The Greater Power Part 32

A faint flicker of colour crept into Laura's cheek. "You know I don't," she replied. "It is the one thing I could have wished for him; indeed, I shall be thankful if he takes a sustaining interest in the scheme, as he seems disposed to do. It will be of benefit to him in many ways. He grows moody and discontented at the ranch."

She broke off for a moment, and her voice had changed when she went on again. "There is one point that troubles me--you provided my father with the money to take his share in the venture."

"No," explained Nasmyth; "I think I can say that I didn't. I have merely set apart for him so many acres of swamp and virgin forest. He will have to earn his t.i.tle to them by a.s.sisting in what we may call the administration, as well as by physical labour."

Laura looked at Nasmyth with quiet eyes. "Would you or Gordon consider it a good bargain to part with a single acre for all the advice he can offer you?" she asked.

Nasmyth sat silent a moment, gravely regarding her. There was a little more colour in her face, but her composure and her fearless honesty appealed to him. She was attired very plainly in a print dress, made, as he knew, by her own fingers. The gown had somehow escaped serious damage in the scramble down the gully. It harmonized with the pale-tinted stone, and it seemed to him that its wearer fitted curiously into her surroundings. He had noticed this often before, and it had occurred to him that she had acquired something of the strength and unchangeableness of the wilderness. Perhaps she had, though it is also possible that the quiet steadfastness had been born in her, and perfected slowly under stress and strain.

"Well," Nasmyth broke out impulsively, "if it had been you to whom we made that block over, I could have abdicated with confidence and have left it all to you."

Laura smiled, and Nasmyth became sensible that his face had grown a deeper red.

"Whatever made you say that?" she asked.

"I don't quite know." Nasmyth's manner was deprecatory. "After all, it's hardly fair to hold a man accountable for everything he may chance to say. Anyway, I think I meant it."

Something in his voice suggested that he was of the same mind still, but Laura glanced at him again.

"Aren't we getting away from the subject?" she queried. "The land you made over to my father must have cost you something. It is a thing I rather shrink from mentioning, but have you any expectation of ever getting the money back?"

Nasmyth did not exactly understand, until a considerable time afterwards, why he was so deeply stirred by what she had said, and he was quite mistaken in fancying that it was merely her courage that touched his heart. In the meanwhile, he was clearly sensible of at least a great pity for her.

"Well," he told her, "we can look at things openly, and not try to persuade ourselves that they're something else. I think that is one of the things that you have taught me. Now, suppose I haven't any expectation of the kind you mention. How does that count? Didn't you take me in when you found me lying in the snow? Isn't it practically certain that I owe my life to you? Admitting all that, is there any reason why you shouldn't permit me to offer you a trifling favour, not for your own sake, but your father's?"

He broke off for a moment with a forceful gesture. "I might, no doubt, have suppressed all this and made some conventional answer, but, you see, one has to be honest with you. Can you persuade yourself that I don't know what you have to bear at the ranch, and how your father's moody discontent must burden you? Isn't it clear that if he takes an interest in this project and forgets to worry about his little troubles, it will make life easier for both of you?"

Laura looked at him curiously. "After all, it is my life. Why should you be so anxious to make it easier?"

The question troubled Nasmyth. It seemed to go beyond the reason he had offered her a moment or two earlier. Indeed, it flashed upon him that the fact that he certainly owed a good deal to her was not in itself quite sufficient to account for the anxiety he felt.

"Well," he answered, "if the grounds I mentioned don't appear to warrant my doing what I did, I can't at the moment think of anything more convincing. It's one consolation that you couldn't upset the little arrangement now, if you wanted to. Your father's going into the thing headlong."

Somewhat to his astonishment the girl appeared embarra.s.sed as she glanced away from him. It was a moment or two before she looked around again.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "I don't want to upset it. He has not been so well and contented for several years. It has lifted him out of his moodiness." Then she leaned a little toward him. "I dare not refuse this favour from you."

Nasmyth was puzzled by a vague something in her manner.

"I certainly can't see why you should want to; but we'll talk of something else," he replied. "As you have noticed, I have set to work, though I expect it will be winter before we make any very great impression."

Laura glanced up the gloomy canon, which was filled with the river's clammy, drifting mist. "Winter," she said, "will be terrible here.

Then you are not going back to the coast or Victoria for some time?"

"Certainly not, if I can help it."

