Chapter XIII: ‘the Deep of Night Is Crept Upon Our Talk.’

Joshua proved a true prophet in so far as related to Oswald Pentreath’s line of conduct on receipt of his betrothed’s letter. To Naomi’s sad epistle, renouncing all claim upon him at her father’s desire, he answered briefly:

‘Your letter has taken me by surprise, dearest; but harsh and
sudden as your decision seems, I acquiesce. I know not how your
father may have arrived at his estimate of my character, or
what has influenced him to desire that our engagement shall be
cancelled, but I am willing to abide his sentence. He may be
right, perhaps. I am by nature unstable. I am not worthy of so
noble a heart as yours. Yet be assured, Naomi, that, although
unworthy, I am at least capable of appreciating and admiring your
character, as well as a better man. To the end of my life I
shall honour and esteem you. To the end of my life I shall deem
you the purest and noblest of women, and think those days of my
life happiest in which I loved you best, and when there was no
shadow of mistrust between us.

‘God bless you, dearest, and farewell! It may be long before I
revisit Combhaven, and this may be a lifelong farewell.--Your
friend, your servant always,

‘OSWALD PENTREATH.’

‘He is grateful to me for letting him go,’ thought Naomi, with a touch of bitterness. She could read gratitude for his release between the lines of this letter.

‘He might have spared me much pain if he had been more candid,’ she thought--‘if he had confessed the truth that day I told him of the change I had seen in him.’

She opened the drawer where her wedding-dress lay on the day she received this final letter, the last she could ever expect from Oswald Pentreath. She looked at the pale silken gown with such sorrowful eyes as look upon a corpse. Was it not the dead corpse of her lost happiness which lay there, with sprigs of rosemary among the folds of its shroud?

‘Poor wedding-gown!’ she said to herself; ‘I shall give it to Lucy Simmonds. Why should it lie and fade in a drawer when it would make her happy? Would it be any comfort to me to look at it in years to come, and remember that I was once young and very happy, fancying myself beloved?’

Lucy Simmonds had been Naomi’s favourite pupil in the Sunday-school over Little Bethel; an intelligent biblical student, who knew Kings and Chronicles as well as a bishop, and had never been known to confound the miracles of Elijah and Elisha. She had blossomed into womanhood, and was about to unite her fate with that of a promising young butcher--a staunch member of Joshua’s congregation.

Naomi folded the dress carefully, and packed it in a large sheet of white paper. The skirts of those days were scanty, and the silk dress did not make a bulky parcel. She wrote a loving letter to her old pupil, and sent the parcel to the widow Simmonds’s house that afternoon. The dress might be too good for Lucy’s present station, but not for her future position as the wife of an aspiring butcher. The young matron would wear that pretty gray silk at friendly tea-parties and Christmas gatherings for years to come, and would think affectionately of the donor. It seemed a small thing, this giving away of her wedding-gown; but to Naomi it meant the total surrender of hope. There was nothing left for her in life but duty and her love for her father.

She bore her cross meekly. None could have told how withering a sorrow had passed over her young life. There was a curious compound of pride and humbleness in her nature. She accepted her lot humbly, as a trial which was but her portion of humanity’s common burden; but she was too proud to let others see how deeply she had been wounded. She put on a brave front; and her father gave her credit for stoicism, in no wise suspecting that the weight of her secret grief was almost intolerable.

Very little was said in the small household about this change in Naomi’s fortunes. The cancelment of her engagement was accepted as an act of Joshua’s. He had forbidden the marriage for some good reason of his own. No one dared ask him why--his wife least of all. She could not have spoken Oswald’s name to him. Her heart was full of fear, sorrow, and deepest pity for Naomi; yet she dared not offer her sympathy. There was a look in Naomi’s face that forbade all approach--every offer of love. Cynthia felt that there was a gulf between them. Naomi tacitly avoided her. She was not unkind, but she shrank from all companionship with her father’s wife; and henceforward Cynthia’s life became very lonely. Her husband’s hours were closely occupied, and spent for the most part away from her. Naomi lived her own life, as much as possible apart from her stepmother, and Judith was harsh and unfriendly. Jim was always Cynthia’s friend and champion; but his busy career did not admit of much companionship. The small household met at meals, at the same hours, with the same regulations and ceremonies; but these family assemblies were silent and gloomy.

