What Necessity Knows | Page 4

thereby receiving an inward hurt that was to bring him death.
CHAPTER II.
The Indian summer, that lingers in the Canadian forest after the fall of the leaves, had passed away. The earth lay frozen, ready to bear the snow. The rivers, with edge of thin ice upon their quiet places, rolled, gathering into the surface of their waters the cold that would so soon create their crystal prison.
The bright sun of a late November day was shining upon a small lake that lay in the lonely region to the west of the Gaspé Peninsula near the Matapediac Valley. There was one farm clearing on a slope of the wild hills that encircled the lake. The place was very lonely. An eagle that rose from the fir-clad ridge above the clearing might from its eminence, have seen other human habitations, but such sight was denied to the dwellers in the rude log-house on the clearing. The eagle wheeled in the air and flew southward. A girl standing near the log-house watched it with discontented eyes.
The blue water of the lake, with ceaseless lapping, cast up glinting reflections of the cold sunlight. Down the hillside a stream ran to join the lake, and it was on the more sheltered slope by this stream, where grey-limbed maple trees grew, that the cabin stood. Above and around, the steeper slopes bore only fir trees, whose cone-shaped or spiky forms, sometimes burnt and charred, sometimes dead and grey, but for the most part green and glossy, from shore and slope and ridge pointed always to the blue zenith.
The log-house, with its rougher sheds, was hard by the stream's ravine. About the other sides of it stretched a few acres of tilled land. Round this land the maple wood closed, and under its grey trees there was a tawny brown carpet of fallen leaves from which the brighter autumn colours had already faded. Up the hillside in the fir wood there were gaps where the trees had been felled for lumber, and about a quarter of a mile from the house a rudely built lumber slide descended to the lake.
It was about an hour before sundown when the eagle had risen and fled, and the sunset light found the girl who had watched it still standing in the same place. All that time a man had been talking to her; but she herself had not been talking, she had given him little reply. The two were not close to the house; large, square-built piles of logs, sawn and split for winter fuel, separated them from it. The man leaned against the wood now; the girl stood upright, leaning on nothing.
Her face, which was healthy, was at the same time pale. Her hair was very red, and she had much of it. She was a large, strong young woman. She looked larger and stronger than the man with whom she was conversing. He was a thin, haggard fellow, not at first noticeable in the landscape, for his clothes and beard were faded and worn into colours of earth and wood, so that Nature seemed to have dealt with him as she deals with her most defenceless creatures, causing them to grow so like their surroundings that even their enemies do not easily observe them. This man, however, was not lacking in a certain wiry physical strength, nor in power of thought or of will. And these latter powers, if the girl possessed them, were as yet only latent in her, for she had the heavy and undeveloped appearance of backward youth.
The man was speaking earnestly. At last he said:--
"Come now, Sissy, be a good lassie and say that ye're content to stay. Ye've always been a good lassie and done what I told ye before."
His accent was Scotch, but not the broad Scotch of an entirely uneducated man. There was sobriety written in the traits of his face, and more--a certain quality of intellectual virtue of the higher stamp. He was not young, but he was not yet old.
"I haven't," said the girl sullenly.
He sighed at her perverseness. "That's not the way I remember it. I'm sure, from the time ye were quite a wee one, ye have always tried to please me.--We all come short sometimes; the thing is, what we are trying to do."
He spoke as if her antagonism to what he had been saying, to what he was 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