Hawtrey's Deputy
Then Wyllard seemed to rouse himself. "I wonder if I ought to write Major Radcliffe and tell him what my object is before I call?" he said. "It would make the thing a little easier."
The girl rose. "Yes," she assented, "that would, perhaps, be wiser." Then she glanced at the photograph which was still in her hand. "It has served its purpose. I scarcely think it would be of any great interest to Major Radcliffe."
She saw his face change as she made it evident that she did not mean to give the portrait back to him; but there was, at least, one excellent reason why she would not have her picture in a strange man's hands.
"Thank you," she said, "for the story. I am glad we have met; but I'm afraid I have already kept my friends waiting for me."
Then she turned away, and it occurred to Wyllard that he had made a very indifferent use of the opportunity, since she had neither asked his name nor told him hers. It was, however, evident that he could not well run after her and demand it, and he decided that he could in all probability obtain it from Major Radcliffe when he called upon him. Still, he regretted his lack of adroitness as he walked back to the inn, where he wrote two letters when he had consulted a map and his landlady. Dufton Holme, he discovered, was a small village within a mile or two of the Grange where, as Miss Rawlinson had informed him, Agatha Ismay was then staying. One letter was addressed to her, and he formally asked permission to call upon her with a message from Gregory Hawtrey. The other was to Major Radcliffe, and in both he said that an answer would reach him at the inn which his landlady had informed him was to be found not far from either of the houses he proposed to visit.
He set out on foot next morning, and after climbing a steep pass followed a winding track across a waste of empty moor until he struck a smooth white road, which led past a rock-girt lake and into a deep valley. It was six o'clock when he started, and three when he reached the inn, where he found an answer to one of his letters awaiting him. It was from Major Radcliffe, who desired an interview with him as soon as possible.
Within an hour he was on his way to the Major's house, where a grey-haired man, whose yellow skin suggested long exposure to a tropical sun, and a little withered lady were waiting for him. They received him graciously, but there was an indefinite something in their manner and bearing which Wyllard, who had read a good deal, recognised, though he had never been brought into actual contact with it until then. He felt that he could not have expected to come across such people anywhere but in England, unless it was at the headquarters of a British battalion in India.
He told his story tersely, softening unpleasant details, and making little of what he had done, and the grey-haired man listened gravely with an unmoved face, though a trace of moisture crept into the little lady's eyes. There was silence for a moment or two when he had finished, and then Major Radcliffe, whose manner was very quiet, turned to him.
"You have laid me under an obligation which I could never wipe out, even if I wished it," he said. "It was my only son you buried out there in Canada."
He broke off for a moment, and his quietness was more marked than ever when he went on again.
"As you have no doubt surmised, we quarrelled," he said. "He was extravagant and careless – at least I thought that then – but now it seems to me that I was unduly hard on him. His mother" – and he turned to the little lady with an inclination that pleased Wyllard curiously – "was sure of it at the time. In any case, I took the wrong way, and he went out to Canada. I made that, at least, easy for him – and I have been sorry ever since."
He paused again with a little expressive gesture. "It seems due to him, and you, that I should tell you this. When no word reached us I had inquiries made, through a banker he called upon, who, discovering that he had registered at a hotel as Pattinson, at length traced him to a British Columbian silver mine. He had, however, left it shortly before my correspondent learned that he had been employed there, and all the latter could tell me was that an unknown prospector had nursed him until he died."
Wyllard, who said nothing, took out a watch and the clasp of a workman's belt from his pocket, and laid them gently on Mrs. Radcliffe's knee. He saw her eyes fill, and turned his head away.
"I feel that you may blame me for not writing sooner, but it was only a very little while ago that I was able to trace you, and then it was only by a very curious – coincidence," he said presently.
This was the most apposite word that occurred to him, for he did not consider it advisable to mention the photograph. It seemed to him that the girl would not like it. Nor, though he was greatly tempted, did he care to make inquiries concerning her just then. In another moment or two the Major spoke again.
"If I can make your stay here pleasanter in any way I should be delighted," he said. "If you will take up your quarters with us I will send down to the inn for your things."
Wyllard excused himself, but when the lady urged him at least to dine with them on the following evening he appeared to consider.
"The one difficulty is that I don't know yet whether I shall be engaged then," he explained. "As it happens, I've a message for Miss Ismay, and I wrote offering to call upon her at any convenient hour. So far I have heard nothing from her."
