A day of showers and breaking clouds--of sudden sunlight, and broad
clefts of blue; a day when shreds of mist are lightly looped and meshed
about the higher peaks of the Rockies and the Selkirks, dividing the
forest world from the ice world above....
The car was slowly descending the Kicking Horse Pass, at the rear of a
heavy train. Elizabeth, on her platform, was feasting her eyes once more
on the great savage landscape, on these peaks and valleys that have
never till now known man, save as the hunter, treading them once or
twice perhaps in a century. Dreamily her mind contrasted them with the
Alps, where from all time man has laboured and sheltered, blending his
life, his births and deaths, his loves and hates with the glaciers and
the forests, wresting his food from the valleys, creeping height over
height to the snow line, writing his will on the country, so that in our
thought of it he stands first, and Nature second. The Swiss mountains
and streams breathe a "mighty voice," lent to them by the free passion
and aspiration of man; they are interfused and interwoven forever with
human fate. But in the Rockies and the Selkirks man counts for nothing
in their past; and, except as wayfarer and playfellow, it is probable
that he will count for nothing in their future. They will never be the
familiar companions of his work and prayer and love; a couple of
railways, indeed, will soon be driving through them, linking the life of
the prairies to the life of the Pacific; but, except for this conquest
of them as barriers in his path, when his summer camps in them are
struck, they, sheeted in a winter inaccessible and superb, know him and
his puny deeds no more, till again the lakes melt and the trees bud.
This it is that gives them their strange majesty, and clothes their
brief summer, their laughing fields of flowers, their thickets of red
raspberry and slopes of strawberry, their infinity of gleaming lakes and
foaming rivers--rivers that turn no mill and light no town--with a
charm, half magical, half mocking.
And yet, though the travelled intelligence made comparisons of this
kind, it was not with the mountains that Elizabeth's deepest mind was
busy. She took really keener note of the railway itself, and its
appurtenances. For here man had expressed himself; had pitched his
battle with a fierce nature and won it; as no doubt he will win other
similar battles in the coming years. Through Anderson this battle had
become real to her. She looked eagerly at the construction camps in the
pass; at the new line that is soon to supersede the old; at the bridges
and tunnels and snow-sheds, by which contriving man had made his purpose
prevail over the physical forces of this wild world. The great railway
spoke to her in terms of human life; and because she had known Anderson
she understood its message.
Secretly and sorely her thoughts clung to him. Just as, insensibly, her
vision of Canada had changed, so had her vision of Anderson. Canada was
no longer mere fairy tale and romance; Anderson was no longer merely its
picturesque exponent or representative. She had come to realise him as a
man, with a man's cares and passions; and her feelings about him had
begun to change her life.
Arthur Delaine, she supposed, had meant to warn her that Mr. Anderson
was falling in love with her and that she had no right to encourage it.
Her thoughts went back intently over the last fortnight--Anderson's
absences--his partial withdrawal from the intimacy which had grown up
between himself and her--their last walk at Lake Louise. The delight of
that walk was still in her veins, and at last she was frank with
herself about it! In his attitude towards her, now that she forced
herself to face the truth, she must needs recognise a passionate
eagerness, restrained no less passionately; a profound impulse, strongly
felt, and strongly held back. By mere despair of attainment?--or by the
scruple of an honourable self-control?
Could she--_could_ she marry a Canadian? There was the central question,
out at last!--irrevocable!--writ large on the mountains and the forests,
as she sped through them. Could she, possessed by inheritance of all
that is most desirable and delightful in English society, linked with
its great interests and its dominant class, and through them with the
rich cosmopolitan life of cultivated Europe--could she tear herself
from that old soil, and that dear familiar environment? Had the plant
vitality enough to bear transplanting? She did not put her question in
these terms; but that was what her sudden tumult and distress of mind
really meant.
Looking up, she saw Delaine beside her. Well, there was Europe, and at
her feet! For the last month she had been occupied in scorning it.
English country-house life, artistic society and pursuits, London in the
season, Paris and Rome in the spring, English social and political
influence--there they were beside her. She had only to stretch out
her hand.
A chill, uncomfortable laughter seemed to fill the inner mind through
which the debate passed, while all the time she was apparently looking
at the landscape, and chatting with her brother or Delaine. She fell
into an angry contempt for that mood of imaginative delight in which she
had journeyed through Canada so far. What! treat a great nation in the
birth as though it were there for her mere pleasure and entertainment?
Make of it a mere spectacle and pageant, and turn with disgust from the
notion that you, too, could ever throw in your lot with it, fight as a
foot-soldier in its ranks, on equal terms, for life and death!
