Chapter 7

Oh! the freshness of the morning on Lake Louise!

It was barely eight o'clock, yet Elizabeth Merton had already taken her coffee on the hotel verandah, and was out wandering by herself. The hotel, which is nearly six thousand feet above the sea, had only just been opened for its summer guests, and Elizabeth and her party were its first inmates. Anderson indeed had arranged their coming, and was to have brought them hither himself. But on the night of the party's return to Laggan he had been hastily summoned by telegraph to a consultation of engineers on a difficult matter of railway grading in the Kootenay district. Delaine, knocking at his door in the morning, had found him flown. A note for Lady Merton explained his flight, gave all directions for the drive to Lake Louise, and expressed his hope to be with them again as expeditiously as possible. Three days had now elapsed since he had left them. Delaine, rather to Elizabeth's astonishment, had once or twice inquired when he might be expected to return.

Elizabeth found a little path by the lake shore, and pursued it a short way; but presently the splendour and the beauty overpowered her; her feet paused of themselves. She sat down on a jutting promontory of rock, and lost herself in the forms and hues of the morning. In front of her rose a wall of glacier sheer out of the water and thousands of feet above the lake, into the clear brilliance of the sky. On either side of its dazzling whiteness, mountains of rose-coloured rock, fledged with pine, fell steeply to the water's edge, enclosing and holding up the glacier; and vast rock pinnacles of a paler rose, melting into gold, broke, here and there, the gleaming splendour of the ice. The sun, just topping the great basin, kindled the ice surfaces, and all the glistening pinks and yellows, the pale purples and blood-crimsons of the rocks, to flame and splendour; while the shadows of the coolest azure still held the hollows and caves of the glacier. Deep in the motionless lake, the shining snows repeated themselves, so also the rose-red rocks, the blue shadows, the dark buttressing crags with their pines. Height beyond height, glory beyond glory--from the reality above, the eye descended to its lovelier image below, which lay there, enchanted and insubstantial, Nature's dream of itself.

The sky was pure light; the air pure fragrance. Heavy dews dripped from the pines and the moss, and sparkled in the sun. Beside Elizabeth, under a group of pines, lay a bed of snow-lilies, their golden heads dew-drenched, waiting for the touch of the morning, waiting, too--so she thought--for that Canadian poet who will yet place them in English verse beside the daffodils of Westmoreland.

She could hardly breathe for delight. The Alps, whether in their Swiss or Italian aspects, were dear and familiar to her. She climbed nimbly and well; and her senses knew the magic of high places. But never surely had even travelled eyes beheld a nobler fantasy of Nature than that composed by these snows and forests of Lake Louise; such rocks of opal and pearl; such dark gradations of splendour in calm water; such balanced intricacy and harmony in the building of this ice-palace that reared its majesty above the lake; such a beauty of subordinate and converging outline in the supporting mountains on either hand; as though the Earth Spirit had lingered on his work, finishing and caressing it in conscious joy.

And in Elizabeth's heart, too, there was a freshness of spring; an overflow of something elemental and irresistible.

Yet, strangely enough, it was at that moment expressing itself in regret and compunction. Since the dawn, that morning, she had been unable to sleep. The strong light, the pricking air, had kept her wakeful; and she had been employing her time in writing to her mother, who was also her friend.

"... Dear little mother--You will say I have been unkind--I say it to myself. But would it really have been fairer if I had forbidden him to join us? There was just a chance--it seems ridiculous now--but there was--I confess it! And by my letter from Toronto--though really my little note might have been written to anybody--I as good as said so to him, 'Come and throw the dice and--let us see what falls out!' Practically, that is what it amounted to--I admit it in sackcloth and ashes. Well!--we have thrown the dice--and it won't do! No, it won't, it won't do! And it is somehow all my fault--which is abominable. But I see now, what I never saw at home or in Italy, that he is a thousand years older than I--that I should weary and jar upon him at every turn, were I to marry him. Also I have discovered--out here--I believe, darling, you have known it all along!--that there is at the very root of me a kind of savage--a creature that hates fish-knives and finger-glasses and dressing for dinner--the things I have done all my life, and Arthur Delaine will go on doing all his. Also that I never want to see a museum again--at least, not for a long time; and that I don't care twopence whether Herculaneum is excavated or not!