Nasmyth spoke without reflection, but he felt what he said, and it was a moment before he realized that he might have expressed himself less decisively. He saw the smile on Laura's lips.

"So you have heard?" he asked. "There was, of course, no reason why Gordon shouldn't have told you. It was a thing I had meant to do myself, only, as it happened, I haven't seen you. After that last speech of mine, I must explain that I feel there is a certain obligation on me to stay away. Miss Hamilton, as a matter of fact, is not engaged to me. Nothing can be settled until I carry out this project successfully."

Laura Waynefleet's face was very quiet, and he sat silent a moment or two, wondering somewhat uneasily what she was thinking. He was also slightly surprised at himself, for he realized that, after all, he had found it considerably easier to stay away than he had expected.

Indeed, during the last few weeks, when every moment of his time had been occupied, he had thought of nothing except the work before him.

It occurred to him for the first time that it was curious that he had been able to do so.

"You see," he made haste to explain, "in the meanwhile I must endeavour to put everything except this scheme out of my mind."

Again he was troubled by Laura Waynefleet's little smile.

"Yes," she said; "in one way, no doubt, that would be the wisest course. I'm not sure, however, that everybody would have sufficient strength of will."

Nasmyth said nothing further for a while, but--though he was probably not aware of this--his face grew thoughtful as he gazed at the river until his companion spoke again.

"Was it Miss Hamilton's wish that you should make your mark first?"

she inquired.

"No," answered Nasmyth decisively; "I want you to understand that it was mine. She merely concurred in it."

He changed the subject abruptly. "Tell me about yourself."

"There is so little to tell. One day is so much like another with me, only I have been rather busier than usual lately. My father has had to cut down expenses. We have no hired man."

Nasmyth set his lips and half-consciously closed one hand. It seemed to him an almost intolerable thing that this girl should waste her youth and sweetness dragging out a life of unremitting toil in the lone Bush. Still, while her father lived, there was nothing else she could look forward to, and he could imagine how the long colourless years would roll away with her, while she lost her freshness and grew hard and worn with petty cares and labour that needed a stronger arm than hers. She might grow discontented, he fancied, and perhaps a trifle bitter, though he could not imagine her becoming querulous.

As yet there was a great patience in her steady eyes. Then it became evident that she guessed what he was thinking.

"Sometimes I feel the prospect in front of me is not a very attractive one," she responded in answer to his thoughts. "Still, one can get over that by not regarding it as a prospect at all. It simplifies the thing when one takes it day by day."

She smiled at him. "Derrick, you have done wisely. I think you need a sustaining purpose and a woman to work for."

Nasmyth's face paled. "Yes," he agreed dryly; "it is, perhaps, rather a significant admission, but I really think I do."

It was a relief to both of them that Wheeler came floundering along the shingle just then with a box and a coil of wire in his hand.

"I've brought you a little present, Nasmyth," he announced. "Firing by fuse is going to be uncertain when there's so much spray about, and I sent down for this electric fixing. We can charge it for you at any time at the mill. Have you put in any giant-powder yet?"

Nasmyth said they had not fired a heavy charge about the fall, but that there were several holes ready for filling, and Wheeler's eyes twinkled.

"I'm quite anxious to try this little toy," he said. "When I was young, a rancher gave me an old played-out shot-gun, and I was out at sun-up next morning to shoot something. That's the kind of being a man is, Miss Waynefleet. Put any kind of bottled-up power in his hands, and he feels he must get up and make a bang with it. After all, I guess it's fortunate that he does."

"Are all men like that?" Laura asked with a strange undertone in her voice.

"Most of them," said Wheeler, with an air of reflection. "Of course, you do run across one here and there who would put the bottled power carefully away for fear that, when it went off, it might hurt him or somebody. The trouble is that when a man of that kind at last makes up his mind to use it he's quite likely to find that the power has gradually leaked out of the bottle. Power's a very curious thing. If you don't use it, it has a way of evaporating."

Gordon had joined them in the meanwhile, and Laura looked at him.

"You agree with that?" she asked.

Gordon's smile was suggestively grim. "Oh, yes," he said. "I guess our friend now and then says some rather forceful things. Anyway, he has. .h.i.t it with this one. For instance, there was that little matter of the man who was sick at his mill. A surgeon with nerve and hands could have fixed him up. We"--and he made an expressive gesture--"packed him out to Victoria."