CHAPTER VIHER PICTURE
Wyllard stayed at the inn three days without seeing anything more of the girl whom he had met beside the stream, although he diligently watched for her. He had long felt it was his duty to communicate with the relatives of the lad that he had befriended, and the fact that he had found the girl’s photograph in the young Englishman’s possession made it appear highly probable that she could assist him in tracing the family. Apart from this, he could not quite analyze his motives for desiring to see more of the Englishwoman, though he was conscious of the desire. Her picture had been a companion to him in his wanderings, and now and then he had found a certain solace in gazing at it. Now that he had seen her in the flesh he was willing to admit that he had never met any woman who had made such an impression on him.
It was, of course, possible for him to call at the vicarage, but though he meant to adopt that course as a last resort, there were certain objections to it. He did not know the girl’s name, and there was nobody to say a word for him. So far as his experience went, the English were apt to be reticent and reserved to a stranger. It seemed to him that, although the girl might give him the information which he required, their acquaintance probably would terminate then and there. She would, he decided, be less likely to stand upon her guard if he could contrive to meet her casually without prearrangement.
On the fourth day fortune favored him, for he came upon her endeavoring to open a tottering gate where a stony hill track led off from the smooth white road. As it happened, he had received a letter from Mrs. Hastings that morning, fixing the date of her departure, and it was necessary for him to discharge the duty with which Hawtrey had saddled him as soon as possible. The Grange, where he understood Miss Ismay was then staying, lay thirty miles away across the fells, and he had decided to start early on the morrow. That being the case, it was clear that he must make the most of this opportunity; but he realized that it would be advisable to proceed circumspectly. Saying nothing, he set his shoulder to the gate, and lifting it on its decrepit hinges swung it open.
“Thank you,” said the girl. Remembering that the words were the last that she had said to him, she smiled, as she added: “It is the second time you have appeared when I was in difficulties.”
In spite of his resolution to proceed cautiously, a twinkle crept into Wyllard’s eyes, and suggested that the fact she had mentioned was not so much of a coincidence as it probably appeared. She saw the look that told her what he was thinking, and was about to pass on, when he stopped her with a gesture.
“The fact is, I have been looking out for you the last three days,” he confessed.
He feared the girl had taken alarm at this candid statement, and spread his hands out deprecatingly. “Won’t you hear me out?” he added. “There’s a matter I must put before you, but I won’t keep you long.”
The girl was a little puzzled, and naturally curious. It struck her as strange that his admission should have aroused in her very little indignation; but she felt that itwould be unreasonable to suspect this man of anything that savored of impertinence. His manner was reassuring, and she liked his face.
“Well?” she said inquiringly.
Wyllard waved his hand toward a big oak trunk that lay just inside the gate.
“If you’ll sit down, I’ll get through as quick as I can,” he promised. “In the first place, I am, as I told you, a Canadian, who has come over partly to see the country, and partly to carry out one or two missions. In regard to one of them I believe you can help me.”
The girl’s face expressed a natural astonishment.
“I could help you?”
Wyllard nodded. “I’ll explain my reasons for believing it later on,” he said. “In the meanwhile, I asked you a question the other night, which I’ll now try to make more explicit. Were you ever acquainted with a young Englishman, who went to Canada from this country several years ago? He was about twenty then, and had dark hair and dark eyes. That, of course, isn’t an unusual thing, but there was a rather curious white mark on his left temple. If he was ever a friend of yours, that scar ought to fix it.”
“Oh!” cried the girl, “that must have been Lance Radcliffe. I was with him when the scar was made—ever so long ago. We heard that he was dead. But you said his name was Pattinson.”
“I did,” declared Wyllard gravely. “Still, I wasn’t quite sure about the name being right. He’s certainly dead. I buried him.”
His companion made an abrupt movement, and he saw the sudden softening of her eyes. There was, however, only a gentle pity in her face, and nothing in her manner suggested the deeper feeling that he had half expected.
“Then,” she said, “I am sure that his father would like to meet you. There was some trouble between them—I don’t know which was wrong—and Lance went out to Canada, and never wrote. Major Radcliffe tried to trace him through a Vancouver banker, and only found that he had died in the hands of a stranger who had done all that was possible for him.” She turned to Wyllard with a look which set his heart beating faster than usual. “You are that man?”
“Yes,” said Wyllard simply, “I did what I could for him. It didn’t amount to very much. He was too far gone.”
Briefly he repeated the story that he had told to Hawtrey, and, when he had finished, her face was soft again, for what he said had stirred her curiously.
“But,” she commented, “he had no claim on you.”
Wyllard lifted one hand with a motion that disclaimed all right to commendation. “He was dying in the bush. Wasn’t that enough?”
The girl made no answer for a moment or two. She had earned her living for several years, and she was to some extent acquainted with the grim realities of life. She did not know that while there are hard men in Canada the small farmers and ranchers of the West—and, perhaps above all, the fearless free lances who build railroads and grapple with giant trees in the forests of the Pacific slope—are as a rule, distinguished by a splendid charity. With them the sick or worn-out stranger is seldom turned away. Watching the stranger covertly, she understood that this man whom she had seen for the first time three days before had done exactly what she would have expected of him.
“I saw a great deal of Lance Radcliffe—when I was younger,” she said. “His people still live at Garside Scar,close by Dufton Holme. I presume you will call on them?”
Wyllard said that he purposed doing so, as he had a watch and one or two other mementos that they might like to have, and she told him how to reach Dufton Holme by a round-about railway journey.
