Chapter IV: Wood and Wilderness

The loss of the Dolphin weighed heavily upon Oswald Pentreath’s spirits. His days seemed so much longer, his life altogether lost brightness and colour, now that he was without a yacht. Love of the sea was innate in him, and his happiest hours had been spent in cruising round the romantic coast of his native country, making a summer voyage to the wilder Cornish cliffs, where Tintagel’s rocky buttress breasts the angry winds, or even going as far afield as the Lizard or the Land’s End.

The yacht being gone he felt his occupation gone with her, and for the first time in his life realised the fact that he was an idler. He had no profession, no hope of a career; he was absolutely without ambition. His future was marked out for him. In the fulness of time his father would drop into the grave, decaying as gradually as the great elms in the park, which shed their rotten old limbs one by one till the hollow trunks stood up leafless and shorn, silvan images of the tenacity with which crippled age holds on to life. The Squire would die, and Pentreath would belong to Oswald--a goodly estate, improved by half a century of economy and good management. That was Oswald’s future. There was not much love between father and son, and the young man’s calculations were not troubled by any sentimental considerations. He was too good-natured to desire his father’s death--he only told himself that it was an event which must happen in due course, and that it would change the colour of his own existence. By the time he was about forty he would most likely inherit the land, and then Arnold could cease those wanderings of his from sea to sea, and come back to his boyhood’s home. They had been loving brothers in the days before Arnold, stung to the quick by the father’s brutal punishment of some boyish offence, ran away to Bristol, and got himself a berth on a merchant ship bound for Bombay. Arnold’s name had never crossed the Squire’s lips since the day of his flight, but the brothers had corresponded faithfully, and once in three or four months a letter from some foreign port informed Oswald of Arnold’s wanderings. The boy had prospered, and at three-and-twenty the Squire’s second son was first mate on board an East Indian clipper ship--a hard life, he told Oswald, but it suited him, and the owners would make him captain before he was six-and-twenty. He had saved one of their ships by his good seamanship, when her captain had been knocked on the head by a falling spar and lay powerless in his berth, and he stood high in favour with the firm. ‘It’s a better life than that you lead at the Grange, my dear boy,’ wrote the sailor; ‘but as you are to be commander there by and by, it’s best you should stick to the ship. I see the world, men, and manners; while you might as well be one of the seven sleepers, for all you know of the changes and chances of this life. However, I fancy that sleepy kind of existence suits you. You always took things easier than I.’

Severance had done little to lessen affection, and Oswald’s pleasantest fancy about the days when he should be master was the thought of Arnold’s return.

‘I’ll have the finest yacht between this and the Solent,’ said Oswald, ‘and Arnold shall be skipper. I’ll give him a thousand a year, and when he marries he shall have the prettiest homestead on the estate, and fifty acres of pleasure-farm rent-free. There has been hoarding and pinching enough for one century in this family: Arnold and I will enjoy life.’

It was a pity so pleasant a day-dream could not be realised now in the bloom and freshness of life’s morning. A man’s ideas of happiness alter as the day wears on. They become more complex, take a wider range, yet centre more narrowly in self.

Deprived of his yacht, and at a loss what to do with himself when he was not riding Herne the Hunter, Oswald took to wandering about the woods and hills in a dreamy way, with a volume of poems in one pocket and a sketch-book and pencil in the other. He had some talent as a draughtsman--a facile delicate touch, and an innate love of the beautiful--which made it sweet to him to sit for a couple of hours before a group of ferns growing in the clefts of a stone wall, reproducing every curve and feathery undulation with his pencil. His love of poetry was also innate, and just as he tried to reproduce the ferns and trees, and flowers and crags, and glimpses of the sea caught through some opening in the woods, so he tried, in a dimmer and less artistic manner, to echo the great singer of his time, whose harp’s last notes yet hung in the air, and whose recent death was felt like a heart-wound by the more youthful and ardent of his disciples. In secret and at odd times of his idle life Oswald’s sense of something wanting in existence forced itself into rhyme--verses to be kept in his pocket-book and reperused occasionally with a blush. A man moderately gifted might have been made a poet by the rich loveliness of nature round and about Combhaven, and by a life of dreamy idleness like Oswald’s; but it must be confessed that young Mr. Pentreath never rose above the rhymester of Pocket Magazines, Caskets, and Wreaths, who addresses his plaintive verses to Celia on her marriage with a happier rival, or indites a monody on the death of the Princess Charlotte.

Pleasant though, even for one who had but poetic tastes without poetic power, to lie at ease among the ferns in Pentreath Wood and read _Manfred_ or the _Corsair_.

