WOOD AND WILDERNESS.
The loss of the Dolphin weighed heavily upon Oswald Pentreath’s
spirits. His days seemed so much longer, his life altogether lost
brightness and colour, now that he was without a yacht. Love of the
sea was innate in him, and his happiest hours had been spent in
cruising round the romantic coast of his native country, making a
summer voyage to the wilder Cornish cliffs, where Tintagel’s rocky
buttress breasts the angry winds, or even going as far afield as the
Lizard or the Land’s End.
The yacht being gone he felt his occupation gone with her, and for
the first time in his life realised the fact that he was an idler.
He had no profession, no hope of a career; he was absolutely without
ambition. His future was marked out for him. In the fulness of time
his father would drop into the grave, decaying as gradually as the
great elms in the park, which shed their rotten old limbs one by one
till the hollow trunks stood up leafless and shorn, silvan images of
the tenacity with which crippled age holds on to life. The Squire
would die, and Pentreath would belong to Oswald--a goodly estate,
improved by half a century of economy and good management. That was
Oswald’s future. There was not much love between father and son, and
the young man’s calculations were not troubled by any sentimental
considerations. He was too good-natured to desire his father’s
death--he only told himself that it was an event which must happen in
due course, and that it would change the colour of his own existence.
By the time he was about forty he would most likely inherit the land,
and then Arnold could cease those wanderings of his from sea to sea,
and come back to his boyhood’s home. They had been loving brothers
in the days before Arnold, stung to the quick by the father’s brutal
punishment of some boyish offence, ran away to Bristol, and got
himself a berth on a merchant ship bound for Bombay. Arnold’s name
had never crossed the Squire’s lips since the day of his flight, but
the brothers had corresponded faithfully, and once in three or four
months a letter from some foreign port informed Oswald of Arnold’s
wanderings. The boy had prospered, and at three-and-twenty the
Squire’s second son was first mate on board an East Indian clipper
ship--a hard life, he told Oswald, but it suited him, and the owners
would make him captain before he was six-and-twenty. He had saved
one of their ships by his good seamanship, when her captain had been
knocked on the head by a falling spar and lay powerless in his berth,
and he stood high in favour with the firm. ‘It’s a better life than
that you lead at the Grange, my dear boy,’ wrote the sailor; ‘but as
you are to be commander there by and by, it’s best you should stick
to the ship. I see the world, men, and manners; while you might as
well be one of the seven sleepers, for all you know of the changes
and chances of this life. However, I fancy that sleepy kind of
existence suits you. You always took things easier than I.’
Severance had done little to lessen affection, and Oswald’s
pleasantest fancy about the days when he should be master was the
thought of Arnold’s return.
‘I’ll have the finest yacht between this and the Solent,’ said
Oswald, ‘and Arnold shall be skipper. I’ll give him a thousand a
year, and when he marries he shall have the prettiest homestead on
the estate, and fifty acres of pleasure-farm rent-free. There has
been hoarding and pinching enough for one century in this family:
Arnold and I will enjoy life.’
It was a pity so pleasant a day-dream could not be realised now in
the bloom and freshness of life’s morning. A man’s ideas of happiness
alter as the day wears on. They become more complex, take a wider
range, yet centre more narrowly in self.
Deprived of his yacht, and at a loss what to do with himself when
he was not riding Herne the Hunter, Oswald took to wandering about
the woods and hills in a dreamy way, with a volume of poems in one
pocket and a sketch-book and pencil in the other. He had some talent
as a draughtsman--a facile delicate touch, and an innate love of the
beautiful--which made it sweet to him to sit for a couple of hours
before a group of ferns growing in the clefts of a stone wall,
reproducing every curve and feathery undulation with his pencil. His
love of poetry was also innate, and just as he tried to reproduce
the ferns and trees, and flowers and crags, and glimpses of the sea
caught through some opening in the woods, so he tried, in a dimmer
and less artistic manner, to echo the great singer of his time,
whose harp’s last notes yet hung in the air, and whose recent death
was felt like a heart-wound by the more youthful and ardent of his
disciples. In secret and at odd times of his idle life Oswald’s sense
of something wanting in existence forced itself into rhyme--verses
to be kept in his pocket-book and reperused occasionally with a
blush. A man moderately gifted might have been made a poet by the
rich loveliness of nature round and about Combhaven, and by a life of
dreamy idleness like Oswald’s; but it must be confessed that young
Mr. Pentreath never rose above the rhymester of Pocket Magazines,
Caskets, and Wreaths, who addresses his plaintive verses to Celia on
her marriage with a happier rival, or indites a monody on the death
of the Princess Charlotte.
Pleasant though, even for one who had but poetic tastes without
poetic power, to lie at ease among the ferns in Pentreath Wood and
read _Manfred_ or the _Corsair_.
