Was ever reverie more vain! He raised his head and stared about him. The glaring lamp showed all the details of the room, and made it seem so real, so much more real than mere thoughts, let alone that of which one cannot think. He got up to alter the stove-damper, pushing it shut with a clatter of iron, burning his fingers slightly, and sat down again, feeling it a relief to know, if by the smart, that he had touched something.

The wood within the stove ceased blazing when the damper was shut, and when its crackling was silenced there was a great quiet. The air outside was still; the flame of the lamp could hardly make sound. Trenholme's watch, which lay on the table, ticked and seemed to clamour for his attention. He glanced down at it. It was not very far from midnight.

Just then he heard another sound. It was possibly the same as that which came to him an hour ago, but more continuous. There was no mistaking this time that it was an unusual one. It seemed to him like a human voice in prolonged ejaculatory speech at some distance.

Startled, he again looked out of his door. At first he saw nothing, but what he had seen before—the world of snow, the starry skies. Yet the sound, which stopped and again went on, came to him as if from the direction in which he looked. Looking, listening intently, he was just about to turn in for his coat and snow-shoes in order to go forth and seek the owner of the voice, when he perceived something moving between him and the nearest wood—that very birch wood in which, more than a month before, he had sought for the man Cameron who had disappeared from his own coffin. In an instant the mood of that time flashed back on him as if there had been nothing between.

All the search that had been made for Cameron in the first days of the snow had resulted in nothing but the finding of his coarse winding-sheet in this birch wood. Then and since, confused rumours had come that he was wandering from village to village, but no one had been brave enough to detain him. Trenholme knew that people on the railway line to the south believed firmly that the old man was still alive, or that his ghost walked. Now, as his eyes focussed more intently upon the moving thing, it looked to him like a man.

Again he heard the sound of a voice, a man's voice certainly. It was raised for the space of a minute in a sort of chant, not loud enough for him to hear any word or to know what language was spoken.

"Hi!" cried Trenholme at the top of his voice. "Hi, there! What do you want?"

There was no doubt that a man out there could have heard, yet, whatever the creature was, it took not the slightest notice of the challenge.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that the figure was moving on the top of the deep snow near the outskirts of the wood—moving about in an aimless way, stopping occasionally, and starting again, raising the voice sometimes, and again going on in silence. Trenholme could not descry any track left on the snow; all that he could see was a large figure dressed in garments which, in the starlight, did not seem to differ very much in hue from the snow, and he gained the impression that the head was thrown back and the face uplifted to the stars.

He called again, adjuring the man he saw to come at once and say why he was there and what he wanted. No attention was paid to him; he might as well have kept silent.

A minute or two more and he went in, shut and bolted his door, even took the trouble to see that the door of the baggage-room was secured. He took his lamp down from the wall where, by its tin reflector, it hung on a nail, and set it on the table for company. He opened the damper of the stove again, so that the logs within crackled. Then he sat down and began to read the Shakespeare he had pushed from him before. What he had seen and heard seemed to him very curious. No obligation rested upon him, certainly, to go out and seek this weird-looking creature. There was probably nothing supernatural, but—well, while a man is alone it is wisest to shut out all that has even the appearance of the supernatural from his house and from his mind. So Trenholme argued, choosing the satirical fool of the Forest of Arden to keep him company.

"Now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content."

Trenholme smiled. He had actually so controlled his mind as to become lost in his book.

There was a sound as if of movement on the light snow near by and of hard breathing. Trenholme's senses were all alert again now as he turned his head to listen. When the moving figure had seemed so indifferent to his calls, what reason could it have now for seeking his door—unless, indeed, it were a dead man retracing his steps by some mysterious impulse, such as even the dead might feel? Trenholme's heart beat low with the thought as he heard a heavy body bump clumsily against the baggage-room door and a hand fumble at its latch. There was enough light shining through his window to have shown any natural man that the small door of his room was the right one by which to enter, yet the fumbling at the other door continued.

Trenholme went into the dark baggage-room and heard the stir against the door outside. He went near it. Whoever was there went on fumbling to find some way of entrance.

By this time, if Trenholme had suffered any shock of dismay, he had righted himself, as a ship rights itself after shuddering beneath a wave. Clearly it now came within his province to find out what the creature wanted; he went back into his room and opened its outer door.

Extending beyond the wall, the flooring of the house made a little platform outside, and, as the opening of the door illuminated this, a man came quietly across the threshold with clumsy gait. This man was no ghost. What fear of the supernatural had gathered about Trenholme's mind fell off from it instantly in self-scorn. The stranger was tall and strong, dressed in workman's light-coloured clothes, with a big, somewhat soiled bit of white cotton worn round his shoulders as a shawl. He carried in his hand a fur cap such as Canadian farmers wear; his grey head was bare. What was chiefly remarkable was that he passed Trenholme without seeming to see him, and stood in the middle of the room with a look of expectation. His face, which was rugged, with a glow of weather-beaten health upon it, had a brightness, a strength, an eagerness, a sensibility, which were indescribable.

"Well?" asked Trenholme rather feebly; then reluctantly he shut the door, for all the cold of the night was pouring in. Neither of him nor of his words or actions did the old man take the slightest notice.

The description that had been given of old Cameron was fulfilled in the visitor; but what startled Trenholme more than this likeness, which might have been the result of mere chance, was the evidence that this man was not a person of ordinary senses and wits. He seemed like one who had passed through some crisis, which had deprived him of much, and given him perhaps more. It appeared probable, from his gait and air, that he was to some extent blind; but the eagerness of the eyes and the expression of the aged face were enough to suggest at once, even to an unimaginative mind, that he was looking for some vision of which he did not doubt the reality and listening for sounds which he longed to hear. He put out a large hand and felt the table as he made his clumsy way round it. He looked at nothing in the room but the lamp on the table where Trenholme had lately put it. Trenholme doubted, however, if he saw it or anything else. When he got to the other side, having wandered behind the reflector, he stopped, as if perhaps the point of light, dimly seen, had guided him so far but now was lost.

Trenholme asked him why he had come, what his name was, and several such questions. He raised his voice louder and louder, but he might as well have talked to the inanimate things about him. This one other human being who had entered his desolate scene took, it would seem, no cognisance of him at all. Just as we know that animals in some cases have senses for sights and sounds which make no impression on human eyes and ears, and are impervious to what we see and hear, so it seemed to Trenholme that the man before him had organs of sense dead to the world about him, but alive to something which he alone could perceive. It might have been a fantastic idea produced by the strange circumstances, but it certainly was an idea which leaped into his mind and would not be reasoned away. He did not feel repulsion for the poor wanderer, or fear of him; he felt rather a growing attraction—in part curiosity, in part pity, in part desire for whatever it might be that had brought the look of joyous expectancy into the aged face. This look had faded now to some extent. The old man stood still, as one who had lost his way, not seeking for indications of that which he had lost, but looking right forwards and upwards, steadily, calmly, as if sure that something would appear.

Trenholme laid a strong hand upon his arm. "Cameron!" he shouted, to see if that name would rouse him. The arm that he grasped felt like a rock for strength and stillness. The name which he shouted more than once did not seem to enter the ears of the man who had perhaps owned it in the past. He shook off Trenholme's hand gently without turning towards him.

"Ay," he said. (His voice was strong.) Then he shook his head with a patient sigh. "Not here," he said, "not here." He spoke as deaf men speak, unconscious of the key of their own voice. Then he turned shuffling round the table again, and seemed to be seeking for the door.

