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

way, and eyes too dazzled to see what otherwise they would have seen. In this plight he did not hesitate, but turned and ran after the two he had met, to ask his way, thinking, as he did so, that he must have already passed the lane.

With some effort he caught them up. They must have heard him coming, for their voices were silent as he approached. He asked for the lane to Cooper's Farm, which he had been told was the name of the house at the foot of the mountain path. They both hesitated in their walk. The man, who ought to have answered, seemed, for some reason, suddenly dumb. After waiting impatiently, the lady took upon herself to reply. She said they had not yet reached the turning to the farm. She remarked that they were going to the same place.

Then they went on again, and he, too, walked quickly, supposing that he could soon pass them and get in front. It is not the matter of a moment, however, to pass people who are walking at a rate of speed almost equal to one's own. He had the awkwardness of feeling, that, whether he would or no, he was obliged to intrude upon them. He noticed they were not walking near together; but when one is tramping and picking steps as best one can in mud that is hidden in darkness, it is, perhaps, more natural that two people on a wide road should give one another a wide berth. At any rate, for a minute all three were making their way through puddles and over rough places in silence. Then, when Alec thought he had got a few paces in advance, he heard the lady speak again, and of himself.

"Did you think you knew that man?"

There was no answer. Alec felt angry with her companion that he should dare to sulk so obviously. After a minute or two more of fast walking, she said again:

"I can't think where he has gone to. Do you see him anywhere?"

To this again there was no answer. Alec naturally went the quicker that he might get out of hearing. As he did so he wondered much that his fellow-travellers went so fast, or rather that the lady did, for she, although some way behind, seemed to keep very near to him.

On they went in silence for ten minutes more, when the lady again took up her reproachful theme. Her voice was quieter now, but amid the harmonious sounds of wind and river he still heard it distinctly. The clear enunciation of her words seemed to pierce through the baffling noises of the night as a ray of light pierces through darkness, albeit that there was excitement in her tones, and her speech was, interspersed with breathless pauses.

"I have been rude; but you insisted upon my rudeness, now you are offended by it. So be it--let me say something else! I don't much believe now in all the sentiment that used to seem so noble to me about forgetting oneself. No thoughtful person _can_ forget himself, and no candid person says he has done it. What we need is to think _more_ of ourselves--to think so much of ourselves that all aims but the highest are beneath us--are impossible to our own dignity. What we chiefly need is ambition."

She stopped to take breath. It seemed to Alec she came near enough to see him as she continued. He could think of nothing, however, but what she was saying. He felt instinctively that it was because of haste and some cause of excitement, not in spite of them, that this lady could speak as she now did.

"Christianity appeals to self-regard as the motive of our best action," she went on, giving out her words in short sentences, "so there must be a self-regard which is good--too good to degrade itself to worldly ends; too good even to be a part of that amalgam--the gold of unselfishness and the alloy of selfishness--which makes the _ordinary_ motive of the _ordinary_ good man."

Her voice seemed to vibrate with scorn on the emphasized words.

"If we desired to live nearer heaven--" she said, and then she stopped.

Alec turned perforce to tell her, what she must now perceive, that he was still close to them; but this impulse was checked by a sudden thought. Was she not addressing himself? Was there another man now with her?

He stopped, looked backward, listened. He was quite alone with the lady, who went past him now, only looking, as she walked, to see why he was tarrying. In his fierce young loyalty to her he took for granted, without question or proof, that her escort had deserted her in revenge for her disdain. He would willingly have gone back to fetch him up, but the impossibility of finding a man who did not wish to be found, the impossibility, as it seemed to him, of letting her go further alone, the boorishness of calling after her--all this constrained him to follow. He ran to make his communication gently, and, as he ran, courage to make it failed him. He thought of her as delicately accustomed to incessant protection. At the thought of letting her know that she was telling her thoughts to a stranger, that she was alone at such hour and place with him, his throat swelled. He hated to speak words that would be so hateful to her; and when he came by her side breathless, and she spoke to him again, he walked on, waiting till she should stop, trying to formulate what he had to say, listening and watching intently for some sign of the recreant. Again speaking as though she must unburden her mind, she turned into the lane. Over its fences he peered down the dark main road, but neither in flash nor interval could the other man be seen. He had not the slightest notion what the lady was saying now; lofty philosophy or practical sarcasm it might be, it was all lost in his exaggerated idea of what her fear and dismay would be when he spoke.

