What Necessity Knows Part 21

"Everybody knows that."

"I can't hear."

"Everybody knows," shouted Trenholme.

"How do you know? What do you know?" asked the other, shaking his head sorrowfully.

Trenholme would have given much to comfort him. He tried to drag him by main force in the direction of the house. The old man yielded himself a few steps, then drew back, asking,

"Why do you say He is here?"

"Because" (Trenholme called out his words in the same high key) "before He died, and after, He said He would always be with His servants. Don't you believe what He said?"

Again the old man yielded a few paces, evidently listening and hearing with difficulty, perhaps indeed only hearing one or two words that attracted him.

"Did the Lord say it to _you_?" he asked eagerly.

"No."

There was blank disappointment shown instantly. They had come to a standstill again.

"Do you know him?" The strong old face was peering eagerly into his, as if it had not been dark. "Have you heard his voice?"

"I don't know," answered Trenholme, half angrily.

Without another word the old man shook him off, and turned once more to the starry sky above.

"Lord Jesus!" he prayed, "this man has never heard thy voice. They who have heard Thee know thy voice--they know, O Lord, they know." He retraced all the steps he had taken with Trenholme and continued in prayer.

After that, although Trenholme besought and commanded, and tried to draw him both by gentleness and force, he obtained no further notice. It was not that he was repulsed, but that he met with absolute neglect. The old man was rock-like in his physical strength.

Trenholme looked round about, but there was certainly no help to be obtained. On the one side he saw the birch wood indistinctly; the white trunks half vanished from sight against the white ground, but the brush of upper branches hung like the mirage of a forest between heaven and earth. All round was the wild region of snow. From his own small house the lamp which he had left on the table shot out a long bright ray through a c.h.i.n.k in the frostwork on the window. It occurred to him that when he had fetched down the lamp it was probably this ray, sudden and unexpected in such a place, that had attracted his strange visitor to his house. Had his poor dazed brain accepted it as some sign of the glorious appearing for which he waited?

Trenholme looked again at his companion. It mattered nothing to him who or what he was; he would have done much to still that pleading voice and pacify him, but since he could not do this, he would go for a little while out of sight and hearing. He was fast growing numb with the fierce cold. He would come back and renew his care, but just now he would go home. He walked fast, and gained his own door with blood that ran less chill.

He heaped his stove with fresh logs, and set on food to warm, in the hope that the stranger might eventually partake of it, and then, opening the stove door to get the full benefit of the blaze, he sat down for a little while to warm himself. He looked at his watch, as it lay on the table, with that glance of interest which we cast at a familiar thing which has lain in the same place while our minds have undergone commotion and change. Midnight had pa.s.sed since he went out, and it was now nearly two o'clock.

Whether it was that the man with whom he had been, possessed that power, which great actors involuntarily possess, of imposing their own moods on others, or whether it was that, coming into such strange companionship after his long loneliness, his sympathies were the more easily awakened, Trenholme was suffering from a misery of pity; and in pity for another there weighed a self-pity which was quite new to him. To have seen the stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme's eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind's eye had grown accustomed--that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy background for life's important activities.

The blazing logs through the open stove door cast flickering flamelight upon the young man, who was restlessly warming himself, shifting his position constantly, as a man must who tries to warm himself too hastily. A traveller read in ancient lore, coming suddenly on this cabin amid its leagues of snow, and looking in to see its light and warmth and the goodly figure of its occupant, might have been tempted to think that the place had been raised by some magician's wand, and would vanish again when the spell was past. And to Alec Trenholme, just then, the station to which he was so habituated, the body which usually seemed the larger part of himself, might have been no more than a thought or a dream, so intent was he upon another sort of reality. He was regardless of it all, even of the heat that, at the same time, scorched him and made him shiver. He thought of the words that he--he, Alec Trenholme--had lifted up his voice to say, waking the echoes of the snow-m.u.f.fled silence with proclamation of--He tried not to remember what he had proclaimed, feeling crushed with a new knowledge of his own falseness; and when perforce the thought came upon him of the invisible Actor in the night's drama whose presence, whose action, he had been so strenuously a.s.serting, he was like a man in pain who does not know what remedy to try; and his mood was tense, he sought only relief. He essayed one thought and another to reason away the cloud that was upon him; and then he tried saying his prayers, which of late had fallen somewhat into disuse. It was only by way of a try to see if it would do any good; and he did not give himself much time, for he felt that he must go out again to try to bring in the old man.

Before he had put on his fur cap a second time, however, he heard the whistle of the engine he had been expecting now for nearly twenty-four hours. It came like a sudden trumpet-sound from the outside world to call him back to his ordinary thoughts and deeds. For the first moment he felt impatient at it; the second he was glad, for there would certainly be some one with it who could aid him in using force, if necessary, to bring the old man to spend the remainder of the night within doors.

Trenholme saw the black and fiery monster come on into his dark and silent white world. It shook a great plume of flaming smoke above its snorting head, and by the light of the blazing jewel in its front he saw that the iron plough it drove before it was casting the snow in misty fountains to right and left.

