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

minutes. The railway-men went back at a quick pace. Trenholme went with them, insisting only that they should look at the track of the stranger's snow-shoes, and admit that it was not his own track.

The French engineer was sufficiently superstitious to lend a half belief to the idea that the place was haunted, and that was his reason for haste. The electrician was only sorry that so much time had been purely wasted; that was his reason. He was a middle-aged man, spare, quick, and impatient, but he looked at Alec Trenholme in the light of the engine lamp, when they came up to it, with some kindly interest.

"I say," he went on again, "don't you go on staying here alone--a good-looking fellow like you. You don't look to me like a chap to have fancies if you weren't mewed up alone."

As Trenholme saw the car carried from him, saw the faces and forms of the men who stood at its door disappear in the darkness, and watched the red light at its back move slowly on, leaving a lengthening road of black rails behind it, he felt more mortified at the thought of the telegraph man's compassion than he cared to own, even to himself.

He went out again, and hunted with a lantern till he found a track leading far into the wood in the opposite direction from his house. This, then, was the way the old man had gone. He followed the track for a mile, but never came within sight or sound of the man who made it.

At last it joined the railway line, and where the snow was rubbed smooth he could not trace it. Probably the old man had taken off his snow-shoes here, and his light moccasins had left no mark that could be seen in the night.


CHAPTER III.

For two nights after that Alec Trenholme kept his lamp lit all night, placing it in his window so that all the light that could struggle through the frosted panes should cast an inviting ray into the night. He did this in the hope that the old man might still be wandering in the neighbourhood; but it was soon ascertained that this was not the case; the stranger had been seen by no one else in Turrifs Settlement. Though it was clear, from reports that came, that he was the same who had visited other villages and been accepted as the missing Cameron, nothing more was heard of him, and it seemed that he had gone now off the lines of regular communication--unless, indeed, he had the power of appearing and disappearing at will, which was the popular view of his case. Turrifs Station had become notorious. Trenholme received jeers and gibes even by telegraph from neighbouring stations. He had given account to no one of the midnight visit, but inventive curiosity had supplied details of a truly wonderful nature. It was not on this account that he gave up his situation on the line, but because a new impulse had seized him, and he had no particular reason for remaining. He waited till a new caretaker arrived from the headquarters of the railway, and then set forth from the station the following morning on foot.

Turrif had been laid up with some complaint for a week or two, and Alec went to say good-bye to him. The roads had been opened up again. He had his snow-shoes on his back, and some clothes in a small pack.

Turrif's wife opened the door, and Trenholme disburdened himself and went and sat by the bed. The little children were about, as usual, in blue gowns; he had made friends in the house since his first supper there, so they stood near now, and laughed at him a great deal without being afraid. In the long large wooden room, the mother and eldest girl pursued the housework of the morning tranquilly. Turrif lay upon a bed in one corner. The baby's cradle, a brown box on rockers, was close to the bed, and when the child stirred the father put out his hand and rocked it. The child's head was quite covered with the clothes, so that Trenholme wondered how it could breathe. He sat by the foot of the bed, and Turrif talked to him in his slow English.

"You are wise to go--a young man and genteel-man like you."

"I know you think I was a fool to take the place, but a man might as well earn his bread-and-butter while he is looking round the country."

"You have looked round at this bit of country for two months"--with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see in two days."

"You'll think me a greater fool when you know where I am going."

"I hope" (Turrif spoke with a shade of greater gravity on his placid face)--"I hope sat you are going to some city where sere is money to be made, and where sere is ladies and other genteel-men like you."

"I knew you would think me mad. I'm going to Bates's clearing to cut down his trees."

"Why?" The word came with a certain authority.

"You would almost be justified in writing to the authorities to lock me up in an asylum, wouldn't you? But just consider what an awful condition of loneliness that poor wretch must be in by this time. You think I've been more alone than's good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage. He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter's lumbering for want of a man. Now, there's a fix, if you will, where I say a man is to be pitied."

"Yes," said Turrif, gravely, "it is sad; but sat is _hees_ trouble."