"Look here," said Trenholme, "don't go out." Again he put his hand strongly on his visitor, and again he was quietly brushed aside. The outside seemed so terribly cold and dark and desolate for this poor old man to wander in, that Trenholme was sorry he should go. Yet go he did, opening the door and shutting it behind him.

Trenholme's greatcoat, cap, and snow-shoes were hanging against the wall. He put them on quickly. When he got out the old man was fumbling for something outside, and Trenholme experienced a distinct feeling of surprise when he saw him slip his feet into an old pair of snow-shoes and go forth on them. The old snow-shoes had only toe-straps and no other strings, and the feat of walking securely upon seemed almost as difficult to the young Englishman as walking on the sea of frozen atoms without them; but still, the fact that the visitor wore them made him seem more companionable.

Trenholme supposed that the traveller was seeking some dwelling-place, and that he would naturally turn either up the road to Turrifs or toward the hills; instead of that, he made again for the birch wood, walking fast with strong, elastic stride. Trenholme followed him, and they went across acres of billowy snow.



CHAPTER II.

Why Alec Trenholme followed the old man toward the wood he himself would have found it a little difficult to tell. If this was really Cameron he did not wish that he should escape; but, at the same time, he saw no means of keeping him against his will, unless he went of his own accord to some place where other men could be called to help. Quite apart, however, from the question whether the stranger was Cameron or not, Trenholme felt for him a sort of respect which character alone inspires, and which character written in a man's appearance has often power to inspire without a word or action to interpret it further. It was because of this that curiosity to know where he was going and what for, and a real solicitude as to what would happen to him, were strong enough to lead the young man on.

They who have not walked upon snow by starlight do not know, perhaps, that the chief difficulty of such progress is that there is no shadow; perhaps they do not even know that at all times the difference between an upward and a downward slope is revealed to the eye by light and shade. The snow on which the two men were now walking had been left by the wind with slight undulations of surface, such as are produced in a glassy sea by the swing of a gentle under-swell; and Trenholme, not sensitive as the stranger seemed to be in the points of his snow-shoes, found himself stepping up when he thought himself stepping down, and the reverse. At last he stumbled and fell.

It is not a matter of ease to rise from a bed which yields endlessly to every pressure of arm or knee. Even a sea-bird, that strongest of flyers, finds it hard to rise from any but its own element; and before Trenholme had managed to spring up, as it were, from nothing, the man in front had in some way become aware of his presence for the first time, and of his fall; he turned and lifted him up with a strong hand. When Trenholme was walking again the other retained a firm hold of his arm, looked at him earnestly, and spoke to him. His words expressed a religious idea which was evidently occupying his whole mind.

"The Lord is coming presently to set up His kingdom," he said. "Are you ready to meet Him?"

On Alec Trenholme the effect of these words, more unexpected than any other words could have been, was first and chiefly to convince him that he was dealing with a witless person. Leaving him again, the speaker had hurried on in front, making his way still toward the wood. When Trenholme came up with him the wanderer had evidently found the place where he had been before, for there was the irregular circular track of his former wandering upon the snow. Trenholme counted himself a fool to have been able before to suppose that there was no track because he had not seen it. But he had hardly time for even this momentary glance at so small a matter, for the old man was standing with face uplifted to the stars, and he was praying aloud that the Divine Son of Man would return to earth and set up His kingdom.

Sometimes there was more light upon the dark scene, sometimes less, for giant rays of the northern light stalked the sky, passing from it, coming again, giving light faintly.

Trenholme felt an uncontrollable excitement come over him. His mind was carried out of himself, not so much to the poor man who was praying, as to the Divine Man to whom the supplication was addressed; for the voice of prayer spoke directly from the heart of the speaker to One who he evidently felt was his friend. The conviction of this other man that he knew to whom he was speaking caught hold of Alec Trenholme's mind with mastering force; he had no conviction of his own; he was not at all sure, as men count certainty, whether there was, or was not, any ear but his own listening to the other's words; but he did not notice his own belief or unbelief in the matter, any more than he noticed the air between him and the stars. The colourlessness of his own mind took on for the time the colour of the other's.

And the burden of the prayer was this: Our Father, thy kingdom come. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

The hardihood of the prayer was astonishing; all tender arguments of love were used, all reasonable arguments as of friend with friend and man with man, and its lengthened pathos was such that Trenholme felt his heart torn for pity within him.

"Look here!" he said at last. (He had been listening he knew not how long, but the planets in the sky above had moved westward. He took hold of the old man.) "Look here! He won't come so that you can see Him; but He's here just the same, you know."

The only result was that the old man ceased speaking aloud, and continued as if in silent prayer.

It seemed irreverent to interrupt him. Trenholme stood again irresolute, but he knew that for himself at least it was madness to stand longer without exercise in the keen night.

"Come, Lord Jesus!" cried the old man again in loud anguish. "Come. The world is needing only Thee. We are so wicked, so foolish, so weak—we need Thee. Come!"

Whether or not his companion had the full use of eyes and ears, Trenholme was emboldened by the memory of the help he had received on his fall to believe that he could make himself heard and understood. He shouted as if to one deaf: "The Lord is here. He is with you now, only you can't see Him. You needn't stay here. I don't know who you are, but come into my place and get warmed and fed."

"How do you know He is here?" asked the old man, shaking his head slowly.

"Everybody knows that."

"I can't hear."

"Everybody knows," shouted Trenholme.

"How do you know? What do you know?" asked the other, shaking his head sorrowfully.

Trenholme would have given much to comfort him. He tried to drag him by main force in the direction of the house. The old man yielded himself a few steps, then drew back, asking,

"Why do you say He is here?"

"Because" (Trenholme called out his words in the same high key) "before He died, and after, He said He would always be with His servants. Don't you believe what He said?"

Again the old man yielded a few paces, evidently listening and hearing with difficulty, perhaps indeed only hearing one or two words that attracted him.

"Did the Lord say it to you?" he asked eagerly.

"No."

There was blank disappointment shown instantly. They had come to a standstill again.

"Do you know him?" The strong old face was peering eagerly into his, as if it had not been dark. "Have you heard his voice?"

"I don't know," answered Trenholme, half angrily.

Without another word the old man shook him off, and turned once more to the starry sky above.

"Lord Jesus!" he prayed, "this man has never heard thy voice. They who have heard Thee know thy voice—they know, O Lord, they know." He retraced all the steps he had taken with Trenholme and continued in prayer.

After that, although Trenholme besought and commanded, and tried to draw him both by gentleness and force, he obtained no further notice. It was not that he was repulsed, but that he met with absolute neglect. The old man was rock-like in his physical strength.

Trenholme looked round about, but there was certainly no help to be obtained. On the one side he saw the birch wood indistinctly; the white trunks half vanished from sight against the white ground, but the brush of upper branches hung like the mirage of a forest between heaven and earth. All round was the wild region of snow. From his own small house the lamp which he had left on the table shot out a long bright ray through a chink in the frostwork on the window. It occurred to him that when he had fetched down the lamp it was probably this ray, sudden and unexpected in such a place, that had attracted his strange visitor to his house. Had his poor dazed brain accepted it as some sign of the glorious appearing for which he waited?

