CHAPTER XXI.
Robert Trenholme had not told his brother that he had made his confession when he took tea with all the women. He knew that in such cases difference and separation are often first fancied and then created, by the self-conscious pride of the person who expects to be slighted. He refrained from making this possible on Alec's part, and set himself to watch the difference that would be made; and the interest of all side-issues was summed up for him in solicitude to know what Miss Rexford would do, for on that he felt his own hopes of her pardon to depend.
When he found, the day after Bates's departure, that Alec must seek Miss Rexford to give Eliza's message, he put aside work to go with him to call upon her. He would hold to his brother; it remained to be seen how she would receive them together.
That same afternoon Sophia went forth with Winifred and the little boys to gather autumn leaves. When the two brothers came out of the college gate they saw her, not twenty yards away, at the head of her little troop. Down the broad road the cool wind was rushing, and they saw her walking against it, outwardly sedate, with roses on her cheeks, her eyes lit with the sunshine. The three stopped, and greeted each other after the manner of civilised people.
Trenholme knew that the change that any member of the Rexford family would put into their demeanour could not be rudely perceptible. He set no store by her greeting, but he put his hand upon his brother's shoulder and he said:
"This fellow has news that will surprise you, and a message to give. Perhaps, if it is not asking too much, we may walk as far as may be necessary to tell it, or," and he looked at her questioningly, "would you like him to go and help you to bring down the high boughs?—they have the brightest leaves."
"Will you come and help us gather red leaves?" said Sophia to Alec.
She did not see the gratitude in the elder brother's eyes, because it did not interest her to look for it.
"And you?" she said to him.
"Ah, I" (he held up the cane with which he still eased the weight on one foot), "I cannot walk so far, but perhaps I will come and meet you on your return," and he pleased himself with the idea that she cared that he should come.
He went into his house again. His heart, which had lately been learning the habit of peace, just now learned a new lesson of what joy might be. His future before him looked troublous, but the worst of his fears was allayed. He had loved Sophia long; to-day his love seemed multiplied a thousandfold. Hope crept to his heart like a darling child that had been in disgrace and now was forgiven.
The others went on down the road.
Alec told his news about Eliza as drily as facts could be told. If he touched his story at all with feeling, it was something akin to a sneer.
"She'll get him on to the track of prosperity now she's taken hold, Miss Rexford," said he. "Mr. and Mrs. Bates will be having a piano before long, and they will drive in a 'buggy.' That's the romance of a settler's life in Canada."
When they had left that subject Sophia said, "Now he is gone, are you going away?"
"Yes; in a day or two. I've fixed nothing yet, because Robert seems to have some unaccountable objection to getting rid of me just at present; but I shall go."
"It is very fine weather," she said.
"There is too much glare," said he.
"You are surely hard to please."
"What I call fine weather is something a man has something in common with. If one were a little chap again, just leaving school for a holiday, this would be a glorious day, but—what man has spirits equal to" (he looked above) "this sort of thing."
His words came home to Sophia with overwhelming force, for, as they went on, touching many subjects one after another, she knew with absolute certainty that her companion had not the slightest intention of being her suitor. If the sunny land through which she was walking had been a waste place, in which storm winds sighed, over which storm clouds muttered, it would have been a fitter home for her heart just then. She saw that she was to be called to no sacrifice, but she experienced no buoyant relief. He was going away; and she was to be left. She had not known herself when she thought she wanted him to go—she was miserable. Well, she deserved her misery, for would she not be more miserable if she married him? Had she not cried and complained? And now the door of this renunciation was not opened to her—he was going away, and she was to be left.
Very dull and prosaic was the talk of these two as they walked up the road to that pine grove where the river curved in, and they turned back through that strip of wilderness between road and river where it was easy to be seen that the brightest leaf posies were to be had.
Nearest the pines was a group of young, stalwart maple trees, each of a different dye—gold, bronze, or red. It was here that they lingered, and Alec gathered boughs for the children till their hands were full. The noise of the golden-winged woodpecker was in the air, and the call of the indigo bird.
Sophia wandered under the branches; her mind was moving always. She was unhappy. Yes, she deserved that; but he—he was unhappy too; did he deserve it? Then she asked herself suddenly if she had no further duty toward him than to come or go at his call. Did she dare, by all that was true, to wreck his life and her own because she would not stoop to compel the call that she had feared?
Humility does not demand that we should think ill of ourselves, but that we should not think of ourselves at all. When Sophia lost sight of herself she saw the gate of Paradise. After that she was at one again with the sunshine and the breeze and the birds, with the rapture of the day and the land, and she ceased to think why she acted, or whether it was right or wrong. The best and worst hours of life are in themselves irresponsible, the will hurled headlong forward by an impulse that has gathered force before.
And what did she do? The first thing that entered her mind—it mattered not what to her. The man was in her power, and she knew it.
