Part 8 (1/2)
”w.i.l.l.y-nilly, your friends must like Canada!” he said, in her ear; ”if it makes you so happy.”
He had no art of compliment, but the words were simple and sincere, and Elizabeth grew suddenly rosy, to her own great annoyance. Before she could reply, however, the Chief Justice had insisted on bringing her back into the general conversation.
”Come and keep the peace, Lady Merton! Here is my friend Mariette playing the devil's advocate as usual. Anderson tells me you are inclined to think well of us; so perhaps you ought to hear it.”
Mariette smiled and bowed a trifle sombrely. He was plain and gaunt, but he had the air of a _grand seigneur_, and was in fact a member of one of the old seigneurial families of Quebec.
”I have been enquiring of Sir Michael, madam, whether he is quite happy in his mind as to these Yankees that are now pouring into the new provinces. He, like everyone else, prophesies great things for Canada; but suppose it is an American Canada?”
”Let them come,” said Anderson, with a touch of scorn. ”Excellent stuff!
We can absorb them. We are doing it fast.”
”Can you? They are pouring all over the new districts as fast as the survey is completed and the railways planned. They bring capital, which your Englishman doesn't. They bring knowledge of the prairie and the climate, which your Englishmen haven't got. As for capital, America is doing everything; financing the railways, the mines, buying up the lands, and leasing the forests. British Columbia is only nominally yours; American capital and business have got their grip firm on the very vitals of the province.”
”Perfectly true!”--put in the lumberman from Vancouver--”They have three-fourths of the forests in their hands.”
”No matter!” said Anderson, kindling. ”There was a moment of danger--twenty years ago. It is gone. Canada will no more be American than she will be Catholic--with apologies to Mariette. These Yankees come in--they turn Englishmen in six months--they celebrate Dominion Day on the first of July, and Independence Day, for old sake's sake, on the fourth; and their children will be as loyal as Toronto.”
”Aye, and as dull!” said Mariette fiercely.
The conversation dissolved in protesting laughter. The Chief Justice, Anderson, and the lumberman fell upon another subject. Philip and the pretty English girl were flirting on the platform outside, Mariette dropped into a seat beside Elizabeth.
”You know my friend, Mr. Anderson, madam?”
”I made acquaintance with him on the journey yesterday. He has been most kind to us.”
”He is a very remarkable man. When he gets into the House, he will be heard of. He will perhaps make his mark on Canada.”
”You and he are old friends?”
”Since our student days. I was of course at the French College--and he at McGill. But we saw a great deal of each other. He used to come home with me in his holidays.”
”He told me something of his early life.”
”Did he? It is a sad history, and I fear we--my family, that is, who are so attached to him--have only made it sadder. Three years ago he was engaged to my sister. Then the Archbishop forbade mixed marriages. My sister broke it off, and now she is a nun in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec.”
”Oh, poor things!” cried Elizabeth, her eye on Anderson's distant face.
”My sister is quite happy,” said Mariette sharply. ”She did her duty.
But my poor friend suffered. However, now he has got over it. And I hope he will marry. He is very dear to me, though we have not a single opinion in the world in common.”
Elizabeth kept him talking. The picture of Anderson drawn for her by the admiring but always critical affection of his friend, touched and stirred her. His influence at college, the efforts by which he had placed his brothers in the world, the sensitive and generous temperament which had won him friends among the French Canadian students, he remaining all the time English of the English; the tendency to melancholy--a personal and private melancholy--which mingled in him with a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm for Canada, and Canada's future; Mariette drew these things for her, in a stately yet pungent French that affected her strangely, as though the French of Saint Simon--or something like it--breathed again from a Canadian mouth. Anderson meanwhile was standing outside with the Chief Justice. She threw a glance at him now and then, wondering about his love affair. Had he really got over it?--or was that M. Mariette's delusion? She liked, on the contrary, to think of him as constant and broken-hearted!
The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from Winnipeg. Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm--one of the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest becomes a pa.s.sion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.
Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour. He got no speech with Elizabeth, and prize cattle were his abomination. When the half-hour was done, he slipped away, unnoticed, from the party. He had marked a small lake or ”slough” at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of cottonwood. He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task. He was in the thirteenth book:
[Greek: os d hot aner dorpoio lilaietai, o te pauemar neion an helketon boe oinope pekton arotron]