruddock, of
Wrinkles Close, with the idea that a rustic coroner was the most
inept and useless of officials.

Once more Naomi heard the old church-bell tolling dismally in the
afternoon sunlight. Again she saw the funeral train wind slowly
round the curve of the hill, the same wind-tossed plumes--for even
in this June weather the breeze blew fresh from the western sea--the
same solemn figures and black horses and poor pomps and vanities of
earthly pride; and this time she turned from the shrouded window with
the heart-sickness of despair, and cast herself upon the ground, and
tried to shut out the light of day, and prayed for death as the one
issue and release from her miseries.

They were carrying him to his father’s grave--her murdered
lover--slain by her father’s cruel hand, and slain at her prompting.
Had she never put that fatal letter in her father’s hand, this thing
would never have been. Oswald would have gone his way in peace to
a new world and repentance, perchance, and quiet days, and Joshua
Haggard would have known nothing of that stolen farewell.

‘Half the guilt is mine,’ she cried; ‘let me bear all the punishment!
God be merciful to my misguided father, maddened by jealousy and
wounded love! O God, charge not against him his sin that day!’

She had not been alone with her father since that night in the
chapel. They had sat at the same board, and she had looked in his
face, which told no story of fear or agitation. He had gone about
his business with quiet regularity; taught in his school, visited
his sick, read and exhorted as of old--yes, even while the inquest
was being held at the First and Last, and all his flock were in a
state of wildest emotion on their pastor’s behalf. There had been
a crowd of Joshua’s people about the door of the justice-room, a
crowd that gave vent to its indignation in a half-smothered way as
Arnold Pentreath went in and out of the court. The feeling that
their pastor was being persecuted for his faith was strong among
them. This accusation of Arnold’s was too wild to be believed even
by the accuser. It was a lying invention of Satan, designed to put
this faithful flock to shame. This feeling pervaded the village,
and wherever the minister went he received some new proof of his
popularity. Women ran out of their cottage-doors as he passed by, and
clasped him by the hand, and offered him their sympathy in this great
trial. He shrank somewhat from these demonstrations of feeling. ‘Let
me bear my own burden,’ he said. ‘It is not too heavy for me.’

And then when he was alone he clasped his hands in prayer and
cried, ‘O Lord, reward these people for their affection and their
trustfulness, for I can only bring shame upon them. I have built up
a temple to Thine honour, and pulled it down, and abased and ruined
Thy holy place with mine own hands. I have given Thee half my heart,
and sold the other half to the devil. Let these people whom I have
loved and taught suffer no loss because of my iniquity. Let their
faith endure steadfast to the end, though my life prove a lie.’

Never had there been such a funeral as that of the young Squire
of Pentreath Grange. The old churchyard was filled with all the
inhabitants of Combhaven, and a crowd of strangers from outlying
hamlets among the hills and tiny fishing villages along the rocky
coast. This God’s acre lay on the side of a hill, and was a place
of ups and downs, beautified by many a fuchsia-shaded tomb, and by
myrtles that had grown into trees--a sheltered and pleasant spot,
hidden from the sight of the sea, but not so remote that the murmur
of the waves might not serve as a lullaby for quiet sleepers under
the ferny turf.

Arnold Pentreath stood by the open vault, pale and haggard, and with
a countenance which grief had made rigid as marble. He was quite
alone in his place by the coffin--chief and only mourner. There was
some sympathy felt with him, yet less than would have been given but
for that accusation brought against Joshua Haggard. This the Little
Bethelites could not pardon. False and monstrous as the charge was,
it had inflicted disgrace upon their sect. It was a fact that would
be remembered and recorded against them in days to come--a dark
tradition to be magnified and distorted by their enemies.

That last ceremonial completed--and O, how brief and hasty a business
it seems to the mourner who feels that this is the last!--the
coffin placed in its stony niche, for worms to invade and toads
to squat upon, and damp and mildew to disfigure--a place of decay
and loathsomeness for evermore--Arnold walked slowly away from the
churchyard, sick at heart, loathing the faces of his fellow-men. He
would not go back to the lych-gate where the coach was waiting for
him--would not be shut up again in the Barnstaple undertaker’s musty
chariot, to hide his grief behind a cambric handkerchief, and so be
conveyed slowly along the straggling village street, the principal
feature and object of interest for the assembled multitude. He left
the churchyard by another gate that led up to the hills--the wild
lonely hills, where he could hug his sorrow, and be alone with his
baffled vengeance and his passionate grief.

That was the sting--to know his brother’s murderer, to have no
shadow of doubt as to the assassin, and to be powerless to strike.
Conscience had its scorpions, no doubt, and Heaven held in reserve
its lash for the hypocrite and murderer; but this was not enough for
the brother who had loved his brother. Human nature in its weakness
and narrowness of vision yearned for personal vengeance. Arnold
wanted to bring this man to the gallows--to be the instrument of
his direct and immediate punishment. Nothing less could satisfy his
wounded love. His brother’s ashes cried to him for vengeance.

One consideration only came between him and this hunger for swift
revenge. He remembered that appealing look of Naomi’s. His Naomi--his
most noble among women--the woman he had hoped to win in days to
come--the woman he had pictured in the fair future sitting at his
board, ruling his household, making life sweet and honourable for him.

Could he ever hope to win her now? In his own mind he dissociated her
altogether from her father’s guilt. She was no less pure in his eyes
because her father’s hands were stained with blood. He was, even in
his direst anger, willing to believe that Joshua’s crime had been an
act of jealous madness, and not the deliberate guilt of a criminal
nature.

He could understand now why Naomi had forbidden him to hope, while
her looks and tones told him he was dear to her. She had known or
suspected her father’s guilt. This would account for that deep
melancholy which no hopeful utterances of his could dispel.

And if he brought Joshua Haggard to the gallows? What then? Was it
not to destroy utterly the woman he so reverenced, the woman he
fondly loved? Could Naomi survive so deep a shame, so deadly an
agony; or, surviving it, could she have any feeling but hatred for
the man who had brought shame and suffering upon her? He remembered
that agonised appeal in the chapel,

‘Arnold, what are you doing?’

And he had answered her coldly; though that answer meant the
destruction of those new hopes which had been so dear to him. He knew
her well enough to be very sure that she would cling to her father
till death; stand beside him on the gallows, were it possible, and be
true to him after death. To hunt Joshua to his doom as he meant to
hunt him must be to lose Naomi for ever.

‘Be it so,’ he cried. ‘What is my happiness, or her peace, that I
should put it in the balance with my brother’s blood? I have one duty
to perform; clear--direct--inexorable. Let me do that, and then go
back to the old rough life at sea, and forget that I ever dreamt of
being happy on shore.’




                            CHAPTER XIII.

                       JOSHUA STOPS HIS WATCH.


Little Bethel was crammed to suffocation on the Sunday that followed
the burial of Oswald Pentreath. Not only had the flock assembled in
fullest force to hear their pastor improve the occasion, and enlarge
upon the evil that had been wrought against him by the Philistine,
but many who were not of Joshua’s sect had been drawn to his
tabernacle by curiosity. They wanted to see how the man would bear
himself under circumstances so trying to manly fortitude.

The flock were not disappointed in the demeanour of their minister.
Never had Joshua conducted his simple service with greater dignity.
His prayers, those eloquent extemporary supplications modelled upon
the theology of William Law, yet, with something of Jeremy Taylor’s
florid warmth in their colouring, carried his congregation along
with him like rushing waters down which a fleet of frail boats are
driven tumultuously, knowing not whither they drift. It was by his
eloquence in prayer chiefly that Joshua had established his power
over his flock. He elevated their souls by his own enthusiasm; they
felt themselves raised to a spiritual height which of themselves
alone they could never have obtained. They heard their cares and
sorrows, their petty doubts and difficulties, their failures and
shortcomings and evil acts laid at the foot of the great Throne, with
such appeals for pardon and pity as their dull minds could never
frame, their uneloquent lips never utter. Joshua took them up in
his arms, as it were, and held them at the feet of their Saviour,
and called down the eternal mercy for them. He used the Scriptures
for their benefit, as a skilful barrister uses precedents for the
extrication of his clients. He found bounteous promises that they
had never dreamed of in those familiar words of Holy Writ, covenants
and pledges of grace and mercy. He held a golden key, with which he
opened the treasury of Heaven, and brought forth promises and favours
for his people.

To-day his prayers took a tone of deepest self-humiliation. He
laid himself prostrate before offended Heaven, and there was none
of the exultant pride which the flock expected to discover in his
supplications, no thanksgiving for an unsullied conscience and a
soul clear of offence, for rectitude which could laugh to scorn
the revilings of the evil-minded. It was the publican and not the
Pharisee who stood up to pray in that rural temple.

The hymn he chose was of a gloomy cast--but all his ministrations had
of late been of a gloomy character. When he went up into the pulpit,
and looked round at the upturned faces, and slowly opened his Bible,
there was a hush of expectancy. It was thought that his text would
have some bearing on the strange event of the past week, and that in
his sermon he would take occasion publicly to declare the falsehood
and iniquity of the charge that had been brought against him.

But when he had given out the text, with his usual deliberate
distinctness, there was a general sense of disappointment--the verses
he had chosen seemed to have so little bearing on the subject which
filled the public mind.

‘In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a
sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one
shall die for his own iniquity.’ Only Naomi understood the meaning
of those words of assurance. For each the burden of his own sin;
the assassin’s innocent children were to have no portion in the
shame and agony of his guilt. Upon this text Joshua Haggard enlarged
with more than his accustomed power. Very awful was the picture
which he painted of the sinner’s earthly doom, the slow agonies of
conscience, the shameful shrinking from the face of his fellow-men,
the caresses of his children stinging him like the sting of serpents,
the reverence and obedience of his household a mockery and a
reproach--the light of day intolerable, the sun a burden, the quiet
night accursed. And when from this picture of the sinner’s suffering
on earth he turned to the contemplation of his punishment hereafter,
the vision assumed a darker and more terrible aspect. Before the
titanic tortures of that land of shadows, earth’s puny torments
shrunk to the sting of buzzing summer flies as measured against the
venom of the cobra or the rattle-snake. Joshua conjured up those
visions of horror with a strange uncanny power, as if the fiend had
lifted the corner of hell’s curtain, and showed him the fiery gulf
behind. He dwelt on these terrors with a gloomy relish, and spoke of
hell and doom with a familiar knowledge, as if he had steeped his
soul in the fires of Pandemonium.

