Lady Merton, Colonist Part 17

Anderson shook his head.

"You must have heard of her when you were a little chap. When I left Ayrshire in 1840 she was a la.s.s of sixteen; never saw her since. But she married a man well-to-do, and was left a widder with no children. And when she died t'other day, she'd left me something in her will, and told the lawyers to advertise over here, in Canada and the States--both. And I happened on the advertis.e.m.e.nt in a Chicago paper. Told yer to call on Smith & Dawkins, Winnipeg. So that was how I came to see Winnipeg again."

"When were you there?"

"Just when you was," said the old man, with a triumphant look, which for the moment effaced the squalor of his aspect. "I was coming out of Smith & Dawkins's with the money in my pocket, when I saw you opposite, just going into a shop. You could ha' knocked me down easy, I warrant ye.

Didn't expect to come on yer tracks as fast as all that. But there you were, and when you came out and went down t' street, I just followed you at a safe distance, and saw you go into the hotel. Afterwards, I went into the Free Library to think a bit, and then I saw the piece in the paper about you and that Saskatchewan place; and I got hold of a young man in a saloon who found out all about you and those English swells you've been hanging round with; and that same night, when you boarded the train, I boarded it, too. See? Only I am not a swell like you. And here we are. See?"

The last speech was delivered with a mixture of bravado, cunning, and sinister triumph. Anderson sat with his head in his hands, his eyes on the mud floor, listening. When it was over he looked up.

"Why didn't you come and speak to me at once?"

The other hesitated.

"Well, I wasn't a beauty to look at. Not much of a credit to you, am I?

Didn't think you'd own me. And I don't like towns--too many people about. Thought I'd catch you somewhere on the quiet. Heard you was going to the Rockies. Thought I might as well go round by Seattle home. See?"

"You have had plenty of chances since Winnipeg of making yourself known to me," said Anderson sombrely. "Why did you speak to a stranger instead of coming direct to me?"

McEwen hesitated a moment.

"Well, I wasn't sure of you. I didn't know how you'd take it. And I'd lost my nerve, d.a.m.n it! the last few years. Thought you might just kick me out, or set the police on me."

Anderson studied the speaker. His fair skin was deeply flushed; his brow frowned unconsciously, reflecting the travail of thought behind it.

"What did you say to that gentleman the other night?"

McEwen smiled a shifty smile, and began to pluck some pieces of straw from his sleeve.

"Don't remember just what I did say. Nothing to do you no harm, anyway.

I might have said you were never an easy chap to get on with. I might have said that, or I mightn't. Think I did. Don't remember."

The eyes of the two men met for a moment, Anderson's bright and fixed.

He divined perfectly what had been said to the Englishman, Lady Merton's friend and travelling companion. A father overborne by misfortunes and poverty, disowned by a prosperous and Pharisaical son--admitting a few peccadilloes, such as most men forgive, in order to weigh them against virtues, such as all men hate. Old age and infirmity on the one hand; mean hardness and cruelty on the other. Was Elizabeth already contemplating the picture?

And yet--No! unless perhaps under the shelter of darkness, it could never have been possible for this figure before him to play the part of innocent misfortune, at all events. Could debauch, could ruin of body and soul be put more plainly? Could they express themselves more clearly than through this face and form?

A shudder ran through Anderson, a cry against fate, a sick wondering as to his own past responsibility, a horror of the future. Then his will strengthened, and he set himself quietly to see what could be done.

"We can't talk here," he said to his father. "Come back into the house.

There are some rooms vacant. I'll take them for you."

McEwen rose with difficulty, groaning as he put his right foot to the ground. Anderson then perceived that the right foot and ankle were wrapped round with a bloodstained rag, and was told that the night before their owner had stumbled over a jug in Mrs. Ginnell's kitchen, breaking the jug and inflicting some deep cuts on his own foot and ankle. McEwen, indeed, could only limp along, with mingled curses and lamentations, supported by Anderson. In the excitement of his son's appearance he had forgotten his injury. The pain and annoyance of it returned upon him now with added sharpness, and Anderson realised that here was yet another complication as they moved across the yard.

