What Necessity Knows | Page 5

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 she stood there, large and miserable, before him. He settled his shoulders obstinately against the wood pile, thinking to wait till she should speak or make some further sign. Nothing but strength of will kept him in his place, for he would gladly have fled from her. He had now less guidance than before to what was passing in her mind, for her face was more hidden from his sight as the light of the sinking sun focussed more exclusively in the fields