Читать книгу What Necessity Knows - L. Dougall - Страница 11

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At dawn Bates came down the ladder again, and went out quietly. The new day was fair, and calm; none of his fears were fulfilled. The dead man might start upon his journey, and Bates knew that the start must be an early one.

He and Saul, taking long-handled oars and poles, went down to the water's edge, where a big, flat-bottomed boat was lying drawn up on the shore to avoid the autumn storms. The stones of the beach looked black: here and there were bits of bright green moss upon them: both stones and moss had a coating of thin ice that glistened in the morning light.

It was by dint of great exertion that they got the clumsy vessel into the water and fastened her to a small wooden landing. They used more strength than time in their work. There was none of that care and skill required in the handling of the scow that a well-built craft would have needed. When she was afloat and tied, they went up the hill again, and harnessed a yoke of oxen to a rough wooden cart. Neither did this take them long. Bates worked with a nervousness that almost amounted to trembling. He had in his mind the dispute with the girl which he felt sure awaited him.

In this fear also he was destined to be disappointed. When he went to the inner room the coffin lay as he had left it, ready for its journey, and on the girl's bed in the corner the thick quilts were heaped as though the sleeper, had tossed restlessly. But now there was no restlessness; he only saw her night-cap beyond the quills; it seemed that, having perhaps turned her face to the wall to weep, she had at last fallen into exhausted and dreamless slumber.

Bates and Saul carried out the coffin eagerly, quietly. Even to the callous and shallow mind of Saul it was a relief to escape a contest with an angry woman. They set the coffin on the cart, and steadied it with a barrel of potash and sacks of buckwheat, which went to make up the load. By a winding way, where the slope was easiest, they drove the oxen between the trees, using the goad more and their voices as little as might be, till they were a distance from the house. Some trees had been felled, and cut off close to the ground, so that a cart might pass through the wood; this was the only sign of an artificial road. The fine powdered snow of the night before had blown away.

When they reached the beach again, the eastern sky, which had been grey, was all dappled with cold pink, and the grey water reflected it somewhat. There was clearer light on the dark green of the pine-covered hills, and the fine ice coating on stone and weed at the waterside had sharper glints of brilliancy.

Bates observed the change in light and colour; Saul did not; neither was disposed to dally for a moment. They were obliged to give forth their voices now in hoarse ejaculations, to make the patient beasts understand that they were to step off the rough log landing-place into the boat. The boat was almost rectangular in shape, but slightly narrower at the ends than in the middle, and deeper in the middle than at the ends; it was of rough wood, unpainted. The men disposed the oxen in the middle of the boat; the cart they unloaded, and distributed its contents as they best might. With long stout poles they then pushed off from the shore. Men and oxen were reflected in the quiet water.

They were not bound on a long or perilous voyage. The boat was merely to act as a ferry round a precipitous cliff where the shore was impassable, and across the head of the gushing river that formed the lake's outlet, for the only road through the hills lay along the further shore of this stream.

The men kept the boat in shallow water, poling and rowing by turns. There was a thin coating of ice, like white silk, forming on the water. As they went, Bates often looked anxiously where the log house stood on the slope above him, fearing to see the girl come running frantic to the water's edge, but he did not see her. The door of the house remained shut, and no smoke rose from its chimney. They had left the childish old woman sitting on the edge of her bed; Bates knew that she would be in need of fire and food, yet he could not wish that the girl should wake yet. "Let her sleep," he muttered to himself. "It will do her good." Yet it was not for her good he wished her to sleep, but for his own peace.

The pink faded from the sky, but the sun did not shine forth brightly.

It remained wan and cold, like a moon behind grey vapours.

"I'll not get back in a week, or on wheels," said Saul. He spoke more cheerfully than was pleasing to his employer.

"If it snows ye'll have to hire a sleigh and get back the first minute you can." The reply was stern.

The elder and bigger man made no further comment. However much he might desire to be kept in the gay world by the weather, the stronger will and intellect, for the hour at least, dominated his intention.

