CHAPTER XIAGATHA’S DECISION
It was with an expectancy which was toned down by misgivings that Hawtrey drove over to the homestead where Agatha was staying the next afternoon. The misgivings were not unnatural, for he had been chilled by the girl’s reception of him on the previous day, and her manner afterwards had, he felt, left something to be desired. Indeed, when she drove away with Mrs. Hastings, he had considered himself an injured man.
His efforts to mend the harness, and extricate the wagon in the dark, which occupied him for an hour, had helped partly to drive the matter from his mind, and when he reached his homestead rather late that night he went to sleep, and slept soundly until sunrise. Hawtrey was a man who never brooded over his troubles beforehand, and this was one reason why he did not always cope with them successfully when they could no longer be avoided.
When he had eaten his breakfast, however, he became sensible of a certain pique against both Mrs. Hastings and Agatha. In planning for the day he was forced to remember that he had no hired man, and that there was a good deal to be done. He decided that it might be well to wait until the afternoon before he called on Agatha, and for several hours he drove his team through the crackling stubble. His doubts and irritation grew weaker as he worked, and when, later, he drove into sight of the Hastings homestead, his buoyant temperament was beginning to reassert itself. Clear sunshine streamed down uponthe prairie out of a vault of cloudless blue, and he felt that any faint shadow that might have arisen between him and the girl could be readily swept away. He was a little less sure of this when he saw Agatha, who sat near an open window, in a scantily furnished match-boarded room. She had not slept at all. Her eyes were heavy, but there was a look of resolution in them which seemed out of place just then, and it struck him that she had lost the freshness which had been her distinguishing charm in England.
She rose when he came in, and then, to his astonishment, drew back a pace or two when he moved impulsively towards her.
“No,” she said, with a hand raised restrainingly, “you must hear what I have to say, and try to bear with me. It is a little difficult, Gregory, but it must be said at once.”
Gregory stood still, gazing at her with consternation in his face, and for a moment she looked steadily at him. It was a painful moment, for she was gifted with a clearness of vision which she almost longed to be delivered from. She saw that the impression which had brought her a vague sense of dismay on the previous afternoon was wrong. The trouble was that he had not changed at all. He was what he had always been, and she had merely deceived herself when she had permitted her girlish fancy to endow him with qualities and graces which he had never possessed. There was, however, no doubt that she had still a duty toward him.
He spoke first with a trace of hardness in his voice.
“Then,” he rejoined, “won’t you sit down? This is naturally a little—embarrassing—but I’ll try to listen.”
Agatha sank into a seat by the open window, for she felt physically worn out, and before her there was a task from which she shrank.
“Gregory,” she began, “I feel that we have come near making what might prove to be a horrible mistake.”
“We?” repeated Hawtrey, while the blood rose into his weather-darkened face. “That means both of us.”
“Yes,” asserted Agatha, with a steadiness that cost her an effort.
Hawtrey went a step nearer to her. “Do you want me to admit that I’ve made a mistake.”
“Are you quite sure you haven’t?”
She flung the question at him sharply with tense apprehension, for, after all, if Gregory was sure of himself, there was only one course open to her. He leaned upon the table, gazing at her, and as he studied her face his indignation melted, and doubts crept into his mind.
She looked weary, and grave, almost haggard, and it was a fresh, light-hearted girl with whom he had fallen in love in England. The mark of the last two years of struggle was plain on her. He tried to realize what he had looked for when he had asked her to marry him, and could not get a clear conception of his vision. In the back of his mind was a half-formulated idea that he had dreamed of a cheerful companion, somebody to amuse him. She scarcely seemed likely to be entertaining now.
Gregory was not a man who could face a crisis collectedly, and his thoughts became confused until one idea emerged from them. He had pledged himself to her, and the fact laid a certain obligation upon him. It was his part to overrule any fancies she might be disposed to indulge in.
“Well,” he said stoutly, “I’m not going to admit anything of that kind. The journey has been too much for you. You haven’t got over it yet.” He lowered his voice, and his face softened. “Aggy, dear, I’ve waited four years for you.”
His words stirred her, for they were certainly true, andhis gentleness had also its effect. The situation was becoming more and more difficult, since it seemed impossible to make him understand that he would in all probability speedily tire of her. To make it clear that she could never be satisfied with him was a thing from which she shrank.
“How have you passed those four years?” she asked, to gain time.
