Chapter XIV: ‘a Storm Was Coming, but the Winds Were Still.’

No life could have been more self-contained than Naomi’s in this fair summer time. She claimed sympathy from no one, but bore the anguish of her widowed heart in a resolute silence. From Cynthia she shrank, with a feeling that was more nearly akin to aversion than she would have liked to confess to herself. Womanly instinct had fathomed the mystery of Oswald’s defection. She had looked back, and remembered, and weighed looks and tones of his, which had but faintly impressed her at the time, but which now, considered by the light of his subsequent conduct, had fullest significance. His heart had gone astray, and it was to Cynthia, her father’s wife, that truant heart had wandered. Not with deliberate sinfulness; she could not believe him deliberately wicked. The tempter had set this snare for him, and he had weakly yielded. Cynthia’s childish beauty, Cynthia’s innocently simple ways, had allured him from the straight path of righteous dealing. He had struggled, poor sinner, fought and striven with the Evil One, and, finding the powers of darkness too strong for him, had turned and fled. It was wisest, it was best so.

Naomi loved him with so fondly indulgent an affection--a passion so unselfish--that she could find it in her heart to forgive him for having fallen away from her. She could pardon and pity him, though he had taken the light and glory out of her life, and left her world empty as an exhausted crater. But she could not so easily forgive Cynthia. Her father’s wife should have been above suspicion, unassailable by temptation. And if Cynthia had not shown some tokens of weakness, Oswald would surely have been stronger. Cynthia, the wandering waif, cherished and garnered by the most generous of men, should have loved her husband with a love strong enough to shield her from the possibility of temptation; and yet in this false wife’s pallid face, in the heavy eyes, and sad set lips, Naomi read the secret of a guilty sorrow. She, Cynthia, grieved for the absent one--she shared Naomi’s sacred grief, she intruded upon that privileged domain of fond regret. The knowledge of this silent distress made Naomi angry and unforgiving.

One evening in the beginning of August, soon after Joshua’s reading of _Werther_, Naomi walked alone in Pentreath Wood. Such lonely evening rambles were her melancholy comfort, and this wood her favourite resort. Her wild garden had been neglected of late. It was too narrow for her grief. Jim, or aunt Judith, or Cynthia might intrude upon her at any moment. But here, in this wide shadowy wood, she was really alone--no one to spy out her tears or offer humiliating pity; no companions but the stars high up yonder, shining through overarching beech and oak; the unknown life in brambles and underwood, dry fern and last year’s leaves, which were stirred now and then mysteriously by those unfamiliar creatures that make merry at nightfall, or by the distant hoot of some ancient owl, sounding ghost-like in the dimness, or the red-brown cattle lying in the grassy hollows and sheltered corners, restful but unsleeping.

Here Naomi could nurse her grief as she pleased. She could bring forth her sorrow from its hiding-place, and cherish and caress it, as if it had been a fondly-loved child. Here she recalled Oswald’s looks and tones, when she had believed him true, and lived over again the happy days in which he had been all her own--the time before Cynthia came and brought sorrow and shameful thoughts into Joshua Haggard’s peaceful home. Every turn and wind of the dear old wood, every veteran oak, ferny bank, and knoll and hollow, was associated with that lost lover, and aided fancy to conjure up his image. Here he had read _Ivanhoe_, here _Marmion_. Here, in a lazy mood, he had lain stretched at full length, and told her the story of Caleb Williams, and how he had once seen Kean play the part of Sir Edward Mortimer, in the _Iron Chest_, at the little theatre in Exeter. Here, leaning against the silvery bark of this giant beech, he had recited Byron’s ‘Isles of Greece,’ thrilled with a fervour which was almost inspiration. O, happy irredeemable hours--the dead departed delights of life!

Here, on this August evening, Naomi walked and meditated. It was a dim and hazy twilight, with a pale new moon shining faintly behind the tree-tops. The young trees and the underwood beneath them had a ghostly look in this half light. It might have been a scene made up of shadows.

Bitter, beyond all measure of common bitterness, to remember the days--but a little while ago--when Naomi and her lover had roamed in this very wood, when there was but the red-brown glow of coming foliage on the beech-boughs, and the chestnut fans were still unfolded, and the anemones whitened the hollows, and the blue dog-violets smiled up at the blue April sky. Cynthia had been with them always--the fair young sick-nurse in her neat gray gown and little Quaker cap. She had been with them, sharing all their talk; and Naomi had nothing suspected, nothing doubted. It was only now that she understood the drama in which her own part had been so sad a one--only now that she could fathom the meaning of that low subdued voice, those pauses of silence, and lapses into dreamy thoughtfulness, which had marked Oswald’s manner during this time.

