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. I.
[Illustration: (Colophon)]
LONDON
JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
4 SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
1876
[_All rights reserved_]
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED
TO
CAPTAIN THE HON. JOHN CARNEGIE, R.N.
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF
HIS KINDLY INTEREST IN THE AUTHOR’S WORK
AND OF
HIS HEARTY COÖPERATION IN THE
OPENING SCENE.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE CRUEL CRAWLING FOAM 1
II. THE FAMILY CIRCLE 52
III. FATHER AND SON 72
IV. WOOD AND WILDERNESS 90
V. THE MINISTER GOES ON A JOURNEY 131
VI. CYNTHIA GOES INTO SERVICE 169
VII. NAOMI’S HOLIDAY 205
VIII. THE SQUIRE MAKES A BARGAIN 253
IX. ‘LOVE IN ONE HAND HIS BOW DID TAKE’ 283
JOSHUA HAGGARD’S DAUGHTER
CHAPTER I.
THE CRUEL CRAWLING FOAM.
There was darkness over the land--darkness that might be felt. In
the midst of the ripe warm harvest-time, when all things were at
their fairest, and the farmers about Combhaven were congratulating
each other on the glorious weather, the storm came: a strange bluish
blackness overspread the sky--metallic, tempest-charged, not one
cloud or many clouds, but a darkening of the face of heaven. It was
like a sudden twilight at noon.
‘It mun be a ’clipse, I think,’ said old Jabez Long, the fisherman,
contemplative of that awful horizon yonder, where one streak of
copper-coloured light made a narrow rent between sea and sky.
‘’Clipse, man!’ cried his neighbour; ‘how can it be a ’clipse, when
there ain’t none in the almanick? It’s more like a judgment than a
’clipse, to my mind--a judgment agen the farmers for making bread so
dear last Chrisselmas. Sarve ’em right if their corn’s drownded afore
they can get it under cover.’
There was no rain yet, but when the rain came by and by, it would be
a flood, thought that little group of awe-stricken fishermen gathered
in front of the King of Bells public-house, at the fishermen’s end of
Combhaven.
‘Look at the sea,’ exclaimed Jabez, pointing seaward.
It had a curious look, the ocean--that sea which in summer time was
wont to seem an emerald lake dappled with purple shadows. To-day the
water was a dull red, darkened to indigo here and there. There was
a strong ground-swell, and the sea heaved like a passionate bosom
stirred with deepest anger. White surf came creeping up the sand, and
with every receding wave there rose a roar like distant thunder.
‘An angry sea,’ cried Jabez. ‘I hope the young Squire won’t try to
come in from Clovelly upon such a tide as this.’
‘Has he gone to Clovelly?’ asked Mike Durran, the younger of the two
men. Both were old and gray and rugged, and had a look of having aged
rather from hard weather than from the flight of years. Time had
crawled for these villagers, winters and summers creeping slowly on
their sluggish course; much labour, little pleasure. They must have
felt a century old at least.
‘Yes, he sailed yesterday morning, and was to be back to-day. Him and
Jack and the lad Peter; not enough of ’em to manage that clumsy old
tub of his, to my mind. He’ll get into trouble some day, I’m afeard.’
‘Money’s scace with him, I’m thinking,’ said Mike.
‘Money’ll never be anything but scace while the old Squire’s
alive,’ answered Jabez. ‘There’s money enough and to spare hid away
somewheres; but nobody’ll ever see the colour of it while he’s alive.’
‘Not they,’ groaned Mike Durran; and there was a general groan from
the little group of idlers, by way of tribute to the Squire.
‘Hard upon everybody,’ said Jabez.
‘Hardest of all upon his own flesh and blood,’ said another man. ‘His
cruelty drove his second son to sea.’
‘Arnold,’ said Jabez. ‘Ah, a fine lad that! I remember ’im; a fine
out-spoken lad, with a kind word for every one.’
‘Ah, he were the right sort, he were,’ said Mike; ‘not like Mr.
Oswald. He haven’t a word to throw at a dog, wrapped up in his-self,
and proud as Lucifus; and as for the colour of his money--well, I
never see it.’
This implies the deepest depth of unpopularity--a man unable or
unwilling to give.
At this juncture there came a silence in the little assembly, and
all eyes were turned in the same direction to look at a man who
came round the sharply-jutting cliff which ran out seaward into
a dangerous reef, and cut off this straggling bit of sea-shore
from the tidy little town that nestled in a cleft of the fertile
Devonian hills. On this side of the promontory there was the original
fishing village, a row of ancient thatched cabins built against the
cliff, and that popular house of entertainment, the Ring of Bells,
a low-roofed, old-fashioned dwelling, with steep gables and curious
abutments and ceilings whose rough-hewn beams scarcely cleared the
heads of its tallest customers.
The person whose approach commanded the general attention was a man
of somewhat striking appearance. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a head
nobly mounted on the throat of a gladiator, penetrating black eyes,
boldly-cut features, a swarthy complexion, a square lower jaw, and
a capacious strongly-marked brow--he was a man to attract attention
anywhere. Intellect and power had set their seal upon his face, and
his bearing was that of one accustomed to command. A man of superior
mind, stranded for life in such a place as Combhaven, might naturally
think himself a king.
The new-comer’s costume was that of the yeoman class. He wore
knee-breeches, coarse gray knitted stockings, and stout buckled
shoes. His only distinguishing characteristic was a white cravat,
but this was a symbol which marked his power and authority over
that little group of rough fishermen; and Mrs. Jakes, the landlady,
who stood at her door listening to the discourse of her customers,
dropped a low curtsy at sight of the man in the white neckcloth.
Joshua Haggard was a strong influence in the little town of
Combhaven, being chief custodian of the souls of its inhabitants,
from Miss Tremaine, the rich maiden lady at Tremaine Place, to the
grubby kitchen-wench at the Ring of Bells, who cleaned herself
once a week, and, with face smarting from the vigorous application
of mottled soap and coarsest huckaback, went to Little Bethel to
hear Mr. Haggard preach. It was over the womankind of Combhaven,
doubtless, that Joshua was most potent; but the men, if they went
to any place of worship, did it for the most part to please their
womankind; and thus was Little Bethel crowded to overflowing on warm
summer evenings; while the white-haired vicar of Combhaven preached
his drowsy orthodox sermon to the school-children, the pew-opener
and beadle, and the half-dozen stanch followers of the Established
Church who had not overeaten themselves at dinner, or drank too much
after that ponderous and hearty meal.
