Lady Merton, Colonist Part 13

And at last he murdered her--her and my poor sisters!"

Elizabeth made a sound of horror.

"Oh, there was no intention to murder," said Anderson bitterly. "He merely sat up drinking one winter night with a couple of whisky bottles beside him. Then in the morning he was awakened by the cold; the fire had gone out. He stumbled out to get the can of coal-oil from the stable, still dazed with drink, brought it in and poured some on the wood. Some more wood was wanted. He went out to fetch it, leaving his candle alight, a broken end in a rickety candlestick, on the floor beside the coal-oil. When he got to the stable it was warm and comfortable; he forgot what he had come for, fell down on a bundle of straw, and went into a dead sleep. The candle must have fallen over into the oil, the oil exploded, and in a few seconds the wooden house was in flames. By the time I came rushing back from the slough where I had been breaking the ice for water, the roof had already fallen in. My poor mother and two of the children had evidently tried to escape by the stairway and had perished there; the two others were burnt in their beds."

"And your father?" murmured Elizabeth, unable to take her eyes from the speaker.

"I woke him in the stable, and told him what had happened. Bit by bit I got out of him what he'd done. And then I said to him, 'Now choose!--either you go, or we. After the funeral, the boys and I have done with you. You can't force us to go on living with you. We will kill ourselves first. Either you stay here, and we go into Winnipeg; or you can sell the stock, take the money, and go. We'll work the farm.' He swore at me, but I told him he'd find we'd made up our minds. And a week later, he disappeared. He had sold the stock, and left us the burnt walls and the land."

"And you've never seen him since?"

"Never."

"You believe him dead?"

"I know that he died--in the first Yukon rush of ten years ago. I tracked him there, shortly afterwards. He was probably killed in a scuffle with some miners as drunken as himself."

There was a silence, which he broke very humbly.

"Do you forgive me? I know I am not sane on this point. I believe I have spoilt your day."

She looked up, her eyes swimming in tears, and held out her hand.

"It's nothing, you know," she said, trying to smile--"in our case.

Philip is such a baby."

"I know; but look after him!" he said earnestly, as he grasped it.

The trees thinned, and voices approached. They emerged from the forest, and found themselves hailed by the Chief Justice.

The journey up the pa.s.s was even more wonderful than the journey down.

Sunset lights lay on the forests, on the glorious lonely mountains, and on the valley of the Yoho, roadless and houseless now, but soon to be as famous through the world as Grindelwald or Chamounix. They dismounted and explored the great camps of workmen in the pa.s.s; they watched the boiling of the stream, which had carved the path of the railway; they gathered white dogwood, and yellow snow-lilies, and red painter's-brush.

Elizabeth and Anderson hardly spoke to each other. She talked a great deal with Delaine, and Mariette held a somewhat acid dispute with her on modern French books--Loti, Anatole France, Zola--authors whom his soul loathed.

But the day had forged a lasting bond between Anderson and Elizabeth, and they knew it.

The night rose clear and cold, with stars shining on the snow. Delaine, who with Anderson had found quarters in one of Laggan's handful of houses, went out to stroll and smoke alone, before turning into bed. He walked along the railway line towards Banff, in bitterness of soul, debating with himself whether he could possibly leave the party at once.

When he was well out of sight of the station and the houses, he became aware of a man persistently following him, and not without a hasty grip on the stout stick he carried, he turned at last to confront him.

"What do you want with me? You seem to be following me."

"Are you Mr. Arthur Delaine?" said a thick voice.

"That is my name. What do you want?"

"And you be lodging to-night in the same house with Mr. George Anderson?"

"I am. What's that to you?"

"Well, I want twenty minutes' talk with you," said the voice, after a pause. The accent was Scotch. In the darkness Delaine dimly perceived an old and bent man standing before him, who seemed to sway and totter as he leant upon his stick.

