Part 10 (2/2)

His look, gay and vivacious as a boy's, interrogated hers. Elizabeth stammered a few words in praise of Canada. But her eyes were still wet, and the Governor-General perceived it.

”That was touching?” he said. ”To die in your teens in this country!--just as the curtain is up and the play begins--hard! Hullo, Anderson!”

The great man extended a cordial hand, chaffed Philip a little, gave Lady Merton some hurried but very precise directions as to what she was to see--and whom--at Vancouver and Pretoria. ”You must see So-and-so and So-and-so--great friends of mine. D----'ll tell you all about the lumbering. Get somebody to show you the Chinese quarter. And there's a splendid old fellow--a C.P.R. man--did some of the prospecting for the railway up North, toward the Yellowhead. Never heard such tales; I could have sat up all night.” He hastily scribbled a name on a card and gave it to Elizabeth. ”Good-bye--good-bye!”

He hastened off, but they saw him standing a few moments longer on the platform, the centre of a group of provincial politicians, farmers, railway superintendents, and others--his hat on the back of his head, his pleasant laugh ringing every now and then above the clatter of talk. Then came departure, and at the last moment he jumped into his carriage, talking and talked to, almost till it had left the platform.

Anderson hailed a farming acquaintance.

”Well? What has the Governor-General been doing?”

”Speaking at a Farmers' Conference. Awful s.h.i.+ndy yesterday!--between the farmers and the millers. Row about the elevators. The farmers want the Dominion to own 'em--vow they're cheated and bullied, and all the rest of it. Row about the railway, too. Shortage of cars; you know the old story. A regular wasp's nest, the whole thing! Well, the Governor-General came this morning, and everything's blown over! Can't remember what he said, but we're all sure somebody's going to do something. Hope you know how he does it!--I don't.”

Anderson laughed as he sat down beside Elizabeth, and the train began to move.

”We seem to send you the right men!” she said, smiling--with a little English conceit that became her.

The train left the station. As it did so, an old man in the first emigrant car, who, during the wait at Regina, had appeared to be asleep in a corner, with a battered slouch hat drawn down over his eyes and face, stealthily moved to the window, and looked back upon the now empty platform.

Some hours later Anderson was still sitting beside Elizabeth. They were in Southern Alberta. The June day had darkened. And for the first time Elizabeth felt the chill and loneliness of the prairies, where as yet she had only felt their exhilaration. A fierce wind was sweeping over the boundless land, with showers in its train. The signs of habitation became scantier, the farms fewer. Bunches of horses and herds of cattle widely scattered over the endless gra.s.sy plains--the brown lines of the ploughed fire-guards running beside the railway--the bents of winter gra.s.s, white in the storm-light, bleaching the rolling surface of the ground, till the darkness of some cloud-shadow absorbed them; these things breathed--of a sudden--wildness and desolation. It seemed as though man could no longer cope with the mere vastness of the earth--an earth without rivers or trees, too visibly naked and measureless.

”At last I am afraid of it!” said Elizabeth, s.h.i.+vering in her fur coat, with a little motion of her hand toward the plain. ”And what must it be in winter!”

Anderson laughed.

”The winter is much milder here than in Manitoba! Radiant suns.h.i.+ne day after day--and the warm chinook-wind. And it is precisely here that the railway lands are selling at a higher price for the moment than anywhere else, and that settlers are rus.h.i.+ng in. Look there!”

Elizabeth peered through the gloom, and saw the gleam of water. The train ran along beside it for a minute or two, then the gathering darkness seemed to swallow it up.

”A river?”

”No, a ca.n.a.l, fed from the Bow River--far ahead of us. We are in the irrigation belt--and in the next few years thousands of people will settle here. Give the land water--the wheat follows! South and North, even now, the wheat is spreading and driving out the ranchers.

Irrigation is the secret. We are mastering it! And you thought”--he looked at her with amus.e.m.e.nt and a kind of triumph--”that the country had mastered us?”

There was something in his voice and eyes, as though not he spoke, but a nation through him. ”Splendid!” was the word that rose in Elizabeth's mind; and a thrill ran with it.

The gloom of the afternoon deepened. The showers increased. But Elizabeth could not be prevailed upon to go in. In the car Delaine and Philip were playing dominoes, in despair of anything more amusing.

Yerkes was giving his great mind to the dinner which was to be the consolation of Philip's day.

Meanwhile Elizabeth kept Anderson talking. That was her great gift. She was the best of listeners. Thus led on he could not help himself, any more than he had been able to help himself on the afternoon of the sink-hole. He had meant to hold himself strictly in hand with this too attractive Englishwoman. On the contrary, he had never yet poured out so frankly to mortal ear the inmost dreams and hopes which fill the ablest minds of Canada--dreams half imagination, half science; and hopes which, yesterday romance, become reality to-morrow.

He showed her, for instance, the great Government farms as they pa.s.sed them, standing white and trim upon the prairie, and bade her think of the busy brains at work there--magicians conjuring new wheats that will ripen before the earliest frosts, and so draw onward the warm tide of human life over vast regions now desolate; or trees that will stand firm against the prairie winds, and in the centuries to come turn this bare and boundless earth, this sea-floor of a primeval ocean, which is now Western Canada, into a garden of the Lord. Or from the epic of the soil, he would slip on to the human epic bound up with it--tale after tale of life in the ranching country, and of the emigration now pouring into Alberta--witched out of him by this delicately eager face, these lovely listening eyes. And here, in spite of his blunt, simple speech, came out the deeper notes of feeling, feeling richly steeped in those ”mortal things”--earthy, tender, humorous, or terrible--which make up human fate.

Had he talked like this to the Catholic girl in Quebec? And yet she had renounced him? She had never loved him, of course! To love this man would be to cleave to him.

Once, in a lifting of the shadows of the prairie, Elizabeth saw a group of antelope standing only a few hundred yards from the train, tranquilly indifferent, their branching horns clear in a pallid ray of light; and once a prairie-wolf, solitary and motionless; and once, as the train moved off after a stoppage, an old badger leisurely shambling off the line itself. And once, too, amid a driving storm-shower, and what seemed to her unbroken formless solitudes, suddenly, a tent by the railway side, and the blaze of a fire; and as the train slowly pa.s.sed, three men--lads rather--emerging to laugh and beckon to it. The tent, the fire, the gay challenge of the young faces and the English voices, ringed by darkness and wild weather, brought the tears back to Elizabeth's eyes, she scarcely knew why.

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