Chapter X: What the Cowboy Could Tell

After his interview with Cynthia Haggard, Captain Pentreath reasoned himself into an easier state of mind about his missing brother. His sanguine nature leaned towards the brighter view of the question. Oswald had been calm and resigned when he parted with the object of his fatal love; he had gone away to begin a new life, had cast off the fetters of passion, and gone forth a free man.

‘I shall hear from him in due time. All will be well,’ said Arnold.

Having made up his mind deliberately to go on hoping, and, indeed, entertaining the conviction that the riddle of his brother’s destiny would be solved in time, Arnold Pentreath considered it his duty to inspire Naomi with the same hopeful view. It afflicted him to see her pale sad face, to watch her slow listless movements. It became his most ardent desire to cheer and console her.

With this end he went very often to the minister’s house, and sat in the quiet old parlour where Oswald had spent so many hours of his life, and talked to Naomi while she sewed. There was no one to object to his visits. Aunt Judith was in the shop; Joshua was away, no one knew whither. It was his habit now to come home wearied at nightfall, save on those evenings when he had class-meetings, or Bible-meetings, or some kind of service in his chapel.

Cynthia was gone, and Joshua had accounted briefly for her absence by stating that she had gone to see her friends at Penmoyle.

‘You had better send her trunk on by the coach,’ said Joshua to Naomi.

‘But why did she go so suddenly, father?’ Naomi asked, puzzled by this disruption of the household.

‘Because it was her whim to go, and it was not my pleasure to say her nay.’

‘Has she gone by the coach?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And when is she to come back?’

‘When I please to bid her come.’

Naomi sighed, and obeyed her father’s order. Alas for this change, which made her father a person to be obeyed with fear and trembling rather than with faith and love! Naomi had not forgiven Cynthia for all the misery she had wrought; but this sudden disappearance of her father’s wife oppressed her with a sense of injustice and wrong done by Joshua. With what cruelty had he driven that meek and sorrowful offender away from him? His daughter had noted his conduct to his wife, and had seen his harshness, his coldness, his growing aversion--the chilling mask which passionate love puts on when jealousy gnaws the heart.

Cynthia was gone, and Naomi’s life was now quite lonely. She was glad of Arnold’s visit, and took some comfort from his hopeful talk about the absent master of the Grange.

‘He will come back to his home and to you, Naomi,’ said the Captain. ‘Come back a new man, and an honest one, proud to redeem his faith.’

‘Were he to come back to-morrow I should give him a sister’s loving welcome,’ answered Naomi, ‘but never more than a sister’s love. He has broken my heart once--I won’t let him break it again.’

‘But if he were honestly repentant and sincere, Naomi?’

‘He might believe himself sincere. I could not trust him with my peace. Do not think that I am angry with him. I am only sorry that he should ever have been so mistaken as to believe in the reality of his love for me. He never knew what love meant till he gave his heart where it should not have been given.’

‘Well, Naomi, perhaps you are wise. The vessel that fails to answer to her helm in the hour of danger is hardly a ship to be trusted. Then we will think of Oswald as an absent brother only, and look forward hopefully to his return.’

‘God knows I try to hope for it,’ said Naomi, with a sigh.

‘Why should he not be really your brother--brother in fact as well as in name?’ pleaded Arnold, taking her unresisting hands. ‘Make him your brother, Naomi, by making me your husband. We have not known each other very long, but our mutual sorrow has brought us nearer together than years of common acquaintance could have done. I have looked into your heart, Naomi, and I know its worth. Let me take my brother’s place, dear; I shall never wander; my love shall know no change. It is founded on a rock--for it was my esteem for your noble nature which first taught me to love you.’

Naomi withdrew her hands from his, and stood up, looking at him seriously, with eyes full of tears.

‘Never again let this be spoken of between us, Arnold,’ she said. ‘It can never be.’

‘Why not?’

‘There is a reason which you must never know.’

‘But I am not to be satisfied like that, Naomi. There is no reason that I can recognise, unless you say that you do not love me--can never teach yourself to love me.’

‘I will say that, then--I can never love you.’