Fifty years ago the Established Church was nowhere in Combhaven, as
compared with Joshua Haggard and Little Bethel. The great Anglican
revival has doubtless awakened that slumberous old parish church
into new life and vigour, and left Little Bethel in the rear; but
in those days Bethel was dominant, and to sit under Joshua was to
be in the right away to salvation, in the opinion of Combhaven;
always excepting certain old families of landed estate, and the more
substantial of the tenant-farmers, who clung to the Established
Church like barnacles to a ship’s bottom, and with little more
ability to reason upon their faith than the barnacles. They stuck to
the Church of England chiefly because their fathers had done so, and
they looked down upon Joshua as a ranter, and follower of that low
person, John Wesley.
Mr. Haggard had his temporal avocation and business in life as well
as his spiritual profession, and a man of less energy and intellect
would have hardly fared so well as he did with both. The business he
had inherited from his father. His clerical position he had made for
himself. He had received no collegiate education; he was a member
of no convocation. If he followed any other light than his own it
was assuredly that lamp which John Wesley lighted nearly a century
earlier; yet the Wesleyans would have disowned Joshua Haggard. Early
in life he had taken to field-preaching, and had made as great an
impression upon his benighted hearers as Whitfield made in the woods
near Bristol. When his father died, reconciled to his only son at the
last, and leaving Joshua his business and a nice little lump of money
in the bargain, Joshua built himself a chapel, and settled down after
his wanderings in his native town. He belonged rather to the order of
Primitive Methodists, founded by Vincent Bourne, than to any other
denomination; but he was a man of more original mind and broader
views than are common to Methodist preachers, and a loving student of
the old Puritan Divines.
Haggard’s was one of the best shops in Combhaven. Ostensibly devoted
to groceries, it gave a counter to linen-drapery, supplied its
customers with stationery, and was generally willing to procure any
article that might be wanted in Combhaven from the larger resources
of Barnstaple or the illimitable storehouses of Exeter. Enthusiast
as Joshua really was in religion, he never neglected his trade;
order and attention marked the conduct of his business; a scrupulous
honesty recommended him even to careful housekeepers. No adulterated
coffee, no sanded sugar, came from his stores; to say that any
article came from Haggard’s was tantamount to saying it was the
best that money could buy. Haggard’s eight shilling mixed tea was a
specific for nervous headache, and for plasters in urgent cases no
one thought of using any mustard but Haggard’s.
Joshua being a widower of some years’ standing, the feminine
element in the business was supplied by his maiden sister Judith,
a woman of commercial mind, frugal housewifely habits, and energy
as inexhaustible as her brother’s. She was of Joshua’s temperament
as regarded mundane things, but lacked his loftier aspirations
and spiritual views. Piety with her was of rather a mechanical
order, dependent upon the number of her attendances at church. She
took an ascetic view of life, especially as regarded the lives of
other people, and was continually cutting off some small enjoyment
or gratification of mind or senses as ‘a snare.’ She was the sole
and despotic ruler of Joshua’s household and family, the family
consisting of one son and one daughter, the household of a sturdy
maid-of-all-work, a shopman, and a boy who carried out goods in
barrow or basket, and occasionally came to grief by upsetting a box
of eggs or breaking a vinegar-bottle.
Joshua Haggard’s house and garden were always the pink of neatness,
his shop was a model of cleanliness and precision; and his life
altogether was so wisely ordered, so temperate, regular, and
honourable, that he himself seemed the highest example of that sober
Christian life he preached to others. When he read the first Psalm,
in that rich sonorous voice of his, his congregation thought of him
as the man whose ‘delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law
doth he meditate day and night.
‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that
bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not
wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
‘The ungodly are not so--’
Ah, with what pious unction, with what a triumphant sense of
superiority, with what confidence and security against the
possibility of temptation assailing _him_, used Joshua Haggard to
roll out the denunciatory verses that follow!
* * * * *
The minister, as Joshua was called in Combhaven, did not come to the
Ring of Bells to drink or make merry. He was the most sober of men,
without being an absolute abstainer, and, except a mug of small-beer
with his dinner and supper, rarely tasted anything stronger than
water. He came to the water-side tavern to reprove and exhort. Mrs.
Jakes had absented herself from chapel for the last two Sabbaths,
and this backsliding was a fact to be inquired into by a shepherd
solicitous for the welfare of his flock.
‘The Saturday nights have been so trying, Mr. Haggard,’ replied Mrs.
Jakes to her pastor’s grave remonstrance. ‘The fishermen will sit so
late and get so quarrelsome. It’s enough to make one feel tired and
addled-like next morning.’
‘If you were more careful of the good of your soul than of filthy
lucre, Mrs. Jakes, you wouldn’t let the men stay late enough to tire
you, or drink enough to get quarrelsome.’
‘Ah,’ sighed the landlady, with a doleful shake of her head; ‘it’s
lucky for they as was brought up to a virtuous business. I was
brought up to mine by they as went before me, and I’m obliged to
abide by it.’
‘Put it away, if you find it a snare, Mrs. Jakes. Put it away, if
you see that it leads others to evil ways. Selling drink to the
intemperate is like going into partnership with Satan. Dissolve the
firm, my dear woman, and put your trust in God.’
‘I might do that, Mr. Haggard; but how should I face the
tax-gatherer, or the brewer’s man, or the old Squire’s bailiff when
he calls for my rent?’
‘Have you forgotten how the sparrows are cared for, Mrs. Jakes?’
‘Ah, sir, it’s well for the sparrows; yet I’ve seen a many o’ they
tumble out of their nests, poor things. Sparrows is made without much
sense, and there’d need be somebody to look after ’em. But I fancy
Providence meant us to do for ourselves, and do the best we can in
the business we’re brought up to.’
