Chapter V: The Minister Goes on a Journey

Very tranquil was the progress of life at Combhaven. None of those bubbles called events rippled the calm surface of that Devonian millpond. Every day and every week brought the same duties--a beaten round of petty cares and unexciting pleasures--pleasures so small as to have been positively invisible to any observer surveying this quiet rustic life from the outside. Even the changes of the season brought but little change to the dwellers in the High-street. The farming folks had their harvest-homes, and apple-storing time, and cider-brewing, and all the variety of rustic life; but in the village--by courtesy, town--the dull unalterable round went on from January to December. Save for the fire-glow upon cottage-windows, and the cheery look of the forge in the early dusk, you would hardly have known winter from summer. Frost rarely visited this favoured clime. There was a good deal of mist and rain, and sometimes fierce winds came tearing across the sea as savagely as if they meant to root up Combhaven altogether, but the traditional winter of the North--icicle-crowned and snow-mantled--was a stranger here.

Naomi, just nineteen years of age in this misty November, schooled her soul to bear the quiet of her life, and performed her daily duties with a sweet tranquillity which might have seemed the essence of patience to any one who could have looked into her heart and seen its eager yearnings for a busier existence. She had talked to her father of her desire for missionary work, and he had answered her in the words of St. Paul, ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak.’

Very hard words they sounded to Naomi.

‘But I don’t want to preach, father,’ she pleaded; ‘I only want to teach the little children.’

‘There are children enough for you to teach here, Naomi. I am not satisfied yet with our Sunday-school. The boys are backward; and the girls, though a little better, are wofully unenlightened.’

Naomi sighed and submitted. This was an unanswerable answer. If she could not do good work with these little English Christians, born and bred to belief in the Scriptures, how could she hope to make converts of little heathens, speaking a strange language? Mr. Pentreath had given her a Hindostani grammar that had belonged to his uncle, Captain Tremaine, and she had worked in secret at the language--learning a little bit at a time during the extra quarter of an hour she could venture to keep her candle burning before going to bed. Anything beyond a quarter of an hour might have drawn upon her the displeasure of aunt Judith, who had a sharp eye to the consumption of bedroom candles, and would have suspected the unholy practice of novel-reading or a sinful lingering over the braiding of hair, had she perceived an undue diminution of the tallow. So Naomi, being convinced that she was not good enough or clever enough for a missionary, began to despair of ever releasing herself from the prison-chamber of life in a village. She had no yearning for fine dresses, or pleasures, or any of the objects that might have presented themselves to the mind of a girl brought up in a boarding-school, but she sighed for something more than Combhaven could give her; or else perhaps she needed some stronger anchor to hold her in those quiet waters than any which her household ties offered.

Her father loved her. Of that fact she had no doubt; but his affection was so undemonstrative as to seem near akin to coldness. He was formal in his intercourse with his children--more given to reprove than to praise, to counsel than to caress. As a child--finding herself motherless in childhood--she had given her father an almost romantic love, following him about with faithful solicitude, fearing, if he were out of her sight for a little longer than usual, that he would go away and she should never see him more, shedding childhood’s passionate tears at the thought that he would die as her mother had died, and leave her lonely. The father had responded to this affection with an almost equal warmth, holding the little girl on his knees through many an hour of pious meditation, taking her with him on many a journey, carrying her when she was tired, watching by her little bed through childhood’s fevers and illnesses, and, in some wise, filling the dead mother’s place, much to Judith’s displeasure, who argued that a woman must know more about the treatment of a sick child than a man, were he twenty times a father.

Little by little, as Naomi grew from childhood to girlhood, this sympathy between father and daughter had dwindled--on the father’s side, not on the daughter’s. Naomi was still as fond, but more reserved in the expression of fondness. She was too old to sit on her father’s knee. She must give up those pleasant wanderings by her father’s side. She had her lessons to learn; her daily tasks, scholastic and domestic. Aunt Judith taught her household economy; Joshua trained her mind. The father was transformed into the schoolmaster; and Judith took care to impress upon her brother that if he were too indulgent, Naomi would respect him too little to profit by his instructions.

‘When we were boy and girl, we used to call father and mother sir and madam,’ said Judith. ‘You must remember that, Joshua.’

