Place Called Bliss, A Read online

  Such confidence made for snobbish women and brazen young men. Margo, in her stone prison, had no reason to feel superior, never having known anything else. But young men such as Winfield Craven often were brash seekers of the status and wealth that could be had for the grabbing. Legitimate fortunes, on the other hand, were being made; a country founded on fur, fish, and timber was benefiting from the raw energy that immigrants and the sons of immigrants were exhibiting.

  Ostentation abounded, especially among the newly rich. The overall effect in home décor was pompous, and clutter was adored. To most people the simple richness of Heatherstone smacked of “old fashioned.” To Hugh it was an oasis after an exhausting day in a world gone wild.

  Everything was huge; Chicago builders were erecting a skyscraper ten stories high! Doors were massive; stairways were wide; hotel styles were medieval castles; department stores, churches, city halls towered on new-paved boulevards.

  People were huge; extra weight was looked upon as proof that health and affluence were being fully enjoyed.

  Though men’s clothing was sober and conservative, and bushy sideburns and beards were out of fashion, the nineties change was apparent in women’s fashions.

  The bustle was finally gone, but its bulk, which had been concentrated on the lower rear, was shifted to the sleeve and the bosom. The wasp waist was in, with the tight-laced corset responsible for the new look. Tight at the waist, skirts flared to a bell shape below, and waists puffed out over cummerbunds and sleeves ballooning to leg-of-mutton proportions and larger. Below the dress skirts a haircloth lining extended to the knees in order that female thighs would not reveal shape or movement. But women were lifting their hemlines a shocking eight inches and in many other ways giving more than subtle hints of the liberties they were to strive for and, eventually, to gain.

  At home, in the dark-paneled library, the clock ticking away her life minute by slow minute, Margo spread out each day’s newspaper and read how women were entering into arts colleges; women (the naughtier ones!) were on the stage; women novelists abounded; factories and offices bulged with women.

  Not everyone approved. When some two hundred women had taken jobs in one Ontario city, a subscriber complained “only cupidity, selfishness and pride” were behind it, and added that soon only housework would be left for menfolk to do.

  Hugh didn’t approve. Such organizations as the Women’s Temperance Union, as devoted to fighting for women’s right to vote as they were against booze, darkened his aristocratic brow. Margo, yearning to gain his approval, couldn’t muster the courage to suggest that she do something constructive with her life. She saw her father’s business enterprises as perfect outlets for her energies but got nowhere with her hesitant suggestions.

  With Kezzie moved away and her mother dead, Margo’s education along some lines was almost totally nonexistent. She had understood, when puberty came, that it was proper to lower her hemlines; she knew she could go nowhere alone; she knew that even engaged couples didn’t appear in public without a chaperone and, on those rare occasions when a young man came to call, some member of her father’s staff was required to be in the room. She knew, somehow, that flirting was dangerous and, if indulged in, might lead to the downfall of some young man; her very conversation could refine him and drive from his bosom ignoble and impure thoughts.

  Hugh probably never knew that his library contained a plain brown-wrappered book titled Light on Dark Corners that was to puzzle his daughter as much as enlighten her. Old wives’ tales, sermonettes, Victorian morals left Margo no wiser than before she read them. “Strive for mental excellence,” the book urged, “and you will never be found in the sinks of pollution. . . . Beauty is shallow, dangerous, deceitful, reigning only to ruin. . . . No sensible young man with a future will marry a flirt. . . . Any improper liberties will change love to sensuality and affections will become obnoxious if not repellent.”

  One bit of advice caused her to have second thoughts regarding Winfield and how very little she knew of him: “Never marry a man that does not make his mother a Christmas present.” How, she wondered, does one determine such matters, without prying—certainly an undesirable trait in a female.

  On one point only was she reassured: “Red-whiskered men,” the treatise on Advice to Maiden, Wife, and Mother—Love, Courtship, and Marriage propounded, “should not marry brunettes.” Winfield was not a redhead! On this one fragile point Margo cautiously moved into a relationship with Winfield Craven.

