Lady Merton, Colonist Part 25

The American police officer resumed his seat. George Anderson, who was to the right of the coroner, had sat, all through this witness's evidence, bending forward, his eyes on the ground, his hands clasped between his knees. There was something in the rigidity of his att.i.tude, which gradually compelled the attention of the onlookers, as though the perception gained ground that here--in that stillness--those bowed shoulders--lay the real interest of this sordid outrage, which had so affronted the pride of Canada's great railway.

The coroner rose. He briefly expressed the thanks of the court to the Nevada State authorities for having so promptly supplied the information in their possession in regard to this man McEwen. He would now ask Mr.

George Anderson, of the C.P.R., whether he could in any way a.s.sist the court in this investigation. An empty envelope, fully addressed to Mr.

George Anderson, Ginnell's Boarding House, Laggan, Alberta, had, strangely enough, been found in McEwen's pocket. Could Mr. Anderson throw any light upon the matter?

Anderson stood up as the coroner handed him the envelope. He took it, looked at it, and slowly put it down on the table before him. He was perfectly composed, but there was that in his aspect which instantly hushed all sounds in the crowded room, and drew the eyes of everybody in it upon him. The Kamloops doctor looked at him from a distance with a sudden twitching smile--the smile of a reticent man in whom strong feeling must somehow find a physical expression. Dixon, the young Superintendent, bent forward eagerly. At the back of the room a group of j.a.panese railway workers, with their round, yellow faces and half-opened eyes stared impa.s.sively at the tall figure of the fair-haired Canadian; and through windows and doors, thrown open to the heat, shimmered lake and forest, the eternal background of Canada.

"Mr. Coroner," said Anderson, straightening himself to his full height, "the name of the man into whose death you are inquiring is not Alexander McEwen. He came from Scotland to Manitoba in 1869. His real name was Robert Anderson, and I--am his son."

The coroner gave an involuntary "Ah!" of amazement, which was echoed, it seemed, throughout the room.

On one of the small deal tables belonging to the coffee-room, which had been pushed aside to make room for the sitting of the court, lay the newspapers of the morning--the _Vancouver Sentinel_ and the _Montreal Star_. Both contained short and flattering articles on the important Commission entrusted to Mr. George Anderson by the Prime Minister. "A great compliment to so young a man," said the _Star_, "but one amply deserved by Mr. Anderson's record. We look forward on his behalf to a brilliant career, honourable both to himself and to Canada."

Several persons had already knocked at Anderson's door early that morning in order to congratulate him; but without finding him. And this honoured and fortunate person--?

Men pushed each other forward in their eagerness not to lose a word, or a shade of expression on the pale face which confronted them.

Anderson, after a short pause, as though to collect himself, gave the outlines of his father's early history, of the farm in Manitoba, the fire and its consequences, the breach between Robert Anderson and his sons. He described the struggle of the three boys on the farm, their migration to Montreal in search of education, and his own later sojourn in the Yukon, with the evidence which had convinced him of his father's death.

"Then, only a fortnight ago, he appeared at Laggan and made himself known to me, having followed me apparently from Winnipeg. He seemed to be in great poverty, and in bad health. If he had wished it, I was prepared to acknowledge him; but he seemed not to wish it; there were no doubt reasons why he preferred to keep his a.s.sumed name. I did what I could for him, and arrangements had been made to put him with decent people at Vancouver. But last Wednesday night he disappeared from the boarding house where he and I were both lodging, and various persons here will know"--he glanced at one or two faces in the ring before him--"that I have been making inquiries since, with no result. As to what or who led him into this horrible business, I know nothing. The Nevada deputies have told you that he was acquainted with Symonds--a fact unknown to me--and I noticed on one or two occasions that he seemed to have acquaintances among the men tramping west to the Kootenay district. I can only imagine that after his success in Montana last year, Symonds made up his mind to try the same game on the C.P.R., and that during the last fortnight he came somehow into communication with my father. My father must have been aware of Symonds's plans--and may have been unable at the last to resist the temptation to join in the scheme. As to all that I am entirely in the dark."

He paused, and then, looking down, he added, under his breath, as though involuntarily--"I pray--that he may not have been concerned in the murder of poor Brown. But there is--I think--no evidence to connect him with it. I shall be glad to answer to the best of my power any questions that the court may wish to put."

He sat down heavily, very pale, but entirely collected. The room watched him a moment, and then a friendly, encouraging murmur seemed to rise from the crowd--to pa.s.s from them to Anderson.

The coroner, who was an old friend of Anderson's, fidgeted a little and in silence. He took off his gla.s.ses and put them on again. His tanned face, long and slightly twisted, with square harsh brows, and powerful jaw set in a white fringe of whisker, showed an unusual amount of disturbance. At last he said, clearing his throat: "We are much obliged to you, Mr. Anderson, for your frankness towards this court. There's not a man here that don't feel for you, and don't wish to offer you his respectful sympathy. We know you--and I reckon we know what to think about you. Gentlemen," he spoke with nasal deliberation, looking round the court, "I think that's so?"

A shout of consent--the shout of men deeply moved--went up. Anderson, who had resumed his former att.i.tude, appeared to take no notice, and the coroner resumed.

"I will now call on Mrs. Ginnell to give her evidence."

The Irishwoman rose with alacrity--what she had to say held the audience. The surly yet good-hearted creature was divided between her wish to do justice to the demerits of McEwen, whom she had detested, and her fear of hurting Anderson's feelings in public. Beneath her rough exterior, she carried some of the delicacies of Celtic feeling, and she had no sooner given some fact that showed the coa.r.s.e dishonesty of the father, than she veered off in haste to describe the pathetic efforts of the son. Her homely talk told; the picture grew.