"I cannot imagine, sir, why you should want anything of the kind." And he turned to pursue his walk. The old man kept up with him, and presently said something which brought Delaine to a sudden stop of astonishment. He stood there listening for a few minutes, transfixed, and finally, turning round, he allowed his strange companion to walk slowly beside him back to Laggan.

CHAPTER VII

Oh! the freshness of the morning on Lake Louise!

It was barely eight o'clock, yet Elizabeth Merton had already taken her coffee on the hotel verandah, and was out wandering by herself. The hotel, which is nearly six thousand feet above the sea, had only just been opened for its summer guests, and Elizabeth and her party were its first inmates. Anderson indeed had arranged their coming, and was to have brought them hither himself. But on the night of the party's return to Laggan he had been hastily summoned by telegraph to a consultation of engineers on a difficult matter of railway grading in the Kootenay district. Delaine, knocking at his door in the morning, had found him flown. A note for Lady Merton explained his flight, gave all directions for the drive to Lake Louise, and expressed his hope to be with them again as expeditiously as possible. Three days had now elapsed since he had left them. Delaine, rather to Elizabeth's astonishment, had once or twice inquired when he might be expected to return.

Elizabeth found a little path by the lake sh.o.r.e, and pursued it a short way; but presently the splendour and the beauty overpowered her; her feet paused of themselves. She sat down on a jutting promontory of rock, and lost herself in the forms and hues of the morning. In front of her rose a wall of glacier sheer out of the water and thousands of feet above the lake, into the clear brilliance of the sky. On either side of its dazzling whiteness, mountains of rose-coloured rock, fledged with pine, fell steeply to the water's edge, enclosing and holding up the glacier; and vast rock pinnacles of a paler rose, melting into gold, broke, here and there, the gleaming splendour of the ice. The sun, just topping the great basin, kindled the ice surfaces, and all the glistening pinks and yellows, the pale purples and blood-crimsons of the rocks, to flame and splendour; while the shadows of the coolest azure still held the hollows and caves of the glacier. Deep in the motionless lake, the shining snows repeated themselves, so also the rose-red rocks, the blue shadows, the dark b.u.t.tressing crags with their pines. Height beyond height, glory beyond glory--from the reality above, the eye descended to its lovelier image below, which lay there, enchanted and insubstantial, Nature's dream of itself.

The sky was pure light; the air pure fragrance. Heavy dews dripped from the pines and the moss, and sparkled in the sun. Beside Elizabeth, under a group of pines, lay a bed of snow-lilies, their golden heads dew-drenched, waiting for the touch of the morning, waiting, too--so she thought--for that Canadian poet who will yet place them in English verse beside the daffodils of Westmoreland.

She could hardly breathe for delight. The Alps, whether in their Swiss or Italian aspects, were dear and familiar to her. She climbed nimbly and well; and her senses knew the magic of high places. But never surely had even travelled eyes beheld a n.o.bler fantasy of Nature than that composed by these snows and forests of Lake Louise; such rocks of opal and pearl; such dark gradations of splendour in calm water; such balanced intricacy and harmony in the building of this ice-palace that reared its majesty above the lake; such a beauty of subordinate and converging outline in the supporting mountains on either hand; as though the Earth Spirit had lingered on his work, finishing and caressing it in conscious joy.

And in Elizabeth's heart, too, there was a freshness of spring; an overflow of something elemental and irresistible.

Yet, strangely enough, it was at that moment expressing itself in regret and compunction. Since the dawn, that morning, she had been unable to sleep. The strong light, the p.r.i.c.king air, had kept her wakeful; and she had been employing her time in writing to her mother, who was also her friend.

"... Dear little mother--You will say I have been unkind--I say it to myself. But would it really have been fairer if I had forbidden him to join us? There was just a chance--it seems ridiculous now--but there was--I confess it! And by my letter from Toronto--though really my little note might have been written to anybody--I as good as said so to him, 'Come and throw the dice and--let us see what falls out!'

