Chapter XI: ‘and All Is Dross That Is Not Helena.’

It was some time before Oswald saw his betrothed after that last reading of _Werther_; and the book remained a broken story for Naomi, who knew not the issue of Werther’s fatal love. Cynthia carried the volume up to her own room, and read it, and wept over it in secret, and then hid it under the little stock of ribbons and collars and feminine prettinesses--all of the simplest, most puritanical kind--which she had acquired since she had been Joshua Haggard’s wife. She put the book away out of sight, as if it were a guilty thing, feeling that it had brought her face to face with a guilty secret. But for the book those wicked words of Oswald’s might never have been spoken. The sad, the awful inexpiable guilt would have existed all the same in the depths of two erring hearts; but it might never have found a voice. Werther had given form and language to that mysterious and sinful passion--bitterest proof of poor humanity’s ingrained iniquity.

‘Not by ourselves can we escape sin,’ she cried, on her knees, in abject self-abasement. ‘We are nothing of ourselves: not even faithful to the most sacred ties--not even true to our own affections--not even pure or constant. Only by Thee, O Redeemer!--only by Thee can we escape the snares our erring hearts set for us; only through Thee can we break loose from the bondage of original sin. O, pity him, spotless Saviour--pity this helpless sinner; pity me, for I love him.’ She was not afraid to carry this secret sorrow, sinful as it was, to the foot of the cross. Her husband’s theology had taught her that Calvary was the sinner’s altar--his temple of expiation; the threshold of heaven, on which all guilty hearts could lay their burdens down, and pass, purified from earthly stain, and liberated from earthly chains, through the golden gate beyond it. The deeper the guilt, the surer welcome for the penitent.

Cynthia’s guilt was but a thought--a fond, weak yielding to a dream of impossible happiness; a sinful regret for the things that might have been. She had not stood firmly against the insidious approach of the tempter; she had suffered him to steal upon her footsteps unawares; she had not shut her eyes and refused to see the dangerous, dazzling vision. Passion was an unknown element in this purely sentimental and poetic nature. Love for Cynthia could never mean storm and fever, guilt and ruin; but it might mean corroding remorse, a slow and silent despair.

When had she first discovered that something amiss in her placid life--that little rift in the lute which made life’s music dumb? Closest self-examination would have scarcely enabled her to answer that question. It might be, perhaps, that on the morning when Oswald parted from her at her husband’s door--in the blank sorrow of his face, with its look of mute appeal, in the tears he shed upon her hand as he clasped it in his own--she had faintly understood a secret which was to become plainer to her by and by. The thought, vague though it was at first, had brought sorrow. She had felt a restraint in the presence of Naomi’s lover, and had striven to avoid him. But the days in which she did not see him, seemed desolate and empty; and then, not weighing the consequences or meaning of her acts, she weakly yielded to the desire to be in his company, and allowed herself to be the companion of Naomi’s walks, the sharer of her lover’s attentions. This was the sin she now looked back upon as the black spot in her life--this was when she had suffered the tempter to overtake her steps, to walk by her side.

O happy fatal afternoons in wood or wilderness--on the hills--by the malachite and purple sea! She could see the bright face looking up at her; she could hear the low thrilling voice reading sweet sad verse that seemed to speak straight to her heart--to have been written and meant only for her: she could see and hear the earthly tempter even now, in this hour of penitence and grief.

‘O, if I had never seen you, if I had never known you, I should have been innocent and true all the days of my life; worthy of Joshua’s noble heart.’

She could pray no more. She sat upon the ground, lost in foolish memories, recalling her first days at Combhaven, and all the peaceful time, before she had given up her soul to this guilty dream. She remembered that autumn afternoon, the first time she saw Oswald--she standing by the hearth, with her bonnet in her hand; he coming in at the door.

‘And he was nothing to me,’ she thought wonderingly. ‘If he had died that night, I should only have been sorry for Naomi’s sake.’

She had thought him handsome--different in every way from all other men she had ever seen--a new creature. He was like a picture that Joshua had shown her in an old country-house they went to see in their brief honeymoon--the portrait of a young man in dark-green velvet clothes of a curious fashion, with fair hair falling on his shoulders, and a melancholy look in his eyes. How often she had seen that melancholy look in Oswald’s eyes, after the Squire’s death, and had known only too well that it was not grief for his father that made him sad!

How gradually it had crept into her heart, this weak, wicked love! Had it come like a bold assailant she could have repulsed it; but sweetly, slowly, gently, like the tender dawn of a summer morning, this new light had overspread the sky of life. How should she bear her life without it!

‘Duty, duty!’ she cried, wresting herself from this web of foolish memories. ‘O, let me remember all I owe my husband; let me remember how I worshipped him one little year ago: what a grace and honour I counted it to be chosen by him. I loved him, because he was the best and wisest of men. He is best and wisest--kindest, truest. Whom have I ever known equal to him?’