“There is one point that rather puzzles me,” she said, after she had made it plain how he was to find the Radcliffe family. “How did you know that I could tell you anything about him?”
Wyllard thrust his hand into his pocket, and took out a little leather case.
“You are by no means a stranger to me,” he remarked as he handed her the photograph. “This is your picture; I found it among the dead lad’s things.”
The girl, who started visibly, flashed a keen glance at him. It was evident that he had not intended to produce any dramatic effect. She flushed a little.
“I never knew he had it,” she asserted. “Perhaps he got it from his sister.” She paused, and then, as if impelled to make the fact quite clear, added, “I certainly never gave it to him.”
Wyllard smiled gravely, for he recognized that while she was clearly grieved to hear of young Radcliffe’s death, she could have had no particular tenderness for the unfortunate lad.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps he took it in the first place for the mere beauty of it, and it afterwards became a companion—something that connected him with the Old Country. It appealed in one of those ways to me.”
Again she flashed a sharp glance at him, but he went on unheeding:
“When I found it I meant to keep it merely as a clew, and so that it could be given up to his relatives some day,”he added. “Then I fell into the habit of looking at it in my lonely camp in the bush at night, and when I sat beside the stove while the snow lay deep upon the prairie. There was something in your eyes that seemed to encourage me.”
“To encourage you?”
“Yes,” Wyllard assented gravely, “I think that expresses it. When I camped in the bush of the Pacific slope we were either out on the gold trail—and we generally came back ragged and unsuccessful after spending several months’ wages which we could badly spare—or I was going from one wooden town to another without a dollar in my pocket and wondering how I was to obtain one when I got there. For a time it wasn’t much more cheerful on the prairie. Twice in succession the harvest failed. Perhaps Lance Radcliffe felt as I did.”
The girl cut him short. “Why didn’t you mention the photograph at once?”
Wyllard smiled at her. “Oh,” he explained, “I didn’t want to be precipitate—you English folk don’t seem to like that. I think”—and he seemed to consider—“I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be repelled by what might look like Colonialbrusquerie. You see, you have been over snow-barred divides and through great shadowy forests with me. We’ve camped among the boulders by lonely lakes, and gone down frothing rapids. I felt—I can’t tell you why—that I was bound to meet you some day.”
His frankness was startling, but the girl showed neither astonishment nor resentment. She felt certain that this stranger was not posing or speaking for effect. It did not occur to Wyllard that he might have gone too far, and for a moment or two he leaned against the gate, while she looked at him with what he thought of as her gracious English calm.
Pale sunshine fell upon them, though the larches beside the road were rustling beneath a cold wind, and the song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odor of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind grayness with shadowy grandeur.
Then Wyllard aroused himself. “I wonder if I ought to write Major Radcliffe and tell him what my object is before I call,” he said. “It would make the thing a little easier.”
The girl rose. “Yes,” she assented, “that would, perhaps, be wiser.” She glanced at the photograph which was still in her hand. “It has served its purpose. I scarcely think it would be of any great interest to Major Radcliffe.”
She saw his face change as she made it evident that she did not mean to give the portrait back to him. There was, at least, one excellent reason why she would not have her picture in a strange man’s hands.
“Thank you,” she said, “for the story. I am glad we have met; but I’m afraid I have already kept my friends waiting for me.”
She turned away, and it occurred to Wyllard that he had made a very indifferent use of the opportunity, since she had neither asked his name nor told him hers. It was, however, evident that he could not well run after her and demand her name, and he decided that he could in all probability obtain it from Major Radcliffe. Still, he regretted his lack of adroitness as he walked back to the inn, where he wrote two letters when he had consulted a map and his landlady. Dufton Holme, he discovered, was a small village within a mile or two of the Grange where, as Miss Rawlinson had informed him, Agatha Ismay wasthen staying. One letter was addressed to her, and he formally asked permission to call upon her with a message from George Hawtrey. The other was to Major Radcliffe, and in both he said that an answer would reach him at the inn which his landlady had informed him was to be found not far from both of the houses he intended to visit.
He set out on foot next morning, and, after climbing a steep pass, followed a winding track across a waste of empty moor until he struck a smooth white road, which led past a rock-girt lake and into a deep valley. It was six o’clock in the morning when he started, and three in the afternoon when he reached the inn, where he found an answer to one of the letters awaiting him. It was from Major Radcliffe, who desired an interview with him as soon as possible.
Within an hour he was on his way to the Major’s house, where a gray-haired man, whose yellow skin suggested long exposure to a tropical sun, and a little withered lady were waiting for him. They received him graciously, but there was an indefinite something in their manner and bearing which Wyllard, who had read a great deal, recognized, though he had never been brought into actual contact with it until then. He felt that he could not have expected to come across such people anywhere but in England, unless it was at the headquarters of a British battalion in India.
He told his story tersely, softening unpleasant details and making little of what he had done. The gray-haired man listened gravely with an unmoved face, though a trace of moisture crept into the little lady’s eyes. There was silence for a moment or two when he had finished, and then Major Radcliffe, whose manner was very quiet, turned to him.
“You have laid me under an obligation, which I could never wipe out, even if I wished it,” he said. “It was my only son you buried out there in Canada.”
He broke off for a moment, and his quietness was more marked than ever when he went on again.
“As you have no doubt surmised, we quarreled,” he said. “He was extravagant and careless—at least I thought that then—but now it seems to me that I was unduly hard on him. His mother”—and he turned to the little lady with an inclination that pleased Wyllard curiously—“was sure of it at the time. In any case, I took the wrong way, and he went out to Canada. I made that, at least, easy for him—and I have been sorry ever since.”
