Masters of the Wheat-Lands Part 17

"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 been granted 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 gra.s.s. 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 thras.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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, which stopped 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed. 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. "I suppose 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 employes are 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."