"Mr. Delaine, sir?"
The gentleman so addressed turned to see the substantial form of Simpson at his elbow. They were both standing in the spacious hall of the C.P.R. Hotel adjoining the station at Winnipeg.
"Her ladyship, sir, asked me to tell you she would be down directly. And would you please wait for her, and take her to see the place where the emigrants come. She doesn't think Mr. Gaddesden will be down till luncheon-time."
Arthur Delaine thanked the speaker for her information, and then sat down in a comfortable corner,Timesin hand, to wait for Lady Merton.
She and her brother had arrived, he understood, in the early hours at Winnipeg, after the agitations and perils of the sink-hole. Philip had gone at once to bed and to slumber. Lady Merton would soon, it seemed, be ready for anything that Winnipeg might have to show her.
The new-comer had time, however, to realise and enjoy a pleasant expectancy before she appeared. He was apparently occupied with theTimes, but in reality he was very conscious all the time of his own affairs and of a certain crisis to which, in his own belief, he had now brought them. In the first place, he could not get over his astonishment at finding himself where he was. The very aspect of the Winnipeg hotel, as he looked curiously round it, seemed to prove to him both the seriousness of certain plans and intentions of his own, and the unusual decision with which he had been pursuing them.
For undoubtedly, of his own accord, and for mere travellers' reasons, he would not at this moment be travelling in Canada. The old world was enough for him; and neither in the States nor in Canada had he so far seen anything which would of itself have drawn him away from his Cumberland house, his classical library, his pets, his friends and correspondents, his old servants and all the other items in a comely and dignified way of life.
He was just forty and unmarried, a man of old family, easy disposition, and classical tastes. He had been for a time Member of Parliament for one of the old Universities, and he was now engaged on a verse translation of certain books of the Odyssey. That this particular labour had been undertaken before did not trouble him. It was in fact his delight to feel himself a link in the chain of tradition--at once the successor and progenitor of scholars. Not that his scholarship was anything illustrious or profound. Neither as poet nor Hellenist would he ever leave any great mark behind him; but where other men talk of "the household of faith," he might have talked rather of "the household of letters," and would have seen himself as a warm and familiar sitter by its hearth. A new edition of some favourite classic; his weeklyAthenæum; occasional correspondence with a French or Italian scholar--(he did not read German, and disliked the race)--these were his pleasures. For the rest he was the landlord of a considerable estate, as much of a sportsman as his position required, and his Conservative politics did not include any sympathy for the more revolutionary doctrines--economic or social--which seemed to him to be corrupting his party. In his youth, before the death of an elder brother, he had been trained as a doctor, and had spent some time in a London hospital. In no case would he ever have practised. Before his training was over he had revolted against the profession, and against the "ugliness," as it seemed to him, of the matters and topics with which a doctor must perforce be connected. His elder brother's death, which, however, he sincerely regretted, had in truth solved many difficulties.
In person he was moderately tall, with dark grizzled hair, agreeable features and a moustache. Among his aristocratic relations whom he met in London, the men thought him a little dishevelled and old-fashioned; the women pronounced him interesting and "a dear." His manners were generally admired, except by captious persons who held that such a fact was of itself enough to condemn them; and he was welcome in many English and some foreign circles. For he travelled every spring, and was well acquainted with the famous places of Europe. It need only be added that he had a somewhat severe taste in music, and could render both Bach and Handel on the piano with success.
His property was only some six miles distant from Martindale Park, the Gaddesdens' home. During the preceding winter he had become a frequent visitor at Martindale, while Elizabeth Merton was staying with her mother and brother, and a little ripple of talk had begun to flow through the district. Delaine, very fastidious where personal dignity was concerned, could not make up his mind either to be watched or laughed at. He would have liked to woo--always supposing that wooing there was to be--with a maximum of dignity and privacy, surrounded by a friendly but not a forcing atmosphere. But Elizabeth Merton was a great favourite in her own neighbourhood, and people became impatient. Was it to be a marriage or was it not?
As soon as he felt this enquiry in the air, Mr. Delaine went abroad--abruptly--about a month before Elizabeth and her brother started for Canada. It was said that he had gone to Italy; but some few persons knew that it was his intention to start from Genoa for the United States, in order that he might attend a celebration at Harvard University in honour of a famous French Hellenist, who had covered himself with glory in Delaine's eyes by identifying a number of real sites with places mentioned in the Odyssey. Nobody, however, knew but himself, that, when that was done, he meant to join the brother and sister on part of their Canadian journey, and that he hoped thereby to become better acquainted with Elizabeth Merton than was possible--for a man at least of his sensitiveness--under the eyes of an inquisitive neighbourhood.
For this step Lady Merton's consent was of course necessary. He had accordingly written from Boston to ask if it would be agreeable to them that he should go with them through the Rockies. The proposal was most natural. The Delaines and Gaddesdens had been friends for many years, and Arthur Delaine enjoyed a special fame as a travelling companion--easy, accomplished and well-informed.
Nevertheless, he waited at Boston in some anxiety for Elizabeth's answer. When it came, it was all cordiality. By all means let him go with them to the Rockies. They could not unfortunately offer him sleeping room in the car. But by day Lady Merton hoped he would be their guest, and share all their facilities and splendours. "I shall be so glad of a companion for Philip, who is rapidly getting strong enough to give me a great deal of trouble."
