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-breedvoyageurs, 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 æons 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 lustrous 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 shore, and to a spot where lightning and storm had ravaged the pines and left a few open spaces 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 glass, 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 noble 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.
"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 attitude 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 ofbracciantion 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 Bassenthwaite 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 passionate 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 god'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 shores of the lake were impassable 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 passion--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 shemadeher world; and Canada and Anderson moved under it, nobly seen and nobly 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 amusement. 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 passion--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 Pass. 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. The other was the head of the "bothy" or boarding-house for hired men, a long low building, with cheerful white-curtained windows, which could be seen just beyond the cow-house.
As she looked over the broad whiteness of the farmlands, above which the sunset clouds were now tossing in climbing lines of crimson and gold, rising steeply to a zenith of splendour, and opening here and there, amid their tumult, to show a further heaven of untroubled blue--Elizabeth thought with lamentation that their days on the farm were almost done. The following week could see them at Ottawa for the opening of the session. Anderson was full of Parliamentary projects; important work for the Province had been entrusted to him; and in the general labour policy of the Dominion he would find himself driven to take a prominent part. But all the while his heart and Elizabeth's were in the land and its problems; for them the true, the entrancing Canada was in the wilds. And for Anderson, who through so many years, as an explorer and engineer, had met Nature face to face, his will against hers, in a direct and simple conflict, the tedious and tortuous methods of modern politics were not easy to learn. He must indeed learn them--he was learning them; and the future had probably great things in store for him, as a politician. But he came back to the Saskatchewan farm with joy, and he would leave it reluctantly.
"If only I wasn't so rich!" thought Elizabeth, with compunction. For she often looked with envy on her neighbours who had gone through the real hardships of the country; who had bought their Canadian citizenship with the toil and frugality of years. It seemed to her sometimes that she was step-child rather than daughter of the dear new land, in spite of her yearning towards it.
And yet money had brought its own romance. It had enabled Anderson to embark on this ample farm of nearly two square miles, to staff it with the best labour to be got, on a basis of copartnership, to bring herds of magnificent cattle into these park-like prairies, to set up horse-breeding, and to establish on the borders of the farm a large creamery which was already proving an attraction for settlers. It was going to put into Elizabeth's hands the power of helping the young University of Strathcona just across the Albertan border, and perhaps of founding in their own provincial capital of Regina a training college for farm-students--girls and boys--which might reproduce for the West the college of St. Anne's, that wonderful home of all the useful arts, which an ever-generous wealth has given to the Province of Quebec. Already she had in her mind a cottage hospital--sorely wanted--for the little town of Donaldminster, wherein the weaklings of this great emigrant army now pouring into the country might find help.
Her heart, indeed, was full of schemes for help. Here she was, a woman of high education, and much wealth, in the midst of this nascent community. Her thoughts pondered the life of these scattered farms--of the hard-working women in them--the lively rosy-cheeked children. It was her ambition so to live among them that they might love her--trust her--use her.
Meanwhile their own home was a "temple of industrious peace." Elizabeth was a prairie housewife like her neighbours. She had indeed brought out with her from Cumberland one of the Martindale gardeners and his young wife and sister; and the two North-Country women shared with the farm mistress the work of the house, till such time as Anderson should help the husband to a quarter-section of his own, and take someone else to train in his place. But the atmosphere of the house was one of friendly equality. Elizabeth--who had herself gone into training for a few weeks at St. Anne's--prided herself on her dairy, her bread, her poultry. One might have seen her, on this winter afternoon, in her black serge dress with white cap and apron, slipping into the kitchen behind the dining-room, testing the scones in the oven, looking to the preparations for dinner, putting away stores, and chatting to the two clear-eyed women who loved her, and would not for the world have let her try her strength too much! For she who was so eagerly planning the help of others must now be guarded and cherished herself--lest ill befall!
But now she was at the window watching for Anderson.
The trail from Donaldminster to Battleford passed in front of the house, dividing the farm. Presently there came slowly along it a covered wagon drawn by a pair of sorry horses and piled at the back with household possessions. In front sat a man of slouching carriage, and in the interior of the wagon another figure could be dimly seen. The whole turn-out gave an impression of poverty and misfortune; and Elizabeth looked at it curiously.
Suddenly, the wagon drew up with a jerk at the gate of the farm, and the man descended, with difficulty, his limbs being evidently numb with cold.
Elizabeth caught up a fur cloak and ran to the door.
"Could you give us a bit of shelter for the night?" said the man sheepishly. "We'd thought of getting on to Battleford, but the little un's bad--and the missus perished with cold. We'd give you no trouble if we might warm ourselves a bit."
And he looked under his eyebrows at Elizabeth, at the bright fire behind her, and all the comfort of the new farmhouse. Yet under his shuffling manner there was a certain note of confidence. He was appealing to that Homeric hospitality which prevails throughout the farms of the Northwest.
And in five minutes, the horses were in the barn, the man sitting by the kitchen fire, while Elizabeth was ministering to the woman and child. The new-comers made a forlorn trio. They came from a district some fifty miles further south, and were travelling north in order to take shelter for a time with relations. The mother was a girl of twenty, worn with hardship and privation. The father, an English labourer, had taken up free land, but in spite of much help from a paternal Government, had not been able to fulfil his statutory obligation, and had now forfeited his farm. There was a history of typhoid fever, and as Elizabeth soon suspected, an incipient history of drink. In the first two years of his Canadian life the man worked for a farmer during the summer, and loafed in Winnipeg during the winter. There demoralisation had begun, and as Elizabeth listened, the shadow of the Old World seemed to be creeping across the radiant Canadian landscape. The same woes?--the same weaknesses?--the same problems of an unsound urban life?