So was Oswald lying one August afternoon, a week after his rescue
from drowning, when he heard a boy’s shrill voice ringing clear
through the wood, and then the rustle of a woman’s dress, and anon a
sweeter voice than the lad’s treble, exclaiming at the beauty of the
ferns:
‘We have none like these in our wilderness, Jim; you must get me some
of these,’ said the voice.
Oswald was on his feet in a moment. He had recognised the tones of
the minister’s daughter. She had a lovely speaking voice, round and
full, like her father’s voice softened to match her womanhood.
‘Are you fern-hunting, Miss Haggard?’ he asked, after they had shaken
hands.
‘We are very fond of ferns, Jim and I,’ she answered, standing before
him shyly, as if she hardly knew whether to stop or pass on after
that first greeting. Jim stuck his stick into the ground, and flung
all his weight upon it, as if he was going to throw himself upon his
sword like a noble Roman.
‘Speak for yourself, Naomi,’ he said, jerking himself upright again;
‘I don’t care for ’em, and they’re precious hard to dig up. I have
all the work, and you have all the glory. She teased father to give
her a bit of waste ground on the other side of our orchard, you
know,’ he went on explanatorily to Oswald, ‘and she’s planted it with
ferns and primroses, and St. John’s wort and periwinkle, and a lot of
trumpery, and calls it a wilderness; and a nice life she leads me,
hunting for weeds and suchlike. I should plant something good to eat
if I had a bit of ground. Aunt Judith may well call it folly. Naomi’s
Folly, I call the place.’
‘Don’t be unkind, Jim. You’ve spent many a pleasant hour there
reading.’
‘Yes, when I could catch hold of a rare good story like _Rob Roy_ or
_Caleb Williams_ or the _Mysteries of Udolpho_. It’s a nice place to
get out of aunt Judith’s way, I grant. It’s too far off the shop and
the till for her to come bothering.’
‘It must be a delightful place, I should think,’ said Oswald,
admiring the girl’s glowing face, framed in a cottage-bonnet of
coarsest straw. ‘Won’t you sit down and rest a little after your
walk, Miss Haggard?’
‘I will,’ cried James, throwing himself at full length on the grass;
‘we were pretty well baked on the road before we got in here. It’s a
jolly place, this wood of yours.’
Naomi seated herself on a low bank beside the turf on which her
brother sprawled, his corduroy legs extended at an acute angle. Jim’s
communicativeness had set her at her ease by this time. She looked
wonderingly at Mr. Pentreath’s book, which lay face downwards on
the mossy bank--a book in boards, covered with coarse blue paper:
our ancestors were content to accept their choicest literature thus
rudely clothed.
‘Is that a tale?’ inquired Jim, pointing to the volume.
‘No; it’s a play, by Lord Byron.’
Naomi gave a little sigh--half surprise, half horror--as if she had
found herself suddenly in evil company.
‘Do you read Lord Byron?’ she asked.
‘Till I know every line by heart,’ answered Oswald, with a gush of
enthusiasm. ‘There never was such a poet; there never will be. All
other poetry--except Shakespeare’s--is prose in comparison. It is
dull, dead, colourless--a thing of rule and grammar, a concatenation
of carefully-chosen words. Or I should rather say all other poets
have written from the head, he alone from the heart. And to think of
Byron admiring Pope! It is like Mont Blanc admiring Holborn-hill.’
‘Do you mean Alexander Pope?’ inquired Naomi, as if there had been a
clan of poets with that surname.
‘Of course.’
‘I have some pieces of his in a book father gave me, and I like them
very much. ‘Vital Spark,’ and ‘The Universal Prayer,’ and an elegy on
a poor young lady who committed suicide. Do you know those?’
‘Yes; they are good enough in their way, and the _Essay on Man_ is
better. I don’t deny the cleverness. Pope is full of wit and force
and meaning. But I don’t call that kind of passionless stuff poetry,
you know, any more than I call Holborn-hill a mountain. Compare that
with _Manfred_, for instance,’ opening his book.
‘But is not Lord Byron’s poetry very, very wicked?’ inquired Naomi.
‘There is a good deal of it that I would not recommend to a young
lady; but take all that away, and there is enough left to make the
greatest lyrical genius of all time,’ answered Oswald warmly. ‘Let me
read you a page from _Manfred_.’
‘O, no, please; my father has forbidden us to read Byron. I have
read some extracts in the _Pocket Magazine_. They seemed very
beautiful--one of them, from the _Bride of Abydos_, made me cry. I
should dearly like to read more, but I am not likely to do that.
Father has forbidden it, and he never changes his mind.’
‘Something like my father when he refuses me money,’ said Oswald. ‘He
always stands to his guns.’
‘Are there any robbers in this here _Manfred_?’ asked Jim, who did
not always remember that he had been carefully educated.
‘No.’
‘Then I shouldn’t care about it. I like such a man as Rob Roy.
There’s a fellow called Mazeppa in one of Lord Byron’s stories. They
tied him on the backs of wild horses, and let them scramble for him.
That’s the kind of person I like to read about.’