They rowed their boat past the head of the river. In an hour they had reached that part of the shore from which the inland road might be gained. They again loaded the cart. It, like the boat, was of the roughest description; its two wheels were broad and heavy; a long pole was mortised into their axle. The coffin and the potash barrel filled the cart's breadth; the sacks of buckwheat steadied the barrel before and behind. The meek red oxen were once more fastened to it on either side of the long pole. The men parted without farewells.

Saul turned his back on the water. The large, cold morning rang to his voice—"Gee. Yo-hoi-ist. Yo-hoi-eest. Gee." The oxen, answering to his voice and his goad, laboured onward over the sandy strip that bound the beach, up the hill among the maple trees that grew thickly in the vale of the small river. Bates watched till he saw the cattle, the cart, and Saul's stalwart form only indistinctly through the numerous grey tree-stems that broke the view in something the way that ripples in water break a reflection. When the monotonous shouting of Saul's voice—"Gee, gee, there. Haw, wo, haw. Yo-hoi-eest," was somewhat mellowed by the widening space, Bates stepped into the boat, and, pushing off, laboured alone to propel her back across the lake.

It took him longer to get back now that he was single-handed. The current of the lake towards its outlet tended to push the great clumsy scow against the shore. He worked his craft with one oar near the stern, but very often he was obliged to drop it and push out from shore with his pole. It was arduous, but all sense of the cold, bleak weather was lost, and the interest and excitement of the task were refreshing. To many men, as to many dogs, there is an inexplicable and unreasoning pleasure in dealing with water that no operation upon land can yield. Bates was one of these; he would hardly have chosen his present lot if it had not been so; but, like many a dry character of his stamp, he did not give his more agreeable sensations the name of pleasure, and therefore could afford to look upon pleasure as an element unnecessary to a sober life. Mid pushings and splashings, from the management of his scow, from air and sky, hill and water, he was in reality, deriving as great pleasure as any millionaire might from the sailing of a choice yacht; but he was aware only that, as he neared the end of his double journey, he felt in better trim in mind and body to face his lugubrious and rebellious ward.

When, however, he had toiled round the black rock cliff which hid the clearing from the river's head, and was again in full sight of his own house, all remembrance of the girl and his dread of meeting her passed from him in his excessive surprise at seeing several men near his dwelling. His dog was barking and leaping in great excitement. He heard the voices of other dogs. It took but the first glance to show him that the men were not Indians. Full of excited astonishment he pushed his boat to the shore.

His dog, having darted with noisy scatter of dry leaves down the hill to meet him, stood on the shore expectant with mouth open, excitement in his eyes and tail, saying as clearly as aught can be said without words—"This is a very agreeable event in our lives. Visitors have come." The moment Bates put his foot on land the dog bounded barking up the hill, then turned again to Bates, then again bounded off toward the visitors. Even a watchdog may be glad to see strangers if the pleasure is only rare enough.

Bates mounted the slope as a man may mount stairs—two steps at a time. Had he seen the strangers, as the saying is, dropping from the clouds, he could hardly have been more surprised than he was to see civilised people had reached his place otherwise than by the lake, for the rugged hills afforded nothing but a much longer and more arduous way to any settlement within reach. When he got up, however, he saw that these men carried with them implements of camp-life and also surveying instruments, by which he judged, and rightly, that his guests were ranging the lonely hills upon some tour of official survey.

That the travellers were his guests neither he nor they had the slightest doubt. They had set down their traps close to his door, and, in the calm confidence that it would soon be hospitably opened by rightful hands, they had made no attempt to open it for themselves. There were eight men in the party, two of whom, apparently its more important members, sauntered to meet Bates, with pipes in their mouths. These told him what district they were surveying, by what track they had just come over the hill, where they had camped the past night, where they wanted to get to by nightfall. They remarked on the situation of his house and the extent of his land. They said to him, in fact, more than was immediately necessary, but not more than was pleasant for him to hear or for them to tell. It is a very taciturn man who, meeting a stranger in a wilderness, does not treat him with more or less of friendly loquacity.

