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

upon them. They both looked at Eliza; and now Bates, trembling in every nerve, felt only a weak fear lest she should turn upon him in wrath for being unfaithful, and summoned all his strength to show her that by the promise with which he had bound himself he would abide. He looked at her as though in very truth he had never seen her before. And the girl took his stony look as if he had struck her, and fell away from the door, so that they saw her no longer.

"Looked as if she'd seen someone she knew in here," remarked Hutchins, complacently. He was always pleased when people noticed Eliza, for he considered her a credit to the house.

The others made no remark, and Bates felt absurdly glad that he had seen her, not that it advanced his desire, but yet he was glad; and he had shown her, too, that she need not fear him.

And Eliza--she went on past the door to the verandah, and stood in sight of the boarders, who were there, in sight of the open street; but she did not see anyone or anything. She was too common a figure at that door to be much noticed, but if anyone had observed her it would have been seen that she was standing stolidly, not taking part in what was before her, but that her white face, which never coloured prettily like other women's, bore now a deepening tint, as if some pale torturing flame were lapping about her; there was something on her face that suggested the quivering of flames.

In a few minutes she went back into the bar-room.

"Mr. Hutchins," she said, and here followed a request, that was almost a command, that he should attend to something needing his oversight in the stable-yard.

Hutchins grumbled, apologised to Bates; but Eliza stood still, and he went. She continued to stand, and her attitude, her forbidding air, the whole atmosphere of her presence, was such that the two men who were on the eve of departure went some minutes before they otherwise would have done, though perhaps they hardly knew why they went.

"Mr. Bates! You're awfully angry with me, Mr. Bates, I'm afraid."

He got up out of his chair, in his petty vanity trying to stand before her as if he were a strong man. "Angry!" he echoed, for he did not know what he said.

"Yes, you're angry; I know by the way you looked at me," she complained sullenly. "You think I'm not fit to look at, or to speak to, and--"

They stood together in the common bar-room. Except for the gay array of bottles behind the bar the place was perfectly bare, and it was open on all sides. She did not look out of door or windows to see who might be staring at them, but he did. He had it so fixed in his faithful heart that he must not compromise her, that he was in a tremor lest she should betray herself. He leaned on the back of his chair, breathing hard, and striving to appear easy.

"No, but I'm thinking, Sissy--"

"You're dreadfully ill, Mr. Bates, I'm afraid."

"No, but I was thinking, Sissy, I must see ye again before I go. I've that to say to ye that must be said before I go home."

"Home!" She repeated the word like the word of a familiar language she had not heard for long. "Are you going home?"

"Where will ye see me?" he urged.

"Anywhere you like," she said listlessly, and then added with sudden determination, "I'll come."

"Hoots!" he said, "_where_ will ye come?"

"Where?" she said, looking at him keenly as if to gauge his strength or weakness. "You're not fit to be much on your feet."

"Can you come in the bush at the back of the college? It would be little harm for you to speak to me there. When can ye come?"

"To-morrow morning."

"How can ye come of a morning? Your time's not your own."

"I say I'll come." She enunciated the words emphatically as Hutchins's crutches were heard coming near the door. Then she left the room.


CHAPTER XIII.

The wood behind the college grounds and Captain Rexford's pasture had appeared to Bates to be a place possessed only by the winds of heaven and by such sunshine and shadow as might fall to its share. He had formed this estimate of it while he had lain for many days watching the waving of its boughs from out his window, and therefore he had named it to Eliza as a place where he could talk to her. Eliza well knew that this wood was no secluded spot in the season of summer visitors, but she was in too reckless a mood to care for this, any more than she cared for the fact that she had no right to leave the hotel in the morning. She left that busy house, not caring whether it suffered in her absence or not, and went to the appointed place, heedless of the knowledge that she was as likely as not to meet with some of her acquaintances there. Yet, as she walked, no one seeing her would have thought that this young woman had a heart rendered miserable by her own acts and their legitimate outcome. In her large comeliness she suggested less of feeling than of force, just as the gown she wore had more pretension to fashion than to grace.

