Alton of Somasco | Page 6

lonely valley amidst the scattered
pines. The room was also bare and somewhat comfortless, for the land
was too poor to furnish its possessor with more than necessities, and
Townshead not the man to improve it much. He lay in an old leather
chair beside the stove, a slender, grey-haired man with the worn look of
one whose burden had been too heavy for him. His face was thin and
somewhat haggard, his long, slender hand rather that of an artist than a
bush rancher, and his threadbare attire was curiously neat. He wore
among other somewhat unusual things an old red velvet jacket, and
there was a little cup of black coffee and a single cigar of exceptional
quality on the table beside him.
Townshead was, in fact, somewhat of an anachronism in a country
whose inhabitants exhibit at least a trace of primitive and wholesome
barbarity. One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure
and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in
the snow-wrapped wilderness swept by the bitter wind. Perhaps he
realized it, for his voice was querulous as he said, "I wonder if you
have forgotten, Nellie, that we were sitting warm and safe in England
five years ago tonight."
Nellie Townshead looked up quickly over her sewing from the other
side of the stove, and for a moment there was something akin to pain in
her eyes. They were clear brown eyes, and it was characteristic that
they almost immediately brightened into a smile, for while the girl's
face resembled her father's in its refinement, there was courage in it in
place of weariness.
"I am afraid I do, though I try not to, and am generally able," she said.
Townshead sighed. "The young are fortunate, for they can forget," he
said. "Even that small compensation is, however, denied to me, while
the man I called my friend is living in luxury on what was yours and
mine. Had it been any one but Charters I might have borne it better, but
it was the one man I had faith in who sent us out here to penury."
Townshead was wrong in one respect, for it was the weakness of an

over-sensitive temperament which, while friends were ready to help
him, had driven him to hide himself in Western Canada when, as the
result of unwise speculations, financial disaster overtook him. His
daughter, however, did not remind him of this, as some daughters
would have done, though she understood it well enough, and a memory
out of keeping with the patter of the snow and moaning of the wind
rose up before her as she looked into the twinkling stove. She could
recall that night five years ago very well, for she had spent most of it
amidst lights and music, as fresh and bright herself as the flowers that
nestled against her first ball dress. It was a night of triumph and
revelation, in which she had first felt the full power of her beauty and
her sex, and she had returned with the glamour of it all upon her to find
her father sitting with his head in his hands at a table littered with
business papers. His face had frightened her, and it had never wholly
lost the look she saw upon it then, for Townshead was lacking in fibre,
and had found that a fondness for horses and some experience of
amateur cattle-breeding on a small and expensive scale was a very poor
preparation for the grim reality of ranching in Western Canada.
Presently his daughter brushed the memories from her, and stood,
smiling at the man, straight and willowy in her faded cotton dress with
a partly finished garment in her hands, which frost and sun had not
wholly turned rough and red.
"Your coffee will be getting cold. Shall I put it on the stove?" she said.
Townshead made a little grimace. "One may as well describe things
correctly, and that is chickory," he said. "Still, you may warm it if it
pleases you, but I might point out that, indifferent as it is, preserved
milk which has gone musty does not improve its flavour."
The girl laughed a little, though there was something more pathetic
than heartsome in her merriment. "I am afraid we shall have none
to-morrow unless Mr. Seaforth gets through," she said. "I suppose you
have not a few dollars you could give me, father?"
"No," said Townshead, with somewhat unusual decisiveness; "I have
not. You are always asking for dollars. What do you want them for?"

"Mr. Seaforth has packed our stores in for a long while, and we have
paid him nothing," said the girl, while a little colour crept into her face.
Townshead made a