What Necessity Knows by Lily Dougall (read aloud .TXT) 📖

all the contents of the room to think if any of them could be falling or shifting among themselves. The sound still continued; it seemed as if something was being gently worked to and fro, as in a soft socket. His imagination was not very quick to represent impossible dangers, nor had he in him more cowardice than dwells in most brave men. He did not allow himself to conclude that he heard the coffin-lid being opened from the inside. He took his lamp and went to see what was wrong.

The sound ceased as he moved. When the light of the lamp was in the next room all was perfectly silent. For almost half a minute he stood still, shading his eyes from the lamp, while, with every disagreeable sensation crowding upon him, he observed distinctly that, although the nails were still holding it loosely in place, the lid of the coffin was raised half an inch, more than that indeed, at the top.

"Now, look here, you know--this won't do," said Trenholme, in loud authoritative tones; so transported was he by the disagreeableness of his situation that, for the moment, he supposed himself speaking to the man with whom he had just spoken. Then, realising that that man, although gone, was yet probably within call, he set down the lamp hastily and ran out.

It seemed to him remarkable that Saul and the oxen could have gone so far along the road, although of course they were still plainly in sight. He shouted, but received no answer. He raised his voice and shouted again and again, with force and authority. He ran, as he shouted, about twenty paces. In return he only heard Saul's own commands to his oxen. Whether the man was making so much noise himself that he could not hear, or whether he heard and would not attend, Trenholme could not tell, but he felt at the moment too angry to run after him farther. It was not his place to wait upon this carter and run his errands! Upon this impulse he turned again.

However, as he walked back, the chill frost striking his bare head, he felt more diffidence and perplexity about his next action than was at all usual to him. He knew that he had no inclination to investigate the contents of the box. All the curiosity stirred within him still failed to create the least desire to pry further; but, on the other hand, he could not think it right to leave the matter as it was. A strong feeling of duty commanding him to open the coffin and see that all was right, and a stout aversion to performing this duty, were the main elements of his consciousness during the minutes in which he retraced his steps to the house.

He had set down the lamp on a package just within the baggage-room door, so that his own room, by which he entered, was pretty dark, save for the fire showing through the damper of the stove. Trenholme stopped in it just one moment to listen; then, unwilling to encourage hesitation in himself, went through the next door. His hand was outstretched to take the lamp, his purpose was clearly defined--to go to the far corner and examine the coffin-lid. Hand and thought arrested, he stopped on the threshold, for the lid was thrown off the coffin, and beside it stood a figure.

The lamp, which did not throw very much light across the comparatively large empty room, was so placed that what light there was came directly in Trenholme's eyes. Afterwards he remembered this, and wondered whether all that he thought he saw had, in fact, been clearly seen; but at the moment he thought nothing of the inadequacy of light or of the glare in his eyes; he only knew that there, in the far corner beside the empty coffin, stood a white figure--very tall to his vision, very lank, with white drapery that clothed it round the head like a cowl and spread upon the floor around its feet. But all that was not what arrested his attention and chilled his strong courage, it was the eyes of the figure, which were clearly to be seen--large, frightened, fierce eyes, that met his own with a courage and terror in them which seemed to quell his own courage and impart terror to him. Above them he saw the form of a pallid brow clearly moulded. He did not remember the rest of the face--perhaps the white clothes wrapped it around. While the eyes struck him with awe, he had a curious idea that the thing had been interrupted in arranging its own winding sheet, and was waiting until he retired again to finish its toilet. This was merely a grotesque side-current of thought. He was held and awed by the surprise of the face, for those eyes seemed to him to belong to no earthly part of the old man who, he had been told, lay there dead. Drawn by death or exhaustion as the face around them looked, the eyes themselves appeared unearthly in their large brightness.

He never knew whether his next action was urged more by fear, or by the strong sense of justice that had first prompted him to call back the carter as the proper person to deal with the contents of the coffin. Whatever the motive, it acted quickly. He drew back; closed the door; locked it on the side of his own room; and set out again to bring back the man. This time he should hear and should return. Trenholme did not spare his voice, and the wide lonely land resounded to his shout. And this time he was not too proud to run, but went at full speed and shouted too.