Trenholme looked again at his companion. It mattered nothing to him who or what he was; he would have done much to still that pleading voice and pacify him, but since he could not do this, he would go for a little while out of sight and hearing. He was fast growing numb with the fierce cold. He would come back and renew his care, but just now he would go home. He walked fast, and gained his own door with blood that ran less chill.

He heaped his stove with fresh logs, and set on food to warm, in the hope that the stranger might eventually partake of it, and then, opening the stove door to get the full benefit of the blaze, he sat down for a little while to warm himself. He looked at his watch, as it lay on the table, with that glance of interest which we cast at a familiar thing which has lain in the same place while our minds have undergone commotion and change. Midnight had passed since he went out, and it was now nearly two o'clock.

Whether it was that the man with whom he had been, possessed that power, which great actors involuntarily possess, of imposing their own moods on others, or whether it was that, coming into such strange companionship after his long loneliness, his sympathies were the more easily awakened, Trenholme was suffering from a misery of pity; and in pity for another there weighed a self-pity which was quite new to him. To have seen the stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme's eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind's eye had grown accustomed—that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy background for life's important activities.

The blazing logs through the open stove door cast flickering flamelight upon the young man, who was restlessly warming himself, shifting his position constantly, as a man must who tries to warm himself too hastily. A traveller read in ancient lore, coming suddenly on this cabin amid its leagues of snow, and looking in to see its light and warmth and the goodly figure of its occupant, might have been tempted to think that the place had been raised by some magician's wand, and would vanish again when the spell was past. And to Alec Trenholme, just then, the station to which he was so habituated, the body which usually seemed the larger part of himself, might have been no more than a thought or a dream, so intent was he upon another sort of reality. He was regardless of it all, even of the heat that, at the same time, scorched him and made him shiver. He thought of the words that he—he, Alec Trenholme—had lifted up his voice to say, waking the echoes of the snow-muffled silence with proclamation of—He tried not to remember what he had proclaimed, feeling crushed with a new knowledge of his own falseness; and when perforce the thought came upon him of the invisible Actor in the night's drama whose presence, whose action, he had been so strenuously asserting, he was like a man in pain who does not know what remedy to try; and his mood was tense, he sought only relief. He essayed one thought and another to reason away the cloud that was upon him; and then he tried saying his prayers, which of late had fallen somewhat into disuse. It was only by way of a try to see if it would do any good; and he did not give himself much time, for he felt that he must go out again to try to bring in the old man.

Before he had put on his fur cap a second time, however, he heard the whistle of the engine he had been expecting now for nearly twenty-four hours. It came like a sudden trumpet-sound from the outside world to call him back to his ordinary thoughts and deeds. For the first moment he felt impatient at it; the second he was glad, for there would certainly be some one with it who could aid him in using force, if necessary, to bring the old man to spend the remainder of the night within doors.

Trenholme saw the black and fiery monster come on into his dark and silent white world. It shook a great plume of flaming smoke above its snorting head, and by the light of the blazing jewel in its front he saw that the iron plough it drove before it was casting the snow in misty fountains to right and left.

When the engine stopped, Trenholme found that there was a small car with it, containing about twenty men sent to dig out the drifts where snow sheds had given way. These were chiefly French Canadians of a rather low type. The engine-driver was a Frenchman too; but there was a brisk English-speaking man whose business it was to set the disordered telegraph system to rights. He came into the station-room to test its condition at this point of the route. As there was a stove in their car, only a few of the men straggled in after him. At a larger place the party might have been tempted to tarry, but here they had no thought of stopping an unnecessary moment. Trenholme had no time to lose, and yet he hardly knew how to state his case. He sought the Englishman, who was at the little telegraph table. The engineer and some others lounged near. He began by recalling the incident of the dead man's disappearance. Every one connected with the railway in those parts had heard that story.

"And look here!" said he, "as far as one can judge by description, he has come back again here to-night." All who could understand were listening to him now. "See here!" he urged addressing the brisk telegraph man, "I'm afraid he will freeze to death in the snow. He's quite alive, you know—alive as you are; but I want help to bring him in."

The other was attending to his work as well as to Trenholme. "Why can't he come in?"

"He won't. I think he's gone out of his mind. He'll die if he's left. It's a matter of life or death, I tell you. He's too strong for me to manage alone. Someone must come too."

The brisk man looked at the engineer, and the French engineer looked at him.

"What's he doing out there?"

"He's just out by the wood."

It ended in the two men finding snow-shoes and going with Trenholme across the snow.

They all three peered through the dimness at the space between them and the wood, and they saw nothing. They retraced the snow-shoe tracks and came to the place where the irregular circuit had been made near the end of the wood. There was no one there. They held up a lantern and flashed it right and left, they shouted and wandered, searching into the edge of the wood. The old man was not to be found.

"I dare say," said the telegraph man to Trenholme, "you'd do well to get into a place where you don't live quite so much alone. 'T'aint good for you."

The whole search did not take more than twenty minutes. The railway-men went back at a quick pace. Trenholme went with them, insisting only that they should look at the track of the stranger's snow-shoes, and admit that it was not his own track.

The French engineer was sufficiently superstitious to lend a half belief to the idea that the place was haunted, and that was his reason for haste. The electrician was only sorry that so much time had been purely wasted; that was his reason. He was a middle-aged man, spare, quick, and impatient, but he looked at Alec Trenholme in the light of the engine lamp, when they came up to it, with some kindly interest.

"I say," he went on again, "don't you go on staying here alone—a good-looking fellow like you. You don't look to me like a chap to have fancies if you weren't mewed up alone."

As Trenholme saw the car carried from him, saw the faces and forms of the men who stood at its door disappear in the darkness, and watched the red light at its back move slowly on, leaving a lengthening road of black rails behind it, he felt more mortified at the thought of the telegraph man's compassion than he cared to own, even to himself.

He went out again, and hunted with a lantern till he found a track leading far into the wood in the opposite direction from his house. This, then, was the way the old man had gone. He followed the track for a mile, but never came within sight or sound of the man who made it.

At last it joined the railway line, and where the snow was rubbed smooth he could not trace it. Probably the old man had taken off his snow-shoes here, and his light moccasins had left no mark that could be seen in the night.



CHAPTER III.

For two nights after that Alec Trenholme kept his lamp lit all night, placing it in his window so that all the light that could struggle through the frosted panes should cast an inviting ray into the night. He did this in the hope that the old man might still be wandering in the neighbourhood; but it was soon ascertained that this was not the case; the stranger had been seen by no one else in Turrifs Settlement. Though it was clear, from reports that came, that he was the same who had visited other villages and been accepted as the missing Cameron, nothing more was heard of him, and it seemed that he had gone now off the lines of regular communication—unless, indeed, he had the power of appearing and disappearing at will, which was the popular view of his case. Turrifs Station had become notorious. Trenholme received jeers and gibes even by telegraph from neighbouring stations. He had given account to no one of the midnight visit, but inventive curiosity had supplied details of a truly wonderful nature. It was not on this account that he gave up his situation on the line, but because a new impulse had seized him, and he had no particular reason for remaining. He waited till a new caretaker arrived from the headquarters of the railway, and then set forth from the station the following morning on foot.

Turrif had been laid up with some complaint for a week or two, and Alec went to say good-bye to him. The roads had been opened up again. He had his snow-shoes on his back, and some clothes in a small pack.