When the children's arms were full and they had gone on homeward down a pathway among lower sumac thickets, Alec turned and saw Sophia, just as stately, just as quiet, as he had ever seen her. So they two began to follow.
Her hand had been cut the day before, and the handkerchief that bound it had come off. Demurely she gave it to him to be fastened. Now the hand had been badly cut, and when he saw that he could not repress the tenderness of his sympathy.
"How could you have done it?" he asked, filled with pain, awed, wondering.
She laughed, though she did not mean to; she was so light-hearted, and it was very funny to see how quickly he softened at her will.
"Do not ask me to tell you how low we Rexfords have descended!" she cried, "and yet I will confess I did it with the meat axe. I ought not to touch such a thing, you think! Nay, what can I do when the loin is not jointed and the servant has not so steady a hand as I? Would you have me let papa grumble all dinner-time—the way that you men do, you know?"
The little horror that she had painted for him so vividly did its work. With almost a groan he touched the hand with kisses, not knowing what he did; and looking up, frightened of her as far as he could be conscious of fear, he saw, not anger, but a face that fain would hide itself, and he hid it in his embrace.
"Oh," cried he, "what have I done?"
Stepping backward, he stood a few paces from her, his arms crossed, the glow on his face suddenly transcended by the look with which a man might regard a crime he had committed.
"What is it?" she cried, wickedly curious. The maple tree over her was a golden flame and her feet were on a carpet of gold. All around them the earth was heaped with palm-like sumac shrubs, scarlet, crimson, purple—dyed as it were, with blood.
"What have I done?" He held out his hands as if they had been stained. "I have loved you, I have dared, without a thought, without a thought for you, to walk straight into all the—the—heaven of it."
Then he told her, in a word, that about himself which he thought she would despise; and she saw that he thought she heard it for the first time.
Lifting her eyebrows in pretty incredulity. "Not really?" she said.
"It is true," he cried with fierce emphasis.
At that she looked grave.
He had been trying to make her serious; but no sooner did he see her look of light and joy pass into a look of thought than he was filled with that sort of acute misery which differs from other sorrows as acute pain differs from duller aches.
"My darling," he said, his heart was wrung with the words—"my darling, if I have hurt you, I have almost killed myself." (Man that he was, he believed that his life must ebb in this pain.)
"Why?" she asked. "How?"
He went a step nearer her, but as it came to him every moment more clearly that he had deceived her, as he realised what he had gained and what he now thought to forego, his voice forsook him in his effort to speak. Words that he tried to say died on his lips.
But she saw that he had tried to say that because of it she should not marry him.
He tried again to speak and made better work of it. "This that has come to us—this love that has taken us both—you will say it is not enough to—to—"
She lifted up her face to him. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were full of light. "This that has come to us, Alec—" (At his name he came nearer yet) "this that has taken us both" (she faltered) "is enough."
He came near to her again; he took her hands into his; and all that he felt and all that she felt, passed from his eyes to hers, from hers to his.
He said, "It seems like talking in church, but common things must be said and answered, and—Sophie—what will your father say?"
"I don't know," she said; but happiness made her playful; she stroked the sleeve of his coat, as if to touch it were of more interest to her. "I will give him my fortune to make up, and come to you penniless."
"He won't consent," he urged.
There was still a honeyed carelessness in her voice and look. "At the great age to which I have attained," said she, "fathers don't interfere."
"What can I do or say," he said, "to make you consider?" for it seemed to him that her thoughts and voice came from her spellbound in some strange delight, as the murmur comes from a running stream, without meaning, except the meaning of all beautiful and happy things in God's world.
"What must I consider?"
"The shop—the trade."
"When you were a very young butcher, and first took to it, did you like it?"
"I wasn't squeamish," he said; and then he told her about his father. After that he philosophised a little, telling something of the best that he conceived might be if men sought the highest ideal in lowly walks of life, instead of seeking to perform imperfectly some nobler business. It was wonderful how much better he could speak to her than to his brother, but Sophia listened with such perfect assent that his sense of honour again smote him.
"Art thinking of it all, love?" he said.
"I was wondering what colour of aprons you wore, and if I must make them."
They began to walk home, passing now under the sumac's palm-like canopy, and they saw the blue gleam of the singing river through red thickets. Soon they came to a bit of open ground, all overgrown with bronzed bracken, and maidenhair sere and pink, and blue-eyed asters and golden-rod. So high and thick were the breeze-blown weeds that the only place to set the feet was a very narrow path. Here Sophia walked first, for they could not walk abreast, and as Alec watched her threading her way with light elastic step, he became afraid once more, and tried to break through her happy tranquillity.
"Dear love," he said, "I hope—"
"What now?" said she, for his tone was unrestful.
He trampled down flowers and ferns as he awkwardly tried to gain her side.
