What Necessity Knows by Lily Dougall (web ebook reader TXT) 📕

Sissy"--feebly--"give over."

But the girl went on crying, not loudly or passionately, but with no sign of discontinuance, as she stood there, large and miserable, before him. He settled his shoulders obstinately against the wood pile, thinking to wait till she should speak or make some further sign. Nothing but strength of will kept him in his place, for he would gladly have fled from her. He had now less guidance than before to what was passing in her mind, for her face was more hidden from his sight as the light of the sinking sun focussed more exclusively in the fields of western sky behind her.

Then the sun went down behind the rugged hills of the lake's other shore; and, as it sank below their sharp outlines, their sides, which had been clear and green, became dim and purple; the blue went out of the waters of the lake, they became the hue of steel touched with iridescence of gold; and above the hills, vapour that had before been almost invisible in the sky, now hung in upright layers of purple mist, blossoming into primrose yellow on the lower edges. A few moments more and grey bloom, such as one sees on purple fruit, was on these vast hangings of cloud that grouped themselves more largely, and gold flames burned on their fringes. Behind them there were great empty reaches of lambent blue, and on the sharp edge of the shadowed hills there was a line of fire.

It produced in Bates unthinking irritation that Nature should quietly go on outspreading her evening magnificence in face of his discomfort. In ordinal light or darkness one accepts the annoyances of life as coming all in the day's work; but Nature has her sublime moments in which, if the sensitive mind may not yield itself to her delight, it is forced into extreme antagonism, either to her or to that which withholds from joining in her ecstasy. Bates was a man sensitive to many forces, the response to which within him was not openly acknowledged to himself. He was familiar with the magnificence of sunsets in this region, but his mind was not dulled to the marvel of the coloured glory in which the daylight so often culminated.

He looked off at the western sky, at first chiefly conscious of the unhappy girl who stood in front of him and irritated by that intervening shape; but, as his vision wandered along the vast reaches of illimitable clouds and the glorious gulfs of sky, his mind yielded itself the rather to the beauty and light. More dusky grew the purple of the upper mists whose upright layers, like league-long wings of softest feather held edge downward to the earth, ever changed in form without apparent movement. More sparkling glowed the gold upon their edges. The sky beneath the cloud was now like emerald. The soft darkness of purple slate was on the hills. The lake took on a darker shade, and daylight began to fade from the upper blue.

It was only perhaps a moment--one of those moments for which time has no measurement--that the soul of this man had gone out of him, as it were, into the vastness of the sunset; and when he recalled it his situation took on for him a somewhat different aspect. He experienced something of that temporary relief from personal responsibility that moments of religious sentiment often give to minds that are unaccustomed to religion. He had been free for the time to disport himself in something infinitely larger and wider than his little world, and he took up his duty at the point at which he had left it with something of this sense of freedom lingering with him.

He was a good man--that is, a man whose face would have made it clear to any true observer that he habitually did the right in contradistinction to the wrong. He was, moreover, religious, and would not have been likely to fall into any delusion of mere sentiment in the region of religious emotion. But that which deludes a man commonly comes through a safe channel. As a matter of fact, the excitement which the delight of the eye had produced in him was a perfectly wholesome feeling, but the largeness of heart it gave him at that moment was unfortunate.

The girl stood just as before, ungainly and without power of expression because undeveloped, but excitation of thought made what she might become apparent to him in that which she was. He became more generous towards her, more loving.

"Don't greet, that's a good lassie," he said soothingly. "There's truth in what ye have said--that it's dull for ye here because ye have nothing to look ahead to. Well, I'll tell ye what I didn't mean to tell ye while ye are so young--when ye're older, if ye're a good lassie and go on learning your lessons as ye have been doing, I will ask ye to marry me, and then (we hope of course to get more beforehand wi' money as years go) ye will have more interest and--"

"Marry!" interrupted the girl, not strongly, but speaking in faint wonder, as if echoing a word she did not quite understand.

"Yes," he went on with great kindliness, "I talked it over with your father before he went, and he was pleased. I told him that, in a year or two, if he liked it, I would marry ye--it's only if ye _like_, of course; and ye'd better not think about it now, for ye're too young."

