What Necessity Knows Part 19

Miss Bennett had a bright, cordial manner. She explained that she thought there was a circulating library in every town. When she was visiting in Quebec her friends had got a novel for her at two cents a day. And then she said Princ.i.p.al Trenholme bought a good many books, and he had once told her mother that he would lend them any they chose, but they had never had time to go and look over them. "It has," she added, "been such an advantage to Ch.e.l.laston to have a gentleman so clever as he at the college."

"Has it?" said Sophia, willing to hear more. "Is he very clever?"

"Oh," cried the other, "from Oxford, you know;" and she said it in much the tone she might have said "from heaven."

"Is it long," asked Sophia, "since you have been in England?"

Miss Bennett said she had never been "home," but she longed, above all things, to go.

She had, it seemed, been born in Canada, and her parents had no possessions in the mother-country, and yet she always called it "home."

This was evidently a tradition.

Sophia, who had come from England a little tired of the conditions there, and eager for a change, felt the pathetic sameness of the discontent wrought by surfeit and by famine.

"Yet," said she, "it is a relief to the mind to feel that one lives in a country where no worthy person is starving, and where every one has a good chance in life if he will but avail himself of it. It seems to make me breathe more freely to know that in all this great country there is none of that necessary poverty that we have in big English towns."

Little answer was made to this, and Sophia went on to talk of what interested her in English politics; but found that of the politics, as well as of the social condition, of the country she adored, Miss Bennett was largely ignorant. Her interest in such matters appeared to sum itself up in a serene belief that Disraeli, then prominent, was the one prop of the English Const.i.tution, and as adequate to his position as Atlas beneath the world. Now, Sophia cherished many a Radical opinion of her own, and she would have enjoyed discussion; but it would have been as difficult to aim a remark at the present front of her new acquaintance as it would be for a marksman to show his skill with a cloud of vapour as a target. Sophia tried Canadian politics, owning her ignorance and expressing her desire to understand what she had read in the newspapers since her arrival; but Miss Bennett was not sure that there was anything that "could exactly be called politics" in Canada, except that there was a Liberal party who "wanted to ruin the country by free trade."

Sophia ceased to take the initiative. She still endeavoured to respect the understanding of a girl of whom she had heard that when her father's fortunes were at a low ebb she had retrieved them by good management and personal industry--a girl, too, who through years of toil had preserved sprightliness and perfect gentility. What though this gentility was somewhat cramped by that undue importance given to trifles which is often the result of a remote life; it was still a very lovely thing, a jewel shining all the more purely for its iron setting of honest labour.

Sophia fought with the scorn that was thrusting itself into her heart as she listened when Miss Bennett now talked in a charming way about the public characters and incidents which interested her.

"I wish for your sake, Miss Rexford," she said, "that some of the Royal family would come out again. The only time that there is any real advantage in being in a colony is when some of them come out; for here, you know, they take notice of every one."

"One would still be on the general level then," said Sophia, smiling.

"Well, I don't know. It makes one feel distinguished, you know, in spite of that. Now, when the Prince was out, he stopped here for a night, and we had a ball. It was simply delightful! He danced with us all--I mean with all who could claim to be ladies, and indeed with some who could not; but how could _he_ discriminate? There was a man called Blake, who kept a butcher's shop here then--you may have noticed we haven't such a thing as a butcher's shop in the village now, Miss Rexford?"

"Indeed I have. It seems so odd."

"Blake had a handsome daughter; and when we had a ball for the Prince, didn't he buy her a fine dress, and take her to it! She really looked very handsome."

"I hope the Prince danced with her," laughed Sophia. Her good spirits were rising, in spite of herself, under the influence of the liveliness with which Miss Bennett's mind had darted, birdlike, into its own element.

"_Yes_, he did. Wasn't it good-natured of him! I believe his aide-de-camp told him who she was; but he was so gracious; he said she should not go away mortified. I never spoke to her myself; but I've no doubt she was unable to open her mouth without betraying her origin; but perhaps on that occasion she had the grace to keep silent, and she danced fairly well."

"Was her head turned by the honour?" asked Sophia, led by the other's tone to expect a sequel to the tale.

"Poor girl! The end was sadder than that. She caught a violent cold, from wearing a dress cut low when she wasn't accustomed to it, and she died in a week. When we heard of it I was glad that he _had_ danced with her; but some were cruel enough to say that it served Blake right for his presumption. He was so broken-hearted he left the place. The dress she wore that night was a green silk, and he had her buried in it; and some one told the Prince, and he sent some flowers. Wasn't it sweet of him! They were buried with her too. It was quite romantic."