‘You remind me of the young man in the Gospel, Mrs. Jakes, who went
away sorrowful because he clung to his great riches.’
‘It isn’t riches as I cling to, Mr. Haggard. It’s bread-and-cheese.
The leopard might as easy change his spots as I go out of the public
line; and if I could take to another business maybe my neighbours
wouldn’t like it. You wouldn’t care to see me open a grocer’s shop,
now, would ’ee, sir?’
Joshua Haggard smiled--a comfortable self-assured smile. He knew that
his business was established upon a basis not easily assailable.
Plenty of capital, shrewd judgment, long experience, unflinching
industry, and the special protection of Providence. Who should
prevail against these?
‘Look,’ cried Jabez Long, taking his pipe out of his mouth, and
pointing to the livid horizon line. ‘Look, lads, there she be--the
Dolfing.’
A patch of white sail--ghastly white against the leaden
sky--glimmered on the edge of the sea. All eyes turned to it in
anxious if not affrighted scrutiny. Poor struggling sail, how it
wavered and dipped, now vanishing, now reappearing! It was like a
human soul battling with the troubled waters of sorrow and sin.
The wind had risen while Joshua Haggard had been standing just inside
the stone-paved kitchen discoursing the words of wisdom to Mrs.
Jakes--a mighty wind that came shrieking up from the sea, and swept
over the fertile hills, and into the wooded gorges, like an evil
spirit intent upon the ruin of mankind.
But the wind was not yet at its worst, for far away to seaward a line
of foam showed like a white rift between the black darkness of sky
and sea. Well did the fishermen know what this portended. A heavy
squall was coming.
‘He ought to ha’ stayed at Clovelly,’ said Mike Durran; ‘none but a
madman would sail in yon cockleshell with a gale coming. Why, she’ll
be swamped by the sea, or have the mast taken clean out of her and
be druv on they rocks. That there boat’ll be smashed like a nutshell
agen they rocks if he don’t take care.’
‘He’s a good sailor, isn’t he?’ asked Joshua Haggard.
‘Good sailor! ay, to be sure. If he warn’t he’d never be able to
manage the boat as he is doing with such a sea running. There isn’t
a better in these parts. He and his brother allus hankered after the
sea. But if he don’t get too much of it this time, I’m a Dutchman.’
There was a coolness in the speech that astonished Mr. Haggard; but
life is cheap on these rocky shores, and a man drowned, more or
less, makes no great sensation. The young Squire was no favourite
with these fishermen. He was reserved, and they gave him credit for
pride. He felt the restraint and injustice of his position as the son
of a miserly father. He had nothing to give his fellow-men, and was
thought mean.
‘What!’ exclaimed Joshua; ‘do you think that boat is in danger?’
‘Ay, danger enough,’ answered Jabez. ‘See, the squall is a’most upon
her. If we see her agen when it clears, I shall be surprised.’
Nearer and nearer to the Dolphin came that line of white foam with
its black background of wind and rain. Another moment and it was on
her. They could see her heel over to the first gust of the storm. The
next instant the white sail vanished.
‘She is gone!’ exclaimed Haggard.
‘No; but the mast has gone--snapped off like a carrot. Nothing can
save her now. She will be swept on the rocks, and the sea will make
short work of her.’
‘And you stand here quietly, smoking and drinking, while a
fellow-creature’s life is in jeopardy--you--seamen!’
The squall which had settled the fate of the Dolphin was by this time
upon them, the blinding rain driving into their eyes, so that they
could hardly distinguish anything to seaward. What they could see
was not encouraging, for the huge waves came leaping up the beach,
roaring and hissing at them like sea-monsters thirsting for their
blood.
Most of their boats were securely hauled up on the beach, above the
estuary of a small stream that falls into the sea a short distance
from the town. Thus they might launch them with safety; but could
they, dare they, pull out to sea in the teeth of the wind, and in
such a sea? And even if they did, could they be in time? The Dolphin
was drifting fast towards the reef. Would it not be a useless hazard
of their lives?
The fishermen looked at each other, and then at Joshua Haggard,
doubtfully. They were none of them young men--declined into the vale
of years rather, and much weather-beaten.
‘We’ve wives and families to think about,’ said Durran. ‘They’re o’
more account to us than the young Squire.’
‘A deal we should get by it if we risked our lives to bring the
Dolfing safe ashore,’ added Jabez.
‘And you would see a fellow-creature perish!’ cried Haggard,
horrified at this inhumanity. These were of his flock; it was to
these he preached the gospel--self-abnegation, love of one’s
neighbour--sometimes of a Sunday evening.
‘No talk of perishing yet a while,’ said one.
‘He ought to ha’ stayed at Clovelly,’ said another.
Joshua Haggard arched his hands above his eyes and looked out
seaward. The squall had spent its force, though it was still blowing
furiously. The rain which had been driven before the blast had
cleared off, and the Dolphin was to be seen, a black spot upon the
troubled sea. To leeward of her, between her and the spot on which
they were standing, a line of black rocks and seething foam denoted
the reef which ran from the point at the west of the bay into the
sea. It was a narrow ledge of rocks, which was uncovered at low
water, terminating in one larger and higher than the rest, which
showed its head above water even in the highest tides. Now the tide
was nearly out, and the whole line of reef could occasionally be seen
as the huge waves rose and fell, inky black against the white foam
which covered the reef, and streamed over the leeward side like a
cataract.
A little to the westward of the Ring of Bells, and close to the rocks
at the point, a single boat was hauled up. It had been a merchant
vessel’s dingey. Small and old, but yet strong, it could be launched
under the shelter of the cliff into almost smooth water. Joshua
glanced at the dingey, then at the Dolphin, which was drifting fast
to her fate.
‘I can handle a pair of sculls with any man in Combhaven,’ he said;
‘lend me your dingey and a coil of rope, Jabez.’
‘What! ye’re not going out in the teeth o’ such a wind, Master
Haggard?’ cried Long.
‘I’m going to save human lives, if I can,’ answered Haggard. ‘He who
walked the waters and stilled the tempest will be with me!’
