What Necessity Knows | Page 7

learning
your lessons as ye have been doing, I will ask ye to marry me, and then
(we hope of course to get more beforehand wi' money as years go) ye
will have more interest and--"
"Marry!" interrupted the girl, not strongly, but speaking in faint wonder,
as if echoing a word she did not quite understand.
"Yes," he went on with great kindliness, "I talked it over with your
father before he went, and he was pleased. I told him that, in a year or
two, if he liked it, I would marry ye--it's only if ye like, of course; and
ye'd better not think about it now, for ye're too young."
"Marry me!" This time the exclamation came from her with a force that
was appalling to him. The coarse handkerchief which she had been
holding to her eyes was withdrawn, and with lips and eyes open she
exclaimed again: "Marry me! You!"
It was remarkable how this man, who so far was using, and through
long years had always used, only the tone of mentor, now suddenly
began to try to justify himself with almost childlike timidity.
"Your father and I didn't know of any one else hereabouts that would
suit, and of course we knew ye would naturally be disappointed if ye
didn't marry." He went on muttering various things about the
convenience of such an arrangement.
She listened to nothing more than his first sentence, and began to move
away from him slowly a few steps backwards; then, perceiving that she
had come to the brink of the level ground, she turned and suddenly
stretched out her arm with almost frantic longing toward the cold, grey
lake and the dark hills behind, where the fires of the west still struggled
with the encroaching November night.

As she turned there was light enough for him to see how bright the
burning colour of her hair was--bright as the burning copper glow on
the lower feathers of those great shadowy wings of cloud--the wings of
night that were enfolding the dying day. Some idea, gathered
indefinitely from both the fierceness of her gesture and his transient
observation of the colour of her hair, suggested to him that he had
trodden on the sacred ground of a passionate heart.
Poor man! He would have been only too glad just then to have effaced
his foot-prints if he had had the least idea how to do it. The small shawl
she wore fell from her unnoticed as she went quickly into the house. He
picked it up, and folded it awkwardly, but with meditative care. It was a
square of orange-coloured merino, such as pedlars who deal with the
squaws always carry, an ordinary thing for a settler's child to possess.
As he held it, Bates felt compunction that it was not something finer
and to his idea prettier, for he did not like the colour. He decided that
he would purchase something better for her as soon as possible. He
followed her into the house.
CHAPTER III.
Night, black and cold, settled over the house that had that day for the
first time been visited by death. Besides the dead man, there were now
three people to sleep in it: an old woman, whose failing brain had little
of intelligence left, except such as showed itself in the everyday habits
of a long and orderly life; the young girl, whose mind slow by nature in
reaching maturity and retarded by the monotony of her life, had not yet
gained the power of realising its own deeper thoughts, still less of
explaining them to another; and this man, Bates, who, being by natural
constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain of the sight of illness
and death which he had just undergone, was not in the best condition to
resist the morbid influences of unhappy companionship.
The girl shed tears as she moved about sullenly. She would not speak to
Bates, and he did not in the least understand that, sullen as she was, her
speechlessness did not result from that, but from inability to reduce to
any form the chaotic emotions within her, or to find any expression

which might represent her distress. He could not realise that the
childish mind that had power to converse for trivial things had, as yet,
no word for the not-trivial; that the blind womanly emotion on which
he had trodden had as yet no counterpart in womanly thought, which
might have formed excuses for his conduct, or at least have
comprehended its simplicity. He only felt uneasily that her former
cause of contention with him, her determination, sudden as her father's
death, to leave the only home she possessed, was now enforced by her
antagonism to the suggestion he had made of a future