‘THE DEEP OF NIGHT IS CREPT UPON OUR TALK.’
Joshua proved a true prophet in so far as related to Oswald
Pentreath’s line of conduct on receipt of his betrothed’s letter. To
Naomi’s sad epistle, renouncing all claim upon him at her father’s
desire, he answered briefly:
‘Your letter has taken me by surprise, dearest; but harsh and
sudden as your decision seems, I acquiesce. I know not how your
father may have arrived at his estimate of my character, or
what has influenced him to desire that our engagement shall be
cancelled, but I am willing to abide his sentence. He may be
right, perhaps. I am by nature unstable. I am not worthy of so
noble a heart as yours. Yet be assured, Naomi, that, although
unworthy, I am at least capable of appreciating and admiring your
character, as well as a better man. To the end of my life I
shall honour and esteem you. To the end of my life I shall deem
you the purest and noblest of women, and think those days of my
life happiest in which I loved you best, and when there was no
shadow of mistrust between us.
‘God bless you, dearest, and farewell! It may be long before I
revisit Combhaven, and this may be a lifelong farewell.--Your
friend, your servant always,
‘OSWALD PENTREATH.’
‘He is grateful to me for letting him go,’ thought Naomi, with a
touch of bitterness. She could read gratitude for his release between
the lines of this letter.
‘He might have spared me much pain if he had been more candid,’ she
thought--‘if he had confessed the truth that day I told him of the
change I had seen in him.’
She opened the drawer where her wedding-dress lay on the day she
received this final letter, the last she could ever expect from
Oswald Pentreath. She looked at the pale silken gown with such
sorrowful eyes as look upon a corpse. Was it not the dead corpse of
her lost happiness which lay there, with sprigs of rosemary among the
folds of its shroud?
‘Poor wedding-gown!’ she said to herself; ‘I shall give it to Lucy
Simmonds. Why should it lie and fade in a drawer when it would make
her happy? Would it be any comfort to me to look at it in years to
come, and remember that I was once young and very happy, fancying
myself beloved?’
Lucy Simmonds had been Naomi’s favourite pupil in the Sunday-school
over Little Bethel; an intelligent biblical student, who knew Kings
and Chronicles as well as a bishop, and had never been known to
confound the miracles of Elijah and Elisha. She had blossomed into
womanhood, and was about to unite her fate with that of a promising
young butcher--a staunch member of Joshua’s congregation.
Naomi folded the dress carefully, and packed it in a large sheet
of white paper. The skirts of those days were scanty, and the silk
dress did not make a bulky parcel. She wrote a loving letter to her
old pupil, and sent the parcel to the widow Simmonds’s house that
afternoon. The dress might be too good for Lucy’s present station,
but not for her future position as the wife of an aspiring butcher.
The young matron would wear that pretty gray silk at friendly
tea-parties and Christmas gatherings for years to come, and would
think affectionately of the donor. It seemed a small thing, this
giving away of her wedding-gown; but to Naomi it meant the total
surrender of hope. There was nothing left for her in life but duty
and her love for her father.
She bore her cross meekly. None could have told how withering a
sorrow had passed over her young life. There was a curious compound
of pride and humbleness in her nature. She accepted her lot humbly,
as a trial which was but her portion of humanity’s common burden;
but she was too proud to let others see how deeply she had been
wounded. She put on a brave front; and her father gave her credit for
stoicism, in no wise suspecting that the weight of her secret grief
was almost intolerable.
Very little was said in the small household about this change in
Naomi’s fortunes. The cancelment of her engagement was accepted as
an act of Joshua’s. He had forbidden the marriage for some good
reason of his own. No one dared ask him why--his wife least of
all. She could not have spoken Oswald’s name to him. Her heart was
full of fear, sorrow, and deepest pity for Naomi; yet she dared not
offer her sympathy. There was a look in Naomi’s face that forbade
all approach--every offer of love. Cynthia felt that there was a
gulf between them. Naomi tacitly avoided her. She was not unkind,
but she shrank from all companionship with her father’s wife; and
henceforward Cynthia’s life became very lonely. Her husband’s
hours were closely occupied, and spent for the most part away from
her. Naomi lived her own life, as much as possible apart from her
stepmother, and Judith was harsh and unfriendly. Jim was always
Cynthia’s friend and champion; but his busy career did not admit of
much companionship. The small household met at meals, at the same
hours, with the same regulations and ceremonies; but these family
assemblies were silent and gloomy.
