THE LAST AFTERNOON
It was a bright day when Lisle took his leave of the Marples. They gave him a friendly farewell and when he turned away Bella Crestwick walked with him down the drive.
“I don’t care what they think; I couldn’t talk to you while they were all trying to say something nice,” she explained. “Still, to do them justice, I believe they meant it. We are sorry to part with you.”
“It’s soothing to feel that,” Lisle replied. “In many ways, I’m sorry to go. I’ve no doubt you’ll miss your brother after to-morrow.”
“Yes,” she said with unusual seriousness. “More than once during the last two years I felt that it would be a relief to let somebody else have the responsibility of looking after him, but now that the time has come I’m sorry he’s going. I can’t help remembering how often I lost my temper, and the mistakes I made.”
“You stuck to your task,” commended Lisle. “I dare say it was a hard one, almost beyond you now and then.”
He knew that he was not exaggerating. She was only a year older than the wilful lad, who must at times have driven her to despair. Yet she had never faltered in her efforts to restrain and control him; and had made a greater sacrifice for his sake than Lisle suspected, though in the light of a subsequent revelation of Gladwyne’s character she was thankful for this.
“Well,” she replied, “I suppose that one misses a load one has grown used to, and I feel very downcast. It’s hardly fair to pass Jim on to you—but I can trust you to take care of him.”
“You can trust the work and the country,” Lisle corrected her with a trace of grimness. “He’s not going out to be idle, as he’ll discover. There’s nothing like short commons and steady toil for taming any one. You’ll see the effect of my prescription when I send him back again.”
“He has physical pluck. I’m glad to remember it; and he has shown signs of steadying since he found Gladwyne out.”
Lisle looked at her searchingly.
“Since he found Gladwyne out?”
“Oh,” she answered, seeing that she had been incautious, “he rather idolized the man, and I suppose it was painful to discover by accident that he wasn’t quite all he thought him. Now, however, he has transferred his homage to you—I’m afraid Jim must always have somebody to prop him—but I’ve no misgivings.”
Lisle laughed.
“I’ve seldom had the time to get into mischief; I suppose that accounts for a good deal.”
They were nearing the lodge and she stopped and held out her hand.
“It’s hard to say good-by; you have helped me more than you’ll ever guess, and you won’t be forgotten.” Then as he held her hand with signs of embarrassment she laughed with something of her usual mocking manner and suddenly drew away. “Good-by,” she added. “I was rather daring once and I suppose you were shocked. I can’t repeat the rashness—it would mean more now.”
She walked back toward the house, and he went on. Half an hour later he met Millicent, who stopped to greet him.
“I was on my way to call on you for the last time,” he told her.
There was something in his voice that troubled her, and, though she had expected it, she shrank from the intimation of his departure.
“Then, will you come back with me?” she asked.
“If you’re not pressed for time, I’d rather walk across the moor, the way you once took me soon after I came. I’d like to look round the countryside again before I leave, though it will be a melancholy pleasure.”
For no very obvious reason, she hesitated. It was, however, hard to refuse his last request and she really wished to go.
“The views are unusually good,” she said, as they started on. “Wouldn’t Nasmyth have gone with you?”
“It wouldn’t have been the same,” he explained. “I’m storing up memories to take away with me and somehow Nasmyth is most clearly associated with Canada. When I think of him, it will be as sitting in camp beside a portage or holding the canoe paddle.”
“And you can’t picture my being occupied in that way?”
“No,” he answered gravely; “I associate you with England—with stately old houses, with well-cared-for woods and quiet valleys. There’s no doubt that your place is here.”
He spoke as if he were making an admission that was forced from him, and she endeavored to answer in a lighter manner.
“It’s the only one I’ve had an opportunity for trying.”
“But you love this place!”
“Yes,” she said; “I love it very well. Perhaps I am prejudiced, and I’ve only had a glimpse at other countries, but I feel that this is the most beautiful land in the world.”
