Chapter II: ‘we Are in Love’s Land To-Day.’

A sleepless night shed the sober light of reason upon those clouds of sentiment which had obscured Miss Priscilla Webling’s mind. ‘When all is done,’ said Reason, ‘you know but too well that you had no hope of having Joshua for a husband, suitable as might have been such an union, blessed as you might have made his days by your cherishing and ministration. You know yourself a creature especially adapted to be a Methodist minister’s wife; but his eyes have been blinded to that fact: he could not pierce the modest veil in which maidenhood enfolded you, and discern the image of the perfect wife behind it. His mind--too much given to spiritual things to be acute upon earthly matters--has been caught by the surface beauty of a foolish child. It is for you to pity rather than resent an error for which he will doubtless pay dearly when he lies down in damp sheets, or drinks tea made with half-boiled water, or eats potatoes as hard as stones, and suffers in various other ways from the mistakes of an inexperienced housekeeper; to say nothing of the likelihood that so young a wife may be dressy and flighty, and given to standing at her door of afternoons gossipping, to the neglect of the housework.’

Thus counselled by Reason, Priscilla assisted at the seven-o’clock breakfast with a tranquil demeanour, and even smiled upon Joshua with an assumed cheerfulness, which had some element of the heroic.

‘I hope you do not think my choice foolish or blameworthy,’ said Joshua meekly, as Deborah helped him to fried potatoes and bacon.

‘Indeed, dear Mr. Haggard, marriage is such a serious consideration--and a second marriage, where there are grown-up children, more particularly--that I don’t feel qualified to form an opinion. Cynthia is a good girl, as girls go; that I should be sorry to deny, after the way she nursed me through my quinsy last winter. But there’s a wide difference between a servant-girl and a minister’s wife, and a great deal will be expected of her in that position.’

‘I am not afraid,’ said Joshua, ‘if I can but make her happy. In the innocence of her heart she has given me her love. God give me grace to keep and strengthen that affection in the days to come!’

‘She has so much reason to be grateful to you,’ began Priscilla.

‘I am not talking of gratitude,’ interrupted Joshua almost angrily. ‘She has given me her love. I know not why I am so blessed; but I know that she loves me. It is the rich reward of all my days of care and toil. I have not felt my labour heavy. I have no foolish pride in my work; but the sum of it has perhaps been pleasing in the sight of Heaven, and this reward has been granted to me--love and renewed youth, a life that seems beginning again from the starting-point of twenty years. I feel as young as on the day I first preached in Penmoyle--before there was a chapel here--on the bit of green waste at the opening of the lane that leads to Mr. Pamble’s farm.’

‘That was four-and-twenty years ago,’ said Deborah; ‘for it was the very year father died, and sister and I walked through the dusty lanes in our new mourning to hear you.’

This, to Deborah’s mind, was almost equal in self-sacrifice to walking over red-hot ploughshares.

‘It was before we opened the school,’ said Priscilla, ‘and when folks were recommending us to take situations as housekeepers, instead of profiting by our education.’

‘I feel as young as I felt that day--four-and-twenty years ago,’ exclaimed Joshua triumphantly.

This was an intoxication of the mind which seemed to the Miss Weblings fraught with peril. It was a positive duty to say something depressing.

‘Ah,’ sighed Priscilla, ‘if poor Mrs. Haggard could have looked forward to this in her long illness, she would have felt it trying. It’s a blessing that we’re not permitted to see into the future.’

‘I am not going to act hastily,’ said Joshua, ignoring this dismal suggestion. ‘I thought it my duty to tell you my intentions without delay; but I shall tell no one else yet awhile, not even my son and daughter. I shall leave Cynthia with you for some time longer. She shall have time for reflection--many peaceful days in which to consider the promise she has made me. If any change should come to her mind, if she should discover that she has been mistaken in her feelings towards me, I shall be ready to set her free. It will need but a word from her to loosen the bond between us. I shall tell her this before we part. If she hold steadfast to her promise of last night, I shall come back to fetch her before this year is ended. Meanwhile I know that you will be kind to her, and that she will be happy with you.’

‘We have always tried to do our duty by her,’ returned Deborah rather stiffly.