‘Yes, Judith. But I don’t know that we loved them any more on that account. Father’s a beautiful word. I should be sorry to hear Naomi change it for sir.’

In pure conscientiousness, and with a view to the culture of his daughter’s mind, Joshua abandoned those loving ways which had been so dear to his daughter’s heart. The change was so gradual that she was hardly aware of its progress. It was only when she looked back to those happy childish days that she knew how much she had lost of life’s sweetness. Yet she had no thought of complaint, nor was her father’s goodness lessened in her estimation. He was still the one most perfect man her little world held; perfect as the best of those good men she had read about in her narrow range of literature.

Mr. Pentreath availed himself of Joshua’s permission to call occasionally, and dropped in now and then of an evening, or came at dusk and drank tea out of the blue and buff Staffordshire teacups. Sometimes he stayed for prayers and supper, and listened attentively to the minister’s exposition of psalm or chapter. Perhaps he obtained more real knowledge of the Scriptures from these evenings than from all those Sunday services which he had attended, absent-minded and sleepy, in the old parish church, where the family pew of the Pentreaths was as large as a small room, provided with a fireplace, and screened from the vulgar gaze by old oak panelling and faded green curtains on brazen rods--a fine place for slumber.

Joshua took the young man’s visits as a matter of course; but Judith expended her spleen in various shrugs and elevations of thin eyebrows and depressions of thin lips.

‘How fond the young Squire is of us all!’ she said; ‘we ought to be uncommonly proud, I’m sure. Is it you or me, I wonder, he comes for?’

Whereupon Joshua’s frown warned her that she had better push her insinuations no further.

* * * * *

It was summer time again--early summer; the sweet fresh season of newly-opened roses and new-mown hay. The young ferns were unfolding their tender green fronds under every hedge, on every stone bank; the hartstongues uncurling their pointed tips; fields purple with clover, or silver-white with blossoming beans; a time of sweetest subtlest odours; the sea yonder, deep translucent green, shining through every opening in the undulating land, through ragged breaks in upland hawthorn hedges, above the beans and the clover, like another world, fairer even than earth.

In such sweet summer weather Joshua Haggard left Combhaven on a journey that was to last a week. He wore his Sunday suit, stout buckled shoes, and carried a change of linen and the simple necessaries of his toilet in a small leather knapsack. His journey was to be performed for the most part in lumbering old stage-coaches, but the last twenty miles were to be done upon foot. Mr. Haggard was going to assist at the opening of an humble little chapel in the wild Cornish country, between the Lizard and Penzance. The minister of the new chapel was one of his pupils and disciples; a dark-browed young shoemaker of five-and-twenty, who had come in of an evening with leather-stained hands to read and study under Joshua Haggard’s direction, and had nursed a tender passion for Naomi which he had never ventured to reveal. Perhaps it was his consciousness that this affection was vain which decided Nicholas Wild upon turning his back on the quiet comfort of Combhaven about two years ago, and taking up his staff as a wandering preacher. He had kept his own body and soul together by mending the shoes of his hearers; and he had ministered to the souls of his shifting flocks without fee or reward, content if in field or on common he could see listening faces crowding round him, and hear the untaught voices pealing up to the open sky in the hymns he dictated to his congregation line by line. After an itinerant career of two years, Nicholas had become so popular in one particular district as to find it advisable to settle there altogether; and his congregation had contrived among them to build him a chapel--such a curious little tabernacle, in an angle of a field, as lonely as if it had dropped from the sky. The walls of cob; the roof covered with large thick slabs of roughly-cut slate, like flagstones; a small door at one end, a big window at each side, and about as much architectural design or beauty in the building as there is in a toy Noah’s ark. But the temple of Solomon was never lovelier in the eyes of its founder than was this rude barn to Nicholas Wild. He wrote to his beloved pastor and teacher, telling him of his good fortune; how the Word had prospered in these far western villages by his humble efforts; and entreating Joshua as a favour beyond all measure of gratitude to come and preach the opening sermon in this new-built chapel.

‘Your voice would call down a blessing upon my work,’ he wrote, ‘and move the hearts of my faithful flock as I can never hope to stir them, though Providence has blessed my teaching. I want the opening of this lowly temple to be a golden page in their memories so long as they live. I want them to feel that this tabernacle among the hills has been sanctified and glorified by an inspired voice, by a chosen messenger of the gospel, gifted above all other servants of God.’