For a moment his conscience smote him. He remembered the trips to Winnipeg, and the dances to which he had escorted Sally Creighton. It was, however, evident that Agatha could have heard nothing of Sally.
“I spent them in hard work. I wanted to make the place comfortable for you,” he answered. “It is true”—and he added this with a twinge of uneasiness, as he remembered that his neighbors had done much more with less incentive—“that it’s still very far from what I would like, but things have been against me.”
The speech had a far stronger effect than he could have expected, for Agatha remembered Wyllard’s description of what the prairie farmer had to face. Those four years of determined effort and patient endurance, as she pictured them, counted heavily against her in the man’s favor. It flashed upon her that, after all, there might have been some warrant for the view that she had held of Gregory’s character when he had fallen in love with her. He was younger then. There must have been latent possibilities in him, but the years of toil had killed them and hardened him. It was for her sake he had made the struggle, and now it seemed unthinkable that she should renounce him because he came to her with the dust and stain of it upon him. For all that, she was possessed with a feeling that she would involve them both in disaster if she yielded. Something warned her that she must stand firm.
“Gregory,” she said, “I seem to know that we should both be sorry afterwards if I kept my promise.”
Hawtrey straightened himself with a smile that she recognized. She had liked him for it once, for it had then suggested the joyous courage of untainted youth. Now, however, it struck her as merely hinting at empty, complacent assurance. She hated herself for the fancy, but it would not be driven away.
“Well,” he replied, “I’m quite willing to face that hazard. I suppose this diffidence is only natural, Aggy, but it’s a little hard on me.”
“No,” replied the girl with emphasis, “it’s horribly unnatural, and that’s why I’m afraid. I should have come to you gladly, without a misgiving, feeling that nothing could hurt me if I was with you. I wanted to do that, Gregory—I meant to—but I can’t.” Then her voice fell to a tone that had vibrant regret in it. “You should have made sure—you should have married me when you last came home.”
“But I’d nowhere to take you. The farm was only half-broken prairie, the homestead almost unhabitable.”
Agatha winced at this. It was, no doubt, true, but it seemed horribly petty and commonplace. His comprehension stopped at such details as these, and he had given her no credit for the courage which would have made light of bodily discomfort.
“Do you think that would have mattered? We were both very young then, and we could have faced our troubles and grown up together. Now we’re not the same. You let me grow up alone.”
Hawtrey shrugged his shoulders. “I haven’t changed,” he told her as she looked at him with deep-seeing eyes.
He contented himself with that, and Agatha grew more resolute. There was not a spark of imagination in him,scarcely even a spark of the passion which, if it had been strong enough, might have swept her away in spite of her shrinking. He was a man of comely presence, whimsical, and quick, as she remembered, at light badinage, but when there was a crisis to be grappled with he somehow failed. His graces were on the surface. There was no depth in him.
“Aggy,” he added humbly, when he should have been dominant and forceful, “it is only a question of a little time. You will get used to me.”
“Then,” pleaded the girl, who clutched at the chance of respite, “give me six months from to-day. It isn’t very much to ask, Gregory.”
Gregory wrinkled his brows. “It’s a great deal,” he answered slowly. “I feel that we shall drift further and further apart if once I let you go.”
“Then you feel that we have drifted a little already?”
“I don’t know what has come over you, Aggy, but there has been a change. I’m what I was, and I want to keep you.”
Agatha rose and turned towards him a white face. “If you are wise you will not urge me now,” she said.
Hawtrey met her gaze for a moment, and then made a sign of acquiescence as he turned his eyes away. He recognized that this was a new Agatha, one whose will was stronger than his. Yet he was astonished that he had yielded so readily.
“Well,” he agreed, “if it must be, I can only give way to you, but I must be free to come over here whenever I wish.” Suddenly a thought struck him. “But you may hare to go away,” he added, with sudden concern. “If I am to wait six months, what are you to do in the meanwhile?”
Agatha smiled wearily. Now that the respite had beengranted her, the question he had raised was not one that caused her any great concern.
“Oh,” she answered, “we can think of that later. I have borne enough to-day. This has been a little hard upon me, Gregory.”
“I don’t think it has been particularly easy for either of us,” returned Hawtrey, with grimness. “Anyway, it seems that I’m only distressing you.” There was a baffled, puzzled look in his face. “Naturally, this is so unexpected that I don’t know what to say. I’ll come back when I feel I’ve grasped the situation.”
Taking one of her hands, he stooped and kissed her cheek.
“My dear,” he said, “I only want to make it as easy as I can. You’ll try to think of me favorably.”
