Читать книгу The House of Cariboo and Other Tales from Arcadia - A. Paul Gardiner - Страница 7

The House of Cariboo.

CHAPTER I.

Table of Contents

The Camerons at the Front.

On a rise of ground at “The Front” called the “Nole” stands the Cariboo House, conspicuously alone.

There, fronting the river channel which separates Castle Island from the mainland, its tinned mansard roof and the golden ball on the summit of the flag-staff blazing in the morning’s sun, the marble castle of the Archipelago shares with the mighty St. Lawrence, the admiration of the tourists.

Then as the guests at the Island gather upon the quay at sunset, the tall marble columns and overhanging gables of the House of Cariboo, frown down upon the waters of the placid river, casting shadows of ugly proportions that reach across to the very pier upon which the spectators are standing, and as they linger, fascinated by the glories of nature, they look again, and behold! outlined against the gold and copper edged clouds strewn over the horizon, they see projecting itself heavenward, the green-latticed observatory, and from its vane reaching up into the clouds is the gilded sphere on the flag-pole still blazing from the setting sun, while all else on earth below has grown dark and silent.

Years have passed since the older inhabitants of Glengarry paused and looked in bewilderment as they traveled the roadway on The Front past the House of Cariboo. Even now, after listening to the preceding generation tell and retell stories of Aladdin interest of the House of Cariboo, the children of the countryside pass hurriedly on their way to the district school, never once turning to gaze at the mansion, brought as if from fairyland and put down in the midst of their unpretentious rural surroundings, till at a safe distance, when they loiter and, looking backward, unconsciously relieve their disturbed little minds by breaking off the heads of the bobbing daisies, till urged further along on their way by the passing of time.

There are in Glengarry County, as you might reasonably suppose, many families whose direct ancestors, if you cared to trace them, would lead you at once to the lochs, lowlands or mountain passes of the Scottish Isle. The Clans of the McDonalds, the Camerons and the MacPhersons, have each sent a goodly representation to sustain in the new land of the Canadas the glory of their families in the Scottish hills of their fathers.

There were in the beginning, at The Front in Glengarry, one Andy Cameron, and his two brothers, called “Andy’s Dan,” and “Laughing Donald Cameron.” Many another family of Camerons lived in Glengarry, but there was no mistaking these three brothers. Dan, who made his home with Andy Cameron and his wife, never left the premises of the little farm on the “Nole” unless Andy and his wife went along too, and this becoming the understood thing among the neighbors at The Front and the storekeepers at the county town of Glengarry, Dan Cameron came to be known as Andy’s Dan. The distinction was understood, his pedigree was recorded in the minds of the people of the neighborhood, and he was forever out of danger of being confused with the other Dan Camerons of his neighborhood. Simple Dan, kind-hearted Dan, and most of all Andy’s Dan.

Laughing Donald had taken up a small farm from the government when he and his timid, frail wife first came to Glengarry, and poor Donald never seemed to be any more successful in getting clear from the taxes levied each year upon him than he was in clearing the few acres he possessed of the tree stumps, that were the bane of his life during seed-time and harvesting.

A few years of land holding by Laughing Donald in Glengarry had been an added expense to Andy, who loaned from his own little store of savings each year to keep his brother from the long-reaching clutch of the county tax gatherer; but always laughingly indifferent when he knew his crop yield was miserably poor, Donald became known to the country people, and at the village where he and his sickly wife went to trade their dried apples and carpet-rags for groceries, as Laughing Donald Cameron. He laughed if he was greeted kindly, and he also laughed with the same apparent degree of happiness if a hard-hearted merchant told him his produce was not worth the buying. So Laughing Donald filled a niche, whose personality was all his own, and neither was he ever confounded with others of his name in the County Glengarry.

Tilling the ground on his small farm on The Front seemed very hard work to Donald Cameron. His gentle wife, since their coming to the new land of the Canadas, had pined for the associations of her Scottish hills; her health had failed with the broken spirit till she was now pronounced an invalid. For her, the delicacies of life could not be provided, and sickness and misfortune speedily came to their humble home. Soon two of the children of Laughing Donald were buried in the churchyard at The Front and the illness of his wife continued.

Andy Cameron had noted with increasing solicitude the inroads being made by sickness and death into the home of his brother. Unpaid bills were accumulating and the hand of misfortune was close upon the head of the luckless Donald. Andy had seen his lawyer friend up at the county village, then consulting his wife Barbara, a mortgage was first made on his own farm at the “Nole,” and Donald’s obligations were paid in full. But then the doctor’s bill came next to Donald, for weeks and months of medical attendance upon his invalid wife, and, still laughing in his childish way, he brought it, as if amused at the impossible amount, and handed it to Andy.

