What Necessity Knows Part 10

"We sink," said Turrif, with his deliberate smile, "it will be best; for if you have not been wandering in your mind, some one else's body has been wandering."

Trenholme went back to his station in the not unpleasant company of two st.u.r.dy farmers, one young and vivacious, the other old and slow. They found the place just as he had left it. The coffin was empty, save for the sweet-scented cushion of roughly covered pine ta.s.sels on which the body of the gaunt old Cameron had been laid to rest.

The three men sat by the stove in the other room. The smoke from their pipes dimmed the light of the lamp. The quiet sounds of their talk and movements never entirely took from them the consciousness of the large dark silence that lay without. No footfall broke it. When they heard the distant rush of the night train, they all three went out to see its great yellow eye come nearer and nearer.

Trenholme had one or two packages to put in the van. He and his companions exchanged greetings with the men of the train.

Just as he was handing in his last package, a gentlemanly voice accosted him.

"Station-master!" said a grey-haired, military-looking traveller, "Station-master! Is there any way of getting milk here?"

A lady stood behind the gentleman. They were both on the platform at the front of a pa.s.senger car.

"It's for a child, you know," explained the gentleman.

Trenholme remembered his untouched tea, and confessed to the possession of a little milk.

"Oh, hasten, hasten!" cried the lady, "for the guard says the train will move on in a moment."

As Trenholme knew that the little French conductor thus grandly quoted did not know when the train would start, and as in his experience the train, whatever else it did, never hastened, he did not move with the sudden agility that was desired. Before he turned he heard a loud-whispered aside from the lady: "Tell him we'll pay him double--treble, for it; I have heard they are avaricious."

When Trenholme had started the train he jumped upon it with the milk. He found himself in a long car. The double seats on either side were filled with sleepy people. There was a pa.s.sage down the middle, and the lamps above shone dimly through dirty gla.s.ses. Trenholme could not immediately see any one like the man who had spoken to him outside, but he did spy out a baby, and, jug in hand, he went and stood a moment near it.

The lady who held the baby sat upright, with her head leaning against the side of the car. She was dozing, and the baby was also asleep. It was a rosy, healthy child, about a year old. The lady's handsome face suggested she was about seven-and-twenty. Among all the shawl-wrapped heaps of restless humanity around them, this pair looked very lovely together. The dusty lamplight fell upon them. They seemed to Trenholme like a beautiful picture of mother and child, such as one sometimes comes upon among the evil surroundings of old frames and hideous prints.

Said Trenholme aloud: "I don't know who asked me for the milk."

The lady stirred and looked at him indifferently. She seemed very beautiful. Men see with different eyes in these matters, but in Trenholme's eyes this lady was faultless, and her face and air touched some answering mood of reverence in his heart. It rarely happens, however, that we can linger gazing at the faces which possess for us the most beauty. The train was getting up speed, and Trenholme, just then catching sight of the couple who had asked for the milk, had no choice but to pa.s.s down the car and pour it into the jar they held.

The gentleman put his hand in his pocket. "Oh no," said Trenholme, and went out. But the more lively lady reopened the door behind him, and threw a coin on the ground as he was descending.

By the sound it had made Trenholme found it, and saw by the light of the pa.s.sing car that it was an English shilling. When the train was gone he stood a minute where it had carried him, some hundred feet from the station, and watched it going on into the darkness.

Afterwards, when his companions had composed themselves to sleep, and he lay sleepless, listening to all that could be heard in the silent night, curiously enough it was not upon the exciting circ.u.mstances of the early evening that he mused chiefly, but upon the people he had seen in the night train.

A seemingly little thing has sometimes the power to change those currents that set one way and another within a man, making him satisfied or dissatisfied with this or that. By chance, as it seems, a song is sung, a touch is given, a sight revealed, and man, like a harp hung to the winds, is played upon, and the music is not that which he devises.

