Chapter V: ‘and Yet I Feel I Fear.’

Under that quiet surface which life wore in Joshua Haggard’s household there were troubled waters.

Naomi had never forgotten the awful look in her father’s face that afternoon in the wood. It haunted her in all places and at all seasons. The impression it had made upon her mind would not pass away. What it meant she knew not--dared not shape the thought in her mind; but she was very sure that it meant evil of some kind--evil to her father’s soul, wrong to Oswald.

If she could have known for certain that Oswald had carried out the intention set forth in his fatal letter to Cynthia, she would have been, comparatively speaking, at ease and happy. But of this she knew nothing. Whether he had really gone to America, how and when he had left Combhaven, of these things she was ignorant. Cynthia might know, perhaps; but not even to set these anxious fears at rest could Naomi stoop so low as to seek for any information about her lover from the woman for whose sake she had been abandoned. No; if Cynthia knew anything for certain, the knowledge must remain locked in her breast. Save in the merest outward and ceremonial form, a bare civility in every-day intercourse, there could be no contact between Naomi and her stepmother. The gulf that sundered these two was impassable.

Oswald’s letter had stated that he meant to leave Combhaven by the night coach. He had not gone by that coach, for James Haggard, who was fond of an evening stroll when the shutters were up, and who took a lively interest in other people’s business, had watched the departure of the coach on that particular evening, and entertained his family at the silent supper-table with a detailed account of that exciting event in the every-day life of his town.

‘There was only one inside, and that was old Mrs. Skevinew, who is going to Exeter to see her married daughter,’ said Jim; ‘she had three bandboxes, two umbrellas, a pair of pattens, and a pair of the new-fashioned clogs--she bought ’em of aunt Judith the day before yesterday--a hamper of peas, a green goose, a basket of eggs, a tin of clouted cream, a red-cotton handkerchief full of bullaces, two pasties done up in brown paper, and a pig’s head. Won’t her friends be glad to see her?’

‘Who were the outsides?’ asked Judith.

Jim ran over the names, checking them off on his fingers.

‘Was there no one else in the coach?’ asked Naomi, looking at her father, who sat in his usual place with bent brows, neither eating nor drinking.

‘No one.’

He had not gone by that coach, then, thought Naomi. But presently it occurred to her that Mr. Pentreath’s return to Combhaven having been a secret and underhand proceeding, he would hardly care to leave the place under the broad glare of his townspeople’s eye. The departure of the coach from the First and Last Inn was a public event. To leave by that vehicle at that point of departure, and not be seen, came hardly within the limits of possibility, unless a man had got himself hidden away in the boot before the spectators assembled. No, if Oswald had determined to travel by that coach, he had doubtless walked on to some quiet spot, to be taken up as the mail passed.

This reflection quieted Naomi’s fears in some measure, yet did not set her heart at ease. Her father’s face haunted her like some unholy image sent by Satan to suggest evil. What had passed between Joshua and that weak sinner--what violence of upbraiding had the minister used against his wife’s lover? That there had been an angry meeting of some kind Naomi did not doubt. Only a wild indulgence of evil passion, only an utter abandonment of himself to man’s omnipresent tempter, could have conjured up such a look in Joshua Haggard’s face. The dark mind of the spirit of evil was there reflected. The lurid gleam in those darkly brooding eyes was the red glare caught from the open doors of hell.

There had been hard words spoken, words of hatred and fury, perchance even some act of open violence--a blow struck by that strong hand of Joshua’s, who might have spurned the sinner as if he had been the tempter himself in his base form of serpent. But it was over, and Joshua had doubtless begun to repent of his violence; and Oswald was on his way to a distant world, to begin a new and wiser life.

‘God keep him and guard him and lead him aright,’ thought Naomi, ‘and make him a good and great man. I could bear the pang of parting with him, could I feel secure about his happy future here and in the better world.’

O empty life from which he had vanished for ever! O dreary days which hung upon this young spirit like a burden, and weighed her down to the dust! Yes, verily, to the dust; so that, in her utter weariness, she felt as if it would be a good and pleasant end of all things to lie down in some lonely corner of the land--lie face downward among the fern and wild flowers, and wait for death. Surely the dark angel would take pity upon her joyless fate, and come and fold her in his sheltering wings, and comfort and cure her.

‘There is no other comfort, no other cure,’ she said, forgetting all the old pious lessons in her despair, forgetting even to do good to others in the sharpness of her pain.