‘But for the sinner’s children,’ he cried at last, withdrawing his
mind, as by an effort, from this contemplation of the nethermost pit,
‘they shall go free, Heaven will not lay upon them the burden of a
father’s sin. He shall perish, he shall go to his doom, but they
shall remain scathless. On earth, perchance, their portion may be
shame and suffering, for earth’s judgments are lying judgments; but
God is righteous, and will keep this promise, and will adjust the
balance.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

Coming out of chapel, amidst the crowd, Naomi found herself close to
a stranger who was talking of her father.

‘I can believe anything of this man now I’ve heard him preach,’ he
said.

‘Why?’ inquired his companion.

‘Because I am very sure he is a madman.’

‘I don’t see that,’ said the other, startled by the assertion. ‘His
sermon was violent and gloomy, but sane enough.’

‘No sane man ever preached as that man preaches, and you may take my
word for it.’

Here the crowd parted Naomi from the speaker, but what she had heard
impressed her deeply. It was hardly a new thought which was thus
abruptly presented to her. The change in her father had inspired
her with fears, to which she had hardly dared to give their actual
form. Who was to discriminate between perpetual gloom, moody
silence, an unbroken reserve, and the tokens and indications of a
mind distraught? That her father’s whole character had undergone an
alteration since the day of Oswald Pentreath’s disappearance, she
well knew. Was it not possible that, on that day, the clear light
of reason was darkened for ever? From that fatal hour he had broken
loose from all old ties--from children and wife, and friends and
business--he had been like an owl of the desert, a pelican in the
wilderness.

But even with the horror of the thought there came a blessed sense
of relief. If reason had left him in the hour of temptation, if the
light was quenched before he did that fatal deed, her father was not
accountable for his sin. It was not with his whole mind that he had
broken the Divine Law. The clouded brain had not taken the measure of
the act.

This offered a way out of her deepest sorrow. Dreadful as earthly
penalties might be--shameful, intolerable, revolting--it was Heaven’s
anger she most dreaded for the father she so devotedly loved. Sure
of God’s pardon and pity for the sinner, she could see him perish on
the scaffold with only earthly sorrow, with only sense of earthly
suffering and loss; secure of a fair hereafter, a glorious meeting
in a land of rest and peacefulness, where the red robes of repentant
sinners were to be washed whiter than snow.

Awful, then, as this thought of mental alienation was, there was
comfort in it. She could cling closer to her afflicted father,
pitying and pardoning him; full of remorse for her own share in his
suffering, ascribing to herself half his guilt.

‘If I had but spared him the knowledge of that letter, Heaven might
have spared me this anguish,’ she thought.

Joshua was absent from the family board at the two-o’clock Sunday
dinner, an uninteresting repast of cold provisions, which James
Haggard regarded as one of the privations and trials of his career.
Other people in Combhaven rioted in hot joints and savoury potatoes,
reeking with unctuous grease and gravy, followed by huge fruit pie or
pasty, and perchance a bowl of cream.

‘I don’t call it honouring the Sabbath to sit down to a worse dinner
than on a work-a-day,’ Jim remarked argumentatively. ‘And all that
Sally may sit in a corner of our pew and breathe hard all through the
sermon.’

‘Eat your dinner, and be thankful,’ said aunt Judith severely; ‘or
leave it, and hold your tongue. I wonder you can be so base-minded
as to think of your meals at such a time, with such affliction come
upon your house as we’ve had to bear.’

‘Do you mean Captain Pentreath bringing that charge against father?’
asked Jim contemptuously. ‘I’m not such a fool as to fret about that.
Any lunatic might accuse us of murder, or arson, or high treason,
or gunpowder plot. Poor Pentreath’s head’s been turned by finding
his brother at the bottom of Matcherly mine. I was over at the First
and Last when the inquest was going on, and heard everybody saying
that it was worse than madness to lay such a crime at father’s door.
There’s not a man in Combhaven would believe a word against father.’

‘It would be hard if they would,’ retorted Judith, ‘after the life
your father has lived among ’em all these years, and no one able
to bring a reproach against him, unless it was for foolishness in
marrying a silly girl for the sake of her pretty face.’

‘I never saw any silliness in Cynthia,’ said Jim; ‘and for my part I
wish she was home again. I miss her pretty face, though it was sad
enough for the last twelvemonth, goodness knows. I don’t think we any
of us made her too happy.’

‘She’s a deal better away,’ replied Judith, with a sour look. ‘She
turned your father’s thoughts from his duties, and never brought
anything but trouble into this house. Let her stop with friends of
her own station, if she has any.’

‘Ain’t it rather like turning her out of doors to let her stop away
so long?’ asked Jim.

‘I didn’t know it was a son’s place to find fault with his father’s
doings,’ said Judith. ‘Your father’s the best judge of his duty to
his wife, I should hope. It isn’t for us to interfere. He didn’t ask
our leave when he brought her home, and it’s not likely he’d want our
leave to send her away.’

‘It’s a pity things couldn’t go smoother, anyhow,’ pursued Jim
persistently; ‘for she’s a pretty little thing, and a good little
thing, that would never do harm to any one.’

‘That’s all you know, Mr. Clever. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to
keep your opinion till you’re asked for it. Why don’t you eat your
dinner, Naomi?’ inquired Miss Haggard sharply. ‘It’s as good a bit of
beef as ever was cooked, and I suppose _you’re_ not too dainty to eat
cold meat on the Sabbath?’

‘I’m not hungry, aunt,’ said Naomi.

She had been sitting with her plate before her, making no attempt
to eat, hearing her aunt and brother talking, but in nowise
understanding them. Her thoughts were with her father in his
lonely room. He had pleaded a headache, and gone quietly up to his
bedchamber when he came in from chapel. How was he bearing his
burden? Without consolation, without sympathy. Yes, verily without
human sympathy; but for this believer, even in his depth of guilty
despair, there still remained a pitying Ear that would listen to his
groaning, and take account of his anguish. The Friend of sinners
would not be deaf to his cry.

‘I think I’ll go up-stairs and see how father is, and if he wants
anything,’ said Naomi, rising from her seat at the table.

‘If I was you, I wouldn’t go bothering and disturbing him,’ said
Judith, with her accustomed tartness; ‘but of course you can do as
you like about it.’

This was an indirect order not to go, but for once in her life Naomi
disobeyed, and went straight to Joshua’s room.

She knocked, but there was no answer, and she went in quietly, hoping
to find her father asleep.

He was sitting in front of the open escritoire, his arms folded,
his eyes bent upon the ground. He did not stir, or look up at his
daughter’s entrance, nor even when she came close to him and laid her
hand gently on his shoulder.

She stood for a few moments in silence, waiting for him to take some
notice of her; but he sat like a statue, and never lifted his eyes
from the ground.

‘Dear father,’ she began, in a low and tender voice, as she would
have spoken to him had he been lying ill, at death’s door, ‘I was
obliged to come to you. I could not bear to think of you alone and
unhappy. Dearest, it is a heavy affliction that has fallen upon us,
but not heavier than we can bear. Father,’ sinking on her knees
beside his chair, and putting her arms round him, ‘if your guilt
is deep, I am guilty too. I sinned grievously when I gave you his
letter. I suffered my evil passions to get the better of me. My heart
was full of hatred and rancour. Let us repent, and seek for mercy
together. We both have sinned.’

‘The letter,’ muttered Joshua, with a bitter laugh, ‘the letter was
not so much. I saw him hold her in his arms and kiss her--saw her
yield herself up to a love that was stronger than honour or duty,
or her love of God--saw her folded to his heart under Heaven’s
all-seeing eye.’

‘It was my fault, father. But for that letter you would never have
known of that last meeting. It was but a stolen farewell, and they
both meant to do their duty. They were so young, and had erred for
want of thought.’

‘They were thoughtful enough to plan secret meetings--thoughtful
enough to deceive me. And I believed her purest among women--free
from all taint of sin. Do not speak of her--or of him. They sinned,
and have reaped the fruit of sin. “The wages of sin is death.”’

‘Father, we have sinned grievously, you and I; and we can have no
hope of mercy unless we repent,’ said Naomi, horrified at Joshua’s
hardness of tone, which implied an unconsciousness of the weight and
measure of his crime.

‘My life has been one long atonement. I have laboured always in the
work of salvation.’

‘But by one sinful act all might be undone--in one dark hour the
labour of a lifetime might be lost,’ urged Naomi.

Her father made no answer.

‘Dearest, will you not kneel and pray with me?’ she pleaded. ‘Will
you not help me to lift this burden from my soul? I am weary with the
weight of my sin. I loved him, and yet betrayed him to you. O, it was
the act of a Judas! _He_ must have loved his master. It was jealousy
that made him a traitor. Father, if you cannot be sorry for your sin,
be sorry for mine.’

In vain; the brooding eyes were never lifted from the ground. Naomi
looked up into the rigid face. Yes, there was an expression there
as of light quenched, at least a temporary aberration. He was not
listening, he was not following her.

He sat for some time thus, Naomi still kneeling by him and watching
him, but in silence. Then he stretched out his hand to the open Bible
that lay upon his desk, and began to read.

‘Leave me, my dear,’ he said; ‘I am better alone.’

‘I would so much rather stay with you, dear father. I will not
disturb you.’

‘Go, dear; I wish to be alone. I have to command my thoughts. It will
be time for chapel presently.’

‘I will go then, dear father. But while we are alone, let me say one
thing.’

‘I am listening.’

She put her arms round his neck, and rested her head on his shoulder.

‘You know how I loved Oswald, father, to the last, even after his
heart had gone away from me. But I told you then, as I tell you now,
you were always first and dearest, always the object of my highest
reverence and love. That could never change in me. No act of yours
could lessen my love, no affliction Heaven could bring upon you could
lower you in my esteem. Remember that always, father. Come what may,
I am your loving daughter to the end!’

With this assurance she left him, a little more at peace with herself
for having thus spoken.

The afternoon service was gone through very quietly. Joshua had a
subdued and weary air, as if worn out by the effort of the morning.
The congregation were less alert and exalted in their piety, as was
natural in people who had dined heavily, and given way to fleshly
snares in the shape of too-substantial pastry. Even the hymns had a
slumberous tone, and acted as lullabies upon some elder members of
the flock whose feeble knees were an excuse for a sitting posture.

After service, Joshua taught for half an hour in his school, and
said a few earnest words to the young men of his adult night-school,
a class in which he had taken a special interest. They were very
touching words, and well remembered afterwards.

Joshua was absent from the tea-table as he had been from the
dinner-table. His headache was worse, he told his sister, and he was
going to lie down. Naomi had an evening Scripture class to attend to
after tea, a task that would occupy her for about an hour. She went
to this duty at half-past six o’clock, while Judith enjoyed the one
Sabbath luxury which she permitted herself, a half hour’s nap in the
chintz-covered arm-chair by the best parlour-window, screened from
the gaze of passing pedestrians, going by at the rate of one in ten
minutes, by the graceful droop of the well-starched curtain.

