The Impostor Part 20

"No," said Witham slowly. "I am afraid not. Still, I will finish the work I see in front of me. That at least--one cannot hope for the unattainable."

Maud Barrington was sensible of a sudden chill. "Still, if one has strength and patience, is anything quite unattainable?"

Witham looked out across the prairie, and for a moment the demons of pride and ambition rioted within him. He knew there were in him the qualities that compel success, and the temptation to stretch out a daring hand and take all he longed for grew almost overmastering.

Still, he also knew how strong the innate prejudices of caste and tradition are in most women of his companion's station, and she had never hidden one aspect of her character from him. It was with a smothered groan he realized that if he flung the last shred of honour aside and grasped the forbidden fruit it would turn to bitterness in his mouth.

"Yes," he said very slowly. "There is a limit, which only fools would pa.s.s."

Then there was silence for a while, until, as they swept across the rise, Maud Barrington laughed as she pointed to the lights that blinked in the hollow, and Witham realized that the barrier between them stood firm again.

"Our views seldom coincide for very long, but there is something else to mention before we reach the Grange," she said. "You must have paid out a good many dollars for the ploughing of your land and mine, and n.o.body's exchequer is inexhaustible at Silverdale. Now I want you to take a cheque from me."

"Is it necessary, that I should?"

"Of course," said the girl, with a trace of displeasure.

Witham laughed. "Then I shall be prepared to hand you my account whenever you demand it."

He did not look at his companion again, but with a tighter grip than there was any need for on the reins, sent the light wagon jolting down the slope to Silverdale Grange.

CHAPTER XIV

THE UNEXPECTED

The sun beat down on the prairie, which was already losing its flush of green, but it was cool where Maud Barrington and her aunt stood in the shadow of the bluff by Silverdale Grange. The birches, ta.s.selled now with whispering foliage, divided the homestead from the waste which would lie white and desolate under the parching heat, and that afternoon it seemed to the girl that the wall of green shut out more than the driving dust and sun-glare from the Grange, for where the trees were thinner she could see moving specks of men and horses athwart the skyline.

They had toiled in the sun-baked furrow since the first flush of crimson streaked the prairie's rim, and the chill of dusk would fall upon the gra.s.ses before their work was done. Those men who bore the burden and heat of the day were, the girl knew, helots now, but there was in them the silent vigour and something of the sombreness of the land of rock and forest they came from, and a time would come when others would work for them. Winning slowly, holding grimly, they were moving on, while secure in its patrician tranquility Silverdale stood still, and Maud Barrington smiled curiously as she glanced down at the long white robe that clung very daintily about her and then towards her companions in the tennis field. Her apparel had cost many dollars in Montreal, and there was a joyous irresponsibility in the faces of those she watched.

"It is a little unequal, isn't it, aunt?" she said. "One feels inclined to wonder what we have done that we should have exemption from the charge laid upon the first tiller of the soil we and the men who are plodding through the dust there are descended from."

Miss Barrington laughed a little as she glanced with a nod of comprehension at the distant toilers, and more gravely towards the net. Merry voices came up to her through the shadows of the trees as English lad and English maiden, lissom and picturesque in many-hued jackets and light dresses, flitted across the little square of velvet green. The men had followed the harrow and seeder a while that morning. Some of them, indeed, had for a few hours driven a team, and then left the rest to the hired hands, for the stress and sweat of effort that was to turn the wilderness into a granary was not for such as them.

"Don't you think it is all made up to those others?" she asked.

"In one sense--yes," said the girl. "Of course, one can see that all effort must have its idealistic aspect, and there may be men who find their compensation in the thrill of the fight, and the knowledge of work well done when they rest at night. Still, I fancy most of them only toil to eat, and their views are not revealed to us. We are, you see, women--and we live at Silverdale."

Her aunt smiled again. "How long is it since the plough crossed the Red River, and what is Manitoba now? How did those mile furrows come there, and who drove the road that takes the wheat out through the granite of the Superior sh.o.r.e? It is more than their appet.i.tes that impelled those men, my dear. Still, it is scarcely wise to expect too much when one meets them, for though one could feel it is presumptuous to forgive its deficiencies, the Berserk type of manhood is not conspicuous for its refinement."

For no apparent reason Maud Barrington evaded her aunt's gaze. "You,"

she said dryly, "have forgiven one of that type a good deal already, but, at least, we have never seen him when the fit was upon him."

Miss Barrington laughed. "Still, I have no doubt that, sooner or later, you will enjoy the spectacle."

Just then a light wagon came up behind them, and when one of the hired men helped them in they swept out of the cool shade into the dust and glare of the prairie, and when, some little time later, with the thud of hoofs and rattle of wheels softened by the bleaching sod, they rolled down a rise, there was spread out before them evidence of man's activity.