‘You like the Waverley Novels, I suppose, Miss Haggard?’ asked
Oswald, feeling that literature was advancing his acquaintance with
this dark-haired girl.
Naomi shook her head despondently.
‘I have not read one of them,’ she said. ‘Father disapproves of
novels. Jim had no right to read _Rob Roy_.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ exclaimed Jim, sticking his hands deep in his
corduroy pockets; ‘a man may read anything. “Mustn’t” is a word
invented for girls.’
‘I’m afraid your father disapproves of everything pleasant,’ said
Oswald.
‘O, no; he is very good, very kind; but he likes us to read
serious books, and the Bible before all books. He says there is
so much in the Bible that we could never come to the end of it if
we were reading it all our lives. We should always find something
new--something to wonder at.’
‘Ah, I have felt that--about Shakespeare.’
Naomi looked unutterably shocked. To compare a profane playwright
with the Bible thus lightly!
‘It’s a pity,’ pursued Oswald; ‘the Waverley Novels are so good. Some
people say they are by Walter Scott, but I shouldn’t think it likely
that a man who writes poetry so well could suddenly burst out into
splendid prose. And then the novels are better than Scott’s poems.’
Naomi sighed. She felt that he was talking of a world from which she
was shut out--nay, must always be excluded. It would be an act of
rebellion, of actual sin, to cross the threshold of that wonder-world
which her father taught her to consider a region of evil and
temptation.
‘I hope your father has been none the worse for his goodness to me
the other day,’ said Oswald, perceiving that literary topics were
exhausted. ‘He did not take cold, I trust.’
‘O, no; father is very strong. I never remember his being ill.’
‘A wonderful man, powerful in mind and body.’
Naomi’s dark cheek glowed with pleasure.
‘He is good,’ she said, ‘and he influences people for good. Many
years ago, before he was married, he used to wander about the country
preaching in the open air. He has told us how the miners used to come
and hear him, and how the tears used to run down their blackened
faces, just as they did when Whitfield preached to the wild rough
people near Bristol.’
‘I sometimes wish I hadn’t been the son of such a saint,’ remarked
Jim, yawning and looking straight up at the cloudless blue. ‘It’s
trying rather, at times. There’s too much holiness at home, and too
little pudding.’
‘Ah, Jim, I hope God will give you a new heart some day,’
remonstrated Naomi, ‘and make you see things differently.’
‘I should like to see more upon the table at supper-time. If
aunt Judith had a new heart, we might find an improvement in the
housekeeping. It’s all very well to talk of carnal affections and
sensual appetites; but what do apples grow for, if it isn’t to be put
into pasties? I wish Providence had set my lines in a farmhouse where
there was plenty of squab-pie and junket. We never have a junket
unless there’s some of the saintly ones coming to tea, and they spoil
the pleasure of good victuals by their psalm-singing.’
Oswald laughed outright, and laughter being infectious the serious
Naomi laughed too, in spite of her regret that James should so
discredit his father’s teaching.
‘Aunt Judith is much stricter about little things than father,’ she
said; ‘and she and Jim don’t get on very well.’
‘Aunt Judith mixes her religion up with everything,’ said Jim; ‘she
can’t boil a potato without quoting Scripture. Father has more sense.’
After this they talked about the ferns, and Oswald told Naomi the
names of the different kinds--long Latin names, at which her dark
eyes grew large with wonder. They rose presently, and he showed
them where certain varieties grew best, and the stone or the
soil they most affected. The rabbits scudded away, flourishing
their silver-gray tails, as the footfalls stirred the bracken. The
spreading branches of elm and beech cast their afternoon shadows on
the sunlit sward. There was a warm yellow light in the wood, and a
perfume of unseen pine-trees.
Oswald showed them his favourite spots--little bits of woodland
landscape, unsurpassable in their way. It was all familiar to
Naomi, for this wood was her chosen ramble on summer afternoons;
the scene of many a blackberrying and nutting in autumn; a paradise
of primroses and violets in April, a thicket of hawthorn in May.
Yet though she had known these scenes from earliest childhood, they
seemed to reveal new beauties when thus illustrated by an artistic
mind.
‘How happy you must be to think that this lovely place is your
father’s--that you belong to this wood, and it to you!’ she said
presently.
‘Yes, I am very fond of it. Our race has sent its roots deep into
the soil. Pentreaths have lived on this land from the days of
King Stephen. We have our pedigree cut and dried--Pentreaths of
Pentreath--from sire to son. We have been rather fond of marrying
cousins too, and keeping ourselves to ourselves, and our land
together. Perhaps that’s why we have dwindled into an enfeebled
family of an old man and two boys. There are plenty of Pentreaths
knocking about the world, I daresay; but of our particular branch
Devonshire boasts only my father and his two sons. I am happy to say,
however, that my father did not marry a kinswoman.’
