It was very late when Harry walked back to Hudson’s, while I did not sleep all night, thinking over the tremendous difference that success or failure would make to myself and Grace.
CHAPTER XXIX
CONCERNING THE DAY SPRING MINE
It was a perfect day when we commenced the ploughing, and we hailed it as a favorable augury that cloudless sunshine flooded the steaming prairie. Glittering snow still filled the hollows here and there, but already the flowers lifted their buds above the whitened sod, and the air vibrated to the beat of tired wings as the wild fowl returned like heralds of summer on their northward journey. We had three hired men to help us, in addition to the teams driven by myself and Harry; but, and this was his own fancy, it was Aline who commenced the work.
“You will remember our hopes and fears the day we first put in the share. Many things have happened since,” he said, “but once more the harvest means a great deal to both of us. Miss Lorimer—and we are now more fortunate, Ralph, than we were then—you will imagine yourself an ancient priestess, and bless the soil for us. That always struck me as an appropriate custom.”
The wind had freshened the roses in Aline’s cheeks, and her eyes sparkled as she patted the brawny oxen. Then she grasped the plough-stilts, and, calling to the beasts, Harry strode beside her, with his brown hand laid close beside her white one. Theirs was the better furrow, for, tramping behind my own team not far away, I could hardly keep my eyes off the pair. Both had grown very dear to me, and they were worth the watching—the handsome strong man, and the eager bright-faced girl, whose merry 327 laugh mingled with the soft sound of clods parting beneath the share. They stopped at the end of the furrow, and I wondered when Aline said with strange gentleness: “God bless the good soil, and give the seed increase, that we may use the same for Thy glory, the relief of those that are needy, and our own comfort.”
“Amen!” said Harry, bending his uncovered head, as, a sinewy, graceful figure in dusty canvas, with the white sod behind him, he helped her across a raw strip of steaming clod, while neither of us spoke again until we had completed another furrow. It was a glorious spring, and not for long years had there been such a seed time, the men who helped us said, while my hopes rose with every fresh acre we drilled with the good grain. I was sowing the best that was within me as well as the best hard wheat, and it seemed that the rest of my life depended on the result of it. There is no need to tell how we labored among the black clods of the breaking, or the dust that followed the harrows, under the cool of morning or the mid-day sun, for we were young and strong, fighting for our own hand, with a great reward before at least one of us. Still, at times I remembered Lee, who was in his own way fighting a harder battle against drunkenness and misery, the reward of which was only hardship and poverty. Once I said so to Aline, and she answered me: “It was his vocation; he could not help it. Yours, and I do not think you could help it either—you would have made a remarkably poor preacher, Ralph—is to break new wheat-lands out of the wilderness; for, you will remember—well, I’m not a preacher either, but not wholly for Grace or yourself.”
Women, I have since learned, not infrequently see, perhaps by instinct, deeper into primal causes than men, and there was more in her words than perhaps she realized, for 328 though the immediate impulse may be trifling or unworthy, it is destiny that has set the task before us, and in spite of the doer’s shortcomings it is for the good of many that all thorough work stands. Many a reckless English scrapegrace has driven the big breaker through new Canadian land because he dare not await the result of his folly at home, but nevertheless, if he ploughed well, has helped to fill the hungry in the land he left behind.