Lady Merton, Colonist Part 20

He had dropped the paper, and was staring abstractedly through the foot of open window close beside him, which the torn blind did not cover.

Outside, through the clearing with its stumps of jack-pine, ran a path, a short cut, connecting the station at Laggan with a section-house further up the line.

As McEwen's eyes followed it, he began to be aware of a group of men emerging from the trees on the Laggan side, and walking in single file along the path. Navvies apparently--carrying bundles and picks. The path came within a few yards of the window, and of the little stream that supplied the house with water.

Suddenly, McEwen sprang up in bed. The two foremost men paused beside the water, mopped their hot faces, and taking drinking cups out of their pockets stooped down to the stream. The old man in the cabin bed watched them with fierce intentness; and as they straightened themselves and were about to follow their companions who were already out of sight, he gave a low call.

The two started and looked round them. Their hands went to their pockets. McEwen swung himself round so as to reach the window better, and repeated his call--this time with a different inflection. The men exchanged a few hurried words. Carefully scrutinising the house, they noticed a newspaper waving cautiously in an open window. One of them came forward, the other remained by the stream bathing his feet and ankles in the water.

No one else was in sight. Mrs. Ginnell was cooking on the other side of the house. Anderson had gone off to catch his train. For twenty minutes, the man outside leant against the window-sash apparently lounging and smoking. Nothing could be seen from the path, but a battered blind flapping in the June breeze, and a dark s.p.a.ce of room beyond.

CHAPTER X

The days pa.s.sed on. Philip in the comfortable hotel at Lake Louise was recovering steadily, though not rapidly, from the general shock of immersion. Elizabeth, while nursing him tenderly, could yet find time to walk and climb, plunging spirit and sense in the beauty of the Rockies.

On these excursions Delaine generally accompanied her; and she bore it well. Secretly she cherished some astonishment and chagrin that Anderson could be with them so little on these bright afternoons among the forest trails and upper lakes, although she generally found that the plans of the day had been suggested and organised by him, by telephone from Laggan, to the kind and competent Scotch lady who was the manager of the hotel. It seemed to her that he had promised his company; whereas, as a rule, now he withheld it; and her pride was put to it, on her own part, not to betray any sign of discontent. He spoke vaguely of "business,"

and on one occasion, apparently had gone off for three days to Saskatchewan on matters connected with the coming general election.

From the newspaper, or the talk of visitors in the hotel, or the railway officials who occasionally found their way to Lake Louise to make courteous inquiries after the English party, Elizabeth became, indeed, more and more fully aware of the estimation in which Anderson was beginning to be held. He was already a personage in the Northwest; was said to be sure of success in his contest at Donaldminster, and of an immediate Parliamentary career at Ottawa. These prophecies seemed to depend more upon the man's character than his actual achievements; though, indeed, the story of the great strike, as she had gathered it once or twice from the lips of eye-witnesses, was a fine one. For weeks he had carried his life in his hand among thousands of infuriated navvies and miners--since the miners had made common cause with the railwaymen--with a cheerfulness, daring, and resource which in the end had wrung success from an apparently hopeless situation; a success attended, when all was over, by an amazing effusion of good will among both masters and men, especially towards Anderson himself, and a general improvement in the industrial temper and atmosphere of the Northwest.

The recital of these things stirred Elizabeth's pulses. But why did she never hear them from himself? Surely he had offered her friendship, and the rights of friendship. How else could he justify the scene at Field, when he had so brusquely probed her secret anxieties for Philip? Her pride rebelled when she thought of it, when she recalled her wet eyes, her outstretched hand. Mere humiliation!--in the case of a casual or indifferent acquaintance. No; on that day, certainly, he had claimed the utmost privileges, had even strained the rights, of a friend, a real friend. But his behaviour since had almost revived her first natural resentment.

Thoughts like these ran in her mind, and occasionally affected her manner when they did meet. Anderson found her more reserved, and noticed that she did not so often ask him for small services as of old. He suffered under the change; but it was, he knew, his own doing, and he did not alter his course.

Whenever he did come, he sat mostly with Philip, over whom he had gradually established a remarkable influence, not by any definite acts or speeches, but rather by the stoicism of his own mode of life, coupled with a proud or laughing contempt for certain vices and self-indulgences to which it was evident that he himself felt no temptation. As soon as Philip felt himself sufficiently at home with the Canadian to begin to jibe at his teetotalism, Anderson seldom took the trouble to defend himself; yet the pa.s.sion of moral independence in his nature, of loathing for any habit that weakens and enslaves the will, infected the English lad whether he would or no. "There's lots of things he's stick-stock mad on," Philip would say impatiently to his sister. But the madness told. And the madman was all the while consolingly rich in other, and, to Philip, more attractive kinds of madness--the follies of the hunter and climber, of the man who holds his neck as dross in comparison with the satisfaction of certain wild instincts that the Rockies excite in him. Anderson had enjoyed his full share of adventures with goat and bear. Such things are the customary amus.e.m.e.nts, it seemed, of a young engineer in the Rockies. Beside them, English covert-shooting is a sport for babes; and Philip ceased to boast of his own prowess in that direction. He would listen, indeed, open-mouthed, to Anderson's yarns, lying on his long chair on the verandah--a graceful languid figure--with a coyote rug heaped about him. It was clear to Elizabeth that Anderson on his side had become very fond of the boy. There was no trouble he would not take for him. And gradually, silently, proudly, she allowed him to take less and less for herself.