So was Oswald lying one August afternoon, a week after his rescue from drowning, when he heard a boy’s shrill voice ringing clear through the wood, and then the rustle of a woman’s dress, and anon a sweeter voice than the lad’s treble, exclaiming at the beauty of the ferns:

‘We have none like these in our wilderness, Jim; you must get me some of these,’ said the voice.

Oswald was on his feet in a moment. He had recognised the tones of the minister’s daughter. She had a lovely speaking voice, round and full, like her father’s voice softened to match her womanhood.

‘Are you fern-hunting, Miss Haggard?’ he asked, after they had shaken hands.

‘We are very fond of ferns, Jim and I,’ she answered, standing before him shyly, as if she hardly knew whether to stop or pass on after that first greeting. Jim stuck his stick into the ground, and flung all his weight upon it, as if he was going to throw himself upon his sword like a noble Roman.

‘Speak for yourself, Naomi,’ he said, jerking himself upright again; ‘I don’t care for ’em, and they’re precious hard to dig up. I have all the work, and you have all the glory. She teased father to give her a bit of waste ground on the other side of our orchard, you know,’ he went on explanatorily to Oswald, ‘and she’s planted it with ferns and primroses, and St. John’s wort and periwinkle, and a lot of trumpery, and calls it a wilderness; and a nice life she leads me, hunting for weeds and suchlike. I should plant something good to eat if I had a bit of ground. Aunt Judith may well call it folly. Naomi’s Folly, I call the place.’

‘Don’t be unkind, Jim. You’ve spent many a pleasant hour there reading.’

‘Yes, when I could catch hold of a rare good story like _Rob Roy_ or _Caleb Williams_ or the _Mysteries of Udolpho_. It’s a nice place to get out of aunt Judith’s way, I grant. It’s too far off the shop and the till for her to come bothering.’

‘It must be a delightful place, I should think,’ said Oswald, admiring the girl’s glowing face, framed in a cottage-bonnet of coarsest straw. ‘Won’t you sit down and rest a little after your walk, Miss Haggard?’

‘I will,’ cried James, throwing himself at full length on the grass; ‘we were pretty well baked on the road before we got in here. It’s a jolly place, this wood of yours.’

Naomi seated herself on a low bank beside the turf on which her brother sprawled, his corduroy legs extended at an acute angle. Jim’s communicativeness had set her at her ease by this time. She looked wonderingly at Mr. Pentreath’s book, which lay face downwards on the mossy bank--a book in boards, covered with coarse blue paper: our ancestors were content to accept their choicest literature thus rudely clothed.

‘Is that a tale?’ inquired Jim, pointing to the volume.

‘No; it’s a play, by Lord Byron.’

Naomi gave a little sigh--half surprise, half horror--as if she had found herself suddenly in evil company.

‘Do you read Lord Byron?’ she asked.

‘Till I know every line by heart,’ answered Oswald, with a gush of enthusiasm. ‘There never was such a poet; there never will be. All other poetry--except Shakespeare’s--is prose in comparison. It is dull, dead, colourless--a thing of rule and grammar, a concatenation of carefully-chosen words. Or I should rather say all other poets have written from the head, he alone from the heart. And to think of Byron admiring Pope! It is like Mont Blanc admiring Holborn-hill.’

‘Do you mean Alexander Pope?’ inquired Naomi, as if there had been a clan of poets with that surname.

‘Of course.’

‘I have some pieces of his in a book father gave me, and I like them very much. ‘Vital Spark,’ and ‘The Universal Prayer,’ and an elegy on a poor young lady who committed suicide. Do you know those?’

‘Yes; they are good enough in their way, and the _Essay on Man_ is better. I don’t deny the cleverness. Pope is full of wit and force and meaning. But I don’t call that kind of passionless stuff poetry, you know, any more than I call Holborn-hill a mountain. Compare that with _Manfred_, for instance,’ opening his book.

‘But is not Lord Byron’s poetry very, very wicked?’ inquired Naomi.

‘There is a good deal of it that I would not recommend to a young lady; but take all that away, and there is enough left to make the greatest lyrical genius of all time,’ answered Oswald warmly. ‘Let me read you a page from _Manfred_.’

‘O, no, please; my father has forbidden us to read Byron. I have read some extracts in the _Pocket Magazine_. They seemed very beautiful--one of them, from the _Bride of Abydos_, made me cry. I should dearly like to read more, but I am not likely to do that. Father has forbidden it, and he never changes his mind.’

‘Something like my father when he refuses me money,’ said Oswald. ‘He always stands to his guns.’

‘Are there any robbers in this here _Manfred_?’ asked Jim, who did not always remember that he had been carefully educated.

‘No.’

‘Then I shouldn’t care about it. I like such a man as Rob Roy. There’s a fellow called Mazeppa in one of Lord Byron’s stories. They tied him on the backs of wild horses, and let them scramble for him. That’s the kind of person I like to read about.’