‘And your eyes are brimming with tears, and your lips tremble as you say the words. It is not true, Naomi; it is a lie--a lie against the might of love. You love me as I love you, and we were meant for each other and for happiness. Why should you or I be miserable all our lives because a foolish young man has run away from felicity? Naomi, dearest love, make my life happy.’

‘You are good, and I honour you; you are like Oswald, and my heart yearns towards you,’ answered the girl falteringly, for it seemed to her at this moment as if the picture of a new life were suddenly unfolded before her eyes, and the vision was marvellously bright; ‘but I can never be more than your friend and sister.’

‘I see. You love the truant still. Did I not say so?’

‘His memory is very dear to me.’

Arnold said no more. Those eloquent eyes, those tremulous lips, had told him he was beloved, and yet this love was denied him. What was he to think? He was hardly inclined to despair, or to accept this answer of Naomi’s as final. She had some mistaken notion of fidelity to a departed love doubtless; she would sacrifice a lover in the present--a real and living affection--for the sake of that inconstant lover in the past.

‘Patience,’ thought Arnold; ‘I shall be able to talk her out of her folly sooner or later.’

Meanwhile he was content to be accepted on the friendly and brotherly footing. He contrived to see Naomi very often. He found his way even into the wilderness, that burial-ground of dead joys and bitter memories. He met her in all her walks. It was difficult for her not to think that her lost lover had come back to her with a nobler mind and larger ideas. Here she found no languid indolence, no placid unconcern for the welfare of others, so long as summer skies were blue, and one could lie at ease under the beeches reading Byron. Arnold was full of care for the labourers on his patrimonial estate, full of sympathy and kindness for the struggling tenant farmers and their industrious wives, for the young men who desired a little more enlightenment and education than their fathers had deemed needful for the fulness of life’s measure. With Arnold benevolent deeds were not castles in the air, Utopian schemes to be set on foot in some convenient hour of the future, but duties to be done at once, now, while it was yet day.

Arnold was glad of so intelligent a sympathiser with his cares as steward of his brother’s fortune. Naomi was always ready to help him with counsel and experience. She had visited among the labouring poor, and knew their needs and shortcomings--knew where disease found them weakest, how fever crept into their dwellings.

‘I can’t think what I should do without you,’ said Arnold; and it was a new happiness to Naomi to feel that she had been useful. Life at home was so empty and barren, her duties mechanically performed, her service unrecognised. The change in her father had made the very atmosphere of home gloomy and oppressive.

Cynthia had been away nearly a month, and there had been no tidings of her. This seemed strange to all the household, but as Joshua expressed neither wonder nor anxiety, it was supposed that his wife’s absence was understood and approved by him.

‘Poor weak-minded mortal,’ sighed aunt Judith, after discussing the question with her niece at their lonely tea-table; ‘the first time I saw that pink and white piece of prettiness step across the threshold I knew what he was laying up for himself. A man of his years can’t set his heart upon a wax doll without paying the penalty; above all when it’s a doll that has neither parents, nor a good stock of house-linen, nor decent bringing up. _I_ knew what was coming,’ cried aunt Judith, with a laugh of exultant irony, ‘and my only wonder is that things haven’t turned out much worse.’

‘Poor thing!’ sighed Naomi, thinking with some touch of compunction of the pale sad face from which she had averted her eyes so coldly of late. ‘Do you think father sent her away?’

‘If he did he’d have done no more than was right,’ said aunt Judith. ‘And if he’d done it when I first tried to open his eyes about her he’d have shown himself a wiser man. But whether she got tired of her life here and went off of her own free will, or whether your father sent her, matters very little to us. She’s gone,’ concluded the spinster decisively, ‘and I hope it’s not unchristianlike to wish she may never come back.’

* * * * *

Having put the idea of his brother’s suicide out of his mind, Arnold had not attached any dark meaning to his interview with Cynthia. Her statement seemed to him natural and credible, and rather calculated to reassure than to alarm. Oswald had been calm and resigned. He had stated his intention of going to a new world, to begin a new life. What ground was there for supposing that a man in this frame of mind had been so false to manhood as to take his own life? Arnold sent to an Exeter bookseller for the _Sorrows of Werther_, and read the story carefully; but not being of so sentimental a turn as his brother, and not being in love with another man’s wife, he had found the reading rather a laborious business, and Werther a weak-minded youth with a fatal habit of prosing about his own emotions.