That soft golden light of the westering sun reminded Naomi
that it was nearly tea-time. She had no longing for tea and
bread-and-butter--nay, would gladly have lingered among the ferns,
in the flickering shadows of beechen branches, until the crescent
moon, floating yonder high above the tree-tops, changed from gray to
silver, and from silver to gold; but unpunctuality at meals was a
crying sin in aunt Judith’s creed, and Joshua himself was displeased
when his children absented themselves from the family board. So Naomi
dropped a stately curtsy, and said:
‘Good-afternoon, sir; we must be going now, I think. Come, Jim.’
Jim, deeply absorbed in looking upward for a squirrel that had just
shot out of sight among lofty boughs, abandoned the quest unwillingly.
‘All right, Naomi. Yes, I suppose it’s tea-time, and we should catch
it if we stayed any longer.’
‘Come to-morrow afternoon,’ said Oswald. ‘You can come into the park,
if you like--not that it’s any better kept than the wood; but we’ve
some fine old timber.’
‘Any squirrels?’ asked Jim.
‘Plenty of vermin.’
‘Then we’ll come. Now, Naomi, look sharp. Here are your ferns.’
Jim thrust a bundle of green stuff into her arms, leaving himself
free to flourish his newly-peeled hazel, as he swaggered along by her
side.
‘Let me carry the ferns,’ said Oswald.
‘O, no, indeed. I couldn’t think of taking you out of your way,’
remonstrated Naomi.
‘It isn’t out of my way. My way leads nowhere. It will be something
for me to do; and your father said I might come and see him
sometimes.’
This was said with so decisive an air that Naomi submitted meekly,
and abandoned the fern-roots to Mr. Pentreath’s care. They all
walked out of the wood together, and down the hill to the little bay
or inlet--it was almost too narrow for a bay--at the mouth of that
insignificant river which flowed behind the High-street of Combhaven,
and began life as a brook high up among the wood-crowned hills. What
a sleepy old place Combhaven looked this slumberous summer afternoon!
The vagrant cat, prowling stealthily along those moss-grown tiles
upon an opposite roof, seemed an important personage in the quiet of
the scene. The little group of children at play in front of the Ring
of Bells, the lazy horse contemplating emptiness over a hedge, the
fat old landlord of the First and Last smoking his pipe in the sunny
porch,--were all of life that the village held.
Naomi opened the little green garden-gate, which admitted her and
her companions into a paradise of stocks, clove-carnations, and
sweet-peas, about twenty feet wide. The shop had its frontage of
barren gravel; but this little garden or forecourt gave a gentility
and exclusiveness to the dwelling-house which was not unappreciated
by Judith Haggard, despite her Radical propensities. Indeed, it must
be confessed that Miss Haggard’s Radicalism chiefly affected other
people.
The parlour, with its high painted dado and flowered paper, looked
cool and shadowy this afternoon. The dark tea-board and old-fashioned
Staffordshire tea-service, sprawling blue flowers on a buff ground;
the shining walnut-wood tables and broad-seated chairs; the dimity
window-curtains with their knotted fringes and tassels; the flowers
that made a bank of green and red and purple in the open window,--all
had some touch of pleasantness to Oswald Pentreath’s fancy. It was
a commonplace interior enough, doubtless; but it was assuredly more
like a home than the stately decay of the Grange.
Judith sat bolt upright before the tea-board, a picture of prim
spinsterhood, in her gray stuff gown, broad muslin collar,
coral earrings, and square mosaic brooch. Joshua was in his big
horsehair-covered arm-chair near the open window, looking weary and
exhausted. He had just returned from a long pastoral round among
distant homesteads and cottages, where it was his custom to read
and expound the Scriptures, to pray with the devout, or to pray for
the unawakened. Much of the work, which in a better state of things
would have been done by the parish-priest, was left for Joshua. His
flock were better cared for, more earnestly watched, than the sheep
of the established and endowed shepherd; and it is scarcely to be
wondered at, perhaps, that while the duly-qualified pastor saw his
sheep dwindle, Joshua’s flock grew larger year by year, until they
threatened to become too numerous for the square barn-like Little
Bethel at the top of the hilly High-street.
‘We met Mr. Pentreath in the wood, father,’ said Naomi, ‘and he has
come to see you.’
‘Yes; and I hope you’ve spent time enough in idleness,’ snapped aunt
Judith; ‘and those tea-cloths not hemmed yet, I’ll warrant.’
‘I finished the last of the dozen before dinner, aunt,’ replied
Naomi, with her grave meekness, which had nothing of timidity or
foolishness, only a tranquil submission to supreme authority.
‘They ought to have been top-sewed,’ said Judith; ‘hemming won’t
stand the wear and tear they’ll get from such a girl as Sally.’
‘I sewed them, aunt; and you know Sally seldom washes the tea-things.’
‘Never, I should hope,’ cried Judith. ‘There wouldn’t be many of ’em
left if she did; and it’s a pattern you can’t match nowadays, if you
was to give its weight in gold.’
