Lady Merton, Colonist Part 1

Lady Merton, Colonist.

by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

A FOREWORD

Towards the end of this story the readers of it will find an account of an "unknown lake" in the northern Rockies, together with a picture of its broad expanse, its glorious mountains, and of a white explorers'

tent pitched beside it. Strictly speaking, "Lake Elizabeth" is a lake of dream. But it has an original on this real earth, which bears another and a real name, and was discovered two years ago by my friend Mrs.

Schaffer, of Philadelphia, to whose enchanting narratives of travel and exploration in these untrodden regions I listened with delight at Field, British Columbia, in June, 1908. She has given me leave to use her own photograph of the "unknown lake," and some details from her record of it, for my own purposes; and I can only hope that in the summers to come she may unlock yet other secrets, unravel yet other mysteries, in that n.o.ble unvisited country which lies north and northeast of the Bow Valley and the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s.

MARY A. WARD.

LADY MERTON, COLONIST

CHAPTER I

"I call this part of the line beastly depressing."

The speaker tossed his cigarette-end away as he spoke. It fell on the railway line, and the tiny smoke from it curled up for a moment against the heavy background of spruce as the train receded.

"All the same, this is going to be one of the most exciting parts of Canada before long," said Lady Merton, looking up from her guide-book.

"I can tell you all about it."

"For heaven's sake, don't!" said her companion hastily. "My dear Elizabeth, I really must warn you. You're losing your head."

"I lost it long ago. To-day I am a bore--to-morrow I shall be a nuisance. Make up your mind to it."

"I thought you were a reasonable person!--you used to be. Now look at that view, Elizabeth. We've seen the same thing for twelve hours, and if it wasn't soon going to be dark we should see the same thing for twelve hours more. What is there to go mad over in that?" Her brother waved his hand indignantly from right to left across the disappearing scene.

"As for me, I am only sustained by the prospect of the good dinner that I know Yerkes means to give us in a quarter of an hour. I won't be a minute late for it! Go and get ready, Elizabeth--"

"Another lake!" cried Lady Merton, with a jump. "Oh, what a darling!

That's the twentieth since tea. Look at the reflections--and that delicious island! And oh! what _are_ those birds?"

She leant over the side of the observation platform, attached to the private car in which she and her brother were travelling, at the rear of the heavy Canadian Pacific train. To the left of the train a small blue lake had come into view, a lake much indented with small bays running up among the woods, and a couple of islands covered with scrub of beech and spruce, set sharply on the clear water. On one side of the lake, the forest was a hideous waste of burnt trunks, where the gaunt stems--charred or singed, snapped or twisted, or flayed--of the trees which remained standing rose dreadfully into the May sunshine, above a chaos of black ruin below. But except for this blemish--the only sign of man--the little lake was a gem of beauty. The spring green clothed its rocky sides; the white spring clouds floated above it, and within it; and small beaches of white pebbles seemed to invite the human feet which had scarcely yet come near them.

"What does it matter?" yawned her brother. "I don't want to shoot them.

And why you make such a fuss about the lakes, when, as you say yourself, there are about two a mile, and none of them has got a name to its back, and they're all exactly alike, and all full of beastly mosquitoes in the summer--it beats me! I wish Yerkes would hurry up." He leant back sleepily against the door of the car and closed his eyes.

"It's _because_ they haven't got a name--and they're so endless!--and the place is so big!--and the people so few!--and the chances are so many--and so queer!" said Elizabeth Merton laughing.

"What sort of chances?"

"Chances of the future."

"Hasn't got any chances!" said Philip Gaddesden, keeping his hands in his pockets.

"Hasn't it? Owl!" Lady Merton neatly pinched the arm nearest to her. "As I've explained to you many times before, this is the Hinterland of Ontario--and it's only been surveyed, except just along the railway, a few years ago--and it's as rich as rich--"

"I say, I wish you wouldn't reel out the guide-book like that!" grumbled the somnolent person beside her. "As if I didn't know all about the Cobalt mines, and that kind of stuff."

"Did you make any money out of them, Phil?"

"No--but the other fellows did. That's my luck."

"Never mind, there'll be heaps more directly--hundreds." She stretched out her hand vaguely towards an enchanting distance--hill beyond hill, wood beyond wood; everywhere the glimmer of water in the hollows; everywhere the sparkle of fresh leaf, the shining of the birch trunks among the firs, the greys and purples of limestone rock; everywhere, too, the disfiguring stain of fire, fire new or old, written, now on the mouldering stumps of trees felled thirty years ago when the railway was making, now on the young stems of yesterday.