She could not quite forgive Mr. Haggard for his absurd choice, when the superior mind of her sister had been lying open before him for these last twenty years like a wise and valuable book, and he had not had the sense to read it.

‘I’m afraid she’ll be puffed up by the change in her prospects,’ suggested Priscilla, ‘and not so obedient and dutiful as she has been. We can hardly expect it of her under the circumstances.’

‘I do not think you will find any difference,’ said Joshua. ‘She is sincerely grateful to you for your goodness to her.’

‘Yes; but in our case her gratitude does not turn into love,’ retorted Priscilla sharply.

Cynthia brought in the tea-kettle to make the tea, and took it out again to be kept on the boil on the kitchen-hob, with a meekness which seemed to give the lie to her mistresses’ doubts; and presently, when Joshua had finished his breakfast and went out to the kitchen to bid his newly-betrothed good-bye, he found her scrubbing the deal-table with vigorous industry, which had brought a vivid pink to the fair young face.

She put down the scrubbing-brush, and he took her in his arms and kissed her--with a kiss which was fatherly in its protecting gentleness, lover-like in its suppressed passion.

‘Dearest love,’ he said softly, holding her in his embrace all the while, and looking down at her with tender seriousness, ‘I am going to leave you for a few months. I am going away, dear, so that you may look into your heart and be very sure the love you talked of last night is real, and not a childish fancy which may melt away like the memory of a dream when we awake. In our sleep we wander in a beautiful garden, and clasp the hand of a friend--loved and dead, perhaps, long ago; and in the morning we awake, and there is nothing left of our dream--hardly a memory. Your love for me might be like that, Cynthia.’

‘No, no,’ she answered eagerly, looking up into his eyes,--‘no it is real, like your goodness, like your wisdom.’

‘I am old enough to be your father, Cynthia. I have a daughter older than you.’

‘What has that to do with it? I did not think about your age when I began to love you.’

‘When did you begin to do that, sweet one?’

‘When you went away from here I felt that there was something gone out of my life, and I knew that I liked you very much. But perhaps I might never have known that I loved you if--’

She stopped, blushing deeply, and trifling with the lapel of his coat.

‘If what, dearest?’

‘I don’t like to tell you; it is so foolish.’

‘Please tell me, dear.’

‘Young Mr. Price, at the Rising Sun, wanted to be my sweetheart. He used to wait for me coming out of chapel of an evening, and follow me across the street, and stop me at the garden-gate talking to me. And when he talked about loving me and wanting to marry me, I hated him dreadfully; and then I knew that I loved you.’

‘And I hope you made Mr. Price quite understand that you didn’t care for him?’

‘O yes; I told him so very plainly, and he was rather offended, and Miss Priscilla said I was very foolish to refuse so good an offer. But you’ve no idea how I hated him when he talked about being fond of me.’

‘God bless you, darling, and good-bye till I come back to fetch my young wife, or till you write me one little line to say you have changed your mind.’

‘I shall never write that,’ replied Cynthia, with conviction.

And with these words they kissed once more and parted, Joshua setting out on his homeward journey with the light heart of youth, weaving visions of this happy future as he walked in the briar-scented lanes, painting pictures of that familiar home which was soon to be beautified by Cynthia’s sweet presence. It seemed to him that he had never known what beauty and grace in woman meant before he found that wanderer on the sunburnt common--before he looked down on those loose locks of palest gold, and saw the white feet gleaming under dark water, the delicate figure half-sitting, half-reclining on the grassy hillock, with the listless grace of repose.

He speculated how he could make the old home a little brighter for its new mistress. That dingy carpet in the common parlour must be exchanged for a new one. He would buy a harpsichord or one of those new pianos people talked about, and Cynthia could learn to play hymn-tunes. He would buy a gig or a four-wheeled chaise to drive his wife in, instead of the tax-cart. When Jim got steadier and married--events which ought to happen within the next half-dozen years--Joshua told himself that he might retire from the grocery business altogether, and devote himself exclusively to the chapel. There was a cottage on the slope of the hill at the upper end of Combhaven which he fancied would be a charming home for himself and his young wife--a romantic cottage, with a garden in which some ambitious tenant had made a fountain. It seemed to the lover’s fancy that this cottage, with its fountain and weeping-ash, was better adapted as a background to his picture of Cynthia than the substantial commonplace old house opposite the First and Last. Yet it would go against him to leave the old house. His father and mother had lived and died there. It was his first idea of home. No; if Cynthia were satisfied, he would stay there. And that cottage with the fountain was probably damp. Picturesqueness and rheumatism often go together.