That was how she put it--how she must put it, of course. He perfectly understood her.
And now here he was, sitting in the C.P.R. Hotel at Winnipeg, at a time of year when he was generally in Paris or Rome, investigating the latest Greek acquisitions of the Louvre, or the last excavation in the Forum; picnicking in the Campagna; making expeditions to Assisi or Subiaco; and in the evenings frequenting the drawing-rooms of ministers and ambassadors.
He looked up presently from theTimes, and at the street outside; the new and raw street, with its large commercial buildings of the American type, its tramcars and crowded sidewalks. The muddy roadway, the gaps and irregularities in the street façade, the windows of a great store opposite, displeased his eye. The whole scene seemed to him to have no atmosphere. As far as he was concerned, it said nothing, it touched nothing.
What was it he was to be taken to see? Emigration offices? He resigned himself, with a smile. The prospect made him all the more pleasantly conscious that one feeling, and one feeling only, could possibly have brought him here.
"Ah! there you are."
A light figure hurried toward him, and he rose in haste.
But Lady Merton was intercepted midway by a tall man, quite unknown to Delaine.
"I have arranged everything for three o'clock," said the interloper. "You are sure that will suit you?"
"Perfectly! And the guests?"
"Half a dozen, about, are coming." George Anderson ran through the list, and Elizabeth laughed merrily, while extending her hand to Delaine.
"How amusing! A party--and I don't know a soul in Winnipeg. Arrived this morning--and going this evening! So glad to see you, Mr. Arthur. You are coming, of course?"
"Where?" said Delaine, bewildered.
"To my tea, this afternoon. Mr. Anderson--Mr. Delaine. Mr. Anderson has most kindly arranged a perfectly delightful party!--in our car this afternoon. We are to go and see a great farm belonging to some friend of his, about twenty miles out--prize cattle and horses--that kind of thing. Isn't it good of him?"
"Charming!" murmured Delaine. "Charming!" His gaze ran over the figure of the Canadian.
"Yerkes of course will give us tea," said Elizabeth. "His cakes are a strong point"; she turned to Anderson. "And we may really have an engine?"
"Certainly. We shall run you out in forty minutes. You still wish to go on to-night?"
"Philip does. Can we?"
"You can do anything you wish," said Anderson, smiling.
Elizabeth thanked him, and they chatted a little more about the arrangements and guests for the afternoon, while Delaine listened. Who on earth was this new acquaintance of Lady Merton's? Some person she had met in the train apparently, and connected with the C.P.R. A good-looking fellow, a little too sure of himself; but that of course was the Colonial fault.
"One of the persons coming this afternoon is an old Montreal fellow-student of mine," the Canadian was saying. "He is going to be a great man some day. But if you get him to talk, you won't like his opinions--I thought I'd better warn you."
"How very interesting!" put in Delaine, with perhaps excessive politeness. "What sort of opinions? Do you grow any Socialists here?"
Anderson examined the speaker, as it were for the first time.
"The man I was speaking of is a French-Canadian," he said, rather shortly, "and a Catholic."
"The very man I want to see," cried Elizabeth. "I suppose he hates us?"
"Who?--England? Not at all. He loves England--or says he does--and hates the Empire."
"'Love me, love my Empire!'" said Elizabeth. "But, I see--I am not to talk to him about the Boer War, or contributing to the Navy?"
"Better not," laughed Anderson. "I am sure he will want to behave himself; but he sometimes loses his head."
Elizabeth sincerely hoped he might lose it at her party.
"We want as much Canada as possible, don't we?" She appealed to Delaine.
"To see, in fact, the 'young barbarians--all at play!'" said Anderson. The note of sarcasm had returned to his clear voice. He stood, one hand on his hip, looking down on Lady Merton.
"Oh!" exclaimed Elizabeth, protesting; while Delaine was conscious of surprise that anyone in the New World should quote anything.
Anderson hastily resumed: "No, no. I know you are most kind, in wishing to see everything you can."
"Why else should one come to the Colonies?" put in Delaine. Again his smile, as he spoke, was a little overdone.
"Oh, we mustn't talk of Colonies," cried Elizabeth, looking at Anderson; "Canada, Mr. Arthur, doesn't like to be called a colony."
"What is she, then?" asked Delaine, with an amused shrug of the shoulders.
"She is a nation!" said the Canadian, abruptly. Then, turning to Lady Merton, he rapidly went through some other business arrangements with her.
"Three o'clock then for the car. For this morning you are provided?" He glanced at Delaine.
Lady Merton replied that Mr. Delaine would take her round; and Anderson bowed and departed.
"Who is he, and how did you come across him?" asked Delaine, as they stepped into the street.
Elizabeth explained, dwelling with enthusiasm on the kindness and ability with which the young man, since their acquaintance began, had made himself their courier. "Philip, you know, is no use at all. But Mr. Anderson seems to know everybody--gets everything done. Instead of sending my letters round this morning he telephoned to everybody for me. And everybody is coming. Isn't it too kind? You know it is for Papa's sake"--she explained eagerly--"because Canada thinks she owes him something."
Delaine suggested that perhaps life in Winnipeg was monotonous, and its inhabitants might be glad of distractions. He also begged--with a slight touch of acerbity--that now that he had joined them he too might be made use of.
