Chapter XIII: Joshua Stops His Watch

Little Bethel was crammed to suffocation on the Sunday that followed the burial of Oswald Pentreath. Not only had the flock assembled in fullest force to hear their pastor improve the occasion, and enlarge upon the evil that had been wrought against him by the Philistine, but many who were not of Joshua’s sect had been drawn to his tabernacle by curiosity. They wanted to see how the man would bear himself under circumstances so trying to manly fortitude.

The flock were not disappointed in the demeanour of their minister. Never had Joshua conducted his simple service with greater dignity. His prayers, those eloquent extemporary supplications modelled upon the theology of William Law, yet, with something of Jeremy Taylor’s florid warmth in their colouring, carried his congregation along with him like rushing waters down which a fleet of frail boats are driven tumultuously, knowing not whither they drift. It was by his eloquence in prayer chiefly that Joshua had established his power over his flock. He elevated their souls by his own enthusiasm; they felt themselves raised to a spiritual height which of themselves alone they could never have obtained. They heard their cares and sorrows, their petty doubts and difficulties, their failures and shortcomings and evil acts laid at the foot of the great Throne, with such appeals for pardon and pity as their dull minds could never frame, their uneloquent lips never utter. Joshua took them up in his arms, as it were, and held them at the feet of their Saviour, and called down the eternal mercy for them. He used the Scriptures for their benefit, as a skilful barrister uses precedents for the extrication of his clients. He found bounteous promises that they had never dreamed of in those familiar words of Holy Writ, covenants and pledges of grace and mercy. He held a golden key, with which he opened the treasury of Heaven, and brought forth promises and favours for his people.

To-day his prayers took a tone of deepest self-humiliation. He laid himself prostrate before offended Heaven, and there was none of the exultant pride which the flock expected to discover in his supplications, no thanksgiving for an unsullied conscience and a soul clear of offence, for rectitude which could laugh to scorn the revilings of the evil-minded. It was the publican and not the Pharisee who stood up to pray in that rural temple.

The hymn he chose was of a gloomy cast--but all his ministrations had of late been of a gloomy character. When he went up into the pulpit, and looked round at the upturned faces, and slowly opened his Bible, there was a hush of expectancy. It was thought that his text would have some bearing on the strange event of the past week, and that in his sermon he would take occasion publicly to declare the falsehood and iniquity of the charge that had been brought against him.

But when he had given out the text, with his usual deliberate distinctness, there was a general sense of disappointment--the verses he had chosen seemed to have so little bearing on the subject which filled the public mind.

‘In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity.’ Only Naomi understood the meaning of those words of assurance. For each the burden of his own sin; the assassin’s innocent children were to have no portion in the shame and agony of his guilt. Upon this text Joshua Haggard enlarged with more than his accustomed power. Very awful was the picture which he painted of the sinner’s earthly doom, the slow agonies of conscience, the shameful shrinking from the face of his fellow-men, the caresses of his children stinging him like the sting of serpents, the reverence and obedience of his household a mockery and a reproach--the light of day intolerable, the sun a burden, the quiet night accursed. And when from this picture of the sinner’s suffering on earth he turned to the contemplation of his punishment hereafter, the vision assumed a darker and more terrible aspect. Before the titanic tortures of that land of shadows, earth’s puny torments shrunk to the sting of buzzing summer flies as measured against the venom of the cobra or the rattle-snake. Joshua conjured up those visions of horror with a strange uncanny power, as if the fiend had lifted the corner of hell’s curtain, and showed him the fiery gulf behind. He dwelt on these terrors with a gloomy relish, and spoke of hell and doom with a familiar knowledge, as if he had steeped his soul in the fires of Pandemonium.

‘But for the sinner’s children,’ he cried at last, withdrawing his mind, as by an effort, from this contemplation of the nethermost pit, ‘they shall go free, Heaven will not lay upon them the burden of a father’s sin. He shall perish, he shall go to his doom, but they shall remain scathless. On earth, perchance, their portion may be shame and suffering, for earth’s judgments are lying judgments; but God is righteous, and will keep this promise, and will adjust the balance.’

* * * * *

Coming out of chapel, amidst the crowd, Naomi found herself close to a stranger who was talking of her father.

‘I can believe anything of this man now I’ve heard him preach,’ he said.

‘Why?’ inquired his companion.