Under the right circumstances Bates was a genial man. He liked the look of these men; he liked the tone of their talk; and had he liked them much less, the rarity of the occasion and the fact that he was their host would have expanded his spirits. He asked astute questions about the region they had traversed, and, as they talked, he motioned them towards the house. He had it distinctly in his mind that he was glad they had come across his place, and that he would give them a hot breakfast; but he did not say so in words—just as they had not troubled to begin their conversation with him by formal greetings.

The house door was still shut; there was still no smoke from the chimney, although it was now full three hours since Bates had left the place. Saying that he would see if the women were up, he went alone into the house. The living-room was deserted, and, passing through the inner door, which was open, he saw his aunt, who, according to custom was neatly dressed, sitting on the foot of Sissy's empty bed. The old woman was evidently cold, and frightened at the unusual sounds outside; greatly fretted, she held the girl's night-cap in her hand, and the moment he appeared demanded of him where Sissy was, for she must have her breakfast. The girl he did not see.

The dog had followed him. He looked up and wagged his tail; he made no sign of feeling concern that the girl was not there. Bates could have cursed his dumbness; he would fain have asked where she had gone. The dog probably knew, but as for Bates, he not only did not know, but no conjecture rose in his mind as to her probable whereabouts.

He took his aunt to her big chair, piled the stove from the well-stored wood-box, and lit it. Then, shutting the door of the room where the disordered bed lay and throwing the house-door open, he bid the visitors enter. He went out himself to search the surroundings of the house, but Sissy was not to be found.

The dog did not follow Bates on this search. He sat down before the stove in an upright position, breathed with his mouth open, and bestowed on the visitors such cheerful and animated looks that they talked to and patted him. Their own dogs had been shut into the empty ox-shed for the sake of peace, and the house-dog was very much master of the situation.

Of the party, the two surveyors—one older and one younger—were men of refinement and education. British they were, or of such Canadian birth and training as makes a good imitation. Five of the others were evidently of humbler position—axe-men and carriers. The eighth man, who completed the party, was a young American, a singularly handsome young fellow—tall and lithe. He did not stay in the room with the others, but lounged outside by himself, leaning against the front of the house in the white cold sunlight.

In the meantime Bates, having searched the sheds and inspected with careful eyes the naked woods above the clearing, came back disconsolately by the edge of the ravine, peering into it suspiciously to see if the girl could, by some wild freak, be hiding there. When he came to the narrow strip of ground between the wall of the house and the broken bank he found himself walking knee-deep in the leaves that the last night's gale had drifted there, and because the edge of the ravine was thus entirely concealed, he, remembering Sissy's warning, kicked about the leaves cautiously to find the crack of which she had spoken, and discovered that the loose portion had already fallen. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if the girl could possibly have fallen with it. Instantly he sprang down the ravine, feeling among the drifted leaves on all sides, but nothing except rock and earth was to be found under their light heaps. It took only a few minutes to assure him of the needlessness of his fear. The low window of the room in which Sissy had slept looked out immediately upon this drift of leaves, and, as Bates passed it, he glanced through the uncurtained glass, as if the fact that it was really empty was so hard for him to believe that it needed this additional evidence. Then the stacks of fire-wood in front of the house were all that remained to be searched, and Bates walked round, looking into the narrow aisles between them, looking at the same time down the hill, as if it might be possible that she had been on the shore and he had missed her.

"What are you looking for?" asked the young American. The question was not put rudely. There was a serenity about the youth's expectation of an answer which, proving that he had no thought of over-stepping good manners, made it, at the same time, very difficult to withhold an answer.

Bates turned annoyed. He had supposed everybody was within.

"What have you lost?" repeated the youth.

"Oh—" said Bates, prolonging the sound indefinitely. He was not deceitful or quick at invention, and it seemed to him a manifest absurdity to reply—"a girl." He approached the house, words hesitating on his lips.

"My late partner's daughter," he observed, keeping wide of the mark, "usually does the cooking."

