CHAPTER V.
It was a delightful proof of the blessed elasticity of inconsistency in human lives, a proof also that there was in these two men more of good than of evil, that that same evening, when the lamp was lit, they discussed the problem that had been mooted in the afternoon with a fair amount of good temper. As they sat elbowing the deal table, sheets of old newspapers under their inspection, Trenholme told his story more soberly. He told it roughly, emphasising detail, slighting important matter, as men tell stories who see them too near to get the just proportion; but out of his words Bates had wit to glean the truth. It seemed that his father had been a warmhearted man, with something superior in his mental qualities and acquirements. Having made a moderate fortune, he had liberally educated his sons. There is nothing in which families differ more by nature than in the qualities of heart which bind them together or easily release them from the bonds of kinship. The members of this small family had that in them which held them together in spite of the pulling of circumstance; for although the elder son had come on the stage of manhood ten years before the younger, although he had had talents that advanced him among scholarly men, and had been quickly taken from his first curacy to fill a superior position in a colony, he had never abated an affectionate correspondence with Alec, and had remained the hero of his young brother's imagination. This younger son, not having the same literary tastes, and having possibly a softer heart, gratified his father by going into business with him; but at that good man's death he had had sufficient enterprise, sufficient distaste, possibly, for his English position, to sell the business that was left in his hands, and affection drew him, as a loadstone a magnet, to his brother's neighbourhood. He brought with him securities of the small fortune they were to divide between them, and expected nothing but happiness in the meeting and prosperity in his future career. Unfortunately, a cause of dispute between the two brothers arose instantly on Alec's arrival: there was an exceptionally good opening in Chellaston for one of Alec's calling; the brothers took different views concerning that calling; they had quarrelled with all the fire of warm natures, and were parted almost as soon as met.
"And did ye think it would be pleasing to your brother to have a tradesman of the same name and blood as himself in the same place?" asked Bates with lack of toleration in his tone.
"That's all very fine!"—scornfully. "You know as well as I do that my lord and my gentleman come out to this country to do what farm-hands and cattle-men would hardly be paid to do at home—"
"When they've ruined themselves first, but not till then," Bates put in.
"And besides, old Robert sets up to be a saint. I didn't suppose he'd look upon things in the vulgar way." This reflection was cast on Bates as one of a class. "Was I likely to suppose he'd think that to kick one's heels on an office stool was finer than honest labour, or that my particular kind of labour had something more objectionable about it than any other? In old times it was the most honourable office there was. Look at the priests of the Old Testament! Read Homer!"
"I don't know that I'm understanding ye about Homer."
"Why, hear him tell the way the animals were cut up, and the number of them—yards and yards of it."
"But in the Bible the animals were used for sacrifice; that's very different." Bates said this, but felt that a point had been scored against him in the poetry of Homer; the Old Testament was primeval, but Homer, in spite of ancient date, seemed to bring with him the authority of modern culture.
"If they were, the people feasted upon them all the same, and the office of preparing them was the most honourable. I'm not claiming to be a priest (I leave that to my respected brother); I claim my right in a new country, where Adam has to delve again, to be a butcher and a gentleman." All his words were hot and hasty.
"But ye see," said Bates, "in the towns here, things are beginning to regulate themselves much in the shape they take in the old country."
"My brother cares more what people think than I do."
"And a verra good thing too; for with the majority there is wisdom," put in Bates, keen and contentious.
"You think so, do you?"—with sarcasm.
"Ye must remember ye're young yet; your brother has seen more of the world—"
Now Alec Trenholme had had no intention of telling what, to his mind, was the worst of his brother's conduct, but here he slapped the table and burst out angrily:
"And I tell you he believes as I do, but he hasn't pluck to act up to it. He's not even told one of his fine friends what his brother does; he says it's for the sake of his school. He's living a lie for his own pride. He's got himself made master of a college, fine as a fiddle, and he cares more about that than about his brother. With all his prayers and his sermons in church every Sunday, he'd let me go to the dogs rather than live out the truth. He thinks I've gone to the devil now, because I left him in a rage, and I told him I'd go and learn to spend my money, and drink, and swear, and gamble as a gentleman should. He thinks I've done it, and he writes and implores me, by all that's holy, to forsake evil courses; but never a word like 'Come back and set up your shop, old fellow, and I'll be your customer.' That's the amount of his religion."
"It was a hard choice ye put upon him," said Bates, solemnly.
"You think it was? Well!" The young man gave a boisterous laugh.
"For, in the first place, it's not his fault, but your own entirely, if ye go to the bad."