A few words to the astonished Mrs. Ginnell sufficed to secure all her vacant rooms, four in number. Anderson put his father in one on the ground floor, then shut the door on him and went back to the woman of the house. She stood looking at him, flushed, in a bewildered silence.

But she and her husband owed various kindnesses to Anderson, and he quickly made up his mind.

In a very few words he quietly told her the real facts, confiding them both to her self-interest and her humanity. McEwen was to be her only lodger till the next step could be determined. She was to wait on him, to keep drink from him, to get him clothes. Her husband was to go out with him, if he should insist on going out; but Anderson thought his injury would keep him quiet for a day or two. Meanwhile, no babbling to anybody. And, of course, generous payment for all that was asked of them.

But Mrs. Ginnell understood that she was being appealed to not only commercially, but as a woman with a heart in her body and a good share of Irish wit. That moved and secured her. She threw herself n.o.bly into the business. Anderson might command her as he pleased, and she answered for her man. Renewed groans from the room next door disturbed them. Mrs.

Ginnell went in to answer them, and came out demanding a doctor. The patient was in much pain, the wounds looked bad, and she suspected fever.

"Yo can't especk places to heal with such as him," she said, grimly.

With doggedness, Anderson resigned himself. He went to the station and sent a wire to Field for a doctor. What would happen when he arrived he did not know. He had made no compact with his father. If the old man chose to announce himself, so be it. Anderson did not mean to bargain or sue. Other men have had to bear such burdens in the face of the world. Should it fall to him to be forced to take his up in like manner, let him set his teeth and shoulder it, sore and shaken as he was. He felt a fierce confidence that could still make the world respect him.

An hour pa.s.sed away. An answer came from Field to the effect that a doctor would be sent up on a freight train just starting, and might be expected shortly.

While Mrs. Ginnell was still attending on her lodger, Anderson went out into the starlight to try and think out the situation. The night was clear and balmy. The high snows glimmered through the lingering twilight, and in the air there was at last a promise of "midsummer pomps." Pine woods and streams breathed freshness, and when in his walk along the railway line--since there is no other road through the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s--he reached a point whence the great Yoho valley became visible to the right, he checked the rapid movement which had brought him a kind of physical comfort, and set himself--in face of that far-stretching and splendid solitude--to wrestle with calamity.

First of all there was the Englishman--Delaine--and the letter that must be written him. But there, also, no evasions, no suppliancy. Delaine must be told that the story was true, and would no doubt think himself ent.i.tled to act upon it. The protest on behalf of Lady Merton implied already in his manner that afternoon was humiliating enough. The smart of it was still tingling through Anderson's being. He had till now felt a kind of instinctive contempt for Delaine as a fine gentleman with a useless education, inclined to patronise "colonists." The two men had jarred from the beginning, and at Banff, Anderson had both divined in him the possible suitor of Lady Merton, and had also become aware that Delaine resented his own intrusion upon the party, and the rapid intimacy which had grown up between him and the brother and sister.

Well, let him use his chance! if it so pleased him. No promise whatever should be asked of him; there should be no suggestion even of a line of action. The bare fact which he had become possessed of should be admitted, and he should be left to deal with it. Upon his next step would depend Anderson's; that was all.

But Lady Merton?

Anderson stared across the near valley, up the darkness beyond, where lay the forests of the Yoho, and to those ethereal summits whence a man might behold on one side the smoke-wreaths of the great railway, and on the other side the still virgin peaks of the northern Rockies, untamed, untrodden. But his eyes were holden; he saw neither snow, nor forests, and the roar of the stream dashing at his feet was unheard.

Three weeks, was it, since he had first seen that delicately oval face, and those clear eyes? The strong man--accustomed to hold himself in check, to guard his own strength as the instrument, firm and indispensable, of an iron will--recoiled from the truth he was at last compelled to recognise. In this daily companionship with a sensitive and charming woman, endowed beneath her light reserve with all the sweetness of unspoilt feeling, while yet commanding through her long training in an old society a thousand delicacies and subtleties, which played on Anderson's fresh senses like the breeze on young leaves--whither had he been drifting--to the brink of what precipice had he brought himself, unknowing?

