Lady Merton, Colonist

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

And last--by happy reaction--it was the prairies again--their fruitful infinity--and the emigrant rush from East and South.

"When we are old"--said Elizabeth softly, slipping her hand into Anderson's--"will all this courage die out of us? Now--nothing of all this vastness, this mystery frightens me. I feel a kind of insolent, superhuman strength!--as if I--even I--could guide a plough, reap corn, shoot rapids, 'catch a wild goat by the hair--and hurl my lances at the sun!'"

"With this hand?" said Anderson, looking at it with a face of amusement. But Elizabeth took no heed--except to slip the other hand after it--both into the same shelter.

She pursued her thought, murmuring the words, the white lids falling over her eyes:

"But when one is feeble and dying, will it all grow awful to me? Suddenly--shall I long to creep into some old, old corner of England or Italy--and feel round me close walls, and dim small rooms, and dear, stuffy, familiar streets that thousands and thousands of feet have worn before mine?"

Anderson smiled at her. He had guided their boat into a green cove where there was a little strip of open ground between the water and the forest. They made fast the boat, and Anderson found a mossy seat under a tall pine from which the lightning of a recent storm had stripped a great limb, leaving a crimson gash in the trunk. And there Elizabeth nestled to him, and he with his arm about her, and the intoxication of her slender beauty mastering his senses, tried to answer her as a plain man may. The commonplaces of passion--its foolish promises--its blind confidence--its trembling joy--there is no other path for love to travel by, and Elizabeth and Anderson trod it like their fellows.

Six months later on a clear winter evening Elizabeth was standing in the sitting-room of a Saskatchewan farmhouse. She looked out upon a dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way--the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running--the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the homestead, and beyond, the long low cowshed, with a group of Shorthorns and Herefords standing beside the open door. Her eyes delighted in the whiteness of the snow, or the touches of orange and scarlet in the clumps of bush, in a note of crimson here and there, among the withered reeds pushing through the snow, or in the thin background of a few taller trees--the "shelter-belt" of the farm--rising brown and sharp against the blue.

Within the farmhouse sitting-room flamed a great wood fire, which shed its glow on the white walls, on the prints and photographs and books which were still Elizabeth's companions in the heart of the prairies, as they had been at Martindale. The room was simplicity itself, yet full of charm, with its blue druggetting, its pale green chairs and hangings. At its further end, a curtain half drawn aside showed another room, a dining-room, also firelit--with a long table spread for tea, a bare floor of polished woodblocks, and a few prints on the walls.

The wagon she had seen on the river approached the homestead. The man who was driving it--a strong-limbed, fair-haired fellow--lifted his cap when he saw Elizabeth at the window. She nodded and smiled at him. He was Edward Tyson, one of the two engine-drivers who had taken her and Philip through the Kicking Horse Pass. His friend also could be seen standing among the cattle gathered in the farmyard. They had become Anderson's foremen and partners on his farm of twelve hundred acres, of which only some three hundred acres had been as yet brought under plough. The rest was still virgin prairie, pasturing a large mixed herd of cattle and horses. The two North-Countrymen had been managing it all in Anderson's Parliamentary absences, and were quite as determined as he to make it a centre of science and progress for a still remote and sparely peopled district. One of the kinsmen was married, and lived in a small frame house, a stone's throw from the main buildings of the farm. The other was the head of the "bothy" or boarding-house for hired men, a long low building, with cheerful white-curtained windows, which could be seen just beyond the cow-house.

As she looked over the broad whiteness of the farmlands, above which the sunset clouds were now tossing in climbing lines of crimson and gold, rising steeply to a zenith of splendour, and opening here and there, amid their tumult, to show a further heaven of untroubled blue--Elizabeth thought with lamentation that their days on the farm were almost done. The following week could see them at Ottawa for the opening of the session. Anderson was full of Parliamentary projects; important work for the Province had been entrusted to him; and in the general labour policy of the Dominion he would find himself driven to take a prominent part. But all the while his heart and Elizabeth's were in the land and its problems; for them the true, the entrancing Canada was in the wilds. And for Anderson, who through so many years, as an explorer and engineer, had met Nature face to face, his will against hers, in a direct and simple conflict, the tedious and tortuous methods of modern politics were not easy to learn. He must indeed learn them--he was learning them; and the future had probably great things in store for him, as a politician. But he came back to the Saskatchewan farm with joy, and he would leave it reluctantly.