Once or twice Arthur Delaine's clumsy hints occurred to her. Was there, indeed, some private matter weighing on the young man's mind? She would not allow herself to speculate upon it; though she could not help watching the relation between the two men with some curiosity. It was polite enough; but there was certainly no cordiality in it; and once or twice she suspected a hidden understanding.

Delaine meanwhile felt a kind of dull satisfaction in the turn of events. The intimacy between Anderson and Lady Merton had clearly been checked, or was at least not advancing. Whether it was due to his own hints to Elizabeth, or to Anderson's chivalrous feeling, he did not know. But he wrote every mail to Mrs. Gaddesden, discreetly, yet not without giving her some significant information; he did whatever small services were possible in the case of a man who went about Canada as a Johnny Head-in-air, with his mind in another hemisphere; and it was understood that he was to leave them at Vancouver. In the forced a.s.sociation of their walks and rides, Elizabeth showed herself gay, kind, companionable; although often, and generally for no reason that he could discover, something sharp and icy in her would momentarily make itself felt, and he would find himself driven back within bounds that he had perhaps been tempted to transgress. And the result of it all was that he fell day by day more tormentingly in love with her. Those placid matrimonial ambitions with which he had left England had been all swept away; and as he followed her--she on pony-back, he on foot--along the mountain trails, watching the lightness of her small figure against the splendid background of peak and pine, he became a troubled, introspective person; concentrating upon himself and his disagreeable plight the attention he had hitherto given to a delightful outer world, sown with the _caches_ of antiquity, in order to amuse him.

Meanwhile the situation in the cabin at Laggan appeared to be steadily improving. McEwen had abruptly ceased to be a rebellious and difficult patient. The doctor's orders had been obeyed; the leg had healed rapidly; and he no longer threatened or cajoled Mrs. Ginnell on the subject of liquor. As far as Anderson was concerned, he was generally sulky and uncommunicative. But Anderson got enough out of him by degrees to be able to form a fairly complete idea of his father's course of life since the false report of his death in the Yukon. He realised an existence on the fringe of civilisation, with its strokes of luck neutralised by drink, and its desperate, and probably criminal, moments.

And as soon as his father got well enough to limp along the trails of the Laggan valley, the son noticed incidents which appeared to show that the old man, while playing the part of the helpless stranger, was by no means without acquaintance among the motley host of workmen that were constantly pa.s.sing through. The links of international trades unionism no doubt accounted for it. But in McEwen's case, the fraternity to which he belonged seemed to apply only to the looser and more disreputable elements among the emigrant throng.

But at the same time he had shown surprising docility in the matter of Anderson's counsels. All talk of the Idaho mine had dropped between them, as though by common consent. Anderson had laid hands upon a young man, a Salvation Army officer in Vancouver, with whom his father consented to lodge for the next six weeks; and further arrangements were to be postponed till the end of that period. Anderson hoped, indeed, to get his father settled there before Lady Merton moved from Lake Louise.

For in a few days now, the private car was to return from the coast, in order to take up the English party.

McEwen's unexpected complaisance led to a great softening in Anderson's feeling towards his father. All those inner compunctions that haunt a just and scrupulous nature came freely into play. And his evangelical religion--for he was a devout though liberal-minded Presbyterian--also entered in. Was it possible that he might be the agent of his father's redemption? The idea, the hope, produced in him occasional hidden exaltations--flights of prayer--mystical memories of his mother--which lightened what was otherwise a time of bitter renunciation, and determined wrestling with himself.

During the latter days of this fortnight, indeed, he could not do enough for his father. He had made all the Vancouver arrangements; he had supplied him amply with clothes and other personal necessaries; and he came home early at night in order to sit and smoke with him. Mrs.

Ginnell, looking in of an evening, beheld what seemed to her a touching sight, though one far beyond the deserts of such creatures as McEwen--the son reading the newspaper aloud, or playing dominoes with his father, or just smoking and chatting. Her hard common sense as a working-woman suggested to her that Anderson was nursing illusions; and she scornfully though silently hoped that the "old rip" would soon, one way or another, be off his shoulders.

But the illusions, for the moment, were Anderson's sustenance. His imagination, denied a more personal and pa.s.sionate food, gave itself with fire to the redeeming of an outlaw, and the paying of a spiritual debt.

It was Wednesday. After a couple of drizzling days the weather was again fair. The trains rolling through the pa.s.s began with these early days of July to bring a first crop of holiday-makers from Eastern Canada and the States; the hotels were filling up. On the morrow McEwen was to start for Vancouver. And a letter from Philip Gaddesden, delivered at Laggan in the morning, had bitterly reproached Anderson for neglecting them, and leaving him, in particular, to be bored to death by glaciers and tourists.

