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

The sabbath quiet was everywhere. All the cows in the pasture came towards her, for it was milking time, and any one who came suggested to them the luxury of that process. Some followed her in slow and dubious fashion; some stopped before her on the path. Eliza did not even look at them, and when she went in among the young fir trees they left her alone.

It was not a thick wood; the evening sun shone freely between the clumps of young spruce. In an open glade an elm tree stood, stretching out branches sensitive to each breath of air, golden in the slant sunlight above the low dark firs. The roots of this tree were raised and dry. Eliza sat down on them. She could see between the young trees out to the side of the college houses and their exit to the road. She could see the road too: it was this she watched.


CHAPTER III.

Eliza sat still in her rough woodland chamber till the stray sunbeams had left its floor of moss and played only through the high open windows in the elm bough roof. She had seen the cows milked, and now heard the church bells ring. She looked intently through the fissures of the spruce shrub walls till at length she saw a light carriage drive away from the college grounds with the clergyman and his brother in it. She knew now that their house would be left almost empty. After waiting till the last church-going gig had passed on the road and the bells had stopped, she went into the college grounds by a back way, and on to the front of Trenholme's house.

As was common in the place, the front door yielded when the handle was turned. Eliza had no wish to summon the housekeeper. She stood in the inner hall and listened, that she might hear what rooms had inmates. From the kitchen came occasional clinking of cups and plates; the housekeeper had evidently not swerved from her regular work. With ears preternaturally acute, Eliza hearkened to the silence in the other rooms till some slight sound, she could hardly tell of what, led her upstairs to a certain door. She did not knock; she had no power to stand there waiting for a response; the primitive manners of the log house in which she had lived so long were upon her. She entered the room abruptly, roughly, as she would have entered the log house door.

In a long chair lay the man she sought. He was dressed in common ill-fitting clothes; he lay as only the very weak lie, head and limbs visibly resting on the support beneath them.

She crossed her arms and stood there, fierce and defiant. She was conscious of the dignity of her pose, of her improved appearance and of her fine clothes; the consciousness formed part of her defiance. But he did not even see her mood, just as, manlike, he did not see her dress. All that he did see was that here, in actual life before him, was the girl he had lost. In his weakness he bestirred himself with a cry of fond wondering joy--"Sissy!"

"Yes, Mr. Bates, I'm here."

Some power came to him, for he sat erect, awed and reverent before this sudden delight that his eyes were drinking in. "Are you safe, Sissy?" he whispered.

"Yes," she replied, scornfully, "I've been quite safe ever since I got away from you, Mr. Bates. I've taken care of myself, so I'm quite safe and getting on finely; but I'd get on better if my feet weren't tied in a sack because of the things you made me do--you _made_ me do it, you know you did." She challenged his self-conviction with fierce intensity. "It was you made me go off and leave your aunt before you'd got any one else to take care of her; it was you who made me take her money because you'd give me none that was lawfully my own; it was you that made me run away in a way that wouldn't seem very nice if any one knew, and do things they wouldn't think very nice, and--and" (she was incoherent in her passion) "you _made_ me run out in the woods alone, till I could get a train, and I was so frightened of you coming, and finding me, and _telling_, that I had to give another name; and _now_, when I'm getting on in the world, I have to keep hiding all this at every turn because people wouldn't think it very pretty conduct. They'd think it was queer and get up a grand talk. So I've told lies and changed my name, and it's you that made me, Mr. Bates."

He only took in a small part of the meaning of the words she poured upon him so quickly, but he could no longer be oblivious to her rage. His joy in seeing her did not subside; he was panting for breath with the excitement of it, and his eyes gloated upon her; for his delight in her life and safety was something wholly apart from any thought of himself, from the pain her renewed anger must now add to the long-accustomed pain of his own contrition.

"But how," he whispered, wondering, "how did you get over the hills? How?--"

"Just how and when I could. 'Twasn't much choice that you left me, Mr. Bates. It signifies very little now how I got here. I _am_ here. You've come after the old man that's dead, I suppose. You might have saved yourself the trouble. He isn't father, if _that's_ what you thought."

He did not even hear the last part of her speech. He grasped at the breath that seemed trying to elude him.