* * * * *

When Naomi went down to the parlour, a little later than usual, on the morning after that last reading of _Werther_--languid still from yesterday’s headache--she found a letter from Oswald on the chimneypiece. Cynthia was sitting at work by the window--just where _he_ had sat yesterday. Judith was washing the breakfast cups and saucers in a little crockery pan which she was accustomed to bring into the parlour for that purpose.

‘Dearest,--I have made up my mind quite suddenly to go to London,
and inquire about Arnold’s ship. It seems such a strange thing
that I have had no answer to my letters, and I am getting really
uneasy. I shall go to Lloyds’--or whatever the right place may
be to obtain information about a ship in the merchant service.
Forgive me for going away so suddenly and without waiting to say
good-bye. An irresistible impulse took hold of me. I shall only
stay long enough to make all needful inquiries and to take a
hasty look at the City; and I shall write to tell you how I get
on. God bless you, dear, and good-bye!--Your always affectionate

‘OSWALD.’

Naomi read the letter twice over, surprised at this sudden impulse in Oswald, who was not subject to impulses, or at least not subject to carrying out their promptings when they prompted immediate action. He was rather of a dreamy temperament, never doing anything to-day which he could possibly put off till to-morrow.

She read the letter a third time, aloud to Cynthia.

‘Did he say anything about this yesterday?’ she asked. ‘Had he any idea of going to London?’

‘I think not,’ answered Cynthia, working steadily. O blessed mechanical click-click of the needle, which went on with its measured paces while the pulses of the heart throbbed so stormily. Naomi gave a little sigh as she folded the letter. It was hard to lose him for an indefinite time, were it ever so short. And her wedding-day seemed so far off now. The neglected old Grange no longer awaited her with its sober old-world look--the look it had worn since her infancy. Confusion had fallen upon the old house, and Naomi felt as if she could have no part in the new house which was to arise from this chaos. Money was being spent recklessly to make the grave old mansion fit for a fine lady; and Naomi knew that it was not in her to become a fine lady. All the money in the world would never make her like Mrs. Carew of the Knoll, who wore rouge, and drove a curricle; or like Miss Donnisthorpe, the daughter of the master of the hounds, who hunted the innocent red deer, in a short green habit, with a gold band round her velvet hunting-cap.

‘If he would only keep to the old simple ways,’ she thought, looking back at the departed Squire’s miserly plainness of living with a touch of regret, ‘I am sure we should be much happier; he would spend his money in doing good.’

She knew, by the experience of one who had succoured and cared for the poor, all the sad details of that dark picture which lies behind the fair outside of country life. That lovely landscape, rich in its variety of colour as the Queen’s regalia, is the theatre in which many a drama of sin and suffering, guiltless poverty and unmerited woe, has to be acted. Yonder cottage, whose thatched roof makes so pretty a feature in the view, shelters starvation: a mother toiling to feed her children, while their father lies in jail for--a rabbit. Pinched faces, untimely wrinkles, meet the traveller in those delightful lanes where the wild apple and the clustering elder suggest to the poetic mind a land of milk, and honey, and pomegranates--faces marked with the brand of premature care, defiled by the cunning that is engendered of childish struggles with tyrants and taskmasters, and a hard, inexorable fate. Not in fetid alleys and festering London back slums only is man’s fight with difficulty a bitter and crushing battle; but here, even where earth is a paradise and the untainted sky an Italian blue, man starves and perishes, and learns to curse the unequal destiny that gives his master all, and him nothing.

Naomi knew what poverty meant in a rural district; and she longed for the power to help and improve, and to use the knowledge which experience had given her. She had talked to Oswald of the labourers’ homes on his estate--hovels rather than houses--and had gently urged the need for improvement. He had put her off lightly, in his pleasant yielding way: so full of grace and beauty in her sight that she forgot the weakness it indicated.

‘It shall be done, dear; “The sooner, sweet, for you,” as Othello says. We will do wonders for the poor things. The Exeter architect shall make a plan--after we are married. You must let me finish the Grange first, and then I will do anything you like; but I can’t take the builder off that till his work is done.’ As if there were no other builder in the world!