"I've not gone to the bad; but if I had, if I'd gone straight there, it would have been his fault."
"'Twould just have been your own. There's just one man that's responsible for your actions, and that's yourself. If your brother was a compete blackguard, instead of a good man, that's no excuse for you. God never put any man into this world and said, 'Be good if some other man is.'"
"When a man sets up to preach, and then throws away his influence over his own brother for a little finery opposition, it's more than being a blackguard. What does a man mean by standing up to preach if he doesn't mean that he's taking some responsibility for other people?"
"Well, but it wasn't he that threw away his influence over you; it was you. He never said 'Don't be influenced any more by me.' If ye thought he was an angel before then, more fool ye were, for no man is an angel. What business had you to make all the influence of his godly life condeetion on his doing right, or what you thought right, on a certain point of opinion?"
"He's living a lie, I tell you."
"I'm not sure but he's right not to have blazoned it. I'm not sure but
I'd have done the same myself."
"Well, as you just remarked, men are not angels. That you would have done it doesn't prove anything."
Next morning Trenholme, whose half-awaked mind had not yet recurred to the night's dispute stepped out of the house into a white morning fog, not uncommon in fierce weather when holes for fishing had been made in the ice of the lake. The air, seemingly as dry as smoke, but keen and sweet, was almost opaque, like an atmosphere of white porcelain, if such might be. The sun, like a scarlet ball, was just appearing; it might have been near, it might have been far; no prospect was seen to mark the distance. Trenholme was walking round by the white snow path, hardly discerning the ox-shed to which he was bound, when he suddenly came upon the dark figure of Bates, who was pitching hay for his Cattle. Bates let down his fork and stood in his path.
"For God's sake, Mr. Trenholme," said he, "let your brother know where you are."
Trenholme started: Bates's figure stood not unlike some gnarled thorn that might have appeared to take human shape in the mist.
"For God's sake, man, write! If ye only knew what it was to feel the weight of another soul on ye, and one that ye had a caring for! Ye're easy angered yourself; ye might as easy anger another, almost without knowing it; and if he or she was to go ye didn't know where, or perhaps die, be sure ye would blame yourself without heeding their blame."
Bates's voice was trembling. The solemnity of his mien and the feminine pronoun he had let slip revealed to Trenholme the direction his thoughts had taken.
He went on, holding out an arm, as though by the gesture swearing to his own transgression: "I counted myself a good man, and I'll not say now but I did more for"—some name died upon his lips—"than one man in a hundred would have done; but in my folly I angered her, and when I'd have given my life ten times over—"
This, then, was the sorrow that dogged his life. Trenholme knew, without more ado, that Bates loved the lost girl, that it was her loss that outweighed all other misfortune. He felt a great compassion: he said impatiently:
"There's no use trying to interfere between brothers. You can't see the thing as I see it. Let's leave it."
"Ay, leave it," cried the other, voice and limb shaking, "and life is short, and the time to die is every time, and if some accident is to sweep us away to-night, who's to tell him that your death, and your soul too, isn't on his head?"
"Bother my soul!" said Alec; and yet there was a certain courtesy expressed in the gentler tone in which he spoke, and what he thought was, "How much he must have loved her!"
When the fog had vanished, leaving daylight absolute, this scene of the morning seemed like a dream, and in the evening, as much from curiosity to see if he could revive its essence again as from a friendly desire to relieve the overcharged heart of his comrade, he said:
"Tell me about her, Bates. What was she like?"
Bates responded to the question like a man whose heart is beating against the walls of his silence as a bird beats upon its cage. He spoke a few words, hardly noticing that he was telling his memories; then the mask of his self-bound habit was resumed; then again the dignity of his sorrow found some expression; and still again he would retire into dumbness, setting the questioner aside slightingly; and when he had forgotten that he had drawn back within himself some further revealing would come from him. It was little that he said in all, but language that has been fused in the furnace of so strong a sorrow and silence has little of the dross of common speech—the unmeaning, misleading, unnecessary elements: his veritable memory and thought and feeling were painted by his meagre tale.
Was that tale true? John Bates would have thought it a great sin to deceive himself or another, and yet, such was the power of his love, blown to white heat by the breath of regret and purified, that when he spoke of the incidents of Sissy's childhood, of the cleverness she displayed when he taught her, of her growth until the day in which he had offended her by speaking of marriage, when he told of her tears, and prayers, and anger, and of his own despotism, the picture of it all that arose in Trenholme's imagination was exceedingly different from what would have been there had he seen the reality. He would not have liked Cameron's daughter had he seen her, but, seeing her through the medium of a heart that loved her, all the reverence that is due to womanly sweetness stirred in him. Cupid may be blind, but to the eyes of chastened love is given the vision of God.
