Lady Merton, Colonist Part 8

"w.i.l.l.y-nilly, your friends must like Canada!" he said, in her ear; "if it makes you so happy."

He had no art of compliment, but the words were simple and sincere, and Elizabeth grew suddenly rosy, to her own great annoyance. Before she could reply, however, the Chief Justice had insisted on bringing her back into the general conversation.

"Come and keep the peace, Lady Merton! Here is my friend Mariette playing the devil's advocate as usual. Anderson tells me you are inclined to think well of us; so perhaps you ought to hear it."

Mariette smiled and bowed a trifle sombrely. He was plain and gaunt, but he had the air of a _grand seigneur_, and was in fact a member of one of the old seigneurial families of Quebec.

"I have been enquiring of Sir Michael, madam, whether he is quite happy in his mind as to these Yankees that are now pouring into the new provinces. He, like everyone else, prophesies great things for Canada; but suppose it is an American Canada?"

"Let them come," said Anderson, with a touch of scorn. "Excellent stuff!

We can absorb them. We are doing it fast."

"Can you? They are pouring all over the new districts as fast as the survey is completed and the railways planned. They bring capital, which your Englishman doesn't. They bring knowledge of the prairie and the climate, which your Englishmen haven't got. As for capital, America is doing everything; financing the railways, the mines, buying up the lands, and leasing the forests. British Columbia is only nominally yours; American capital and business have got their grip firm on the very vitals of the province."

"Perfectly true!"--put in the lumberman from Vancouver--"They have three-fourths of the forests in their hands."

"No matter!" said Anderson, kindling. "There was a moment of danger--twenty years ago. It is gone. Canada will no more be American than she will be Catholic--with apologies to Mariette. These Yankees come in--they turn Englishmen in six months--they celebrate Dominion Day on the first of July, and Independence Day, for old sake's sake, on the fourth; and their children will be as loyal as Toronto."

"Aye, and as dull!" said Mariette fiercely.

The conversation dissolved in protesting laughter. The Chief Justice, Anderson, and the lumberman fell upon another subject. Philip and the pretty English girl were flirting on the platform outside, Mariette dropped into a seat beside Elizabeth.

"You know my friend, Mr. Anderson, madam?"

"I made acquaintance with him on the journey yesterday. He has been most kind to us."

"He is a very remarkable man. When he gets into the House, he will be heard of. He will perhaps make his mark on Canada."

"You and he are old friends?"

"Since our student days. I was of course at the French College--and he at McGill. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home with me in his holidays."

"He told me something of his early life."

"Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec."

"Oh, poor things!" cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.

"My sister is quite happy," said Mariette sharply. "She did her duty.

But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single opinion in the world in common."

Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon--or something like it--breathed again from a Canadian mouth. Anderson meanwhile was standing outside with the Chief Justice. She threw a glance at him now and then, wondering about his love affair. Had he really got over it?--or was that M. Mariette's delusion? She liked, on the contrary, to think of him as constant and broken-hearted!

The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from Winnipeg. Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm--one of the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest becomes a pa.s.sion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.

Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour. He got no speech with Elizabeth, and prize cattle were his abomination. When the half-hour was done, he slipped away, unnoticed, from the party. He had marked a small lake or "slough" at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of cottonwood. He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task. He was in the thirteenth book:

[Greek: os d hot aner dorpoio lilaietai, o te pauemar neion an helketon boe oinope pekton arotron]

"As when a man longeth for supper, for whom, the livelong day, two wine-coloured oxen have dragged the fitted plough through the fallow, and joyful to such an one is the going down of the sun that sends him to his meal, for his knees tremble as he goes--so welcome to Odysseus was the setting of the sun": ...

He lost himself in familiar joy--the joy of the Greek itself, of the images of the Greek life. He walked with the Greek ploughman, he smelt the Greek earth, his thoughts caressed the dark oxen under the yoke.

These for him had savour and delight; the wide Canadian fields had none.

