Hawtrey's Deputy

Wyllard smiled gravely, for he recognised that while she was clearly grieved to hear of his death, she could have had no particular tenderness for the unfortunate lad. He was, however, a little off his guard just then.

"Well," he said, "perhaps he took it in the first place for the mere beauty of it, and it afterwards became a companion – something that connected him with the Old Country. It appealed in one of those ways to me."

Again she flashed a sharp glance at him, but he went on unheeding:

"When I found it I meant to keep it merely as a clue, and so that it could be given up to his relatives some day," he added. "Then I fell into the habit of looking at it in my lonely camp in the bush at night, and when I sat beside the stove while the snow lay deep upon the prairie. There was something in your eyes that seemed to encourage me."

"To encourage you?"

"Yes," Wyllard assented gravely; "I think that expresses it. When I camped in the bush of the Pacific slope we were either out on the gold trail – and we generally came back ragged and unsuccessful after spending several months' wages which we could badly spare – or I was going from one wooden town to another without a dollar in my pocket and wondering, how I was to obtain one when I got there. For a time it wasn't much more cheerful on the prairie: twice in succession the harvest failed. Perhaps Lance Radcliffe felt as I did."

The girl cut him short. "Why didn't you mention the photograph at once?"

Wyllard smiled at her. "Oh," he said, "I didn't want to be precipitate – your folks don't seem to like that; I've met them out West. I think" – and he seemed to consider – "I wanted to make sure you wouldn't be repelled by what might look like Colonial brusquerie. You see, you have been over snow-barred divides and through great shadowy forests with me. We've camped among the boulders by lonely lakes, and gone down frothing rapids. I felt – I can't tell you why – that I was bound to meet you some day."

It was, perhaps, a trifle startling, but the girl now showed neither astonishment nor resentment. She felt curiously certain that this stranger was not posing or speaking for effect. It did not occur to him that he might have gone too far, and for a space he leaned against the gate, saying nothing, while she looked at him with what he thought of as her gracious English calm.

Pale sunshine fell upon them, though the larches beside the road were rustling beneath a little cold wind, and the song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odour of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind greyness with shadowy grandeur.

Then Wyllard seemed to rouse himself. "I wonder if I ought to write Major Radcliffe and tell him what my object is before I call?" he said. "It would make the thing a little easier."

The girl rose. "Yes," she assented, "that would, perhaps, be wiser." Then she glanced at the photograph which was still in her hand. "It has served its purpose. I scarcely think it would be of any great interest to Major Radcliffe."

She saw his face change as she made it evident that she did not mean to give the portrait back to him; but there was, at least, one excellent reason why she would not have her picture in a strange man's hands.

"Thank you," she said, "for the story. I am glad we have met; but I'm afraid I have already kept my friends waiting for me."

Then she turned away, and it occurred to Wyllard that he had made a very indifferent use of the opportunity, since she had neither asked his name nor told him hers. It was, however, evident that he could not well run after her and demand it, and he decided that he could in all probability obtain it from Major Radcliffe when he called upon him. Still, he regretted his lack of adroitness as he walked back to the inn, where he wrote two letters when he had consulted a map and his landlady. Dufton Holme, he discovered, was a small village within a mile or two of the Grange where, as Miss Rawlinson had informed him, Agatha Ismay was then staying. One letter was addressed to her, and he formally asked permission to call upon her with a message from Gregory Hawtrey. The other was to Major Radcliffe, and in both he said that an answer would reach him at the inn which his landlady had informed him was to be found not far from either of the houses he proposed to visit.

He set out on foot next morning, and after climbing a steep pass followed a winding track across a waste of empty moor until he struck a smooth white road, which led past a rock-girt lake and into a deep valley. It was six o'clock when he started, and three when he reached the inn, where he found an answer to one of his letters awaiting him. It was from Major Radcliffe, who desired an interview with him as soon as possible.

Within an hour he was on his way to the Major's house, where a grey-haired man, whose yellow skin suggested long exposure to a tropical sun, and a little withered lady were waiting for him. They received him graciously, but there was an indefinite something in their manner and bearing which Wyllard, who had read a good deal, recognised, though he had never been brought into actual contact with it until then. He felt that he could not have expected to come across such people anywhere but in England, unless it was at the headquarters of a British battalion in India.

He told his story tersely, softening unpleasant details, and making little of what he had done, and the grey-haired man listened gravely with an unmoved face, though a trace of moisture crept into the little lady's eyes. There was silence for a moment or two when he had finished, and then Major Radcliffe, whose manner was very quiet, turned to him.

"You have laid me under an obligation which I could never wipe out, even if I wished it," he said. "It was my only son you buried out there in Canada."

He broke off for a moment, and his quietness was more marked than ever when he went on again.

"As you have no doubt surmised, we quarrelled," he said. "He was extravagant and careless – at least I thought that then – but now it seems to me that I was unduly hard on him. His mother" – and he turned to the little lady with an inclination that pleased Wyllard curiously – "was sure of it at the time. In any case, I took the wrong way, and he went out to Canada. I made that, at least, easy for him – and I have been sorry ever since."

He paused again with a little expressive gesture. "It seems due to him, and you, that I should tell you this. When no word reached us I had inquiries made, through a banker he called upon, who, discovering that he had registered at a hotel as Pattinson, at length traced him to a British Columbian silver mine. He had, however, left it shortly before my correspondent learned that he had been employed there, and all the latter could tell me was that an unknown prospector had nursed him until he died."

