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Lily Dougall - What Necessity Knows

L >> Lily Dougall >> What Necessity Knows




This, then, was the sorrow that dogged his life. Trenholme knew, without
more ado, that Bates loved the lost girl, that it was her loss that
outweighed all other misfortune. He felt a great compassion: he said
impatiently:

"There's no use trying to interfere between brothers. You can't see the
thing as I see it. Let's leave it."

"Ay, leave it," cried the other, voice and limb shaking, "and life is
short, and the time to die is every time, and if some accident is to
sweep us away to-night, who's to tell him that your death, and your soul
too, isn't on his head?"

"Bother my soul!" said Alec; and yet there was a certain courtesy
expressed in the gentler tone in which he spoke, and what he thought
was, "How much he must have loved her!"

When the fog had vanished, leaving daylight absolute, this scene of the
morning seemed like a dream, and in the evening, as much from curiosity
to see if he could revive its essence again as from a friendly desire to
relieve the overcharged heart of his comrade, he said:

"Tell me about her, Bates. What was she like?"

Bates responded to the question like a man whose heart is beating
against the walls of his silence as a bird beats upon its cage. He spoke
a few words, hardly noticing that he was telling his memories; then the
mask of his self-bound habit was resumed; then again the dignity of his
sorrow found some expression; and still again he would retire into
dumbness, setting the questioner aside slightingly; and when he had
forgotten that he had drawn back within himself some further revealing
would come from him. It was little that he said in all, but language
that has been fused in the furnace of so strong a sorrow and silence has
little of the dross of common speech--the unmeaning, misleading,
unnecessary elements: his veritable memory and thought and feeling were
painted by his meagre tale.

Was that tale true? John Bates would have thought it a great sin to
deceive himself or another, and yet, such was the power of his love,
blown to white heat by the breath of regret and purified, that when he
spoke of the incidents of Sissy's childhood, of the cleverness she
displayed when he taught her, of her growth until the day in which he
had offended her by speaking of marriage, when he told of her tears, and
prayers, and anger, and of his own despotism, the picture of it all that
arose in Trenholme's imagination was exceedingly different from what
would have been there had he seen the reality. He would not have liked
Cameron's daughter had he seen her, but, seeing her through the medium
of a heart that loved her, all the reverence that is due to womanly
sweetness stirred in him. Cupid may be blind, but to the eyes of
chastened love is given the vision of God.

When it appeared that Bates had said all that he was going to say, Alec
Trenholme sat pondering the problem of this girl's disappearance with
more mental energy than he had before given to it. Knowing the place
now, he knew that what Bates and Saul had averred was true--that there
were but two ways by which any one could leave it while water was
unfrozen, one by the boat, and the other by striking at random across
the hill to the back of the farm--a route that could only lead either to
one of several isolated farms, or, by a forty-mile tramp round by the
nearest river bridge, to the railway. At no farmhouse had she been seen,
and the journey by the bridge was too long to have been accomplished
before the snow storm must have impeded her. It was in attempting this
journey, Bates was convinced, that she had perished. There was, of
course, another possibility that had been mooted at Turrifs Settlement;
but the testimony of Bates and Saul, agreeing in the main points, had
entirely silenced it. Trenholme, thinking of this now, longed to
question more nearly, yet hardly dared.

"Do you think she could have gone mad? People sometimes do go stark mad
suddenly. Because, if so, and if you could be mistaken in thinking you
saw her in the house when you went--"

The Scotchman was looking keenly at him with sharp eyes and haggard
face. "I understand ye," he said, with a sigh of resignation, "the noise
o' the thing has been such that there's no evil men haven't thought of
me, or madness of her. Ye think the living creature ye saw rise from the
coffin was, maybe, the dead man's daughter?"

"I think it was much too big for a woman."

"Oh, as to that, she was a good height." Perhaps, with involuntary
thought of what might have been, he drew himself up to his full stature
as he said, "A grand height for a woman; but as to this idea of yours,
I'll not say ye're insulting her by it, though! that's true too; but
I've had the same notion; and now I'll tell ye something. She was not
mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order. Was that the act of
a maniac? and if she wasn't mad, clean out of her wits, would she have
done such a thing as ye're thinking of?"

"No"--thoughtfully--"I should think not."