"Ah! but you don't know the country," said Lady Merton gently. "Don't you feel that we must get the natives to guide us--to put us in the way? It is only they who can really feel the poetry of it all."
Her face kindled. Arthur Delaine, who thought that her remark was one of the foolish exaggerations of nice women, was none the less conscious as she made it, that her appearance was charming--all indeed that a man could desire in a wife. Her simple dress of white linen, her black hat, her lovely eyes, and little pointed chin, the bunch of white trilliums at her belt, which a child in the emigrant car had gathered and given her the day before--all her personal possessions and accessories seemed to him perfection. Yes!--but he meant to go slowly, for both their sakes. It seemed fitting and right, however, at this point that he should express his great pleasure and gratitude in being allowed to join them. Elizabeth replied simply, without any embarrassment that could be seen. Yet secretly both were conscious that something was on its trial, and that more was in front of them than a mere journey through the Rockies. He was an old friend both of herself and her family. She believed him to be honourable, upright, affectionate. He was of the same world and tradition as herself, well endowed, a scholar and a gentleman. He would make a good brother for Philip. And heretofore she had seen him on ground which had shown him to advantage; either at home or abroad, during a winter at Rome--a spring at Florence.
Indeed, as they strolled about Winnipeg, he talked to her incessantly about persons and incidents connected with the spring of the year before, when they had both been in Rome.
"You remember that delicious day at Castel Gandolfo?--on the terrace of the Villa Barberini? And the expedition to Horace's farm? You recollect the little girl there--the daughter of the Dutch Minister? She's married an American--a very good fellow. They've bought an old villa on Monte Mario."
And so on, and so on. The dear Italian names rolled out, and the speaker grew more and more animated and agreeable.
Only, unfortunately, Elizabeth's attention failed him. A motor car had been lent them in the hospitable Canadian way; and as they sped through and about the city, up the business streets, round the park, and the residential suburb rising along the Assiniboine, as they plunged through seas of black mud to look at the little old-fashioned Cathedral of St. John, with its graveyard recalling the earliest days of the settlement, Lady Merton gradually ceased even to pretend to listen to her companion.
"They have found some extremely jolly things lately at Porto D'Anzio--a fine torso--quite Greek."
"Have they?" said Elizabeth, absently--"Have they?--And to think that in 1870, just a year or two before my father and mother married, there was nothing here but an outpost in the wilderness!--a few scores of people! One justhearsthis country grow." She turned pensively away from the tombstone of an old Scottish settler in the shady graveyard of St. John.
"Ah! but what will it grow to?" said Delaine, drily. "Is Winnipeg going to be interesting?--is it going tomatter?"
"Come and look at the Emigration Offices," laughed Elizabeth for answer.
And he found himself dragged through room after room of the great building, and standing by while Elizabeth, guided by an official who seemed to hide a more than Franciscan brotherliness under the aspects of a canny Scot, and helped by an interpreter, made her way into the groups of home-seekers crowding round the clerks and counters of the lower room--English, Americans, Swedes, Dutchmen, Galicians, French Canadians. Some men, indeed, who were actually hanging over maps, listening to the directions and information of the officials, were far too busy to talk to tourists, but there were others who had finished their business, or were still waiting their turn, and among them, as also among the women, the little English lady found many willing to talk to her.
And what courage, what vivacity she threw into the business! Delaine, who had seen her till now as a person whose natural reserve was rather displayed than concealed by her light agreeable manner, who had often indeed had cause to wonder where and what might be the real woman, followed her from group to group in a silent astonishment. Between these people--belonging to the primitive earth-life--and herself, there seemed to be some sudden intuitive sympathy which bewildered him; whether she talked to some Yankee farmer from the Dakotas, long-limbed, lantern-jawed, all the moisture dried out of him by hot summers, hard winters, and long toil, who had come over the border with a pocket full of money, the proceeds of prairie-farming in a republic, to sink it all joyfully in a new venture under another flag; or to some broad-shouldered English youth from her own north country; or to some hunted Russian from the Steppes, in whose eyes had begun to dawn the first lights of liberty; or to the dark-faced Italians and Frenchmen, to whom she chattered in their own tongues.
An Indian reserve of good land had just been thrown open to settlers. The room was thronged. But Elizabeth was afraid of no one; and no one repulsed her. The high official who took them through, lingered over the process, busy as the morning was, all for thebeaux yeuxof Elizabeth; and they left him pondering by what legerdemain he could possibly so manipulate his engagements that afternoon as to join Lady Merton's tea-party.
"Well, that was quite interesting!" said Delaine as they emerged.
Elizabeth, however, would certainly have detected the perfunctoriness of the tone, and the hypocrisy of the speech, had she had any thoughts to spare.
But her face showed her absorbed.
"Isn't itamazing!" Her tone was quiet, her eyes on the ground.
"Yet, after all, the world has seen a good many emigrations in its day!" remarked Delaine, not without irritation.
She lifted her eyes.
"Ah--but nothing like this! One hears of how the young nations came down and peopled the Roman Empire. But that lasted so long. One person--with one life--could only see a bit of it. And here one sees itall--all, at once!--as a great march--the march of a new people to its home. Fifty years ago, wolves and bears, and buffaloes--twelve years ago even, the great movement had not begun--and now, every week, a new town!--the new nation spreading, spreading over the open land, irresistibly, silently; no one setting bounds to it, no one knowing what will come of it!"
