Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest. Volume 3 of 3

And then, in her dream, he was come – raining tears upon her cheek, holding her from all the world, fearing to thank God yet. She was smiling up at him; oh, it was so delicious! Suddenly she opened her eyes. What made her face so wet? Why, Wena!

Wena, as sure as dogs are dogs; mounted on the mossy arm, lick–lick–licking, mewing like a cat almost, even offering taste of her tongue, while every bit of the Wena dog shook with ecstatic rapture.

“Oh, Wena, Wena! what are you come to tell me, Wena? Oh that you could speak!”

Wena immediately proved that she could. She galloped round Amy, barking and yelling, until the great wood echoed again; the rabbits, a mile away, pricked their ears, and the yaffingales stopped from tapping. Then off set the little dog down the footpath. Oh, could it be to fetch somebody?

The mere idea of such a thing made Amy shake so, and feel so odd, she was forced to put one hand against the tree, and the other upon her heart. She could not look, she was in such a state; she could not look down the footpath. It seemed, at least, a century, and it may have been half a minute, before she heard through the bushes a voice – tush, she means the voice.

“Wena, you bad dog, come in to heel. Is this all you have learned by travelling?”

But Wena broke fence and everything, set off full gallop again to Amy, tugged at her dress, and retrieved her.

What happened after that Amy knows not, neither knows Cradock Nowell. So anything I could tell would be a fond thing vainly invented. All they remember is – looking back upon it, as both of them may, to the zenith of their lives – that neither of them could say a word except “darling, darling, darling!” all pronounced as superlatives, with “my own,” once or twice between, and an exclusive sense of ownership, illiberal and unphilosophical. What business have we with such minor details? Who has sworn us accountants of kisses? All we have any right to say is, that after a long spell of inarticulate tautology, Amy looked up when Cradock proposed to add another cipher; very gravely, indeed, she looked up; except in the deepest depth of her eyes.

“Oh no, Cradock. You must not think of it. Seriously now, you must not, love.”

“Why? I should like to know, indeed! After all the time I have been away!”

“I have so little presence of mind. I forgot to tell you in time, dear. Why, because Wena has licked my face all over, darling. Darling, yes, she has, I say. You are too bad not to care about it. Now come to my own best father, dear. Offer your arm like a gentleman.”

So they – as Milton concisely says. Homer would have written “they two.” How sadly our language wants a dual! We, the domestic race, have we rejected it because the use would have seemed a truism?

*****

That same afternoon Bull Garnet lay dying, calmly and peacefully going off, taking his accounts to a larger world. He knew that there were some heavy items underscored against him; but he also knew that the mercy of God can even outdo the hope He gives us for token and for keepsake. A greater and a grander end, after a life of mark and power, might, to his early aspirations and self–conscious strength, have seemed the bourne intended. If it had befallen him – as but for himself it would have done – to appear where men are moved by passion, vigour, and bold decision, his name would have been historical, and better known to the devil. As it was, he lay there dying, and was well content. The turbulence of life was past, the torrent and the eddy, the attempt at fore–reaching upon his age, and sense of impossibility, the strain of his mental muscles to stir the great dead trunks of “orthodoxy,” and then the self–doubt, the chill, the depression, which follow such attempts, as surely as ague tracks the pioneer.

Thank God, all this was over now, and the violence gone, and the dark despair. Of all the good and evil things which so had branded him distinct, two yet dwelled in his feeble heart, only two still showed their presence in his dying eyes. Each of those two was good, if two indeed they were – faith in the heavenly Father, and love of the earthly children.

Pearl was sitting on a white chair at the side of the bed away from the window, with one hand in his failing palm, and the other trying now and then to enable her eyes to see things. She was thinking, poor little thing, of what she should do without him, and how he had been a good father to her, though she never could understand him. That was her own fault, no doubt. She had always fancied that he loved her as a bit of his property, as a thing to be managed; now she knew that it was not so; and he was going away for ever, and who would love or manage her? And the fault of all this was her own.

Rufus Hutton had been there lately, trying still to keep up some little show of comfort, and a large one of encouragement; for he was not the man to say die till a patient came to the preterite. Throughout the whole, and knowing all, he had behaved in the noblest manner, partly from his own quick kindness, partly from that protective and fiduciary feeling which springs self–sown in the hearts of women when showers of sorrow descend, and crops up in the manly bosom at the fee of golden sunshine. Not that he took any fees; but that his professional habits revived, with a generosity added, because he knew that he would take nothing, though all were in his power.

