Lady Merton, Colonist Part 15

"Don't feel it. I am a wilful woman."

"A rather perplexing one! May I at least be sure that"--he hesitated--"that you will be on your guard?"

"On my guard?" she lifted her eyebrows proudly--"and against what?"

"That is precisely what you won't let me tell you."

She laughed--a little fiercely.

"There we are; no forrarder. But please remember, Mr. Arthur, how soon we shall all be separating. Nothing very dreadful can happen in these few days--can it?"

For the first time there was a touch of malice in her smile.

Delaine rose, took one or two turns along the path in front of her, and then suddenly stopped beside her.

"I think"--he said, with emphasis, "that Mr. Anderson will probably find himself summoned away--immediately--before you get to Vancouver. But that I will discuss with him. You could give me no address, so I have not yet been able to communicate with him."

Again Elizabeth's eyebrows went up. She rose.

"Of course you will do what you think best. Shall we go back to the hotel?"

They walked along in silence. He saw that she was excited, and that he had completely missed his stroke; but he did not see how to mend the situation.

"Oh! there is Philip, going to fish," said Elizabeth at last, as though nothing had happened. "I wondered what could possibly have got him up so early."

Philip waved to her as she spoke, shouting something which the mountain echoes absorbed. He was accompanied by a young man, who seemed to be attached to the hotel as guide, fisherman, hunter--at the pleasure of visitors. But Elizabeth had already discovered that he had the speech of a gentleman, and attended the University of Manitoba during the winter.

In the absence of Anderson, Philip had no doubt annexed him for the morning.

There was a pile of logs lying on the lake side. Philip, rod in hand, began to scramble over them to a point where several large trunks overhung deep water. His companion meanwhile was seated on the moss, busy with some preparations.

"I hope Philip will be careful," said Delaine, suddenly. "There is nothing so slippery as logs."

Elizabeth, who had been dreaming, looked up anxiously. As she did so Philip, high perched on the furthest logs, turned again to shout to his sister, his light figure clear against the sunlit distance. Then the figure wavered, there was a sound of crashing wood, and Philip fell head-foremost into the lake before him.

The young man on the bank looked up, threw away his rod and his coat, and was just plunging into the lake when he was antic.i.p.ated by another man who had come running down the bank of the hotel, and was already in the water. Elizabeth, as she rushed along the edge, recognized Anderson.

Philip seemed to have disappeared; but Anderson dived, and presently emerged with a limp burden. The guide was now aiding him, and between them they brought young Gaddesden to land. The whole thing pa.s.sed so rapidly that Delaine and Elizabeth, running at full speed, had hardly reached the spot before Anderson was on the sh.o.r.e, bearing the lad in his arms.

Elizabeth bent over him with a moan of anguish. He seemed to her dead.

"He has only fainted," said Anderson peremptorily. "We must get him in." And he hurried on, refusing Delaine's help, carrying the thin body apparently with ease along the path and up the steps to the hotel. The guide had already been sent flying ahead to warn the household.

Thus, by one of the commonplace accidents of travel, the whole scene was changed for this group of travellers. Philip Gaddesden would have taken small harm from his tumble into the lake, but for the fact that the effects of rheumatic fever were still upon him. As it was, a certain amount of fever, and some heart-symptoms that it was thought had been overcome, reappeared, and within a few hours of the accident it became plain that, although he was in no danger, they would be detained at least ten days, perhaps a fortnight, at Lake Louise. Elizabeth sat down in deep despondency to write to her mother, and then lingered awhile with the letter before her, her head in her hands, pondering with emotion what she and Philip owed to George Anderson, who had, it seemed, arrived by a night train, and walked up to the hotel, in the very nick of time. As to the accident itself, no doubt the guide, a fine swimmer and _coureur de bois_, would have been sufficient, unaided, to save her brother. But after all, it was Anderson's strong arms that had drawn him from the icy depths of the lake, and carried him to safety! And since? Never had telephone and railway, and general knowledge of the resources at command, been worked more skilfully than by him, and the kind people of the hotel. "Don't be the least anxious"--she had written to her mother--"we have a capital doctor--all the chemist's stuff we want--and we could have a nurse at any moment. Mr. Anderson has only to order one up from the camp hospital in the pa.s.s. But for the present, Simpson and I are enough for the nursing."