Meanwhile Anderson sat impatient or benumbed, annoyed with Mrs.

Ginnell's garrulity, and longing for the whole thing to end. He had a letter to write to Ottawa before post-time.

When the verdicts had been given, the doctor and he walked away from the court together. The necessary formalities were carried through, a coffin ordered, and provision made for the burial of Robert Anderson. As the two men pa.s.sed once or twice through the groups now lounging and smoking as before outside the hotel, all conversation ceased, and all eyes followed Anderson. Sincere pity was felt for him; and at the same time men asked each other anxiously how the revelation would affect his political and other chances.

Late in the same evening the burial of McEwen took place. A congregational minister at the graveside said a prayer for mercy on the sinner. Anderson had not asked him to do it, and felt a dull resentment of the man's officiousness, and the unctious length of his prayer. Half an hour later he was on the platform, waiting for the train to Glacier.

He arrived there in the first glorious dawn of a summer morning. Over the vast Illecillowaet glacier rosy feather-clouds were floating in a crystal air, beneath a dome of pale blue. Light mists rose from the forests and the course of the river, and above them shone the dazzling snows, the hanging glaciers, and glistening rock faces, ledge piled on ledge, of the Selkirk giants--Hermit and Tupper, Avalanche and Sir Donald--with that cleft of the pa.s.s between.

The pleasant hotel, built to offer as much shelter and comfort as possible to the tired traveller and climber, was scarcely awake. A sleepy-eyed j.a.panese showed Anderson to his room. He threw himself on the bed, longing for sleep, yet incapable of it. He was once more under the same roof with Elizabeth Merton--and for the last time! He longed for her presence, her look, her touch; and yet with equal intensity he shrank from seeing her. That very morning through the length of Canada and the States would go out the news of the train-robbery on the main line of the C.P.R., and with it the "dramatic" story of himself and his father, made more dramatic by a score of reporters. And as the news of his appointment, in the papers of the day before, had made him a public person, and had been no doubt telegraphed to London and Europe, so also would it be with the news of the "hold-up," and his own connection with it; partly because it had happened on the C.P.R.; still more because of the prominence given to his name the day before.

He felt himself a disgraced man; and he had already put from him all thought of a public career. Yet he wondered, not without self-contempt, as he lay there in the broadening light, what it was in truth that made the enormous difference between this Monday and the Monday before. His father was dead, and had died in the very commission of a criminal act.

But all or nearly all that Anderson knew now about his character he had known before this happened. The details given by the Nevada officers were indeed new to him; but he had shrewdly suspected all along that the record, did he know it, would be something like that. If such a parentage in itself involves stain and degradation, the stain and degradation had been always there, and the situation, looked at philosophically, was no worse for the catastrophe which had intervened between this week and last.

And yet it was of course immeasurably worse! Such is the "bubble reputation"--the difference between the known and the unknown.

At nine o'clock a note was brought to his room:

"Will you breakfast with me in half an hour? You will find me alone.

"E.M."

Before the clock struck the half-hour, Elizabeth was already waiting for her guest, listening for every sound. She too had been awake half the night.

When he came in she went up to him, with her quick-tripping step, holding out both her hands; and he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

"I am so--so sorry!" was all she could say. He looked into her eyes, and as her hands lay in his he stooped suddenly and kissed them. There was a great piteousness in his expression, and she felt through every nerve the humiliation and the moral weariness which oppressed him.

Suddenly she recalled that first moment of intimacy between them when he had so brusquely warned her about Philip, and she had been wounded by his mere strength and fearlessness; and it hurt her to realise the contrast between that strength and this weakness.

She made him sit down beside her in the broad window of her little sitting-room, which over-looked the winding valley with the famous loops of the descending railway, and the moving light and shade on the forest; and very gently and tenderly she made him tell her all the story from first to last.

His shrinking pa.s.sed away, soothed by her sweetness, her restrained emotion, and after a little he talked with freedom, gradually recovering his normal steadiness and clearness of mind.

At the same time she perceived some great change in him. The hidden spring of melancholy in his nature, which, amid all his practical energies and activities, she had always discerned, seemed to have overleaped its barriers, and to be invading the landmarks of character.

At the end of his narrative he said something in a hurried, low voice which gave her a clue.

"I did what I could to help him--but my father hated me. He died hating me. Nothing I could do altered him. Had he reason? When my brother and I in our anger thought we were avenging our mother's death, were we in truth destroying him also--driving him into wickedness beyond hope? Were we--was I--for I was the eldest--responsible? Does his death, moral and physical, lie at my door?"

He raised his eyes to her--his tired appealing eyes--and Elizabeth realised sharply how deep a hold such questionings take on such a man.

She tried to argue with and comfort him--and he seemed to absorb, to listen--but in the middle of it, he said abruptly, as though to change the subject:

"And I confess the publicity has. .h.i.t me hard. It may be cowardly, but I can't face it for a while. I think I told you I owned some land in Saskatchewan. I shall go and settle down on it at once."

"And give up your appointment--your public life?" she cried in dismay.

He smiled at her faintly, as though trying to console her.

"Yes; I shan't be missed, and I shall do better by myself. I understand the wheat and the land. They are friends that don't fail one."

Elizabeth flushed.

"Mr. Anderson!--you mustn't give up your work. Canada asks it of you."

"I shall only be changing my work. A man can do nothing better for Canada than break up land."

"You can do that--and other things besides. Please--please--do nothing rash!"

She bent over to him, her brown eyes full of entreaty, her hand laid gently, timidly on his.

He could not bear to distress her--but he must.

"I sent in my resignation yesterday to the Prime Minister."

The delicate face beside him clouded.