"She's away," Mrs. Radcliffe informed him. "They have probably sent your letter on to her. I had a note from her yesterday, however, and expect her here to-morrow. You have met some friends of hers in Canada?"
"Gregory Hawtrey," said Wyllard. "I have promised to call upon his people, too."
He saw Major Radcliffe glance at his wife, and the faint gleam in the latter's eyes.
"Well," she said, "if you will promise to come I will send word over to Agatha."
Wyllard agreed to this, and went away a few minutes later. He noticed the tact and consideration with which his new friends had refrained from expressing any sign of the curiosity he fancied they naturally felt, for Mrs. Radcliffe's face had suggested that she understood the situation. The latter was, however, commencing to appear a little more difficult to him. It was, it seemed, his task to explain to a girl brought up among such people delicately what she must be prepared to face as a farmer's wife in Western Canada. He was not sure that this would be easy in itself, but it was rendered much more difficult by the fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly daunting her. Her letter had certainly suggested courage, but, after all, it was as he reflected the courage of ignorance, and he had now some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends led. He was commencing to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.
CHAPTER VII.
AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH
Next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had been endued with or had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.
The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was, as he noticed, of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets, tinted walls, formed, it seemed to him, a harmony of soft colouring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. Then a row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room, and looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad gravelled terrace, which was apparently raked smooth every day, with a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed upon its pillared wall. From the middle of it a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond that clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.
It all impressed him curiously – the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives the cultured English led, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that a good many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady, old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. He could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honour, and it seemed to him that his lady might have stepped down from some old picture with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who could also stand fast by a point of honour in Western Canada. Though the latter fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.
Then he recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.
"You are interested in all you see?" she asked frankly.
"Yes, madam," said Wyllard – and the word rose instinctively to his lips, for it seemed to him the only fitting way to address her. "In fact, I'd like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I'd begin at the pictures and work right round."
His companion's smile suggested that she was not displeased.
"But you have been in London?"
"I have," said Wyllard. "I had one or two letters to folks there from big flour shippers, and they did all they could to entertain me. Still, their places were different; they hadn't the – charm – of yours. It's something which I think could only exist in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I've never been accustomed to."
The lady was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.
"Your life is necessarily different from ours," she suggested.
Wyllard smiled. "It's so different that you couldn't realise it. It's all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The dollars we raise are sunk again in seed and extra teams and ploughs."
"After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here."
"No," said Wyllard gravely, "that's not it exactly. At least, not with most of us. It's rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking – our own – by labour, breaking the wilderness. You" – and he added this as though to explain that he could hardly expect her to quite grasp his views – "have never been out West?"
His hostess laughed. "I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and I have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each others' throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering either party would have pulled him down."
"You'll have to forgive me, madam" – and Wyllard's gesture was deprecatory, though his eyes twinkled. "The notion that we're the only ones who really work, or, at least, do anything worth while, is rather a favourite one out West. No doubt it's a delusion. I should have known that all of us are born like that."
His hostess forgave him readily, if only for the "all of us," which struck her as especially fortunate. A few minutes later there were voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and the girl he had met at the stepping stones came in. She was dressed differently, in trailing garments which, it seemed to him, became her wonderfully, and he noticed now the shapely delicacy of her hands and the fine, ivory pallor of her skin. Then his hostess turned to him.
"I had better present you formally to Miss Ismay," she said. "Agatha, this is Mr. Wyllard, who I understand has brought you a message from Canada."
There was no doubt that Wyllard was blankly astonished, and for a moment the girl was clearly startled, too.
"You!" was all she said.
She, however, held her hand out before she turned to speak to Mrs. Radcliffe, but it was a slight relief to both when somebody announced that dinner was ready.
Wyllard sat next to his hostess, and was not sorry that he was only called upon to take part in casual general conversation, though he fancied once or twice that Miss Ismay was unobtrusively studying him. It was also nearly an hour after the meal was over when Mrs. Radcliffe left them alone in her little drawing-room.
"You have, no doubt, a good deal to talk about, and you needn't join us until you're ready," she said. "The Major always reads the London papers after dinner."