Saul undoubtedly saw and heard him, for he faced about and looked. Perhaps something in the very way in which Trenholme ran suggested why he ran. Instead of responding to the command to return, he himself began to run away and madly to goad his oxen. There are those who suppose oxen yoked to a cart cannot run, but on occasion they can plunge into a wild heavy gallop that man is powerless to curb. The great strength latent in these animals was apparent now, for, after their long day's draught, they seemed to become imbued with their driver's panic, and changed from walking to dashing madly down the road. It was a long straight incline of three miles from the station to the settlement called Turrifs. Saul, unable to keep up with the cattle, flung himself upon the cart, and, with great rattling, was borne swiftly away from his pursuer. Young Trenholme stopped when he had run a mile. So far he had gone, determined that, if the man would not stop for his commands, he should be collared and dragged back by main force to face the thing which he had brought, but by degrees even the angry young man perceived the futility of chasing mad cattle. He drew up panting, and, turning, walked back once more. He did not walk slowly; he was in no frame to loiter and his run had brought such a flush of heat upon him that it would have been madness to linger in the bitter cold. At the same time, while his legs moved rapidly, his mind certainly hesitated--in fact, it almost halted, unable to foresee in the least what its next opinion or decision would be. He was not a man to pause in order to make up his mind. He had a strong feeling of responsibility towards his little station and its inexplicable tenant, therefore he hurried back against his will. His only consolation in this backward walk was the key of the door he had locked, which in haste he had taken out and still held in his hand. Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could pass through locked doors.

Nor did the ghost, if ghost it was, pass through unopened doors. The flaw in Trenholme's comfortable theory was that he had forgotten that the large double door, which opened from the baggage room to the railway track, was barred on the inside. When he got back to his place he found this door ajar, and neither in his own room, nor in the baggage room, nor in the coffin, was there sign of human presence, living or dead.

All the world about lay in the clear white twilight. The blueberry flats, the bramble-holts, were red. The clouded sky was white, except for that metallic blue tinge in the west, through which, in some thin places, a pale glow of yellower light was now visible, the last rays of the day that had set. It was this world on which the young Englishman looked as, amazed and somewhat affrighted, he walked round the building, searching on all sides for the creature that could hardly yet, had it run away in such a level land, be wholly out of sight.

He went indoors again to make sure that nothing was there, and this time he made a discovery--his tea was gone from his cup. He gave a shudder of disgust, and, leaving his food untouched, put on coat and cap, and went out shutting his door behind him. His spirits sank. It seemed to him that, had it been midnight instead of this blank, even daylight, had his unearthly-looking visitant acted in more unearthly fashion, the circumstances would have had less weird force to impress his mind.

We can, after all, only form conjectures regarding inexplicable incidents from the successive impressions that have been made upon us. This man was not at all given to love of romance or superstition, yet the easy explanation that some man, for purpose of trick or crime, had hidden in the box, did not seem to him to fit the circumstances. He could not make himself believe that the eyes he had seen belonged to a living man; on the other hand, he found it impossible to conceive of a tea-drinking ghost.

About a quarter of a mile away there was a long grove of birch trees, the projecting spur of a second growth of forest that covered the distant rising ground. Towards this Trenholme strode, for it was the only covert near in which a human being could travel unseen. It was more by the impulse of energy, however, than by reasonable hope that he came there, for by the time he had reached the edge of the trees, it was beginning to grow dark, even in the open plain.

No one who has not seen birch trees in their undisturbed native haunts can know how purely white, unmarred by stain or tear, their trunks can be. Trenholme looked in among them. They grew thickly. White--white--it seemed in the gathering gloom that each was whiter than the other; and Trenholme, remembering that his only knowledge of the figure he sought was that it was wrapped in white, recognised the uselessness, the absurdity even, of hoping to find it here, of all places.

Then he went back to the road and started for Turrifs Settlement.


CHAPTER IX.

The settlement called "Turrifs" was not a village; it was only a locality, in which there were a good many houses within the radius of a few square miles.

When Alec Trenholme started off the third time to reproach the recreant driver of the ox-cart, he had no intention of again dealing with him directly. He bent his steps to the largest house in the neighbourhood, the house of the family called