"More romantic to have such a swan-like death than to live on as a butcher's daughter," said Sophia, and sarcasm was only a small ingredient in the speech.

"We were quite grieved about it," said Miss Bennett, sincerely.

Sophia also felt sorry, but it was not her way to say so. She was more interested in remarking upon the singular method of getting butcher's meat then in vogue at Ch.e.l.laston. A Frenchman, a butcher in a small way, drove from door to door with his stock, cutting and weighing his joints in an open box-sleigh. To see the frozen meat thus manipulated in the midst of the snow had struck Sophia as one of the most novel features of their present way of life. Miss Bennett, however, could hardly be expected to feel its picturesqueness. Her parents did not fancy this vendor's meat, and at present they usually killed their own. Her father, she said, had grown quite dexterous in the art.

"Really!" cried Sophia. This was an item of real interest, for it suggested to her for the first time the idea that a gentleman could slaughter an ox. She was not shocked; it was simply a new idea, which she would have liked to enlarge on; but good-breeding forbade, for Miss Bennett preferred to chat about the visit of the Prince, and she continued to do so in a manner so lively that Sophia found it no dull hearing.

"And, do you know," she cried, "what Bertha Nash did? The Nashes, you know, are of quite a common family, although, as Dr. Nash is everybody's doctor, of course we are all on good terms with them. Well, Bertha asked the Prince how his mother was!" She stopped.

"I suppose he knew whom she was talking about?"

"Oh, that was the worst of it--he couldn't _help knowing_," cried Miss Bennett. "I should have sunk through the floor with mortification if I had done such a thing. I should have expected to be arrested on the spot for high treason. Bertha says, you know, that she was so nervous at the thought of who her partner was that she didn't know what she was saying; but I scarcely think she knew really how to address him. One can never be thankful enough, I'm sure, for having been thoroughly well brought up."

She went on to explain what had been her own sensations when first accosted by this wonderful Prince, upon being led out by him, and so on.

It all sounded like a new fairy tale; but afterwards, when she had gone, with cordial wishes, as she took leave, that another prince might come soon and dance with Sophia, the latter felt as if she had been reading a page of an old-fashioned history which took account only of kings and tournaments.

This visit was a distinct disappointment on the whole. Sophia had hoped more from it, and coming after weeks that had been trying, it had power to depress. It was late afternoon now, and the day was the last in the year. Sophia, going upstairs to get rid of the noise of the children, was arrested by the glow of the sunset, and, weary as she was, stood long by the diamond window that was set in the wooden wall of her room.

It was cold. She wrapped a cloak about her. She did not at first look observantly at the glow and beauty outside. Her eyes wandered over the scene, the bright colour upon it rousing just enough interest to keep her standing there: her thoughts were within.

Sophia Rexford had set herself, like many a saint of olden and modern times, to crush within her all selfishness; and the result had been the result of all such effort when it is staunch and honest--to show that that against which she was warring was no mere mood or bad habit, to be overcome by directing the life on a n.o.bler plan, but a living thing, with a vitality so strong that it seemed as if G.o.d Himself must have given it life. She stood now baffled, as she had often been before, by her invincible enemy. Where was the selfless temper of mind that was her ideal? Certainly not within her. She was too candid to suppose for a moment that the impatient scorn she felt for those with whom she had been talking approached in any way to that humility and love that are required of the Christian. She felt overwhelmed by surging waves of evil within. It was at the source the fountain ought to be sweet, and there ambition and desire for pleasure rose still triumphant; and the current of her will, set against them, seemed only to produce, not their abatement, but a whirlpool of discontent, which sucked into itself all natural pleasures, and cast out around its edge those dislikes and disdains which were becoming habitual in her intercourse with others. It was all wrong--she knew it. She leaned her head against the cold pane, and her eyes grew wet with tears.

There is no sorrow on earth so real as this; no other for which such bitter tears have been shed; no other which has so moved the heart of G.o.d with sympathy. Yet there came to Sophia just then a strange thought that her tears were unnecessary, that the salvation of the world was something better than this conflict, that the angels were looking upon her discouragement in pained surprise.

