What Necessity Knows Part 23

"In bodily health," said Bates, "she is well. You may perhaps have heard that in mind she has failed somewhat."

The man's reserve was his dignity, and it produced its result, although obvious dignity of appearance and manner was entirely lacking to him.

The toothless, childish old man woman Trenholme encountered when he entered the house struck him as an odd exaggeration of the report he had just received. He did not feel at home when he sat down to eat the food Bates set before him; he perceived that it was chiefly because in a new country hospitality is considered indispensable to an easy conscience that he had received any show of welcome.

Yet the lank brown hand that set his mug beside him shook so that some tea was spilt. Bates was in as dire need of the man he received so unwillingly as ever man was in need of his fellow-man. It is when the fetter of solitude has begun to eat into a man's flesh that he begins to proclaim his indifference to it, and the human mind is never in such need of companionship as when it shuns companions.

The two spent most of the evening endeavouring to restore to liveliness the birds that Trenholme had taken from his pockets, and in discussing them. Bates produced a very old copy of a Halifax newspaper which contained a sonnet to this bird, in which the local poet addressed it as

"The Sunset-tinted grosbeak of the north"

Trenholme marvelled at his resources. Such newspapers as he stored up were kept under the cushion of the old aunt's armchair.

Bates brought out some frozen cranberries for the birds. They made a rough coop and settled them in it outside, in lee of one of the sheds.

It is extraordinary how much time and trouble people will expend on such small matters if they just take it into their heads to do it.

CHAPTER IV.

There was no very valuable timber on Bates's land. The romance of the lumber trade had already pa.s.sed from this part of the country, but the farmers still spent their winters in getting out spruce logs, which were sold at the nearest saw-mills. Bates and Cameron had possessed themselves of a large portion of the hill on which they had settled, with a view to making money by the trees in this way--money that was necessary to the household, frugal as it was, for, so far, all their gains had been spent in necessary improvements. Theirs had been a far-seeing policy that would in the end have brought prosperity, had the years of uninterrupted toil on which they calculated been realised.

It was not until the next day that Trenholme fully understood how helpless the poor Scotchman really was in his present circ.u.mstances. In the early morning there was the live-stock to attend to, which took him the more time because he was not in strong health; and when that was done it seemed that there was much ado in the house before the old woman would sit down peacefully for the day. He apologised to Trenholme for his housework by explaining that she was restless and uneasy all day unless the place was somewhat as she had been accustomed to see it; he drudged to appease her, and when at last he could follow to the bush, whither he had sent Trenholme, it transpired that he dared not leave her more than an hour or two alone, for fear she should do herself a mischief with the fire. In the bush it was obvious how pitifully small was the amount of work accomplished. Many trees had been felled before Cameron's death; but they still had to be lopped and squared, cut into twelve-foot lengths, dragged by an ox to the log-slide, and pa.s.sed down on to the ice of the lake. Part of the work required two labourers; only a small part of what could be done single-handed had been accomplished; and Trenholme strongly suspected that moonlight nights had been given to this, while the old woman slept.

It is well known that no line can be drawn between labour and play; it is quite as much fun making an ox pull a log down a woodland path as playing at polo, if one will only admit it, especially when novelty acts as playmate. Most healthy men find this fascination hidden in labour, provided it only be undertaken at their own bidding, although few have the grace to find it when necessity compels to the task. Alec Trenholme found the new form of labour to which he had bidden himself toilsome and delightful; like a true son of Adam, he was more conscious of his toil than of his delight--still both were there; there was physical inspiration in the light of the snow, the keen still air, and the sweet smell of the lumber. So he grew more expert, and the days went past, hardly distinguished from one another, so entire was the unconsciousness of the slumber between them.

He had not come without some sensation of romance in his knight-errantry. Bates was the centre, the kernel as it were, of a wild story that was not yet explained. Turrif had disbelieved the details Saul had given of Bates's cruelty to Cameron's daughter, and Trenholme had accepted Turrif's judgment; but in the popular judgment, if Cameron's rising was not a sufficient proof of Bates's guilt, the undoubted disappearance of the daughter was. Whatever had been his fault, rough justice and superst.i.tious fear had imposed on Bates a term of solitary confinement and penal servitude which so far he had accepted without explanation or complaint. He still expressed no satisfaction at Trenholme's arrival that would have been a comment on his own hard case and a confession of his need. Yet, on the whole, Trenholme's interest in him would have been heightened rather than decreased by a nearer view of his monotonous life and his dry reserve, had it not been that the man was to the last degree contentious and difficult to deal with.

Taking for granted that Trenholme was of gentle extraction, he treated him with the generosity of pride in the matter of rations; but he a.s.sumed airs of a testy authority which were in exact proportion to his own feeling of physical and social inferiority. Seen truly, there was a pathos in this, for it was a weak man's way of trying to be manful but his new labourer, could not be expected to see it in that light. Then, too, on all impersonal subjects of conversation which arose, it was the nature of Bates to contradict and argue; whereas Trenholme, who had little capacity for reasonable argument, usually dealt with contradiction as a pot of gunpowder deals with an intruding spark. As regarded the personal subject of his own misfortune--a subject on which Trenholme felt he had a certain right to receive confidence--Bates's demeanour was like an iron mask.