"Isn't it shocking? I can't explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur evidently can't make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad. So I am, in a sense. I am suffering from a new kind of _folie des grandeurs_. The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human story--all its simple fundamental things at least--is writ so large here. Hope and ambition--love and courage--the man wrestling with the earth--the woman who bears and brings up children--it is as though I had never felt, never seen them before. They rise out of the dust and mist of our modern life--great shapes warm from the breast of Nature--and I hold my breath. Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her unfolding task!

"How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should have altered him so in my foolish eyes--as though one had scrubbed all the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and charmless. It is not his fault--is mine. In Europe we loved the same things; his pleasure kindled mine. But here he enjoys nothing that I enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just singing for delight. For it is not only Canada in the large that holds me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail--all its clatter of new towns and spreading farms--of pushing railways and young parliaments--of roadmaking and bridgemaking--of saw-mills and lumber camps--detail so different from anything I have ever discussed with Arthur Delaine before. Some of it is ugly, I know--I don't care! It is like a Rembrandt ugliness--that only helps and ministers to a stronger beauty, the beauty of prairie and sky, and the beauty of the human battle, the battle of blood and brain, with the earth and her forces.

"'_Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare!_'"

"There is a man here--a Mr. George Anderson, of whom I told you something in my last letter--who seems to embody the very life of this country, to be the prairie, and the railway, and the forest--their very spirit and avatar. Personally, he is often sad; his own life has been hard; and yet the heart of him is all hope and courage, all delight too in the daily planning and wrestling, the contrivance and the cleverness, the rifling and outwitting of Nature--that makes a Canadian--at any rate a Western Canadian. I suppose he doesn't know anything about art. Mr. Arthur seems to have nothing in common with him; but there is in him that rush and energy of life, from which, surely, art and poetry spring, when the time is ripe.

"Don't of course imagine anything absurd! He is just a young Scotch engineer, who seems to have made some money as people do make money here--quickly and honestly--and is shortly going into Parliament. They say that he is sure to be a great man. To us--to Philip and me, he has been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here--or anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out of perspective; he doesn't fit.

"You will say, that if I married him, it would not be to live in Canada, and once at home again, the old estimates and 'values' would reassert themselves. But in a sense--don't be alarmed--I shall always live in Canada. Or, rather, I shall never be quite the same again; and Mr. Arthur would find me a restless, impracticable, discontented woman.

"Would it not really be kinder if I suggested to him to go home by California, while we come back again through the Rockies? Don't you think it would? I feel that I have begun to get on his nerves--as he on mine. If you were only here! But, I assure you, he doesn't _look_ miserable; and I think he will bear up very well. And if it will be any comfort to you to be told that I know what is meant by the gnawing of the little worm, Compunction, then be comforted, dearest; for it gnaws horribly, and out of all proportion--I vow--to my crimes.

"Philip is better on the whole, and has taken an enormous fancy to Mr. Anderson. But, as I have told you all along, he is not so much better as you and I hoped he would be. I take every care of him that I can, but you know that he is not wax, when it comes to managing. However, Mr. Anderson has been a great help."

Recollections of this letter, and other thoughts besides, coming from much deeper strata of the mind than she had been willing to reveal to her mother, kept slipping at intervals through Elizabeth's consciousness, as she sat beside the lake.

A step beside her startled her, and she looked up to see Delaine approaching.

"Out already, Mr. Arthur! But _I_ have had breakfast!"

"So have I. What a place!"

Elizabeth did not answer, but her smiling eyes swept the glorious circle of the lake.

"How soon will it all be spoilt and vulgarised?" said Delaine, with a shrug. "Next year, I suppose, a funicular, to the top of the glacier."

Elizabeth cried out.

"Why not?" he asked her, as he rather coolly and deliberately took his seat beside her. "You applaud telephones on the prairies; why not funiculars here?"

"The one serves, the other spoils," said Elizabeth eagerly.

"Serves whom? Spoils what?" The voice was cold. "All travellers are not like yourself."

"I am not afraid. The Canadians will guard their heritage."

