Chapter XV: Carrying Peace and Pardon

Joshua was far upon his road before Naomi had left the Grange. He had walked many miles in the dull gray of early morning, before the shadowy clouds had parted or the stars begun to pale in the saffron lights of sunrise. The energy that sustained him, the eager purpose that bore him on in that beginning of his journey, made him unconscious of time or distance. He had heard Cynthia calling; yes, his wife’s cry, piteous and weak, as of one in distress, was still sounding in his ear as he hurried along the well-known road, which seemed just a little strange and dreamlike in the dim gray dawn. He had heard her calling him, and he was going to answer her cry.

‘Dearest, I am coming to you,’ he repeated inwardly. ‘I, who drove you away with undeserved reproaches, am coming to pray for pardon; I, who was cruel, unjust, savage, and inhuman, only because I loved too blindly,--I am coming to ask for pity from the tender heart I wounded. Love, I was mad, and I have suffered for my madness--a long night of suffering. The morning has come, and peace and pardon. My eyes are opened; I see and understand.’

It was only when a sudden faintness made him stagger dizzily, and stretch out his hands to save himself from falling, that he became aware of the hot sun beating down upon his head, and the fact that he had walked many miles.

He was nearly twenty miles from Combhaven. He had crossed the wild craggy hills, and come back mechanically to the coach-road. He was at the top of a long hill, and saw the coach toiling slowly up the white dusty road. He felt all at once that his strength was gone--gone utterly, as if it had left him for ever--and thanked God for the coming of the coach. It seemed by a special providence that he had been brought across those wild hills back to the turnpike-road in time for the passing of the coach.

‘If I had missed it I should not have got to Penmoyle to-night; and my darling is waiting for me,’ he said to himself.

There was a vacant place on the seat behind the driver. Joshua hailed the coach, and scrambled into this place before the coachman had time to pull up his horses.

‘You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Mr. Haggard,’ remonstrated the man; ‘it’s dangerous.’

Joshua took no notice. The man’s voice sounded far off, as in a dream. The horses went downhill and uphill over the wild yet fertile country, by hills and woods that Joshua knew as well as he knew his Bible. They stopped to change horses in straggling little villages, where he had preached in his young days; and people who remembered those days came out of their houses, and stood looking up at the coach and talked to him. He answered their inquiries and acknowledged their civil speeches mechanically, dimly conscious of their identity. He had a curious feeling of superiority to all these people, as if the universe had been planned for him, and they were only accidents in it, like the great black flies buzzing round the heads of the patient blinkered coach-horses, to whom Providence had given no special mercy except mane and tail.

The time had been--and but a year or so ago--when he would have got down from the coach and peeped into those whitewashed cottages, and had his well-chosen word of greeting or counsel for each old acquaintance. To-day their faces looking up at him were blank and meaningless. The faces of the rabble round Stephen may have looked so to the saint and martyr in his death agony.

Joshua’s mind was going on before him. He fancied himself arriving at Penmoyle in the sunset. She would be standing at the gate perhaps, watching for him, as he had found her on that unforgotten afternoon two years ago. He would see the sweet face with the western light shining on it, the soft eyes kindling with love and happiness at sight of him. He had almost forgotten that bitter day of parting, the day when he had driven her into banishment, with more cruelty than Abraham had shown to ill-used Hagar; and it can hardly be said that the patriarch was a pattern to all future husbands in that transaction.

O, how sweet it was to dwell upon that picture of meeting and reconciliation! The burden on his conscience had been cast off since the agony of yesterday. It was verily as if he had laid down his load on the sinners’ altar. He forgot all the silent pangs and tortures of the last year, and felt as if a new life of happiness was opening before him. He would carry the lamp of the Gospel into dark places, he would preach by the wayside, as in his youth; he would carry neither purse nor scrip, but wander from village to village and from town to town, in that benighted north country he had read about in the lives of Wesley and Whitfield; or, if it were possible, still farther away, among the absolute heathen of the South Seas.

This was his vision of a glorious future. And she would be with him--his companion, helpmeet, and comforter. It was such a career as this to which she had aspired. Her spiritual nature had been revolted by the trader’s petty life--she had sighed to see her husband doing the work of an apostle.

Such thoughts as these were in his mind all through the day. They rose and fell in his brain, wave upon wave, as regularly as the waves of the Atlantic were rising and falling upon the long sandy shore beyond those brown Cornish hills. The day seemed very long to him, for his exaggerated activity of brain made minutes like unto hours. And yet he was ineffably happy. No fear of disappointment at the end of his journey clouded the radiance of his visions. He apprehended no further stroke from an angry fate. God had punished him with the undying worm called conscience, and had heard his prayers and forgiven him. He feared nothing.

It was afternoon when the coach rumbled into the stony street of Truro. Joshua had to be reminded of his fare respectfully by the coachman. He was on the point of hurrying off without paying it.

‘Your mind’s full of better things, I know, Mr. Haggard,’ said the man; ‘but I thought you’d like me to remind you.’

‘Thank you, Norman,’ said Joshua dreamily. ‘Yes, my mind was much occupied; pleasantly, though, pleasantly, as one sure of God’s bounteous mercy.’

He gave the man a crown for himself. It was half as much as the fare--an astounding donation.

‘You may not be driving me again for some time to come,’ said the minister kindly.

‘Thank’ee, sir. It isn’t many behaves as handsomely, and it’s always a pride to drive such as you. But don’t take it as a liberty if I give’ee one bit of advice. Don’t try to get up to the outside of a coach before the horses ’ave stopped. You’re in the prime of life, sir, maybe; but you’re a good many years too old to do that with safety.’

‘Yes, yes, Norman; I shall bear it in mind,’ said Joshua, walking away, without stopping at the comfortable inn for ‘bite or sup,’ as Norman remarked afterwards.

‘The fact is the minister is wearing of hisself out,’ the coachman remarked to his cronies that night. ‘He’s got oddish ways with him, and a look as if he didn’t half know what’s going on round about him.’