Joshua was alone, sitting by the escritoire, as he had sat when Naomi
went to him in the afternoon. He had locked the door, determined to
be free from all intrusion--free even from his daughter’s pitying
love. He wanted nothing between him and that awful solitude in which
he had lived of late--the isolation which a mind unhinged makes for
itself.

He sat thus till the twilight thickened and the pages of his open
Bible grew dim. Even in the troubled state of his brain--a trouble
which had been growing for months--that book was his rock of defence,
his sheet-anchor. He looked into those pages for justification, for
assurance of grace and redemption, and he seldom looked in vain.
If he had sinned, had not David sinned also, and yet retained his
exalted place in the love of God and men? Was he to humble himself
more than David humbled himself? Had David ever ceased to be King,
and Priest, and teacher, chief and supreme among the people? If _he_
had fallen, had not Peter also fallen, and yet received that divine
commission which gave him charge of Christ’s flock?

‘I will preach the Gospel and teach men while I have breath,’
protested Joshua, laying his hand upon the sacred book. ‘What have
the burdens on my conscience to do with my teaching? What does it
matter that I know myself a sinner if I can expound the word of God?
He has given me a gift, and I will use it--to the uttermost and to
the last. If this is to be a hypocrite, my hypocrisy shall go with me
to my grave.’

This was the summing-up of his position in one of his calmer moods;
but his mind was not always so clear, or his views so fixed and
resolute. There were moments to-night, as he sat in the summer dusk
while the shadows grew and deepened in the lonely old-fashioned
room, grotesque shadows of familiar things which he had known from
childhood--there were intervals in which his brain grew clouded, and
past and present were alike dim and distorted. His thoughts flashed
far and wide like the erratic gleams of a lantern--now alighting upon
some picture of the past, now plunging into the dark gulf of the
future. He saw himself as he had been at the outset of his laborious
career--eager for self-sacrifice, careless of all worldly loss,
sustained by an enthusiast’s exaggerated hopes, and an enthusiast’s
indifference to suffering. He had laboured, and had been plenteously
rewarded. He had been a wandering light shining in dark places and
forgotten corners of the earth, and had brought many lost sheep
home to the fold. Then his father had died, and he had been called
back to his native place, to find that, after all, he had lost
nothing of earthly gain by his constancy, for, despite the old man’s
threatenings, he had left all to his only son.

This day of inheritance Joshua felt to have been in some measure a
time of temptation and falling away. He had turned aside from the
desert and desolate places to dwell in a land of fatness. He had
been content to serve a few instead of serving many. He had sat down
under his vine and fig-tree, and taught one little flock instead
of wandering from village to village seeking those whom the Church
had forgotten, or cared for with a lukewarm love. True that he had
laboured hard for his flock, walked many miles, stretched his cure of
souls to its utmost limits, taught the young, brought the light of
education, both spiritual and secular, into many dark places; but he
had from this time ceased to be a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth,
a disciple who has given up all things for his Master.

Then came his prosperous first marriage, the birth of his children,
new ties that bound him to the old home.

How strange and remote those early years seemed as the fitful light
of memory shone upon them!

The picture changed. Those peaceful monotonous days were past. He
was standing on the Cornish common in the pure sunshine, the great
Atlantic glittering in the distance, the sandy knolls and hollows all
ablaze with yellow furze, the subtle scent of that golden blossom in
the air--standing on the threshold of a new life. Never after that
hour was he to be the same man, independent of all human influence.
Henceforth he was to be chained to humanity by mankind’s most pitiful
weakness, an unreasoning love for a weak fellow-creature.

‘I verily believe I loved her from that first day,’ he thought.
‘Her image never left me. She was always before me, sitting in the
sunlight, with her drooping hair like pale gold. Can I doubt that
Satan set her there for my entanglement and ruin? “His heart shall
be heavy for her sake, he shall be so troubled that he shall grow
dumb,” said the fiend. But I have cheated him of his prey. He has
had my heart, and bruised and broken it, but he has not quenched my
spirit--he has not silenced me. I have borne my burden and continued
to teach and exhort, and will so continue to the end. No snare of the
Arch-tempter hiding behind a fair face shall destroy me.’

Then followed a moment of relenting.

‘She seemed so innocent, so pure. She was so gentle and obedient,
and owned so meekly that she had been tempted, and had sinned in
hearkening for a little while to the tempter. O God, there could be
no vileness in the soul that looked up at me from those gentle eyes.
And I thrust her from me with violence and contumely, and sent her
back to servitude and dependence. My wedded wife, the one creature I
have loved most on earth!’ He clasped his hands, and looked upward in
exaltation of mind.

‘Surely that was an atonement for my weakness. Surely that was a
sacrifice which Heaven must approve. And yet I have known no peace
of mind since that day. Heaven has given me no token of approval or
forgiveness.’

That intense egotism which is one of the characteristics of a mind
off its balance had taken possession of him. He felt himself the
centre of the universe. The Bible had been written for him. He stood
face to face with his Creator, and felt himself worthy to be saved.

His daughter knocked at the door presently, and asked him if he would
not have a light.

‘No,’ he answered; ‘my soul can hold communion with God in the
darkness. I am alone, as Elijah was upon the mountain, waiting for
the voice of the Lord.’

It was after midnight when he laid himself upon his bed, wearied with
meditations in which his brain had been hyper-active. Tired as he
was with the long day and its double service, the long evening and
its protracted thoughtlessness, he could not easily sleep; and when
at last his weary eyelids closed, his slumber was more like a trance
than a sleep.

He saw his wife’s face looking up at him as she had looked that last
day in the lane, pleadingly, piteously, full of grief and love. He
saw it more vividly than faces are seen in dreams--saw it close to
him as he lay upon his pillow, and was dimly conscious of lying
there, and the hour of the night, and that this face was looking
at him from afar off, though it seemed so near that he could have
stretched out his hand and touched it.

Then came a voice that thrilled him:

‘Joshua, Joshua, come to me!’

He was awake and on his feet in an instant. It seemed to him that
his waking ears had heard that voice--that it was something more
than a part of his dream. He stood listening for some moments, half
expecting to hear the cry repeated, and his wife’s hand upon his door.

He went to the door, and opened it, and looked out upon the landing
faintly lighted by the stars.

No, the place was empty, the lower part of the house was dark and
silent. Nothing had happened. It was only a dream.

‘But it is a dream sent by Heaven,’ he said. ‘I will hearken to it,
and go. Yes, my love, I forgive you; I am coming to you. I bring you
pardon and love.’

He struck a light from the old tinder-box, lighted his candle, and
began to dress himself hurriedly. He had looked at his watch on first
rising, wondering to find so little of the night was gone. It was
twenty minutes past one o’clock.

Joshua took his watch from under his pillow, lifted the glass, and
laid his finger on the hands and stopped them. Only once before in
his life had he ever done this thing, and that occasion was the
moment of his conversion, the instant in which the divine assurance
of his election and calling had been breathed into his soul. At that
blessed moment he had stopped his watch that it might for ever record
that one hallowed hour. It was the watch he had used as a young
man, and was still in his desk: he had never carried it afterwards,
and had endured no small inconvenience for the want of it till his
father’s fine old timekeeper had descended to him as a part of his
inheritance.

It was a curious fancy which moved him to do the same thing to-night.
He could have given no reason for the impulse, but he obeyed it
blindly, and the loud ticking of the watch grew still at twenty
minutes past one.




                             CHAPTER XIV.

                         JOSHUA’S CONFESSION.


Another bright June morning; newly-blown roses looking in at the
open windows, born, like the butterflies, for a day. Naomi was astir
earlier than usual after a sleepless night, full of care for her
father. O, if that sweet air of heaven, which is a joy in itself for
the happy, could but blow away one’s sense of abiding trouble, could
but bring the promise of relief! This was what Naomi thought, as she
stood at her open window, looking out at the calm hill-tops, from
which the summer mists were rising, like a veil slowly unfolded by
invisible hands.

She was at her father’s door before six o’clock, knocking and waiting
his reply with fast-throbbing heart, fearing she knew not what. There
was no answer. She felt the floor reeling under her feet. Awful fears
seized upon her. She knocked loudly, violently almost, and still no
answer. She tried the door with shaking hands, expecting to find it
locked, as it had been yesterday evening when she came to inquire
about the light; but it yielded under her hand, and she went into her
father’s room.

It was empty. She looked round with wild eager eyes, almost beside
herself in the agony of that great dread. The room was quite empty.
The bed had been lain upon; the candle had been left burning, and
had burned down to the brazen socket. There was a letter lying on
the escritoire, which Naomi seized upon eagerly. It was addressed to
herself.

She tore it open, still full of fear; for the letter might reveal
some terrible determination. There was another letter inside, sealed,
and addressed to Captain Pentreath.

  ‘My beloved Daughter,--I am going to Penmoyle to seek my wife,
  and shall return to Combhaven no more. My duty there is done. I
  have taught my people to know the right path. I can give them up
  into the hands of a new minister. I am going where the darkness
  has never been dispelled by Gospel light: I am going to find new
  duties in desolate places. But first I must see my wife. I would
  pardon and bless her before I go. Do not follow me. My lot is
  fixed.

  ‘Do not fail to give the enclosed letter, with the seal unbroken,
  into Captain Pentreath’s hands.--Your affectionate father,

                                                    ‘JOSHUA HAGGARD.’

Naomi lifted up her heart in thankfulness. He had gone to do no
wicked and desperate act. He had gone to seek his wife, carrying with
him pardon and love. The ice had melted. Who could tell what healing
for mind and soul there might be in the change?

But this letter to be delivered to Arnold Pentreath? Here was a
fearful thought. What if it were a confession of her father’s
guilt--a confession which would put his life in Arnold’s power? And
Arnold had already shown himself merciless. To withhold the letter
would be to disobey her father’s express command. To deliver it might
be to endanger his life. What was she to do?

She sat by the escritoire with the letter in her hand, perplexed
in the extreme. Then, finding thought useless to show her the way,
she fell upon her knees and prayed for guidance, prayed long and
earnestly.

She rose from this prayer resolved, whether for good or ill, she
would obey her father’s behest, and deliver the letter, trusting
to God’s mercy and her own influence with Arnold for the issue. He
had pretended to love her--nay, had loved her--before this fearful
discovery of his brother’s fate. She must have some power over him
still; her pleading must be of some avail. Yes, she would obey her
father, and in so doing proclaim her trust in Providence.

