Part 7 (2/2)
”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.
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