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

Robert seems to have some unaccountable objection to getting rid of me just at present; but I shall go."

"It is very fine weather," she said.

"There is too much glare," said he.

"You are surely hard to please."

"What I call fine weather is something a man has something in common with. If one were a little chap again, just leaving school for a holiday, this would be a glorious day, but--what _man_ has spirits equal to" (he looked above) "this sort of thing."

His words came home to Sophia with overwhelming force, for, as they went on, touching many subjects one after another, she knew with absolute certainty that her companion had not the slightest intention of being her suitor. If the sunny land through which she was walking had been a waste place, in which storm winds sighed, over which storm clouds muttered, it would have been a fitter home for her heart just then. She saw that she was to be called to no sacrifice, but she experienced no buoyant relief. He was going away; and she was to be left. She had not known herself when she thought she wanted him to go--she was miserable. Well, she deserved her misery, for would she not be more miserable if she married him? Had she not cried and complained? And now the door of this renunciation was not opened to her--he was going away, and she was to be left.

Very dull and prosaic was the talk of these two as they walked up the road to that pine grove where the river curved in, and they turned back through that strip of wilderness between road and river where it was easy to be seen that the brightest leaf posies were to be had.

Nearest the pines was a group of young, stalwart maple trees, each of a different dye--gold, bronze, or red. It was here that they lingered, and Alec gathered boughs for the children till their hands were full. The noise of the golden-winged woodpecker was in the air, and the call of the indigo bird.

Sophia wandered under the branches; her mind was moving always. She was unhappy. Yes, she deserved that; but he--he was unhappy too; did he deserve it? Then she asked herself suddenly if she had no further duty toward him than to come or go at his call. Did she dare, by all that was true, to wreck his life and her own because she would not stoop to compel the call that she had feared?

Humility does not demand that we should think ill of ourselves, but that we should not think of ourselves at all. When Sophia lost sight of herself she saw the gate of Paradise. After that she was at one again with the sunshine and the breeze and the birds, with the rapture of the day and the land, and she ceased to think why she acted, or whether it was right or wrong. The best and worst hours of life are in themselves irresponsible, the will hurled headlong forward by an impulse that has gathered force before.

And what did she do? The first thing that entered her mind--it mattered not what to her. The man was in her power, and she knew it.

When the children's arms were full and they had gone on homeward down a pathway among lower sumac thickets, Alec turned and saw Sophia, just as stately, just as quiet, as he had ever seen her. So they two began to follow.

Her hand had been cut the day before, and the handkerchief that bound it had come off. Demurely she gave it to him to be fastened. Now the hand had been badly cut, and when he saw that he could not repress the tenderness of his sympathy.

"How could you have done it?" he asked, filled with pain, awed, wondering.

She laughed, though she did not mean to; she was so light-hearted, and it was very funny to see how quickly he softened at her will.

"Do not ask me to tell you how low we Rexfords have descended!" she cried, "and yet I will confess I did it with the meat axe. I ought not to touch such a thing, you think! Nay, what can I do when the loin is not jointed and the servant has not so steady a hand as I? Would you have me let papa grumble all dinner-time--the way that you men do, you know?"

The little horror that she had painted for him so vividly did its work. With almost a groan he touched the hand with kisses, not knowing what he did; and looking up, frightened of her as far as he could be conscious of fear, he saw, not anger, but a face that fain would hide itself, and he hid it in his embrace.

"Oh," cried he, "what have I done?"

Stepping backward, he stood a few paces from her, his arms crossed, the glow on his face suddenly transcended by the look with which a man might regard a crime he had committed.

"What is it?" she cried, wickedly curious. The maple tree over her was a golden flame and her feet were on a carpet of gold. All around them the earth was heaped with palm-like sumac shrubs, scarlet, crimson, purple--dyed as it were, with blood.

"What have I done?" He held out his hands as if they had been stained. "I have loved you, I have dared, without a thought, _without a thought for you_, to walk straight into all the--the--heaven of it."

Then he told her, in a word, that about himself which he thought she would despise; and she saw that he thought she heard it for the first time.

Lifting her eyebrows in pretty incredulity. "Not really?" she said.