‘You like the Waverley Novels, I suppose, Miss Haggard?’ asked Oswald, feeling that literature was advancing his acquaintance with this dark-haired girl.

Naomi shook her head despondently.

‘I have not read one of them,’ she said. ‘Father disapproves of novels. Jim had no right to read _Rob Roy_.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ exclaimed Jim, sticking his hands deep in his corduroy pockets; ‘a man may read anything. “Mustn’t” is a word invented for girls.’

‘I’m afraid your father disapproves of everything pleasant,’ said Oswald.

‘O, no; he is very good, very kind; but he likes us to read serious books, and the Bible before all books. He says there is so much in the Bible that we could never come to the end of it if we were reading it all our lives. We should always find something new--something to wonder at.’

‘Ah, I have felt that--about Shakespeare.’

Naomi looked unutterably shocked. To compare a profane playwright with the Bible thus lightly!

‘It’s a pity,’ pursued Oswald; ‘the Waverley Novels are so good. Some people say they are by Walter Scott, but I shouldn’t think it likely that a man who writes poetry so well could suddenly burst out into splendid prose. And then the novels are better than Scott’s poems.’

Naomi sighed. She felt that he was talking of a world from which she was shut out--nay, must always be excluded. It would be an act of rebellion, of actual sin, to cross the threshold of that wonder-world which her father taught her to consider a region of evil and temptation.

‘I hope your father has been none the worse for his goodness to me the other day,’ said Oswald, perceiving that literary topics were exhausted. ‘He did not take cold, I trust.’

‘O, no; father is very strong. I never remember his being ill.’

‘A wonderful man, powerful in mind and body.’

Naomi’s dark cheek glowed with pleasure.

‘He is good,’ she said, ‘and he influences people for good. Many years ago, before he was married, he used to wander about the country preaching in the open air. He has told us how the miners used to come and hear him, and how the tears used to run down their blackened faces, just as they did when Whitfield preached to the wild rough people near Bristol.’

‘I sometimes wish I hadn’t been the son of such a saint,’ remarked Jim, yawning and looking straight up at the cloudless blue. ‘It’s trying rather, at times. There’s too much holiness at home, and too little pudding.’

‘Ah, Jim, I hope God will give you a new heart some day,’ remonstrated Naomi, ‘and make you see things differently.’

‘I should like to see more upon the table at supper-time. If aunt Judith had a new heart, we might find an improvement in the housekeeping. It’s all very well to talk of carnal affections and sensual appetites; but what do apples grow for, if it isn’t to be put into pasties? I wish Providence had set my lines in a farmhouse where there was plenty of squab-pie and junket. We never have a junket unless there’s some of the saintly ones coming to tea, and they spoil the pleasure of good victuals by their psalm-singing.’

Oswald laughed outright, and laughter being infectious the serious Naomi laughed too, in spite of her regret that James should so discredit his father’s teaching.

‘Aunt Judith is much stricter about little things than father,’ she said; ‘and she and Jim don’t get on very well.’

‘Aunt Judith mixes her religion up with everything,’ said Jim; ‘she can’t boil a potato without quoting Scripture. Father has more sense.’

After this they talked about the ferns, and Oswald told Naomi the names of the different kinds--long Latin names, at which her dark eyes grew large with wonder. They rose presently, and he showed them where certain varieties grew best, and the stone or the soil they most affected. The rabbits scudded away, flourishing their silver-gray tails, as the footfalls stirred the bracken. The spreading branches of elm and beech cast their afternoon shadows on the sunlit sward. There was a warm yellow light in the wood, and a perfume of unseen pine-trees.

Oswald showed them his favourite spots--little bits of woodland landscape, unsurpassable in their way. It was all familiar to Naomi, for this wood was her chosen ramble on summer afternoons; the scene of many a blackberrying and nutting in autumn; a paradise of primroses and violets in April, a thicket of hawthorn in May. Yet though she had known these scenes from earliest childhood, they seemed to reveal new beauties when thus illustrated by an artistic mind.

‘How happy you must be to think that this lovely place is your father’s--that you belong to this wood, and it to you!’ she said presently.

‘Yes, I am very fond of it. Our race has sent its roots deep into the soil. Pentreaths have lived on this land from the days of King Stephen. We have our pedigree cut and dried--Pentreaths of Pentreath--from sire to son. We have been rather fond of marrying cousins too, and keeping ourselves to ourselves, and our land together. Perhaps that’s why we have dwindled into an enfeebled family of an old man and two boys. There are plenty of Pentreaths knocking about the world, I daresay; but of our particular branch Devonshire boasts only my father and his two sons. I am happy to say, however, that my father did not marry a kinswoman.’