‘“Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord; for very great are His
mercies,”’ said Naomi. ‘Can I doubt that my father is in God’s hands
to-day, though men may seem to have the ordering of his fate?’

She lost no time in carrying out her determination, but went back to
her room and put on her bonnet, and then ran down-stairs.

She was going out at the street-door when it suddenly occurred to her
that her father’s absence must speedily be discovered, and would
make a commotion in the house if it were in no manner accounted for.
So she went to the kitchen, where her aunt was employed in her usual
morning duty of giving out provisions for the day’s consumption from
a rigorously locked store-room.

To her Naomi quietly announced that her father had started early that
morning on his way to Penmoyle to see his wife.

‘Started early!’ cried Judith incredulously. ‘Why, the Truro coach
doesn’t go before half-past seven, and it’s not a quarter-past yet.
What do you mean by started early?’

‘He may have set out to walk part of the journey, perhaps, aunt,’
answered Naomi. ‘You know how fond he is of walking. He was gone at
six o’clock when I went to his room, and had left me a letter to say
he was going to Penmoyle.’

‘I think he might have written to me,’ said Judith, with her offended
air. ‘If he must needs go off at a moment’s notice, throwing all the
housekeeping into a muddle--you needn’t roast the mutton to-day,
Sally; the cold beef will be good enough for us--he might at least
have had the civility to address his explanation to me. After keeping
his house nearly thirty years it’s hard to have such a slight put on
me.’

‘The beef, mum!’ remonstrated Sally; ‘there’s hardly anything but
bones.’

‘Nonsense, girl; there’s plenty of picking between the bones. And if
I’ve time I’ll make a treacle pudding.’

Naomi vanished while the dinner was under discussion. Her heart was
very heavy as she went to the Grange. She had not entered the house
since the days when she had been Oswald’s plighted wife, and the
future lay fair before her, full of the promise of happiness. And now
there was a thought of horror in the very road by which she went.
Twice had her murdered lover been carried along that road; and now he
was lying quietly in his grave, and all earthly hopes lay buried with
him.

The old house looked peaceful enough in the cheerful morning light.
Gardens and shrubberies had been better kept since Arnold’s return.
The beds and borders were full of sweet-smelling flowers. The
windows were all open, and a handsome red setter--a favourite of
Arnold’s--was lying in the porch.

Naomi rang the noisy old bell, which was answered after a longish
pause by Nicholas the butler, who came across the hall, carrying his
master’s breakfast on one of those old silver trays which had been
kept under lock and key during the Squire’s lifetime, but which the
less careful sailor had given out for daily use.

At sight of Naomi the old man stopped short, with a startled look.

‘Lord, miss, how you skeared me!’ he exclaimed.

‘Can I see your master, Nicholas?’

‘To be sure ’ee can, miss. He’s to his break’ust in the blue
parlour--the room that was Squire’s study, you know; but the
harkiteck had it all routed out and painted.’

The butler opened the door of that small room on the left hand of the
porch, and ushered Naomi into the presence of Captain Pentreath.

He started up with a cry, half surprise, half welcome, as if to see
her only were in itself so glad a thing, that he forgot all the
painful circumstances of their meeting. This oblivion lasted but for
a moment. His face clouded, and he looked at her deprecatingly.

‘Naomi, I have been longing for such a meeting as this. I want to
tell you--to make you understand, if I can--that in what I have done
I have been constrained by my duty to the dead. Had your father
wronged me--that wrong the deepest one man could do another--I would
have endured all for your sake; but my duty to the dead is sacred. At
the hazard of breaking your heart, with the certainty of losing your
regard, I was forced to do what I did.’

‘Hush!’ she said; ‘do not speak of me or my feelings. You have
brought great misery upon us--an irreparable shame. It may be in your
power to work still greater misery for us. I can but do _my_ duty to
God and my father. My first duty to both is obedience. I have brought
you a letter.’

‘A letter?’

‘From my father. But before I give it you, promise that you will make
no evil use of it, that you will not make his own words the means of
destroying him. I cannot tell what he has written. I know that all
yesterday his mind was sorely disturbed--that he has been oppressed
and troubled in mind for a long time. How can I tell what he has
written? Promise me that you will not use this letter against him.’

‘I promise,’ answered Arnold, with a touch of scorn. ‘It is not
likely that a letter which your father writes to me of his own free
will can prove a weapon with which to strike him.’

He opened the letter, prepared to find an artful and studied
composition setting forth the minister’s innocence of the crime
charged against him, a plausible and subtle defence, such as the
ingenuity of a clever and thoughtful man might elaborate at his
leisure. The paper almost dropped from his hand as he read the first
line.

  ‘Arnold Pentreath, you accused me rightly. It was this hand slew
  your brother. But the deed was not so basely done as you think.
  We stood face to face, each with his weapon in his hand. It was
  what the sons of Belial call an honourable meeting, though my
  conscience tells me it was murder. He stole my young wife’s
  heart--came between me and the most perfect happiness that Heaven
  ever vouchsafed to man. I met him with my wife’s kiss still warm
  upon his lip. I had seen them part, mind you, as lovers whose
  hearts are cloven asunder in parting. I told him that he owed me
  his life, and he was willing to admit the debt. “My life is of so
  little value that you are heartily welcome to it,” he said; “I
  have often thought of taking it myself.” He had a pair of pistols
  about him, and proposed that we should fight on the spot; but
  withdrew his proposal the next moment, remembering that I had no
  practice in the use of firearms.

  ‘I told him I was willing to set my want of skill against his bad
  cause. “It is you that are the wrongdoer,” I cried; “Heaven will
  be on my side.”

  ‘We fought, and he fell. I was alone with his dead body, and all
  the horror of my position was suddenly revealed to me. According
  to my own creed I was a murderer; and in the sight of the world
  I should stand revealed as a murderer if I were found with this
  dead man by my side.

  ‘Satan, who had made me blind to the guilt of my act till it was
  accomplished, now tempted me to the baseness of concealment. I
  dragged the body to the edge of the shaft and threw it down, and
  went quickly home, and kept silence about your brother’s fate
  till the day I spoke of him with you.

  ‘I told you that in my opinion your brother had committed
  suicide. I say still that he flung his life recklessly away. Had
  he pleaded or argued with me my blind passion might have been
  subjugated. He put the weapon which killed him into my hand.

  ‘God rest his soul, and pardon my sin!

  ‘I am going forth to a life as desolate as that of St. John in
  the desert. May God so appoint my punishment here that I may not
  lose my portion in glory hereafter!

                                                    ‘JOSHUA HAGGARD.’

Naomi stood before Captain Pentreath with ashen lips, watching him as
he read the letter, praying dumbly all the while, and with that sense
of efficacy in her prayers, even in this moment of suspense, as only
an implicit faith can experience.

‘Thank God!’ exclaimed Arnold, giving her the letter; ‘thank God it
is not so bad as I believed! This confession has the stamp of truth;
and--he is your father!’

No words can tell the depth of tenderness in that little speech and
the look that went with it.

Both look and tone were lost on Naomi. Her eyes were rooted to the
letter; triumph, gratitude, joy, illumined her face.

‘It was not murder,’ she cried; ‘there was no treachery, no secrecy;
they stood face to face--sinners both--blinded, maddened by passion.
It was no murder. Father, how could I have wronged you by such base
thoughts--I, who have known and loved you all these years? Guilty!
yes, I will acknowledge your guilt; but not a treacherous assassin.
My God, I thank Thee!’

In days when the first gentlemen of the land asserted their sense
of honour and superiority to the common herd by slaying one another
in a formal manner the idea of a duel was not so revolting as it is
now. Even to Naomi, educated as she had been in a far different creed
from the code of honour, the knowledge that her father had stood
face to face with his foe, risking his own life against the life he
took, was an infinite relief. In horrible nightmare dreams she had
seen him, with the assassin’s face, creeping stealthily towards his
victim. The horrid image had haunted her sleeping and waking; and now
that horror was laid at rest for ever. Her belief in this confession
of her father’s was as implicit as her faith in God.

‘Arnold,’ she pleaded, with deep humility, as one who asks an almost
impossible boon, ‘can you ever bring yourself to forgive my erring
father?’

‘No!’ he answered stoutly; ‘but I no longer look upon him with
loathing. There is one atonement left to him--he can stand face to
face with me, as he stood with my brother, and let God judge between
us.’

Naomi flung herself at his feet, clasping his hands, as if he held
the keys of life and death.

‘No, no, no!’ she cried; ‘you would not be so cruel, so wicked--you,
who condemn the shedder of blood!’

‘I want the life of the man who slew my brother. So much the better
if I can have it in an honourable manner. Yes, Naomi, we will meet
as men of honour should, and let the righteous cause win.’

‘Arnold,’ she cried, ‘I thought you loved me.’

The pathos of that cry moved him. He bent over her as she knelt at
his feet, resisting his effort to raise her, clinging to his knees
in her agony, pleading as only women can plead for the love of their
dearest.

‘If I thought you loved me, and would give me love for love,’ he
said, with a sudden change to passionate tenderness, ‘I would spare
his life; yes, let him go unpunished to the grave; yes, forget that I
ever had an only and beloved brother. It is a mean offer, a miserable
bargain, proving me selfish, dastardly; but I am human, and I love
you. My love, my only love, answer me.’

‘Can you forgive me for being my father’s daughter?’

‘When I believed the worst of him I loved you, and held you unsullied
by his guilt.’

‘You must forgive him, Arnold. You would forgive him if you knew
as much as I do. He was not in his right senses that awful day. I
saw him go through the wood. Yes, I was there watching for him,
fearing evil. His face has haunted me ever since. It was the face
of a madman. It was my sin that caused all. Yes, Arnold, mine. You
do not know how vile I am. I gave my father the letter your brother
wrote to my stepmother! A lover’s letter, full of despairing love.
_That_ maddened him, as it had maddened me. He was not in his right
mind that day. He has never been the same man since--gloomy, austere,
set against those he had loved before. You cannot conceive how great
a change there has been in him. We who have lived with him know and
feel it. On my knees here, before God, I do not believe that my
father was responsible for his acts that day.’

Arnold raised her from her knees, and put her in the arm-chair by the
open window. She was almost fainting, but the brave spirit struggled
with bodily weakness.

Arnold paced the room for a little while deep in thought.

‘What am I to do, Naomi?’ he asked at last. ‘I love you--would lay
down my life for you; but I owe a duty to my brother. That is a
solemn charge. He loved me--was so good to me. I have his letter
summoning me home, full of affection, overflowing with generosity.
What am I to do, Naomi? Counsel me, if you can. You loved him?’

