What Necessity Knows Part 52

"I hear them saying down at the hotel that you're awfully ill."

"It's not mortal, the doctor says."

"You'll need someone to take care of you, Mr. Bates."

"Oh, I'll get that."

He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience, and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his mind, she began again:

"I don't mind if you don't sell, for I don't want to get any money."

"Oh, but ye can sell when I'm gone; it'll be worth more then than now.

I'm just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I go on breathing."

She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and crosswise.

"What I want--to ask of ye now is--what I want to ask ye first is a solemn question. Do ye know where your father's corpse--is laid?"

"Yes, I know," she said. "He didn't care anything about cemeteries, father didn't."

He looked at her keenly, and there was a certain stern setting of his strong lower jaw. His words were quick: "Tell on."

"'Twas you that made me do it," said she, sullenly.

"Do what? What did ye do?"

"I buried my father."

"Did ye set Saul to do it?"

"No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?"

"La.s.sie, la.s.sie! it's no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own woman's heart didn't misgive ye."

Perhaps, for all he knew, it had misgiven her often, but she did not say so now.

"In the clearin's all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands,"

she said, still sullen.

"Ye buried him on his own land!" he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing upon him. "When? Where? Out with it! Make a clean breast of it."

"I buried him that night. The coffin slipped easy enough out of the window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it. I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself. Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing. "I made a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him."

"But--but I dug there," cried Bates. (In his surprise the nervous affection of his breath had largely left him.) "I dug where the bank had fallen; for I had strange thoughts o' what ye might have been driven to when I was long alone, and I dug, but his body wasna' there."

It was curious that, even after her confession, he should feel need to excuse himself for his suspicion.

"There was a sort of cleft sideways in the rock at the side of the stream; you'd never have seen it, for I only saw it myself by hanging over, holding by a tree. No one would ever have thought o' digging there when I'd closed up the opening with stones; I thought o' that when I put him in."

He got up and took a step or two about, but he gave no gesture or prayer or word of pain. "The sin lies at my door," he said.

"Well, yes, Mr. Bates, you drove me to it, but--"

Her tone, so different from his, he interrupted. "Don't say 'but,'

making it out less black. Tell what ye did more."

Then she told him, coolly enough, how she had arranged the bedclothes to look as though, she slept under them: how she had got into the box because, by reason of the knot-hole in the lid, she had been able to draw it over her, and set the few nails that were hanging in it in their places. She told him how she had laughed to herself when he took her with such speed and care across the lake that was her prison wall. She told him that, being afraid to encounter Saul alone, she had lain quiet, intending to get out at Turrifs, but that when she found herself in a lonely house with a strange man, she was frightened and ran out into the birch woods, where her winding-sheet had been her concealment as she ran for miles among the white trees; how she then met a squaw who helped her to stop the coming railway train.

"We lit a fire," she said, "and the Indian woman and the children stood in the light of it and brandished; and further on, where it was quite dark, we had got a biggish log or two and dragged them across the track, so when the train stopped the men came and found them there; and I went round to the back and got on the cars when all the men were off and they didn't come near me till morning. I thought they'd find me, and I'd got money to pay, but I got mixed up with the people that were asleep. I gave the squaw one of your aunt's gold pieces for helping, but"--with a sneer--"the pa.s.sengers gave her money too. I made sure she'd not tell on me, for if she had she'd have got in jail for stopping the train."

"Puir body," said he; "like enough all she had seen o' men would make her think, too, she had no call to say anything, though she must have known of the hue and cry in the place."

"More like she wanted to save herself from suspicion of what she had done," said Eliza, practically.

She still stood before him on the path, the strong firm muscles of her frame holding her erect and still without effort of her will. The stillness of her pose, the fashionableness of gown and hat, and the broad display of her radiant hair, made a painful impression on Bates as he looked, but the impression on two other men who went by just then was apparently otherwise. They were a pair of young tourists who stared as they pa.s.sed.

"By Jove, what a magnificent girl!" said one to the other just before they were out of hearing. There was that of consciousness in his tone which betrayed that he thought his own accents and choice words were well worthy her attention.

Eliza turned her back to the direction in which the strangers had gone, thus covering the spare man to whom she was talking from their backward glances. Bates, who was looking up at her face with his heart-hunger in his eyes, saw a look of contempt for the pa.s.sing remark flit across her face, and because of the fond craving of his own heart, his sympathy, strangely enough, went out to the young man who had spoken, rather than to her sentiment of contempt. The angel of human loves alone could tell why John Bates loved this girl after all that had pa.s.sed, but he did love her.

