Lady Merton, Colonist Part 21

"You think of the drudgery, the domestic hardships?"

"There are some ladies in the hotel, from British Columbia. They are in easy circ.u.mstances--and the daughter is dying of overwork! The husband has a large fruit farm, but they can get no service; the fruit rots on the ground; and the two women are worn to death."

"Aye," said Anderson gravely. "This country breeds life, but it also devours it."

"I asked these two women--Englishwomen--if they wanted to go home, and give it up. They fell upon me with scorn."

"And you?"

Elizabeth sighed.

"I admired them. But could I imitate them? I thought of the house at home; of the old servants; how it runs on wheels; how pretty and--and dignified it all is; everybody at their post; no drudgery, no disorder."

"It is a dignity that costs you dear," said Anderson almost roughly, and with a change of countenance. "You sacrifice to it things a thousand times more real, more human."

"Do we?" said Elizabeth; and then, with a drop in her voice: "Dear, dear England!" She paused to take breath, and as she leant resting against a tree he saw her expression change, as though a struggle pa.s.sed through her.

The trees had opened behind them, and they looked back over the lake, the hotel, and the wide Laggan valley beyond. In all that valley, not a sign of human life, but the line of the railway. Not a house, not a village to be seen; and at this distance the forest appeared continuous, till it died against the rock and snow of the higher peaks.

For the first time, Elizabeth was home-sick; for the first time she shrank from a raw, untamed land where the House of Life is only now rearing its walls and its roof-timbers, and all its warm furnishings, its ornaments and hangings are still to add. She thought of the English landscapes, of the woods and uplands round her c.u.mberland home; of the old church, the embowered cottages, the lichened farms; the generations of lives that have died into the soil, like the summer leaves of the trees; of the ghosts to be felt in the air--ghosts of squire and labourer and farmer, alive still in men and women of the present, as they too will live in the unborn. Her heart went out to England; fled back to it over the seas, as though renewing, in penitence, an allegiance that had wavered. And Anderson divined it, in the yearning of her just-parted lips, in the quivering, restrained sweetness of her look.

His own heart sank. They resumed their walk, and presently the path grew steeper. Some of it was rough-hewn in the rock, and enc.u.mbered by roots of trees. Anderson held out a helping hand; her fingers slipped willingly into it; her light weight hung upon him, and every step was to him a mingled delight and bitterness.

"Hard work!" he said presently, with his encouraging smile; "but you'll be paid."

The pines grew closer, and then suddenly lightened. A few more steps, and Elizabeth gave a cry of pleasure. They were on the edge of an alpine meadow, encircled by dense forest, and sloping down beneath their feet to a lake that lay half in black shadow, half blazing in the afternoon sun. Beyond was a tossed wilderness of peaks to west and south. Light ma.s.ses of c.u.mulus cloud were rushing over the sky, and driving waves of blue and purple colour across the mountain ma.s.ses and the forest slopes. Golden was the sinking light and the sunlit half of the lake; golden the western faces and edges of the mountain world; while beyond the valley, where ran the white smoke of a train, there hung in the northern sky a dream-world of undiscovered snows, range, it seemed, beyond range, remote, ethereal; a Valhalla of the old G.o.ds of this vast land, where one might guess them still throned at bay, majestic, inviolate.

But it was the flowers that held Elizabeth mute. Anderson had brought her to a wild garden of incredible beauty. Scarlet and blue, purple and pearl and opal, rose-pink and lavender-grey the flower-field ran about her, as though Persephone herself had just risen from the shadow of this nameless northern lake, and the new earth had broken into eager flame at her feet. Painter's brush, harebell, speedwell, golden-brown gaillardias, silvery hawkweed, columbines yellow and blue, heaths, and lush gra.s.ses--Elizabeth sank down among them in speechless joy. Anderson gathered handfuls of columbine and vetch, of harebell and heath, and filled her lap with them, till she gently stopped him.

"No! Let me only look!"

And with her hands around her knees she sat motionless and still.

Anderson threw himself down beside her. Fragrance, colour, warmth; the stir of an endless self-sufficient life; the fruitfulness and bounty of the earth; these things wove their ancient spells about them. Every little rush of the breeze seemed an invitation and a caress.

Presently she thanked him for having brought her there, and said something of remembering it in England.

"As one who will never see it again?" He turned and faced her smiling.

But behind his frank, pleasant look there was something from which she shrank.

"I shall hardly see it, again," she said hesitating. "Perhaps that makes it the more--the more touching. One clings to it the more--the impression--because it is so fugitive--will be so soon gone."

He was silent a moment, then said abruptly:

"And the upshot of all this is, that you could not imagine living in Canada?"

She started.

"I never said so. Of course I could imagine living in Canada!"

"But you think, for women, the life up here--in the Northwest--is too hard."

She looked at him timidly.

"That's because I look at it from my English point of view. I am afraid English life makes weaklings of us."

"No--not of you!" he said, almost scornfully. "Any life that seemed to you worth while would find you strong enough for it. I am sure of that."

Elizabeth smiled and shrugged her shoulders. He went on--almost as though pleading with her.

"And as to our Western life--which you will soon have left so far behind--it strains and tests the women--true--but it rewards them. They have a great place among us. It is like the women of the early races. We listen to them in the house, and on the land; we depend on them indoors and out; their husbands and their sons worship them!"

Elizabeth flushed involuntarily; but she met him gaily.

"In England too! Come and see!"

"I shall probably be in England next spring."

Elizabeth made a sudden movement.

"I thought you would be in political life here!"

"I have had an offer--an exciting and flattering offer. May I tell you?"

He turned to her eagerly; and she smiled her sympathy, her curiosity.

Whereupon he took a letter from his pocket--a letter from the Dominion Prime Minister, offering him a mission of inquiry to England, on some important matters connected with labour and emigration. The letter was remarkable, addressed to a man so young, and on the threshold of his political career.

Elizabeth congratulated him warmly.

"Of course you will come to stay with us!"

It was his turn to redden.

"You are very kind," he said formally. "As you know, I shall have everything to learn."

"I will show you _our_ farms!" cried Elizabeth, "and all our dear decrepit life--our little chessboard of an England."

"How proud you are, you Englishwomen!" he said, half frowning. "You run yourselves down--and at bottom there is a pride like Lucifer's."

"But it is not my pride," she said, hurt, "any more than yours. We are yours--and you are ours. One state--one country."

"No, don't let us sentimentalise. We have our own future. It is not yours."

"But you are loyal!" The note was one of pain.

"Are we? Foolish word! Yes, we are loyal, as you are--loyal to a common ideal, a common mission in the world."

"To blood also--and to history?" Her voice was almost entreating. What he had said seemed to jar with other and earlier sayings of his, which had stirred in her a patriotic pleasure.

He smiled at her emotion--her implied reproach.