He stopped and glanced round. From where they stood he could look out upon leagues of lonely brown moors running back into the distance under a cloudless sky. Beyond them the Scottish hills were softly penciled in delicate gray. There was a sense of space and vastness in the picture, but it was not that which spoke most plainly to him. Down on the far-spread low ground lay such white homesteads, built to stand for generations, as he had never seen in Canada; parks sprinkled with noble trees, amid which the gray walls of some ancient home peeped out; plantations made with loving care, field on field, fenced in with well-trimmed trimmed hedges.
It was all eloquent of order, security and long-established ease; a strong contrast to the rugged wilderness where, in the bush and on treeless prairie, men never relaxed their battle with nature. In many ways, his was a stern country; a land of unremitting toil from which one desisted only long enough to eat and sleep, and he was one of the workers. Mrs. Gladwyne had been right—it was no place for this delicately nurtured girl with her sensitiveness and artistic faculties.
“For those who can live as you live, it would be hard to find the equal of this part of England,” he said. “But I’m not sure you can keep it very much longer as it is.”
“Why?” she asked.
It was a relief to talk of matters of minor interest, for he dare not let his thoughts dwell too much on the subject that was nearest them.
“Well,” he replied, “there’s the economic pressure, for one thing; the growth of your cities; the demand for food. I see land lying almost idle that could be made productive at a very moderate outlay. Our people often give nearly as much as it’s worth here for no better soil.”
“But how do they make it pay?”
He laughed.
“The secret is that they expect very little—enough to eat, a shack they build with their own hands to sleep in—and they’re willing to work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four.”
“They can’t do so in winter.”
“The hours are shorter, but where the winter’s hardest—on the open middle prairie—the work’s more severe. There the little man spends a good deal of his time hauling home stove-wood or building-logs for new stables or barns. He has often to drive several leagues with the thermometer well below zero before he can find a bluff with large enough trees. In the Pacific Slope forests, where it’s warmer, work goes on much as usual. The bush rancher spends his days chopping big trees in the rain and his nights making odd things—furniture, wagon-poles, new doors for his outbuildings. What you would call necessary leisure is unknown.”
This was not exaggeration; but he spoke of it from a desire to support his resolution by emphasizing the sternest aspects of western life. It had others more alluring: there were men who dwelt more or less at their ease; but they were by no means numerous, and the toilers—in city office, lonely bush, or sawmill—were consumed by or driven into a feverish activity. As one of them, it was his manifest duty to leave this English girl in her sheltered surroundings. There was, however, one remote but alluring possibility that made this a little easier—he might, after all, win enough to surround her with some luxury and cultured friends in one of the cities of the Pacific coast. Though they differed from those in England, they were beautiful, with their vistas of snow-capped mountains and the sea.
“But you are not a farmer,” she objected.
“No; mining’s my vocation and it keeps me busy. In the city, I’m at work long before they think of opening their London offices, and it’s generally midnight before I’ve finished worrying engineers and contractors at their homes or hotels. In the wilds, we’re more or less continuously grappling with rock or treacherous gravel, or out on the prospecting trail, while the northern summer lasts; it’s then light most of the night. In the winter, we sometimes sleep in the snow, with the thermometer near the bottom of its register.”
Millicent shivered a little, wondering uneasily why he had taken the trouble to impress this upon her. It was, she thought, certainly not to show what he was capable of.
“Are you glad to go back, or do you dread it?” she asked.
“I don’t dread it—it’s my life, and things may be easier by and by. Still, I’m very loath to go.”
Millicent could believe that. His troubled expression confirmed it; and she was strangely pleased. She had never had a companion in whom she could have so much confidence, and she had already recognized that she was, in one sense of the word, growing fond of him. Indeed, she had begun to be curious about the feeling and to wonder whether it stopped quite short at liking.
“Well,” she told him, “I’m glad that you asked me to come with you. I think I was one of your first friends and I’m pleased that you should wish to spend part of your last day in my company.”
“You come first of all!”
“That’s flattering,” she smiled. “What about Nasmyth?”