He paused again with a little expressive gesture. “It seems due to him, and you, that I should tell you this. When no word reached us I had inquiries made, through a banker, who, discovering that he had registered at a hotel as Pattinson, at length traced him to a British Columbian silver mine. He had, however, left the mine shortly before my correspondent learned that he had been employed there, and all that the banker could tell me was that an unknown prospector had nursed my boy until he died.”
Wyllard took out a watch and the clasp of a workman’s belt from his pocket, and laid them gently on Mrs. Radcliffe’s knee. He saw her eyes fill, and turned his head away.
“I feel that you may blame me for not writing sooner, but it was only a very little while ago that I was able to trace you, and then it was only by a very curious—coincidence,” he explained presently.
He did not consider it advisable to mention the photograph. It seemed to him that the girl would not like it. Nor, though he was greatly tempted, did he care to makeinquiries concerning her just then. In another moment or two the Major spoke again.
“If I can make your stay here pleasanter in any way I should be delighted,” he said. “If you will take up your quarters with us I will send down to the inn for your things.”
Wyllard excused himself, but when Mr. Radcliffe urged him to dine with them on the following evening he hesitated.
“The one difficulty is that I don’t know yet whether I shall be engaged then,” he said. “As it happens, I’ve a message for Miss Ismay, and I wrote offering to call upon her at any convenient hour. So far, I have heard nothing from her.”
“She’s away,” Mrs. Radcliffe informed him. “They have probably sent your letter on to her. I had a note from her yesterday, however, and expect her here to-morrow. You have met some friends of hers in Canada?”
“Gregory Hawtrey,” said Wyllard. “I have promised to call upon his people, too.”
He saw Major Radcliffe glance at his wife, and he noticed a faint gleam in Mrs. Radcliffe’s eyes.
“Well,” she observed, “if you promise to come I will send word over to Agatha.”
Wyllard agreed to this, and went away a few minutes later. He noticed the tact and consideration with which his new friends had refrained from indicating any sign of the curiosity they naturally felt, for Mrs. Radcliffe’s face had suggested that she understood the situation, which was beginning to appear a little more difficult to him. It was, it seemed, his task to explain delicately to a girl brought up among such people what she must be prepared to face as a farmer’s wife in Western Canada. He was not sure that this task would be easy in itself, but it wasrendered much more difficult by the fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly daunting her. Her letter certainly had suggested courage, but, after all, it was the courage of ignorance, and he had now some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends enjoyed. He was beginning to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.
CHAPTER VIIAGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH
The next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar. He looked about him with quiet interest. He had now and then passed a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect than a mere appeal to the material side of his nature. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.
The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets and tinted walls formed a harmony of soft coloring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. A row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room. Looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad graveled terrace, which was evidently raked smooth every day, and a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed stood upon its pillared wall. From the middle of the terrace a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond the lawn clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.
It all impressed him curiously—the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives of the cultured English people, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and would have seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. Wyllard could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honor, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Radcliffe, with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments, might have stepped down from some old picture. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met in Western Canada hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who also could stand fast by a point of honor. Though the fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.
He recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.
“You are interested in all you see?” she asked frankly.
“Yes,” said Wyllard. “In fact, I’d like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I’d begin at the pictures and work right around.”
Mrs. Radcliffe’s smile suggested that she was not displeased.
“But you have been in London?”
“I have,” said Wyllard. “I had one or two letters to persons there, and they did all they could to entertainme. Still, their places were different; they hadn’t the—charm—of yours. It’s something which I think could exist only in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I’ve never been accustomed to.”
Mrs. Radcliffe was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.
“Your life is necessarily different from ours,” she suggested.
Wyllard smiled. “It’s so different that you couldn’t realize it. It’s all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The money we make is sunk again in seed and extra teams and plows.”
“After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here.”
“No,” Wyllard rejoined gravely, “that’s not it exactly. At least, not with the most of us. It’s rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking—our own—by labor, breaking the wilderness. You”—and he added this as if to explain that he could hardly expect her quite to grasp his views—“have never been out West?”
His hostess laughed. “I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each other’s throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering, either party would have pulled him down.”
“You’ll have to forgive me”—Wyllard’s gesture was deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled. “The notion that we’re the only ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather a favorite one out West. No doubt it’s a delusion. I should have known that all of us are born like that.”
Mrs. Radcliffe forgave him readily, if only for the “all of us,” which struck her as especially fortunate. A few minutes later there were voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl whom he had met at the stepping stones came in. She was dressed in trailing garments which became her wonderfully, and he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory pallor of her skin. Mrs. Radcliffe turned to him.
“I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay,” she said. “Agatha, this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from Canada.”
There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a moment the girl was clearly startled, too.
“You!” was all she said.
She held out her hand before she turned to speak to Mrs. Radcliffe. It was a relief to both when dinner was announced.
Wyllard sat next to his hostess, and was not sorry that he was called upon to take part only in casual general conversation. He thought once or twice that Miss Ismay was unobtrusively studying him. It was nearly an hour after the dinner when Mrs. Radcliffe left them alone in the drawing-room.
“You have, no doubt, a good deal to talk about, and you needn’t join us until you’re ready,” she said. “The Major always reads the London papers after dinner.”