‘Nay, master, but we’ll go instead of ’ee,’ cried Jabez.
‘Ay, to be sure we will,’ said Durran; and there was an assenting
murmur from the rest of the group, and a move towards the little
estuary, where the boats lay bottom upwards, trembling and groaning
as the wind shook their battered old timbers.
‘No,’ cried Joshua decisively, ‘you have wives and families
unprovided for. Mine will be well supplied with temporal blessings
if the waters should swallow me; and if they were penniless I could
trust them to Him who rules on sea and land.’
Joshua ran to the dingey and pushed it down to the water amidst the
remonstrances of the fishermen, now all eager to rush to the rescue.
‘Not one of you shall go with me,’ he cried, with that fiery
enthusiasm which gave him his strongest influence on his flock. ‘The
Lord has given these lives into my hand. I am going alone. Give me
the rope and the sculls.’
They obeyed him submissively; but farther down the beach a larger
boat was being got ready for sea at the same time. There was no
question now of wives and families to be left to the tender mercies
of the parish.
Joshua had not boasted when he called himself a good oarsman. He was
a man skilled in many things--a man who must needs have been dominant
in any station. Fate had made him a dissenting parson, but if Fate
had chosen to make him soldier or sailor, he would have come to the
front.
He had no easy task before him. For a short distance he was sheltered
by the cliff; but when that was cleared, he felt the full fury of the
wind sweeping down on him. From the waves he was still sheltered by
this reef, which acted as a natural breakwater. Still, as the heaving
seas dashed on and over it, they made a seething caldron of foaming
and perturbed water, which rendered Joshua’s progress a matter of
extreme difficulty, the little boat being rocked to and fro, so that
he could hardly handle his sculls with any effect.
Joshua glanced over his shoulder as he desperately pulled on. About a
hundred yards from him he saw the Dolphin, not yet in the breakers,
but drifting down on them a little on the shoreward side of the large
rock at the end of the reef. Her crew had not given way to despair.
Hopeless as it seemed, they had got out a small pair of oars, which
were always kept in her, and had endeavoured with them to propel her
past the reef; but finding that impossible, and seeing the gallant
little boat coming to their rescue, they were steering for a place
where a slight cleft in the reef gave them the best chance of being
washed over without their lives being dashed out of them on the rocks.
Away to leeward they could see a larger boat, manned by six vigorous
fishermen, struggling against the wind and sea; but their fate must
be decided before she could reach them. The little boat was their
only chance.
Joshua gave but one glance, and then, with a heartfelt prayer upon
his lips, gave all his energies to the task before him.
‘The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea,
than the mighty waves of the sea,’ cried Joshua.
He was not a moment too soon. He had hardly got abreast of the spot
where he had last seen the Dolphin, when she struck. Carried on the
crest of a wave she lighted on the top of the reef, and that one
shock destroyed the slightly-built old pleasure-boat. In a moment
more two forms were seen struggling in the foam on the lee-side of
the reef, half stunned by the shock, half choked by the water. One
after the other Joshua pulled these two into the rocking dingey. The
first was the lad Peter, the second Jack the skipper. But where was
the young Squire?
Joshua’s keen eyes scanned surf and rocks, and at last discovered
him. There he was on the highest part of the reef. The wave that
had thrown him there had not had power to carry him over, but
had left him stunned apparently, with just life enough to cling
instinctively to the ridge of the rock. As every seaman knows, the
waves succeed each other with varying bulk and power; first a series
of medium-sized waves, then a few higher ones, culminating in two or
three that overtop all the rest. The young Squire had been thrown up
by the last big wave of the series. The next big wave would either
wash him over to the lee-side of the reef, or else the backwash would
draw him into its vortex, and the returning wave would dash out what
little life he had remaining. To go to his assistance was to risk
sharing his fate. No personal danger would prevent Joshua from at
least trying to save him; but to get to him was no easy task.
To land on the rock was not only difficult in the extreme, but
hazardous, not only of Joshua’s own life, but of the lives of those
two he had already rescued. These had now in somewise recovered from
the immersion and the shock they had sustained while carried along by
the vast bulk of water, and had almost come to their wits.
The boat lying, as she did, under the lee of the reef was much
sheltered; but still the rise and fall of the large waves rendered
any attempt at landing on the reef full of peril.
Joshua gave the sculls into the hands of the skipper and his mate,
then steadied himself in the bow, and prepared to leap on the reef.
No easy matter. One moment the boat was on a level or almost above
the rock, the next it was many feet below. If the bow of the dingey
caught the rock as the water fell, the boat was doomed. If Joshua
sprang and missed his footing, his destruction was almost inevitable.
But upon Joshua Haggard the knowledge of this peril had no deterring
influence. Long-familiar texts were in his mind even at this moment;
his heart, amidst the roar of the waves, lifted up its voice to his
God. What if death came in the effort to do this good work? It was
but a plunge into the dark dividing stream that parted the Christian
from his eternal country.
‘But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers
and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall
gallant ships pass thereby. For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is
our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us.’
He thought of the poor fellows he had rescued rather than of himself.
Their calling and election might not be sure. Here, perchance, were
two sinners still unreconciled with their God.
‘Pull your starboard scull,’ he cried. ‘That will do. One stroke
together--back-hand.’
As the last order was given, Joshua sprang on the rock--just a little
too late. He had timed it well too; but even the most practised
sailor would have found it difficult to steady himself for the spring
in that cockleshell of a boat, tossed about like a cork in the
seething foam. As he raised himself on the bow-thwart he staggered
back, and though he recovered himself instantly for the leap, the
favourable moment had passed. Instead of springing from a rising
motion, he sprang from a falling one; and though he lighted on the
rock, it was not on his feet. He fell heavily against the edge of
the reef, bruising and wounding himself severely; but he clung to
the reef with his fingers, and succeeded after a hard struggle in
gaining a foothold on the rock. He was bleeding and exhausted; but
only a few yards of slippery reef now separated him from the object
of his hazardous attempt. A few yards; but they were yards not easily
passed; the seas were still dashing over them; and though the broken
wave shivered before it dashed against the surface of the reef, still
to keep his footing was more than Joshua could do.
