What Necessity Knows | Page 9

the afternoon, and a chill north breeze ruffled the leaden
surface of the lake and seemed to curdle the water with its breath;
patches of soft ice already mottled it. The sky was white, and leafless
maple and evergreen seemed almost alike colourless in the dull, cold
air. Bates had turned from his work to stand for a few moments on the
hard trodden level in front of the house and survey the weather. He had
reason to survey it with anxiety. He was anxious to send the dead man's
body to the nearest graveyard for decent burial, and the messenger and
cart sent on this errand were to bring back another man to work with
him at felling the timber that was to be sold next spring. The only way
between his house and other houses lay across the lake and through a
gap in the hills, a way that was passable now, and passable in calm
days when winter had fully come, but impassable at the time of
forming ice and of falling and drifting snow. He hoped that the snow
and ice would hold off until his plan could be carried out, but he held
his face to the keen cold breeze and looked at the mottled surface of the
lake with irritable anxiety. It was not his way to confide his anxiety to
any one; he was bearing it alone when the girl, who had been
sauntering aimlessly about, came to him.
"If I don't go with the boat to-morrow," she said, "I'll walk across as
soon as the ice'll bear."
With that he turned upon her. "And if I was a worse man than I am I'd
let ye. It would be a comfort to me to be rid of ye. Where would ye go,
or what would ye do? Ye ought to be only too thankful to have a
comfortable home where ye're kept from harm. It's a cruel and bad
world, I tell ye; it's going to destruction as fast as it can, and ye'd go
with it."
The girl shook with passion. "I'd do nothing of the sort," she choked.
All the anger and dignity of her being were aroused, but it did not
follow that she had any power to give them adequate utterance. She
turned from him, and, as she stood, the attitude of her whole figure

spoke such incredulity, scorn, and anger, that the flow of hot-tempered
arguments with which he was still ready to seek to persuade her reason,
died on his lips. He lost all self-control in increasing ill-temper.
"Ye may prance and ye may dance"--he jerked the phrase between his
teeth, using words wholly inapplicable to her attitude because he could
not analyse its offensiveness sufficiently to find words that applied to it.
"Yes, prance and dance as much as ye like, but ye'll not go in the boat
to-morrow if ye'd six fathers to bury instead of one, and ye'll not set
foot out of this clearing, where I can look after ye. I said to the dead I'd
take care of ye, and I'll do it--ungrateful lass though ye are."
He hurled the last words at her as he turned and went into a shed at the
side of the house in which he had before been working.
The girl stood quite still as long as he was within sight. She seemed
conscious of his presence though she was not looking towards him, for
as soon as he had stepped within the low opening of the shed, she
moved away, walking in a wavering track across the tilled land,
walking as if movement was the end of her purpose, not as if she had
destination.
The frozen furrows of the ploughed land crumbled beneath her heavy
tread. The north wind grew stronger. When she reached the edge of the
maple wood and looked up with swollen, tear-blurred eyes, she saw the
grey branches moved by the wind, and the red squirrels leaped from
branch to branch and tree to tree as if blown by the same air. She
wandered up one side of the clearing and down the other, sometimes
wading knee-deep in loud rustling maple leaves gathered in dry
hollows within the wood, sometimes stumbling over frozen furrows as
she crossed corners of the ploughed land, walking all the time in
helpless, hopeless anger.
When, however, she came back behind the house to that part of the
clearing bounded by the narrow and not very deep ravine which
running water had cut into the side of the hill, she seemed to gather
some reviving sensations from the variety which the bed of the brook
presented to her view. Here, on some dozen feet of steeply sloping rock

and earth, which on either side formed the