And Judith? How would that tight-waisted, tight-lipped damsel get on with a lovely young wife? Judith must be taught to bridle that sharp tongue of hers, to put the curb on her quick temper. There must be no biting blasts to wither his tender flower.

‘I shall make Judith understand at once and for ever that she must be kind and gentle to my wife,’ thought Joshua. ‘She has always respected and obeyed me--I am bound to remember that.’

He was in no hurry to tell Judith, or even his faithful Naomi, of the change that had come upon his life--that startling and wondrous change which had made him a new man. It would be time enough when he took his young wife home. No one had any right to question his choice or to doubt his wisdom.

He felt somewhat embarrassed, notwithstanding these arguments, when Naomi questioned him, with a dutiful interest in all his doings, about the girl he had found on Springfield Common.

‘Has she been well-behaved, father? Has she learned to read yet?’

‘Yes, my dear. She has made wonderful progress.’

‘And is she as pretty as when you first saw her sitting with her feet in the water, and with her hair falling loose about her shoulders?’

Naomi’s fancy had pictured the scene; her father’s dark face looking down at the fair-haired wanderer; the thymy hillocks and gorse-bushes and wild broom under the blue warm sky.

‘I think she is even prettier.’

‘What a sweet little thing she must be! I should so like to see her! If Sally were to get married now, we might have Cynthia for a servant, mightn’t we, father?’

‘There’s not much chance of that, Naomi.’

‘Of Sally’s marrying? I’m not sure of that,’ replied Naomi. ‘I know she has thoughts of it.’

‘You shall see Cynthia some day, Naomi, and I hope you will learn to love her; but it will not be as a servant. Nature has made her fit for something better than servitude. I do not mean to say that service is not worthy, or that all men and women are not equal in the eyes of their Maker. But Nature has set a mark upon us all, and we have each our appointed station. I do not think Cynthia was created to work like Sally, or to take pleasure in the things that please Sally.’

‘You might get her a better place, father--as lady’s-maid, for instance.’

‘To be some fine lady’s drudge! That would be worse rather than better. Don’t concern yourself about her, my dear, till you come to know more of her. I have made up my mind as to her future life.’

‘How good you are, father, to take so much trouble for a poor nameless orphan!’

‘There is more selfishness than goodness in the matter, Naomi. It has been a pleasure to me to do as much for her.’

This was all that he said to his daughter about Cynthia; but he was pleased to think that Naomi had shown a friendly interest in the subject, and he fancied that Cynthia’s beauty and Cynthia’s sweetness would at once appeal to the girl’s heart; that it would be natural for these two to love one another, and that they would cleave to each other like sisters. It never occurred to him that Cynthia, as the recipient of his charity, was quite a different person in the eyes of Naomi from the same Cynthia as his second wife; and that in proportion to his daughter’s love for him would be her disinclination to divide his affection with a new-comer and interloper. In the fulness of his content, which inclined him to see all things on the sunnier side, he could foresee no domestic difficulty, unless it were a little extra snappishness on the part of Judith, an exhibition of temper which he meant to put down with a high hand.

He was very happy. It seemed as if his capacity for full and perfect happiness had never been called into play till now. His life had been prosperous, successful; but the rainbow hues of joy had not entered largely into the fabric of his existence. A gleam of vivid colour here and there had flashed across the dull gray woof; but now warp and woof were all brightness and colour. He saw all things under an altered aspect, apparelled in the beauty of a dream. Nature, which he had viewed hitherto with a mild regard, moved him now to loving worship. He thanked God for having set him in so fair a world, for having given him such a goodly heritage. In his daily walks he was continually repeating to himself those psalms which breathe joyfulness and thanksgiving, those canticles which tell of triumph and rapture for the Lord’s chosen people. There was more eloquence in his sermons, more fervour in his prayers. His congregation even felt stirred by that strong floodtide of joy which filled his own breast.