She had no understanding with which to take in this thought. As she looked at it, with her soul's eye dim, it pa.s.sed away; and she, trying in vain to recall the light that it seemed to hold, wondered if it would come again.

Perhaps the tears had given relief to her brain; perhaps some Divine Presence had come near her, giving hope that she could not weigh or measure or call by name; at any rate, as she looked round again with fresh glance, the scene outside seemed fairer than it had yet appeared to her.

A long strip had been swept on the ice of the river by pleasure-loving hands. Down this burnished path young men and maidens were skating, and their way was paved with gold. There was soft tinting of this same light on the undulations of the pearly land beyond; blue shadows were in its woods, and reflected fire on many a window of the houses that cl.u.s.tered near and far. She knew that in each house that was a true Canadian home there was joyous preparations going on for the next day's fete. She wondered what it would be like to be at home in this country, to be one in its sports and festivities. She could not see from her attic window the land on this side of the river, but she heard the shouts of some boys who were spending their holiday at the college. They were at some game or other in a field near. Sophia liked to hear them.

Just then Mrs. Rexford came upstairs to consult her about something. She joined in the outlook for a few moments, and the sunset made her reflective.

"Well, my love," said she, "last year at this time we did not know we should be here to-day! Ah, Sophia, it is always a little doleful to see the Old Year go out; but here, where there are no bells in the churches, it will seem less solemn."

END OF BOOK I.

BOOK II.

"_Necessity, like light's electric force, Is in ourselves and all things, and no more Without us than within us_--."

CHAPTER I.

The bells have solemn sound that from old belfries ring the pa.s.sing of the year in the hearing of thousands; but perhaps it is a more solemn thing to watch and tell the birth of a new year by the march of stars that look down out of their purple void upon a land of trackless snow.

If ceremony and the united sentiment of many hearts have impressive effect, they yet tend to lighten the burden of individual responsibility, which presses with weight, like the weight of the atmosphere upon a vacuum, when a man tries to grapple with his own soul in solitude.

Alec Trenholme was spending another wakeful night in the living-room of his small railway station. Winter lay around him. For a month the blueberry flats and bramble thickets had been wholly lost under the snow, which stretched far whiter than the pure white of the birch trees in the nearest groves. Now the last night but one of the old year had brought a fresh downfall, unusually heavy; the long, straight railway track, and the sleigh-road which was kept open between the station and Turrifs Settlement, had been obliterated by it. Alec Trenholme had awoke that morning to observe that his little station of new wood, and the endless line of rough telegraph poles, were the only remaining signs of man's lordship of earth, as far as his eyes could see. It was upon this sight, when the snow clouds had fled, that he had seen a scarlet sun come up; over the same scene he had watched it roll its golden chariot all day, and, tinging the same unbroken drifts, it had sunk scarlet again in the far southwest. He had not been far from his house, and no one, in train, or sleigh, or on snow-shoes, had happened to come near it.

He would have gone himself to Turrifs for milk, for the pleasure of exchanging a word with his fellow-men, and for air and exercise, had it not been that he had hourly expected to see an engine, with its snow-plough, approaching on the rails. Conversation by telegraph would have been a relief to him, but the wires seemed to have succ.u.mbed in more than one place to their weight of snow, and there was nothing for this young station-master to do but wait, and believe that communication would be re-established over the road and the wires sooner or later. In the meantime he suffered no personal inconvenience, unless loneliness can be thus named, for he had abundance of food and fuel. He watched the bright day wane and the sun of the old year set, and filled his stove with wood, and ate his supper, and told himself that he was a very fortunate fellow and much better off than a large proportion of men.

It is not always when we tell ourselves that we are well off that we are happiest: that self-addressed a.s.sertion often implies some tacit contradiction.

When darkness came he wondered if he should put on his snow-shoes and run over to Turrifs. Yet for some reason he did not go, in the way that men so often do not do things that they think on the whole would be very good things to do. An hour or two later he knew that the good people there would have gone to bed and that he had no longer the option of going. He did not go to bed himself. He had not had enough exercise that day to make him sleepy; and then, too, he thought he would sit up and see the old year out. He had an indistinct idea that it was rather a virtuous thing to do, rather more pious than sleeping the night through just as if it were any other night. He put his much-handled, oft-read books down before him on the table, and set himself to pa.s.sing the evening with them. Midnight is actually midnight when the sun goes down before five o'clock and there is no artificial interest for the after hours.