Twice the wash of the waves carried his feet from under him; but each
time he clung with bleeding hands to the rock, and held on like a
limpet till the wave had passed and he was able again to struggle on.
Had the young Squire recovered strength and consciousness he might
in a few seconds have crawled far enough to be out of all danger of
being carried back to the weather-side of the reef, even if he felt
himself too weak to swim to the boat through the troubled water on
the lee-side. But Oswald Pentreath had never seen the boat. The wave
which drove him on the top of the rock seemed to have dashed the life
out of him; and there he lay, with the spray dashing over him, but
out of reach of all but the largest waves.
Joshua was close to him; but the time for the big waves had come
again. Before Joshua could reach him, the first of those giant masses
of water struck on the rock to windward of him. It came to the rock a
huge green mountain; it struck and curled over into a mass of foam,
which dashed up against the young Squire. It was not strong enough
to carry him over, but it was just strong enough for the reflux to
carry him back. And now his doom must have been fixed had not Joshua
struggled through the spray just in time. It was pull, wave; pull,
Joshua: but Joshua was the stronger. In a moment he had Oswald over
the ridge of the reef, and safe on the lee-side.
Joshua hailed the men in the dingey--who, while watching the scene,
had drifted away--to pull close in and stand by, to pick Oswald and
him up, intending to plunge in with the still inanimate Squire; but
the next wave saved him the trouble, sweeping them both off the rock
and almost against the boat. A few seconds more and the skipper and
his mate hauled their master over the gunwale, and assisted Joshua to
clamber in after him. Ten minutes more, and the heavily-laden dingey
ran in upon the sandy shore, amidst the loud hurrahs of the little
populace of fishermen’s wives and children gathered to watch the
struggle.
Joshua came on shore, carrying his burden with him. He made nothing
of the Squire’s young figure, though Oswald Pentreath was no
feather-weight.
‘Tell Mrs. Jakes to get a blazing fire,’ cried Joshua as he went
slowly towards the Ring of Bells; ‘or, on second thoughts, I’ll take
him to my own house. There’s more comfort there, a clean bed, and my
sister Judith, who’s as good as a doctor. Lend a hand one of you, and
we’ll get him up street in no time.’
Mr. Haggard’s house was at the beginning of the High-street, the
one single street of Combhaven, and was not more than five minutes’
walk from the Ring of Bells. Half a dozen men ran forward to help the
minister with his burden, but he bade the youngest of the group take
Mr. Pentreath’s feet, while he held him by his shoulders, and the
two carried him thus easily round the point, across the little sandy
bay, and into the street, at the corner of which, with one side to
the sea, stood Joshua Haggard’s house--a square stone cottage, with a
shop built out at one side, and a couple of extra rooms on the other,
making it altogether a building of some importance. There was a good
garden of the old-fashioned utilitarian type, and behind the garden
an orchard, on the steep slope of one of those hills which sheltered
Combhaven from wind and weather. There was a stable adjacent to the
house, in which the minister kept his gray cob, a useful animal,
which carried Joshua or the groceries with perfect equanimity.
Architecturally Mr. Haggard’s dwelling-place had no claim to be
admired. Not easy were it to imagine a building more commonplace,
or one in which the useful more completely predominated over the
ornamental. But in this fertile Devonian land there is a wealth of
colour everywhere, which renders the meanest things lovely, and on
a sunny day Joshua’s house and garden would have made a study for a
Turner or a Millais. There is also, happily for the lowly-minded,
a beauty in neatness and perfect order which comes home to every
mind, and in this kind of beauty Joshua’s home was rich. The
stainless floors, the spotless walls, the shining old furniture,
transparent window-panes, china bowls of sweet-scented flowers,
bright brass-fenders and fire-irons, the freshness and sweetness
that pervaded all things might have charmed the inhabitant of a
palace. The kitchen with its gleaming array of copper saucepans and
brazen pipkins, polished industriously every week, but kept more
for show than use; and the parlour with its brass-handled bureaus,
wide-backed chairs with broad horsehair seats, fluted legs, and an
unknown coat of arms painted on their polished panels, recalled the
rich umber shadows and mellow lights of an old Dutch picture. The
broad sanded passage with low ceiling, panelled walls, and vista of
garden through the open door at the end, made a delicious bit of
perspective. The best parlour was a temple of coolness and repose,
odorous with dried rose-leaves, spices, and lavender--a room in
which to slumber luxuriously on warm Sunday afternoons, the world
forgetting, and most assuredly forgotten by the world.
Judith Haggard flew to the door as the little crowd entered at the
green wooden gate which divided the narrow strip of front-garden from
the street.
‘Why, what’s happened, Joshua?’ she cried, affrighted at that
lifeless burden.
She was briefly told the state of the case.
‘There’s a good fire in the kitchen,’ she cried; ‘carry him in.
Naomi, run and help Sally down with the mattress off the spare bed,
and a blanket or two, and a pillow to lay under him. Why, Joshua,
you’ve been in the water too.’
‘Yes, Judith, by God’s grace I was privileged to save him.’
‘Humph,’ muttered his sister doubtfully, ‘I wish you’d ha’ saved a
better man than any of old Pentreath’s breed.’
The old Squire kept himself close within his own domain, never went
to church, and gave nothing to the poor; whereby Combhaven held him
in awe as a limb of Satan, who would hardly require Christian burial
with bell and book, but would be assuredly carried away bodily by his
master when the predestined hour came.
It was a dim tradition in Combhaven that the Squire in his early
manhood had been a republican and a Wilkite, had rioted and
blasphemed with the wild monks of Medmenham, and that the gripping
and pinching of his old age were intended to balance the waste and
profusion of his youth. There was a slight anachronism here, for the
Squire was not old enough to have known John Wilkes in his glory.
