Lady Merton, Colonist Part 16

"I am afraid there is a mistake. The man who spoke to me is aware that you suppose him dead--he had his own reasons, he declares, for allowing you to remain under a misconception; he now wishes to reopen communications with you, and to my great regret, to my indignation, I may say he chose me--an entire stranger--as his intermediary. He seems to have watched our party all the way from Winnipeg, where he first saw you, casually, in the street. Naturally I tried to escape from him--to refer him to you. But I could not possibly escape from him, at night, with no road for either of us but the railway line. I was at his mercy."

"What was his reason for not coming direct to me?"

They were still pausing in the road. Delaine could see in the failing light that Anderson had grown pale. But he perceived also an expression of scornful impatience in the blue eyes fixed upon him.

"He has professed to be afraid--"

"That I should murder him?" said Anderson with a laugh. "And he told you some sort of a story?"

"A long one, I regret to say."

"And not to my credit?"

"The tone of it was certainly hostile. I would rather not repeat it."

"I should not dream of asking you to do so. And where is this precious individual to be found?"

Delaine named the address which had been given him--of a lodging mainly for railway men near Laggan.

"I will look him up," said Anderson briefly. "The whole story of course is a mere attempt to get money--for what reason I do not know; but I will look into it."

Delaine was silent. Anderson divined from his manner that he believed the story true. In the minds of both the thought of Lady Merton emerged.

Anderson scorned to ask, "Have you said anything to them?" and Delaine was conscious of a nervous fear lest he should ask it. In the light of the countenance beside him, no less than of the event of the day, his behaviour of the morning began to seem to him more than disputable. In the morning he had seemed to himself the defender of Elizabeth and the cla.s.s to which they both belonged against low-born adventurers with disreputable pasts. But as he stood there, confronting the "adventurer,"

his conscience as a gentleman--which was his main and typical conscience--p.r.i.c.ked him.

The inward qualm, however, only stiffened his manner. And Anderson asked nothing. He turned towards Laggan.

"Good night. I will let you know the result of my investigations." And, with the shortest of nods, he went off at a swinging pace down the road.

"I have only done my duty," argued Delaine with himself as he returned to the hotel. "It was uncommonly difficult to do it at such a moment!

But to him I have no obligations whatever; my obligations are to Lady Merton and her family."

CHAPTER VIII

It was dark when Anderson reached Laggan, if that can be called darkness which was rather a starry twilight, interfused with the whiteness of snow-field and glacier. He first of all despatched a message to Banff for Elizabeth's commissions. Then he made straight for the ugly frame house of which Delaine had given him the address. It was kept by a couple well known to him, an Irishman and his wife who made their living partly by odd jobs on the railway, partly by lodging men in search of work in the various construction camps of the line. To all such persons Anderson was a familiar figure, especially since the great strike of the year before.

The house stood by itself in a plot of cleared ground, some two or three hundred yards from the railway station. A rough road through the pine wood led up to it.

Anderson knocked, and Mrs. Ginnell came to the door, a tired, and apparently sulky woman.

"I hear you have a lodger here, Mrs. Ginnell," said Anderson, standing in the doorway, "a man called McEwen; and that he wants to see me on some business or other."

Mrs. Ginnell's countenance darkened.

"We have an old man here, Mr. Anderson, as answers to that name, but you'll get no business out of him--and I don't believe he _have_ any business with any decent crater. When he arrived two days ago he was worse for liquor, took on at Calgary. I made my husband look after him that night to see he didn't get at nothing, but yesterday he slipped us both, an' I believe he's now in that there outhouse, a-sleeping it off.

Old men like him should be sent somewhere safe, an' kep' there."

"I'll go and see if he's awake, Mrs. Ginnell. Don't you trouble to come.

Any other lodgers?"

"No, sir. There was a bunch of 'em left this morning--got work on the Crow's Nest."

Anderson made his way to the little "shack," Ginnell's house of the first year, now used as a kind of general receptacle for tools, rubbish and stores.

He looked in. On a heap of straw in the corner lay a huddled figure, a kind of human rag. Anderson paused a moment, then entered, hung the lamp he had brought with him on a peg, and closed the door behind him.

He stood looking down at the sleeper, who was in the restless stage before waking. McEwen threw himself from side to side, muttered, and stretched.

Slowly a deep colour flooded Anderson's cheeks and brow; his hands hanging beside him clenched; he checked a groan that was also a shudder.

The abjectness of the figure, the terrible identification proceeding in his mind, the memories it evoked, were rending and blinding him. The winter morning on the snow-strewn prairie, the smell of smoke blown towards him on the wind, the flames of the burning house, the horror of the search among the ruins, his father's confession, and his own rage and despair--deep in the tissues of life these images were stamped. The anguish of them ran once more through his being.

How had he been deceived? And what was to be done? He sat down on a heap of rubbish beside the straw, looking at his father. He had last seen him as a man of fifty, vigorous, red-haired, coa.r.s.ely handsome, though already undermined by drink. The man lying on the straw was approaching seventy, and might have been much older. His matted hair was nearly white, face blotched and cavernous; and the relaxation of sleep emphasised the mean cunning of the mouth. His clothing was torn and filthy, the hands repulsive.

Anderson could only bear a few minutes of this spectacle. A natural shame intervened. He bent over his father and called him.

"Robert Anderson!"

A sudden shock pa.s.sed through the sleeper. He started up, and Anderson saw his hand dart for something lying beside him, no doubt a revolver.

But Anderson grasped the arm.

"Don't be afraid; you're quite safe."

McEwen, still bewildered by sleep and drink, tried to shake off the grasp, to see who it was standing over him. Anderson released him, and moved so that the lamplight fell upon himself.

Slowly McEwen's faculties came together, began to work. The lamplight showed him his son George--the fair-haired, broad-shouldered fellow he had been tracking all these days--and he understood.

He straightened himself, with an attempt at dignity.

"So it's you, George? You might have given me notice."

"Where have you been all these years?" said Anderson, indistinctly. "And why did you let me believe you dead?"

"Well, I had my reasons, George. But I don't mean to go into 'em. All that's dead and gone. There was a pack of fellows then on my shoulders--I was plumb tired of 'em. I had to get rid of--I did get rid of 'em--and you, too. I knew you were inquiring after me, and I didn't want inquiries. They didn't suit me. You may conclude what you like. I tell you those times are dead and gone. But it seemed to me that Robert Anderson was best put away for a bit. So I took measures according."

"You knew I was deceived."

"Yes, I knew," said the other composedly. "Couldn't be helped."

"And where have you been since?"

"In Nevada, George--Comstock--silver-mining. Rough lot, but you get a stroke of luck sometimes. I've got a chance on now--me and a friend of mine--that's first-rate."

"What brought you back to Canada?"

"Well, it was your aunt, Mrs. Harriet Sykes. Ever hear of her, George?"