"And, furthermore; if she had wished to do it, where is it she could
have laid him? D'ye think I haven't looked the ground over? There's no
place where she could have buried him, and to take him to the lake was
beyond her strength." There was nothing of the everyday irascibility
about his voice; the patience of a great grief was upon him, as he
argued away the gross suspicion.

"That settles it." Trenholme said this willingly enough.

"Yes, it settles it; for if there was a place where the earth was loose
I dug with my own hands down to the very rock, and neither man nor woman
lay under it."

Trenholme was affected; he again renounced his suspicion.

"And now I've told ye that," said Bates, "I'll tell ye something else,
for it's right ye should know that when the spring comes it'll not be in
my power to help ye with the logs--not if we should lose the flood and
have to let 'em lie till next year--for when the snow passes, I must be
on the hills seeking her." (He had put a brown, bony hand to shade his
eyes, and from out its shade he looked.) "There were many to help me
seek her alive; I'll take none wi' me when I go to give her burial."

The other saddened; The weary length and uncertainty of such a search,
and its dismal purpose, came to him.

"You've no assurance that she hasn't drowned herself in the lake here,"
he cried, remonstrating.

"But I have that; and as ye'll be naturally concerned at me leaving the
logs, I'll tell ye what it is, if ye'll give me your word as an honest
man that ye'll not repeat it at any time or place whatsoever."

He looked so like a man seeking courage to confess some secret sin that
Trenholme drew back.

"I'll not _tell_, but--"

Bates took no heed. "My aunt," he began, "had money laid by; she had ten
English sovereigns she liked to keep by her--women often do. There was
no one but me and Sissy knew where it was; and she took them with her.
By that I know she was making for the railway, and--" His voice grew
unsteady as he brought his hand down; there was a look of far-off vision
in his eyes, as though he saw the thing of which he spoke. "Ay, she's
lying now somewhere on the hills, where she would be beaten down by the
snow before she reached a road."

Trenholme was thinking of the sadness of it all, forgetting to wonder
even why he had been told not to repeat this last, when he found Bates
was regarding his silence with angry suspicion.

"It wasn't stealing," he said irritably; "she knew she might have them
if she wanted." It was as though he were giving a shuffling excuse for
some fault of his own and felt its weakness.

The young man, taken by surprise, said mechanically, "Would Miss Bates
have given them to her?" He had fallen into the habit of referring to
the childish old woman with, all due form, for he saw Bates liked it.

"Hoots! What are you saying, man? Would ye have had the lassie leave the
burden on my mind that she'd gone out of her father's house penniless?
'Twas the one kindness she did me to take the gold."




CHAPTER VI.


One evening Alec Trenholme sat down to write to his brother. Bates had
urged him to write, and, after a due interval, of his own accord he
wrote. The urging and the writing had a certain relation of cause and
effect, but the writer did not think so. Also, the letter he wrote was
very different from the document of penitence and recantation that Bates
had advised, and now supposed him to be writing.

He gave a brief account of what he had done before he accepted the post
of station-master at Turrifs Station, and then,

"I liked it well enough," he wrote, "until one night a queer thing
happened. As evening came on, a man drove up bringing a coffin
to be sent by train to the next village for burial. When I was left
alone with the thing, the man inside got up--he really did, I saw him.
I shut him in and ran to fetch the carter, but couldn't catch him.
When I came back, the man had got out and ran into the wood.
They had lined the box with a white bed-quilt, and we found that
some miles away in the bush the next day, but we never found the
man; and the queer thing is that there were two men and a girl who
seem to have been quite certain he was dead. One of them, a very
intelligent fellow that I am staying with now, thinks the carter must
have played some trick on the way; but I hardly believe that myself,
from the way the carter acted. I think he spoke the truth; he said
he had been alone on the road all day, and had been scared out of his
wits by hearing the man turn in the coffin. He seemed well frightened,
too. Of course, if this is true, the man could not really have
been dead; but I'm not trying to give an explanation; I'm just telling
you what occurred. Well, things went on quietly enough for
another month, and on the last night of the old year the place was
snowed up--tracks, roads, everything--and at midnight an old man
came about who answered to the description I had of the dead man,
clothes and all, for it seems they were burying him in his clothes.
He was rather deaf, and blind I think, though I'm not sure, and he
seemed to be wandering in his mind somehow; but he was a fine,
powerful fellow--reminded me a little of father--and the pathetic
thing about it was that he had got the idea into his head--"