“An unusually fine man, but he has his limits. You have none.”
“I’m not sure I quite understand you.”
“Then,” he explained seriously, “what I think I mean is this—you’re one of the people who somehow contrive to meet any call that is made on them. You would never sit down, helpless, in a trying situation; you’d find some way of getting over the difficulties. It’s a gift more useful than genius.”
“You’re rating me too highly,” she answered with some embarrassment. “You admitted that you thought my place was here—the inference was that I shouldn’t fit into a different one.”
“No,” he corrected her; “you’d adapt yourself to changed conditions; but that wouldn’t prevent your suffering in the process. Indeed, I think people of your kind often suffer more than the others.”
He was to some extent correct in his estimate of her, but she shrank from the direct personal application of his remarks.
“Aren’t the virtues you have described fairly common?” she asked. “I think that must be so, because they’re so necessary.”
“In a degree, I suppose they are. You see them, perhaps, most clearly in such lands as mine. The pioneer has a good deal against him—frost and floods, hard rock and sliding snow; he must face every discomfort, hunger and stinging cold. The prospector crawls through tangled forests, and packs his stores across snowy divides; shallow shafts cave in, rude dams are swept away. A man worked to exhaustion on the trail runs out of provisions and goes on, starving; he lames himself among the rocks, sets his teeth and limps ahead. I’ve thought the capacity to do so is humanity’s greatest attribute, but after all it’s not shown in its finest light battling with material things. When the moral stress comes, the man who would face the other often fails.”
“Yes,” she asserted; “there are barriers that can’t be stormed. Merely to acquiesce is the hardest thing of all, but in that lies the victory.”
“It’s a bitter one,” he answered moodily.
There was silence for a few minutes while they strolled on through the heather. Afterward, Millicent understood where his thoughts had led, but now she was chiefly conscious of a slight but perplexing resentment against the fact that he should discourse rather crude philosophy. Indeed, the feeling almost amounted to disappointment—it was their last walk, and though she did not know what she had expected from him, it was something different from this. Walking by her side, with his fine poise, his keen eyes that regarded her steadily when she spoke, and his resolute brown face, he appealed to her physically, and in other ways she approved of him. It was borne in upon her more clearly that she would miss him badly, and she suspected that he would not find it easy to part from her. In the meanwhile he recognized that she had, no doubt unconsciously, given him a hint—when the moral difficulties were unsurmountable one must quietly submit.
They stopped when they reached the highest strip of moor. The sun was low, the vast sweep of country beneath them was fading to neutral color, woods, low ridges, and river valleys losing their sharpness of contour as the light left them. A faint cold wind sighed among the heather, emphasizing the desolation of the moorland.
Millicent shivered.
“We’ll go down,” Lisle said quietly; “the brightness has gone. I’ve had a great time here—something to think of as long as I live—but now it’s over.”
“But you’ll come back some day?” she suggested.
“I may; I can’t tell,” he answered. “I’ve schemes in view, to be worked out in the North, that may make my return possible; but even then it couldn’t be quite the same. Things change; one mustn’t expect too much.”
His smile was a little forced; his mood was infectious, and an unusual melancholy seized upon Millicent as they moved down-hill across the long, sad-colored slopes of heather. Then they reached a bare wood where dead leaves that rustled in the rising wind lay in drifts among the withered fern and the slender birch trunks rose about them somberly. The light had almost gone, the gathering gloom reacted upon both of them, and there was in the girl’s mind a sense of something left unsaid. Once or twice she glanced at her companion; his face was graver than usual and he did not look at her.
It was quite dark when they walked down the dale beneath the leafless oaks, talking now with an effort about indifferent matters, until at last Millicent stopped at the gate of the drive to her house.
“Will you come in?” she asked.
“No; Nasmyth’s waiting. I’m glad you came with me, but I won’t say good-by. I’ll look forward to the journey we’re to make together through British Columbia.”
She held out her hand; in another moment he turned away, and she walked on to the house with a strange sense of depression.