Turrif's wife opened the door, and Trenholme disburdened himself and went and sat by the bed. The little children were about, as usual, in blue gowns; he had made friends in the house since his first supper there, so they stood near now, and laughed at him a great deal without being afraid. In the long large wooden room, the mother and eldest girl pursued the housework of the morning tranquilly. Turrif lay upon a bed in one corner. The baby's cradle, a brown box on rockers, was close to the bed, and when the child stirred the father put out his hand and rocked it. The child's head was quite covered with the clothes, so that Trenholme wondered how it could breathe. He sat by the foot of the bed, and Turrif talked to him in his slow English.

"You are wise to go—a young man and genteel-man like you."

"I know you think I was a fool to take the place, but a man might as well earn his bread-and-butter while he is looking round the country."

"You have looked round at this bit of country for two months"—with a shrug of the shoulders. "I should have sought your bright eyes could see all what sere is to see in two days."

"You'll think me a greater fool when you know where I am going."

"I hope" (Turrif spoke with a shade of greater gravity on his placid face)—"I hope sat you are going to some city where sere is money to be made, and where sere is ladies and other genteel-men like you."

"I knew you would think me mad. I'm going to Bates's clearing to cut down his trees."

"Why?" The word came with a certain authority.

"You would almost be justified in writing to the authorities to lock me up in an asylum, wouldn't you? But just consider what an awful condition of loneliness that poor wretch must be in by this time. You think I've been more alone than's good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage. He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter's lumbering for want of a man. Now, there's a fix, if you will, where I say a man is to be pitied."

"Yes," said Turrif, gravely, "it is sad; but sat is hees trouble."

"Look here: he's not thirty miles away, and you and I know that if he isn't fit to cut his throat by this time it isn't for want of trouble to make him, and you say that that state of things ought to be only his own affair?"

"Eh?"

"Well, I say that you and I, or at least I, have something to do with it. You know very well I might go round here for miles, and offer a hundred pounds, and I couldn't get a single man to go and work for Bates; they're all scared. Well, if they're scared of a ghost, let them stay away; but I'm not frightened, and I suppose I could learn to chop down trees as well as any of them. He's offered good wages; I can take his wages and do his work, and save him from turning into a blethering idiot."

Probably, in his heat to argue, he had spoken too quickly for the Frenchman to take in all his words. That his drift was understood and pondered on was evident from the slow answer.

"It would be good for Monsieur Bates, but poor for you."

"I'm not going to turn my back on this country and leave the fellow in that pickle. I should feel as if his blood were on my head."

"Since?"

"How since?"

"Since what day did you have his care on you? Last time you came you did not mean sen to help him." It was true, but so strongly did Trenholme see his point that he had not realised how new was the present aspect of the case to him.

"Well," said he, meaning that this was not a matter of importance.

"But why?" said Turrif again.

"Oh, I don't know." Trenholme looked down at his moccasined feet. "I thought" (he gave a laugh as if he were ashamed) "I'd turn over a new leaf this year, and do something that's more worth doing. I was well enough off here so far as looking out for myself was concerned."

Turrif looked at him with kind and serious disapproval.

"And when will you begin to live se life of a man?"

"How do you mean—'a man'?"

"When will you make money and get married?"

"Do you think time is all wasted when one isn't making money and getting married?"

"For a boy, no; for a man, yes."

Trenholme rose. "Good-bye, and thank you for all your hospitality," said he. "I'll come back in spring and tell you what I'm going to do next."

He was moving out, when he looked again at the little shrine in the middle of the wall, the picture of the Virgin, and, below, the little altar shelf, with its hideous paper roses. He looked back as it caught his eye, arrested, surprised, by a difference of feeling in him towards it.

Noticing the direction of Trenholme's glance, the Frenchman crossed himself.

It was a day of such glory as is only seen amid Northern snowfields. Alec Trenholme looked up into the sky, and the blue of other skies that he remembered faded beside it, as the blue of violets fades beside the blue of gentian flowers. There was no cloud, no hint of vapour; the sky, as one looked for it, was not there, but it was as if the sight leaped through the sunlit ether, so clear it was, and saw the dark blue gulfs of space that were beyond the reach of the sun's lighting. The earth was not beyond the reach of the sunlight, and in all that wide white land, in mile after mile of fields, of softened hillock and buried hollow, there was not a frozen crystal that did not thrill to its centre with the sunlight and throw it back in a soft glow of myriad rays.

Trenholme retraced his steps on the road from Turrif's door to a point nearer his old railway-station; then he put on his snow-shoes and set out for the gap in the hills that led to the Bates and Cameron clearing. As he mounted the soft snow that was heaped by the roadside and struck out across the fields, his heart bounded with a sense of power and freedom, such as a man might have who found means to walk upon the ocean. Little need had he of map or guide to mark the turning or crossing of his road; the gap in the hills was clear to his eyes fifteen miles away; the world was white, and he strode across it. When the earth is made up of pearl-dust and sunshine, and the air is pure as the air of heaven, the heart of man loses all sense of effort, and action is as spontaneous as breath itself. Trenholme was half-way to the hills before he felt that he had begun his day's journey.

When he got past the unbroken snow of the farm lands and the blueberry flats, the white surface was broken by the tops of brushwood. He did not take the line of the straight corduroy road; it was more free and exciting to make a meandering track wherever the snow lay sheer over a chain of frozen pools that intersected the thickets. There was no perceptible heat in the rays the sun poured down, but the light was so great that where the delicate skeletons of the young trees were massed together it was a relief to let the eye rest upon them.

That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere. Intense light has the effect of lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in comparison with the blue beyond.

This was while he was in the open plain; but when he walked into the forest, passing into the gap in the hills, all was changed. The snow, lightly shadowed by the branches overhead, was more quiet to the sight, and where his path lay near fir trees, the snow, where fell their heavy shade, looked so dead and cold and grey that it recalled thoughts of night-time, or of storm, or of other gloomy things; and this thought of gloom, which the dense shadow brought, had fascination, because it was such a wondrous contrast to the rest of the happy valley, in which the sunbeams, now aslant, were giving a golden tinge to the icy facets of crags, to high-perched circling drifts, to the basin of unbroken snow, to the brown of maple trunks, and to the rich verdure of the very firs which cast the shadow.

It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when he stopped his steady tramp, arrested by the sight of the first living things he had seen—a flock of birds upon a wild vine that, half snow-covered, hung out the remnant of its frozen berries in a cleft of the hill. The birds did not fly at his approach, and, going nearer and nearer on the silent snow, he at last stopped, taking in greedily the sight of their pretty, fluttering, life. They were rather large birds, large as the missel thrush; they had thick curved beaks and were somewhat heavy in form; but the plumage of the males was like the rose-tint of dawn or evening when it falls lightly upon some grey cloud. They uttered no note, but, busy with their feast, fluttered and hopped with soft sound of wings.

In lieu of gun or net, Trenholme broke a branch from a tree beside him, and climbed nearer to the birds in order to strike one down if possible. To his surprise, as he advanced deftly with the weapon, the little creatures only looked at him with bright-eyed interest, and made no attempt to save themselves. The conviction forced itself upon him with a certain awe that these birds had never seen a man before. His arm dropped beside him; something of that feeling which comes to the explorer when he thinks that he sets his foot where man has never trod came to him now as he leaned against the snow-bank. The birds, it is true, had fluttered beyond his arm's length, but they had no thought of leaving their food. Twice his arm twitched with involuntary impulse to raise the stick and strike the nearest bird, and twice the impulse failed him, till he dropped the stick.