She checked herself. Her voice had been subdued, but there was a tremor in it. Delaine caught her up, rather helplessly.
"Ah! isn't that the point? What will come of it? Numbers and size aren't everything. Where is it all tending?"
She looked up at him, still exalted, still flushed, and said softly, as though she could not help it, "'On to the bound of the waste--on to the City of God!'"
He gazed at her in discomfort. Here was an Elizabeth Merton he had yet to know. No trace of her in the ordinary life of an English country house!
"YouareCanadian!" he said with a smile.
"No, no!" said Elizabeth eagerly, recovering herself, "I am only a spectator.Wesee the drama--we feel it--much more than they can who are in it. At least"--she wavered--"Well!--I have met one man who seems to feel it!"
"Your Canadian friend?"
Elizabeth nodded.
"He sees the vision--he dreams the dream!" she said brightly. "So few do. But I think he does. Oh, dear--dear!--how time flies! I must go and see what Philip is after."
Delaine was left discontented. He had come to press his suit, and he found a lady preoccupied. Canada, it seemed, was to be his rival! Would he ever be allowed to get in a word edgewise?
Was there ever anything so absurd, so disconcerting? He looked forward gloomily to a dull afternoon, in quest of fat cattle, with a car-full of unknown Canadians.
At three o'clock, in the wide Winnipeg station, there gathered on the platform beside Lady Merton's car a merry and motley group of people. A Chief Justice from Alberta, one of the Senators for Manitoba, a rich lumberman from British Columbia, a Toronto manufacturer--owner of the model farm which the party was to inspect, two or three ladies, among them a little English girl with fine eyes, whom Philip Gaddesden at once marked for approval; and a tall, dark-complexioned man with hollow cheeks, large ears, and a long chin, who was introduced, with particular emphasis, to Elizabeth by Anderson, as "Mr. Félix Mariette"--Member of Parliament, apparently, for some constituency in the Province of Quebec.
The small crowd of persons collected, all eminent in the Canadian world, and some beyond it, examined their hostess of the afternoon with a kindly amusement. Elizabeth had sent round letters; Anderson, who was well known, it appeared, in Winnipeg, had done a good deal of telephoning. And by the letters and the telephoning this group of busy people had allowed itself to be gathered; simply because Elizabeth was her father's daughter, and it was worth while to put such people in the right way, and to send them home with some rational notions of the country they had come to see.
And she, who at home never went out of her way to make a new acquaintance, was here the centre of the situation, grasping the identities of all these strangers with wonderful quickness, flitting about from one to another, making friends with them all, and constraining Philip to do the same. Anderson followed her closely, evidently feeling a responsibility for the party only second to her own.
He found time, however, to whisper to Mariette, as they were all about to mount the car:
"Eh bien?"
"Mais oui--très gracieuse!" said the other, but without a smile, and with a shrug of the shoulders.Hewas only there to please Anderson. What did the aristocratic Englishwoman on tour--with all her little Jingoisms and Imperialisms about her--matter to him, or he to her?
While the stream of guests was slowly making its way into the car, while Yerkes at the further end, resplendent in a buttonhole and a white cap and apron, was watching the scene, and the special engine, like an impatient horse, was puffing and hissing to be off, a man, who had entered the cloak-room of the station to deposit a bundle just as the car-party arrived, approached the cloak-room door from the inside, and looked through the glazed upper half. His stealthy movements and his strange appearance passed unnoticed. There was a noisy emigrant party in the cloak-room, taking out luggage deposited the night before; they were absorbed in their own affairs, and in some wrangle with the officials which involved a good deal of lost temper on both sides.
The man was old and grey. His face, large-featured and originally comely in outline, wore the unmistakable look of the outcast. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth trembled, so did his limbs as he stood peering by the door. His clothes were squalid, and both they and his person diffused the odours of the drinking bar from which he had just come. The porter in charge of the cloak-room had run a hostile eye over him as he deposited his bundle. But now no one observed him; while he, gathered up and concentrated, like some old wolf upon a trail, followed every movement of the party entering the Gaddesden car.
George Anderson and his French Canadian friend left the platform last. As Anderson reached the door of the car he turned back to speak to Mariette, and his face and figure were clearly visible to the watcher behind the barred cloak-room door. A gleam of savage excitement passed over the old man's face; his limbs trembled more violently.
Through the side windows of the car the party could be seen distributing themselves over the comfortable seats, laughing and talking in groups. In the dining-room, the white tablecloth spread for tea, with the china and silver upon it, made a pleasant show. And now two high officials of the railway came hurrying up, one to shake hands with Lady Merton and see that all was right, the other to accompany the party.
Elizabeth Merton came out in her white dress, and leant over the railing, talking, with smiles, to the official left behind. He raised his hat, the car moved slowly off, and in the group immediately behind Lady Merton the handsome face and thick fair hair of George Anderson showed conspicuous as long as the special train remained in sight.
The old man raised himself and noiselessly went out upon the platform. Outside the station he fell in with a younger man, who had been apparently waiting for him; a strong, picturesque fellow, with the skin and countenance of a half-breed.
