Ida, who was watching him, fancied that this was a sore point with Weston, for he momentarily forgot his dinner.
“No,” he answered curtly. “I took some trouble to make young Little understand it when he came to me with a nonsensical proposition not long ago. Like the rest of them, he’s always wanting something. I asked him where he thought the money was coming from.”
Ida was not surprised at this, though she knew that in western Canada the smaller settlers as a rule stripped themselves of every comfort, and lived in the most grim simplicity, that they might have more to give the land.
Then, as the man did not answer, Weston solemnly laid down his fork, with the manner of one making a painful sacrifice.
“There is a good deal of nonsense talked about farming in these days,” he observed authoritatively. “You can put a fortune into drains and fences and buildings, but it’s quite another matter to get two or three per cent, upon it back. In the old days I hadn’t a horse in the stables worth less than sixty guineas, and my father thought nothing of giving twice as much. The other things were to match.” He looked down the table with a flush of indignation in his heavy face. “Now, Walters at the George gives a navvy the horse I hired. Still, what can you expect when they pile up the taxes on us, and open new doors continually to the foreigners? We grew wheat at Scarthwaite, and it was ground at Ramside mill. The last time I looked in, Harvey had his stores full of flour from Minneapolis and Winnipeg. I asked him whether he didn’t feel ashamed of having any hand in that kind of thing.”
Ida could not check a smile. In Weston’s case, at least, the reason why western wheat had displaced the local product was tolerably plain. This full-fleshed man differed, she fancied, in most essentials from the lean farmers who drove the half-mile furrows, or ripped up their patches of virgin sod with plodding oxen on the vast expanses of the prairie. While he indulged his senses and bought sixty-guinea horses, they rose at four or earlier, and, living on pork and flour and green tea, worked in grim earnest until it was dark. Blizzard and hail and harvest frost brought them to the verge of ruin now and then but could not drive them over it. They set their lips, cut down the grocery bill, and, working still harder, went on again. A good many of them had, as she knew, come from England.
Then Weston appeared to remember his dinner, and made a little vague gesture which seemed to indicate that there was no more to be said.
“I don’t want to hear about drains and deeper tillage while we let every foreigner pour his wheat and chilled beef into our market. It’s nonsense,” he asserted.
Some one started another topic; and an hour or so later most of the little party strolled out on the terrace in front of the house. It was almost dark now, but the evening was no more than pleasantly cool, and Ida sat down on an old stone seat.
Scarthwaite faced toward the west, and she looked out across a deep, green valley toward the sweep of upland and heather moor that cut black and solemn against a paling saffron glow. It was very still, though now and then a bleating of sheep rang sharply out of the wisps of mist that streaked the lower meadows. Perhaps it was the stillness or the scent of the firs that climbed the hollow of the ghyll behind the house that reminded Ida of the man who had strolled with her through the shadow of the giant redwoods of the Pacific Slope. In any case, she was thinking of him when Arabella Kinnaird stopped for a moment at her side and glanced toward Weston, who stood not far away.