Willy Cameron

“ They're like religious converts, stronger than the ones born in the fold. They're Americans because they want to be. Anyhow, you ought to be strong for him, Cameron. He said to tell you, but no one else.”
“I'll tell you how strong I am for him later,” Willy Cameron said, grimly. ”

“ Time had been, and not so long ago, when he might have reciprocated her little advance in the spirit in which it was offered, might have taken the hand and held it, out of the sheer joy of youth and proximity. But there was nothing of the philanderer in the Willy Cameron who sat beside Edith Boyd that night in body, while in spirit he was in another state, walking with his slight limp over crisp snow and sodden mud, but through magic lands, to the little moving picture theater at the camp. ”

“ There was something in Joel's voice that caught Willy Cameron's attention. He thought about Joe a great deal that night. Joe was another one who must never know about Edith's trouble. The boy had little enough, and if he had built a dream about Edith Boyd he must keep his dream. He was rather discouraged that night, was Willy Cameron, and he began to think that dreams were the best things in life. They were a sort of sanctuary to which one fled to escape realities. Perhaps no reality was ever as beautiful as one's dream of it.
Lily had passed very definitely out of his life. ”

“ Home had always been a place to get away from. Nobody had cared what became of her. And hadn't she tried to get out of the way? Only they all did their best to make her live. She wished she had died.
Dan, huddled low in his chair, his legs sprawling, stared at nothing with hopeless eyes.
Afterwards Willy Cameron could remember nothing of the scene in detail. He remembered its setting, but of all the argument and quarreling only one thing stood out distinctly, and that was Edith's acceptance of Dan's accusation. It was Akers, then. And Lily Cardew was going to marry him. ”

“ Their stock has to be looked after.”
“This fellow says they drop everything and go. The whole outfit. They're as busy raising an alibi as the other lot is raising the devil.”
But Willy Cameron was a Scot, and hard-headed.
“It looks too simple, Pink,” he said reflectively. He sat for some time, filling and lighting his pipe, and considering as he did so. He was older than Pink; not much, but he felt extremely mature and very responsible.
“What do we know about Cusick?” he asked, finally.
“One of the best men we've got. They've fired his place once, and he's keen to get them.” ”

“ But the most that's behind it is a lot of fellows who want without working what the other fellow's worked to get.”
It was about that time that Lily was exchanged into the town near the camp, and Willy Cameron suddenly found life a stale thing, and ashes in the mouth. He finally decided that he had not been such a hopeless fool as to fall in love with her, but that it would be as well not to see her too much.
“The thing to do,” he reasoned to himself, “is, first of all, not to see her. Or only on Friday nights, because she likes the movies, and it would look queer to stop.” ”

“ There is only one thing to be done. You will have to divorce me, and marry her.”
“Marry her? A girl of the streets, who chooses to say that I am the father of her child! It's the oldest trick in the word. Besides—” He played his best card—“she won't marry me. Ask Cameron, who chose to make himself so damned busy about my affairs. He's in love with her. Ask him.”
In spite of herself Lily winced. Out of the wreckage of the past few weeks one thing had seemed to remain, something to hold to, solid and dependable and fine, and that had been Willy Cameron. ”

“ Hendricks. As if he could be elected against Mr. Cardew!”
The confinement told on Ellen. She would sit for hours, wondering what had become of Lily. Had she gone back home? Was she seeing that other man? Perhaps her valiant loyalty to Lily faded somewhat during those days, because she began to guess Willy Cameron's secret. If a girl had no eyes in her head, and couldn't see that Willy Cameron was the finest gentleman who ever stepped in shoe leather, that girl had something wrong about her.
Then, sometimes, she wondered how Edith's condition was going to be kept from her mother. ”

“ I've tried most everything. Edith wants to rent a room, so we can keep a hired girl, but it's hard to get a girl. They want all the money on earth, and they eat something awful. That's a nice friendly dog of yours, Mr. Cameron.”
It was perhaps Jinx who decided Willy Cameron. Jinx was at that moment occupying the only upholstered chair, but he had developed a strong liking for the frail little lady with the querulous voice and the shabby black dress. ”