"Married?" asked the young man rapidly.

"She?—No," said Bates, taken by surprise.

"Young lady?" asked the other, with more interest. Bates was not accustomed to consider his ward under his head.

"She is just a young girl about seventeen," he replied stiffly.

"Oh, halibaloo!" cried the youth joyously. "Why, stranger, I haven't set eyes on a young lady these two months. I'd give a five dollar-bill this minute, if I had it, to set eyes on her right here and now." He took his pipe from his lips and clapped his hand upon his side with animation as he spoke.

Bates regarded him with dull disfavour. He would himself have given more than the sum mentioned to have compassed the same end, but for different reasons, and his own reasons were so grave that the youth's frivolity seemed to him doubly frivolous.

"I hope," he said coldly, "that she will come in soon." His eyes wandered involuntarily up the hill as he spoke.

"Gone out walking, has she?" The youth's eyes followed in the same direction. "Which way has she gone?"

"I don't know exactly which path she may have taken." Bates's words grew more formal the harder he felt himself pressed.

"Path!" burst out the young man—"Macadamised road, don't you mean? There's about as much of one as the other on this here hill."

"I meant," said Bates, "that I didn't know where she was."

His trouble escaped somewhat with his voice as he said this with irritation.

The youth looked at him curiously, and with some incipient sympathy.

After a minute's reflection he asked, touching his forehead:

"She ain't weak here, is she—like the old lady?"

"Nothing of the sort," exclaimed Bates, indignantly. The bare idea cost him a pang. Until this moment he had been angry with the girl; he was still angry, but a slight modification took place. He felt with her against all possible imputations.

"All right in the headpiece, is she?" reiterated the other more lightly.

"Very intelligent," replied Bates. "I have taught her myself. She is remarkably intelligent." The young man's sensitive spirits, which had suffered slight depression from contact with Bates's perturbation, now recovered entirely.

"Oh, Glorianna!" he cried in irrepressible anticipation. "Let this very intelligent young lady come on! Why"—in an explanatory way—"if I saw as much as a female dress hanging on a clothes-line out to dry, I'm in that state of mind I'd adore it properly."

If Bates had been sure that the girl would return safely he would perhaps have been as well pleased that she should not return in time to meet the proposed adoration; as it was, he was far too ill at ease concerning her not to desire her advent as ardently as did the naïve youth. The first feeling made his manner severe; the second constrained him to say he supposed she would shortly appear.

His mind was a good deal confounded, but if he supposed anything it was that, having wakened to find herself left behind by the boat, she had walked away from the house in an access of anger and disappointment, and he expected her to return soon, because he did not think she had courage or resolution to go very far alone. Underneath this was the uneasy fear that her courage and resolution might take her farther into danger than was at all desirable, but he stifled the fear.

When he went in he told the company, in a few matter-of-fact words of his partner's death, and the object of the excursion from which they had seen him return. He also mentioned that his aunt's companion, the dead man's child, had, it appeared, gone off into the woods that morning—this was by way of apology that she was not there to cook for them, but he took occasion to ask if they had seen her on the hill. As they had come down the least difficult way and had not met her, he concluded that she had not endeavoured to go far afield, and tried to dismiss his anxiety and enjoy his guests in his own way.

Hospitality, even in its simplest form, is more often a matter of amiable pride than of sincere unselfishness, but it is not a form of pride with which people are apt to quarrel. Bates, when he found himself conversing with scientific men of gentle manners, was resolved to show himself above the ordinary farmer of that locality. He went to the barrel where the summer's eggs had been packed in soft sand, and took out one apiece for the assembled company. He packed the oven with large potatoes. He put on an excellent supply of tea to boil. The travellers, who, in fact, had had their ordinary breakfast some hours before, made but feeble remonstrances against these preparations, remonstrances which only caused Bates to make more ample provision. He brought out a large paper bag labelled, "patent self-raising pancake meal," and a small piece of fat pork. Here he was obliged to stop and confess himself in need of culinary skill; he looked at the men, not doubting that he could obtain it from them.