He went out and left her sitting beside the open window. A warm breeze swept into the room; outside a blaze of sunshine rested on the prairie. The ground about the house was torn up with wheel ruts, for the wooden building rose abruptly without fence or garden from the waste of whitened grass. Close to the house stood a birch-log barn or stables, its sides curiously ridged and furrowed where the trunks were laid on one another. Further away rose a long building of sod, and a great shapeless yellow mound with a domed top towered behind it. It was most unlike a trim English rick, and Agatha wondered what it could be. As a matter of fact, it was a not uncommon form of granary, the straw from the last thrashing flung over a birch-pole framing. Behind it ran a great breadth of knee-high stubble, blazing ocher and cadmium in the sunlight. It had evidently extended further than it did, for a blackened space showed where a fire had been lighted to destroy it. In the big field Hastings was plowing. Clad in blue duck he plodded behind his horses, whichstopped now and then when the share jarred against a patch of still frozen soil. Further on two other men, silhouetted in blue against the whitened grass, drove spans of slowly moving oxen that hauled big breaker plows, and the lines of clods that lengthened behind them gleamed in the sunlight a rich chocolate-brown. Beyond them the wilderness ran unbroken to the horizon.
Agatha gazed at it all vacantly, but the newness and strangeness of it reacted upon her. She felt very desolate and lonely, but she remembered that she must still grapple with a practical difficulty. She could not stay with Mrs. Hastings indefinitely, and she had not the least notion where to go or what she was to do. She was leaning back in her chair wearily with half-closed eyes when her hostess came in and looked at her with a smile that suggested comprehension. Mrs. Hastings was thin, and seemed a trifle worn, but she had shrewd, kindly eyes. She wore a plain print dress which was dusted here and there with flour.
“So you have sent him away!” she exclaimed.
It was borne in upon Agatha that she could be candid with this woman who had already guessed the truth.
“Yes,” she replied, “for six months. That is, we are not to decide on anything until they have passed. I felt we must get used to each other. It seemed best.”
“To you. Did it seem best to Gregory?”
A flush crept into Agatha’s face. Though his acquiescence had been a relief to her, she felt that he might have made a more vigorous protest.
“He gave in to me,” she answered.
Mrs. Hastings looked thoughtful. “Well,” she observed, “I believe you were wise, but that opens up another question. What are you going to do in the meanwhile?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Agatha apathetically. “Isuppose I shall have to go away—to Winnipeg, most probably. I could teach, I think.”
“How are you and Gregory to get used to each other if you go away?”
Agatha made a helpless gesture. “I hadn’t looked at it in that light.”
“Are you very anxious to get used to him?”
Agatha shrank from the question; but there was a constraining kindliness in the older woman’s eyes.
“I daren’t quite think about it yet. I mean to try. I must try. I seem to be playing an utterly contemptible, selfish part, but I could not marry him—now!”
Mrs. Hastings crossed the room, and sat down by her side.
“My dear,” she said, “as I told you, I think you are doing right, and I believe I know how you feel. Everybody prophesied disaster when I came out to join Allen from a sheltered home in Montreal, and at the beginning my life here was not easy to me. It was all so different, and there were times when I was afraid, and my heart was horribly heavy. If it hadn’t been for Allen I think I should have given in and broken down. He understood, however. He never failed me.”
Agatha’s eyes grew misty, and she turned her head away.
“Yes,” she replied, “that would make it wonderfully easier.”
“You must forgive me,” apologized Mrs. Hastings. “I was tactless, but I didn’t mean to hurt you. Well, one difficulty shouldn’t give us very much trouble. Why shouldn’t you stay here with me?”
Agatha turned towards her abruptly with a look of relief in her face, which faded quickly. She liked this woman, and she liked her husband, but she remembered that she had no claim on them.
“Oh,” she declared, “it is out of the question.”
“Wait a little. I’m proposing to give you quite as much as you will probably care to do. There are my two little girls to teach, and I think they have rather taken to you. I can scarcely find a minute for their lessons, and, as you have seen, there is a piano which has only a few of the keys broken. Besides, we have only one Scandinavian maid who smashes everything that isn’t made of indurated fiber, and I’m afraid she’ll marry one of the boys in a month or two. It was only by sending the kiddies to Brandon and getting Mrs. Creighton, a neighbor of ours, to look after Allen, who insisted on my going, that I was able to get to Paris with some Montreal friends. In any case, you’d have no end of duties.”