‘It was then he began to care for her,’ she told herself. ‘God help and pardon them both! I do not believe that either entered deliberately upon this path of sin. But if Cynthia saw that he was so weak, so wicked, she ought to have left the Grange at once; she ought never to have seen him again. It was her duty.’

Easy enough to say this, but a moment’s reflection showed Naomi that it would have been no easy thing to do. To avoid temptation thus would have been to create a scandal. And Oswald had made no confession of his weakness. Those subtle differences in his tones and looks may have been meaningless for Cynthia.

‘No,’ thought Naomi, with a burst of very human passion, ‘she must have understood them; his words and looks must have been clear to her, for she loves him.’

Pondering thus--as she had pondered on many an evening since her lover’s desertion, travelling over and over again the same sad pathway of thought--Naomi came to the skirt of the wood, and from the wood into the park, where the trees stood far apart, and the smooth sward rose and fell in gentle undulations. She could see the house from this point. How lonely it looked, how deserted; a gloomy dwelling that might have been so bright!

‘I was to have been a fine lady, with a drawing-room and a conservatory,’ Naomi said to herself, full of bitterness; ‘and coaches were to come rolling over the gravel drive, where the weeds grow so thickly. And there were to be lights in all those windows; and music sounding in the night--a life like fairyland. Poor Oswald! How he used to talk of our future! And he was true then--he meant all he said. O my dearest, my dearest,’ she murmured, with clasped hands, ‘I wanted no lights or music; I wanted no grand visitors--no bliss other than this common world can give, while I had you! My life would have been all happiness, had Providence made you the poorest of God’s poor, and our home a hovel, and our days full of toil, if we had only spent them together--if you had only been true to me.’

She stopped, with tears rolling down her faded cheeks, tears that gushed forth unawares at the thought of what life might have been. She stood looking straight before her with those tear-dimmed eyes, looking at the dull old house.

Not a gleam of light! Yes; the heavy hall-door opens slowly, and she sees the dim lamp within. A figure comes out of the dusky porch, and walks at a leisurely pace along the broad gravel terrace at the side of the house.

Naomi gave a faint awe-stricken cry, as if she had seen a ghost--a cry so faint that it could not reach the ears of yonder solitary dreamer pacing the gravel path with bent head. She turned, and hurried back to the wood, and was quickly lost in the darkness of that green mystery of oak and beech; and then, secure from observation, walked slowly home meditating, upon what she had seen.

He had come back; he who had said his path of life was to lie in other lands; he, the self-banished exile, the new Childe Harold. Why had he come? and was it for long? How was it that the village had not been aware of his coming, and made his return common talk--an inevitable consequence of such knowledge? Had he any purpose in returning secretly, in hiding himself from his little world? Naomi was perplexed and troubled by these unanswerable questions.

It was late when she entered the little parlour at home. Prayers were over, and the family were seated in the usual formal array round the temperately furnished board. The huge junk of single Gloucester, about the size and shape of one of those granite slabs which bestrew the path of the adventurous tourist who tempts the perils of the Loggan Rock, stood up in the centre of the table like a household idol, round which the family had assembled for evening worship. The brown beer-jug--simulating a portly figure in a three-cornered hat--occupied its accustomed corner. Everything was precisely as Naomi remembered it in her earliest childhood. The quiet monotony of life had never been disturbed by new crockery, or a change of form and colour in the vulgar details of existence. The Druids could hardly have lived more simply than Joshua Haggard.

And now that the mainspring of life was broken, this sordid sameness seemed odious; nay, almost unbearable. Naomi looked at the familiar home-picture with a shudder. Affection gave it no beauty in her eyes to-night. A fair enough picture of domestic peace from the outside, if there had been any one in the street to contemplate that candle-lit circle through the window; some vagabond, perchance, homeless, and deeming that there must be bliss in a home. Yet, save honest Jim, who sat munching his bread-and-cheese with a countenance of equable discontent, there was no member of that family circle whose bosom had not its load of care.

‘Half-past nine, Naomi!’ exclaimed Joshua, looking up reproachfully, as his daughter came into the room. ‘The first time I’ve read prayers without you since I can remember, except when you’ve been ill. What has kept you so long?’

‘I’ve been frightened,’ answered Naomi, looking not at her father, but at Cynthia. ‘I was in Pentreath Park, and I thought I saw a ghost.’

