The day after his coming, and the next, for some reason the old stranger called Cameron remained in the brick house to which Harkness had brought him. The young man, impatient for novelty, if for nothing else, began to wonder if he had sunk into some stupor of mind from which he would not emerge. He had heard of him as a preacher, and as the conceptions of ordinary minds are made up only of the ideas directly presented to them, he had a vague notion that this old man continually preached. As it was, he went to his work at the hotel on the third morning, and still left his strange guest in the old house, walking about in an empty room, munching some bread with his keen white teeth, his bright eyes half shut under their bushy brows.
Harkness came to the hotel disconcerted, and, meeting Eliza near the dining-room, took off his hat in sullen silence. Several men in the room called after him as he passed. "How's your dancing bear, Harkness?" "How's the ghost you're befriending?" "How's your coffin-gentleman?" There was a laugh that rang loudly in the large, half-empty room.
After Harkness had despatched two morning visitors, however, and was looking out of his window, as was usual in his idle intervals, he noticed several errand-boys gazing up the road, and in a minute an advancing group came within his view, old Cameron walking down the middle of the street hitting the ground nervously with his staff, and behind him children of various sizes following rather timidly. Every now and then the old man emitted some sound—a shout, a word of some sort, not easily understood. It was this that had attracted the following of children, and was very quickly attracting the attention of every one in the street. One or two men, and a woman with a shawl over her head, were coming down the sidewalks the same way and at about the same pace as the central group, and Harkness more than suspected that they had diverged from the proper course of their morning errands out of curiosity. He took more interest in the scene than seemed consistent with his slight connection with the principal actor. He made an excited movement toward his door, and his hand actually trembled as he opened it. Eliza was usually about the passages at this time of day. He called her name.
She put her head over the upper bannister.
"Come down and see Lazarus Cameron!"
"I'll come in a minute."
He saw through the railing of the bannisters the movement of some linen she was folding.
"He'll be past in a minute." Harkness's voice betrayed his excitement more than he desired.
Eliza dropped the linen and came downstairs rather quickly. Harkness returned to his window; she came up beside him. The inner window was open, only one pane was between them and the outer air. In yards all round cocks were crowing, as, on a mild day in the Canadian March, cocks will crow continually. Light snow of the last downfall lay on the opposite roofs, and made the hills just seen behind them very white. The whole winter's piles of snow lay in the ridges between the footpaths and the road. Had it not been that some few of the buildings were of brick, and that on one or two of the wooden ones the white paint was worn off, the wide street would have been a picture painted only in different tones of white. But the clothes of the people were of dark colour, and the one vehicle in sight was a blue box-sleigh, drawn by a shaggy pony.
Eliza was conscious of the picture only as one is conscious of surroundings upon which the eye does not focus. Her sight fastened on the old man, now almost opposite the hotel. He was of a broad, powerful frame that had certainly once possessed great strength. Even now he was strong; he stooped a little, but he held his head erect, and the well-formed, prominent features of his weather-beaten face showed forth a tremendous force of some sort; even at that distance the brightness of his eyes was visible under bushy brows, grey as his hair. His clothes were of the most ordinary sort, old and faded. His cap was of the commonest fur; he grasped it now in his hand, going bareheaded. Tapping the ground with his staff, he walked with nervous haste, looking upward the while, as blind men often look.