Practically, that is what it amounted to--I admit it in sackcloth and ashes. Well!--we have thrown the dice--and it won't do! No, it won't, it won't do! And it is somehow all my fault--which is abominable. But I see now, what I never saw at home or in Italy, that he is a thousand years older than I--that I should weary and jar upon him at every turn, were I to marry him. Also I have discovered--out here--I believe, darling, you have known it all along!--that there is at the very root of me a kind of savage--a creature that hates fish-knives and finger-gla.s.ses and dressing for dinner--the things I have done all my life, and Arthur Delaine will go on doing all his. Also that I never want to see a museum again--at least, not for a long time; and that I don't care twopence whether Herculaneum is excavated or not!

"Isn't it shocking? I can't explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur evidently can't make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad. So I am, in a sense. I am suffering from a new kind of _folie des grandeurs_. The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human story--all its simple fundamental things at least--is writ so large here. Hope and ambition--love and courage--the man wrestling with the earth--the woman who bears and brings up children--it is as though I had never felt, never seen them before. They rise out of the dust and mist of our modern life--great shapes warm from the breast of Nature--and I hold my breath. Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her unfolding task!

"How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should have altered him so in my foolish eyes--as though one had scrubbed all the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and charmless. It is not his fault--is mine. In Europe we loved the same things; his pleasure kindled mine. But here he enjoys nothing that I enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just singing for delight. For it is not only Canada in the large that holds me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail--all its clatter of new towns and spreading farms--of pushing railways and young parliaments--of roadmaking and bridgemaking--of saw-mills and lumber camps--detail so different from anything I have ever discussed with Arthur Delaine before. Some of it is ugly, I know--I don't care! It is like a Rembrandt ugliness--that only helps and ministers to a stronger beauty, the beauty of prairie and sky, and the beauty of the human battle, the battle of blood and brain, with the earth and her forces.

"'_Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare!_'"

"There is a man here--a Mr. George Anderson, of whom I told you something in my last letter--who seems to embody the very life of this country, to be the prairie, and the railway, and the forest--their very spirit and avatar. Personally, he is often sad; his own life has been hard; and yet the heart of him is all hope and courage, all delight too in the daily planning and wrestling, the contrivance and the cleverness, the rifling and outwitting of Nature--that makes a Canadian--at any rate a Western Canadian. I suppose he doesn't know anything about art. Mr. Arthur seems to have nothing in common with him; but there is in him that rush and energy of life, from which, surely, art and poetry spring, when the time is ripe.

"Don't of course imagine anything absurd! He is just a young Scotch engineer, who seems to have made some money as people do make money here--quickly and honestly--and is shortly going into Parliament. They say that he is sure to be a great man. To us--to Philip and me, he has been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here--or anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out of perspective; he doesn't fit.

"You will say, that if I married him, it would not be to live in Canada, and once at home again, the old estimates and 'values' would rea.s.sert themselves. But in a sense--don't be alarmed--I shall always live in Canada. Or, rather, I shall never be quite the same again; and Mr.

Arthur would find me a restless, impracticable, discontented woman.

"Would it not really be kinder if I suggested to him to go home by California, while we come back again through the Rockies? Don't you think it would? I feel that I have begun to get on his nerves--as he on mine. If you were only here! But, I a.s.sure you, he doesn't _look_ miserable; and I think he will bear up very well. And if it will be any comfort to you to be told that I know what is meant by the gnawing of the little worm, Compunction, then be comforted, dearest; for it gnaws horribly, and out of all proportion--I vow--to my crimes.

"Philip is better on the whole, and has taken an enormous fancy to Mr.

Anderson. But, as I have told you all along, he is not so much better as you and I hoped he would be. I take every care of him that I can, but you know that he is not wax, when it comes to managing. However, Mr.

Anderson has been a great help."

Recollections of this letter, and other thoughts besides, coming from much deeper strata of the mind than she had been willing to reveal to her mother, kept slipping at intervals through Elizabeth's consciousness, as she sat beside the lake.