Harold Bindloss - Delilah of the Snows

"Well," said the girl sharply, "some of them say things they shouldn't. I heard you – in a crowded car, too."

She stopped abruptly, as she remembered the scanty privacy of the Colonist train, and that she was supposed to have been asleep about the time Ingleby had allowed his temper to get the better of him. He, however, only laughed.

"Hetty," he said, "what is the matter? I always thought you brave, and I have almost a right to know."

"I think you have," and there was a little flash in Hetty's eyes. "It was you who brought us here, and this is a horrible country. It frightens me."

Ingleby was a trifle perplexed, and showed it. He had known Hetty Leger for four or five years, and had never seen her in a mood of the kind before. It also occurred to him, as it did every now and then, that, although she was not to be compared with Miss Coulthurst, Hetty was in her own way beautiful. Just then a pretty plump arm showed beneath the unfastened sleeve of the thin blouse, and the somewhat dusty hair with the tint of pale gold in it, lying low on the white forehead, matched the soft blue eyes, though there was a hint of more character than is usually associated with her type in Hetty's white and pink face. Ingleby noticed all this with impersonal appreciation, as something which did not greatly concern him.

"Well," he said, "I'm sorry, and by no means sure I'm very much pleased with the country myself; but I don't quite see what else I could have done in the circumstances. Still, it hurts me to see you unhappy."

Hetty turned to him impulsively. "Never mind me. I'm an ungrateful little – beast. That's the fact, and you needn't try to say anything nice – I know I am. If it hadn't been for you Tom would have been in prison now."

Ingleby looked out across the endless dusty levels. "I'm sure the country must be a good deal better than it looks – when one gets used to it," he said a trifle dubiously. "Anyway, we are three to one against it, and needn't be afraid of it while we stick together. That is the one thing we must make up our minds to do."

"There was a time when you didn't seem very sure you wanted Tom and me."

"Didn't you feel that I was right a little while ago?"

Hetty said nothing for a space. She was quick-witted, and not infrequently understood her companion rather better than he understood himself, while recollecting the half-shy delicacy which occasionally characterized him she felt a trifle comforted. It was not, she fancied, to please himself that he had been willing to leave her behind, and she watched him covertly as he, too, sat silent, gazing at the prairie with thoughtful eyes. He was not, she was quite aware, as clever as her brother, and he certainly had his shortcomings – in fact, a good many of them; but for all that there was something about him which, so far as she was concerned, set him apart from any other man. Exactly what it was she persuaded herself that she did not know, or, at least, made a brave attempt to do so, for it was evident that he had only a frank, brotherly regard for her. Still, the silence was getting uncomfortable, and she flung a question at him.

"How much have we left?" she asked.

Ingleby laughed, somewhat ruefully. "Eight dollars, I believe. Still, we shall cross the Rockies to-morrow, and start at once to heap up riches. We are certainly going to do it, as others have; and you will never be frightened any more."

Hetty had a stout heart of her own, but nevertheless she was glad of the reassuring grasp he laid upon her shoulder as she looked out across the muddy river and desolate, grey-white plain. However, she smiled at him, and once more they sat silent until a curious and unexpected thing happened.

Far away on the rim of the prairie there was a stirring of the haze, and a dim smear of pinewoods grew out of the dingy vapour. Then a vista of rolling hills rose to view, and was lost in mist again, until high above them all a great serrated rampart of never-melting snow gleamed ethereally against a strip of blue. It was a brief, bewildering vision, sudden as the shifting of a gorgeous transformation scene, and then the vapours rolled down again; but they felt that they had looked upon an unearthly glory. Hetty turned to her companion with a little gasp.

"Oh," she said, "it was wonderful!"

"It was real, at least," said Ingleby. "Your first glimpse of the country to which I have brought you. I think we shall be happy there – and we will remember afterwards that we saw it together."

Again the little pink tinge crept into Hetty's cheek, but she said nothing, and Ingleby's glance rested on the shoe, which he had not noticed before.

"Hetty," he said severely, "do you want to catch cold? What is that doing there?"

Hetty essayed to draw her foot farther beneath the hem of the dusty skirt, and the colour grew a trifle plainer in her face; but Ingleby made a little reproachful gesture, and taking up the shoe rubbed it with his handkerchief.

"Now," he said, "I'm going to the bridge. Put it on!"

He turned away; but the leather was stiff with water, and Hetty struggled fruitlessly with the buttons, and when she rejoined him Ingleby noticed that she was walking somewhat awkwardly.

"Stand still a minute," he said. "You can't limp back along the track like that."

He dropped on one knee, and Hetty turned her face aside when he looked up again.

"It is such a pretty little foot," he said.

Then as they went back together they met Leger on the trestle. He said nothing, but though he endeavoured to hide it there was concern in his sallow face.

The afternoon was clear and cool, but bright sunlight filled a glade among the towering pines which creep close up to the western outskirts of Vancouver City. They are very old and great of girth, and though here and there a path or carriage drive has been hewn through the strip of primeval wilderness the municipal authorities have been wise enough to attempt no improvement upon what nature has done for them, and Stanley Park remains a pleasance whose equal very few cities possess. It is scented ambrosially with the odours of balsam and cedar; deep silence fills the dim avenues between the colonnades of towering trunks; and from every opening one looks out upon blue water and coldly gleaming snow.

On the afternoon in question the stillness was rudely broken by a murmur of voices, unmodulated and sharp with an intonation which sounds especially out of place in the wilderness, though it is heard there often enough, from the redwoods of Oregon to where Alaskan pines spring from ten feet of snow. A crowd of people were scattered about the glade, and while some were dressed in "store clothes" and a few in coarse blue jean the eyes of all were turned towards the stump of a great cedar, sawn off a man's height above the ground, which formed a natural platform for a speaker whose address had astonished most of them. Ingleby and Leger lay a little apart from the rest, where the sunlight fell faintly warm upon the withered needles, while Hetty was seated near them upon a fallen fir, displeasure in her eyes and her lips set together. Her eyebrows also seemed unusually straight, as they often did when she was angry, and that gave to her delicately pretty face a curious appearance of severity one would scarcely have expected to find there. She was dressed tastefully, for she earned a sufficiency as a boarding-house waitress.

Ingleby, who lay nearest her, looked up at her with a little smile.

"You would make rather a striking picture just now, Hetty," he said. "That is a most attractive frown. I don't know where you got it, but taken together with your attitude it's – I can't think of a better comparison – almost Roman."

Hetty glanced at him sharply. Her education had not been very comprehensive, and she scarcely understood the allusion; but Ingleby, who had made it at random, was nevertheless in a measure right, for there is a recurrent type of feminine beauty, not exactly common, but to be met with among women of her station in the north of England, while they are young at least, which approaches the classical. Hetty might have posed just then as a virgin sitting with turned-down thumb.