"You know, dear, I have a sort of feeling that I've perhaps just fascinated and entranced you—so that you are under a spell and don't consider, you know."
It was exactly what he meant, and he said it; but how merrily she laughed! Her happy laughter rang; the river laughed in answer, and the woodpecker clapped applause.
But Alec blushed very much and stumbled upon the tangled weeds.
"I only meant—I—I didn't mean—That is the way I feel fascinated by you, you know; and I suppose it might be the same—"
They walked on, she still advancing a few paces because she had the path, he retarded because, in his attempt to come up with her, he was knee-deep in flowers. But after a minute, observing that he was hurt in his mind because of her laughter, she mocked him, laughing again, but turned the sunshine of her loving face full upon him as she did so.
"Most fascinating and entrancing of butchers!" quoth she.
With that as she entered another thicket of sumac trees, he caught and kissed her in its shade.
* * * * *
And there was one man who heard her words and saw his act, one who took in the full meaning of it even more clearly than they could, because they in their transport had not his clearness of vision. Robert Trenholme, coming to seek them, chanced in crossing this place, thick set with shrubs, to come near them unawares, and seeing them, and having at the sight no power in him to advance another step or speak a word, he let them pass joyously on their way towards home. It was not many moments before they had passed off the scene, and he was left the only human actor in that happy wilderness where flower and leaf and bird, the blue firmament on high and the sparkling river, rejoiced together in the glory of light and colour.
Trenholme crossed the path and strode through flowery tangle and woody thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to detain his feet. He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to guard the loneliness of its bank, he sat down upon a rock and covered his face, as if even from the spirits of solitude and from his own consciousness he must hide. He thought of nothing: his soul within him was mad.
He had come out of his school not half an hour before, rejoicing more than any schoolboy going to play in the glorious weather. For him there was not too much light on the lovely autumn landscape; it was all a part of the peace that was within him and without, of the God he knew to be within him and without—for, out of his struggle for righteousness in small things, he had come back into that light which most men cannot see or believe. Just in so far as a man comes into that light he ceases to know himself as separate, but knows that he is a part of all men and all things, that his joy is the joy of all men, that their pain is his; therefore, as Trenholme desired the fulfilment of his own hopes, he desired that all hope in the world might find fruition. And because this day he saw—what is always true if we could but see it—that joy is a thousandfold greater than pain, the glory of the autumn seemed to him like a psalm of praise, and he gave thanks for all men.
Thus Trenholme had walked across the fields, into these groves—but now, as he sat by the river, all that, for the time, had passed away, except as some indistinct memory of it maddened him. His heart was full of rage against his brother, rage too against the woman he loved; and with this rage warred most bitterly a self-loathing because he knew that his anger against them was unjust. She did not know, she had no cause to know, that she had darkened his whole life; but—what a fool she was! What companionship could that thoughtless fellow give her? How he would drag her down! And he, too, could not know that he had better have killed his brother than done this thing. But any woman would have done for Alec; for himself there was only this one—only this one in the whole world. He judged his brother; any girl with a pretty face and a good heart would have done for that boisterous fellow—while for himself—"Oh God," he said, "it is hard."
Thus accusing and excusing these lovers, excusing and again accusing himself for his rage against them, he descended slowly into the depth of his trouble—for man, in his weakness, is so made that he can come at his worst suffering only by degrees. Yet when he had made this descent, the hope he had cherished for months and years lay utterly overthrown; it could not have been more dead had it been a hundred years in dying. He had not known before how dear it was, yet he had known that it was dearer than all else, except that other hope with which we do not compare our desires for earthly good because we think it may exist beside them and grow thereby.
There are times when, to a man, time is not, when the life of years is gathered into indefinite moments; and after, when outward things claim again the exhausted mind, he wonders that the day is not further spent. And Trenholme wondered at the length of that afternoon, when he observed it again and saw that the sun had not yet sunk low, and as he measured the shadows that the bright trees cast athwart the moving water, he was led away to think the thoughts that had been his when he had so lightly come into those gay autumn bowers. A swallow skimmed the wave with burnished wing; again he heard the breeze and the rapid current. They were the same; the movement and music were the same; God was still with him; was he so base as to withhold the thanksgiving that had been checked half uttered in his heart by the spring of that couchant sorrow? Then in the sum of life's blessings he had numbered that hope of his, and now he had seen the perfect fruition of that hope in joy. It was not his own,—but was it not much to know that God had made such joy, had given it to man? Had he in love of God no honest praise to give for other men's mercies? none for the joy of this man who was his brother? Across the murmur of the river he spoke words so familiar that they came to clothe the thought—
"We do give Thee most humble and hearty thanks for all Thy goodness and—loving kindness—to us—and to all men."
And although, as he said them, his hand was clenched so that his fingers cut the palm, yet, because he gave thanks, Robert Trenholme was nearer than he knew to being a holy man.