The path up to the house was lightly barred by the wild vine, that, climbing on overgrown shrubs on either side, had more than once cast its tendrils across. A trodden path there was in and out the bushes, although not the straight original one, and by following it Alec gained the open s.p.a.ce before the house. Here self-sown magenta petunias made banks of colour against the old brick walls, and the evening light, just turning rosy, fell thereon. He could not see the river, although he heard it flowing behind a further ma.s.s of bushes. He stood alone with the old house in the opening that was enclosed by shrubs and trees so full of leaf that they looked like giant heaps of leaves, and it seemed to him that, if earth might have an enchanted place, he had surely entered it. Then, remembering that the light would not last long, he fitted the key to the door and went in.

Outside, nature had done her work, but inside the ugly wall-paper and turned bannisters of a modern villa had not been much beautified by dust and neglect. Still, there is something in the atmosphere of a long neglect that to the mind, if not to the eye, has softening effect. Alec listened a moment, as it were, to the silence and loneliness of the house, and went into the first dark room.

It was a large room, probably a parlour of some pretension, but the only light came through the door and lit it very faintly. All the windows of the house were shut with wooden shutters, and Alec, not being aware that, except in the rooms Harkness had occupied, the shutters were nailed, went to a window to open it. He fumbled with the hasp, and, concluding that he did not understand its working, went on into the next room to see if the window there was to be more easily managed. In this next room he was in almost total darkness. He had not reached the window before he heard some one moving in an adjoining room. Turning, he saw a door outlined by cracks of lamplight, and as it was apparent that some one else was in the house, he made at once for this door. Before he had reached it the cracks of light which guided him were gone; and when he had opened it, the room on whose threshold he stood was dark and silent; yet, whether by some slight sounds, or by some subtler sense for which we have no name, he was convinced that there was some one in it.

Indignant at the extinction of the light and at the silence, he turned energetically again in the direction of the window in order to wrench it open, when, hearing a slight scratching sound, he looked back into the inner room. There was light there again, but only a small vaporous curl of light. Connecting this with the sound, he supposed that a poor sulphur match had been struck; but this supposition perhaps came to him later, for at the moment he was dazed by seeing in this small light the same face he had seen over old Cameron's coffin. The sight he had had of it then had almost faded from his memory; he had put it from him as a thing improbable, and therefore imaginary; now it came before his eyes distinctly. A man's face it certainly was not, and, in the fleet moment in which he saw it now, he felt certain that it was a woman's. The match, if it was a match, went out before its wood was well kindled, and all he could see vanished from sight with its light. His only thought was that whoever had escaped him before should not escape him again, and he broke open the window shutters by main strength.

The light poured in upon a set of empty rooms, faded and dusty. A glance showed him an open door at the back of the farthest room, and rushing through this, he opened the windows in that part of the house which had evidently been lately inhabited. He next came into the hall by which he had entered, and out again at the front door, with no doubt that he was chasing some one, but he did not gain in the pursuit. He went down the path to the road, looking up and down it; he came back, in and out among the bushes, searching the cemetery and river bank, vexed beyond measure all the time to perceive how easy it would be for any one to go one way while he was searching in another, for the garden was large.

He had good reason to feel that he was the victim of most annoying circ.u.mstances, and he naturally could not at once perceive how it behoved him to act in relation to this new scene in the almost forgotten drama. Cameron was dead; the old preacher was dead; whether they were one and the same or not, who was this person who now for the second time suddenly started up in mysterious fashion after the death? Alec a.s.sumed that it could be no one but Cameron's daughter, but when he tried to think how it might be possible that she should be in the deserted house, upon the track of the old preacher, as it were, his mind failed even to conjecture.

The explanation was comparatively simple, if he had known it, but he did not know it. Someone has said that the man most a.s.sured of his own truthfulness is not usually truthful; and in the same sense it is true that the man most positive in trusting his own senses is not usually reliable. Alec Trenholme flagged in his search; a most unpleasing doubt came to him as to whether he had seen what he thought he saw and was not now playing hide-and-seek with the rosy evening sunbeams among these bushes, driven by a freak of diseased fancy. He was indeed provoked to a degree almost beyond control, when, in a last effort of search through the dense shrubbery, he skirted the fence of Captain Rexford's nearest field, and there espied Sophia Rexford.