‘A ghost, Naomi? I thought you were too good a Christian to believe in such folly.’

‘Saul saw a ghost,’ interjected Jim, with his mouth full of lettuce, ‘and you wouldn’t say that was folly.’

‘Saul lived in days when God taught His children by miracles.’

‘And if Providence chose to send a ghost to Combhaven, who’s to hinder it?’ cried Jim, with unconscious irreverence. ‘I’m sure ghosts are wanted--people are wicked enough. I daresay the Cock-lane ghost would have done a deal of good if a pack of busybodies hadn’t made her out an impostor. And there are the ghosts that worried the Wesley family. You can’t fly in _their_ faces.’

‘Sit down to your supper, Naomi,’ said Joshua, rebuking Jim’s flippancy by a grave disregard which was more crushing than remonstrance: ‘you ought not to be wandering about so late of nights. It is not respectable.’

Naomi sighed and made no answer. Those weary ghosts in Dante’s shadow world, wandering in their circles of despair, might have felt very much as she did, had any accuser charged them with levity or unseemly conduct. She looked at her father with eyes full of a wondering reproachfulness, as if she would have said, ‘Can you, who know my burden, upbraid me?’

‘What about the ghost?’ asked aunt Judith, sweeping her crumbs into a neat little heap with the back of her knife. ‘Don’t tell me it was Mr. Trimmer. Sally had the impudence to hint at his walking, only last Sunday night; but I think I stopped her tongue.’

Mr. Trimmer was a retired miller who had died of dropsy ‘up street,’ and who was supposed to be not quite comfortable in his mind concerning the division of the property which he had left behind him, about which there had been some squabbling among his nephews and nieces. This disagreement of the miller’s heirs had given rise to the report of ghostly visitations of an erratic and unconsecutive character on the part of the miller.

‘I won’t swear to his having walked,’ cried Jim eagerly: ‘but there have been groans heard down at the old mill. _That_ I can vouch for, because Joe Davis’s father heard them when he was coming home from his work last Saturday night.’

‘Why, Trimmer hadn’t worked the mill for ten good years,’ exclaimed aunt Judith. ‘What could he want down there?’

‘To look after the money he’d buried,’ replied Jim, with conviction. ‘You may depend that what he’s left behind him above ground isn’t half what he’s left beneath.’

‘Was it Trimmer?’ asked Judith, letting her natural love of the marvellous get the better of common sense.

‘No,’ answered Naomi; ‘it was nothing but fancy, I daresay. The mists were rising--white clouds of vapour that looked like the shadows of the dead.’

‘Let there be no more said upon the subject,’ said Joshua sternly. ‘It is sinful to dwell upon such folly. Eat your supper, Naomi, and let there be none of these evening wanderings.’

It is not easy to eat when one is bidden. The home-made bread, sweet as it was, seemed bitter to Naomi’s parched mouth. She drank a long draught of water and held her peace, and there was silence till the end of the meal. Naomi lifted her downcast eyelids once or twice, and looked at Cynthia with thoughtful scrutiny. There was nothing in the young wife’s countenance to betray any knowledge of Oswald’s return to the Grange. There was only that settled sadness which had become a part of the sweet face lately.

‘She will know very soon, I daresay,’ thought Naomi bitterly. ‘It is not to see me that he has come back.’

Her heart burned with indignation, as if Cynthia had, by some unholy witchcraft, some subtle silent exercise of womanly artifice, lured the false lover back to her net. She could not give her credit for innocence, or even for unconscious yielding to a guilty love. No, it was Cynthia’s fault that Oswald had gone astray. Had she been strong in purity of heart, Oswald would never have been so weak.

When the time came for bidding good-night, and Cynthia approached with her pretty pleading look and rosebud mouth ready to kiss, Naomi turned away from her stepmother with a stony face, and left the room in silence. Cynthia looked after her wonderingly, but said not a word. She knew but too well what it meant. Oswald’s treachery had made a lasting breach between them. Her only hope was that Joshua had not seen that cruel repulse. But he had seen it, and formed his own conclusions thereupon.

END OF VOL. II.

LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been silently corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the three volumes of this work and consultation of external sources. Some hyphens in words have been silently removed and some silently added when a predominant preference was found in the original work. Except for those changes noted below, original spellings in the text and inconsistent or archaic usage have been retained.

Page 126: “the mearest waif” replaced by “the merest waif”.
Page 189: “about you father” replaced by “about your father”.
Page 215: “only foolishnes” replaced by “only foolishness”.

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.