Acre by acre, gleaming chocolate brown against the grey and green of the prairie, the wheat loam rolled away, back to the ridge, over it, and on again. It was such a breadth of sowing as had but once, when wheat was dear, been seen at Silverdale, but still across the foreground, advancing in echelon, came lines of dusty teams, and there was a meaning in the furrows they left behind them, for they were not ploughing where the wheat had been. Each wave of l.u.s.trous clods that rolled from the gleaming shares was so much rent from the virgin prairie, and a promise of what would come when man had fulfilled his mission and the wilderness would blossom. There was a wealth of food stored, little by little during ages past counting, in every yard of the crackling sod to await the time when the toiler with the sweat of the primeval curse upon his forehead should unseal it with the plough.

It was also borne in upon Maud Barrington that the man who directed those energies was either altogether without discernment, or one who saw further than his fellows and had an excellent courage, when he flung his substance into the furrows while wheat was going down. Then, as the hired man pulled up the wagon, she saw him.

A great plough with triple shares had stopped at the end of the furrow, and the leading horses were apparently at variance with the man who, while he gave of his own strength to the uttermost, was asking too much from them. Young and indifferently broken, tortured by swarming insects, and galled by the strain of the collar, they had laid back their ears, and the wickedness of the bronco strain shone in their eyes. One rose almost upright amidst a clatter of harness, its mate squealed savagely, and the man who loosed one hand from the headstall flung out an arm. Then he and the pair whirled round together amidst the trampled clods in a blurred medley of spume-flecked bodies, soil-stained jean, flung-up hoofs, and an arm that swung and smote again. Miss Barrington grew a trifle pale as she watched, but a little glow crept into her niece's eyes.

The struggle, however, ended suddenly, and hailing a man who plodded behind another team, Witham picked up his broad hat, which was trampled into shapelessness, and turned towards the wagon. There was dust and spume upon him, a rent in the blue s.h.i.+rt, and the knuckles of one hand dripped red, but he laughed as he said, "I did not know we had an audience, but this, you see, is necessary."

"Is it?" asked Miss Barrington, who glanced at the ploughing. "When wheat is going down?"

Witham nodded. "Yes," he said. "I mean, to me; and the price of wheat is only part of the question."

Miss Barrington stretched out her hand, though her niece said nothing at all. "Of course, but I want you to help us down. Maud has an account you have not sent in, to ask you for."

Witham first turned to the two men who now stood by the idle machine.

"You'll have to drive those beasts of mine as best you can, Tom, and Jake will take your team. Get them off again now. This piece of breaking has to be put through before we loose again."

Then he handed his visitors down, and Maud Barrington fancied as he walked with them to the house that the fas.h.i.+on in which the damaged hat hung down over his eyes would have rendered most other men ludicrous. He left them a s.p.a.ce in his bare sitting-room, which suggested only grim utility, and Miss Barrington smiled when her niece glanced at her.

"And this is how Lance, the profligate, lives!" said she.

Maud Barrington shook her head. "No," she said. "Can you believe that this man was ever a prodigal?"

Her aunt was a trifle less astonished than she would once have been, but before she could answer Witham, who had made a trifling change in his clothing, came in.

"I can give you some green tea, though I am afraid it might be a good deal better than it is, and our crockery is not all you have been used to," he said. "You see, we have only time to think of one thing until the sowing is through."

Miss Barrington's eyes twinkled. "And then?"

"Then," said Witham, with a little laugh, "there will be prairie hay to cut, and after that the harvest coming on."

"In the meanwhile, it was business that brought me here, and I have a cheque with me," said Maud Barrington. "Please let us get it over first of all."

Witham sat down at a table and scribbled on a strip of paper. "That,"

he said gravely, "is what you owe me for the ploughing."

There was a little flush in his face as he took the cheque the girl filled in, and both felt somewhat grateful for the entrance of a man in blue jean with the tea. It was of very indifferent quality, and he had sprinkled a good deal on the tray, but Witham felt a curious thrill as he watched the girl pour it out at the head of the bare table. Her white dress gleamed in the light of a dusty window, and the shadowy cedar boarding behind her forced up each line of the shapely figure. Again the maddening temptation took hold of him and he wondered whether he had betrayed too much, when he felt the elder lady's eyes upon him. There was a tremor in his brown fingers as he took the cup held out to him, but his voice was steady.

"You can scarcely fancy how pleasant this is," he said. "For eight years, in fact, ever since I left England, no woman has ever done any of these graceful little offices for me."

Miss Barrington glanced at her niece, and both of them knew that, if the lawyer had traced Courthorne's past correctly, this could not be true. Still, there was no disbelief in the elder lady's eyes, and the girl's faith remained unshaken.

"Eight years," she said, with a little smile, "is a very long while."

"Yes," said Witham, "horribly long, and one year at Silverdale is worth them all--that is, a year like this one, which is going to be remembered by all who have sown wheat on the prairie; and that leads up to something. When I have ploughed all my own holding I shall not be content, and I want to make another bargain. Give me the use of your unbroken land, and I will find horses, seed, and men, while we will share what it yields us when the harvest is in."

The girl was astonished. This, she knew, was splendid audacity, for the man had already staken very heavily on the crop he had sown, and while the daring of it stirred her she sat silent a moment.

"I could lose nothing, but you will have to bring out a host of men and have risked so much," she said. "n.o.body but you, and I, and three or four others in all the province, are ploughing more than half their holdings."