"Look here: he's not thirty miles away, and you and I know that if he isn't fit to cut his throat by this time it isn't for want of trouble to make him, and you say that that state of things ought to be only his own affair?"

"Eh?"

"Well, I say that you and I, or at least I, have something to do with it. You know very well I might go round here for miles, and offer a hundred pounds, and I couldn't get a single man to go and work for Bates; they're all scared. Well, if they're scared of a ghost, let them stay away; but _I'm_ not frightened, and I suppose I could learn to chop down trees as well as any of them. He's offered good wages; I can take his wages and do his work, and save him from turning into a blethering idiot."

Probably, in his heat to argue, he had spoken too quickly for the Frenchman to take in all his words. That his drift was understood and pondered on was evident from the slow answer.

"It would be good for Monsieur Bates, but poor for you."

"I'm not going to turn my back on this country and leave the fellow in that pickle. I should feel as if his blood were on my head."

"Since?"

"How since?"

"Since what day did you have his care on you? Last time you came you did not mean sen to help him." It was true, but so strongly did Trenholme see his point that he had not realised how new was the present aspect of the case to him.

"Well," said he, meaning that this was not a matter of importance.

"But why?" said Turrif again.

"Oh, I don't know." Trenholme looked down at his moccasined feet. "I thought" (he gave a laugh as if he were ashamed) "I'd turn over a new leaf this year, and do something that's more worth doing. I was well enough off here so far as looking out for myself was concerned."

Turrif looked at him with kind and serious disapproval.

"And when will you begin to live se life of a _man_?"

"How do you mean--'a man'?"

"When will you make money and get married?"

"Do you think time is all wasted when one isn't making money and getting married?"

"For a _boy_, no; for a _man_, yes."

Trenholme rose. "Good-bye, and thank you for all your hospitality," said he. "I'll come back in spring and tell you what I'm going to do next."

He was moving out, when he looked again at the little shrine in the middle of the wall, the picture of the Virgin, and, below, the little altar shelf, with its hideous paper roses. He looked back as it caught his eye, arrested, surprised, by a difference of feeling in him towards it.

Noticing the direction of Trenholme's glance, the Frenchman crossed himself.

It was a day of such glory as is only seen amid Northern snowfields. Alec Trenholme looked up into the sky, and the blue of other skies that he remembered faded beside it, as the blue of violets fades beside the blue of gentian flowers. There was no cloud, no hint of vapour; the sky, as one looked for it, was not there, but it was as if the sight leaped through the sunlit ether, so clear it was, and saw the dark blue gulfs of space that were beyond the reach of the sun's lighting. The earth was not beyond the reach of the sunlight, and in all that wide white land, in mile after mile of fields, of softened hillock and buried hollow, there was not a frozen crystal that did not thrill to its centre with the sunlight and throw it back in a soft glow of myriad rays.

Trenholme retraced his steps on the road from Turrif's door to a point nearer his old railway-station; then he put on his snow-shoes and set out for the gap in the hills that led to the Bates and Cameron clearing. As he mounted the soft snow that was heaped by the roadside and struck out across the fields, his heart bounded with a sense of power and freedom, such as a man might have who found means to walk upon the ocean. Little need had he of map or guide to mark the turning or crossing of his road; the gap in the hills was clear to his eyes fifteen miles away; the world was white, and he strode across it. When the earth is made up of pearl-dust and sunshine, and the air is pure as the air of heaven, the heart of man loses all sense of effort, and action is as spontaneous as breath itself. Trenholme was half-way to the hills before he felt that he had begun his day's journey.

When he got past the unbroken snow of the farm lands and the blueberry flats, the white surface was broken by the tops of brushwood. He did not take the line of the straight corduroy road; it was more free and exciting to make a meandering track wherever the snow lay sheer over a chain of frozen pools that intersected the thickets. There was no perceptible heat in the rays the sun poured down, but the light was so great that where the delicate skeletons of the young trees were massed together it was a relief to let the eye rest upon them.

That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce