Lady Merton, Colonist Part 10

"And why not?" said Elizabeth indignantly. "If he didn't love the country and believe in it he wouldn't be going into its public life. You can feel that he is Canadian through and through."

"A farmer's son, I think, from Manitoba?"

"Yes." Elizabeth's tone was a little defensive.

"Will you not sometimes--if you watch his career--regret that, with his ability, he has not the environment--and the audience--of the Old World?"

"No, never! He will be one of the shapers of the new."

Delaine looked at her with a certain pa.s.sion.

"All very well, but _you_ don't belong to it. We can't spare you from the old."

"Oh, as for me, I'm full of vicious and corrupt habits!" put in Elizabeth hurriedly. "I am not nearly good enough for the new!"

"Thank goodness for that!" said Delaine fervently, and, bending forward, he tried to see her face. But Elizabeth did not allow it. She could not help flushing; but as she bent over the side of the platform looking ahead, she announced in her gayest voice that there was a town to be seen, and it was probably Regina.

The station at Regina, when they steamed into it, was crowded with folk, and gay with flags. Anderson, after a conversation with the station-master, came to the car to say that the Governor-General, Lord Wrekin, who had been addressing a meeting at Regina, was expected immediately, to take the East-bound train; which was indeed already lying, with its steam up, on the further side of the station, the Viceregal car in its rear.

"But there are complications. Look there!"

He pointed to a procession coming along the platform. Six men bore a coffin covered with white flowers. Behind it came persons in black, a group of men, and one woman; then others, mostly young men, also in mourning, and bare-headed.

As the procession pa.s.sed the car, Anderson and Delaine uncovered.

Elizabeth turned a questioning look on Anderson.

"A young man from Ontario," he explained, "quite a lad. He had come here out West to a farm--to work his way--a good, harmless little fellow--the son of a widow. A week ago a vicious horse kicked him in the stable. He died yesterday morning. They are taking him back to Ontario to be buried. The friends of his chapel subscribed to do it, and they brought his mother here to nurse him. She arrived just in time. That is she."

He pointed to the bowed figure, hidden in a long c.r.a.pe veil. Elizabeth's eyes filled.

"But it comes awkwardly," Anderson went on, looking back along the platform--"for the Governor-General is expected this very moment. The funeral ought to have been here half an hour ago. They seem to have been delayed. Ah! here he is!"

"Elizabeth!--his Excellency!" cried Philip, emerging from the car.

"Hush!" Elizabeth put her finger to her lip. The young man looked at the funeral procession in astonishment, which was just reaching the side of the empty van on the East-bound train which was waiting, with wide-open doors, to receive the body. The bearers let down the coffin gently to the ground, and stood waiting in hesitation. But there were no railway employes to help them. A flurried station-master and his staff were receiving the official party. Suddenly someone started the revival hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River?" It was taken up vigorously by the thirty or forty young men who had followed the coffin, and their voices, rising and falling in a familiar lilting melody, filled the station:

Yes, we'll gather at the river, The beautiful, beautiful river-- Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of G.o.d!

Elizabeth looked towards the entrance of the station. A tall and slender man had just stepped on to the platform. It was the Governor-General, with a small staff behind him. The staff and the station officials stood hat in hand. A few English tourists from the West-bound train hurried up; the men uncovered, the ladies curtsied. A group of settlers' wives newly arrived from Minnesota, who were standing near the entrance, watched the arrival with curiosity. Lord Wrekin, seeing women in his path, saluted them; and they replied with a friendly and democratic nod.

Then suddenly the Governor-General heard the singing, and perceived the black distant crowd. He inquired of the persons near him, and then pa.s.sed on through the groups which had begun to gather round himself, raising his hand for silence. The pa.s.sengers of the West-bound train had by now mostly descended, and pressed after him. Bare-headed, he stood behind the mourners while the hymn proceeded, and the coffin was lifted and placed in the car with the wreaths round it. The mother clung a moment to the side of the door, unconsciously resisting those who tried to lead her away. The kind grey eyes of the Governor-General rested upon her, but he made no effort to approach or speak to her. Only his stillness kept the crowd still.

Elizabeth at her window watched the scene--the tall figure of his Excellency--the bowed woman--the throng of officials and of mourners.

Over the head of the Governor-General a couple of flags swelled in a light breeze--the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf; beyond the heads of the crowd there was a distant glimpse of the barracks of the Mounted Police; and then boundless prairie and floating cloud.

At last the mother yielded, and was led to the carriage behind the coffin. Gently, with bent head, Lord Wrekin made his way to her. But no one heard what pa.s.sed between them. Then, silently, the funeral crowd dispersed, and another crowd--of officials and business men--claimed the Governor-General. Standing in its midst, he turned for a moment to scan the West-bound train.

"Ah, Lady Merton!" He had perceived the car and Elizabeth's face at the window, and he hastened across to speak to her. They were old friends in England, and they had already met in Ottawa.

"So I find you on your travels! Well?"

His look, gay and vivacious as a boy's, interrogated hers. Elizabeth stammered a few words in praise of Canada. But her eyes were still wet, and the Governor-General perceived it.

"That was touching?" he said. "To die in your teens in this country!--just as the curtain is up and the play begins--hard! Hullo, Anderson!"

The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was to see--and whom--at Vancouver and Pretoria. "You must see So-and-so and So-and-so--great friends of mine. D----'ll tell you all about the lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a splendid old fellow--a C.P.R. man--did some of the prospecting for the railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could have sat up all night." He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave it to Elizabeth. "Good-bye--good-bye!"

He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers, railway superintendents, and others--his hat on the back of his head, his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.

Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.

"Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?"

"Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful shindy yesterday!--between the farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the Dominion to own 'em--vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do something. Hope you know how he does it!--I don't."

Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to move.

"We seem to send you the right men!" she said, smiling--with a little English conceit that became her.

The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now empty platform.

Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle widely scattered over the endless gra.s.sy plains--the brown lines of the ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway--the bents of winter gra.s.s, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these things breathed--of a sudden--wildness and desolation. It seemed as though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth--an earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.

"At last I am afraid of it!" said Elizabeth, shivering in her fur coat, with a little motion of her hand toward the plain. "And what must it be in winter!"

Anderson laughed.

"The winter is much milder here than in Manitoba! Radiant sunshine day after day--and the warm chinook-wind. And it is precisely here that the railway lands are selling at a higher price for the moment than anywhere else, and that settlers are rushing in. Look there!"

Elizabeth peered through the gloom, and saw the gleam of water. The train ran along beside it for a minute or two, then the gathering darkness seemed to swallow it up.

"A river?"

"No, a ca.n.a.l, fed from the Bow River--far ahead of us. We are in the irrigation belt--and in the next few years thousands of people will settle here. Give the land water--the wheat follows! South and North, even now, the wheat is spreading and driving out the ranchers.

Irrigation is the secret. We are mastering it! And you thought"--he looked at her with amus.e.m.e.nt and a kind of triumph--"that the country had mastered us?"

There was something in his voice and eyes, as though not he spoke, but a nation through him. "Splendid!" was the word that rose in Elizabeth's mind; and a thrill ran with it.

The gloom of the afternoon deepened. The showers increased. But Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to go in. In the car Delaine and Philip were playing dominoes, in despair of anything more amusing.

Yerkes was giving his great mind to the dinner which was to be the consolation of Philip's day.

Meanwhile Elizabeth kept Anderson talking. That was her great gift. She was the best of listeners. Thus led on he could not help himself, any more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the sink-hole. He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too attractive Englishwoman. On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest minds of Canada--dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which, yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.

He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they pa.s.sed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there--magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord. Or from the epic of the soil, he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it--tale after tale of life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into Alberta--witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely listening eyes. And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those "mortal things"--earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up human fate.

Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man would be to cleave to him.

Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly pa.s.sed, three men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices, ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.