  With change sweeping around her, Margo was almost as cloistered as a nun. But with less, much less, to do. And without the satisfaction of one devoted to her chosen lifestyle.

  While Margo had little more to worry about than giving an “at-home”—those designated hours when the other ladies of the city were free to call—with its strict rules of etiquette, railways were spilling settlers by the thousands into the void that was the West. Towns mushroomed, springing up around schools and churches and police posts. Raw railway stations became centers for squalid, pathetic Indians hoping to sell feather work or buffalo horns, their garments tattered and almost as disreputable as those of the former buffalo hunters who wandered aimlessly across the land, their future uncertain and their livelihood gone.

  While Margo and others entertained themselves with Mr. Edison’s amazing talking machine, out west families still huddled in huts of sod or tar paper; roads were rutted nightmares; ornate cast-iron stoves blazed summer and winter, and porridges, soups, beans, and rabbit stews simmered endlessly on the back lid. Here men struggled out in temperatures of fifty degrees below zero to do chores morning and evening; here women washed clothes and hung them on lines to freeze into bizarre shapes. Here injuries were treated at home, and the dead were packed away in granaries to await the spring thaw and burial.

  Tested and tried beyond their eastern sisters’ ability to understand, pioneer women overcame—if they were a tough breed and most were—or broke under the strain and died. In such instances their place was filled without delay if that were possible. Often the distant family, hearing of the need, sent another sister, or cousin, or some willing female, to marry the bereaved husband and to raise his children.

  In the deep bush, in a district named Bliss but just as often known for despair, Mary Morrison was one of the survivors. Always, through sickness, deprivation, loneliness, and weariness, the grace and beauty of her Lord was evident. Mary’s life was a shining light, a bright example of her Savior’s purpose as set forth in John 12:46: “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.”

  Mary barely pulled through the birth and death of the child that had brought Kezzie from the east to be with her. Kezzie’s joy in being with her daughter and grandchildren, dear as they were, could not make up for the emptiness and grief she felt upon leaving her Mr. Hugh and beloved Margo.

  Mary recovered, but her physical strength was limited. Her spirit, however, glowed its strength without flickering and beckoned many a hungry-hearted neighbor to its warmth and fulfillment. Many a neighbor and visitor—but never Kezzie.

  Kezzie saw, and Kezzie listened. At times it seemed that the need lurking deep in her fading eyes would break the silence of her lips. She warmed her heart at Mary’s joy; she bowed her head when Mary prayed, but never a prayer passed her lips.

  Angus, Cameron, and Molly had found Mary’s witness irresistible, and each, in time, confessed a need for “something,” prayed a sincere prayer of repentance, and found satisfaction in Christ Jesus.

  It was not often that Kezzie accompanied her family to the church services held in the small Bliss schoolhouse. One time, however, when she was present, the minister, speaking of death and urging his listeners to be ready, mentioned the “Grim Reaper.” Mary’s eyes turned to Kezzie’s face, watching it whiten and her jaw tighten. Kezzie’s eyes, the blue of the wide Saskatchewan sky, took on a sick expression; still she did not move out and forward when invited to do so.

  Soo
n, in her devotional time at home, Mary shared, casually it seemed, the story of Lazarus and the rich man, reading aloud for Kezzie, who mended nearby, the last half of the sixteenth chapter of Luke.

  “Did you catch that, Mam?” she asked, repeating “the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.”

  “Abraham’s bosom?” a puzzled Kezzie questioned.

  “Before Christ and the New Testament,” Mary explained, “the best hope of the Hebrew people was to be welcomed by Abraham into a place of supreme happiness. Abraham was called the father of the faithful, you know. And he welcomed into paradise the godly person. Now we know—through the New Testament—that when believers die they depart to be with Christ, which is far better.”

  “Ah.”

  “But the part that makes me so happy . . . so blessed, Mam, is this part about the convoy of angels waiting there, ready to just fly away with this poor beggar.”

  “Ah-huh.” Kezzie’s response was guarded.

  “Think of it—angels, Mam. No grim reaper for God’s people!”

  Kezzie started. “No grim reaper,” she whispered.