"It is true," he cried with fierce emphasis.

At that she looked grave.

He had been trying to make her serious; but no sooner did he see her look of light and joy pass into a look of thought than he was filled with that sort of acute misery which differs from other sorrows as acute pain differs from duller aches.

"My darling," he said, his heart was wrung with the words--"my darling, if I have hurt you, I have almost killed myself." (Man that he was, he believed that his life must ebb in this pain.)

"Why?" she asked. "How?"

He went a step nearer her, but as it came to him every moment more clearly that he had deceived her, as he realised what he had gained and what he now thought to forego, his voice forsook him in his effort to speak. Words that he tried to say died on his lips.

But she saw that he had tried to say that because of it she should not marry him.

He tried again to speak and made better work of it. "This that has come to us--this love that has taken us both--you will say it is not enough to--to--"

She lifted up her face to him. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were full of light. "This that has come to us, Alec--" (At his name he came nearer yet) "this that has taken us both" (she faltered) "is enough."

He came near to her again; he took her hands into his; and all that he felt and all that she felt, passed from his eyes to hers, from hers to his.

He said, "It seems like talking in church, but common things must be said and answered, and--Sophie--what will your father say?"

"I don't know," she said; but happiness made her playful; she stroked the sleeve of his coat, as if to touch it were of more interest to her. "I will give him my fortune to make up, and come to you penniless."

"He won't consent," he urged.

There was still a honeyed carelessness in her voice and look. "At the great age to which I have attained," said she, "fathers don't interfere."

"What can I do or say," he said, "to make you consider?" for it seemed to him that her thoughts and voice came from her spellbound in some strange delight, as the murmur comes from a running stream, without meaning, except the meaning of all beautiful and happy things in God's world.

"What must I consider?"

"The shop--the trade."

"When you were a very young butcher, and first took to it, did you like it?"

"I wasn't squeamish," he said; and then he told her about his father. After that he philosophised a little, telling something of the best that he conceived might be if men sought the highest ideal in lowly walks of life, instead of seeking to perform imperfectly some nobler business. It was wonderful how much better he could speak to her than to his brother, but Sophia listened with such perfect assent that his sense of honour again smote him.

"Art thinking of it all, love?" he said.

"I was wondering what colour of aprons you wore, and if I must make them."

They began to walk home, passing now under the sumac's palm-like canopy, and they saw the blue gleam of the singing river through red thickets. Soon they came to a bit of open ground, all overgrown with bronzed bracken, and maidenhair sere and pink, and blue-eyed asters and golden-rod. So high and thick were the breeze-blown weeds that the only place to set the feet was a very narrow path. Here Sophia walked first, for they could not walk abreast, and as Alec watched her threading her way with light elastic step, he became afraid once more, and tried to break through her happy tranquillity.

"Dear love," he said, "I hope--"

"What now?" said she, for his tone was unrestful.

He trampled down flowers and ferns as he awkwardly tried to gain her side.

"You know, dear, I have a sort of feeling that I've perhaps just fascinated and entranced you--so that you are under a spell and don't consider, you know."

It was exactly what he meant, and he said it; but how merrily she laughed! Her happy laughter rang; the river laughed in answer, and the woodpecker clapped applause.

But Alec blushed very much and stumbled upon the tangled weeds.

"I only meant--I--I didn't mean--That is the way I feel fascinated by you, you know; and I suppose it might be the same--"

They walked on, she still advancing a few paces because she had the path, he retarded because, in his attempt to come up with her, he was knee-deep in flowers. But after a minute, observing that he was hurt in his mind because of her laughter, she mocked him, laughing again, but turned the sunshine of her loving face full upon him as she did so.

"Most fascinating and entrancing of butchers!" quoth she.

With that as she entered another thicket of sumac trees, he caught and kissed her in its shade.

* * * * *


And there was one man who heard her words and saw his act, one who took in the full meaning of it even more clearly than they could, because they in their transport had not his clearness of vision. Robert Trenholme, coming to seek them, chanced in crossing this place, thick set with shrubs, to come near them unawares, and seeing them, and having at the sight