To an appeal such as this Joshua Haggard would have esteemed it sinful to have turned a deaf ear. Nicholas Wild’s intelligence and piety had made the youth very dear to him. He was proud of his pupil’s success, as in a considerable measure his own work; and his heart warmed at the thought of that little chapel among the wild hills by that rock-bound shore, over whose craggy pinnacles the dark-winged cormorants and the silver-white gulls skim, and wheel, and scream, and chatter.

To Joshua this Cornish coast was at once familiar and dear. He, too, had wandered there in his hardy youth. He had taught and preached from Camelford to Penzance, and his teaching had prospered. His name was a word of power in the West, and he seldom let a summer go by without making some such journey as he was making now--to preach, to inspect village schools, to spend a day here and there among old friends, and perform other duties of his office.

The little chapel was opened to the eager flock one bright June morning; men, women, and children in their smartest clothes, as if for a flower-feast; a congregation gathered from twenty miles round, so eager were these Dissenters to hear Joshua Haggard. The fervid extemporaneous prayers were poured forth above the heads of that assembly, all standing to pray after their manner; the enthusiastic hymns were sung--hymns which compared the cob-walled barn to the gorgeous temple in the sacred city; and then Joshua ascended to the deal pulpit, and opened his Bible upon the green-baize cushion and preached a two hours’ sermon upon one of his favourite texts: ‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.’

No one felt that two hours’ discourse a sentence too long, unless it were, perhaps, the children--some of whom yawned piteously, or shuffled on their seats, and were shaken and otherwise admonished by offended elders; while others of still more tender years sank into placid slumber, and enjoyed the warmth of the atmosphere and the sonorous lullaby of Joshua’s deep melodious voice.

Nicholas Wild was in a glow of gratitude as he walked home to the adjacent village with his friend.

‘They will never forget your words to-day, nor shall I,’ he said. ‘They have sunk into my heart. You have told us what the minister of such a flock should be. It shall be the business of my life to come as near as I can to that sublime type. It ought to be easy for me, having known you. I have but to imitate my master upon earth in order to approach nearer to the example of my Master in heaven.’

‘Gently, Nicholas, gently; you offend me by such words as those. Providence has been very good to me. My lines have fallen in pleasant places; life has been made easy to me. I have not been tried as some are tried, or tempted as some are tempted. I have known little sorrow. My faith has not been shaken by adversity. I have known neither hunger nor thirst, disease nor loss of fortune. My wife was a good woman, my children are affectionate and dutiful, my business is prosperous. I am like Job before Satan asked to try him. What am I, then, that I should boast, or suffer others to boast of me?’

To which Nicholas replied with fervid eulogy:

‘All that I am I owe to you,’ he said, ‘as Saul owed all to Samuel. And your lovely daughter, Mr. Haggard, to have known her, to have lived in her company for a little while, is to have held fellowship with angels.’

‘Nicholas, you must not talk like that. My daughter is a good girl, but--’

‘She has more than common goodness. My sisters are good women, but they are not like Naomi. She is strong and noble, like the women of old; a woman to sacrifice herself for others, to suffer in silence; to do great deeds like the women of old time, like Jael or Judith.’

‘I would rather she should resemble Ruth or Esther,’ replied Joshua, smiling at an enthusiasm which betrayed the speaker’s secret. ‘I would rather she should live her simple life, meek, obedient, faithful, domestic, happy herself, and the source of happiness to others.’

‘We have often talked together of spiritual things, Mr. Haggard, and perhaps Naomi has poured forth her heart more freely to me than she would venture to do to you. Her heart burns within her to do some good and great thing. She would like to go on a foreign mission; to teach the children of the heathen, to carry light into dark places.’

‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed Joshua contemptuously. ‘Let her stay at home and mind her own business. That is a woman’s mission. Remember what St. Paul says about women.’

‘St. Paul had not the privilege of knowing Naomi Haggard,’ said the rapturous Nicholas. ‘But I will not presume to argue with you, sir; only tell me that she is well and happy.’

‘She is well, I am thankful to say; and I suppose she is happy. She has no cause for unhappiness.’