But the fact remained that old Mr. Pentreath’s youth had been wild
and wicked. He had squandered his substance upon dissipations which
the Combhaven people hinted at darkly, as something not to be openly
expressed, like the vices of Commodus or Elagabalus--horrors to be
shrouded in one of the dead languages, or communicated dumbly by nods
and shrugs and significant pursings up of the lips. He had raised
money on mortgage, and wasted it on midnight orgies, in drink, in
play; and the slow laborious money-scraping of his later years had
been in somewise necessary. Twenty years ago he must have been a poor
man, said Combhaven, with the certainty which springs from a careful
study of our neighbours’ business; but the mortgages were paid off
about that time, and the intervening twenty years must have made the
Squire rich. A man who owns over seven hundred acres of cultivated
land, and who neither spends nor gives, must needs become the Crœsus
of his narrow sphere. Combhaven could imagine no wealthier miser than
its Squire, and they resented his miserly temper as a public wrong.
But although Miss Judith Haggard looked somewhat contemptuously
upon the lifeless figure lying face-downward on one of her best
mattresses, she set to work none the less vigorously to expedite
Oswald Pentreath’s return to life. She rubbed him, she shook him, she
punched him in the back, and made returning animation such a severe
ordeal that the struggling soul, feeling its husk of clay so roughly
handled, might naturally entreat to be allowed to stay in Hades.
Judith, however, without having the printed instructions of the
Humane Society to guide her, evidently knew her business, and did
it so well that, when she had made her patient disgorge all the
sea-water he had swallowed, and had dragged him into a half-sitting
position with his head upon her knee, her labours were crowned with
success. The heavy eyelids slowly raised themselves, the dark gray
eyes looked round the circle of eager faces with a gaze of vague
inquiry, a shuddering sigh broke from the parted lips.
‘The Lord be praised!’ exclaimed Joshua solemnly.
‘It’s taken twenty minutes by grandmother’s clock,’ said Judith,
glancing at that authority--an ancient eight-day timepiece in a
mahogany case, crowned with three brass nobs--a clock that kept some
mysterious record of the sun, moon, and stars, the months and weeks,
and which had never been known to be correct within the memory of man.
There had been silence, save for furtive whisperings in the
background, until now; but the opening of Oswald Pentreath’s eyes
seemed a signal for the loosening of every one else’s tongue.
‘Well, I’m glad he’s come to,’ said Jabez Long confidentially to his
next neighbour and favourite chum, Michael Durran; ‘but I’d leaver
the minister saved him nor me.’
‘Why’s that, mate?’
‘Don’t ’ee know?’
‘No.’
‘Why, I thought you was too good a sayman not to know _that_.’
‘What, lad?’
‘Why, as no good never come o’ reskying a drownding man. You fetches
him out of the water at the risk of your own life, don’t ’ee? Yes,
and that there man’s bound to do ’ee a hinjury. He can’t help it.
Why, mate, arn’t it a common saying all along this ’ere coast--
“Save a stranger from the sea
And he’ll turn your enemy”?
The deepest wrong as the minister ever had done agen him will be
done by that young man. Them as lives to see it may remember my
words.’
He had raised his voice in his excitement, and his speech had been
audible to Joshua standing in front of him.
‘I knew you were an ignorant man, Long,’ said Joshua, turning sharply
upon the guileless fisherman; ‘but I didn’t think you were a fool
into the bargain.’
‘It’s trew as the tides and the mune, Muster Haggard. You beware o’
that young ’un. He’s bound to be your foe.’
‘Because I have done him the greatest service one man can do another?
Nonsense, man. I’m ashamed of such folly.’
‘Them as knows the say knows it for truth,’ said Long doggedly.
‘Come, my friends,’ said Joshua, too contemptuous of such foolishness
to argue further; ‘Mr. Pentreath is all right, you see; so you may as
well clear out of this, and let us make him as comfortable as we can.
The more air we give him the better.’
‘And you’ve got your own clothes to change yet, Joshua,’ said
Judith. ‘If you’re not in for the rheumatics after this, I shall be
surprised. A man had need be careful when he has seen the last of his
five-and-fortieth birthday.’
The fishermen slowly withdrew, and the young Squire was left with
Judith and her brother. Naomi Haggard and Sally the servant-girl had
been banished from the kitchen during the process of resuscitation,
and were waiting outside in the passage, breathless with expectation,
Naomi trembling a little and holding Sally’s stalwart arm.
‘Let go, please, miss; you be a pinching of me,’ remonstrated Sally
at last as the grip tightened.
‘I beg your pardon, Sally, I’m so anxious.’
‘No call to be anxious, miss. He’s drownded and dead, poor young man;
and missus is wasting her trouble. Did you see how blue his lips was?
purplish, like my Sunday frock.’
‘O, Sally, I hope he is not dead!’
‘Lor’, miss, it ain’t much odds. Them was never no good, they
Pentreaths.’
The fishermen had gone out by a door that opened from kitchen to
garden, so Naomi and the maid-servant remained in ignorance of the
patient’s progress under aunt Judith’s ministrations. Naomi had
been much too well brought up to think of opening the kitchen-door,
were it ever so narrow a chink, after she had been told to keep her
distance. There was love, doubtless, in Mr. Haggard’s household; but
the love was in somewise a latent element, and the more ostensible
ruler was fear. From their babyhood upwards Naomi and James Haggard
had regarded their father as the one awful power in this world. They
were fond of him and proud of him, but with a far-off affection
and a reverential pride which admitted of no familiarity. They
had never clambered on his knees, or rifled his coat-pockets. The
nearest approach to making him a playfellow had been to stand by his
chair on a Sunday afternoon, between dinner-time and chapel, and
hear him relate the story of Joseph and his brethren, or of those
never-to-be-forgotten children who made a mock of the prophet’s bald
head, in his deep full voice, which gave additional solemnity even to
the language of the Bible.
While Naomi and Sarah were straining their ears to catch any sound
that might penetrate the stout oaken door--a vain effort--the door
suddenly opened, and Joshua appeared, supporting a curiously muffled
figure in his arms. It was Oswald Pentreath wrapped in a couple of
blankets.