In this state of mind he was naturally disposed to look with an indulgent eye upon Oswald Pentreath’s wooing. He remembered with a guilty sheepishness what the Squire had said to him--that if he, Joshua, were going to be married he would not be for such long delay; and moved by this recollection he told Oswald one evening in the wilderness that, if he liked, the wedding might take place early in the year--say in March, when the spring flowers were coming in and the days getting bright.

‘Now that your father has given his consent there is less reason for me to hold you to the letter of your promise,’ said Joshua. ‘If you are quite sure of your affection for Naomi--quite sure she is the one woman you would choose for yourself out of all the world--it makes little difference whether you marry her in March or July.’

‘There is no fear of any change in my feelings,’ answered Oswald; ‘I love her better every day, and honour her more as I get to know her better. She is the noblest and best of women. I feel myself small and weak in comparison with her.’

Oswald lost no time in telling Naomi that the length of his apprenticeship, as it pleased him to call it, had been lessened.

‘We are to be married early in March, Naomi, when the woods are yellow with daffodils; and you are coming to brighten that dismal old house of ours. I shall be a respectable married man by midsummer. I must get my father to buy me a gig, and put Herne into harness, so that I may drive you about. We shall be a regular Darby and Joan.’

Naomi blushed at an imaginary picture of herself sitting beside Oswald in a high-wheeled gig, with that unreliable horse swaying the vehicle against banks and hedges, and making wild bolts round awkward corners. The idea of driving with her husband in a gig like old married people seemed to bring their marriage closer home to her than any gush of poetry on the lover’s part could have done.

‘And we must think of smartening the old rooms a little bit before you come to us,’ continued Oswald cheerily. ‘I daresay a coat of whitewash for the ceilings will be about as much as the Squire will care to afford; but I must see what Phœbe--that’s our old housemaid, you know--can do with a few yards of chintz and muslin. She’s a capital manager, poor old thing, and has made her elbow-bones twice their natural size with rubbing the panelling and furniture. There’s no such polish in Devonshire, I should think, as poor Phœbe’s elbow-grease. I see her at it sometimes at six o’clock in the morning when I’m going for an early ride; and I often wonder why she takes so much out of herself to embellish rooms that hardly any one sees. I fancy it must be a part of her religion. There are Shakers, you know, and Jumpers; perhaps there is a sect of Rubbers--an extra devout sect, like the Essenes.’

Naomi looked disapprovingly here. As a dissenter herself she was not prepared to think lightly of even Shakers or Jumpers, who had doubtless some reason for the faith that was in them--an innate conviction of truth, perhaps, so strong as to counterbalance the ridiculousness of their outward manifestations.

‘But when you come the old oak panels will have their use,’ said Oswald gaily. ‘They will serve as mirrors to reflect your imperial beauty. I always fancy you like the good Agrippinas and Julias, Naomi. There were one or two virtuous Julias, you know, though the majority turned their attention the other way; and there may have been a decent Agrippina, though there I’m doubtful. I always picture you as a Roman lady, with golden embroidery on your robes, and a golden diadem on that dark hair of yours.’

Naomi had read neither Tacitus nor Gibbon; all she knew about Rome was that St. Paul had acquired the Roman franchise, and that the Romans had persecuted the early Christians. But she knew that Oswald meant to praise her beauty when he likened her to these imperial ladies of doubtful character.

These two also were very happy, but with a more quiet joy than Joshua’s. The bloom of novelty had been worn off their love by this time. They had grown accustomed to look forward to a life spent together; to think of themselves as bound to each other. Oswald surveyed his future with a tranquil contentment. He liked Naomi better every day, leaned upon her more entirely, felt her superiority and his own weaker nature, and looked forward confidently to the part she was to play in his life. Naomi’s feelings lay deeper, and but seldom found expression in words. She could not speak playfully of a love which was the most solemn element in her life. She thought of her happiness--of this most perfect boon Heaven had given her in Oswald’s love--with a subdued sense of awe. If he had never loved her; if he were to be taken from her? She dared not picture to herself the hideous blank which life must have been in the first case, nor the gloomy ruin life must become in the second. Sometimes she recalled that dreadful day when the storm had swept over Combhaven and her father’s strong arm had snatched Oswald from the greedy devouring waves. If he had not been saved, and she had never known him! She was not metaphysician enough to contemplate life under such seemingly impossible conditions.

