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.