Agatha sat in a low chair near the hearth, and it occurred to Wyllard, who took a place opposite her, that shewas too delicate and dainty, too over-cultivated, in fact, to marry Hawtrey. This was rather curious, since he had hitherto regarded his comrade as a typical well-educated Englishman; but it now seemed to him that there was a certain streak of coarseness in Gregory. The man, it suddenly flashed upon him, was self-indulgent, and the careless ease of manner, which he had once liked, was too much in evidence.
Agatha turned to him.
“I understand that Gregory is recovering rapidly?” she said.
Wyllard assured her that Hawtrey was convalescing, and Agatha said quietly, “He wants me to go out to him.”
Wyllard felt that if a girl of that sort had promised to marry him he would not have sent for her, but would have come in person, if he had been compelled to pledge his last possessions, or crawl to the tideway on his hands and knees. For all that he was ready to defend his friend.
“I’m afraid it’s necessary,” he said. “Gregory was quite unfit for such a journey when I left, and he must be ready to commence the season’s campaign with the first of the spring. Our summer is short, you see, and with our one-crop farming it’s indispensable to get the seed in early. In fact, he will be badly behind as it is.”
This was not particularly tactful, since, without intending it, he made it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but Agatha smiled.
“Oh,” she replied, “I understand! You needn’t labor with excuses. But doesn’t the same thing apply to you?”
“It certainly did. Now, however, things have become a little easier. My holding is larger than Gregory’s, and I have a foreman who can look after it for me.”
“Gregory said that you were a great friend of his.”
Wyllard seized this opportunity. “He was a great friendof mine and I like to think it means the same thing. In fact it’s reasonably certain that he saved my life for me.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Agatha; “that is a thing he didn’t mention. How did it come about?”
Wyllard was glad to tell the story. He was anxious to say all he honestly could in Hawtrey’s favor.
“We were at work on a railroad trestle—a towering wooden bridge, in British Columbia. It stretched across a deep ravine with great boulders and there was a stream in the bottom of it. He stood high up on a staging close beneath the rails. A fast freight, a huge general produce train came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly hold on to the bridge. The construction foreman was a hustler, and we had to get the spikes in. I was swinging the hammer when I felt the plank beneath me slip. The train, it seems, had jarred loose the bolt around which we had our lashings. For a moment I felt that I was going down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me. He had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to. It seemed certain that I would pull him with me, too. We hung like that for a space—I don’t quite know how long.”
He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.
“It was then,” he said, “I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey was. Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on. I got my hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer.”
He saw the gleam in Agatha’s eyes. “Oh!” she cried, “that is just what he must have done. He was like that always—impulsive, splendidly generous.”
Wyllard felt that he had succeeded, though he knew that there were men on the prairie who called his comrade slackly careless, instead of impulsive. Agatha spoke again.
“But Gregory wasn’t a carpenter,” she said.
“In those days when money was scarce we had to be whatever we could. There wasn’t much specialization of handicrafts out there then. The farmer whose crop was ruined took up the railroad shovel, or borrowed a saw from somebody and set about building houses, or anything else that was wanted.”
“Of course!” replied Agatha. “Besides, he was always wonderfully quick. He could learn any game by just watching it a while. He did all he undertook brilliantly.”
It occurred to Wyllard that Gregory had, at least, made no great success of farming; but that occupation, as practiced on the prairie, demands a great deal more than quickness and what some call brilliancy from the man who undertakes it. He must, as they say out there, possess the capacity for staying with it—the grim courage to hold fast the tighter under each crushing blow, when the grain shrivels under the harvest frost, or when the ragged ice hurtling before a roaring blast does the reaping. It was, however, evident that this girl had an unquestioning faith in Gregory Hawtrey, and once more Wyllard felt compassionate towards her. He wondered if she would have retained her confidence had Hawtrey spent those four years in England instead of Canada, for it was clear from the contrast between her and her picture that she had grown in many ways since she had given her promise to her lover. He had said what he could in Hawtrey’s favor, but now he felt that something was due to the girl.
“Gregory told me to explain what things are like out there,” he said. “I think it is because they are so different from what you are accustomed to that he has waitedso long. He wanted to make them as easy as possible for you, and now he would like you to realize what is before you.”
He was surprised at the girl’s quick comprehension, for she glanced around the luxurious room with a faint smile.
“You look on me as part of—this? I mean it seems to you that I fit in with my surroundings, and would be in harmony only with them?”
“Yes,” answered Wyllard gravely, “I think you fit in with them excellently.”
Agatha laughed. “Well,” she said, “I was once, to a certain extent, accustomed to something similar; though, after all, one could hardly compare the Grange with Garside Scar. Still, that was some time ago, and I have earned my living for several years now. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
She glanced down at her dress. “For instance, this is the result of a great deal of self-denial, though the cost of it was partly worked off in music lessons, and the stuff was almost the cheapest I could get. I sang at concerts—and it was part of my stock in trade. After all, why should you think me capable only of living in luxury?”
“I didn’t go quite that far.”
She laughed again. “Then is Canada such a very dreadful place? I have heard of other Englishwomen going out there as farmers’ wives. Do they all live unhappily?”
“No,” replied Wyllard, “at least, they show no sign of it, and some of them and the city-born Canadians are, I think, the salt of this earth. Probably it’s easy to be calm and gracious in such a place as this—though naturally I don’t know since I’ve never tried it—but when a woman who toils from sunrise to sunset most of the year keeps her sweetness and serenity, it’s a very different andmuch finer thing. But I’ll try to answer the other question. The prairie isn’t dreadful; it’s a land of sunshine and clear skies. Heat and cold—and we have them both—don’t worry one there. There’s optimism in the crystal air. It’s not beautiful like these valleys, but it has its beauty. It is vast and silent, and, though our homesteads are crude and new, once you pass the breaking, it’s primevally old. That gets hold of one somehow. It’s wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind is like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ocher and burnished copper waves, it is more wonderful still. One sees the fulfillment of the promise, and takes courage.”
