Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank manager married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young manager behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own happiness—that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen’s admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the best horsemen of the province. She had the gift of doing as well as of being.
“‘Tis the light heart she has, and slippin’ in and out of things like a humming-bird, no easier to ketch, and no longer to stay,” said Finden, the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gaiety. She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words were full of raillery and humour, yet there was ever a gentle note behind all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears, as she bent over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.
“Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel,” added Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, “but a heart no bigger than a marrowfat pea-selfishness, all self. Keepin’ herself for herself when there’s manny a good man needin’ her. Mother o’ Moses, how manny! From Terry O’Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there’s a string o’ them. All pride and self; and as fair a lot they’ve been as ever entered for the Marriage Cup. Now, isn’t that so, father?”
Finden’s brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the family estate in Galway.
Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.
“You t’ink her heart is leetla. But perhaps it is your mind not so big enough to see—hein?” The priest laughed noiselessly, showing white teeth. “Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of Finden—n’est-ce pas?”
Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh. “I’d almost forgotten I was one of them—the first almost. Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he’ll get it, sure. It was my duty, and I did it. Was she to feel that Jansen did not price her high? Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before anny man should say he set me the lead. Before the carpet in the parlour was down, and with the bare boards soundin’ to my words, I offered her the name of Finden.”
“And so—the first of the long line! Bien, it is an honour.” The priest paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and then said: “And so you t’ink there is no one; that she will say yes not at all—no?”
They were sitting on Father Bourassa’s veranda, on the outskirts of the town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream. They were facing the wild North, where civilisation was hacking and hewing and ploughing its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the Pole.
Finden’s glance loitered on this scene before he replied. At length, screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: “Sure, it’s all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman. ‘Tis not the same with women as with men; you see, they don’t get younger—that’s a point. But”—he gave a meaning glance at the priest—“but perhaps she’s not going to wait for that, after all. And there he rides, a fine figure of a man, too, if I have to say it!”