‘God forbid that my brother should ever follow the example of such a booby!’ said Arnold, when he had seen Werther laid in his unconsecrated grave, in the memorable blue coat and yellow waistcoat, with Charlotte’s pink breast-knot in his pocket; ‘I should have as much contempt for his want of sense as regret for his want of religion.’

Arnold had not yet gone to look at the spot where Oswald had parted from Mrs. Haggard. He remembered the scene well enough in days gone by; the lonely common with its hillocks and hollows and marshy spots, over which the swift-winged plover skimmed lightly, vanishing with a shrill cry into blue distance. The scene was so familiar to him that it had no special significance; it never struck him that just that one spot of all others, that little bit of sunburnt common by the abandoned mine, might be fatal--that here yawned a natural grave, ready for the end of a tragedy.

He went up to an old farmhouse one afternoon, to settle a question of roofing and thatching which had been for some time in discussion. It was the last house on the way to Matcherly Common, a house that stood on the edge of the wood, or almost in the wood. The latticed casements looked down a beechen glade. It was a place of silence and soft cool shadows, a welcome retreat on a summer’s day like this on which Arnold rode over to settle matters with Farmer Westall about his granary roofs.

Herne had been made happy in a spacious stable where the good old white wagon-horses dozed over their hay and clover, and where the thud of a ponderous tail whisked round for the slaughter of a forest-fly and the slow munching of fodder were the only sounds that broke the slumberous stillness. Captain Pentreath had made his inspection of the premises, and was drinking a glass of Mrs. Westall’s famous perry before departing, when the farmer mentioned a subject which always found Arnold an attentive listener.

‘You haven’t heerd anything of your brother, I suppose, Captain?’

‘Not a line. But I don’t despair of getting news of him before long. He’s not been gone a twelvemonth yet, you see, Mr. Westall, and a year is a short time when a man has to cross the sea. He may have changed his mind about America, and gone to New South Wales, and that’s half a year’s voyage to begin with.’

‘That’s where the convicks go, ain’t it, Captain? The young Squire ’ud never go theer, surely.’

‘There’s no knowing how far a man may go when he’s once made up his mind to turn rover,’ said Arnold cheerily.

‘Ah,’ sighed the farmer, ‘this here world of ours be a strange un; there’s things in it that puzzles my poor old wits a’most as much as that theer thatch catchin’ fire the identical day arter I refused aunt Nancy the faggit.’

There was a lurking significance in this remark that caught Arnold’s attention.

‘You have heard something about my brother!’ he cried; ‘you can tell me something! For God’s sake keep nothing from me; it is a matter of life or death.’

‘The by’s a truth-spoken by,’ said the farmer, ‘or I shouldn’t ha’ listened to un.’

‘What boy?’

‘It isn’t because a by earns his bit o’ mate minding cows that he hasn’t got a soul to be saved,’ continued the farmer, as deliberately as if pursuing a philosophical argument; ‘and I can’t say as ever I found out this here lad in a lie.’

‘Will you tell me what you mean, how this bears upon my brother?’ cried Arnold, breathless with impatience.

‘My wife and me have sat under Mr. Haggard for the last ten years. He was the first to tell us our souls were in danger o’ everlasting fire, and he’s gone on warning of us ever since. ’Tain’t likely I’m going to speak agen him.’

‘Speak plainly at any rate,’ exclaimed Arnold, ‘if you mean anything. And from your manner it’s clear you mean something. What has this boy of yours to do with my brother’s fate?’

‘It ain’t what he has to do, but what he can tell. It was a hot summer day, you may remember, that day as the young Squire were last seen at Combhaven--harvest time, and reg’lar harvest weather. This lad o’ mine, Tim, was out in the forest mindin’ cows. But perhaps you’d sooner hear it from the lad’s own lips?’ suggested the farmer.

‘I don’t care how I hear it, so long as I hear it quickly!’

‘Well, I’ll call the by; he’s close handy, diggin’ taties.’

‘Let’s go to him,’ said Arnold, taking up his whip and gloves.