“Then,” asked Agatha, who had scarcely suspected him of such appreciation of nature, “what is there to shrink from?”
“In the case of a small farmer’s wife, the constant, never-slackening strain. There’s no hired assistance. She must clean the house, and wash, and cook, though it’s not unusual for the men to wash the plates.”
The girl evidently was not much impressed, for she laughed.
“Does Gregory wash the plates?” she asked.
Wyllard’s eyes twinkled. “When Sproatly won’t,” he said. “Still, in a general way they do it only once a week.”
“Ah,” observed Agatha, “I can imagine Gregory hating it. As a matter of fact, I like him for it.”
“Then the farmer’s wife must bake, and mend her husband’s clothes. Indeed, it’s not unusual for her to mend for the hired man, too. Besides that, there are always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel thestrain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There’s no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or a supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled and are frozen almost stiff beneath the robes.”
“Still,” interposed Agatha, “that does not last.”
The man understood her. “Oh!” he said, “one makes progress—that is, if one can stand the strain—but, as the one way of doing it is to sow for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no slackening in the meanwhile. Every dollar must be guarded and plowed into the soil again.”
He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.
“A woman who didn’t slacken could make the struggle easier for the man, couldn’t she?”
“Yes,” Wyllard assured her, “in every way. Still, she would have a great deal to bear.”
Agatha’s face softened. “Ah,” she commented, “she would not grudge the effort in the case of one she loved.”
She looked up again with a smile. “I wonder,” she added, “if you really thought I should flinch.”
“When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely. Then when I read your letter my doubts vanished.”
He saw that he had not been judicious, for there was, for the first time, a trace of hardness in the girl’s expression.
“He showed you that?” she asked.
“One small part of it,” assured Wyllard. “I want to say that when I first saw this house, and how you seemed fitted to it, my misgivings about Gregory’s decision troubled me once more. Now,”—and he made an impressive gesture—“they have vanished altogether, and they’ll never come back again.”
He spoke as he felt. This girl, he knew, would feel the strain; but it seemed to him that she had strength enough to bear it cheerfully. In spite of her daintiness, she was one who, in time of stress, could be depended on. He often remembered afterwards how they had sat together in the luxuriously furnished room, she leaning back in her big, low chair, with the soft light on her delicately tinted face. By and by he looked at her.
“It’s curious that I had your photograph ever so long, and never thought of showing it to Gregory,” he observed.
Agatha smiled. “I suppose it is,” she admitted. “After all, except that it might have been a relief to Major Radcliffe if he had met you sooner, the fact that you didn’t show it to Gregory doesn’t seem of any particular consequence.”
Wyllard was not quite sure of this. He had thought about this girl often, and certainly had been conscious of a curious thrill of satisfaction when he had met her at the stepping-stones. That feeling had suddenly disappeared when he had learned that she was his comrade’s promised wife. He had, however, during the last hour or two made up his mind to think no more of her.
“Well,” he declared, “the next thing is to arrange for Mrs. Hastings to meet you in London, or, perhaps, at the Grange. Her husband is a Canadian, a man of education, who has quite a large homestead not far from Gregory’s. Her relatives are people of station in Montreal, and I feel sure that you’ll like her.”
They decided that he was to ask Mrs. Hastings to stay a few days at the Grange, and then he looked at the girl somewhat diffidently.
“She suggests going in a fortnight,” he said.
Agatha smiled at him. “Then,” she said, “I must not keep her waiting.”
She rose and they went back together to join their hostess.
CHAPTER VIIITHE TRAVELING COMPANION
A gray haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when theScarrowmanialay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood-tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the two steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them to theScarrowmania’sforward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde—Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles—and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered how they had raised their passage money, and how many years’ bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their transit to the land of promise.
At the head of the gangway stood the steamboat doctors, for theScarrowmaniawas taking out an unusual number of passengers, and there were two of them. They were immaculate in blue uniform, and looked very clean and English by contrast with the mass of frowsy aliens. Beside them stood another official, presumably acting on behalf of the Dominion Government, though there were few restrictions imposed upon Canadian immigration then,nor, for that matter, did anybody trouble much about the comfort of the steerage passengers. Each steamer carried as many as she could hold.
As the stream poured out of the gangway, the doctor glanced at each newcomer’s face, and then seizing him by the wrist uncovered it. Then he looked at the official, who made a sign, and the man moved on. Since this took him two or three seconds, one could have fancied that he either possessed peculiar powers, or that the test was a somewhat inefficient one.
A group of first-class passengers, leaning on the thwartship rails close by, looked on, with complacent satisfaction or half-contemptuous pity. Among them stood Mrs. Hastings, Miss Winifred Rawlinson, and Agatha. It was noticed that Wyllard, with a pipe in his hand, sat on a hatch forward, near the head of the gangway. Agatha drew Mrs. Hastings’ attention to it.
“Whatever is Mr. Wyllard doing there?” she asked.
Mrs. Hastings, who was wrapped in furs, to protect her from the sting in the east wind, smiled at her.
“That,” she answered, “is more than I can tell you; but Harry Wyllard seems to find an interest in what other folks would consider most unpromising things, and, what is more to the purpose, he is rather addicted to taking a hand in them. It is a habit that costs him something now and then.”