“You are doing this out of—charity!”
Mrs. Hastings laughed. “A week or two ago, Allen wrote to some friends of his in Winnipeg asking them to send me anybody.”
The girl’s eyes shone mistily. “Oh!” she cried, “you have lifted one weight off my mind.”
“I think,” observed Mrs. Hastings, “the others will also be removed in due time.”
After that she talked cheerfully of other matters, and Agatha listened to her with a vague wonder at her own good fortune in falling in with such a friend.
There are in that country many men and women who are unfettered by conventions. They stretch out an open hand to the stranger and the outcast. Toil has brought them charity in place of hardness, and still retaining, as some of them do, the culture of the cities, they have outgrown all the petty bonds of caste. The wheat-grower and the hired-man eat together. Rights are good-humoredly conceded in place of being fought for, and the sense of grievance and half-veiled suspicion common elsewhere among employesare exchanged for an efficient co-operation. It must, however, be admitted that there are also farmers of another kind, from whom the hired man has occasionally some difficulty in extracting his covenanted wages by personal violence.
The two women had been talking a long time when a team and a jolting wagon swept into sight, and Mrs. Hastings rose as the man who drove pulled up his horses.
“It’s Sproatly; I wonder what has brought him here,” she remarked.
The man sprang down from the wagon and walked towards the house. She gazed at him almost incredulously.
“He’s quite smart,” she added. “I don’t see a single patch on that jacket, and he has positively got his hair cut.”
“Is that an unusual thing in Mr. Sproatly’s case?” Agatha inquired.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hastings. “It’s very unusual indeed. What is stranger still, he has taken the old grease-spotted band off his hat, after clinging to it affectionately for the last twelve months.”
Agatha thought that the soft hat, which fell shapelessly over part of Sproatly’s face, needed something to replace the discarded band; but in another moment he entered the room. He shook hands with them both.
“You are looking remarkably fresh, but appearances are not invariably to be depended on, and it’s advisable to keep the system up to par,” he said with a smile. “I suppose you don’t want a tonic of any kind?”
“I don’t,” declared Mrs. Hastings resolutely; “Allen doesn’t, either. Besides, didn’t you get into some trouble over that tonic?”
“It was the cough cure,” explained Sproatly with a grin.“I sold a man at Lander’s one of the large-sized bottles, and when he had taken some he felt a good deal better. Then he seems to have argued the thing out like this: if one dose had relieved the cough, a dozen should drive it out of him altogether, and he took the lot. He slept for forty-eight hours afterward, and when I came across him at the settlement he attacked me with a club. The fault, I may point out, was in his logic. Perhaps you would like some pictures. I’ve a rather striking oleograph of the Kaiser. It must be like him, for two of his subjects recognized it. One hung it up in his shanty; the other asked me to hold it out, and then pitched a stove billet through the middle of it. He, however, produced his dollar; he said he felt so much better after what he’d done that he didn’t grudge it.”
“I’m afraid we’re not worth powder and shot,” said Mrs. Hastings. “Do you ever remember our buying any tonics or pictures from you?”
“I don’t, though I have felt that you ought to have done it.” Sproatly, who paused a moment, turned towards Agatha with a little whimsical bow. “The professional badinage of an unlicensed dealer in patent medicines may now and then mercifully cover a good deal of embarrassment. Miss Ismay has brought something pleasantly characteristic of the Old Country along with her.”
His hostess disregarded the last remark. “Then if you didn’t expect to sell us anything, what did you come for?”
“For supper,” answered Sproatly cheerfully. “Besides that, to take Miss Rawlinson out for a drive. I told her last night it would afford me considerable pleasure to show her the prairie. We could go round by Lander’s and back.”
“Then you will probably come across her somewhere about the straw-pile with the kiddies.”
Sproatly took the hint, and when he went out Mrs. Hastings laughed.
“You would hardly suppose that was a young man of excellent education!” she exclaimed. “So it’s on Winifred’s account he has driven over; at first I fancied it was on yours.”
Agatha was astonished, but she smiled. “If Winifred favors him with her views about young men he will probably be rather sorry for himself. He lives near you?”
“No,” said Mrs. Hastings. “In the summer he lives in his wagon, or under it, I don’t know which. Of course, if he’s really taken with Winifred he will have to alter that.”
“But he has only seen her once—you can’t mean that he is serious.”
“I really can’t speak for Sproatly, but it would be quite in keeping with the customs of the country if he was.”