Here Alec stopped, and, holding the pen idly in his hand, sat lost in
thought. So wistful did he look, so wrapt, that Bates, glancing
furtively at him, thought the letter had raised associations of his home
and childhood, and took himself off to bed, hoping that the letter would
be more brotherly if the writer was left alone. But when Alec put pen to
paper again he only wrote:--

"Well, I don't know that it matters what he had got into his head;
it hadn't anything to do with whether he was Cameron (the name of the
man supposed dead) or not. I could not get a word out of him as to who
he was or where he came from. I did all I could to get him to come in
and have food and get warmed; but though I went after him and stood with
him a long while, I didn't succeed. He was as strong as a giant. It was
awfully solemn to see an old man like that wandering bareheaded in the
snow at night, so far from any human being. I was forced to leave him,
for the engine came clearing the track. I got some men to come after him
with me, but he was gone, and we never saw him again. I stayed on there
ten days, trying to hear something of him, and after that I came here to
try my hand at lumbering. The owner of this place here was terribly cut
up about the affair. It was he who started the coffin I told you of, and
he's been left quite alone because this tale frightened men from coming
to work for him in the winter as usual. I have a very comfortable berth
here. I think there must have been something curious--a streak of some
kind--in the dead man's family; his only daughter went off from here in
a rage a few days after his death, and as the snow came at once, she is
supposed to have perished in the drifts on the hills. Our logs have to
be floated down the small river here at the spring flood, and this man,
Bates, is determined to look for the lost girl at the same time. I'll
stay and see him through the spring. Very likely I shall look in on you
in summer."

Alec Trenholme went to bed not a little sleepy, but satisfied that he
had given a clear account of the greater part of what had befallen him.

The next day he tramped as far as the railway to post the letter.

When Principal Trenholme received this letter he was standing in his
library, holding an interview with some of his elder pupils. He had a
pleasant manner with boys; his rule was to make friends with them as
much as possible; and if he was not the darling of their hearts, he was
as dear to them as a pedagogue ever is to a class under his authority.
When he saw Alec's letter, his heart within him leaped with hope and
quailed with fear. It is only a few times during his life that a man
regards a letter in this way, and usually after long suspense on a
subject which looms large in his estimate of things. When he could
disengage himself, he tore it open, and the first question with which
he scanned it concerned Alec only--was he in trouble? had he carried out
his threat of evil-doing? or was it well with him?

Robert Trenholme was not now merely of the stuff of which men of the
world are made. Could we but know it, a man's mind probably bears to his
religion no very different relation from what his body bears; his creed,
opinions, and sentiments are more nearly allied to what St. Paul calls
"the flesh" than they are to the hidden life of the man, with which God
deals. To the inner spring of Robert Trenholme's life God had access, so
that his creed, and the law of temperance in him, had, not perfection,
but vitality; and the same vitality, now permitted, now refused, by
unseen inlets flowed into all he did and was, and his estimate of things
was changed. He, in subtle selfishness, did much, almost all he could,
to check and interrupt the incoming life, although indeed he prayed, and
often supposed his most ardent desire was, to obtain it. Such is the
average man of faith; such was Robert Trenholme--a better thing, truly,
than a mere man, but not outwardly or inwardly so consistent.

The great fear he had when he opened this letter was that he had caused
his brother to stumble; the great hope, that, because of his prayers,
Heaven would grant it should not be so; but when, on the first hasty
glance over the pages, he discovered that Alec was well, and was
apparently amusing himself in a harmless way, that fear and hope
instantly glided into the background; he hardly knew that they had both
been strong, so faded did they look in the light of the commonplace
certainty.

The next question that pressed assumed an air of paramount importance.
He had asked Alec to enter some honourable mercantile profession. He had
pressed this in the first interview, when the hot-tempered young man had
left him in a rage. He had argued the point in subsequent letters; he
had even offered his own share of their inheritance as additional
capital. He felt that he deserved an answer to this offer, and believed
that his happiness depended upon Alec's acceding to the proposed change
of his life-plan. His mind full of this secondary subject, he perused
the sheets of the letter with singular impatience and distaste. Any man
might, in the most favourable circumstances, have been excused for
experiencing impatience at having so wild a tale foisted in brief
confusion upon his credulity; in the mood of his present circumstance
the elder Trenholme refolded the letter, using within himself the
strongest language in his vocabulary.