Agatha asked nothing further. She was interested in Wyllard, but she was at the moment more interested in the faces of those who swarmed on board. She wondered what the emigrants had endured in the lands that had cast them out; and what they might still have to bear. It seemed to her that the murmur of their harsh voices went up in a great protest, an inarticulate cry of sorrow. While she looked on the doctor held back a long-haired man who,shuffling in broken boots, was following a haggard woman. The physician drew him aside, and after he had consulted with the other official, two seamen hustled the man towards a second gangway that led to the tug. The woman raised a wild, despairing cry. She blocked the passage, and a quarter-master drove her, expostulating in an agony of terror, forward among the rest. Nobody appeared concerned about this alien’s tragedy, except one man, and Agatha was not surprised when Wyllard rose and quietly laid his hand upon the official’s shoulder.
A parley appeared to follow, somebody gave an order, and when the alien was led back again the woman’s cries subsided. Agatha looked at Mrs. Hastings and once more a smile crept into the older woman’s eyes.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hastings, “I guessed he would feel that he had to interfere. That is a man who can’t see any one in trouble.” She added, with a little whimsical sigh, “He had a bonanza harvest last fall, anyway.”
They moved aft soon afterwards, and theScarrowmaniawas smoothly sliding seawards with the first of the ebb when Agatha met Wyllard. He glanced at the Lancashire sandhills, which were fading into a pale ocher gleam amid the haze over the starboard hand, and then at the long row of painted buoys that moved back to them.
“You’re off at last! The sad gray weather is dropping fast astern,” he said. “Out yonder, the skies are clear.”
“Thank you,” replied Agatha, “I’m to apply that as I like? As a matter of fact, however, our days weren’t always gray. But what was the trouble when those steerage people came on board?”
Wyllard’s manner, she noticed, was free alike from the complacent self-satisfaction which occasionally characterizes the philanthropist, and from any affectation of diffidence.
“Well,” he answered, “there was something wrong with that woman’s husband. Nothing infectious, I believe, but they didn’t seem to consider him a desirable citizen. They make a warning example of somebody with a physical infirmity now and then. The man, they decided, must be put ashore again. In the meanwhile, somebody else had hustled the woman forward, and it looked as if they would take her on without him. The tug was almost ready to cast off.”
“How dreadful!” said Agatha. “But what did you do?”
“Merely promised to guarantee the cost of his passage back if they would refer his case to the immigration people at the other end. It is scarcely likely that they’ll make trouble. As a rule, they only throw out folks who are certain to become a charge on the community.”
“But if he really had any infirmity, mightn’t it lead to that?”
“No,” Wyllard responded dryly. “I would engage to give him a fair start if it was necessary. You wouldn’t have had that woman landed in Montreal, helpless and alone, while the man was sent back again to starve in Poland?”
He saw a curious gleam in Agatha’s eyes, and added in a deprecating manner, “You see, I’ve now and then limped without a dollar into a British Columbian mining town.”
The girl was touched with compassion, but there was another matter that must be mentioned, though she felt that the time was inopportune.
“Miss Rawlinson, who had only a second-class ticket, insists upon being told how it is that she has been transferred to the saloon.”
Wyllard’s eyes twinkled, but she noticed that he waswholly free from embarrassment, which was not quite the case with her.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a matter I must leave you to handle. Anyway, she can’t go second-class now. One or two of the steerage exchanged when they saw their quarters, for which I don’t blame them, and they have filled up every room.”
“You haven’t answered the question.”
Wyllard waved his hand. “Miss Rawlinson is your bridesmaid, and I’m Gregory’s best man. It seems to me it’s my business to do everything just as he would like it done.”
He left her a moment later, and, though she did not know how she was to explain the matter to Miss Rawlinson, who was of an independent nature, it occurred to her that he, at least, had found a rather graceful way out of the difficulty. The more she saw of this Western farmer, the more she liked him.
It was after dinner when she next met him and the wind had changed. TheScarrowmaniawas steaming head-on into a glorious northwest breeze. The shrouds sang; chain-guy, and stanchion, and whatever caught the wind, set up a deep-toned throbbing; and ahead ranks of little, white-topped seas rolled out of the night. A half-moon, blurred now and then by wisps of flying cloud, hung low above them, and odd spouts of spray that gleamed in the silvery light leaped up about the dipping bows. Wyllard was leaning on the rail when Agatha stopped beside him. She glanced towards the lighted windows of the smoking-room not far away.
“How is it you are not in there?” she asked, noticing that he held a cigar in his hand.
“I was,” answered Wyllard. “It’s rather full, and it seemed that they didn’t want me. They’re busy playingcards, and the stakes are rather high. In a general way, a steamboat’s smoking-room is less of a men’s lounge than a gambling club.”
“And you object to cards?”
“Oh, no!” Wyllard replied with a smile. “They merely make me tired, and when I feel I want some excitement for my money I get it another way. That one seems tame to me.”
“What sort of excitement do you like?”
The man laughed. “There are a good many that appeal to me. Once it was collecting sealskins off other people’s beaches, and there was zest enough in that, in view of the probability of the dory turning over, or a gunboat dropping on to you. Then there was a good deal of very genuine excitement to be got out of placer-mining in British Columbia, especially when there was frost in the ranges, and you had to thaw out your giant-powder. Shallow alluvial workings have a way of caving in when you least expect it of them. After all, however, I think I like the prairie farming best.”
“Is that exciting?”
