Lady Merton, Colonist Part 33

"Till Mr. Anderson--" she resumed, "is--well!--is brave enough to--trust a woman! and--oh! good Heavens!"--she dashed the tears from her eyes, half laughing, as her self-control broke down--"clever enough to save her from proposing to him in this abominable way!"

She sprang to her feet impatiently. Anderson would have caught her in his arms; but with a flashing look, she put him aside. A wail broke from Mrs. Gaddesden:

"Lisa--you won't leave us!"

"Never, darling--unless you send me!--or come with me! And now, don't you think, Philip dearest, you might let us all go to bed? You are really not worse, you know; and Mother and I are going to carry you off south--very, very soon."

She bent to him and kissed his brow. Philip's face gradually changed beneath her look, from the tension and gloom with which he had begun the scene to a kind of boyish relief--a touch of pleasure--of mischief even.

His high, majestical pretensions vanished away; a light and volatile mind thought no more of them; and he turned eagerly to another idea.

"Elizabeth, do you know that you have proposed to Anderson?"

"If I have, it was your fault."

"He hasn't said Yes?"

Elizabeth was silent. Anderson came forward--but Philip stopped him with a gesture.

"He can't say Yes--till I give him back his promise," said the boy, triumphantly. "Well, George, I do give it you back--on one condition--that you put off going for a week, and that you come back as soon as you can. By Jove, I think you owe me that!"

Anderson's difficult smile answered him.

"And now you've got rid of your beastly Conference, you can come in, and talk business with me to-morrow--next day--every day!" Philip resumed, "can't he, Elizabeth? If you're going to be my brother, I'll jolly well get you to tackle the lawyers instead of me--boring old idiots! I say--I'm going to take it easy now!"

He settled himself in his chair with a long breath, and his eyelids fell. He was speaking, as they all knew, of the making of his will. Mrs.

Gaddesden stooped piteously and kissed him. Elizabeth's face quivered.

She put her arm round her mother and led her away. Anderson went to summon Philip's servant.

A little later Anderson again descended the dark staircase, leaving Philip in high spirits and apparently much better.

In the doorway of the drawing-room, stood a white form. Then the man's pa.s.sion, so long d.y.k.ed and barriered, had its way. He sprang towards her. She retreated, catching her breath; and in the shadows of the empty room she sank into his arms. In the crucible of that embrace all things melted and changed. His hesitations and doubts, all that hampered his free will and purpose, whether it were the sorrows and humiliations of the past--or the compunctions and demurs of the present--dropped away from him, as unworthy not of himself, but of Elizabeth. She had made him master of herself, and her fate; and he boldly and loyally took up the part. He had refused to become the mere appanage of her life, because he was already pledged to that great idea he called his country. She loved him the more for it; and now he had only to abound in the same sense, in order to hold and keep the nature which had answered so finely to his own. He had so borne himself as to wipe out all the social and external inequalities between them. What she had given him, she had had to sue him to take. But now that he had taken it, she knew herself a weak woman on his breast, and she realised with a happy tremor that he would make her no more apologies for his love, or for his story. Rather, he stood upon that dignity she herself had given him--her lover, and the captain of her life!

EPILOGUE

About nine months later than the events told in the last chapter, the August sun, as it descended upon a lake in that middle region of the northern Rockies which is known as yet only to the Indian trapper, and--on certain tracks--to a handful of white explorers, shone on a boat containing two persons--Anderson and Elizabeth. It was but twenty-four hours since they had reached the lake, in the course of a long camping expedition involving the company of two guides, a couple of half-breed _voyageurs_, and a string of sixteen horses. No white foot had ever before trodden the slender beaches of the lake; its beauty of forest and water, of peak and crag, of sun and shadow, the terror of its storms, the loveliness of its summer--only some stray Indian hunter, once or twice in a century perhaps, throughout all the aeons of human history, had ever beheld them.

