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

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