Wyllard, who said nothing, took out a watch and the clasp of a workman's belt from his pocket, and laid them gently on Mrs. Radcliffe's knee. He saw her eyes fill, and turned his head away.

"I feel that you may blame me for not writing sooner, but it was only a very little while ago that I was able to trace you, and then it was only by a very curious – coincidence," he said presently.

This was the most apposite word that occurred to him, for he did not consider it advisable to mention the photograph. It seemed to him that the girl would not like it. Nor, though he was greatly tempted, did he care to make inquiries concerning her just then. In another moment or two the Major spoke again.

"If I can make your stay here pleasanter in any way I should be delighted," he said. "If you will take up your quarters with us I will send down to the inn for your things."

Wyllard excused himself, but when the lady urged him at least to dine with them on the following evening he appeared to consider.

"The one difficulty is that I don't know yet whether I shall be engaged then," he explained. "As it happens, I've a message for Miss Ismay, and I wrote offering to call upon her at any convenient hour. So far I have heard nothing from her."

"She's away," Mrs. Radcliffe informed him. "They have probably sent your letter on to her. I had a note from her yesterday, however, and expect her here to-morrow. You have met some friends of hers in Canada?"

"Gregory Hawtrey," said Wyllard. "I have promised to call upon his people, too."

He saw Major Radcliffe glance at his wife, and the faint gleam in the latter's eyes.

"Well," she said, "if you will promise to come I will send word over to Agatha."

Wyllard agreed to this, and went away a few minutes later. He noticed the tact and consideration with which his new friends had refrained from expressing any sign of the curiosity he fancied they naturally felt, for Mrs. Radcliffe's face had suggested that she understood the situation. The latter was, however, commencing to appear a little more difficult to him. It was, it seemed, his task to explain to a girl brought up among such people delicately what she must be prepared to face as a farmer's wife in Western Canada. He was not sure that this would be easy in itself, but it was rendered much more difficult by the fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly daunting her. Her letter had certainly suggested courage, but, after all, it was as he reflected the courage of ignorance, and he had now some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends led. He was commencing to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.

CHAPTER VII.

AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH

Next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. Though he had lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had been endued with or had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was, as he noticed, of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets, tinted walls, formed, it seemed to him, a harmony of soft colouring, and there were scattered here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. Then a row of low, stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room, and looking out he saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately beneath the windows ran a broad gravelled terrace, which was apparently raked smooth every day, with a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed upon its pillared wall. From the middle of it a wide stairway led down to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus with golden gleams in it, and beyond that clipped yews rose smooth and solid as a rampart of stone.

It all impressed him curiously – the order and beauty of it, the signs of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives the cultured English led, for there was no sign of strain and fret and stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that a good many Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate country house, and seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered lady, old-fashioned in her dress and views, this Westerner had what was, perhaps, a clearer vision. He could imagine the Major standing fast at any cost upon some minute point of honour, and it seemed to him that his lady might have stepped down from some old picture with all the graces of an earlier age and the smell of the English lavender upon her garments. Then he remembered that, after all, Englishwomen lived somewhat coarsely in the Georgian days, and that he had met hard-handed men grimed with dust and sweat who could also stand fast by a point of honour in Western Canada. Though the latter fact did not occur to him, he had, for that matter, done it more than once himself.

Then he recalled his wandering thoughts as his hostess smiled at him.

"You are interested in all you see?" she asked frankly.

"Yes, madam," said Wyllard – and the word rose instinctively to his lips, for it seemed to him the only fitting way to address her. "In fact, I'd like to spend some hours here and look at everything. I'd begin at the pictures and work right round."

His companion's smile suggested that she was not displeased.

"But you have been in London?"

"I have," said Wyllard. "I had one or two letters to folks there from big flour shippers, and they did all they could to entertain me. Still, their places were different; they hadn't the – charm – of yours. It's something which I think could only exist in these still valleys and in cathedral closes. It strikes me more because it is something I've never been accustomed to."

The lady was interested, and fancied that she partly understood his attitude.

"Your life is necessarily different from ours," she suggested.

Wyllard smiled. "It's so different that you couldn't realise it. It's all strain and effort from early sunrise until after dusk at night. Bodily strain of aching muscles, and mental stress in adverse seasons. We scarcely think of comfort, and never dream of artistic luxury. The dollars we raise are sunk again in seed and extra teams and ploughs."

"After all, a good many people are driven rather hard by the love of money here."

"No," said Wyllard gravely, "that's not it exactly. At least, not with most of us. It's rather the pride of wresting another quarter-section from the prairie, taking – our own – by labour, breaking the wilderness. You" – and he added this as though to explain that he could hardly expect her to quite grasp his views – "have never been out West?"

His hostess laughed. "I have stayed down in the plains through the hot season in stifling cantonments, and I have once or twice been in Indian cholera camps. Besides, I have seen my husband sitting, haggard and worn with fever, in his saddle holding back a clamorous crowd that surged about him half-mad with religious fury. There were Hindus and Moslems to be kept from flying at each others' throats, and at a tactless word or sign of wavering either party would have pulled him down."