Philip Gaddesden meanwhile could not be induced to leave the car. While the others were going through the splendid stables and cowsheds, kept like a queen's parlour, he and the pretty girl were playing at bob-cherry in the saloon, to the scandal of Yerkes, who, with the honour of the car and the C.P.R. and Canada itself on his shoulders, could not bear that any of his charges should shuffle out of the main item in the official programme.

But Elizabeth, as before, saw everything transfigured; the splendid Shire horses; the famous bull, progenitor of a coming race; the sheds full of glistening cows and mottled calves. These smooth, sleek creatures, housed there for the profit of Canada and her farm life, seemed to Elizabeth no less poetic than the cattle of Helios to Delaine.

She loved the horses, and the patient, sweet-breathed kine; she found even a sympathetic mind for the pigs.

Presently when her host, the owner, left her to explain some of his experiments to the rest of the party, she fell to Anderson alone. And as she strolled at his side, Anderson found the June afternoon pa.s.s with extraordinary rapidity. Yet he was not really as forthcoming or as frank as he had been the day before. The more he liked his companion, the more he was conscious of differences between them which his pride exaggerated. He himself had never crossed the Atlantic; but he understood that she and her people were "swells"--well-born in the English sense, and rich. Secretly he credited them with those defects of English society of which the New World talks--its vulgar standards and prejudices. There was not a sign of them certainly in Lady Merton's conversation. But it is easy to be gracious in a new country; and the brother was sometimes inclined to give himself airs. Anderson drew in his tentacles a little; ready indeed to be wroth with himself that he had talked so much of his own affairs to this little lady the day before. What possible interest could she have taken in them!

All the same, he could not tear himself from her side. Whenever Delaine left his seat by the lake, and strolled round the corner of the wood to reconnoitre, the result was always the same. If Anderson and Lady Merton were in sight at all, near or far, they were together. He returned, disconsolate, to Homer and the reeds.

As they went back to Winnipeg, some chance word revealed to Elizabeth that Anderson also was taking the night train for Calgary.

"Oh! then to-morrow you will come and talk to us!" cried Elizabeth, delighted.

Her cordial look, the pretty gesture of her head, evoked in Anderson a start of pleasure. He was not, however, the only spectator of them.

Arthur Delaine, standing by, thought for the first time in his life that Elizabeth's manner was really a little excessive.

The car left Winnipeg that night for the Rockies. An old man, in a crowded emigrant car, with a bundle under his arm, watched the arrival of the Gaddesden party. He saw Anderson accost them on the platform, and then make his way to his own coach just ahead of them.

The train sped westwards through the Manitoba farms and villages.

Anderson slept intermittently, haunted by various important affairs that were on his mind, and by recollections of the afternoon. Meanwhile, in the front of the train, the paragraph from the _Winnipeg Chronicle_ lay carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.

CHAPTER V

"I say, Elizabeth, you're not going to sit out there all day, and get your death of cold? Why don't you come in and read a novel like a sensible woman?"

"Because I can read a novel at home--and I can't see Canada."

"See Canada! What is there to see?" The youth with the scornful voice came to lean against the doorway beside her. "A patch of corn--miles and miles of some withered stuff that calls itself gra.s.s, all of it as flat as your hand--oh! and, by Jove! a little brown fellow--gopher, is that their silly name?--scootling along the line. Go it, young 'un!" Philip shied the round end of a biscuit tin after the disappearing brown thing.

"A boggy lake with a kind of salt fringe--unhealthy and horrid and beastly--a wretched farm building--et cetera, et cetera!"

"Oh! look there, Philip--here is a school!"

Elizabeth bent forward eagerly. On the bare prairie stood a small white house, like the house that children draw on their slates: a chimney in the middle, a door, a window on either side. Outside, about twenty children playing and dancing. Inside, through the wide-open doorway a vision of desks and a few bending heads.

Philip's patience was put to it. Had she supposed that children went without schools in Canada?

But she took no heed of him.

"Look how lovely the children are, and how happy! What'll Canada be when they are old? And not another sign of habitation anywhere--nothing--but the little house--on the bare wide earth! And there they dance, as though the world belonged to them. So it does!"