“Go back home, Donald,” was Andy’s reply. “Take good care of your poor wife. The doctor must be paid.” And then Andy made another trip up to the village. At the lawyer’s he arranged for the money and then for the mortgage which was this time to be placed upon Donald’s little farm.

That night, as Andy journeyed homeward from the town, he recalled how he and his wife and Dan, his simple-minded brother, had struggled to clear their little farm of debt; how they had stumped the land and builded barns and stables, and fenced in the meadows for their cattle; how happy they had been when they had paid off the last of the tax debt; and how proudly he walked up the church aisle upon a Sunday, and sat in the and afterwards greeted his neighbors around the church door, as they stood gossiping after service. But now to think what he had been compelled to do. Donald was his brother, though, and was not poor Donald in trouble? And his invalid wife—Andy well knew that if a few of the luxuries of life and the tender care which her timid, shrinking nature cried out for, could only be given to her in ever so slight a degree, she would no longer be a suffering invalid.

“Two years,” Andy remarked to himself, “was the time set before the lawyer could foreclose on his own homestead, and the same time was set for his brother, Laughing Donald.” Andy recalled as he rode slowly homeward, that the storekeeper hesitated as he gave him the pound of tea to be charged as before, and when he had asked for a dollar’s worth of brown sugar, he had only been given half that amount. It was to be charged also.

“Who were they that dared to think a Cameron would not pay a just bill! Was not he a Cameron, the eldest of his brothers, and from the proudest clan of all the Highland Tartans?”

Andy felt as he had never felt before. The latent pride of his forefathers was stirred within him. Should they take the farm from his brother Donald? Should they take his farm and that of his wife and the home of his simple-minded brother Dan? “No, never!” determined Andy, “not while I live to protect the innocent,” the cry went up from his very soul. There was money to be had, wealth to be gotten, for life must be preserved. To the gold fields of California, to the mountain passes of the Rockies, or the far British Columbias, he would go, and before the expiration of the mortgages he would return, and in the eyes of his neighbors in Glengarry and among the storekeepers of the town, the name of Andy’s Dan, Laughing Donald or Andy Cameron would stand good for a great deal more than the pound of tea or the paltry dollar’s worth of sugar they had refused him this very night upon which he had made his resolve.

A day or two following the last trip Andy had made to the county town in the interest of procuring more money, he thought it next important that he consult his loyal but none too assertive spouse concerning the execution of the resolve he had settled upon, through which he hoped to clear the good name of Cameron in the county from the insults which had been offered him, even so slightly, by the storekeepers in the town.

Barbara Cameron, the faithful wife to whom Andy went for encouragement when he found that the burdens heaped upon him by the unfortunate members of his family were greater than the resources of the combined farms could support, listened with a heart full of sympathy while her husband unfolded the plan by which he hoped to retrieve their waning fortunes. Quietly, at first, he began to tell of the circumstances which compelled him to place a mortgage upon their own little farm and homestead. Then, arising in his excitement, he proceeded to relate to her the cruel indignities heaped upon his unfortunate brother by the avaricious tax gatherer, who seemed to take a special delight in hunting him to earth; and how, to satisfy his demands, and to meet the bills of the doctors and druggists, he had last of all been compelled to mortgage Donald’s home. For, he explained, as he sadly looked from the window over in its direction, he could not remain a passive onlooker while the cruel hand of fate still pursued the family of the helpless Donald, and a low fever slowly burned out the wick of life in the feeble frame of his gentle wife.

Finally, with a rising inflection in his voice and a righteous indignation of manner, Andy explained to his wife the nature of the insults which he had had offered to him in the town, and that he, as a Cameron, and the head of their little colony must resent the wrongs, and maintain the dignity and pride of his forefathers. He would leave her for perhaps two years, he said—he was going to the gold fields of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. There in the Cariboo Hills, in the Canons of the Rockies and in the shifting river beds of the melting glaziers, he would dig for gold. He would hunt the shining flecks of dust, the gold colored nuggets, seeking the wealth by which he hoped to retrieve his darkening fortunes.

“We will sell our cows, Barbara.” His voice was lowered almost to a whisper. “You and Dan shall have the money. The team of roans we must part with, too, Barbara. Laughing Donald and his frail wife, you will be kind to—and poor Dan, tell him always, Barbara, that Andy is coming back soon—coming soon.”

With confiding faith, though she did not quite understand, Barbara felt that if her husband said all this, it must be right for her to believe it. Andy had brushed away with the back of his hand the tears upon his weather-beaten cheeks awaiting her reply. She in her characteristic way, made only this comment: “When will you start, Andy, think ye?”