‘The female mind is a delicate thing, Mr. Haggard, and common blessings do not always suffice for its contentment. Has Naomi any thought of settling?’

‘You mean getting married?’ said Joshua. ‘No, I think not. We have heard nothing about that yet awhile.’

‘None but a superior person would suit Naomi.’

‘I think not; and her only admirer--not an avowed admirer as yet--is a person so far her superior in birth and fortune that I am doubtful whether I do right in encouraging their acquaintance.’

Nicholas Wild’s cheek paled at this. He had long ago despaired of winning Naomi for himself, but it was not the less a pang to hear that she was likely to be won by another, and that other a man of higher rank than himself. This gave a keener point to the knife that stabbed him, for Nicholas, though a good fellow, was not large-minded, and was inclined to believe that to be a gentleman by birth and fortune was to belong to the children of Belial.

‘It would be hard to find anybody worthy of Naomi,’ he said, ‘least of all a pampered idler, with nothing but fine clothes and a fine name to recommend him.’

‘The young man I speak of has not been very kindly treated by Fortune, though birth has made him a gentleman, and he will have a fair estate by and by. You remember young Pentreath, the Squire’s son?’

‘Remember him? yes; a pale-faced slip of a youth. He comes of a bad race, if all is true that folks say about the old Squire.’

‘All that folks say of their neighbours rarely is true,’ replied Joshua. ‘I daresay the Squire led a wild life in his youth, and I know that he is a hard uncharitable man in his age; but there is no reason his son should resemble him in character any more than he does in looks, and there have seldom been father and son less alike.’

Joshua told his disciple about the wreck of the Dolphin, and the friendship that had since arisen between Oswald and the minister’s family.

‘I have very little reason to suppose that his feeling for Naomi is anything warmer than the friendship he has for the rest of us,’ concluded Joshua; ‘but they have been a good deal together, and they seem to have many ideas in common.’

‘He could not know her and not love her,’ replied Nicholas warmly. ‘How does the old Squire take it?’

‘You mean does he approve his son’s intimacy with me and mine?’ said Joshua. ‘So far as I can discover he neither approves or disapproves. He lets his son take his own course in all things, except spending money. His poor sordid soul seems to be so absorbed in the task of scraping together every sixpence he can screw out of the land, that he gives no care or heed to his son’s existence. The youth who ran away to sea is not more remote from his father than the son who lives in the same house with him.’

Here the conversation ended. They had arrived at the village where Nicholas lived. He had a comfortable lodging of two clean little rooms in a stone cottage set in a square plot of land, chiefly devoted to the growth of potatoes, but beautified by a few rosebushes and a row of tiger lilies on each side of the narrow path leading from the little wooden gate to the cottage door. His landlady had prepared quite a banquet in honour of the minister--a potato-pasty and a boiled leg of pork, with cabbage enough for a large family.

Here Joshua lodged for the night. He set out at seven o’clock next morning, after a comfortable breakfast, on the first stage of his homeward journey. He might have taken the coach at Helston, only nine miles off, but he had made up his mind to walk at least as far as Truro, not always choosing the straightest road thither, but taking a peep at various spots that had been dear and familiar to him in those wandering days of his youth, when he had carried the glad tidings from hamlet to hamlet and homestead to homestead, dropping unawares upon sequestered households far from the voices of this world, as if he had been in very truth a heaven-sent messenger.

‘I’m afraid you’ll find the journey tiring,’ said Nicholas at parting; ‘the sun is so hot, and the roads are dusty.’

‘I love a hot sun, and I must put up with the dust,’ answered Joshua cheerily. ‘It will do my heart good to see the old places and the old faces, and to find that I have not been forgotten.’

He shouldered his knapsack, wrung Nicholas’s hand for the last time, gave him a hearty blessing, and walked away upon the white high-road with that swinging stride of his, which showed how easy such exercise was to him.

It was a glorious summer day--the blue bright sky without a cloud, the warm earth breathing perfume. This village among the hills--two straggling rows of cottages bordering a broad high-road--seemed to be set upon the apex of this western world. There lay the bright green sea, ever so far below yonder dip in the broad fields, that stretched away to the edge of the cliff. No indication of the rock-bound shore below--the craggy arches and peaks and ragged boulders--was to be seen from here; only cornfields and meadows sloping to the cliff, and in the distance a battlemented mansion, rising from the soil, gaunt and lonely, like the castle of Giant Blunderbore.