"Well?" said the younger, impatiently. "Thought you was goin' to take a bunk there."
"Couldn't get out before. It's all right."
"Don't care if it is," said the other sulkily. "Don't care a damn button not for you nor anythin' you're after! But you give me my two dollars sharp, and don't keep me another half-hour waitin'. That's what I reckoned for, an' I'm goin' to have it." He held out his hand.
The old man fumbled slowly in an inner pocket of his filthy overcoat.
"You say the car's going on to-night?"
"It is, old bloke, and Mr. George Anderson same train--number ninety-seven--as ever is. Car shunted at Calgary to-morrow night. So none of your nonsense--fork out! I had a lot o' trouble gettin' you the tip."
The old man put some silver into his palm with shaking fingers. The youth, who was a bartender from a small saloon in the neighbourhood of the station, looked at him with contempt.
"Wonder when you was sober last? Think you'd better clean yourself a bit, or they'll not let you on the train."
"Who told you I wanted to go on the train?" said the old man sharply. "I'm staying at Winnipeg."
"Oh! you are, are you?" said the other mockingly. "We shouldn't cry our eyes out if youwassayin' good-bye. Ta-ta!" And with the dollars in his hand, head downwards, he went off like the wind.
The old man waited till the lad was out of sight, then went back into the station and bought an emigrant ticket to Calgary for the night train. He emerged again, and walked up the main street of Winnipeg, which on this bright afternoon was crowded with people and traffic. He passed the door of a solicitor's office, where a small sum of money, the proceeds of a legacy, had been paid him the day before, and he finally made his way into the free library of Winnipeg, and took down a file of theWinnipeg Chronicle.
He turned some pages laboriously, yet not vaguely. His eyes were dim and his hands palsied, but he knew what he was looking for. He found it at last, and sat pondering it--the paragraph which, when he had hit upon it by chance in the same place twenty-four hours earlier, had changed the whole current of his thoughts.
"Donaldminster, Sask., May 6th.--We are delighted to hear from this prosperous and go-ahead town that, with regard to the vacant seat the Liberals of the city have secured as a candidate Mr. George Anderson, who achieved such an important success last year for the C.P.R. by his settlement on their behalf of the dangerous strike which had arisen in the Rocky Mountains section of the line, and which threatened not only to affect all the construction camps in the district but to spread to the railway workers proper and to the whole Winnipeg section. Mr. Anderson seems to have a remarkable hold on the railway men, and he is besides a speaker of great force. He is said to have addressed twenty-three meetings, and to have scarcely eaten or slept for a fortnight. He was shrewd and fair in negotiation, as well as eloquent in speech. The result was an amicable settlement, satisfactory to all parties. And the farmers of the West owe Mr. Anderson a good deal. So does the C.P.R. For if the strike had broken out last October, just as the movement of the fall crops eastward was at its height, the farmers and the railway, and Canada in general would have been at its mercy. We wish Mr. Anderson a prosperous election (it is said, indeed, that he is not to be opposed) and every success in his political career. He is, we believe, Canadian born--sprung from a farm in Manitoba--so that he has grown up with the Northwest, and shares all its hopes and ambitions."
The old man, with both elbows on the table, crouched over the newspaper, incoherent pictures of the past coursing through his mind, which was still dazed and stupid from the drink of the night before.
Meanwhile, the special train sped along the noble Red River and out into the country. All over the prairie the wheat was up in a smooth green carpet, broken here and there by the fields of timothy and clover, or the patches of summer fallow, or the white homestead buildings. The June sun shone down upon the teeming earth, and a mirage, born of sun and moisture, spread along the edge of the horizon, so that Elizabeth, the lake-lover, could only imagine in her bewilderment that Lake Winnipeg or Lake Manitoba had come dancing south and east to meet her, so clearly did the houses and trees, far away behind them, and on either side, seem to be standing at the edge of blue water, in which the white clouds overhead were mirrored, and reed-beds stretched along the shore. But as the train receded, the mirage followed them; the dream-water lapped up the trees and the fields, and even the line they had just passed over seemed to be standing in water.
How foreign to an English eye was the flat, hedgeless landscape! with its vast satin-smooth fields of bluish-green wheat; its farmhouses with their ploughed fireguards and shelter-belts of young trees; its rare villages, each stretching in one long straggling line of wooden houses along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the duck rose as the train passed! Was it this mere foreignness, this likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else--some perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself, mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of the scene?
Yet she scarcely spoke to Arthur Delaine, with whom one might have supposed this hidden feeling connected. She was indeed aware of him all the time. She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the characteristic modern way. But outwardly she was absorbed in talking with the guests.
The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the Northwest grow from babyhood. He had passed his seventieth year, but Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a passionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.
"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy."
"Well, and what then?" said a harsh voice in a French accent, interrupting the Chief Justice.
Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened, as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely."
"The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.
"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field of wheat they were passing--a field two miles long, flat and green and bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain. His soul rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes. All very well for those who must live in it and make it. "Yet is there better than it!"--lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them by the mere life of immemorial generations.
He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.
"Their shroud?" she said, to tease him. "But Canada has on her wedding garment!"
Again he asked himself what had come to her. She looked years younger than when he had parted from her in England. The delicious thought shot through him that his advent might have something to do with it.
He stooped towards her.