Her heart sank for a moment--only to provoke an instant reaction of cheerfulness. No!--in Canada the human will has still room to work, and is not yet choked by a jungle growth of interests.
She waited for Anderson to come in, and meanwhile she warmed and comforted the mother. The poor girl looked round her in amazement at the pretty spacious room, as she spread her hands, knotted and coarsened by work, to the blaze. Elizabeth held her sickly babe, rocking it and crooning to it, while upstairs one of kind-eyed Cumberland women was getting a warm bath ready, and lighting a fire in the guest-room.
"How old is it?" she asked.
"Thirteen months."
"You ought to give up nursing it. It would be better for you both."
"I tried giving it a bit o' what we had ourselves," said the mother, dully--"But I nearly lost her."
"I should think so!" laughed Elizabeth indignantly; and she began to preach rational ways of feeding and caring for the child, while the mother sat by, despondent, and too crushed and hopeless to take much notice. Presently Elizabeth gave her back the babe, and went to fetch hot tea and bread and butter.
"Shall I come and get it in the kitchen?" said the woman, rising.
"No, no--stay where you are!" cried Elizabeth. And she was just carrying back a laden tray from the dining-room when Anderson caught her.
"Darling!--that's too heavy for you!--what are you about?"
"There's a woman in there who's got to be fed--and there's a man in there"--she pointed to the kitchen--"who's got to be talked to. Hopeless case!--so you'd better go and see about it!"
She laughed happily in his face, and he snatched a kiss from her as he carried off the tray.
The woman by the fire rose again in amazement as she saw the broad-shouldered handsome man who was bringing in the tea. Anderson had been tramping through the thin-lying snow all day, inquiring into the water-supply of a distant portion of the farm. He was ruddy with exercise, and the physical strength that seemed to radiate from him intimidated the wanderer.
"Where are you bound to?" he said kindly, as he put down the tea beside her.
The woman, falteringly, told her story. Anderson frowned a little.
"Well, I'd better go and talk to your husband. Mrs. Anderson will look after you."
And Elizabeth held the baby, while the woman fed languidly--too tired and spiritless indeed to eat.
When she could be coaxed no further, Elizabeth took her and the babe upstairs.
"I never saw anything like this in these parts!" cried the girl, looking round her at the white-tiled bathroom.
"Oh, they're getting quite common!" laughed Elizabeth. "See how nice and warm the water is! Shall we bathe the baby?" And presently the child lay warm and swaddled in its mother's arms, dressed in some baby-clothes produced by Elizabeth from a kind of travellers' cupboard at the top of the stairs. Then the mother was induced to try a bath for herself, while Elizabeth tried her hand at spoon-feeding the baby; and in half an hour she had them both in bed, in the bright spare-room--the young mother's reddish hair unbound lying a splendid mass on the white pillows, and a strange expression--as of some long tension giving way--on her pinched face.
"We'll not know how to thank you"--she said brokenly. "We were just at the last. Tom wouldn't ask no one to help us before. But we'd only a few shillings left--we thought at Battleford, we'd sell our bits of things--perhaps that'd take us through." She looked piteously at Elizabeth, the tears gathering in her eyes.
"Oh! well, we'll see about that!" said Elizabeth, as she tucked the blankets round her. "Nobody need starve in this country! Mr. Anderson'll be able perhaps to think of something. Now you go to sleep, and we'll look after your husband."
Anderson joined his wife in the sitting-room, with a perplexed countenance. The man was a poor creature--and the beginnings of the drink-craving were evident.
"Give him a chance," said Elizabeth. "You want one more man in the bothy."
She sat down beside him, while Anderson pondered, his legs stretched to the fire. A train of thought ran through his mind, embittered by the memory of his father.
He was roused from it by the perception that Elizabeth was looking tired. Instantly he was all tenderness, and anxious misgiving. He made her lie down on the sofa by the fire, and brought her some important letters from Ottawa to read, and the English newspapers.
From the elementary human need with which their minds had just been busy, their talk passed on to National and Imperial affairs. They discussed them as equals and comrades, each bringing their own contribution.
"In a fortnight we shall be in Ottawa!" sighed Elizabeth, at last.
Anderson smiled at her plaintive voice.
"Darling!--is it such a tragedy?"
"No, I shall be as keen as anybody else when we get there. But--we are so happy here!"
"Is that really, really true?" asked Anderson, taking her hand and pressing it to his lips.
"Yes"--she murmured--"yes--but it will be truer still next year!"
They looked at each other tenderly. Anderson stooped and kissed her, long and closely.
He was called away to give some directions to his men, and Elizabeth lay dreaming in the firelight of the past and the future, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes filling with soft tears. Upstairs, in the room above her, the emigrant mother and baby lay sleeping in the warmth and shelter gathered round them by Elizabeth. But in tending them, she had been also feeding her own yearning, quickening her own hope. She had given herself to a man whom she adored, and she carried his child on her heart. Many and various strands would have gone to the weaving of that little soul; she trembled sometimes to think of them. But no fear with her lasted long. It was soon lost in the deep poetic faith that Anderson's child in her arms would be the heir of two worlds, the pledge of a sympathy, a union, begun long before her marriage in the depths of the spirit, when her heart first went out to Canada--to the beauty of the Canadian land, and the freedom of the Canadian life.