"Is the storm coming this way?" he said.

The man who had first answered him pointed to another. "This gentleman,"

he said, "has just come from Ch.e.l.laston."

As the remark did not seem to be an answer to his question about the weather, Alec waited to hear its application. It followed.

The first man drew a little nearer. "He's been telling us that the Adventists--that means folks that are always expecting the end of the world--all about Ch.e.l.laston believe the end's coming to-night."

Alec made an exclamation. It was a little like hearing that some one sees a ghost at your elbow. The idea of proximity is unpleasant, even to the incredulous. "Why to-night?" he asked.

"Well, I'll say this much of the notion's come true," said the native of Ch.e.l.laston hastily--"it's awful queer weather--not that I believe it myself," he added.

"Has the weather been so remarkable as to make them think that?" asked Alec.

"'Tain't the weather _made_ them think it. He only said the weather weren't unlike as if it were coming true." As the first man said this, he laughed, to explain that he had nothing to do with the tale or its credence, but the very laugh betrayed more of a tendency to dislike the idea than perfect indifference to it would have warranted.

In defiance of this laugh the Ch.e.l.laston man made further explanation.

He said the religious folks said it was clearly written in the Book of Daniel (he p.r.o.nounced it Dannel); if you made the days it talks of years, and the weeks seven years, the end must come about this time. At first folks had calculated it would be 1843, but since then they had found they were thirty years out somehow.

"That would make it this year," agreed the first man. Some others that had gathered round laughed in chorus. They vented some bad language to; but the Ch.e.l.laston man, excited with his tale, went on.

"All the Advent folks believe that. They believe all the good folks will be caught up in the air; and after that they're to come back, and the world will be just like the Garden of Eden for a thousand years."

He was casting pearls before swine, for some of his hearers chanted gibes. "Is that so?" they sang, to the notes of a response in Church music.

Night had closed in black about them. All on the platform had come together in close group. The wind-blown light of the station lamp was on their faces. In the distance the smouldering storm rumbled and flashed.

"All religious folks believe that," continued the speaker, a little scornfully, "and the Advents think it'll be now; but old Cameron we've had in Ch.e.l.laston for a year, he tells them it'll be to-night."

Alec Trenholme had by this time received his brother's letters. "A year!" interrupted he almost fiercely. "Didn't he come in January?"

The narrator drew in the horns of his exaggeration. "D'ye know all about him, for there's no use telling if you do?"

"I only thought you might be talking about an old man heard went there then."

"He a'most died, or did really, somewhere below Quebec; and then he got up and preached and prayed, and his folks wouldn't keep him, so he wandered everywhere, and a kind young man we have at our place took him in and keeps him. When he was in the other world he heard the Judgment would happen to-night. Would that be the same man you know?"

"It will be the same man."

"Did you know his people?" asked the other curiously.

But Alec had no thought of being questioned. He brought the speaker back to his place as historian, and he, nothing loth, told of the intended meeting on the mountain, and of the white ascension robes, in his ignorant, blatant fashion, laying bare the whole pathetic absurdity of it.

Two ribald listeners, who had evidently been in some choir, paced arm in arm, singing the responses to the Litany in melodramatic fashion, except when their voices were choked with loud laughter at their own wit.

Pushed by the disagreeableness of these surroundings, and by keen interest in the old man who had once visited him, Alec decided on the walk. The mountain was nearer than the village; he hoped to reach it in time. He was told to keep on the same road till he came to the river, to follow its bank for about a mile, and when he saw the buildings of a farm just under the hill, to turn up a lane which would lead him by the house to the princ.i.p.al ascent. He walked out into the night.

At first he was full of thoughts, but after walking a while, fatigue and monotony made him dull. His intelligence seemed to dwell now in his muscles rather than in his brain. His feet told him on what sort of a road he was walking; by his fatigue he estimated, without conscious thought, how far he had walked.

When he had gone for nearly two hours the storm had come so much nearer that the lightning constantly blinded his eyes. He heard now the rushing of the river, and, as he turned into the road by its side, he saw the black hill looming large. Nothing but the momentum of a will already made up kept his intention turned to the climb, so unpropitious was the time, so utterly lonely the place. As it was, with quiescent mind and vigorous step, he held on down the smooth road that lay beside the swollen river.

Some way farther, when the water had either grown quieter or his ear accustomed to the sound, human voices I became audible, approaching on the road. Perhaps they might have been two or three hundred yards away when he first heard them, and from that moment his mind, roused from its long monotony, became wholly intent upon those who were drawing near.

It was a woman's voice he heard, and before he could see her in the least, or even hear her footsteps in the soft mud, the sense of her words came to him. She was, evidently speaking under the influence of excitement, not loudly, but with that peculiar quality of tone which sometimes makes a female voice carry further than is intended. She was addressing some companion; she was also walking fast.

"There _was_ a time when I thought you were ambitious, and would therefore do great things."

There was an exquisite edge of disdain in her tone that seemed to make every word an insult that would have had power, Alec thought, to wither any human vanity on which it might fall.