And perceiving now that she had told what she had to tell, he turned his mind to that something that lay on his mind to say to her. With the burden of the thought he rose up again from his rude seat, and he held up his head to look at her as with effort; she was so tall, that he still must needs look up.

"All's said that need be said, Sissy, between us two." His voice was almost hard because he would not betray his wistfulness. "Ye have chosen your own way o' life, and I willna raise a cry to alter it; I'm no fit for that. If I could shape ye to my pleasure, I see now I'd make a poor thing of it. Ye can do better for yourself if--if"--his square jaw seemed almost to tremble--"if ye'll have a heart in ye, la.s.sie. Forgive me if I seem to instruct ye, for I've no thought in me now that I could make ye better if I tried."

He stopped again, and she saw his weak frame moving nervously; she thought it was for want of breath.

"You're awfully ill, Mr. Bates," she said, in dulness repeating words that she seemed to have got by heart.

Her stupid pity stung him into further speech.

"Oh, la.s.sie, it's not because I'm fond of ye that I say it, for what does it matter about me, but because of all the men in the world that love women. It's G.o.d's voice through them to you; and (although I can't rightly frame it into words) because G.o.d set men and women in families, and gave them to have affections, I tell ye the soul in which the pride o' life, or pleasure, or the like o' that, takes the place of the affections is a lost soul." Again his harsh mouth trembled, and the words came with effort. "Sissy Cameron, ye've not known a mother nor a sister, and your father was hard, and I who loved ye was worse than a brute, and I can't rightly say what I would; but when I'm gone, look round ye; la.s.sie, at the best women ye know that are wives and mothers, and if ye can't greet at the things they greet at, and if ye laugh at things they don't laugh at, and if ye don't fear to do the things they fear, then, even if your cleverness should make ye queen o' the whole world, G.o.d pity ye!"

"Yes, Mr. Bates," she said, just as she used to when she said the catechism to him and he admonished her. She had listened to him with that dull half-attention which we give to good-sounding words when our heart is only alert for something for which we yet wait. She had it firmly in her mind that he was going to say something on which would hang her future fate, that he would either still ask her, in spite of all she had said, to go back with him, or would tell her that he would not have her now, as the American had done. All her sensibilities lay, as it were, numb with waiting; she had no purpose concerning the answer she would make him; her mind was still full of invective and complaint; it was also full of a dull remorse that might melt into contrition; either or both must break forth if he said that which appealed to words in her.

When Bates saw, however, that the little sermon which he had wrung from his heart with so much pain had not impressed her much, he felt as if he had never known until then the sharpest pain of sorrow, for although he did not know what he had hoped for, there had been hope in proportion to effort, and disappointment, the acutest form of sorrow, cut him to the heart. He did not moan or bewail, that was not his way. He stood holding himself stiffly, as was his wont, and pain laid emphasis on the severe and resolute lines upon his face, for a face that has long been lent as a vehicle for stern thoughts does not express a milder influence, although the depths of the heart are broken up.

She looked at his face, and the main drift of what he had said was interpreted by his look; she had expected censure and took for granted that all this was reproof.

"I don't see, Mr. Bates"--her tone was full of bitterness--"that you've got any call to stand there handing me over as if I was a leper."

To which he answered angrily, "Bairn, haven't I told you once and again that take your sin on my own soul?"

"Well then"--still in angry complaint--"what right have you to be looking and talking of me as if nothing was to be expected of me but ill?"

So he believed that it was worse than useless to speak to her. He drew his hand over his heavy eyebrows. He thought to himself that he would go home now, that he would start that day or the next and never see her again, and in the decision he began walking away, forgetting the word "good-bye" and all its courtesy, because oblivious of everything except that thought that he was unfit for anything but to go and live out his time in the desolate home. But when he had got about twenty paces from her he remembered that he had said no farewell, and turned, looked back, and came to her again, his heart beating like a boy's.

She stood where he had left her, sullen, with head slightly bent, and tearing the same leaves. Bates recognised her beauty to the full, as much as any other man could have done, but it only hurt him and made him afraid. He looked at her, timid as a child, yet manfully ignoring his timidity, he tried to smile to her as he said,

"Bairn, I may never see ye in this world again; give your old teacher a kiss."