A minute or two later Agatha saw Winifred in the wagon when it reappeared from behind the straw-pile, and Mrs. Hastings turned toward the window.
“She has gone with him,” she commented significantly. “Unfortunately, he has taken my kiddies too. If he brings them back with no bones broken it will be a relief to me.”
CHAPTER XIIWANDERERS
Agatha had spent a month with Mrs. Hastings. When they were driving over to Wyllard’s homestead one afternoon, the older woman pulled up her team while they were still some little distance away from their destination, and looked about her with evident interest. On the one hand, a vast breadth of torn-up loam ran back across the prairie, which was now faintly flecked with green. On the other, plowing teams were scattered here and there across the tussocky sod, and long lines of clods that flashed where the sunlight struck their facets trailed out behind them. The great sweep of grasses that rustled joyously before a glorious warm wind, gleamed luminously, and overhead hung a vault of blue without a cloud in it. Trailing out across it, flocks of birds moved up from the south.
“Harry is sowing a very big crop this year, and most of it on fall back-set,” she observed. “He has, however, horses enough to do that kind of thing, and, of course, he does it thoroughly.” She glanced toward the place where the teams were hauling unusually heavy plows through the grassy sod. “This is virgin prairie that he’s breaking, and he’ll probably put oats on it. They ripen quicker. He ought to be a rich man after harvest unless the frost comes, or the market goes against him. Some of his neighbors, including my husband, would have sown a little less and held a reserve in hand.”
Agatha remembered what Wyllard had told her one night on board theScarrowmania, and smiled, for she fanciedthat she understood the man. He was not one to hedge, as she had heard it called, or cautiously hold his hand. He staked boldly, but she felt that this was not only for the sake of the money that he might hope to gain. It was part of his nature—the result of an optimistic faith or courage that appealed to her, and sheer love of effort. She also guessed that his was not a spasmodic, impulsive activity. She could imagine him holding on as steadfastly with everything against him, exacting all that men and teams and machines could do. It struck her as curious that she should feel so sure of this; but she admitted that it was the case.
Sitting in the driving-seat of a big machine that ripped broad furrows through the crackling sod, he was approaching them. Four horses plodded wearily in front of the giant plow until he thrust one hand over, and there was a rattle and clanking as he swung them and the machine around beside the wagon. Then he got down, and stood smiling up at Agatha with his soft hat in his hand and the sunlight falling full upon his weather-darkened face. It was not a particularly striking face, but there was something in it, a hint of restrained force and steadfastness, she thought, which Gregory’s did not possess, and for a moment or two she watched him covertly.
He wore an old blue shirt, open at the throat and belted into trousers of blue duck, and she noticed the fine symmetry of his spare figure. The absence of any superfluous flesh struck her as in keeping with her view of his character. The man was well-endowed physically; but apart from the strong vitality that was expressed in every line of his pose he looked clean, as she vaguely described it to herself. There was an indefinable something about him that was apparently born of a simple, healthful life spent in determined labor in the open air. It became plainer, as sheremembered other men upon whom the mark of the beast was unmistakably set. Mrs. Hastings broke the silence.
“Well,” she said, “we have driven over as we promised. I’ve no doubt you will give us supper, but we’ll go on and sit with Mrs. Nansen in the meanwhile. I expect you’re too busy to talk to us.”
Wyllard laughed, and it occurred to Agatha that his laugh was wholesome as well as pleasant.
“I generally am busy,” he admitted. “These horses have been at it since sun-up, and they’re rather played out now. I’ll talk to you as long as you will let me after supper, which will soon be ready.”
Agatha noticed that though the near horse’s coat was foul with dust and sweat he laid his brown hand upon it, and it seemed to her that the gentleness with which he did it was very suggestive.
Mrs. Hastings, who had been scrutinizing the field, asked, “What’s to be the result of all this plowing if we have harvest frost or the market goes against you?”
“Quite a big deficit,” answered Wyllard cheerfully.
“And that doesn’t cause you any anxiety?”
“I’ll have had some amusement for my money.”
Mrs. Hastings turned to Agatha. “He calls working from sunrise until it’s dark, and afterwards now and then, amusement!” She looked back at Wyllard. “I believe it isn’t quite easy for you to hold your back as straight as you are doing, and that off-horse certainly looks as if it wanted to lie down.”
Wyllard laughed. “It won’t until after supper, anyway. There are two more rows of furrows still to do.”
“I suppose that is a hint!” Mrs. Hastings glanced at Agatha when the wagon jolted on.
