Principal Trenholme had been gone from Chellaston a day or two on
business. When he returned one evening, he got into his smart little
sleigh which was in waiting at the railway station, and was driving
himself home, when his attention was arrested and his way blocked by a
crowd in front of the hotel. He did not force a way for his horse, but
drew up, listening and looking. It was a curious picture. The wide
street of snow and the houses were dusky with night, except where light
chanced to glow in doorways and windows. The collection of people was
motley. Above, all the sky seemed brought into insistent notice as a
roof or covering, partly because pale pink streamers of flickering
northern light were passing over it, partly because the leader of the
crowd, an old man, by looking upwards, drew the gaze of all to follow
whither his had gone.
Trenholme heard his loud voice calling: "Behold He shall come again, and
every eye shall look on Him Whom they have pierced. Blessed are those
servants whom their Lord when He cometh shall find watching."
The scene was foreign to life in Chellaston. Trenholme, who had no mind
to stand on the skirts of the crowd, thrust his reins into the hand of
his rustic groom, and went up the broad steps of the hotel, knowing that
he would there have his inquiries most quickly answered.
In the bar-room about thirty men were crowded about the windows, looking
at the preacher, not listening, for the double glass, shut out the
preacher's voice. They were interested, debating loudly among
themselves, and when they saw who was coming up the steps, they said to
each other and the landlord, "Put it to the Principal." There were men
of all sorts in this group, most of them very respectable; but when
Trenholme stood inside the door, his soft hat shading his shaven face,
his fur-lined driving coat lying back from the finer cloth it covered,
he was a very different sort of man from any of them. He did not know
that it was merely by the influence of this difference (of which perhaps
he was less conscious than any of them) that they were provoked to
question him. Hutchins, the landlord, sat at the back of the room on his
high office chair.
"Good evening, Principal," said he. "Glad to see you in the place again,
sir. Have you heard of a place called Turrifs Road Station? 'Tain't on
our map."
Trenholme gave the questioner a severe glance of inquiry. The scene
outside, and his proposed inquiry concerning it, passed from his mind,
for he had no means of divining that this question referred to it. The
place named was known to him only by his brother's letter. The men, he
saw, were in a rough humour, and because of the skeleton in his closet
he jumped to the thought that something had transpired concerning his
brother, something that caused them to jeer. He did not stop to think
what it might be. His moral nature stiffened itself to stand for truth
and his brother at all costs.
"I know the place;" he said.
His words had a stern impressiveness which startled his hearers. They
were only playing idly with the pros and cons of a newspaper tale; but
this man, it would seem, treated the matter very seriously.
Hutchins had no desire to annoy, but he did not know how to desist from
further question, and, supposing that the story of Cameron was known, he
said in a more ingratiating way:
"Well, but, sir, you don't want us to believe the crazy tale of the
station hand there, that he saw the dead walk?"
Again there was that in Trenholme's manner which astonished his
hearers. Had they had the slightest notion they were offending him, they
would have known it was an air of offence, but, not suspecting that,
they could only judge that he thought the subject a solemn one.
"I would have you believe his word, certainly. He is a man of honour."
A facetious man here took his pipe out of his mouth and winked to his
companions. "You've had private information to that effect, I suppose,
Principal."
Very haughtily Trenholme assented.
He had not been in the room more than a few moments when all this had
passed. He was handed a newspaper, which gave still another account of
the remote incident which was now at last ticklings the ears of the
public, and he was told that the man Cameron was supposed to be the
preacher who was now without. He heard what part Harkness had played,
and he saw that his brother's name was not mentioned in the public
print, was apparently not known. He took a little pains to be genial (a
thing he was certainly not in the habit of doing in that room), in order
to dissipate any impression his offended manner might have given, and
went home.
It is not often a man estimates at all correctly the effect of his own
words and looks; he would need to be a trained actor to do this, and,
happily, most men are not their own looking-glasses. Trenholme thought
he had behaved in a surly and stiff manner, and, had the subject been
less unpleasant, he would rather have explained at once where and who
his brother was. This was his remembrance of his call at the hotel, but
the company there saw it differently.
No sooner had he gone than the facetious man launched his saw-like voice
again upon the company. "He had private information on the subject, _he
had_."
"There's one sure thing," said a stout, consequential man; "he believes
the whole thing, the Principal does."
A commercial traveller who was acquainted with the place put in his
remark. "There isn't a man in town that I wouldn't have expected to see
gulled sooner."
To which a thin, religious man, who, before Trenholme entered, had
leaned to the opinion that there were more things in the world than they
could understand, now retorted that it was more likely that the last
speaker was gulled himself. Principal Trenholme, he asserted, wasn't a
man to put his faith in anything without proofs.
Chellaston was not a very gossiping place. For the most part the people
had too much to do, and were too intent upon their own business, to take
much trouble to retail what they chanced to hear; but there are some
things which, as the facetious man observed, the dead in their graves
would gossip about if they could; and one of these themes, according to
him, was that Principal Trenholme believed there had been something
supernatural about the previous life of the old preacher. The story went
about, impressing more particularly the female portion of the community,
but certainly not without influence upon the males also. Portly men, who
a week before would have thought themselves compromised by giving a
serious thought to the narrative, now stood still in the street to get
the chance of hearing the preacher, and felt that in doing so they were
wrapped in all the respectability of the cloth of Trenholme's coats, and
standing firm on the letters of his Oxford degree and upon all the
learning of the New College.
They did not believe the story themselves. No, there was a screw loose
somewhere; but Principal Trenholme had some definite knowledge of the
matter. The old man had been in a trance, a very long trance, to say the
least of it, and had got up a changed creature. Principal Trenholme was
not prepared to scout the idea that he had been nearer to death than
falls to the lot of most living men.
It will be seen that the common sense of the speakers shaped crude
rumour to suit themselves. Had they left it crude, it would have died.
It is upon the nice sense of the probable and possible in talkative men
that mad rumour feeds.
As for Trenholme, he became more or less aware of the report that had
gone out about his private knowledge of old Cameron, but it was less
rather than more. The scholastic life of the college was quite apart
from the life of the village, and in the village those who talked most
about Cameron were the least likely to talk to Trenholme on any subject.
His friends were not those who were concerned with the rumour; but even
when he was taxed with it, the whole truth that he knew was no apparent
contradiction. He wrote to Alec, making further inquiries, but Alec had
retreated again many miles from the post. To be silent and ignore the
matter seemed to be his only course.
Thus it happened that, because Harkness housed him in the hope of
working upon Eliza, and because Trenholme happened to have had a brother
at Turrifs Station, the strange old preacher found a longer resting
place and a more attentive hearing in the village of Chellaston than he
would have been likely to find elsewhere.