But now, here were Anderson and Elizabeth!--first invaders of an inviolate nature, pioneers of a long future line of travellers and worshippers.

They had spent the day of summer sunshine in canoeing on the broad waters, exploring the green bays, and venturing a long way up a beautiful winding arm which seemed to lose itself in the bosom of superb forest-skirted mountains, whence glaciers descended, and cataracts leapt sheer into the glistening water. Now they were floating slowly towards the little promontory where their two guides had raised a couple of white tents, and the smoke of a fire was rising into the evening air.

Sunset was on the jagged and snow-clad heights that shut in the lake to the eastward. The rose of the sky had been caught by the water and interwoven with its own l.u.s.trous browns and cool blues; while fathom-deep beneath the shining web of colour gleamed the reflected snows and the forest slopes sliding downwards to infinity. A few bird-notes were in the air--the scream of an eagle, the note of a whip-poor-will, and far away across the lake a dense flight of wild duck rose above a reedy river-mouth, black against a pale band of sky.

They were close now to the sh.o.r.e, and to a spot where lightning and storm had ravaged the pines and left a few open s.p.a.ces for the sun to work. Elizabeth, in delight, pointed to the beds of wild strawberries crimsoning the slopes, intermingled with stretches of bilberry, and streaks of blue and purple asters. But a wilder life was there. Far away the antlers of a swimming moose could be seen above the quiet lake.

Anderson, sweeping the side with his field gla.s.s, pointed to the ripped tree-trunks, which showed where the brown bear or the grizzly had been, and to the tracks of lynx or fox on the firm yellow sand. And as they rounded the point of a little cove they came upon a group of deer that had come down to drink.

The gentle creatures were not alarmed at their approach; they raised their heads in the red light, seeing man perhaps for the first time, but they did not fly. Anderson stayed the boat--and he and Elizabeth watched them with enchantment--their slender bodies and proud necks, the bright sand at their feet, the brown water in front, the forest behind.

Elizabeth drew a long breath of joy--looking back again at the dying glory of the lake, and the great thunder-clouds piled above the forest.

"Where are we exactly?" she said. "Give me our bearings."

"We are about seventy miles north of the main line of the C.P.R., and about forty or fifty miles from the projected line of the Grand Trunk Pacific," said Anderson. "Make haste, dearest, and name your lake!--for where we come, others will follow."

So Elizabeth named it--Lake George--after her husband; seeing that it was his topographical divination, his tracking of the lake through the ingenious unravelling of a score of Indian clues which had led them at last to that Pisgah height whence the silver splendour of it had first been seen. But the name was so hotly repudiated by Anderson on the ground of there being already a famous and an historical Lake George on the American continent, that the probability is, when that n.o.ble sheet of water comes to be generally visited of mankind, it will be known rather as Lake Elizabeth; and so those early ambitions of Elizabeth which she had expressed to Philip in the first days of her Canadian journeying, will be fulfilled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "LAKE ELIZABETH"]

Alas!--poor Philip! Elizabeth's black serge dress, and the black ribbon on her white sun-hat were the outward tokens of a grief, cherished deep in her protesting, pitiful heart. Her brother had lived for some four months after her engagement to Anderson; always, in spite of encouraging doctors, under the same sharp premonition of death which had dictated his sudden change of att.i.tude towards his Canadian friend. In the January of the new year, Anderson had joined them at Bordighera, and there, after many alternating hopes and fears, a sudden attack of pneumonia had slit the thin-spun life. A few weeks later, at Mrs.

Gaddesden's urgent desire, and while she was in the care of a younger sister to whom she was tenderly attached, there had been a quiet wedding at Genoa, and a very pale and sad Elizabeth had been carried by her Anderson to some of the beloved Italian towns, where for so long she had reaped a yearly harvest of delight. In Rome, Florence, and Venice she must needs rouse herself, if only to show the keen novice eyes, beside her what to look at, and to grapple with the unexpected remarks which the spectacle evoked from Anderson. He looked in respectful silence at Bellini and Tintoret; but the industrial growth of the north, the strikes of _braccianti_ on the central plains, and the poverty of Sicily and the south--in these problems he was soon deeply plunged, teaching himself Italian in order to understand them.

