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.