‘Loved him? Yes; it was my love that made me mad with jealousy; it
was my love that rose up against him and destroyed him. If you must
have a life for his life, take mine. Yes, Arnold, take mine. I am
most guilty. It was my jealousy that killed him.’

‘Naomi, we are all most miserable. I can do nothing; I feel myself
tied and bound. Either way there is wrong and misery. I love you,
and am miserable in loving you. I have my brother’s death to avenge,
yet cannot bring myself to injure your father. O my love, my love!
your sad accusing face has haunted me ever since that night when you
turned and looked at me at the chapel-door. What can I do?’

‘Forgive,’ said Naomi solemnly; ‘that is what the Gospel teaches
us--to forgive our enemies, even the enemies who have injured those
we love. We can never err in being merciful. “How often shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seventy times seven.”
That must mean pardon for wrongs man thinks unpardonable.’

‘You can teach me to believe anything, Naomi. I am like a child in
your hands.’

‘May God teach you to judge and act wisely! He will not inspire you
with thoughts of vengeance. He has said, “Vengeance is mine, I will
repay.” My unhappy father has suffered for his sin, and will continue
to suffer till death brings him peace; but I know in my heart that
God will forgive him.’

‘And if God can forgive, erring man should not be obstinately
unforgiving. That is what you would say, Naomi. We have an
illimitable faith in God’s capacity to pardon, yet find it so hard,
sinners as we are, to forgive a fellow-sinner. It is a dark problem.’

‘Pray that you may understand God’s will, Arnold. He will lead and
uphold you.’

‘No; earthly passion will sway me. It is my love for you urges me to
forgive your father.’

‘I would have you act from a higher light. I will leave you to seek
a better guidance,’ Naomi answered, with gentle reproachfulness.

She felt that her father was secure from any violence of Arnold’s
after this interview. She left him full of faith that the right
guidance would come, that the vengeful spirit which had threatened
Joshua with ruin and death would be calmed and appeased. She knew
that Arnold loved her; and though all thoughts of herself were vague
and secondary at such a crisis of her father’s fate, she was glad of
Arnold’s love, for her father’s sake.




                             CHAPTER XV.

                      CARRYING PEACE AND PARDON.


Joshua was far upon his road before Naomi had left the Grange. He
had walked many miles in the dull gray of early morning, before
the shadowy clouds had parted or the stars begun to pale in the
saffron lights of sunrise. The energy that sustained him, the eager
purpose that bore him on in that beginning of his journey, made him
unconscious of time or distance. He had heard Cynthia calling; yes,
his wife’s cry, piteous and weak, as of one in distress, was still
sounding in his ear as he hurried along the well-known road, which
seemed just a little strange and dreamlike in the dim gray dawn. He
had heard her calling him, and he was going to answer her cry.

‘Dearest, I am coming to you,’ he repeated inwardly. ‘I, who drove
you away with undeserved reproaches, am coming to pray for pardon;
I, who was cruel, unjust, savage, and inhuman, only because I loved
too blindly,--I am coming to ask for pity from the tender heart I
wounded. Love, I was mad, and I have suffered for my madness--a long
night of suffering. The morning has come, and peace and pardon. My
eyes are opened; I see and understand.’

It was only when a sudden faintness made him stagger dizzily, and
stretch out his hands to save himself from falling, that he became
aware of the hot sun beating down upon his head, and the fact that he
had walked many miles.

He was nearly twenty miles from Combhaven. He had crossed the wild
craggy hills, and come back mechanically to the coach-road. He was at
the top of a long hill, and saw the coach toiling slowly up the white
dusty road. He felt all at once that his strength was gone--gone
utterly, as if it had left him for ever--and thanked God for the
coming of the coach. It seemed by a special providence that he had
been brought across those wild hills back to the turnpike-road in
time for the passing of the coach.

‘If I had missed it I should not have got to Penmoyle to-night; and
my darling is waiting for me,’ he said to himself.

There was a vacant place on the seat behind the driver. Joshua hailed
the coach, and scrambled into this place before the coachman had time
to pull up his horses.

‘You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Mr. Haggard,’ remonstrated the man;
‘it’s dangerous.’

Joshua took no notice. The man’s voice sounded far off, as in a
dream. The horses went downhill and uphill over the wild yet fertile
country, by hills and woods that Joshua knew as well as he knew his
Bible. They stopped to change horses in straggling little villages,
where he had preached in his young days; and people who remembered
those days came out of their houses, and stood looking up at the
coach and talked to him. He answered their inquiries and acknowledged
their civil speeches mechanically, dimly conscious of their identity.
He had a curious feeling of superiority to all these people, as if
the universe had been planned for him, and they were only accidents
in it, like the great black flies buzzing round the heads of the
patient blinkered coach-horses, to whom Providence had given no
special mercy except mane and tail.

The time had been--and but a year or so ago--when he would have got
down from the coach and peeped into those whitewashed cottages,
and had his well-chosen word of greeting or counsel for each old
acquaintance. To-day their faces looking up at him were blank and
meaningless. The faces of the rabble round Stephen may have looked so
to the saint and martyr in his death agony.

Joshua’s mind was going on before him. He fancied himself arriving at
Penmoyle in the sunset. She would be standing at the gate perhaps,
watching for him, as he had found her on that unforgotten afternoon
two years ago. He would see the sweet face with the western light
shining on it, the soft eyes kindling with love and happiness at
sight of him. He had almost forgotten that bitter day of parting,
the day when he had driven her into banishment, with more cruelty
than Abraham had shown to ill-used Hagar; and it can hardly be said
that the patriarch was a pattern to all future husbands in that
transaction.

O, how sweet it was to dwell upon that picture of meeting and
reconciliation! The burden on his conscience had been cast off since
the agony of yesterday. It was verily as if he had laid down his load
on the sinners’ altar. He forgot all the silent pangs and tortures
of the last year, and felt as if a new life of happiness was opening
before him. He would carry the lamp of the Gospel into dark places,
he would preach by the wayside, as in his youth; he would carry
neither purse nor scrip, but wander from village to village and from
town to town, in that benighted north country he had read about in
the lives of Wesley and Whitfield; or, if it were possible, still
farther away, among the absolute heathen of the South Seas.

This was his vision of a glorious future. And she would be with
him--his companion, helpmeet, and comforter. It was such a career as
this to which she had aspired. Her spiritual nature had been revolted
by the trader’s petty life--she had sighed to see her husband doing
the work of an apostle.

Such thoughts as these were in his mind all through the day. They
rose and fell in his brain, wave upon wave, as regularly as the
waves of the Atlantic were rising and falling upon the long sandy
shore beyond those brown Cornish hills. The day seemed very long to
him, for his exaggerated activity of brain made minutes like unto
hours. And yet he was ineffably happy. No fear of disappointment
at the end of his journey clouded the radiance of his visions. He
apprehended no further stroke from an angry fate. God had punished
him with the undying worm called conscience, and had heard his
prayers and forgiven him. He feared nothing.

It was afternoon when the coach rumbled into the stony street of
Truro. Joshua had to be reminded of his fare respectfully by the
coachman. He was on the point of hurrying off without paying it.

‘Your mind’s full of better things, I know, Mr. Haggard,’ said the
man; ‘but I thought you’d like me to remind you.’

‘Thank you, Norman,’ said Joshua dreamily. ‘Yes, my mind was much
occupied; pleasantly, though, pleasantly, as one sure of God’s
bounteous mercy.’

He gave the man a crown for himself. It was half as much as the
fare--an astounding donation.

‘You may not be driving me again for some time to come,’ said the
minister kindly.

‘Thank’ee, sir. It isn’t many behaves as handsomely, and it’s always
a pride to drive such as you. But don’t take it as a liberty if I
give’ee one bit of advice. Don’t try to get up to the outside of a
coach before the horses ’ave stopped. You’re in the prime of life,
sir, maybe; but you’re a good many years too old to do that with
safety.’

‘Yes, yes, Norman; I shall bear it in mind,’ said Joshua, walking
away, without stopping at the comfortable inn for ‘bite or sup,’ as
Norman remarked afterwards.

‘The fact is the minister is wearing of hisself out,’ the coachman
remarked to his cronies that night. ‘He’s got oddish ways with him,
and a look as if he didn’t half know what’s going on round about him.’




                             CHAPTER XVI.

                        THE ODOUR OF ROSEMARY.


It happened as Joshua had calculated. The sun was setting as he
entered quiet Penmoyle. The walk from Truro had tired him more than
he had supposed possible. He could hardly drag himself along the last
mile or so of the dusty road, between hedges where the dog-roses and
honeysuckle climbed high above his head, and where the foxgloves were
opening their purple bells. The salt sea-wind, sweeping over yonder
swelling hills, seemed to have lost its refreshing power. He turned
his eyes wearily towards the western point--the wild Land’s End, with
its rocks of many-hued granite, on which the sea-gulls and cormorants
were perching in the rosy evening light. The scene was so familiar to
him that he could see it all, in that clear vision of the mind, as
he turned his gaze westward. Was there anything on this vast earth
more beautiful, he wondered, than that wild point of English soil,
with the great Atlantic waves for ever beating up against it--an
impregnable natural fortress, the rocky seat of dead and gone giants,
for ever defying the assaults of ocean?

His thoughts wandered a good deal during these last miles, when his
body was racked with the pains of exceeding fatigue. He thought of
Nicholas Wild, his old pupil, and the little chapel among yonder
hills. The young man had written him long letters, telling him of
the rich reward that had crowned his labours, and how he had built a
school for the children of his flock. Joshua had been too preoccupied
to take any notice of the letters, and the memory of that neglect
smote him now as he came nearer his pupil’s home.

‘Poor Nicholas! he was always faithful and affectionate. We will go
and see him, my wife and I,’ Joshua said to himself.

At last the old square tower of Penmoyle church rose in its gray
severity above the avenue of limes that led to it. Then came the
well-known street; the chestnut-grove where the children played at
eventide; the inn; the village pump; the cocks and hens, and a
vagabond pig picking up unconsidered trifles in the middle of the
road; the old yellow wagon turned up on end after a day’s usefulness.
The sun was still visible--a shining crimson disk on the edge of the
western hill.

It was a mere foolishness, no doubt, and Joshua chid himself for so
weak a regret, but he felt strangely disappointed when he came in
sight of the little green gate before Miss Webling’s cottage, and
did not see the graceful figure of his wife standing there, just as
he had seen her that happy afternoon two years ago, when he had come
full of benevolent intentions, and ignorant of his heart’s mystery.
He had counted on seeing her there. It would have been the natural
fulfilment of his dream, it seemed to him, that she should be on the
watch for his coming. She had called him, and, by some mystic power
beyond the limits of flesh and blood, he had heard her summons. Why
was she not watching for him, full of faith in his obedience? Was his
sympathy with her stronger than hers with him?