Then they had returned to Mrs. Gaddesden, and to the surrender of Martindale to its new master. For the estate went to a cousin, and when the beauty and the burden of it were finally gone, Philip's gentle ineffectual mother departed with relief to the moss-grown dower-house beside Ba.s.senthwaite lake, there to sorrow for her only son, and to find in the expansion of Elizabeth's life, in Elizabeth's letters, and the prospects of Elizabeth's visits, the chief means left of courage and resignation. Philip's love for Anderson, his actual death in those strong arms, had strengthened immeasurably the latter's claim upon her; and in March she parted with him and Elizabeth, promising them boldly that she would come to them in the fall, and spend a Canadian winter with them.

Then Anderson and Elizabeth journeyed West in hot haste to face a general election. Anderson was returned, and during three or four months at Ottawa, Elizabeth was introduced to Canadian politics, and to the swing and beat of those young interests and developing national hopes which, even after London, and for the Londoner, lend romance and significance to the simpler life of Canada's nascent capital. But through it all both she and Anderson pined for the West, and when Parliament rose in early July, they fled first to their rising farm-buildings on one of the tributaries of the Saskatchewan, and then, till the homestead was ready, and the fall ploughing in sight, they had gone to the Rockies, in order that they might gratify a pa.s.sionate wish of Elizabeth's--to get for once beyond beaten tracks, and surprise the unknown. She pleaded for it as their real honeymoon. It might never be possible again; for the toils of life would soon have snared them.

And so, after a month's wandering beyond all reach of civilisation, they were here in the wild heart of Manitou's wild land, and the red and white of Elizabeth's cheek, the fire in her eyes showed how the G.o.d's spell had worked....

The evening came. Their frugal meal, prepared by one of the Indian half-breeds, and eaten in a merry community among beds of orchids and vetch, was soon done; and the husband and wife pushed off again in the boat--for the densely wooded sh.o.r.es of the lake were impa.s.sable on foot--to watch the moon rise on this mysterious land.

And as they floated there, often hand in hand, talking a little, but dreaming more--Anderson's secret thoughts reviewed the past year, and the incredible fortune which had given him Elizabeth.

Deep in his nature was still the old pessimism, the old sadness. Could he make her happy? In the close contact of marriage he realised all that had gone to the making of her subtle and delicate being--the influences of a culture and tradition of which he was mostly ignorant, though her love was opening many gates to him. He felt himself in many respects her inferior--and there were dark moments when it seemed to him inevitable that she must tire of him. But whenever they overshadowed him, the natural reaction of a vigorous manhood was not far off. Patriotism and pa.s.sion--a profound and simple pride--stood up and wrestled with his doubt. She was not less, but more, than he had imagined her. What was in truth his safeguard and hers, was the fact that, at the very root of her, Elizabeth was a poet! She had seen Canada and Anderson from the beginning in the light of imagination; and that light was not going to fail her now. For it sprang from the truth and glow of her own nature; by the help of it she _made_ her world; and Canada and Anderson moved under it, n.o.bly seen and n.o.bly felt.

This he half shrinkingly understood, and he repaid her with adoration, and a wisely yielding mind. For her sake he was ready to do a hundred things he had never yet thought of, reading, inquiring, observing, in wider circles and over an ampler range. For as the New World, through Anderson, worked on Elizabeth--so Europe, through Elizabeth, worked on Anderson. And thus, from life to life, goes on the great interpenetrating, intermingling flux of things!