He stood there indefinitely, among the charred tree-trunks that bordered the line, his arms folded, looking straight before him, motionless.

Supposing to-day had been yesterday, need he--together with this sting of pa.s.sion--have felt also this impotent and angry despair? Before his eyes had seen that figure lying on the straw of Mrs. Ginnell's outhouse, could he ever have dreamed it possible that Elizabeth Merton should marry him?

Yes! He thought, trembling from head to foot, of that expression in her eyes he had seen that very afternoon. Again and again he had checked his feeling by the harsh reminder of her social advantages. But, at this moment of crisis, the man in him stood up, confident and rebellious. He knew himself sound, intellectually and morally. There was a career before him, to which a cool and reasonable ambition looked forward without any paralysing doubts. In this growing Canada, measuring himself against the other men of the moment, he calmly foresaw his own growing place. As to money, he would make it; he was in process of making it, honourably and sufficiently.

He was well aware indeed that in the case of many women sprung from the English governing cla.s.s, the ties that bind them to their own world, its traditions, and its outlook, are so strong that to try and break them would be merely to invite disaster. But then from such women his own pride--his pride in his country--would have warned his pa.s.sion. It was to Elizabeth's lovely sympathy, her generous detachment, her free kindling mind--that his life had gone out. _She_ would, surely, never be deterred from marrying a Canadian--if he pleased her--because it would cut her off from London and Paris, and all the ripe antiquities and traditions of English or European life? Even in the spa.r.s.ely peopled Northwest, with which his own future was bound up, how many English women are there--fresh, some of them, from luxurious and fastidious homes--on ranches, on prairie farms, in the Okanagan valley! "This Northwest is no longer a wilderness!" he proudly thought; "it is no longer a leap in the dark to bring a woman of delicate nurture and cultivation to the prairies."

So, only a few hours before, he might have flattered the tyranny of longing and desire which had taken hold upon him.

But now! All his life seemed besmirched. His pa.s.sion had been no sooner born than, like a wounded bird, it fluttered to the ground. Bring upon such a woman as Elizabeth Merton the most distant responsibility for such a being as he had left behind him in the log-hut at Laggan? Link her life in however remote a fashion with that life? Treachery and sacrilege, indeed! No need for Delaine to tell him that! His father as a grim memory of the past--that Lady Merton knew. His own origins--his own story--as to that she had nothing to discover. But the man who might have dared to love her, up to that moment in the hut, was now a slave, bound to a corpse--

_Finis_!

And then as the anguish of the thought swept through him, and by a natural transmission of ideas, there rose in Anderson the sore and sudden memory of old, unhappy things, of the tender voices and faces of his first youth. The ugly vision of his degraded father had brought back upon him, through a thousand channels of a.s.sociation, the recollection of his mother. He saw her now--the worn, roughened face, the sweet swimming eyes; he felt her arms around him, the tears of her long agony on his face. She had endured--he too must endure. Close, close--he pressed her to his heart. As the radiant image of Elizabeth vanished from him in the darkness, his mother--broken, despairing, murdered in her youth--came to him and strengthened him. Let him do his duty to this poor outcast, as she would have done it--and put high thoughts from him.

He tore himself resolutely from his trance of thought, and began to walk back along the line. All the same, he would go up to Lake Louise, as he had promised, on the following morning. As far as his own intention was concerned, he would not cease to look after Lady Merton and her brother; Philip Gaddesden would soon have to be moved, and he meant to escort them to Vancouver.

Sounds approached, from the distance--the "freight," with the doctor, climbing the steep pa.s.s. He stepped on briskly to a signal-man's cabin and made arrangements to stop the train.

It was towards midnight when he and the doctor emerged from the Ginnell's cabin.

"Oh, I daresay we'll heal those cuts," said the doctor. "I've told Mrs.

Ginnell what to do; but the old fellow's in a pretty cranky state. I doubt whether he'll trouble the world very long."

Anderson started. With his eyes on the ground and his hands in his pockets, he inquired the reason for this opinion.

"Arteries--first and foremost. It's a wonder they've held out so long, and then--a score of other things. What can you expect?"