The slight crust which usually forms on snow-banks had broken with the weight of his figure as he leaned against it, and he lay full length against the soft slope, enjoying rest upon so downy a couch, until the birds forgot him, and then he put out his hand and grasped the nearest, hardly more to its own surprise than to his. The bird feigned dead, as frightened birds will, and when he was cheated into thinking it dead, it got away, and it was only by a very quick movement that he caught it again. He put it in a hanging pocket of his coat, and waited till he could catch a companion to fill the opposite pocket.

Thus weighted, he continued his journey. It gave him the cheerful feeling that a boy has when choice marbles are in his pocket. Neither birds nor marbles under such circumstances have absolute use, but then there is always the pleasant time ahead when it will be suitable to take them out and look at them. The man did not finger his birds as a boy might have done his marbles, but he did not forget them, and every now and then he lifted the flaps of the, baggy pockets to refill them with air.

He was tramping fast now down the trough of the little valley, under trees that, though leafless, were thick enough to shut out the surrounding landscape. The pencils of the evening sunlight, it is true, found their way all over the rounded snow-ground, but the sunset was hidden by the branches about him, and nothing but the snow and the tree trunks was forced upon his eye, except now and then a bit of blue seen through the branches—a blue that had lost much depth of colour with the decline of day, and come nearer earth—a pale cold blue that showed exquisite tenderness of contrast as seen through the dove-coloured grey of maple boughs.

Where the valley dipped under water and the lake in the midst of the hills had its shore, Trenholme came out from under the trees. The sun had set. The plain of the ice and the snowclad hills looked blue with cold—unutterably cold, and dead as lightless snow looks when the eye has grown accustomed to see it animated with light. He could not see where, beneath the snow, the land ended and the ice began; but it mattered little. He walked out on the white plain scanning the south-eastern hill-slope for the house toward which he intended to bend his steps. He was well out on the lake before he saw far enough round the first cliff to come in sight of the log house and its clearing, and no sooner did he see it than he heard his approach, although he was yet so far away, heralded by the barking of a dog. Before he had gone much farther a man came forth with a dog to meet him.

The two men had seen one another before, in the days when the neighbourhood had turned out in the fruitless search for Cameron's daughter and for Cameron himself. At that time a fevered eye and haggard face had been the signs that Bates was taking his misfortune to heart; now Trenholme looked, half expecting to see the same tokens developed by solitude into some demonstration of manner; but this was not the case. His flesh had certainly wasted, and his eye had the excitement of expectation in it as he met his visitor; but the man was the same man still, with the stiff, unexpressive manner which was the expression of his pride.

Bates spoke of the weather, of the news Trenholme brought from Turrifs Settlement, of the railway—all briefly, and without warmth of interest; then he asked why Trenholme had come.

"You haven't been able to get any one yet to fell your trees for you?"

Bates replied in the negative.

"They think the place is dangerous," said the other, as if giving information, although he knew perfectly that Bates was aware of this. He had grown a little diffident in stating why he had come.

"Fools they are!" said Bates, ill-temperedly.

Trenholme said that he was willing to do the work Bates had wanted a man for, at the same wages.

"It's rough work for a gentlemany young man like you."

Trenholme's face twitched with a peculiar smile. "I can handle an axe. I can learn to fell trees."

"I mean, the living is rough, and all that; and of course" (this was added with suspicious caution) "it wouldn't be worth my while to pay the same wages to an inexperienced hand."

Trenholme laughed. This reception was slightly different from what he had anticipated. He remarked that he might be taken a week on trial, and to this Bates agreed, not without some further hesitation. Trenholme inquired after the health of the old aunt of whom he had heard.

"In bodily health," said Bates, "she is well. You may perhaps have heard that in mind she has failed somewhat."

The man's reserve was his dignity, and it produced its result, although obvious dignity of appearance and manner was entirely lacking to him.

The toothless, childish old man woman Trenholme encountered when he entered the house struck him as an odd exaggeration of the report he had just received. He did not feel at home when he sat down to eat the food Bates set before him; he perceived that it was chiefly because in a new country hospitality is considered indispensable to an easy conscience that he had received any show of welcome.

Yet the lank brown hand that set his mug beside him shook so that some tea was spilt. Bates was in as dire need of the man he received so unwillingly as ever man was in need of his fellow-man. It is when the fetter of solitude has begun to eat into a man's flesh that he begins to proclaim his indifference to it, and the human mind is never in such need of companionship as when it shuns companions.

The two spent most of the evening endeavouring to restore to liveliness the birds that Trenholme had taken from his pockets, and in discussing them. Bates produced a very old copy of a Halifax newspaper which contained a sonnet to this bird, in which the local poet addressed it as

"The Sunset-tinted grosbeak of the north"

Trenholme marvelled at his resources. Such newspapers as he stored up were kept under the cushion of the old aunt's armchair.

Bates brought out some frozen cranberries for the birds. They made a rough coop and settled them in it outside, in lee of one of the sheds. It is extraordinary how much time and trouble people will expend on such small matters if they just take it into their heads to do it.



CHAPTER IV.

There was no very valuable timber on Bates's land. The romance of the lumber trade had already passed from this part of the country, but the farmers still spent their winters in getting out spruce logs, which were sold at the nearest saw-mills. Bates and Cameron had possessed themselves of a large portion of the hill on which they had settled, with a view to making money by the trees in this way—money that was necessary to the household, frugal as it was, for, so far, all their gains had been spent in necessary improvements. Theirs had been a far-seeing policy that would in the end have brought prosperity, had the years of uninterrupted toil on which they calculated been realised.

It was not until the next day that Trenholme fully understood how helpless the poor Scotchman really was in his present circumstances. In the early morning there was the live-stock to attend to, which took him the more time because he was not in strong health; and when that was done it seemed that there was much ado in the house before the old woman would sit down peacefully for the day. He apologised to Trenholme for his housework by explaining that she was restless and uneasy all day unless the place was somewhat as she had been accustomed to see it; he drudged to appease her, and when at last he could follow to the bush, whither he had sent Trenholme, it transpired that he dared not leave her more than an hour or two alone, for fear she should do herself a mischief with the fire. In the bush it was obvious how pitifully small was the amount of work accomplished. Many trees had been felled before Cameron's death; but they still had to be lopped and squared, cut into twelve-foot lengths, dragged by an ox to the log-slide, and passed down on to the ice of the lake. Part of the work required two labourers; only a small part of what could be done single-handed had been accomplished; and Trenholme strongly suspected that moonlight nights had been given to this, while the old woman slept.

It is well known that no line can be drawn between labour and play; it is quite as much fun making an ox pull a log down a woodland path as playing at polo, if one will only admit it, especially when novelty acts as playmate. Most healthy men find this fascination hidden in labour, provided it only be undertaken at their own bidding, although few have the grace to find it when necessity compels to the task. Alec Trenholme found the new form of labour to which he had bidden himself toilsome and delightful; like a true son of Adam, he was more conscious of his toil than of his delight—still both were there; there was physical inspiration in the light of the snow, the keen still air, and the sweet smell of the lumber. So he grew more expert, and the days went past, hardly distinguished from one another, so entire was the unconsciousness of the slumber between them.