‘Because I am very sure he is a madman.’

‘I don’t see that,’ said the other, startled by the assertion. ‘His sermon was violent and gloomy, but sane enough.’

‘No sane man ever preached as that man preaches, and you may take my word for it.’

Here the crowd parted Naomi from the speaker, but what she had heard impressed her deeply. It was hardly a new thought which was thus abruptly presented to her. The change in her father had inspired her with fears, to which she had hardly dared to give their actual form. Who was to discriminate between perpetual gloom, moody silence, an unbroken reserve, and the tokens and indications of a mind distraught? That her father’s whole character had undergone an alteration since the day of Oswald Pentreath’s disappearance, she well knew. Was it not possible that, on that day, the clear light of reason was darkened for ever? From that fatal hour he had broken loose from all old ties--from children and wife, and friends and business--he had been like an owl of the desert, a pelican in the wilderness.

But even with the horror of the thought there came a blessed sense of relief. If reason had left him in the hour of temptation, if the light was quenched before he did that fatal deed, her father was not accountable for his sin. It was not with his whole mind that he had broken the Divine Law. The clouded brain had not taken the measure of the act.

This offered a way out of her deepest sorrow. Dreadful as earthly penalties might be--shameful, intolerable, revolting--it was Heaven’s anger she most dreaded for the father she so devotedly loved. Sure of God’s pardon and pity for the sinner, she could see him perish on the scaffold with only earthly sorrow, with only sense of earthly suffering and loss; secure of a fair hereafter, a glorious meeting in a land of rest and peacefulness, where the red robes of repentant sinners were to be washed whiter than snow.

Awful, then, as this thought of mental alienation was, there was comfort in it. She could cling closer to her afflicted father, pitying and pardoning him; full of remorse for her own share in his suffering, ascribing to herself half his guilt.

‘If I had but spared him the knowledge of that letter, Heaven might have spared me this anguish,’ she thought.

Joshua was absent from the family board at the two-o’clock Sunday dinner, an uninteresting repast of cold provisions, which James Haggard regarded as one of the privations and trials of his career. Other people in Combhaven rioted in hot joints and savoury potatoes, reeking with unctuous grease and gravy, followed by huge fruit pie or pasty, and perchance a bowl of cream.

‘I don’t call it honouring the Sabbath to sit down to a worse dinner than on a work-a-day,’ Jim remarked argumentatively. ‘And all that Sally may sit in a corner of our pew and breathe hard all through the sermon.’

‘Eat your dinner, and be thankful,’ said aunt Judith severely; ‘or leave it, and hold your tongue. I wonder you can be so base-minded as to think of your meals at such a time, with such affliction come upon your house as we’ve had to bear.’

‘Do you mean Captain Pentreath bringing that charge against father?’ asked Jim contemptuously. ‘I’m not such a fool as to fret about that. Any lunatic might accuse us of murder, or arson, or high treason, or gunpowder plot. Poor Pentreath’s head’s been turned by finding his brother at the bottom of Matcherly mine. I was over at the First and Last when the inquest was going on, and heard everybody saying that it was worse than madness to lay such a crime at father’s door. There’s not a man in Combhaven would believe a word against father.’

‘It would be hard if they would,’ retorted Judith, ‘after the life your father has lived among ’em all these years, and no one able to bring a reproach against him, unless it was for foolishness in marrying a silly girl for the sake of her pretty face.’

‘I never saw any silliness in Cynthia,’ said Jim; ‘and for my part I wish she was home again. I miss her pretty face, though it was sad enough for the last twelvemonth, goodness knows. I don’t think we any of us made her too happy.’

‘She’s a deal better away,’ replied Judith, with a sour look. ‘She turned your father’s thoughts from his duties, and never brought anything but trouble into this house. Let her stop with friends of her own station, if she has any.’

‘Ain’t it rather like turning her out of doors to let her stop away so long?’ asked Jim.

‘I didn’t know it was a son’s place to find fault with his father’s doings,’ said Judith. ‘Your father’s the best judge of his duty to his wife, I should hope. It isn’t for us to interfere. He didn’t ask our leave when he brought her home, and it’s not likely he’d want our leave to send her away.’

‘It’s a pity things couldn’t go smoother, anyhow,’ pursued Jim persistently; ‘for she’s a pretty little thing, and a good little thing, that would never do harm to any one.’