"How dull England will seem to you when you go back to it!" he said to her, after a moment. His tone had an under-note of bitterness which Elizabeth uncomfortably recognised.

"Oh! I have a way of liking what I must like," she said, hurriedly. "Just now, certainly, I am in love with deserts--flat or mountainous--tempered by a private car."

He laughed perfunctorily. And suddenly it seemed to her that he had come out to seek her with a purpose, and that a critical moment might be approaching. Her cheeks flushed, and to hide them she leant over the water's edge and began to trail her finger in its clear wave.

He, however, sat in hesitation, looking at her, the prey of thoughts to which she had no clue. He could not make up his mind, though he had just spent an almost sleepless night on the attempt to do it.

The silence became embarrassing. Then, if he still groped, she seemed to see her way, and took it.

"It was very good of you to come out and join our wanderings," she said suddenly. Her voice was clear and kind. He started.

"You know I could ask for nothing better," was his slow reply, not without dignity. "It has been an immense privilege to see you like this, day by day."

Elizabeth's pulse quickened.

"How can I manage it?" she desperately thought. "But I must--"

"That's very sweet of you," she said aloud, "when I have bored you so with my raptures. And now it's coming to an end, like all nice things. Philip and I think of staying a little in Vancouver. And the Governor has asked us to go over to Victoria for a few days. You, I suppose, will be doing the proper round, and going back by Seattle and San Francisco?"

Delaine received the blow--and understood it. There had been no definite plans ahead. Tacitly, it had been assumed, he thought, that he was to return with them to Montreal and England. This gentle question, then, was Elizabeth's way of telling him that his hopes were vain and his journey fruitless.

He had not often been crossed in his life, and a flood of resentment surged up in a very perplexed mind.

"Thank you. Yes--I shall go home by San Francisco."

The touch of haughtiness in his manner, the manner of one accustomed all his life to be a prominent and considered person in the world, did not disguise from Elizabeth the soreness underneath. It was hard to hurt her old friend. But she could only sit as though she felt nothing--meant nothing--of any importance.

And she achieved it to perfection. Delaine, through all his tumult of feeling, was sharply conscious of her grace, her reticence, her soft dignity. They were exactly what he coveted in a wife--what he hoped he had captured in Elizabeth. How was it they had been snatched from him? He turned blindly on the obstacle that had risen in his path, and the secret he had not yet decided how to handle began to run away with him.

He bent forward, with a slightly heightened colour.

"Lady Merton--we might not have another opportunity--will you allow me a few frank words with you--the privilege of an old friend?"

Elizabeth turned her face to him, and a pair of startled eyes that tried not to waver.

"Of course, Mr. Arthur," she said smiling. "Have I been doing anything dreadful?"

"May I ask what you personally know of this Mr. Anderson?"

He saw--or thought he saw--her brace herself under the sudden surprise of the name, and her momentary discomfiture pleased him.

"What I know of Mr. Anderson?" she repeated wondering. "Why, no more than we all know. What do you mean, Mr. Arthur? Ah, yes, I remember, you first met him in Winnipeg; _we_ made acquaintance with him the day before."

"For the first time? But you are now seeing a great deal of him. Are you quite sure--forgive me if I seem impertinent--that he is--quite the person to be admitted to your daily companionship?"

He spoke slowly and harshly. The effort required before a naturally amiable and nervous man could bring himself to put such an uncomfortable question made it appear particularly offensive.

"Our daily companionship?" repeated Elizabeth in bewilderment. "What can you mean, Mr. Arthur? What is wrong with Mr. Anderson? You saw that everybody at Winnipeg seemed to know him and respect him; people like the Chief Justice, and the Senator--what was his name?--and Monsieur Mariette. I don't understand why you ask me such a thing. Why should we suppose there are any mysteries about Mr. Anderson?"

Unconsciously her slight figure had stiffened, her voice had changed.

Delaine felt an admonitory qualm. He would have drawn back; but it was too late. He went on doggedly--

"Were not all these persons you named acquainted with Mr. Anderson in his public capacity? His success in the strike of last year brought him a great notoriety. But his private history--his family and antecedents--have you gathered anything at all about them?"