* * * * *

Oswald was in London trying to find his Lethe in the somewhat prosaic distractions of that capital;--not the London of to-day, with its Viaduct and Embankment, and houses as tall as those of old Edinburgh and Paris; its innumerable railway-stations, and theatres, and restaurants, and music-halls; but a city of narrower streets and more jovial manners. He knew no one, and put up at the busy commercial hotel at which the Western coach deposited him, taking no trouble to seek a more refined habitation. He made his inquiries about his brother’s ship, and, after some trouble, found out the last port she had touched at in the China seas. Yet this was not much: for Arnold might have exchanged to another ship for anything Oswald knew to the contrary. But to gain intelligence about his absent brother had not been Mr. Pentreath’s only business in London, or even his chief reason for going there. He went thither in quest of forgetfulness--to cure himself, were it curable, of a passion that threatened to be fatal at once to peace of mind and honour. He had torn himself away from Combhaven with a wrench, thinking that to turn his back upon Cynthia might be to forget her; but, alas for youth’s constancy to a forbidden dream! the sweet face followed him to the crowded city, and harassed him by day, and held him awake at night; the soft blue eyes betrayed love’s sad secret; the tremulous lips seemed to him to murmur: ‘Yes, dearest, I love and pity you; though it can never be--though we are parted in life and eternity, I love--I pity--I deplore.’

Not quite in vain had he loved her if she but loved him in return; though all hopes, dreams, delights that love could give--were it ever so erring--must be here laid down: a solemn sacrifice to duty and honour. Yes, there was much comfort--nay, more than comfort, a rapture that thrilled him--in knowing that he was loved. And he did most assuredly know it, though no admission had fallen from Cynthia’s lips. Their spirits had touched, as flame touches flame, but a moment--swift as the quivering arrows of fire that flash and fade in the instant; yet the touch was a revelation. He did not doubt that she loved him.

He had never meant to speak of his love. This he repeated to himself deprecatingly in his hours of remorse. Passion had forced his secret from him, and he despised himself for the confession that had dishonoured him. He had meant to speak only through Werther; finding a morbid delight in dwelling upon the record of sufferings so like his own, half assured that Cynthia understood and recognised his passion veiled in the words of another; and then impulse and emotion had been too strong for him, and he had given loose to the desire of his heart and disgraced himself for ever in his own eyes, and in the sight of the woman he loved.

‘She could not look upon me without loathing after that wretched scene,’ he told himself. Yet the vision of Cynthia which he carried with him everywhere did not regard him with loathing, but with a tender pity, a sad, immeasurable love.

He tried to steep himself in London dissipations, knowing about as much of them as a baby. If he could have fallen in with the mohawks of the day--the gentlemen who went to Epsom races in a hearse, and wrenched off harmless citizens’ knockers, or plucked out their bell-wires; who drank porter with hackney coachmen and their watermen, and made bosom friends of prize-fighters--he would perchance have enrolled himself in that band of choice spirits, and tried to discover a new Lethe in the porter-pot, wherein the Corinthian Tom of the period was generally so fortunate as speedily to find that oblivion which goes by the name of Death. But Oswald Pentreath had no introduction to this patrician set, and was fain to seek for distraction in such simple pleasures as Vauxhall, and the theatres, where he found something at every turn which reminded him of himself and of Cynthia.

Sometimes a face that had been sweet and fair flashed past him under the coloured lamps in the Vauxhall groves--bright with artificial hues--and in its venal smile dimly recalling Cynthia’s innocent beauty; sometimes a face upon the stage reminded him of hers, or a tone of voice in some young actress thrilled him like hers. Forget her! Everything in life was associated with her. He could not even remember what life had been like before he loved her.

He saw all that London could show him--parks, streets, theatres, gambling-houses, racecourses, folly, extravagance, vacuity--but found no forgetfulness. Nay, his passion grew and strengthened in absence. The aching void in his heart went with him everywhere. At the play, when the house was roaring at Tom and Jerry, and the Charlies were carried off bodily in their rickety old watchboxes, Oswald sat staring blankly. His thoughts were in the parlour at Combhaven, acting that foolish scene over again--living in the light of Cynthia’s eyes--draining deep delight from every look--however sad, however reproachful--which told him he was beloved.

He did not yield himself up to despair without a struggle--which was a manly struggle for one whom Nature had cast in no heroic mould. He wrestled with himself, and tried to make a stand against the tempter, and had it in his mind to thrust Joshua’s wife out of his heart, and to be faithful to Joshua’s daughter. He would go back to Combhaven in a month or so, regenerated; and would hurry on his marriage, and begin a new life as a useful and worthy member of society.

‘Arnold may be home by that time,’ he thought; ‘and the delight of seeing him again will make me forget everything.’

In the mean while, he wrote twice a week to Naomi, decorous and amiable letters, describing all he saw, and telling nothing of his feelings or impressions--hardly one word of himself from beginning to end. Poor Naomi read and re-read the letters, and puzzled herself sorely about them. He seemed to be enjoying himself, for he was always going to theatres and operas and races; and he was staying in London longer than he had intended, which proved that he was pleased with what he saw. Naomi was contented to bear the pain of severance, for the sake of his pleasure; but to be parted from him was a sharper pain than she could have thought possible before he went. Life was so empty without him! She had her father--always the first in her esteem, she had told herself; she had all her old home duties and home ties; but Oswald’s absence took the sunshine and colour out of everything.