He passed the chestnut-grove. It seemed to him that the children
were less noisy than of old. They were there under the spreading
branches, the same boys and girls--the fustian jackets and lavender
pinafores, the petticoated little ones, with chubby cheeks and great
staring brown eyes. But there was a hush upon the scene. The elder
children were congregated in little knots talking. Some of them
suddenly perceived him, and there was a curious excitement among them
immediately, and much whispering, and some pointing at him with eager
fingers; and he could see that they all stopped their talk or games
to watch him.

Joshua walked slowly towards the green gate, strangely disappointed
and depressed. The windows of the Webling cottage faced south-west,
and it was only natural that the spotless blinds should be drawn to
exclude such a blaze of sunset; but it gave the house a blank look
not the less. The casements offered him no smile of welcome.

Here was a friendly welcome, however, from an unexpected direction.
Before Joshua had opened the gate, Mr. Martin, the kind old minister,
came hurrying across from his dwelling on the other side of the
road, and clasped him by both hands, and looked at him with eyes
brimming over with tears.

‘God bless you! God sustain and comfort you, my beloved friend!’
he cried. ‘I was watching for you. O, be composed, my friend,
be composed! Such a blessed euthanasia! The precious soul of my
Elizabeth was not more spotless or fitter for heaven. Dear friend,
let us go in together.’

Joshua turned and looked at him with wild wondering eyes; then
wrenched himself suddenly from the old man’s friendly grasp, and
moved towards the door.

‘No, no,’ he muttered; ‘I don’t want you. I am going alone--to see
my wife. Cynthia!’ he called, as he opened the door. ‘Cynthia!’ in a
louder and more urgent tone--‘Cynthia, where are you?’

A fiery impatience had taken hold of him. He could not wait for
formalities of any kind. The Miss Weblings would come, and there
would be stately greetings, and cake and wine brought out of the
wainscot cupboard, and all manner of ceremonies before he could open
his arms and clasp his ill-used wife to his heart, and weep over her
and be forgiven.

Deborah came out of the kitchen, and took his hands, just as old Mr.
Martin had done, and looked at him in the same tearful way.

Were the people all mad here, or was he? Even the children had seemed
to look at him strangely.

‘Dearest friend,’ said Deborah, ‘this is a sore trial for all of us.
Priscilla has been in hysterics all day; out of one fit into another.
Quite dreadful! The feathers we’ve burnt, and the vinegar, and all to
no purpose. She has such a feeling heart.’

It was Priscilla who was ill, then. That’s what all this fuss meant.

‘I want to see my wife,’ Joshua said shortly.

‘At once?’ faltered Deborah, looking at him timorously.

‘Yes, at once; this instant. Have I not come all these weary miles to
see her? This instant.’

‘O dear sir, what need of impatience? Be calm, I beg you.’

The doors of both parlours were open. Joshua had glanced in and seen
that both rooms were empty.

‘Where is she?’ he asked. ‘Up-stairs?’

‘Yes, in our spare room,’ Deborah answered huskily. ‘Let me show you
the way.’

‘I know it,’ he said; and went up-stairs before her.

The narrow corkscrew staircase was close and dark, like the winding
stair in a church-tower. Midway Joshua started as if he had been
shot, and came to a standstill.

There was a pungent odour of freshly-gathered herbs, a perfume he had
not smelt thus, on the threshold of a bedchamber, since his mother’s
death.

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Is it rosemary?’

‘Yes,’ sobbed Deborah, ‘we always use it here. We’ve a bush in the
garden on purpose. The neighbours come and beg a bunch of it when
they’ve a death in the house.’

Joshua staggered up the few steep stairs, lifted the jingling latch
of the low wainscot door, and went into the room in which he had
slept two years ago, when the new joys and pains of love began to
grow in his heart.

That odour of rosemary had forewarned him what he was to see. No
living wife, standing on the threshold to greet him, with warm arms
ready to be wound about his neck--no sweet eyes lifted shyly to meet
his own--no faltering words, or half-broken sobs: only a fair marble
statue lying on a white flower-strewn bed, hands meekly folded,
violet-veined eyelids closed over wearied eyes--a broken heart for
ever at rest.

He stood looking at her for a long time, as it seemed to the
heart-stricken Deborah--looking at her with eyes that hung upon that
silent beauty in a rapture of despair; then flung up his arms with a
sudden gurgling cry, and fell upon the floor beside her bed like a
stone.

                  *       *       *       *       *

He remained unconscious for many hours, breathing stertorously, and
lying like a log upon the bed where his faithful attendants had
laid him. The village doctor had bled him, and administered various
orthodox remedies of a severe character, with but little result.
Mr. Martin, the good old dissenting minister, stayed with him all
through the weary night, which might know no dawn in this world. The
spinster sisters were indefatigable, Priscilla waiving her peculiar
prerogative of hysterics in her desire to be useful.

The sun had risen, and the birds were singing outside the open
casements, when Joshua slowly lifted his heavy lids and looked about
him with dim bloodshot eyes.

For some minutes after he had struggled back to consciousness there
was a dimness in his brain as well as in his eyes, and he looked at
the anxious watchful faces vaguely. Then memory came back with cruel
distinctness.

‘Tell me--everything,’ he said.

‘Dear friend,’ pleaded Mr. Martin, ‘let your mind be at rest for a
little while. Repose, dear sir; you have been heavily afflicted, and
you have had a stroke of illness which might have been fatal, had God
refused to hear our earnest prayers.’

‘Tell me about my wife,’ urged Joshua vehemently.

‘She is at rest. She has gone to her heavenly home. I, who was with
her at the last, have no doubt of her calling and election. She
was one of God’s chosen vessels, with a mind naturally attuned to
heavenly things, like that pure spirit, my heavenly-minded Elizabeth,
whose deathbed conversations it was my precious privilege to preserve
for the edification of many. Yes, she came very near that sainted
young woman in the holy simplicity of her nature.’

‘What was it that killed her?’ asked Joshua, putting aside all these
words with a motion of his strong hand. ‘Did she die of a broken
heart? Was it my ill-usage that caused her death?’

‘Your ill-usage, dear friend! Your senses must be wandering. She
always talked of you as the best and most honoured of husbands.
Ill-usage, and from you! She loved you above all earthly things. Your
name was on her lips with her last breath.’

‘Yes,’ cried Joshua, ‘she called me, and I heard her. Give me my
watch,’ pointing to the chest of drawers where it lay; ‘see, I
stopped the hands at the moment in which I heard her voice calling to
me in a kind of dream--not a common dream, mark you--twice as vivid
and lifelike. It was after midnight on Sunday; see, twenty minutes
past one.’

‘“This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes!”’ exclaimed
Mr. Martin piously. ‘It was at that very hour her spirit took flight.’

‘Why was I not told that she was ill--dying?’ asked Joshua.

‘It was her wish that you should not be troubled. “He will send for
me or come for me when he wants me to go home again,” she said. “He
has higher things than me to think about.” She was so earnest in this
wish that we did not like to overrule her.’

‘And nobody thought that she was dangerously ill,’ explained Deborah.
‘The doctor couldn’t make her out. That was what he always said.
It was one of the strangest cases he’d ever had to deal with. Some
days she seemed so well and bright; and she was always industrious,
anxious to be doing something for us; household work or needlework,
it was all the same--we couldn’t give her enough to do.’

‘The journey here hurt her a great deal, I think,’ said Priscilla,
‘though she would never own to it. She walked a good bit of the way,
I believe, and she was footsore and very weak when she came. I opened
the door to her at dusk one evening, and I almost thought she was a
ghost. “I want to be your servant, dear Miss Priscilla,” she said,
“as I was in the old happy days.” “Why, Mrs. Haggard,” said I, “what
would your honoured husband think of such a notion?” But I’d hardly
got out the words before she fell down in a faint at my feet; and for
a week after that we had her laid up, and as low as could be.’

‘And you never wrote to me about her!’ cried Joshua, with agonised
reproach.

‘Well, the truth was we didn’t like. We thought there was something
wrong--a family quarrel perhaps, second marriages often turn out
so--and the poor thing seemed to have come to us for refuge, and
clung to us so; and if ever we talked of writing to you she seemed so
distressed. And we had always been fond of her, and had missed her
dreadfully after her marriage. She seemed like a daughter to us now
she had come back; and I’m sure we nursed her and took care of her in
her illness as if she’d really been a daughter, as I know Mr. Martin
will bear witness.’

‘You did,’ said the minister; ‘she could not have had better nursing
or kinder treatment.’

‘It was only just at the last that there was any mention of danger,’
continued Deborah. ‘On Saturday morning the doctor found her very
low, poor dear, and her mind was wandering a little. He seemed quite
distressed as he came down-stairs with me, as if it was a shock to
him to find her so. “I don’t at all like her looks this morning, Miss
Webling,” he said; “I begin to be afraid we shall lose her.” I never
had such a turn in my life. Poor Priscilla and I were almost beside
ourselves with grief, and it was as much as I could do to write you a
letter, begging you to come at once. You don’t seem to have received
that letter.’

‘No, it must have been delivered after I left home. The post is so
slow; you should have sent a messenger. Tell me, for God’s sake--did
she die happy, and did she love me at the last?’

‘At the last, and always,’ answered Mr. Martin earnestly. ‘She bared
her heart to me. I knew all its secrets, its waverings from the
right, its weakness. She had always loved and revered you. She had
been tempted, poor child, and her fancy had strayed to another for a
little while--only a little while. Heart and mind were true to her
duty. She was worthy of your fondest love; she was worthy of your
deepest regret.’

‘And I cast her from me, I repudiated her, I spurned her as the
vilest of sinners! O friend, can her injured spirit look down upon me
from heaven, and pity? Can God ever pardon my sin? He gave me this
sweet flower to wear in my bosom, and I cast it from me, and trampled
it under foot. I have steeped my soul in sin, I have dyed my hands
with blood!’

The two spinsters and the minister looked at each other with an
awful significance. These remorseful utterances seemed to them the
tokens of a wandering mind. That this man, their model and pattern of
uprightness, could deeply err came hardly within the limits of belief.




                            CHAPTER XVII.

                        ‘BETWEEN TWO WORLDS.’


