What Necessity Knows | Page 5

yet saying, had had a painful effect upon him which he was
endeavouring to hide.
The girl looked over his head at the smoke that was proceeding from
the log-house chimney. She saw it curl and wreathe itself against the

cold blue east. It was white wood smoke, and as she watched it began
to turn yellow in the light from the sunset. She did not turn to see
whence the yellow ray came.
"Now that father's dead, I won't stay here, Mr. Bates." She said "I
won't" just as a sullen, naughty girl would speak. "'Twas hateful
enough to stay while he lived, but now you and Miss Bates are nothing
to me."
"Nothing to ye, Sissy?" The words seemed to come out of him in
pained surprise.
"I know you've brought me up, and taught me, and been far kinder to
me than father ever was; but I'm not to stay here all my life because of
that."
"Bairn, I have just been telling ye there is nothing else ye can do just
now. I have no ready money. Your father had nothing to leave ye but
his share of this place; and, so far, we've just got along year by year,
and that's all. I'll work it as well as I can, and, if ye like, ye're welcome
to live free and lay by your share year by year till ye have something to
take with ye and are old enough to go away. But if ye go off now ye'll
have to live as a servant, and ye couldn't thole that, and I couldn't for ye.
Ye have no one to protect ye now but me. I've no friends to send ye to.
What do ye know of the world? It's unkind--ay, and it's wicked too."
"How's it so wicked? You're not wicked, nor father, nor me, nor the
men--how's people outside so much wickeder?"
Bates's mouth--it was a rather broad, powerful mouth--began to grow
hard at her continued contention, perhaps also at the thought of the
evils of which he dreamed. "It's a very evil world," he said, just as he
would have said that two and two made four to a child who had dared
to question that fact. "Ye're too young to understand it now: ye must
take my word for it."
She made no sort of answer; she gave no sign of yielding; but, because
she had made no answer, he, self-willed and opinionated man that he

was, felt assured that she had no answer to give, and went on to talk as
if that one point were settled.
"Ye can be happy here if ye will only think so. If we seem hard on ye in
the house about the meals and that, I'll try to be better tempered. Ye
haven't read all the books we have yet, but I'll get more the first chance
if ye like. Come, Sissy, think how lonesome I'd be without ye!"
He moved his shoulders nervously while he spoke, as if the effort to
coax was a greater strain than the effort to teach or command. His
manner might have been that of a father who wheedled a child to do
right, or a lover who sued on his own behalf; the better love, for that
matter, is much the same in all relations of life.
This last plea evidently moved her just a little. "I'm sorry, Mr. Bates,"
she said.
"What are ye sorry for, Sissy?"
"That I'm to leave you."
"But ye're not going. Can't ye get that out of your head? How will ye
go?"
"In the boat, when they take father."
At that the first flash of anger came from him. "Ye won't go, if I have
to hold ye by main force. I can't go to bury your father. I have to stay
here and earn bread and butter for you and me, or we'll come short of it.
If ye think I'm going to let ye go with a man I know little about--"
His voice broke off in indignation, and as for the girl, whether from
sudden anger at being thus spoken to, or from the conviction of
disappointment which had been slowly forcing itself upon her, she
began to cry. His anger vanished, leaving an evident discomfort behind.
He stood before her with a weary look of effort on his face, as if he
were casting all things in heaven and earth about in his mind to find
which of them would be most likely to afford her comfort, or at least, to

put an end to tears which, perhaps for a reason unknown to himself,
gave him excessive annoyance.
"Come, Sissy"--feebly--"give over."
But the girl went on crying, not loudly or passionately, but with no sign
of discontinuance, as