‘What a good thing that ugliness should go out of fashion!’ retorted
Jim, not foreseeing the day when the commonest of those Staffordshire
cups and saucers might take their places among the chosen specimens
in a collector’s cabinet.
‘Ah,’ sighed Judith, ‘they were your grandmother’s; but that makes
little difference to you. You’ve no reverence for those that came
before you.’
This conversation had been carried on in undertones at the
tea-table, while Joshua had given Mr. Pentreath friendly welcome.
They all drew round the tea-board after this. Aunt Judith filled
the cups with precision, and the conversation became more general
and more ceremonious. There was not much to talk about--not much
local chit-chat--in Combhaven; but they did manage somehow to find
something to say. Joshua talked of the people he had visited in his
day’s duty--tenants of the Squire’s most of them; their grievances;
their ailments--scalds from tea-kettles, wounds from scythes or
reaping-hooks; their sick cattle. Mr. Haggard confined his talk
to worldly subjects, being wiser in this respect than some of his
fellow-labourers.
Oswald felt himself quite at home in the calm family circle, being
happily ignorant of aunt Judith’s low opinion of him. He sipped his
tea and ate his bread-and-butter, and looked at the flowers in the
window and the coloured busts of George Whitfield and John Wesley
in Bow china on the mantelpiece, and familiarised himself with the
aspect of the place. There was a mahogany bookcase with glass doors
on one side of the fireplace, containing several rows of books,
neatly arranged and neatly bound--books that looked as if they were
treasured by their owner--not like Oswald’s ragged regiment of
volumes, always out of their proper places.
‘You are fond of reading, Mr. Haggard,’ said the young man, looking
at the bookcase.
‘Very fond. I give all my spare hours to my books, but my spare hours
do not make many days in the year. I carry a volume in my pocket
when I have to walk far, and read as I go. That is my best chance of
enjoying a book.’
‘And who are your favourite authors?’
‘Bunyan, Baxter, and Law.’
These were strangers to Oswald Pentreath, save for a dim remembrance
of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, devoured and wondered over in early
boyhood.
The conversation came to a dead stop at this point, but there was no
embarrassment. A pause in the flow of talk is not such an awful thing
in a Devonshire village as it is at a London dinner-table, where
the fountain of wit is supposed to be inexhaustible, and a silence
reflects discredit on the assemblage.
‘Let us go into the garden,’ said Joshua, when everybody’s second cup
was empty.
Jim had turned his bottom-upwards, and balanced his teaspoon across
it, thereby scandalising aunt Judith, whose reproving frown had no
influence upon him.
‘Yes, and I’ll show you Naomi’s wilderness,’ said the boy to Oswald,
in a confidential undertone.
It was one of Joshua’s leisure evenings. There was no service at
Little Bethel, and until closing-time there was nothing for him to
do in the shop. He could afford to lounge in his garden and refresh
himself with a little repose after a toilsome day.
Aunt Judith went to the shop, where there was generally a run upon
tape, needles, and such small gear in the leisure hours of evening,
good housewives, who had been too busy to touch their needlework
in the day, discovering their wants after tea and running down to
Haggard’s to supply the same, and perhaps to spend five minutes or so
inquiring after the health of that excellent man, the minister.
The rest repaired to the garden--an oblong piece of ground of about
an acre, running off at the end into another acre, of irregular
shape, which had been an orchard for the last hundred years.
There was nothing picturesque about Mr. Haggard’s garden. It was
neatly laid out upon utilitarian principles, with just so much
regard to ornament as is implied in narrow borders of old-fashioned
cottage flowers in front of homely vegetables, and a row of espaliers
screening beds of onions and turnips. It was a garden running over
with fertility, from the young pear-trees, around whose lowermost
branches the scarlet-runners had entwined themselves lovingly, to the
golden pumpkins sprawling in the setting sunlight, and the deformed
old quince-trees that hung over a pond in a corner by the wall. The
narrow paths were neatly kept, and there were very few weeds among
vegetables or flowers, Jim being held answerable for the condition
of things, and labouring here himself daily, with some little
assistance from the shopboy and a good deal of help from Naomi, who
was passionately fond of flowers.
Mr. Haggard walked to the end of the garden with the young people,
and then, feeling tired after his long round by hill and dale,
seated himself on a bench by the quince-trees, which with an ancient
walnut made this the shady spot of the garden. There was a square
grass-plat here, upon which stood a rude table--a specimen of Jim’s
carpentry; and on very warm afternoons aunt Judith was sometimes
persuaded into an out-of-door tea-drinking here--a concession on her
part only to be obtained by much diplomacy.
Joshua was fond of his garden in a passive way, and it was here
that he communed with himself on Saturday afternoons, meditating
his subject for the next day’s sermons. It was here he read the
Nonconformist divines, or indulged in that introspective study, that
searching out of his own heart, which formed a prominent part of his
system. There was not much to search for in the minister’s heart--no
lurking evil to be thrust out of it. In singleness of purpose, in
directness of aim, in simplicity of life, he came as near perfection
as it is given to erring man to come.