Something that he could not decipher flashed through Elizabeth's expression. It was a strange and thrilling sense that what she had gathered she would not reveal for--a kingdom!

"Monsieur Mariette told me all that anyone need want to know!" she cried, breathing quick. "Ask him what he thinks--what he feels! But if you ask _me_, I think Mr. Anderson carries his history in his face."

Delaine pondered a moment, while Elizabeth waited, challenging, expectant, her brown eyes all vivacity.

"Well--some facts have come to my knowledge," he said, at last, "which have made me ask you these questions. My only object--you must, you will admit that!--is to save you possible pain--a possible shock."

"Mr. Arthur!" the voice was peremptory--"If you have learned anything about Mr. Anderson's private history--by chance--without his knowledge--that perhaps he would rather we did not know--I beg you will not tell me--indeed--please--I forbid you to tell me. We owe him much kindness these last few weeks. I cannot gossip about him behind his back."

All her fine slenderness of form, her small delicacy of feature, seemed to him tense and vibrating, like some precise and perfect instrument strained to express a human feeling or intention. But what feeling? While he divined it, was she herself unconscious of it? His bitterness grew.

"Dear Lady Merton--can you not trust an old friend?"

She did not soften.

"I do trust him. But"--her smile flashed--"even new acquaintances have their rights."

"You will not understand," he said, earnestly. "What is in my mind came to me, through no wish or will of mine. You cannot suppose that I have been prying into Mr. Anderson's affairs! But now that the information is mine, I feel a great responsibility towards you."

"Don't feel it. I am a wilful woman."

"A rather perplexing one! May I at least be sure that"--he hesitated--"that you will be on your guard?"

"On my guard?" she lifted her eyebrows proudly--"and against what?"

"That is precisely what you won't let me tell you."

She laughed--a little fiercely.

"There we are; no forrarder. But please remember, Mr. Arthur, how soon we shall all be separating. Nothing very dreadful can happen in these few days--can it?"

For the first time there was a touch of malice in her smile.

Delaine rose, took one or two turns along the path in front of her, and then suddenly stopped beside her.

"I think"--he said, with emphasis, "that Mr. Anderson will probably find himself summoned away--immediately--before you get to Vancouver. But that I will discuss with him. You could give me no address, so I have not yet been able to communicate with him."

Again Elizabeth's eyebrows went up. She rose.

"Of course you will do what you think best. Shall we go back to the hotel?"

They walked along in silence. He saw that she was excited, and that he had completely missed his stroke; but he did not see how to mend the situation.

"Oh! there is Philip, going to fish," said Elizabeth at last, as though nothing had happened. "I wondered what could possibly have got him up so early."

Philip waved to her as she spoke, shouting something which the mountain echoes absorbed. He was accompanied by a young man, who seemed to be attached to the hotel as guide, fisherman, hunter--at the pleasure of visitors. But Elizabeth had already discovered that he had the speech of a gentleman, and attended the University of Manitoba during the winter. In the absence of Anderson, Philip had no doubt annexed him for the morning.

There was a pile of logs lying on the lake side. Philip, rod in hand, began to scramble over them to a point where several large trunks overhung deep water. His companion meanwhile was seated on the moss, busy with some preparations.

"I hope Philip will be careful," said Delaine, suddenly. "There is nothing so slippery as logs."

Elizabeth, who had been dreaming, looked up anxiously. As she did so Philip, high perched on the furthest logs, turned again to shout to his sister, his light figure clear against the sunlit distance. Then the figure wavered, there was a sound of crashing wood, and Philip fell head-foremost into the lake before him.

The young man on the bank looked up, threw away his rod and his coat, and was just plunging into the lake when he was anticipated by another man who had come running down the bank of the hotel, and was already in the water. Elizabeth, as she rushed along the edge, recognized Anderson. Philip seemed to have disappeared; but Anderson dived, and presently emerged with a limp burden. The guide was now aiding him, and between them they brought young Gaddesden to land. The whole thing passed so rapidly that Delaine and Elizabeth, running at full speed, had hardly reached the spot before Anderson was on the shore, bearing the lad in his arms.

Elizabeth bent over him with a moan of anguish. He seemed to her dead.