Robert Trenholme was not a happy man just now. Since he had last seen
Alec a change had come to him which made this matter of the other's
calling of warmer interest than it had been. Then his early love for
Sophia Rexford had been a memory and a far, half-formed hope; now it had
been roused again to be a true, steady flame, an ever-present influence.
His one desire now was to win her affection. He would not be afraid then
to tell her all that there was to tell of himself, and let her love
decide. He did not feel that he should wrong her in this. At present he
had everything to give, she everything to receive, except the possession
of gentle blood, which would apparently be her only dowry. The girl he
could not once have dared to address was now working servantless in her
father's kitchen; he knew that it was no light drudgery; and he could
offer her a comparatively luxurious home, and a name that had attracted
to itself no small honour. He had a nice appreciation for what is called
position, and the belief that their mutual positions had changed was
very sweet to him. All his mind expanded in this thought, as the nerves
of the opium-eater to the influence of his drug; it soothed him when he
was weary; it consoled him when he was vexed; it had come to him as an
unexpected, unsought good, like a blessing direct from heaven.

This was as things now were; but if his brother adhered to his purpose
of establishing himself in his business in the same country, that would
make a difference--a difference that it was hard, perhaps, for a
thoughtful man to put into words, but which was still harder to wipe
away by any sophistry of words. Robert Trenholme may have been wise, or
he may have been foolish, but he estimated this difference as great.
Should Alec persist in this thing, it would, in the first place,
endanger the success of his school, or alter his relation to that
school; in the second, it would make him more unworthy in the eyes of
all Sophia's well-born relatives. While he remained in suspense,
therefore, he was too honourable to seek to entangle her affections by
the small arts that are used for such purposes; for if the worst came,
he felt that he would be too proud to ask her to be his wife, or, if
love should overcome pride, and he should still sue for what he loved
better than life, he must do so before he sought her heart--not after;
he must lay his cause before the tribunal of Sophia's wit before she had
let go her heart--a thing that he, being what he was, had not courage to
do.

He was not "living a lie" (as his brother had said) any more than every
man does who allows his mind to dwell on the truth of what pleases him
more than on disagreeable truth. The fact that he was, by a distant tie
of consanguinity, related to a gentleman of some county position in
England was just as true, and to Trenholme's mind more largely true,
than the fact of his father's occupation. Yet he had never made this a
boast; he had never voluntarily stated the pleasant truth to any one to
whom he had not also told the unpleasant; and where he had kept silence
concerning the latter, he had done so by the advice of good men, and
with excuse concerning his professional influence. Yet, some way, he was
not sufficiently satisfied with all this to have courage to bring it
before Miss Rexford, nor yet was he prepared (and here was his worldly
disadvantage) to sacrifice his conscience to success. He would not ask
his brother to change, except in so far as he could urge that brother's
duty and advantage; he would not say to him, "Do this for my sake"; nor
yet would he say, "Go, then, to the other side of the world"; nor yet,
"You shall be no longer my brother."

Robert Trenholme was bearing a haunted life. The ghost was fantastic
one, truly--that of a butcher's shop; but it was a very real haunting.




CHAPTER VII.


The Rexford family was without a servant. Eliza, the girl they had
brought with them from Quebec, had gone to a situation at the Chellaston
hotel. The proprietor and manager of that large building, having become
lame with rheumatism, had been sorely in need of a lieutenant, or
housekeeper, and had chosen one with that shrewdness which had ever been
his business capital. His choice had fallen on Eliza and she had
accepted the place.

When Robert Trenholme heard of this arrangement he was concerned,
knowing how difficult servants were to procure. He took occasion to
speak to Miss Rexford on the subject, expressing sympathy with her and
strong censure of Eliza.

"Indeed I am not sure but that she has done right," said Sophia.

"You surprise me very much. I thought you made somewhat of a companion
of her."

"I do; and that is why, after hearing what she has to say about it, I
think she has done right. She has abilities, and this is the only
opening in sight in which she can exercise them."

"I should think"--sternly--"that these abilities were better
unexercised."

"That is probably because you haven't the least idea what it is to have
energies and faculties for which you have no scope"--this archly.

"But I should think the risk of learning pert manners--"

"That is the way men always argue about women. I tell you there is no
such risk for an energetic, clever girl as to place her where the rust
of unexercised faculties will eat into her soul. It is just because so
many girls have to undergo this risk, and cannot do it safely, that the
world is so full of women that are captious or morbid or silly. Boys
treated in the same way would turn out as badly."