The young people strolled on along the narrow path to the orchard,
leaving Joshua to his meditations. If Judith had been there, she
would have taken pains to prevent this unrestricted communion between
the young Squire and Naomi; but her brother, in his contemplation of
far-off things, was apt to overlook trifles lying near at hand, and
he saw no danger in the temporary association of these young minds.
‘Come and see our wilderness,’ cried Jim, opening the orchard-gate.
The orchard was a queerly-shaped enclosure, a strip of land running
into a sharp point; and this triangular end had been allowed to be
waste ground until Naomi’s fifteenth birthday, on which privileged
occasion she begged the bit of waste from her father by way of
birthday gift; and from that time forward it had been her constant
delight and Jim’s occasional caprice to adorn the spot with all
manner of Nature’s wildlings of forest, heath, and dell. It was a
wonderful soil, that wilderness--everything grew there. Plants that
affected sand, and plants that hungered for loam; flowers that loved
the sun, and ferns enamoured of shade. They all grew together in
harmony, like the happy family of birds and beasts, to oblige Naomi.
Such primroses, yellow and purple; such bluebells and foxgloves, and
dragon’s-mouth and marsh-mallows, and amethyst-hued heaths, and gold
and silver broom, and ferns of every denomination.
‘I think we could grow seaweed if we tried,’ said Jim.
The old, old orchard was like a hospital of cripples, so lame and
twisted and warped and crooked were the ancient trees, with more
gummy exudation upon some of them than fruit; such gray old bark,
such yawning wounds in their trunks. The turf was deep and soft, all
hillocks and hollows; and in one sunny corner there was a row of
beehives, the produce whereof was usually sold by aunt Judith, as a
favour and at a good price, to some of the superior customers.
‘Other people get the honey, and we run the risk of getting stung,’
complained James, who felt injured by this arrangement. ‘That’s what
comes of being brought up by an aunt. If mother had lived, we should
have had cakes and junkets sometimes, I’ll warrant.’
Jim had but a cloudy memory of his dead mother, and was apt to
associate her loss with the idea of indulgences which would have
flowed naturally from the maternal bounty.
They loitered a little in the orchard, talking in a lazy
summer-evening way about nothing particular. It was long past the
Squire’s dinner-time, and Oswald knew that he had forfeited his
dinner by absence. There was no such thing as a meal served out of
due season at the Grange. Mrs. Nichols, the housekeeper, knew her
duty too well for such foolish concessions. But Oswald was reconciled
to the loss of his dinner. Female society was almost a novelty to
him. The Squire lived like a recluse, and enjoyed the privilege of
being eminently unpopular--a privilege which, in his own opinion,
saved him five hundred a year.
‘Your popular man is everybody’s friend except his own,’ remarked the
Squire, in his philosophic mood. ‘People are always asking favours of
him. Nobody ever asks me for anything.’
Oswald therefore, as the son of a miserly hermit, stinted of
pocket-money, and of a nature too generous to live easily under
a weight of obligation, visited hardly any one of those pleasant
country houses which lay far apart among the fertile hills and
valleys of his native place. He lived as lonely a life as ever a
young man had to endure, and was in a better position to cultivate
the Byronic temperament than most of the great poet’s disciples.
Happily Nature had given him a disposition to take life easily,
rather than the misanthropic mind; and solitary and secluded as his
existence was, he tried to make the best of it, amusing himself
after his own simple fashion, and complained to nobody. There was a
touch of bitterness occasionally in his intercourse with his father,
the old man’s meanness and suspicion being almost too much for
endurance; but this was the only bitter in his life. To this young
man, therefore, reduced of necessity to the society of peasants
and boatmen, it was a new thing to find himself in the company of
a handsome young woman, who spoke with a certain refinement and
expressed herself fairly, although her range of ideas was limited.
Those vague yearnings of Naomi’s for something wider and brighter
than the narrow life of Combhaven answered to the sense of loss in
his own mind. There was sympathy between them already, though this
was but the second time of their meeting.
‘I suppose you would hardly stay at Combhaven if you were a man,
Miss Haggard?’ said Oswald, after they had discussed the place and
its dulness.
‘O, no. If I were a man I should be a minister, and I would go and
preach to the Cornish miners, as father did when he was a young man;
or else I would be a missionary, and go to India.’
‘Ah, you talked about that the other night.’
‘Yes; I should like to teach those poor creatures--to turn them from
their hideous gods, their human sacrifices, their cruelties. Why do
we let them go on with such dreadful creeds?’