“ Girls were like that, at such times. They always took a step back for every two steps forward. He let her hand go, and took a careful survey of his face in the mirror of the cab. The swelling had gone down, but that bruise below his eye would last for days. He cursed under his breath.
It was after nine o'clock when one of the Cardew cars stopped not far from the Benedict Apartments, and Willy Cameron got out.
He was quite certain that Louis Akers would know where Lily was, and he anticipated the interview with a sort of grim humor. There might be another fight ”

“ And so Wilford Cameron found himself seated next to a man who wilfully trampled upon all rules of etiquette, shocking him in his most sensitive points, and making him thoroughly disgusted with the country and country people generally. All but Morris and Katy—he did make an exception in their favor, leaning most to Morris, whom he admired more and more, as he became better acquainted with him, wondering how he could content himself to settle down quietly in Silverton, when he would surely die if compelled to live there for a week. ”

“ Cameron's most imperious tones. "To pass by the house wi' an empty stomach, and it not even a fast! A fast, say I? A feast for Gleneira, and twa glasses o' port wine for Father Macdonald whether he will or no. Marjory, my lass, away with them like good boys to the parlour and cry on Kirsty for the glasses. Will, ye gawk, are there no grooms in Gleneira House that you must be standing there doing their wark. Now, Mr. Wilson, just come you down to terry-firmy, as you would say yourself. You're no golden calf, man, to be put up on a pedestal." ”

“ A boy, a Cameron heir, was something of which to be proud; but a little girl, scarcely larger than the last doll with which Katy had played, was a different thing, and it required all Wilford’s philosophy and common sense to keep him from showing his chagrin to the girlish creature, whose love had fastened with an idolatrous grasp upon her child, clinging to it with a devotion which made Helen tremble as she thought what if God should take it from her. ”

“ Cameron was an enthusiast in his profession, and with outwardly the air of a well-bred man of the world, and thoroughly so that of a young Line officer, he had in his nature a deep sentiment of nationality, of clanship, and Highland romance, with an intense pride in his regiment. He had entertained Eveline often with sketches, anecdotes, and traditions of the Black Watch, but of himself and his V.C., of course, he never spoke. ”

“ He had reserved the bitterest drop for the last, and coming close to her he said,
“And who think you the woman is—this Genevra, Wilford’s and your divorced wife? You were too proud to acknowledge an apothecary’s daughter! See if you like better a dressmaker, a nurse to Katy’s baby, Marian Hazelton!”
He whispered the last name, and with a shriek the lady fainted. Mr. Cameron would not summon a servant; and as there was no water in the room, he walked to the window, and lifting the sash scraped from the sill a handful of the light spring snow which had been falling since morning. ”

“ Cameron presiding over all with lady-like decorum, her soft glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin in perfect keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford sat, a tall, dark, handsome man, of thirty or thereabouts—a man, whose polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and whose face, to a close observer, indicated how little satisfaction he had as yet found in the world. ”

“ That momentary weakness of Cameron's like a subtle poison runs through the Scottish line; and like fluid lightning through the Welsh. It is the touch upon the trembling balance. With cries exultant with triumph, the Welsh forwards fling themselves upon the steady Scots now fighting for life rather than for victory. And under their captain's directions these fierce, victory-sniffing Welsh are delivering their attack upon the spot where he fancies he has found a yielding. In vain Cameron rallies his powers; his nerve is failing him, his strength is done. ”

“ Why, here you are, a boy of—how old?”
“Thirteen,” said Tim.
“A boy of thirteen able to do a man's work, and here am I, a man of twenty-one, only able to do a boy's work, and not even that. But I'm going to learn, Tim,” added Cameron. “You hear me, I am going to learn to do a man's work. If I can,” he added doubtfully.
“Oh, shucks!” replied Tim, “you bet yeh can, and I'll show yeh,” with which mutual determination they turned in at the gate of the Haley farm, which was to be the scene of Cameron's first attempt to do a man's work and to fill a man's place in the world. ”