That soft golden light of the westering sun reminded Naomi that it was nearly tea-time. She had no longing for tea and bread-and-butter--nay, would gladly have lingered among the ferns, in the flickering shadows of beechen branches, until the crescent moon, floating yonder high above the tree-tops, changed from gray to silver, and from silver to gold; but unpunctuality at meals was a crying sin in aunt Judith’s creed, and Joshua himself was displeased when his children absented themselves from the family board. So Naomi dropped a stately curtsy, and said:

‘Good-afternoon, sir; we must be going now, I think. Come, Jim.’

Jim, deeply absorbed in looking upward for a squirrel that had just shot out of sight among lofty boughs, abandoned the quest unwillingly.

‘All right, Naomi. Yes, I suppose it’s tea-time, and we should catch it if we stayed any longer.’

‘Come to-morrow afternoon,’ said Oswald. ‘You can come into the park, if you like--not that it’s any better kept than the wood; but we’ve some fine old timber.’

‘Any squirrels?’ asked Jim.

‘Plenty of vermin.’

‘Then we’ll come. Now, Naomi, look sharp. Here are your ferns.’

Jim thrust a bundle of green stuff into her arms, leaving himself free to flourish his newly-peeled hazel, as he swaggered along by her side.

‘Let me carry the ferns,’ said Oswald.

‘O, no, indeed. I couldn’t think of taking you out of your way,’ remonstrated Naomi.

‘It isn’t out of my way. My way leads nowhere. It will be something for me to do; and your father said I might come and see him sometimes.’

This was said with so decisive an air that Naomi submitted meekly, and abandoned the fern-roots to Mr. Pentreath’s care. They all walked out of the wood together, and down the hill to the little bay or inlet--it was almost too narrow for a bay--at the mouth of that insignificant river which flowed behind the High-street of Combhaven, and began life as a brook high up among the wood-crowned hills. What a sleepy old place Combhaven looked this slumberous summer afternoon! The vagrant cat, prowling stealthily along those moss-grown tiles upon an opposite roof, seemed an important personage in the quiet of the scene. The little group of children at play in front of the Ring of Bells, the lazy horse contemplating emptiness over a hedge, the fat old landlord of the First and Last smoking his pipe in the sunny porch,--were all of life that the village held.

Naomi opened the little green garden-gate, which admitted her and her companions into a paradise of stocks, clove-carnations, and sweet-peas, about twenty feet wide. The shop had its frontage of barren gravel; but this little garden or forecourt gave a gentility and exclusiveness to the dwelling-house which was not unappreciated by Judith Haggard, despite her Radical propensities. Indeed, it must be confessed that Miss Haggard’s Radicalism chiefly affected other people.

The parlour, with its high painted dado and flowered paper, looked cool and shadowy this afternoon. The dark tea-board and old-fashioned Staffordshire tea-service, sprawling blue flowers on a buff ground; the shining walnut-wood tables and broad-seated chairs; the dimity window-curtains with their knotted fringes and tassels; the flowers that made a bank of green and red and purple in the open window,--all had some touch of pleasantness to Oswald Pentreath’s fancy. It was a commonplace interior enough, doubtless; but it was assuredly more like a home than the stately decay of the Grange.

Judith sat bolt upright before the tea-board, a picture of prim spinsterhood, in her gray stuff gown, broad muslin collar, coral earrings, and square mosaic brooch. Joshua was in his big horsehair-covered arm-chair near the open window, looking weary and exhausted. He had just returned from a long pastoral round among distant homesteads and cottages, where it was his custom to read and expound the Scriptures, to pray with the devout, or to pray for the unawakened. Much of the work, which in a better state of things would have been done by the parish-priest, was left for Joshua. His flock were better cared for, more earnestly watched, than the sheep of the established and endowed shepherd; and it is scarcely to be wondered at, perhaps, that while the duly-qualified pastor saw his sheep dwindle, Joshua’s flock grew larger year by year, until they threatened to become too numerous for the square barn-like Little Bethel at the top of the hilly High-street.

‘We met Mr. Pentreath in the wood, father,’ said Naomi, ‘and he has come to see you.’

‘Yes; and I hope you’ve spent time enough in idleness,’ snapped aunt Judith; ‘and those tea-cloths not hemmed yet, I’ll warrant.’

‘I finished the last of the dozen before dinner, aunt,’ replied Naomi, with her grave meekness, which had nothing of timidity or foolishness, only a tranquil submission to supreme authority.

‘They ought to have been top-sewed,’ said Judith; ‘hemming won’t stand the wear and tear they’ll get from such a girl as Sally.’

‘I sewed them, aunt; and you know Sally seldom washes the tea-things.’

‘Never, I should hope,’ cried Judith. ‘There wouldn’t be many of ’em left if she did; and it’s a pattern you can’t match nowadays, if you was to give its weight in gold.’