“That man,” she said, “is a great favorite of mine. For one thing, he’s fastidious, though he’s fortunately veryfar from perfect in some respects. He has a red-hot temper, which now and then runs away with him.”
“What do you mean by fastidious?”
“It’s a little difficult to define, but I certainly don’t mean pernicketty. Of course, there is a fastidiousness which makes one shrink from unpleasant things, but Harry’s is the other kind. It impels him to do them every now and then.”
Agatha made no answer. She was uneasily conscious that it might not be advisable to think too much about this man, and in another minute or two they reached the homestead. The house was a plain frame building that had grown out of an older and smaller one of logs, part of which remained. It was much the same with the barns and stables, for, while they were stoutly built of framed timber or logs, one end of most of them was lower than the rest, and in some cases consisted of poles and sods. Even to her untrained eyes all she saw suggested order, neatness, and efficiency. The whole was flanked and sheltered by a big birch bluff, in which trunks and branches showed through a thin green haze of tiny opening leaves.
A man whom Wyllard had sent after them took the horses.
Agatha commented on what she called the added-to look of the buildings.
“The Range,” said Mrs. Hastings, “has grown rapidly since Harry took hold. The old part represents the high-water mark of his father’s efforts. Of course,” she added reflectively, “Harry has had command of some capital since a relative of his died, but I never thought that explained everything.”
They entered the house, and a gray-haired Swedish woman led them through several match-boarded rooms into a big, cool hall. She left them there for a while, and Agathawas absorbed for a minute or two with her impressions of the house. It was singularly empty by comparison with the few English homesteads that she had seen. There were no curtains nor carpets nor hangings of any kind, but it was commodious and comfortable.
“What can a bachelor want with a place like this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” answered Mrs. Hastings; “perhaps it’s Harry’s idea of having everything proportionate. The Range is quite a big, and generally a prosperous, farm. Besides, it’s likely that he doesn’t contemplate remaining a bachelor forever. Indeed, Allen and I sometimes wonder how he has escaped marriage for so long.”
“Is ‘escaped’ the right word?” Agatha asked.
“It is,” asserted Mrs. Hastings with a laugh. “You see, he’s highly eligible from our point of view, but at the same time he’s apparently invulnerable. I believe,” she added dryly, “that’s the right word, too.”
The Swedish housekeeper appeared again and they talked with her until she went to bring in the six o’clock supper. Soon after the table was laid Wyllard and the men came in. Wyllard was attired as when Agatha had last seen him, except that he had put on a coat. He led his guests to the head of the long table, but the men—there were a number of them—sat below, and evidently had no diffidence about addressing question or comment to their employer.
The men ate with a voracious haste, but that appeared to be the custom of the country, and Agatha could find no great fault with their manners or conversation. The talk was, for the most part, quaintly witty, and some of the men used what struck her as remarkably fitting and original similes. Indeed, as the meal proceeded, she became curiously interested.
The windows were open wide, and a sweet, warm airswept into the barely furnished room. The spaciousness of the room impressed her, and she was pleased with the evident unity of these brown-faced, strong-armed toilers with their leader. At the head of the table he sat, self-contained, but courteous and responsive to all alike, and though they were in an essentially democratic country, she felt that there was something almost feudal in the relations between him and his men. She could not imagine them to be confined to the mere exaction of so much labor and the expectation of payment of wages due. She was pleased that he had not changed his clothing.
So strong was Agatha’s interest that she was surprised when the meal was finished. Afterward, she and Mrs. Hastings talked with the housekeeper for a while, and an hour had slipped away when Wyllard suggested that he should show her the slough beyond the bluff.
“It’s the nearest approach to a lake we have until you get to the alkali tract,” he said.
Agatha went with him through the shadow of the wood, and when they came out among the trees he found her a seat upon a fallen birch. The house and plowing were hidden now, and they were alone on the slope to a slight hollow, in which half a mile of gleaming water lay. Its surface was broken here and there by tussocks of grass and reeds, and beyond it the prairie ran back unbroken, a dim gray waste, to the horizon. The sun had dipped behind the bluff, and the sky had become a vast green transparency. There was no wind now, but a wonderful exhilarating freshness crept into the cooling air, and the stillness was broken only by the clamor of startled wildfowl which Agatha could see paddling in clusters about the gleaming slough.
“Those are ducks—wild ones?” she asked.
“Yes,” answered Wyllard; “ducks of various kinds. Most of them the same as your English ones.”