The farmer wished to bring the boy to the parlour, as a mode of proceeding more consistent with the respect due to his landlord, but the Captain was too eager to endure ceremony. He hurried to the straggling old kitchen-garden at the back of the house, where ancient espaliers which had long outgrown their sustaining framework spread wide their arms against the blue June sky.

Here, digging up the smooth golden-skinned potatoes, they found the farmer’s cowboy, a frank-looking blue-eyed lad, over whose sunburnt forehead trickled the dew of toil.

‘Now look ’ee here, Tim,’ said the farmer; ‘I want ’ee to tell the Captain what it was you saw and heerd that day in Matcherly Wood, when th’ young Squire passed ’ee by.’

The boy wiped his forehead upon his shirt-sleeve, shifted his spade from one hand to the other, and after some moments of obvious embarrassment found a voice.

‘I were mindin’ cattle in the forest, you see, sir, and theer were one cow wi’ a white face, she were a new un that master had boughten at Barnstaple last market-day, and she were strange, poor thing, and strayed away ever so far up towards the common; and I was goin’ arter her, when who should I see but the minister on afore me, goin’ right up to the common.’

‘Do you mean Mr. Haggard?’

‘Surely. And he went on ahead o’ me, till he come right out o’ the wood, just wheer the old shaft be; and he looked about un a bit, when he got clear o’ the trees, and then went into the engine-house. I watched a bit, wonderin’ what he were up to; and then I see un standin’ just inside the doorway, where there’s a lot o’ fallen stones and rubbish, and tansy growin’ as tall as young trees, and he stood there lookin’ out, yet keepin’ of hisself hidden like, as if he were watchin’ for somebody. And just then I catched sight o’ the white-faced cow, ever so far across the common, and I ran arter her.’

‘Strange, warn’t it?’ said the farmer. ‘But there’s more to tell.’

‘I cotched the old cow, and I was takin’ of her back to the wood, when I comes right up agen the young Squire. I was a bit scared at seein’ he, for I’d heerd tell as he were away from Combhaven. He didn’t take no notice o’ me, but went on, swingin’ his stick round, and singin’ to hisself, soft like. Well, I thowt no more about un, and I was here and theer with they cows, and they would stray up towards the common, though there warn’t much but tansy for they to eat up theer; and I were up close to the common about an hour arterwards, when I heerd a shot fired and then another, so close together they might a been one a’most.’

A white blankness spread itself over Arnold’s face--the vacant horror of despair. It was some moments before he could speak.

‘You ran to see what those shots meant?’ he cried.

‘I couldn’t tell wheer they come from, not for sartain; but I thowt it was somewheer near the old shaft, and I went up theer arter a bit, but theer was nowt to be seen, and no one about. I went into the engine-house, but the minister was gone.’

‘Why has this been kept from me?’ asked Arnold. ‘Why, in Heaven’s name, didn’t you let me know this sooner, Westall? You know how anxious I have been about my brother.’

‘I only heerd of it t’other day, when I overheerd Timothy talkin’ to our Prudence, the dairymaid. He was tellin’ her about the shot.’

‘Don’t you think it was your duty to have told your master, boy?’ asked Arnold.

‘I didn’t think it was any harm. It might ha’ been some one firin’ at a rabbit or a gull. There’s plenty o’ say-gulls flies across Matcherly Common.’

‘You saw no more--you heard no more?’

‘No, there was nowt arter that. It were milkin’ time, and I had to take the cows home.’

‘Now look here, Westall,’ said Captain Pentreath, taking the farmer aside. ‘Those shots may mean nothing, or they may mean a great deal. I know my brother was up yonder, by the old shaft, that August day. I know he had an enemy, and was watched and followed. I have no evidence that he was ever seen alive after that day. Till to-day I’ve hugged myself with the hope that he is living in some distant country, and that I shall hear of him in due time. I begin to think that hope is a delusion, and that he never left this neighbourhood. If he has been murdered, it is my business to bring his murderer to the gallows. But I must first find his murdered body. Will you help me? You’ve plenty of farm-labourers in your service. Will you help me to search Matcherly Common, and the mine below it?’