She despised herself. And yet--and yet! She thought of her mother--her
frail, refined, artistic mother; of a hundred subtleties and charms and
claims, in that world she understood, in which she had been reared; of
all that she must leave behind, were she asked, and did she consent, to
share the life of a Canadian of Anderson's type. What would it be to
fail in such a venture! To dare it, and then to find life sinking in
sands of cowardice and weakness! Very often, and sometimes as though by
design, Anderson had spoken to her of the part to be played by women in
Canada; not in the defensive, optimistic tone of their last walk
together, but forbiddingly, with a kind of rough insistence. Substantial
comfort, a large amount of applied science--that could be got. But the
elegancies and refinements of English rich life in a prairie
farm--impossible! A woman who marries a Canadian farmer, large or small,
must put her own hands to the drudgery of life, to the cooking, sewing,
baking, that keep man--animal man--alive. A certain amount of rude
service money can command in the Northwest; but it is a service which
only the housewife's personal coöperation can make tolerable. Life
returns, in fact, to the old primitive pattern; and a woman counts on
the prairie according as "she looketh well to the ways of her household
and eateth not the bread of idleness."
Suddenly Elizabeth perceived her own hands lying on her lap. Useless
bejewelled things! When had they ever fed a man or nursed a child?
Under her gauze veil she coloured fiercely. If the housewife, in her
primitive meaning and office, is vital to Canada, still more is the
house-mother. "Bear me sons and daughters; people my wastes!" seems to
be the cry of the land itself. Deep in Elizabeth's being there stirred
instincts and yearnings which life had so far stifled in her. She
shivered as though some voice, passionate and yet austere, spoke to her
from this great spectacle of mountain and water through which she
was passing.
* * * * *
"There he is!" cried Philip, craning his head to look ahead along the
train.
Anderson stood waiting for them on the Field platform. Very soon he was
seated beside her, outside the car, while Philip lounged in the doorway,
and Delaine inside, having done his duty to the Kicking Horse Pass, was
devoting himself to a belated number of the "Athenæum" which had just
reached him.
Philip had stored up a string of questions as to the hunting of goat in
the Rockies, and impatiently produced them. Anderson replied, but, as
Elizabeth immediately perceived, with a complete lack of his usual
animation. He spoke with effort, occasionally stumbling over his words.
She could not help looking at him curiously, and presently even Philip
noticed something wrong.
"I say, Anderson!--what have you been doing to yourself? You look as
though you had been knocking up."
"I have been a bit driven this week," said Anderson, with a start. "Oh,
nothing! You must look at this piece of line."
And as they ran down the long ravine from Field to Golden, beside a
river which all the way seems to threaten the gliding train by the
savage force of its descent, he played the showman. The epic of the
C.P.R.--no one knew it better, and no one could recite it more
vividly than he.
So also, as they left the Rockies behind; as they sped along the
Columbia between the Rockies to their right and the Selkirks to their
left; or as they turned away from the Columbia, and, on the flanks of
the Selkirks, began to mount that forest valley which leads to Roger's
Pass, he talked freely and well, exerting himself to the utmost. The
hopes and despairs, the endurances and ambitions of the first explorers
who ever broke into that fierce solitude, he could reproduce them; for,
though himself of a younger generation, yet by sympathy he had lived
them. And if he had not been one of the builders of the line, in the
incessant guardianship which preserves it from day to day, he had at one
time played a prominent part, battling with Nature for it, summer
and winter.
Delaine, at last, came out to listen. Philip in the grip of his first
hero-worship, lay silent and absorbed, watching the face and gestures of
the speaker. Elizabeth sat with her eyes turned away from Anderson
towards the wild valley, as they rose and rose above it. She listened;
but her heart was full of new anxieties. What had happened to him? She
felt him changed. He was talking for their pleasure, by a strong effort
of will; that she realised. When could she get him alone?--her
friend!--who was clearly in distress.
They approached the famous bridges on the long ascent. Yerkes came
running through the car to point out with pride the place where the
Grand Duchess had fainted beneath the terrors of the line. With only the
railing of their little platform between them and the abyss, they ran
over ravines hundreds of feet deep--the valley, a thousand feet sheer,
below. And in that valley, not a sign of house, of path; only black
impenetrable forest--huge cedars and Douglas pines, filling up the
bottoms, choking the river with their débris, climbing up the further
sides, towards the gleaming line of peaks.
"It is a nightmare!" said Delaine involuntarily, looking round him.