When the engine stopped, Trenholme found that there was a small car with it, containing about twenty men sent to dig out the drifts where snow sheds had given way. These were chiefly French Canadians of a rather low type. The engine-driver was a Frenchman too; but there was a brisk English-speaking man whose business it was to set the disordered telegraph system to rights. He came into the station-room to test its condition at this point of the route. As there was a stove in their car, only a few of the men straggled in after him. At a larger place the party might have been tempted to tarry, but here they had no thought of stopping an unnecessary moment. Trenholme had no time to lose, and yet he hardly knew how to state his case. He sought the Englishman, who was at the little telegraph table. The engineer and some others lounged near. He began by recalling the incident of the dead man's disappearance. Every one connected with the railway in those parts had heard that story.

"And look here!" said he, "as far as one can judge by description, he has come back again here to-night." All who could understand were listening to him now. "See here!" he urged addressing the brisk telegraph man, "I'm afraid he will freeze to death in the snow. He's quite alive, you know--alive as you are; but I want help to bring him in."

The other was attending to his work as well as to Trenholme. "Why can't he come in?"

"He won't. I think he's gone out of his mind. He'll die if he's left.

It's a matter of life or death, I tell you. He's too strong for me to manage alone. Someone must come too."

The brisk man looked at the engineer, and the French engineer looked at him.

"What's he doing out there?"

"He's just out by the wood."

It ended in the two men finding snow-shoes and going with Trenholme across the snow.

They all three peered through the dimness at the s.p.a.ce between them and the wood, and they saw nothing. They retraced the snow-shoe tracks and came to the place where the irregular circuit had been made near the end of the wood. There was no one there. They held up a lantern and flashed it right and left, they shouted and wandered, searching into the edge of the wood. The old man was not to be found.

"I dare say," said the telegraph man to Trenholme, "you'd do well to get into a place where you don't live quite so much alone. 'T'aint good for you."

The whole search did not take more than twenty minutes. The railway-men went back at a quick pace. Trenholme went with them, insisting only that they should look at the track of the stranger's snow-shoes, and admit that it was not his own track.

The French engineer was sufficiently superst.i.tious to lend a half belief to the idea that the place was haunted, and that was his reason for haste. The electrician was only sorry that so much time had been purely wasted; that was his reason. He was a middle-aged man, spare, quick, and impatient, but he looked at Alec Trenholme in the light of the engine lamp, when they came up to it, with some kindly interest.

"I say," he went on again, "don't you go on staying here alone--a good-looking fellow like you. You don't look to me like a chap to have fancies if you weren't mewed up alone."

As Trenholme saw the car carried from him, saw the faces and forms of the men who stood at its door disappear in the darkness, and watched the red light at its back move slowly on, leaving a lengthening road of black rails behind it, he felt more mortified at the thought of the telegraph man's compa.s.sion than he cared to own, even to himself.

He went out again, and hunted with a lantern till he found a track leading far into the wood in the opposite direction from his house.

This, then, was the way the old man had gone. He followed the track for a mile, but never came within sight or sound of the man who made it.

At last it joined the railway line, and where the snow was rubbed smooth he could not trace it. Probably the old man had taken off his snow-shoes here, and his light moccasins had left no mark that could be seen in the night.

CHAPTER III.

For two nights after that Alec Trenholme kept his lamp lit all night, placing it in his window so that all the light that could struggle through the frosted panes should cast an inviting ray into the night. He did this in the hope that the old man might still be wandering in the neighbourhood; but it was soon ascertained that this was not the case; the stranger had been seen by no one else in Turrifs Settlement. Though it was clear, from reports that came, that he was the same who had visited other villages and been accepted as the missing Cameron, nothing more was heard of him, and it seemed that he had gone now off the lines of regular communication--unless, indeed, he had the power of appearing and disappearing at will, which was the popular view of his case.

Turrifs Station had become notorious. Trenholme received jeers and gibes even by telegraph from neighbouring stations. He had given account to no one of the midnight visit, but inventive curiosity had supplied details of a truly wonderful nature. It was not on this account that he gave up his situation on the line, but because a new impulse had seized him, and he had no particular reason for remaining. He waited till a new caretaker arrived from the headquarters of the railway, and then set forth from the station the following morning on foot.

Turrif had been laid up with some complaint for a week or two, and Alec went to say good-bye to him. The roads had been opened up again. He had his snow-shoes on his back, and some clothes in a small pack.

Turrif's wife opened the door, and Trenholme disburdened himself and went and sat by the bed. The little children were about, as usual, in blue gowns; he had made friends in the house since his first supper there, so they stood near now, and laughed at him a great deal without being afraid. In the long large wooden room, the mother and eldest girl pursued the housework of the morning tranquilly. Turrif lay upon a bed in one corner. The baby's cradle, a brown box on rockers, was close to the bed, and when the child stirred the father put out his hand and rocked it. The child's head was quite covered with the clothes, so that Trenholme wondered how it could breathe. He sat by the foot of the bed, and Turrif talked to him in his slow English.

"You are wise to go--a young man and genteel-man like you."

"I know you think I was a fool to take the place, but a man might as well earn his bread-and-b.u.t.ter while he is looking round the country."

"You have looked round at this bit of country for two months"--with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see in two days."

"You'll think me a greater fool when you know where I am going."