"He has only fainted," said Anderson peremptorily. "We must get him in." And he hurried on, refusing Delaine's help, carrying the thin body apparently with ease along the path and up the steps to the hotel. The guide had already been sent flying ahead to warn the household.

Thus, by one of the commonplace accidents of travel, the whole scene was changed for this group of travellers. Philip Gaddesden would have taken small harm from his tumble into the lake, but for the fact that the effects of rheumatic fever were still upon him. As it was, a certain amount of fever, and some heart-symptoms that it was thought had been overcome, reappeared, and within a few hours of the accident it became plain that, although he was in no danger, they would be detained at least ten days, perhaps a fortnight, at Lake Louise. Elizabeth sat down in deep despondency to write to her mother, and then lingered awhile with the letter before her, her head in her hands, pondering with emotion what she and Philip owed to George Anderson, who had, it seemed, arrived by a night train, and walked up to the hotel, in the very nick of time. As to the accident itself, no doubt the guide, a fine swimmer and _coureur de bois_, would have been sufficient, unaided, to save her brother. But after all, it was Anderson's strong arms that had drawn him from the icy depths of the lake, and carried him to safety! And since? Never had telephone and railway, and general knowledge of the resources at command, been worked more skilfully than by him, and the kind people of the hotel. "Don't be the least anxious"--she had written to her mother--"we have a capital doctor--all the chemist's stuff we want--and we could have a nurse at any moment. Mr. Anderson has only to order one up from the camp hospital in the pass. But for the present, Simpson and I are enough for the nursing."

She heard voices in the next room; a faint question from Philip, Anderson replying. What an influence this man of strong character had already obtained over her wilful, self-indulgent brother! She saw the signs of it in many directions; and she was passionately grateful for it. Her thoughts went wandering back over the past three weeks--over the whole gradual unveiling of Anderson's personality. She recalled her first impressions of him the day of the "sink-hole." An ordinary, strong, capable, ambitious young man, full of practical interests, with brusque manners, and a visible lack of some of the outer wrappings to which she was accustomed--it was so that she had first envisaged him. Then at Winnipeg--through Mariette and others--she had seen him as other men saw him, his seniors and contemporaries, the men engaged with him in the making of this vast country. She had appreciated his character in what might be hereafter, apparently, its public aspects; the character of one for whom the world surrounding him was eagerly prophesying a future and a career. His profound loyalty to Canada, and to certain unspoken ideals behind, which were really the source of the loyalty; the atmosphere at once democratic and imperial in which his thoughts and desires moved, which had more than once communicated its passion to her; a touch of poetry, of melancholy, of greatness even--all this she had gradually perceived. Winnipeg and the prairie journey had developed him thus before her.

So much for the second stage in her knowledge of him. There was a third; she was in the midst of it. Her face flooded with colour against her will. "Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness." The words rushed into her mind. She hoped, as one who wished him well, that he would marry soon and happily. And the woman who married him would find it no tame future.

Suddenly Delaine's warnings occurred to her. She laughed, a little hysterically.

Could anyone have shown himself more helpless, useless, incompetent, than Arthur Delaine since the accident? Yet he was still on the spot. She realised, indeed, that it was hardly possible for their old friend to desert them under the circumstances. But he merely represented an additional burden.

A knock at the sitting-room door disturbed her. Anderson appeared.

"I am off to Banff, Lady Merton," he said from the threshold. "I think I have all your commissions. Is your letter ready?"

She sealed it and gave it to him. Then she looked up at him; and for the first time he saw her tremulous and shaken; not for her brother, but for himself.

"I don't know how to thank you." She offered her hand; and one of those beautiful looks--generous, friendly, sincere--of which she had the secret.

He, too, flushed, his eyes held a moment by hers. Then he, somewhat brusquely, disengaged himself.

"Why, I did nothing! He was in no danger; the guide would have had him out in a twinkle. I wish"--he frowned--"you wouldn't look so done up over it."

"Oh! I am all right."

"I brought you a book this morning. Mercifully I left it in the drawing-room, so it hasn't been in the lake."

He drew it from his pocket. It was a French novel she had expressed a wish to read.

She exclaimed,

"How did you get it?"