Never had Joshua Haggard been in a happier frame of mind than on this fair June morning. He loved the sunshine, the soft westerly breeze, which warmed him even more than the sun. It was some hereditary instinct, perhaps, from his Spanish forefathers, some innate love of sunburnt sierras and a torrid sky, that made him so fond of the breathless midsummer weather and the fierce noontide sun. He walked on for a good many miles without a halt, and in this solitary walk fell into meditation upon his family and their prospects. That conversation yesterday afternoon with Nicholas Wild had set him thinking about his daughter and Oswald Pentreath.

He was not an ambitious man, either for himself or for his children. He was not a man who sought for earthly distinctions or set his affections on the things of this world. Yet it pleased him to think that his daughter might be raised in the social scale by marriage with a gentleman and a man who took his rank from the land. In the minds of these country people there is a natural love of the soil which makes landed estate seem to them above all other fortune. A manufacturer with a million would have been a very small man at Combhaven compared with Squire Pentreath, whose race had occupied the land from time immemorial.

‘Why should he not choose her for his wife?’ argued Joshua. ‘She is a lady in education and principle. She has the manners of a lady, and beauty that is given to few women, be their rank of the highest. As for fortune--well, I could give her enough to make the marriage no imprudent one for Oswald Pentreath. I must get to understand the state of that young man’s feelings. Judith may be right after all. We have been going on too easily, perhaps. I must ascertain the old Squire’s sentiments. I will not have my daughter trifled with or slighted.’

Having come to this conclusion, Joshua Haggard dismissed the subject. He was too clear-brained and definite to go on revolving his ideas in a mill. There had never yet been confusion or perplexity in his mind upon any subject: no question had ever arisen that he had not been able to grapple with and answer satisfactorily. But then, as he himself said to Nicholas Wild, his life journey had been an easy one. Heretofore Fate had given him no hard riddles to solve. But every man in his time meets the Sphinx, and must answer or die. Joshua’s time had not yet come.

Very beautiful was that far Cornish land in the summer noon--a large wild beauty, but neither desolate nor gloomy. The undulating fields had a fertile prosperous look, the patches of common were golden with furze, and all the water-pools shone like jewels under that bounteous glorifier of all things, the sun. Three miles short of Penmoyle, a village made dear to him by pleasant youthful memories, and where he had determined to take his rest, Joshua Haggard turned aside from the sandy road, little better than a lane on this steep hill-side, and strolled on to a bit of rugged common-land, all hillock and hollow, with water here and there in the deeper hollows, and furze ablaze upon all the hillocks. Here, he thought, was a pleasant place for half an hour’s repose. He had walked seven or eight miles, and had three more to walk to Penmoyle, where he meant to dine with some of his old friends. The Penmoyle dinner-hour would be over by an hour or two when he arrived, but the land was full of plenty. There would be a slice of corned beef or Cornish ham or a wedge of cold pasty at his service, to say nothing of crisply-baked cakes, fried potatoes and bacon--luxuries which the minister’s soul renounced as dangerous, savouring too much of Esau’s fatal feast.

Nothing could be prettier in its own peculiar way than that little bit of common on the top of the sandy hill. Perhaps it was its peacefulness that made it so lovely, or the summer atmosphere, in itself so delicious that it would have beautified a desert. There was a silence, save of sweet vague summer sounds: the humming of insects, the whispering of that soft west wind, and presently, bursting out with a shrill gush, the carol of the skylark aloft, a speck in the dazzling blue.

Joshua Haggard sighed the sigh of utter contentment as he stretched himself on the mossy turf (the soil here grew more moss than grass), and inhaled the almond perfume of the furze--a warm sweetness, as if those golden butterfly blossoms smelt of the sun that had given them their colour and their bloom.

It seemed as if that sigh of his woke the sleeping nymph of the scene; for there came in answer to it a faint fluttering sound like the rustle of a woman’s garment--no _frôlement_ or _frou-frou_ of rich silken tissue, but a little fluttering noise of softer humbler drapery, such as poor folks wear.