‘What a good thing that ugliness should go out of fashion!’ retorted Jim, not foreseeing the day when the commonest of those Staffordshire cups and saucers might take their places among the chosen specimens in a collector’s cabinet.

‘Ah,’ sighed Judith, ‘they were your grandmother’s; but that makes little difference to you. You’ve no reverence for those that came before you.’

This conversation had been carried on in undertones at the tea-table, while Joshua had given Mr. Pentreath friendly welcome. They all drew round the tea-board after this. Aunt Judith filled the cups with precision, and the conversation became more general and more ceremonious. There was not much to talk about--not much local chit-chat--in Combhaven; but they did manage somehow to find something to say. Joshua talked of the people he had visited in his day’s duty--tenants of the Squire’s most of them; their grievances; their ailments--scalds from tea-kettles, wounds from scythes or reaping-hooks; their sick cattle. Mr. Haggard confined his talk to worldly subjects, being wiser in this respect than some of his fellow-labourers.

Oswald felt himself quite at home in the calm family circle, being happily ignorant of aunt Judith’s low opinion of him. He sipped his tea and ate his bread-and-butter, and looked at the flowers in the window and the coloured busts of George Whitfield and John Wesley in Bow china on the mantelpiece, and familiarised himself with the aspect of the place. There was a mahogany bookcase with glass doors on one side of the fireplace, containing several rows of books, neatly arranged and neatly bound--books that looked as if they were treasured by their owner--not like Oswald’s ragged regiment of volumes, always out of their proper places.

‘You are fond of reading, Mr. Haggard,’ said the young man, looking at the bookcase.

‘Very fond. I give all my spare hours to my books, but my spare hours do not make many days in the year. I carry a volume in my pocket when I have to walk far, and read as I go. That is my best chance of enjoying a book.’

‘And who are your favourite authors?’

‘Bunyan, Baxter, and Law.’

These were strangers to Oswald Pentreath, save for a dim remembrance of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, devoured and wondered over in early boyhood.

The conversation came to a dead stop at this point, but there was no embarrassment. A pause in the flow of talk is not such an awful thing in a Devonshire village as it is at a London dinner-table, where the fountain of wit is supposed to be inexhaustible, and a silence reflects discredit on the assemblage.

‘Let us go into the garden,’ said Joshua, when everybody’s second cup was empty.

Jim had turned his bottom-upwards, and balanced his teaspoon across it, thereby scandalising aunt Judith, whose reproving frown had no influence upon him.

‘Yes, and I’ll show you Naomi’s wilderness,’ said the boy to Oswald, in a confidential undertone.

It was one of Joshua’s leisure evenings. There was no service at Little Bethel, and until closing-time there was nothing for him to do in the shop. He could afford to lounge in his garden and refresh himself with a little repose after a toilsome day.

Aunt Judith went to the shop, where there was generally a run upon tape, needles, and such small gear in the leisure hours of evening, good housewives, who had been too busy to touch their needlework in the day, discovering their wants after tea and running down to Haggard’s to supply the same, and perhaps to spend five minutes or so inquiring after the health of that excellent man, the minister.

The rest repaired to the garden--an oblong piece of ground of about an acre, running off at the end into another acre, of irregular shape, which had been an orchard for the last hundred years.

There was nothing picturesque about Mr. Haggard’s garden. It was neatly laid out upon utilitarian principles, with just so much regard to ornament as is implied in narrow borders of old-fashioned cottage flowers in front of homely vegetables, and a row of espaliers screening beds of onions and turnips. It was a garden running over with fertility, from the young pear-trees, around whose lowermost branches the scarlet-runners had entwined themselves lovingly, to the golden pumpkins sprawling in the setting sunlight, and the deformed old quince-trees that hung over a pond in a corner by the wall. The narrow paths were neatly kept, and there were very few weeds among vegetables or flowers, Jim being held answerable for the condition of things, and labouring here himself daily, with some little assistance from the shopboy and a good deal of help from Naomi, who was passionately fond of flowers.

Mr. Haggard walked to the end of the garden with the young people, and then, feeling tired after his long round by hill and dale, seated himself on a bench by the quince-trees, which with an ancient walnut made this the shady spot of the garden. There was a square grass-plat here, upon which stood a rude table--a specimen of Jim’s carpentry; and on very warm afternoons aunt Judith was sometimes persuaded into an out-of-door tea-drinking here--a concession on her part only to be obtained by much diplomacy.

Joshua was fond of his garden in a passive way, and it was here that he communed with himself on Saturday afternoons, meditating his subject for the next day’s sermons. It was here he read the Nonconformist divines, or indulged in that introspective study, that searching out of his own heart, which formed a prominent part of his system. There was not much to search for in the minister’s heart--no lurking evil to be thrust out of it. In singleness of purpose, in directness of aim, in simplicity of life, he came as near perfection as it is given to erring man to come.

