What Necessity Knows Part 28

He looked hard at the paper, as if needing a few moments to formulate further translation.

"Do go on," said Eliza, with manifest impatience.

"Why now, you're _real_ interested, Miss White."

"Anybody would want to know what you're at."

"Well, but, considering it's any one so composed as you, Miss White, it's real pleasant to see you so keen."

"I'm keen for my work. I haven't time, like you, to stand here all day."

All this time he had been looking at the paper. "What I've read so far, you see, is what I've told you before as having happened to my knowledge at a place called Turrifs Station."

"Is that all?"

"No," and he went on translating. "'Whether this man was dead or not, he is now alive, but partially deaf and blind; and whether he has ever seen anything of the next world or not, he has now no interest in this one, but spends his whole time praying or preaching, living on crusts, and walking great distances in solitary places. He has lately appeared in the suburbs of this city' (that is Quebec) 'and seems to be a street-preacher of no ordinary power.'"

Harkness stopped with an air of importance.

"Is that all?" asked Eliza.

He gave her another paper, in English, to read. This contained a longer and more sensational account of the same tale, and with this difference, that instead of giving the simple and sentimental view of the French writer, the English journalist jeered greatly, and also stated that the nickname Lazarus had been given in derision, and that the man, who was either mad or an imposter, had been hooted, pelted, and even beaten in the streets.

"Is that all?" she asked.

"Unless you can tell me any more." He did not say this lightly.

"Is that all?" she asked again, as if his words had been unmeaning.

"Well now, I think that's enough. 'Tisn't every day this poor earth of ours is favoured by hearing sermons from one as has been t'other side of dying. I think it would be more worth while to hear him than to go to church, I do."

"Do you mean to say," she asked, with some asperity, "that you really believe it?"

"I tell you I saw the first part of it myself, and unless you can give me a good reason for not believing the second, I'm inclined to swallow it down whole, Miss Cameron--I beg your pardon, White, I mean. One gets real confused in names, occasionally."

"Well," said Eliza, composedly, preparing to leave him, "I can't say I understand it, Mr. Harkness, but I must say it sounds too hard for me to believe."

He looked after her with intense curiosity in his eyes, and in the next few days returned to the subject in her presence again and again, repeating to her all the comments that were made on the story in the bar-room, but he could not rouse her from an appearance of cheerful unconcern.

Another item appeared in the papers; the old man called Cameron had been brought before the magistrates at Quebec for some street disturbance of which he appeared to have been the innocent cause.

Upon this Cyril Harkness took a whim into his head, which he made known to all his friends in the place, and then to Eliza--a most extraordinary whim, for it was nothing less than to go down to Quebec, and take the street preacher under his own protection.

"I feel as if I had a sort of responsibility," said he, "for I was at the very beginning of this whole affair, and saw the house where he had lived, and I got real well acquainted with his partner, who no doubt had ill-treated him. I saw the place where a daughter of his perished too, and now he's got so near up here as this, I can't bear to think of that old man being ill-treated and having no one to look after him. I'm going right down to Quebec by the Sat.u.r.day-night train, an' I'll be back Monday morning if I can persuade the old gentleman to come right here where I can look after him. I reckon there's room in the Harmon house for both him and me, an' I reckon, if he's got anything particularly powerful to say in the way of religion, it won't do this little town any harm to hear it."

He had said all this to Eliza.

"Don't!" she cried in great surprise, but with determined opposition. "I shall never think you have any sense again if you do such a foolish and wicked thing."

"Why now, Miss White, as to losing your good opinion, I didn't know as I'd been fortunate enough to get it yet; and as to its being wicked, I don't see how you make _that_ out."

"It's meddling with what you have nothing to do with."

"Well now, what will you give me not to go?" He said these words, as he said most of his words, in a languid, lingering way, but he turned and faced her with an abrupt glance.

He and she were standing at the head of the first staircase in the unfurnished corridor. It was the middle of the afternoon; no one chanced to be pa.s.sing. He, light-moving, pretty fellow as he was, leaned on the wall and glanced at her sharply. She stood erect, ma.s.sive, not only in her form, but in the strength of will that she opposed to his, and a red flush slowly mantled her pale, immobile face.

"I don't know what you want of me," she said. "Money's the thing you love, and I haven't any money; but whether I had or not, I would give you _nothing_." She turned at the last word.

Then Harkness, taking the chiding and jeers of all his companions good-naturedly, and giving them precisely the same excuses that he had given to Eliza, started for Quebec.

