The tone of the novel is melancholy and reverent. For example, Part 2, Chapter 1 opens at the grave John Bergson shares with his wife:
IT IS SIXTEEN YEARS since John Bergson died. His wife now lies beside him, and the white shaft that marks their graves gleams across the wheatfields.
There is a combination of sadness and respect embedded in this description. The narrator has described John Bergson in Part 1 as a hardworking, selfless man who looked out for the best interests of his family and who sacrificed his youth and eventually his life so that his children could enjoy the fruits of his labor. It is clear from this introduction that John Bergson deserved better than what he got. He was 46 years old when he lay on his deathbed and left Alexandra in charge of his land. Given life expectancy in the 1880s, this is not an especially young age for him to have died; the tragedy is not necessarily that he should have expected to live longer, but rather that the cruel world gave him 11 years of difficult labor on his homestead, only to let him break even just in time to die.
Technically, though, John Bergson accomplished what he set out to do. The narrator's description of his grave is admiring: the Bergsons are dead, but they are lying side by side beneath a sunbeam that illuminates all the land they worked to leave behind for their children. In a sense, they got the ideal ending. This is just one example of the novel's attitude toward labor and love. It holds that the world is often more demanding than seems fair, but that there is something beautiful and dignified in sacrificing oneself to leave behind a legacy.