Joshua Haggard turned his head a little way, and looked across the ragged clump of furze that topped the hillock on which he had thrown himself. There was a tiny pool of water in the hollow below, and on the other side of the hillock sat a girl, bareheaded under the summer sun, a little bundle lying on the turf beside her, her bare feet in the water. They shone ivory white under that clear water, and Joshua’s heart gave a curious thrill--half fear, half wonder--as if he had seen a fairy.

There came back to his memory stories that he had loved in his childhood, before he had grown to believe that there were no other stories save Bible stories that were good for a man to read or admire. Dimly there came back to him a legend of a summer noontide such as this, and a princess transformed by wicked arts into a beggar wench washing her toil-worn feet by the wayside.

He could not see the girl’s face as he looked down the slope on which she sat, with her back to the hillock and to him; but he saw she had the princess’s long fair hair, fair as flax, and bright as the silk his children used to wind from the cocoons of their silkworms in the autumn evenings a few years ago.

‘I am not much like the prince who met the disguised princess,’ he thought, smiling at his fancy, ‘nor yet like the lucky adventurer I used to read of in those fairy books. Poor child! I daresay she is some miner’s daughter, who has been over the hills yonder to carry her father his dinner. I wonder whether she has ever read her Bible. I used to teach many such fair-haired children when I was in this part of the country years ago.’

The furze rustled as he bent over to look down at that sunlit head with its loose flaxen hair, and the girl started and looked up at him, and gave a little cry of fear on seeing that dark intent face bent above her.

She took her feet hastily out of the water, snatched her bundle, and sprang up as if about to fly; but Joshua stepped quickly down from the hillock and stood beside her.

‘Why are you running away, child? Are you afraid of me?’

She looked up at him with great blue eyes--those rare eyes that are absolutely blue, the azure of the summer sky--looked up at him in evident terror.

‘Let me go,’ she cried, as his strong hand grasped her arm, gently but firmly.

‘My child, I have no desire to detain you. But you mustn’t run away from me as if I were some terrible monster. I will not do you any harm. I would do you good if I could, poor wandering lamb. Alas, I fear the world has not used you kindly, or the sight of a strange face would not scare you so.’

‘You won’t take me back to them?’ cried the girl, with a shudder.

‘I will take you nowhere that you do not wish to go. But who are these people whom you fear so much?’

‘The people I belong to.’

‘Your father and mother?’

‘No. I never had a father or mother--not to know them.’

‘Who are these people, then?’

‘The strollers. I was at Helston fair with them yesterday; and I ran away and slept under a haystack last night, and came on here this morning; and O, please, please, please, good gentleman, don’t take me back to them!’ she cried, clasping her hands piteously.

‘Strolling players--mountebanks, you mean?’

‘Yes. They act, and dance, and tumble at fairs and places; and they have some horses, and sometimes they call themselves a circus; and they made me dance on the horses’ backs and jump through hoops. I fell once, and was nearly killed: it was only the sawdust saved me, they said.’

‘Poor child! Have you been with them long?’

‘All my life,’ answered the girl, opening those innocent blue eyes. ‘I belong to them. I never had any other home or any other friends.’

‘My poor lost lamb! And were they unkind?’

The girl’s red under-lip--fuller than the upper, like Sophia Western’s--pouted a little as she meditated this question.

‘They never starved me,’ she said; ‘they did not beat me often.’

‘But they did sometimes strike you?’ cried the minister indignantly.

‘Yes, when I was stupid and could not learn what they wanted. I was fond of the horses and the jumping through hoops, though it was dangerous; but they wanted me to learn tricks with cards, and conjuring. I was stupid at that: the numbers puzzled me. And then the Black Captain--he’s the master of us all--used to get into a passion, and hit me, and swear at me--such dreadful words.’

The very recollection was appalling, for she burst into tears and sobbed passionately for a minute or two. Joshua was accustomed to be the confidant and consoler of other people’s troubles. He patted this wanderer gently on the shoulder, and comforted her with a few soothing words.

‘You shall not go back to these people, child, if I can prevent it,’ he said; ‘and you shall learn to read your Bible. You have never learned that, I fear.’

‘Is that the book people read in the churches?’ she asked.

‘Yes, and in chapels, and in every Christian home.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the girl wonderingly; ‘I don’t know what it means.’