Aunt Judith’s attitude of mind in relation to the lovers was one of equable disapprobation. She thought that Joshua was sacrificing to Baal by giving his daughter five thousand pounds in order that the misguided young woman might be raised from her proper position in life to a station for which Providence had never intended her. Five thousand pounds at five per cent meant two hundred and fifty pounds a year, Judith reflected, or nearly five pounds a week, which division made the money seem a great deal more, as it was thus brought nearer the housewife’s eye. Why the entire housekeeping expenses of Mr. Haggard’s establishment--after debiting all goods had out of the shop against the house--seldom came to more than five pounds a week. And Joshua was to surrender all that money to make his daughter a fine lady.

The idea of this monetary sacrifice weighed heavily upon aunt Judith. She had begun a system of small economies as a kind of set-off against Naomi’s dowry. Puddings now only graced the board thrice a week, and those were puddings of the homeliest and least expensive character; puddings of a substantial and filling character specially dear to prudent housekeepers, as they do not require eggs in their composition, and are for the most part independent of butter. The tea-table was furnished even more sparingly than of old, and, with a view to the economising of butter, the careful manager pressed upon the maturer taste of her nephew and niece that thick and slab molasses which their childish fancies had affected. She doled out the week’s allowance of soap more grudgingly than of old, and was a despot in the matter of soda.

‘I don’t know what’s come to your aunt, Miss Naomi,’ the aggrieved Sally remarked despondently. ‘It’s as much as I can wash out a pair of white stockings for Sunday afternoon without her going on about my vanity and extravagance, and throwing Jezebel in my teeth, as if I was the wickedest young woman in Combhaven.’

These infinitesimal savings, though they inflicted some annoyance on the household, could go about as far towards counterbalancing the loss of five thousand pounds as the laborious exertions of an industrious beaver in the construction of a dam designed to stem the waters of Niagara; yet these vain efforts afforded some mental solace to aunt Judith’s perturbed mind. She scraped the butter off her bread, and felt herself a domestic martyr.

‘There’ll be fine flaunting when she’s a married woman and her own mistress,’ thought Judith, ‘with two hundred and fifty pounds a year for her own spending--silk gowns trimmed with thread-lace on workadays, I daresay. We sha’n’t see her often at chapel, I should think. She’ll be going to church for the sake of sitting in a big pew among the gentry. If I were Joshua I’d as leave have my daughter dead and buried as married to a fine gentleman that would look down upon me.’

Judith had never been able to get rid of the idea that in his secret soul Oswald Pentreath despised the Haggards and their surroundings. Her narrow mind could not conceive it possible that the son of a landowner could believe in his equality with shopkeepers; that the odour of soap and candles was not hateful to the nostrils of a gentleman who sealed his letters with a coat of arms that looked almost royal, and bore a name which was engraved on the oldest brazen tablet in the chancel. She was unable to understand that easy-going temper of Oswald’s, to which rank and wealth were of small moment compared with the blessings of personal well-being and the gratification of one’s own inclination. She had a lurking conviction that Mr. Pentreath, be he never so polite and respectful, was secretly laughing at her; that he did not admire her Sunday gown, and thought her pronunciation vulgar; and that he encouraged that impudent jackanapes Jim in the practice of grimacing behind her shoulder as she poured out the tea or carved the cold joint at supper. This conviction and a general sense of injury, chiefly referable to that marriage portion of five thousand pounds, made aunt Judith unpleasant company to herself at this time, and not the most agreeable company for other people.

The young people were happy after their tranquil fashion, untouched by the blighting influence of this aggrieved spinster. They had their afternoon rambles together, and Naomi made progress in the art of pencil landscape, sitting for many a happy hour copying the bold curved lines of the hartstongue and the delicate tracery of parsley and oakleaf fern, or the larger outlines of elm or beech; while Oswald lay on the grass at her side reading _Marmion_ or _Ivanhoe_. Gentle, peaceful time--a cup filled to the brim with perfect joy--to be remembered in days to come, when the memory shall be life’s crowning sorrow.