"You went out into the woods alone," he said, pityingly. He was so accustomed to give her pity for this that it came easily. "You--you mean over our hills to the back of the--"

"No, I don't, I wasn't such a silly as to go and die in the hills. I got across the lake, and I'm here now--that's the main thing, and I want to know why you're here, and what you're going to do."

Her tone was brutal. It was, though he could not know it, the half hysterical reaction from that mysterious burst of feeling that had made her defend him so fiercely against the American's evil imputation.

She was not sufficiently accustomed to ill health to have a quick eye for it; but she began now to see how very ill he looked. The hair upon his face and head was damp and matted; his face was sunken, weather-browned, but bloodless in the colouring. His body seemed struggling for breath without aid from his will, for she saw he was thinking only of her. His intense preoccupation in her half fascinated, half discomforted her, the more so because of the feverish lustre of his eye.

"I'm sorry you're so ill, Mr. Bates," she said, coldly; "you'd better lie down."

"Never mind about me," he whispered, eagerly, and feebly moved upon the seat to get a little nearer her. "Never mind about me; but tell me, Sissy, have you been a good girl since you got off like this? You're safe and well--have you been good?"

"I took your aunt's money, if you mean that, but I left you my half of things for it; and anyway, it was you who made me do it."

"Yes, yes," he assented, "'twas my doing; the sin of all you did then lies at my door. But since then, Sissy?" His look, his whole attitude, were an eager question, but she looked at him scornfully.

"Of _course_ I've been good. I go to church and say my prayers, and every one respects me. I worked first in a family, but I didn't let them call me a servant. Then I got a place in the Grand Hotel. Old Mr. Hutchins had got lame, so he couldn't see after things, and I could. I've done it now for six months, and it's a different house. I always do everything I do well, so we've made money this summer. I'm thinking of making Mr. Hutchins take me into partnership; he'd rather do it than lose me. I'm well thought of, Mr. Bates, by everybody, and I'm going to get rich."

"Rich," he echoed, quietly. He looked now, his mind drawn by hers, at her fine clothes, and at the luxuriant red hair that was arranged with artificial display. The painfulness of his breath and his weakness returned now within his range of feeling.

Without having expected to absorb his mind or knowing that she cared to do so, she still felt that instant that something was lost to her. The whole stream of his life, that had been hers since she had entered the room, was no longer all for her. She pressed on quietly to the business she had with him, fearing to lose a further chance.

"Look here, Mr. Bates! It's not more than a few hours since I heard you were here, so I've come to tell you that I'm alive and all right, and all that I've done that wasn't very nice was your fault; but, look here, I've something else to say: I don't know why you've come here to see this old preacher, or who he is, or what you have to do with him; but it would be cruel and mean of you now, after driving me to do what I did, to tell the people here about it, and that my name isn't White, you know. I've very nice friends here, who'd be shocked, and it would do me harm. I'm not going to accuse you to people of what you've done. I'm sorry you're ill, and that you've had all the trouble of hunting for me, and all that; but I've come to ask you now to keep quiet and not say who I am."

He drew great sighs, as a wounded animal draws its breath, but he was not noticing the physical pain of breathing. He did not catch at breath as eagerly as he was trying to catch at this new idea, this new Sissy, with a character and history so different from what he had supposed. His was not a mind that took rational account of the differences between characters, yet he began to realise now that the girl who had made her own way, as this one had, was not the same as the girl he had imagined wandering helplessly among pathless hills, and dying feebly there.

She still looked at him as if demanding an answer to her request, looked at him curiously too, trying to estimate how ill he _was_. He did not speak, and she, although she did not at all fathom his feeling, knew instinctively that some influence she had had over him was lessened.

"Of course you can spoil my life if you like, Mr. Bates, but I've come to ask you not. Someone's told me there's a mine found on our clearin'--well, when I took your aunt's gold pieces I meant to leave you the land for them. I'm too proud to go back on that now, _far_ too proud; you can keep the money if you want to, or you can give me some of it if you _want_ to. I'd like to be rich better than anything, but I'd rather be poor as a church mouse, and free to get on my own way, than have you to say what I ought to do every touch and turn, thinking I'd only be good and sensible so long