The young people strolled on along the narrow path to the orchard, leaving Joshua to his meditations. If Judith had been there, she would have taken pains to prevent this unrestricted communion between the young Squire and Naomi; but her brother, in his contemplation of far-off things, was apt to overlook trifles lying near at hand, and he saw no danger in the temporary association of these young minds.

‘Come and see our wilderness,’ cried Jim, opening the orchard-gate.

The orchard was a queerly-shaped enclosure, a strip of land running into a sharp point; and this triangular end had been allowed to be waste ground until Naomi’s fifteenth birthday, on which privileged occasion she begged the bit of waste from her father by way of birthday gift; and from that time forward it had been her constant delight and Jim’s occasional caprice to adorn the spot with all manner of Nature’s wildlings of forest, heath, and dell. It was a wonderful soil, that wilderness--everything grew there. Plants that affected sand, and plants that hungered for loam; flowers that loved the sun, and ferns enamoured of shade. They all grew together in harmony, like the happy family of birds and beasts, to oblige Naomi. Such primroses, yellow and purple; such bluebells and foxgloves, and dragon’s-mouth and marsh-mallows, and amethyst-hued heaths, and gold and silver broom, and ferns of every denomination.

‘I think we could grow seaweed if we tried,’ said Jim.

The old, old orchard was like a hospital of cripples, so lame and twisted and warped and crooked were the ancient trees, with more gummy exudation upon some of them than fruit; such gray old bark, such yawning wounds in their trunks. The turf was deep and soft, all hillocks and hollows; and in one sunny corner there was a row of beehives, the produce whereof was usually sold by aunt Judith, as a favour and at a good price, to some of the superior customers.

‘Other people get the honey, and we run the risk of getting stung,’ complained James, who felt injured by this arrangement. ‘That’s what comes of being brought up by an aunt. If mother had lived, we should have had cakes and junkets sometimes, I’ll warrant.’

Jim had but a cloudy memory of his dead mother, and was apt to associate her loss with the idea of indulgences which would have flowed naturally from the maternal bounty.

They loitered a little in the orchard, talking in a lazy summer-evening way about nothing particular. It was long past the Squire’s dinner-time, and Oswald knew that he had forfeited his dinner by absence. There was no such thing as a meal served out of due season at the Grange. Mrs. Nichols, the housekeeper, knew her duty too well for such foolish concessions. But Oswald was reconciled to the loss of his dinner. Female society was almost a novelty to him. The Squire lived like a recluse, and enjoyed the privilege of being eminently unpopular--a privilege which, in his own opinion, saved him five hundred a year.

‘Your popular man is everybody’s friend except his own,’ remarked the Squire, in his philosophic mood. ‘People are always asking favours of him. Nobody ever asks me for anything.’

Oswald therefore, as the son of a miserly hermit, stinted of pocket-money, and of a nature too generous to live easily under a weight of obligation, visited hardly any one of those pleasant country houses which lay far apart among the fertile hills and valleys of his native place. He lived as lonely a life as ever a young man had to endure, and was in a better position to cultivate the Byronic temperament than most of the great poet’s disciples. Happily Nature had given him a disposition to take life easily, rather than the misanthropic mind; and solitary and secluded as his existence was, he tried to make the best of it, amusing himself after his own simple fashion, and complained to nobody. There was a touch of bitterness occasionally in his intercourse with his father, the old man’s meanness and suspicion being almost too much for endurance; but this was the only bitter in his life. To this young man, therefore, reduced of necessity to the society of peasants and boatmen, it was a new thing to find himself in the company of a handsome young woman, who spoke with a certain refinement and expressed herself fairly, although her range of ideas was limited. Those vague yearnings of Naomi’s for something wider and brighter than the narrow life of Combhaven answered to the sense of loss in his own mind. There was sympathy between them already, though this was but the second time of their meeting.

‘I suppose you would hardly stay at Combhaven if you were a man, Miss Haggard?’ said Oswald, after they had discussed the place and its dulness.

‘O, no. If I were a man I should be a minister, and I would go and preach to the Cornish miners, as father did when he was a young man; or else I would be a missionary, and go to India.’

‘Ah, you talked about that the other night.’

‘Yes; I should like to teach those poor creatures--to turn them from their hideous gods, their human sacrifices, their cruelties. Why do we let them go on with such dreadful creeds?’

