"For G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 p.r.o.noun 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 compa.s.sion: 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 G.o.d.

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 pa.s.ses, 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 a.s.surance 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 la.s.sie 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."

CHAPTER VI.

One evening Alec Trenholme sat down to write to his brother. Bates had urged him to write, and, after a due interval, of his own accord he wrote. The urging and the writing had a certain relation of cause and effect, but the writer did not think so. Also, the letter he wrote was very different from the doc.u.ment of penitence and recantation that Bates had advised, and now supposed him to be writing.

He gave a brief account of what he had done before he accepted the post of station-master at Turrifs Station, and then,

"I liked it well enough," he wrote, "until one night a queer thing happened. As evening came on, a man drove up bringing a coffin to be sent by train to the next village for burial. When I was left alone with the thing, the man inside got up--he really did, I saw him.

I shut him in and ran to fetch the carter, but couldn't catch him.

When I came back, the man had got out and ran into the wood.

They had lined the box with a white bed-quilt, and we found that some miles away in the bush the next day, but we never found the man; and the queer thing is that there were two men and a girl who seem to have been quite certain he was dead. One of them, a very intelligent fellow that I am staying with now, thinks the carter must have played some trick on the way; but I hardly believe that myself, from the way the carter acted. I think he spoke the truth; he said he had been alone on the road all day, and had been scared out of his wits by hearing the man turn in the coffin. He seemed well frightened, too. Of course, if this is true, the man could not really have been dead; but I'm not trying to give an explanation; I'm just telling you what occurred. Well, things went on quietly enough for another month, and on the last night of the old year the place was snowed up--tracks, roads, everything--and at midnight an old man came about who answered to the description I had of the dead man, clothes and all, for it seems they were burying him in his clothes.

He was rather deaf, and blind I think, though I'm not sure, and he seemed to be wandering in his mind somehow; but he was a fine, powerful fellow--reminded me a little of father--and the pathetic thing about it was that he had got the idea into his head--"

Here Alec stopped, and, holding the pen idly in his hand, sat lost in thought. So wistful did he look, so wrapt, that Bates, glancing furtively at him, thought the letter had raised a.s.sociations of his home and childhood, and took himself off to bed, hoping that the letter would be more brotherly if the writer was left alone. But when Alec put pen to paper again he only wrote:--

"Well, I don't know that it matters what he had got into his head; it hadn't anything to do with whether he was Cameron (the name of the man supposed dead) or not. I could not get a word out of him as to who he was or where he came from. I did all I could to get him to come in and have food and get warmed; but though I went after him and stood with him a long while, I didn't succeed. He was as strong as a giant. It was awfully solemn to see an old man like that wandering bareheaded in the snow at night, so far from any human being. I was forced to leave him, for the engine came clearing the track. I got some men to come after him with me, but he was gone, and we never saw him again. I stayed on there ten days, trying to hear something of him, and after that I came here to try my hand at lumbering. The owner of this place here was terribly cut up about the affair. It was he who started the coffin I told you of, and he's been left quite alone because this tale frightened men from coming to work for him in the winter as usual. I have a very comfortable berth here. I think there must have been something curious--a streak of some kind--in the dead man's family; his only daughter went off from here in a rage a few days after his death, and as the snow came at once, she is supposed to have perished in the drifts on the hills. Our logs have to be floated down the small river here at the spring flood, and this man, Bates, is determined to look for the lost girl at the same time. I'll stay and see him through the spring. Very likely I shall look in on you in summer."

Alec Trenholme went to bed not a little sleepy, but satisfied that he had given a clear account of the greater part of what had befallen him.

The next day he tramped as far as the railway to post the letter.

When Princ.i.p.al Trenholme received this letter he was standing in his library, holding an interview with some of his elder pupils. He had a pleasant manner with boys; his rule was to make friends with them as much as possible; and if he was not the darling of their hearts, he was as dear to them as a pedagogue ever is to a cla.s.s under his authority.

When he saw Alec's letter, his heart within him leaped with hope and quailed with fear. It is only a few times during his life that a man regards a letter in this way, and usually after long suspense on a subject which looms large in his estimate of things. When he could disengage himself, he tore it open, and the first question with which he scanned it concerned Alec only--was he in trouble? had he carried out his threat of evil-doing? or was it well with him?

Robert Trenholme was not now merely of the stuff of which men of the world are made. Could we but know it, a man's mind probably bears to his religion no very different relation from what his body bears; his creed, opinions, and sentiments are more nearly allied to what St. Paul calls "the flesh" than they are to the hidden life of the man, with which G.o.d deals. To the inner spring of Robert Trenholme's life G.o.d had access, so that his creed, and the law of temperance in him, had, not perfection, but vitality; and the same vitality, now permitted, now refused, by unseen inlets flowed into all he did and was, and his estimate of things was changed. He, in subtle selfishness, did much, almost all he could, to check and interrupt the incoming life, although indeed he prayed, and often supposed his most ardent desire was, to obtain it. Such is the average man of faith; such was Robert Trenholme--a better thing, truly, than a mere man, but not outwardly or inwardly so consistent.