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.