He had not come without some sensation of romance in his knight-errantry. Bates was the centre, the kernel as it were, of a wild story that was not yet explained. Turrif had disbelieved the details Saul had given of Bates's cruelty to Cameron's daughter, and Trenholme had accepted Turrif's judgment; but in the popular judgment, if Cameron's rising was not a sufficient proof of Bates's guilt, the undoubted disappearance of the daughter was. Whatever had been his fault, rough justice and superstitious fear had imposed on Bates a term of solitary confinement and penal servitude which so far he had accepted without explanation or complaint. He still expressed no satisfaction at Trenholme's arrival that would have been a comment on his own hard case and a confession of his need. Yet, on the whole, Trenholme's interest in him would have been heightened rather than decreased by a nearer view of his monotonous life and his dry reserve, had it not been that the man was to the last degree contentious and difficult to deal with.

Taking for granted that Trenholme was of gentle extraction, he treated him with the generosity of pride in the matter of rations; but he assumed airs of a testy authority which were in exact proportion to his own feeling of physical and social inferiority. Seen truly, there was a pathos in this, for it was a weak man's way of trying to be manful but his new labourer, could not be expected to see it in that light. Then, too, on all impersonal subjects of conversation which arose, it was the nature of Bates to contradict and argue; whereas Trenholme, who had little capacity for reasonable argument, usually dealt with contradiction as a pot of gunpowder deals with an intruding spark. As regarded the personal subject of his own misfortune—a subject on which Trenholme felt he had a certain right to receive confidence—Bates's demeanour was like an iron mask.

Bates scorned the idea, which Turrif had always held, that Cameron had never really died; he vowed, as before, that the box he had sent in Saul's cart had contained nothing but a dead body; he would hear no description of the old man who, it would seem, had usurped Cameron's name; he repeated stolidly that Saul had put his charge into some shallow grave in the forest, and hoaxed Trenholme, with the help of an accomplice; and he did not scruple to hint that if Trenholme had not been a coward he would have seized the culprit, and so obviated further mystery and after difficulties. There was enough truth in this view of the case to make it very insulting to Trenholme. But Bates did not seem to cherish anger for that part of his trouble that had been caused by this defect; rather he showed an annoying indifference to the whole affair. He had done what he could to bury his late partner decently; he neither expressed nor appeared to experience further emotion concerning his fate.

When a man has set himself to anything, he generally sticks to it, for a time at least; this seemed to be the largest reason that Trenholme had the first four weeks for remaining where he was. At any rate, he did remain; and from these unpromising materials, circumstance, as is often the case, beat, out a rough sort of friendship between the two men. The fact that Bates was a partial wreck, that the man's nerve and strength in him were to some extent gone, bred in Trenholme the gallantry of the strong toward the weak—a gallantry which was kept from rearing into self-conscious virtue by the superiority of Bates's reasoning powers, which always gave him a certain amount of real authority. Slowly they began to be more confidential.

"It's no place for a young man like you to be here," Bates observed with disfavour.

It was Sunday. The two were sitting in front of the house in the sunshine, not because the sun was warm, but because it was bright; dressed, as they were, in many plies of clothes, they did not feel the cold, in flat, irregular shape the white lake lay beneath their hill. On the opposite heights the spruce-trees stood up clear and green, as perfect often in shape as yews that are cut into old-fashioned cones.

"I was told that about the last place I was in, and the place before too," Trenholme laughed. He did not seem to take his own words much to heart.

"Well, the station certainly wasn't much of a business," assented Bates; "and, if it's not rude to ask, where were ye before?"

"Before that—why, I was just going to follow my own trade in a place where there was a splendid opening for me; but my own brother put a stop to that. He said it was no fit position for a young man like me. My brother's a fine fellow," the young man sneered, but not bitterly.

"He ought to be," said Bates, surveying the sample of the family before him rather with a glance of just criticism than of admiration. "What's your calling, then?"

Alec pulled his mitts out of his pocket and slapped his moccasins with them to strike off the melting snow. "What do you think it is, now?"

Bates eyed him with some interest in the challenge. "I don't know," he said at last. "Why didn't your brother want ye to do it?"

"'Twasn't grand enough. I came out naturally thinking I'd set up near my brother; but, well, I found he'd grown a very fine gentleman—all honour to him for it! He's a good fellow." There was no sneer just now.

Bates sat subjecting all he knew of Alec to a process of consideration. The result was not a guess; it was not in him to hazard anything, even a guess.

"What does your brother do?"

"Clergyman, and he has a school."

"Where?"

"Chellaston, on the Grand Trunk."

"Never heard of it. Is it a growing place?"

"It's thriving along now. It was just right for my business."

"Did the clergyman think your business was wrong?"

The young man laughed as a man laughs who knows the answer to an amusing riddle and sees his neighbour's mental floundering. "He admits that it's an honest and respectable line of life."

"Did ye give in, then?"

"I took a year to think over it. I'm doing that now."

"Thinking?"

"Yes."

"I've not observed ye spending much time in meditation."

The young man looked off across the basin of the frozen lake. What is more changeful than the blue of the sky? Today the far firmament looked opaque, an even, light blue, as if it were made of painted china. The blue of Alec Trenholme's eyes was very much like the sky; sometimes it was deep and dark, sometimes it was a shadowy grey, sometimes it was hard and metallic. A woman having to deal with him would probably have imagined that something of his inward mood was to be read in these changes; but, indeed, they were owing solely to those causes which change the face of the sky—degrees of light and the position of that light. As for Bates, he did not even know that his companion had blue eyes; he only knew in a general way that he was a strong, good-looking fellow, whose figure, even under the bulgy shapes of multiplied garments, managed to give suggestion of that indefinite thing we call style. He himself felt rather thinner, weaker, more rusty in knowledge of the world, more shapeless as to apparel, than he would have done had he sat alone.

After a minute or two he said, "What's your trade?"

Trenholme, sitting there in the clear light, would have blushed as he answered had his face not been too much weathered to admit of change of colour. He went through that momentary change of feeling that we connect with blushes. He had been perfectly conscious that this question was coming, and perfectly conscious, too, that when he answered it he would fall in Bates's estimation, that his prestige would be gone. He thought he did not mind it, but he did.

"Butcher," he said.

"Ye're not in earnest?" said Bates, with animosity.

"Upon my word."

"Ye don't look like that"—with disappointment.

"Look like what?"—fiercely—"What would you have me look like? My father was as good-looking a man as you'd see in the three kingdoms, and as good a butcher, too. He got rich, had three shops, and he sent us boys to the best school he could find. He'd have set me up in any business I liked; if I chose his it was because—I did choose it."

He was annoyed at Bates's open regret, just as we are constantly more annoyed at fresh evidence of a spirit we know to be in a man than with the demonstration of some unexpected fault, because we realise the trait we have fathomed and see how poor it is.

"How did your brother come to be a minister?"

"He's a clergyman of the Church of England"—with loftiness.

"Well, that's more of a thing than a minister; how did he come by it?"

"He was clever, and father was able to send him to Oxford. He was a good deal older than I was. I suppose he took to the Church because he thought it his duty."

"And now that he's out here he wants to sink the shop?"

"Oh, as to that"—coldly—"when he was quite young, in England, he got in with swells. He's tremendously clever. There were men in England that thought no end of him."

"Did he lie low about the shop there?"

"I don't know"—shortly—"I was at school then."