‘That’s all you know, Mr. Clever. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to keep your opinion till you’re asked for it. Why don’t you eat your dinner, Naomi?’ inquired Miss Haggard sharply. ‘It’s as good a bit of beef as ever was cooked, and I suppose _you’re_ not too dainty to eat cold meat on the Sabbath?’

‘I’m not hungry, aunt,’ said Naomi.

She had been sitting with her plate before her, making no attempt to eat, hearing her aunt and brother talking, but in nowise understanding them. Her thoughts were with her father in his lonely room. He had pleaded a headache, and gone quietly up to his bedchamber when he came in from chapel. How was he bearing his burden? Without consolation, without sympathy. Yes, verily without human sympathy; but for this believer, even in his depth of guilty despair, there still remained a pitying Ear that would listen to his groaning, and take account of his anguish. The Friend of sinners would not be deaf to his cry.

‘I think I’ll go up-stairs and see how father is, and if he wants anything,’ said Naomi, rising from her seat at the table.

‘If I was you, I wouldn’t go bothering and disturbing him,’ said Judith, with her accustomed tartness; ‘but of course you can do as you like about it.’

This was an indirect order not to go, but for once in her life Naomi disobeyed, and went straight to Joshua’s room.

She knocked, but there was no answer, and she went in quietly, hoping to find her father asleep.

He was sitting in front of the open escritoire, his arms folded, his eyes bent upon the ground. He did not stir, or look up at his daughter’s entrance, nor even when she came close to him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder.

She stood for a few moments in silence, waiting for him to take some notice of her; but he sat like a statue, and never lifted his eyes from the ground.

‘Dear father,’ she began, in a low and tender voice, as she would have spoken to him had he been lying ill, at death’s door, ‘I was obliged to come to you. I could not bear to think of you alone and unhappy. Dearest, it is a heavy affliction that has fallen upon us, but not heavier than we can bear. Father,’ sinking on her knees beside his chair, and putting her arms round him, ‘if your guilt is deep, I am guilty too. I sinned grievously when I gave you his letter. I suffered my evil passions to get the better of me. My heart was full of hatred and rancour. Let us repent, and seek for mercy together. We both have sinned.’

‘The letter,’ muttered Joshua, with a bitter laugh, ‘the letter was not so much. I saw him hold her in his arms and kiss her--saw her yield herself up to a love that was stronger than honour or duty, or her love of God--saw her folded to his heart under Heaven’s all-seeing eye.’

‘It was my fault, father. But for that letter you would never have known of that last meeting. It was but a stolen farewell, and they both meant to do their duty. They were so young, and had erred for want of thought.’

‘They were thoughtful enough to plan secret meetings--thoughtful enough to deceive me. And I believed her purest among women--free from all taint of sin. Do not speak of her--or of him. They sinned, and have reaped the fruit of sin. “The wages of sin is death.”’

‘Father, we have sinned grievously, you and I; and we can have no hope of mercy unless we repent,’ said Naomi, horrified at Joshua’s hardness of tone, which implied an unconsciousness of the weight and measure of his crime.

‘My life has been one long atonement. I have laboured always in the work of salvation.’

‘But by one sinful act all might be undone--in one dark hour the labour of a lifetime might be lost,’ urged Naomi.

Her father made no answer.

‘Dearest, will you not kneel and pray with me?’ she pleaded. ‘Will you not help me to lift this burden from my soul? I am weary with the weight of my sin. I loved him, and yet betrayed him to you. O, it was the act of a Judas! _He_ must have loved his master. It was jealousy that made him a traitor. Father, if you cannot be sorry for your sin, be sorry for mine.’

In vain; the brooding eyes were never lifted from the ground. Naomi looked up into the rigid face. Yes, there was an expression there as of light quenched, at least a temporary aberration. He was not listening, he was not following her.

He sat for some time thus, Naomi still kneeling by him and watching him, but in silence. Then he stretched out his hand to the open Bible that lay upon his desk, and began to read.

‘Leave me, my dear,’ he said; ‘I am better alone.’

‘I would so much rather stay with you, dear father. I will not disturb you.’

‘Go, dear; I wish to be alone. I have to command my thoughts. It will be time for chapel presently.’

‘I will go then, dear father. But while we are alone, let me say one thing.’

‘I am listening.’

She put her arms round his neck, and rested her head on his shoulder.