"But there is scope for all the highest faculties of a woman's nature in
such a household as yours," cried he.

"Since you say so"--politely--"I am bound to believe it."

"No, but really--do you mean to say you don't think so?"

"You have just expressed yourself so positively that I am curious to
know how you came by your knowledge, first, as to Eliza's faculties, and
secondly, as to the scope for them in our house."

"It is unkind of you to laugh at me when I am only a humble enquirer
after truth."

"Having expressed yourself thus modestly--"

"Nay, but I only said what I would have said about any girl in any such
family."

"And you only said it with that simplicity of certainty which every man
would have felt on the same subject."

"I cry a truce; I plead for mercy. Let us have out the traits of Eliza's
character separately, and examine the scope in detail."

"To begin with, she has wonderful foresight; her power to plan the work
of the house so as to get it done as easily as possible often surprises
me. Now, of what use is this faculty in the kingdom of my step-mother,
who always acts on the last impulse, and upsets every one's plans
without even observing them? She has great executive ability, too; but
what use is it when, as soon as she gets interested in the
accomplishment of something, my mother cries, 'Come, Eliza, all work
and no play makes Jack a dull boy; go and romp with the children!' Then,
too, she has plenty of resource; but of what use is that, when the thing
she sees to be best in an emergency is seldom the thing that is done?
The hotel-keeper is more observing than you; he has noticed that Eliza
is no ordinary manager, and offered her high wages."

"You know, of course, what you are talking about," said Trenholme,
feelingly, for he had no doubt that her sympathy with Eliza had arisen
out of the pains of her own experience; "but in your house there is
surely boundless room for humble, loving service; and how much better
this girl would be if she could set aside her cleverness to perform such
service." He did not add, "as you have done," but there was that in his
voice which implied it. He went on: "I do not yet allow that you have
disproved my statement, for I said that where she was she had scope for
her _highest_ faculties."

"I suppose it is admitted that the highest faculty of man is worship,"
remarked Sophia, suggesting that he was not speaking to the point; "but
that is no reason why a boy with a head for figures should be made a
farmer, or that a young woman with special ability should remain a
maid-of-all-work."

"And what of the affections--love for children, and for other women
better than herself? A girl who has such privileges as this girl had
with you has a far better chance of doing well than in a public hotel,
even if that were a safe place for her."

Possibly Sophia thought her companion showed too great sensibility
concerning Eliza's privileges, for she did not take notice of any but
the last part of his sentence.

"It is a safe place for her; for she is able to take care of herself
anywhere, if she chooses; and if she doesn't choose, no place is safe.
Besides, you know, the place is a boarding-house really, rather than an
hotel."

"I am not so surprised at the view _you_ take of it, for you will do
more than any one else to supply her place."

This, Trenholme's feeling prophecy, was quite true. Sophia did do more
of Eliza's work than any one. She spared her younger sisters because she
wanted them to be happy.

In spite of this, however, Sophia was not so much in need of some one's
sympathy as were those younger girls, who had less work to do. A large
element in happiness is the satisfaction of one's craving for romance.
Now, there are three eras of romance in human life. The first is
childhood, when, even if the mind is not filled with fictitious fairy
tales which clothe nature, life is itself a fairy tale, a journey
through an unexplored region, an enterprise full of effort and wonder,
big with hope, an endless expectation, to which trivial realisations
seem large. It was in this era that the younger Rexford children, up to
Winifred, still lived; they built snow-men, half-expecting, when they
finished them in the gloaming, that the thing of their creation would
turn and pursue them; they learned to guide toboggans with a trailing
toe, and half dreamed that their steeds were alive when they felt them
bound and strain, so perfectly did they respond to the rider's will.
Sophia, again, had reached the third epoch of romance, when, at a
certain age, people make the discovery of the wondrous loveliness in the
face of the Lady Duty, and, putting a hand in hers, go onward, thinking
nothing hard because of her beauty. But it is admitted by all that there
is often a stage between these two, when all the romance of life is
summed up in the hackneyed word "love." The pretty girls who were
nicknamed Blue and Red had outgrown childhood, and they saw no
particular charm in work; they were very dull, and scarce knew why,
except that they half envied Eliza, who had gone to the hotel, and who,
it was well known, had a suitor in the person of Mr. Cyril Harkness, the
Philadelphian dentist.

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