Bates, perceiving that his questions were considered vastly offensive, desisted, but not with that respectfulness of mind that he would have had had Alec's father been a clergyman as well as his brother. Bates's feeling in this matter was what it was by inheritance, exactly as was the shape of his nose or the length of his limbs; it required no exercise of thought on his part to relegate Alec Trenholme to a place of less consequence.

Trenholme assuaged his own ill-temper by going to take out his pink and grey grosbeaks and give them exercise. He was debating in his mind whether they were suffering from confinement or not—a question which the deportment of the birds never enabled him to solve completely—when Bates wandered round beside him again, and betrayed that his mind was still upon the subject of their conversation.

"Ye know," he began, with the deliberate interest of a Scotchman in an argument, "I've been thinking on it, and I'm thinking your brother's in the right of it."

"You do!" The words had thunderous suggestion of rising wrath.

"Well," said the other again, "ye're hard to please; ye were vexed a while since because ye thought I was criticising him for lying low."

The answer to this consisted in threats thrown out at any man who took upon himself to criticise his brother.

"And now, when I tell ye I'm thinking he's in the right of it, ye're vexed again. Now, I'll tell ye: ye don't like to think the Rev. Mr. Trenholme's in the right, for that puts ye in the wrong; but ye don't like me to think he's in the wrong, because he's your brother. Well, it's natural! but just let us discuss the matter. Now, ye'll agree with me it's a man's duty to rise in the world if he can."

Upon which he was told, in a paraphrase, to mind his own business.



CHAPTER V.

It was a delightful proof of the blessed elasticity of inconsistency in human lives, a proof also that there was in these two men more of good than of evil, that that same evening, when the lamp was lit, they discussed the problem that had been mooted in the afternoon with a fair amount of good temper. As they sat elbowing the deal table, sheets of old newspapers under their inspection, Trenholme told his story more soberly. He told it roughly, emphasising detail, slighting important matter, as men tell stories who see them too near to get the just proportion; but out of his words Bates had wit to glean the truth. It seemed that his father had been a warmhearted man, with something superior in his mental qualities and acquirements. Having made a moderate fortune, he had liberally educated his sons. There is nothing in which families differ more by nature than in the qualities of heart which bind them together or easily release them from the bonds of kinship. The members of this small family had that in them which held them together in spite of the pulling of circumstance; for although the elder son had come on the stage of manhood ten years before the younger, although he had had talents that advanced him among scholarly men, and had been quickly taken from his first curacy to fill a superior position in a colony, he had never abated an affectionate correspondence with Alec, and had remained the hero of his young brother's imagination. This younger son, not having the same literary tastes, and having possibly a softer heart, gratified his father by going into business with him; but at that good man's death he had had sufficient enterprise, sufficient distaste, possibly, for his English position, to sell the business that was left in his hands, and affection drew him, as a loadstone a magnet, to his brother's neighbourhood. He brought with him securities of the small fortune they were to divide between them, and expected nothing but happiness in the meeting and prosperity in his future career. Unfortunately, a cause of dispute between the two brothers arose instantly on Alec's arrival: there was an exceptionally good opening in Chellaston for one of Alec's calling; the brothers took different views concerning that calling; they had quarrelled with all the fire of warm natures, and were parted almost as soon as met.

"And did ye think it would be pleasing to your brother to have a tradesman of the same name and blood as himself in the same place?" asked Bates with lack of toleration in his tone.

"That's all very fine!"—scornfully. "You know as well as I do that my lord and my gentleman come out to this country to do what farm-hands and cattle-men would hardly be paid to do at home—"

"When they've ruined themselves first, but not till then," Bates put in.

"And besides, old Robert sets up to be a saint. I didn't suppose he'd look upon things in the vulgar way." This reflection was cast on Bates as one of a class. "Was I likely to suppose he'd think that to kick one's heels on an office stool was finer than honest labour, or that my particular kind of labour had something more objectionable about it than any other? In old times it was the most honourable office there was. Look at the priests of the Old Testament! Read Homer!"

"I don't know that I'm understanding ye about Homer."

"Why, hear him tell the way the animals were cut up, and the number of them—yards and yards of it."

"But in the Bible the animals were used for sacrifice; that's very different." Bates said this, but felt that a point had been scored against him in the poetry of Homer; the Old Testament was primeval, but Homer, in spite of ancient date, seemed to bring with him the authority of modern culture.

"If they were, the people feasted upon them all the same, and the office of preparing them was the most honourable. I'm not claiming to be a priest (I leave that to my respected brother); I claim my right in a new country, where Adam has to delve again, to be a butcher and a gentleman." All his words were hot and hasty.

"But ye see," said Bates, "in the towns here, things are beginning to regulate themselves much in the shape they take in the old country."

"My brother cares more what people think than I do."

"And a verra good thing too; for with the majority there is wisdom," put in Bates, keen and contentious.

"You think so, do you?"—with sarcasm.

"Ye must remember ye're young yet; your brother has seen more of the world—"

Now Alec Trenholme had had no intention of telling what, to his mind, was the worst of his brother's conduct, but here he slapped the table and burst out angrily:

"And I tell you he believes as I do, but he hasn't pluck to act up to it. He's not even told one of his fine friends what his brother does; he says it's for the sake of his school. He's living a lie for his own pride. He's got himself made master of a college, fine as a fiddle, and he cares more about that than about his brother. With all his prayers and his sermons in church every Sunday, he'd let me go to the dogs rather than live out the truth. He thinks I've gone to the devil now, because I left him in a rage, and I told him I'd go and learn to spend my money, and drink, and swear, and gamble as a gentleman should. He thinks I've done it, and he writes and implores me, by all that's holy, to forsake evil courses; but never a word like 'Come back and set up your shop, old fellow, and I'll be your customer.' That's the amount of his religion."

"It was a hard choice ye put upon him," said Bates, solemnly.

"You think it was? Well!" The young man gave a boisterous laugh.

"For, in the first place, it's not his fault, but your own entirely, if ye go to the bad."

"I've not gone to the bad; but if I had, if I'd gone straight there, it would have been his fault."

"'Twould just have been your own. There's just one man that's responsible for your actions, and that's yourself. If your brother was a compete blackguard, instead of a good man, that's no excuse for you. God never put any man into this world and said, 'Be good if some other man is.'"

"When a man sets up to preach, and then throws away his influence over his own brother for a little finery opposition, it's more than being a blackguard. What does a man mean by standing up to preach if he doesn't mean that he's taking some responsibility for other people?"

"Well, but it wasn't he that threw away his influence over you; it was you. He never said 'Don't be influenced any more by me.' If ye thought he was an angel before then, more fool ye were, for no man is an angel. What business had you to make all the influence of his godly life condeetion on his doing right, or what you thought right, on a certain point of opinion?"

"He's living a lie, I tell you."

"I'm not sure but he's right not to have blazoned it. I'm not sure but I'd have done the same myself."

"Well, as you just remarked, men are not angels. That you would have done it doesn't prove anything."

Next morning Trenholme, whose half-awaked mind had not yet recurred to the night's dispute stepped out of the house into a white morning fog, not uncommon in fierce weather when holes for fishing had been made in the ice of the lake. The air, seemingly as dry as smoke, but keen and sweet, was almost opaque, like an atmosphere of white porcelain, if such might be. The sun, like a scarlet ball, was just appearing; it might have been near, it might have been far; no prospect was seen to mark the distance. Trenholme was walking round by the white snow path, hardly discerning the ox-shed to which he was bound, when he suddenly came upon the dark figure of Bates, who was pitching hay for his Cattle. Bates let down his fork and stood in his path.