  Mary was quick to follow up her point. “That takes all the fear out of dying for me. With my final breath I can expect angels to take me right away into Christ’s presence!” Mary’s voice thrilled with the thought.

  “And for you, too, Mam, and all who accept Him as their personal Savior.”

  The shutters came down over the eyes again, and though the lips quivered, they remained sealed.

  Mary saw, and the light on her face quenched. “It’s so simple, Mam, so simple. Anyone can do it, pray a sincere prayer of confession, receive forgiveness—and God never fails to forgive—and accept Christ. Old things pass away, all things become new—”

  But Kezzie’s head was bent over her mending. Mary’s voice trailed away . . . she had explained it so many times. And always, as now, it seemed she ran head-on into a brick wall.

  “I can’t understand it,” Mary said later to Angus as they prepared for bed. “I know God is working—I’ve prayed so much, He just has to be! And I can see the hunger in her eyes and on her face. But it’s as if she’s bound. Much as I want to,” Mary’s voice broke, “I can’t do it for her.”

  Angus, dear faithful Angus, knelt at the bedside with his wife, and together they lifted the dear one up to the throne of grace—again.

  M argo’s first realization that something was ailing her father came at the breakfast table. Hugh refused his coffee in favor to tea. At Margo’s raised eyebrows he explained, “Just a little stomach upset, my dear. Tea—if you remember Kezzie’s firm conviction—is a great healer.” Hugh’s smile did much to allay Margo’s small concern.

  And after several days of tea and toast, Hugh did appear to be feeling better. Enough so that when Margo raised the question of the sleigh ride, he waved a thin hand, shrugged, and went back to his newspaper with, “Young Craven, you say? As good as any, I suppose.”

  Because there was such a cavalcade of cutters making the Sunday afternoon jaunt, personal chaperones were unnecessary. Winfield at the reins, Margo bundled under a fur rug beside him, swung into a line that extended a mile or more across town, heading for the country.

  It was winter at its best. The sun shone on a silver world glinting from every bough, bush, fence rail, and housetop. Better yet was the fact that the jingle of sleigh bells, the creak of harness and runners, along with the merry shouts and happy laughter floating back from dozens of merrymakers, made intimate conversation impossible. Margo relaxed and enjoyed the experience—in the company of a handsome man, warm and comfortable, and more at ease with a masculine escort than at any other time.

  Conversation consisted mainly of “Comfortable?” “Just look at that!” “Hungry yet?” shouted from a man intent on handling the reins of a lively horse, keeping the proper distance from the rigs ahead and behind.

  Later—warming themselves before an open fire in the drawing room at Heatherstone, drinking hot cocoa and indulging in an array of delicacies from a tray Lorna the maid had brought in, to withdraw into a corner of the room, seat herself, and lower her head into a book—Margo and Winfield forsook Mr. and Miss in favor of first names. As if this intimacy were not enough, Winfield, with his back turned to Lorna and hiding his face and actions, took the cup from Margo’s hand, set it aside, and regained her hand. Surprised, Margo raised her eyes to his while he tightened his hold against her tentative move to free herself.

  “Allow me this small favor,” he said tenderly, and he looked into Margo’s eyes so deeply and so steadily that she found herself flushing.

  “Tell me you don’t mind,” Winfield said, and his half-whispered words throbbed with unspoken feelings.

  Uncomfortable, Margo considered her answer. “I don’t mind ,” she began. Her honest “But I can’t say I really care for it” was cut off by Winfield’s instinctive tightening of his grip, with suggestive manipulation, that, to Margo’s surprise, sent little ripples of pleasure up her arm.

  Pressing his advantage, Winfield murmured such things as Margo had never heard before, and she found herself half mesmerized by the hearing.

  “Has anyone ever told you,” Winfield murmured, “that your eyes are like”—Margo expected “olives,” the term she herself had used critically when studying those dark features in the mirror—“pools,” he said, showing no imagination at all, but fresh and flattering to Margo.

  “And your hair,” he said, fleetingly touching a straying strand, “is like”—a tangle of brambles , Margo immediately came up with silently—“midnight,” Winfield supplied. He seemed to surprise even himself with the additional “misty midnight.”

