What Necessity Knows | Page 8

was a very bad thing; she should not leave his protection, and he was considerate enough to desire that, when the time came for launching the boat which was to take her father's body to burial, he should not need to detain her by force.
The girl set an ill-cooked supper before Bates and the hired man, and would not herself eat. As Bates sat at his supper he felt drearily that his position was hard; and, being a man whose training disposed him to vaguely look for the cause of trial in sin, wondered what he had done that it had thus befallen him. His memory reverted to the time when, on an emigrant ship, he had made friends with the man Cameron who that day had died, and they had agreed to choose their place and cast in their lot together. It had been part of the agreement that the aunt who accompanied Bates should do the woman's work of the new home until she was too old, and that Cameron's child should do it when she was old enough.
The girl was a little fat thing then, wearing a red hood. Bates, uneasy in his mind both as to his offer of marriage and her resentment, asked himself if he was to blame that he had begun by being kind to her then, that he had played with her upon the ship's deck, that on their land journey he had often carried her in his arms, or that, in the years of the hard isolated life which since then they had all lived, he had taught and trained the girl with far more care than her father had bestowed on her. Or was he to blame that he had so often been strict and severe with her? Or was he unjust in feeling now that he had a righteous claim to respect and consideration from her to an almost greater extent than the dead father whose hard, silent life had showed forth little of the proper attributes of fatherhood? Or did the sin for which he was now being punished lie in the fact that, in spite of her constant wilfulness and frequent stupidity, he still felt such affection for his pupil as made him unwilling, as he phrased it, to seek a wife elsewhere and thus thrust her from her place in the household. Bates had a certain latent contempt for women; wives he thought were easily found and not altogether desirable; and with that inconsistency common to men, he looked upon his proposal to the girl now as the result of a much more unselfish impulse than he had done an hour ago, before she exclaimed at it so scornfully. He did not know how to answer himself. In all honesty he could not accuse himself of not having done his duty by the girl or of any desire to shirk it in the future; and that being the case, he grew every minute more inclined to believe that the fact that his duty was now being made so disagreeable to him was owing, not to any fault of his, but to the naughtiness of her disposition.
The hired man slept in an outer shed. When he had gone, and Bates went up to his own bed in the loft of the log-house, the last sound that he heard was the girl sobbing where she lay beside the old woman in the room below. The sound was not cheering.
The next day was sunless and colder. Twice that morning Sissy Cameron stopped Bates at his work to urge her determination to leave the place, and twice he again set his reasons for refusal before her with what patience he could command. He told her, what she knew without telling, that the winter was close upon them, that the winter's work at the lumber was necessary for their livelihood, that it was not in his power to find her an escort for a journey at this season or to seek another home for her. Then, when she came to him again a third time, his anger broke out, and he treated her with neither patience nor good sense.
It was in 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