Early in the afternoon Anderson took his way up the mountain road to Lake Louise. He found the English travellers established among the pines by the lake-side, Philip half asleep in a hammock strung between two pines, while Delaine was reading to Elizabeth from an article in an archaeological review on "Some Fresh Light on the Cippus of Palestrina."

Lady Merton was embroidering; it seemed to Anderson that she was tired or depressed. Delaine's booming voice, and the frequent Latin pa.s.sages interspersed with stammering translations of his own, in which he appeared to be interminably tangled, would be enough--the Canadian thought--to account for a subdued demeanour; and there was, moreover, a sudden thunderous heat in the afternoon.

Elizabeth received him a little stiffly, and Philip roused himself from sleep only to complain: "You've been four mortal days without coming near us!"

"I had to go away. I have been to Regina."

"On politics?" asked Delaine.

"Yes. We had a couple of meetings and a row."

"Jolly for you!" grumbled Philip. "But we've had a beastly time. Ask Elizabeth."

"Nothing but the weather!" said Elizabeth carelessly. "We couldn't even see the mountains."

But why, as she spoke, should the delicate cheek change colour, suddenly and brightly? The answering blood leapt in Anderson. She _had_ missed him, though she would not show it.

Delaine began to question him about Saskatchewan. The Englishman's forms of conversation were apt to be tediously inquisitive, and Anderson had often resented them. To-day, however, he let himself be catechised patiently enough, while all the time conscious, from head to foot, of one person only--one near and yet distant person.

Elizabeth wore a dress of white linen, and a broad hat of soft blue. The combination of the white and blue with her brown hair, and the pale refinement of her face, seemed to him ravishing, enchanting. So were the movements of her hands at work, and all the devices of her light self-command; more attractive, infinitely, to his mature sense than the involuntary tremor of girlhood.

"Hallo! What does Stewart want?" said Philip, raising himself in his hammock. The hunter who had been the companion of his first unlucky attempt at fishing was coming towards them. The boy sprang to the ground, and, vowing that he would fish the following morning whatever Elizabeth might say, went off to consult.

She looked after him with a smile and a sigh.

"Better give him his head!" laughed Anderson. Then, from where he stood, he studied her a moment, unseen, except by Delaine, who was sitting among the moss a few yards away, and had temporarily forgotten the Cippus of Palestrina.

Suddenly the Canadian came forward.

"Have you explored that path yet, over the shoulder?" he said to Lady Merton, pointing to the fine promontory of purple piny rock which jutted out in front of the glacier on the southern side of the lake.

She shook her head; but was it not still too early and too hot to walk?

Anderson persisted. The path was in shade, and would repay climbing. She hesitated--and yielded; making a show of asking Delaine to come with them. Delaine also hesitated, and refrained; making a show of preferring the "Archaeological Review." He was left to watch them mount the first stretches of the trail; while Philip strolled along the lake with his companion in the slouch hat and leggings, deep in tales of ba.s.s and trout.

Elizabeth and Anderson climbed a long sloping ascent through the pines.

The air was warm and scented; the heat of the sun on the moistened earth was releasing all its virtues and fragrances, overpowering in the open places, and stealing even through the shadows. When the trees broke or receded, the full splendour of the glacier was upon them to their left; and then for a s.p.a.ce they must divine it as a presence behind the actual, faintly gleaming and flashing through the serried ranks of the forest. There were heaths and mosses under the pines; but otherwise for a while the path was flowerless; and Elizabeth discontentedly remarked it. Anderson smiled.

"Wait a little--or you'll have to apologise to the Rockies."

He looked down upon her, and saw that her small face had bloomed into a vivacity and charm that startled him. Was it only the physical effort and pleasure of the climb? As for himself, it took all the power of a strong will to check the happy tumult in his heart.

Elizabeth asked him of his Saskatchewan journey. He described to her the growing town he hoped to represent--the rush of its new life.

"On one Sunday morning there was nothing--the bare prairie; by the next--so to speak--there was a town all complete, with a hotel, an elevator, a bank, and a church. That was ten years ago. Then the railway came; I saw the first train come in, garlanded and wreathed with flowers. Now there are eight thousand people. They have reserved land for a park along the river, and sent for a landscape gardener from England to lay it out; they have made trees grow on the prairie; they have built a high school and a concert hall; the munic.i.p.ality is full of ambitions; and all round the town, settlers are pouring in. On market day you find yourself in a crowd of men, talking cattle and crops, the last thing in binders and threshers, as farmers do all over the world.

But yet you couldn't match that crowd in the old world."

"Which you don't know," put in Elizabeth, with her sly smile.

"Which I don't know," repeated Anderson meekly. "But I guess. And I am thinking of sayings of yours. Where in Europe can you match the sense of _boundlessness_ we have here--boundless s.p.a.ce, boundless opportunity? It often makes fools of us: it intoxicates, turns our heads. There is a germ of madness in this Northwest. I have seen men destroyed by it. But it is Nature who is the witch. She brews the cup."

"All very well for the men," Elizabeth said, musing--"and the strong men. About the women in this country I can't make up my mind."