What was more remarkable, he actually brought back the old preacher with him--brought him, or rather led him, to the Harmon house, for the old man was seemingly quite pa.s.sive. This was an accomplished fact when Eliza and Harkness met again.

CHAPTER IX.

The day after his coming, and the next, for some reason the old stranger called Cameron remained in the brick house to which Harkness had brought him. The young man, impatient for novelty, if for nothing else, began to wonder if he had sunk into some stupor of mind from which he would not emerge. He had heard of him as a preacher, and as the conceptions of ordinary minds are made up only of the ideas directly presented to them, he had a vague notion that this old man continually preached. As it was, he went to his work at the hotel on the third morning, and still left his strange guest in the old house, walking about in an empty room, munching some bread with his keen white teeth, his bright eyes half shut under their bushy brows.

Harkness came to the hotel disconcerted, and, meeting Eliza near the dining-room, took off his hat in sullen silence. Several men in the room called after him as he pa.s.sed. "How's your dancing bear, Harkness?"

"How's the ghost you're befriending?" "How's your coffin-gentleman?"

There was a laugh that rang loudly in the large, half-empty room.

After Harkness had despatched two morning visitors, however, and was looking out of his window, as was usual in his idle intervals, he noticed several errand-boys gazing up the road, and in a minute an advancing group came within his view, old Cameron walking down the middle of the street hitting the ground nervously with his staff, and behind him children of various sizes following rather timidly. Every now and then the old man emitted some sound--a shout, a word of some sort, not easily understood. It was this that had attracted the following of children, and was very quickly attracting the attention of every one in the street. One or two men, and a woman with a shawl over her head, were coming down the sidewalks the same way and at about the same pace as the central group, and Harkness more than suspected that they had diverged from the proper course of their morning errands out of curiosity. He took more interest in the scene than seemed consistent with his slight connection with the princ.i.p.al actor. He made an excited movement toward his door, and his hand actually trembled as he opened it. Eliza was usually about the pa.s.sages at this time of day. He called her name.

She put her head over the upper bannister.

"Come down and see Lazarus Cameron!"

"I'll come in a minute."

He saw through the railing of the bannisters the movement of some linen she was folding.

"He'll be past in a minute." Harkness's voice betrayed his excitement more than he desired.

Eliza dropped the linen and came downstairs rather quickly. Harkness returned to his window; she came up beside him. The inner window was open, only one pane was between them and the outer air. In yards all round c.o.c.ks were crowing, as, on a mild day in the Canadian March, c.o.c.ks will crow continually. Light snow of the last downfall lay on the opposite roofs, and made the hills just seen behind them very white. The whole winter's piles of snow lay in the ridges between the footpaths and the road. Had it not been that some few of the buildings were of brick, and that on one or two of the wooden ones the white paint was worn off, the wide street would have been a picture painted only in different tones of white. But the clothes of the people were of dark colour, and the one vehicle in sight was a blue box-sleigh, drawn by a s.h.a.ggy pony.

Eliza was conscious of the picture only as one is conscious of surroundings upon which the eye does not focus. Her sight fastened on the old man, now almost opposite the hotel. He was of a broad, powerful frame that had certainly once possessed great strength. Even now he was strong; he stooped a little, but he held his head erect, and the well-formed, prominent features of his weather-beaten face showed forth a tremendous force of some sort; even at that distance the brightness of his eyes was visible under bushy brows, grey as his hair. His clothes were of the most ordinary sort, old and faded. His cap was of the commonest fur; he grasped it now in his hand, going bareheaded. Tapping the ground with his staff, he walked with nervous haste, looking upward the while, as blind men often look.

Harkness did not look much out of the window; he was inspecting Eliza's face: and when she turned to him he gave her a glance that, had she been a weaker woman, would have been translated into many words--question and invective; but her silence dominated him. It was a look also that, had he been a stronger man, he would have kept to himself, for it served no purpose but to betray that there was some undercurrent of antagonism to her in his mind.

"You're very queer to-day, Mr. Harkness," she remarked, and with that she withdrew.

But when the door closed she was not really gone to the young man. He saw her as clearly with his mind as a moment before he had seen her with his eyes, and he pondered now the expression on her face when she looked out of the window. It told him, however, absolutely nothing of the secret he was trying to wring from her.

There was no square in Ch.e.l.laston, no part of the long street much wider than any other or more convenient as a public lounging place.

Here, in front of the hotel, was perhaps the most open spot, and Harkness hoped the old man would make a stand here and preach; but he turned aside and went down a small side street, so Harkness, who had no desire to identify himself too publicly with his strange _protege_, was forced to leave to the curiosity of others the observation of his movements.