‘You know how I loved Oswald, father, to the last, even after his heart had gone away from me. But I told you then, as I tell you now, you were always first and dearest, always the object of my highest reverence and love. That could never change in me. No act of yours could lessen my love, no affliction Heaven could bring upon you could lower you in my esteem. Remember that always, father. Come what may, I am your loving daughter to the end!’

With this assurance she left him, a little more at peace with herself for having thus spoken.

The afternoon service was gone through very quietly. Joshua had a subdued and weary air, as if worn out by the effort of the morning. The congregation were less alert and exalted in their piety, as was natural in people who had dined heavily, and given way to fleshly snares in the shape of too-substantial pastry. Even the hymns had a slumberous tone, and acted as lullabies upon some elder members of the flock whose feeble knees were an excuse for a sitting posture.

After service, Joshua taught for half an hour in his school, and said a few earnest words to the young men of his adult night-school, a class in which he had taken a special interest. They were very touching words, and well remembered afterwards.

Joshua was absent from the tea-table as he had been from the dinner-table. His headache was worse, he told his sister, and he was going to lie down. Naomi had an evening Scripture class to attend to after tea, a task that would occupy her for about an hour. She went to this duty at half-past six o’clock, while Judith enjoyed the one Sabbath luxury which she permitted herself, a half hour’s nap in the chintz-covered arm-chair by the best parlour-window, screened from the gaze of passing pedestrians, going by at the rate of one in ten minutes, by the graceful droop of the well-starched curtain.

Joshua was alone, sitting by the escritoire, as he had sat when Naomi went to him in the afternoon. He had locked the door, determined to be free from all intrusion--free even from his daughter’s pitying love. He wanted nothing between him and that awful solitude in which he had lived of late--the isolation which a mind unhinged makes for itself.

He sat thus till the twilight thickened and the pages of his open Bible grew dim. Even in the troubled state of his brain--a trouble which had been growing for months--that book was his rock of defence, his sheet-anchor. He looked into those pages for justification, for assurance of grace and redemption, and he seldom looked in vain. If he had sinned, had not David sinned also, and yet retained his exalted place in the love of God and men? Was he to humble himself more than David humbled himself? Had David ever ceased to be King, and Priest, and teacher, chief and supreme among the people? If _he_ had fallen, had not Peter also fallen, and yet received that divine commission which gave him charge of Christ’s flock?

‘I will preach the Gospel and teach men while I have breath,’ protested Joshua, laying his hand upon the sacred book. ‘What have the burdens on my conscience to do with my teaching? What does it matter that I know myself a sinner if I can expound the word of God? He has given me a gift, and I will use it--to the uttermost and to the last. If this is to be a hypocrite, my hypocrisy shall go with me to my grave.’

This was the summing-up of his position in one of his calmer moods; but his mind was not always so clear, or his views so fixed and resolute. There were moments to-night, as he sat in the summer dusk while the shadows grew and deepened in the lonely old-fashioned room, grotesque shadows of familiar things which he had known from childhood--there were intervals in which his brain grew clouded, and past and present were alike dim and distorted. His thoughts flashed far and wide like the erratic gleams of a lantern--now alighting upon some picture of the past, now plunging into the dark gulf of the future. He saw himself as he had been at the outset of his laborious career--eager for self-sacrifice, careless of all worldly loss, sustained by an enthusiast’s exaggerated hopes, and an enthusiast’s indifference to suffering. He had laboured, and had been plenteously rewarded. He had been a wandering light shining in dark places and forgotten corners of the earth, and had brought many lost sheep home to the fold. Then his father had died, and he had been called back to his native place, to find that, after all, he had lost nothing of earthly gain by his constancy, for, despite the old man’s threatenings, he had left all to his only son.

This day of inheritance Joshua felt to have been in some measure a time of temptation and falling away. He had turned aside from the desert and desolate places to dwell in a land of fatness. He had been content to serve a few instead of serving many. He had sat down under his vine and fig-tree, and taught one little flock instead of wandering from village to village seeking those whom the Church had forgotten, or cared for with a lukewarm love. True that he had laboured hard for his flock, walked many miles, stretched his cure of souls to its utmost limits, taught the young, brought the light of education, both spiritual and secular, into many dark places; but he had from this time ceased to be a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, a disciple who has given up all things for his Master.

Then came his prosperous first marriage, the birth of his children, new ties that bound him to the old home.