Some reply, she received--he could not hear it--and she went on with such intensity in her voice that her words bore along the whole current of Alec's thought with them, though they came to him falling out of darkness, without personality behind them.

"We may _call_ it ambition when we try to climb trees, but it is not really so for us if we once had mountain-tops for our goal."

Again came a short reply, a man's voice so much lower in key that again he could not hear; and then:

"Yes, I have wasted years in tree climbing, more shame to me; but even when I was most willing to forget the highest, I don't think a little paltry prosperity in the commonplace atmosphere of a colony would have tempted me to sell my birthright."

The man she was rating answered, and the clear voice came proudly again:

"You have at least got the pottage that pleases you--you are a success in this Canadian world."

Just then the soft, wet sound of feet tramping in mud came to him, and apparently the sound of his own feet was heard also, for the talking stopped until he had pa.s.sed them. He discerned their figures, but so dimly he could hardly have told they were man and woman had he not known it before by their voices. They were walking very fast, and so was he.

In a moment or two they were out of sight, and he had ceased to hear their footsteps. Then he heard them speak again, but the wind blew their words from him.

The tones, the accent, of the woman who had been speaking, told that she was what, in good old English, used to be called a lady. Alec Trenholme, who had never had much to do with well-bred women, was inclined to see around each a halo of charm; and now, after his long, rough exile, this disposition was increased in him tenfold. Here, in night and storm, to be roused from the half lethargy of mechanical exercise by the modulations of such a voice, and forced by the strength of its feeling to be, as it were, a confidant--this excited him not a little. For a few moments he thought of nothing but the lady and what he had heard, conjecturing all things; but he did not a.s.sociate her with the poor people he had been told were to meet that night upon the mountain.

Roused by the incident, and alert, another thought came quickly, however. He was getting past the large black hill, but the lane turning to it he had not found. Until he now tried with all his might to see, he did not fully know how difficult seeing was.

The storm was not near enough to suggest danger, for there was still more than a minute between each flash and its peal. As light rain drifted in his face, he braced himself to see by the next flash and remember what he saw; but when it came he only knew that it reflected light into the pools on the road in front of him, and revealed a black panorama of fence and tree, field and hill, that the next moment, was all so jumbled in his mind that he did not know where to avoid the very puddles he had seen so clearly, and splashed on through them, with no better knowledge of his way, and eyes too dazzled to see what otherwise they would have seen. In this plight he did not hesitate, but turned and ran after the two he had met, to ask his way, thinking, as he did so, that he must have already pa.s.sed the lane.

With some effort he caught them up. They must have heard him coming, for their voices were silent as he approached. He asked for the lane to Cooper's Farm, which he had been told was the name of the house at the foot of the mountain path. They both hesitated in their walk. The man, who ought to have answered, seemed, for some reason, suddenly dumb.

After waiting impatiently, the lady took upon herself to reply. She said they had not yet reached the turning to the farm. She remarked that they were going to the same place.

Then they went on again, and he, too, walked quickly, supposing that he could soon pa.s.s them and get in front. It is not the matter of a moment, however, to pa.s.s people who are walking at a rate of speed almost equal to one's own. He had the awkwardness of feeling, that, whether he would or no, he was obliged to intrude upon them. He noticed they were not walking near together; but when one is tramping and picking steps as best one can in mud that is hidden in darkness, it is, perhaps, more natural that two people on a wide road should give one another a wide berth. At any rate, for a minute all three were making their way through puddles and over rough places in silence. Then, when Alec thought he had got a few paces in advance, he heard the lady speak again, and of himself.

"Did you think you knew that man?"

There was no answer. Alec felt angry with her companion that he should dare to sulk so obviously. After a minute or two more of fast walking, she said again:

"I can't think where he has gone to. Do you see him anywhere?"

To this again there was no answer. Alec naturally went the quicker that he might get out of hearing. As he did so he wondered much that his fellow-travellers went so fast, or rather that the lady did, for she, although some way behind, seemed to keep very near to him.

On they went in silence for ten minutes more, when the lady again took up her reproachful theme. Her voice was quieter now, but amid the harmonious sounds of wind and river he still heard it distinctly. The clear enunciation of her words seemed to pierce through the baffling noises of the night as a ray of light pierces through darkness, albeit that there was excitement in her tones, and her speech was, interspersed with breathless pauses.

"I have been rude; but you insisted upon my rudeness, now you are offended by it. So be it--let me say something else! I don't much believe now in all the sentiment that used to seem so n.o.ble to me about forgetting oneself. No thoughtful person _can_ forget himself, and no candid person says he has done it. What we need is to think _more_ of ourselves--to think so much of ourselves that all aims but the highest are beneath us--are impossible to our own dignity. What we chiefly need is ambition."

She stopped to take breath. It seemed to Alec she came near enough to see him as she continued. He could think of nothing, however, but what she was saying. He felt instinctively that it was because of haste and some cause of excitement, not in spite of them, that this lady could speak as she now did.