“Really, it’s all very romantic, isn’t
it? I suppose it’s better as it is, all
things considered. Mark behaved splendidly, didn’t
he? Not many men would have done as he did.”
For once in my life I agreed with Isabella.
But I felt like having a good cry over it all—and
I had it. I was glad for my dearie’s sake
and Owen’s; but Mark Foster had paid the price
of their joy, and I knew it had beggared him of happiness
for life.
Few people in Avonlea could understand why Elinor
Blair had never married. She had been one of
the most beautiful girls in our part of the Island
and, as a woman of fifty, she was still very attractive.
In her youth she had had ever so many beaux, as we
of our generation well remembered; but, after her return
from visiting her brother Tom in the Canadian Northwest,
more than twenty-five years ago, she had seemed to
withdraw within herself, keeping all men at a safe,
though friendly, distance. She had been a gay,
laughing girl when she went West; she came back quiet
and serious, with a shadowed look in her eyes which
time could not quite succeed in blotting out.
Elinor had never talked much about her visit, except
to describe the scenery and the life, which in that
day was rough indeed. Not even to me, who had
grown up next door to her and who had always seemed
more a sister than a friend, did she speak of other
than the merest commonplaces. But when Tom Blair
made a flying trip back home, some ten years later,
there were one or two of us to whom he related the
story of Jerome Carey,—a story revealing
only too well the reason for Elinor’s sad eyes
and utter indifference to masculine attentions.
I can recall almost his exact words and the inflections
of his voice, and I remember, too, that it seemed
to me a far cry from the tranquil, pleasant scene
before us, on that lovely summer day, to the elemental
life of the Flats.
The Flats was a forlorn little trading station fifteen
miles up the river from Prince Albert, with a scanty
population of half-breeds and three white men.
When Jerome Carey was sent to take charge of the
telegraph office there, he cursed his fate in the
picturesque language permissible in the far Northwest.
Not that Carey was a profane man, even as men go in
the West. He was an English gentleman, and he
kept both his life and his vocabulary pretty clean.
But—the Flats!
Outside of the ragged cluster of log shacks, which
comprised the settlement, there was always a shifting
fringe of teepees where the Indians, who drifted down
from the Reservation, camped with their dogs and squaws
and papooses. There are standpoints from which
Indians are interesting, but they cannot be said to
offer congenial social attractions. For three
weeks after Carey went to the Flats he was lonelier
than he had ever imagined it possible to be, even
in the Great Lone Land. If it had not been for
teaching Paul Dumont the telegraphic code, Carey believed
he would have been driven to suicide in self-defense.