Then Joshua tried in simplest, easiest phrases to tell her what Christianity meant, and what its Founder had done for men. She listened meekly, and understood some part of what he said; but even that much was dimly comprehended by her. The veil of ignorance which shrouded her young mind was too dense to be penetrated easily by the light of truth.

‘Tell me how you came to belong to these strollers,’ said Joshua presently.

‘I don’t know. I belonged to them always.’

‘You have no memory that goes back beyond that strolling life? Your mind cannot pierce to something behind that--far away--half forgotten--a different life, a fixed home?’

‘No. The first thing I can remember is a little close room upon wheels, a room that was always moving, the hedges and trees going by outside. I used to watch them move. I thought it was the road that moved, not us; and I remember the little dark corner where I slept, squeezed in by the wall, and how I used to be almost smothered sometimes. That was when my first mother was alive. She was kind to me, and I loved her dearly; but she used to get tipsy sometimes, poor thing. She danced on the slack-rope, and she was very clever. She had been a rope-dancer in London, they said; and one night at Truro she had been drinking, and lost her balance and fell from the rope, and hurt her head against a post, and she was very bad, and soon after she died.’

Tears came into the girl’s eyes as she told of her protectress’s fate.

‘How do you know that this woman was not really your mother?’ asked Joshua.

‘Because they all told me I had no father or mother. I don’t know how they came by me, but I belonged to them, and none of them belonged to me. Somebody once said they had bought me. When Susannah Beck was dead I had another mother, called Harriet Long; and she was cruel, and used to beat me if I didn’t learn the steps or the songs she taught me quick enough. She was a dancer too, but on the ground, not on ropes; and she sang and acted, and tried to do everything. She didn’t drink like poor Susannah, but she was greedy for money, and used to make me go round with a tambourine among the crowd begging, when the Black Captain--he did the tumbling--wasn’t looking, and then used to take the money from me; and one day the Captain heard of it, and he beat her and me too, and then she took a dislike to me, and used to be very cruel; and then I grew up, and she said I was too big for my business; and then I made up my mind to run away the first time I could get off; and I watched and waited; and last night, at Helston, Harriet was asleep in the van, and the others were almost all tipsy, and I crept out into the fields. It was warm and starlight; I felt quite happy. I ran for a long, long way, till I heard the sea washing against the rocks; and then I came to a farm, and crept in among some loose hay beside a haystack, and it smelt so sweet, and I forgot that I was hungry, and fell asleep; and when I woke the sun was shining, and a little field-mouse was looking at me with its bright eyes, and I was ever so much hungrier.’

‘Poor child! Have you had nothing to eat since then?’

‘Yes; a woman in a village I came through gave me a great thick slice of bread-and-cheese.’

‘Good woman! And now tell me what you mean to do?’

‘To work in the fields, if they will let me.’

‘Field-labour! You don’t look much like that. Show me your hands.’

She laid a thin little hand confidingly in Joshua’s broad brown palm. Quite a delicate hand, sunburnt on the outside, but with a soft pink palm and filbert-shaped nails; a hand that had done no hard work, and which, according to a popular theory, might be taken as a sign of a good lineage.

‘My child, you were never made for field-labour,’ said the minister, with kindly seriousness; ‘we must find some other work for you. It would be better for you to be a servant, if any one would be patient with you and teach you for a little while. I feel sure you are teachable.’

‘I learnt all but the card tricks,’ exclaimed the girl innocently. ‘I know the rabbit trick, and I learnt the nosegay trick and the pocket-handkerchief trick very quickly; but the numbers were so puzzling.’

‘Are you clever at your needle?’

‘Nobody ever taught me to work. I used to mend the dresses sometimes, and sew on gold lace and spangles; but I’m afraid the stitches weren’t very neat--they used to be so big.’ And the damsel measured off a Brobdignagian stitch on her slender forefinger.

‘You might be taught to work. You might be taught almost anything, I am sure,’ mused Joshua, looking intently at the fair sweet face so delicately, purely chiselled, with the pearly tints of a Greuze and the azure eyes he so loved to paint--just that exquisite ideal of girlhood’s innocence which approaches as nearly as earthly mould can come to the angelic, and which may mean much or little. So innocent, so artless, so unconscious, so divinely lovely may Gretchen have appeared to the student in that vision in the witch’s kitchen. This girl was of the Gretchen type, that fair Saxon beauty which seems made for love, and to have lived its hour and fulfilled its end when it has won its first lover. It was not the Cleopatra beauty, created to subjugate and hold a triad of heroes, but the transient perfection of a rose in June, which blooms once and for one only.