She sought for consolation from no one--not even from honest Jim, who was distressed at seeing such blank hopeless faces in his home, and was eager, after his rough and ready fashion, to administer comfort.

‘Come, Naomi, cheer up and be bright, like a sensible girl,’ he would say. ‘There’s as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and though you’ve missed landing a fine salmon through father’s foolishness, you’ll have your net full by and by, I’ll warrant. A good-looking straight-built lass like you will never want a sweetheart.’

‘Jim, if you talk to me like that I shall hate you!’ cried Naomi. ‘I shall go single to my grave, and you know it; or if you can think otherwise of me, you’re not worthy to be my brother.’

‘Hoity-toity!’ cried Jim, ‘what fine notions run in our family! Here’s father refusing the lord of the manor for his son-in-law, and you talking of dying an old maid because your first affections have been blighted. Why, if my first love takes a wrong direction, I shall turn my heart into the right road, as easily as I guide gray Dobbin down a lane where he doesn’t want to go. Just a shake of the reins or a touch of the whip, and off we start.’

Crushed by this weariness of life, Naomi strove notwithstanding to do her duty. Even aunt Judith found no room for complaint with Naomi or Cynthia, unless haggard eyes and pale faces, and low voices with no joyous ring in them, were sufficient ground for upbraiding. The household work was faithfully performed. The starching and ironing, the dusting and beeswaxing, the sewing and darning were duly done. Cynthia had finished her dozen of shirts, without a gusset set awry, a seam puckered, or one deviation from a right line in the pearl-like stitching of collars and wristbands; and now she had taken to knitting Joshua’s gray-woollen stockings, which was a pleasantly dreamy occupation calling for very little exercise of the intellectual faculties till one came to the heel. She used to sit in the garden or the wilderness in the calm September afternoons, with a grave quiet face bent over her flashing needles--a face that told of an abiding sorrow. The Miss Weblings would scarcely have recognised their sunny-faced little maid in the serious young matron, with a complexion almost as white as her cap. Joshua rarely saw that patient figure sitting in his place on the grass-plat, for he had been growing more and more indefatigable in his visitations among the scattered members of his flock, walking great distances to lonely homesteads or labourers’ cottages, or, when not thus occupied, spending his afternoons in solitary wanderings by the wild sea-shore, holding commune with his troubled soul.

Save at family prayer and at meals he was now seldom seen in his own house, while he had almost wholly deserted the shop. Aunt Judith bewailed this falling away from the good old habits which had made Haggard’s the leading commercial institution in Combhaven. The salvation of one’s soul was a vital transaction, doubtless; but a man secure of his calling and election in eternity could well afford to attend to his temporal business, instead of wandering about in desolate places like John the Baptist, without having any one to baptise.

‘He might as well live on the top of a pillar like St. Simon What’s-his-name, and have his meals sent up to him by a ladder,’ said Judith contemptuously, ‘if his mind is never in his business. We’re always running out of things now, for want of proper attention to the stock.’

To Naomi it was a small thing that her father should be indifferent to loss and gain, and turn his back upon the trade by which his father and grandfather had maintained their importance and respectability in the little town. The change she saw in him was more alarming than this neglect of daily duties--a change which she associated involuntarily with that bitter day on which she had seen his gloomy murderer’s face pass by her in the woodland dimness.

In the autumn evenings, when she could escape from the joyless house, Naomi felt herself drawn, as by a magnet, to Pentreath Wood. It was not that she found peace there, or consolation. She loved the shadowy scene as a place in which she could feed her grief, and haunted it as an inconsolable mourner haunts the burial-ground where lies her dead. How desolate the place seemed in the season of earth’s decay, all the winding ways deeply strewn with the red-brown leaves, soft and soddened in the hollows where the autumn rains lay longest; frogs croaking in the marshy places, and a dead snake lying here and there among the brambles!

It was not often that Naomi went within sight of the deserted house, where the old servants lived on in a lazy seclusion, waiting their master’s bidding; almost as slumberous a household as that which slept for a hundred years in the old fairy story, only that here there was no lovely princess shining like a jewel in the innermost chamber of the castle. Here were only empty rooms and dust and loneliness.

One evening early in October, Naomi roamed a little farther than she had intended, and found that, to reach home in decent time, she must go by the nearest way, which was across the park, and out into the road by the park-gate. This would take her very near the house.