“Yes,” returned Wyllard, “if you do it in one way. The gold’s there—that you’re sure of—piled up by nature during I don’t know how many thousand years, but you have to stake high, if you want to get much of it out. One needs costly labor,—teams—no end of them—breakers, and big gang-plows. The farmer who has nerve enough drills his last dollar into the soil in spring, but if he means to succeed it costs him more than that. He must give the sweat of his tensest effort, the uttermost toil of his body—all, in fact, that has been given him. Then he must shut his eyes tight to the hazards against him, or look at them without wavering—the drought, the hail, the harvest frost, I mean. If his teams fall sick, or the season goes againsthim, he must work double tides. Still, it now and then happens that things go right, and the red wheat rolls ripe right back across the prairie. I don’t know that any man could want a keener thrill than the one he feels when he drives in the binders!”
Agatha had imagination, and she could realize something of the toil, the hazard, and the exultation of that victory.
“You have felt it often?” she inquired.
“Twice we helped to fill a big elevator,” Wyllard answered. “But I’ve been very near defeat.”
The girl looked at him thoughtfully. It seemed that he possessed the power of acquisition, as well as a wide generosity that came into play when by strenuous effort success had been attained. So far as her experience went, these were things that did not invariably accompany each other.
“And when the harvest comes up to your expectations, you give your money away?” she asked with a lifting of her brows.
Wyllard laughed. “You shouldn’t deduce too much from a single instance. Besides, that Pole’s case hasn’t cost me anything yet.”
Mrs. Hastings joined them, and when Wyllard strolled away the women passed some time leaning on the rails, and looking at the groups of shadowy figures on the forward deck. The attitude of the steerage passengers was dejected and melancholy, but one cluster had gathered around a man who stood upon the hatch.
“Oh,” he declared, “you’ll have no trouble. Canada’s a great country for a poor man. He can sleep beneath a bush all summer, if he can’t strike anything he likes.”
This did not appear particularly encouraging, but the orator went on: “Been over for a trip to the Old Country,and I’m glad I’m going back again. Went out with nothing except a good discharge, and they made me Sergeant of Canadian Militia. After that I was armorer to a rifle club. There’s places a blame long way behind the Dominion, and I struck one of them when we went with Roberts to Afghanistan. It was on that trip I and a Pathan rolled all down a hill, him trying to get his knife arm loose, and me jabbing his breastbone with my bayonet before I got it into him. I drove it through to the socket. You want to make quite sure of a Pathan.”
Miss Rawlinson winced at this. “Oh,” she cried, “what a horrible man!”
“It was ’most as tough as when you went after Riel, and stole the Scotchman’s furs,” suggested a Canadian.
The sergeant let the jibe go by. He said: “Louis’s bucks could shoot! We had them corraled in a pit, and every time one of the boys from Montreal broke cover he got a bullet into him. Did any of you ever hear a dropped man squeal?”
Agatha had heard sufficient, and she and her companions turned away, but as they moved across the deck the sergeant’s voice followed her.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “a grand country for a poor man. In the summer he can sleep beneath a bush.”
For some reason this eulogy haunted Agatha when she retired to her stateroom that night, and she wondered what awaited all those aliens in the new land. It occurred to her that in some respects she was situated very much as they were. For the first time, vague misgivings crept into her mind as she realized that she had cut herself adrift from all to which she had been accustomed. She felt suddenly depressed and lonely.
The depression had, however, almost vanished when, awakening rather early next morning, she went up on deck.A red sun hung over the tumbling seas that ran into the hazy east astern. The waves rolled up in crested phalanxes that gleamed green and incandescent white ahead. TheScarrowmaniaplunged through them with a spray cloud flying about her dipping bows. She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and because she carried 3,000 tons of railway iron she rolled distressfully. Her tall spars swayed athwart the vivid blueness of the morning sky with the rhythmic regularity of a pendulum. The girl was not troubled by any sense of sea-sickness. The keen north-wester that sang amid the shrouds was wonderfully fresh; and, when she met Wyllard crossing the saloon deck, her cheeks were glowing from the sting of the spray, and her eyes were bright.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Down there,” answered Wyllard, pointing to the black opening in the fore-hatch that led to the steerage quarters. “An acquaintance of mine who’s traveling forward asked me to take a look round, and I’m rather glad I did. When I’ve had a word with the chief steward I’m going back again.”
“You have a friend down there?”
“I met the man for the first time yesterday, and rather took to him. One of your naval petty officers, forcibly retired. He can’t live upon his pension, that is why he’s going out to Canada. Now you’ll excuse me.”
“I wonder,” ventured Agatha, “if you would let me go back with you?”
Wyllard looked at her curiously. “Well,” he said, with an air of reflection, “you’ll probably have to face a good deal that you don’t like out yonder, and in one way you won’t suffer from a little preparatory training. This, however, is not a case where sentimental pity is likely to relieve anybody. It’s the real thing.”
“I think I told you at Garside Scar that I haven’t lived altogether in luxury!” she replied.
Wyllard, who made no comment, disappeared, and merely signed to her when he came back. They reached the ladder that led down into the gloom beneath the hatch, and Agatha hesitated when a sour and musty odor floated up to her. She went down, however, and a few moments later stood, half-nauseated, gazing at the wildest scene of confusion her eyes had ever rested on. A little light came down the hatchway, and a smoky lamp or two swung above her head, but half the steerage deck was wrapped in shadow, and out of it there rose a many-voiced complaining. Flimsy, unplaned fittings had wrenched away, and men lay inert amid the wreckage, with the remains of their last meal scattered about them. There were unwashed tin plates and pannikins, knives, and spoons, sliding up and down everywhere, and the deck was foul with slops of tea, and trodden bread, and marmalade. Now and then, in a wilder roll than usual, a frowsy, huddled object slid groaning down the slant of slimy planking, but in every case the helpless passenger was fully dressed. Steerage passengers, in fact, seldom take off their clothes. For one thing, all their worldly possessions are, as a rule, secreted among their garments, and for another, most of those hailing from beyond the Danube have never been accustomed to disrobing. In the midst of the confusion, two half-sick steward lads were making ineffective efforts to straighten up the mess.
