"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?"