Elizabeth laughed, a bright colour in her cheeks. Again the wilderness
ran through her blood, answering the challenge of Nature. Faint!--she
was more inclined to sing or shout. And with the exhilaration, physical
and mental, that stole upon her, there mingled secretly, the first
thrill of passion she had ever known. Anderson sat beside her, once more
silent after his burst of talk. She was vividly conscious of him--of his
bare curly head--of certain lines of fatigue and suffering in the
bronzed face. And it was conveyed to her that, although he was clearly
preoccupied and sad, he was yet conscious of her in the same way. Once,
as they were passing the highest bridge of all, where, carried on a
great steel arch, that has replaced the older trestles, the rails run
naked and gleaming, without the smallest shred of wall or parapet,
across a gash in the mountain up which they were creeping, and at a
terrific height above the valley, Elizabeth, who was sitting with her
back to the engine, bent suddenly to one side, leaning over the little
railing and looking ahead--that she might if possible get a clearer
sight of Mount Macdonald, the giant at whose feet lies Roger's Pass.
Suddenly, as her weight pressed against the ironwork where only that
morning a fastening had been mended, she felt a grip on her arm. She
drew back, startled.
"I beg your pardon!" said Anderson, smiling, but a trifle paler than
before. "I'm not troubled with nerves for myself, but--"
He did not complete the sentence, and Elizabeth, could find nothing to
say.
"Why, Elizabeth's not afraid!" cried Philip, scornfully.
"This is Roger's Pass, and here we are at the top of the Selkirks," said
Anderson, rising. "The train will wait here some twenty minutes. Perhaps
you would like to walk about."
They descended, all but Philip, who grumbled at the cold, wrapped
himself in a rug inside the car, and summoned Yerkes to bring him a cup
of coffee.
On this height indeed, and beneath the precipices of Mount Macdonald,
which rise some five thousand feet perpendicularly above the railway,
the air was chill and the clouds had gathered. On the right, ran a line
of glacier-laden peaks, calling to their fellows across the pass. The
ravine itself, darkly magnificent, made a gulf of shadow out of which
rose glacier and snow slope, now veiled and now revealed by scudding
cloud. Heavy rain had not long since fallen on the pass; the small
stream, winding and looping through the narrow strip of desolate ground
which marks the summit, roared in flood through marshy growths of dank
weed and stunted shrub; and the noise reverberated from the mountain
walls, pressing straight and close on either hand.
"Hark!" cried Elizabeth, standing still, her face and her light dress
beaten by the wind.
A sound which was neither thunder nor the voice of the stream rose and
swelled and filled the pass. Another followed it. Anderson pointed to
the snowy crags of Mount Macdonald, and there, leaping from ledge to
ledge, they saw the summer avalanches descend, roaring as they came,
till they sank engulfed in a vaporous whirl of snow.
Delaine tried to persuade Elizabeth to return to the car--in vain. He
himself returned thither for a warmer coat, and she and Anderson
walked on alone.
"The Rockies were fine!--but the Selkirks are superb!"
She smiled at him as she spoke, as though she thanked him personally for
the grandeur round them. Her slender form seemed to have grown in
stature and in energy. The mountain rain was on her fresh cheek and her
hair; a blue veil eddying round her head and face framed the brilliance
of her eyes. Those who had known Elizabeth in Europe would hardly have
recognised her here. The spirit of earth's wild and virgin places had
mingled with her spirit, and as she had grown in sympathy, so also she
had grown in beauty. Anderson looked at her from time to time in
enchantment, grudging every minute that passed. The temptation
strengthened to tell her his trouble. But how, or when?
As he turned to her he saw that she, too, was gazing at him with an
anxious, wistful expression, her lips parted as though to speak.
He bent over her.
"What was that?" exclaimed Elizabeth, looking round her.
They had passed beyond the station where the train was at rest. But the
sound of shouts pursued them. Anderson distinguished his own name. A
couple of railway officials had left the station and were hurrying
towards them.
A sudden thought struck Anderson. He held up his hand with a gesture as
though to ask Lady Merton not to follow, and himself ran back to
the station.
Elizabeth, from where she stood, saw the passengers all pouring out of
the train on to the platform. Even Philip emerged and waved to her. She
slowly returned, and meanwhile Anderson had disappeared.
She found an excited crowd of travellers and a babel of noise. Delaine
hurried to her.
It appeared that an extraordinary thing had happened. The train
immediately in front of them, carrying mail and express cars but no
passengers, had been "held up" by a gang of train-robbers, at a spot
between Sicamous junction and Kamloops. In order to break open the mail
van the robbers had employed a charge of dynamite, which had wrecked
the car and caused some damage to the line; enough to block the
permanent way for some hours.