When she entered the wood it was yet early morning. Bates was not there. She had come thus early because she feared hindrance to her coming, not because she cared when he came. She went into the young spruce fringes of the wood near the Rexford pasture, and sat down where she had before sat to watch Principal Trenholme's house. The leaves of the elm above her were turning yellow; the sun-laden wind that came between the spruce shades seemed chill to her; she felt cold, an unusual thing for her, and the time seemed terribly long. When she saw Bates coming she went to the more frequented aisles of the trees to meet him.

Bates had never been a tall man, but now, thin and weak, he seemed a small one, although he still strove to hold himself up manfully. His face this day was grey with the weariness of a sleepless night, and his enemy, asthma, was hard upon him--a man's asthma, that is a fierce thing because it is not yielded to gracefully, but is struggled against.

"Oh, but you're ill, Mr. Bates," she said, relapsing into that repeated expression of yesterday.

"I'm no so ill as I--I seem," he panted, "but that's neither here--nor there."

This was their greeting. Round them the grass was littered by old picnic papers, and this vulgar marring of the woodland glade was curiously akin to the character of this crucial interview between them, for the beauty of its inner import was overlaid with much that was common and garish. A rude bench had been knocked together by some picnicker of the past, and on this Bates was fain to sit down to regain his breath. Sissy stood near him, plucking at some coloured leaves she had picked up in her restlessness.

"You think of going back to the old place," she said, because he could not speak.

"Aye."

"Miss Bates is keeping pretty well?"--this in conventional tone that was oddly mortised into the passionate working of her mind.

"Oh, aye."

"Why wouldn't you sell it and live in a town?"

"It's the only air there I can be breathing," said he; the confession was wrung from him by his present struggle for breath. "I'm not fit for a town."

"I hear them saying down at the hotel that you're awfully ill."

"It's not mortal, the doctor says."

"You'll need someone to take care of you, Mr. Bates."

"Oh, I'll get that."

He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience, and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his mind, she began again:

"I don't mind if you don't sell, for I don't want to get any money."

"Oh, but ye can sell when I'm gone; it'll be worth more then than now. I'm just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I go on breathing."

She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and crosswise.

"What I want--to ask of ye now is--what I want to ask ye first is a solemn question. Do ye know where your father's corpse--is laid?"

"Yes, I know," she said. "He didn't care anything about cemeteries, father didn't."

He looked at her keenly, and there was a certain stern setting of his strong lower jaw. His words were quick: "Tell on."

"'Twas you that made me do it," said she, sullenly.

"Do what? What did ye do?"

"I buried my father."

"Did ye set Saul to do it?"

"No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?"

"Lassie, lassie! it's no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own woman's heart didn't misgive ye."

Perhaps, for all he knew, it had misgiven her often, but she did not say so now.

"In the clearin's all round Turrifs they buried on their own lands," she said, still sullen.

"Ye buried him on his own land!" he exclaimed, the wonder of it growing upon him. "When? Where? Out with it! Make a clean breast of it."

"I buried him that night. The coffin slipped easy enough out of the window and on the dry leaves when I dragged it. I laid him between the rocks at the side, just under where the bank was going to fall, and then I went up and pushed the bank down upon him." She looked up and cried defiantly: "Father'd as soon lie there as in a cemetery!" Although it was as if she was crushing beneath her heel that worship of conventionality which had made Bates try to send the body so far to a better grave, there was still in her last words a tone of pathos which surprised even herself. Something in the softening influences which had been about her since that crisis of her young life made her feel more ruth at the recital of the deed than she had felt at its doing. "I made a bed of moss and leaves," she said, "and I shut up the ledge he lay in with bits of rock, so that naught could touch him."

"But--but I dug there," cried Bates. (In his surprise the nervous affection of his breath had largely left him.) "I dug where the bank had fallen; for I had strange thoughts o' what ye might have been driven to when I was long alone, and I dug, but his body wasna' there."

It was curious that, even after her confession, he should feel need to excuse himself for his suspicion.

"There was a sort of cleft sideways in the rock at the side of the stream; you'd never have seen it, for I only saw it myself by hanging over, holding by a tree. No one would ever have thought o' digging there when I'd closed up the opening with stones; I thought o' that when I put him in."

He got up and took a