“Do you shoot them?”
Agatha was not greatly interested, but he seemed disposed to silence, and she felt, for no very clear reason, that it was advisable to talk of something.
“No,” he said, “not often, anyway. If Mrs. Nansen wants a couple I crawl down to the long grass with the rifle and get them for her.”
“The rifle? Doesn’t the big bullet destroy them?”
“No,” returned Wyllard. “You have to shoot their head off or cut their neck in two.”
“You can do that—when they’re right out in the slough?” asked Agatha, who had learned that it is much more difficult to shoot with a rifle than a shotgun, which spreads its charge.
Wyllard smiled. “Generally; that is, if I haven’t been doing much just before. It depends upon one’s hands. We have our game laws, but as a rule nobody worries about them, and, anyway, those birds won’t nest until they reach the tundra by the Polar Sea. Still, as I said, we never shoot them unless Mrs. Nansen wants one or two for the pot.”
“Why?”
“I don’t quite know. For one thing, they’re worn out; they just stop here to rest.”
His answer appealed to the girl. It did not seem strange to her that the love of the lower creation should be strong in this man, who had no hesitation in admitting that the game laws were no restraint to him. When these Lesser Brethren, worn with their journey, sailed down out of the blue heavens, he believed in giving them right of sanctuary.
“They have come a long way?” she asked.
Wyllard pointed towards the south. “From Florida, Cuba, Yucatan; further than that, perhaps. In a day or two they’ll push on again toward the Pole, and others willtake their places. There’s a further detachment arriving now.”
Looking up, Agatha saw a straggling wedge of birds dotted in dusky specks against the vault of transcendental blue. The wedge coalesced, drew out again, and dropped swiftly, and the air was filled with the rush of wings; then there was a harsh crying and splashing, and she heard the troubled water lap among the reeds until deep silence closed in upon the slough again.
“The migrating instinct is strangely interesting,” she said.
A curious look crept into Wyllard’s eyes.
“It gives the poor birds a sad destiny, I think; they’re wanderers and strangers without a habitation; there’s unrest in them. After a few months on the tundra mosses to gather strength and teach the young to fly, they’ll unfold their wings to beat another passage before the icy gales. Some of us, I think, are like them!”
Agatha could not avoid the personal application.
“You surely don’t apply that to yourself,” she said. “You certainly have a habitation—the finest, isn’t it, on this part of the prairie?”
“Yes,” answered Wyllard slowly; “I suppose it is. I’ve now had a little rest and quietness too.”
His last remark did not appear to call for an answer, and Agatha sat silent.
“Still,” he went on reflectively, “I have a feeling that some day the call will come, and I shall have to take the trail again.” He paused, and looked at her before he added, “It would be easier if one hadn’t to go alone, or, since that would be necessary, if one had at least something to come back to when the journey was done.”
“Must you heed the call?” asked Agatha, who was puzzled by his steady gaze.
“Yes,” he said with gravity, “the call will come from the icy North if it ever comes at all.”
There was another brief silence. Agatha wondered what he was thinking of, but he soon told her.
“I remember how I came back from there last time,” he said. “We were rather late that season, and out of our usual beat when the gale broke upon us in the gateway of the Pole, between Alaska and Asia. We ran before it with a strip of the boom-foresail on one vessel and a jib that blew to ribands every now and then. The schooner was small, ninety tons or so, and for a week she scudded with the gray seas tumbling after her, white-topped, out of the snow and spume. The waves ranged high above her taffrail, curling horribly, but one did not want to look at them. The one man on deck had a line about him, and he looked ahead, watching the vessel screwing round with hove-up bows as she climbed the seas. If he’d let her fall off or claw up, the next wave would have made an end of her. He was knee-deep half the time in icy brine, and his hands had split and opened with the frost, but the sweat dripped from him as he clung to the jarring wheel. The helmsmen had another trouble which preyed on them. They were thinking of the three men they had left behind.
“Well,” he added, “we ran out of the gale, and I had bitter words to face when we reached Vancouver. As one result of the trouble I walked out of the city with four or five dollars in my pocket—though there was a share due to me. Then in an open car I rode up into the ranges to mend railroad bridges in the frost and snow. It was not the kind of home-coming one would care to look forward to.”
“Ah!” Agatha cried with a shudder, “it must have been horribly dreary.”