"For God'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 God'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 pronoun 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 compassion: 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 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?"

"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 passes, 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 assurance 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 lassie 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 document 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 associations 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 Principal 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 class 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 God deals. To the inner spring of Robert Trenholme's life God 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.

The great fear he had when he opened this letter was that he had caused his brother to stumble; the great hope, that, because of his prayers, Heaven would grant it should not be so; but when, on the first hasty glance over the pages, he discovered that Alec was well, and was apparently amusing himself in a harmless way, that fear and hope instantly glided into the background; he hardly knew that they had both been strong, so faded did they look in the light of the commonplace certainty.

The next question that pressed assumed an air of paramount importance. He had asked Alec to enter some honourable mercantile profession. He had pressed this in the first interview, when the hot-tempered young man had left him in a rage. He had argued the point in subsequent letters; he had even offered his own share of their inheritance as additional capital. He felt that he deserved an answer to this offer, and believed that his happiness depended upon Alec's acceding to the proposed change of his life-plan. His mind full of this secondary subject, he perused the sheets of the letter with singular impatience and distaste. Any man might, in the most favourable circumstances, have been excused for experiencing impatience at having so wild a tale foisted in brief confusion upon his credulity; in the mood of his present circumstance the elder Trenholme refolded the letter, using within himself the strongest language in his vocabulary.

Robert Trenholme was not a happy man just now. Since he had last seen Alec a change had come to him which made this matter of the other's calling of warmer interest than it had been. Then his early love for Sophia Rexford had been a memory and a far, half-formed hope; now it had been roused again to be a true, steady flame, an ever-present influence. His one desire now was to win her affection. He would not be afraid then to tell her all that there was to tell of himself, and let her love decide. He did not feel that he should wrong her in this. At present he had everything to give, she everything to receive, except the possession of gentle blood, which would apparently be her only dowry. The girl he could not once have dared to address was now working servantless in her father's kitchen; he knew that it was no light drudgery; and he could offer her a comparatively luxurious home, and a name that had attracted to itself no small honour. He had a nice appreciation for what is called position, and the belief that their mutual positions had changed was very sweet to him. All his mind expanded in this thought, as the nerves of the opium-eater to the influence of his drug; it soothed him when he was weary; it consoled him when he was vexed; it had come to him as an unexpected, unsought good, like a blessing direct from heaven.

This was as things now were; but if his brother adhered to his purpose of establishing himself in his business in the same country, that would make a difference—a difference that it was hard, perhaps, for a thoughtful man to put into words, but which was still harder to wipe away by any sophistry of words. Robert Trenholme may have been wise, or he may have been foolish, but he estimated this difference as great. Should Alec persist in this thing, it would, in the first place, endanger the success of his school, or alter his relation to that school; in the second, it would make him more unworthy in the eyes of all Sophia's well-born relatives. While he remained in suspense, therefore, he was too honourable to seek to entangle her affections by the small arts that are used for such purposes; for if the worst came, he felt that he would be too proud to ask her to be his wife, or, if love should overcome pride, and he should still sue for what he loved better than life, he must do so before he sought her heart—not after; he must lay his cause before the tribunal of Sophia's wit before she had let go her heart—a thing that he, being what he was, had not courage to do.

He was not "living a lie" (as his brother had said) any more than every man does who allows his mind to dwell on the truth of what pleases him more than on disagreeable truth. The fact that he was, by a distant tie of consanguinity, related to a gentleman of some county position in England was just as true, and to Trenholme's mind more largely true, than the fact of his father's occupation. Yet he had never made this a boast; he had never voluntarily stated the pleasant truth to any one to whom he had not also told the unpleasant; and where he had kept silence concerning the latter, he had done so by the advice of good men, and with excuse concerning his professional influence. Yet, some way, he was not sufficiently satisfied with all this to have courage to bring it before Miss Rexford, nor yet was he prepared (and here was his worldly disadvantage) to sacrifice his conscience to success. He would not ask his brother to change, except in so far as he could urge that brother's duty and advantage; he would not say to him, "Do this for my sake"; nor yet would he say, "Go, then, to the other side of the world"; nor yet, "You shall be no longer my brother."

Robert Trenholme was bearing a haunted life. The ghost was fantastic one, truly—that of a butcher's shop; but it was a very real haunting.



CHAPTER VII.

The Rexford family was without a servant. Eliza, the girl they had brought with them from Quebec, had gone to a situation at the Chellaston hotel. The proprietor and manager of that large building, having become lame with rheumatism, had been sorely in need of a lieutenant, or housekeeper, and had chosen one with that shrewdness which had ever been his business capital. His choice had fallen on Eliza and she had accepted the place.

When Robert Trenholme heard of this arrangement he was concerned, knowing how difficult servants were to procure. He took occasion to speak to Miss Rexford on the subject, expressing sympathy with her and strong censure of Eliza.

"Indeed I am not sure but that she has done right," said Sophia.

"You surprise me very much. I thought you made somewhat of a companion of her."

"I do; and that is why, after hearing what she has to say about it, I think she has done right. She has abilities, and this is the only opening in sight in which she can exercise them."

"I should think"—sternly—"that these abilities were better unexercised."

"That is probably because you haven't the least idea what it is to have energies and faculties for which you have no scope"—this archly.

"But I should think the risk of learning pert manners—"

"That is the way men always argue about women. I tell you there is no such risk for an energetic, clever girl as to place her where the rust of unexercised faculties will eat into her soul. It is just because so many girls have to undergo this risk, and cannot do it safely, that the world is so full of women that are captious or morbid or silly. Boys treated in the same way would turn out as badly."

"But there is scope for all the highest faculties of a woman's nature in such a household as yours," cried he.

"Since you say so"—politely—"I am bound to believe it."

"No, but really—do you mean to say you don't think so?"

"You have just expressed yourself so positively that I am curious to know how you came by your knowledge, first, as to Eliza's faculties, and secondly, as to the scope for them in our house."

"It is unkind of you to laugh at me when I am only a humble enquirer after truth."

"Having expressed yourself thus modestly—"

"Nay, but I only said what I would have said about any girl in any such family."

"And you only said it with that simplicity of certainty which every man would have felt on the same subject."

"I cry a truce; I plead for mercy. Let us have out the traits of Eliza's character separately, and examine the scope in detail."

"To begin with, she has wonderful foresight; her power to plan the work of the house so as to get it done as easily as possible often surprises me. Now, of what use is this faculty in the kingdom of my step-mother, who always acts on the last impulse, and upsets every one's plans without even observing them? She has great executive ability, too; but what use is it when, as soon as she gets interested in the accomplishment of something, my mother cries, 'Come, Eliza, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy; go and romp with the children!' Then, too, she has plenty of resource; but of what use is that, when the thing she sees to be best in an emergency is seldom the thing that is done? The hotel-keeper is more observing than you; he has noticed that Eliza is no ordinary manager, and offered her high wages."

"You know, of course, what you are talking about," said Trenholme, feelingly, for he had no doubt that her sympathy with Eliza had arisen out of the pains of her own experience; "but in your house there is surely boundless room for humble, loving service; and how much better this girl would be if she could set aside her cleverness to perform such service." He did not add, "as you have done," but there was that in his voice which implied it. He went on: "I do not yet allow that you have disproved my statement, for I said that where she was she had scope for her highest faculties."