‘If you will trust me and come with me, I will get you more fitting work than field-labour,’ said Joshua; ‘I have plenty of friends in the next village, and I shall find some one who will give you food and shelter for my sake. You will have to work for your bread of course, and to be obedient.’

‘I always did what Harriet told me,’ answered the girl. ‘I will do anything to earn my bread.’

‘Anything that is honest,’ replied the minister’s grave voice. ‘I hope you know the difference between right and wrong.’

‘I know that it is wrong to tell lies or to steal, but most of our people did it.’

‘You did not, I hope?’

‘No. I tried to tell a lie once, but the words wouldn’t come. Something inside me seemed to rise against it. I felt as if I should choke; and I thought after all they could only beat me, and then I told them the truth.’

‘That was brave and good of you. And when you have learnt to read your Bible you will love truth still more, and you will know many things that you do not know now.’

‘I’m afraid that will be a long time,’ said the girl despondently, ‘for I don’t know any letters except those our clever pony knew. It was he that taught me to count.’

‘A pony taught you?’

‘Well, perhaps I taught myself when I had to show the pony. “Now, Mr. Macaroni, show us number ten,” I used to say; and the pony used to put his hoof upon the card with the number; and he could tell the days of the week, and a lot more.’

‘You shall learn to read your Bible, my child, and to work with your needle, and to be industrious in proper useful duties; and you must forget all about the pony.’

‘Poor Macaroni!’ sighed the girl. ‘I was very fond of him. He used to put his kind old nose upon my shoulder, and against my cheek; and I used to fancy that he pitied me. He was so clever, you see. I think he knew I was unhappy.’

‘What is your name, my dear child?’ inquired Joshua thoughtfully. Even in Penmoyle some kind of introduction would be necessary, and it would be as well to make sure of his _protégée’s_ name before he presented her to his friends in that village.

‘O, I’ve had ever so many names,’ answered the girl frankly. ‘Sometimes they called me Mamselle Fantini, and sometimes The Little Wonder.’

‘O, dear, those outlandish names would not do,’ exclaimed Joshua. ‘Were you never baptised?’

‘If that’s anything to do with church, I should think not,’ replied the girl. ‘But they used to call me Cynthia generally. Perhaps that was my name.’

‘Cynthia! It’s not a common name; but it is pretty enough, and it will do.’

They have rather a leaning to fine names in Cornwall; and Mr. Haggard was not appalled by this fanciful name of Cynthia, even for a servant-girl.

‘Come,’ he said, looking at his big silver watch, a huge machine in a double case, ‘if you’ve rested enough, we had better be moving on.’

‘You are not going to take me back to them?’ asked the girl again, with an affrighted look.

‘My child, can you not understand that an honest man’s yea or nay is as good as an oath? I have promised not to give you back to your people. I am going to take you where you may earn your living, and learn to be a Christian.’

‘Is that as hard as conjuring?’ asked Cynthia simply.

‘O child, child, what sad darkness--here, in this land of light! What need to seek far away for the heathen, when we have them round us, near us, calling upon us mutely, like dumb creatures neglected and in pain?’

Cynthia had dried her bare feet on the sun-scorched grass--such pretty little feet, arched and slender. If such feet were put up at auction at Christie and Manson’s, peeresses would be racing one another for them. She tied on a pair of dilapidated boots, the most miserable things, which hung round her feet like ragged sandals. Had she been Scotch or Irish she would have gone barefoot, and been comfortable; but being an English girl, these apologies for shoes seemed to her better than nothing.

She took up her little bundle again, and was ready to follow her new friend. They stood side by side under that cloudless blue, the lark singing loud and clear, bees humming, sweet wild flowers abloom under their feet, the distant sea gleaming yonder above the hills, like a strip of brightness against the sky. They seemed alone upon this lonely earth, alone under that azure heaven; of human voices there was no sound, only the glad chorus of Nature--bird and insect, waving trees and falling waters.

‘Come,’ said Joshua again; and they walked down to the white road side by side and in silence.