It was a fine bright evening. The sun had set redly behind the trees before she had entered the wood, and now the moon had risen and was shining over the great sea yonder--a lovely evening, mild and peaceful. She was loth to go back to the lighted room at home, and her father’s evening lecture, now always of so gloomy a character as to minister to her despair rather than to lift up her soul from its depth of sorrow.

The hall-door stood open, and a light burned dimly within. Old Nicholas, the butler, was sitting in the porch. He recognised Naomi as she skirted the outer garden, and got up quickly and came after her.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Haggard, but seeing you go by just now, I made bold to follow you. Have you heard any news of the young Squire? I’ve wanted to ask sometimes when I’ve been up at the shop, to get my bit of tea and sugar; but your father wasn’t about, and I don’t like to ask your aunt--she’s apt to be snappy.’

‘No, Nicholas, we have had no news. You would be more likely to hear of your master than we.’

‘Deary, now! I knew there was something wrong when he came down here so sudden, and told me I was to say nothing about it, and he was going off to Ameriky, and I was to keep the place in order agen Mr. Arnold came home, and then he was to be the master here. A power of changes to happen in such a short time, ain’t it, miss? I feel as if the world was topsy-turvy, somehow. The poor old master gone! He was dreadful near, to be sure; but I’d got used to him, and I misses his fidgety pinching ways, looking after every candle-end, and such a nose of his own if he suspected we was frying a bit of bacon for supper. Well, he’s gone where scraping and saving won’t help him, poor gentleman. There’s no candle-ends in the heavenly Jerusalem.’

Nicholas sighed despondently, as if he doubted whether an immortal home in which cheese-paring could not be practised would satisfy his departed master.

‘And you haven’t heard nothing, miss?’

‘Nothing,’ answered Naomi. ‘But there is hardly time for any one to have had a letter yet, is there, Nicholas?’

‘I can’t say, miss. Perhaps not. It were the beginning of August when he went away, warn’t it? and here we are in October. I suppose there wouldn’t be time; and yet I begin to feel oneasy in my mind about him. There was something queer about his going away, you see.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Naomi, looking at him intently.

‘Well, you see, he says to me, “Nicholas, you get they two big trunks down to the coach this evening, and that there bag.” The trunks was what he’d packed his clothes and books in, and suchlike, that morning, purpose to take them with him to Ameriky. “I shall walk on ahead, and let the coach pick me up this side of Henbury turnpike,” he says. “But you get they trunks safe in the boot,” says he. So the gardener and me puts ’em in a barrer and wheels ’em down, and gets ’em safe packed into the boot afore seven o’clock.’

‘Well, what then?’ asked Naomi, with suppressed eagerness.

‘What then, Miss Haggard? Why, they trunks and that there bag is in the young Squire’s room now--come back, like a bad penny!’

‘Come back?’

‘Yes. The coach never picked him up this side of Henbury turnpike. The coachman never set eyes upon him all along the road. When he got to Exeter, there was no one to take to they trunks, no directions left about ’em, so he just brought ’em back; and if the young Squire be gone to Ameriky, he be gone without his luggage. Lord, miss, how you do trimble! I hope there’s nothing wrong, but it comes over me sometimes that things ain’t altogether right.’

‘He may have changed his mind at the last,’ said Naomi falteringly. ‘He may not have gone to America.’

‘Perhaps not, miss; but wherever he’s gone, he’s gone without his luggage--even the carpet-bag, with his razors and night-clothes.’

‘He may have had other luggage in London.’

‘He had a black portmanteau at the inn where he’d been stopping in London, but it wasn’t a big one. It wouldn’t have been luggage enough for Ameriky, or anywhere else in foreign parts. And then the books and things that he was so fond of, and his writing-desk, and most of his clothes--all in they big boxes. It’s odd he didn’t send for ’em.’

‘He may not want them.’

‘But it’s queer for him not to want ’em all this time. And if that there coach didn’t pick him up--and we know it didn’t--how did he get away? Nobody saw him leave, nobody heard of him. Lord-a-mercy, miss, how white you be! I didn’t ought to say suchlike things, but it weighs so heavy on my mind, it’s a comfort to talk about it. The London lawyer he sends me down my wages monthly, and board-wages for me and the others indoors. We might live on the fat of the land if we chose, only our constitutions have got used to pinching, and we likes it. We couldn’t have a better place; only they two trunks weighs upon my mind, and I sha’n’t feel easy till I’ve had a letter from my master.’

What comfort could Naomi give him--she whose thoughts were full of fear? She went home and found the family circle waiting for her. It was past the customary prayer-time by ten minutes or so.