Before he had a chance to speak, however, he saw, in dark outline, the building of the farm to which he supposed her to be going. It would be a thousand times better to conduct her in silence to the door, which was now so near. To tell her before could serve no end, for even if she should wish to return to seek her late companion she could there obtain an escort. So, with feeling of guiltiness in the part he was acting, and in the surly silence he assumed, Alec let her lead up the lane she must know better than he. Her previous speeches, which he had followed so closely, were only remembered now to give food for conjecture as to who she might be and what relation she held to her late companion. The interest in his own journey and its extraordinary object were lost for the time in the excitement of his knight-errantry.

He was astonished to see that the house, as they neared it, showed no sign of life and light. The lady, whether inmate or guest, must surely be expected; but the very roofs of the house and huge barns seemed to droop in slumber, so black was the whole place and closely shut. Alec was looking out for the house gate in order to step forward and open it, when, to his utter surprise, he saw that the lady with haste passed it, and went on toward the hill.

He stopped with hand on the gate and called her.

"What is the matter?" she asked, checking her walk. "Are you ill? What is it?"

He supposed that his strange voice would tell her all, but, although she was evidently puzzled, to his further astonishment, she did not realise that he was a stranger.

"Why do you speak like that?" she asked. And she talked on rapidly about some waggon she expected to find at the foot of the path. She went on, in fact, as if unable to endure the loss of time; and he, thinking of the waggon and waggoner as a further point of safety for her, ran after. In a minute they both came out of the lane on a small common. Here were two horses tied under a tree and an open waggon with its shafts laid down.

"Call the man," she said.

To Alec's call a man came sleepily from a small barn that was near. He said he had brought about a dozen women in the waggon, and they had gone up the hill. Impatiently she demanded of him how long it was since they had started to walk, and heard it was about a quarter of an hour. She went on once more, with what seemed to Alec incredible speed. But this time he gave way to no further indecision. Where she had darted under the trees he followed in her path.

They were just under the covert of the first trees on a steep footpath when he stopped her, and above him she turned, listening. The scent of moss and fern and overhanging leaf was sweet. So perfect a woodland bower was the place, so delicate did the lady seem to his imagination, that he wished he could tell his concern for her alarm and readiness to devote himself to her cause. But when he saw her shrink from him, he could only stand awkwardly, tell her in a few clumsy words that he and the other man had changed places, he did not know how, and he had thought to take her to the farm.

"Your voice is very like his," she said, looking at him strangely.

But he now knew certainly, what for the last hour had seemed to him almost impossible, that in very truth the religious assembly was to take place that night; and the thought of it, and of the strange excitement with which others had gone before them on that same path took from Alec, and, he supposed, from the lady also, the power to give much consideration to their own strange encounter. When he had told her of the time he had seen old Cameron at prayer in the lone wintry fields, and how far he had just walked to see him again in the strange conditions of to-night, they climbed on together.


CHAPTER XXII.

There is nothing of which men take less heed than the infection of emotion, a thing as real as that mysterious influence which in some diseases leaps forth from one to another till all are in the same pain. With the exception, perhaps, of the infection of fear, which societies have learnt to dread by tragic experience, man still fondly supposes that his emotions are his own, that they must rise and fall within himself, and does not know that they can be taken in full tide from another and imparted again without decrease of force. May God send a healthful spirit to us all! for good or evil, we are part of one another.

There were a good many people who went up the mountain that night to find the enthusiasts, each with some purpose of interference and criticism. They went secure in their own sentiments, but with minds tickled into the belief that they were to see and hear some strange thing. They saw and heard not much, yet they did not remain wholly their own masters. Perhaps the idea that Cameron's assembly would be well worth seeing was gleaned partly from the lingering storm, for an approaching storm breeds in the mind