‘Light a fire in the spare room, Sally,’ cried Judith, as the girl
ran off to the wood-house, while Joshua half carried, half led,
the young Squire up-stairs. Not often was Mr. Haggard’s spare room
occupied by a visitor, and he might as well have used that extra
chamber for his own comfort, as a study or book-room. But in Judith’s
opinion it was the right thing in a respectable house to have a spare
bedroom, and it was her pride to maintain that apartment in perfect
order, and in a certain kind of splendour, even at some sacrifice of
the inhabited rooms. Thus, while Joshua’s four-poster was of painted
deal, with washed-out chintz curtains and a coarse knotted coverlet,
the spare bed had curly posts and an elaborate cornice, with a good
deal of white fringe and dimity festooning, watch-pockets of silken
patchwork, and a counterpane of the same industrious work, a little
faded, but gorgeous still, with memorials of dead-and-gone brocades
and satins, choice morsels which Miss Patterson, the Barnstaple
dressmaker, had bestowed upon Mrs. Martha Haggard, her first cousin.
The dressing-table in the spare room was an elaborate piece of
furniture, with numerous drawers, an oval looking-glass, and faint
traces of departed gilding on its pale green paint--a dressing-table
which had evidently adorned a grander room in its time. The bedside
carpets were Brussels instead of Dutch, bordered and fringed by
Judith’s own hands; the pierced brass fender and brass-handled
fire-irons were objects of admiration with all Judith’s female
acquaintance who came to the spare room to take off their bonnets at
ceremonious tea-drinkings or social stepping-in for the afternoon.
There were Swansea china teacups and saucers, the relics of an old
set, on the narrow mantelpiece, and oval gems of art in tent-stitch
on the wall--Adam and Eve in the Garden, and the meeting of Isaac and
Rebecca.
In this chamber Mr. Pentreath was made to lie down, wrapped to
suffocation in blankets, made still warmer by the administration of
hot brandy-and-water, and bidden to sleep. His clothes should be
dried and brought to him, he was told, before dark that evening; and
a messenger should be sent to his father announcing the fact of his
safety; to which the young Squire replied drowsily that they need
take no such trouble--his father would not be uneasy about him.
‘I’m sorry for the Dolphin,’ he said; ‘and I think I might as well
have gone down in her while I was about it;’ for which speech Mr.
Haggard reproved him gravely.
‘I hope you wouldn’t say such a thing if you had quite come to your
right senses, Mr. Pentreath,’ he said.
‘Why, what have I to live for, do you think, that I should be
overfond of life?’ returned the young Squire carelessly.
‘We can all make our lives good to ourselves and to others, if we
set about it the right way, and seek the right direction,’ answered
Joshua.
‘Ah, you mean by preaching and praying. That’s out of my line.’
‘I’ll come and talk to you when you have slept,’ said Joshua,
shocked at this reprobate speech; ‘and I’ll say a short prayer before
I leave you.’
The minister knelt beside the bed, and lifted up his voice in one of
those supplications which he knew so well how to make impressive.
Oswald opened his heavy eyelids and watched the uplifted face on
a level with his own, shining with the faith of an enthusiast. He
thought more of the man, perhaps, than of the prayer for ‘this sinner
wandering darkly,’ but he was impressed. He had thought of Joshua
Haggard hitherto as a smooth-tongued canting rascal, who improved his
business prospects by an affectation of sanctity. Brought for the
first time in his life face to face with the man, he was moved to
wonder at and even to respect him.
Having said his prayer, Joshua went to change his clothes, which
had dried upon him; and when this was done it was tea-time, and the
little family assembled, according to their custom from year’s end to
year’s end, at the parlour-table, where aunt Judith in her afternoon
cap and gown sat before the mahogany tea-board, and poured out the
tea from a flowered china teapot, squat and square, which dispensed
a mild and unexciting liquor of uniform strength and colour. It is
not to be supposed that Mr. Haggard’s household lacked that evidence
of respectability, a silver teapot. Aunt Judith had a whole boxful of
good old silver, wrapped in baize, and safely bestowed under her bed,
from which retreat the family treasures only emerged on solemn and
festive occasions.
That afternoon gathering in Joshua Haggard’s parlour was apt to
be rather a dull business. Judith had gone through life with
a fixed idea that cheerfulness and laughter, and all youthful
trifling and unmeaning gaiety, were so many snares and pitfalls
set by the indefatigable enemy of mankind. She was happily exempt
herself from these weaknesses; rarely smiled, save with the set
smile she kept for after-chapel greetings and formal tea-parties;
and suspected some evil in every unconsidered outbreak of gaiety
in the young people of her acquaintance. Judicious training and
seasonable reproof--seasonable in this case meaning at all times
and seasons--had made Naomi almost as serious as her aunt; but
the boy James was his sister’s junior by four years, and not so
easily tamed. Naomi saw very little in life to move her to smiles
or gladness; James had his joke with every truant and scamp in
Combhaven. James was often late for tea, and brought discredit upon
poor hard-working Sally by his dirty boots, which left their track
along the sanded passage and across the red-brick floor of the
kitchen.
‘Hearthstoning and cleanliness are thrown away where James is,’ aunt
Judith used to remark vindictively.
They had taken their seats at the tea-table this afternoon, when
Joshua came down in his good black clothes and fresh cambric
neckcloth, looking like a bishop, Judith thought, as she eyed him
admiringly. Her brother was the one object of Judith’s reverence and
love. She was not demonstrative, and rarely gratified or plagued
him by any expression of her affection; but from her childhood
upwards she had worshipped him, toiled for him, and believed in him,
with a single-minded devotion which is given to few brothers. This
affection, like most intense feeling in this world, was not without
its alloy of jealousy. Judith liked, nay expected, to be first in
her brother’s regard, to receive his warmest praises, and to stand
nearest him at all times. She would have been wounded if she had
thought his own children could be as dear to him as she was.
It may be that Joshua’s departed wife, laid at rest under the daisies
in the parish churchyard ten years ago, had languished somewhat in
the shadow of the domestic hearth, obscured by the more important
figure of her sister-in-law. But if it were so, it is certain that
Mrs. Haggard had never complained. She had honoured and loved her
husband, had praised his virtues, and been full of gratitude for
the grave tenderness which sheltered and fenced in her innocent
uneventful life. She had come into his house meekly and quietly, and
she faded out of his life as calmly as she had entered it; and no
outbreak of jealousy, no desire to be paramount, had ever kindled the
fatal spark of domestic warfare.