The man met her eyes. “Yes,” he said, “you—know. You came here from far away, I think a little weary, too,and something failed you. Then you felt yourself adrift. There were—it seemed—only strangers around you, but you were wrong in one respect; you were by no means a stranger to me.”
He had been leaning against a birch trunk, but now he moved a little nearer, and stood gravely looking down on her.
“You have sent Gregory away?” he questioned.
“Yes,” answered Agatha, and, startled, as she was, it did not occur to her that the mere admission was misleading.
Wyllard stretched out his hands. “Then won’t you come to me?”
The blood swept into the girl’s face. For the moment she forgot Gregory, and was conscious only of an unreasoning impulse which prompted her to take the hands held out to her. She rose and faced Wyllard with burning cheeks.
“You know nothing of me,” she said. “Can you think that I would let you take me out of charity?”
“Again you’re wrong—on both points. As I once told you, I have sat for hours beside the fire beneath the pines or among the boulders with your picture for company. When I was worn out and despondent you encouraged me. You have been with me high up in the snow on the ranges, and through leagues of shadowy bush. That is not all. There were times when, as we drove the branch line up the gorge beneath the big divide, all one’s nature shrank from the monotony of brutal labor. The paydays came around, and opportunities were made for us to forget what we had borne, and had still to bear. Then you laid a restraining hand on me. I could not take your picture where you could not go. Is all that to count for nothing?”
He held out his arms to her. “As to the other question,can you get beyond the narrow point of view? We’re in a big, new country where the old barriers are down. We’re merely flesh and blood—red blood—and we speak as we feel. Admitting that I was sorry for you—I am—how does that tell against me—or you? There’s one thing only that counts at all—I want you.”
Agatha was stirred with an emotion that made her heart beat wildly. He had spoken with a force and passion that had nearly swept her away with it. The vigor of the new land throbbed in his voice, and, flinging aside all cramping restraints and conventions, he had claimed her as primitive man claimed primitive woman. Her whole being responded to his love and Gregory faded out of her mind; but there was, after all, pride in her, and she could not quite bring herself to look at life from his point of view. All her prejudices and her traditions were opposed to it. He had made a mistake when he had admitted that he was sorry for her. She did not want his compassion, and she shrank from the thought that she would marry him—for shelter. It brought to her a sudden, shameful confusion as she remembered the haste with which marriages were arranged on the prairie. Then, as the first unreasoning impulse which had almost compelled her to yield to him passed away, she reflected that it was scarcely two months since she had met him in England. It was intolerable that he should think that she would be willing to fall into his arms merely because he had held them out to her.
“It is a little difficult to get beyond one’s sense of what is fit,” she said. “You—I must say again—can’t know anything about me. You have woven fancies about that photograph, but you must recognize that I’m not the girl you have created out of your reveries. In all probability she is wholly unreal, unnatural, visionary.” Agatha contrivedto smile, for she was recovering her composure. “Perhaps it is easy when one has imagination to endow a person with qualities and graces that could never belong to them. It must be easy”—though she was unconscious of it, there was a trace of bitterness in her voice—“because I know I could do it myself.”
Again the man held out his arms. “Then,” he said simply, “won’t you try? If you can only feel sure that the person has the qualities you admire it is possible that he could acquire one or two.”
Agatha drew back. “And I’ve changed ever so much since that photograph was taken!” she exclaimed with a catch in her voice.
Wyllard admitted it. “Yes,” he said, “I recognized that; you were a little immature then. I know that now—but all the graciousness and sweetness in you has grown and ripened. What is more, you have grown just as I seemed to know you would. I saw that clearly the day we met beside the stepping-stones. I would have asked you to marry me in England, only Gregory stood in the way.”
The color ebbed suddenly out of the girl’s face as she remembered.
“Gregory,” she declared in a strained voice, “stands in the way still. I didn’t send him away altogether. I’m not sure I made that clear.”
Wyllard stood very still for a moment or two.
“I wonder,” he said, “if there’s anything significant in the fact that you gave me that reason last. He failed you in some way?”
“I’m not sure that I haven’t failed him; but I can’t go into that.”
Again Wyllard stood silent. Then he turned to her with a strong restraint in his face.
“Gregory is a friend of mine,” he said, “there is, atleast, one very good reason why I should remember it, but it seems that somehow he hadn’t the wit to keep you. Well, I can only wait, but when the time seems ripe I shall ask you again. Until then you have my promise that I will not say another word that could distress you. Perhaps I had better take you back to Mrs. Hastings now.”
Agatha turned away, and they walked back together silently.