The lovers had been employed thus one afternoon in August. Oswald had just read that intense and dramatic scene of Sir Walter Scott’s most romantic poem when Constance de Beverley defies her pitiless judges. There had been an ominous stillness in the air for the last half-hour, and the birds were uttering those subdued twitterings by which they seem to warn one another of approaching evil; but Naomi had been too much absorbed by the story to give any heed to these whisperings of a coming storm, when one big drop falling on her pencilled group of ferns startled her out of her complacency. Oswald had been reading the stirring lines somewhat sleepily, the heavy air under those tall elms exercising a narcotic effect upon his senses, and he too had been heedless of a change in the heavens.

‘Why, I declare it’s raining!’ he exclaimed, when one of those big drops had alighted upon his nose; ‘and what a black sky! I’m afraid we’re in for a storm. And you in that thin dress, Naomi! Let us get to the house as fast as we can.’

‘To the Grange?’ cried Naomi, with a look of alarm, as if he had proposed the most awful thing in the world.

‘Why not, love? It is to be your home next spring. Is it too much to ask a little shelter from the old roof to-day?’

‘The Squire might not like--’ faltered Naomi.

‘He would be delighted. He has not asked you and your father formally to visit him, for then, you see, you would be visitors, and it is against his principles to squander his substance upon entertaining people; but if you were to drop in upon him unawares he would be enchanted. Come, dear; the rain-drops are falling faster--and there’s the first thunder-clap.’

It pealed among the trees, sounding so close to them that it seemed a local thunder-clap intended for them in particular.

‘What a threatening sound it has, Oswald!’ said Naomi, as they hurried towards the little gate which opened from the wood into the path.

‘Yes; one can fancy the first murderer hearing such a peal as he fled. It sounds like the voice of Nemesis, doesn’t it? There’s a blinding flash; run, Naomi!’

They were at the gate by this time, and only a broad stretch of turf lay between them and the house. The Squire’s oxen kept the turf closely cropped, and Oswald and his companion were able to run quickly over the short crisp grass. Naomi arrived at the porch with her cambric dress only lightly sprinkled by the rain.

The hall-door stood open, and Oswald led her in. He tried the handle of his father’s den; but that sanctuary was locked. The Squire was out, and had the key of his study in his pocket, no doubt, according to custom. Naomi stood in the grave old hall, looking about her wonderingly. It was the first time she had ever entered this house, in which she was to live and die. She felt as if it were a solemn moment in her life--a moment to be remembered as the beginning of an epoch. This house was henceforward to mean something more for her than a tradition or a feature in a familiar landscape: it was to embody her idea of home.

She looked round her doubtfully. The fine square hall; the brown-oak panelling, adorned with half a dozen family portraits browner and darker than the old oak; the wide shallow staircase with its solid balustrade; the pavement of white and black marble, had doubtless a certain dignity and beauty of their own. She felt that she was beneath a roof that had sheltered many generations; but there was a bleakness and barrenness in the scene that chilled her. A house built for the accommodation of a large family and numerous servants must needs have a cheerless and empty look when it falls into the occupation of a miser’s shrunken household.

‘Let me show you the rooms that are to be all your own,’ said Oswald, opening the door of a long drawing-room, an apartment so rarely used that it had assumed a ghost-like air, as of a chamber conscious of old family secrets, and made gloomy by the mysteries of the past. It was a narrow panelled room, painted white and salmon, and this very delicacy of tint, which would have made the apartment cheerful under favourable conditions, enhanced its chill phantasmal aspect in the gray light of this thunderous afternoon.

All the furniture was at least a century old. Naomi had never imagined such spindle-legged tables, such narrow high-backed chairs, such a general straightness and spareness of outline. The bareness of all ornament, save the small oval mirrors and crystal candelabra, and the lack of colour, struck even her inexperienced eye, which had been accustomed only to the plainest furniture. The brocaded window-curtains, once sea-green, had faded to a neutral tint; the seats and backs of chairs and sofas were covered with holland. There were no books, no pictures.

Oswald watched his betrothed, expectant of some expression of admiration. He fancied she would be delighted with rooms so much larger and more aristocratic than those in which she had lived all her life.

‘It’s a handsome room, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘Forty feet by eighteen.’