How strange and remote those early years seemed as the fitful light of memory shone upon them!

The picture changed. Those peaceful monotonous days were past. He was standing on the Cornish common in the pure sunshine, the great Atlantic glittering in the distance, the sandy knolls and hollows all ablaze with yellow furze, the subtle scent of that golden blossom in the air--standing on the threshold of a new life. Never after that hour was he to be the same man, independent of all human influence. Henceforth he was to be chained to humanity by mankind’s most pitiful weakness, an unreasoning love for a weak fellow-creature.

‘I verily believe I loved her from that first day,’ he thought. ‘Her image never left me. She was always before me, sitting in the sunlight, with her drooping hair like pale gold. Can I doubt that Satan set her there for my entanglement and ruin? “His heart shall be heavy for her sake, he shall be so troubled that he shall grow dumb,” said the fiend. But I have cheated him of his prey. He has had my heart, and bruised and broken it, but he has not quenched my spirit--he has not silenced me. I have borne my burden and continued to teach and exhort, and will so continue to the end. No snare of the Arch-tempter hiding behind a fair face shall destroy me.’

Then followed a moment of relenting.

‘She seemed so innocent, so pure. She was so gentle and obedient, and owned so meekly that she had been tempted, and had sinned in hearkening for a little while to the tempter. O God, there could be no vileness in the soul that looked up at me from those gentle eyes. And I thrust her from me with violence and contumely, and sent her back to servitude and dependence. My wedded wife, the one creature I have loved most on earth!’ He clasped his hands, and looked upward in exaltation of mind.

‘Surely that was an atonement for my weakness. Surely that was a sacrifice which Heaven must approve. And yet I have known no peace of mind since that day. Heaven has given me no token of approval or forgiveness.’

That intense egotism which is one of the characteristics of a mind off its balance had taken possession of him. He felt himself the centre of the universe. The Bible had been written for him. He stood face to face with his Creator, and felt himself worthy to be saved.

His daughter knocked at the door presently, and asked him if he would not have a light.

‘No,’ he answered; ‘my soul can hold communion with God in the darkness. I am alone, as Elijah was upon the mountain, waiting for the voice of the Lord.’

It was after midnight when he laid himself upon his bed, wearied with meditations in which his brain had been hyper-active. Tired as he was with the long day and its double service, the long evening and its protracted thoughtlessness, he could not easily sleep; and when at last his weary eyelids closed, his slumber was more like a trance than a sleep.

He saw his wife’s face looking up at him as she had looked that last day in the lane, pleadingly, piteously, full of grief and love. He saw it more vividly than faces are seen in dreams--saw it close to him as he lay upon his pillow, and was dimly conscious of lying there, and the hour of the night, and that this face was looking at him from afar off, though it seemed so near that he could have stretched out his hand and touched it.

Then came a voice that thrilled him:

‘Joshua, Joshua, come to me!’

He was awake and on his feet in an instant. It seemed to him that his waking ears had heard that voice--that it was something more than a part of his dream. He stood listening for some moments, half expecting to hear the cry repeated, and his wife’s hand upon his door.

He went to the door, and opened it, and looked out upon the landing faintly lighted by the stars.

No, the place was empty, the lower part of the house was dark and silent. Nothing had happened. It was only a dream.

‘But it is a dream sent by Heaven,’ he said. ‘I will hearken to it, and go. Yes, my love, I forgive you; I am coming to you. I bring you pardon and love.’

He struck a light from the old tinder-box, lighted his candle, and began to dress himself hurriedly. He had looked at his watch on first rising, wondering to find so little of the night was gone. It was twenty minutes past one o’clock.

Joshua took his watch from under his pillow, lifted the glass, and laid his finger on the hands and stopped them. Only once before in his life had he ever done this thing, and that occasion was the moment of his conversion, the instant in which the divine assurance of his election and calling had been breathed into his soul. At that blessed moment he had stopped his watch that it might for ever record that one hallowed hour. It was the watch he had used as a young man, and was still in his desk: he had never carried it afterwards, and had endured no small inconvenience for the want of it till his father’s fine old timekeeper had descended to him as a part of his inheritance.

It was a curious fancy which moved him to do the same thing to-night. He could have given no reason for the impulse, but he obeyed it blindly, and the loud ticking of the watch grew still at twenty minutes past one.