Part 10 (1/2)

”We sink,” said Turrif, with his deliberate smile, ”it will be best; for if you have not been wandering in your mind, some one else's body has been wandering.”

Trenholme went back to his station in the not unpleasant company of two st.u.r.dy farmers, one young and vivacious, the other old and slow. They found the place just as he had left it. The coffin was empty, save for the sweet-scented cus.h.i.+on of roughly covered pine ta.s.sels on which the body of the gaunt old Cameron had been laid to rest.

The three men sat by the stove in the other room. The smoke from their pipes dimmed the light of the lamp. The quiet sounds of their talk and movements never entirely took from them the consciousness of the large dark silence that lay without. No footfall broke it. When they heard the distant rush of the night train, they all three went out to see its great yellow eye come nearer and nearer.

Trenholme had one or two packages to put in the van. He and his companions exchanged greetings with the men of the train.

Just as he was handing in his last package, a gentlemanly voice accosted him.

”Station-master!” said a grey-haired, military-looking traveller, ”Station-master! Is there any way of getting milk here?”

A lady stood behind the gentleman. They were both on the platform at the front of a pa.s.senger car.

”It's for a child, you know,” explained the gentleman.

Trenholme remembered his untouched tea, and confessed to the possession of a little milk.

”Oh, hasten, hasten!” cried the lady, ”for the guard says the train will move on in a moment.”

As Trenholme knew that the little French conductor thus grandly quoted did not know when the train would start, and as in his experience the train, whatever else it did, never hastened, he did not move with the sudden agility that was desired. Before he turned he heard a loud-whispered aside from the lady: ”Tell him we'll pay him double--treble, for it; I have heard they are avaricious.”

When Trenholme had started the train he jumped upon it with the milk. He found himself in a long car. The double seats on either side were filled with sleepy people. There was a pa.s.sage down the middle, and the lamps above shone dimly through dirty gla.s.ses. Trenholme could not immediately see any one like the man who had spoken to him outside, but he did spy out a baby, and, jug in hand, he went and stood a moment near it.

The lady who held the baby sat upright, with her head leaning against the side of the car. She was dozing, and the baby was also asleep. It was a rosy, healthy child, about a year old. The lady's handsome face suggested she was about seven-and-twenty. Among all the shawl-wrapped heaps of restless humanity around them, this pair looked very lovely together. The dusty lamplight fell upon them. They seemed to Trenholme like a beautiful picture of mother and child, such as one sometimes comes upon among the evil surroundings of old frames and hideous prints.

Said Trenholme aloud: ”I don't know who asked me for the milk.”

The lady stirred and looked at him indifferently. She seemed very beautiful. Men see with different eyes in these matters, but in Trenholme's eyes this lady was faultless, and her face and air touched some answering mood of reverence in his heart. It rarely happens, however, that we can linger gazing at the faces which possess for us the most beauty. The train was getting up speed, and Trenholme, just then catching sight of the couple who had asked for the milk, had no choice but to pa.s.s down the car and pour it into the jar they held.

The gentleman put his hand in his pocket. ”Oh no,” said Trenholme, and went out. But the more lively lady reopened the door behind him, and threw a coin on the ground as he was descending.

By the sound it had made Trenholme found it, and saw by the light of the pa.s.sing car that it was an English s.h.i.+lling. When the train was gone he stood a minute where it had carried him, some hundred feet from the station, and watched it going on into the darkness.

Afterwards, when his companions had composed themselves to sleep, and he lay sleepless, listening to all that could be heard in the silent night, curiously enough it was not upon the exciting circ.u.mstances of the early evening that he mused chiefly, but upon the people he had seen in the night train.

A seemingly little thing has sometimes the power to change those currents that set one way and another within a man, making him satisfied or dissatisfied with this or that. By chance, as it seems, a song is sung, a touch is given, a sight revealed, and man, like a harp hung to the winds, is played upon, and the music is not that which he devises.

So it was that Trenholme's encounter in the dusty car with the beautiful woman who had looked upon him so indifferently had struck a chord which was like a plaintive sigh for some better purpose in life than he was beating out of this rough existence. It was not a desire for greater pleasure that her beauty had aroused in him, but a desire for n.o.bler action--such was the power of her face.

The night pa.s.sed on; no footfall broke the silence. The pa.s.sing train was the only episode of his vigil.

In the morning when Trenholme looked out, the land was covered deep in snow.

CHAPTER X.

When the night train left Turrifs Station it thundered on into the darkness slowly enough, but, what with b.u.mping over its rough rails and rattling its big cars, it seemed anxious to deceive its pa.s.sengers into the idea that it was going at great speed. A good number of its cars were long vans for the carriage of freight; behind these came two for the carriage of pa.s.sengers. These were both labelled ”First Cla.s.s.” One was devoted to a few men, who were smoking; the other was the one from which Trenholme had descended. Its seats, upholstered in red velvet, were dusty from the smoke and dirt of the way; its atmosphere, heated by a stove at one end, was dry and oppressive. It would have been impossible, looking at the motley company lounging in the lamplight, to have told their relations one to another; but it was evident that an uncertain number of young people, placed near the lady who held the baby, were of the same party; they slept in twos and threes, leaning on one another's shoulders and covered by the same wraps. It was to seats left vacant near this group that the man and his wife who had procured the milk returned. The man, who was past middle life, betook himself to his seat wearily, and pulled his cap over his eyes without speaking. His wife deposited the mug of milk in a basket, speaking in low but brisk tones to the lady who held the baby.

”There, Sophia; I've had to pay a s.h.i.+lling for a cupful, but I've got some milk.”