The Zeit-Geist by Lily Dougall (important of reading books txt) 📕

actions the same to Christa as another? and was she content to forget all their own shame and all her father's wretched plight if she could only have a few pleasures for herself? It was exactly the passive state that she had desired to evoke in Christa; but there are many spectres that come to our call and then appal us with their presence!

Ann went on with her work. She was not in the habit of indulging herself in moods or reveries; still, within her grew a silent disapproval of Christa. She felt herself superior to her. After a while another thought came upon her with unexpected force. Christa's motive for taking to the religious life was only self-interest; her own motive was the same; and was not that the motive which she really supposed hitherto to actuate all religious people? Had she not, for instance, been fully convinced that self-interest was the sum and substance of Bart Toyner's religion? Now between Bart Toyner and Christa and herself she felt that a great gulf was fixed.

Well, she did not know; she did not understand; she was not at all sure that she wanted to understand anything more about Bart Toyner and all the complex considerations about life which the thought of him seemed to arouse in her. She felt that the best way of ridding herself of uncomfortable thoughts about him was to be busy in performing all that he could reasonably require at her hands. It is just in the same way that many people rid themselves of thoughts about God.

All that long day, while the sunlight fell pink through the haze, Ann worked at renovating her own life and Christa's. She took Christa and went to some girls of their acquaintance, and presented them with all the feathers, furbelows, and artificials which she and Christa possessed. She cooked some of the viands which she had advertised for sale, and prepared all her small stock of kitchen utensils for the new avocation. It was a long hard day's work, and before it was over the village was ringing with the news of all this change. The minister had already called on Ann and Christa, saying suitable things concerning their father's terrible crime and their own sad position. When he was gone Christa laughed.


CHAPTER XII.

The sweet-scented smoke of the distant forest fires had diffused itself all day in the atmosphere more and more palpably. It was not a gloomy effect, and familiar to eyes accustomed to the Canadian August. All the sunbeams were very pink, and they fell flickering among the shadows of the pear tree upon Markham's grey wooden house, upon the path and the ragged green in front. Ann had pleasant associations with these pink beams because they told of fine weather. Smoke will not lie thus in an atmosphere that is molested with any currents of wind that might bring cloud or storm. On the whole Ann had spent the day happily, for fair weather has much to do with happiness; but when that unusual flood of blood-red light came at sunset, giving an unearthly look to a land which was well enough accustomed to bright sunsets of a more ordinary sort, Ann's courage and good humour failed her; she yielded to the common influence of marvels and felt afraid.

What had she done, and what was she going to do? She was playing with religion; and religion, if it was nothing more, was something which had made Bart Toyner look at her with such a strange smile of selfless hope and desire--hope that she would be something different from what she had been, desire that the best should come to her whatever was going to happen to him. That was the explanation of what had seemed inexplicable in his look (she felt glad to have worked it out at last); and if anything so strange as that were possible in Bart, what was the force with which she was playing? Would some judgment befall her?

The evening closed in. Christa went to bed to finish a yellow-backed novel. As it was the last she was to read for a long time, she thought she might as well enjoy it. Ann sat alone in the outer room. The night was very still. Christa went to sleep, but Ann continued to sit, stitching at the very plain garb that Christa was to don on the morrow, not so much because she needed to work as because she felt no need of sleep. The night being close and warm, her window, a small French casement, stood open. At a late hour, when passers upon the road were few, arrested by some sound, she knew not what, she lifted her head and looked through the open window intently, in the same way as we lift our eyes and look sometimes just because another, a stranger perhaps, has riveted his gaze upon us.

A moment more, and Ann saw some one come within the beams of her own lamp outside of the window; the figure crossed like a dark, silent shadow, but Ann thought she recognised Toyner. The outline of the clothes that he had worn when she had seen him last just about this hour on the previous night was unconsciously impressed upon her mind. A shudder of fear came over her, and then she was astonished at the fear; he might easily have done all that she had given him to do and returned by this time. Yet why did he pass the window in that ghostly fashion and show no sign of coming to the door? A moment or two that she sat seemed beaten out into the length and width of minutes by the throbbing of her nerves, usually so steady. She determined to steel herself against discomfort. If Toyner had done his work and come home and did not think it wise to visit her openly, what was there to alarm in that? Yet she remembered that Toyner had spoken of being away for some indefinite length of time. She had not understood why last night, and now it seemed even more hard to understand.