‘Our dinner-time is getting uncommonly like a Quakers’ meeting,’ observed the audacious Jim at one of these dreary gatherings; ‘I wish the spirit would move some of us to be lively.’

‘When you’ve as much trouble on your mind as your father has you won’t be quite so active with your tongue,’ retorted aunt Judith.

The works at the Grange had undergone a sudden check. Oswald had written peremptory orders to his architect. The contract was to be carried out only so far as concerned the substantial repairs of the house. There was to be no rotunda, and the end of the drawing-room was to be walled up again.

‘I am going abroad,’ he wrote; ‘make as good a job as you can of the place, and write to me at the subjoined address for cheques as you want them.’

The subjoined address was that of a London solicitor, a man who had done business for the old Squire occasionally.

The architect wondered and talked; and before many days everybody in Combhaven knew that Mr. Pentreath’s engagement to Joshua Haggard’s daughter was broken off. There was a great deal of talk, and much discussion and disputation about details, but a wonderful unanimity of opinion. The match would have been most unsuitable. Naomi Haggard was much too serious for a Squire’s lady. The Grange could never have held up its head properly under such a mistress, and a glass rotunda would have been absurdly out of keeping. ‘He ought to marry Mr. Pinkley’s only daughter,’ said Combhaven, deciding for him offhand. ‘There’s only an accommodation road between Pinkley’s land and his.’

The builders finished their work. The end of the long drawing-room was walled-up again, and there was no more talk of palms or fountains or an Italian garden. The Grange resumed its air of gloom and emptiness, and looked almost as dismal as in the lifetime of the old Squire.

So the summer ripened and grew more glorious, bringing no delight of heart to the minister’s small household. The colours of the sea took a more vivid lustre from the fulness of the sun, like jewels in an Indian temple shining in the glare of many torches. There came over the land the sultry hush of the days before harvest. Very little doing in those rich fields, where the corn was gently stirred by the hot south wind, like the waves of a golden sea; very little doing in the big farmyards, where the cattle stood knee-deep in the tawny gorse-litter, and contemplated the outer world listlessly, with dreamy brown eyes and a general air of benevolence: stillness and repose on all things. Cynthia Haggard looked at this lovely external universe languidly, with eyes that saw its beauty dimly, as in a dream in which one absorbing sense of overwhelming trouble makes all things faint and blurred. Her husband had spoken no unkind word to her since that scene with Oswald; yet she felt that he was estranged. He read more; he shut himself up in his own thoughts; gave himself up more completely to his contemplative and subjective religion, and that religion seemed to take a more gloomy and inexorable character. In his sermons he dwelt less on the divine love and charity, and harped on a harsher string--the doom of sinners destined to perdition; wretches on whom the divine light had never shone, for whom that all-saving faith which could lift the sinner out of the mire by one upward impulse of an awakened soul was a dead letter.

Cynthia shuddered as she listened. Was Oswald Pentreath one of these lost spirits?

She could see that her husband was unhappy, yet had no power to comfort him. That weighed upon her heavily. She dared not complain to him of this disunion, lest she should be drawn into a confession of her sinful weakness, and constrained to admit her guilty love for the sinner. She could not have stood up before that righteous man and spoken falsely.

He never questioned her about Oswald Pentreath; yet she felt that there must be some strong suspicion of evil in his mind, and at the root of his arbitrary conduct in cancelling his daughter’s engagement. It never occurred to her that Oswald’s wild talk that afternoon had been overheard, and told to Joshua. She looked upon his knowledge rather as the result of some occult power of his own. His wisdom had penetrated the guilty secret.

One night, a little while after Naomi had given up her lover, Joshua came up to his bedchamber somewhat later than usual. He had stayed in the parlour after supper, writing or reading. Cynthia was lying awake, full of sad thoughts, vague forebodings of evil, aching pity for that weak sinner, wandering she knew not where. Joshua walked up and down the room in silence for some minutes, and then stopped suddenly beside the bed, and looked down at the small face on the pillow, the sad blue eyes glancing up at him timidly, deprecating blame.