"Willy-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 agrand 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 passionate 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 passion; 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: ôs d hot anêr dorpoio lilaietai, ô te pauêmar neion an helkêton boe oinope pêkton 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 pass 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 theWinnipeg Chroniclelay carefully folded in an old tramp's waistcoat pocket.
"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 grass, 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!"
"And my sister to a lunatic asylum!" said Philip, exasperated. "I say, why doesn't that man Anderson come and see us?"
"He promised to come in and lunch."
"He's an awfully decent kind of fellow," said the boy warmly.
Elizabeth opened her eyes.
"I didn't know you had taken any notice of him, Philip."
"No more I did," was the candid reply. "But did you see what he brought me this morning?" He pointed to the seat behind him, littered with novels, which Elizabeth recognized as new additions to their travelling store. "He begged or borrowed them somewhere from his friends or people in the hotel; told me frankly he knew I should be bored to-day, and might want them. Rather 'cute of him, wasn't it?"
Elizabeth was touched. Philip had certainly shown rather scant civility to Mr. Anderson, and this trait of thoughtfulness for a sickly and capricious traveller appealed to her.
"I suppose Delaine will be here directly?" Philip went on.
"I suppose so."
Philip let himself down into the seat beside her.
"Look here, Elizabeth," lowering his voice; "I don't think Delaine is any more excited about Canada than I am. He told me last night he thought the country about Winnipeg perfectly hideous."
"Oh!" cried Elizabeth, as though someone had flipped her.
"You'll have to pay him for this journey, Elizabeth. Why did you ask him to come?"
"Ididn'task him, Philip. He asked himself."
"Ah! but you let him come," said the youth shrewdly. "I think, Elizabeth, you're not behaving quite nicely."
"How am I not behaving nicely?"
"Well, you don't pay any attention to him. Do you know what he was doing while you were looking at the cows yesterday?"
Elizabeth reluctantly confessed that she had no idea.
"Well, he was sitting by a lake--a kind of swamp--at the back of the house, reading a book." Philip went off into a fit of laughter.
"Poor Mr. Delaine!" cried Elizabeth, though she too laughed. "It was probably Greek," she added pensively.
"Well, that's funnier still. You know, Elizabeth, he could read Greek at home. It's because you were neglecting him."
"Don't rub it in, Philip," said Elizabeth, flushing. Then she moved up to him and laid a coaxing hand on his arm. "Do you know that I have been awake half the night?"
"All along of Delaine? Shall I tell him?"
"Philip, I just want you to be a dear, and hold your tongue," said Lady Merton entreatingly. "When there's anything to tell, I'll tell you. And if I have--"
"Have what?"
"Behaved like a fool, you'll have to stand by me." An expression of pain passed over her face.
"Oh, I'll stand by you. I don't know that I want Mr. Arthur for an extra bear-leader, if that's what you mean. You and mother are quite enough. Hullo! Here he is."
A little later Delaine and Elizabeth were sitting side by side on the garden chairs, four of which could just be fitted into the little railed platform at the rear of the car. Elizabeth was making herself agreeable, and doing it, for a time, with energy. Nothing also could have been more energetic than Delaine's attempts to meet her. He had been studying Baedeker, and he made intelligent travellers' remarks on the subject of Southern Saskatchewan. He discussed the American "trek" into the province from the adjoining States. He understood the new public buildings of Regina were to be really fine, only to be surpassed by those at Edmonton. He admired the effects of light and shadow on the wide expanse; and noticed the peculiarities of the alkaline lakes.
Meanwhile, as he became more expansive, Elizabeth contracted. One would have thought soon that Canada had ceased to interest her at all. She led him slyly on to other topics, and presently the real Arthur Delaine emerged. Had she heard of the most recent Etruscan excavations at Grosseto? Wonderful! A whole host of new clues! Boni--Lanciani--the whole learned world in commotion. A fragment of what might very possibly turn out to be a bi-lingual inscription was the last find. Were we at last on the brink of solving the old, the eternal enigma?
He threw himself back in his chair, transformed once more into the talkative, agreeable person that Europe knew. His black and grizzled hair, falling perpetually forward in strong waves, made a fine frame for his grey eyes and large, well-cut features. He had a slight stammer, which increased when he was animated, and a trick of forever pushing back the troublesome front locks of hair.
Elizabeth listened for a long, long time, and at last--could have cried like a baby because she was missing so much! There was a chance, she knew, all along this portion of the line, of seeing antelope and coyotes, if only one kept one's eyes open; not to speak of the gophers--enchanting little fellows, quite new to such travellers as she--who seemed to choose the very railway line itself, by preference, for their burrowings and their social gatherings. Then, as she saw, the wheat country was nearly done; a great change was in progress; her curiosity sprang to meet it. Droves of horses and cattle began to appear at rare intervals on the vast expanse. No white, tree-sheltered farms here, like the farms in Manitoba; but scattered at long distances, near the railway or on the horizon, the first primitive dwellings of the new settlers--the rude "shack" of the first year--beginnings of villages--sketches of towns.