‘I fancy the work of conversion would be rather beyond us. A missionary may labour in a corner, set up his little schoolroom, and baptise a handful or so of dusky Christians, who will go back to Siva and the rest of them as soon as his back is turned; but to turn all India from her false idols is a project beyond man’s dreams of the impossible. When Burke addressed the House of Commons on the evils of our government in India, the territory of the East India Company was larger than Russia and Turkey. We have extended our conquests since his day, and we are but a sprinkling among that vast population. I think you must put India out of your head, Miss Haggard. The Thugs would strangle you; or the Khoords would bury you up to your neck and sacrifice you to their gods; or the tigers would eat you.’

‘Of course,’ cried Jim. ‘How few people ever go to India that don’t get eaten by tigers in the long-run! I never took up a magazine yet without seeing a picture of tiger-eating.’

They had arrived at the wilderness by this time--a corner of fern-tangle and sweet-smelling flowers, with masses of rough stone here and there amongst the greenery; which stonework had cost Jim much labour. There were some elder-trees leaning over from an adjoining orchard, and the spreading branches of a mulberry, which shaded one side of the small enclosure. There was a stone bench, which Jim had picked up from among the ruins of an old manor-house; and in the middle of the wilderness, its rugged base choked with fern and primrose roots, there stood an old stone sundial, spoil from the same ruined mansion. That sundial and the monkish-looking bench gave an air of antiquity to the place. It was quite out of the world of Combhaven, as lonely as if it had been an oasis in the desert. One might have lived all one’s life in the High-street, and never suspected the existence of Naomi’s wilderness. A mild-faced sheep sometimes peeped at it through an opening in the blackberry-hedge, perhaps wondering whether those ferns and flowers were edible; but except the sheep, there was rarely any sign of life in the adjoining orchard.

Oswald praised the spot, as in duty bound. It could not appear particularly beautiful to him after the picturesque wildness of Pentreath park and wood; but it had a quaint prettiness that was not without its charm. He sat down by Naomi on the broad old stone bench, and watched her thoughtfully and in silence for a little. She had taken her knitting out of her pocket, and the needles were flashing swiftly under her slender fingers. The hands were brown, but slim and well shaped.

She was very handsome, Oswald thought--much handsomer than the Devonshire beauties, with their complexions of roses and cream. Her face had a noble look: the features boldly carved; the eyes deep and dark, with heavy lids such as he remembered seeing oftener in sculpture than in flesh; the mouth was full and firm; the chin a thought too square for feminine loveliness. If the face erred at all, it was that the girl was too like her father:--manly firmness rather than womanly softness prevailed. But Oswald could not see any blemish in this noble countenance. He was drawn to its owner with strongest sympathy. It was not love at first sight, but friendship, confidence, companionship, which drew him; and he had no thought of peril in this new influence. What peril could there be, indeed, for him, even if the fancy had been of a warmer tendency? He had no money to spend, but he was the master of his own heart. He might dispose of that as he pleased.

‘Marry a dairymaid if you like,’ the Squire had once said to him, in his brutal fashion; ‘but I shall expect you to keep her until I’m under the sod. An impoverished estate can’t afford to recognise early marriages, unless they bring land or money along with them.’

They had been in the wilderness about half an hour, Jim exhibiting his chosen specimens, in pursuit of which he had, by his showing, more or less imperilled his life, hanging on to precipices like the samphire gatherer, scaling inaccessible hills, and losing himself in pathless woods inhabited by the reptile tribe. The sun had gone down behind the old tiled roofs and thatched gables of the High-street, and Joshua had left his quiet garden for the bustle and business of the shop.

‘We’d better be going indoors, Jim,’ said Naomi, rolling up her stocking. ‘You’ve your sum to do for to-morrow.’

Oswald felt that he had no excuse for prolonging his visit. He walked back to the house with Naomi and her brother, but did not go indoors with them. There was a side gate opening into the street, and here he stopped to wish them good-evening.

‘You might as well stop to supper,’ said Jim. ‘It would be livelier if you stayed.’

‘I think I have intruded too long already,’ answered Oswald ceremoniously; and as Naomi did not second her brother’s invitation, he shook hands with them both, and went away.

Aunt Judith was standing at the house-door when they went in--a surprise for both, as it was her custom to be in the shop at this hour.

‘I hope you’ve wasted enough time with your fine gentleman,’ she said, with extra acidity.

‘I wasn’t wasting time, aunt; I had my knitting with me,’ replied Naomi; ‘and there was nothing for me to do indoors.’

‘A pity there wasn’t. Idling about the garden with a gentleman above you in station! What would your father say to that, I wonder?’

‘Father was with us part of the time,’ said Naomi.

‘Was he really? and what about the rest of the time when he wasn’t with you? Fine carryings-on indeed for a grocer’s daughter! No good ever came of that kind of thing, Miss Naomi, I can tell you.’

‘No harm will ever come of it while I’m here,’ cried Jim, his face crimson with anger. ‘I’d knock down any man that said an uncivil word to my sister. As for the young Squire, he’s a gentleman, and as soft-spoken as a girl.’