Agatha made out that a swarm of urchins were huddled together in a helpless mass along one side of the horrible place. The sergeant was haranguing them, while another man, whom she supposed to be the petty officer, pulled them to their feet one by one. A good deal of his labor was wasted, for theScarrowmaniawas rolling viciously,and as soon as a few were placed upright half of them collapsed again. Wyllard glanced towards the boys compassionately.
“I believe most of them have had nothing to eat since they came on board, though it isn’t the company’s fault,” he said. “There’s food enough served out, but before we picked the breeze up the men laid hands upon it first and half of it was wasted in the scramble. Then it seems they pitched these youngsters out of their berths.”
“Don’t they belong to anybody?” Agatha asked. “Is there no one to look after them?”
Wyllard smiled. “I believe one of your charitable institutions is sending them out, and there seems to be a clergyman, who has a curate and a lay assistant to help him, in charge of them. The assistant won’t be available while this rolling lasts, and the other two very naturally prefer the saloon. In a way, that’s comprehensible.”
He left her, and proceeded to help the man who was dragging the urchins to their feet.
“Get up!” commanded the sergeant. “Get up, and fall in. Dress from the left, and number off, the ones who can stand.”
It appeared that the lads had been drilled, for they scrambled into a line that bent and wavered each time theScarrowmania’sbows went down. After that, every other lad stepped forward at the word. The order was, “Left turn. March, and fall in on deck,” and when they feebly clambered up the ladder Wyllard, who turned to Agatha, pointed to a door in a bulkhead of rough white wood.
“It should have been locked, but I fancy you can get in that way, and up through another hatch,” he remarked. “The single women, and women with children, are in yonder, and if you want to be useful there’s a field for you. Get as many as possible up on deck.”
Agatha left him, and her face was rather white when at last she came up into the open air, with about a dozen forlorn, draggled women trailing helplessly after her. The lads were now sitting down in a double line on deck, each with a tin plate and a steaming pannikin in front of him. There were at least a hundred of them, and a man with a bronzed face and the stamp of command upon him was giving them the order of the voyage. He was the one she had already noticed.
“You’ll turn out at the whistle at half-past six,” he said. “Shake mattresses, roll up blankets, and prepare for berth inspection. Then, at the next whistle, you’ll fall in on deck stripped to the waist for washing parade. Fourth files numbering even are orderlies in charge of the plates and pannikins.”
“And,” announced the sergeant, “any insubordination will be sharply dealt with. Now, when I was with Roberts in Afghanistan——”
Wyllard, who was standing close by, turned to Agatha.
“I don’t think we’ll be wanted. You have probably earned your breakfast.”
They went back to the saloon deck, and the girl smiled when he looked at her inquiringly.
“It was a little horrible, but I hadn’t so many to deal with,” she said. “Do you, and those others, expect to bring any order out of that chaos?”
“No,” answered Wyllard, “with a little encouragement they’ll do it themselves. That is, the English, Danes, and Germans. One can trust them to evolve a workable system. It’s in their nature. You can trace most things that tend to wholesome efficiency back to the old Teutonic leaven. By and by, they’ll proceed to put some pressure on the Latins, Slavs, and Jews.”
“But is it your business to offer them that encouragement?”
Wyllard laughed. “Strictly speaking, it isn’t in the least, but unnecessary chaos is hateful, and, any way, I’m not the only one who doesn’t seem to like it. There’s the petty officer, and our friend, the sergeant, who was with Roberts in Afghanistan.”
Agatha said nothing further. She was a little surprised to feel that she was anxious to keep this man’s good opinion, though that was not exactly why she had nerved herself for the venture into the single women’s quarters. Leaving him out altogether, it seemed to her that there was something rather fine in the way that the sergeant and the petty officer who was going out almost penniless to Canada, had saddled themselves with the task of looking after those helpless lads. It was wholly unpaid labor, for which the men who preferred to remain within the safe limits of the saloon deck would presumably get the credit. After all, she decided, there were, no doubt, men in every station who helped to keep the world sweet and clean, and she believed that Wyllard was to be counted among them. He certainly differed in many ways from Gregory, but then Gregory was unapproachable. She did not remember that it was four years since she had seen Hawtrey, and that her ideas had been a little unformed then.
In the evening, Mrs. Hastings, with whom he was evidently a favorite, happened to speak of Wyllard, and the efforts he was making in the steerage, and Agatha asked a question.
“Does he often undertake this kind of thing?”
“No,” Mrs. Hastings answered with a smile. “Any way, not on so large a scale. He’s very far from setting up as a professional philanthropist, my dear. I don’t rememberhis offering to point out duty to other folks, and I don’t think he goes about in search of an opportunity of benefiting humanity. Still, when an individual case thrusts itself beneath his nose, he generally does what he can.”
“I’ve heard people say that the individual method only perpetuates the trouble,” remarked Agatha.
Mrs Hastings shook her head. “That,” she said, “is a subject I’m not well posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry Wyllard’s simple plan, there would be considerably less need for organized charity.”