"I have always thought the Etruscan problem the most fascinating in the whole world," cried Delaine, with pleasant enthusiasm. "When you consider all its bearings, linguistic and historical--"
"Oh!doyou see," exclaimed Elizabeth, pointing--"doyou see all those lines and posts, far out to the horizon? Do you know that all these lonely farms are connected with each other and the railway bytelephones? Mr. Anderson told me so; that some farmers actually make their fences into telephone lines, and that from that little hut over there you can speak to Montreal when you please? And just before I left London I was staying in a big country house, thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner, and you couldn't telephone to London except by driving five miles to the nearest town!"
"I wonder why that should strike you so much--the telephones, I mean?"
Delaine's tone was stiff. He had thrown himself back in his chair with folded arms, and a slight look of patience. "After all, you know, it may only be one dull person telephoning to another dull person--on subjects that don't matter!"
Elizabeth laughed and coloured.
"Oh! it isn't telephones in themselves. It's--" She hesitated, and began again, trying to express herself. "When one thinks of all the haphazard of history--how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up, through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a nation made consciously!--before your eyes--by science and intelligence--everything thought of, everything foreseen! First of all, this wonderful railway, driven across these deserts, against opposition, against unbelief, by a handful of men, who risked everything, and have--perhaps--changed the face of the world!"
She stopped smiling. In truth, her new capacity for dithyramb was no less surprising to herself than to Delaine.
"I return to my point"--he made it not without tartness--"will the new men be adequate to the new state?"
"Won't they?" He fancied a certain pride in her bearing. "They explained to me the other day at Winnipeg what the Government do for the emigrants--how they guide and help them--take care of them in sickness and in trouble, through the first years--protect them, really, even from themselves. And one thinks how Governments have taxed, and tortured, and robbed, and fleeced--Oh, surely, surely, the world improves!" She clasped her hands tightly on her knee, as though trying by the physical action to restrain the feeling within. "And to see here the actual foundations of a great state laid under your eyes, deep and strong, by men who know what it is they are doing--to see history begun on a blank page, by men who know what they are writing--isn't it wonderful,wonderful!"
"Dear lady!" said Delaine, smiling, "America has been dealing with emigrants for generations; and there are people who say that corruption is rife in Canada."
But Elizabeth would not be quenched.
"We come after America--we climb on her great shoulders to see the way. But is there anything in America to equal the suddenness of this? Twelve years ago even--in all this Northwest--practically nothing. And then God said: 'Let there be a nation!'--and there was a nation--in a night and a morning." She waved her hand towards the great expanse of prairie. "And as for corruption--"
"Well?" He waited maliciously.
"There is no great brew without a scum," she said laughing. "But find me a brew anywhere in the world, of such power, with so little."
"Mr. Anderson would, I think, be pleased with you," said Delaine, drily.
Elizabeth frowned a little.
"Do you think I learnt it from him? I assure you he never rhapsodises."
"No; but he gives you the material for rhapsodies."
"And why not?" said Elizabeth indignantly. "If he didn't love the country and believe in it he wouldn't be going into its public life. You can feel that he is Canadian through and through."
"A farmer's son, I think, from Manitoba?"
"Yes." Elizabeth's tone was a little defensive.
"Will you not sometimes--if you watch his career--regret that, with his ability, he has not the environment--and the audience--of the Old World?"
"No, never! He will be one of the shapers of the new."
Delaine looked at her with a certain passion.
"All very well, butyoudon't belong to it. We can't spare you from the old."
"Oh, as for me, I'm full of vicious and corrupt habits!" put in Elizabeth hurriedly. "I am not nearly good enough for the new!"
"Thank goodness for that!" said Delaine fervently, and, bending forward, he tried to see her face. But Elizabeth did not allow it. She could not help flushing; but as she bent over the side of the platform looking ahead, she announced in her gayest voice that there was a town to be seen, and it was probably Regina.
The station at Regina, when they steamed into it, was crowded with folk, and gay with flags. Anderson, after a conversation with the station-master, came to the car to say that the Governor-General, Lord Wrekin, who had been addressing a meeting at Regina, was expected immediately, to take the East-bound train; which was indeed already lying, with its steam up, on the further side of the station, the Viceregal car in its rear.
"But there are complications. Look there!"
He pointed to a procession coming along the platform. Six men bore a coffin covered with white flowers. Behind it came persons in black, a group of men, and one woman; then others, mostly young men, also in mourning, and bare-headed.
As the procession passed the car, Anderson and Delaine uncovered.
Elizabeth turned a questioning look on Anderson.
"A young man from Ontario," he explained, "quite a lad. He had come here out West to a farm--to work his way--a good, harmless little fellow--the son of a widow. A week ago a vicious horse kicked him in the stable. He died yesterday morning. They are taking him back to Ontario to be buried. The friends of his chapel subscribed to do it, and they brought his mother here to nurse him. She arrived just in time. That is she."
He pointed to the bowed figure, hidden in a long crape veil. Elizabeth's eyes filled.
"But it comes awkwardly," Anderson went on, looking back along the platform--"for the Governor-General is expected this very moment. The funeral ought to have been here half an hour ago. They seem to have been delayed. Ah! here he is!"
"Elizabeth!--his Excellency!" cried Philip, emerging from the car.
