What Necessity Knows Part 29

The curiosity of people in the street also seemed to abate. The more respectable cla.s.s of people are too proud to show interest in the same way that gaping children show it, and most people in this village belonged to the more respectable cla.s.s. Those who had come to doors or windows on the street retired from them just as Harkness had done; those out in the street went on their ways, with the exception of two men of the more demonstrative sort, who went and looked down the alley after the stranger, and called out jestingly to some one in it.

Then the old man stopped, and, with his face still upturned, as if blind to everything but pure light, took up his position on one side of the narrow street. He had only gone some forty paces down it. A policeman, coming up in front of the hotel, looked on, listening to the jesters.

Then he and they drew a little nearer, the children who had followed stood round, one man appeared at the other end of the alley. On either side the houses were high and the windows few, but high up in the hotel there was a small window that lighted a linen press, and at that small window, with the door of the closet locked on the inside, Eliza stood unseen, and looked and listened.

The voice of the preacher was loud, unnatural also in its rising and falling, the voice of a deaf man who could not hear his own tones. His words were not what any one expected. This was the sermon he preached:

"In a little while He that shall come will not tarry. Many shall say to Him in that day, 'Lord, Lord,' and He shall say, 'Depart from me; I never knew you.'"

His voice, which had become very vehement, suddenly sank, and he was silent.

"Upon my word, that's queer," said one of the men who stood near the policeman.

"He's staring mad," said the other man in plain clothes. "He should be in the asylum."

This second man went away, but the first speaker and the policeman drew still nearer, and the congregation did not diminish, for the man who left was replaced by the poor woman with the checked shawl over her head who had first followed the preacher up the street, and who now appeared standing listening at a house corner. She was well known in the village as the wife of a drunkard.

The old man began speaking again in softer voice, but there was the same odd variety of tones which had exciting effect.

"Why do you defraud your brother? Why do you judge your brother? Why do you set at nought your brother? Inasmuch as you do it unto the least of these, you do it to Him."

His voice died away again. His strong face had become illumined, and he brought down his gaze toward the listeners.

"If any man shall do His will he shall know of the doctrine. He will know--yes, know--for there is no other knowledge as sure as this."

Then, in such a colloquial way that it almost seemed as if the listeners themselves had asked the question, he said: "What shall we do that we may work the works of G.o.d?"

And he smiled upon them, and held out his hands as if in blessing, and lifted up his face again to heaven, and cried, "This is the work of G.o.d, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent."

As if under some spell, the few to whom he had spoken stood still, till the preacher slowly s.h.i.+fted himself and began to walk away by the road he had come.

Some of the children went after him as before. The poor woman disappeared behind the house she had been standing against. The policeman and his companion began to talk, looking the while at the object of their discussion.

Eliza, in the closet, leaned her head against the pile of linen on an upper shelf, and was quite still for some time.

CHAPTER X.

Princ.i.p.al Trenholme had been gone from Ch.e.l.laston a day or two on business. When he returned one evening, he got into his smart little sleigh which was in waiting at the railway station, and was driving himself home, when his attention was arrested and his way blocked by a crowd in front of the hotel. He did not force a way for his horse, but drew up, listening and looking. It was a curious picture. The wide street of snow and the houses were dusky with night, except where light chanced to glow in doorways and windows. The collection of people was motley. Above, all the sky seemed brought into insistent notice as a roof or covering, partly because pale pink streamers of flickering northern light were pa.s.sing over it, partly because the leader of the crowd, an old man, by looking upwards, drew the gaze of all to follow whither his had gone.

Trenholme heard his loud voice calling: "Behold He shall come again, and every eye shall look on Him Whom they have pierced. Blessed are those servants whom their Lord when He cometh shall find watching."

The scene was foreign to life in Ch.e.l.laston. Trenholme, who had no mind to stand on the skirts of the crowd, thrust his reins into the hand of his rustic groom, and went up the broad steps of the hotel, knowing that he would there have his inquiries most quickly answered.

In the bar-room about thirty men were crowded about the windows, looking at the preacher, not listening, for the double gla.s.s, shut out the preacher's voice. They were interested, debating loudly among themselves, and when they saw who was coming up the steps, they said to each other and the landlord, "Put it to the Princ.i.p.al." There were men of all sorts in this group, most of them very respectable; but when Trenholme stood inside the door, his soft hat shading his shaven face, his fur-lined driving coat lying back from the finer cloth it covered, he was a very different sort of man from any of them. He did not know that it was merely by the influence of this difference (of which perhaps he was less conscious than any of them) that they were provoked to question him. Hutchins, the landlord, sat at the back of the room on his high office chair.

"Good evening, Princ.i.p.al," said he. "Glad to see you in the place again, sir. Have you heard of a place called Turrifs Road Station? 'Tain't on our map."