So it was that Trenholme's encounter in the dusty car with the beautiful woman who had looked upon him so indifferently had struck a chord which was like a plaintive sigh for some better purpose in life than he was beating out of this rough existence. It was not a desire for greater pleasure that her beauty had aroused in him, but a desire for n.o.bler action--such was the power of her face.

The night pa.s.sed on; no footfall broke the silence. The pa.s.sing train was the only episode of his vigil.

In the morning when Trenholme looked out, the land was covered deep in snow.

CHAPTER X.

When the night train left Turrifs Station it thundered on into the darkness slowly enough, but, what with b.u.mping over its rough rails and rattling its big cars, it seemed anxious to deceive its pa.s.sengers into the idea that it was going at great speed. A good number of its cars were long vans for the carriage of freight; behind these came two for the carriage of pa.s.sengers. These were both labelled "First Cla.s.s." One was devoted to a few men, who were smoking; the other was the one from which Trenholme had descended. Its seats, upholstered in red velvet, were dusty from the smoke and dirt of the way; its atmosphere, heated by a stove at one end, was dry and oppressive. It would have been impossible, looking at the motley company lounging in the lamplight, to have told their relations one to another; but it was evident that an uncertain number of young people, placed near the lady who held the baby, were of the same party; they slept in twos and threes, leaning on one another's shoulders and covered by the same wraps. It was to seats left vacant near this group that the man and his wife who had procured the milk returned. The man, who was past middle life, betook himself to his seat wearily, and pulled his cap over his eyes without speaking. His wife deposited the mug of milk in a basket, speaking in low but brisk tones to the lady who held the baby.

"There, Sophia; I've had to pay a shilling for a cupful, but I've got some milk."

"I should have thought you would have been surer to get good milk at a larger station, mamma." She did not turn as she spoke, perhaps for fear of waking the sleeping baby.

The other, who was the infant's mother, was rapidly tying a shawl round her head and shoulders. She was a little stout woman, who in middle age had retained her brightness of eye and complexion. Her features were regular, and her little nose had enough suggestion of the eagle's beak in its form to preserve her countenance from insignificance.

"Oh, my dear," she returned, "as to the milk--the young man looked quite clean, I a.s.sure you; and then such a large country as the cows have to roam in!"

Having delivered herself of this energetic whisper, she subsided below the level of the seat back, leaving Sophia to sit and wonder in a drowsy muse whether the mother supposed that the value of a cow's milk would be increased if, like Io, she could prance across a continent.

Sophia Rexford sat upright, with the large baby in her arms and a bigger child leaning on her shoulder. Both children were more or less restless; but their sister was not restless, she sat quite still. The att.i.tude of her tall figure had the composure and strength in it which do not belong to first youth. Hers was a fine face; it might even be called beautiful; but no one now would call it pretty--the skin was too colourless, the expression too earnest.

Her eyes took on the look that tells of inward, rather than outward, vision. Her thoughts were such as she would not have told to any one, but not because of evil in them.

This was the lady to whom Robert Trenholme, the master of the college at Ch.e.l.laston, had written his letter; and she was thinking of that letter now, and of him, pondering much that, by some phantasy of dreams, she should have been suddenly reminded of him by the voice of the man who had pa.s.sed through the car with the milk.

Her mind flitted lightly to the past; to a season she had once spent in a fashionable part of London, and to her acquaintance with the young curate, who was receiving some patronage from the family with whom she was visiting. She had been a beauty then; every one danced to the tune she piped, and this curate--a mere fledgeling--had danced also. That was nothing. No, it was nothing that he had, for a time, followed lovesick in her train--she never doubted that he had had that sickness, although he had not spoken of it--all that had been notable in the acquaintance was that she, who at that time had played with the higher aims and impulses of life, had thought, in her youthful arrogance, that she discerned in this man something higher and finer than she saw in other men. She had been pleased to make something of a friend of him, condescending to advise and encourage him, p.r.o.nouncing upon his desire to seek a wider field in a new country, and calling it good. Later, when he was gone, and life for her had grown more quiet for lack of circ.u.mstances to feed excitement, she had wondered sometimes if this man had recovered as perfectly from that love-sickness as others had done.