"I want to see it all in a moment of time," Elizabeth continued, still above herself. "An air-ship, you know, Philip--and we should see it all in a day, from here to James Bay. A thousand miles of it--stretched below us--just waiting for man! And we'd drop down into an undiscovered lake, and give it a name--one of our names--and leave a letter under a stone. And then in a hundred years, when the settlers come, they'd find it, and your name--or mine--would live forever."

"I forbid you to take any liberties with my name, Elizabeth! I've something better to do with it than waste it on a lake in--what do you call it?--the 'Hinterland of Ontario.'" The young man mocked his sister's tone.

Elizabeth laughed and was silent.

The train sped on, at its steady pace of some thirty miles an hour. The spring day was alternately sunny and cloudy; the temperature was warm, and the leaves were rushing out. Elizabeth Merton felt the spring in her veins, an indefinable joyousness and expectancy; but she was conscious also of another intoxication--a heat of romantic perception kindled in her by this vast new country through which she was pa.s.sing. She was a person of much travel, and many experiences; and had it been prophesied to her a year before this date that she could feel as she was now feeling, she would not have believed it. She was then in Rome, steeped in, ravished by the past--a.s.sisted by what is, in its way, the most agreeable society in Europe. Here she was absorbed in a rushing present; held by the vision of a colossal future; and society had dropped out of her ken. Quebec, Montreal and Ottawa had indeed made themselves pleasant to her; she had enjoyed them all. But it was in the wilderness that the spell had come upon her; in these vast s.p.a.ces, some day to be the home of a new race; in these lakes, the playground of the Canada of the future; in these fur stations and scattered log cabins; above all in the great railway linking east and west, that she and her brother had come out to see.

For they had a peculiar relation to it. Their father had been one of its earliest and largest shareholders, might indeed be reckoned among its founders. He had been one, also, of a small group of very rich men who had stood by the line in one of the many crises of its early history, when there was often not enough money in the coffers of the company to pay the weekly wages of the navvies working on the great iron road. He was dead now, and his property in the line had been divided among his children. But his name and services were not forgotten at Montreal, and when his son and widowed daughter let it be known that they desired to cross from Quebec to Vancouver, and inquired what the cost of a private car might be for the journey, the authorities at Montreal insisted on placing one of the official cars at their disposal. So that they were now travelling as the guests of the C.P.R.; and the good will of one of the most powerful of modern corporations went with them.

They had left Toronto, on a May evening, when the orchards ran, one flush of white and pink, from the great lake to the gorge of Niagara, and all along the line northwards the white trilliums shone on the gra.s.sy banks in the shadow of the woods; while the pleasant Ontario farms flitted by, so mellowed and homelike already, midway between the old life of Quebec, and this new, raw West to which they were going.

They had pa.s.sed, also--but at night and under the moon--through the lake country which is the playground of Toronto, as well known, and as plentifully be-named as Westmoreland; and then at North Bay with the sunrise they had plunged into the wilderness,--into the thousand miles of forest and lake that lie between Old Ontario and Winnipeg.

And here it was that Elizabeth's enthusiasm had become in her brother's eyes a folly; that something wild had stirred in her blood, and sitting there in her shady hat at the rear of the train, her eyes pursuing the great track which her father had helped to bring into being, she shook Europe from her, and felt through her pulses the tremor of one who watches at a birth, and looks forward to a life to be--

"Dinner is ready, my lady."

"Thank Heaven!" cried Philip Gaddesden, springing up. "Get some champagne, please, Yerkes."

"Philip!" said his sister reprovingly, "it is not good for you to have champagne every night."

Philip threw back his curly head, and grinned.

"I'll see if I can do without it to-morrow. Come along, Elizabeth."

They pa.s.sed through the outer saloon, with its chintz-covered sofas and chairs, past the two little bedrooms of the car, and the tiny kitchen to the dining-room at the further end. Here stood a man in steward's livery ready to serve, while from the door of the kitchen another older man, thin and tanned, in a cook's white cap and ap.r.o.n, looked benevolently out.

"Smells good, Yerkes!" said Gaddesden as he pa.s.sed.

The cook nodded.

"If only her ladyship'll find something she likes," he said, not without a slight tone of reproach.

"You hear that, Elizabeth?" said her brother as they sat down to the well-spread board.

Elizabeth looked plaintive. It was one of her chief weaknesses to wish to be liked--adored, perhaps, is the better word--by her servants and she generally accomplished it. But the price of Yerkes's affections was too high.

"It seems to me that we have only just finished luncheon, not to speak of tea," she said, looking in dismay at the menu before her. "Phil, do you wish to see me return home like Mrs. Melhuish?"

Phil surveyed his sister. Mrs. Melhuish was the wife of their local clergyman in Hampshire; a poor lady plagued by abnormal weight, and a heart disease.