"Hush!" Elizabeth put her finger to her lip. The young man looked at the funeral procession in astonishment, which was just reaching the side of the empty van on the East-bound train which was waiting, with wide-open doors, to receive the body. The bearers let down the coffin gently to the ground, and stood waiting in hesitation. But there were no railway employés to help them. A flurried station-master and his staff were receiving the official party. Suddenly someone started the revival hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River?" It was taken up vigorously by the thirty or forty young men who had followed the coffin, and their voices, rising and falling in a familiar lilting melody, filled the station:
/P Yes, we'll gather at the river, The beautiful, beautiful river-- Gather with the saints at the river, That flows by the throne of God! P/
Elizabeth looked towards the entrance of the station. A tall and slender man had just stepped on to the platform. It was the Governor-General, with a small staff behind him. The staff and the station officials stood hat in hand. A few English tourists from the West-bound train hurried up; the men uncovered, the ladies curtsied. A group of settlers' wives newly arrived from Minnesota, who were standing near the entrance, watched the arrival with curiosity. Lord Wrekin, seeing women in his path, saluted them; and they replied with a friendly and democratic nod. Then suddenly the Governor-General heard the singing, and perceived the black distant crowd. He inquired of the persons near him, and then passed on through the groups which had begun to gather round himself, raising his hand for silence. The passengers of the West-bound train had by now mostly descended, and pressed after him. Bare-headed, he stood behind the mourners while the hymn proceeded, and the coffin was lifted and placed in the car with the wreaths round it. The mother clung a moment to the side of the door, unconsciously resisting those who tried to lead her away. The kind grey eyes of the Governor-General rested upon her, but he made no effort to approach or speak to her. Only his stillness kept the crowd still.
Elizabeth at her window watched the scene--the tall figure of his Excellency--the bowed woman--the throng of officials and of mourners. Over the head of the Governor-General a couple of flags swelled in a light breeze--the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf; beyond the heads of the crowd there was a distant glimpse of the barracks of the Mounted Police; and then boundless prairie and floating cloud.
At last the mother yielded, and was led to the carriage behind the coffin. Gently, with bent head, Lord Wrekin made his way to her. But no one heard what passed between them. Then, silently, the funeral crowd dispersed, and another crowd--of officials and business men--claimed the Governor-General. Standing in its midst, he turned for a moment to scan the West-bound train.
"Ah, Lady Merton!" He had perceived the car and Elizabeth's face at the window, and he hastened across to speak to her. They were old friends in England, and they had already met in Ottawa.
"So I find you on your travels! Well?"
His look, gay and vivacious as a boy's, interrogated hers. Elizabeth stammered a few words in praise of Canada. But her eyes were still wet, and the Governor-General perceived it.
"That was touching?" he said. "To die in your teens in this country!--just as the curtain is up and the play begins--hard! Hullo, Anderson!"
The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was to see--and whom--at Vancouver and Pretoria. "You must see So-and-so and So-and-so--great friends of mine. D----'ll tell you all about the lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a splendid old fellow--a C.P.R. man--did some of the prospecting for the railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could have sat up all night." He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave it to Elizabeth. "Good-bye--good-bye!"
He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers, railway superintendents, and others--his hat on the back of his head, his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.
Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.
"Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?"
"Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful shindy yesterday!--between the farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the Dominion to own 'em--vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do something. Hope you know how he does it!--I don't."
Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to move.
"We seem to send you the right men!" she said, smiling--with a little English conceit that became her.
The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now empty platform.
Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle widely scattered over the endless grassy plains--the brown lines of the ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway--the bents of winter grass, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these things breathed--of a sudden--wildness and desolation. It seemed as though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth--an earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.
"At last I am afraid of it!" said Elizabeth, shivering in her fur coat, with a little motion of her hand toward the plain. "And what must it be in winter!"
Anderson laughed.
"The winter is much milder here than in Manitoba! Radiant sunshine day after day--and the warm chinook-wind. And it is precisely here that the railway lands are selling at a higher price for the moment than anywhere else, and that settlers are rushing in. Look there!"
Elizabeth peered through the gloom, and saw the gleam of water. The train ran along beside it for a minute or two, then the gathering darkness seemed to swallow it up.
"A river?"
"No, a canal, fed from the Bow River--far ahead of us. We are in the irrigation belt--and in the next few years thousands of people will settle here. Give the land water--the wheat follows! South and North, even now, the wheat is spreading and driving out the ranchers. Irrigation is the secret. We are mastering it! And you thought"--he looked at her with amusement and a kind of triumph--"that the country had mastered us?"
There was something in his voice and eyes, as though not he spoke, but a nation through him. "Splendid!" was the word that rose in Elizabeth's mind; and a thrill ran with it.
The gloom of the afternoon deepened. The showers increased. But Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to go in. In the car Delaine and Philip were playing dominoes, in despair of anything more amusing. Yerkes was giving his great mind to the dinner which was to be the consolation of Philip's day.
Meanwhile Elizabeth kept Anderson talking. That was her great gift. She was the best of listeners. Thus led on he could not help himself, any more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the sink-hole. He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too attractive Englishwoman. On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest minds of Canada--dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which, yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.
He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they passed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there--magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord. Or from the epic of the soil, he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it--tale after tale of life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into Alberta--witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely listening eyes. And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those "mortal things"--earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up human fate.
Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man would be to cleave to him.
Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly passed, three men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices, ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.
"Settlers, in their first year," said Anderson, smiling, as he waved back again.
But, to Elizabeth, it seemed a parable of the new Canada.