  With a quick glance at Lorna, finding her head nodding and her eyes closed, Winfield slipped from the hassock on which he was perched to a seat beside Margo, his arm going neatly around her shoulders but in a tender, gentle manner more fraught with meaning than if he had “pressed his suit” more vigorously. Margo found the man’s dark eyes, under dark brows, saying things not spoken aloud. The uniqueness of it so gripped her that there was no telling where the evening might have gone if the couple’s fascination in each other had not been rudely interrupted when Casper opened the door, stepped inside, hesitated momentarily, then approached.

  Margo, flustered and annoyed at the flustering, said, more sharply than usual, “Yes, what is it?”

  “It’s Mr. Galloway, Miss.”

  Guiltily imagining her father had somehow discerned his daughter’s indiscretion, Margo halted between a haughty response, coolness in front of the butler, or embarrassment.

  “He’s ill, Miss Margaret.” Casper’s starchiness had quite hidden what apparently was serious, for he allowed a faint tone of concern to touch the simple explanation.

  Casting foolishness aside, Margo said immediately, “I’ll go right up. Have you called the doctor?”

  “Yes, Miss. It’s not the first time.” A muscle moved in the man’s stern jaw, the only emotion he allowed himself.

  “Not the first! Why haven’t I been told?”

  “Mr. Galloway’s orders, Miss.” Casper’s eyes flickered toward Winfield Craven, and his mouth tightened disapprovingly. Obviously he wasn’t going to say more with Winfield present.

  “Winfield . . . Mr. Craven,” Margo began, turning toward her erstwhile wooer. Only later was she to try to puzzle through the expression on his face. So recently flushed with fervor, it was alert, the eyes thoughtful. Certainly it showed no surprise, a surprise in itself. Had Winfield observed something about Hugh’s condition that she, Margo, had not seen? Seeing Hugh only occasionally while Margo saw him daily, was Hugh’s deteriorating health quite obvious to Winfield? Noting this only dimly, it made no great impression at the time.

  “You must excuse me, Mr. Craven,” she said, giving Winfield her hand briefly.

  “Of course. I’ll come by tomorrow—to see how things are. . . .” Even now Winfield’s tones spoke of something other than th
e present topic of conversation. But Margo, free from the spell that had gripped her, spoke crisply to Casper, requesting that he bring Mr. Craven’s coat and hat, saying to Winfield only, “It was a delightful day, Mr. Craven. Thank you, and good night.”

  Margo flew to her father’s room, to find him in bed and his manservant, Bailey, in attendance. Elbowing Bailey aside, she leaned over Hugh, her eyes widening in alarm. Even in the dim light Hugh’s color seemed dreadful, but what was worse—the evidence of stark pain that twisted his patrician features.

  “Papa, Papa—what’s wrong? Oh, what’s wrong?” Margo managed and thought she didn’t have his attention through his suffering.

  Eyes shut, mouth twisted, Hugh spoke. Not to Margo but to Bailey.

  “Remove her. I—don’t—want—the—girl—here.”

  With an apologetic glance Bailey replaced Margo at Hugh’s side. “I think you ought to go, Miss,” he murmured. “The doctor will be here soon, and things will be better.”

  Consequently, Margo was waiting in the drawing room when the doctor, a man unknown to her, appeared before the room’s open door, where Casper waited with his cloak.

  “Doctor,” Margo said from the drawing room’s dimness, and the man turned his head. “Please come in for a moment. I’m Margaret Galloway,” she added when the doctor had joined her. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid not, Miss Galloway. Mr. Galloway’s strict orders. I feel bound to honor them. If I don’t he’ll simply replace me with someone else who will have the same instructions.”

  “But—but, I’m his daughter, for heaven’s sake! Don’t I have a right to know what’s wrong with my own father? This suffering—I don’t understand it. Will it happen again? Has it happened before?”

  “Sorry, Miss Galloway.”

  Margo attempted to speak calmly. “Doctor, my mother is dead. There is no one, no one else at all but me. I want to be a help—”