Suddenly Mr. Pell came in, our old friend Octavius, sent for in an urgent manner, and looking as a man looks who feels but cannot open on the hinge of his existence. Like a thorough gentleman, he had been shy of the cottage, although aware of their distress; eager at once and reluctant, partly because it stood not in his but his rectorʼs parish, partly for deeper reasons.

Though Pell came in so quietly, Bull Garnet rose at his entry, or tried to rise on the pillow, swept his daughter back by a little motion of his thumb, which she quite understood, and cast his eyes on the parsonʼs with a languid yet strong intelligence. He had made up his mind that the man was good, and yet he could not help probing him.

The last characteristic act of poor Bull Garnetʼs life, a life which had been all character, all difference, from other people.

“Will you take my daughterʼs hand, Pell?”

“Only too gladly,” answered Pell; but she shrank away, and sobbed at him.

“Pearl, come forward this moment. It is no time for shilly–shallying.”

The poor thing timidly gave her hand, standing a long way back from Pell, and with her large eyes streaming, yet fixed upon her father, and no chance at all of wiping them.

“Now, Pell, do you love my daughter? I am dying, and I ask you.”

“That I do, with all my heart,” said Pell, like a downright Englishman. “I shall never love any other.”

“Now, Pearl, do you love Mr. Pell?” Her fatherʼs eyes were upon her in a way that commanded truth. She remembered how she had told a lie, at the age of seven or eight, and that gaze had forced it out of her, and she had never dared to tell one since, until no lie dared come near her.

“Father, I like him very much. Very soon I should love him, if – if he loved me.”

“Now, Pell, you hear that!”

“Beyond all doubt I do,” said Octave, whose dryness never deserted him in the heaviest rain of tears; “and it is the very best thing for me I have heard in all my life.”

Bull Garnet looked from one to the other, with the rally of his life come hot, and a depth of joyful sadness. Yet must he go a little further, because he had always been a tyrant till people understood him.

“Do you want to know how much money, sir, I intend to leave her, when I die to–night or to–morrow morning?”

Cut–and–dry Pell was taken aback. A thoroughly upright and noble fellow, but of wholly different and less rugged road of thought. Meanwhile Pearl had slipped away; it was more than she could bear, and she was so sorry for Octavius. Then Pell up and spake bravely:

“Sir, I would be loth to think of you, my dear oneʼs father, as anything but a gentleman; a strange one, perhaps, but a true one. And so I trust you have only put such a question to me in irony.”

“Pell, there is good stuff in you. I know a man by this time. What would you think of finding your dear oneʼs father a murderer?”

Octavius Pell was not altogether used to this sort of thing. He turned away with some doubt whether Pearl would be a desirable mother of children (for he, after all, was a practical man), and hereditary insanity – Then he turned back, remembering that all mankind are mad. Meanwhile Bull Garnet watched him, with extraordinary wrinkles, and a savage sort of pleasure. He felt himself outside the world, and looking at the stitches of it. But he would not say a word. He had always been a bully, and he meant to keep it up.

“Sir,” said Octave Pell, at last, “you are the very oddest man I ever saw in all my life.”

“Ah, you think so, do you, Pell? Possibly you are right; possibly you are right, Pell. I have no time to think about it. It never struck me in that light. If I am so very odd, perhaps you would rather not have my daughter?”

“If you intend to refuse her to me, you had better say so at once, sir. I donʼt understand all this.”

“I wish you to understand nothing at all beyond the simple fact. I shot Clayton Nowell, and did it on purpose, because I found him insulting her.”

“Good God! You donʼt mean to say it?”

“I never yet said a thing, Pell, which I did not mean to say.”

“You did it in haste? You have repented? For Godʼs sake, tell me that.”

“Treat this as a question of business. Look at the deed and nothing else. Do you still wish to marry my daughter?”

Pell turned away from the great wild eyes now solemnly fixed upon him. His manly heart was full of wonder, anguish, and giddy turbulence. The promptest of us cannot always “come to time,” like a prizefighter.

Pearl came in, with her chest well forward, and then drew back very suddenly. She thought her fate must be settled now, and would like to know how they had settled it. Then, like a genuine English lady, she gave a short sigh and went away. Pride makes the difference between us and all other nations.

But the dignified glance she had cast on Pell settled his fate and hers for life. He saw her noble self–respect, her stately reservation, her deep sense of her own pure value (which never would assert itself), and her passing contempt of his hesitation.

“At all risks I will have her,” he said to himself, for his manly strength gloried in her strong womanhood; “if she can be won I will have her. Oh, how I am degrading her! What a fool–bound fellow I am!”

Then he spoke to her father, who had fallen back, and was faintly gazing, wondering what the stoppage was.

“Sir, I am not worthy of her. God knows how I love her. She is too good for me.”