Lady Merton, Colonist Part 7

"No, no!" said Elizabeth eagerly, recovering herself, "I am only a spectator. _We_ see the drama--we feel it--much more than they can who are in it. At least"--she wavered--"Well!--I have met one man who seems to feel it!"

"Your Canadian friend?"

Elizabeth nodded.

"He sees the vision--he dreams the dream!" she said brightly. "So few do. But I think he does. Oh, dear--_dear_!--how time flies! I must go and see what Philip is after."

Delaine was left discontented. He had come to press his suit, and he found a lady preoccupied. Canada, it seemed, was to be his rival! Would he ever be allowed to get in a word edgewise?

Was there ever anything so absurd, so disconcerting? He looked forward gloomily to a dull afternoon, in quest of fat cattle, with a car-full of unknown Canadians.

CHAPTER IV

At three o'clock, in the wide Winnipeg station, there gathered on the platform beside Lady Merton's car a merry and motley group of people. A Chief Justice from Alberta, one of the Senators for Manitoba, a rich lumberman from British Columbia, a Toronto manufacturer--owner of the model farm which the party was to inspect, two or three ladies, among them a little English girl with fine eyes, whom Philip Gaddesden at once marked for approval; and a tall, dark-complexioned man with hollow cheeks, large ears, and a long chin, who was introduced, with particular emphasis, to Elizabeth by Anderson, as "Mr. Felix Mariette"--Member of Parliament, apparently, for some const.i.tuency in the Province of Quebec.

The small crowd of persons collected, all eminent in the Canadian world, and some beyond it, examined their hostess of the afternoon with a kindly amus.e.m.e.nt. Elizabeth had sent round letters; Anderson, who was well known, it appeared, in Winnipeg, had done a good deal of telephoning. And by the letters and the telephoning this group of busy people had allowed itself to be gathered; simply because Elizabeth was her father's daughter, and it was worth while to put such people in the right way, and to send them home with some rational notions of the country they had come to see.

And she, who at home never went out of her way to make a new acquaintance, was here the centre of the situation, grasping the ident.i.ties of all these strangers with wonderful quickness, flitting about from one to another, making friends with them all, and constraining Philip to do the same. Anderson followed her closely, evidently feeling a responsibility for the party only second to her own.

He found time, however, to whisper to Mariette, as they were all about to mount the car:

"Eh bien?"

"Mais oui--tres gracieuse!" said the other, but without a smile, and with a shrug of the shoulders. _He_ was only there to please Anderson.

What did the aristocratic Englishwoman on tour--with all her little Jingoisms and Imperialisms about her--matter to him, or he to her?

While the stream of guests was slowly making its way into the car, while Yerkes at the further end, resplendent in a b.u.t.tonhole and a white cap and ap.r.o.n, was watching the scene, and the special engine, like an impatient horse, was puffing and hissing to be off, a man, who had entered the cloak-room of the station to deposit a bundle just as the car-party arrived, approached the cloak-room door from the inside, and looked through the glazed upper half. His stealthy movements and his strange appearance pa.s.sed unnoticed. There was a noisy emigrant party in the cloak-room, taking out luggage deposited the night before; they were absorbed in their own affairs, and in some wrangle with the officials which involved a good deal of lost temper on both sides.

The man was old and grey. His face, large-featured and originally comely in outline, wore the unmistakable look of the outcast. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth trembled, so did his limbs as he stood peering by the door. His clothes were squalid, and both they and his person diffused the odours of the drinking bar from which he had just come. The porter in charge of the cloak-room had run a hostile eye over him as he deposited his bundle. But now no one observed him; while he, gathered up and concentrated, like some old wolf upon a trail, followed every movement of the party entering the Gaddesden car.

George Anderson and his French Canadian friend left the platform last.

As Anderson reached the door of the car he turned back to speak to Mariette, and his face and figure were clearly visible to the watcher behind the barred cloak-room door. A gleam of savage excitement pa.s.sed over the old man's face; his limbs trembled more violently.

Through the side windows of the car the party could be seen distributing themselves over the comfortable seats, laughing and talking in groups.

In the dining-room, the white tablecloth spread for tea, with the china and silver upon it, made a pleasant show. And now two high officials of the railway came hurrying up, one to shake hands with Lady Merton and see that all was right, the other to accompany the party.

Elizabeth Merton came out in her white dress, and leant over the railing, talking, with smiles, to the official left behind. He raised his hat, the car moved slowly off, and in the group immediately behind Lady Merton the handsome face and thick fair hair of George Anderson showed conspicuous as long as the special train remained in sight.

The old man raised himself and noiselessly went out upon the platform.

Outside the station he fell in with a younger man, who had been apparently waiting for him; a strong, picturesque fellow, with the skin and countenance of a half-breed.

"Well?" said the younger, impatiently. "Thought you was goin' to take a bunk there."

"Couldn't get out before. It's all right."

"Don't care if it is," said the other sulkily. "Don't care a d.a.m.n b.u.t.ton not for you nor anythin' you're after! But you give me my two dollars sharp, and don't keep me another half-hour waitin'. That's what I reckoned for, an' I'm goin' to have it." He held out his hand.

The old man fumbled slowly in an inner pocket of his filthy overcoat.

"You say the car's going on to-night?"

"It is, old bloke, and Mr. George Anderson same train--number ninety-seven--as ever is. Car shunted at Calgary to-morrow night. So none of your nonsense--fork out! I had a lot o' trouble gettin' you the tip."

The old man put some silver into his palm with shaking fingers. The youth, who was a bartender from a small saloon in the neighbourhood of the station, looked at him with contempt.