The days wore on very slowly for Naomi in her father’s absence.
Her heart was weighed down with anxiety on his account; but he had
told her not to follow him, and, anxious though she was, she obeyed
implicitly. A great burden had been taken from her mind by Joshua’s
confession. Bitter as it was to know that her lover had fallen by
her father’s hand, that the bright young life had been snapped short
off, like a blossom from its stalk, in a burst of sinful passion,
yet there was all the difference in the world between a fair fight
and a dastardly assassination; and she was able now to think of her
father as of other duellists she had heard and read about, red-handed
sinners all, but not beyond the reach of human pity.

She was reconciled even to the idea of her father’s prolonged
absence, of a separation which might extend over years. It would
be better, happier for him to go out into untrodden fields, and do
difficult work, for his Master’s sake. This pious labour would be his
penance: in heathen lands he would find cities of atonement, from
whose gates he might come forth loosed from the burden and stigma of
his crime. She had longed herself to go into strange lands and teach
heathen children the Gospel. What more natural than that her father,
with his consciousness of a terrible sin to be expiated, should
desire to brave dangers and endure hardships and trials in the great
cause?

‘Let him come back to me ten years hence, old and bent and gray,’
said Naomi, ‘and I will praise God for His bounteous mercies. I will
say that our lives have been full of blessings even after all our
sorrows.’

This was her prayer--that he might go forth as a messenger of the
Gospel, and do his work of expiation, and come back to her purified
and happy. It was the old heroic Greek idea of atonement, only in a
Christian and better form.

A letter had come from Penmoyle for Joshua, and was laid aside,
unopened, awaiting tidings from him. No one supposed that the letter
was of any particular importance. What they all waited for anxiously
was a letter from Joshua himself.

It was Thursday, and Oswald Pentreath had been lying in the family
vault for many days and nights. It seemed a natural thing already
to think of him resting there with his ancestors, and it was almost
possible to forget that he had lain for nearly a year in the darkness
of the deserted mine, none knowing his fate. Strange how soon poor
human nature resigns itself to the inevitable. Arnold bore the
annihilation of all his hopes about his brother better than he could
have supposed it possible to bear so heavy a blow. That agonising
grief which he had felt when he supposed Oswald the victim of a
treacherous assassin was lessened by Joshua’s confession. At least he
had fallen face to face with death. The murderer had not crept behind
him with uplifted knife, coming upon his victim in a ghostly silence.
It had been a hard fate and a cruel one, but not so bad as this.
And poor Naomi, the innocent sufferer from her lover’s inconstancy
and her father’s sin--could he ever be sorry enough for her? could
he ever be sufficiently kind, or gentle, or thoughtful for her dear
sake? Consideration for her pleaded eloquently against his desire for
revenge. Joshua must go unscathed, so far as human vengeance went,
and take his punishment from God. This was the result of many a weary
hour of thought that followed upon Arnold’s interview with Naomi.

Thursday morning brought another letter from Penmoyle, in the same
handwriting as the last, but directed to Judith instead of to Joshua.

Miss Haggard broke the seal with a slight tremor, while Naomi waited
full of anxiety. Why had her father not written?

                                        ‘Chestnut Cottage, Penmoyle,
                                        Cornwall, June 26th.

  ‘Dear Miss Haggard,--I hope you will pardon the above
  familiarity, but although we have not had the pleasure of
  meeting, you can be no stranger to one who loves and reveres your
  brother as I do.

  ‘I deeply regret to inform you that Mr. Haggard now lies in a
  sadly precarious state. Indeed our doctor and another gentleman,
  summoned at his advice from Penzance, entertain little hope of
  his recovery. The shock caused by his wife’s death, which took
  place prior to his arrival, caused an apoplectic stroke. He
  recovered consciousness after several hours, but has never been
  quite right in his mind since the seizure.

  ‘Feeling assured that you and the rest of his family would desire
  to be with him at such a time, I hasten to communicate the sad
  state of affairs, and beg you to make whatever use you please of
  our small abode. It is entirely at your disposal, and my elder
  sister and self will consider it a privilege to do all in our
  power to ameliorate your sorrow by such attentions as sympathetic
  hearts can offer. Our poor Cynthia’s funeral takes place to-day.
  It is perhaps a blessing that in your suffering brother’s state
  of mind he is scarcely conscious of passing events.

  ‘Awaiting your speedy arrival, I remain, dear Miss Haggard, your
  obedient servant,

                                                ‘PRISCILLA WEBLING.’

Before she had read half this letter, Judith Haggard gave a shriek
of horrified surprise, and her niece looked over her shoulder and
read it with her. The two women stood side by side, devouring the
lines with white agonised faces, each in her own way feeling that
this sorrow was the deathblow to all hope. James was in the shop,
busy, happy, ignorant of this evil. He was whistling the last popular
melody as he went about his work. How awful it seemed to hear him!

Naomi’s grief found no outlet in tears or sobs or passionate speech.
She stood with the letter in her hand, her lips trembling.

‘The coach, aunt, the coach!’ she gasped. ‘Is it too late?’

‘Gone half an hour, child; we must have a post-shay. Jim!’

The shrill voice rang through house and shop, and Jim appeared with a
scared face at the parlour-door.

‘What’s the matter, aunt?’

‘Your father’s dying, and we’re going to him. Get us a post-shay.’

Jim looked from one to the other in awful wonder. Naomi tried to
speak, and, failing, gave him Priscilla’s letter.

‘What!’ he cried, hurriedly reading, ‘the poor little stepmother dead
and buried! Has the world come to an end?’

‘You unfeeling boy!’ exclaimed Judith. ‘To think of anybody else when
your father’s in such a state!’

‘Father will come round again, please God; but poor little
Cynthia--buried yesterday--so young and pretty! Isn’t it dreadful?’

‘Go for a chaise, Jim, for pity’s sake,’ cried Naomi. ‘Father may die
while you stand wondering there. O, let me go to him, let me go! let
me keep him back from death!’

James ran across to the First and Last, the only place in Combhaven
where post-horses were to be had. There was a burst of sympathy from
the stout landlord when he heard Jim’s news. The chaise should be
ready in ten minutes--the best horses in his stable.

It was half an hour before the chaise was at the door, despite the
landlord’s promises. Naomi and her aunt had put on their bonnets
and packed a few necessaries in a carpet-bag, and had been waiting
in the parlour ever so long, as it seemed to them, before an ancient
yellow-bodied chariot, like that which had brought Joshua’s young
bride to Combhaven, pulled up before the garden-gate.

‘You’ll stay at home and mind the business till I can come back,
Jim,’ said Judith.

‘I’d rather go to poor father; but perhaps it’s best so,’ answered
Jim. ‘But if he should be very bad, if there’s no chance of his
getting over it, you’ll send for me, aunt. I should like to see him
before--’

A sob strangled the young man’s speech, and he went back to the
house, leaving them to get into the carriage unassisted. Some one
was at Naomi’s side before she could mount the steps. It was Captain
Pentreath, breathless with running.

‘Naomi, I have just heard of your sorrow,’ he said gently. ‘One of
our men told me as I came across the meadow. Dear sister, let me go
with you. Let me go with you, Miss Haggard,’ he added pleadingly to
Judith. ‘I should like to go--to be of service to you, if I can--to
ask your brother’s pardon for my violence the other night.’

‘You’d need be sorry for that, I think,’ answered Judith. ‘What’s
the good of your coming? He’ll want to see his blood-relations, poor
dear--that’s natural; but it can’t give him much pleasure to see you.’

‘I may be of use to you on the journey. Let me come, Miss Haggard.
Two unprotected women, anxious, agitated as you are, ought not to
undertake such a journey. These post-boys are such ruffians. I shall
be able to prevent loss of time, to insure you civil treatment.’

Judith relented a little. Post-boys were an exacting and difficult
race--greedy of gain, capable of abandoning their helpless fare
upon a lonesome highway, or of colleaguing with highwaymen for
a defenceless traveller’s spoliation. Perhaps Judith, though
strong-minded enough at home, where every one trembled at her
voice, felt that she should be a weak vessel abroad. She had never
travelled farther than Barnstaple in her life; and to go up alone
into the wilds of bleak and barren Cornwall--the very stronghold of
witchcraft--a place where half the people were savage miners, and the
other half wreckers and smugglers; and to be benighted, perhaps, on a
moor where the Druids sacrificed human beings before the days of King
Arthur!

These terrors were too much for Judith. The proffered escort of
a courageous young man, open-handed and ready to make use of his
purse for the gratification of post-boys, was not to be despised. He
had brought a false charge against Joshua in an hour of temporary
madness; but he had repented, and this act of to-day was a confession
of his past folly. All Combhaven would know of it, and see how
baseless he now felt his idea of Joshua’s guilt to have been. Judith
gave way, but maintained her dignity even in the moment of concession.

‘It matters very little to me whether you come or stay,’ she said.
‘My mind’s too full of my poor brother to care about anything else.
But Naomi may be glad of your company on the dark roads--girls are so
timid.’

‘Indeed, aunt, I am not frightened,’ exclaimed Naomi.

‘I am coming with you,’ said Arnold decisively.

There was a seat at the back of the vehicle, a kind of rumble, and
into this he mounted, after despatching a small boy to the Grange
with a message for Nicholas the butler, who was to send his master’s
valise on to Truro by the evening coach. Arnold would not ask so
much as five minutes’ delay, lest Judith should change her mind and
decline his company. So the post-boy smacked his whip, and the chaise
went rattling through the long village street, to the delight of
the inhabitants, who flocked out of their dwellings to witness the
unwonted spectacle.

A long journey at any time; a weary one for aching hearts. Naomi
looked out of the carriage-window with dull eyes that roamed over
hill and valley, wood and winding stream, and saw no comfort
anywhere. Was the journey never to be over? she wondered, as the
slow hours rolled on; was there never to be an end of those green
hedgerows, and tangled honeysuckles, and clambering dog-roses,
and dusty wayside ferns, and sudden hollows, and jutting walls of
hill?--these perpetual hills, at the foot of which the travellers
descended, to walk in mournful silence to the top, where all the
glory of the valley below could not move Naomi’s cold lips to a smile
of gladness.

Arnold made no attempt at consolation. He entreated his companions
to hope for the best, and after that made no further allusion to
their grief. He talked to them very little, only showing himself
anxious for their comfort and repose. He saved them all trouble about
post-boys, or any of the details of their journey. They had nothing
to do but be patient, and wait till darkness came, and the end. Even
to eyes accustomed to the rustic seclusion of Combhaven, Penmoyle
looked a curious out-of-the-world place as the post-chaise drove into
the wide village street after sunset on that June evening. Lights
twinkled feebly in two or three casements, wide apart and rare, as if
the majority had gone to roost at curfew. There was one light much
brighter than the rest, which seemed to Naomi to shine like a star.
Some instinct of her heart told her that it was the candle in her
father’s sick-room.