Agatha sat down in a low chair near the hearth, and it first of all occurred to Wyllard, who took a place opposite her, that she was, although of full stature, too delicate and dainty, too over-cultivated, in fact, to marry Hawtrey. This was rather curious, since he had hitherto regarded his comrade as a typical, well-educated Englishman; but it now seemed to him that there was a certain streak of coarseness in Gregory. The man, it suddenly flashed upon him, was self-indulgent, and his careless ease of manner, which he had once liked, was rather too much in evidence. In a few moments, however, Agatha turned to him.
"I understand that Gregory is recovering rapidly?" she said.
Wyllard assured her that this was the case, and Agatha said quietly, "He wants me to go out to him."
Wyllard felt that if a girl of this kind had promised to marry him he would not have sent for her but have come in person, if he had been compelled to pledge his last possessions, or crawl to the tideway on his hands and knees. For all that, he was ready to defend his friend.
"I'm afraid it's necessary," he said. "Gregory was quite unfit for such a journey when I left, and he must be ready to commence the season's campaign with the first of the spring. Our summer is short, you see, and with our one-crop farming it's indispensable to get the seed in early: in fact, he will be badly behind as it is."
This was not particularly tactful since, without intending it, he made it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but Agatha smiled.
"Oh," she said, "I understand! You needn't labour the excuse. But doesn't the same thing apply to you?"
"It certainly did. Now, however, things have become a little easier. My holding's larger than Gregory's, and I have a foreman who can look after it for me."
"Gregory said that you were a great friend of his."
Wyllard seized this opportunity. "He is a great friend of mine, and I like to think it means the same thing. In fact, it's reasonably certain that he saved my life for me."
"Ah!" said Agatha; "that is a thing he didn't mention. How did it come about?"
Wyllard was glad to tell the story: he was anxious to say all he honestly could in Hawtrey's favour.
"We were at work on a railroad trestle – a towering wooden bridge, in British Columbia. It stretched across a deep ravine with great boulders and a stream in the bottom of it, and we stood high up on a staging close beneath the metals. A fast freight, a huge general produce train, came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly hold on to the bridge. Still, the construction foreman was a hustler, and we had to get the spikes in. I was swinging the hammer when I felt the plank beneath me slip. The train, it seems, had jarred the bolt we had our lashings round loose. For a moment I felt that I was going down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me. He had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to. It seemed certain that I would pull him with me, too. We hung like that for a space – I don't quite know how long."
He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.
"It was then," he said, "I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey was. Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on. Then I got my hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer."
He saw the gleam in Agatha's eyes. "Oh!" she said, "that is just what he must have done. He was like that always – impulsive, splendidly generous."
Wyllard felt that he had succeeded, though he knew that there were men on the prairie who called his comrade slackly careless, instead of impulsive. Agatha, however, spoke again.
"But Gregory wasn't a carpenter," she said.
"In those days when dollars were scanty we had to be whatever we could. There wasn't much specialisation of handicrafts out there then. The farmer whose crop was ruined took up the railroad shovel, or borrowed a saw from somebody and set about building houses, or anything else that was wanted."
"Of course!" said Agatha. "Besides, he was always wonderfully quick. He could learn any game by just watching it awhile. He did all he undertook brilliantly."
It occurred to Wyllard that Gregory had, at least, made no great success of farming; but that occupation, as practised on the prairie, demands a good deal more than quickness and what some call brilliancy from the man who undertakes it. He must, as they say out there, possess the capacity for staying with it; the grim courage to hold fast the tighter under each crushing blow, when his teams die, or the grain shrivels under the harvest frost, or ragged ice hurtling before a roaring blast does the reaping. It was, however, evident that this girl had an unquestioning faith in Gregory Hawtrey, and once more Wyllard felt compassionate towards her. He wondered if she would have retained it had the man spent those four years in England instead of Canada: for it was clear from the contrast between her and her picture that she had grown in many ways since she had given her promise to her lover. He had said what he could in Hawtrey's favour, but now he felt that something was due to the girl.
"Gregory told me to explain what things are like out there," he said. "I think it is because they are so different from what you are accustomed to that he has waited as long as he has done. He wanted to make them as easy as possible for you, and now he would like you to realise what is before you."
He was almost astonished at the girl's comprehension, for she glanced round the luxurious room with a faint smile.
"You look on me as part of – this? I mean it seems to you that I fit in with my surroundings, and would only be in harmony with them?"
"Yes," said Wyllard gravely, "I think you fit in with them excellently."
