The Woman from Outside [On Swan River]. Footner Hulbert
![The Woman from Outside [On Swan River] - Footner Hulbert](limg_read903698.jpg "The Woman from Outside [On Swan River] - Footner Hulbert")
sir!”
Meanwhile Gaviller was nervously focussing his binoculars. “By Golly! there’s a big crowd on deck!” he cried. “Must be ten or twelve beside the crew!”
“Can you see the petticoat?” asked Doc Giddings. “Gee! I hope she can cook!”
“Wait a minute! Yes—there she is!—Hello! By God, boys, there’s two of them!”
“Two!”
“Go on, you’re stringing us!”
“The other must be a breed.”
“No, sir, she’s got a white woman’s hat on, a stylish hat. And now I can see her white face!”
“John, for the lova Mike let me look!”
But the trader held him off obdurately. “I believe she’s young. She’s a little woman beside the other. I believe she’s good-looking! All the men are crowding around her.”
Stonor’s heart set up an unaccountable beating. “Ah, it’ll be the wife of one of the surveyors,” he said, with the instinct of guarding against a disappointment.
“No, sir! If her husband was aboard the other men wouldn’t be crowding around like that.”
“No single woman under forty would dare venture up here. She’d be mobbed.”
“Might be a pleasant sort of experience for her.”
Doc Giddings had at last secured possession of the glasses. “She is good-looking!” he cried. “Glory be, she’s a peach! I can see her smile!”
The boat was soon close enough for the binoculars to be dispensed with. To Stonor the whole picture was blurred, save for the one slender, fragile figure clad in the well-considered dress of a lady, perfect in detail. Of her features he was aware at first only of a beaming, wistful smile that plucked at his heartstrings with a strange sharpness. Even at that distance she gave out something that changed him for ever, and he knew it. He gazed, entirely self-forgetful, with rapt eyes and parted lips that would have caused the other men to shout with laughter—had they not been gazing, too. The man who dwells in a world full of charming women never knows what they may mean to a man. Let him be exiled, and he’ll find out. In that moment the smouldering uneasiness which had made Stonor a burden to himself of late burst into flame, and he knew what was the matter. He beheld his desire.
As the steamboat swept by below them, Stonor automatically dipped the flag, and Gaviller touched off the old muzzle-loader, which vented a magnificent roar for its size. The whistle replied. The Spirit River waltzed gracefully around in the stream, and, coming back against the current, pushed her nose softly into the mud of the strand. They ran down to meet her. Hawsers were passed ashore and made fast, and the plank run out.
Gaviller and the others went aboard, and first greetings were exchanged on the forward deck of the steamboat. Stonor, afflicted with a sudden diffidence, hung in the background. He wished to approach her by degrees. Meanwhile he was taking her in. He scarcely dared look at her directly, but his gaze thirstily drank in her outlying details, so to speak. Her small, well-shod feet were marvellous to him; likewise her exquisite silken ankles. He observed that she walked with stiff, short, delicate steps, like a high-bred filly. He was enchanted with the slight, graceful gesticulation of her gloved hand. When he finally brought himself to look at her eyes he was not disappointed; deep blue were they, steady, benignant, and of a heart-disquieting wistfulness. Other items, by the way, were a little straight nose, absurd and lovable, and lips fresh and bright as a child’s. All the men were standing about her with deferential bared heads, and the finest thing (in Stonor’s mind) was that she displayed no self-consciousness in this trying situation; none of the cooings, the gurglings, the flirtatious flutterings that bring the sex into disrepute. Her back was as straight as a plucky boy’s and her chin up like the same.
When Stonor saw that his turn was approaching to be introduced, he was seized outright with panic. He slipped inside the vessel and made his way back to where the engineer was wiping his rods. He greeted Mathews with a solicitude that surprised the dour Scotchman. He stood there making conversation until he heard everybody in the bow go ashore. Afterwards he was seized with fresh panic upon realizing that delaying the inevitable introduction could not but have the effect of singling him out and making him more conspicuous when it came about.
John Gaviller carried Miss Pringle and the charming unknown up to the clap-boarded villa until the humble shack attached to the English mission could be made fit to receive them. Stonor went for a long walk to cool his fevered blood. He was thoroughly disgusted with himself. By his timidity, not to use a stronger word, he had lost precious hours; indeed, now that he had missed his first opportunity, he might be overlooked altogether. The other men would not be likely to help him out at all. A cold chill struck to his breast at the thought. He resolved to march right up to the guns of her eyes on his return. But he made a score of conflicting resolutions in the course of his walk. Meanwhile he didn’t yet know whether she were Miss or Mrs., or what was her errand at Fort Enterprise. True, he could have gone back and asked any of the men who came on the boat, but nothing in the world could have induced him to speak of her to anyone just then.
When he got back, it was to find the post in a fever of preparation. John Gaviller had asked every white man to his house to dinner to meet the ladies. It was to be a real “outside” dinner party, and there was a sudden, frantic demand for collars, cravats and presentable foot-wear. Nobody at the post had a dress-suit but Gaviller himself.
Of them all only Stonor had no sartorial problems; his new uniform and his Strathcona boots polished according to regulations were all he had and all he needed. He surveyed the finished product in his little mirror with strong dissatisfaction. “Ornery-looking cuss,” he thought. But a man is no judge of his own looks. A disinterested observer might have given a different verdict. A young man less well favoured by nature would have gazed at Stonor’s long-limbed ease with helpless envy. He had that rare type of figure that never becomes encumbered with fat. The grace of youth and the strength of maturity met there. He would make a pattern colonel if he lived. Under the simple lines of his uniform one apprehended the ripple and play of unclogged muscles. If all men were like Stonor the tailor’s task would be a sinecure.
As to his face, mention has already been made of the sober gaze lightened by a suggestion of sly mirthfulness. In a company where sprightliness was the great desideratum, Stonor, no doubt, would have been considered slow. Men with strong reserves are necessarily a little slow in coming into action; they are apt, too, as a decent cover for their feelings, to affect more slowness than they feel. A woman can rarely look at that kind of man without feeling a secret desire to rouse him; there is so clearly something to rouse. It was Stonor’s hair which had given rise to the quaint name the native maidens had applied to him, the “Gold-piece.” It was not yellow hair, as we call it, but a shiny light brown, and under the savage attack of his brushes the shine was accentuated.
The guests were received in the drawing-room of Enterprise House, which was rarely opened nowadays. It had a charming air of slightly old-fashioned gentility, just as its dead mistress had left it, and the rough Northerners came in with an abashed air. John Gaviller, resplendent in the dress-suit, stood by the piano, with the little lady on one hand and the large lady on the other, and one after another the men marched up and made their obeisances. The actual introduction proved to be not so terrible an ordeal as Stonor had feared—or perhaps it is more proper to say, that it was so terrible he was numbed and felt nothing. It was all over in a minute. “Miss Starling!” the name rang through his consciousness like the sound of silver bells.
Face to face Stonor saw her but dimly through the mist of too much feeling. She treated him exactly the same as the others, that is to say, she was kind, smiling, interested, and personally inscrutable. Stonor was glad that there was another man pressing close at his heels, for he felt that he could stand no more just then. He was passed on to Miss Pringle. Of this lady it need only be said that she was a large-size clergyman’s sister, a good soul, pious and kindly. She has little to do with this tale.
In Stonor’s eyes she proved