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

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."