Agatha laughed. "Well," she said, "I was once, to a certain extent, accustomed to something similar; though, after all, one could hardly compare the Grange with Garside Scar. Still, that was some time ago, and I have earned my living for several years now. That counts for something, doesn't it?"
She glanced down at her dress. "For instance, this is the result of a good deal of self-denial, though the cost of it was partly worked off in music lessons, and the stuff was almost the cheapest I could get. I sang at concerts – and it was part of my stock-in-trade. After all, why should you think me only capable of living in luxury?"
"I didn't quite go that far."
She laughed again. "Then is Canada such a very dreadful place? I have heard of other Englishwomen going out there as farmers' wives. Do they all live unhappily?"
"No," said Wyllard; "at least, they show no sign of it, and some of them and the city-born Canadians are, I think, the salt of this earth. Probably it's easy to be calm and gracious in such a place as this – though I naturally don't know since I've never tried it – but when a woman who toils from sunrise to sunset most of the year keeps her sweetness and serenity, it's a very different and much finer thing. But I'll try to answer the other question. The prairie isn't dreadful; it's a land of sunshine and clear skies. Heat and cold – and we have them both – don't worry one there. There's optimism in the crystal air. It's not beautiful like these valleys, but it has its beauty. It's vast and silent, and, though our homesteads are crude and new, once you pass the breaking it's primevally old. That gets hold of one somehow. It's wonderful after sunset in the early spring, when the little cold wind's like wine, and it runs white to the horizon with the smoky red on the rim of it melting into transcendental green. When the wheat rolls across the foreground in ochre and burnished copper waves, it's more wonderful still. One sees the fulfilment of the promise, and takes courage."
"Then," said Agatha, who had scarcely suspected him of a capacity for such flights as this, "what is there to shrink from?"
"In the case of a small farmer's wife, the constant, never-slackening strain. There's no hired assistance; she must clean the house, and wash, and cook – though it's not unusual for the men to wash the plates."
The girl was evidently not much impressed, for she laughed.
"Does Gregory wash the plates?" she asked.
Wyllard's eyes twinkled. "When Sproatly won't," he said. "Still, in a general way they only do it once a week."
"Ah," said Agatha, "I can imagine Gregory hating it. As a matter of fact, I like him for it."
"Then she must bake, and mend her husband's clothes. Indeed, it's not unusual for her to mend for the hired man too. Besides that, there are always odds and ends of tasks, but the time when you feel the strain most is in the winter. Then you sit at night, shivering, as a rule, beside the stove in an almost empty log-walled room, reading a book you have probably read three or four times before. Outside, the frost is Arctic; you can hear the roofing shingles crackle now and then; and you wake up when the fire burns low. There's no life, no company, rarely a new face, and if you go to a dance or supper somewhere, perhaps once a month, you ride back on a bob-sled frozen almost stiff beneath the robes."
"Still," said Agatha, "that does not last."
The man understood her. "Oh!" he said, "one makes progress – that is, if one can stand the strain – but, as the one way of doing it is to sow for a larger harvest and break fresh sod every year, there can be no slackening down in the meanwhile. Every dollar must be guarded and ploughed into the soil again."
He broke off, feeling that he had done all that could reasonably be expected of him, and Agatha asked one question.
"A woman who didn't slacken could make the struggle easier for the man?"
"Yes," said Wyllard simply, "in every way. Still, she would have a great deal to bear."
Agatha's face softened. "Ah," she said, "she would not grudge the effort in the case of one she loved."
Then she looked up again with a smile. "I wonder," she added, "if you really thought I should flinch."
"When I first heard of it, I thought it quite likely. Then when I read your letter my doubts vanished."
He saw he had not been judicious, for there was, for the first time, a trace of hardness in the girl's expression.
"He showed you that?" she asked.
"One small part of it," said Wyllard. "I want to say that when I saw this house, and how you seemed fitted to it, my misgivings about Gregory's decision troubled me once more. Now" – and he made a little impressive gesture – "they have vanished altogether, and they'll never come back again."
He spoke as he felt. This girl, he fancied, would feel the strain; but it seemed to him that she had strength enough to bear it cheerfully. In spite of her daintiness, she was one who, in time of stress, could be depended on. He often remembered afterwards how they had sat together in the little, luxuriously furnished room, she leaning back, with the soft light on her delicately tinted face, in her big, low chair. In the meanwhile she said nothing, and by and bye he looked up at her.