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

sorrow and he could dwell at peace together. He would still go, for he cherished one of those nervous ideas common with sick men, that he could breathe there and nowhere else; but he hated the place that was now rife with memories far more unrestful and galling than memories of the dead can ever be.

He hugged to himself no flattering delusion; in his judgment Sissy had shown herself heartless and cruel; but he did not therefore argue, as a man of politer mind might have done, that the girl he had loved had never existed, that he had loved an idea and, finding it had no resemblance to the reality, he was justified in casting away both, and turning to luxurious disappointment or to a search for some more worthy recipient of the riches of his heart. No such train of reasoning occurred to him. He had thought Sissy was good and unfortunate; he had found her fortunate and guilty of an almost greater degree of callousness than he could forgive; but, nevertheless, Sissy was the person he loved--his little girl, whom he had brought up, his big girl, in whom he centred all his hopes of happy home and of years of mature affection. Sissy was still alive, and he could not endure to think of her living on wholly separated from him. For this reason his mind had no rest in the thought of remaining where he was, or of returning whence he had come, or in the dream of seeking new places. He could think of no satisfaction except that of being near to her and making her a better girl; yet he had promised to have no dealings with her; and not only that, but he now at length perceived the futility of all such care as he might exercise over her. He had thought to shield her by his knowledge of the world, and he had found that she, by natural common sense, had a better knowledge of the world than he by experience; he had thought to protect her by his strong arm, and he had found himself flung off, as she might have flung a feeble thing that clung to her for protection. She was better able to take care of herself in the world than he had been to take care of her, and she did not want his tenderness. Yet he loved her just as he had ever done, and perceived, in the deep well of his heart's love and pity, that she did, in sooth, need something--a tenderer heart it might be--need it more terribly than he had ever fancied need till now. He longed unspeakably to give her this--this crown of womanhood, which she lacked, and in the helplessness of this longing his heart was pining.

"A man isn't going to die because he has asthma," had been the doctor's fiat concerning Bates. He had come to Chellaston apparently so ill that neither he nor his friends would have been much surprised had death been the order of the day, but as the programme was life, not death, he was forced to plan accordingly. His plans were not elaborate; he would go back to the clearing; he would take his aunt back from Turrifs to be with him; he would live as he had lived before.

Would he not sell the land? they asked; for the price offered for it was good, and the lonely life seemed undesirable.

No, he would not sell. It would, he said, be selling a bit of himself; and if there was value in it, it would increase, not diminish, by holding till the country was opened up. When he was dead, his heirs, be they who they might (this he said mysteriously), could do as they would. As for him, he would take a man back from this part of the country to work in Alec's place. His cough, he said, had been worse since he had been beguiled into leaving his wilderness to travel with Alec; the pure air of the solitude would be better than doctors for him.

The journey into which Alec had beguiled him had already had three results: he had sold his lumber at a good price; had found out, by talking with business men at Quebec, what the real value of his land probably was, and would be; and had been put by Dr. Nash into a right way of thinking concerning his disease and its treatment, that would stand him in good stead for years to come; but none of these goodly results did he mention when he summed up the evils and discomforts of the trip in Alec's hearing. If his irascible talk was the index to his mind, certainly any virtue Alec had exercised toward him would need to be its own reward.

He offered to pay Alec his wages up to the time of their arrival in Chellaston, because he had looked after him in his feebleness, and he talked of paying "The Principal" for his board during his sojourn there. When they treated these offers lightly, he sulked, mightily offended. He would have given his life, had it been necessary, for either of the brothers, because of the succour they had lent him; nay more, had they come to him in need a lifetime afterwards, when most men would have had time to forget their benefaction many times over, John Bates would have laid himself, and all that he had, at their disposal; but he was too proud to say "thank you" for what they had done for him, or to confess that he had never been so well treated in his life before.

During his first days in Chellaston he was hardly able to leave his own room; but all the time he talked constantly of leaving the place as soon as he was well enough to do so; and the only reason that he did not bring his will to bear upon his lagging health, and fix the day of departure, was that he could not compel himself to leave the place where Sissy was. He knew he must go, yet he could not. One more interview with her he must have, one more at least before he left Chellaston. He could not devise any way to bring this about without breaking his promise to her, but his intention never faltered--see her he must, if only once, and so the days passed, his mental agitation acting as a drag on the wheels of his recovery.


CHAPTER VIII.

When Alec Trenholme had had the key of the Harmon house in his possession some days, he went one evening, beguiled by the charm of the weather and by curiosity, for the first time into the Harmon garden. He wished to look over the rooms that were of some interest to him because of one of their late inmates, and having procrastinated, he thought to carry out his intention now, in the last hour before darkness came on, in order to return the key that night.

The path up to the house was lightly barred by the wild vine, that, climbing on overgrown shrubs on either side, had more than once cast its tendrils across. A trodden path there was in and out the bushes, although not the straight original one, and by following it Alec gained the open space before the house. Here self-sown magenta petunias made banks of colour against the old brick walls, and the evening light, just turning rosy, fell thereon. He could not see the river, although he heard it flowing behind a further mass of bushes. He stood alone with the old house in the opening that was enclosed by shrubs and trees so full of leaf that they looked like giant heaps of leaves, and it seemed to him that, if earth might have an enchanted place, he had surely entered it. Then, remembering that the light would not last long, he fitted the key to the door and went in.

Outside, nature had done her work, but inside the ugly wall-paper and turned bannisters of a modern villa had not been much beautified by dust and neglect. Still, there is something in the atmosphere of a long neglect that to the mind, if not to the eye, has softening effect. Alec listened a moment, as it were, to the silence and loneliness of the house, and went into the first dark room.

It was a large room, probably a parlour of some pretension, but the only light came through the door and lit it very faintly. All the windows of the house were shut with wooden shutters, and Alec, not being aware that, except in the rooms Harkness had occupied, the shutters were nailed, went to a window to open it. He fumbled with the hasp, and, concluding that he did not understand its working, went on into the next room to see if the window there was to be more easily managed. In this next room he was in almost total darkness. He had not reached the window before he heard some one moving in an adjoining room. Turning, he saw a door outlined by cracks of lamplight, and as it was apparent that some one else was in the house, he made at once for this door. Before he had reached it the cracks of light which guided him were gone; and when he had opened it, the room on whose threshold he stood was dark and silent; yet, whether by some slight sounds, or by some subtler sense for which we have no name, he was convinced that there was some one in it. Indignant at the extinction of the light and at the silence, he turned energetically again in the direction of the window in order to wrench it open, when, hearing a slight scratching sound, he looked back into the inner room. There was light there again, but only a small vaporous curl of light. Connecting this with the sound, he supposed that a poor sulphur match had been struck; but this supposition perhaps came to him later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the same face he had seen over old Cameron's coffin. The sight he had had of it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a thing improbable, and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes distinctly. A man's face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman's. The match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and all he could see vanished from sight with its light. His only thought was that whoever had escaped him before should not escape him again, and he broke open the window shutters by main strength.

The light poured in upon a set of empty rooms, faded and dusty. A glance showed him an open door at the back of the farthest room, and rushing through this, he opened the windows in that part of the house which had evidently been lately inhabited. He next came into the hall by which he had entered, and out again at the front door, with no doubt that he was chasing some one, but he did not gain in the pursuit. He went down the path to the road, looking up and down it; he came back, in and out among the bushes, searching the cemetery and river bank, vexed beyond measure all the time to perceive how easy it would be for any one to go one way while he was searching in another, for the garden was large.

He had good reason to feel that he was the