"Marry me!" This time the exclamation came from her with a force that was appalling to him. The coarse handkerchief which she had been holding to her eyes was withdrawn, and with lips and eyes open she exclaimed again: "Marry me! _You_!"

It was remarkable how this man, who so far was using, and through long years had always used, only the tone of mentor, now suddenly began to try to justify himself with almost childlike timidity.

"Your father and I didn't know of any one else hereabouts that would suit, and of course we knew ye would naturally be disappointed if ye didn't marry." He went on muttering various things about the convenience of such an arrangement.

She listened to nothing more than his first sentence, and began to move away from him slowly a few steps backwards; then, perceiving that she had come to the brink of the level ground, she turned and suddenly stretched out her arm with almost frantic longing toward the cold, grey lake and the dark hills behind, where the fires of the west still struggled with the encroaching November night.

As she turned there was light enough for him to see how bright the burning colour of her hair was--bright as the burning copper glow on the lower feathers of those great shadowy wings of cloud--the wings of night that were enfolding the dying day. Some idea, gathered indefinitely from both the fierceness of her gesture and his transient observation of the colour of her hair, suggested to him that he had trodden on the sacred ground of a passionate heart.

Poor man! He would have been only too glad just then to have effaced his foot-prints if he had had the least idea how to do it. The small shawl she wore fell from her unnoticed as she went quickly into the house. He picked it up, and folded it awkwardly, but with meditative care. It was a square of orange-coloured merino, such as pedlars who deal with the squaws always carry, an ordinary thing for a settler's child to possess. As he held it, Bates felt compunction that it was not something finer and to his idea prettier, for he did not like the colour. He decided that he would purchase something better for her as soon as possible. He followed her into the house.


CHAPTER III.

Night, black and cold, settled over the house that had that day for the first time been visited by death. Besides the dead man, there were now three people to sleep in it: an old woman, whose failing brain had little of intelligence left, except such as showed itself in the everyday habits of a long and orderly life; the young girl, whose mind slow by nature in reaching maturity and retarded by the monotony of her life, had not yet gained the power of realising its own deeper thoughts, still less of explaining them to another; and this man, Bates, who, being by natural constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain of the sight of illness and death which he had just undergone, was not in the best condition to resist the morbid influences of unhappy companionship.

The girl shed tears as she moved about sullenly. She would not speak to Bates, and he did not in the least understand that, sullen as she was, her speechlessness did not result from that, but from inability to reduce to any form the chaotic emotions within her, or to find any expression which might represent her distress. He could not realise that the childish mind that had power to converse for trivial things had, as yet, no word for the not-trivial; that the blind womanly emotion on which he had trodden had as yet no counterpart in womanly thought, which might have formed excuses for his conduct, or at least have comprehended its simplicity. He only felt uneasily that her former cause of contention with him, her determination, sudden as her father's death, to leave the only home she possessed, was now enforced by her antagonism to the suggestion he had made of a future marriage, and he felt increasing annoyance that it should be so. Naturally enough, a deep undercurrent of vexation was settling in his mind towards her for feeling that antagonism, but he was vexed also with himself for having suggested the fresh source of contest just now to complicate the issue between them as to whether she should remain where she was, at any rate for the present. Remain she must; he was clear upon that point. The form of his religious theories, long held in comparative isolation from mankind, convinced him, whether truly or not, that humanity was a very bad thing; she should not leave his protection, and he was considerate enough to desire that, when the time came for launching the boat which was to take her father's body to burial, he should not need to detain her by force.

The girl set an ill-cooked supper before Bates and the hired man, and would not herself eat. As Bates sat at his supper he felt drearily that his position was hard; and, being a man whose training disposed him to vaguely look for the cause of trial in sin, wondered what he had done that it had thus befallen him. His memory reverted to the time when, on an emigrant ship, he had made friends with the man Cameron who that day had died, and they had agreed to choose their place and cast in their lot together. It had been part of the agreement that the aunt who accompanied Bates should do the woman's work of the new home until she was too old, and that Cameron's child should do it when she was old enough.

The girl was a little fat thing then, wearing a red hood. Bates, uneasy in his mind both as to his offer of marriage and her resentment, asked himself if he was to blame that he had begun by being kind to her then, that he had played with her upon the ship's deck, that on their land journey he had often carried her in his arms, or that, in the years of the hard isolated