Trenholme gave the questioner a severe glance of inquiry. The scene outside, and his proposed inquiry concerning it, pa.s.sed from his mind, for he had no means of divining that this question referred to it. The place named was known to him only by his brother's letter. The men, he saw, were in a rough humour, and because of the skeleton in his closet he jumped to the thought that something had transpired concerning his brother, something that caused them to jeer. He did not stop to think what it might be. His moral nature stiffened itself to stand for truth and his brother at all costs.

"I know the place;" he said.

His words had a stern impressiveness which startled his hearers. They were only playing idly with the pros and cons of a newspaper tale; but this man, it would seem, treated the matter very seriously.

Hutchins had no desire to annoy, but he did not know how to desist from further question, and, supposing that the story of Cameron was known, he said in a more ingratiating way:

"Well, but, sir, you don't want us to believe the crazy tale of the station hand there, that he saw the dead walk?"

Again there was that in Trenholme's manner which astonished his hearers. Had they had the slightest notion they were offending him, they would have known it was an air of offence, but, not suspecting that, they could only judge that he thought the subject a solemn one.

"I would have you believe his word, certainly. He is a man of honour."

A facetious man here took his pipe out of his mouth and winked to his companions. "You've had private information to that effect, I suppose, Princ.i.p.al."

Very haughtily Trenholme a.s.sented.

He had not been in the room more than a few moments when all this had pa.s.sed. He was handed a newspaper, which gave still another account of the remote incident which was now at last ticklings the ears of the public, and he was told that the man Cameron was supposed to be the preacher who was now without. He heard what part Harkness had played, and he saw that his brother's name was not mentioned in the public print, was apparently not known. He took a little pains to be genial (a thing he was certainly not in the habit of doing in that room), in order to dissipate any impression his offended manner might have given, and went home.

It is not often a man estimates at all correctly the effect of his own words and looks; he would need to be a trained actor to do this, and, happily, most men are not their own looking-gla.s.ses. Trenholme thought he had behaved in a surly and stiff manner, and, had the subject been less unpleasant, he would rather have explained at once where and who his brother was. This was his remembrance of his call at the hotel, but the company there saw it differently.

No sooner had he gone than the facetious man launched his saw-like voice again upon the company. "He had private information on the subject, _he had_."

"There's one sure thing," said a stout, consequential man; "he believes the whole thing, the Princ.i.p.al does."

A commercial traveller who was acquainted with the place put in his remark. "There isn't a man in town that I wouldn't have expected to see gulled sooner."

To which a thin, religious man, who, before Trenholme entered, had leaned to the opinion that there were more things in the world than they could understand, now retorted that it was more likely that the last speaker was gulled himself. Princ.i.p.al Trenholme, he a.s.serted, wasn't a man to put his faith in anything without proofs.

Ch.e.l.laston was not a very gossiping place. For the most part the people had too much to do, and were too intent upon their own business, to take much trouble to retail what they chanced to hear; but there are some things which, as the facetious man observed, the dead in their graves would gossip about if they could; and one of these themes, according to him, was that Princ.i.p.al Trenholme believed there had been something supernatural about the previous life of the old preacher. The story went about, impressing more particularly the female portion of the community, but certainly not without influence upon the males also. Portly men, who a week before would have thought themselves compromised by giving a serious thought to the narrative, now stood still in the street to get the chance of hearing the preacher, and felt that in doing so they were wrapped in all the respectability of the cloth of Trenholme's coats, and standing firm on the letters of his Oxford degree and upon all the learning of the New College.

They did not believe the story themselves. No, there was a screw loose somewhere; but Princ.i.p.al Trenholme had some definite knowledge of the matter. The old man had been in a trance, a very long trance, to say the least of it, and had got up a changed creature. Princ.i.p.al Trenholme was not prepared to scout the idea that he had been nearer to death than falls to the lot of most living men.

It will be seen that the common sense of the speakers shaped crude rumour to suit themselves. Had they left it crude, it would have died.

It is upon the nice sense of the probable and possible in talkative men that mad rumour feeds.

As for Trenholme, he became more or less aware of the report that had gone out about his private knowledge of old Cameron, but it was less rather than more. The scholastic life of the college was quite apart from the life of the village, and in the village those who talked most about Cameron were the least likely to talk to Trenholme on any subject.

His friends were not those who were concerned with the rumour; but even when he was taxed with it, the whole truth that he knew was no apparent contradiction. He wrote to Alec, making further inquiries, but Alec had retreated again many miles from the post. To be silent and ignore the matter seemed to be his only course.

Thus it happened that, because Harkness housed him in the hope of working upon Eliza, and because Trenholme happened to have had a brother at Turrifs Station, the strange old preacher found a longer resting place and a more attentive hearing in the village of Ch.e.l.laston than he would have been likely to find elsewhere.

CHAPTER XI.