Lady Merton, Colonist Part 22

"Yes, we stand together. We march together. But Canada will have her own history; and you must not try to make it for her."

Their eyes met; in hers exaltion, in his a touch of sternness, a moment's revelation of the Covenanter in his soul.

Then as the delightful vision of her among the flowers, in her white dress, the mountains behind and around her, imprinted itself on his senses, he was conscious of a moment of intolerable pain. Between her and him--as it were--the abyss opened. The trembling waves of colour in the gra.s.s, the n.o.ble procession of the clouds, the gleaming of the snows, the shadow of the valleys--they were all wiped out. He saw instead a small unsavoury room--the cunning eyes and coa.r.s.e mouth of his father. He saw his own future as it must now be; weighted with this burden, this secret; if indeed it were still to be a secret; if it were not rather the wiser and the manlier plan to have done with secrecy.

Elizabeth rose with a little shiver. The wind had begun to blow cold from the northwest.

"How soon can we run down? I hope Mr. Arthur will have sent Philip indoors."

Anderson left Lake Louise about eight o'clock, and hurried down the Laggan road. His mind was divided between the bitter-sweet of these last hours with Elizabeth Merton, and anxieties, small practical anxieties, about his father. There were arrangements still to make. He was not himself going to Vancouver. McEwen had lately shown a strong and petulant wish to preserve his incognito, or what was left of it. He would not have his son's escort. George might come and see him at Vancouver; and that would be time enough to settle up for the winter.

So Ginnell, owner of the boarding house, a stalwart Irishman of six foot three, had been appointed to see him through his journey, settle him with his new protectors, and pay all necessary expenses.

Anderson knocked at his father's door and was allowed to enter. He found McEwen walking up and down his room, with the aid of a stick, irritably pushing chairs and clothes out of his way. The room was in squalid disorder, and its inmate had a flushed, exasperated look that did not escape Anderson's notice. He thought it probable that his father was already repenting his consent to go to Vancouver, and he avoided general conversation as much as possible.

McEwen complained of having been left alone; abused Mrs. Ginnell; vowed she had starved and ill-treated him; and then, to Anderson's surprise, broke out against his son for having refused to provide him with the money he wanted for the mine, and so ruined his last chance. Anderson hardly replied; but what he did say was as soothing as possible; and at last the old man flung himself on his bed, excitement dying away in a sulky taciturnity.

Before Anderson left his room, Ginnell came in, bringing his accounts for certain small expenses. Anderson, standing with his back to his father, took out a pocketbook full of bills. At Calgary the day before a friend had repaid him a loan of a thousand dollars. He gave Ginnell a certain sum; talked to him in a low voice for a time, thinking his father had dropped asleep; and then dismissed him, putting the money in his pocket.

"Good night, father," he said, standing beside the bed.

McEwen opened his eyes.

"Eh?"

The eyes into which Anderson looked had no sleep in them. They were wild and bloodshot, and again Anderson felt a pang of helpless pity for a dishonoured and miserable old age.

"I'm sure you'll get on at Vancouver, father," he said gently. "And I shall be there next week."

His father growled some unintelligible answer. As Anderson went to the door he again called after him angrily: "You were a d---- fool, George, not to find those dibs."

"What, for the mine?" Anderson laughed. "Oh, we'll go into that again at Vancouver."

McEwen made no reply, and Anderson left him.

Anderson woke before seven. The long evening had pa.s.sed into the dawn with scarcely any darkness, and the sun was now high. He sprang up, and dressed hastily. Going into the pa.s.sage he saw to his astonishment that while the door of the Ginnells' room was still closed, his father's was wide open. He walked in. The room and the bed were empty. The contents of a box carefully packed by Ginnell--mostly with new clothes--the night before, were lying strewn about the room. But McEwen's old clothes were gone, his gun and revolver, also his pipes and tobacco.

Anderson roused Ginnell, and they searched the house and its neighbourhood in vain. On going back into his own room, Anderson noticed an open drawer. He had placed his pocketbook there the night before, but without locking the drawer. It was gone, and in its place was a dirty sc.r.a.p of paper.

"Don't you try chivvying me, George, for you won't get any good of it.

You let me alone, and I'll let you. You were a stingy fellow about that money, so I've took some of it. Good-bye."