‘I am glad you are not asleep,’ he said. ‘I want that book--the _Sorrows of Werther_. I have been thinking of what my sister said about it. I want to judge for myself. I looked at it too hurriedly the other day. I want to see what kind of book it was that made you unhappy.’

‘You can’t read it to-night, Joshua, surely? It’s so late, and you must be tired.’

‘I am tired, but not able to sleep. I would rather read than lie awake. My thoughts have been a burden to me of late. There was a time when my wakeful hours were full of sweetness, when I could lose myself in communion with my Redeemer. That time is past. Human trouble has made a wall between this poor clay and the spirit world.’

This was a reproach which smote the erring wife to the heart.

‘Joshua, it is my fault,’ she faltered; ‘you were happier before you married me.’

‘Happier!’ he cried bitterly; ‘I never knew the extremes of human joy or human pain till I knew you. Well, the pain has been immeasurable as the joy. If I erred, I have paid the penalty. Give me that book, Cynthia.’

Cynthia rose without another word, went to the drawer where she had hidden that fatal romance of real life, and brought the book to her husband with a meek obedience that moved him deeply. Even in his doubt and distrust of her--for he did doubt her, despite his brave words to Judith--there was an abiding love in his soul, a yearning to take her to his heart and forgive her and comfort her, and offer her deeper love than was ever given to woman--the wide strong love of a heart that had only awakened to passion in the maturity of its force and power. Could the love of youth, in all its glow of romance and poetry, be in anywise equal to this?

Cynthia put the book into his hand, and then remonstrated gently against the folly of midnight studies.

‘Read it to-morrow, dear Joshua. You look tired and ill. Hark! it is striking eleven.’

‘Go to bed and sleep,’ he said sternly; ‘I cannot. I want to read the book that melted you--and Oswald Pentreath. I wonder whether it will move me to tears.’

He set the candle on the old mahogany escritoire at which he wrote sometimes, and seated himself in the wide horsehair-covered arm-chair edged with brass nails, like an old-fashioned coffin. He opened the book with a resolute air, as a man who meant to plod through it, whatever stuff it might be. He read and read on with an intent face, turning leaf after leaf at measured intervals; Cynthia, lying with her face turned towards that gloomy figure, watching him as if he were reading in the book of doom. To her mind that book held the confession of Oswald’s weakness and of hers. Joshua would know all when he had read that. Had it been an acknowledgment of sin written with her own hand, signed and attested, she could not have thought it more complete or final.

He read on deep into the night, Cynthia dozing a little now and then, but for the most part watching him. The small hours struck, one after another, on the solemn old church bell; a faint chillness crept into the summer air; then slowly, softly, mysteriously, like a dream, came the gray dawn--first with a glimmer at the window; then with a broad cold light, that filled the room and made the flame of the candle pale and ghost-like; then with gleams of saffron and rose, and dim morning sunbeams like an infant’s vague sweet smile. Still Joshua sat reading in the same fixed attitude; reading on with indomitable resolve, bent on knowing the utmost and the worst. For him, too, the book was a confession and a revelation. Werther was Oswald Pentreath; Charlotte was Cynthia: and they loved each other; their young hearts yearned to each other, overflowing with tenderest sympathies, with unspeakable affection; and fate, duty, religion, and honour stood between them, in the person of the unloved husband, separating them for ever.

The room was flooded with sunlight when he closed the book, with one long sigh. He could not refuse the sinner that one expression of pity, so lost, so given over to an unconquerable passion, and yet with so much in him that was gentle and true and worthy.

Cynthia had fallen asleep at last. Joshua looked down at the pale face on the pillow, full of compassion, pitying her, pitying himself.

‘Those two lived happily together, when Werther was gone,’ he said to himself, thinking of Albert and Charlotte; ‘but then Albert did not know that his wife’s heart had gone from him.’

He washed and dressed himself, and went down to his daily round of labour, and said no word to Cynthia about the fatal book.