“ But Mother, alas! proved a stumbling-block. “That would be very nice,” she said, “very nice indeed; but Elliott Cameron has plenty of relatives. They will 21 make some arrangement among them. I should hardly feel at liberty to interfere with their plans.”
“But her Aunt Elinor is going to France, and you know the James Camerons’ house is in quarantine. That leaves only the Vermont Camerons—”
“Oh, yes. I remember, now, there was a third brother. They have their plans, probably.”
And that was absolutely all Bess could get her mother to say. ”

“ Then Cameron understood dimly something of the wander-lust in the boy's soul, of the hunger for adventure, for the colour and movement of life in the great world “away” from the farm, that thrilled in the boy's voice. So for the next half hour he told Tim tales of his own life, the chief glory of which had been his achievements in the realm of sport, and, before he was aware, he was describing to the boy the great International with Wales, till, remembering the disastrous finish, he brought his narrative to an abrupt close. ”

“ Cameron, if I speak as openly as if I were the mother of you both. Bracelets are suitable for you who have everything else, but is there not something your sister needs more? Now, allowing me to suggest, I should say, buy her some furs, and let the bracelets go. In Silverton her furs were well enough, but here, as the sister of Mrs. Wilford Cameron, she is deserving of better.”
Katy understood Mrs. Banker at once, her cheeks reddening as there flashed upon her the reason why Wilford had never yet been in the street with Helen, notwithstanding that she had more than once requested it. ”

“ It didn’t take Tom long, for he was a boy of fewer words than Stannard.
Morning, noon, and night the Camerons speculated about that telegram. They combed its words with a fine-toothed comb, but they couldn’t make anything out of them except the bald fact that Pete was missing.
248
If you think they let it go at that, you are very much mistaken. Where the fact stopped the Cameron imaginations began, and imaginations never know where to stop. The less actual information an imagination has to work on, the busier it is. ”

“ Helen answered, “but somehow since he came after Katy, I have grown so hard, so wicked toward Mr. Cameron. He seems so proud, so unapproachable. Say, Cousin Morris, do you think him a good man, that is, good enough for Katy?”
“Most people would call him too good for her,” Morris replied. “And, in a worldly point of view, she is doing well. Cameron, I believe, is better than three-fourths of the men who marry our girls. He is very proud: but that results from his education and training. Looking only from a New York standpoint he misjudges country people, but he will appreciate you by and by. ”

“ In the French chronicles of the time we read of Cameron attending the ‘young chevalier’ on his visit to Versailles as his ‘master of the horse.’ His father died at Nieuport in Flanders, after a long exile of thirty-three years, in 1748. In the same year Cameron died. By his wife, Anne, daughter of Sir James Campbell, fifth baron Auchinbreck, he had three sons and four daughters: John, who succeeded to his father's Albany regiment, and was afterwards captain of Royal Scots in the French service, died 1762 ”

“ By the direction of the partnership he received a recompense of £100, paid to him by one of the company's clerks. In the account-book above mentioned appears Cameron's testimony to the merits of this hero. "This (George Campbell) is a very decent man, and a great partisan, who often exposed his life for the North-West company. He has been of very essential service in the transactions of Red River, and deserves at least £100, Halifax; and every other service that can be rendered him by the North-West company. ”

“ It never rains on things Mother plans.”
And it didn’t. The morning of the picnic dawned clear and dewy and sparkling, as perfect a summer day as though it had been made to the Camerons’ order. By nine o’clock the big hay-wagon had appeared, driven by Mr. Gordon himself, who said he was going to turn over the reins to Mr. Cameron when they reached the Gordon farm. ”

“ The mystic magic power of that rich resonant voice, its rhythmic cadence emphasized by the soft throbbing of the drum, the uplifted face glowing as with prophetic fire, the tall swaying form instinct with exalted emotion, swept the souls of his hearers with surging tides of passion. Cameron, though he caught but little of its meaning, felt himself irresistibly borne along upon the torrent of the flowing words. He glanced at Jerry beside him and was startled by the intense emotion showing upon his little wizened face. ”