Sick at heart, Anderson resumed the search, further afield. He sent Ginnell along the line to make confidential inquiries. He telegraphed to persons known to him at Golden, Revelstoke, Kamloops, Ashcroft, all to no purpose. Twenty-four--thirty-six hours pa.s.sed and nothing had been heard of the fugitive.

He felt himself baffled and tricked, with certain deep instincts and yearnings wounded to the death. The brutal manner of his father's escape--the robbery--the letter--had struck him hard.

When Friday night came, and still no news, Anderson found himself at the C.P.R. Hotel at Field. He was stupid with fatigue and depression. But he had been in telephonic communication all the afternoon with Delaine and Lady Merton at Lake Louise, as to their departure for the Pacific.

They knew nothing and should know nothing of his own catastrophe; their plans should not suffer.

He went out into the summer night to take breath, and commune with himself. The night was balmy; the stars glorious. On a siding near the hotel stood the private car which had arrived that evening from Vancouver, and was to go to Laggan the following morning to fetch the English party. They were to pick him up, on the return, at Field.

He had failed to save his father, and his honest effort had been made in vain. Humiliation and disappointment overshadowed him. Pa.s.sionately, his whole soul turned to Elizabeth. He did not yet grasp all the bearings of what had happened. But he began to count the hours to the time when he should see her.

CHAPTER XI

A day of showers and breaking clouds--of sudden sunlight, and broad clefts of blue; a day when shreds of mist are lightly looped and meshed about the higher peaks of the Rockies and the Selkirks, dividing the forest world from the ice world above....

The car was slowly descending the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s, at the rear of a heavy train. Elizabeth, on her platform, was feasting her eyes once more on the great savage landscape, on these peaks and valleys that have never till now known man, save as the hunter, treading them once or twice perhaps in a century. Dreamily her mind contrasted them with the Alps, where from all time man has laboured and sheltered, blending his life, his births and deaths, his loves and hates with the glaciers and the forests, wresting his food from the valleys, creeping height over height to the snow line, writing his will on the country, so that in our thought of it he stands first, and Nature second. The Swiss mountains and streams breathe a "mighty voice," lent to them by the free pa.s.sion and aspiration of man; they are interfused and interwoven forever with human fate. But in the Rockies and the Selkirks man counts for nothing in their past; and, except as wayfarer and playfellow, it is probable that he will count for nothing in their future. They will never be the familiar companions of his work and prayer and love; a couple of railways, indeed, will soon be driving through them, linking the life of the prairies to the life of the Pacific; but, except for this conquest of them as barriers in his path, when his summer camps in them are struck, they, sheeted in a winter inaccessible and superb, know him and his puny deeds no more, till again the lakes melt and the trees bud.

This it is that gives them their strange majesty, and clothes their brief summer, their laughing fields of flowers, their thickets of red raspberry and slopes of strawberry, their infinity of gleaming lakes and foaming rivers--rivers that turn no mill and light no town--with a charm, half magical, half mocking.

And yet, though the travelled intelligence made comparisons of this kind, it was not with the mountains that Elizabeth's deepest mind was busy. She took really keener note of the railway itself, and its appurtenances. For here man had expressed himself; had pitched his battle with a fierce nature and won it; as no doubt he will win other similar battles in the coming years. Through Anderson this battle had become real to her. She looked eagerly at the construction camps in the pa.s.s; at the new line that is soon to supersede the old; at the bridges and tunnels and snow-sheds, by which contriving man had made his purpose prevail over the physical forces of this wild world. The great railway spoke to her in terms of human life; and because she had known Anderson she understood its message.

Secretly and sorely her thoughts clung to him. Just as, insensibly, her vision of Canada had changed, so had her vision of Anderson. Canada was no longer mere fairy tale and romance; Anderson was no longer merely its picturesque exponent or representative. She had come to realise him as a man, with a man's cares and pa.s.sions; and her feelings about him had begun to change her life.

Arthur Delaine, she supposed, had meant to warn her that Mr. Anderson was falling in love with her and that she had no right to encourage it.