That was all--absolutely all. Her life had lately come again into indirect relations with him through circ.u.mstances over which neither he nor she had had any control; and now, when she was about to see him, he had taken upon him to write and pick up the thread of personal friendship again and remind her of the past.

In what mood had he written this reminder? Sophia Rexford would surely not have been a woman of the world if she had not asked herself this question. Did he think that on seeing her again he would care for her as before? Did he imagine that intervening years, which had brought misfortune to her family, would bring her more within his grasp? Or was his intention in writing still less pleasing to her than this? Had he written, speaking so guardedly of past friendship, with the desire to ward off any hope she might cherish that he had remained unmarried for her sake? Sophia's lips did not curl in scorn over this last suggestion, because she was holding her little court of inquiry in a mental region quite apart from her emotions.

This woman's character was, however, revealed in this, that she pa.s.sed easily from her queries as to what the man in question did, or would be likely to, think of her. A matter of real, possibly of paramount, interest to her was to wonder whether his life had really expanded into the flower of which she had thought the bud gave promise. She tried to look back and estimate the truth of her youthful instinct, which had told her he was a man above other men. And if that had been so, was he less or more now than he had been then? Had he been a benefit to the new country to which he had come? Had the move from the Old World to this--the decision in which she had rashly aided with youthful advice--been a good or a bad thing for him and for the people to whom he had come?

From this she fell a-thinking upon her own life as, in the light of Trenholme's letter, the contrast of her present womanly self with the bright, audacious girl of that past time was set strongly before her. It is probably as rare for any one really to wish to be the self of any former time--to wish to be younger--as it is really to wish to be any one else. Sophia certainly did not dream of wishing to be younger. We are seldom just to ourselves--either past or present: Sophia had a fine scorn for what she remembered herself to have been; she had greater respect for her present self, because there was less of outward show, and more of reality.

It might have been a quarter of an hour, it might have been more, since the train had last started, but now it stopped rather suddenly. Sophia's father murmured sleepily against the proximity of the stations. He was reclining in the seat just behind her.

Sophia looked out of her window. She saw no light. By-and-by some men came up the side of the track with lanterns. She saw by the light they held that they were officials of the train, and that the bank on which they walked looked perfectly wild and untrodden. She turned her head toward her father.

"We are not at any station," she remarked.

"Ay!" He got up with c.u.mbrous haste, as a horse might rise. He, too, looked out of the window, then round at his women and children, and clad himself in an immense coat.

"I'll just go out," he whispered, "and see how things are. If there's anything wrong I'll let you know."

He intended his whisper to be something akin to silence; he intended to exercise the utmost consideration for those around him; but his long remark was of the piercing quality that often appertains to whispers, and, as he turned his back, two of the children woke, and a young girl in the seat in front of Sophia sat up, her grey eyes dilated with alarm.

"Sophia," she said, with a low sob, "oh, Sophia, is there something _wrong_?"

"Be quiet!" said Sophia, tartly.

The snoring mother now shut her mouth with a snap. In a twinkling she was up and lively.

"Has your father got on his overcoat, Sophia? Is there danger?" She darted from one side of the carriage to another, rubbing the moisture off each window with a bit of her shawl and speaking with rapidity.

Then she ran out of the car. Two of the children followed her. The others, rea.s.sured by Sophia's stillness, huddled together at the windows, shivering in the draught of cold air that came from the open door.

After some minutes Sophia's father came in again, leading his wife and children with an old-world gallantry that was apparent even in these unsatisfactory circ.u.mstances. He had a slow impressive way of speaking that made even his unimportant words appear important. In the present case, as soon as he began to speak most of the people in the car came near to hear.