"Wonder when you was sober last? Think you'd better clean yourself a bit, or they'll not let you on the train."

"Who told you I wanted to go on the train?" said the old man sharply.

"I'm staying at Winnipeg."

"Oh! you are, are you?" said the other mockingly. "We shouldn't cry our eyes out if you _was_ sayin' good-bye. Ta-ta!" And with the dollars in his hand, head downwards, he went off like the wind.

The old man waited till the lad was out of sight, then went back into the station and bought an emigrant ticket to Calgary for the night train. He emerged again, and walked up the main street of Winnipeg, which on this bright afternoon was crowded with people and traffic. He pa.s.sed the door of a solicitor's office, where a small sum of money, the proceeds of a legacy, had been paid him the day before, and he finally made his way into the free library of Winnipeg, and took down a file of the _Winnipeg Chronicle_.

He turned some pages laboriously, yet not vaguely. His eyes were dim and his hands palsied, but he knew what he was looking for. He found it at last, and sat pondering it--the paragraph which, when he had hit upon it by chance in the same place twenty-four hours earlier, had changed the whole current of his thoughts.

"Donaldminster, Sask., May 6th.--We are delighted to hear from this prosperous and go-ahead town that, with regard to the vacant seat the Liberals of the city have secured as a candidate Mr. George Anderson, who achieved such an important success last year for the C.P.R. by his settlement on their behalf of the dangerous strike which had arisen in the Rocky Mountains section of the line, and which threatened not only to affect all the construction camps in the district but to spread to the railway workers proper and to the whole Winnipeg section. Mr.

Anderson seems to have a remarkable hold on the railway men, and he is besides a speaker of great force. He is said to have addressed twenty-three meetings, and to have scarcely eaten or slept for a fortnight. He was shrewd and fair in negotiation, as well as eloquent in speech. The result was an amicable settlement, satisfactory to all parties. And the farmers of the West owe Mr. Anderson a good deal. So does the C.P.R. For if the strike had broken out last October, just as the movement of the fall crops eastward was at its height, the farmers and the railway, and Canada in general would have been at its mercy. We wish Mr. Anderson a prosperous election (it is said, indeed, that he is not to be opposed) and every success in his political career. He is, we believe, Canadian born--sprung from a farm in Manitoba--so that he has grown up with the Northwest, and shares all its hopes and ambitions."

The old man, with both elbows on the table, crouched over the newspaper, incoherent pictures of the past coursing through his mind, which was still dazed and stupid from the drink of the night before.

Meanwhile, the special train sped along the n.o.ble Red River and out into the country. All over the prairie the wheat was up in a smooth green carpet, broken here and there by the fields of timothy and clover, or the patches of summer fallow, or the white homestead buildings. The June sun shone down upon the teeming earth, and a mirage, born of sun and moisture, spread along the edge of the horizon, so that Elizabeth, the lake-lover, could only imagine in her bewilderment that Lake Winnipeg or Lake Manitoba had come dancing south and east to meet her, so clearly did the houses and trees, far away behind them, and on either side, seem to be standing at the edge of blue water, in which the white clouds overhead were mirrored, and reed-beds stretched along the sh.o.r.e. But as the train receded, the mirage followed them; the dream-water lapped up the trees and the fields, and even the line they had just pa.s.sed over seemed to be standing in water.

How foreign to an English eye was the flat, hedgeless landscape! with its vast satin-smooth fields of bluish-green wheat; its farmhouses with their ploughed fireguards and shelter-belts of young trees; its rare villages, each stretching in one long straggling line of wooden houses along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the duck rose as the train pa.s.sed! Was it this mere foreignness, this likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else--some perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself, mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of the scene?

Yet she scarcely spoke to Arthur Delaine, with whom one might have supposed this hidden feeling connected. She was indeed aware of him all the time. She watched him secretly; watching herself, too, in the characteristic modern way. But outwardly she was absorbed in talking with the guests.

The Chief Justice, roundly modelled, with a pink ball of a face set in white hair, had been half a century in Canada, and had watched the Northwest grow from babyhood. He had pa.s.sed his seventieth year, but Elizabeth noticed in the old men of Canada a strained expectancy, a buoyant hope, scarcely inferior to that of the younger generation. There was in Sir Michael's talk no hint of a Nunc Dimittis; rather a pa.s.sionate regret that life was ebbing, and the veil falling over a national spectacle so enthralling, so dramatic.

"Before this century is out we shall be a people of eighty millions, and within measurable time this plain of a thousand miles from here to the Rockies will be as thickly peopled as the plain of Lombardy."

"Well, and what then?" said a harsh voice in a French accent, interrupting the Chief Justice.

Arthur Delaine's face, turning towards the speaker, suddenly lightened, as though its owner said, "Ah! precisely."

"The plain of Lombardy is not a Paradise," continued Mariette, with a laugh that had in it a touch of impatience.

"Not far off it," murmured Delaine, as he looked out on the vast field of wheat they were pa.s.sing--a field two miles long, flat and green and bare as a billiard-table--and remembered the chestnuts and the looping vines, the patches of silky corn and spiky maize, and all the interlacing richness and broidering of the Italian plain. His soul rebelled against this naked new earth, and its bare new fortunes. All very well for those who must live in it and make it. "Yet is there better than it!"--lands steeped in a magic that has been woven for them by the mere life of immemorial generations.

He murmured this to Elizabeth, who smiled.

"Their shroud?" she said, to tease him. "But Canada has on her wedding garment!"

Again he asked himself what had come to her. She looked years younger than when he had parted from her in England. The delicious thought shot through him that his advent might have something to do with it.

He stooped towards her.