"The Philadelphian can do it better," said one. This was corroborated by the others. "Call Harkness," they cried, and at the same time they called Harkness themselves.

The young American opened the door and came in in a very leisurely, not to say languid, manner. He took in the situation at a glance without asking a question. "But," said he, "are we not to wait for the intelligent young lady? Female intelligence can make the finer pancake."

The surveyors manifested some curiosity. "What do you know about a young lady?" they asked.

"The young lady of the house," replied Harkness. "Hasn't he"—referring to Bates—"told you all about her? The domestic divinity who has just happened to get mislaid this morning. I saw him looking over the wood pile to see if she had fallen behind it, but she hadn't."

"It is only a few days since her father died," said the senior of the party gravely.

"And so," went on the young man, "she has very properly given these few days to inconsolable grief. But now our visit is just timed to comfort and enliven her, why is she not here to be comforted and enlivened?"

No-one answered, and, as the speaker was slowly making his way toward the frying-pan, no one seemed really apprehensive that he would keep them waiting. The youth had an oval, almost childish face; his skin was dark, clear, and softly coloured as any girl's; his hair fell in black, loose curls over his forehead. He was tall, slender without being thin, very supple; but his languid attitudes fell short of grace, and were only tolerable because they were comic. When he reached out his hand for the handle of the frying-pan he held the attention of the whole company by virtue of his office, and his mind, to Bates's annoyance, was still running on the girl.

"Is she fond of going out walking alone?" he asked.

"How could she be fond of walking when there's no place to walk?" Bates spoke roughly. "Besides, she has too much work to do."

"Ever lost her before?"

"No," said Bates. It would have been perfectly unbearable to his pride that these strangers should guess his real uneasiness or its cause, so he talked as if the fact of the girl's long absence was not in any way remarkable.

Having mixed a batter the American sliced pork fat into the hot pan and was instantly obscured from view by the smoke thereof. In a minute his face appeared above it like the face of a genius.

"You will observe, gentlemen," he cried without bashfulness, "that I now perform the eminently interesting operation of dropping cakes—one, two, three. May the intelligent young lady return to eat them!"

No one laughed, but his companions smiled patiently at his antics—a patience born of sitting in a very hot, steamy room after weeks in the open air.

"You are a cook," remarked Bates.

The youth bent his long body towards him at a sudden angle. "Born a cook—dentist by profession—by choice a vagabond."

"Dentist?" said Bates curiously.

"At your service, sir."

"He is really a dentist," said one of the surveyors with sleepy amusement. "He carries his forceps round in his vest pocket."

"I lost them when I scrambled head first down this gentleman's macadamised road this morning, but if you want a tooth out I can use the tongs."

"My teeth are all sound," said Bates.

"Thank the Lord for that!" the young man answered with an emphatic piety which, for all that appeared, might have been perfectly sincere.

"And the young lady?" he asked after a minute.

"What?"

"The young lady's teeth—the teeth of the intelligent young lady—the intelligent teeth of the young lady—are they sound?"

"Yes."

He sighed deeply. "And to think," he mourned, "that he should have casually lost her just this morning!"

He spoke exactly as if the girl were a penknife or a marble that had rolled from Bates's pocket, and the latter, irritated by an inward fear, grew to hate the jester.

When the meal, which consisted of fried eggs, pancakes, and potatoes, was eaten, the surveyors spent an hour or two about the clearing, examining the nature of the soil and rock. They had something to say to Bates concerning the value of his land which interested him exceedingly. Considering how rare it was for him to see any one, and how fitted he was to appreciate intercourse with men who were manifestly in a higher rank of life than he, it would not have been surprising if he had forgotten Sissy for a time, even if they had had nothing to relate of personal interest to himself. As it was, even in the excitement of hearing what was of importance concerning his own property, he did not wholly forget her; but while his visitors remained his anxiety was in abeyance.

When they were packing their instruments to depart, the young American, who had not been with them during the morning, came and took Bates aside in a friendly way.