"I found Mariette had it with him. He sends it me from Vancouver. Will you promise to read it--and rest?"

He drew a sofa towards the window. The June sunset was blazing on the glacier without. Would he next offer to put a shawl over her, and tuck her up? She retreated hastily to the writing-table, one hand upon it. He saw the lines of her gray dress, her small neck and head; the Quakerish smoothness of her brown hair, against the light. The little figure was grace, refinement, embodied. But it was a grace that implied an environment--the cosmopolitan, luxurious environment, in which such women naturally move.

His look clouded. He said a hasty good-bye and departed. Elizabeth was left breathing quick, one hand on her breast. It was as though she had escaped something--or missed something.

As he left the hotel, Anderson found himself intercepted by Delaine in the garden, and paused at once to give him the latest news.

"The report is really good, everything considered," he said, with a cordiality born of their common anxiety; and he repeated the doctor's last words to himself.

"Excellent!" said Delaine; then, clearing his throat, "Mr. Anderson, may I have some conversation with you?"

Anderson looked surprised, threw him a keen glance, and invited him to accompany him part of the way to Laggan. They turned into a solitary road, running between the woods. It was late evening, and the sun was striking through the Laggan valley beneath them in low shafts of gold and purple.

"I am afraid what I have to say will be disagreeable to you," began Delaine, abruptly. "And on this particular day--when we owe you so much--it is more than disagreeable to myself. But I have no choice. By some extraordinary chance, with which I beg you to believe my own will has had nothing to do, I have become acquainted with something--something that concerns you privately--something that I fear will be a great shock to you."

Anderson stood still.

"What can you possibly mean?" he said, in growing amazement.

"I was accosted the night before last, as I was strolling along the railway line, by a man I had never seen before, a man who--pardon me, it is most painful to me to seem to be interfering with anyone's private affairs--who announced himself as"--the speaker's nervous stammer intervened before he jerked out the words--"as your father!"

"As my father? Somebody must be mad!" said Anderson quietly. "My father has been dead ten years."

"I am afraid there is a mistake. The man who spoke to me is aware that you suppose him dead--he had his own reasons, he declares, for allowing you to remain under a misconception; he now wishes to reopen communications with you, and to my great regret, to my indignation, I may say he chose me--an entire stranger--as his intermediary. He seems to have watched our party all the way from Winnipeg, where he first saw you, casually, in the street. Naturally I tried to escape from him--to refer him to you. But I could not possibly escape from him, at night, with no road for either of us but the railway line. I was at his mercy."

"What was his reason for not coming direct to me?"

They were still pausing in the road. Delaine could see in the failing light that Anderson had grown pale. But he perceived also an expression of scornful impatience in the blue eyes fixed upon him.

"He has professed to be afraid--"

"That I should murder him?" said Anderson with a laugh. "And he told you some sort of a story?"

"A long one, I regret to say."

"And not to my credit?"

"The tone of it was certainly hostile. I would rather not repeat it."

"I should not dream of asking you to do so. And where is this precious individual to be found?"

Delaine named the address which had been given him--of a lodging mainly for railway men near Laggan.

"I will look him up," said Anderson briefly. "The whole story of course is a mere attempt to get money--for what reason I do not know; but I will look into it."

Delaine was silent. Anderson divined from his manner that he believed the story true. In the minds of both the thought of Lady Merton emerged. Anderson scorned to ask, "Have you said anything to them?" and Delaine was conscious of a nervous fear lest he should ask it. In the light of the countenance beside him, no less than of the event of the day, his behaviour of the morning began to seem to him more than disputable. In the morning he had seemed to himself the defender of Elizabeth and the class to which they both belonged against low-born adventurers with disreputable pasts. But as he stood there, confronting the "adventurer," his conscience as a gentleman--which was his main and typical conscience--pricked him.

The inward qualm, however, only stiffened his manner. And Anderson asked nothing. He turned towards Laggan.

"Good night. I will let you know the result of my investigations." And, with the shortest of nods, he went off at a swinging pace down the road.

"I have only done my duty," argued Delaine with himself as he returned to the hotel. "It was uncommonly difficult to do it at such a moment! But to him I have no obligations whatever; my obligations are to Lady Merton and her family."