‘There,’ she cried, putting her head out of the window, and calling
to the post-boy; ‘stop there.’

But Arnold had made his inquiries at the beginning of the village,
and the boy was already pulling up his horses. That lighted casement
belonged to Chestnut Cottage. The approach of the carriage had been
heard within, and Deborah’s stiff curls were waving at the door, as
she came out to receive her guests.

‘O dear Miss Haggard; O dear Miss Naomi,’ she gasped; ‘thank God you
are come!’

‘Not too late!’ cried Naomi, going into the house; ‘not too late!’

‘No, dear young lady, praised be Heaven! He has asked for you so
often.’

‘Take me to him, please--at once.’

‘But you ought to be prepared for the change--’

‘God will give me strength when his dear head is on my breast.
Father, I am coming,’ she cried, as if her voice would carry strength
and new life to the sick man.

She went up-stairs as quickly as if she had known the corkscrew
staircase all her life. The door of her father’s room was open;
the window opened wide to the summer night. The old-fashioned tent
bedstead, with its dimity festooning and netted fringe, faced the
door.

Who was it lying there, still as a stone figure, with a white strange
face, and dark cavernous eyes--a face Naomi had never seen before?
For a moment her heart failed, and she shrank away a step or two, as
from something more awful than death. Was this her father?

Yes, the hollow eyes lighted up at sight of her, the livid lips moved
tremulously, and then murmured, ‘Naomi!’

In the next instant she was on her knees beside his bed, clasping
the heavy hands, crying over him, kissing him with those passionate
despairing kisses life gives to death.

‘Dearest, I have come to nurse you, to bring you back to life. God
will help me. I have been praying for you all through our long
journey. Father, you will get well for my sake.’

‘I am dying, Naomi. The doctor and my old friend Martin have both
told me so. Do not cry, dear; I am suffering so little. The passage
is made very easy for me. And I have an infinite inextinguishable
faith in my Redeemer’s love. I go to Him without fear. He has loosed
me from the burden of my sin. Yes, Naomi, it is no idle boast. I feel
and know that I am forgiven. My punishment has been awarded here. My
broken heart has reconciled me with my God.’

‘You shall not die!’ said Naomi. ‘God cannot be so cruel as to part
us now, when there is no cloud between us any more, when I can love
you and honour you as I did in my childhood. Father, you will live
for my sake.’

‘No, dear, I have done with earthly life. God sent His stroke in
mercy when I came into this house and found my darling dead. O
Naomi, my latter days have been full of sin. I have been the slave
of passion. And yet I might have been so happy. I can see her
still--sitting in the sunshine--hair like spun gold--so helpless and
lovely, so ignorant of good and evil--like Eve when God gave her to
Adam.’

His mind wandered a little after this. All through the night he lay
in the same attitude, a corpse-like figure, a soul hovering between
life and death. Naomi never stirred from her seat beside his pillow,
save to kneel and pray. Judith and Priscilla sat a little way aloof,
watching the two, only coming nearer at intervals to moisten the sick
man’s lips with a feather dipped in brandy.

About an hour after daybreak Arnold, who had spent the night in the
parlour below, came slowly up the stair, and stood on the threshold.
Joshua had been lying for a long time with his eyes closed, breathing
heavily, and his watchers had supposed him sleeping; but at the sound
of Arnold’s cautious footfall he opened his eyes, and those restless
hands of his fastened with a nervous grasp upon the coverlet.

‘Is that Captain Pentreath?’ he asked his daughter.

‘Yes, dear father.’

‘Let the others go away,’ looking dimly round at the two women; ‘I
want to be alone with you and him.’

Priscilla and Judith left the room, full of wonder.

‘You got my letter?’ he said.

‘Yes, Mr. Haggard; and I am here to ask your forgiveness for the
accusation I brought against you. When I found my poor brother in his
secret grave I believed him the victim of a murderer. I am willing
now to believe that he was the victim of his own folly, and that he
willingly staked his life against yours.’

Joshua was silent. Some kind of struggle--whether bodily or mental
those who watched him could not tell--was racking him. His nether lip
worked convulsively; the veins stood up darkly purple from the broad
strong brow.

‘My letter told the truth,’ he said after that painful pause, ‘but
not all the truth. I am going to face an offended God--going to Him
confident in His illimitable mercy. Naomi, do not hate me when I
am dead;’ his hands wandered helplessly for a little, and then he
clasped them round her neck, and let his head fall on her shoulder;
‘do not hate me, dear. Your lover was murdered. He was generous, and
I was a dastard. We stood up, face to face, each with a pistol in
his hand. I was to count three, he told me, and then take aim. But
as I lifted my hand to aim at his heart I saw his arm flung up, his
pistol pointed to the sky. It was but an instant, fleeter than a
breath, before I fired straight at his breast. It was thirty years
since I had pulled a trigger--not since I was an idle lad, and went
rabbit-shooting with my father’s old blunderbuss. Yet my aim was
deadly. The bullet pierced his heart. He had fired in the air. I had
just time enough to see and understand what he was doing before I
killed him. This was the crime that weighed upon my soul and dragged
me down to the pit. O God, I can see him now, with his face lifted
up, the sun shining on it, his arm raised to fire in the air. It was
but a flash, scarce time for thought, but when it was over I knew
myself a murderer. O God, only an instant between everlasting glory
and eternal condemnation, unless Thine infinite sacrifice can blot
out mine iniquity.’

There was silence. Naomi’s face was buried in the coverlet. Arnold
walked across to the open window, and stood there looking out at the
gray morning sky, deeply thoughtful.

‘My God, my sin is heavy,’ ejaculated Joshua after an interval;
‘Thou only knowest my temptation. I, who had preached against
duelling, became a duellist; I, who had taught men brotherly love,
stained my hands with my brother’s blood. Only in illimitable mercy
can I find hope; and who shall tell the sinner his case is hopeless
when God has given the promise of forgiveness?’

He lay for a long time after this in a state that was almost
unconsciousness. The doctor came and felt his pulse, and told
them that he was slowly sinking. It was only the vigour of his
constitution which had held out so long against death. The
nobly-built frame had wrestled involuntarily with man’s last enemy,
while the spirit yearned to pass the mystic river, and rest in the
fair land beyond.

That day wore on, and the night which followed it, and another
long summer day, which seemed to Naomi different even in the
colour of its sky from every other day in her life. The sunshine
climbed the whitewashed wall, and touched with brighter gold the
tarnished gilding of the old oval picture-frames, and glorified the
old cups and saucers and quaint little pottery jars on the narrow
chimneypiece; and still Joshua lay, awfully motionless, with his
dull eyes turned to the light.

It was sunset when the dreaded change came. They were all on their
knees praying silently when Joshua lifted himself up in the bed, and
stretched out his arms towards that fading glory in the western sky.

‘Cynthia--chosen--beloved,’ he cried; ‘innocent as a little
child--ignorant of evil! Of such is the kingdom of heaven.’

And so, with a long-drawn shivering sigh, he fell back upon the
pillow; and, as the sun went down behind a dark range of moorland,
this little lamp of light went out with it, no less secure of
resurrection.




                              EPILOGUE.


Joshua Haggard has been lying in his quiet grave among the Cornish
hills just three years. It is midsummer time again, and the long
straggling village of Combhaven is looking its gayest, beautified by
Nature, and not by art. There is an unaccustomed life and stir in
the place--people dressed in their best clothes, new bonnet-ribbons
as rife as butterflies, every one upon the tiptoe of expectancy--and
Naomi Haggard standing by the open parlour-window, very pale, in a
gray Quaker-like silk--almost as pretty a gown as that wedding-dress
she gave away four years ago; but it was not her father’s hand this
time which tested the quality of the silk, or her father’s blessing
which made the gift sweet.

Naomi has been an independent young woman for the last three years;
for Joshua Haggard’s will, made immediately after Oswald’s dismissal,
left his only daughter the five thousand pounds which had been
intended as her marriage portion. She has suffered her aunt’s
domestic tyranny none the less meekly because of this independence.
She has lived her quiet life in the old familiar home, so desolate
without her father, and has taught her classes in the Sunday-school,
and helped the new minister by many a quiet service, and held her
place in the hearts of the Dissenters of Combhaven, who still honour
Joshua’s memory as that of a great and good man. This is Naomi’s
consolation. No shame or dishonour has ever been attached to her
father’s name in the public mind. The secret of Oswald’s fate is
known to none living save Arnold and herself.

To-day is a great day for Naomi--the happiest she has known since
her father’s death; for the memorial chapel--the new Bethel which
she has built with a portion of her inheritance--is to be opened
to-day. A fair lofty building of gray stone--a little too much like a
corn-exchange on a small scale for the improved taste of this latter
part of the century, but in those days a temple of exceeding beauty.
There are four long straight windows on each side, an oak pulpit and
reading-desk, a commodious gallery, and a Doric portico; and in the
eyes of Combhaven the edifice is second only to Exeter Cathedral and
Barnstaple Market.

To Naomi’s mind the fairest thing in the brand-new chapel is a brazen
tablet in front of the gallery bearing this brief inscription:

  ‘This Chapel was erected in affectionate remembrance of Joshua
  Haggard, Minister.’

                  *       *       *       *       *

Naomi leaves the chapel after the opening service leaning on Arnold
Pentreath’s arm, tearful, but not altogether unhappy. Friends gather
round her, and congratulate her, and are warm in their praises of
the new Bethel; but it is to be noticed that there is an unwonted
reverence in the tone of these old acquaintances, and that Mrs.
Spradgers, notorious for extravagance in millinery, drops a low
curtsy to Miss Haggard, instead of extending her pudgy hand in its
black-lace glove.

Standing on the threshold of the new chapel, Naomi stands also on
the threshold of a new life. Her lover--faithful and unchanging
through his three years’ apprenticeship--is by her side, and
to-morrow is to be their wedding-day.


                               THE END.


                               LONDON:
            ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.




                         Transcriber’s Notes


Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences
within the three volumes of this work and consultation of external
sources. Some hyphens in words have been silently removed and
some silently added when a predominant preference was found in
the original work. Except for those changes noted below, original
spellings in the text and inconsistent or archaic usage have been
retained.

  Page 168: “ound out this” replaced by “found out this”.
  Page 199: “brother’s murdar” replaced by “brother’s murder”.
  Page 215: “with a a strange” replaced by “with a strange”.
  Page 219: “last twelvemonths” replaced by “last twelvemonth”.
  Page 233: “protrated thoughtlessness” replaced by “protracted
  thoughtlessness”.

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.



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