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

victim of most annoying circumstances, and he naturally could not at once perceive how it behoved him to act in relation to this new scene in the almost forgotten drama. Cameron was dead; the old preacher was dead; whether they were one and the same or not, who was this person who now for the second time suddenly started up in mysterious fashion after the death? Alec assumed that it could be no one but Cameron's daughter, but when he tried to think how it might be possible that she should be in the deserted house, upon the track of the old preacher, as it were, his mind failed even to conjecture.

The explanation was comparatively simple, if he had known it, but he did not know it. Someone has said that the man most assured of his own truthfulness is not usually truthful; and in the same sense it is true that the man most positive in trusting his own senses is not usually reliable. Alec Trenholme flagged in his search; a most unpleasing doubt came to him as to whether he had seen what he thought he saw and was not now playing hide-and-seek with the rosy evening sunbeams among these bushes, driven by a freak of diseased fancy. He was indeed provoked to a degree almost beyond control, when, in a last effort of search through the dense shrubbery, he skirted the fence of Captain Rexford's nearest field, and there espied Sophia Rexford.

Those people are happy who have found some person or thing on earth that embodies their ideal of earthly solace. To some it is the strains of music; to some it is the interior of church edifices; to the child it is his mother; to the friend it is his friend. As soon as Alec Trenholme saw this fair woman, whom he yet scarcely knew, all the fret of his spirit found vent in the sudden desire to tell her what was vexing him, very much as a child desires to tell its troubles and be comforted.


CHAPTER IX.

That evening Mrs. Rexford and Sophia had been sitting sewing, as they often did, under a tree near the house. Sophia had mused and stitched. Then there came a time when her hands fell idle, and she looked off at the scene before her. It was the hour when the sun has set, and the light is not less than daylight but mellower. She observed with pleasure how high the hops had grown that she had planted against the gables of the house and dairies. On this side the house there was no yard, only the big hay-fields from which the hay had been taken a month before; in them were trees here and there, and beyond she saw the running river. She had seen it all every day that summer, yet--

"I think I never saw the place look so nice," she said to her step-mother.

Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick grass. She had found an ox-daisy and a four-o'clock.

"Here! take my pretties," she said imperiously.

Sophia took them.

"They's to be blowed," said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the different uses of flowers or of words.

Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o'clock was scattered into space; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the slender hand that held it. Dottie looked at it with indignation.

"Blow again!" was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered. It was not wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon "He loves me." "Who, I wonder?" thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside. Her mind glanced to Robert Trenholme. "No," she thought, "he loves me not." She meditated on him a little. Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her at eighteen. If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the songs of his youth. Then for some reason--the mischief of idleness, perhaps--Sophia thought of Trenholme's young brother--how he had looked when he spoke to her over the fence. She rose to move away from such silly thoughts.

Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the river. Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very cruel, would not allow her to go there without a grown-up companion.

When she and her big sister reached the river they differed as to the next step, Dottie desiring to go on into the water, and Sophia deeming it expedient to go back over the field. As each was in an indolent mood, they both gave way a little and split the difference by wandering along the waterside, conversing softly about many things--as to how long it would take the seed of the four-o'clock to "sail away, away, over the river," and why a nice brown frog that they came across was not getting ready for bed like the birdies. There is no such sweet distraction as an excursion into Children's Land, and Sophia wandered quite away with this talkative baby, until she found herself suddenly cast out of Dottie's magic province as she stood beyond the trees that edged the first field not far from the fence of the Harmon garden. And that which had broken the spell was the appearance of Alec Trenholme. He came right up to her, as if he had something of importance to say, but either shyness or a difficulty in introducing his subject made him hesitate. Something in his look caused her to ask lightly:

"Have you seen a ghost?"

"Yes."

"Are you in earnest?"

"I am in earnest, and," added he, somewhat dubiously, "I think I am in my right mind."

He did not say more just then, but looked up and down the road in his search for someone. In a moment he turned to her, and a current of amusement seemed to cross his mind and gleamed out of his blue eyes as he lifted them to hers. "I believe when I saw you I came to you for protection."

The light from pink tracts of sunset fell brightly upon field and river, but this couple did not notice it at all.

"There is no bogie so fearful as the unknown," she cried. "You frightened me, Mr. Trenholme."

"There is no bogie in the case," he said, "nor ghost I suppose; but I saw someone. I don't know how to tell you; it begins so far back, and I may alarm you when I tell you that there must be someone in this neighbourhood of yours who has no right to be here." Then to her eager listening he told the story that he had once written to his brother, and added to it the unlooked for experience of the last half-hour. His relation lacked clearness of construction. Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.

"I'm no good," he concluded, deprecating his own recital. "Robert has all the language that's in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say what it was like? Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that?"

The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before. These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.

That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true. If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.

Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest. She plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to get a better look at the house; she assured him that Chellaston was the last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.

He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates's story, to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.

"I saw the face twice. It was first at Turrifs Station, far enough away from here; and I saw it again in this house. As sure as I'm alive, I believe it was a woman."

They stood on the verge of the field where the grass sloped back from the river. Sophia held the little child's hand in hers. The dusk was gathering, and still they talked on, she questioning and exclaiming with animation, he eager to enter the house again, a mutual interest holding their minds as one.

He began to move again impatiently. He wanted a candle with which to search the rooms more carefully, and if nothing was found, he said, he would go to the village and make what inquiries he could; he would leave no stone unturned.

Sophia would not let him go alone. She was already on perfectly familiar terms with him. He seemed to her a delightful mixture of the ardent boy and the man who, as she understood it, was roughened by lumberman's life. She lifted Dottie on her shoulder and turned homeward. "I will only be a few minutes getting Harold and some candles; don't go without us, I beg of you," she pleaded.

He never thought of offering to carry the child, or call her brother for her; his ideas of gallantry were submerged in the confusion of his thoughts. He watched her tripping lightly with the child on her shoulder. He saw her choose a path by the back of the white dairy buildings, and then he heard her clear voice calling, "Harold! Harold!" All up the yard's length to windows of house and stable he heard her calling, till at length came the answering shout. In the silence that followed he remembered, with a feeling of wonder, the shudder of distaste that had come over him when he found that the other creature with whom he had been dealing bore a woman's form. He could not endure to think of her in the same moment in which he longed to hear Miss Rexford's voice again and to see her come back. In the one case he could not believe that evil was not the foundation of such eccentricity of mystery; in the other he thought nothing, realised nothing, he only longed for Sophia's return, as at times one longs for cool air upon the temples, for balm of nature's distilling. He never thought that because Sophia was a woman she would be sure to keep him waiting and forget the candle. He felt satisfied she would do just what she said, and even