‘It’s very long,’ said Naomi, rather stupidly her lover thought.

‘Perhaps you’d like to see the dining-room?’

‘Very much.’

Anything would be a relief after this ghastly saloon, with its white cold walls and general emptiness.

They crossed the hall and entered the dining-room. Here brownness and gloom replaced the ghostly whiteness of the saloon. Here too the furniture was scanty; but there was more homeliness, a greater look of occupation, this being the room in which the Squire and his son lived from January to December. There were newspapers, books, and writing-materials on a table in the bay-window; there were whips and walking-sticks in the corners; the large oaken sideboard was adorned with a pair of solid old silver tankards, and surmounted by a portrait of the present Squire, painted in the bloom of youth, when waistcoats were worn long and ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ was still a party cry.

The lightning flashed across Naomi’s face as she looked out at the large bay-window, surveying that neatly-kept garden in front of the house, which was separated by a close-cut holly hedge from the neglected domain beyond, the wide stretch of turf which had once been a lawn sacred from the feet of cattle, and on which the Squire’s store oxen now browsed at their ease. He could see no good in land which produced nothing--grass that was mown at much cost of labour only to be thrown on the manure-heap.

The day had grown darker, and the thunder-peals seemed to shake the old chimney, down whose wide throat there came gusts of wind and rain. It was an awful chimney for the wind to howl in; and the Squire and his son, sitting silently by the hearth on a gloomy winter evening, had often felt as if evil spirits were howling wild threatenings at them from the house-top.

Naomi looked at the dark hearth with an affrighted glance, as if she had heard the family banshee shrieking at her.

‘What an awful noise!’ she said.

‘It’s only the wind, love. And now I must show you the family portraits, and my mother’s sitting-room, which will be yours so soon. I think it is the most cheerful room in the house.’

Naomi was glad to think that she was going to see something cheerful. The gloom of the dining-room had been more depressing than the ghostly pallor of the drawing-room.

They went up the uncarpeted staircase to a gallery which occupied the whole length of the house, with a row of long narrow windows looking westward, and a deep oaken seat in each window. Here there were family portraits of the usual character; sea-pieces, battle-pieces, fruit-pieces, and a Dutch picture or two to give a touch of human interest to the collection. Here too there were some old delf jars, filled with dried rose-leaves--roses that had been gathered by fingers that were now clay, and which exhaled an odour of the past.

Oswald showed his betrothed the untenanted rooms, all neatly kept by the indefatigable housemaid. The room that had been his mother’s was the prettiest Naomi had seen yet. The white walls, embellished with carved garlands of fruit and flowers; the old furniture, painted white; a narrow old-fashioned bookcase on each side of the fireplace; cabinets of shells and sea-weeds between the windows, local shells and local weeds, which the Squire’s young wife had collected in her idle uneventful days.

Naomi went eagerly to look at the books. They were many of them strange to her even in name. Old poets--Spenser, Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Prior, Pope--in white vellum, with gilded lettering. The Essayists, in neat duodecimo volumes, with faded calf bindings; Richardson’s voluminous novels, in thin octavos, bound in brown. Naomi read the titles with keenest interest. The great world of books was an unknown region to her, save for such feeble glimmer as was afforded by the _Pocket Magazine_, a folio Milton, with awful mezzotint pictures of Sin and Death, Satan and his Council, which she used to look at shudderingly in her childhood, and those books of a theological or devotional character which formed the staple of the minister’s small collection. Joshua had never been a great reader, save of his Bible and those good old Puritan divines whose teaching was after his own heart. His life had been too full and busy to admit of his acquiring the habits of a student. He read the Scriptures, or Baxter’s _Saints’ Rest_, or Law’s _Serious Call_ by the wayside.

‘What dear little books!’ exclaimed Naomi, admiring the neat rows of thin volumes, literature spread over a wide surface.

‘They all belonged to my grandfather, and came to my mother at his death. She was very fond of them, the poets especially.’

‘I did not know there were so many poets. I knew of Pope and Spenser, but all these other names are strange to me. Why have you never told me about them?’