‘I never trust your soft-spoken people,’ answered Judith; and at this juncture a shrill cry of ‘Miss Haggard, wanted, please,’ from the opened door at the back of the shop diverted the spinster’s attention, and she ran off to measure calico or printed goods for an impatient matron.

Supper-time, prayers, and Scripture-reading seemed a little duller than usual to Naomi that evening. The quiet monotony of life hung upon her heavily, like an actual burden. She had begun to ask herself of late whether existence was to go on always in the same measured round--eventless, unvarying; whether the portion which appeared satisfying and all-sufficient for aunt Judith was also to content her; whether those vague aspirings of the soul for something loftier and wider, which stirred in her breast like the wings of imprisoned birds, were to wear themselves out by their own restlessness, and know no fruition. To-night the question seemed to press itself upon her more closely than usual. O, how much better to be a female missionary--a teacher of little tawny heathens in some clearing of the jungle; or to visit fever-poisoned prisons, like Mrs. Fry! How much fairer any life in which there was peril, and with peril the reward of brave deeds, the hope of glory!

‘What use am I in this world?’ she thought, on her knees in that solemn silence which ensued after Joshua’s extemporaneous prayer--a pause which he bade his household devote to self-examination and pious meditation. ‘If I were to die to-morrow, no one would be the worse for my loss. Father would be sorry, perhaps, because he is good, not because I am of any use to him, or make his life happier by living. There is no duty I do that aunt Judith would not do better than I if I were gone; and the tasks I do listlessly she would perform briskly, putting all her heart and mind into them. But if I were to go abroad and teach heathen children, I feel that I could work honestly and earnestly--yes, like those good women I have read of.’

These were Naomi’s musings on her knees to-night. No fairer scheme of life offered itself to her girlish fancy than the missionary idea. She resolved to work for that end, to read more, to be more attentive to her father’s teaching, to raise herself to that higher level from which she might shed enlightenment on ignorant Pagan souls. And behold, in the midst of these high resolves, her thoughts flew off at a tangent. ‘If I were Mr. Pentreath I would be a soldier,’ she thought. ‘I wonder if he is tired of Combhaven? But he has his horse, and, until the other day, he had his yacht. It is different for him. Yet, if I were free like him, with a good old name, I would try to be something more than an idle country gentleman. People respect his brother for running away to sea. I know that by the way they talk of the two in Combhaven.’

‘You’d better take your candle and go to bed, child,’ Miss Haggard said to Naomi directly after supper. ‘I want to have a few words with Joshua.’

Of all things most displeasing to the minister’s human weakness was a few words with his sister Judith. That preface of hers seemed as prophetic of evil as the screech-owl’s warning or the minor howl of the dog. Nothing pleasant ever came of a few words with Judith.

‘Well, Judith, what is it now?’ asked her brother, as soon as they were alone, anxious to come to the worst without beating about the bush.

‘Only that I think it’s a pity you don’t keep your eyes a little wider open to see what’s under your nose. It’s all very well to be looking towards the New Jerusalem, and I’d be the last to lose my habitation in that blessed city, but while a man lives among the Philistines he should have an eye to his own household.’

‘What’s the matter, my dear? The new cask of Irish butter is not rancid, I hope? I gave a halfpenny a pound more for it than the last.’

‘No, Joshua, the butter is as sweet as a new cobnut. But I don’t like your daughter’s goings on with Mr. Pentreath.’

‘What do you mean, Judith?’ cried the minister, with a flash of natural indignation.

‘Bringing him home to tea as if he was her equal. A pretty thing to set tongues wagging in Combhaven.’

‘I see no need for people to talk about us because the Squire’s son takes a cup of tea in my house. He is better born than my daughter, I grant you, but not better bred. Naomi is a lady in mind and nature, and as such no man’s inferior. And she is something less than my daughter if she does not respect herself so much as to make every man respect her.’

‘That’s all very fine,’ retorted Judith, ‘but you’d better look out that no mischief comes of it. You heard what Jabez Long said while I was working like a slave to bring the life back to that young man’s body. It’s unlucky to save a man from drowning. Take care the bad luck doesn’t come our way. I don’t like to see Mr. Pentreath hanging about the place.’

‘Why, Judith, you can’t be weak enough or wicked enough to give heed to such a vulgar superstition.’

‘I don’t know about that. There’s a grain of good sense sometimes in vulgar superstitions.’

‘Sometimes, perhaps; but in that particular superstition not an iota. Our fishermen get the fancy from the North. It is a common belief in Shetland.’

‘Have it your own way,’ said Judith, with an offended air; ‘but I’m afraid you’ve too much book-learning to be wise about the affairs of this life.’