The Impostor. Bindloss Harold
had not seen what I did, haled the boy before him, and Lance looked him in the face and lied with the assurance of an ambassador. The end was that the gardener, who was admonished, cuffed the innocent lad. These, my dear, are somewhat instructive memories.”
“I wonder,” said Maud Barrington, glancing out across the prairie which was growing dusky now, “why you took the trouble to call them up for me?”
The Colonel smiled dryly. “I never saw a Courthorne who could not catch a woman’s eye, or had any undue diffidence about making the most of the fact; and that is partly why they have brought so much trouble on everybody connected with them. Further, it is unfortunate that women are not infrequently more inclined to be gracious to the sinner who repents, when it is worth his while, than they are to the honest man who has done no wrong. Nor do I know that it is only pity which influences them. Some of you take an exasperating delight in picturesque rascality.”
Miss Barrington laughed, and fearlessly met her uncle’s glance. “Then you don’t believe in penitence?”
“Well,” said the Colonel dryly, “I am, I hope, a Christian man, but it would be difficult to convince me that the gambler, cattle-thief, and whisky-runner who ruined every man and woman who trusted him will be admitted to the same place as clean-lived English gentlemen. There are, my dear, plenty of them still.”
Barrington spoke almost fiercely, and then flushed through his tan, when the girl, looking into his eyes, smiled a little. “Yes,” she said, “I can believe it, because I owe a good deal to one of them.”
The ring in the girl’s voice belied the smile, and the speech was warranted; for, dogmatic, domineering, and vindictive as he was apt to be occasionally, the words he had used applied most fitly to Colonel Barrington. His word at least had never been broken, and had he not adhered steadfastly to his own rigid code, he would have been a good deal richer man than he was then. Nor did his little shortcomings, which were burlesqued virtues, and ludicrous now and then, greatly detract from the stamp of dignity which, for speech was his worst point, sat well upon him. He was innately conservative to the backbone, though since an ungrateful Government had slighted him, he had become an ardent Canadian, and in all political questions aggressively democratic.
“My dear, I sometimes fancy I am a hypercritical old fogey!” he said, and sighed a little, while once more the anxious look crept into his face. “Just now I wish devoutly I was a better business man.”
Nothing more was said for a little, and Miss Barrington watched the crimson sunset burn out low down on the prairie’s western rim. Then the pale stars blinked out through the creeping dusk, and a great silence and an utter cold settled down upon the waste. The muffled thud of hoofs, and the crunching beneath the sliding steel, seemed to intensify it, and there was a suggestion of frozen brilliancy in the sparkle flung back by the snow. Then a coyote howled dolefully in a distant bluff, and the girl shivered as she shrank down further amidst the furs.
“Forty degrees of frost,” said the Colonel. “Perhaps more. This is very different from the cold of Montreal. Still, you’ll see the lights of Silverdale from the crest of the next rise.”
It was, however, an hour before they reached them, and Miss Barrington was almost frozen when the first square loghouse rose out of the prairie. It and others that followed it flitted by, and then, flanked by a great birch bluff, with outlying barns, granaries and stables, looming black about it against a crystalline sky, Silverdale Grange grew into shape across their way. Its rows of ruddy windows cast streaks of flickering orange down the trail, the baying of dogs changed into a joyous clamour when the Colonel reined in his team, half-seen men in furs waved a greeting, and one who risked frost-bite, with his cap at his knee, handed Miss Barrington from the sleigh and up the veranda stairway.
She had need of the assistance, for her limbs were stiff and almost powerless, and she gasped a little when she passed into the drowsy warmth and brightness of the great log-walled hall. The chilled blood surged back tingling to her skin, and swaying with a creeping faintness she found refuge in the arms of a grey-haired lady who stooped and kissed her gently. Then the door swung to, and she was home again in the wooden grange of Silverdale, which stood far remote from any civilization but its own on the frozen levels of the great white plain.
CHAPTER VI – ANTICIPATIONS
It was late at night, and outside the prairie lay white and utterly silent under the Arctic cold, when Maud Barrington, who glanced at it through the double windows, flung back the curtains with a little shiver, and turning towards the fire, sat down on a little velvet footstool beside her aunt’s knee. She had shaken out the coils of lustrous brown hair which flowed about her shoulders glinting in the light of the shaded lamp, and it was with a little gesture of physical content she stretched her hands towards the hearth. A crumbling birch log still gleamed redly amidst the feathery ashes, but its effect was chiefly artistic, for no open fire could have dissipated the cold of the prairie, and a big tiled stove brought from Teutonic Minnesota furnished the needful warmth.
The girl’s face was partly in shadow, and her figure foreshortened by her pose, which accentuated its rounded outline and concealed its willowy slenderness; but the broad white forehead and straight nose became visible when she moved her head a trifle, and a faintly humorous sparkle crept into the clear brown eyes. Possibly Maud Barrington looked her best just then, for the lower part of the pale-tinted face was a trifle too firm in its modelling.
“No, I am not tired, aunt, and I could not sleep just now,” she said. “You see, after leaving all that behind one, one feels, as it were, adrift, and it is necessary to realize one’s self again.”
The little silver-haired lady who sat in the big basket chair smiled down upon her and laid a thin white hand that was still beautiful upon the gleaming hair.
“I can understand, my dear, and am glad you enjoyed your stay in the city, because sometimes when I count your birthdays, I can’t help a fancy that you are not young enough,” she said. “You have lived out here with two old people who belong to the past too much.”
The girl moved a little, and swept her glance slowly round the room. It was small and scantily furnished, though great curtains shrouded door and window, and here and there a picture relieved the bareness of the walls, which were panelled with roughly-dressed British-Columbian cedar. The floor was of redwood, diligently polished and adorned, not covered, by one or two skins brought by some of Colonel Barrington’s younger neighbours from the Rockies. There were two basket-chairs and a plain, redwood table; but in contrast to them a cabinet of old French workmanship stood in one corner bearing books in dainty bindings, and two great silver candlesticks. The shaded lamp was also of the same metal, and the whole room with its faint resinous smell conveyed, in a fashion not uncommon on the prairie, a suggestion of taste and refinement held in check by the least comparative poverty. Colonel Barrington was a widower who had been esteemed a man of wealth, but the founding of Silverdale had made a serious inroad on his finances. Even yet, though he occasionally practised it, he did not take kindly to economy.
“Yes,” said the girl, “I enjoyed it all – and it was so different from the prairie.”
There was comprehension, and a trace of sympathy, in Miss Barrington’s nod. “Tell me a little, my dear,” she said. “There was not a great deal in your letters.”
Her niece glanced dreamily into the sinking fire as though she would call up the pictures there. “But you know it all – the life I have only had glimpses of. Well, for the first few months I almost lost my head, and was swung right off my feet by the whirl of it. It was then I was, perhaps, just a trifle thoughtless.”
The while-haired lady laughed softly. “It is difficult to believe it, Maud.”
The girl shook her head reproachfully. “I know what you mean, and perhaps you are right, for that was what Twoinette insinuated,” she said. “She actually told me that I should be thankful I had a brain since I had no heart. Still, at first I let myself go, and it was delightful – the opera, the dances, and the covered skating rink with the music and the black ice flashing beneath the lights. The whirr of the toboggans down the great slide was finer still, and the torchlight meets of the snowshoe clubs on the mountain. Yes, I think I