‘Rambling again, Naomi!’ said her father severely; and then opened his Bible and began to read a chapter of Jeremiah, which he afterwards expounded, dwelling darkly on all that was darkest in the text. The prayer that followed was rather a cry of self-abasement and desolation than a supplicatory address, curiously different from that simple and single-minded appeal which the Divine Teacher dictated to His disciples. Joshua asked for no common wants of common life, he pleaded not to be forgiven as freely as he forgave; but he grovelled in the dust before an angry God, and heaped ashes upon his head, and abased himself with humility which touched the confines of fanaticism.

‘What kept you out so long, sis?’ asked James, when they were seated at supper.

‘Nicholas, the butler at the Grange, stopped me to ask about his master. He is very anxious about him.’

‘Why?’ asked her father sharply.

‘Because he has been away so long, and has not written.’

Cynthia lifted her languid eyes, large with sudden terror.

‘How could any one get a letter? He has not been gone three months. And even if there were time enough, why should he write to Nicholas?’ said Joshua.

‘Nicholas is anxious about him, in any case,’ answered Naomi.

She said nothing about the luggage left behind, which was the chief cause of the old servant’s uneasiness.

‘Well, all I can say is, that a young man with such a property as that was a fool to go to America,’ remarked Jim conclusively.

It was a generally accepted fact by this time that the young Squire had gone to America, and there were various versions of his motive for this exile. The male gossips inclined to the idea that he and Naomi had quarrelled, and that this lovers’ quarrel had been the cause of his departure; the female portion of the community pinned their faith upon the young man’s fickleness. He had repented of his engagement to the grocer’s daughter, and had gone away to avoid its fulfilment.

‘It was all very fine while his father was living, and likely to live to a hundred, and he hadn’t a five-pound note,’ said Mrs. Spradgers. ‘He knew that Mr. Haggard was a warm man, and he might do worse than marry Naomi; but it was quite another thing when the old gentleman went off, and the property turned out better than young Mr. Pentreath had ever expected. It’s only natural he should look higher. Circumstances alter cases.’

The year wore to its close, and yet there came no tidings of the young Squire. There was, perhaps, no reason why he should trouble himself to write to any one at Combhaven, argued Naomi, trying to shake off that burden of unquiet thoughts which oppressed her. He could hardly be expected to write to his old servants; he had provided for their comfort through his London solicitor. His rents were collected by a local agent and paid to the same man of business. There was no one at Combhaven who had any right to expect letters from him. He had broken away from his old moorings, and begun a new life in a new country. He was happy, perhaps, amused and interested by the novelty of his surroundings--occupied, adventurous, a light-hearted traveller, while her thoughts of him were so full of gloom.

‘Why cannot I banish him from my mind altogether?’ she asked herself. ‘It is a sin to dwell thus persistently upon an earthly loss. “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” He came between me and heaven--for I loved him too well. Even now that he is far away the thought of him binds me down to earth. Why cannot I forget him?’

There was another question in her mind which hardly shaped itself in direct words: ‘Why cannot I forget my father’s face that day in the wood?’

The new year began, and there was no change in the quiet household, save a change in Cynthia which had been so gently wrought that it was invisible to the eyes that saw her daily. The minister’s young wife had faded and drooped since that troubled summer time of the year just gone. The slender figure had lost its graceful curves, the white arm was no longer round and full, the oval of the cheek had fallen, and the blue-veined lids drooped languidly over the gentle eyes, in which there was a look that seemed to plead for pity or forgiveness.

Joshua’s popularity was at its height this winter. Those stirring sermons--those eloquent theological fulminations--acted on his hearers as a stimulant and a tonic. People flocked to hear him from distant villages. He was proud of his popularity, lifted up and exalted by the idea that he was bringing sinners home to God, fighting hand to hand with the devil and all his angels. He lived apart from his own household, a stranger among them, though sitting by the same fireside. It was as if they were people of old time giving shelter to a prophet. They scarcely dared speak to him, but approached him with an awful respect. It was an understood thing that he had no more to do with the business which had in years past occupied half his time and some portion of his care. James now took the helm in the commercial vessel, and felt that he was of the stuff that makes great captains. Joshua seemed hardly aware of the change that had come over his life. He was a dreamer, and lived in a world of dreams.

So the year began, and it was early spring again, and Naomi felt that her youth was gone, and that the years could bring her nothing but age and death. They would come and go, and make no difference in her life. They held no promise, they knew no hope.