"See here," he said, "were you gassing about that young lady? There ain't no young lady now, is there?"

"I told you"—with some superiority of manner—"she is not a young lady; she is a working girl, an emigrant's——"

"Oh, Glorianna!" he broke out, "girl or lady, what does it matter to me?

Do you mean to say you've really lost her?"

The question was appalling to Bates. All the morning he had not dared to face such a possibility and now to have the question hurled at him with such imperative force by another was like a terrible blow. But when a blow is thus dealt from the outside, a man like Bates rallies all the opposition of his nature to repel it.

"Not at all"—his manner was as stiff as ever—"she is lurking somewhere near."

"Look here—I've been up the hill that way, and that way, and that way"—he indicated the directions with his hand—"and I've been down round the shore as far as I could get, and I've had our two dogs with me, who'd either of them have mentioned it if there'd been a stranger anywheres near; and she ain't here. An' if she's climbed over the hill, she's a spunky one—somewhat spunkier than I should think natural." He looked at Bates very suspiciously as he spoke.

"Well?"

"Well, my belief is that there ain't no young lady, and that you're gassing me."

"Very well," said Bates, and he turned away. It was offensive to him to be accused of telling lies—he was not a man to give any other name than "lie" to the trick attributed to him, or to perceive any humour in the idea of it—but it was a thousand times more offensive that this youth should have presumed to search for Sissy and to tell him that the search had been vain.

Horrible as the information just given was, he did not more than half believe it, and something just said gave him a definite idea of hope—the strange dogs had not found Sissy, but the house-dog, if encouraged to seek, would certainly find her. He had felt a sort of grudge against the animal all day, because he must know which way she had gone and could not tell. Now he resolved as soon as the strangers were gone to set the dog to seek her. Upon this he stayed his mind.

The surveyors hoped to get a few days' more work done before the winter put an end to their march; they determined when thus stopped to turn down the river valley and take the train for Quebec. The way they now wished to take lay, not in the direction in which the ox-cart had gone, but over the hills directly across the lake. The scow belonging to this clearing, on which they had counted, was called into requisition.

The day was still calm; Bates had no objection to take them across. At any other time he would have had some one to leave in charge of the place, but especially as he would be in sight of the house all the time, he made no difficulty of leaving as it was. He could produce four oars, such as they were, and the way across was traversed rapidly.

"And there ain't really a female belonging to the place, except the old lady," said the dentist, addressing the assembled party upon the scow. "It was all a tale, and—my eye;—he took me in completely."

Probably he did not give entire credence to his own words, and wished to provoke the others to question Bates further; but they were not now in the same idle mood that had enthralled them when, in the morning, they had listened to him indulgently. Their loins were girded; they were intent upon what they were doing and what they were going to do. No one but Bates paid heed to him.

Bates heard him clearly enough, but, so stubbornly had he set himself to rebuff this young man, and so closely was he wrapped in that pride of reserve that makes a merit of obstinate self-reliance, that it never even occurred to him to answer or to accept this last offer of a fellow-man's interest in the search he was just about to undertake.

He had some hope that, if Sissy were skulking round, she would find it easier to go back to the house when he was absent, and that he should find her as usual on his return; but, as he wrought at his oar in returning across the leaden water, looking up occasionally to make the log house his aim, and staring for the most part at the lone hills, under the pine woods of which his late companions had disappeared, his heart gradually grew more heavy; all the more because the cheerfulness of their society had buoyed up his spirit in their presence, did it now suffer depression. The awful presentiment began to haunt him that he would not find the girl that night, that he had in grim reality "lost her." If this were the case, what a fool, what a madman, he had been to let go the only aid within his reach! He stopped his rowing for a minute, and almost thought of turning to call the surveying party back again. But no, Sissy might be—in all probability was—already in the house; in that case what folly to have brought them back, delaying their work and incurring their anger! So he reasoned, and went on towards home; but, in truth, it was not their delay or displeasure that deterred him so much as his own pride, which loathed the thought of laying bare his cause for fear and distress.