It seemed as though the golden light could not die from the lake, though midsummer was long past. And presently up into its midst floated the moon, and as they watched the changing of the light upon the northern snow-peaks, they talked of the vast undiscovered regions beyond, of the valleys and lakes that no survey has ever mapped, and the rivers that from the beginning of time have spread their pageant of beauty for the heavens alone; then, of that sudden stir and uproar of human life--prospectors, navvies, lumbermen--that is now beginning to be heard along that narrow strip where the new line of the Grand Trunk Pacific is soon to pierce the wilderness--yet another link in the girdling of the world. And further yet, their fancy followed, ever northward--solitude beyond solitude, desert beyond desert--till, in the Yukon, it lit upon gold-seeking man, dominating, at last, a terrible and hostile earth, which had starved and tortured and slain him in his thousands, before he could tame her to his will.

And last--by happy reaction--it was the prairies again--their fruitful infinity--and the emigrant rush from East and South.

"When we are old"--said Elizabeth softly, slipping her hand into Anderson's--"will all this courage die out of us? Now--nothing of all this vastness, this mystery frightens me. I feel a kind of insolent, superhuman strength!--as if I--even I--could guide a plough, reap corn, shoot rapids, 'catch a wild goat by the hair--and hurl my lances at the sun!'"

"With this hand?" said Anderson, looking at it with a face of amus.e.m.e.nt. But Elizabeth took no heed--except to slip the other hand after it--both into the same shelter.

She pursued her thought, murmuring the words, the white lids falling over her eyes:

"But when one is feeble and dying, will it all grow awful to me?

Suddenly--shall I long to creep into some old, old corner of England or Italy--and feel round me close walls, and dim small rooms, and dear, stuffy, familiar streets that thousands and thousands of feet have worn before mine?"

Anderson smiled at her. He had guided their boat into a green cove where there was a little strip of open ground between the water and the forest. They made fast the boat, and Anderson found a mossy seat under a tall pine from which the lightning of a recent storm had stripped a great limb, leaving a crimson gash in the trunk. And there Elizabeth nestled to him, and he with his arm about her, and the intoxication of her slender beauty mastering his senses, tried to answer her as a plain man may. The commonplaces of pa.s.sion--its foolish promises--its blind confidence--its trembling joy--there is no other path for love to travel by, and Elizabeth and Anderson trod it like their fellows.

Six months later on a clear winter evening Elizabeth was standing in the sitting-room of a Saskatchewan farmhouse. She looked out upon a dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way--the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running--the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the homestead, and beyond, the long low cowshed, with a group of Shorthorns and Herefords standing beside the open door. Her eyes delighted in the whiteness of the snow, or the touches of orange and scarlet in the clumps of bush, in a note of crimson here and there, among the withered reeds pushing through the snow, or in the thin background of a few taller trees--the "shelter-belt" of the farm--rising brown and sharp against the blue.

Within the farmhouse sitting-room flamed a great wood fire, which shed its glow on the white walls, on the prints and photographs and books which were still Elizabeth's companions in the heart of the prairies, as they had been at Martindale. The room was simplicity itself, yet full of charm, with its blue druggetting, its pale green chairs and hangings. At its further end, a curtain half drawn aside showed another room, a dining-room, also firelit--with a long table spread for tea, a bare floor of polished woodblocks, and a few prints on the walls.

The wagon she had seen on the river approached the homestead. The man who was driving it--a strong-limbed, fair-haired fellow--lifted his cap when he saw Elizabeth at the window. She nodded and smiled at him. He was Edward Tyson, one of the two engine-drivers who had taken her and Philip through the Kicking Horse Pa.s.s. His friend also could be seen standing among the cattle gathered in the farmyard. They had become Anderson's foremen and partners on his farm of twelve hundred acres, of which only some three hundred acres had been as yet brought under plough. The rest was still virgin prairie, pasturing a large mixed herd of cattle and horses. The two North-Countrymen had been managing it all in Anderson's Parliamentary absences, and were quite as determined as he to make it a centre of science and progress for a still remote and sparely peopled district. One of the kinsmen was married, and lived in a small frame house, a stone's throw from the main buildings of the farm.