When it appeared that Bates had said all that he was going to say, Alec Trenholme sat pondering the problem of this girl's disappearance with more mental energy than he had before given to it. Knowing the place now, he knew that what Bates and Saul had averred was true—that there were but two ways by which any one could leave it while water was unfrozen, one by the boat, and the other by striking at random across the hill to the back of the farm—a route that could only lead either to one of several isolated farms, or, by a forty-mile tramp round by the nearest river bridge, to the railway. At no farmhouse had she been seen, and the journey by the bridge was too long to have been accomplished before the snow storm must have impeded her. It was in attempting this journey, Bates was convinced, that she had perished. There was, of course, another possibility that had been mooted at Turrifs Settlement; but the testimony of Bates and Saul, agreeing in the main points, had entirely silenced it. Trenholme, thinking of this now, longed to question more nearly, yet hardly dared.
"Do you think she could have gone mad? People sometimes do go stark mad suddenly. Because, if so, and if you could be mistaken in thinking you saw her in the house when you went—"
The Scotchman was looking keenly at him with sharp eyes and haggard face. "I understand ye," he said, with a sigh of resignation, "the noise o' the thing has been such that there's no evil men haven't thought of me, or madness of her. Ye think the living creature ye saw rise from the coffin was, maybe, the dead man's daughter?"
"I think it was much too big for a woman."
"Oh, as to that, she was a good height." Perhaps, with involuntary thought of what might have been, he drew himself up to his full stature as he said, "A grand height for a woman; but as to this idea of yours, I'll not say ye're insulting her by it, though! that's true too; but I've had the same notion; and now I'll tell ye something. She was not mad; she took clothes; she left everything in order. Was that the act of a maniac? and if she wasn't mad, clean out of her wits, would she have done such a thing as ye're thinking of?"
"No"—thoughtfully—"I should think not."
"And, furthermore; if she had wished to do it, where is it she could have laid him? D'ye think I haven't looked the ground over? There's no place where she could have buried him, and to take him to the lake was beyond her strength." There was nothing of the everyday irascibility about his voice; the patience of a great grief was upon him, as he argued away the gross suspicion.
"That settles it." Trenholme said this willingly enough.
"Yes, it settles it; for if there was a place where the earth was loose I dug with my own hands down to the very rock, and neither man nor woman lay under it."
Trenholme was affected; he again renounced his suspicion.
"And now I've told ye that," said Bates, "I'll tell ye something else, for it's right ye should know that when the spring comes it'll not be in my power to help ye with the logs—not if we should lose the flood and have to let 'em lie till next year—for when the snow passes, I must be on the hills seeking her." (He had put a brown, bony hand to shade his eyes, and from out its shade he looked.) "There were many to help me seek her alive; I'll take none wi' me when I go to give her burial."
The other saddened; The weary length and uncertainty of such a search, and its dismal purpose, came to him.
"You've no assurance that she hasn't drowned herself in the lake here," he cried, remonstrating.
"But I have that; and as ye'll be naturally concerned at me leaving the logs, I'll tell ye what it is, if ye'll give me your word as an honest man that ye'll not repeat it at any time or place whatsoever."
He looked so like a man seeking courage to confess some secret sin that
Trenholme drew back.
"I'll not tell, but—"
Bates took no heed. "My aunt," he began, "had money laid by; she had ten English sovereigns she liked to keep by her—women often do. There was no one but me and Sissy knew where it was; and she took them with her. By that I know she was making for the railway, and—" His voice grew unsteady as he brought his hand down; there was a look of far-off vision in his eyes, as though he saw the thing of which he spoke. "Ay, she's lying now somewhere on the hills, where she would be beaten down by the snow before she reached a road."
Trenholme was thinking of the sadness of it all, forgetting to wonder even why he had been told not to repeat this last, when he found Bates was regarding his silence with angry suspicion.
"It wasn't stealing," he said irritably; "she knew she might have them if she wanted." It was as though he were giving a shuffling excuse for some fault of his own and felt its weakness.
The young man, taken by surprise, said mechanically, "Would Miss Bates have given them to her?" He had fallen into the habit of referring to the childish old woman with, all due form, for he saw Bates liked it.
"Hoots! What are you saying, man? Would ye have had the lassie leave the burden on my mind that she'd gone out of her father's house penniless? 'Twas the one kindness she did me to take the gold."