Bates scorned the idea, which Turrif had always held, that Cameron had never really died; he vowed, as before, that the box he had sent in Saul's cart had contained nothing but a dead body; he would hear no description of the old man who, it would seem, had usurped Cameron's name; he repeated stolidly that Saul had put his charge into some shallow grave in the forest, and hoaxed Trenholme, with the help of an accomplice; and he did not scruple to hint that if Trenholme had not been a coward he would have seized the culprit, and so obviated further mystery and after difficulties. There was enough truth in this view of the case to make it very insulting to Trenholme. But Bates did not seem to cherish anger for that part of his trouble that had been caused by this defect; rather he showed an annoying indifference to the whole affair. He had done what he could to bury his late partner decently; he neither expressed nor appeared to experience further emotion concerning his fate.

When a man has set himself to anything, he generally sticks to it, for a time at least; this seemed to be the largest reason that Trenholme had the first four weeks for remaining where he was. At any rate, he did remain; and from these unpromising materials, circ.u.mstance, as is often the case, beat, out a rough sort of friendship between the two men. The fact that Bates was a partial wreck, that the man's nerve and strength in him were to some extent gone, bred in Trenholme the gallantry of the strong toward the weak--a gallantry which was kept from rearing into self-conscious virtue by the superiority of Bates's reasoning powers, which always gave him a certain amount of real authority. Slowly they began to be more confidential.

"It's no place for a young man like you to be here," Bates observed with disfavour.

It was Sunday. The two were sitting in front of the house in the sunshine, not because the sun was warm, but because it was bright; dressed, as they were, in many plies of clothes, they did not feel the cold, in flat, irregular shape the white lake lay beneath their hill. On the opposite heights the spruce-trees stood up clear and green, as perfect often in shape as yews that are cut into old-fashioned cones.

"I was told that about the last place I was in, and the place before too," Trenholme laughed. He did not seem to take his own words much to heart.

"Well, the station certainly wasn't much of a business," a.s.sented Bates; "and, if it's not rude to ask, where were ye before?"

"Before that--why, I was just going to follow my own trade in a place where there was a splendid opening for me; but my own brother put a stop to that. He said it was no fit position for a young man like me. My brother's a fine fellow," the young man sneered, but not bitterly.

"He ought to be," said Bates, surveying the sample of the family before him rather with a glance of just criticism than of admiration. "What's your calling, then?"

Alec pulled his mitts out of his pocket and slapped his moccasins with them to strike off the melting snow. "What do you think it is, now?"

Bates eyed him with some interest in the challenge. "I don't know," he said at last. "Why didn't your brother want ye to do it?"

"'Twasn't grand enough. I came out naturally thinking I'd set up near my brother; but, well, I found he'd grown a very fine gentleman--all honour to him for it! He's a good fellow." There was no sneer just now.

Bates sat subjecting all he knew of Alec to a process of consideration.

The result was not a guess; it was not in him to hazard anything, even a guess.

"What does your brother do?"

"Clergyman, and he has a school."

"Where?"

"Ch.e.l.laston, on the Grand Trunk."

"Never heard of it. Is it a growing place?"

"It's thriving along now. It was just right for my business."

"Did the clergyman think your business was wrong?"

The young man laughed as a man laughs who knows the answer to an amusing riddle and sees his neighbour's mental floundering. "He admits that it's an honest and respectable line of life."

"Did ye give in, then?"

"I took a year to think over it. I'm doing that now."

"Thinking?"

"Yes."

"I've not observed ye spending much time in meditation."

The young man looked off across the basin of the frozen lake. What is more changeful than the blue of the sky? Today the far firmament looked opaque, an even, light blue, as if it were made of painted china. The blue of Alec Trenholme's eyes was very much like the sky; sometimes it was deep and dark, sometimes it was a shadowy grey, sometimes it was hard and metallic. A woman having to deal with him would probably have imagined that something of his inward mood was to be read in these changes; but, indeed, they were owing solely to those causes which change the face of the sky--degrees of light and the position of that light. As for Bates, he did not even know that his companion had blue eyes; he only knew in a general way that he was a strong, good-looking fellow, whose figure, even under the bulgy shapes of multiplied garments, managed to give suggestion of that indefinite thing we call style. He himself felt rather thinner, weaker, more rusty in knowledge of the world, more shapeless as to apparel, than he would have done had he sat alone.

After a minute or two he said, "What's your trade?"

Trenholme, sitting there in the clear light, would have blushed as he answered had his face not been too much weathered to admit of change of colour. He went through that momentary change of feeling that we connect with blushes. He had been perfectly conscious that this question was coming, and perfectly conscious, too, that when he answered it he would fall in Bates's estimation, that his prestige would be gone. He thought he did not mind it, but he did.

"Butcher," he said.

"Ye're not in earnest?" said Bates, with animosity.

"Upon my word."

"Ye don't look like that"--with disappointment.

"Look like what?"--fiercely--"What would you have me look like? My father was as good-looking a man as you'd see in the three kingdoms, and as good a butcher, too. He got rich, had three shops, and he sent us boys to the best school he could find. He'd have set me up in any business I liked; if I chose his it was because--I did choose it."