As she sewed she found herself looking up moment by moment at the window. It was not long before she saw the same figure there again, close now, and in the full light. Her hands dropped nerveless upon her knee; she sat gazing with strained whitened face. The outline of the clothes she associated with the thought of Toyner, but from under the dark hat her father's face looked at her. Not the face of a man she thought, but the face of a spirit, as white as if it were lifeless, as haggard as if it were dead, but with blazing life in the eyeballs and a line like red fire round their rims. In a moment it was gone again.

Ann started up possessed with the desire to prove the ghostly visitant material; passing through the door, she fled outside with her lamp. Whatever had been there had withdrawn itself more quickly than she had come to seek it.

She felt convinced now that her father was dead; she fell to imagining all the ways in which the tragic end might have come. No thought that came to her was satisfactory. What had Bart done? Why had his form seemed to her so inextricably confused with the form of her father at the moment of the apparition? The recognition of a man or his garments, although the result of observation, does not usually carry with it any consciousness of the details that we have observed; and she did not know now what it was that had made her think of Toyner so strongly.

The next morning, as the day was beginning to wear on, one of the Fentown men put his head into Ann's door.

"Do you happen to know where Toyner is?" he asked.

She gave a negative, only to be obliged to repeat it to several questions in quick succession.

"Seen him this morning?"

"Seen him last night?"

"Happen to know where he would likely be?"

The growing feeling of distress in Ann's mind made the shake of her head more and more emphatic. She was of course an object of more or less pity to every one at that time, and the intruder made an explanation that had some tone of apology.

"Oh, well, I didn't know but as you might have happened to have seen him since he came back. His boat's there at the landing all right, but his mother's not seen him up to the house."

During the day Ann heard the same tale in several different forms. Toyner was one of those quiet men not often in request by his neighbours; and as he was known at present to have reason possibly for hidden movements in search of his quarry, there was not that hue and cry raised concerning the presence of the boat and the absence of the owner that would have been aroused in the case of some other; still, the interest in his whereabouts gradually grew, and Ann heard the talk about it. Within her own heart an unexpressed terror grew stronger and stronger. It was founded upon the sense of personal responsibility. She alone knew the secret mission upon which Toyner had left; she alone knew of the glimpse of her father which she had caught the night before, and she doubted now whether she had seen a spirit or visible man. What had happened in the dark hour in which Toyner and Markham had met, and which of them had brought back the boat? The misery of these questions grew to be greater than she could endure; but to confide her distress to any one was impossible. To do so might not only be to put her father's enemies upon his track, but it would be to confess Bart's unfaithfulness to his public duty; and in that curious revolution of feeling which so frequently comes about in hearts where it is least expected, Ann felt the latter would be the more intolerable woe of the two.

Then came another of those strange unearthly sunsets. Ann's mind was made up. Inactivity she could endure no longer. There was one explanation that appeared to her more reasonable than any other; that was, that Bart had wavered in his resolution to relieve Markham, that the latter had died upon the tree where he was hiding, and that Bart would not show himself for the present where Ann could see him. Ann did not believe in this explanation; but because of the apparition which she thought she had seen, because of the horrible nature of the fear it entailed, she determined that, come what would, she would go to that secret place which she alone knew and find out if her father had been taken from it or if any trace remained there to show what had really happened. It was when the sisters were again alone for the night that she first broke the silence of her fears.

"Christa, father came to the window last night, but went away again before I could catch him."

"Sure he would never show his face in this place, Ann. You must have been dreaming!"

"Well, I must try to find him. I tell you what I'm going to do. I've been along all the boats, and there's not one of them I could take without being heard except David Brown's canoe that is tied at the foot of his father's field. I could get that, and I expect to be back here long before it's light. If any one should come to the door asking for me, you say, like the other night,