‘Our dinner-time is getting uncommonly like a Quakers’ meeting,’
observed the audacious Jim at one of these dreary gatherings; ‘I wish
the spirit would move some of us to be lively.’
‘When you’ve as much trouble on your mind as your father has you
won’t be quite so active with your tongue,’ retorted aunt Judith.
The works at the Grange had undergone a sudden check. Oswald had
written peremptory orders to his architect. The contract was to be
carried out only so far as concerned the substantial repairs of the
house. There was to be no rotunda, and the end of the drawing-room
was to be walled up again.
‘I am going abroad,’ he wrote; ‘make as good a job as you can of the
place, and write to me at the subjoined address for cheques as you
want them.’
The subjoined address was that of a London solicitor, a man who had
done business for the old Squire occasionally.
The architect wondered and talked; and before many days everybody in
Combhaven knew that Mr. Pentreath’s engagement to Joshua Haggard’s
daughter was broken off. There was a great deal of talk, and much
discussion and disputation about details, but a wonderful unanimity
of opinion. The match would have been most unsuitable. Naomi Haggard
was much too serious for a Squire’s lady. The Grange could never
have held up its head properly under such a mistress, and a glass
rotunda would have been absurdly out of keeping. ‘He ought to marry
Mr. Pinkley’s only daughter,’ said Combhaven, deciding for him
offhand. ‘There’s only an accommodation road between Pinkley’s land
and his.’
The builders finished their work. The end of the long drawing-room
was walled-up again, and there was no more talk of palms or fountains
or an Italian garden. The Grange resumed its air of gloom and
emptiness, and looked almost as dismal as in the lifetime of the old
Squire.
So the summer ripened and grew more glorious, bringing no delight of
heart to the minister’s small household. The colours of the sea took
a more vivid lustre from the fulness of the sun, like jewels in an
Indian temple shining in the glare of many torches. There came over
the land the sultry hush of the days before harvest. Very little
doing in those rich fields, where the corn was gently stirred by the
hot south wind, like the waves of a golden sea; very little doing
in the big farmyards, where the cattle stood knee-deep in the tawny
gorse-litter, and contemplated the outer world listlessly, with
dreamy brown eyes and a general air of benevolence: stillness and
repose on all things. Cynthia Haggard looked at this lovely external
universe languidly, with eyes that saw its beauty dimly, as in a
dream in which one absorbing sense of overwhelming trouble makes all
things faint and blurred. Her husband had spoken no unkind word to
her since that scene with Oswald; yet she felt that he was estranged.
He read more; he shut himself up in his own thoughts; gave himself
up more completely to his contemplative and subjective religion, and
that religion seemed to take a more gloomy and inexorable character.
In his sermons he dwelt less on the divine love and charity,
and harped on a harsher string--the doom of sinners destined to
perdition; wretches on whom the divine light had never shone, for
whom that all-saving faith which could lift the sinner out of the
mire by one upward impulse of an awakened soul was a dead letter.
Cynthia shuddered as she listened. Was Oswald Pentreath one of these
lost spirits?
She could see that her husband was unhappy, yet had no power to
comfort him. That weighed upon her heavily. She dared not complain
to him of this disunion, lest she should be drawn into a confession
of her sinful weakness, and constrained to admit her guilty love for
the sinner. She could not have stood up before that righteous man and
spoken falsely.
He never questioned her about Oswald Pentreath; yet she felt that
there must be some strong suspicion of evil in his mind, and at
the root of his arbitrary conduct in cancelling his daughter’s
engagement. It never occurred to her that Oswald’s wild talk that
afternoon had been overheard, and told to Joshua. She looked upon his
knowledge rather as the result of some occult power of his own. His
wisdom had penetrated the guilty secret.
One night, a little while after Naomi had given up her lover, Joshua
came up to his bedchamber somewhat later than usual. He had stayed
in the parlour after supper, writing or reading. Cynthia was lying
awake, full of sad thoughts, vague forebodings of evil, aching pity
for that weak sinner, wandering she knew not where. Joshua walked
up and down the room in silence for some minutes, and then stopped
suddenly beside the bed, and looked down at the small face on the
pillow, the sad blue eyes glancing up at him timidly, deprecating
blame.