‘I fancy the work of conversion would be rather beyond us. A
missionary may labour in a corner, set up his little schoolroom, and
baptise a handful or so of dusky Christians, who will go back to Siva
and the rest of them as soon as his back is turned; but to turn all
India from her false idols is a project beyond man’s dreams of the
impossible. When Burke addressed the House of Commons on the evils of
our government in India, the territory of the East India Company was
larger than Russia and Turkey. We have extended our conquests since
his day, and we are but a sprinkling among that vast population. I
think you must put India out of your head, Miss Haggard. The Thugs
would strangle you; or the Khoords would bury you up to your neck and
sacrifice you to their gods; or the tigers would eat you.’
‘Of course,’ cried Jim. ‘How few people ever go to India that don’t
get eaten by tigers in the long-run! I never took up a magazine yet
without seeing a picture of tiger-eating.’
They had arrived at the wilderness by this time--a corner of
fern-tangle and sweet-smelling flowers, with masses of rough stone
here and there amongst the greenery; which stonework had cost Jim
much labour. There were some elder-trees leaning over from an
adjoining orchard, and the spreading branches of a mulberry, which
shaded one side of the small enclosure. There was a stone bench,
which Jim had picked up from among the ruins of an old manor-house;
and in the middle of the wilderness, its rugged base choked with fern
and primrose roots, there stood an old stone sundial, spoil from
the same ruined mansion. That sundial and the monkish-looking bench
gave an air of antiquity to the place. It was quite out of the world
of Combhaven, as lonely as if it had been an oasis in the desert.
One might have lived all one’s life in the High-street, and never
suspected the existence of Naomi’s wilderness. A mild-faced sheep
sometimes peeped at it through an opening in the blackberry-hedge,
perhaps wondering whether those ferns and flowers were edible; but
except the sheep, there was rarely any sign of life in the adjoining
orchard.
Oswald praised the spot, as in duty bound. It could not appear
particularly beautiful to him after the picturesque wildness of
Pentreath park and wood; but it had a quaint prettiness that was not
without its charm. He sat down by Naomi on the broad old stone bench,
and watched her thoughtfully and in silence for a little. She had
taken her knitting out of her pocket, and the needles were flashing
swiftly under her slender fingers. The hands were brown, but slim and
well shaped.
She was very handsome, Oswald thought--much handsomer than the
Devonshire beauties, with their complexions of roses and cream. Her
face had a noble look: the features boldly carved; the eyes deep
and dark, with heavy lids such as he remembered seeing oftener in
sculpture than in flesh; the mouth was full and firm; the chin a
thought too square for feminine loveliness. If the face erred at all,
it was that the girl was too like her father:--manly firmness rather
than womanly softness prevailed. But Oswald could not see any blemish
in this noble countenance. He was drawn to its owner with strongest
sympathy. It was not love at first sight, but friendship, confidence,
companionship, which drew him; and he had no thought of peril in this
new influence. What peril could there be, indeed, for him, even if
the fancy had been of a warmer tendency? He had no money to spend,
but he was the master of his own heart. He might dispose of that as
he pleased.
‘Marry a dairymaid if you like,’ the Squire had once said to him, in
his brutal fashion; ‘but I shall expect you to keep her until I’m
under the sod. An impoverished estate can’t afford to recognise early
marriages, unless they bring land or money along with them.’
They had been in the wilderness about half an hour, Jim exhibiting
his chosen specimens, in pursuit of which he had, by his showing,
more or less imperilled his life, hanging on to precipices like the
samphire gatherer, scaling inaccessible hills, and losing himself in
pathless woods inhabited by the reptile tribe. The sun had gone down
behind the old tiled roofs and thatched gables of the High-street,
and Joshua had left his quiet garden for the bustle and business of
the shop.
‘We’d better be going indoors, Jim,’ said Naomi, rolling up her
stocking. ‘You’ve your sum to do for to-morrow.’
Oswald felt that he had no excuse for prolonging his visit. He walked
back to the house with Naomi and her brother, but did not go indoors
with them. There was a side gate opening into the street, and here he
stopped to wish them good-evening.
‘You might as well stop to supper,’ said Jim. ‘It would be livelier
if you stayed.’
‘I think I have intruded too long already,’ answered Oswald
ceremoniously; and as Naomi did not second her brother’s invitation,
he shook hands with them both, and went away.
Aunt Judith was standing at the house-door when they went in--a
surprise for both, as it was her custom to be in the shop at this
hour.
‘I hope you’ve wasted enough time with your fine gentleman,’ she
said, with extra acidity.
‘I wasn’t wasting time, aunt; I had my knitting with me,’ replied
Naomi; ‘and there was nothing for me to do indoors.’
‘A pity there wasn’t. Idling about the garden with a gentleman above
you in station! What would your father say to that, I wonder?’
‘Father was with us part of the time,’ said Naomi.
‘Was he really? and what about the rest of the time when he wasn’t
with you? Fine carryings-on indeed for a grocer’s daughter! No good
ever came of that kind of thing, Miss Naomi, I can tell you.’
‘No harm will ever come of it while I’m here,’ cried Jim, his face
crimson with anger. ‘I’d knock down any man that said an uncivil
word to my sister. As for the young Squire, he’s a gentleman, and as
soft-spoken as a girl.’