Those people are happy who have found some person or thing on earth that embodies their ideal of earthly solace. To some it is the strains of music; to some it is the interior of church edifices; to the child it is his mother; to the friend it is his friend. As soon as Alec Trenholme saw this fair woman, whom he yet scarcely knew, all the fret of his spirit found vent in the sudden desire to tell her what was vexing him, very much as a child desires to tell its troubles and be comforted.

CHAPTER IX.

That evening Mrs. Rexford and Sophia had been sitting sewing, as they often did, under a tree near the house. Sophia had mused and st.i.tched.

Then there came a time when her hands fell idle, and she looked off at the scene before her. It was the hour when the sun has set, and the light is not less than daylight but mellower. She observed with pleasure how high the hops had grown that she had planted against the gables of the house and dairies. On this side the house there was no yard, only the big hay-fields from which the hay had been taken a month before; in them were trees here and there, and beyond she saw the running river.

She had seen it all every day that summer, yet--

"I think I never saw the place look so nice," she said to her step-mother.

Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick gra.s.s. She had found an ox-daisy and a four-o'clock.

"Here! take my pretties," she said imperiously.

Sophia took them.

"They's to be blowed," said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the different uses of flowers or of words.

Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o'clock was scattered into s.p.a.ce; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the slender hand that held it. Dottie looked at it with indignation.

"Blow again!" was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered. It was not wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon "He loves me."

"Who, I wonder?" thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside. Her mind glanced to Robert Trenholme. "No," she thought, "he loves me not." She meditated on him a little. Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her at eighteen. If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the songs of his youth. Then for some reason--the mischief of idleness, perhaps--Sophia thought of Trenholme's young brother--how he had looked when he spoke to her over the fence. She rose to move away from such silly thoughts.

Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the river. Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very cruel, would not allow her to go there without a grown-up companion.

When she and her big sister reached the river they differed as to the next step, Dottie desiring to go on into the water, and Sophia deeming it expedient to go back over the field. As each was in an indolent mood, they both gave way a little and split the difference by wandering along the waterside, conversing softly about many things--as to how long it would take the seed of the four-o'clock to "sail away, away, over the river," and why a nice brown frog that they came across was not getting ready for bed like the birdies. There is no such sweet distraction as an excursion into Children's Land, and Sophia wandered quite away with this talkative baby, until she found herself suddenly cast out of Dottie's magic province as she stood beyond the trees that edged the first field not far from the fence of the Harmon garden. And that which had broken the spell was the appearance of Alec Trenholme. He came right up to her, as if he had something of importance to say, but either shyness or a difficulty in introducing his subject made him hesitate. Something in his look caused her to ask lightly:

"Have you seen a ghost?"

"Yes."

"Are you in earnest?"

"I am in earnest, and," added he, somewhat dubiously, "I think I am in my right mind."

He did not say more just then, but looked up and down the road in his search for someone. In a moment he turned to her, and a current of amus.e.m.e.nt seemed to cross his mind and gleamed out of his blue eyes as he lifted them to hers. "I believe when I saw you I came to you for protection."

The light from pink tracts of sunset fell brightly upon field and river, but this couple did not notice it at all.

"There is no bogie so fearful as the unknown," she cried. "You frightened me, Mr. Trenholme."

"There is no bogie in the case," he said, "nor ghost I suppose; but I saw someone. I don't know how to tell you; it begins so far back, and I may alarm you when I tell you that there must be someone in this neighbourhood of yours who has no right to be here." Then to her eager listening he told the story that he had once written to his brother, and added to it the unlooked for experience of the last half-hour. His relation lacked clearness of construction. Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.

"I'm no good," he concluded, deprecating his own recital. "Robert has all the language that's in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say what it was like? Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that?"