She heard voices in the next room; a faint question from Philip, Anderson replying. What an influence this man of strong character had already obtained over her wilful, self-indulgent brother! She saw the signs of it in many directions; and she was pa.s.sionately grateful for it. Her thoughts went wandering back over the past three weeks--over the whole gradual unveiling of Anderson's personality. She recalled her first impressions of him the day of the "sink-hole." An ordinary, strong, capable, ambitious young man, full of practical interests, with brusque manners, and a visible lack of some of the outer wrappings to which she was accustomed--it was so that she had first envisaged him.

Then at Winnipeg--through Mariette and others--she had seen him as other men saw him, his seniors and contemporaries, the men engaged with him in the making of this vast country. She had appreciated his character in what might be hereafter, apparently, its public aspects; the character of one for whom the world surrounding him was eagerly prophesying a future and a career. His profound loyalty to Canada, and to certain unspoken ideals behind, which were really the source of the loyalty; the atmosphere at once democratic and imperial in which his thoughts and desires moved, which had more than once communicated its pa.s.sion to her; a touch of poetry, of melancholy, of greatness even--all this she had gradually perceived. Winnipeg and the prairie journey had developed him thus before her.

So much for the second stage in her knowledge of him. There was a third; she was in the midst of it. Her face flooded with colour against her will. "Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness." The words rushed into her mind. She hoped, as one who wished him well, that he would marry soon and happily. And the woman who married him would find it no tame future.

Suddenly Delaine's warnings occurred to her. She laughed, a little hysterically.

Could anyone have shown himself more helpless, useless, incompetent, than Arthur Delaine since the accident? Yet he was still on the spot.

She realised, indeed, that it was hardly possible for their old friend to desert them under the circ.u.mstances. But he merely represented an additional burden.

A knock at the sitting-room door disturbed her. Anderson appeared.

"I am off to Banff, Lady Merton," he said from the threshold. "I think I have all your commissions. Is your letter ready?"

She sealed it and gave it to him. Then she looked up at him; and for the first time he saw her tremulous and shaken; not for her brother, but for himself.

"I don't know how to thank you." She offered her hand; and one of those beautiful looks--generous, friendly, sincere--of which she had the secret.

He, too, flushed, his eyes held a moment by hers. Then he, somewhat brusquely, disengaged himself.

"Why, I did nothing! He was in no danger; the guide would have had him out in a twinkle. I wish"--he frowned--"you wouldn't look so done up over it."

"Oh! I am all right."

"I brought you a book this morning. Mercifully I left it in the drawing-room, so it hasn't been in the lake."

He drew it from his pocket. It was a French novel she had expressed a wish to read.

She exclaimed,

"How did you get it?"

"I found Mariette had it with him. He sends it me from Vancouver. Will you promise to read it--and rest?"

He drew a sofa towards the window. The June sunset was blazing on the glacier without. Would he next offer to put a shawl over her, and tuck her up? She retreated hastily to the writing-table, one hand upon it. He saw the lines of her gray dress, her small neck and head; the Quakerish smoothness of her brown hair, against the light. The little figure was grace, refinement, embodied. But it was a grace that implied an environment--the cosmopolitan, luxurious environment, in which such women naturally move.

His look clouded. He said a hasty good-bye and departed. Elizabeth was left breathing quick, one hand on her breast. It was as though she had escaped something--or missed something.

As he left the hotel, Anderson found himself intercepted by Delaine in the garden, and paused at once to give him the latest news.

"The report is really good, everything considered," he said, with a cordiality born of their common anxiety; and he repeated the doctor's last words to himself.

"Excellent!" said Delaine; then, clearing his throat, "Mr. Anderson, may I have some conversation with you?"

Anderson looked surprised, threw him a keen glance, and invited him to accompany him part of the way to Laggan. They turned into a solitary road, running between the woods. It was late evening, and the sun was striking through the Laggan valley beneath them in low shafts of gold and purple.

"I am afraid what I have to say will be disagreeable to you," began Delaine, abruptly. "And on this particular day--when we owe you so much--it is more than disagreeable to myself. But I have no choice.

By some extraordinary chance, with which I beg you to believe my own will has had nothing to do, I have become acquainted with something--something that concerns you privately--something that I fear will be a great shock to you."

Anderson stood still.

"What can you possibly mean?" he said, in growing amazement.

"I was accosted the night before last, as I was strolling along the railway line, by a man I had never seen before, a man who--pardon me, it is most painful to me to seem to be interfering with anyone's private affairs--who announced himself as"--the speaker's nervous stammer intervened before he jerked out the words--"as your father!"

"As my father? Somebody must be mad!" said Anderson quietly. "My father has been dead ten years."