‘She was a poor, harmless creature,’ said Judith, in bland approval,
‘and she did her duty by my brother. I won’t deny that I always
wondered what Joshua could see to admire in her; but the more mind a
man has the easier his fancy is satisfied, and one doll’s face seems
to do as well as another, if it’s only pink and white enough.’
The pinkness and whiteness which in Judith’s opinion had constituted
Mrs. Haggard’s chief attraction in the eye of her husband had not
been transmitted to Mrs. Haggard’s daughter. Naomi had her father’s
olive skin, black hair, strongly-marked brows, and dark eyes. She was
a girl about whom opinion varied. Some people in Combhaven called her
plain, for lack of that pinkness and whiteness which were essential
to the Combhaven notion of beauty; but drape that tall slim figure
in Cleopatra’s flowing robe, put a fillet of gold round that smooth
raven hair and low broad brow, and you would have as noble an image
of the daughter of the Ptolemies as ever shone on the painter’s
canvas or glorified the poet’s page. But Combhaven had not awakened
to the Cleopatra type of beauty, and was wont to speak of Naomi
Haggard with a patronising pity, as a young woman who ought to have
been much more personable, having had such a pretty mother.
‘Father,’ began Naomi gravely, when Joshua had taken his seat, and
his cup and saucer had been handed to him, ‘was not your life in
danger while you were saving Mr. Pentreath?’
‘My life was in the keeping of my Master, Naomi, just as much then as
it is now.’
‘What, when you were sliding about on that slippery rock?’ asked
James, who had a matter-of-fact mind, and who had just come back from
a business journey to a distant farmhouse in time to hear of his
father’s heroism.
‘I was as safe as Daniel in the lions’ den, or as Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego in the fiery furnace,’ answered Joshua.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said James argumentatively. James would
have argued with an archbishop. ‘_I_ wouldn’t trust myself among
hungry lions on the strength of Daniel’s coming off so easy, if I was
you. Look at the early Christians in the Roman amphitheatre; _they_
weren’t Danieled; they were eaten up body and bones.’
‘How often must I tell you, James, that such arguments are
irreverent?’ asked the father reprovingly.
Naomi took up her father’s strong broad hand and kissed it.
‘How good you are, father! how brave, how unselfish!’ she said, with
a little gush of feeling. ‘All those fishermen standing by, and only
you, a landsman, ready to help that drowning man.’
‘My dear, I had but to set the example, and those poor men were as
ready as I. They were sluggish-minded rather than cowardly; slow to
perceive the call of duty, but not unwilling to encounter peril. As
for being a landsman, I was almost as much on sea as on land when I
was a boy.’
‘You were nearly as bad as James for idling about in any bit of a
boat when you ought to have been minding your business ashore,’ said
aunt Judith; ‘and that’s saying a good deal.’
‘I love the sea,’ cried Naomi. ‘The first thing I can remember is
the water rolling up over my feet, and the smell of the seaweed, and
slippery green rocks, and the roaring tide. I’m very fond of the
country, with its woods and hills and deep green hollows, where the
ground is like a carpet of primroses in April, and Matcherly Common
all ablaze with furze; but lovely as it all is, the sea’s best. It
seems somehow as if the sea’s alive, and the land dumb and dead.’
‘I suppose you’d have been just as fond of the sea if it had
swallowed up your father to-day,’ remarked Judith sharply. Perhaps
she resented that little burst of affection with which Naomi
had rewarded her father’s prowess. The girl was not often so
demonstrative.
‘O, aunt,’ cried Naomi reproachfully, ‘do you think I could have ever
looked at the sea without agony if it had killed my father?’
‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ replied her aunt. ‘When young women are as
fanciful as you are, there’s no reckoning upon ’em.’
Joshua’s dark eyes contemplated his daughter with grave disapproval.
‘Fanciful,’ he repeated. ‘I hope no one is fanciful in my family. My
children have been brought up to be sober-minded, and steadfast to
the right.’
‘I wish we had been brought up to have more variety at meals,’ said
Jim, taking the impression of a fine set of teeth on his fourth
slice of bread-and-butter. ‘Green-meat is very well in its way, but
bread-and-butter and green stuff every afternoon is rather too much
of a good thing. I feel as if I was making a Nebuchadnezzar of myself
before the summer is over.’
‘Lettuces are good for your blood, boy,’ said Judith.
‘As wholesome for your body as the sensual desire for dainty food is
hurtful to your soul,’ added his father.
‘Are shrimps sinful, father?’ inquired the undaunted Jim, ‘because
they’re only fourpence a quart this afternoon, and there’s a good
deal of sinfulness of that kind going on up street.’
‘If you hadn’t grumbled, I might have given you shrimps for tea
to-morrow,’ said Judith; ‘but after your wicked murmurings I shall do
nothing of the kind.’
James made a wry face behind his bread-and-butter. He had not much
faith in these frustrated good intentions of his aunt Judith’s.
‘She’s always meaning and unmeaning,’ he used to say. ‘If she really
meant to give us anything nice, she’d do it, once in a way, instead
of telling us how she was going to do it if we hadn’t offended her.’
When the teacups were empty, and Jim had reduced the stack of
substantial bread-and-butter to nothingness, Joshua improved the
occasion by a homily, in which he held up to his son the picture of
his young infirmities as in a mirror. He took for his text the wise
man’s saying, that ‘a contented mind is a perpetual feast.’ He set
forth the sin of gluttony, the love of savoury meats, which lost Esau
his inheritance and his father’s blessing; and then he broke into a
rhapsody on the duty of thankfulness, the freewill offering of praise
and thanksgiving to an all-beneficent Creator.
There was real eloquence in his discourse, but it fell on somewhat
stony ground with James, for whom such exhortations may have lost
some of their power to move from frequency of application.
‘All this fuss about a plate of shrimps,’ thought Jim; and he wished
that his lines had been cast in another place than beneath the
roof-tree of a disciple of Whitfield and Wesley.