Masters of the Wheat-Lands Part 8

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 was then 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 pa.s.s, 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 make inquiries 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 was rendered 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 VII

AGATHA 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 pa.s.sed 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 coa.r.s.ely 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 entertain me. 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 att.i.tude.

"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 un.o.btrusively 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 she was 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 coa.r.s.eness 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.