Her thoughts went back intently over the last fortnight--Anderson's absences--his partial withdrawal from the intimacy which had grown up between himself and her--their last walk at Lake Louise. The delight of that walk was still in her veins, and at last she was frank with herself about it! In his att.i.tude towards her, now that she forced herself to face the truth, she must needs recognise a pa.s.sionate eagerness, restrained no less pa.s.sionately; a profound impulse, strongly felt, and strongly held back. By mere despair of attainment?--or by the scruple of an honourable self-control?

Could she--_could_ she marry a Canadian? There was the central question, out at last!--irrevocable!--writ large on the mountains and the forests, as she sped through them. Could she, possessed by inheritance of all that is most desirable and delightful in English society, linked with its great interests and its dominant cla.s.s, and through them with the rich cosmopolitan life of cultivated Europe--could she tear herself from that old soil, and that dear familiar environment? Had the plant vitality enough to bear transplanting? She did not put her question in these terms; but that was what her sudden tumult and distress of mind really meant.

Looking up, she saw Delaine beside her. Well, there was Europe, and at her feet! For the last month she had been occupied in scorning it.

English country-house life, artistic society and pursuits, London in the season, Paris and Rome in the spring, English social and political influence--there they were beside her. She had only to stretch out her hand.

A chill, uncomfortable laughter seemed to fill the inner mind through which the debate pa.s.sed, while all the time she was apparently looking at the landscape, and chatting with her brother or Delaine. She fell into an angry contempt for that mood of imaginative delight in which she had journeyed through Canada so far. What! treat a great nation in the birth as though it were there for her mere pleasure and entertainment?

Make of it a mere spectacle and pageant, and turn with disgust from the notion that you, too, could ever throw in your lot with it, fight as a foot-soldier in its ranks, on equal terms, for life and death!

She despised herself. And yet--and yet! She thought of her mother--her frail, refined, artistic mother; of a hundred subtleties and charms and claims, in that world she understood, in which she had been reared; of all that she must leave behind, were she asked, and did she consent, to share the life of a Canadian of Anderson's type. What would it be to fail in such a venture! To dare it, and then to find life sinking in sands of cowardice and weakness! Very often, and sometimes as though by design, Anderson had spoken to her of the part to be played by women in Canada; not in the defensive, optimistic tone of their last walk together, but forbiddingly, with a kind of rough insistence. Substantial comfort, a large amount of applied science--that could be got. But the elegancies and refinements of English rich life in a prairie farm--impossible! A woman who marries a Canadian farmer, large or small, must put her own hands to the drudgery of life, to the cooking, sewing, baking, that keep man--animal man--alive. A certain amount of rude service money can command in the Northwest; but it is a service which only the housewife's personal cooperation can make tolerable. Life returns, in fact, to the old primitive pattern; and a woman counts on the prairie according as "she looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness."

Suddenly Elizabeth perceived her own hands lying on her lap. Useless bejewelled things! When had they ever fed a man or nursed a child?

Under her gauze veil she coloured fiercely. If the housewife, in her primitive meaning and office, is vital to Canada, still more is the house-mother. "Bear me sons and daughters; people my wastes!" seems to be the cry of the land itself. Deep in Elizabeth's being there stirred instincts and yearnings which life had so far stifled in her. She shivered as though some voice, pa.s.sionate and yet austere, spoke to her from this great spectacle of mountain and water through which she was pa.s.sing.

"There he is!" cried Philip, craning his head to look ahead along the train.

Anderson stood waiting for them on the Field platform. Very soon he was seated beside her, outside the car, while Philip lounged in the doorway, and Delaine inside, having done his duty to the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s, was devoting himself to a belated number of the "Athenaeum" which had just reached him.

Philip had stored up a string of questions as to the hunting of goat in the Rockies, and impatiently produced them. Anderson replied, but, as Elizabeth immediately perceived, with a complete lack of his usual animation. He spoke with effort, occasionally stumbling over his words.

She could not help looking at him curiously, and presently even Philip noticed something wrong.

"I say, Anderson!--what have you been doing to yourself? You look as though you had been knocking up."

"I have been a bit driven this week," said Anderson, with a start. "Oh, nothing! You must look at this piece of line."

And as they ran down the long ravine from Field to Golden, beside a river which all the way seems to threaten the gliding train by the savage force of its descent, he played the showman. The epic of the C.P.R.--no one knew it better, and no one could recite it more vividly than he.