‘I am glad you are not asleep,’ he said. ‘I want that book--the
_Sorrows of Werther_. I have been thinking of what my sister said
about it. I want to judge for myself. I looked at it too hurriedly
the other day. I want to see what kind of book it was that made you
unhappy.’
‘You can’t read it to-night, Joshua, surely? It’s so late, and you
must be tired.’
‘I am tired, but not able to sleep. I would rather read than lie
awake. My thoughts have been a burden to me of late. There was a
time when my wakeful hours were full of sweetness, when I could
lose myself in communion with my Redeemer. That time is past. Human
trouble has made a wall between this poor clay and the spirit world.’
This was a reproach which smote the erring wife to the heart.
‘Joshua, it is my fault,’ she faltered; ‘you were happier before you
married me.’
‘Happier!’ he cried bitterly; ‘I never knew the extremes of human joy
or human pain till I knew you. Well, the pain has been immeasurable
as the joy. If I erred, I have paid the penalty. Give me that book,
Cynthia.’
Cynthia rose without another word, went to the drawer where she had
hidden that fatal romance of real life, and brought the book to her
husband with a meek obedience that moved him deeply. Even in his
doubt and distrust of her--for he did doubt her, despite his brave
words to Judith--there was an abiding love in his soul, a yearning to
take her to his heart and forgive her and comfort her, and offer her
deeper love than was ever given to woman--the wide strong love of a
heart that had only awakened to passion in the maturity of its force
and power. Could the love of youth, in all its glow of romance and
poetry, be in anywise equal to this?
Cynthia put the book into his hand, and then remonstrated gently
against the folly of midnight studies.
‘Read it to-morrow, dear Joshua. You look tired and ill. Hark! it is
striking eleven.’
‘Go to bed and sleep,’ he said sternly; ‘I cannot. I want to read the
book that melted you--and Oswald Pentreath. I wonder whether it will
move me to tears.’
He set the candle on the old mahogany escritoire at which he wrote
sometimes, and seated himself in the wide horsehair-covered arm-chair
edged with brass nails, like an old-fashioned coffin. He opened the
book with a resolute air, as a man who meant to plod through it,
whatever stuff it might be. He read and read on with an intent face,
turning leaf after leaf at measured intervals; Cynthia, lying with
her face turned towards that gloomy figure, watching him as if he
were reading in the book of doom. To her mind that book held the
confession of Oswald’s weakness and of hers. Joshua would know all
when he had read that. Had it been an acknowledgment of sin written
with her own hand, signed and attested, she could not have thought it
more complete or final.
He read on deep into the night, Cynthia dozing a little now and
then, but for the most part watching him. The small hours struck, one
after another, on the solemn old church bell; a faint chillness crept
into the summer air; then slowly, softly, mysteriously, like a dream,
came the gray dawn--first with a glimmer at the window; then with
a broad cold light, that filled the room and made the flame of the
candle pale and ghost-like; then with gleams of saffron and rose, and
dim morning sunbeams like an infant’s vague sweet smile. Still Joshua
sat reading in the same fixed attitude; reading on with indomitable
resolve, bent on knowing the utmost and the worst. For him, too, the
book was a confession and a revelation. Werther was Oswald Pentreath;
Charlotte was Cynthia: and they loved each other; their young hearts
yearned to each other, overflowing with tenderest sympathies, with
unspeakable affection; and fate, duty, religion, and honour stood
between them, in the person of the unloved husband, separating them
for ever.
The room was flooded with sunlight when he closed the book, with one
long sigh. He could not refuse the sinner that one expression of
pity, so lost, so given over to an unconquerable passion, and yet
with so much in him that was gentle and true and worthy.
Cynthia had fallen asleep at last. Joshua looked down at the pale
face on the pillow, full of compassion, pitying her, pitying himself.
‘Those two lived happily together, when Werther was gone,’ he said to
himself, thinking of Albert and Charlotte; ‘but then Albert did not
know that his wife’s heart had gone from him.’
He washed and dressed himself, and went down to his daily round of
labour, and said no word to Cynthia about the fatal book.