"And Philip has just opened this telegram for you."
Delaine handed it to her. It was from the District Superintendent,
expressing great regret for the interruption to their journey, and
suggesting that they should spend the night at the hotel at Glacier.
"Which I understand is only four miles off, the other side of the pass,"
said Delaine. "Was there ever anything more annoying!"
Elizabeth's face expressed an utter bewilderment.
"A train held up in Canada--and on the C.P.R.--impossible!"
An elderly man in front of her heard what she said, and turned upon her
a face purple with wrath.
"You may well say that, madam! We are a law-abiding nation. We don't put
up with the pranks they play in Montana. They say the scoundrels have
got off. If we don't catch them, Canada's disgraced."
"I say, Elizabeth," cried Philip, pushing his way to her through the
crowd, "there's been a lot of shooting. There's some Mounted Police
here, we picked up at Revelstoke, on their way to help catch these
fellows. I've been talking to them. The police from Kamloops came upon
them just as they were making off with a pretty pile--boxes full of
money for some of the banks in Vancouver. The police fired, so did the
robbers. One of the police was killed, and one of the thieves. Then the
rest got off. I say, let's go and help hunt them!"
The boy's eyes danced with the joy of adventure.
"If they've any sense they'll send bloodhounds after them," said the
elderly man, fiercely. "I helped catch a murderer with my own hands that
way, last summer, near the Arrow Lakes."
"Where is Mr. Anderson?"
The question escaped Elizabeth involuntarily. She had not meant to put
it. But it was curious that he should have left them in the lurch at
this particular moment.
"Take your seats!" cried the station-master, making his way through the
crowded platform. "This train goes as far as Sicamous Junction only. Any
passenger who wishes to break his journey will find accommodation at
Glacier--next station."
The English travellers were hurried back into their car. Still no sign
of Anderson. Yerkes was only able to tell them that he had seen
Anderson go into the station-master's private room with a couple of the
Mounted Police. He might have come out again, or he might not. Yerkes
had been too well occupied in exciting gossip with all his many
acquaintances in the train and the station to notice.
The conductor went along through the train. Yerkes, standing on the
inside platform, called to him:
"Have you seen Mr. Anderson?"
The man shook his head, but another standing by, evidently an official
of some kind, looked round and ran up to the car.
"I'm sorry, madam," he said, addressing Elizabeth, who was standing in
the doorway, "but Mr. Anderson isn't at liberty just now. He'll be
travelling with the police."
And as he spoke a door in the station building opened, and Anderson came
out, accompanied by two constables of the Mounted Police and two or
three officials. They walked hurriedly along the train and got into an
empty compartment together. Immediately afterwards the train moved off.
"Well, I wonder what's up now!" said Philip in astonishment. "Do you
suppose Anderson's got some clue to the men?"
Delaine looked uncomfortably at Elizabeth. As an old adviser and
servant of the railway, extensively acquainted moreover with the
population--settled or occasional--of the district it was very natural
that Anderson should be consulted on such an event. And yet--Delaine had
caught a glimpse of his aspect on his way along the platform, and had
noticed that he never looked towards the car. Some odd conjectures ran
through his mind.
Elizabeth sat silent, looking back on the grim defile the train was just
leaving. It was evident that they had passed the water-shed, and the
train was descending. In a few minutes they would be at Glacier.
She roused herself to hold a rapid consultation over plans.
They must of course do as they were advised, and spend the night at
Glacier.
* * * * *
The train drew up.
"Well, of all the nuisances!"--cried Philip, disgusted, as they prepared
to leave the car.
Yerkes, like the showman that he was, began to descant volubly on the
advantages and charms of the hotel, its Swiss guides, and the
distinguished travellers who stayed there; dragging rugs and bags
meanwhile out of the car. Nobody listened to him. Everybody in the
little party, as they stood forlornly on the platform, was in truth
searching for Anderson.
And at last he came--hurrying along towards them. His face, set,
strained, and colourless, bore the stamp of calamity. But he gave them
no time to question him.
"I am going on," he said hastily to Elizabeth; "they will look after you
here. I will arrange everything for you as soon as possible, and if we
don't meet before, perhaps--in Vancouver--"
"I say, are you going to hunt the robbers?" asked Philip, catching his
arm.
Anderson made no reply. He turned to Delaine, drew him aside a moment,
and put a letter into his hand.
"My father was one of them," he said, without emotion, "and is dead. I
have asked you to tell Lady Merton."
There was a call for him. The train was already moving. He jumped into
it, and was gone.