‘They are dead, my dear; gone to the limbo of forgotten genius. Byron sent the whole crew to Hades. They have a kind of fossil life in old-fashioned libraries, like flies in amber. Their music was sweet to mawkishness, their loves and sufferings were as unreal as their periwigs; they were the poets of a patchbox and powder period.’

He took out a volume of Waller and read the ‘Lines to Amoret,’ that elegant excuse for being in love with two women at once:

‘Amoret! as sweet and good
As the most delicious food,
Which, but tasted, does impart
Life and gladness to the heart.
Sacharissa’s beauty’s wine,
Which to madness doth incline:
Such a liquor as no brain
That is mortal can sustain.’

‘Not a bad definition of the love that satisfies and the love that intoxicates, is it, Naomi?’ asked Oswald, as he closed the book. ‘These periwigged poets reduced love to a science. You are my Amoret, Naomi, and have given life and gladness to my heart.’

‘I hope you may never meet your Sacharissa,’ replied Naomi gravely, ‘since it seems that poets can love two women at once.’

‘My dearest, that was written in the days of Charles II., when poets were fops and courtiers, and it was incumbent on a court poet to have a new mistress as often as he had a new coat. It was a scenic age, unreal as a stage play; and yet there were true lovers and broken hearts while Charles Stuart was king; but you will find no trace of them among his poets.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to like that kind of poetry.’

‘But you like my mother’s room, Naomi?’

‘It is lovely.’

‘I am so glad to hear you say that. It will be your own after next March.’

‘I have been trying to think of this house as my home, Oswald; but I have such a strange feeling about it. I cannot imagine myself living here. I cannot make a picture of our new life. It all seems far away and shadowy, like my idea of the life to come, which neither my own faith nor my father’s teaching could ever make real or visible to me. I must have a very weak imagination.’

‘Perhaps you have too much common sense, Naomi. You will not give your fancies scope. You think of yourself as Naomi Haggard living in your father’s house in Combhaven, and you can’t realise the fact that next year you will be Naomi Pentreath, and sole mistress of these desolate old rooms. Your coming will alter everything, dear. Even my father looks forward to it with pleasant anticipations.’

‘He is very good. If it were not foolish or even wicked to give heed to such fancies, I should think that this feeling of mine was a presentiment--that God does not intend me ever to live the happy life you speak of. It is such a settled feeling in my mind to-day; it comes between me and my happiness, just as those stormy clouds come between us and the day.’

‘Naomi!’

‘O, it is because I love you so dearly, Oswald! I cannot believe that Heaven means me to be so perfectly happy all my life, to have no sorrows, no trials,--I who have been taught that our journey on earth is to lead us through thorny places,--your love given to me in all its fulness. It is too much to expect from Providence.’

‘My dearest, you have been taught a gloomy creed. Do you suppose Providence has never favoured true lovers--never smiled on a happy union before our time? There are old men and women who loved each other fifty years ago just as faithfully as you and I love to-day, and who have climbed the hill of life and gone down into the valley hand-in-hand. Providence means us to be happy for the most part, I believe, Naomi. Earth’s most miserable men are those who have made their own sorrows. That is my creed.’

The Squire’s harsh croak was heard in the hall below at this moment, and made an end of the conversation. Oswald took Naomi down to greet her future father-in-law, who had ridden home from one of his outlying farms in the rain, and was changing his coat and boots with the assistance of the old butler.

He stopped in the operation to kiss Naomi.

‘We were caught in the storm, father, while we were sketching in the wood,’ said Oswald. ‘I brought Naomi in for shelter. I’ve been showing her my mother’s sitting-room.’

‘Very proper. It will be hers when she’s married. She’ll keep her accounts there, and do her sewing; won’t you, my dear? My shirts and cravats are in a wretched state. It’ll be a blessing to have a clever young woman like you to look after them. What a dreadful storm! It will do no end of mischief to the corn where it isn’t cut--an excuse for tenants being backward with their Christmas rent.’

‘The rain has stopped, I think,’ said Naomi timidly, looking out through the open door, ‘and I must go home to tea.’

‘Never mind your tea, my dear. Oswald shall get you a dish of tea before you go,’ said the Squire, in a gush of hospitality.

But Naomi declared that her father would be alarmed at her absence; and the storm being really over, Oswald and she set out for Combhaven.