The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before. These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.

That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true. If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.

Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest. She plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to get a better look at the house; she a.s.sured him that Ch.e.l.laston was the last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.

He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates's story, to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.

"I saw the face twice. It was first at Turrifs Station, far enough away from here; and I saw it again in this house. As sure as I'm alive, I believe it was a woman."

They stood on the verge of the field where the gra.s.s sloped back from the river. Sophia held the little child's hand in hers. The dusk was gathering, and still they talked on, she questioning and exclaiming with animation, he eager to enter the house again, a mutual interest holding their minds as one.

He began to move again impatiently. He wanted a candle with which to search the rooms more carefully, and if nothing was found, he said, he would go to the village and make what inquiries he could; he would leave no stone unturned.

Sophia would not let him go alone. She was already on perfectly familiar terms with him. He seemed to her a delightful mixture of the ardent boy and the man who, as she understood it, was roughened by lumberman's life. She lifted Dottie on her shoulder and turned homeward. "I will only be a few minutes getting Harold and some candles; don't go without us, I beg of you," she pleaded.

He never thought of offering to carry the child, or call her brother for her; his ideas of gallantry were submerged in the confusion of his thoughts. He watched her tripping lightly with the child on her shoulder. He saw her choose a path by the back of the white dairy buildings, and then he heard her clear voice calling, "Harold! Harold!"

All up the yard's length to windows of house and stable he heard her calling, till at length came the answering shout. In the silence that followed he remembered, with a feeling of wonder, the shudder of distaste that had come over him when he found that the other creature with whom he had been dealing bore a woman's form. He could not endure to think of her in the same moment in which he longed to hear Miss Rexford's voice again and to see her come back. In the one case he could not believe that evil was not the foundation of such eccentricity of mystery; in the other he thought nothing, realised nothing, he only longed for Sophia's return, as at times one longs for cool air upon the temples, for balm of nature's distilling. He never thought that because Sophia was a woman she would be sure to keep him waiting and forget the candle. He felt satisfied she would do just what she said, and even to his impatience the minutes did not seem long before he saw her return round the same corner of the outbuildings, her brother beside her, lantern in hand.

So in the waning daylight the three went together to the Harmon house, and found torn bits of letters scattered on floor and window-sill near the spot where Alec had last seen the unlooked-for apparition. The letters, to all appearance, had belonged to the dentist, but they were torn very small. The three searched the house all through by the light of more than one candle, and came out again into the darkness of the summer night, for the time nothing wiser concerning the mystery, but feeling entirely at home with one another.

CHAPTER X.

Although Mrs. Rexford had been without an indoor servant for several months of the winter, she had been fortunate enough to secure one for the summer. Her dairy had not yet reached the point of producing marketable wares, but it supplied the family and farm hands with milk and b.u.t.ter, and, since the cows had been bought in spring, the one serving girl had accomplished this amount of dairy work satisfactorily.

The day after Sophia and Harold had made their evening excursion through the Harmon house, this maid by reason of some ailment was laid up, and the cows became for the first time a difficulty to the household, for the art of milking was not to be learnt in an hour, and it had not yet been acquired by any member of the Rexford family.

Harold was of course in the fields. Sophia went to the village to see if she could induce anyone to come to their aid; but, hard as it was to obtain service at any time, in the weeks of harvest it was an impossibility. When she returned, she went in by the lane, the yard, and the kitchen door. All the family had fallen into the habit of using this door more than any other. Such habits speak for themselves.

"Mamma!"--she took off her gloves energetically as she spoke--"there is nothing for it but to ask Louise to get up and do the milking--the mere milking--and I will carry the pails."

Louise was the pale-faced Canadian servant. She often told them she preferred to be called "Loulou," but in this she was not indulged.

Mrs. Rexford stirred Dottie's porridge in a small saucepan. Said she, "When Gertrude Bennett is forced to milk her cows, she waits till after dark; her mother told me so in confidence. Yes, child, yes"--this was to Dottie who, beginning to whimper, put an end to the conversation.