‘I never trust your soft-spoken people,’ answered Judith; and at
this juncture a shrill cry of ‘Miss Haggard, wanted, please,’ from
the opened door at the back of the shop diverted the spinster’s
attention, and she ran off to measure calico or printed goods for an
impatient matron.
Supper-time, prayers, and Scripture-reading seemed a little duller
than usual to Naomi that evening. The quiet monotony of life hung
upon her heavily, like an actual burden. She had begun to ask herself
of late whether existence was to go on always in the same measured
round--eventless, unvarying; whether the portion which appeared
satisfying and all-sufficient for aunt Judith was also to content
her; whether those vague aspirings of the soul for something loftier
and wider, which stirred in her breast like the wings of imprisoned
birds, were to wear themselves out by their own restlessness, and
know no fruition. To-night the question seemed to press itself upon
her more closely than usual. O, how much better to be a female
missionary--a teacher of little tawny heathens in some clearing of
the jungle; or to visit fever-poisoned prisons, like Mrs. Fry! How
much fairer any life in which there was peril, and with peril the
reward of brave deeds, the hope of glory!
‘What use am I in this world?’ she thought, on her knees in that
solemn silence which ensued after Joshua’s extemporaneous prayer--a
pause which he bade his household devote to self-examination and
pious meditation. ‘If I were to die to-morrow, no one would be the
worse for my loss. Father would be sorry, perhaps, because he is
good, not because I am of any use to him, or make his life happier by
living. There is no duty I do that aunt Judith would not do better
than I if I were gone; and the tasks I do listlessly she would
perform briskly, putting all her heart and mind into them. But if I
were to go abroad and teach heathen children, I feel that I could
work honestly and earnestly--yes, like those good women I have read
of.’
These were Naomi’s musings on her knees to-night. No fairer scheme of
life offered itself to her girlish fancy than the missionary idea.
She resolved to work for that end, to read more, to be more attentive
to her father’s teaching, to raise herself to that higher level from
which she might shed enlightenment on ignorant Pagan souls. And
behold, in the midst of these high resolves, her thoughts flew off
at a tangent. ‘If I were Mr. Pentreath I would be a soldier,’ she
thought. ‘I wonder if he is tired of Combhaven? But he has his horse,
and, until the other day, he had his yacht. It is different for him.
Yet, if I were free like him, with a good old name, I would try to
be something more than an idle country gentleman. People respect his
brother for running away to sea. I know that by the way they talk of
the two in Combhaven.’
‘You’d better take your candle and go to bed, child,’ Miss Haggard
said to Naomi directly after supper. ‘I want to have a few words with
Joshua.’
Of all things most displeasing to the minister’s human weakness was
a few words with his sister Judith. That preface of hers seemed as
prophetic of evil as the screech-owl’s warning or the minor howl of
the dog. Nothing pleasant ever came of a few words with Judith.
‘Well, Judith, what is it now?’ asked her brother, as soon as they
were alone, anxious to come to the worst without beating about the
bush.
‘Only that I think it’s a pity you don’t keep your eyes a little
wider open to see what’s under your nose. It’s all very well to be
looking towards the New Jerusalem, and I’d be the last to lose my
habitation in that blessed city, but while a man lives among the
Philistines he should have an eye to his own household.’
‘What’s the matter, my dear? The new cask of Irish butter is not
rancid, I hope? I gave a halfpenny a pound more for it than the last.’
‘No, Joshua, the butter is as sweet as a new cobnut. But I don’t like
your daughter’s goings on with Mr. Pentreath.’
‘What do you mean, Judith?’ cried the minister, with a flash of
natural indignation.
‘Bringing him home to tea as if he was her equal. A pretty thing to
set tongues wagging in Combhaven.’
‘I see no need for people to talk about us because the Squire’s son
takes a cup of tea in my house. He is better born than my daughter, I
grant you, but not better bred. Naomi is a lady in mind and nature,
and as such no man’s inferior. And she is something less than my
daughter if she does not respect herself so much as to make every
man respect her.’
‘That’s all very fine,’ retorted Judith, ‘but you’d better look out
that no mischief comes of it. You heard what Jabez Long said while I
was working like a slave to bring the life back to that young man’s
body. It’s unlucky to save a man from drowning. Take care the bad
luck doesn’t come our way. I don’t like to see Mr. Pentreath hanging
about the place.’
‘Why, Judith, you can’t be weak enough or wicked enough to give heed
to such a vulgar superstition.’
‘I don’t know about that. There’s a grain of good sense sometimes in
vulgar superstitions.’
‘Sometimes, perhaps; but in that particular superstition not an iota.
Our fishermen get the fancy from the North. It is a common belief in
Shetland.’
‘Have it your own way,’ said Judith, with an offended air; ‘but I’m
afraid you’ve too much book-learning to be wise about the affairs of
this life.’